To begin, but of course, with Aristotle, with assists from Ernst Cassirer and Kenneth Burke: humans are the symbol-making animals. Not even “What’s your favorite color?” is an innocent question. On the first page of Portrait, the infant Stephen already knows that maroon stands for Michael Davitt and green stands for Parnell. Since green also stands for Ireland, he is already on his way toward knowing which of the two is the true Irish hero. In the middle, night-lessons chapter of Finnegans Wake we learn that the infant Shaun knew “from his cradle” what the five fingers of his left hand were for. They were “pickpocketpumb [thumb], pickpocket point [index], pickpocketprod [middle] pickpocket promise [wedding] and upwithem” [tea-drinking fastidiousness] (FW 282.15-18).(1)

I hazard the categorical statement that all of Joyce’s symbols are of this kind. As such they are revealing in ways simultaneously psychological and anthropological. Shaun’s hand, like his body, is a semiotic force-field, because everything human or involved with humans is. And of course this applies to anything one chooses to put into the body. For what Stephen jocoseriously calls this “isle of dreadful thirst” (U 3.153-4), such incorporations are bound to have special significance when it comes to the consumption of alcohol. You are what you drink. Joyce himself, for a spell on the continent, eschewed the grain-based drinks, especially that “slimy drink,” beer(2) – for, I’d suggest, pretty much the same reason that the African-American writer James Baldwin said that he couldn’t stand the taste, or even the sight, of watermelon. He would ask his red-wine favoring friends why they were drinking beefsteak, and for reasons best known to himself (maybe he just didn’t want to share) liked to refer to his preferred white as an Archduchess’s urine.(3) On the other hand, he fancied John Jameson’s Irish whiskey because, he said, it was the only one that really tasted of Liffey water, that didn’t filter out the mud.(4)

The point being, none of those drinks were just drinks. They signified.

Moving from fact to fiction, consider Blazes Boylan. Boylan sends Molly a bottle of port and comments, to the shopgirl probably next on his to-do list, “It’s for an invalid” (U 8.322). This constitutes a multi-layered stratagem. He is sending Molly a bottle of wine, which is classy of him, but fortified wine, which, being about double the proof of the regular stuff, is much to his purpose. The old roué in the Flanders and Swann song knows what he’s about when he keeps inviting his young guest to “Have some Madeira, m’dear”(5) (Madeira is also fortified.) Port originates from Portugal, thus paying faux-sentimental if approximate tribute to Molly’s Iberian origins: how, kind of, thoughtful of him! “And the “invalid” label, later confirmed in “Ithaca” when we re-encounter a “halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co’s white invalid port” (U 17.306), both furnishes him with a private little, nasty little joke at Molly’s expense – especially if the secondary sense “invalid” occurs to him - and falsely reassures the buxom shopgirl, who is alert to such things, that the gift is, not to worry, not romantic, is probably for an infirm aunt or some such. I mean, you have hand it to Boylan: the man is a pro.

In “Sirens,” Boylan himself orders a glass of sloe gin - counterpointed, in one of the chapter’s many “inexquisite contrast[s]” (U 11.464), with Lenehan’s glass of “bitter” (U 11.350). Sloe gin is sweet. It is cotton candy in a glass. Like Brandy Alexanders and Singapore Slings and Kahlua Sombreros, it is a drink for people who don’t drink, who’d basically be happier with a melted lollipop - the opposite end of the continuum from a shot and a beer. It’s not liquor; it’s liqueur: expensive, high-hat stuff, which is probably why Miss Douce has to reach all the way to the top shelf to get the bottle – the “flagon,” no less - for Boylan’s daintily “tiny” glass (U 11.360, 420),(6) with the result that she almost bursts out of her blouse. Did Boylan anticipate that consequence? Probably. The man is good. In any case, the main thing was that his drink was liqueur. “He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name,” thinks Little Chandler. “He knew that people went there after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs” (D 72). Molly agrees: the scent on Boylan’s breath, she remembers, came from “some liqueur” like “those richlooking green and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink” (U 18.128-9). Which was exactly what Boylan wanted Molly – not to mention the barmaids, two other candidates for his list - to think.

So, again: he’s good. For Boylan, his drink functions as 1) status symbol, 2) interior cologne, and 3) prowess protector: a thimble of fermented syrup is not about to unman him. And then there’s this: sloe gin is made from plums.(7) So, Bloom: “He gets the plums, and I the plumstones” (U 13.1898-9). Sad, but let us digress and remember that the plumstones are the seeds. Bloom is a father and Boylan is not.

