The Heightened Vision of Exile: Dublin in 'Ulysses' (2002)
In the wake of the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001, a phrase of Samuel Beckett about James Joyce lingered in my mind: ‘To him there was no difference between the fall of a feather and the fall of a bomb’. Was Joyce a Hyperborean, regarding the catastrophes of his time with an impassive gaze? Did exile chill his responses, bringing an emotional disconnection that finally made even his creativity sterile, like that of a virus, in the wastes of Finnegans Wake? Or should we rather see his cult of literary impersonality as chiming with the Buddhist ideal of equanimity? Equanimity is the fourth of the spiritual exercises known as the Brahma-abodes, along with loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, and compassion, and it is the highest of the four, as a state of complete spiritual freedom. Equanimity is the condition of compassion: the spiritually free person is able to put forth the energies of loving-kindness and compassion without impediment. Equanimity and compassion work in tandem in many parts of Dubliners and Ulysses. Joyce’s detachment from ideologies frees him for compassionate observation of the quirky human texture that ideologies override. In Finnegans Wake, one fears, his powers of observation become absorbed by the quirks – or quarks – of language, as if humanity itself were an ideology to be overcome.
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Yet estrangement need not entail disengagement. Paradoxically, the distance of exile can intensify one’s vision of home. Only an author who had plunged himself deeply into the experience of alienation and exile could re-envision his native city as Joyce did, recasting its streetscapes in a symbolic mould. Dublin is viewed from the distance of exile, a distance not only temporal and spatial but psychological. To the exile his native city has become the strangest place on earth. Memories and recognitions of it have a thrilling quality that cannot attach to the European cities — Trieste, Zurich, Paris — where this portrait of Dublin was composed. Like Odysseus, Joyce has ‘seen the towns and known the minds of many people’ and it is these European cities that allow the perspective, the triangulation, whereby Dublin comes into focus in a novel way (even in comparison with Joyce’s previous works in which Dublin appears only through the eyes of its citizens, as a familiar milieu).
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Those who correlate the aesthetic aspects of how Dublin is represented in Ulysses with the political and historical backgrounds tend to re-naturalise the presentation of Dublin in the novel. Joyce is no longer studying the real Dublin, as in Dubliners. Instead he is re-envisioning the Dublin of his youth from a variety of angles that lift it to the status of an object of aesthetic contemplation. If Bloom is Everyman, Dublin, the ‘new Bloomusalem’ is Pantopolis, the city of humanity. The vividness of Ulysses has less to do with realism than with the defamiliarisation created by its language, an effect that is not found in Dubliners. The Homeric correspondences and the motival connections confer on all the places in the novel a symbolic status. The profile of the city is thrown into high relief by the lighting and staging of each chapter, the selection and fetishising of details, the ‘odyssey of style’ that produces an array of effects of defamiliarisation. But running through all this is a method of imaginative apotheosis. Each scene is signalled as past (especially the library scene, which Stephen is telling himself to remember) and is staged as a past event (like the scenes in the epic memory of Homer). The stylistic decisions presiding over the scenes focus them at a sharp angle, as moments from the past to be set out in their symbolic significance. The Martello Tower, Sandymount Strand, Glasnevin Cemetery, the newspaper office, the library, the Ormond Hotel, Barney Kiernan’s, the maternity hospital, the brothel, the cabman’s shelter, and 7 Eccles St. are stylistic places built on the memory of real places. They resemble movie sets: meticulous recreations that obey the law of the spectacle, ultimately answerable to the demands of art for a symbolic, stylistically distinctive site rather than to any merely documentary concerns. It is interesting to play with the idea that each of these locales is an emblem of the city as a whole. The white Martello tower suggests the white walls of a Greek city against the Mediterranean. The cemetery in ‘Hades’ completes the image of Dublin as a city of the dead that has been built up during the ride there. The other venues bring together assortments of Dubliners who act out a representative part of the wide network of negotiations that bind the city together.
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Three great novels, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and Joyce’s Ulysses have in common that they freeze a European city in the pre-World War I period and turn it into a literary stage on which human beings can exhibit their mystery and absurdity in conditions that allow for the maximum of literary analysis and representation. [Professor Guy Stroumsa suggests that the same can be said of Kafka’s Das Schloss and pre-war Prague: indeed, when I visited Prague in 2004, I spent three days trying to find my way to the great Castle dominating the horizon – famed to schoolboys for the Defenestration of 1618. After this apprenticeship in the perplexity of Kafka’s K., I finally visited the Castle and the little house in the lane alongside it where Kafka lived. I learned that the bureaucracy of Prague is the real-life equivalent of Kafka’s nightmare: ‘Are there supervising authorities? There are only supervising authorities!’ (Ob es Kontollbehörden gibt? Es gibt nur Kontrollbehörden.) (ch. 5).]
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Ulysses draws on the selective, distilling and crystallising powers of memory as Proust does to transform the gross materiality of Dublin into a city of words, a recreated aesthetic picture, which can function as a kind of mirror to a later age. Despite Joyce’s obsessive concern with realistic documentation, or rather because of it, the Dublin of Ulysses is just as much a selective and rather phantasmagorical recreation as the Paris of À la recherche. Each of the recreated items bathes in the ‘light of other days’, distanced and transmuted by memory and exile. In exile, the city is clarified, distilled, recomposed. It has become a city of the mind. Joyce’s researches into Dublin lore had nothing to do with staying in touch with the real, changing Dublin. Each item he collected was valued for its epiphanic potency, as a little tile to be added to his great mosaic, his recreation of the sacred receding moment of 1904. Exile simplifies and fixates the land one has left behind, and lends it an extra depth of past that could not be enjoyed in situ. The fantastical old-fashioned patriotism of some Irish Americans is a product of this psychological retrojection. In Finnegans Wake Joyce has sunk further into the past, into the mid-nineteenth century, and his Ireland has become a medley of Boucicault, Thomas Moore, and Victorian legends of Finn McCool and St. Kevin; the one contemporary Irish voice that is heard in his writing now is that of John McCormack, ‘the voice of the Irish’ for the sentimental diaspora of those years. As a thinker of modern Ireland the later Joyce is far outstripped by the rejuvenated Yeats.
