Tracking the Oxen

Abstract

X robably most readers' least favorite chapter of Ulysses, Oxen ofthe Sun has long been cited as flagrant evidence for the commonest charge against James Joyce, that his work was written for professors to interpret rather than for people to read. problem is not in the action, which as usual in Ulysses is straightforward enough: gathered in the waiting-room of a maternity hospital, a group of medical students and various friends and hangers-on hold an improptu drinking-party, while upstairs a difficult delivery is taking place; near the end, they head off to a local pub just before closing-time; throughout, they are accompanied uneasily by Leopold Bloom, who feels solicitous first toward the woman in labor and then toward Stephen Dedalus, present. problem is what Joyce did with this action, as outlined in his famous letter on the chapter's composition. The Technique, he said, is nineparted episode without divisions, reproducing in serial pastiches nothing less than a chronologoical history of English prose, from its Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots through dozens of distinct voices?Malory, Bunyan, Swift, Pater, among others?to the frightful jumble of modern slangs. All of this is also linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode ofthe day and, besides this, with the natural of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. And, oh yes: Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo.2 Taking up the challenge, the professors?to be honest about it, we professors3?have gone to work at tracking down these multiple stages and the ways in which they seem to be linked with other on other levels. Some of these studies agree in their essential fmdings, and some do not, but, consciously or not, one assumption that all of them advance is that