Book Chapter
Reference
Classified Advertising in Joyce
SPURR, David Anton
Abstract
The classified ad is used and re-appropriated by James Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in a number of ways. It appears in the form of Leopold Bloom's ad searching for a
“smart lady typist” in “Ulysses, as well as the imaginary ad written by Molly offering £5 for an imaginary runaway Bloom in “Ithaca.” It resurfaces in “Shem the Penman” and other episodes of "Finnegans Wake." Operating as a means of negotiation between the private and the public spheres, the classified ad provides a language which can be re-used and re-appropriated, for example for erotic ends. The treatment the classified ad receives in Joyce diverts it from its original function of communication about goods and services; it becomes a minor form of fiction in itself, as well as a vehicle for parody and the return of the repressed.
SPURR, David Anton. Classified Advertising in Joyce. In: Publishing in Joyce's Ulysses. Leiden : Brill, 2017.
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Classified Advertising in Joyce
David Spurr
Abstract
The classified ad is used and re-appropriated by James Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in a number of ways. It appears in the form of Bloom’s ad searching for a “smart lady typist” in “Lestrygonians” – resurfacing in a rewritten form in the “Shem the Penman” episode of Finnegans Wake. It features as the imaginary ad offering £5 for an imaginary runaway Bloom in “Ithaca”, and in a passage in hce’s boastful speech, which bears resemblance to the language of the rooms-to-let ad of newspapers. The purpose classified ads serve in Ulysses ranges from functioning as an investment to providing a mode of concealment and alibi for illicit private communication. Operating as a means of negotiation between the private and the public sphere, adhering to a certain notion of respectability is key, but it also provides a particular language which can be re-used and re-appropriated, for example for erotic ends. The treatment the classified ad receives in Joyce diverts it from its original function of communication about goods and services; it becomes a minor form of fiction in itself, as well as a vehicle for parody and the return of the repressed.
Keywords
Ulysses – Finnegans Wake – classified ad – respectability – secrecy – désoeuvrement – Rowntree
Classified advertising may be defined as the form of communication, originally printed in newspapers, consisting of brief personal messages from individuals seeking an exchange of goods or services from other individuals. Classified ads are grouped together by categories such as employment opportunities, missing objects or persons and rooms to let, all of which appear in Joyce’s fiction. The classified advertisement is nearly as old as the newspaper itself, the first classi- fieds having appeared in the early seventeenth century, such as the one selling
“a young dromedary camel” or the one “looking for a travelling companion to
go to Italy in two weeks”, both in La Feuille du Bureau d’adresses, published in Paris from 1633 to 1651.1
The Evening Telegraph “pink edition” for 16 June 1904, the one that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus read at the cabman’s shelter in Ulysses, carries several ads for “apartments vacant”:
Couple of respectable young Girls or Men can have comfortable double- bedded room, breakfast and tea; terms very moderate … 1 Camden Row, Camden street.
Lodgings; wanted three respectable young Men to share nice airy front room; terms, with attendance and washing, 10s … Address 1 Valleymount Park, Kilmainham.
Respectable lodgings for young men; terms moderate. Apply at 1a James’s Place, Lower Baggot Street.
The key word here is “respectable”. It is a word to which Joyce will have frequent recourse insofar as it designates the status to which the private individuals of Joyce’s universe, from Martha Clifford to hce, often lay dubious claim. Imply- ing both the moral character and the social status of a person, respectability is situated at the intersection between the private and public spheres. As such, it is perfectly adapted to the classified advertisement, where the private indi- vidual represents his or her needs before the public. Joyce makes liberal use of the discourse of the classified ad precisely because his fiction is designed to explore the interpenetration of the private and public spheres in the modern world, where individual consciousness is invaded by mass media, and private desire becomes public scandal.
