Bloomsday 100 essays on Ulysses 9780813034027, 9780813041971, 0813034027, 9780813043210, 0813043212

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Bloomsday 100 The Florida James Joyce Series

University Press of Florida Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee New College of Florida, Sarasota University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

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Bloomsday 100 Essays on Ulysses

Edited by Morris Beja and Anne Fogarty Foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

University Press of Florida Gainesville / Tallahassee / Tampa / Boca Raton Pensacola / Orlando / Miami / Jacksonville / Ft. Myers / Sarasota

Copyright 2009 by Morris Beja and Anne Fogarty All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America. This book is printed on Glatfelter Natures Book, a paper certified under the standards of the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC). It is a recycled stock that contains 30 percent postconsumer waste and is acid-free. First cloth printing, 2009 First paperback printing, 2012 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloomsday 100 : essays on Ulysses / edited by Morris Beja and Anne Fogarty; foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles. p. cm. — (The Florida James Joyce series) Papers from the Bloomsday 100 Symposium, held in the National College of Ireland, Dublin, June 12–19, 2004. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8130-3402-7 (alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8130-4197-1 (pbk.) 1. Joyce, James, 1882–1941. Ulysses. 2. Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Knowledge— Dublin (Ireland) 3. Dublin (Ireland)—In literature. I. Beja, Morris. II. Fogarty, Anne, 1958– III. Title: Bloomsday one hundred. PR6019.O9U6265 2009 823'.912—dc22 2009017135 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 http://www.upf.com

For Ellen and Ulf

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Contents

Foreword ix List of Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Anne Fogarty Part I. “That Other World”: Material Dimensions of Ulysses 1. Joyce’s Debris 15 David Spurr 2. “Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!”: The Pussens Perplex 31 John Gordon 3. Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 41 Austin Briggs Part II. “Agenbite”: History in the Text 4. Mixing Memory and Desire: Narrative Strategies and the Past in Ulysses 65 Richard P. Lynch 5. Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 77 Tracey Teets Schwarze 6. Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 96 Greg Winston Part III. Mixed Media: Image and Performance 7. “In the Beginning Was the Gest”: Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” 117 Anthony Paraskeva

8. Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 135 Katherine O’Callaghan 9. Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama 150 Timothy Martin Part IV. Counterparts: Intertextualities 10. Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” 163 Yu-chen Lin 11. Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 178 Gerald Gillespie 12. Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 190 Robert Weninger Part V. “Almosting It”: Ulysses and the Reader 13. Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 213 Michael Patrick Gillespie 14. Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature: A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” 228 Margot Norris List of Contributors 241 Index 245

Foreword

Somehow Joyce studies has become associated with excess, despite the scrupulous meanness of Dubliners, the asceticism of Portrait, and the general parsimony of Joyce’s output, the major titles of which can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The commemoration of Bloomsday bears a great deal of the responsibility for this: what other author is given the luxury of a day to celebrate the exploits of a fictional character? And perhaps Joyceans themselves, who tend to be a gregarious lot, have contributed to this perception: the phrase that Gretta bestows upon her husband—“You are a very generous person, Gabriel”—can stand as a motto for all the generous spirits in the Joycean world. So it is with considerable relief that one finds reflected in this volume not the overabundance of the year-long public extravaganza that was Bloomsday’s centenary year, but the more lasting benefits of considered meditation on Joycean themes by some of the most thoughtful and provocative critics working on Joyce today. We find in these pages a set of fresh and engaged readings with everything from Schopenhauer to rubbish, all written in the state of heightened alertness that marks the true Joycean reader. To be brought to a standstill by a text or an object is the Joycean state par excellence: Bloom, Molly, and Stephen have all been there before us, staring at the label on a bottle of Bass, listening to a distant train, or identifying the three masts of a passing ship. John Gordon is riveted by the additional r’s in the cat’s meow in “Calypso,” reading them not as evidence of increased hunger on the part of the cat but rather as the result of an increased awareness on the part of the auditor, who is hearing the sound more precisely with each cry. David Spurr takes a line as apparently innocuous as the “archipelago of corks” amid which the throwaway bobs in “Wandering Rocks” and connects it to everything from the Aegean Sea (the original archipelago) to the missing corkscrews of “Ivy Day” and “Clay.” It is this strange ability to make something wonderful out of nothing that has led to Joyceans earning their richly deserved reputation for plenary abundance.

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At the same time, Bloomsday 100 is a memory piece, from Spurr’s celebration of the objects in Ulysses to Gordon’s investigation of the working loops of memory by which the world can be stored and restored, from Richard Lynch’s study of memory as symbolic narrative to Michael Gillespie’s review of the best that has been thought and said in Joycean criticism. This again brings us back to Ulysses, which is nothing if not a study in memory, and to Bloomsday itself. Bloomsday, in the memorable words of Anne Fogarty in her elegant introduction, is part phantom, part projection, and part post hoc construction: we could not be more fortunate to have, through the good offices of Beja and Fogarty, such a testament to one of the very best of the Bloomsday symposia. Sebastian D. G. Knowles Series Editor

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are among those standard for references to Joyce’s works and important secondary texts, following the conventions established by the James Joyce Quarterly. Where contributors have used alternative editions, the edition used will be noted in the Works Cited. CW

Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1969. D Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking, 1969. FW Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1939; London: Faber, 1939 and subsequent reprints. These two editions have identical pagination. Citation includes page and line number. JJ Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Letters Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking, 1957; reissued with corrections 1966. Vols. II and III, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1966. P Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The definitive text corrected from Dublin Holograph by Chester G. Anderson and edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1964. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968. SH Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. Ed. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1963. SL Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1975; London: Faber, 1975. U Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York and London: Garland, 1984, 1986. Editions published by Garland, Random House, Bodley Head, and Penguin. Citations include episode and line numbers.

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Abbreviations

Joyce, James. Ulysses, 1934; reset and corrected 1961 (New York: Vintage-Random, 1990). Citations include page number. Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Rev. and expanded ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Introduction Anne Fogarty

Bloomsday—16 June—has long established itself as the hallowed festival of lovers of Joyce. It is enjoyed as much because of its populist raffishness and carnivalesque dimensions as for its lofty literary pretensions. The imaginative bravado and palpable absurdity of commemorating characters and events in Ulysses that are to all intents and purposes entirely fictional add to the piquancy of this most celebrated anniversary in the literary calendar. Other writers are feted in more traditional fashion on their dates of birth, whether putative or otherwise, such as William Shakespeare on 23 April and Robert Burns on 25 January. Joyce is unique in that he is honored in tandem with his epic novel, which has managed to acquire a separate curriculum vitae and unfurling history of its own. Originally, of course, careful orchestration ensured that Ulysses appeared on Joyce’s birthday, 2 February 1922, and for several years afterwards celebrations organized by the author or his friends centered on this occasion in winter rather than on Bloomsday itself. Gradually, however, the June date took over as the arena of interest in step with the growth in stature and renown of the novel. The déjeuner Ulysse organized by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier—to mark the publication of the French translation of Ulysses by Auguste Morel, Valery Larbaud, and Stuart Gilbert and the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bloomsday—took place on 27 June 1929 and represented one of the important milestones demarcating the growing weightiness of this literary work and its increasing cultural aura. The guests at this event held at the Léopold restaurant in Les Vaux-de-Cernay, a hamlet near Versailles, included Paul Valéry, Samuel Beckett, Édouard Dujardin, and Thomas McGreevey (Fitch 291). The surviving memorabilia, ranging from the menu bearing the autographs of those present to the overcrowded and alarmingly staid group photo, indicate the degree to which this was not simply a celebration but a calculated endorsement of, and

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investment in, the cult of fame attendant on this work. Bloomsday even at this early juncture had become a hallmark of the value of Ulysses, while simultaneously functioning as a public relations exercise that served to augment the novel’s reputation. However, the anecdotes about the delayed return journey of this august group to Paris caused by the frequent stops en route for visits to pubs by Joyce, Beckett, Philippe Soupault, and others, to the disgust of the more sober members of the entourage, puncture the portentousness and uncanny prescience of this cultural celebration and endow it with an altogether more ramshackle and makeshift quality (Fitch 292). Through such admixtures of volition, marketing strategy, and happenstance, Bloomsday now functions—seemingly ineluctably—as a memorial to Joyce’s radical literary experiment. On one level, this day of public celebration punctuated more often than not by solo or group readings of sections of Ulysses and the consumption of Guinness or other appropriate Irish alcoholic products nicely acts as a distillation of Joyce’s text with its emphasis on the diurnal, the communal, and the commercial. On another level, in its aspect as figment or simulacrum, Bloomsday fittingly captures the quintessence of a novel that determinedly blurs the boundaries between book and world, plays with the resources of fictionality, and collapses the categories of truth and fiction. Moreover, even though 16 June 1904 is irrevocably fixed as the temporal setting for Ulysses, the concept of Bloomsday has proven to be remarkably pliant, portable, and adaptable. It has now become a global occasion as readings, performances, parties, and theatrical enactments are held in numerous urban centers around the world, including Szombathely (the birthplace of Rudolph Virag), Tokyo, Rome, New York, Beijing, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and a host of other venues. The marketability of Bloomsday as well as of aspects of Irishness means that Dublin is less a point of convergence for 16 June than a reconfigurable domain that can locate itself anywhere through the potent endorsement of Joyce’s language, persona, and prestige. The essays assembled in this collection, however, have tangible links with the Irish capital because they originated as papers for the Bloomsday 100 Symposium that was held in the National College of Ireland, Dublin, from 12–19 June 2004. This conference was the biggest gathering ever convened under the auspices of the International James Joyce Foundation: over six hundred papers were delivered at an event attended by in excess of eight hundred delegates. The symposium coincided with a year-long civic festival, styled “ReJoyce 2004,” sponsored by the Irish government, which had the express purpose not only of marking the centennial of Bloomsday but also of raising public awareness of

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Joyce and his works. Some of this activity concentrated on diplomatic relations, the marketing of Ireland abroad, and the mediation of Joyce to a worldwide community. To this end, a traveling exhibit documenting Joyce’s biography and his chief works was created and dispatched by the Department of Foreign Affairs through its foreign embassies to numerous destinations around the globe. The events at home encompassed a richly documented exhibition on Joyce and Ulysses at the National Library of Ireland, designed by Luca Crispi and Catherine Fahy, that drew on newly acquired manuscript materials, a short story writing competition funded by Davy Byrne’s pub, and a display of international art inspired by Joyce at the Royal Hibernian Art Gallery, curated by Mia Lerm-Hayes. Inevitably, the most important happenings were scheduled for mid-June to coincide with Bloomsday. Special license enabled the closure of O’Connell Street, the main Dublin thoroughfare, to permit the hosting of a Bloomsday breakfast on Sunday, 13 June, at which ten thousand people enjoyed a modified Bloomian repast devoid of kidneys, and the staging on Wednesday, 16 June, of “The Parable of the Plums,” a carnivalesque, multiethnic pageant based on the “Aeolus” episode. The high-profile nature and impressive quality of these lavish and slickly orchestrated events funded by the Irish Department of Arts, Sports, and Tourism turned the centennial Bloomsday in Dublin into a public extravaganza. Nonetheless, the passage of a century since 16 June 1904 must give pause. An inquiry into the symbolism of Bloomsday seems more rather than less compelling, given that over one hundred years now separate readers from the day on which Ulysses takes place. By the same token, an attempt to take stock of Joyce’s talismanic text is warranted as a new century advances and the interpretive frames that we bring to his work alter, take on a different focus, or demand readjustment. For Joyceans 2004 provided the impetus for the creation of necessary retrospectives to document the slow and laborious evolution of Joyce Studies pace the current institution of the supposedly all-enveloping “Joyce Industry.” The very phenomenon of Bloomsday is instructive in this regard. Although this symbolic date is now an apparent fixity and fundamental to our understanding of Joyce and the defining contexts of Ulysses, its precise import remains elusive. Popular belief would have it that Joyce chose this date as a basis for his epic text because it was the day on which he first went out with Nora Barnacle. Yet, a complex reality and textual history underlie this seemingly incontrovertible and beguiling romantic myth. Eschewing the story of a love tryst, the OED provides a circumspect definition of the term “Bloomsday.” Having elucidated

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its derivation from Bloom’s name and pointed out that it designates the day on which the action of Ulysses takes place, it confines itself to speculating that it is punningly named after Doomsday. A plaintive note in Nora’s hand recorded in one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks also acts as a reminder that the current status of Bloomsday was less of a preordained development than is often supposed: “to day 16 of June 1924 / twenty years after / Will anybody remember / this date” (Deane, Ferrer, and Lernout 37). Genetic criticism and textual scholarship additionally underscore the degree to which the election of the date for Ulysses was neither a given nor an automatically predisposed component of the scaffolding. Rather, it was arrived at gradually and after much delay through the painstaking process of revision. As Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon have argued, drawing on Michael Groden’s influential account of the incremental phases of composition of Ulysses, the novel was originally conceived of as a sequel to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this so-called proto-Ulysses, about which Hans Walter Gabler has also written, Joyce initially intended to mesh the conflicting dates and time schemes of the two works so that they might be coordinated. Rose, O’Hanlon, and Gabler, through roundabout computations, arrive at the conclusion that the original date of the fictional day on which the events of Ulysses take place was 8 October 1904 and that Joyce altered this crucial aspect of his fictional apparatus only many years into the process of composition in alighting on 16 June 1904 (Rose and O’Hanlon xix; Gabler, “Joyce’s Text in Progress” 220–21). This earlier suppositional date was of moment to Joyce because it was the day on which he departed from Dublin for the Continent with his chosen companion, Nora Barnacle. It was, in the phrase of Rose and O’Hanlon, “supereminently important” (xv) to the author and was celebrated by him in subsequent years as an auspicious anniversary that marked the inauguration of his new life outside Ireland and of his official alliance with Nora. Joyce continued to honor this date as a form of wedding anniversary even after his marriage in July 1931. Further, as Gabler speculates, 8 October has an added layer of symbolic associations for Joyce, since he denominates it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as the day on which Stephen is pushed by Wells into the square ditch at Clongowes. It is thereby insinuated into an intricate sequence of events whereby Stephen’s illness and recovery from his life-threatening fever are counterposed with the death of Parnell on 6 October and the arrival of his body in Kingstown for burial in Glasnevin on 11 October. Thus this resonant date forms part of a complex symbolic reckoning by virtue of which Parnell assumes the role of messianic scapegoat and enables the recovery and resurrec-