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The Dublin of Ulysses is a tidy fictional arena, a stage for demonstrating perennial aspects of the human comedy. The novel also undertakes an ambitious work of aesthetic transfiguration and redemption. The exile’s gaze is not merely a skepsis, but becomes visionary. The novel attempts to capture or invent a poetic essence of Dublin as a ‘place’ just before it disappears into the anonymous technological and capitalistic ‘space’ of contemporary cityhood, a space that is already felt encroaching in the omnipresence of advertisement in the novel. No city can live without its myth. Joyce more than any other, his vision cleared by distance, forged a mythic vision of the city, which has become a precious reference as daily developments exile us from a more humane past. What was squalid to the first readers of the novel touches us now as having the authenticity of a relic, the tang of original Dublinhood. Today both in the diaspora and in Ireland itself we are re-envisioning our history from a perspective of estrangement. Joyce is a model of how to do this is in a style that is fearlessly critical but not heedlessly destructive.
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Language as Bondage and as Liberation
‘The limits of my language signify the limits of my world’, wrote Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-philosophicus 5.6). The characters in Joyce are all limited by their individual range of language, and his own stylistic versatility betokens the wish to break down those limits and to free people from their fixated sense of identity. Joyce uses language to fight the enslaving power of language. One recalls the Buddhist notion of prapanca, linguistic fabrication, which as the bearer of delusory investments in fixated identity creates the world of bondage in which we live, but which, wisely handled, can become a skilful means conducive to liberation and enlightenment.
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Dubliners reveals a gallery of characters who are trapped in their speech. As Joyce visits the various cells of their ‘prison house of language’ (Nietzsche) his manner is as grave and taciturn as Dante’s in the Inferno. One victim is Maria in ‘Clay’. Her prettifying maidenly diction shields her from registering any of the grim facts around her (see French; Attridge, 36). Her style of awareness represses undesirable knowledge; she knows but does not know what the eponymous ‘soft wet substance’ she touches is; her language refuses to know but her senses bring the unpleasant, chilly impingement of the real. But Maria does not allow her ‘epiphany’ to take hold. Similarly, Mr Duffy in ‘A Painful Case’ carefully constructs a prison for himself as he maps the world in cynical, coldly intellectual categories. Again he has a moment of epiphany after reading of Mrs Sinico’s death, but it is covered over by the return of his habitual patterns of thought.
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Vigilant, alert to shifting nuances, Joyce’s style works to shake the reader out of mental habits by sudden intrusions of the real, ‘keeping the ball rolling’ in language that ‘is a process of discovery as it unrolls its signification’ (Welch, 108-9). The interplay between a constantly mobile language and a constantly mobile external world is born of Joyce’s demystified sense of life as dependently co-arising (Buddhist pratitya-samutpâda); his art does not seek escape into a realm of ‘formless spiritual essences’ (U 9.49). ‘This mobile, shifting quality, an awareness of the variousness of the impacts life makes, is Joyce’s basic vision’ (Welch, 110). In Ulysses the style itself is affected by awareness of the mobility and dependently co-arising nature of perception and language, to the point that the authority of declarative utterance is radically undermined. What appears scrupulous reportage often mutates, as we scrutinise it, into self-sufficient verbal event.
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The critique of Dublin offered in Dubliners might have seemed exhaustive. Ulysses reveals that it was merely a set of preliminary sketches for a critical vision that goes deep into the underpinnings of individual failure in history, economics, popular culture, and language itself. Joyce does not work with a simple opposition of the individual and the social system. Ideological falsehood is thoroughly internalised by the individual, and that is the root of its power over the individual. Hence ‘in here it is I must kill the priest and the king’ (U. 15.4436-7). The critical analysis of how people are shaped and trapped by the languages they use is now enriched by the sense of cultural relativism Joyce has acquired in exile, which brings clearer insight into the conventionality of the fabric of our lives.
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Ulysses is perhaps the greatest encyclopaedia of idiolects ever assembled, as it takes into view the multitudinous discourses of popular culture that shape and pervade the individual worlds of discourse. The rather silent city of Dubliners is now revealed as a city of jostling noisy styles, private and public. Distant from it in time and place, Joyce hears the music of its Babel of tongues, its heteroglossic carnival, and revels in it as a comic resource. The comic moments in Dubliners were few: the embarrassed ellipses and pathetic lapses in the dialogues of ‘The Sisters’, the discussion of papal infallibility in ‘Grace’, the deadpan absurdity of the poem that concludes ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’. But now the Dubliners are seen revelling in their theatricality and in the rhythms of their own eloquence. All voices, and even all non-human sounds, are given a heightened particularity, so that the city comes before us in one arresting and vivid sound-signature after another (and the visual epiphanies are equally particularised). There is no view from above, no crowd scene, no generalisation about urban existence. All of this particularity is lost in Finnegans Wake, where the tumultuous theatre of Dublin life is reduced to a fitfully animated drone.
