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In support of this position he offers a survey of the action's evocation of the narrative voices, claiming that the different styles reflect the emotional color of Stephen and Bloom's perceptions at particular points in the action. For instance, the paragraphs following the invocation "track the dawning awareness of someone last seen falling asleep, awaking at night as he approaches and becomes familiar with a strange setting" (236). Then, the stray sound of Mina Purefoy's cry "affects--perhaps prompts--the students' discussion about the perils of childbirth"; the somber mood, the round table discussion, the aggressive rivalry all evoke, Gordon argues, Malory's narrative voice.[2] His analysis of Bloom's reverie follows a similar tack, demonstrating how chance words from the surrounding conversation interact with Bloom's thoughts, feelings and memories in producing both a narrative event, Bloom's reverie, and the narrative voices of DeQuincey and Lamb. To take one instance, Gordon claims that "The horses, cued by background talk about the day's race [U 415], mutate into cattle when a thunder clap (from lightning [signaled in the text by the "fiat!" U 413]) reminds Bloom of the thundering herd seen earlier on the highway, heading to the sea and death" (240). Able thus to explicate the relationship of event to style, Gordon concludes that Joyce has designed "Oxen" as a test of the reader's "resolve to pay attention, to struggle to discern the story being told, with its beginning and end, its real people and critical events" to submit, that is, to the authority of the narrator (252). The reader who obeys the "narrator's commands" is granted insights the less persevering and perspicacious reader is denied. Gordon argues that the text maneuvers this compliant reader

into the position of Stephen's Hamlet, seeking consubstantial continuities stretching from the present moment back through the dimly recognizable ghosts ranged before us, back to an origin figured as the vital 'outflinging' connections of fathering and authoring, from which point the true story--source, destination, and points in between--can be traced. (250)

The question then becomes whether Joyce is merely interfering with this typical response or completely defeating it. Gordon argues that Joyce disturbs the surface in order to test the willingness of the reader to persevere in seeking the continuities below the surface. Bernard Benstock, on the other hand, believes that Joyce is defeating the reader's desire for a coherent reality, the need "to chart the factual universe of Joyce's epic,... [to] concretise the firm ground on which the narrative stands."[5] As he asserts in Narrative Con/Texts in Ulysses, the text is "constructed to remain inconclusive despite all efforts to impose solutions, resolutions or even happy endings" (75). While one might wonder what evidence could ever refute this claim, Benstock does illustrate the intractability of several issues in the novel. He shows, for instance, that the text presents two Ellen Blooms, one Catholic, one Protestant, co-existing in parallel plotlines (75). Based on this kind of ambiguity, Benstock concludes that "two overlapping texts exist ... both quite plausible and each in its own way contributing to a facet of the narrative of Ulysses, although it is also apparent that each undercuts the other, challenging the assumed notion that a literary text inevitably posits a singular 'reality'" (135). While Benstock is not proposing that the underlying world of fact in Ulysses is incoherent, he does argue that "Perspective is in the eyes of the beholder" (82), and that since "Ulysses deals almost exclusively with the Dublin bourgeoisie as it sees itself," it is pointless to try to infer one's way back to a stable, privileged reality. There is no base reality to appeal to in order to resolve the text's ambiguities.

I think it is possible to argue for a fairly stable narrative reality in Ulysses. I agree with Thornton when he states that "there is in Ulysses a fictive world consisting of far more than the 'speaking voice' of each episode, and that here as in all novels, the most basic expressions of authorial presence and of the novel's underlying values are the persons and events and structures of the book" (244-45). Developing an ethical reading of Ulysses, Thornton claims that Joyce's values--"his preferences for caritas over selfishness, for responsiveness over solipsism, for honest self-awareness over sentimental self-indulgence"--are expressed by a "bedrock of character and event that persist throughout the book" (251). While the voice expressing these values dominates in the early episodes (Thornton refers to it as the "initial style"), later episodes express values and perspectives opposed to those in the initial style. Thornton accounts for these voices as manifesting a "Presenter." He reasons that in order to expose the insufficiencies and distortions of various styles, Joyce permits the Presenter to take over the narrative voice, granting him license to cloud or "obfuscat[e] the presentation of the thoughts and dialogue of [a] character" but not to take "liberties with the events of the novel or with the personalities of the characters or with the content of their thoughts or dialogue" (248). With this interpretive tool in hand, Thornton can argue that "in Ulysses at least, if not in 'real life,' we do have a substrate of novelistic reality available to us in the events and the personalities of the characters" (251) and that "while it may not be possible to 'produce a subject that exists apart from words,' it certainly is possible for us to distinguish between a subject and the language in which it is presented."[6] So while the novel's stylistic surfaces are complex, Thornton credits the underlying initial style with a fundamental coherence and the reader with the ability to infer that stable world, which for Thornton is the world of Joyce's values.

