iii. The Intertemporal Eye : Molly's Gibraltar and the Morphology of the Irish Happy Otherworld

The Celtic otherworld is bivalent: it can be welcoming to mortals if they are invited, but hostile if it is invaded or if mortals come unbidden. Joyce has represented both faces of the otherworld in Ulysses : the hostile and frightening elements in the adventure in Nighttown and the delightful aspects in Molly's interior monologue. Together these episodes represent the unconscious desires as well as the unconscious fears and guilts that underlie the human construction of any system of otherworld beliefs. Joyce mediates these representations and at the same time disambiguates the bivalent values of the Irish otherworld in adapting the motifs for a modern English-speaking audience.^[40] This disambiguation and the consequent doubling of otherworld genres in Ulysses have been among the factors that obscured Joyce's use of motifs and genres from early Irish literature.

Several early Irish primary sources delineate the characteristics of the

[40] Teasing apart the ambivalence of Irish mythological motifs as Joyce does in Ulysses has been a long-standing process; it is a way of assimilating Celtic modalities to the dominant norms of Western culture and can be traced in the history of the assimilation of Celtic myth to Christian-Latin norms. See Tymoczko, "Unity and Duality," for more extensive discussion of the issues involved.

Celtic happy Otherworld; most important are the early Irish voyage tales including The Voyage of Bran, but there are also other narratives such as The Sickbed of CuChulainn. The early texts portray the Irish happy otherworld as a land of youth in which people neither die nor wither. There is no sickness. The Otherworld is a land of warmth and light where there are exotic colors and plants; blossoms coexist with fruit. It is a place of beauty, abounding in poetry and music. There is no work; it is a land of feasting and play. There is a limitless supply of food and drink; the otherworld has its caldron of plenty, bithlán, 'ever full'. There can be fighting in the otherworld, but the otherworld is characterized primarily by peace and lack of conflict. The otherworld is a sensual land, where sexuality is sinless and innocent. It is a land of women, and the women are generally sensual and friendly. Though the otherworld may be located in a mound or under a lake or entered through a magical mist, the happy otherworld is most frequently located on islands in the western sea; one form such islands assume is that of a land mounted on an inaccessible pillar. Thus, the otherworld is frequently reached by a sea voyage. Once left behind, it is difficult to regain.

These are some of the features that impinge on the configuration of Molly's Gibraltar, causing perturbations in the historicity that Herring and others have observed. Joyce highlights the natural aspects of Gibraltar—the botany and climate—in ways that emphasize its likeness to the Irish happy otherworld. Gibraltar is a land of warmth; Molly remembers the heat, particularly at night, and the heat is sensual, causing her clothing to stick and cling: "I used to be weltering then in the heat my shift drenched with the sweat stuck in the cheeks of my bottom on the chair when I stood up" (18.662–63). Gibraltar is bright and light: the sun beats down and shimmers, causing mortal cloches to fade: "red sentries here and there the poplars and they all whitehot and the smell of the rainwater in those tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on you faded all that lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from the B Marche paris what a shame" (18.610–13). Molly remembers the beauty and color of Gibraltar, in particular the fruit and flowers, including exotic plants: "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" (18.1598–1601).

All the names of the Irish otherworld—from the most common Tír na

nÓg and Tír inna mBan, 'the land of youth' and 'the land of women', to the less common Tír inna mBéo, 'the land of the living', Mag Mell, 'the plain of delight', and Magh da Chéo, 'the plain of the two mists'—are relevant to aspects of the Irish happy otherworld reflected by Joyce in Molly's monologue. Molly's memories of Gibraltar center on young people—her young man Mulvey is central, and she remembers Mulvey's boyishness: "he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth his mouth was sweetlike young" (18.769–71). Even her Mrs Stanhope is youthful: "she didn't look a bit married just like a girl" (18.623–24). The older generation—including her duenna, Mrs Rubio—is active and vigorous. Gibraltar is also "the land of youth," the land of Molly's youth, the land whose very memories make her feel rejuvenated: "Lord its just like yesterday to me" (18.821); "well small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then" (18.1469–71). We should note, too, that though in fact the society of Gibraltar was predominantly male, Molly's memories of Gibraltar give women a dominant place. We see this also in her frequent references to the Spanish or Andalusian girls and women (18.440, 18.632–33, 18.778, 18.1586).