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The ball is set rolling by Buck Mulligan, whose marvellous gifts as a mimic are writ large in the novel as a whole. Hugh Kenner calls Mulligan a ‘stage Irishman’, using the phrase loosely and not in the sense of the theatrical tradition of Boucicault, Synge, or John Bull’s Other Island or the simian caricatures of Punch (see Shimokusu). Mulligan is theatrical, but the stage Irishman is only one of his many roles. He is a wit, the successor of Oscar Wilde. He is at times a stage Dubliner, using locutions such as ‘O Jay’. Lenehan, another performing wit, is the master of that genre. Alf Bergan delights in droll Dublin locutions: ‘I beg your parsnips’ (12.387); ‘Don’t cast your nasturtiums on my character’ (12.1040). Simon Dedalus is a stage Corkman. The Citizen and Father Conmee act their roles as patriot and as ecclesiastic with theatrical aplomb but without critical self-distancing. The Citizen is the most stage Irish figure in the novel, not ‘putting it on’ to mock the English interlocutor or in self-mockery, but totally caught up in it so that he is a walking parody of himself.
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The many versions of stage Irishry the novel displays have a function analogous to that of the Fools in Shakespeare (a suggestion of Professor Tetsuo Anzai). They belong to a realm of liminality in which the serious discourse of the Empire and the entire realm of European high culture as well are carnivalised and subverted. Irishmen can become stage Irishmen at the drop of a hat, which implies a capacity for self-mockery and parody of one’s own stereotyped identity. Mulligan carries this to a rare pitch of versatility, and Joyce goes still further. The hostility of most critics to Mulligan is perhaps misplaced; Stephen’s hostility cannot be taken as a yardstick, nor can Joyce’s hostility to Gogarty, and in either case it was laced with admiration. Bloom has the last word on Mulligan in Ulysses, declaring him to be untrustworthy ‘as a guide, philosopher and friend’ (16.281) but praising his talents and courage (16.287-95). Bloom is not at all histrionic, and he is used to convey a rather puritanical judgment on Dublin performances, once their comic value has been fully exploited. But though the stage Irishman, an icon of popular culture, is criticised as a colonial stereotype imposed on themselves by the colonised, Joyce both has his cake and eats it. Critical assessment and carnivalesque celebration co-exist. Though meretricious sentiment and commodity fetishism are exposed, the popular voice dominates the novel, soliciting the discourses of high culture out of their orbit. Finnegans Wake will revel in stage Irish intonations, without any critical resistance, and perhaps with a corresponding loss of significance and comic impact.
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Carnivalesque, too, is the novel’s cannibalising of literary tradition. In Joyce’s early style there are only hints of the constant inbuilt self-parody that marks the writing in Ulysses — hints that acquire significance in retrospect. It would be hard to find in Dubliners a sentence as self-conscious in its narrative manner, as pointedly self-exhibiting, and consequently as self-undercutting, as the opening sentence of Ulysses. This self-reflexivity is plainly on view in the headlines of ‘Aeolus’ and the mimetic plasticity that increasingly marks the language and typography of ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and that is carried through to the level of phonemes in ‘Sirens’, licensing verbal distortions that look forward to Finnegans Wake. The ‘intrusions’ in ‘The Wandering Rocks’ lead to the rockier lurches of the ‘interpolations’ in ‘Cyclops’ and the defamiliarising catechism format of ‘Ithaca’, all of which highlight the textuality of the text. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ has sometimes been seen as self-indulgent parody that does not match these experiments, an impression confirmed by those who argue that ‘most of its complexities are, in fact, completely functional’ (Sultan, 279). The point of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ is that it is a climactic demonstration of what the stylistic experiments have increasingly been making obvious: that a story changes radically with the style of its telling. It exhibits the fabricating powers of language itself in its historical accumulation. The events described are rather drowned out through the prominence here claimed by style, as again in ‘Eumaeus’ and ‘Ithaca’. Still, the changes from one historical style to the next lend an unresting motion to the narrative, which can never step twice in the same stream. (In contrast, the three chapters of the nostos are deliberately static in style, forming a grand cadence to the work.)
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John Eglinton in 1935 associated Joyce’s work with a ‘Celtic revenge’. In ‘Ithaca’ the imperialistic discourse of nineteenth-century science is appropriated for Irish Catholic culture and is at the same time subverted by ‘Celtic’ inflections: ‘fancy, inconsequence, random thinking, whimsy, the darkness of soul beyond enlightenment’ (Gibson, 165). But these Celtic graffiti on the crumbling edifice of old-style science are themselves a parody. Again, ‘Oxen of the Sun’ mockingly appropriates the gamut of English historical styles for Irish consciousness, but this schoolboyish mimesis is itself being mocked; the chapter is a send-up of Irish mimicry too. Yet just as Shakespeare’s Fools lose none of their subversive force through mocking themselves, so the anarchic Irish foolery Joyce injects into the discourses he hijacks can carry through a comic exposure of their pretentiousness even as it undercuts any pretentiousness of its own. ‘Sirens’ appropriates for Irish use the European operatic tradition, as mediated by Britain (texts in English), hybridising it with nationalistic ballads, and satirising both continental and local sentimentality. ‘Penelope’ acquires for Irish use a sexual language that subverts British and Catholic imperialism, and the sentimental images of Irish women and of Ireland as woman, by being quite oblivious of Victorian prudery and Jansenist guilt. But this sexual language is no feminist or Lawrentian model speech about sex; it is self-mocking from beginning to end (rather like Merriman’s Midnight Court).