This debate over the integrity of Ulysses's narrative reality may reduce finally to the question of how one chooses to read the novel, that is, to personal preference or ideological orientation. Predisposed to coherence, the reader finds coherence. Expecting none, he or she finds ambiguity and obfuscation. What we can conclude from these arguments for and against is that if a critic wants to argue for narrative coherence, it behooves him or her to explicate a coherent narrative reality and to account for the opacity of the text: how is the difficult surface related to the narrative content? and what end does the obfuscation of content by style achieve?

One way to do this is to find a key with which to unlock the text from the outside. The critical history of "Oxen" is filled with attempts to use the sources of the imitations and Joyce's declared technique of "embryological development" as such keys. Though critics have argued for significance in the embryological "technic," this approach has not taken anyone very far: Joyce does seem to have implanted many allusions to the developing fetus in "Oxen," but critics have been frustrated in their attempts to shape these into a nine-month gestation or to show how these months relate to the narrative action or the historical survey. Robert Janusko's transcription of Joyce's embryological notes reveals how few compelling parallels there are.[7] J.S. Atherton, who makes repeated reference to the embryological correspondences in his explication of "Oxen," admits that he finds "it impossible to reduce [the episode's allusive] details to a consistent pattern."[8] Thornton makes the interesting suggestion that the embryological schema is the Presenter's, which Joyce considers naively imitative and is therefore satirizing (249, 263). Even the sources of the parodies, the search for which has produced much interesting information about Joyce's transformations of his material, cannot provide a satisfying schema for reading the text. Atherton again expresses frustration--and valiant determination: "Joyce seems to have deliberately confused his margins so as to make it impossible to produce a neat and accurate tabulation of the various details in his chapter, although this, of course, is precisely what all we critics try to do" (323). And Janusko admits the irrelevance to most readers of the search after sources: "I doubt that Joyce expected his readers to recognize the sources of these phrases, or of most of those in this chapter for that matter, but such incongruities between source and application must have delighted him while writing it" (70). Such schemata, therefore, offer little help to the reader, who is looking for an approach that will make the text's narrative action and Joyce's thematic concerns accessible--even if not entirely explicable.

The reader can also search for such a concept in the text, without recourse to imposed schemata. Gordon argues this way, taking Newman's paragraph on evocation by "chance word" as exemplary of the workings of the whole chapter, then demonstrating how the narrative opens into the thematic concerns. While I agree that the text can be explicated from within, there are two problems with Gordon's implementation of this approach. First, he insists on too close a link between style and underlying action. He wants to show that each narrative voice is evoked by specific events and represents a particular mental state. As such, he must demonstrate a direct causal link between action and description. He claims that in its emphasis on the necessity of continuity, "Oxen" demands the reader's "recognition of a causal connectivity in its structure" (247). I will argue in my own account of the chapter that while the narrative is basic and while there are causal connections between the content and the styles, the link between them is fundamentally thematic: the stylistic surface explores issues similar to those concerning the characters themselves. The stylistic surface does not need to be linked directly to every element in the narrative's world, as Gordon suggests. Rather, the style is able to span gaps between its connections with the narrative events. Second, Gordon argues that "events generate style," the evocation always working in this direction. I think that while it is primarily evoked by the action, the stylistic structure is complexly interrelated with the narrative, sometimes even seeming to influence events in the narrative's world. So, while I agree that the narrative content of the chapter is the reader's most natural and reliable entree into the text and that a process of evocation is one of the links between style and content, I will argue that another kind of "vocation" provides a broader account of the workings and meanings of "Oxen," an account which avoids the problems in Gordon's argument.