Molly has no memory of death in Gibraltar. Though Captain Rubio is dead (18.858), and Molly has seen an officer's funeral (18.1262), and the consul is in mourning for his son (18.684), none of these deaths is said explicitly to have occurred in Gibraltar. It seems that in Molly's Gibraltar people do not die: as with the Celtic otherworld, they die only when they leave. In 1904 the Stanhopes are lost and presumed dead—"I suppose theyre dead long ago the 2 of them" (18.636)—and Major Tweedy has died in Ireland, but Molly has no memory of death associated with Gibraltar itself. Like Bran's company in The Voyage of Bran, the mortals who come to Molly's Gibraltar become dust only when they land on other shores.^[41]

As with the Celtic otherworld, the passage to Gibraltar is not simple. In Molly's memories the men come and go as a result of sea voyages, connecting the passage to Gibraltar with the Irish genre of the imram, literally 'rowing' or 'voyage': "he went to India he was to write the voyages

[41] Note that Molly wonders whether Mulvey is still alive (18.823) and considers that he may have been drowned or killed on his trip to India (18.855).

those men have to make to the ends of the world and back its the least they might get a squeeze or two at a woman while they can going out to be drowned or blown up somewhere" (18.853–56). As with the early Irish otherworld, it is difficult if not impossible to return to Gibraltar once one goes away, as the previous passage suggests. Moreover, a decision to leave is decisive: "of course they never came back. . .people were always going away and we never" (18.666–68). After people leave Gibraltar, contact with the inhabitants of Gibraltar fails, and neither Mulvey (18.853) nor the Stanhopes (18.667) maintain a correspondence with Molly once they have left: "not a letter from a living soul" (18.698). Molly wonders whether she herself will ever return (18.1338), and at times she seems cut off even from her memories of Gibraltar: "its like all through a mist makes you feel so old" (18.636–37). Joyce's use of the figure of the mist here connects the passage with the motif of the magic mist as an entryway to the Irish otherworld as well as with one of the names for the Irish otherworld, Magh da Chéo, 'the plain of the two mists'.

Herring notes that Molly is portrayed as "growing to maturity in a carefree atmosphere of warm nights, lazy summer days, free of worries or obligations" ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 513). Such an atmosphere is, of course, an otherworldly one, and the activities that Molly associates with Gibraltar underscore its likeness to the Celtic otherworld with its pleasant sounds and music. Molly's Gibraltar is a land of music and poetry: "where softly sighs of love the light guitar where poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa point the guitar that fellow played was so expressive" (18.1335–38; see also 18.441, 18.644, 18.700, 18.1596).^[42]

Molly's memories stress eating and drinking (18.692–98; cf. 18.749, 18.831, 18.973–74, 18.1593–94). Indeed, when the Stanhopes leave Gibraltar, ]it is the teas that they remember: "will always think of the lovely teas we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore" (18.620–21). It is noteworthy that Molly has little memory of work in Gibraltar and only once mentions her father's military duties as he oversees and instructs at drill (18.766–67), remembered because the

[42] Note that in Irish láid is both 'song' and 'poem'. By association Molly seems to credit her own sensitivity to these arts to her place of origin.

occasion may have given her the freedom to contact Mulvey. Her memories of her father's activities center on his relaxation with his friend over drinks (18.690–98), and she remembers other types of amusements, including parades, visits of dignitaries, band concerts, shopping, strolling, bullfights, picnics, and excursions (18.610–885). All these are otherworld themes; in fact, the abundance of food and drink, the absence of work, and the atmosphere of leisure and pleasure are typical paradisiacal motifs worldwide (cf. Patch).

Finally, Joyce's choice of Gibraltar for the location of his happy otherworld is piquant. The very geography of the place is an amusingly realistic correlate to the Celtic otherworld island located on a pillar. Here the unscalable fortress of the Rock of Gibraltar is a correlate to the crystal or metal pillar of the medieval texts.^[43] In Ulysses there is a doubling of the motif of the pillar: Joyce calls our attention both to the unscalable fortress of the Rock and to O'Hara's Tower located on the rock, near which Molly and Mulvey have their sexual encounter. O'Hara's Tower—itself built for the fantastic purpose of spying on far-distant Cadiz (Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle 124)—functions also as the tower from which the Milesians sight Ireland in The Book of Invasions ; in Ulysses the "sighting of Ireland" gets conflated with a glimpse of "natural" sexual relations between Molly and her young man. There is both a doubling of the tower and a doubling of perspective: the tower is at once the object of vision and the location of mythic otherworldly vision.