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The European connections of the three protagonists provide a sceptical angle on the city’s habitual patterns of speech and behaviour, and the labour of the text carries this skepsis to the limit. This goes beyond the sharp critical vision of the protagonists, as it reveals that they, too, are limited by the reach of their language. We are thoroughly immersed in the worlds of Stephen, Bloom and Molly by long exposure to their inner monologues, three radically different styles of self-address. It may seem highly artificial that all the perceptions of these characters are instantly translated into language, so that they spend much of the novel talking to themselves. Joyce himself admitted that he was offering not an exposition but a stylised representation of consciousness. The representation highlights the shaping of perception by language and by ego-centred preoccupations. Bloom’s telegraphic style reflects his wary, observant, and rather grubby outlook. Whenever a flight of thought or feeling is on the verge of occurring, Bloom interrupts himself, falls back into some linguistic muddle. His sexual inadequacy is matched by the intuitus interruptus that is the standard procedure of his rumination. Stephen, in contrast, elevates all perceptions through literary grandiosity founded in his own sense of his future greatness, or through paranoid detection of enmity and danger. Though both Stephen and Bloom are busy spinning their mental and linguistic fabrications all day long, they nonetheless experience a series of minor epiphanies that shake them out of their cocoons. Molly’s consciousness, represented by Joyce’s attempt at écriture féminine, is closer to immediate sensation and feeling.
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In ‘The Wandering Rocks’ the ‘intrusions’ in each section shock us out of the habits of linear narrative, allowing the synchronic to disrupt the diachronic; and even within the diachronic mini-narratives there are many subversive shifts of focus. But the force of these rips in the text lies chiefly in how they expose the verbal texture of what we are reading. Up to this point in the novel, Stephen’s and Bloom’s inner monologues have punctuated the narration with epiphanal effect, beginning with Stephen’s ‘Chrysostomos’ (1.26). Note the polyphonic condensation in this one word: (1) Its literal sense, ‘golden mouth’, is an epiphany of the eloquent Mulligan, teeth glinting in the morning sun. (2) As the name of a Greek Father it instantiates three motifs of the first chapter (and of the novel as a whole): theology, paternity, Hellenism. (3) As the first, unexplained, emergence of Stephen’s inner monologue it produces an enigmatic rupture in the text, a discord resolved only in rereading. (4) It characterises Stephen as someone obsessed with historical memory and theological associations. In ‘The Wandering Rocks’ we have for the first and only time direct access to five other consciousnesses. That of Father Conmee is rendered in free indirect style punctuated by fragments of inner monologue (10.2-6, 36-9, 61, 65-7, 70-2, 74-5, 78, 80, 81-2, 84, 90-2, 164-70, 179, 183, 191-2). Though the verbs in the inner monologue are in the past tense and the pronoun in the third person, the disruptive vividness of our first encounters with the inner monologues of Stephen and Bloom is achieved again by this emergence of a new consciousness; note, too, the effect of the sudden flashbacks (10.131-2, 185-8). The present tense and first person prevail in the inner monologues of Blazes Boylan (10.327), Miss Dunne (10.371-2, 382-7), Mr Kernan (10.720-39, 743-5 1, 755-72, 776-7, 781-93, 797-8) and Master Dignam (10.1124-9, 1135-8, 1139-40, 1142-4, 1145-9, 1153, 1155-7, 1157-8, 1158-74). The shifts from objective to subjective keep the ball rolling and the readers on their toes. Readers must keep their eyes on the ball over a longer span, too, for its motion follows the rules of a game, as Joyce weaves its course to the total formal effect emblematised by the closing description of the vice-regal cavalcade.
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These five characters have no epiphanic breakthroughs. They are entirely creatures of convention. Gerty McDowell’s perceptions, to which we have access in free indirect style, are rather more vivid, though couched according to the ‘Uncle Charles principle’ in the ‘artistic’ language in which she would like an admirer to write about her (Norris, 39). The delusive sentimentalism of this, which represses awareness of the unromantic aspects of her transaction with Bloom, generates a delightful heightening and excitement. Her Bovaryism is more comic than tragic. Her aspiration after beauty falls pathetically short of true satisfaction, yet it does enhance her life in its own way. There is much charm and vivacity in the girl’s world her prapanca conjures up. Joyce’s critique of the sentimentalism of popular culture does not exclude sympathy with those who find enjoyment in it. He revels in any display of verbal vitality. Like the absurd theological discussion in ‘Grace’, Gerty’s thoughts light up a corner of Irish life with amazing vividness. It is not necessary to see her as ‘a pathetically obnoxious girl’ (Sultan, 267) or to view with Tertullianesque disfavour the fact that ‘she uses ointments, cosmetic preparations, and treatments of every kind for every part of her body’ (268). Nonetheless, her conventions of thought and speech ensure that she lives within a cocoon of delusion. If we contrast her language-world with that of Molly the full iconoclastic and epiphanic force of the latter can be measured.
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The conventionality and constructedness of selfhood is a characteristic preoccupation of modernist authors. Ulysses conveys an almost Buddhist sense that the assured stability of our identity is little more than the rigidity of that unchanging mark we call our name. The text plays with names in a way that undermines stability of character. In ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’ and ‘Eumaeus’ the characters change as their names do — ‘sir Leopold’, ‘Mr Cautious Calmer’, ‘Leop. Bloom’, ‘Mr Leopold’, ‘Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.)’, ‘the Bloom toff’, ‘L. Boom’. The nominalism explicit in these chapters pervades the entire novel more subtly, as in the insistent naming of ‘Father Conmee’ at the start of ‘The Wandering Rocks’ — which prompts us to recognise that the character is projecting a conventional ego-image, a rather pompous one, that is concretised in his name.
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Stephen’s wilfully constructed identity is shown to be in danger of becoming a rigid mask. What we identify as the core of our ego is often that part of ourselves which is most easily identified, for it has been implanted in us by our culture; it is what the culture has taught us to think that we are. Stephen’s conception of himself as an ‘artist’ is a tissue of the most typical conceptions of the time; that actual ‘art’ of James Joyce begins where those clichés break down. The trajectory of Joyce’s work is a gradual erosion of grandiose conceptions of the artist, through parody of them; the impersonality of Ulysses is a parody of Flaubertian impersonality (building on what Flaubert himself began to do in Bouvard et Pécuchet); the lofty impersonality of the artist is allowed to dissolve back into the banal impersonality of the newspaper or the catechism. The last version of the ‘portrait of the artist’ is the figure of Shem in Finnegans Wake; this figure is not recognisable as the hero of A Portrait nor as the implied author in Ulysses; he entirely lacks Flaubertian impersonality; the implied artist of Finnegans Wake is a joker messing around with his inkpot, modest and self-effacing in a quite new way.
