The Aztecs in Ulysses

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• The Aztecs in Ulysses
• Brian Griffin (bio)

In the "Eumaeus" episode of Ulysses, a drunken sailor, "D. B. Murphy of Carrigaloe," regales his audience in a cabman's shelter with gruesome tales of his experiences in foreign lands.¹ His listeners include Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. Bloom is at first skeptical of Murphy's stories but then concedes to himself that they might not be "an entire fabrication," even though "at first blush there was not much inherent probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly accurate gospel" (U 16.827, 828-29). He says to Stephen:

Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. … In those waxworks in Henry street I myself saw some Aztecs, as they are called, sitting bowlegged, they couldn't straighten their legs if you paid them because the muscles here, … the sinews or whatever you like to call them behind the right knee, were utterly powerless from sitting that way so long cramped up, being adored as gods.

(U 16.849-56)

After telling Stephen what he had seen in the waxworks, Bloom then proceeds to assess whether the tales told by "friend Sinbad" are plausible (U 16.858).

But who or what were the "Aztecs" that Bloom saw in "those waxworks in Henry street"? There is some confusion among Joyce scholars on this point. Guillemette Bolens, for example, writes that Bloom saw "wax statues of Aztecs adored as gods,"² rather than seeing people, while Suzanna Chan states that Bloom saw "models of Aztecs" in the waxworks.³ Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman suggest that Bloom has seen just one person, "a yogi ascetic or fakir whose musculature has been weakened by prolonged worship in one position."⁴ In a similar vein, John Peter Schwartz argues that, when he is in the waxworks, "Bloom mistakes 'ascetics' for 'Aztecs' who are being 'adored as gods.'"⁵ Other scholars refer to this episode without speculating on the Aztecs' nature or identity.⁶

It is now possible to clarify what Bloom saw: it was neither wax statues, models, a single yogi ascetic or fakir, nor multiple ascetics, but two siblings, Maximo and Bartola, two of the most famous people to be exhibited as human "freaks" in North America and Europe in the nineteenth century. As Robert Bogdan explains, "freaks" [End Page 121] were "people with alleged and real physical, mental, or behavioral anomalies" who were exhibited for amusement or profit in formally organized "freak shows."⁷ Maximo and Bartola were first presented to the New York and Boston public in 1849 as "Aztec Children" or "Aztec Lilliputians," the last survivors of a priestly caste who were venerated by the inhabitants of the fabled Central American jungle city of Iximaya (Show 130). They were allegedly brought from the jungle as captives by the sole survivor of three explorers who discovered Iximaya (Show 129). Some of the publicity for the "freak shows" in which they were exhibited claimed that Bartola and Maximo had been "found squatting on an altar as idols" in Iximaya (Show 129). Their diminutive stature—Maximo, who was aged seven or eight and thirty-three inches tall, while his sister Bartola was aged between four and six was around twenty-nine-and-a-half inches tall—and their unusually elongated heads helped their exhibitors to create a "freak" identity for the pair. The siblings' unusual appearance was explained as resulting from generations of in-breeding among the Aztec priestly caste who were only allowed to marry among themselves, and it was even claimed that Maximo and Bartola were the last survivors of a distinct race of human beings.⁸

The truth was rather more prosaic: the siblings were microcephalics and were possibly members of a peasant family from the village of Decora in the El Salvadoran province of San Miguel (Show 127). However, the siblings' exhibitors were able to pass them off as "Aztecs," partly because their elongated heads resembled those of human figures in relief sculptures on Mayan or Aztec stone altars.⁹ Following successful exhibitions in Boston and New York in the early 1850s, the children were brought on a highly successful tour of Europe in...