How the Coda Wags the Oxen Gregory M. Downing Editors’ Note Gregory Downing comments on the opening of the coda of “Oxen of the Sun”. In music, the coda (tail) is a relatively independent passage following a completed movement, forming its conclusion. In FW Joyce mentioned a specific content of the coda: “Rota rota ran the pagoda con dio in capo ed il diavolo in coda” (FW 466.20), ‘with God in the head and the Devil in the tail’. For my session, I chose the opening of the "Oxen" coda ("All off for a buster...," U 14.1440 ff.). The coda continues "Oxen"'s earlier stylistic techniques, but in some ways stretches them (almost to? past?) the breaking point, illustrating various problems—of narrative, character, perspective, language, etc.—that are crucial to the second half of Ulysses1. I began my non-presentation by stating that readers' reactions to "Oxen" styles fall between extremes we could term "discursive" and "narrative." At one extreme, the styles are simply the book's discourses, i.e., linguistic constructs with thematic implications that give only vague information about what people are doing, saying, or thinking. At the other extreme, the styles convey the same kinds of narrative information that episodes 1 through 10 conveyed about characters' conversations, actions, conceptions, and perceptions. In "Oxen," the perceptions and conceptions are only Bloom's, as was also the case in episodes 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, and 13. Reading "Oxen"'s styles as the discursive voices of the book or an Arranger is a common, useful readerly strategy. I asked the group to ponder the other extreme too, i.e., what the styles may narrate about who is doing, saying, and thinking what just before 11 PM. I did not begin my non-presentation with any of my own ideas, but in this "focus essay" I should report that I do have some hypotheses, inferred from close but unavoidably imperfect and tentative attention to each coda sentence: (1) A basic "Oxen" stylistic technique continues till the episode's close: the styles constantly function as filtering lenses that simultaneously reveal, alter, and disguise narrative (actions, conversations, thoughts) and theme. Thus, earlier in "Oxen" the Junius paragraph ("But with what fitness...," U 14.905 ff.) conveyed, modified, and concealed the self-critical thoughts Bloom would have had after realizing the hypocrisy of the critical thoughts he has had about the sexual predations of the others in the conference room. The paragraph's revelation of secrets and criticism of failings resonate with Junius's subject-matter, but historical Junian style had depicted actions rather than mental states, and the historical style both elevates and ironizes Bloom's ordinary, personal, contemporary troubles. (2) But unlike passages earlier in "Oxen" where the styles portray and comment on or ironize Bloom's mental processes, no coda passages portray his thoughts or even his words other than by recounting others' actions and utterances. Cf. "Cyclops" which, like the coda, shows drinkers in a public house commenting on Bloom in a passage where—in contrast to the prior "Sirens" episode—we receive no direct portrayal of his mental states. (3) Earlier in "Oxen," the paragraph was the basic stylistic unit. In the coda, however, styles can vary from sentence to sentence. Coda sentences do not contain multiple styles; no sentence mixes, e.g., cockney and pidgin. Each sentence is stylistically uniform, not each paragraph. This shift occurs as the coda begins, when several other important changes take place: narratively, everyone rushes out of the N.M.H. to head for a nearby pub, while on its obstetric level "Oxen" passes from gestation to messier afterbirth. I.e., when "Oxen" shifts from a stationary conversation (U 14.139-1390) to the complex movements of a drunken group, more complex stylistic modes become appropriate. These modes are also appropriate to messy afterbirth and to the complex array of vernaculars that represent the present of language in the coda, just as in the body of "Oxen" a sequence of formal prose styles had represented the cumulative past of English. There is even a kind of (so to speak) prosaic justice in the fact that "Oxen"s stationary body exhibits a moving sequence of styles, while the agitated, on-the-move coda exhibits a single constantly miscellaneous style. (4) The coda's set of styles is not huge, and a few stand out because they are distinctive and recur frequently. The most frequent of these styles are briefly discussed below. When I began my non-presentation, I mentioned several of the above ideas concisely. With only the text before us, I then employed ad hoc questions to elicit what others made of the coda's styles. Between the "discursive" and "narrative" extremes, most who spoke inclined toward the "discursive." For example, Susan Bazargan explained that she prefers to think of how the coda's vernaculars decentre the idea of mainstream English while expressing things formal prose styles do not. She sees no great need to press the styles for exact details of who is saying and doing what as the coda unfolds. She compared this to African American Vernacular English (AAVE), whose energetic transgression of "standard English" she appreciates even though she does not follow all of it. Other workshoppers were also happy to react thematically to the coda's "dialects," leaving the coda to present its narrative more vaguely. This is understandable, and certainly a valid and productive way of reading the coda. Joyce