He goes over all the debates about who this M’Intosh was. The widest range of interpretations exists. There are those who think that he is Mr. James Duffy, the indecisive companion of Mrs. Sinico in “A Painful Case” from Dubliners, who commits suicide overwhelmed by lovelessness and solitude. Duffy, tormented by the consequences of his indecision, wanders around the tomb of the woman he could have loved. And there are those who think he is Charles Stewart Parnell, who’s risen from the grave to continue his fight for Ireland. And there are also those who think it might be God, disguised as Jesus Christ, on his way to Emmaus.
Nietzky has always been especially fond of Nabokov’s theory. After reading the opinions of so many researchers, Nabokov deduced that the key to the enigma of the stranger was to be found in the fourth chapter of the second part of Ulysses, in the library scene. In this scene, Stephen Dedalus is talking about Shakespeare and maintains that he included himself in his plays. Very tensely, Stephen says that Shakespeare “has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas.”
This, according to Nabokov, is what Joyce managed to do in Ulysses: to set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. The man in the macintosh who crosses the book’s dream is none other than the author himself. Bloom actually sees his creator!
He wonders whether he should make an effort to stay awake, or give in to sleep — he doesn’t think that is such a good idea because his insomnia is giving him a special sort of lucidity, although Celia’s already gotten seriously annoyed with him because of it. They had a morning argument, so she hasn’t gone back to the old days, that is, to the times when she used to get so annoyed she’d end up putting a few things in a suitcase and leaving it on the landing. She hasn’t acted like that this time, but it’s clear that if things get worse, she might do so later, when she gets home from work at lunch time. It’s terrible. Everything’s always hanging from a thread with Celia.
He leaves the computer and goes over to the window, looks out at the street. He hears Celia slamming the door loudly as she goes to work. She’s gone at last. It’s ridiculous, but it seems as if the thing that’s really irritated her, that’s made her explode with rage, is when a moment ago, he flippantly quoted W. C. Fields at her: “The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.” This little phrase drove her crazy. “Excuses are worthless,” she said.
He went too far with the Fields quote, he thinks now, uselessly repentant. When will he learn to control his words better? When will he realize that there are certain inappropriate remarks that might seem witty in many settings outside the conjugal one? Celia was probably more than justified in slamming the door. For a while, from the big window, he stands and watches what happens when nothing is happening. When he turns his eyes away from the general view of Barcelona and looks down to focus on what’s going on nearby, he realizes that a man in a gray Burberry coat is walking down his street, a man who reminds him — who has an air — of the stranger in the raincoat with his hair plastered to his head that Riba and Ricardo saw in La Central bookshop. At first this seems strange and then less so. The fact is he ends up feeling a mysterious emotional affinity with him. Couldn’t he have come to tell him to persist in his search for “the unfathomable dimension,” the dimension that, in the middle of a storm, his father asked about in a low voice the other day? He feels dizzy. And he remembers the Swedish thinker Swedenborg who, one day, finding himself by the window of his London house, noticed a man walking down the street for whom he felt instant empathy. To his surprise, this man came over to his door and knocked at it. And when he opened it, Swedenborg felt from the first moment absolute trust in this individual, who introduced himself as the son of God. They took tea together, and over the course of the encounter, the man told Swedenborg that he saw in him the most suitable person to explain the right path to the world. Borges always said that lots of mystics could pass as madmen, but that the case of Swedenborg was special, as much for his enormous intellectual capacity and great scientific prestige, as for the radical change in his life and work brought about by the visions that came from the hand of this unexpected visitor, who connected him directly to celestial life.
He watches the footsteps of the man in the gray Burberry and for a moment fears, and at the same time wishes, that this individual will come over to the front door of his building and press the intercom. It might be that the man wants to congratulate him for planning a requiem for the Gutenberg age, but also that he wants, as well as this, to tell him there’s no reason to look at things in such a short-term way and that he should intone a funeral song for the digital age too — which one day will disappear — and not be afraid, moreover, of time-traveling and intoning another requiem for everything that will come after the apocalypse of the internet, including not just the end of the world but the end of the world that follows that one. After all, life is an enjoyable and serious journey round the most diverse funerals.
Will the second end of the world include the brilliant blue dress with silver needlework, the white gloves and the little cocked hat his mother used to wear every Saturday night in the fifties when she went out with her husband to dance at the Flamingo? Back then no one in the family asked about the unfathomable dimension.
He looks out of the window again and sees that the man in the gray Burberry isn’t on his street anymore. What if it was Swedenborg? No, it wasn’t him. Just as it wasn’t that guy he one day thought might be directing everything under a weary light. It was someone who’s walked right by, although it’s strange, because at first that hadn’t seemed to be his intention.
His insomnia leads him to sit and read in his armchair. Like in the old days, when the computer didn’t limit his time so drastically. The music on the radio is still French, as if the English leap is up against curious domestic resistance from his favorite station.
He’s rescued from the shelf a book by W. B. Yeats, one of his favorite poets. It wasn’t planned, but reading this book might also contribute perfectly to the preparations for his trip to Dublin. Time goes by very quickly, and his insomnia adds even more to a sensation of time flying, but the fact is there are now only five days left until his trip. Everything has gone by really quickly and it seems like only yesterday when, in order to avoid his mother finding out he had absolutely no plans for the future, it occurred to him to say he had to go to Dublin.
He dives into the Yeats, into a poem where it clearly says that everything is falling apart, and that turns out to be ideal for the bloodshot eyes of a profoundly sleepless reader. Letting the verses carry him along, he imagines that the bright light of day is blinding him and that he’s turned into a skilled pilot who flies quickly over the geography of infinite life. A pilot who very soon leaves behind all the stages of humanity — the Iron age, the Silver age, the Gutenberg age, the digital age, the definitive, mortal age — and arrives just in time to witness the universal flood and the grand end, the funeral of the world, although in reality it would be more accurate to say that the world itself had been gradually burning through the ages and traveling toward its grand finale and funeral, previously announced in these lines of Yeats’s that carried Riba so far along this morning: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.. .”