“Stork’s Legs” and “The Step of a Pard”: Bloom’s Gait
In contrast to the paralysis of Dubliners, Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel driven by movement. Mapping the characters’ itineraries yields a network of dizzying circumlocutions, serendipitous crosses, and points stretching the edge of Dublin’s map. As readers, we join the meticulously detailed journey of Bloom and his thoughts, developing an unprecedented acquaintance with a fictional character. Indeed, we may know more about Bloom than is possible to know about another human being. Troublingly in the context of this sense of intimacy, and despite all of Bloom’s rootedness in the physical world, Joyce withholds a satisfying description of Bloom’s physical appearance. Still, a few precise details emerge over the course of the novel: he weighs 158 pounds (U 17.91), is “five feet nine inches and a half” tall (U 17.86-7), has “dark” eyes (U 6.533), still has enough hair to pass his hand over (U 5.22), notices that his body is “getting a bit softy” (U 6.204-5), and is referred to as “old lardyface” (U 12.1476-7). These descriptions might sate the reader of an ordinary character of fiction, but Ulysses’s presentation of a complete human’s thoughts, habits, and memories render disconcerting the absence of a commensurately detailed physical description. Given that Sylvia Beach includes in her memoir a photograph of Mr. Holbrook Jackson, the man on whom Joyce claimed to have based Bloom’s appearance (Beach 97), many readers must share this desire to “see” Bloom.
While Joyce does not satisfy the desire for an exact portrait of Bloom’s physical features, he does offer illuminative, contradictory, and metaphorically infused descriptions of the way Bloom moves through the world. These descriptions of Bloom’s gait come adorned with literary devices that include allusions to the stork and the pard, creatures whose contradictory portrayals in ancient texts and medieval bestiaries inform and complicate our understanding of Leopold/Leopard. As descriptions of Bloom’s style of movement accumulate, Joyce reveals that Mr. Bloom moves swiftly, independently, purposefully, unimpeded by mockery, and indeed casting a wake in which his mockers follow. In using contradictory descriptions of Bloom’s gait, Joyce challenges the very notion of our ability to interpret and assign symbolic meaning to the physical world.
If imitation is not always the highest form of flattery, it at least implies individuality. In the Aeolus episode, Bloom’s gait is parodied twice in quick succession, but each imitation conjures a separate and contradictory image. When Bloom exits the pressroom to meet Alexander Keyes at Dillon’s Auctionrooms, Lenehan and J. J. O’Molloy watch from the window as the newsies follow him:
Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr Bloom’s wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking kite, a tail of white bowknots.
— Look at the young guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said, and you’ll kick. O, my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the walk. Small nines. Steal upon larks.
He began to mazurka in swift caricature across the floor on sliding feet past the fireplace to J. J. O’Molloy who placed the tissues in his receiving hands. (U 7.444-52)
The simple fact that both the newsboys and Lenehan imitate Bloom’s gait implies a distinguishable style of movement; however, their interpretations of his walk significantly contradict themselves and each other. In the newsboys’ mockery, they “caper” in a “zigzagging” motion, implying that Bloom’s movement is haphazard. Joyce compares Bloom to a kite and the boys to the “white bow knots” of the tail, metaphorically elevating Bloom above those in his “wake” despite their “mocking” of him. The image of the mocked soaring beyond his mockers has shades of irony while illuminating Bloom’s strength of purpose and identity. These sorts of conflicted portrayals of Bloom’s walk continue as Lenehan interprets the boys’ imitation of Bloom. He comments that they are “taking off his flat spaugs and the walk,” using the Anglicized Gaelic word “spaugs,” which means “paw” or “long flat foot” (Johnson 812). Gifford glosses this phrase to mean “big clumsy feet,” supplying an adjective that contradicts Lenehan’s subsequent “caricature” of Bloom’s gait in the form of a “mazurka,” a graceful, light-footed, and sweeping style of Polish dance. This passage seems contradictory as Bloom floats like a dancing kite and zigzags with clumsy feet. Nevertheless, one characteristic appears which will remain consistent: Bloom’s gait is “swift.”