always thematizes uncertainty and misunderstanding, and the surface of the coda is one of the most obviously unclear aspects of Ulysses. But Joyce also constantly generates closely woven and deeply dyed verbal, narrative, and thematic patterns. Uncertainty and pervasive meaning are not contradictory but complementary. After all, thought always involves both comprehension and incomprehension—the half-full and half-empty aspects of the epistemic glass. In fact, AAVE makes perfect sense if you learn its modes and pay attention; almost all cultural behaviour is rule-governed rather than chaotic. So while allowing for the proclivity to read the coda in a thematic and only vaguely narrative fashion, it is also important to think about how the coda may have been arranged to convey more specific narrative information than a "discursive" reading is interested in. From this angle, the coda's most basic aspects are the numbered points above: The "dialects" function as filters, simultaneously revealing, altering, and disguising the group's actions and discussions, and each sentence (the basic stylistic unit) is in a distinctive vernacular style. Prior to the coda, each "Oxen" style resonated with and ironized characters' deeds, words, and thoughts. What are the coda's "dialects" resonating with and ironizing? During my session, Fritz Senn cited the "phonograph" theory, which claims the coda is a kind of transcription of the group's verbal output. Certainly almost all of the coda should be taken as utterances. But the "phonograph" theory has problems. It is clear that not all of the group's utterances are recorded; see for example U 14.1458-61, where only some of the singing is transcribed. Nor do we have any more reason to believe that the interlocutors speak in "dialects" than we had to believe that pre-coda historical styles were documenting speakers' exact wording.          So, rejecting any un-nuanced version of the "phonograph" theory, my working hypothesis is that each vernacular style represents what some character says, just as pre-coda "Oxen" paragraphs represent characters' utterances without necessarily documenting them verbatim. Which "dialects" represent which characters? During my session, I only had time to get even briefly into two "dialects," but for the record here is a more extensive list, with just a few of the reasons why those "dialects" are narratively and/or thematically appropriate to the characters they represent: Cockney/Mulligan: Mulligan puts on a cockney accent when we first see him in "Telemachus," and has recently spent time in England. Pidgin/Dixon: Dixon is more mature than the other young males, and he invited Bloom into the group; hence, he mediates between the young males and middle-aged Bloom, just as pidgin mediates between people who do not share a language. French/Lenehan: Throughout Ulysses, Lenehan employs bits of French with humorous intent. American/Lynch: Lynch is the bluntest and most uncouth of Stephen's "friends," and this resonates well with the early 20th-century European view of American personality and diction. Scots/Crotthers: Crotthers is Scottish; though he may not speak in the coda's "stereotype scots," his actual speech must have some Scots features. Religious-Archaic/Stephen: These are the some of the same stylistic traits that characterized the learnèd Stephen when he dominated the conversation early in "Oxen" (U 14.222-473)—not to speak of his thoughts and even diction in for example episodes 1-3 and 9-10. The above list is not exhaustive, and needs a couple of asterisks. First, not all coda wording is in a distinctive "dialect." However, context often permits non-"dialect" wording to be linked to one character. It should also be noted that some characters are represented by more than one "dialect." Each "dialect" pins down resonant traits of one character, but characters reveal various aspects of their personalities at different moments, so more than one "dialect" can resonate with a character at successive points. All Joyce needed to do, if he wanted to allow readers to work out characters in the coda, was to restrict each style to one character, not each character to one style. To clarify the coda's narrative further, one must take it quite literally sentence by sentence, doing the kind of detailed work Fritz Senn terms "inductive" (i.e., carefully observational, thoughtfully inferential) and "asymptotic" (i.e., striving to move toward less imperfect understanding)—methods appropriate to Senn's workshops. But because this requires close discussion of every verbal detail from multiple angles, it cannot be done in a short report. (I do have a draft of about 50,000 words in which I discuss each coda sentence for several paragraphs.) However, the "discursive predilection" of many of the coda's readers holds a lesson relevant to a workshop on hypermedia annotation, namely: We need to formulate multiple levels of hypermedia interpretation for readers with different interests, just as a teacher builds into a class session various things for students with different interests. Senn's "interactive" workshop format made me think more clearly about the different ways different readers respond to the same language. This "discursive predilection" has important implications for the turn of the millennium's major cultural and ideological issues, but those will have to await some other occasion. ——— 1 Coincidentally, Fritz Senn later mentioned that the coda had provoked the first Zürich Ulysses reading group into existence in 1982.