Horses versus cattle in Ulysses.(Critical Essay)

In his contribution to Papers on Joyce 3, Rafael I. Garcia Leon has attempted a survey of the role played by horses and equine images in Ulysses. (1) His survey could have been much more fruitful and less casual, however, if he had not chosen to isolate equine references from references to other animals. For a full understanding of the role played by horses in Ulysses it seems essential to also consider the role played by cattle, as I would like to show briefly in this article.

As early as the "Nestor" episode (art: "History"; symbol: "Horse," according to Joyce (2)), equine allusions are beginning to be complimented by bovine ones. Pictures of dead horses ("Framed around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage," U 2.300) illustrate the history which is represented by Deasy and which, for Stephen, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (U 2.377), thus turning the nightmare into a "night-mare," (3) i.e., a dark horse--but Deasy, albeit quite unintentionally, at the same time provides Stephen with the very means to awake from both nightmares and horses. From Deasy, Stephen receives a tool of bovine strength--Deasy's letter on foot and mouth disease: "Allimportant question. In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the hospitality of your columns" (U 2.335-37). Bulls and hospitality are indeed mighty weapons to overcome horses as well as racism, if Stephen manages to be that "bullockbefriending bard" (U 2.431) that he feels he will be come in Buck Mulligan's eyes.

In the next episode, "Aeolus," the dualism of horses/history versus cattle/hospitality is explored further. Horses remain to be sign-posts to the bad dream of Ireland's past: "The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of Mananaan" (U 3.56-57). However, Stephen remembers to have been awakened from this nightmare by a better kind of dream: "After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway.... In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who" (U 3.365-69). Obviously this is a dream of hospitality--and this is a dream of the man from the east whom Stephen will meet soon, i.e., Leopold Bloom.

It is quite misleading to see horses as "one of the many features that make Bloom and Stephen similar" (4)--what really contributes to the union of Bloom and Stephen is rather the fact that both reject equine images in favor of bovine ones. To be sure, Bloom in the "Lotus Eaters" episode encounters a horse--but he does not like the image:

Mr. Bloom went round the corner and passed the drooping nags of hazard. No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag rime.... Poor jugginses! Damn all they know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags. Too full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their haunches. (U 5.210-18)

This passage indicates that for Bloom, horses are connected with non-fertility, with sterility. Bloom himself, however, is clearly dissociated from the horse image, and for this reason Bantam Lyons, in order to get a racing tip from Bloom, has to misunderstand his "I was just going to throw it away" (U 5.534): what Bantam Lyons gets from Bloom seems to be a tip but is not; Bloom seems to get associated with horse imagery but in reality is not.

What Bloom is inobtrusively associated with is rather the cattle imagery of Ulysses. When in "Scylla and Charybdis" Buck Mulligan--himself "equine" (U 1.15)--mistakes Bloom for a homosexual, Stephen silently associates Bloom with the "Manner of Oxenford" (U 9.1212) and thus indirectly makes him a friend of himself, "the bullockbefriending bard" (U 2.431).