Several nonhistorical aspects of Molly's Gibraltar have been stressed by Herring, and Irish literary and mythic correlates are relevant to these critical problems. Herring claims that Joyce gives us "a tourist-eye view" of Gibraltar, devoid of information about the misery or daily lives of Gibraltarians, a view largely conditioned by Joyce's sources for Gibraltar ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 505). He notes that in fact military prerogatives predominated in Gibraltar; over a third of its eighteeen thousand inhabitants were in the garrison. Uniforms were everywhere, and he speaks of "six thousand bored soldiers, plus visiting sailors" ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 502, 504). Despite the strong military presence in the English colony of Gibraltar, it is only the ceremonial and curiously peaceful aspects of Gibraltar's military that find a place in Molly's mem-

[43] The motif of the island on a pillar is old and is found in both branches of Celtic literature, as Jarman (14) shows.

ories—the parades, the young men in their uniforms, the visits of royalty. She remembers "the same old bugles for reveille in the morning and drums rolling and the unfortunate poor devils of soldiers walking about with messtins smelling the place more than the old longbearded jews in their jellibees and levites assembly and sound clear and gunfire for the men to cross the lines and the warden marching with his keys to lock the gates and the bagpipes" (18.685–89). The "damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop" signal only ceremonial occasions, "especially the Queens birthday . . . [and] general Ulysses Grant whoever he was or did supposed to be some great fellow landed off the ship" (18.679–83). The transmutation of the military cast of Gibraltar to the peaceful ambience of Molly's memories may reflect Joyce's sources for his information about Gibraltar, as Herring suggests, but the peaceful and ceremonial atmosphere also echoes the Irish happy otherworld, in which there are warriors but seldom war. Indeed, the very name for the otherworld, síd, signifies 'peace' (Ó Cathasaigh).

The historical anomaly of Molly's unchaperoned freedom and hence her sexual encounters have also been noted: a freedom from "parental guidance or social censure" that places demands on our "credulity" (Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 513). Again, Joyce's presentation of Gibraltar is illuminated by noting that, like many other conceptions of paradise worldwide, the Irish happy otherworld is sensual. The Celtic otherworld is an erotic place with a great deal of sexual license; similarly, in Gibraltar there are graffiti of naked women (18.325–26), men and women expose themselves (18.544ff., 18.919ff.), and the women wear scant clothing ("I dont know what kind of drawers he likes none at all I think didnt he say yes and half the girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made them that Andalusian singing her Manola she didn't make much secret of what she hadnt" [18.439–42]). As in other delineations of paradise, the Celtic otherworld is also sinless: "Sin has not come to us" (AIT 593). Even sexuality in the otherworld is innocent: "Men and gentle women under a bush,/Without sin, without crime" (AIT 592).

These mythic elements are determinants of Molly's open-air lovemaking with Mulvey near O'Hara's Tower, an episode where the surface of Victorian naturalism cracks as Mulvey and Molly dally "under a bush": "she little knows what I did with her beloved husband before he ever dreamt of her in broad daylight too in the sight of the whole world you

might say" (18.827–29). The mythic substratum explains why in the Gibraltar of Ulysses, though not in the historical Gibraltar, Molly could have had such physical and moral freedom. At the same time we can note that Molly's sensuality does include a typical Victorian episode of female-female sensuality, a memory of her having slept with Mrs Stanhope on the slim pretext of a thunderstorm: "I slept in her bed she had her arms round me" (18.641–42). All these sexual activities in Molly's Gibraltar are conducted without conflict about morality, sin, or guilt; they reflect a moral freedom that is typical not only of the Irish otherworld but of conceptions of paradise and holy places worldwide (Mac Cana, "Sinless Otherworld"). In a psychoanalytic analysis of Molly's monologue, Mark Shechner notes that she betrays little evidence of anxiety or guilt but that "her liberated condition is not particularly admirable, for it has not been won. Molly has overcome no psychic or social barriers to gain her freedom. . . . And insofar as she exists in a realm beyond conflict, she is unreal" (205). He therefore concludes that the psychology of the episode is superficial. It is perhaps more to the point to note that Molly's psychology is the morality of the inhabitants of paradise: as such it is a birthright and does not need to be won.