The different voices in "Oxen" engage as a group in a specific kind of calling, a calling to account. The narrators and revelers repeatedly ask each other to answer for their conduct, ideas or statements. "Oxen" then is a book of inquiries, of "aresouns" as Joyce puts it, in the Maloryean voice (U 388). "Aresoun" is a variant of "areason," which the OED defines as "[v.] to address words and esp. questions to; to question, examine, call to account. [sb.] Examination, interrogation." I will argue that the many callings to account occurring on the narrative level of "Oxen" can provide the puzzled reader with a concept which brings some coherence to the action and significance of the episode. "Aresoun" helps account for and interpret the chapter's action, stylistic surface, and thematic concerns. It gives the chapter a conflict motivating its action, the responses of its characters, and its climax and denouement. And it is closely related to the chapter's concern with history. In starting with the narrative rather than by reference to the hermeneutics of sources and technique, I am perhaps reading against one of the canonical grains of Joyce criticism. However, when dealing with an episode devoted to calling for accounts and attempts to evade the aresouning, I think it is reasonable to stick to the text as accounting for itself. The most basic level of self-account offered by the text is its narrative and it is there that I will begin. Confronted with such recalcitrant oxen, the reader must do what he can to corral them. Whether this means sacrificing them in or to the process of comprehension will remain for the time being an open question.

Immediately upon joining the "rag and bobtail" of imbibers in the Common Room of the National Maternity Hospital, Bloom notices the revelers' spirited banter: "For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen other as touching birth and righteousness" (U 388). Though somewhat obscured by the Maloryean prose, the energy of their good-natured verbal jousting is evident: "... This was scant said but all cried with one acclaim.... In colour whereof they waxed hot upon that head what with argument and what for their drinking.... Thereat laughed they all right jocundly...." (U 389). Throughout this initial exchange of queries and aspersions, and indeed throughout the chapter the carousers repeatedly call one another to account for their actions, ideas, or statements. For instance, at the beginning of the episode, Madden is required to defend himself when he comments on the mother that died the year before. When Nurse Quigley interrupts his "bawdy catch," Costello is "incontinently ... of them all embraided and they reclaimed the churl with civil rudeness some and with menace of blandishments others whiles all chode with him" (U 392). When he later insults the honor of Nurse Callan, he is reproached with similar warmth by Dixon, the others murmuring their "approval ... for ejecting the low soaker without more ado" (U 406-07). The sardonic aresouners are only too willing to descend with comically exaggerated vituperation upon anyone showing any sign of weakness.

This inquisitive tone is reinforced by the aresouning of the narrative voices. The muddled translator of convoluted Latin prefaces the episode with his calling to account of those who do not respect the importance to a nation of "proliferant continuance" (U 383). Even his diction, complex, abstract and passive as it is, issues a challenge. Instead of simply making an assertion, he couches his statement in the form of an "anyone who knows anything" statement, which brings the erring party into the sentence in order to denounce him as if present: "Everyone thinks that someone who doesn't agree with those who are wise about what is important is not very perceptive" roughly translates the aresoun in this narrator's first sentence (U 383). The narrator who depicts Bloom's awakening from reverie defends Leopold with a similar kind of statement: "...anybody that conjectured the contrary would have found themselves pretty speedily in the wrong shop" (U 416).[9] Other narrators also participate in the aresouning. Bunyan upbraids Stephen, "Young Boasthard," for his disbelief and profligacy with a number of rhetorical questions each calling for an accounting which Bunyan, unsurprisingly, supplies: "But could he not have endeavored to have found again as in his youth the bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed not.... And would he accept to die like the rest and pass away? By no means...." (U 395). Junius mercilessly reviles Bloom, again with telling rhetorical questions such as, "is it that from being a deluder of others he has become at last his own dupe as he is, if report belie him not his own and his only enjoyer?" (U 409). Of course, the characters are largely powerless to respond to these narratorial rebukes, which are thus left to reverberate in the already ringing air of the chapter.

We might even consider Joyce a participant in the jocose interrogations. The chapter's historical survey can be seen as an aresouning in two ways. Joyce might be giving an account (to the reader, to posterity, to himself) of his literary ancestry. Alternately, he may be sacrificing some of English literature's sacred cows, calling them to account for their stylistic distortions and excesses. As a giving of account, "Oxen" is pastiche, imitating in flattery; as a calling to account, it is parody, imitating in mockery. The tone of the chapter is difficult to characterize. Joyce seems not to display a consistent tone toward his literary predecessors, ranging from the satirical--as in the Dickensian send-up--to the laudatory--with a more respectful treatment of Newman.[10] Although the tonal inconsistency would suggest a parodic intent, since pastiche connotes a consistently admiring survey rather than discrete imitations, it is unnecessary to judge between the two if one sees the chapter as an expression of a (Harold) Bloomian "anxiety of influence." In this vein, Ames creates a subgenre for "Oxen" (and Woolf's Between the Acts), defining "canon narrative" as a fictional text "that presents chronological readings or surveys of literary history overlaid upon another narrative" (390). As such "Oxen" reflects Joyce's struggle to come to terms with tradition; it is simultaneously "a sort of anti-textbook, a demonic Saintsbury ... challeng[ing] the exclusive claims to literary greatness that might be made for monuments of the English canon," and a tribute to the tradition and its rich treatment of the themes Joyce examines in "Oxen": love, procreation and artistic creation (394).

