Typewriters and Funerals: Alienation in Dublin

                In one of the mysterious headlines interrupting the narrative of the chapter entitled “Aeolus”, James Joyce attaches a chaotic description of the unending cacophony of typewriters to the moniker “How a Great Daily Organ is Produced”. Oddly enough, the first four books describing Leopold Bloom’s journey are strangely germane to this obtrusive headline. During his initial travels, the reader notes  Benjamin’s themes of alienation resurfacing on the streets of Dublin. Accordingly, Joyce’s characters seek respite in the same manners of temporal pleasure identified by Benjamin.

                Benjamin references Marx by stating a capitalist system must synchronize if it hopes to maximize its efficiency. Joyce’s Dublin runs on such a system as his city shuffles the characters to where they need to go in order to fulfill their day’s labor. While Bloom takes a moment to enjoy his garden, the bells of George’s church interrupt his idyllic interlude with a cantankerous noise informing him that he must leave his small pastoral paradise if he is to attend the funeral of Patrick Dingman. While walking to the service, Bloom notices a physical manifestation of the subordination of the individual itinerary to the will of commerce: a group of cabbies. “Curious the life of drifting cabbies,” reflects Bloom, “all weathers all places, time, or set down, no will of their own” [1]. Bloom is confused by how a man driving a vehicle has no control of where he travels. The cabby’s passenger dictates every aspect of his life during their tenure together. This process repeats hundreds of times a day thus engraining the notion of subservience in the cabby’s psyche. Eventually, the cabby views himself as a component in the city’s fluid transportation system instead of an individual operating in accordance with his own will.

                Joyce correlates another theme of Benjamin’s alienation by applying the Marxist theory of mechanical reproduction and division of labor to Dublin during its continued evolution into a collective machine. People forfeit a connection with their trade in lieu of increased production. Accordingly, Joyce enforces codes of uniformity to maintain efficiency. During Patrick Dingman’s funeral profession, Bloom explains that there is even a system for assigning the same coffins to certain demographics of the dead. He dictates this coffin distribution system adheres to the following assignment code: “Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for a nun”[2]. The burial of Patrick Dingman continues to define a highly efficient system that divorces its participants from any connection to their labor. During Patrick Dingman’s Last Rites, Bloom notes that the priest must be exhausted by the repetition of the same ritual multiple times day after day. As the priest blesses Patrick Dingman’s remains with holy water, Bloom ponders, “He must be fed up with that job, shaking that thing over all the corpses  they trot up…Every mortal day a fresh batch: middle aged men, old women, children, women dead in childbirth, men with bears, baldheaded business men, consumptive girls with little sparrow’s breasts”[3]. From the hearse driver to the gravediggers, Joyce creates an efficient machine that fills the cemetery’s empty lots in the quickest manner possible.   

                The Freeman Journal is another example of Joyce creating alienation through mechanical reproduction. However, Joyce does not just alienate his characters in the chapter “Aeolus”; he alienates his reader. In her notes to Ulysses, Jeri Johnson states that the random headlines interrupting the narrative of “Aeolus” are the product of a “an editor who has taken to the copy with a pair of scissors and a blue pencil, has cut it up and inserted “Headlines” into the gaps (headlines which often have a flippant disregard for their relevance to what follows)”[4]. This “editor” disregards the reader’s desire for a concise narrative. Irrelevant headlines yield a greater production volume and thus warrant the reader’s confusion. Furthermore, it is inconsequential that the headlines’ mysterious nature confuses us; they make sense to the editor who is producing the narrative. They are a crucial part to his design and thus are included at the expense of our alienation from comprehending a narrative. As the reader navigates the headlines’ intrusion, he quickly discovers a whirling vortex of roaring typewriters, colliding newsboys, editors shouting, and a fury of printed pages hastily assembled into to morning and evening additions. While waiting in one of the paper’s office, Bloom notes of a man typing, “The machines clanked in three-four time. Thump, thump, thump. Now if he got paralyzed there and no one knew how to stop them they’d clank on the same, print I over and over and up and back”[5]. The Freeman’s Journal focuses on maximizing its production as opposed to constructing a smaller, legitimate volume. When placing an advertisement, Bloom minces his words in order to be more palatable to the public. He emphatically demands his add include a specific logo of crossed keys. “’The idea,’ Mr. Bloom said, ‘is the house of keys. You know councilor, the Manx parliament. Innuendo of home rule’”[6]. In order to sell more papers, The Freeman’s Journal must avoid appearing as staunch supporters of the independence movement. Once again, production dominates individual will and expression.

