82 (U118.880) ーThat is oratory, the professor said

Cast 82. Page 118, line 880.

　ーThat is oratory, the professor said, uncontradicted.

　Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of porches. The tribune’s words, howled and scattered to the four winds. A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more.

　I have money.

　ーGentlemen, Stephen said. As the next motion on the agenda paper may I suggest that the house do now adjourn?”

 

This is from Episode 7, in the newspaper office. J. J. O’Molloy, Professor MacHugh, Stephen, and others are talking. Professor MacHugh has just quoted a speech by the orator and barrister John F. Taylor. What follows is Stephen’s inward response.

In Taylor’s speech, an Egyptian high priest rebukes the Jewish Moses. The point is clearly allegorical: Egypt stands for Britain, and the Jews for Ireland.

Stephen imagines Taylor’s speech transposed into the landscape of ancient Ireland.

“Gone with the wind” is of course famous as the title of the novel by Margaret Mitchell (published in 1936), and even more through the 1939 film.

But since Ulysses was published in 1922, Mitchell’s novel cannot be relevant here. Her title itself was taken from a line in the poem Cynara by the nineteenth-century English poet Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), and that may well be what Joyce had in mind.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

The Hill of Tara was the legendary seat of the High Kings of Ireland. Mullaghmast was likewise associated with royal or ceremonial gatherings in early Irish history.

It is also an extraordinary coincidence that Tara is the name of the plantation in Gone with the Wind, owned by the O’Hara family, Irish immigrants living near Atlanta. Yet here in Ulysses, Tara appears for wholly Irish reasons.

I was not sure at first about hosts, but dictionary definitions include “a vast multitude,” which fits perfectly here.

“Miles of ears of porches” comes from Hamlet. It echoes the famous speech in Act I, Scene 5, where the ghost of Hamlet’s father describes how Claudius murdered him by pouring poison into his ear.

Brief let me be. Sleeping within mine orchard,
My custom always in the afternoon
Upon my secure hour, thy uncle stole
With juice of cursèd hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of mine ears did pour
The leperous distillment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,

The ear is imagined as the porch or entranceway of a house. Here Stephen seems to picture long rows of listeners’ ears opening themselves to the orator’s voice.

A little earlier in the chapter, Stephen had already recalled this same phrase in connection with a murder case involving brothers, and that earlier echo leads into the present passage.

　J. J. O’Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:

　ーOne of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide, the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him.

　And in the porches of mine ear did pour.

（U114.750）

“Scatter … to the four winds” means to scatter in every direction.

The phrase apparently comes from Jeremiah 49:36 in the Old Testament:

And upon Elam will I bring the four winds from the four quarters of heaven, and will scatter them toward all those winds; and there shall be no nation whither the outcasts of Elam shall not come.

So the “four winds” also connect back to the opening phrase, “Gone with the wind.”

The “Akasic records” refer to the idea of a cosmic memory in which every event, thought, and emotion since the birth of the universe is somehow recorded.

The term is associated either with Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), founder of the Theosophical Society, or with Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), who later developed Anthroposophy. Spiritualism and theosophy were very much in vogue in the world of the novel, that is, in 1904.

And again, just a little earlier in the chapter, J. J. O’Molloy had asked Stephen what he thought of the Blavatsky circle, so this too is part of the chain of association in Stephen’s mind.

　ーprofessor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O’Molloy said to Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal hush poets: A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it. She was a nice old bag of tricks.

（U115.782）

Stephen has money because he was paid this morning by Mr Deasy, the schoolmaster.

He seems, at least here, impatient with Irish nationalist rhetoric. So he declares the meeting adjourned and proposes they all move on to the pub.

Sunset of the Hill of Tara

File:Sunset-hill-of-tara.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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