The other patrons of the Ormond also reveal themselves with their orders. Ben Dollard, singing a violently anti-British song, has been reduced to poverty by the product of a British brewer, Samuel Bass, whose horse Sceptre, likely named in tribute to Bass’s very own sceptred isle, is almost simultaneously reducing the resources of at least three Dubliners we know about. Then there’s Tom Kernan, who literally drank himself out of a job in “Grace:” he was a tea-taster, an office obviously calling for some discrimination of taste, who bit off the end of his tongue when drunk, and is now reduced to peddling tea from pub to pub: is there a sadder relic of old decency in the book than Kernan’s line in “Wandering Rocks,” “Damn good gin that was?” (U 10.787) (Quel connoisseur.) By the next chapter, “Sirens,” he is “Tomgin Kernan” (U 11.1148). Why? I once met a recovering alcoholic who, on the subject of heavy drinkers who stuck to vodka on the theory that no one could smell it on them, said, with an impressive air of been-there authority, “They can when it’s coming out of your pores.” I think the gin is coming out Kernan’s pores.

Then there are Simon Dedalus and Richie Goulding. The first ordering generic whiskey, the latter, as Bloom remarks, being “particular about his drink,” Power’s Irish Whiskey (U 11.619). That kind of shabby-genteel choosiness is yet another relic of old decency that Simon likely finds egregious, a symptom of what has driven the brothers-in-law apart. As for Bloom, he drinks cider – not, I’d have been inclined to think, the ideal accompaniment for a dish of liver and bacon, but it’s hard to quarrel with its Bloom-mediated symbolic significance. In “Eumaeus” he describes the whiskey-soaked Corley as “redolent of rotten cornjuice” (U 16.130), that is, whiskey. Bloom’s cider – certainly alcoholic and perhaps highly so – is by that construction rotten apple-juice. (That the fermentation which produces alcohol is in essence a process of organic putrefaction is a major theme of Finnegans Wake.) Thus, remembering Boylan’s plum liqueur, along with Molly’s words about women, “we’re such a mixture of plum and apple” (U 18.941), do the falls in Eden and Eccles Street converge. The cider – etymologically derived from the Hebrew for “strong drink” – is probably the most potent thing Bloom takes all day, and I’m inclined to speculate that the “[f]lood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness” (U 11.705) that floods through his dilating senses when Simon sings “M’appari” owes something to his simultaneous ingestion of that concoction, that it as well as the rendition is what has been “consumed” (U 11.753) at song’s end.

That high point aside, the Ormond is no argument for having a few before the sun is over the yardarm. On the contrary: it recalls the Mrs. Sinico of “A Painful Case” who, deprived of her one source of affection, gets “in the habit of going out at night to buy spirits” (D 115). Give that last word a properly sardonic spin, and “buy[ing] spirits” translates into the Dubliners keynote of simony, of attempting to satisfy the absence of something valid and spiritual with something material and mercenary, and always getting rooked in the transaction.

Bloom and Boylan excepted, the drinkers of “Sirens” exemplify this trade-off. I owe this perception to Austin Briggs, leader of the Prague “Joyce and Alcohol” panel at which the original of this essay was presented, who many years ago advised the class on Joyce of which I was a member that perhaps the best way to get a sense of the “Sirens” ambience was to take a field trip to a midtown bar, preferably in a dreary city, around the middle of a weekday afternoon. Simon, Richie, Dollard, and Kernan are lifers. “Sirens” occurs well before what a later age would call the “happy hour,” and for sure there’s precious little happy about it. On the contrary: alcohol is a depressant, a depressant, a depressant. Misses Douce and Kennedy, drinking tea – perhaps Kernan’s - while everyone else drinks liquor, are one teetotaling equivalent to the sirens, who encourage men to destructive urges they themselves do not share, and the passion most on show in the Ormond is for giving up. The in-and-out Boylan, I suggest, also constitutes a variant of that theme – his drink was a teeny breath-sweetener intended to influence others, not himself, and it may not be coincidental that on his way to Molly he passes a statue of the temperance apostle Father Matthew, a juxtaposition which perhaps helps give a spin to Finnegans Wake’s version of the good father’s maxim, “Ireland sober is Ireland free:” “Ireland sober is Ireland stiff” (FW 214.18).

The other escaper is Bloom, with reasons at least as impressive as Boylan’s: after all, if anyone ever had a good excuse to get blotto, it’s him at this hour, and that glass of rotten apple juice, downed while his soul yearns toward a phantasmal amalgam of two Marthas, one fictional and the other problematically epistolary, and his hands are “gyved” (U 11.684), like Odysseus’ to the mast, coincides with Odysseus’ closest approach to the singing island and its rocks. But the next song, not coincidentally about mawkish death, appeals to him less, and he gets out before the end, propelled, speedboat-like, or so he speculates, by the gassy aftereffect of that very same drink.