A good example of this often perilous overlap between the private and the public is the ad which Bloom has placed in the Irish Times: “Wanted, smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work” (u 8.326–27). Before commenting on the ad itself, let us consider the paper in which it is printed. The choice of the Irish Times rather than, for example, the Freeman’s Journal is strategic. A Protes- tant Unionist paper familiarly called “The Old Lady of d’Olier Street”, the Times had what would today be called a superior demographic in comparison to the
1 Howard M. Solomon, Public Welfare, Science and Propaganda in Seventeenth Century France:
Innovations of Théophraste Renaudot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 54 as quoted in M.C. Barrès-Baker, “An Introduction to the Early History of Newspaper Advertis- ing”, in Brent Museum and Archive Occasional Publications, no. 2 (London: Brent Council, 2011), 9. Also accessed 6 December 2016 at, http://www.brent.gov.uk/media/387509/Newspa- per_advertising_article_2011.pdf.
Freeman’s Journal. As the paper of social standing it was more in keeping with Bloom’s claim to be a “gentleman” engaged in literary work. According to Bloom’s own professional analysis, the Times also has better distribution and market penetration. He has already received 44 responses to his ad, and while walking past the Times building he reflects that there might be more waiting for him in- side. “Best paper by long chalks for a small ad. Got the provinces now. Cook and general, exc. cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit counter. Resp.
girl (R.C.)2 wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop” (u 8.334–36). In the same episode, the form of the classified ad fixes itself so firmly in Bloom’s mind that even his passing observations take form in the language of classifieds. The sight of “a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy thought” against John Long’s pub in Dawson Street thus provokes the following thought: “Handy man wants job.
Small wages. Will eat anything” (u 8.1067–68). In such cases the classified ad becomes a way of seeing, of literally classifying experience.
Bloom’s appeal for a “smart” lady typist has an ambiguity that might have given pause to prospective applicants for the position. As today, in 1904 “smart”
had the alternate meanings of “clever” and “stylish”, suggesting that the literary gentleman in question could be interested as much in the physical person of his typist as in her secretarial skills.3 This ambiguity is in keeping with the bold imposture of the ad, the illicit nature of which is compounded by the secret and somewhat louche correspondence it occasions between “Henry Flower”
and Martha Clifford, whose real name is Peggy Griffin, if we are to believe her confession in the “Circe” episode (u 15.765–66). In addition to seeking a straightforward exchange of goods or services, the classified ad can also serve as a code, a means of concealment, an alibi for the satisfaction of less than respectable desires: “Good system for criminals. Code” (u 8.324).
Given that the wording of Bloom’s ad is code for an invitation to a secret erotic exchange, the simple Martha Clifford has understood it better than Lizzie Twigg, whose response to the same ad reveals an overly literal interpre- tation: “My literary efforts have had the good fortune to meet with the approval of the eminent poet A.E. (Mr Geo. Russell)” (u 8.331–32). This letter consti- tutes a rare and improbable point of contact between Bloom and the world of the Irish literary revival; it is the reason why, later in the same episode, Bloom speculates that the “listening woman” he sees in the company of Russell is the same Lizzie Twigg, “coming from the vegetarian” (u 8.534). Bloom’s judgment is not flattering: “Her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that: so taste- less. Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy, symbolistic”
2 Respectable girl, Roman Catholic.
3 “Smart”, oed Online, accessed 6 December 2016, http://oed.com.
(u 8.542–43). When it comes to her reply to Bloom’s ad, the joke here is that the “literary” Lizzie Twigg – “No time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of poetry” (u 8.332–33) – is less skilled at reading between the lines than the unschooled but more instinctive Martha. Lizzie is “smart” neither in the fashionable sense nor that of cleverness. Martha, on the other hand, has a tal- ent for writing letters which, in their authentic soft-porn style, move Bloom to the “weak joy” of sensual reverie (u 5.268). The erotic charge of these letters is a literary accomplishment in itself, deriving from the balanced tension between bold flirtation – “I will punish you … you naughty boy” (u 5.251–52) – and the pretence of respectability: “a girl of good family like me, respectable character”
(u 5.269–70).
