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Humour in the ‘Cyclops’ episode

How and in what ways is Ulysses a funny novel? In this article, Dr. Bryan Radley explains more...

In ‘Cyclops’, Joyce memorably brings us to Barney Kiernan’s pub, which is full of lively, drunken comic chat.

The richly entertaining dialect of the unnamed, working-class narrative voice in this episode stands in contrast to Bloom’s more refined speech, which this caustic narrator thinks is full of scientific “jawbreaker” words such as ‘phenomenon’:

“And Bloom, of course, with his knockmedown cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Phenomenon! The fat heap he married is a nice old phenomenon with a back on her like a ballalley.”

Clearly, the narrator’s waggish anti-intellectualism is full of verbal energy and invention, but also grotesque, misogynistic comedy. Indeed, much of the heteroglossic humour of this episode is deliberately uncomfortable. The mockery of Bloom by the monstrous ‘citizen’, which includes a disdainful and unashamedly anti-Semitic questioning of Bloom’s nationality and patriotism, is classic superiority humour – what today might be called ‘punching down’ – along the lines of Quintilian’s remarks on the proximity of laughter and contempt. Or, as Thomas Hobbes puts it, “Men Laugh at the infirmityes of others by comparison of which their owne abilityes are sett off, and illustrated”. Admirably, Bloom stands up for himself, his “race”, and his principles against this gigantic, fanatical bully; in the face of derisive laughter, he speaks ably and movingly about injustice and persecution – “Force, hatred, history, all that” – and in favour of Love, “the opposite of hatred”. Crucially, though, his cause is also aided by humour later in the episode, specifically the realizing of the restorative, equalizing comic potential of the Jacob’s biscuit tin that Garryowen, the citizen’s “mangy mongrel”, has been eating from. The citizen subsequently throws the tin at Bloom as he leaves at speed in a carriage with the dog in hot pursuit. In the words of the everyman narrator,

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Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the sun was in his eyes or he’d have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old mongrel after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street.

The narrative style then abruptly changes comic gear into an absurdist, intensifying fantasy mode, with the tin transformed into a meteor and the “clattering” magnified into earthquakes:

The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli’s scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534 […] Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received from all parts of the different continents […] The work of salvage, removal of débris, human remains etc has been entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son, 159 Great Brunswick street […]

This departure into hilariously overcooked journalistic cliché – specifically, the apparently dispassionate but dubiously gleeful language of febrile reporting on natural disasters – represents an obvious departure from the idiolect of the ‘decent old skin’ narrator (“Begob”, “bloody”, “Mercy of God”). The wonderfully ironic narration of this bathetic moment of impotent range helps to puncture the citizen’s belligerent pomposity and, by extension, deflate the xenophobic, ultra-nationalist rhetoric he spouts.

But the repeated hyperbole-bathos rhythm of comic relief does not stop there. Picking up on the “Elijah is coming” motif from ‘Wandering Rocks’, Bloom’s escape from and triumph over the citizen is finally and fantastically reimagined in the overdetermined terms of celestial ascent in the final lines of the episode –

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness […]

– only for the description to, in the words of Stuart Gilbert, “crash at last, like Icarus, into sudden bathos”:

at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.

The pleasurable shock of this mocking Joycean punchline, with its handbrake rhetorical turn, recalls Kant’s contribution to incongruity theories of comedy: “the bubble of our expectation was extended to the full and suddenly burst”. Indeed, throughout Ulysses, Joyce shows himself to be both a connoisseur and pioneer of the laughter generated when “a strained expectation [is] suddenly reduced to nothing”.