Parallax

“The paths that Joyce lays out for Bloom and Stephen that day in Dublin are not parallel to one another, for then they would never meet. They are parallactic: his characters, unbeknownst to themselves, meet the same issues which themselves assume different appearances as they are differently perceived and experienced in the context of the two men’s separate lives.” - Myra Glazer Schotz, Parallax in Ulysses

The Ballast House (facing north), January 2023

As Leopold Bloom makes his way to lunch in the opening pages of “Lestrygonians”, the eighth episode of Ulysses, he meets a sight familiar to anyone who has followed Bloom’s trail through Dublin’s city center: the Ballast Office (now called the Ballast House), just past O’Connell Bridge:

“After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time.”

These details might seem minor, but they reveal a quirk in Dublin’s relationship with time. It’s easy to assume Bloom looks to the Ballast Office clock to tell the time, but in 1904, the clock was on the east side of the building, and therefore it wouldn’t be visible from Bloom’s position on the quays. The clock was moved to its current north-facing position when the building was refurbished in the late 1970’s. Instead, Bloom estimates the time thanks to the timeball, a large metal ball on a pole atop the Ballast Office’s roof. You would be forgiven if you have never heard of such a contraption, as it was there for the benefit of navigators on the ships anchored in the Liffey. The timeball dropped every day at precisely one o’clock, and the ships’ navigators could use it to calibrate their chronometers. The timeball was removed from the Ballast Office’s roof in 1920, and its current whereabouts are unknown, another Dublin mystery for the ages.

People walking on Westmoreland St., Dublin, c. 1901-1904; the timeball and east-facing clock can be seen on the Ballast Office to the left. (Image Source: https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000168763 )

Following his assessment of the timeball, Bloom cryptically mentions to “Dunsink Time”. In part, he is referring to the Dunsink Observatory to the north of Dublin. In the 1870’s, both the timeball and clock on the Ballast Office were linked to a master clock at Dunsink by telegraph wire to ensure the exactness of their time. However, in 1904, time was a quite a hot button political issue. In 1884, Greenwich Mean Time was introduced as the timezone for both Britain and Ireland. Many in Ireland were quite affronted at this notion. Westminster continued to enforce its political will on Ireland, and now, through the imposition of GMT, they were attempting to control the ineluctable modality of time itself. The timelords in Dunsink had other ideas, though. You see, Ireland is 6 ¼° to the west of Greenwich, and thus, the time in Dublin is technically about 25 minutes earlier. Sir Robert Ball, the Astronomer Royal of Ireland at the Dunsink Observatory, insisted that “the time of Ireland has always been understood to mean the time of Dunsink.” The clocks agreed with Ball until 1914 when the timeball changed to GMT. The rest of Ireland made the switch in 1916. That means for 30 years, give or take, when it was 1:00 in Britain, it was 12:35 in Ireland. Bloom’s thoughts likewise turn to Ball:

“Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s. Parallax. I never exactly understood.”

The Story of the Heavens, which we will see on Bloom’s bookshelf in “Ithaca”, is Ball’s “fascinating little book.” Bloom recalls an enticing word from the book, though he can’t quite make out its meaning: parallax. Among Ball’s achievements as an astronomer was measuring and refining the parallax of the star 61 Cygni, and Ball dedicates a chapter of The Story of the Heavens to describing, in plain words, how parallax is used to more precisely measure the position of stars relative to Earth. Without the book at hand, Bloom doesn’t quite remember the finer points, but he continues to turn this word over in his mind throughout Ulysses. Like Bloom, the more I think about parallax, the more muddled it gets in my mind, so let’s have the Merriam-Webster definition on hand, just to keep our heads straight:

“the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object”

For readers of Ulysses, the important qualities of parallax to keep in mind are that it a. depends on the vantage point of the viewer and b. requires both physical and imaginative perception. Joyce’s usage of the term “parallax”, as we shall see, is different from the scientific usage in some key ways. Without ready access to online dictionaries, the definition of parallax nags at Bloom. Initially, he thinks it’s related to “parallel” in some way, as they both derive from Greek. Not a terrible guess, to be fair. He then defers to the wisdom of Molly before moving on to other topics:

“Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballastoffice. She’s right after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.”