The question of Martha’s respectability resurfaces in “Circe”, where, hold- ing a copy of the Irish Times in her hand and pointing at Bloom, she calls in a tone of reproach, “Clear my name”, and accuses him of “breach of promise”
(u 15.752–65). It is then for Bloom himself, facing a jury, to protest, “I am a respectable married man, without a stain on my character” (u 15.776–77). We have seen how in the real classified ads published in Joyce’s time the issue of respectability is omnipresent as a condition of the arrangements proposed: re- spectable lodgings offered for respectable “young girls or men”, etc. The medi- um of the classified ad is obsessed with respectability in its discourse precisely because of the opportunities it offers for disreputable behaviour, a paradox that Joyce exploits in a treatment that exposes the hypocrisy of conventional respectability. Whereas this theme is treated sombrely in Dubliners, for ex- ample in the scene from “The Boarding House” where Mrs Mooney demands reparation for “the loss of her daughter’s honour” (d 7.21), it becomes a comic motif in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
The paper that Bloom both works for and reads is not the Irish Times but the Freeman’s Journal. A copy of this paper, one of the objects that Bloom carries throughout the day, serves as a material means of concealment for the cor- respondence that ensues from his ad in the Irish Times. In the “Lotus Eaters”
episode, after collecting Martha Clifford’s letter from the Westland Row Post Office, he transfers it from his pocket to the folded Freeman’s Journal he is car- rying, before reading the letter and destroying the envelope near the timber yard in Cumberland Street. In “Sirens”, Bloom uses the same newspaper to con- ceal the letter he is writing in reply to Martha, while pretending to answer an ad for a town traveller. In order to satisfy the inquiring gaze of Richie Goulding, a fellow diner at the Ormond Hotel, he murmurs, “best references” while as Henry Flower he writes, “it will excite me” (u 11.888). This active performance of the epistolary charade compounds the system of disguises: by pretending to answer an ad in his own name, Bloom disguises the epistolary performance
of “Henry Flower” in writing a letter which disguises its authorship by Leop- old Bloom. If Bloom’s ad in the gentlemanly Irish Times is a public cover for a clandestine liaison, the humbler Freeman’s Journal serves literally to cover the written production of this literary-erotic masquerade.4
In the “Ithaca” episode we learn that Martha’s letters are kept in a locked drawer at Bloom’s home. On the envelopes containing the letters her return address is written in code, presumably the same code Bloom uses for his return address in letters to her. Does Bloom suppose that a letter with a return address obviously written in code would excite less suspicion than one from “Martha Clifford”? In any case, the use of code is in keeping with his earlier acknowl- edgment that his classified ad was a kind of code, while Martha’s letters, coded and locked away, have now become “classified” in the bureaucratic sense. The subterfuge of the original ad has necessitated a whole system of secrecy ex- tending to the storage of the letters as well as to the act of writing required to answer them. In the drawer, Martha’s letters are stored with a press cutting from the English weekly Modern Society on the subject of “corporal chastise- ment in girls’ schools” (u 17.1801–3). The subject of the press cutting resonates with a principal theme of the exchange between Martha and Bloom:
Martha: “Remember if you do not I will punish you”. (u 5.251–52) Bloom: “How will you pun? You punish me?” (u 11.890–91)
We note a curious constellation of the following terms: advertising, the press, secrecy, punishment. These terms are connected by a system of desire which apparently depends on the precarious status of respectability, the uneasy conjunction of public and private. An advertising man in his private fantasies as well as by profession, Bloom through his classified ad goes public with his private desires, albeit in disguise. At the same time he secretly appropriates public information (the press cutting on girls’ chastisement) to his most in- timate sphere as represented by the locked drawer. A similar transgression of the boundary between public and private takes place in “Circe”, where Bloom’s obscene letters to ladies of social distinction are exposed in court.