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tion of Stephen. However, it is simultaneously intimated that the cataclysmic downfall of the father is compulsively reenacted by the son who likewise experiences an overthrow. The discarded as well as the later date of Ulysses hence encrypt key matrices of the text overall and condense its constitutive anxieties and desires. The choice of 16 June 2004 was of course anything but adventitious. Yet, as Sidney Feshbach has pointed out, Richard Ellmann smooths over many of the gaps in our knowledge about its private significance for Joyce in producing his persuasive and authoritative narrative of a foundational love. As in many other aspects, Joyce’s magisterial biographer is the chief source of the prevailing view of Bloomsday. Ellmann argues that this date is a nodal point in Joyce’s life because many significant occurrences converge upon it, including the finalization of his theory about Hamlet. The most momentous occurrence that falls into this time frame is his meeting and falling in love with Nora Barnacle. Joyce’s well-known letter from 15 June 1904 expresses his disappointment at her failure to show up for an appointment they had made and asks for another to be made in lieu (Letters II 42). Despite the lack of corroborating evidence about the precise date of their next meeting, Ellmann adamantly ties it to 16 June 1904 and formulates a highly charged account of the redemptive force of this liaison: The appointment was made, and for the evening of June 16, when they went walking at Ringsend, and then arranged to meet again. To set Ulysses on this date was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a recognition of the determining effect upon his life of his attachment to her. On June 16, as he would afterwards realize, he entered into relation with the world around him, and left behind the loneliness he had felt since his mother’s death. He would tell her later, “You made me a man.” June 16 was the sacred day that divided Stephen Dedalus, the insurgent youth, from Leopold Bloom, the complaisant husband. (JJ 156) Brenda Maddox disputes Ellmann’s rhapsodic view of the dramatic watershed in Joyce’s life and advances a much more prosaic and skeptical assessment of this period: “Was the day of their first date, Thursday June 16, 1904? Probably. That is the best that can be said” (41). Hence, it is uncertain whether Joyce simply randomly chose a midsummer day in this evidently momentous phase of his life or deliberately gravitated toward a date that had immense private resonance. As a consequence, Bloomsday is in this regard a traceless originating moment whose significance remains arcane and irrecoverable. Yet, this is not

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to gainsay its import. Rather, the biographical, fictional, and symbolic meanings that have accrued around 16 June 1904 may be seen as the outcome not of a simple determining chain of cause and effect but of a fluid and always mutating set of interpretive perspectives. Further, even though Bloomsday may be in part a phantom, a projection, or a post hoc construction, it also remains lastingly rooted in Joyce’s personal history and the Dublin world that he obliquely mirrors in Ulysses even as he artistically reinvents and reworks it. The essays collected in this volume are of a piece in that they approach Ulysses in a spirit of inquiry and direct attention to unexamined or insufficiently explored aspects of the text. They also cohere to the degree that they tend less to give primacy to theoretical discussion than to interweave it with their own engagements with the text. Above all, these essays mesh with each other because they uniformly focus on materialist facets of Ulysses and use their findings about the historical, social, and political, or intermedial dimensions of the novel to deepen our insight into the intricate workings of Joycean textuality. Historicist research in this volume serves always as the basis for exacting formalist and linguistic investigation of salient passages and episodes of Ulysses. In “Joyce’s Debris,” David Spurr considers the place of Ulysses in the history of the novel and reflects on the degree to which objects gradually come to proliferate and assume a dominant role in nineteenth-century British and French fiction. Joyce, however, differs from his predecessors such as Dickens and Balzac, Spurr concludes, because seemingly worthless objects like the “throwaway” advertisement are given a central part and are not made answerable to the exigencies of plot and character. By the same token, Joyce foregrounds the material dimensions of language, frees it to some degree from the laws of narrativity, and exploits the links between litter and letter. However, even if rubbish or debris is not made to fit into a metaphysical framework as in the Victorian novel, it is still capable of yielding moments of insight or of conveying a transformational vision, as Spurr’s detailed tracking of the symbolic reverberations of the throwaway illustrates. John Gordon is likewise concerned with how Joyce renders reality or, more specifically, how he captures our slow-motion sensory apprehension of the world. In a reading itself characterized by its fine attunement to the text, he notes how the onomatopoeic notation of the mewing of Bloom’s cat in “Calypso,” if carefully deciphered, captures the ways in which sounds gradually become more audible as we begin to discern and interpret them. He further contends, in delineating the semantic games enacted with the figure of the Porter in Finnegans Wake, that the process of reading this text spurs readers to re-

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fine and sharpen their powers of perception. In similar manner, the recurrence of details and the differing versions of events to which we are often treated in Ulysses mimic the time-release effect of sense perception while encouraging readers to hone their observational powers. In his richly documented essay, Austin Briggs catalogs a persistent vein of imagery in Ulysses which cross-associates Bloom with stereotypical properties of Jewishness, particularly those of effeminacy and the peculiar slur of male menstruation. Moreover, the panoply of racist stigmas, as the essay deftly shows, is inherently contradictory because it simultaneously casts Jews as vengeful and bloodthirsty and as timorous and emasculated. Ultimately, Joyce references and counterpoints the lurid denigrations of anti-Semitism and the discourses of masculinism and athleticism espoused by Irish nationalists such as Michael Cusack and Patrick Pearse in order to refute them. As Briggs argues, the unmanliness and pacifism of Stephen and especially of Bloom act as a pointed counter to political ideologies that aggrandize violence and aggression. The problematic operations of memory are the central concern of the essay by Richard P. Lynch. He differentiates between active and passive memory and the modes of storytelling that they generate and contends that symbolic narratives which reorder the past or sidestep facticity may act as a palliative to the dead weight of history. Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, however, is caught between two modes of recall: a radical refutation of the past, on the one hand, and a passive surrender to its enervating effects, on the other. He persistently fights against forms of memory that induce stagnation but ultimately cannot escape the traumatic vestiges of his own familial past, especially the enduring psychic damage caused by the death of his mother. Tracey Teets Schwarze casts a dramatic new light on the much-aired topic of Joyce’s Parnellism by purposefully shifting attention from Charles Stewart Parnell to his consort, Katharine O’Shea. Revealingly, she notes the degree to which Bloom’s chronicling of the divorce case and the death of Parnell in “Eumaeus” is informed by O’Shea’s viewpoint and skewed in favor of the perspective of the aggrieved but adulterous wife. Moreover, the conflation of Molly and Katharine O’Shea, which is merely implicit in episode sixteen, is more fully actualized in the final episode, which casts itself as a kind of confessional memoir. In secretly replicating some of the tropes and strategies of O’Shea’s memoir, Molly’s forensic self-accountancy, however, is not simply a rectification or squaring of the record. It also adds further fictional layers to the text as it is qualified by the slipperiness which all such acts of exculpation involve.

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In “Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses,” Greg Winston likewise homes in on a cluster of essential but peripheral female figures in Joyce’s novel—the streetwalkers. His detailed investigation of the trade of prostitution in turn-of-the-century Ireland uncovers its peculiar historical dimensions. As he reveals, imperialism, militarism, and the sex trade were inextricably connected, a fact that was mirrored in the very geography of Dublin, where barracks and brothels tended to be situated in adjacent districts. In Joyce’s writings, Winston holds, the figure of the prostitute is deployed not only to expose the symbiosis of militarism and female sexual labor and the exploitative effects of imperialism but also to undercut the moral pretensions of Irish nativist philosophy, which condemned the sexual diseases spread by prostitution as a foreign import and refused to acknowledge the all-pervasive importance of sexuality and desire in the human constitution. The third section of this collection is devoted to the intermediality of Joyce’s work and demonstrates the degree to which Ulysses does not simply mimic or borrow from other art forms but reconstitutes and plays with their techniques and fully ingests and appropriates their varying aesthetic effects. In his densely argued essay, Anthony Paraskeva expands on Joyce’s interest in cinema and discloses how the technological developments that enabled the compilation of discrete shot sequences radically altered the gestural language of early films. Movies now substituted the histrionic and exaggerated body movements of the melodramatic stage tradition with complex strings of closely observed small movements. Paraskeva documents the influence of numerous aspects of the cinematic medium on Ulysses, such as the use of peephole-style framing techniques. Above all, he convincingly argues that the minutely itemized gestural language of hand movements that peculiarly dominated the text of Exiles, as evidenced by its stage directions, was further elaborated on in Ulysses, especially in the “Circe” episode. The heightened readability of the body in silent film is turned to account by Joyce, who exploits the radical implications of the close-up and plays with the semiotics of gesture and the possibility that physical movements now can become a discrete part of a signifying system that operates irrespective of human agency or of the integrity of the body. Katherine O’Callaghan revisits “Sirens” and the interpretive problems it perennially poses for interpretation. In her revolutionary reading she proposes that the opening of this episode functions less in the manner of an overture, as has previously been mooted, than of a score. She further contends that Joyce’s writing aspires not to the condition of music but to achieving the status of a radically performative text whose potential can only be unfolded by the read-

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er and then in a partial manner. Like a musical score, Ulysses is dynamically brought to life through the interpretive work of its audience, who must become Joycean impresarios in order to uncover its meanings. Timothy Martin, by contrast, concentrates on the literary intertexts of Ulysses. His suggestive essay details how Joyce adopts not just the structural elements but also the ethos and affective characteristics of nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama. Drawing on the work of Robert Heilman, he observes that melodrama tends to be monopathic, that is, to insist upon intense but unmixed emotion, and also to give precedence to politics and action within the world. Martin provocatively speculates that Joyce may have gravitated toward melodrama in the later episodes of Ulysses, especially “Cyclops” and “Circe,” as a reaction against the now hampering constraints of the modernist aesthetic. Yu-chen Lin’s focus in “Modernity and Its Discontents” is, by contrast, on the material world of fashion and the import of the oft-cited music hall song “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.” Lin argues that the ironic transformation of the frugal, self-denying woman in this song into a prostitute in “Circe” provides an implicit commentary on the vicissitudes of colonialism. Having examined the attire of many of the characters in Ulysses and their imperfect attempts to follow contemporary fashion, she concludes that Joyce depicts many of his central figures as both complicit with and resistant to consumerist modernity. Moreover, the economic plight of many of the prostitutes and the monetary worries of Molly Bloom lay bare the conditions of colonial subjects and highlight their penuriousness and struggles to survive. Gerald Gillespie constructs a persuasive and scrupulously argued riposte to the view that Joyce is a materialist and empiricist. He reveals the tangled interweave of philosophical references in “Proteus” and tracks the presence of Schopenhauer’s account of the artist as a creator and mediator of ultimate truths in particular. In this account, Joyce emerges as an eclectic thinker who creates an independent aesthetic but nonetheless retains many of the key tenets of idealism and even of theosophy and cabalism. Robert Weninger’s fascinating exploration of the one-day novel directs attention to another aspect of Joycean intertextuality, his influence on subsequent authors. Weninger contends that Ulysses has become, in Foucault’s term, a foundational literary text of the twentieth century. However, authors who imitated some of the crucial innovations of Ulysses, such as Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, Graham Swift in The Sweet-Shop Owner, Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis, and Arno Schmidt in Zettels Traum, felt compelled also to fight against his legacy or to deny and suppress its effects.

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The final two essays in this volume take as their subject even more problematic facets of the reception of Ulysses. Michael Patrick Gillespie’s trenchant and sardonic metacritique of Joycean scholarship depicts the would-be reader as a bewildered consumer baffled by the endless array of critical works on offer. His skeptical commentary points to the need for a more discerning assessment of the quality and value of Joyce criticism and to the advantage of a therapeutic disengagement from the compulsive overproduction of academic writing. Margot Norris’s original and reflective essay likewise advocates a return to first principles in its endeavor to track the heuristic dilemmas faced by a “virgin” reader of “Calypso.” Adopting Paul Grice’s notion of implicature, the role of the unspoken and the implied in discourse, her investigation meticulously charts the path the reader must steer through the false leads, explanatory gaps, perplexing conjunctions, semiotic lapses, and insinuated points of view of this episode. Her instructive finding is that all interpretations of Ulysses must necessarily be incomplete and imperfect and that, moreover, Joyce forces us to collude in the guilty secrets at which the text playfully gestures only often to reveal as figments. The centennial of Bloomsday in 2004 was certainly a pinnacle in the global lionization of Joyce. In Dublin it marked a decisive tidal change in Irish attitudes to this author who had for so long been treated with disaffection and suspicion. Yet, no Bloomsday is ever definitive or final: it merely forms part of a continuous and ever-evolving process of engagement with Joyce and his work. As the challenging and engaging essays in this volume attest in their elicitation of the diffuse material and political dimensions of Ulysses and their diverse and quarrelsome accounts of its philosophical underpinnings, Bloomsday 2004 furnishes us, above all, with a renewed incentive to deepen our understanding of Joyce’s radical text, to reinspect those passages and episodes that continue to puzzle or elude us, to reexamine its primary interpretive cruxes, and to reimmerse ourselves in its all-engrossing complexity.

Notes 1. A reproduction of the menu and the photo taken at the déjeuner Ulysse may be found in Fitch 214, 291. 2. For the complex calculation whereby the dates of Stephen’s experiences in Clongowes might be computed see Gabler, “Joyce’s Text in Progress” 220–21 and “The Christmas Dinner Scene” 31–34.

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Works Cited Deane, Vincent, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout, eds. The “Finnegans Wake” Notebooks at Buffalo: Notebooks VI.B.5. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004. Feshbach, Sidney. “June 16 1904: Joyce’s Date with Nora?” James Joyce Quarterly 21.4 (1984): 369–70. Fitch, Nora Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Norton, 1983. Gabler, Hans Walter. “The Christmas Dinner Scene, Parnell’s Death, and the Genesis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” James Joyce Quarterly 13.1 (1975): 27–38. ———. “Joyce’s Text in Progress.” The Cambridge Companion to Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 213–36. Maddox, Brenda. Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce. London: Minerva, 1988. Rose, Danis, and John O’Hanlon, eds. James Joyce: The Lost Notebook: New Evidence of the Genesis of “Ulysses.” Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1989.