                What is most unsettling of Joyce’s Dublin is his portrayal of what awaits all of its inhabitants: a systematic disposal of one who is unable to perform his mandated labor. The city capitalizes on the body's decomposition to maximize the efficiency of the dead. At Patrick Dingman’s funeral, Bloom recalls a story about dead bodies producing methane. “Down in the vaults of Saint Werburgh’s lovely old organ hundred and fifty they have to bore a hole in the coffins sometimes to let the bad gas and burn it. Out it rushes: blue. One whiff of that and you’re a goner”[7]. Bloom further reflects that Patrick Dingman’s machines are still “pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in”[8].The notion that the only gratitude for a lifetime of labor one will receive from Dublin is its enabling his decomposition into natural resources and rat food is most unsettling and depressing. When Joyce couples his characters’ present alienation with the promise of an emotionally sterile disposal, the readers beholds them searching for happiness in ways quite familiar to Benjamin.

                Both Bloom and his wife subconsciously enact Benjamin’s notion of finding happiness in the interior space of their home. Here, the Blooms maintain a sense of control, albeit it miniscule and ultimately interrupted by the bells of George’s church. Above Mrs. Bloom, bed hangs a copy of the Bath of a Nymph. This scene of naked Greek nymphs enables the Blooms to fanaticize about metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. Even though their bodies are confined to Dublin, the hope that one day their souls will travel somewhere else is soothing for the Blooms. Furthermore, Bloom maintains a small garden he fertilizes with kitchen slop. The catharsis of filth into a small sense of pastoral bliss makes Bloom happy and temporally divorces him from the awaiting alienation outside his front gate.

                Bloom also embraces a form of escape identified by Benjamin: flânerie. After Bloom rises from his sleep, he walks to the local butcher shop to buy a kidney for his cat. While strolling through a Dublin already rife with activity, Bloom tells himself:

“Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at dawn, travel round in front of the sun steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up forever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand, strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too, old Tweedy’s big moustaches leaning on a long kind of spear. Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by…Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel sherbet. Wander along all day”[9].

By wondering, Bloom feels like he can out-pace time and thus avoid being enslaved by the city’s dominating production schedule. He strolls through an eclectic market place without being consumed by the diverse cultures and peddling strange wares. By viewing them as a panorama instead of an individual collection, Bloom is able to resist the city’s trap of alienation. He, like Dedalus, maintains the status of “the hyperborean” by subordinating the cities appearance to his own understanding. As long as he remains mobile, Bloom is able to view the city in a totality familiar to his spatial understanding.
                The same feelings of alienation noted by Benjamin in Paris resurface in Joyce’s Dublin. As Bloom begins his journey, we behold a system manipulating its population into a highly efficient production model that ignores the will of the individual. Furthermore, the only contract between the city and the individual is the disposal of one’s body upon the conclusion of his life. Naturally, this creates a sense of depression and futility within the city’s population. In hopes to abate this miserable recognition, Joyce’s characters enact Benjamin’s theory of finding happiness in one’s interior life and wandering the streets in an attempt to behold the city as a whole as opposed to an infinite number of separate pieces.

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[1] James Joyce, Ulysses, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 74.

[2] Ibid., 92.

[3] Ibid., 100.

[4] Ibid., 809.

[5] Ibid., 115.

[6] Ibid., 116.

[7] Ibid., 100.

[8] Ibid., 114.

[9] Ibid., 55.