As Bloom crosses Nassau St. a few blocks away, he pauses outside Yeates and Son to window shop for fieldglasses. He recalls a peculiar story:

“There’s a little watch up there on the roof of the bank to test those glasses by.
His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides. Can’t see it. If you imagine it’s there you can almost see it. Can’t see it.”

While I think the little watch is just a story, it’s enough to turn Bloom’s mind back to the puzzle of parallax:

“He faced about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right hand at arm’s length towards the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes: completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun’s disk. Must be the focus where the rays cross. If I had black glasses.”

This is our first inkling that, despite his faulty memory, Bloom does possess some idea about the meaning of parallax, though perhaps it’s buried in his subconscious. He is “almosting it,” shall we say. Parallax is used to predict eclipses, and Bloom makes the leap through word association even if he doesn’t explicitly realize it. He even causes his own tiny, personal solar eclipse with his pinky finger. His mind turns to the timeball once more:

“Now that I come to think of it that ball falls at Greenwich time. It’s the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink.”

If the timeball falls according to GMT, but the clock obeys Dunsink Time, then the timeball would fall around 25 minutes after the clocks of Dublin chime one. There’s something oddly pleasing about the notion of a building in Dublin confidently broadcasting two different times, but I think this little quirk of Irish time telling is just a beautiful dream. I’ve seen this story repeated more than once, including in Hugh Kenner’s Ulysses and in the Irish Times, but according to Deborah Warner, a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, there doesn’t seem to be any record of this odd arrangement. It’s also absent from the Dunsink Observatory’s description of Dunsink Time on their website, and it seems like they would know best. It’s a shame, especially as we consider parallax as a difference in points of view. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a building that told you a different time depending on how you looked at it? Bloom quickly moves on from this thought again and has a novel idea about how to get the answers he so desires:

“Must go out there some first Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to: man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman proud to be descended from some king’s mistress. His foremother. Lay it on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt out what you know you’re not to: what’s parallax? Show this gentleman the door.”

This definitely feels like the salesman’s method of answering a scientific question. Maybe it’s the hunger talking, but Bloom ends his flight of fancy in frustration:

“His hand fell to his side again.
Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always.”

Bloom may move on from his parallactic reverie, but the Ballast Office clock clearly captured James Joyce’s imagination. It seems the clock’s ordinariness is what transfixed him rather than some unique essence, though. Before the advent of cheap watches, a clock like the one on the Ballast Office was a necessity for busy Dubliners, albeit one that many must have taken for granted. Stephen Dedalus uses the clock to illustrate his fascination with epiphanies to Cranly in Joyce’s unfinished Stephen Hero, the book that would eventually evolve into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany…. Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.”

Stephen is fascinated with the act of perception in Ulysses, as well. He spent his time on Sandymount Strand in “Proteus” pondering all those pesky yet ineluctable modalities of perception and reading the signatures of all things. During that episode, Stephen thinks about the philosophy of Bishop George Berkeley and how one might differentiate objects and people when all they’re truly perceiving are shades and variations of color. One way we’re able to do that as humans is through stereoscopic vision, an ability made possible through the parallax created by the slightly overlapping perspectives of each eye (and which Berkeley thought humans didn’t possess). In the microcosm of “Proteus”, we experience the seaside through Stephen’s imperfect yet ineluctable stereoscopic vision.

But Stephen is only looking at rocks and bits of seaweed. What about something as complex as a clock? Thousands of people must pass the Ballast Office clock everyday but never really see it. Could anyone describe it in detail without looking? If you’ve spent a lot of time in central Dublin, can you even picture the clock in your mind’s eye? Learning the contours of something so ordinary allows the observer to tap into a deeper part of their mind, to approach something akin to epiphany. Bloom does exactly this in “Lestrygonians”, but stops himself short before he really grasps anything insightful. Bloom clings to the word itself rather than the image. And while he seems to grasp parallax in broad strokes, he can’t quite shake the feeling that it holds something ineffable to be puzzled out. Unlike Stephen pondering his ineluctable modalities on the strand, Bloom gives up fairly quickly, fretting that he’ll “never know anything about it. Waste of time.” While Stephen may be too prone to flights of philosophical fancy, Bloom may be a little too grounded.