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I

“That Other World” Material Dimensions of Ulysses

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1 Joyce’s Debris David Spurr You friable shore with trails of debris, You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot, What is yours is mine my father. Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”

If a history is ever written on the status of the object in the modern novel, perhaps it will have room for Harriet Smith’s court plaster. In Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), the dizzy Harriet is so taken with the fatuous Mr. Elton that she has preserved, in a box labeled Most precious treasures, two objects that once had the distinction of being held in his hands: a discarded bit of court plaster and the end of an old pencil (304–5). The latter is more valuable because it has been the actual property of Mr. Elton: “This was really his,” she declares reverently. However, in Austen’s novel these objects figure purely as relics of a girlish infatuation, and as such they are entirely subordinated to the logic of character delineation and of narrative, which in this case takes the form of an ironic hagiography. Austen’s novels are models of economy in this regard, that every object has its proper use. There are no extra things lying around. As the nineteenth century progresses, however, the novel begins to accumulate more and more things. The first chapter of Balzac’s Le cousin Pons (1847) is titled “Un glorieux débris de l’Empire,” which refers not just to the novel’s title character but also, by metonymic extension, to his immense collection of bric-a-brac: a miscellaneous and helter-skelter assemblage of curiosities, of obscure pictures and engravings, snuffboxes, picture frames, and so forth. This being a novel by Balzac, the collection of debris from the brocantes of Paris is discovered to be of fabulous value, and so becomes the object of deadly intrigue among Pons’s neighbors and relations. In terms of the novel’s function as historical interpretation, Balzac solves the problem posed by the debris of

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France’s empire by recirculating it in the form of capital and commodity in the bourgeois world of the July monarchy. The spirit of sheer accumulation represented in Pons’s collection is shared by the less glorious debris of Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). One of the symbolic loci of this novel is Krook’s shop, a dusty repository of rags and bottles, bones, old iron, wastepaper, and old clothes (61–62)—tottering piles of cast-off stuff from the Victorian economy of bourgeois consumption and institutional corruption. As the shop is putatively a commercial concern in secondhand goods, the things in it are theoretically for sale. But, in fact, it represents the dark underside of the Court of Chancery, the debris left over from interminable, ruinous struggles over the rights of inherited property. Trash is again brought to the foreground in Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), where a dustman’s rubbish heaps, as tall as hills in the urban landscape of London, represent a potentially vast fortune to be made from what they might contain. Rubbish here, however, is simply another form of capital, and therefore becomes the object of a Balzacian struggle for inheritance. In Theodor Adorno’s analysis, Dickens’s object world, even in the form of debris, represents the bourgeois sphere of power and property, one that his characters must master if they are not to be sacrificed to it (Notes 2: 177). If, in contrast to the novels of Austen, those of Balzac and Dickens have among their functions that of registering the proliferation of objects in a newly industrial and urbanized world, they (just) succeed in doing so by containing this proliferation within narrative structures of individual triumph over or sacrifice to that world. Joyce is unlike his novelist predecessors in that he abandons the master narratives to which character relations and the world of objects are conventionally subordinated. This relinquishment of a totalizing narrative structure appears to have been necessary to Joyce’s larger purpose of formulating an artistic vision congruous with the fragmented character of modernity. In the process, the object world of Joyce’s work tends to take on a life of its own, while at the same time spilling over into an abundance of debris that seems made to defy any conventional attempt at authorial control. The problem for Joyce is somehow to comprehend this increasingly fragmented world of objects in a work of art. Such a work would need, on the one hand, to resist the kind of narrative that imposes an illusory order on the world of objects. On the other hand, it would need a sharper focus and greater discipline than the form in which Dickens wrote, which Joyce found “diffuse, overloaded with minute and often irrelevant observation” (Occasional 183).

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Joyce’s solution to this problem is to transform the text itself into a form of debris: a series of passages or episodes related primarily as fragments, and fragmentary as well in their absence of hierarchical order. Yet, as an art form, his work is redeemed from the randomness of debris by its textuality: the manner in which its fragments are interwoven on the level of linguistic texture. What the forces of modernity have reduced to ruin and debris, Joyce’s work recuperates on the level of language. In what follows, the first part of this essay involves a practical demonstration of this point: that elements of material and symbolic debris in Ulysses are connected to one another on the level of language. A second part, in which the debris of Ulysses is compared to that of Finnegans Wake, considers the theoretical implications deriving from Joyce’s equation of the letter and litter.

Trash Metonymies Heaps of wet rubbish, moldering offal, an empty porter bottle, a dead dog: so many of Joyce’s cast-off objects are just there, not particularly contributing to the purposes of character study, social satire, or narrative development. To understand why this is so, it helps to regard Joyce’s fictional technique as primarily linguistic rather than narrative. In Joyce, elements of language are brought together for their semantic, historical, and phonetic associations rather than for their function as part of a totalizing and self-enclosed narrative economy. The proliferation of Joyce’s text is therefore itself a function of an infinity of linguistic units endlessly split and recombined in a process that resembles more the modern economy of free market exchange and enterprise than a more traditional economy, with its origins in feudal society, of protection, exclusion, and centralized control. In Joyce events are not related, as in Balzac or Jane Austen, because they contribute to a globalized narrative development. Rather, what happens is that seemingly random incidents create a series of metonymic juxtapositions between elements of language that Joyce wishes to combine on the metaphorical, paradigmatic axis. For example, in “Lotus-Eaters,” Leopold Bloom has bought a copy of a newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, in order to learn the hour of the funeral of his friend Patrick Dignam. While walking in Westland Row he is approached by Bantam Lyons, one of the many underemployed scroungers who people the streets of Joyce’s Dublin. Lyons wants to consult the newspaper to learn the odds in the Ascot Gold Cup, a celebrated horse race to be run later that day in England, where the real money is. Bloom gives him the paper, saying,

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“You can keep it, I was just going to throw it away.” By coincidence, “Throwaway” happens to be the name of one of the horses entered in the race. “I’ll risk it . . . thanks,” says Lyons to an uncomprehending Bloom (U 5.541). Later, Throwaway will win the race against odds of twenty to one, causing a great deal of trouble for Bloom, who will mistakenly be thought to have bet on the winning horse, a “rank outsider.” However, the purpose of the exchange with Lyons is primarily linguistic rather than narrative: it is to generate a play on the word “throwaway” that will lead to the proliferation of an entire semantic field of things thrown away: trash, debris, the cast-off remainder, the rank outsider. This semantic field will acquire importance in the text precisely because it recuperates in the symbolic economy of the text that which is excluded from the economic and social orders of modern Dublin. Before developing this idea further, it will be useful to distinguish among certain terms: first, the material economic order, that which assigns the market or exchange value to the actual objects in our world, objects among which we find literary texts; and second, the symbolic economy of the text, or the manner in which the text exists as a field of signifiers, each of which receives its value from its place in that field and its relation to other signifiers. I shall also refer to the symbolic order in the Lacanian sense, by which is meant simply language itself, including the entire realm of human culture conceived as a symbolic system itself structured on the model of language. The symbolic economy internal to the text itself has only a tangential relation to the larger symbolic order. But let us pursue the linguistic odyssey of the word “throwaway” in Joyce’s text. Three episodes after the Bantam Lyons incident, “throwaway” refers to a publicity sheet placed in Bloom’s hand by a young YMCA man. The word itself does not appear to be the most obvious one to have chosen for this context. It appears to have been new in Joyce’s time, and less current than its synonyms “hand-bill,” “fly-sheet,” or the American “flyer.” The OED records its first printed use in 1903, as “a printed sheet or work not intended for preservation after it has been read.” One might speculate, therefore, that Joyce chose to write “throwaway” because of its modernity, but above all because of its semantic relation to debris. In any case, the document in question announces the coming visit of an American evangelist preacher, Dr. John Alexander Dowie, “restorer of the church in Zion.” Bloom’s reading of the throwaway text is rendered in a manner that appears to combine elements of the text itself with Bloom’s own internal commentary: “Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a build-

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ing, sacrifice, kidneyburntoffering, druids’ altars. Elijah is coming” (U 8.10–13). What these lines suggest is a kind of meditation on the universality of sacrifice, in keeping with the Homeric passage with which Joyce associated this episode. In book 10 of the Odyssey, Odysseus loses all his companions, except those belonging to his own ship, to the man-eating giants known as the Lestrygonians. In terms of human lives, it is the greatest sacrifice Odysseus is fated to make in expiation of his offense to the god Poseidon. Beyond this, however, the lines devoted to Bloom’s reading of the throwaway constitute a catalog of pagan, Jewish, and Christian forms of sacrifice in their character as acts of violence in the name of the sacred. According to popular belief, the druids sacrificed human victims to their gods. The “foundation of a building” recalls the construction of the Temple in 1 Kings 6–8, built by the forced labor of tens of thousands, and dedicated by “sacrificing sheep and oxen that could not be told nor numbered for multitude” (1 Kings 8:5). The blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7:14) is of course that of Christ himself, martyr to human sin, who sacrifices his own life for the sake of human spiritual redemption. In the transhistorical vision that arises from Bloom’s reading, a certain emphasis is placed on the form of sacrifice the Greeks called enagisma, in which the sacrificial victim is not shared by the assembled guests at a ceremonial feast, but rather burned so as to put it beyond human use or enjoyment. Odysseus performs this renunciatory form of sacrifice in book 11 where, in order to gain entrance to Hades, he must shed the blood of his sheep for the dead souls to drink, and then burn the carcasses as an offering to the gods. The point is that for Joyce, sacrifice is the making sacred (Latin sacer, holy, facere, to make) not just through violence, but also through exclusion and elimination. Odysseus’s companions, however tragic their deaths at the hands of the Lestrygonians, are expendable, as were the thousands of slaves who built the Temple. Christ himself is in excess as a man, not to be assimilated into either the Roman or the Jewish order. The sacrificial victim by definition is that which is expelled from the economy of the living, that which must be put to death in order for the living to retain their proper relation to the sacred. The victim, too, is sanctified through its own destruction, thereby signifying the nullity of the profane as a condition for the presence of the sacred. The distinct nature of Joyce’s fiction, however, is to render a vision of the world in which nothing is sacrificed, and where the violent severance which, according to doxa, erects the sacred on the ashes of the profane, is annulled. This is the sacrifice of sacrifice, in which nothing and everything is sacred; it is the comic collapse of a symbolic order based on an ontological difference between the sacred and the

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profane, and which can be sustained only at the expense of life and jouissance. The symbolic economy of Joyce’s text collapses this distinction by investing the profane with the aura of the sacred without the need for sacrifice; the sacred is to be found here and now, even in trash. By putting the demand for sacrifice in the form of a throwaway, Joyce invites a comparison between the object of sacrifice and the worthless object thrown away. Both are to be eliminated or put out in the name of a higher principle (the sacred, cleanliness, economy). In the figure of the throwaway, however, the traditional sublimation of the sacrificial object from profane to sacred, often represented as a vertical ascent, is supplanted by the horizontal passage of the worthless, but no less sacred, object through the world itself, from O’Connell bridge to the river’s mouth. Bloom tosses the throwaway into the Liffey, where for a moment it bobs unheeded, like the message it bears, worthless even to the gulls, before beginning its own voyage downstream and eastward toward the sea. The throwaway’s voyage will in subsequent episodes constitute an odyssey of trash contained within the mock odyssey of Ulysses itself. This trash odyssey brings together the throwaway’s cast-off status, its light nomadic character, and its announcement of the coming Messiah. In all three respects it figures as a sign of excess, of the supplemental remainder, sailing beyond the Hesperides of narrative necessity and economic value. The state of being beyond value is precisely what trash shares with the sacred: the former bereft of use or exchange value, the latter transcendent of these, thus creating a kind of symbolic kinship between the two. In Joyce’s text, this kinship is realized in the form of sacred trash. In Rubbish Theory (1979), the social anthropologist Michael Thompson claims that all of the material objects in our world fall into one of three categories: those actually in use, those consigned to the rubbish heap, and those preserved in museums or other repositories of the sacred and priceless. All objects of the first category are destined, if they don’t disintegrate altogether, for one of the latter two, both of which stand outside the realm of economic exchange. Objects in museums are, theoretically, never thrown away, so they cannot make the passage from there to the rubbish heap. These same objects, however, have all been rendered useless at some point before entering the museum. So, although things do not pass from museum to rubbish heap, they can make the reverse journey, from junk to sacred object. As recently as 2002, a large number of manuscript pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were discovered gathering dust in the attic of a Paris apartment. They are now preserved as hallowed objects in the National Library of Ireland.

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Precisely this miraculous synthesis of worthlessness and pricelessness is at stake in the fate of Bloom’s throwaway flyer. We encounter it again two episodes and two hours later (in “Wandering Rocks”), where it has become “a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming” riding “lightly down the Liffey” (U 10.294). Further on, it is rocked briefly upstream (“sailing westward”) in the wake of a passing ferry, just at the moment when, onshore, the commercial traveler Mr. Kernan is congratulating himself on the skill with which he has just concluded a business deal with William Crimmins, a tea, wine, and spirit merchant: “Got round him all right” (U 10.720). The conversation with Crimmins has been about the explosion, reported in that day’s news, of a steamer in New York harbor, a disaster of a thousand casualties. The cause of the explosion is the same that finished off old Krook in Bleak House: spontaneous combustion. In this case as in that, the deadly phenomenon is associated with the intense concentration of rubbish, at least in a figurative sense. “America,” asks Kernan, “What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own” (U 10.734–35). Both Krook and the General Slocum (as Kernan perceives it) are volatile concentrations of human or material debris, and both go up in flames like a pile of oily rags, spectacular testimonies to the latent energy retained in even the least valued of objects. Apart from the echo of Dickens, this is the first expression of a connection between trash and the object of Irish xenophobia that will be developed later in the “Cyclops” episode. Readers of Dubliners will recall Kernan’s chronic drunkenness, and his attendance, at the insistence of his friends, at a somewhat farcical religious retreat for businessmen (Dubliners 164). There is thus an ironic juxtaposition between the combination of intemperance, xenophobia, and venality represented by Kernan and the discarded announcement of the Messiah made by the passing throwaway, itself a product of the America made of the sweepings of every other country. Meanwhile, the American evangelist flyer, a sweeping from the streets of Dublin, resumes its course downstream: “Elijah, skiff, crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson’s ferry” (U 10.1097–98). The location is important, because here we are at the mouth of the Liffey, a place that figures throughout Joyce’s work as the center of his symbolic universe, the site of both mythic origin and end. The word archipelago, which occurs here for the first of four times in Joyce, is not chosen innocently, for it has a bearing on both the origin and the fragmented form of Joyce’s text, while it also has a history ridden with debris. On a purely thematic level, the archipelago of bobbing corks serves as a parodic image of the “wandering rocks” that lend