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Stephen struggles with the limits of his own individual form, seeking Protean transformation: ‘As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies... so does the artist weave and unweave his image’ (9.376-8). Stephen’s play with Shakespeare’s identity and with his own in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ brings him at several points to an awareness of the sheer absence of self-identity that this dismantling can reveal: ‘On that mystery’ (fatherhood) ‘the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood’ (9.839-42). In ‘Telemachus’ he had reflected that ‘The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind’ (1.661-2), namely the ancient heretics. Stephen has an almost Buddhist awareness that ‘form itself is emptiness’ as he registers the Protean malleability of his, or Shakespeare’s, image and the incertitude of constructions of artistic vision, comparable to those of the heretics who weave the wind, or even to the Church itself insofar as it is founded on an instable myth of paternity, the apostolic succession. In ‘Ithaca’ he thinks of himself as ‘a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void’ (17.1013-5), and Bloom in turn becomes ‘a conscious reactor against the void of incertitude’ (17.2210-11). Bloom has been that all along, and has been a more successful negotiator of emptiness than Stephen. ‘Ineluctably’ recalls ‘Ineluctable modality of the visible’ (3.1; 15.3630-1), ‘the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality’ (3.425-6), and the ‘manshape ineluctable’ (3.413) of Stephen’s shadow. He also has a sense of his own destiny as ineluctable: ‘That lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctably’ (9.1200-1); ‘Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become’ (15.2120-1). ‘Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind’ (2.52-3). Ironically, Joyce himself felt that Stephen had become a fixated fictional character who left little room for development.
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Bloom, as a Jew in Dublin, is given a maximally complex identity, and is shown throughout the day negotiating the elements that make it up. He often has a sense of the relativity of identity: ‘No-one is anything’ (8.493). Often this has a nihilistic tinge, as in his meditations in Glasnevin Cemetery or his momentary sense of ‘Desolation./Grey horror seared his flesh’ (4.229-30). He has a non-discriminatory sense of the interpenetration of contraries: Love among the tombstones... In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet’ (6.758-60). He combines and surpasses contraries in himself: male and female, Jew and gentile, Catholic and Protestant, Irish and European. He is a walking instantiation of the principle, ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet’ (15.2097-8). Unlike Stephen, he has no desire to monumentalise or immortalise himself as an artist, and his ambitions are invested in practical schemes, in flexible, pragmatic interaction with the ever-changing world. He has a canny sense of the provisionality and conventionality of its fabric. He has an ability to imagine others’ point of view, beginning with the cat’s: ‘Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me’ (4.28-9). The multiplication of perspectives and the unimpeded interpenetration of all phenomena in Bloom’s world give him a touch of the Buddhist sage who has transcended the constricting horizons of ego.
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Fixated Identities in ‘Cyclops’
‘Might an IRA bomb and Joyce’s Ulysses have anything in common? How might an IRA terrorist read Ulysses? Or how might a victim of terrorism read the novel? (Duffy, 1). Those are truly Hyperborean questions, reminding one of the composer Stockhausen’s ill-fated remark that the September 11 bombings were a great work of art. Joyce was at least a pacifist, so that his equanimity was not acquiescence in hatred and violence, but a quasi-Buddhist insight into the delusions underlying them. Ulysses is subversive art, but that does not put it in the same camp as subversive violence. Buddhism, the most subversive of religions, is the least violent. Joyce’s writing, too, is a form of non-violent subversive praxis. He rewrites the Odyssey in a pacifist style: ‘The victories of Bloom are mental, in spite of the pervasive physicality of Joyce’s book. This kind of victory is not Homeric, though Homer gestures towards it; it is compatible with Christianity, but it is not Christian either, for Bloom is a member of a secular world’ (Ellmann, 360).
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Critics who seek to reinsert the novel in history will reject this humanistic generalisation along with starchy modernist readings that see Ulysses as abstracting a day from the life of Dublin, sealing it off and using it as material for experimental analysis or for symbolic ritual celebration of Life. But it may also be misleading to say that Ulysses is about ‘the means by which oppressed communities fight their way out of abjection and the potential pitfalls of anti-colonial struggles’ (Duffy, 1). If Joyce is a liberator, it is in a subtler way than can be glimpsed if one makes the details of the Irish War of Independence the primary objective correlative of the novel, the content of its political unconscious. Regarding his compatriots as their own worst enemies, he is more anxious to rouse them to critical awareness and flexibility of vision than to develop any political theme.
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In ‘Cyclops’ the Citizen as a send-up of the mentality of ‘Irish nationalist terrorism’ (Duffy, 109) shows not only its impotence, but also its opportunism. Duffy suggests that in creating a terrorist stereotype in the Citizen Joyce is parodying the English creation of this bugbear: Joyce ‘cannot but have had some sense of irony, of defiance of the forces that built this stereotype in the first place’ (112). Nonetheless, the juiciest target for Joyce is the flood of nationalist grandiosity that the Irish themselves were inventing at the time: ‘And our wool that was sold in Rome at the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen?’ (1242-50). This is the loftiest rhetoric of the chapter and it is what sets off most of the wildly rhetorical interpolations. Duffy seems to want to blunt this satire when he writes: ‘The vulgar narrative of the Nameless One seems closest to the world of the Citizen, while the hyperbolic officialese of the interpolations matches the officious, bourgeois mind of Bloom’ (Duffy, 112). I would say that all three characters are in the grip of delusive language, and that the interpolations defuse the passion and grandiosity of their speech. The rich polyphony that is set up between the cynical eloquence of the Dublin gutter, the blazing rhetoric of romantic violent nationalism, and the interpolations which exhibit various forms of grandiose sentimentality afloat in the media of the times can well be taken as a mise en scène of the quandaries of colonial existence. Bloom’s voice is impotent amid this hubbub, and though he scores a local moral victory he by no means represents a clear-sighted view of the larger historical situation.