Herring also rightly questions the realism of Molly's ethnic identity, suggesting that the child of a local Jew and a British major would have had no social context in which she could have been accepted: "Molly could well have been rejected by all but the most tolerant in Gibraltar: by Jews as an outcast (though legally Jewish) like her mother; by local society as a daughter of the regiment . . . by the garrison as the product of a scandalous union" ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 514). The paradox is resolved if Molly's mixed identity—Jewish, Moorish, Irish, Spanish—is related to the Book of Invasions theme: her heritage in Ulysses is less realistic than emblematic of the pseudohistorical background of the Milesians that Joyce invokes. At the same time the absence of sectarian and racial conflict in her idealized Gibraltar mirrors the peacefulness of the Irish otherworld, where there is no conflict and strife, rather than a temporal and geographical reality.

It has often been observed that there are problems with time in Molly's monologue and that there is no chronological orderliness. Just as all the men of her life become the indeterminate, archetypal he in her thoughts (Kenner, "Ulysses" 147–49; Shechner 199; Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey 166; cf. Benstock and Benstock 229–33), so all her life experiences

run together and merge without regard for chronology. Hayman observes that she has "a mind which makes no real distinction between past and present" and that for her "time is one continuous erotic present" ("Empirical Molly" 124, 127). Indeed, Molly has been criticized for being psychologically immature and regressive because of these characteristics of her thought, but the temporal anomalies of Molly's thought, like many of the other critical puzzles about Molly, are illuminated by a mythic perspective. We must begin by recognizing that in his scheme for the book Joyce assigns an hour for every episode but the last, which he marks "[¥ ]" That sign for infinity indicates that Molly's episode is to include all time and to be no time, to be both eternal and beyond time. As Richard Ellmann has put it, "The ruins of time and space and the mansions of eternity here coexist" (Ulysses on the Liffey 163). This timelessness of Molly's thought is the time of the gods and constitutes a reversion to primordial time, where past, present, and future are all equally accessible. Such a temporal context—all time, bounded by no time—is appropriate for a deity and is to be expected in the supernatural realm of the gods; thus the movement of time in this episode fits Molly's status as a Sovereignty figure and an earth goddess. It is no wonder that, as Molly herself observes, she has a problem with mortal time: "I never know the time even that watch he gave me never seems to go properly Id want to get it looked after" (18.344–46).^[44] The temporal framework of the otherworld—as well as the closed form created by the dúnad to the episode—enabled Joyce to assert that "Penelope has no beginning, middle or end" (Letters 1: 172).

This infinity of time also mirrors specific temporal characteristics of the Celtic otherworld. The Irish otherworld has a timelessness in the sense that things neither wither nor decay nor die, aspects reflected in Molly's Gibraltar.^[45] But the flow of time in the otherworld is also disengaged from that of the mortal world: one can be in the otherworld for a short time only to discover that centuries have passed in the world of men, or one can spend a long time in the otherworld only to return to one's own world at the moment one left (AIT 250–51, 595). The shifting perspective on time associated with the Irish otherworld explains some

[44] Bloom also has a problem with his watch in the narrative; cf. 13.983–89.

[45] Though inhabitants of the otherworld do not die, in some tales they can be killed (e.g., AIT 191).

of Molly's temporal dislocation. She has the sense of immense gulfs of time ("how long ago it seems centuries" [18.666]), and the sense that time does double duty ("the days like years" [18.698]), as well as the sense that no time has elapsed at all ("I dont feel a day older than then" [18.1471–72]; cf. 18.821: "its just like yesterday").