If we zoom out to encompass the entirety of Ulysses, we encounter a new type of stereoscopic vision - the double perspective of Bloom and Dedalus as they take in the events of June the sixteenth. Their experiences overlap temporally in the way stereoscopic images overlap visually in our eyes. There are multiple instances of this throughout Ulysses, but one of the earliest is the way Stephen and Bloom react to the same cloud occluding the sun momentarily around 8 a.m. Stephen slides deeper into melancholy as it darkens the waters of Dublin Bay to the south, while Bloom momentarily envisions Agendath transformed into a haunted wasteland on Dublin’s northside. The cloud creates not only a visual parallax, but an emotional one, as they are simultaneously plunged into a depth of despair.

Stephen and Bloom are not fixed points, though. Their movements throughout the city overlap in time and space, first superficially and eventually meaningfully, just like those “gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing.” There are obvious examples of this, such as Bloom passing Stephen in the funeral cortége in “Hades” and their multiple near misses in “Aeolus” and “Scylla and Charybdis.” When Bloom pauses to create his mini-eclipse near Yeates and Son, he is unknowingly echoing the action of Stephen on the strand in “Proteus” when the young Dedalus also creates a man-sized eclipse, a parallax of time rather than space:

“Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form?”

Stephen and Bloom shift in and out of each other’s gravitational pull until their fateful encounter in “Circe”. Their parallactic shifts through Dublin are a miniscule version of the macrocosm of the universe, as Bloom imagines the motions of those uncouth stars once more in “Ithaca”:

“...of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.”

In “Lestrygonians”, Stephen and Bloom haven’t quite fallen into one another’s orbit, but by the end of “Ithaca”, their budding friendship creates the potential for them to form a binary star system - two stars circling one another through a shared gravity well (as described by Sir Robert Ball). Their meeting on the pages of Ulysses is fleeting, like an eclipse, but it creates powerful potential energy. The union of Stephen and Bloom culminates in a shared urination in the Blooms’ back garden. Scholar Barbara Stevens Heusel wrote that Ulysses’ structure, bolstered by parallax, is framed by water imagery:

“One of the novel’s goals is to convey the flux of time and space.… Ulysses begins and ends and undulates with water.”

The first parallax of our heroes is ringed in the water of Dublin Bay, while the climactic parallax is a piss-soaked hypostasis, a union of these two men, bonded by mutual micturition. Lest you find this too gross, water imagery throughout Ulysses (including urine) represents creative, artistic expression, whether it be in Old Mother Grogan’s teapot, on boulders along the strand, or in the backyard of 7 Eccles St. Creation begets life, and water is the symbol of that life. In Heusel’s view, a full vision of life is the outcome of viewing the world through the lens of the Artist and the Common Man simultaneously, in contrast to “groping blindly” with one eye closed, as we must in the middle of the novel. Despite this, Bloom still suspects that a flowing stream reveals something more. Back in “Lestrygonians,” Bloom thinks as he gazes down at the Liffey (whose Irish name is An Life):

“How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.”

Stephen and Bloom crossing the streams of their lives, symbolized in their streams of urine, helps make sense of parallax, one of those big words that make us so unhappy. Parallax is to Leopold what metempsychosis is to Molly, what Stuart Gilbert called the Word Ineffable. Behind this ten dollar word must lie some greater Truth, if only Bloom is able to decode it. It’s right under his nose, like the most common piece of street furniture. Parallax, like metempsychosis, allows Ulysses to encompass the whole of human experience. Metempsychosis allows for the rebirth of ancient people and events in the streets of Edwardian Dublin, layered within the deep reaches of the psyche of even a common man like Leopold Bloom. Parallax allows for the consciousness of these people to merge and overlap, layering complexity over even the most mundane situations. It forces the reader, by adding their own viewpoint, to notice the subjectivity of even the most perfunctory actions, blending more and more with the supposed objective fact of the characters’ actions.

Further Reading:

Kino's & Hely's: Two Ads in Lestrygonians

Elijah is coming! Is Coming!! IS COMING!!!