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The interpolations are launched by grandiose moments in the characters’ speech and carry that grandiosity to far as to deflate it entirely. The following passages ‘send up’ the world of the Citizen: 12.68-99, 102-18, 151-205, 525-678, 712-47, 1266-1310, 1438-64, 1676-1750 and have no connection with Bloom. Only the following passages are mock-heroic or simply mocking accounts of Bloom: 12.215-7, 468-78, 846-9, 897-938 (officialese account of Bloom’s dialogue the Citizen), 1493-1501, 1814-42, 1910-18. The other interpolations have no connection with either character. The general impact of the interpolations is to make fun of the over-wrought eloquence of the disputants. No more than comparable parody in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ or ‘Ithaca’ can they be associated especially with the mind of Bloom. His rejection of ‘Force, hatred, history, all that’ (12.1481) is bumbling. Like Svevo’s Zeno he is a schlemiel, a double outsider as an unorthodox Jew, and the interpolations at this point mock his bumbling. The many-levelled critical alertness of the chapter, laced in places with Swiftian rage, is transcended by a movement towards sheer delight in the play of language. The interpolations defuse ressentiment, not only the Citizen’s, but the hot reaction of Bloom: ‘this may well be the writing degree zero of ressentiment in twentieth-century fiction’ (Duffy, 115). It is this uncanny detachment, rather than any political or humanistic consciousness, that brings us to the heart of what is going on in Ulysses.
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In contrast to the delusive substantialism of the Citizen, the equally deluded nihilism of the narrator takes the homely form of Dublin cynicism. He is incapable of speaking a good word of anyone, reminding one of Yeats’s observation that ‘Dean Swift created a soul for the people of Dublin, by teaching them to hate their neighbour as themselves’. His negativity is a prison within which this Thersites is bound, though he imagines it frees him from delusion. He thinks his cynicism is an unbeatable posture, as he cuts down to size the declarations of the pub discussants, often by spilling the beans on their personal lives, to which his collusion with the Police has made him privy: ‘As much as his bloody life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled multitude in Shanagolden where he daren’t show his nose with the Molly Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant’ (12.1312-16). But his freedom is laced with bitterness and rage. He is a no-man (Outis in the Homeric analogue), irritated and unhappy with his own lack of conviction; his repeated locution ‘Arrah’ voices this exasperation.
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Joyce’s method of getting inside his characters and mapping the contours and the limits of their world is through mimicry of their speech. He sounds out the potential of a certain vein of eloquence and its inbuilt limits. After a page of the ‘Cyclops’ narrator, we already have a good idea of the constraints that weigh on his speech. It is demotic: ‘I was just passing the time of day...’ ‘be damned but a bloody sweep came along.’ It is familiar: ‘who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes’. It is derogatory: ‘I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out’ (12.30-1). The narrator is himself an excellent mimic, and thus reveals his power to dominate and see through the victims of his irony. He imitates both Moses Herzog and his debtor Geraghty. He is also ironical toward himself: ‘Ay, says I. How are the mighty fallen! Collector of bad and doubtful debts’ (12.24-5).
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Supervening on this voice, the legalese of the first interpolation — ‘For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog...’ (12.33) — shakes us out of the narrator’s mental universe and brings him into perspective from outside. After this estrangement effect has done its work we are plunged back into the narrator’s world, and realise that its loose, natural, casualness — ‘So we went around by the Linenhall barracks and the back of the courthouse talking of one thing or another’ (12.64-5) — is in fact just as constricting a cultural construct as the art-languages of the interpolations. Moreover, the narrator himself is calculating in his affected casualness — as he ‘talks of one thing or another’ he is picking up information.
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The high-flown interpolation about St Michan’s is punctured by the lines: ‘I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him. Come out here, Geraghty, you notorious hill and dale robber!’ (12.100-1), repeating the mimicry of 12.27-8. No epic flights of fancy for the narrator, who is locked into the empirical details of his role; yet his sense of detail in turn mocks the epic voice, already subverted by the parodic mode. As in ‘The Wandering Rocks’, the changes from narrator’s voice to interpolation and back dislodge us from attachment to any one mode of awareness. Thus the final paragraph begins as a mock-biblical apotheosis of Bloom and ends in the demotic mode — ‘like a shot off a shovel’ (12.1918) —, avoiding the numbing effect that would have been produced by the sleepy rhythm of the anticipated ‘literary’ cadence.
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‘Cyclops’ directs its irony in many directions. Bloom is given a heroic part, but his viewpoint is not the ultimate viewpoint of the chapter (if only because of the limits of his political vision, underscored in Duffy’s discussion). Beyond the extremes of substantialism and nihilism, the style of the chapter is aiming at a liberation of vision, and exemplifies something like a Buddhist middle way between the extremes. Its traversal of oceans of Dublin speech issues in no positive utterance beyond that speech. Yet a silent judgment is operative in the way the speech is recreated in a reflective prise de conscience. As Joyce replays the speech of Dublin in the silence of exile its accents are sifted and clarified, and the writing itself places one in a position of insight and freedom beyond all the positions represented by the characters.
