You Say Tomatoes, She say Met Him Pike Hoses
Post Two
Joyce in a letter to Harriet Shaw-Weaver revealed a certain scepticism for books with ‘goahead plot’. He felt it dispensable. Drama he said elsewhere, was for the journalists. So with Ulysses, ignoring phantasmagorical earthquakes, flying chariots and whatnot, not a great deal happens. Such plot as exists is largely driven by Bloom’s suspicion/expectation that Molly will be unfaithful to him that afternoon. But why does he think this?
The main clue is the letter from the would-be lover impresario Blazes Boylan, that arrives in that morning’s post. This is no great mystery, for in Calypso Molly tells Bloom that the letter is from Boylan and that he’s informing her firstly of the programme for next week’s tour of Ulster and secondly that he’ll be dropping in at 4pm that afternoon to discuss it further. We will know many episodes later that he signs off with the business-like ‘Yours ever, Hugh Boylan’ but otherwise, we do not know what else the letter says.
Bloom’s background information, for example the walk along the river Tolka and him observing Molly and Boylan’s secret hand signals (or so Bloom suspects), will seep through in subsequent episodes and he may well be suspicious of Boylan’s true agenda. This is compounded by him seeing Molly hide the letter under her pillow for more private reading. So it may not be entirely business-like.
But there is something else, something more subtle and if not quite a smoking gun then enough to challenge common claims that we must await episode 18 to discover what goes on with Molly and Boylan.
Calypso contains the very famous metempsychosis conversation with Molly asking Bloom what the word means. He explains it’s a Greek derived word meaning reincarnation, the transmigration of souls which is of course one of the book’s essential themes. She then retorts with ‘met him pike hoses’. This isn’t quoted in Calypso but we find out in Lestrygonians that that is what she said in the course of conversation either then or at least before Bloom leaves for Westland Row at about 9.30 a.m. Bloom later thinks of Molly’s endearing habit whereby she corrupts words into others more familiar to her. So metempsychosis which she doesn’t understand converts to met him pike hoses which to her at any rate, means something.
So what does it mean and what does it reveal?
Molly is pretty straightforward. That is established at the very start. So why not give Met Him its ordinary meaning. That she has met or will be meeting someone. And as the word ‘metempsychosis’ featured in the smutty book she was reading, we might give ‘met him’ rather smutty overtones. Pike, we shall return to; let us think about Hoses. Having just read Proteus we might be prepped for words having more than one meaning, that the meaning of words might reincarnate within other words. So hose suggests trousers as well as something long phallic and wriggly. Pike also is a phallic shaped slippery wriggly fish or otherwise something phallic, rigid and hard; either way, it’s lurking inside his trousers.
What with the smut of Paul de Kock’s novel as well as Boylan’s letter, it seems Molly has sex on her mind and it spills out in this corruption of ‘metempsychosis’. No wonder Bloom is concerned!
There is also something else, something psychologically subtle but Joyce is fond of subtleties. Is Molly trying to bare her soul to Bloom? To tell him without telling him? Just as Bloom leaves unlocked the drawer containing Martha Clifford’s letters? We know by episode 18 Penelope, that Molly is determined to be brazen about her infidelity as much to save the marriage as hurt Bloom and I wonder if this is a foreshadowing of that.
Just a thought.
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