Along the same line of reasoning, but from a historicizing approach, James Fairhall discusses Ulysses as an expression of Joyce's desire to preserve something of his younger self and the Dublin of his youth against the postwar rush of the recent past into anachronism. Fairhall mentions "Oxen" as an instance of "creative anachronism." Through "a deliberate dramatization of historical passage, bringing a concrete present into relation with a specific past and playing with the distance between them," Ulysses and "Oxen" help prevent their own "tragic anachronism,"[11] which Thomas Greene describes as the fact that "all products come into being bearing the marks of their historical moment and then, if they last, are regarded as alien during a later moment because of these marks."[12] Joyce's struggle with the tradition of English prose style in "Oxen" creates, then, a frame of accounting and calling to account within which the aresouning of narrators and characters alike can resonate.

It follows then that different levels of the text, which "Oxen" so sharply distinguishes by means of the opacity of its stylistic surface, are unified by the shared motif of aresouning. This motif also gives the reader an entree into Stephen's behavior in the chapter and to his feelings, which, although often obscured by the frenetic badinage, constitute one of the episode's main concerns. In order to understand his reaction to the drunken aresouning, then, it is necessary to sketch the arc of his reflections in the chapters leading up to "Oxen," particularly his grief over his mother's death and his anger toward Mulligan.

The novel's first indication of Stephen's emotional state comes in his answer to Buck Mulligan's callous pro-vocation: "The aunt thinks you killed your mother.... --Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily" (U 5). Partly in response to this challenge, Stephen asks Mulligan to account for an earlier comment: "O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead" (U 8). Though momentarily ashamed (or as close to it as we will see him in Ulysses), Mulligan quickly recovers his boldness. He knows Stephen's chinks, and his aim is sure:

And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own?... You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's.... I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother.

... Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:

--I am not thinking of the offence to my mother ... [but of] the offence to me. (U 8-9)

These thoughts are a pall hanging over Stephen's inner life for the rest of the day. In the midst of expounding his theory about Shakespeare and Hamlet in "Scylla and Charybdis" more associated images rise into consciousness: "Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. Liliata rutilantium." (U 190). However, while these images are a source of pain for him, he also nurtures them as a source of creative energy. Of Shakespeare's posited pain he says: "He goes back, weary of the old creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed" (U 197). This emotional aspect of his aesthetic theory expresses his own awareness of the bind pain puts him in. When faced with the apparition of his mother in "Circe," he exclaims, "The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all" (U 582). He recognizes, that is, that he cannot give up the imaginative reality of his mother's death without sacrificing the imagination he needs for his poetry. And without giving up this aspect of his imagination, he will never free himself from the vengeful god of his worst fears. The anger he will express in "Oxen" and again later in "Circe," indicate the level of his frustration in the face of this emotional and imaginative dilemma. "The ghoul! Hyena!... The corpsechewer! Raw head and bloody bones!... Non serviam!... No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you if you can! I'll bring you all to heel!" (U 581-82). In fighting to free himself from subjugation to church, nation and even love of mother--subjective or objective genitive--he has committed a crime and in a sense created this evil god. So his turmoil over his mother's death is more than "simply" grief. Stephen's mourning represents the center of a series of interrelated struggles for freedom and expression of self. This "farraginous" wound is the one Stephen attempts to shield throughout Ulysses's day.

And it is this core that Stephen feels is threatened by the barbed aresouns of the other revelers. This perceived threat motivates the full range of Stephen's behavior in "Oxen," from his almost manic bawdy and blasphemous declamations to his brooding silence. By tracing these wildly varying responses through the chapter, I hope to demonstrate how they are linked to various actual and perceived callings to account. This approach will also lead to an explication of the vague, apparently arbitrary and anti-climactic climax of "Oxen."