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their name to this episode. In book 12 of the Odyssey, Circe warns Odysseus against passing by the planktas, the wandering or clashing rocks, as the sea around them is littered with the debris of shipwreck: “the planks of ships and bodies of men are whirled confusedly by the waves” (1: 437). Odysseus follows her counsel by taking instead the route by Scylla and Charybdis, but Bloom’s throwaway goes without such warning, taking in effect the route not taken by Odysseus, and so charting new territory through the archipelago. Joyce must have known, however, that the word archipelago is not Greek. It derives from the Italian arcipelago (Italian arci, high or original, Greek pelagos, sea), a medieval word coined to render the Latin Egeopelagus, the Aegean Sea (Weekley 1: 67). The original archipelago is thus the Aegean, so that the throwaway in finding its way to the archipelago at the mouth of the Liffey also reascends the course of history to the Aegean, and thus to the Homeric origins of Joyce’s text. Joyce’s archipelago, however, does not correspond to the romantic ideal of the Aegean celebrated in Hölderlin’s great poem of 1800, Der Archipelagus. It is instead an archipelago of debris, of cast-off fragments, and in this way it helps to found what will become a characteristically modernist form, such as the series of poetic fragments that make up René Char’s La parole en archipel (1962). Blanchot writes in an essay on Char, “Parole en archipel: découpée en la diversité de ses îles et ainsi faisant surgir la haute mer principale, cette immensité très ancienne et cet inconnu toujours à venir” (Speech as archipelago: cut up into the diversity of its islands and so giving rise to the great open sea, that ancient immensity, that unknown always yet to come) (454). In this way Blanchot defends the fragmentary nature of Char’s poetic text as the authentic refusal of a false unity, whether belonging to the text itself or to the world it signifies: Char writes “non pas pour en venir à la totalité où le pour et le contre se réconcilient ou se fondent: pour nous rendre responsables de l’irréductible différence” (not in order to achieve a totality in which the for and the against are reconciled or merged, but to make us answerable to irreducible difference) (454). What Blanchot says of Char may also be said of Joyce. Despite the system of thematic “intrusions,” the nineteen sections of “Wandering Rocks” are, formally speaking, like so many floating corks, each surrounded by the white space of the page, which in turn stands for the great openness and the unknown nature of whatever unity or totality might ultimately join the disparate moments and spaces that the respective sections of the text denote. As a formal principle this holds equally for the eighteen episodes of Ulysses, which bear roughly the same relation to one another as do the sections of this episode. However, the

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meaning of Joyce’s textual fragmentation need not be limited to the modernist gesture that refuses an inauthentic unity. Joyce’s fragments can also signify a cyclical return to origins, as on the final page of Finnegans Wake, where, on the “ultimate ysland of Yreland in the encyclical yrish archipelago” (FW 605.4–5), the reader is led back to the mouth of the Liffey and its far-calling gulls by a language that increasingly breaks up as it approaches the engulfing white space of the page: “Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take” (FW 628.13–14). That white space is now a quite graphic representation of the sea, which figures as the site of origin in a number of senses: geographical, historical, mythic, literary, textual. What Joyce does on a formal level with the textual fragment is reproduced on the thematic level by his preoccupation with debris, such as the archipelago of corks. As for corks, we have seen them before in Joyce. For want of a corkscrew during the haphazard gathering of political canvassers in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” three bottles of stout are put on the hob. Animated by the heat, the corks fly, respectively, with apologetic, tardy, and unheard poks out of their bottles (Dubliners 128–32). In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen, wandering along the quays by the customhouse, wonders at “the multitude of corks that lay bobbing on the surface of the water in a thick yellow scum, at the crowds of quay porters and the rumbling carts and the illdressed bearded policeman.” For Stephen, the corks and the crowds are equally part of “the new and complex sensation” of Dublin itself (Portrait 69). In Ulysses the multitude of corks has gathered further downstream, “by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks” (U 10.1098–99). We are again at the mouth of the Liffey, where the inflow and outflow of Dublin’s commercial economy are held in suspension. Awash with the cast-off corks from a thousand empty bottles, the river also holds, in the schooner Rosevean, the bricks about to enter the city’s system of exchange and hence the cycle of building, decay, and ultimate reduction to debris, a cycle on which Bloom has mused in unconscious parody of the vanitas vanitatum mode, concluding with the gloomy thought that “No-one is anything” (U 8.493). Here, however, the lightness of the little white throwaway skiff is made to recall the ascent of Elijah in 2 Kings 2, where the prophet is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. By the time it reaches the mouth of the Liffey, the little throwaway has acquired a literary life of its own: a narrative trajectory in its voyage downstream, a figurative representation in its character as a skiff, and a spiritual dimension in its prophetic function. These values in terms of the symbolic economy of the text, however, are acquired only as

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a consequence of the object’s exclusion from the material economy of the modern city. Still two episodes later, in “Cyclops,” the fate of the cast-off object is experienced on the social level by Bloom himself, a repetition of the act of exclusion marked by the recurrence of the name “Elijah.” We find Bloom at Barney Kiernan’s pub in Little Britain Street, where news has arrived that the Ascot Gold Cup has been won by Throwaway, at twenty to one a “rank outsider” (U 12.1219). This information comes in the midst of mounting tension between Bloom and the Citizen, who considers Bloom, as a Jew, to be just such a rank outsider, that is, one rank with vermin, “coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs” (U 12.1141–42). The rumor spreads through the pub that Bloom had money on Throwaway, and that by failing to share his winnings by offering a round of drinks, he is behaving like a typically avaricious Jew. “He’s a bloody dark horse himself,” says Joe Hynes, one of the pub loungers (U 12.1558). As suspicion gives way to insult and violence, Bloom retreats from the pub, pursued by the Citizen’s angry dog and by a tin biscuit box hurled in his direction. Bloom, as a Jew, is thus cast out from the society of the pub and, like the cast-off YMCA throwaway, follows his own lonely path through the city. In Joyce’s hands, however, Bloom’s narrow escape is figured parodically as both the ascent of Elijah into heaven (2 Kings 2) and the transfiguration of Christ in Matthew 17:1–5, where Jesus appears before his disciples alongside Moses and Elijah as the living fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy. Joyce’s episode ends thus: When, lo, there came about them all a brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohue’s in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel. (U 1910–18) The brightness of the chariot in its ascent to heaven repeats, on the level of the sublime, the lightness of the little throwaway skiff in its voyage to the sea. The symbolic triangulation of the three terms—throwaway, Bloom, and Elijah— may be sketched as follows:

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Elijah

skiff

ben

Throwaway

Bloom dark horse

That is, Joyce creates a constellation of three terms, each two of which are linked by an intermediate term: Throwaway and Elijah are joined as names for the light paper skiff, Elijah and Bloom combine in the name “ben Bloom Elijah,” Throwaway and Bloom are both termed “dark horse.” In this way Joyce establishes a semantic order, specific to his text, connecting a set of terms that together designate the discarded foreign object. We recall that in 1 Kings 19 Elijah himself is cast out into the wilderness, persecuted by King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, who are worshippers of Baal. The status of these combined terms as divine debris may be compared to the debris of history that the young poet Stephen Dedalus has invoked in an earlier episode by imagining the apocalyptic aftermath of Blake’s wings of excess: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame” (U 2.9–10).

Letter and Litter From the perspective of today’s reader, Stephen’s vision of history in ruins resonates not just with Blake but also with the Passagen-Werk, the great unfinished project of Joyce’s contemporary Walter Benjamin. In this monumental but fragmentary work, Benjamin attempted a historical reconstruction of nineteenth-century Paris that has much in common with Joyce’s imaginative reconstruction of turn-of-the-century Dublin. Benjamin’s technique, like Joyce’s, involves a certain abdication of narrative authority: Methode dieser Arbeit: literarische Montage. Ich habe nichts zu sagen. Nur zu zeigen. Ich werde keine geistwollen Formulierungen mir aneignen, nichts Wertvolles entwenden. Aber die Lumpen, den Abfall: die will ich nicht beschreiben sondern vorzeigen. (5:1030) Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I’ll appropriate no astute phrases, steal nothing of value. But rags, trash: these I’ll not describe, but show forth.

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Benjamin’s resolutely materialist vision of history shares with Joyce the refusal of master narratives and great ideas in favor of what is left over after the conventional historians have done their work: rags, trash, debris. The work of both writers, however, manages to transform this debris into a distinctive visionary mode. The textual economy of Ulysses, like that of Finnegans Wake, is both allconsuming and endlessly regenerative, sweeping up the debris of language, of history, and of the material economic order, and then recombining them in a constantly proliferating system, one that seems to bypass all of the mechanisms of exclusion and expulsion necessary to the proper functioning of other systems, whether bodily, social, symbolic, or economic. Although the manuscripts of both works are filled with material that Joyce ended by rejecting, they nonetheless read as if they had nothing left over, no remainder. The solution to this apparent paradox lies in the distinction between writing and its object. Even if Joyce is scrupulously selective in his choice of language, his artistic vision has no a priori principles of exclusion regarding its object: the range of this vision is both universal and destructive of any existing hierarchy of value: literally everything is, at least potentially, of equal interest. It might be instructive in this regard to contrast Joyce with another contemporary, the poet Wallace Stevens. In Stevens’s poem “The Man on the Dump” (1938), “the dump is full of images”; it is the vast universe of human imagination that the poet must reject in order to get at the truth, which Stevens names in terms of the definite article: “The the.” In the course of this process, “One feels the purifying change. One rejects / The trash” (202). This movement ultimately will lead Stevens to the rarefied solitude and the restrained poetic economy of his later poems. Joyce also arrives at “the” as the final word of Finnegans Wake, but the difference from Stevens is that for Joyce the definite article is not definitive; it is not, as in Stevens, followed by a final full stop, but instead serves to redirect us back into the circular syntax that joins the final page to the beginning. In Finnegans Wake especially, Joyce is a different kind of poet from Stevens, one who takes another way. Homeless exile that he is, he sorts through the trash, putting its pieces together in new and strange ways. He dives into the dump of language, groping his way through the “chaosmos of alle,” carrying a “travelling inkhorn” from which he produces “variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns” (118). This is not exactly to say that Joyce writes trash, but that his writing has in common with trash its character as being accumulated, variegated, seemingly random and chaotic, and above all without readily assignable value.

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In the early chapters of the Wake, a letter, unearthed by chance from a dump, bears all the marks of its partial decomposition: tea stains, terracious matter, fork punctures, and so forth. To the extent that this document stands for the Wake itself, it represents the status of the letter as litter. In “Joyce le symptôme” Lacan writes: “Et pour ce mot littérature, en souligner le poids, je dirai l’équivoque sur quoi souvent Joyce joue—letter, litter. La lettre est déchet” (And for this word literature, to emphasize its weight, I’ll say the equivocality on which Joyce often plays—letter, litter. The letter is litter) (26). Joyce’s letter is understood here as the leftover litter or remainder from the symbolic order, a condition that has to be understood as the inevitable consequence of a writing that fails to observe the limits of that order. If indeed the textual economy of the Wake represents the leftover remainder, the trash left behind in the construction of the larger symbolic order, then it is tempting to think of Joyce’s writing not as composition but rather as decomposition, as the strategic disintegration of the symbolic into the realm of the real. For Lacan, the real is “ce qui pâtit du signifiant,” that which suffers on account of the signifying order. It is, again, “le domaine qui subsiste hors de toute symbolisation,” the domain that subsists outside of all symbolization (Ecrits 388). The analogy with trash produces the following formula: symbolic ———— real

=

value ———— trash

The symbolic is to the real as value is to trash: in both cases the latter term represents that which remains outside of, unintegrated into the system of the former. The consequences for the latter are not just neglect but a damaging effect that can also weaken the system of the former. The implications of this analogy for Joyce’s language are related to his attempt to create a space for that dimension of language which has been cast out of the reigning symbolic order. The equation of the letter with litter appears to be authorized by Joyce’s repeated play on these two words in the Wake, as in Shaun’s indignant description of Shem’s “litterery bed” (FW 422.35). The respective etymologies of the two words, moreover, tend to support the comparison of Joyce’s language to Lacan’s notion of the real, a comparison that Lacan himself seems to endorse in evoking what he calls Joyce’s parlêtre, his speech-as-being. The English word “litter” is derived not from the Latin littera (letter) but from lectus, meaning bed, itself derived from the Greek lektron. In early English, “litter” came to mean not just bed but also bedding, commonly made of

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straw or strewn rushes, whence a disorderly accumulation of odds and ends. The word “litter” thus has embedded within it connotations both of disorder and of the bed or substratum made of various materials: litter is cast off and beaten down, but it also constitutes a foundation or underlayer, however loose and variegated. The French expression “faire litière de quelque chose” means literally to trample something underfoot, but figuratively to scorn or disregard it. Joyce’s letter as litter is the scorned and trampled remainder that nonetheless underlies language, just as the real is “ce qui pâtit du signifiant.” This is one way to account for Joyce’s insistence on the radical materiality of language, on its status as both vocal utterance and the trace on the page, or, as he puts it, as both “vocable scriptsign” and “stinksome inkenstink” (183). Let us recall that the Wake’s archetypal poet-figure, Shem the Penman, himself lives in a dump of a place, where the rubbish of verbiage is indistinguishable from bits of food and other litter. This “lair” is persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps, doubtful eggshells . . . rindless raisins, alphybettyformed verbage, vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahas, imeffible tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen lucifers . . . once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations . . . (FW 183) This “speech unasyllabled” is the unassimilated syllable left over from dayspeech; it is speech fit only for the likes of Shem himself, a Lucifer fallen from the social order, an unredeemed castoff of the same dubious company as Beckett’s Watt and Céline’s Bardamu, both of whom might claim descendance from Dickens’s Krook. Joyce’s interest in the materiality of language as well as in the physical substance of objects themselves may be addressing a basic need for literature, in an age of capitalist materialism and pure exchange-value, to come into contact with the more fundamental object world. The presence of debris in the modern work of art has been put into historical perspective by Adorno. He interprets this phenomenon as part of the decline of the importance of subject matter in art since the advent of Kandinsky, Proust, and Joyce, so that a well-painted gutter is better than a badly painted palace (Aesthetic 149). But there is more to it than that. This breakdown in the hierarchy of subject matter has been accompanied by a more radical critique, in art, of its own possibilities for coherence and meaning. The modern artwork has undertaken to destroy its own status

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as a “nexus of meaning” (Sinnzusammenhang), so that “for the first time in the development of art, affixed debris cleaves visible scars in the work’s meaning” (Aesthetic 155). How does it happen that, in works like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, debris—both as material object and as linguistic form—rises to the surface to undermine the work as a system of meaning? In Adorno’s analysis, this process belongs both to the general nature of the artwork itself, and to its particular relation to the modern world. In the first instance, the self-critical nature of art, with its requirement that artistic composition be “drossless” (schlackenlos), that is, purified of excess baggage, is one that paradoxically recognizes chaos as “the ever lurking precondition of all art” (Aesthetic 152). Modern art, in other words, would recall from exile the forces of anarchy banished long ago, even at the cost of its own coherence. The second reason for art’s mise en cause of its own status as a nexus of meaning has to do with the impulse to resist the ways in which artistic coherence has conferred an illusory meaning on the modern world itself. The semblance of meaning provided by recent movements such as impressionism and Jugendstil “was to be broken by the work admitting into itself literal, illusionless ruins of empirical reality, thereby acknowledging the fissure and transforming it for purposes of aesthetic effect” (Aesthetic 155). According to this way of seeing it, the presence of trash in the artwork sacrifices the work’s inner coherence in favor of a subversive negation of late-capitalist totality, a subversive power it acquires not through the destruction of meaning but through the ceaseless interrogation of meaning itself. In my view, Adorno’s analysis of trash in modern art resonates with Lacan’s observation that for Joyce, “la lettre est déchet,” although Adorno applies to the historical scene what Lacan regards as a question of the fundamental relation between the subject and language. If the Lacanian “sinthome” is, apart from the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, a fourth domain in which the subject pursues the sources of his or her trauma through the structures of language itself, then this has something in common with the story told by Adorno in which modern art, including the work of Joyce, stages its own traumatic relation to the scene of modernity. In both cases, the space reserved for debris testifies to an artistic will toward working through the effects of repression by returning to the loose foundations on which meaning is constructed. In either case, Joyce’s debris is somehow redeemed, not by being given a meaning other than that of mere debris, but precisely by being acknowledged as debris, as the meaning of meaning reduced to debris.

