The two walking candles in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Abstract

Abstract Following the theory of textual thematization at the level of fictional narrative discourse (Kikuchi 2001, Lose heart, gain heaven: The false reciprocity of gain and loss in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen CII(4). 427–434; 2001, Unveiling the dramatic secret of “Ghost” in Hamlet. Journal of Literary Semantics 39(2). 103–117; 2012, O I just want to leave this place: Auden’s discourse of thematized self-alienation. Philologia 10. 61–72; 2013, Poe’s name excavated: The mediating function and the transformation of discourse theme into discourse rheme. Language and Literature 22(1). 3–8), this article examines how Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses are walking representations of “two candles” set at the head of a dying Dublin. This is one instance of a grand design which is repeated in many of his novels. In “The Sisters”, the first short story in Dubliners and the earliest work in which the grand design can be seen, the two candles are verbally placed at the head of the novel. Later in the story, this design reappears in the house of a dead priest where his two sisters, like the two candles, are holding a wake for him. In Ulysses, Dedalus and Bloom, after roaming through Dublin, stand side by side urinating outside Bloom’s house, like candles offered for one who has crossed the border from old life to new life. This scene presages Molly’s free flowing stream of consciousness in the last chapter, in which her thoughts flow across the syntactic demarcations between utterances, as if symbolizing the dissolution of borders. I shall discuss Joyce’s underlying intent in Ulysses by assuming that the stages in which Dedalus and Bloom roam through Dublin and then urinate together are the theme or topic, and that the demarcation-crossing of Molly’s stream of consciousness, namely, the resolution of the demarcation between the two distinct entities as represented by the two candles, is the rheme or comment on this theme.