Billy Sunday: A New Source for “Oxen of the Sun”

Abstract

One strand of the frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken dogger l (Letters! 140) with which the Oxen of the Sun episode ends is a kind of overheated oratory associated by Joyce with American popu lar preaching. One such preacher is named several times in Ulysses, although only once in ungarbled form (LI 8.13): John Alexander Dowie (1847-1907), a once-famous preacher, faith-healer, and temper ance campaigner. Joseph C. Voelker and Thomas Arner point out that Joyce would have been able to follow the antics (and prose style) of Dowie in the Irish press, which regularly reported on his sermons and covered a visit he made to London in 1904.1 Robert Janusko, in a further investigation of the Dowie connection, suggests that he may have had Dowie or his brand of invective in mind when composing what he calls Americanese parody2 The altar call in question is indeed a fine specimen of its type: on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! (IT 14.1580-84). But it is not a parody, so much as an almost verbatim transcription of the sermonizing of another American evangelist: Sunday. William Ashley Billy Sunday (1862-1935), now a little-known fig ure, was in his time a spectacularly successful evangelical preacher and a passionate advocate of temperance. A former professional baseball player, he underwent a religious conversion in 1886 and thereafter increasingly devoted his life to preaching. In his heyday, he addressed vast crowds, often in specially constructed wooden tabernacles; hundreds of thousands were said to have been con verted at his meetings, Newspaper reports often carried extensive extracts from his speeches and sermons, some of which were issued as pamphlets. Over the years of his preaching, Sunday evolved a number of distinctive strings of epithets that he would incorporate, with only slight variations, into almost every sermon and speech. These choice pieces of invective were quoted with relish in newspaper reports, and from these it is possible to track even relatively small changes in wording. Thus in an anti-liquor diatribe that Sunday gave on several occasions, reproduced in a 1908 pamphlet entitled Get On The Water Wagon, occurs the description peanut-brained,3 weasel-eyed, hog jowled, beetle-browed, bull-necked lobsters:4 this is close to Joyce's