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Notes 1. Cf. Derrida’s “Le sacrifice” on the relations between ritual sacrifice, philosophy, and theater. 2. Translations from French and German are my own except where otherwise noted.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Translation of Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften 7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970. ———. Notes to Literature. 2 vols. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Austen, Jane. Emma. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften 5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982. Blanchot, Maurice. L’entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Derrida, Jacques. “Le sacrifice.” La Metaphore 1 (1993): 51–65. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. Our Mutual Friend. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Homer. The Odyssey. 2 vols. Trans. A. T. Murray. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1984. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1992. ———. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. ———. “Joyce le symptôme.” Joyce avec Lacan. Ed. Jacques Aubert. Paris: Navarin, 1987. 21–29. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1990. Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Weekley, Ernest. An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1967.

2 ”Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!” The Pussens Perplex John Gordon

A reviewer, if I remember correctly, once wrote that for me Joyce was literally a sensational writer. This writer was right. I have always been interested in how the senses work in Joyce’s writings—in how they register and reverberate, how they progress from stimulus to sensation, from sensation to perception, from perception to conviction or hallucination or dream. The process of sensation, in short, and what follows from it in the embodied brains, or brainy bodies, of Joyce’s characters. To give one example, which I have cited before: when in “Proteus” Stephen, walking on the beach, “closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells” (U 3.10–11), the distinctively Joycean note is not the onomatopoeia of the last five words but rather the fact that it kicks in at the moment Stephen closes his eyes and starts to listen. We are tracking here not so much reality as attention to it, not impressions but the dynamics of impression formation, neither sound nor sense nor sense’s virtual source but the interplay of all three, the way they work out in the sensorium and the mind managing the sensorium. You can perhaps find approximations of such effects in a few other places, among the symbolists, for instance, but for writers of fiction no one I know of—not Pater or Proust, Chekhov or James, Woolf, Nabokov, Updike, or anyone later—comes close to the way Joyce threads the course of his fictions through the glimmerings and awakenings of his characters, through the percepts, made and in making, of his resident perceptors. These observations of mine are not original. Over forty years ago Frank O’Connor remarked of the phrase “The high cold empty gloomy rooms,” from “Araby,” pretty much what I just said about Stephen’s crackling shells in “Proteus,” that their order follows, as he put it, “almost experimentally,” the young

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protagonist’s stages of apprehension: “Because he is so small, the first thing the boy notices is that the rooms are high; then he perceives the cold and associates it with the rooms themselves; then he realizes that they are cold because they are empty, and finally comes the emotive adjective ‘gloomy’ that describes their total impression” (O’Connor 19–20). Earlier, in The Classical Temper, S. L. Goldberg had described Joyce’s streams of consciousness as rendering not “passive registrations of external reality” but “the very process in which meaning is apprehended in life” (92). More recently, similar comments have been made by Christy Burns and by Fritz Senn, who in his reading of the “Lestrygonians” sentence, “Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quaywalls, gulls,” observes that the odd syntactic postponing of “gulls” there may be explained by the fact that, “Empirically, we may well notice something moving”—flapping and wheeling, for instance—“before the thing moving is determined—motion before identification” (Senn 102). What I would like to do is call attention to one critical phase of these perceptual dynamics as they are realized in Joyce’s work. It is the phase that Finnegans Wake describes as passing from the “impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform” (FW 18.24–25). It begins with the involuntary operation colloquially known as “pricking up your ears” or, for sight, “peeling your eyes,” and its essential unit is what the experimental psychology current in Joyce’s youth called the “just noticeable difference,” or “j.n.d.” The j.n.d. is the minimal increment necessary to distinguish one phase from another of what Herman Helmholtz called the “modality” of a class of sensations—for instance, the notes of a scale (Boring 10). For a musical neophyte, the interval between C and C-sharp might, for instance, be such a j.n.d. But as Bloom remarks in “Sirens,” it would be different for musical “enthusiasts,” the ones who are “all ears,” who never “lose a demisemiquaver” (U 11.1192–93) and who would surely be able to distinguish other gradations falling between any two adjacent keys on the keyboard. As the experimenters of the time were demonstrating, j.n.d.’s are modifiable (Boring 480–81), and the first step in modifying them is to apply the kind of attention exemplified by Bloom’s musical enthusiasts, the ones who are “all ears.” Again, by pricking up your ears. I am walking through a strange town, say, and I hear a faint “ong” sound. I wonder if it might be a church bell ringing the time. I prick up my ears. If so, there will probably be another one coming. There is. But this time around, it is not a faint “ong” sound. It is a distinct and obvious bell sound, and it seems noticeably louder than the one before. That is because, prompted by that first liminal stimulus, I was listening for it, and because, having heard the bell once—and having heard sounds

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like it before—I had in place an expectation of what it might be, what to listen for. The second sound was qualitatively richer and more distinct because I had pricked up my ears for it. Were I as musically inclined as most of Joyce’s Dubliners, I might then be able, like Leopold Bloom at the end of “Calypso,” to detect the musical “third,” that is (in the words of the OED), “a note three diatonic degrees above or below a given note . . . also . . . the interval between this and the given note” reverberating in the “overtone following through the air” (U 4.549–50) after the last (high note—low note) “Heigho!” of St. George’s bells. Bloom can hear that “third,” as he did not when the bells started ringing, both because the clanging of “loud dark iron” has subsided into “overtone” and because he began pricking up his ears to listen from the moment the sound of “A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up” (U 4.544) announced that the tolling was about to start. That is why, I suggest, the language just before their ringing becomes so ding-dongian: “The bells of George’s church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron” (U 4.544–45). This, again, is before the bells toll. It registers Bloom’s anticipatory receptivity to the sound to come, a receptivity established by all the previous times he has heard the “creak and . . . dark whirr”—what his contemporary Pavlov would have called a “conditional stimulus”—followed by the familiar ringing sound. Thus alerted and activated, his auditory apparatus—his ear and mind working together—is ready to pick up that diatonic interval. Something similar happens later in “Sirens,” when he hears a “jing, a little sound,” from outside, then identifies it as coming from Boylan’s jaunting car leaving for Molly, then listens again: “Jingling. He’s gone. Jingle. Hear” (U 11.457–58). It isn’t that the sound of the car has amplified, from “jing” to “jingle.” It’s that Bloom has pricked up his ears. If you want to witness this operation in action, you can do no better than to observe a cat, and the way its ears swivel, radar-like, in the direction of some stray sound. The first time around, it was just a stray sound. The second time, it might be identifiable as, who knows, a bird sound. Hence, cat-brain to cat-ears: swivel! Think bird! Listen! In “Calypso,” the cat Pussens sees Bloom pouring a saucer of milk, runs to the saucer of milk, tips the surface three times with her whiskers, licks the surface, and then, finally, laps (U 4.38–43). She has identified and certified that it is lappable, in seven graduated stages. In “Sirens,” Miss Kennedy “sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped, sweet tea” (U 11.140). “Sipping” is her equivalent of Pussens’s tipping. It takes her from brew to tea to hot tea to sweet tea, also from unpleasant (“distastefully”) to pleasant (“sweet”). She had to get past one before she could get to the other, by degrees. It is a kind of progressively self-correcting feedback loop. In “Aeolus,” Professor

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MacHugh takes a bite of water biscuit and, “hungered, made ready to nibble the biscuit in his other hand” (U 7, 259). “Hungered”: when we serve ourselves what we call appetizers, we perform the gustatory equivalent of pricking up our ears. Getting her milk, Pussens is I think also part of another demonstration of j.n.d. progression, this one working the other way. She communicates with Bloom, and Bloom, pricking up his ears, homes in, by degrees, on what she is saying. She doesn’t say “Meow,” because cats don’t. Writing about this passage in a great footnote, Hugh Kenner remarked that laboratory researchers of the late twentieth century, armed with the most sophisticated audio equipment, had determined that a cat has at its disposal “9 consonants, 5 vowels, 2 diphthongs an umlaut and an a:ou sound which begins as a while the mouth is open but ends as ou while the mouth is gradually closed” (Kenner 40), and that Joyce had obviously been way ahead of them. True enough. But the next question is not why Bloom’s cat is so expressive—it’s because she’s a cat, and they are—but why she gets more expressive with each plaint, why her second cry, “Mrkgnao!,” is identical to the first except with one extra j.n.d., an “r,” and why her third, “Mrkrgnao!,” is identical to the second, except for, again, yet another j.n.d., yet another “r.” Aside from coincidence, there are I think two possible explanations. One is that Pussens is getting progressively more expressive, stretching out her phonemes. The other is that Bloom, pricking up his ears, achieves with each successive stimulus a more refined perception. I think that the latter answer is the right one. I would suggest it is not accidental that the sound added each time, “r,” is the one that most likely would be missed by an inattentive, or less attentive, human listener. It is, in phonemic terms, a liquid, prone to blend with other sounds and at times to be crowded out in the process. And, as Barbara Walters was put on this earth to remind us, people—but not, I think, cats—can have trouble with r’s. I think that the Pussens’ first r-less “Mkgnao!” comes out of Bloom’s, and not her, equivalent of the unconscious elision that produces, in Boston, Hahvad Yahd, and that in parts of the British Isles anyway can as Finnegans Wake attests (FW 16.18) turn “horrible” into something like “hauddible.” I would point out as well that of those three cat-cries, the first is at least relatively unexpected, when Bloom has his back turned—“O, there you are,” he says in response—whereas the next two are given his full, face-to-face attention. Also, this: that “Calypso,” as we all know, parallels the simultaneously occurring action of “Telemachus” in certain ways, and that “Telemachus,” on

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its first page, may itself feature a similar operation. How, to ask an old question, does Mulligan there know just when those two whistles he pretends to summon are going to sound? The best explanation so far is the one offered by Stephen Whittaker and Francis X. Jordan (29–31), that he has seen the steam blasts coming from the whistle of the mailboat, knows from experience that the sound, traveling over a distance of about a mile, will show up about five seconds later, and times his act accordingly. It is a compelling hypothesis, I think, but with one problem: that at the time, Mulligan has his back to the harbor and mailboat. His gold fillings are glinting in the sun, which is in the southeast. The harbor is to the northwest. He cannot be looking both ways at once. Which leaves us, if there is an explanation, with the modality of the audible. Suppose those two whistles were not the first. Suppose they were, for instance, in response to another whistle, or some other such signal, perhaps coming from the harbor, and that such an exchange was part of the normal harbor-leaving routine. Mulligan would then have known when the second signal was coming, from having his ears pricked up by the first. Then the question becomes, why didn’t we hear that first signal?, and I would suggest that the answer might be, because we are processing this sequence through Stephen, who, being sleepy and distracted, failed to register it, but does pick up the second signal because, in part, he has been told by Mulligan, in an attitude of “rapt attention,” to prick up his ears: “Shut your eyes, gents. . . . Silence, all” (U 1.23–25). It is, in other words, a preliminary version of the way that, in “Proteus,” he, and we, will hear the crackling shells only when he attends to them. The whistles which seem to come at Mulligan’s call are then described as “strong” and “shrill” (U 1.26). Maybe they are, but they are also coming from a mile away. I would suggest that one reason they make such an impression is that this time around we, through Stephen, are listening for them. Of the three cat callings in “Calypso,” it is only the third, with Bloom in full-focus mode, that is described as sounding “loudly.” One character who understands the principle I am describing is Bloom. He is, after all, in the profession of advertising, from Latin ad-vert, to turn your attention toward something, and, as he tries to explain to Joe Hynes, “repetition” is advertising’s “whole secret” (U 12.1148). (So, in “Aeolus,” where we see the adman at work, he tells—and, crossing his fingers, shows—Nannetti his “House of Keyes” idea, thinks “Let him take that in first” [U 7.133], then, repeating himself [“Like that” (U 7.132) . . . “Like that, see” (U 7.142)], tells and shows him again, this time around adding more information.) The idea is to get your attention (with something that “catches the eye” [U 7.151]) in order to make you

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take a second look. It is a technique based on a sound grasp of how the mind and senses work together, as demonstrated throughout Ulysses and the rest of Joyce’s writings. We see it demonstrated, for instance, in this sequence from “Hades”: Oot: a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his mouth opening: oot. —Four bootlaces for a penny. (U 6.229–31) The first sentence registers a stroboscopic moment, the second its gestaltic completion. The colon indicates that the truncated sight, flashing into view as the figure appears in the frame of Bloom’s carriage window, occurs at the same moment as the sound “oot.” The sound is truncated as well because Bloom has not noticed it, not gone about the operation of separating it from the general background of street noise, until the visual image has cued him. That is why he does not pick up on the old man’s cry until mid-syllable. Then, when his full attention is directed to sight and sound, he takes more in, including the full duration of “Four bootlaces for a penny.” The second act of apprehension is what does the trick. “Beauty of music you must hear twice,” he thinks in “Sirens” (U 11.1060–61), and from my experience, anyway, he is right about that: I can almost never tell whether I like a new song until I hear it for the second time. Songwriters themselves, who almost invariably alternate between verses one, two, and three on the one hand and, on the other, that species of formal repetition called the “refrain,” would also understand what Bloom is talking about. The thought-forming organism needs to be prompted, to be primed, before the nameform can be knit. Once thus alerted, the ad-verting consciousness can drastically reduce the range of the operative j.n.d. You could “hear a pin drop,” thinks Bloom, remembering an audience’s hushed expectation, cued by the familiar sequence of a church service, before Molly began an aria (U 11.400). Of the distant watch he strains to see in “Lestrygonians,” he thinks, “If you imagine it’s there, you can almost see it” (U 8.563), as, tracking the bat in “Nausicaa,” he can “almost see” its “tiny,” “weeny bones” (U 11.1131). In such adverting, nameform-framing states, he is in the company of the Stephen Dedalus of Portrait whose reception of the sound of the director’s swishing soutane in chapter 4 (P 154) is heightened and conditioned and determined by the impression made by that sound, courtesy of Father Dolan, in chapter 1 (P 50); in the company, too, of the Gabriel Conroy who, because he has just been told a romantic story of gravel being thrown against a windowpane, hears or fancies he can hear the sound of snow tapping on a windowpane (D 221, 223).