Some of the otherworldly aspects of Molly's episode have been recognized before. Ellmann, for example, concludes that Molly's monologue "bursts through. . .to 'that other world,'" a world that is "a paradise lost" (172). What has not been recognized is the specifically Irish quality of this paradise lost. The appendix to this chapter summarizes some of the correspondences between Molly's Gibraltar and the presentation of the Irish otherworld in The Voyage of Bran, perhaps the most famous of the Irish otherworld texts.^[46] It can be seen that some of the correspondences are ironically delicious and amusing: "the best of wine" becomes "Bushmills whisky" in Gibraltar, "strange raiment" becomes lack of drawers. Joyce treats the Irish myth of the happy otherworld with the same comic freedom that he does Greek myth; and while using Irish myth to give structural form to his work, he never solemnizes or sentimentalizes the material, as did most other Anglo-Irish writers of the period. Joyce's playful and humorous tone does more justice to Irish tradition, gives a more adequate reading of the early material, and represents a more seamless continuation of the tradition than did the treatment of such materials by any of the members of the Irish revival, including Yeats.

After identifying breaks in the historical surface of Molly's Gibraltar, breaks that to Herring seem infelicitous but that are meaningful in the context of Irish myth, Herring concludes that Joyce also actively and consciously undermines the social reality of Gibraltar to imbue Molly's past with a mysterious dimension ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 513). Herring notes in particular that Molly's parents seem to have been designed to challenge our credulity (515). Herring's reading is essentially correct: the structures from Irish myth reflected in Ulysses indicate that Joyce has deliberately broken the surface historicization of Molly and that this presentation is part of Joyce's mythic method. Molly's mysterious origin is related to her status as a Sovereignty figure: she has the uncertain parentage characteristic of many mythological figures. Thus, the

[46] Citations to The Voyage of Bran are taken from AIT, where Meyer's text is reprinted.

breaks in the historical surface of Gibraltar reinforce Molly's mythic stature at the same time that they coincide with the morphology of the Irish otherworld. Indeed, the structures from The Book of Invasions, the delineation of Molly as Irish Sovereignty goddess, and the presentation of Gibraltar as Irish otherworld together make a mythic pattern of great intricacy and texture; the mythic elements from Irish literature complement and amplify each other, even as they shatter the realistic surface.

Without knowing the Irish dimensions of the material, Shechner has concluded that the end of Ulysses, "this most psychological of modern novels," derives from folklore and myth; Shechner sees this ending as a failure on Joyce's part, a retreat (206). A comparative perspective including Irish literature indicates to the contrary that Joyce's methods in Molly's monologue are an epitome and summation of the mythic elements from Irish literature that provide one axis of the framework of Ulysses and that structure the book from its beginning. Rather than beating a narratological retreat from realism, Joyce uses a technique in the final episode of Ulysses that anticipates the postmodernism of Finnegans Wake. The shearing of the historical surface of Gibraltar is deliberate on Joyce's part; instead of caviling at the ahistoricity of Molly's memories or Molly's speech (Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 516), critics should consider the implications of Joyce's craft here: the "errors" are a portal of discovery. It seems clear that the breaks in the historical surface of Gibraltar are neither simply an absurdist abandonment of the "sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp" (Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 501, 518–19) nor an indication of Molly's nostalgic and inadequate psyche. Instead, they are indications that Molly's Gibraltar is less a geographical location than a mythic and a symbolic one. Joyce's purposes for the symbolism must be considered.^[47]

[47] The mythic determinants of Molly's Gibraltar are largely Irish, as I have shown, but as with much of Joyce's mythic material they coincide also with prototypes from classical literature and from Joyce's other sources. Joyce's otherworldly imagery is implicit also in Field's description of sunset at Gibraltar, in which "the straits shine as if they were the very gates of gold that open into a fairer world than ours" (quoted in Card 167); Field was one of Joyce's sources for Gibraltar. That this passage made an impact on Joyce we can see from an allusion to it set in Molly's voice in her interior monologue: "the straits shining I could see over to Morocco almost the bay of Tangier white and the Atlas mountain with snow on it and the straits like a river so clear" (18.859–61). Joyce truncates the passage and makes the otherworldly associations implicit rather than explicit, letting them pervade his whole treatment of Gibraltar. But Joyce's Gibraltar also suggests the happy otherworlds of classical tradition, particularly the Hesperides, both by its location and the universal aspects of his paradisiacal imagery. Thus, Molly's Gibraltar is at once the otherworld of Field's imagination, the happy otherworld of the Greeks, and the otherworldly western isles of the Celts; Joyce's syncretism here, as noted above, follows Nutt's placement of the Irish otherworld in a comparative mythological context.