Stephen's first display of emotion in "Oxen" is his failure, along with Bloom, to laugh "right jocundly" at the irreverent repartee (U 389). Though the narrator accounts for Bloom's straight face, he leaves the reader to infer the cause of Stephen's sobriety. Janusko proposes that Stephen is thinking about his mother's death and that this "loss is too recent for him to speak of dying mothers with levity, as a purely academic problem"; he points for evidence to Stephen's comment, "earthly mother which was but a dam to bring forth beastly should die" (U 390), and notes that this recalls "the fact that [his] own mother is 'beastly dead'" (Sources 14). Though Stephen's contribution to the discussion is no doubt colored by his recent experience of maternal mortality, Janusko has the order of evocation backward. Stephen reacts sourly to Crotthers's singing of "young Malachi's praise of that beast the unicorn" (U 389): while the others laugh and swear by St. Foutinus, Stephen recalls Mulligan's crass comment; this memory elicits his diatribe against Catholic reproductive ethics. The Mulligan-inflicted wound is tender enough that even the mention of him evokes an emotional response.

Stephen is momentarily made "a marvellous glad man" by Dixon's punning response to Bloom's diplomatic answer to the question of infant mortality, regaining enough heart to boast falsely about money he has earned "for a song which he writ" and to offer his aesthetic theory of postcreation and reflections on the virgin birth (U 390, 391f). He is even cheerful enough to engage in the banter when first directly aresouned.

Master Dixon,... goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he had not cided to take friar's vows.... Master Lenehan made return ... that he had heard ... he had besmirched the lily virtue of a confiding female which was corruption of minors and they all intershowed it too, waxing merry and toasting his fathership. But he said very entirely it was clean contrary to their suppose for he was the eternal son and ever virgin. (U 392)

However, Stephen's prevailing fear that his emotional wounds will become visible and that he will fall victim to the general mockery is proved well-founded when a thunder clap interrupts his song. Always ready with self-reproach, Stephen perceives the "noise in the street" as the aresoun of a vengeful god, "an old Nobodaddy ... in his cups" (U 394, 395). Lynch plays the prophet, confirming Stephen's interpretation. Though frightened Stephen tries, in keeping with his reticence, to "dye his desperation"; however the merciless medicos have noticed (he "waxed pale as they might all mark") and tease him ("Then did some mock and some jeer" U 394), Madden adding bite to the bark with an elbow to the ribs. Here, the more obtrusive narrative voices of Bunyan (who calls him to task, as discussed above) and Pepys interpose, and we do not get another reaction from Stephen until he responds "a little moved but very handsomely" to Bloom's challenge about bovine disease (U 399). Later, his conclusion to the Swiftian apologue shows him sporting again--even if in his black, anti-Irish vein.

At this point Mulligan joins the festivities and Stephen is silent for some time.[13] The narrator comments on this withdrawal from the action when "Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus" is called upon to settle the question of "the event of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other":

Hitherto silent, whether the better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the garb with which he was invested or in obedience to an inward voice, he delivered briefly, and as some thought perfunctorily, the ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to put asunder what God has joined. (U 411-12, my italics)

Stephen falls silent after Lenehan's attack, speaking again only when inadvertently provoked by Bloom's query about infant mortality and by the answers proposed by Mulligan, Crotthers and Lynch. While Stephen silently listens, Mulligan blames infant mortality on Ireland's poor sanitary conditions and "the revolting spectacles offered by our streets," and prophesies that the "fallingoff in calibre of the race" will be halted only by "Kalipedia"--the contemplation of beauty (U 418-19).[14] Crotthers offers an obstetric explanation, blaming physical labor, neglect, "criminal abortion" and malpractice. The Huxleyean narrator interposes at this point, criticizing Crotthers for generalizing from rare instances and expresses his own astonishment at the high rate of successful pregnancies. Next, Lynch offers a deterministic theory of evolution, the "ingenious suggestion" that "a law of numeration" accounts for human mortality. Here the narrator seems to take over the argument he has placed in Lynch's mouth, offering his own conclusion to the issue:

Still the plain straightforward question why a child ... succumbs unaccountably in early childhood ... must certainly, in the poet's words, give us pause. Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law of anticipation ... which, though productive of pain to some of our feelings (notably the maternal), is nevertheless, some of us think, in the long run beneficial to the race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest. (U 419)

The Huxleyean discourse is interrupted when Stephen, who has only just contained his pain over his mother throughout the chapter, raves against that "omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and apparently pass through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not to speak of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns" (U 420). It seems, in fact, that Stephen is provoked by the narrator's phrasing. His reference to "maternal" feelings ("amor matris"), especially in concert with his remote, almost callous, scientific account of pain and death elicits Stephen's own superstitious theological account of infant and maternal mortality. The narrator prefaces his account of this debate with an aresoun of his own, challenging Stephen directly "to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can" while giving up the "perverted transcendentalism" that Stephen himself admits he cannot shake (U 418). After Stephen's outburst, the narrator vilifies Stephen for his arrogance and ignorance of science. It is almost as if this challenge, issued from across the divide between narrator and characters, has been added to the continued parries of friends (Lynch), foes (Mulligan), and strangers (Bloom), forcing the chapter to its emotional climax.