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He is also in the company of, really of the same substance as, the reader, who comes into the book having been informed by the title page that what he or she is experiencing is a twice-told tale, a second take on a set of cues presumably already absorbed, and who in the course of the book will repeatedly be given this or that piece of data and then given it again. In yet another anomaly of the opening scene, for instance, Stephen looks “towards the blunt cape of Bray Head” (U 1.181). But you cannot see Bray Head from the Martello Tower. What gives? Well, much later, in “Ithaca,” a shooting star is described as heading “towards” Leo (U 17.1213), a constellation that, being below the horizon at that hour, you also cannot see. I would suggest that this second occurrence constitutes a double take on the first, one that resolves its irritating incongruity by refining out of the word “towards” the unexamined assumption that orientation must imply connection. “Towards” is a dull-as-dishwater word, happily overlooked, but Ulysses wants you to look at it, first once and then again. As for Finnegans Wake: this is a book which famously begins as a double take, whose first line takes us “back,” and whose first complete sentence is a rearriving encore. Reading it is always a business of trying, with another and yet another look, to refine and fill out our perception of something that piqued and perplexed us the last time around. Above all, it is a book of thresholds, in all senses including the sense I have been discussing without, up to now, naming—that is, the thresholds of perceptual mechanics, the j.n.d. demarcations at which a stimulus or change of stimulus first becomes detectable or comprehensible, and which determine the difference between the liminal and the subliminal. The doors of perception. Its central figure is a man named Porter, a tender of thresholds. I know this is disputed, but aside from his repeated identification by that name in the book’s waking-up chapter (iii.4), I would respectfully point out that before then he is perennially presented as a load-carrying porter or a bottle of porter or a server of porter whose establishment is a “pint of porter place” (FW 260.6) or (for instance as “janitor” [FW 27.03, 224.11]) a Janus-figure porter, that for a while one son is a re-porter and the other a barrel of porter, that his onetime nemesis and double, Hosty, gets his name from Latin Ostarius, “porter,” that variations of the word are woven into his various incarnations (the “freipforter” he becomes as city founder [FW 548.12], the “portrifaction” and “Porterfeud” [FW 78.21, 91.15] of his feuding, falling-apart household, the “fool porterfull” with which, as “michindaddy,” he is addressed, at the door—port—of his cave [FW 15.05], the “subporters” supporting his coat of arms [FW 372.09], the references scattered throughout the book to him, his family, and his habitation as “porty” [FW 51.24], “pfortner” [FW 531.25],

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“Portergill” [FW 104.18], “Sublime Porter” [FW 72.2–3], “porte sublimer” [FW 551.35], “porterhouse” [FW 204.05] and so on), that the last leaf that “clings still” (FW 628.07) on the book’s last page (i.e., leaf) takes its cue from the story “The Last Leaf,” by O. Henry, whose real name was (William) Porter, that as the latter-day “Humphrey” he is a “humping” (FW 62.28) humper of burdens, like the kind of porter whose traditional “porter’s knot” would account nicely for the “hump” often attributed to him, that his other nonce-name of “Earwicker,” given to a figure outfitted with a bunch of keys (the iconographic signature of another kind of porter), includes (see FW 72.27, 532.18, 589.24) “wicket,” a small door or portal—and, above all, speaking of doors, that he is forever standing at them. He is, for instance, the “dour” Jarl Van Hoother (FW 21.17) who shuts his door on the Prankquean in the first chapter. The Prankquean episode is all about thresholds, including the threshold-crossing mental operation of solving a riddle. The riddle is, in its first version, “Why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?” (FW 21.18–19), and it is among other things a dream-censored rendition of the question, “Why do I look like a Porter?,” to which the answer is, “Because you are one. You are my daughter, daughter of a Porter, which is also why we look as alike as two peas in a pod.” The dream-censoring arises from the dreamer’s need not to face one of the big-time taboos of Finnegans Wake, Porter’s desire for his daughter, whose relation to him in this sequence is accordingly displaced several removes into “only the niece-of-his-in-law” (FW 21.14–15). The result is what the text calls a piece of “porthery”—“porthery” (FW 23.10)—with the embedded “porter,” again there to remind us that in solving or trying to solve a riddle we have been not only transgressing inhibitions but crossing thresholds, from confusion to comprehension, and that as Bloom the adman pointed out, repetition, in this case of essentially the same “poss of porterpease” question, three times, is the key. Finnegans Wake, taking us round and round again over the same field of incipiently grasped and partially processed cues, is continuously putting us in the business of pricking up our ears and peeling our eyes, of crossing from threshold to threshold. In short, ad-verting. The resident advertising man of Ulysses is a canvasser, making him like Odysseus, the sailor with the canvas sails. In Finnegans Wake, he’s a “madison man” (FW 25.04)—Madison Avenue seller of patent medicine, yes, but also a medicine man, a shaman, ushering us more and more deeply into the arcanum with each repeated spell and spelling out of spells. Bloom would not have liked Finnegans Wake—he would not, for that matter, have much liked Ulysses either, except for the dirty bits—but

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the man who took the time to attend, three times, to what Pussens had to say would, if he had somehow been brought to attend to it, have made a pretty good reader.

Notes 1. Burns observes how Joyce’s onomatopoeic effects “extend . . . away from phonetic realism toward an emphasis on how the ear bends a sound toward its relevant message,” for instance the “Haltyaltyall” of bicycle bells, heard by Bloom as a signal to stop (Burns 32). 2. Sometimes spelled “jnd.” The principle of the j.n.d. was introduced by Ernst Heinrich Weber and was studied intensively in the laboratory by Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt, the latter of whom was active and influential during Joyce’s youth. 3. For a more recent treatment, see Hilgard 109–11. My thanks to my colleague Professor Stuart Vyse, of the Connecticut College Psychology Department, for recommending this book and for reviewing the manuscript. 4. Kenner’s quotation comes from Muriel Beadle, The Cat. 5. For evidence that Ulysses keeps careful track of the sun’s position at any given hour and accurately registers the likely effects of glare and shadow, see chapter 10, “Dublin: Sun, Moon, Stars,” of my Joyce and Reality (122–37). Allowing for the later arrival of Daylight Savings Time and the disappearance of Dunsink time, the sun’s position for 8:00 on 16 June has been calculated with the computer program Skymap. It would have had an azimuth of 100.31—ten degrees south of due east. The mailboat, “clearing the harbourmouth” (U 1.83), should be about twenty degrees west of due north—in other words about 120 degrees off the line of sunlight. When last visiting the Martello Tower of Ulysses, I found that when I was facing the doorway in which Stephen appears—and toward which Mulligan is facing during the events in question—the “harbourmouth” was behind my back and off to my right. 6. A little later in “Hades,” at U 6.294, Bloom will pick up all of the street cry “Eight plums a penny! Eight for a penny!”—because, I suggest, he has just heard Simon Dedalus speak the word “eightpence” (U 6.291). Something similar may be happening at the end of the episode, when he notices the irregularity in Menton’s hat—also known as a “bowler”—just after remembering the time that, because of the irregularity, the “bias,” of the ball, he antagonized Menton during a game of bowls (U 6.1010–15). 7. Trying to see it, “His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides” (U 8.562). Compare Pussens, waiting for Bloom to get her milk, with her “avid shameclosing eyes . . . narrowing with greed” (U 4.33–35). Both are constricting—“narrowing”—their fields of vision, the better to concentrate on one point of attention. 8. There is probably another kind of threshold-crossing involved in this scene, the vocalization of the j.n.d. that distinguishes one tribe’s pronunciation from another’s, “shibboleth” being the classic example. Here and elsewhere, Joyce is apparently incorporating the story of the Sicilian Vespers, the 1282 uprising in which Sicilian natives slaughtered their Angevin occupiers, identifying the victims by their pronunciation of the Italian “ciceri,” for “chickpeas.” (The Sicilians pronounced it “checheri,” the Angevins “kekeri.”) In the Prankquean exchange, one party repeatedly poses questions about peas, and the other repeatedly fails to give a satisfactory answer, at least once (“He clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch and he ordurd and his

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thick spch spck . . .” [FW 23.3–4]) because of confusion about how to pronounce the letter “c.” Elsewhere in the book, FW 267.10–21 seems to elide Issy’s “peas” with the disputed “syllable” of “shibboleth,” FW 54.23–24 and 76.08 give two occasions where the word is invoked, as “sicker,” to ward off threats from without, FW 425.19 has Shaun brag that unlike his outcast brother he can “perorate a chickero,” and FW 586.28–30 shows the “patrolman Seekersenn” emerging to make “siccar” that no God-damned Irish natives are encroaching on the occupier’s settlement. All in all, “ciceri,” with its permutations into pea, pee, and peas, may be the book’s most important shibboleth. For Joyce’s—or Stephen’s—earlier derivation of pea-pod from “Cicero,” see U 16.363. Joyce, incidentally, would probably have learned of the Sicilian uprising from Verdi’s Les Vêpres Siciliennes, although the opera make no use of the “cicera” tradition.

Works Cited Boring, Edwin G. Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology. New York: Appleton-Crofts, 1942. Burns, Christy. Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. Goldberg, S. L. The Classical Temper. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969. Gordon, John. Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004. Hilgard, Ernest L. Psychology in America: A Historical Survey. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Kenner, Hugh. “Ulysses.” London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980. O’Connor, Frank. “Work in Progress.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Dubliners.” Ed. Peter K. Garrett. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988. 18–26. Senn, Fritz. Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Whittaker, Stephen, and Jordan, Francis X. “The Three Whistles and the Aesthetic of Mediation: Modern Physics and Platonic Metaphysics in Joyce’s Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly 33.1 (1995): 27–47.

3 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates Austin Briggs Joyce was a great hater of bloodshed. . . . On so many occasions has he prefaced an observation to me with: “You know, Budgen, I am not a bloodyminded man,” that it became a kind of refrain. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses”

“That Bloody Jewman” Preparatory to anything else, I might state that prudery is not part of my makeup, or so I like to think; I read Joyce, after all. Nevertheless, I can still recall the little shiver of male delicacy I felt in 1972 when my 23 March issue of the New York Review of Books arrived blazoned with a cover headline announcing Richard Ellmann’s “Why Molly Bloom Menstruates.” Here, with no shivers, I wish to address a corollary question: why Leopold Bloom menstruates. The so-called Prefatory Notebook for Ulysses in the National Library of Ireland, Frances Ilmberger reports, describes Bloom as menstruating. In the novel itself, Bloom’s menstruation is first suggested by the nameless narrator of “Cyclops,” who circulates Pisser Burke’s story that Bloom used to lie about in the City Arms Hotel “once a month with headache like a totty with her courses” (U 12.1659–60). To be sure, gossip originating in a man nicknamed “Pisser” and passed on by a barfly who is a scabrous Dublin Thersites scarcely constitutes reliable testimony. Something very like Pisser’s report is suggested by Bloom himself, however: musing on the periods of Gerty MacDowell and Molly, he reflects, “Feel it myself too” (U 13.824). And he seems even more explicit in “Circe” when, feeling “light in the head” and touched by “[b]rainfogfag,” he thinks that the cause may be his “[m]onthly” (U 15.209–10). Thus it is appropriate that in “Circe” Bloom should wed Selene, goddess of the phases of the moon (U 15.1507): in addition to his other idiosyncrasies, peculiarities, kinks,

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perversions, or what have you, “that bloody jewman”—as the Citizen names Bloom—experiences something he regards as menstrual periods (U 12.1811). Others have touched on the question of why Bloom menstruates. In “‘Penelope’ as Period Piece,” Cheryl Herr says that “Bloom’s periodicity strikes me as . . . appropriating female power, and even Molly’s instances of menstruation strike me as merely playacting” (72). Although I admire the characteristic brio of Herr’s essay, it will be clear why I do not agree with it. In “The Source(s) of Joyce’s Anti-Semitism in Ulysses,” Erwin Steinberg cites the story that Bloom menstruates as evidence of a pervasive anti-Semitism in Joyce, a view utterly contrary to mine. Consonant with my reading is Marilyn Reizbaum’s “When the Saints Come Marching In: Re-Deeming ‘Cyclops.’” Although my focus falls elsewhere, I agree with Reizbaum’s cogent argument that in evoking the myth that Jewish men menstruate, Joyce is working with “the way in which the Jewish taboo against menstruation and blood—kashrut law—has been inverted to become a taboo against Jews who become themselves the pollutants” (173). I must also recommend Joseph Boone’s “New Approach to Bloom as ‘Womanly Man.’” Boone addresses Bloom’s association with menstruation in only a paragraph (71–72), but his thoughtful discussion of Bloom as a man whose “femininity” functions as a critique of “masculinity” is thoroughly in keeping with my argument here. For a partial explanation of Bloom’s menstruation, I will look at the myth of Jewish male menstruation in more detail than Herr, Steinberg, Reizbaum, and Boone; then I will examine an interrelated explanation: that Bloom’s “monthly” distinguishes him from an ideal of masculine blood sacrifice repugnant to him and to Joyce alike.

