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“OMNIUM GATHERUM”
235
Paris is gay . . . They believe in enjoying life
—
and don’t you
think they’re right?” (77). He advises his friend “to knock
about a bit in the world” (76), which means to lead a life of
debauchery in Paris, London, and other European capitals. He
sketches for Little Chandler “some pictures of the corruption
which was rife abroad,” claiming that “he had had personal
experience” (78). Marriage for him signifies a union not with
his beloved but with money: “I mean to marry money” (81).
Over the course of their conversation, Little Chandler’s
admiration turns increasingly to disillusionment; he observes
“something vulgar in his friend,” but attributes it to “the result
of living in London amid the bustle and competition of the
Press” (76-77). It is thus revealed that Gallaher is not only
vulgar but corrupt. “THE GREAT GALLAHER” (Joyce, 1986:
111) has never been a “great” intellectual; his “vagrant and
triumphant life” (1996: 80) is a vicious one. “[T]awdry
journalism” (80) may have corrupted Gallaher as his friend
believes, but the pressman has corrupted the press as well
—
as
Crawford and his like have corrupted Irish journalism.
While the Irish-born Gallaher lives amid the bustle and
competition of the London Press, Joseph Patrick Nannetti, a
man of Italian descent, works among the loud machinery of the
Freeman
offices. The foreman, also a member of Parliament
and later the Lord Mayor of Dublin, “boomed that workaday
worker tack for all it was worth” (Joyce, 1986: 98), and could
therefore be seen as a Gramscian organic intellectual. Unlike
the alcoholic Crawford—more interested in drinking than
doing his job—Nannetti is fully preoccupied with his work: he
consents to the Keyes advertisement rather than rebuffing the
canvasser and the advertiser. So concentrated on work is he
that throughout his encounter with Bloom, the foreman speaks
only twice: “We can do that . . . Have you the design?”; “We
can do that. . . . Let him give us a three months’ renewal”
(100). After saying that, the foreman “began to check [a