So vituperative is Stephen's response that a silence falls on the previously irrepressible revelers.[15] This is the silence that Ruskin captures, a pregnant, tense silence, building toward some unknown climax: "But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds ... compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field and drowsy oxen ... till in an instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent ..." (422). Without the "noise of voices" to allay his most recent smart and needing to escape from this reproachful silence, Stephen must supply the climax. He yells "Burke's!" and in so doing brings an end to the episode's aresouning.

"Burke's" is, of course, nothing more than John Burke's, tea and wine merchant, 17 Holles Street on the corner of Denzille St. (Gifford, note on 14.1391). To avoid facing any more comments about his mother or his poetry, Stephen simply and logically directs his fellow drinkers's attention away from himself and to this nearby public house for a nightcap before it closes. "Burke's!" then is a directive: it is an utterance attempting to bring about a state of affairs. In this capacity, it can be expressed as "Let us go to Burke's," which is reminiscent of the invocation, "Deshil Holles Eamus," "Let us go right into Holles Street." Ruskin anticipates that the silent scene he describes will end with a word that produces an effect: "... so and not otherwise was the transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the Word" (U 422). "Burke's!" is a successful directive, accomplishing several immediate effects. It breaks the awkward silence and re-convokes the cacophony of voices which help him ignore his smart. It also brings about a change of physical location and, because the topics of discussion have been largely determined by the location of the gathering in the maternity hospital, Burke's will likely turn the conversation away from mothers and death.

However, "Burke's!" does not produce these desired effects only indirectly. Stephen's outflinging also issues another directive, "Let these inquisitions end," also implicit in "Burke's!" "To burke" is to avoid or smother publicity or inquiry, and to hush up or suppress a rumor (The Concise Oxford Dictionary). By uttering this "Word," then, Stephen brings about a state of affairs in which he will avoid intrusive scrutiny in the near future. Stephen, that is, burkes further inquiry when he says "Burke's!": uttering the word has the effect of bringing about both the meaning of the word and intention of the speaker. The word denotes both the place where inquiry will end and the smothering of inquiry itself.

The verb "to burke" derives from the name of William Burke (1790-1829) an Irishman, who, "with his partner William Hare (1790-1860) ... committed a series of murders in Edinburgh, to supply dissection subjects to Dr. Robert Knox, the anatomist. Hare, the more villainous of the two, was admitted king's evidence ... while Burke was hanged, to the general satisfaction of the crowd."[16] The OED, to which Joyce had access, cites the Times of 02 February 1829, which records the crowd's emotion: "As soon as the executioner proceeded to his duty, the cries of 'Burke him, Burke him--give him no rope' ... were vociferated ... 'Burke Hare too!'"[17] The primary denotation, then, is "To murder, in the same manner or for the same purpose as Burke did; to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim's body for dissection." (This meaning was current into the 1840s, with the figurative meanings persisting into current usage. Medical students especially might be expected to remember the story and expression, given their black sense of humor and the macabre lore of the dissecting room.) The OED's secondary, figurative definition is "To smother, 'hush up,' suppress quietly. Also, to evade, to shirk, to avoid."

The "Burke's!" in "Oxen," then, draws figurative resonances from both definitions of the word. For instance, Stephen's final declamation condemns god as a murderer of infants, mothers, gentlemen, politicians, nuns--of the deserving and undeserving alike. This god is a burker. The image also harks back to the discussion of death in "Telemachus." Trying to convince Stephen that death, though terrible, is ubiquitous, Mulligan exclaims, "I see them ... cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It's a beastly thing and nothing else" (U 8). So Stephen's image of a corpse-chewing ghoulish god may owe something to Mulligan's description of burked bodies. In exclaiming "Burke's!" Stephen is trying to smother or suppress his "intellectual imagination" which produces these images of a vengeful being. He is trying to enact Nietzsche's death of god in his own intellect. In "Oxen" he has been unable to find the necessary self-assurance and boldness, venturing at one point--comically but still revealingly--"Thus, or words to that effect, said Zarathustra" (U 393), the qualification undercutting the very point of the brazen, self-creating declamation. Taken together then, his scornful caricature of the ghoulish god and his definitive "Burke's!" represent Stephen's effort to speak himself free of this feared god, to effect a "violent and instantaneous" transformation. As such, it may be the most creative word Stephen speaks in Ulysses.