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‘Circe’: Dublin as Transparent Thing
This reflexive recycling of the language of Dublin is redoubled in ‘Circe’, where the novel retraverses the discourses it has set forth so far. Become a ghost through absence, Joyce projects a spectral Dublin (not yet confessedly a dream one) and when the novel begins to echo and reflect itself in ‘Circe’ this spectrality becomes manifest. ‘Circe’ is a mirror within the mirror, an x-ray of a novel that is itself an x-ray, for here all the words of the novel are recycled in such a way that the literary artifice is transparent at every step. Rereading the entire novel in the light of ‘Circe’ we are alerted to its texture as a castle of words. The things named in it become ‘transparent things’ (see Nabokov) — one can see transparently how they are created and how this recreated world of art has escaped the murkiness of the ordinary world.
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Ulysses is a Mass — initiated by Buck Mulligan’s ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’ (1.5); his elaborate shaving is a ritual action, and the breakfast is one of the happier communion scenes in Joyce. ‘Circe’ is a Black Mass within the larger ceremony, which parodies and inverts all its elements. Stephen’s ‘introit’ (15.74) is followed by his long-delayed response to Mulligan’s opening: ‘ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam’ (15.121-2). The Black Mass climaxes with Father Malachi O’Flynn’s ‘Introibo ad altare diaboli’ (15.3769). The reference to the Mass raises the low-level language of Dublin to a quasi-liturgical dignity. The Black Mass section might seem to degrade it all again, in a betrayal of Stephen Dedalus’s image of the artist as ‘a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life’ (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Penguin Edition, 1992, p. 240). But Dublin has already been transfigured in the preceding chapters; the dull city has become the radiant body of the work of art. Now a second level of alchemy is attempted, as the work of art turns in on itself reflexively, explicitly manifesting its constructed, fictional, linguistic status.
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‘Circe’ is a rhapsody or cadenza allowing all sorts of virtualities of the day’s gathered experiences, as encapsulated in gems of style or linguistic objets trouvés, to play freely. The Nighttown vision of Dublin complements the realism of the daytime vision and prevents it from closing in on itself, by opening a free play of fantasy around it. ‘Circe’ shifts gear from narrative to dramatic, and it is the dramatic form that gives high relief to the hallucinatory phantasmagoria. The recycled motifs from earlier chapters are transmuted first of all by this dramatisation. The effect is comparable to the way in which words, or the figures on a pack of cards, take on a life of their own when one passes ‘through the looking-glass’ in Lewis Carroll. The phantasmagoria can at any moment revert to the merely verbal material from which it arises, collapsing as a house of cards. It is the extreme point in Joyce’s demonstration of the constructedness of self, world and meaning. The world has become book and the book has become a self-consuming artefact. The solid fulness of the world has revealed itself to be indistinguishable from the emptiness of the play of words, verifying Paul Valéry’s dictum: ‘God has made the world from nothing, but the nothing shows through’.
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Consider how the narrative thread concerning Denis Breen’s postcard, possibly composed by Alf Bergan, is concentrated into a lurid moment:
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(Denis Breen, whitetallhatted, with Wisdom Hely’s sandwich boards, shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his dull beard thrust out, muttering to right and left. Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the pall of the ace of spades, dogs him to left and right, doubled in laughter.)
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ALF BERGAN
(points jeering at the sandwichboards) U. p: up. (15.479-85)
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Two elements here are specifically Circean motifs: the word ‘dogs’ belongs to the ubiquitous animal imagery of the chapter, and the inversion from ‘right and left to ‘left and right’ connects with the many other inversions (white mass to black mass, male to female, active to passive) and with the chapter’s other references to right and left (22 rights; 36 lefts, dextro, Kithogue, ambidexterity; also 3 sinisters, and 16 rights and 11 lefts in other senses); in the final tableau Rudi ‘reads from right to left (15.4959). As one uncovers the motival status of these references the scene is reabsorbed into the abstract aesthetic design of the chapter, in a dreamlike collapse of significance. The elements recycled from earlier chapters include:
(1) Breen’s slippers and beard: earlier he wore ‘skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes’ (8.310); he ‘thrust his dull grey beard towards’ his wife (8.313); these motifs are taken up in ‘Cyclops’, where the narrator sees Breen ‘in his bathslippers’ (12.253-4) and ‘with his beard out tripping him, bringing down the rain’ (12.1063-4).
(2) The postcard inscription ‘U. p’: This obscure libel, probably composed by Alf Bergan, has percolated through the novel from its first appearance (8.257-8), re-echoing in Bloom’s mind (8.274) as he deduces Bergan’s role (8.320), recurring to him again at 11.903 and 13.1239, and resurfacing in his speech at 15.1609 and in Molly’s thoughts (18.229). In ‘Cyclops’ Alf repeats the phrase ‘U. p: up’ (12.258, 269, 276) in a fit of laughter: ‘he doubled up’ (12.259); he recurs to it later and J. J. Molloy declares it to imply that Breen is not compos mentis (12.1031, 1044). Later in ‘Circe’ John O’Connell refers to a ‘Burial docket letter number U. P. eightyfive thousand’ (15.1249). The cryptic or unintelligible nature of the postcard inscription makes it emblematic of Dublin mockery – the vacuity of the content accentuates its purpose as the vehicle of jeering, and also allows a wide penumbra of uncanny associations with madness and death. The acoustic qualities of the city allow a little phrase like this to circulate, with all its connotations of mockery. Because of the acoustics each of the characters has a story or set of stories attached to their name, stories that are known to a broader or narrower circle and have a greater or lesser degree of veracity. Whether true: Mulligan saved a man from drowning, or false: Bloom drew up plans for Sinn Fein (as Cunningham asserts with the authority of a Dublin Castle employee in ‘Cyclops’), a rumour has a life of its own and tends to fix the one who is its subject in a certain memorable role.
