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T he mystery of the man in the macintosh never seemed glamorous to me until I read Frank Kermode's marvelous work The Genesis of Secrecy, in which he describes Macintosh as a "drab" but, nevertheless, compelling enigma. 1 In Kermode's discussion of the various contexts in which Macintosh appears, I was struck by one in particular, the unexpected appearance of the man at Paddy Dignam's funeral. "Where the deuce did he pop out of?" Bloom asks; "he wasn't in the chapel, that I'll swear" (U 6.826-27). For entirely unrelated reasons, I was reading The Valley of Fear at the same time as Kermode's book and remembered a similar phrase in that novel, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published in 1914 during the first years of Joyce's work on Ulysses. 2 Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are called to a moated manor house in order to consult on a murder investigation in which a man presumed to be John Douglas is found dead in his office. They find that the body whose face has been blown off is not Douglas at all and that, instead, he has been hiding in a secret room connected to the office. Having solved the mystery, Holmes calls him forth from his hiding place, and the other characters are amazed.

Author

Hart, David J.

Publisher

Project MUSE; University of Tulsa (ISSN 0021-4183)

Published

2012

Language

EN