So Stephen's "Word" achieves desired effects in the narrative reality, releasing him from the episode's aresouning. And it can be deployed figuratively to describe Stephen's emotional response to the episode's action. Furthermore, just as each level of the text can be seen in terms of aresouns, so can the aresouning in each be understood to be brought to an abrupt climax by the utterance of "Burke's!"

This outflinging suits the Carlylean narrative voice in several ways. It reflects the powerful vocal quality of his prose. It is historically appropriate, William Burke having been at work in Edinburgh at the same time Carlyle was (Carlyle left for Craigenputtock in 1828, Burke was hanged in 1829). More significantly, Carlyle, as the episode's climactic stylistic voice can be seen as burking the previous narrators, "hushing up" their voices and smothering the action they describe, an act which fits the real Carlyle: as one critic puts it, "The trivial banter of London's bohemia did not merely bore him; it drove him to furious repudiations."[18] Here he seems to be repudiating a similarly trivial and aimless banter. He criticizes the pointlessness of the communal history, referring, apparently, to the entire episode or to Ulysses itself as "this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle," exposing its failure to labor toward a point with his use of "farraginous": "miscellaneous, indiscriminate, 'hotchpotch'" (OED). He similarly disparages the episode's characters as a "dedale," that is "varied, variously adorned," and as "a tag and bobtail," which is "a contemptuous term for a number of persons of various sorts and conditions, all and sundry, esp. of the lower classes."[19] While he does seem to have some respect for the "strong fund of animal spirits" of the students (U 407), he retrospectively refocuses the narrative on Theodore Purefoy, his paragon of fructification. So Carlyle's "Burke's!" along with Stephen's constitutes itself as a powerful climax and the imposition through utterance of a new order.

Joyce's "Burke's!" is first of all a tool for bringing about the closure of this section of the narrative. It brings Stephen's emotional progression to a climax. It also brings closure to Joyce's historical survey by simply smothering it, so to speak, as it nears the present. However, if this history is read as Joyce's giving of and calling to account, as I suggested earlier, "Burke's!" serves an additional purpose. It signals Joyce's acknowledgment that in presenting his history of English prose he has burked his predecessors: he has smothered their living voices and dissected their prose styles to further his own aesthetic project. Marie-Helene Huet claims that this kind of creative and destructive appropriation--the cinematic "remake" is her example--is "the emblem of modern art in more ways than one": it is

a form of body snatching, of 'burking' as Madame Tussaud would have it. The remake takes over the original, impersonating the model while preventing total assimilation: 'It is the same ... but changed.' The remake differs from other forms of imitation ... by its simultaneous recognition of parentage and erasure of filiation. It claims and negates a genitor.[20]

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In "aresoun" and "Burke's!" Joyce has provided two rich, interacting concepts to guide the reader's comprehension of the narrative action and of his thematic concerns. The stylistic voices provide these words which describe the action and refer figuratively to the whole episode. Additionally, these images offer a context for thinking about the acts of reading and interpreting fiction. Frustrated by the episode's opacity, the reader calls upon the text to give an account of itself. It "responds" but leaves one with an account the status of which is uncertain. Is it a true or misleading, self-protecting account? Is, for example, the sketch of prose history--the episode's stylized surface--the meaning or truth of the episode? Or is it a diversionary account, testing the reader's determination to penetrate to the stable narrative reality beneath, as Gordon argues? Or again, is it an ironic condemnation of naive mimesis, as Thornton suggests? Has the stylistic surface so effectively hushed-up the narrative that the reader is denied any sure access to it? Finally, have one's own interpretive strategies murdered and dissected the text? These are only some of the questions "Oxen" raises. Like the aresouns directed against Stephen, they finally go unanswered, burked by the climactic "Burke's!" uttered simultaneously by Stephen, the narrator and Joyce.