(3) Breen’s hat and sandwich boards: The ‘U. p’ motif is crossed with the letters designating Bloom’s former employer. Bloom reflects critically on H. E. L. Y. S. inscribed on the tall white hats of the five sandwichmen at 8.123-42, and recalls the I. H. S. on the priest’s vestment (5.372; see 15.1935). They reappear as H. E. L. Y’s in 10.310-11, 377-9, 1236-8, on the last occasion described as ‘flagons’, a corruption of Anglo-Irish ‘flag’ or ‘flagger’, a water-plant (OED), but here used in the sense of one who flags, as in the case of the Flagger accompanying the Pavior (paver) at 15.1459. It is now Breen who wears the tall white hat and his postcard has magnified into the sandwich boards he carries.
(4) The ace of spades: Breen dreamed that ‘the ace of spades was walking up the stairs’ (8.253), a sinister development of Alice in Wonderland. The postcard, now sandwich-boards, has taken on a life of its own, like the card, and both are symbols of death. Thus in the recycling motifs from different quarters are intricately co-implicated, and this intensity of cross-reference dissolves the book’s pretence of sedulous realism into the manifest madness of art, as if the whole had been generated from this template of key words and images. Indeed, from the start the novel was constructed of verbal elements; elements of realistic observation entered its texture only as already converted into signatures, stylistic trouvailles, so that the reduction of ‘Circe’ can be accomplished with ease.
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As the novel thus turns in on itself, Joyce completes his imaginative digestion of Dublin, now offered to the world as a self-contained city of words. He boasted that if Dublin were destroyed it could be reconstructed on the basis of Ulysses. What he has done for himself is to create a new Dublin that replaces the city he left, a Dublin to outlast any physical embodiment of the actual city. It is a replica, which advertises its replica status, and which has a shapeliness and self-containment that no real city could have. It projects a Platonic Idea of the city and of cityhood in general. It does this by eschewing the sprawl of Balzac or Dickens for whom Paris and London are real places offering endless avenues for exploration. Dublin for Joyce has ceased to be a real place. Instead it is a set of impressions, confined to a vanished past, and the task of the artist is to excogitate the essence of Dublin from these impressions. The more the novel turns its back on realism and preys on its own substance, the more it succeeds in this task.
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In 1922 Ulysses was a startling exposure of the conventionality of the fabric of culture, but now it has been fully integrated into the culture and even folklorised in the institution of Bloomsday, so that ‘Far from contesting the authority of culture, Ulysses reinvents our relation to Western culture in terms of exegetical devotion, that is, as the exegesis of Ulysses itself (Leo Bersani, quoted, Attridge, 184). A stuffy belief in literature and its redemptive value is reinstated, and the book no longer destabilises conventional understandings. Bersani prefers Flaubert and Beckett, for whom literature ‘can only exist in a continuous anxiety about its capacity to sustain itself, perhaps even to begin itself (ib.). Words uttered in such a condition, a speech aware of its own impossibility, are likely to produce a vision beyond the conventional, whereas Joyce ensconces us comfortably in an encyclopaedic re-appropriation of the literary tradition.
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Derrida, to be sure, finds the endless dissemination of allusion in Ulysses, and still more in Finnegans Wake, to remain unsettling. But the anxiety of this is paralysing rather than liberating. Derrida sees Joyce as showing us caught in the web of language as a grim fate. Joyce’s art leads us into the Platonic khôra, a place of radical unease and indeterminacy, not into the freedom of Buddhist emptiness in which each phenomenon can be rediscovered in fresh vision. I expressed a similar view earlier: ‘He shows language as a treacherous arrangement without secure foundations, spinning webs of illusion and conventional wisdom, which it can always dissolve again if allowed to. The dissolution never uncovers an underlying absolute, the tathatâ (suchness) of Buddhism, but only a new weaving of the web, endlessly’ (O’Leary, 327).
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However, the formal and critical labour that Joyce carries out on the abundance of his material, in a novel that enacts awareness of its own status as a textual construction, moves not toward endless indeterminacy but toward unity of vision. In his basic style acute consciousness of the workings of language goes hand in hand with alertness to the mobility of phenomena that constantly eludes language (and that is incorrectly characterised as ‘an underlying absolute’). In its reflexive movement Ulysses immobilizes the phenomena by stopping language in its tracks and sifting and synthesizing its overtones. Thus he places over against the living, historical Dublin a city of form, a mirror of art, an enigmatic portrait, which still can ‘tease us out of thought’ even as the world it monumentalised recedes into a past from which we are otherwise forever exiled.
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REFERENCES
Attridge, Derek (2000). Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History. Cambridge University Press.
Duffy, Enda (1994). The Subaltern Ulysses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ellmann, Richard (1983). James Joyce. New and Revised Edition. Oxford University Press.
French, Marilyn (1982). ‘Joyce and Language’. James Joyce Quarterly 19:239-55.
Gibson, Andrew (1996). ‘“An aberration of the light of reason”: Science and Cultural Politics in “Ithaca”‘. European Joyce Studies 6:133-74.
Nabokov, Vladimir (1972). Transparent Things. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Norris, Margot (1988). ‘Modernism, Myth, and Desire in “Nausicaa”’. James Joyce Quarterly 26:37-50.
O’Leary, J. S. (1993). ‘The Spiritual Upshot of Ulysses’. In: James Mackey, ed. An Introduction to Celtic Christianity. Edinburgh: Clark (revised edition), pp. 305-34.
Shimokusu, Masaya (2001). Stage Irishman and Police Informer: Stereotypical Representations of the Irish in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Ph.D. diss., Sophia University, Tokyo.
Sultan, Stanley (1964). The Argument of Ulysses. Ohio State University Press.
Welch, Robert (1993). Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing. London: Routledge.
(English Literature and Language 39, 2002, pp. 3-24)