While the description of Bloom as a fast walker recurs, the metaphors of stork and pard are employed to describe his speed, each creature carrying mythological associations which contradict themselves. When Molly detects “a smell of burn” in the Calypso episode, Bloom is shown “stepping hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork’s legs” (U 4.380-84). Although the description suggests swiftness in the words “hastily” and “flurried,” the impression of speed is conflicted by the metaphor comparing his legs to those of a gangly “stork.” Beyond the description’s physical contradictions, the symbolism of the stork contains similar incongruities. In Peacham’s Emblem 111, the caption reads that the stork was “in ancient times, the mark of wedlock chast … because this bird, a deadly foe is said to adultery” (Peacham qtd. in McDonald). Given that Bloom tolerates the adultery of his wife rather than confront it as a “deadly foe,” this symbol seems ironic in its application to Mr. Bloom. However, in ancient Egyptian pictography, a figure with a stork’s body and the head of a man represented the soul’s transmigration, especially from parent to newborn child (McDonald). Joyce’s metaphor of Bloom’s “stork’s legs,” amplified by the definition of metempsychosis one page prior, resonates with the Egyptian symbolism of the stork. Again, though, Joyce complicates our use of symbols to interpret the physical world as Bloom’s association with a figure of parenthood seems inapt. Elsewhere, medieval bestiaries explain that the stork’s only “enemies are snakes” (Hugo qtd. in McDonald), thus placing the bird in opposition to the symbol of Satan and evil. Further confusing the stork’s symbolism, Aesop’s fable of “The Frogs Desiring a King” depicts the stork as a tyrannical and bloody ruler, thus contradicting the already multifaceted symbolic meanings of the stork in Ulysses. By alluding to this creature in describing Bloom’s movement, Joyce highlights the difficulty of assigning a fixed meaning to features of the physical world.
Likewise, the twice-invoked metaphor of Bloom moving with “the step of a pard” (U 9.1214, 15.4326) carries contradictory associations. Joyce once more depicts his “fleet” (U 15.4326) gait, but various explanations of the pard in bestiaries challenge our ability as readers to accurately and finally interpret the physical. Gifford informs, “in medieval bestiaries, the pard is described as the most beautiful of all the four-footed animals. … It is allegorically Christ. It is of mild and good disposition, loved by all the animals except the dragon” (Gifford 256). This tidy symbolism associates Bloom, a savior figure in the Circe episode, with Christ. Furthermore, this explanation of the pard coheres with the metaphor of the stork in that they each have as their only enemies symbols for Satan. But Joyce has repeatedly shown a resistance to convenient meaning-making, and the Bodleian bestiary of 764 directly contradicts the source of Gifford’s annotation:
The pard is a mottled beast and very swift, thirsty for blood; if it pounces, it kills. The leopard is born of an adulterous match between a lioness and a pard … The mystic pard signifies either the devil, full of a diversity of vices, or the sinner, spotted with crimes and a variety of wrongdoings. … Antichrist is known as a pard, spotted with many kinds of evil. (Bestiary 34)
Rather than a symbol for Christ, this bestiary depicts the pard as the Antichrist: violent, adulterous, and spotted with sin. As such, Joyce seeks to complicate our celebration of Bloom’s virtues, drawing attention to his sins of infidelity and irreverence. If Bloom truly is, as proposed at the outset of this paper, the most complete human in the history of fiction, it is only appropriate that he should be part Christ and part anti-Christ. Are not we all some combination of the two?
Regardless of whether Bloom’s gait in the pard passages associates him with Christ or Antichrist, Joyce’s descriptions of his movement again include the elements of speed and casting a wake behind him. The Bodleian bestiary confirms that the pard is “very swift” (Bestiary 34), and the Circe instance of this symbol portrays a “fleet” (U 15.4226) Bloom who “flits” (U 15.4325) quickly through Nighttown. When the pard metaphor initially appears at the conclusion of the Scylla and Charybdis episode, Stephen’s entourage, despite Mulligan’s “clown[ish]” mockery, “follow[s]” Bloom as he leaves the National Library (U 9.1205, 9.1216). Similarly, in the Circe instance of the pard metaphor, Joyce depicts Bloom “strewing the drag behind him, torn envelopes … after him freshfound the hue and cry zigzag gallops in hot pursuit” (U 15.4327, 35). The subsequent twenty-five lines of Circe catalogue at least eighty-one characters who “hue and cry” in Bloom’s wake, just as the paperboys did in the Aeolus episode. This image of Bloom walking with swift purpose to help Stephen and followed by an aggressive mob portrays him literally moving beyond trivial mockery.
Through contradictions, confusion, and irony, Joyce rebuffs our desire to fix meaning and moral judgment on Mr. Bloom. The uncertainty created by this technique calls into question the possibility of objectivity and knowledge. A person cannot observe his or her own gait; the style of one’s physical presence in the world can only be observed, interpreted, and characterized by external, subjective entities. In analyzing the manner in which the novel portrays Bloom’s walk, we come to appreciate the impossibility of defining his character, whether through physical descriptions or symbolic associations. As such, the desire to “see” Leopold Bloom must be thwarted in order to reveal the infinite possibilities of experiencing and interpreting life. Our understanding of Bloom, like his gait, is fleeting.
Works Cited
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.
Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 764
With all the original Miniatures Reproduced in Facsimile. Trans. Richard Barber. London: The Folio Society, 1992.
Gifford, Don. “Ulysses” Annotated. London: University of California Press, 1988.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: The Bodley Head,1986.
McDonald, Scott. “The Stork: Emblem 111.” The Minerva Britanna Project.
Middlebury University. Web. 24 July 2011.