There, his response to the threat of punishment is to say, “I love the danger”
(u 15.1086). Everything takes place as if Bloom’s desire took the form of this
4 The scene in the Ormond parallels one remembered by Molly in which Bloom “was scrib- bling something a letter when I came into the front room to show him Dignams death in the paper as if something told me and he covered it up with the blottingpaper pretending to be thinking about business” (u 18.47–49).
transgression between private and public, a desire only heightened by the dan- ger of punishment.
In Joyce’s day as in our own, classified ads made it possible for people to imagine themselves as other than they were. Even if his initial aim were merely to receive letters from “smart” ladies, Bloom had to imagine himself as a lit- erary gentleman with the means and productivity to hire a private secretary.
To this fantasy of another, more glorious existence, the “Ithaca” chapter adds Bloom’s fantasy of “departure” from his world, again rendered in terms of a classified ad:
What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?
£5 reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence 7 Eccles street, miss- ing gent about 40, answering to the name of Bloom, Leopold (Poldy), height 5 ft 9½ inches, full build, olive complexion, may have since grown a beard, when last seen was wearing a black suit. Above sum will be paid for information leading to his discovery.
u 17.2000–2005
The question is strangely put, not least in the paradoxical sense of “divulge the occultation”, meaning roughly “reveal the concealment”. The question sup- poses that the purpose of the ad is primarily to declare Bloom’s disappearance rather than to seek information leading to his discovery. Since the question concerns Bloom’s early-morning meditations, we can assume that both ques- tion and answer reflect Bloom’s speculative version of the ad that Molly would place in the event of his absence. Rather than seeking Bloom’s discovery and return, would Molly be just as interested in making known his departure in order to advertise her newfound freedom? Such an intention would be most unlike Homer’s Penelope, as in fact Molly mostly is unlike her. In any case, the form of the classified ad provides another opportunity for literary ven- triloquism: Bloom puts himself in Molly’s place and writes “in her name”, to the point of using the nickname (Poldy) by which she alone knows him. The language of the ad is that more often used in seeking the return of a lost dog or cat, “lost, stolen, or strayed”, suggesting Bloom’s domestic status as a kind of pet, on the level of the “pussens” he addresses in his opening speech at u 4.24. The physical description is straightforward, except that we might expect Molly to know Bloom’s age more precisely than “about 40”. However, the most interesting feature of the ad is the £5 reward it offers for information leading to Bloom’s discovery. We may assume that this represents Bloom’s estimation of either the amount Molly would be able to pay for his return, or the amount
she would be willing to pay. In the latter case, it is his estimation of her estima- tion of his value to her. It is not a particularly generous sum. According to the budget outlined at u 17.1455, £5 represents a little more than two days’ daily expenses in Bloom’s own modest way of life. The form of the classified ad thus has ambivalent consequences for Bloom’s fantasy of departure: it allows him to imagine his absence as a kind of freedom, but also to imagine the precise and limited interest that his absence would occasion in the lives of others.
Before exploring the role of classified advertising in Finnegans Wake, let us recapitulate some of the observations of its treatment in Ulysses. First, classi- fied advertising is presented as a profitable product of the publishing indus- try, with its own forms of capital, investment and return. Bloom observes that the investment in classifieds by James Carlisle, managing director of the Irish Times, has returned a dividend of six and one-half percent (u 8.337). The go- ing rate for classified ads was 27 words for sixpence,5 and Bloom’s ad at only 10 words is well within that limit. For this investment he has had the handsome return of 44 letters from females eager to assist him, essentially supporting his fantasy of being a literary gentleman. These letters constitute an impressive capital on which to draw should he tire of the correspondence with Martha, a process which has already begun, to judge by his efforts at writing a new letter to her: “Bore this” (u 11.863).
