Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Of the 262,869 words in James Joyce’s Ulysses, eight begin with the letters ‘alg-’. Their contribution to the novel is slight.1 Yet, Joyce placed them chiastically, to help indicate the novel’s Odyssean return to ‘Penelope’ in its final episode. And, while there is nothing maternal about words that begin with ‘alg-’,2 Joyce associates most of the eight in Ulysses with motherhood: like flags, they signal the presence of the theme. The chiastic pattern in which Joyce arranged these ‘alg-’ words is another of his variations on The Odyssey.3 The first ‘alg-’ word, ‘Algy’, appears in episode one, ‘Telemachus’, and is spoken by Buck Mulligan: — God! he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look. Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown. — Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said. He turned abruptly his great searching eyes from the sea to Stephen’s face. — The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That’s why she won’t let me have anything to do with you. — Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.4 The passage alludes to The Triumph of Time (1866), by Algernon Charles Swinburne: In a subsequent passage, Joyce strengthens the link between ‘Algy’, the sea and motherhood: ‘in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him’6 Joyce had documentary reason for quoting Swinburne. There were rumours of a neoplatonic cult at the Martello tower that Buck Mulligan’s original, Oliver St. John Gogarty, rented, and at which Joyce was a guest in 1904: ‘Nietzsche was the principal prophet’, writes Ellmann, ‘Swinburne the tower laureate’.7 Gogarty wanted the Martello Tower to be like The Pines in Putney, where Theodore Watts-Dunton, Swinburne’s minder, rescued the poet from alcohol and drugs: Joyce would play Watts-Dunton to his Swinburne.8 Joyce did not share Gogarty’s taste. When, at the first meeting of Yeats and Joyce, the former mentioned Swinburne, ‘Joyce roared with laughter’.9 But Joyce took care to associate the author of ‘I will go back to the great sweet mother,/Mother and lover of men, the sea’, with the sea: the shortening of ‘Algernon’ to ‘Algy’ puns on ‘algae’, the aquatic organism.10 The second ‘alg-’ word in ‘Telemachus’, ‘algebra’,11 is related to paternity. Mulligan jokes with Haines that Stephen, ‘proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father’.12 Yet, the third appearance of an ‘alg-’ word, in episode two, ‘Nestor’, is proximate to the theme of motherhood. Stephen, while helping Cyril Sargent with his Maths, recalls Mulligan’s words, quoted above. It is the sums that remind Stephen of the word ‘algebra’. But, from that, he thinks of Mulligan’s references to his mother. ‘[S]omeone had loved [Cyril],’ he thinks, ‘borne him in her arms and in her heart’. This brings thoughts of his own mother’s ‘prostrate body’, and of ‘the fiery Columbanus’, the Irish missionary (543–615) who left his protesting mother in Ireland to spread Christianity in continental Europe, and a conjecture that a mother’s love is ‘the only true thing in life’.13 The novel’s fourth ‘alg-’ word appears in episode three, ‘Proteus’, and tightens the links between ‘Algy’, the sea and motherhood. Stephen watches midwives (the ‘Frauenzimmer’) descend to the beach, ‘[l]ike me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother’, and thinks of his birth (‘[o]ne of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life’) and of the passage of all humankind, since the Fall, through the womb: ‘strandentwining cable of all flesh’; ‘naked Eve…Belly without blemish’; ‘[w]ombed in sin darkness I was too’.14 These four ‘alg-’ words appear in the ‘Telemachiad’, which constitutes the first sixth of the novel. The fifth, ‘algate’, does not appear until episode fourteen. That episode, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, is the novel’s most direct treatment of motherhood and childbirth. It is set in the Holles Street Maternity Hospital, on the night that Mina Purefoy gives birth, after a labour of ‘full three days’.15 The episode both pastiches the development of English prose, from mediaeval Latin chronicles to Thomas Caryle, and tracks the gestation of the foetus, from ovum to birth. Its organ, according to the Gilbert schema,16 is the ‘womb’, its art ‘medicine’, its symbol ‘mothers’ and its technique ‘embryonic development’. ‘Bloom is the spermatozoon’, wrote Joyce, ‘the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo’.17 The ‘alg-’ word, an obsolete or dialect form of ‘always’, is related to the death of ‘O’Hare Doctor’ (‘[a]ll she there told him, ruing death for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God’s rightwiseness to withsay’) and is surrounded by such lines as ‘[w]ithin womb he won worship’, ‘every man that is born of woman…came naked forth from his mother’s womb’ and ‘[t]he man hearkened to her words for he felt with wonder woman’s woe in the travail that they have of motherhood’.18 The sixth ‘alg-’ word appears in ‘Eumaeus’, episode sixteen and the first of the ‘Nostos’ trilogy with which Ulysses ends. It is the third ‘algebra’ of the novel; only, this time, as a capitalised sobriquet, when Bloom ponders Mr Deasy, headmaster of Stephen’s school: ‘as to who he in reality was let x equal my right name and address, as Mr Algebra remarks passim’.19 ‘Mr Algebra’ is Stephen: it suggests his job at the school, Bloom’s impression of Stephen’s analytical mind, and it recalls Mulligan’s joke about Stephen’s ‘algebraic’ theory of Hamlet. This sixth instance of an ‘alg-’ word seems closer to the theme of fatherhood—of Odysseus and Telemachus—than to the theme of motherhood. ‘Eumaeus’ takes place in a cabman’s shelter near Butt Bridge, where Bloom and Stephen recover from their evening at Bella Cohen’s brothel. At the end of, ‘Circe’, the previous episode, Bloom ministered to Stephen (punched by Private Carr), and hallucinated, in the episode’s final image, about Rudy, his dead son. The last two ‘alg-’ words, in ‘Penelope’, the eighteenth and final episode, close the ring that was opened in ‘Telemachus’. Molly thinks twice of ‘Algeciras’, the port city in Andalusia.20 She first remembers ‘looking across the bay from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies’.21 Then, in her final reverie, and among a cluster of Arabisms on the novel’s last page: ‘the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’22 As a river runs through Finnegans Wake (1939), Ulysses begins and ends by the sea. ‘Telemachus’ overlooks Dublin Bay, and Molly’s thoughts, in ‘Penelope’, return to the Bay of Gibraltar: her Bahía de Algeciras is Penelope’s Paralía Fríkes. The novel goes back to its great sweet mother. The chiastic pattern tells us that Molly, and her tidal sentences, are the sea. In ‘Penelope’, she uses the word ‘sea’ eleven times, in relation to menstruation (‘O patience above its pouring out like the sea’), to sex (‘I was thinking of him on the sea all the time after at mass when my petticoat began to slip down’; ‘pick up a sailor off the sea’) and to freedom, excitement and beauty (‘the sea and the sky you could do what you liked’; ‘the smell of the sea excited me’; ‘poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully coming back on the nightboat’; ‘God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing’).23 But the ring connects to itself when Molly translates the Greek phrase that Mulligan used in ‘Telemachus’: ‘Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother?…Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother’. The quotation, from Xenophon’s Anabasis (c. 370 b.c.), means ‘The Sea! The Sea!’ Molly is the ‘great sweet mother’, ‘the sea’, the ‘lover of men’, to which Ulysses goes back. Joyce intended her as a symbol of womanhood, as the universal mother. Her episode is composed of eight sentences: the numeral eight on its side represents infinity. And there are eight ‘alg-’ words in the novel. They make a slight contribution to the 262,869. But they are not quite scattered throughout: they are not quite passim. Rather, they indicate a pattern of symmetry related to parenthood—to motherhood particularly—and they signal the novel’s return, Odysseus-like, to ‘Penelope’. Chiastic patterns are one of Joyce’s many variations on The Odyssey. Ring-like structures are prominent in Homer, just as they are in Joyce’s epic precursors from the nineteenth-century, such as Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), which use them for a kind of providential grandeur. In Ulysses, ‘alg-’ words are not a ‘leit’ (as in a ‘guiding’ or a ‘leading’) motif: they are a light motif. But they contribute to an impression of complex design and internal coherence that astounds the reader, as numerology is meant to, and chiastic patterns in scripture.
Source: Notes and Queries
Author: Luke Maxted
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Topic: Giambattista Vico and Joyce
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,296
OpenAlex ID: W4413348165