Blood Curse Mr. Leopold Bloom is the victim of many myths about the Jewish “race” that were commonplace in Joyce’s era and some of which persist in some quarters even to this day. Thinking of Jewish merchants outside the Paris Stock Exchange, Stephen recalls that their eyes “knew the dishonours of their flesh” (U 2.372); Stephen cannot know, of course, of the betrayal scheduled for Bloom’s bed at 4:00 PM, but the dishonors of Jewish flesh that he could have heard of are numerous. It is not surprising that when Garryowen starts sniffing around Bloom in “Cyclops,” the nameless narrator says, “I’m told those jewies does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs” (U 12.452–53): the “foetor judaicus,” the Jewish stench, was alleged for centuries (Trachtenberg 50).

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When Lenehan describes a newsboy in “Aeolus” making sport of Bloom by “[t]aking off his flat spaugs and the walk” (U 7.448), he and the boy may be invoking a mythology so vast that Sander Gilman devotes entire chapters of The Jew’s Body (38–59) and The Case of Sigmund Freud (113–68) to “the Jewish foot.” And when pleading in Bloom’s defense in “Circe” that his client is not legally responsible for his actions because of “Mongolian extraction” (U 15.954), J. J. O’Molloy may refer not only to “Mongolism” (Down syndrome) but to claims that Jewish features often betray an “admixture of Mongolian blood” (Weininger 303). (At a time when the Irish were often classified as racially inferior, the Stephen of Stephen Hero thinks the Irish peasant “almost Mongolian” in appearance [SH 244].) Although the essay does not mention foetor, feet, or features Mongolian, Robert Byrnes’s “Bloom’s Sexual Tropes: Stigmata of the ‘Degenerate’ Jew” summarizes physical markers of Jewish inferiority detailed in Max Nordau’s 1895 Degeneration: “stunted growth, multiple deformities, over-large ears, squinting eyes, harelips, flat or pointed palates, webbed fingers, and perceptible asymmetry in the face or cranium” (307). Bloom does not appear to be afflicted with most of these, but one may see stunted growth in the measurements of his body reported in “Ithaca” that Byrnes concludes are those of a “ninetyeight pound degenerate” (320). Furthermore, as Jennifer Ann Savino proposes, Bloom’s chest measurement of a pitiful twenty-nine and one-half inches may be based on a newspaper article about the physical condition of Jews (346–47). Perhaps Bloom’s body is not a finished example of Jewish physical degeneracy, however. As Hugh Kenner points out, Bloom is tall for the Dublin of 1904 (44), and the body measurements, Kenner and Robert M. Adams have argued, like many of the other facts and figures recorded in “Ithaca,” are by no means necessarily to be trusted (Kenner 164–65; Adams 184). Even if his physique were up to Sandow’s standard, however, Bloom would remain associated with the most bizarre physical stigma ever dreamed up by anti-Semitism—the myth of Jewish male menstruation. Extending to medieval times, the belief that Jewish men suffer a literal stigma of copious periodic bleeding enjoyed wide credence, particularly in the early modern era (Horowitz 2). “Stigma,” as Bloom might put it, is from the Greek, what the ancient Greeks called it. The word originally denoted a prick or puncture with a pointed instrument. Often notably anxious about pins and such, Bloom still recalls what Molly terms the “cursed day” (U 18.953) on which he was stung by a bee, oddly, the same day on which her last period—her curse— began. “If you prick us,” Shylock famously asks, “do we not bleed?” Associated

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with Shylock when John Wyse Nolan says of him, “there is much kindness in the jew,” Bloom might well ask the same question himself (U 10.980; Merchant of Venice 3.1). In “Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern England,” David Katz proposes that Shakespeare’s actor would have bought a laugh with Shylock’s question by gesturing at the word “prick” toward what the audience would have understood to be his circumcised penis and that the audience would have heard a reference to the menstruation of Jewish men in “do we not bleed?” (460–61). One need not agree with Katz’s reading of The Merchant to accept his extensive documentation of an ancient and widespread belief that Jewish men menstruated. Equally persuasive is Irven Resnick’s “Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” with Katz’s essay the primary source for my knowledge of the subject. The myth of Jewish male menstruation was sometimes associated with another myth, the so-called blood libel that Jews murdered Christians for their blood. In the year in which Ulysses is set, a priest in Limerick preached that if only they dared, Irish Jews would “kidnap and slay Christian children” (Hyman 212), and the blood libel is familiar both to Stephen and Bloom. Stephen recites “Little Harry Hughes” (U 17.802–28), and Bloom, who is familiar with the myth behind Stephen’s ballad, muses in “Hades” about “those jews they said killed the christian boy” (U 6.771–72). The myth, which has been traced back as far as the twelfth century, affirmed that Jews took the blood of Christians for a variety of purposes ranging from the making of Passover matzot to serve as an aphrodisiac, as an analgesic for the pain of childbirth, as a perfume to cover the foetor judaicus, or as a cure or palliative for a variety of afflictions that Jewish men suffered from, including a periodic flow of blood (Resnick 243–44). In the thirteenth century Thomas de Cantimpré postulated that although only the sanguine Christi of the Eucharist is truly lifesaving, Jews mistakenly believed that they would be cured of their bleeding by sanguine Cristiano, the blood of a Christian (Resnick 262). The blood libel was often traced doctrinally to the “blood curse” that was said to have been called down when the Jewish mob cried, “His blood be upon us, and on our children,” after Pilate washed his hands of Jesus’ death (Resnick 249; Matthew 27:25). Having “sinned against the light” (as Garrett Deasy puts it, U 2.361), Jews are “[c]ursed by God” (as the Citizen puts it, only seven lines after the recitation of the tale of Bloom lying about “like a totty with her courses,” U 12.1659–67). To some, a dramatic manifestation of the divine judgment the mob called down was a literal blood punishment on Jewish men, curso

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menstruo sanguinis—menstruation—a process spoken of to this day as a curse on all womankind (Shapiro 37). Menstruation has been associated with hemorrhoids and nosebleeds at least as far back as Aristotle’s Generation of Animals (1129), and for centuries Jewish men were widely believed to be subject to periodic bleeding through the anus and/or the nose (Katz 446–50; Resnick 252–60), and even, it was sometimes thought, through the urethra (Katz 454–55). Aristotle’s Masterpiece, which is known to both Bloom and Molly and which connects nose bleeds and menstruation (45), says that Jewish men are “much subject” to hemorrhoids, because, like other men who suffer thus, “When their veins are full of melancholic blood, then the conduits of nature are opened, and the blood issues out once a month, like a woman’s terms” (233). Whether Bloom’s hemorrhoids bleed is not stated, but he worries about them in “Calypso” and “Nausicaa” (U 4.509–10, 13.1083). He also suffers from nosebleeds. Noting Molly’s reflection that if Bloom’s “nose bleeds youd think it was O tragic” (U 18.24), Cheryl Herr speculates that Bloom’s nosebleeds may be a surrogate form of menstruation (78n7), a Freudian explanation with which Freud himself might have agreed. In 1897 he wrote of “an occasional bloody nasal secretion” as an expression of male periodicity in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, who notoriously focused on the association of the nose and the penis, a folk belief with which Molly is familiar (U 18.145–46). In another letter to Fliess of the same year, Freud reported a twenty-eight-day cycle in his own body (Gilman, Case of Freud 96–97). Even without his “monthlies,” Bloom would be considered by many of his countrymen and women to be less than a man simply by virtue of being a Jew, for as has long been recognized, Ulysses plays throughout with the prejudice that Jewish men are somehow female, are “the other” not only because they are Jewish but because they are “womanish” or at best sexually indeterminate. The prejudice was expansively articulated in Otto Weininger’s 1903 Sex and Character. This widely influential work was known to Joyce, but the everyday anti-Semitism of Dublin alone would have supplied him abundantly with the prejudice that Jewish men were less than “manly.” The lads drinking in “Cyclops” joke that “every jew is in a tall state of excitement . . . till he knows if he’s a father or a mother” (U 12.1647–48), and—though “Circe” does not speak of Bloom lactating after he is delivered of the eight babies that gratify his desire to be a mother—there were legends that Jewish men were sometimes capable of breast-feeding (Shapiro 38; Katz 452). The drinkers in Kiernan’s make jokes about “a bit off the top” (U 12.20), a serious diminution of the circumcised Jew’s virility according to a prejudice that stretches back centuries and according to

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a “constant and purposeful confusion throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of circumcision and castration” (Gilman, Jew’s Body 119). It is thus not difficult to see why “when he is just only after being semisized” is one answer suggested for Shaun’s “when is a man not a man?” (FW 170.19, 170.5). In sum, one answer to the question of why Leopold Bloom menstruates may be simply that Joyce is playing with an ancient myth about the female nature of Jewish men; however, as I will try to show, the significance of Bloom’s alleged menstruation is more complex.

Blood Sacrifice Stately (or is that an adverb?) Buck Mulligan may be plump, but he is nevertheless an athletic, virile figure. Both he and Blazes, as shall be discussed, stand in contrast to Stephen and especially to Bloom, for Shaun’s nasty question about Shem in Finnegans Wake—“when is a man not a man?”—is posed about the putatively Jewish Bloom again and again in Ulysses (FW 170.5): —Do you call that a man? says the citizen. —I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe. —Well, there were two children born anyhow, says Jack Power. —And who does he suspect? says the citizen. (U 2.1654–57) Speaking out in Kiernan’s pub against injustice, Bloom is exhorted, “Stand up to it then with force like men.” The nameless narrator comments, “That’s an almanac picture for you. . . . Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he’d adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse’s apron on him” (U 12.1475–78). In the midst of all the talk of violence, according to the narrator, Bloom suddenly collapses, “as limp as a wet rag” (U 12.1479–80). Real men, of course, are hard, not limp; they are firm; they “stand up like men.” Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Bloom facing the muzzle of a gun. His ideal kindergarten would eliminate popguns and catapults (U 17.571–72), and the very thought of children playing at war prompts him to ask, “How can people aim guns at each other? Sometimes they go off ” (U 13.1193–94). Bloom’s rejoinder to the advocates of violence is scarcely limp, however: —But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life. —What? says Alf. —Love, says Bloom. (U 12.1481–85)

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In the stereotype, the Jew should endorse unforgiving eye-for-an-eye Hebraic law in contrast to forgiving Christian love (Justius versus Mercius in the Wake), but that model is reversed here. In contrast to Bloom’s “love,” violence is insistently valorized in “Cyclops,” where the words “blood” and “bloody” occur no fewer than seventy-one times. The Linati schema charts the sense or meaning of the episode as “The Egocidal Terror” (Il Terrore Egocida), the organs as “Muscles” and “Bones,” and one of the dominant symbols as “Fanaticism” (Ellmann, “Ulysses” on the Liffey appendix). A memorable celebration of violence occurs in the description in “Cyclops” of a festive public execution complete with “the quartering knife, the various finely tempered disembowelling appliances . . . a terra cotta saucepan for the reception of the duodenum, colon, blind intestine and appendix etc . . . and two commodious milkjugs destined to receive the most precious blood of the most precious victim” (U 12.618–24). As is well known, this comic account is based on the execution of Robert Emmet. “Emmet Died to Free Ireland,” reads the headline on a 1915 recruiting poster for the Irish Volunteers. “What are YOU doing towards this glorious end?” The foot of the poster advised, “Keep this to bait your friends with.” Certainly Emmet was bait for many Irishmen. Bloom encounters a portrait of the “gallant pictured hero” (U 11.1274) after leaving the Ormond Hotel, in whose barroom “brighteyed and gallant” men clink glasses to the accompaniment of patriotic ballads and toasts whose siren songs Bloom resists as easily as he resists the wretched whore of the lane (U 11.1270). Joyce’s text does not say which portrait of Emmet sits in the window of Lionel Marks’s antique store, but it is probably pretty much what Michael MacDonagh reported in 1903: “In the humblest cabins of the land may be seen—with the pictures of the Blessed Virgin and St. Patrick—rude portraits of Emmet as he would wish perhaps to be remembered—in his cocked hat and feathers, his green and gold and white uniform” (qtd. in Elliott 182). Kevin Whelan describes standard nineteenthcentury images of a figure gallant indeed: “the Irish Washington with his tightfitting trousers, fine uniform and dashing air. . . . His rounded leg, is determinedly thrust into the foreground; his beautiful, almost sexualized body is displayed in highly elaborate uniforms.” Thus portrayed, Whelan concludes, Emmet became “an icon for Irish masculinity” (4). Such an aggressively masculine ideal seems antithetical to the icon of Jesus, stripped to his loincloth and limp on the cross, but as Bloom’s association of Emmet’s last words and the last words of Christ implies, the figures of Emmet and Christ as sacrificial redeemers merged repeatedly in the rhetoric of republican politics. Nowhere was that rhetoric more in evidence than in the writing

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and speeches of Patrick/Pádraic Pearse. It has been suggested that for all their divergencies Pearse and Joyce were contemporaries who “shared an identical experience of Ireland and of themselves as Irishmen” (Flood 104). In the course of his political development, Pearse became haunted by the shade of Emmet, his model of purifying blood sacrifice; as already noted, Joyce too took Emmet as a model, in the deeply ironic account of a public execution in “Oxen of the Sun.” Writing in December 1915 of the Great War, Pearse said that the preceding sixteen months had been “the most glorious in the history of Europe.” “Heroism,” he exulted, “has come back to the earth.” At this moment, Pearse declared himself indifferent as to whether the war was being fought for or against English tyranny; what mattered was that “[t]he old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage,” he said, “was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country” (216). Six months later, Pearse would describe the Easter Rising in similar terms as a “blood sacrifice” to redeem Ireland that was beyond the issue of success or failure (Moran 1). Pearse became obsessed by the sacrifice he saw promised in what he called “red war” (Edwards 159). Declaring that he had been “rebaptized in the Fenian faith” (qtd. in Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 212), he wrote his own apostolic creed in “Mionn” (Oath), which invoked “the blood of our ancestors,” “the bloody wounds of Tone,” and “the noble blood of Emmet” (qtd. in Edwards 161–62). Fragments of speeches by Pearse are repeated more or less verbatim by an offstage orator who rouses the patriotic fervor of the doomed Irish Citizen Army at the end of act 2 of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. Among O’Casey’s borrowings is an utterance that has been quoted more often than anything else Pearse ever said or wrote. Addressing the Gaelic League, Ireland, and the world, Pearse declared, “[B]loodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood” (99). For Pearse, Emmet’s uprising was a glorious and transfiguring moment; for Joyce, it was “foolish” (“Fenianism,” CW 189). For Pearse, the martyrdom of Emmet was the beau ideal of manly blood sacrifice; for Joyce, it was the occasion for the fart that closes “Sirens” while the well-hung “base barreltone” (U 11.1011) big Ben Dollard and his fellows sing “The Memory of the Dead,” honoring the “true men” who died in the rising of ninety-eight (U 11.1276). As the oft-repeated comparison between Pearse and Rupert Brooke suggests, Pearse’s rhetoric was by no means peculiar to himself or the Irish. Declan Kiberd notes that when Ulysses was begun in 1914, war promised to many in Europe a heroic antidote to a widespread sense of anomie. As an alterna-