Second, we have seen the manner in which the classified ad bridges the separation between the private and public spheres, along with the possibili- ties for the fulfilment of desire as well as the dangers occasioned by this pas- sage. In the discourse of the ad, the code of “respectability” functions as the name for the moral and social condition reflecting the intersection of public and private. Third, we have seen how the classified ad can serve as a mode of concealment, as a public alibi for illicit private communication. And finally, we have seen how the language of classified advertising is subject to subversion, deviation and re-appropriation in various ways, especially for erotic ends. In a larger sense, the relation between literary work and erotic experience is not without relevance to Joyce’s own work. There is in Joyce’s writing the sugges- tion that literature is the written form of desire; it is writing both as desire itself and desire’s object. Martha’s letters, which embody her desire in language, are thus an object of desire as well as of interpretation, as if they constituted some minor, everyday form of literary expression contained within the more excep- tional form of Ulysses. The achievement of Ulysses is not thus to express some
5 Ian Gunn and Alistair McCleery, eds., Evening Telegraph: Dublin, Thursday, June 16, 1904 (Edin- burgh: Split Pea Press, 1990). I am grateful to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation for supplying me with a copy of this edition.
higher desire, but to convey the common matter of human desire in an original and monumental form.
Given the possibilities of the classified ad for going public with private fantasies, it is not surprising to find it used in Finnegans Wake, where one of the principal motifs is precisely the “partial exposure” (fw 34.26–27) of hce’s “private parts” to public view and comment. The scandal created by this inci- dent also brings into view another partial exposure, that of the ladies’ under- garments presumably made visible when the two maidservants or “gown and pinners” enter the rushy hollow in Phoenix Park to answer the call of nature – a
“ripe occasion to provoke” the ungentlemanly behaviour of hce, according to the narrator of Chapter I.2 (fw 34.18–29). The respective accounts of the inci- dent given by the two young ladies are here described as “published combina- tions of silkinlaine testimonies” (fw 34.22–23), where “combinations” refers both to joined testimonies and to underwear. To this is added the intriguing suggestion that the ladies’ published testimony can somehow be clothed in the silk and laine fabric of their intimate lingerie.
The volatile combination of indecent exposure, ladies’ underclothing and publication reappears in a parenthetical paragraph written in the form of a classified ad in the “Shem the Penman” chapter (fw I.7):
Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes, gratefully received, wadmel jumper, rather full pair of culottes and on- thergarmenteries, to start city life together. His jymes is out of job, would sit and write. He has lately commited one of the then commandments but she will now assist … Also got the boot. He appreciates it. Copies.
ABORTISEMENT.
fw 181.27–33
This ad, placed by an alter-ego of James Joyce himself, is a more elaborate version of the one Bloom has placed in the Irish Times, this time exposing everything repressed in the original. The language of the ad extends the fe- tishisation of female undergarments introduced in the trial scene of “Circe”, where Mrs Bellingham testifies that Bloom “eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which, he said, he could conjure up” (u 15.1052–54). It also suggests the real nature of Bloom’s interest in a “smart”, i.e. smartly dressed lady typist. In contrast to the relative restraint of Bloom’s ad, Jymes’s abandons itself to the rich fantasy of female clothing, particularly clothes themselves abandoned, i.e. cast off after prolonged contact with the female body, though curiously re-worn by those to whom the ad is addressed.
In his 1927 essay on “Fetishism”, Freud speculates that the male fetishisation of objects closely associated with the female body functions as “a substitute for
the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and … does not want to give up” because her lack of a penis produces in him the fear of castration.6 Whatever the reason for this substitution, the fetish func- tions both for Freud and for Joyce as both metaphor and metonymy: it stands metaphorically for the absent sexual organ, on the condition that, metonymi- cally, it be in close contact with the female body. The logic of the fetish thus reproduces that of the language of “Shem the Penman”, whose principal figure is both a metaphor for Joyce and a fantastically metonymic extension of his own writerly identity. It might be said in general that Finnegans Wake is the fetishisation of language in which the indistinguishable nature of metaphor and metonymy is the condition of desire.