Or maybe it was the burgundy. One thing it wasn’t was beer. And that fact signifies as distinctively as any in the book. 1904 Dublin is a northern, non-Mediterranean, warm-beer-drinking culture. It is, that is, a male culture. One thing that struck me, American, on my first visit to Dublin, decades ago, was that many of the drinking establishments were for all intents and purposes sexually segregated. For wives and such there was this appendage called the “lounge,” where the appointments were cushier and the prices higher, the drinks delivered from the bar by dutiful males who would then return to the source. And the women were not drinking beer or ale or stout. They were drinking cocktails and sherry and things with little umbrellas in them. In fact, I remember that later, in 1985, when my wife and I, visiting Dublin, sat right up at the bar for a pint apiece, a cordial gent named Desmond McCarthy introduced himself and remarked that we must be Americans. It was the lady with the pint that made that clear. After “Sirens,” Bloom reluctantly shows up at a rush-hour pub with no women in it, and despite his general dislike of tobacco orders a cigar rather than get into the “round” business of buying pints apiece of Guinness, the “wine of the country” (U 14.144). In “Oxen of the Sun” he makes what anyone else present would consider the counterintuitive move of emptying his glass of beer into that of his neighbor (U 14.164-5). Then he follows the company to Burke’s, where his order of wine is registered as “Rome boose for the Bloom toff” (U 14.1535).

Toff? Who ever thinks of Bloom as a “toff?” But the thing is, he’s gone into an Irish pub and ordered wine. When, in my Joyce course, I begin the section on “Lestrygonians,” I often start by posing this question to the students: You go to a party; wine and beer are being served; you’re asked which would you prefer; what do you answer? The upshot is that, most of the time, most of the women opt for wine, most of the men for beer. In the same way that men’s fashion is British, Saville Row and Bond Street, and women’s fashion is French, couture and Champs Elysees, beer is male and wine is female, guzzler and sipper respectively. When Bloom asks for that glass of burgundy in Davy Byrne’s, he is marking himself. He is effeminate. He is uxorious. He is not a true Irish man. It’s not just that it’s wine – it has to be “burgundy,” for Pete’s sake, because one of the things about wine is that it has all these discriminations, these gradations of taste and class and region and whatnot, all these toff-ish high-hat niceties. Signatures of class accompany those of gender, and there will always be an upper limit beyond one’s means: burgundy may be toff-ish in Davy Byrnes’ and Burke’s, but Bloom knows well enough that someone like Judge Falkiner, decanting his dusty bottle of vintage whatever, would turn up his nose at it (U 8.1154). People don’t think that way about their beer.

It was Oscar Wilde who once said, unfairly enough, that there were two ways of not liking poetry: one was not to like poetry; the other was to like Browning. In Bloom’s Dublin, there are two ways of not drinking. One is not to drink. The other is this: “Touching the much vexed question of stimulants, he relished a glass of choice old wine in season as both nourishing and bloodmaking and possessing aperient virtues (notably a good burgundy which he was a staunch believer in” (U 16.89-92). This is the voice of the same person who lies to Corny Kelleher – and who lies about drinking when they haven’t? - that he and a friend had just been having “a liquor together” (U 15.4875). A liquor? But at least he didn’t say liqueur.

That closing-hour glass of wine is Bloom’s return to, in two senses, musical and medical, tonic. Stephen’s corresponding tonic is absinthe (U 14.1533-4, 15.4877), which he is ordering at the same place and time, and which sets Lenehan - whose distinctive alcoholic signature is that he doesn’t have one; he’ll drink anything - to reprising his parleyvoo routine. A day’s consumption of the local stuff notwithstanding, absinthe is Stephen’s madelaine for decadent, artist-worthy Paris, a variation on the “eastering” impulse long ago noted among the characters of Dubliners. And so is Bloom’s burgundy, with the addition that, like Keats’ “beaker full of the warm South,” transporting the poet to a place, of “Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth,” where he has never in fact been, Bloom’s burgundy takes him, with its “mild fire” (8.854), first to the sunny winepress grapes of Burgundy the place, where he has, likewise, never been. But then the venue shifts: “Touched his sense moistened remembered.” What it remembers is the sunny day with Molly on Howth, and what it brings forth is the closest Bloom ever gets to a Keatsian moment – remembering, here, that Bloom quoted Keats in his love-letters to Molly, and that it had the desired effect (U 18.1177-8): “Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound” (U 8.899-900) - and so on. Question: why? Why this sudden rhapsodic flashback to that day on Howth? Is it really just that the warmth of the wine associatively summons the warmth of the weather? But there have been other warm days. I conclude with a speculation: that the trip to Howth was a daytrip, that it accordingly included a picnic, that the couple wanted something to drink to go with the seedcake and whatever other foodstuffs they brought, that that drink was wine, perhaps even burgundy. Molly remembers about that day that Bloom wore a straw hat (U 18.1573). Who does that remind us of? Figure and ground, original and imitation, have a way of flip-flopping in Joyce’s work. Boylan is the man of the hour, but just that. He betokens his status with his bottle of sweetish (like Gerty McDowell, whose perfume is “sweet and cheap: soon sour” (U 13.1010), he evidently goes in for sweets) fortified, invalid wine. I’m guessing that there was an earlier bottle, drunk on that day on Howth (then as now, after all, the traditional accompaniment, for a man trying to get his maiden to say yes) and that for Bloom, and I like to think Molly as well, it remains – Howth, 1888, a very good year - the true vintage.