Footnotes

1 John Gordon, "Obeying the Boss in 'Oxen of the Sun,'" ELH, 58 (March 1991), p. 234. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2 For the sake of convenience I will refer to the narrative voices by the name of their imitatee, as these are listed in Don Gifford, with Robert J. Seidman, "Ulysses" Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's "Ulysses," 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 283. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

3 Weldon Thornton, "Voices and Values in Ulysses," in Joyce's "Ulysses," ed. Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1987), p. 251. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

4 Christopher Ames, "The Modernist Canon Narrative: Woolf's Between the Acts and Joyce's 'Oxen of the Sun,'" Twentieth-Century Literature, 37 (December 1991), p. 394. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

5 Bernard Benstock, (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 73. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

6 Thornton 250, quoting from Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), p. 52.

7 Robert Janusko, The Sources and Structures of James Joyce's "Oxen," (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983). See Chapter 3 and Appendix B. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

8 J.S. Atherton, "The Oxen of the Sun," in James Joyce's "Ulysses": Critical Essays, ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 320. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

9 This narrative voice has been identified by several critics as Macaulay's (see Gifford's note to 14.1174-1222 and Janusko 74), but Atherton's claim that it embodies some of the common solecisms described in Hodgson's Errors in the Use of English seems to account for it and its difference from the following indubitably Macauleyesque paragraph (Atherton 332). Janusko quotes in passing Saintsbury (whose History of English Prose Rhythm has been identified as a source for Joyce's historical survey: see, for e.g., Atherton 316f): "Nobody whose opinion is good for anything has ever undervalued Mandeville as a writer...." (61). The tone and syntax of this sentence are similar enough to these sentences to suggest that Saintsbury himself has crept into Joyce's parodies.

10 Janusko describes Joyce's admiration for Newman's prose and possible sources for the pastiche in "Grave Beauty," JJQ, 28 (Spring 1991), 617-21.

11 James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 198f.

12 Thomas Greene, The Vulnerable Text (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), p. 222, qtd. in Fairhall 198f. Fairhall gets the notions of "creative" and "tragic anachronism" from Greene.

13 Stephen's silence spans more than ten pages of text (U 401-411), though narrative time is very loose here.

14 Mulligan's reasoning seems to be based upon the superstition that the objects contemplated by a pregnant woman can misshape her child. Marie-Helene Huet discusses manifestations in Renaissance and later literature of this belief in the power of the maternal imagination, specifically that "monstrous progeny resulted from the disorder of the maternal imagination"; she also discusses the way in which Romanticism altered the notion in developing its own aesthetic of the monstrous in her Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), p. 1.

15 Though sections in the voices of Dickens, Newman and Pater come between Stephen's outburst and Ruskin's description of the pregnant silence in the Common Room, these three voices describe events occuring outside the Common Room (the birth of young Purefoy) or in a moment of thought (Bloom's recollection of young Stephen and his mother) and present a non-narrative meditation. One can almost picture them as the narrator's attempt to fill the awkward gap in the events which he has created by provoking Stephen.

16 "Burke, William," in Chambers Biographical Dictionary, gen ed. Magnus Magnusson (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1990), p. 231. Incidentally, this criminal connotation brings to at least three the number of pubs in Ulysses associated with murder and execution: Kiernan's, with its hangman's glasses and criminal memorabilia, the cabman's shelter, Skin-the-Goat, proprietor, and Burke's.

17 The crowd included Sir Walter Scott, who recorded the mob's greed "for more victims" in his journal. (Qtd. in Jonathan Goodman, Bloody Versicles: The Rhymes of Crime (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971), p. 112; see also pp. 110-15. Jacques Barzun reprints contemporary broadsides, verses, illustrations and polemics about Burke and Hare, as well as a complete transcript of the testimony given at Burke's trial in Burke and Hare: The Resurrection Men (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974).

18 "Carlyle, Thomas," in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., gen. ed. M.H. Abrams (New York: Norton, 1986) pp. 939-44. The OED cites a use of the verb by Lamb in his Last Essays. It would be an interesting twist to the episode's historical play if Joyce encountered this word in Lamb and transposed it into the narrative voice of Carlyle, who loathed Lamb's prose.

19 The OED lists this definition under "tagrag."

20 Huet 267-68. Huet discusses Burke and Hare as symbols of the monstrous Romantic imagination exemplified in the "art" of Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum: "The raw material of her art and the embryonic object of her Museum [i.e., The Chamber of Horrors, in which wax figures of Burke and Hare were prominently displayed] are the dead. And what is the nature of her 'peculiar art,' if not to reenact on the dead the very act of suffocation [in making a plaster cast] that Burke practiced on the living?" (205)

21 Robert Fitzgerald, trans., The Odyssey (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 223, lines 531-32.