If, as I propose, Jymes’s “abortisement” is a rewriting of Bloom’s, its second part, expressing the desire to “sit and write”, echoes the ambitions of the gentle- man engaged in “literary work”, while the affirmation that “she will now assist”
seems to fulfil that gentleman’s search for a lady typist to assist him. Jymes has lately “commited one of the then commandments”, which implies both that he has followed the commandment and committed a sin against it, though it is difficult to say which commandment has either been particularly followed or violated. Perhaps that is the point – that the Ten Commandments, eight of which take the form of interdiction, assume the inherent guilt of mankind even as they define the life of piety, so that to act according to them is both to
“commit” them and to commit against them. In this respect Jymes has some- thing of Bloom’s sense of guilt in placing the ad, evidence of which we have already witnessed in the furtive manner of his collecting and responding to Martha’s letters. But in Finnegans Wake the Ten Commandments have become the “then commandments”, relegated to a past from which Jymes may now be free: free of the logic of sin and piety, free to write precisely because out of a job. The Wake is in this sense the writing of désoeuvrement, of creative idle- ness and undoing, as Bloom dreams of writing to Martha: “let everything rip.
Forget…. Tell her: more and more: all” (u 5.293–99). With respect to Bloom’s ad, Jymes’s is the return of the repressed. In this respect it bears the same relation to the former ad that Finnegans Wake bears to Ulysses.
In the Wake, the most extended tour de force concerning the form of the classified ad occurs in III.3, originally published as Haveth Childers Everywhere (1930). This passage, a single sentence extending from 543.14 to 545.14, occurs in the context of a boastful speech by hce about his colonial exploits – “I sent my boundary to Botany Bay and I ran up a score and four of mes while the Yanks were huckling the Empire” (fw 543.4–6) – followed by an invitation to
6 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 152–53.
emigration extended to the indigent, overcrowded population of the British Isles, i.e. to “all who have received tickets” (fw 543.21–22). The catalogue of those addressed in this speech functions as a double parody. On one hand, it serves as a satirical version of B. Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life, an early sociological study of housing conditions among the poor in York.7 On the other hand, the description of these conditions, as transformed by Joyce, bears a curious resemblance to the language of the rooms-to-let or
“apartments vacant” section of newspapers like the Evening Telegraph (cited above), especially in their obsession with “respectability”. Whereas Rowntree’s study takes the form of the starkest realism, the classified ads do their best to put a good face on things. Joyce does neither, instead producing his own darkly comic language: “respectable in every way, harmless imbecile suppos- ingly weakminded, a sausage every Sunday, has a staff of eight servants, out- look marred by ne’er-do-wells using the laneway” (fw 544. 27–30).
Rowntree’s study includes a “classification of families” according to income and other general living conditions, often including their degree of “respect- ability”. This work may have been of interest to Joyce because the population it studies is largely made up of Irish immigrants who, having fled the conditions of famine in their native land, settled in York in the late 1840s, only to become the underclass of their adopted city. In an otherwise fairly objective study of material living conditions, Rowntree’s comments on the respectability of his subjects leaves this quality undefined, as in the following notes:8
On the family of a widowed joiner: “Four boys, one girl. Seems respect- able. Girl at home since mother’s death”.
On the family of the keeper of a lodging-house: “Daughters married, respectable. House dirty and untidy”.
On a widow who keeps a lodger: “Disreputable old woman, ill; ought to be in Workhouse. Hawks when able … House very dirty, probably used as a house of ill-fame. Gets parish relief”.
On a bricklayer’s household: “Respectable, looks well-to-do compared with many. House clean and tidy”.
Rowntree assumes that his readers know what respectability is. For those who may not, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “respectable” persons as “having a good or fair standing in society, either because of status or (esp. in later use)
7 B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London: Macmillan, 1901).
8 All notes are taken from Rowntree, Poverty, 17.
through being regarded as having a good character, a reputation for honesty or decency, etc.”9
The question of respectability has bearing on Joyce’s life and work in several ways. In Ulysses, it occurs exclusively in ironic contexts, as in Simon Dedalus’
characterization of his in-laws: “De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers”
(u 3.65–67). Stephen reflects ruefully, “Houses of decay, mine, his and all”
(u 3.105), implicitly acknowledging that his own family is just barely respect- able. In Finnegans Wake II.3, the dreary place awaiting a culpable hce is, in John Gordon’s reading,10 what Irish ill-wishers have predicted for the emigrant Joyce: a habitation “auspicably suspectable but in expectancy of respectable- ness … three bedrooms upastairs, of which one with fireplace (aspectable), with greenhouse11 in prospect (particularly perspectable)” (fw 362.23–35).
Like Jymes’s “abortised” version of Bloom’s ad in I.7, Joyce produces an abor- tive version of Rowntree’s survey that serves as a return of the repressed for the language of room-to-let ads in the Dublin newspapers. Here are examples of Rowntree’s notes, followed by Joyce’s adaptation of them in Finnegans Wake:
Rowntree: “Young son wants situation, just out of prison”. (17) fw: “wageearner freshly shaven from prison” (543.27)
Rowntree: “dangerous to life and limb to enter the doors” (19) fw: “floor dangerous for unaccompanied old clergymen” (544.14–15) Rowntree: “man ‘has not had his boots on’ for twelve months” (33) fw: “man has not had boots off for twelve months” (544.18)
Rowntree: “house shares one closet with two others, and one water-tap with seven others” (37)
fw: “shares same closet with fourteen similar cottages and an illfamed lodginghouse” (545.2–3)
Rowntree: “slovenly wife” (50), “one adult entered with a jug” (319) fw: “slovenly wife active with the jug” (543.34)
9 “Respectable”, oed Online, accessed 6 December 2016, http://oed.com.
10 John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 210.
11 In Dublin slang, a public toilet.
Rowntree’s survey makes truly depressing reading, and Joyce does not miss the parallels between some of the households described and the one in which he grew up. Among Joyce’s adaptations of Rowntree we encounter the fam- ily where “eldest son will not serve but peruses Big-man-up-in-the-Sky scraps”
(fw 543.29–30), an allusion to Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,12 and thus indirectly to Joyce’s own youthful aspirations. However, Joyce avoids the Victorian discourse of bourgeois respectability found both in well- meaning sociological studies and in the advertisements in Dublin newspa- pers. Rather, his parodic version of this discourse establishes a comic distance from his own origins, while subjecting the notion of respectability to merci- less satire. In the space of 61 lines Joyce plays on every degree of this moral and social quality, respectively: “respectable”, “more than respectable”, “quasi respectable”, “particularly respectable”, “partly respectable”, “most respectable”,
“thoroughly respectable”, “outwardly respectable”, “eminently respectable”, “re- spectable in every way”, “the pink of respectability”, “more respectable than some”, “respectability unsuccessfully aimed at”, “as respectable can respectably be” (fw 543.23–545.12). The force of multiple repetition and declension serves to reveal the fetishistic nature of this notion in public discourse.
The various classified ads we have surveyed in the preceding pages might be reclassified according to their different functions in Joyce’s fiction. Bloom’s ad for a lady typist is a spurious one placed under a false name. In its modest way it is Bloom’s own little work of fiction, generating a correspondence with the use of fictional names representing fictional characters, with Bloom as “liter- ary gentleman” and Martha “doing the indignant: a girl of good family like me, respectable character” (u 5.269–70). In the “Ithaca” episode, Molly’s ad for the missing Bloom is imaginary rather than being strictly false. It assists Bloom in his fantasy of departure, being all the more necessary to that fantasy in that his departure is unlikely to be realized. It is thus a fiction which compensates for the impossibility of departure. The discourse of classified advertising we have encountered in Finnegans Wake functions both as parody and as a return of the repressed, where the chaotic habitations of private lives emerge from dark- ness and are exposed to public view. In each of these cases, Joyce diverts the advertisement from its official function as a straightforward communication concerning goods and services. The discourse of the classified ad is thus made subject to the treatment Joyce reserves for every other form of conventional discourse: its subversion and re-appropriation for his own literary purposes.
12 “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my father- land or my church” (p v.2575–57).
Please check the deletion of repeated word “as respectable”.