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tive, Kiberd says, Joyce “wished to reassert the dignity of the quotidian round, to reclaim the everyday as a primary aspect of experience” (Inventing Ireland 330). Though one can scarcely refer to the female cycle as quotidian (praise the Lord!), Kiberd’s remark on Ulysses can be applied to that cycle, difficult as it may be for many to associate “dignity” with “menstruation.” It was not only Jewish men who were often perceived as unmanly; Celtic men too were often seen as essentially feminine in contrast to the essentially masculine Anglo-Saxon male. That view, memorably articulated in Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature, was widely shared in a Victorian culture that saw the deepest binary division between men and “the opposite sex.” (The opposition is so deep for Weininger that he believes that for transfusions, surgeons “must take blood not merely from one of the same species, family and sex, but of a similar degree of masculinity or femininity” [21].) Using a term coined to describe a response to the way colonialism feminizes its subjects (Sisson 200n17), Kiberd speaks of an Irish nationalist “hypermasculinity” (Inventing Ireland 363), and indeed such nationalists as those who taunt Bloom in “Cyclops” are enlisted in an effort to reclaim for Ireland masculine qualities believed to have been lost under English rule. Thus, Seamus Deane notes, in the clichés of Pearse’s rhetoric, republican Irishmen “are always virile” (71). Following D. P. Moran, who looked back to a “hypermasculinized Irishspeaking Gael” in contrast to the modern Celt of twilight and fairies, Elaine Sisson points out, Pearse designed an educational philosophy aimed at “remasculinizing” Ireland (14). He hoped to train boys to redeem an Anglicized Irish race from what he termed the “eunuchs” (9) of a nation in which so many had “suffered themselves to be deprived of their manhood” that an Irishman will sometimes “boast of his unmanliness” (194–95). Looking back in In First Century Ireland to “the splendid specimens of manhood” of ancient times, Pearse heralded a heroic breed of ancient Gael—“big boned and sinewy . . . broad in the shoulder, thin in the flank . . . as lithe as greyhounds” (qtd. in Sisson 11) that sounds suspiciously like the description of the Citizen as a “broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero” (U 12.151–55). In Stephen Hero, Madden is the captain of a hurley club who regularly reports at nationalist gatherings on “the muscular condition of the young irreconcilables under his charge.” Present at the meetings at which Madden reports on his program “to raise the physique of the country” in preparation for armed revolt is a separatist who always wears a green muffler and, in “the voice of an

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ox,” is always “criticizing, denouncing and scoffing.” This “stout black-bearded citizen” is clearly based on Michael Cusack, who boasted that he was born on the anniversary of Emmet’s execution and who was the model for the Citizen in Ulysses (SH 61–62; “Gaelic Athletic Association”). Calling for a “manlier tone” in Irish athletic endeavor, Cusack founded the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884 to promote Irish sports and banish English ones (qtd. in de Búrca 88). As Kiberd says, the GAA was created to counter “emasculation” and “degrading femininity by a disciplined programme of physical-contact sports” (Inventing Ireland 25). Thus, when Eamon de Valera in a 1943 St. Patrick’s Day radio address broadcast his dream for an Ireland that would be “the home of a people living the life that God desires men should live,” in addition to such requisites as “frugal comfort,” “cozy homesteads,” and “the laughter of comely maidens,” he included “the contests of athletic youths” (466); we can safely assume that the athletic youths envisioned by Dev were all male. At the turn of the century, when Irishmen were being exhorted to reclaim their manhood through athletics, “Jewish physical culturists all over Europe” were echoing Max Nordau’s call in 1898 for Muskeljudentum, “muscular Jewry” (Hoberman 144). Bloom may have heard such calls, but despite fitful efforts with Sandow’s exercises, he is scarcely the advocate for or specimen of manhood whom Madden or Cusack or Nordau wished to see. In “Cyclops,” Bloom promotes lawn tennis and speaks against Hynes’s “appeal for the resuscitation of the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes . . . as calculated to revive the best traditions of manly strength and prowess handed down to us from ancient ages” (U 12.909–12). Neither Buck nor Blazes seems engaged in sports or politics, but they are “hypermasculine,” as their sobriquets imply, nicknames that place them in sharp contrast to a “Poldy” whose middle name is “Paula” and whose surname suggests flowers. Appearing markedly “unmanly” next to the stud who cuckolds him, Bloom is said to collapse “limp as a wet rag” in “Cyclops,” as has been noted, and his “limp father of thousands” is feminized as a “languid floating flower” at the close of “Lotus-Eaters” (U 5.571–72). Molly calls Blazes’s phallus “that tremendous big red brute of a thing . . . I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up” (U 18.144–50); and Bello contrasts Bloom’s “teapot”—“limp as a boy of six’s doing his pooly behind a cart”—with Blazes’s “weapon with knobs and warts all over it” (U 15.3131–39). Stephen appears equally unmanly compared to Blazes. The lost young poet often seems languid and drooping, even effeminate, in his concern for aesthetics (after all, he quotes Wilde!) beside the ribald, athletic Buck, who

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carries a card advertising his “services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever” (U 14.686–87). “You saved men from drowning,” Stephen thinks of Buck. “I’m not a hero” (U 1.63). And elsewhere Stephen contrasts Buck’s courage with his own fear of “a cur’s yelping” (U 3.318). The hurley sticks with which Madden arms his future soldiers are traditionally made of ash, but Stephen’s ashplant, though he thinks of it as a sword in “Proteus” and twice again in “Scylla and Charybdis” (U 3.16, 9.296, 9.947), seems little more than a prop for his body—at least until he strikes at the chandelier in Bella Cohen’s brothel. Stephen and Joyce alike are open to a 1903 accusation by Pearse that the emigrant was “a traitor to the Irish State” (Moran 113). Emer Nolan points out that Pearse, who was briefly Joyce’s Irish teacher, is “apparently” the original of Stephen’s Irish teacher Hughes in Stephen Hero (43). After Stephen delivers his “Drama and Life” paper to the college literary society, Hughes accuses him of being an immoral aesthete, a purveyor of “foreign filth,” and “a renegade from the Nationalist ranks”; and, using a word that was often code for “Jewish,” he attacks Stephen’s “cosmopolitanism.” In an assault on Stephen that anticipates the charge in “Cyclops” that Bloom is not Irish, Hughes continues, “a man that was of all countries was of no country” (SH 103). When Stephen declares that “my country must be important because it belongs to me” (U 16.1164–65), he places himself in direct opposition to those Irishmen eager to give their life’s blood for their country, who ask not what their country can do for them but what they can do for their country—as would another son of Ireland, elevated to near sainthood after martyrdom over a half century later. Hard on the kicking heels of the hanged Croppy Boy in “Circe,” Old Gummy Granny appears. A caricature of the Poor Old Woman— Ireland herself—whom Stephen recognizes as the old sow that eats her farrow, she tries to thrust a dagger into his hand, promising salvation if he stabs Private Carr: Kill him, she says, and “you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free” (U 15.4738). Stephen, of course, will have none of this; the king he wishes to kill is in his head. “[T]hose big words . . . which make us so unhappy” that he fears surely include such darlings of the republican lexicon as “honor” and “martyrdom” (U 2.264). When Almidano Artifoni charges that Stephen is sacrificing himself for his ideals, Stephen’s reply, though offered with a smile, is sincere: “Sacrifizio incruento” (“Bloodless sacrifice”) (U 10. 348). The cleansing qualities of blood are not apparent to the Stephen of Stephen Hero, who affects the expletive “yellow in protest against the sanguine adjective” (SH 136). Speculating on the Buddhist qualities of Ernest Renan’s Jesus, he

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concludes that “the fierce eaters and drinkers of the western world would never worship such a figure.” “Blood will have blood,” he thinks: “There are some people in this island who sing a hymn called ‘Washed in the blood of the Lamb’ by way of easing the religious impulse. . . . Yeow! what a notion! A blood-bath to cleanse the spiritual body of all its sinful sweats . . .” (SH 190; final ellipsis in original). When Molly says that Bloom has more “spunk” in him than Boylan (U 18.168), the context makes it clear that she means “sperm,” but the word can also mean “courage,” something seen in the cuckolded husband but never in the cocky cocksman. The execution of the Croppy Boy in “Circe” provides semen aplenty: “A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up” (U 15.4548–52). This blood sacrifice enacts a religiosexual drama in which the death of the hero testifies to his manhood and for which the Wake word “heroticism” is wonderfully apposite (FW 614.35). As a shower of semen gushes forth, the executioner is brought to a pitch close to his own orgasm: “I’m near it myself,” he says (U 15.4553). Women identified as players in Bloom’s masochistic fantasies take relics of the sacrifice as if the ejaculate were martyr’s blood. Given Jesus’ parable of the sowers and Stephen’s parable of the plums, however, the cobblestones the seed falls upon do not promise that the sacrifice of the Croppy Boy will be redemptive. Heartbreak House, a play as antiwar as The Plough and the Stars (both end with ironic renderings of Keep the Home Fires Burning sung against the detonations of battle), dramatizes what a section of its preface baldly states: “Those Who Do Not Know How to Live Must Make a Merit of Dying” (15). In Shaw’s play, Hesione Hushabye’s husband, Hector, is a man famed for heroism who has to assure himself that he is not a coward by such stunts as walking on the outside of third-floor window ledges. More than a decade before Freud’s famous “Was will das Weib?,” Hesione asks, “What do men want?” She offers her own answer when she continues, “Why do they envy us the pain with which we bring them into the world, and make strange dangers and torments for themselves to be even with us?” (90). (A similar notion appears in Mussolini’s slogan “War is to men what maternity is to women” [Braudy 449].) Is it possible that some men envy women for the blood and pain of menstruation as well as the blood and pain of parturition? Englishwomen picketing the American missile base at Greenham Common in the 1980s thought so when they protested, “War is disguised menstruation” (Shuttle, Wise Wound 264). As is always the

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case where fantasy is artful, Gloria Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate” is grounded in reality. In a world in which men and not women menstruated, Steinem imagined that “Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (men-struation) as proof that only men could serve in the Army (‘you have to give blood to take blood’)” (110). Invoking the traditional symbol of the rose for Ireland in “The Red Rose Tree,” Yeats declared in Pearse’s voice, “There’s nothing but our own red blood / Can make a right Rose Tree” (183), and in “Three Songs to the One Burden,” he concluded, “For Patrick Pearse had said / That in every generation / Must Ireland’s blood be shed” (330). But Ulysses celebrates other blood, not the masculine red wine that rhetoric claimed as the blessing of heroic violence, but the blood of the “curse”—female, despised, domestic. The blood sacrifice called for by such as Emmet and Pearse is not a call that summons Bloom or Stephen— or James Joyce, who once declared his conviction that “the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie” (Letters II 81). Assuming that Private Carr is ready to die for England, Stephen says, “Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so.” “Damn death,” he cries. “Long live life!” (U 15.4473–74). Earlier, beset by the specter of death in “Hades,” Bloom is reassured by the thought of Molly’s “warm fullblooded life” (U 6.1005). Handed a throwaway for an evangelist, Bloom thinks: “Bloo . . . . Me? No. Blood of the Lamb. His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druids’ altars” (U 8.8–13; ellipsis in original). The humorous inclusion of the burnt kidney notwithstanding, the catalog that concludes this passage pretty well describes Stephen’s “dio boia,” the hangman god who is the idol of many in Ulysses (U 9.1049). In “Oxen of the Sun,” the ordeal that brings Bloom to the Holles Street Hospital to inquire after Mrs. Purefoy in her third day of labor provides occasion for coarse humor among the medical students drinking in the hospital common room; in “Sirens,” the rupture of the hymen is something to joke about for the men drinking in the Ormond bar, something to play off against “guy-talk” of bursting the tympanum of the ear (U 11.536); and throughout Ulysses, religious martyrdom and political sacrifice conflate as they have so often and so fatally in Irish history—and as they continue to wreak destruction in an era of suicide bombers. Blood of the lamb? Repulsed by the “animals”—“Men, men, men”—feeding in the Burton, Bloom adjourns to Davy Byrne’s (U 8.652–53). Just before he orders his cheese sandwich there, he recalls the horrors of killing day when

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he worked for Cuffe the cattle dealer: hooks and poleaxes; “[w]retched” and “trembling” beasts; “[f]layed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust.” “Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline,” Bloom reflects. “Blood always needed. Insidious” (U 8.723–30). The Agnus Dei worshipped by many in Ulysses is “Dublin’s pet lamb,” Myler Keogh, bleeding “lively claret” as he fights an English sergeant major in the prize ring (U 11.962–65). Of course Ulysses does not say that Leopold Bloom actually bleeds during his “monthly” any more than it says that he was ever pregnant, despite the eight sons he delivers in “Circe,” an experience that contradicts Stephen’s assertion that “Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child” (U 9.836–37). R. Barry Walkley has proposed that an important structural device in Ulysses is Bloom’s association with couvade, an argument that is supported by what I take to be evidence of Joyce’s interest in couvade in the discourse on the subject by “Kinch”—citing Diodorus—that is reported in Gogarty’s Tumbling in the Hay (193). As Walkley points out, one of the ways in which Bloom is linked with couvade is his association with his own “monthlies” and those of others. Bloom’s participation in the experience of the female cycle is something that might be termed “menstrual couvade” or, to use a word coined by Janice Delaney and her coauthors in The Curse, “saignade” (222). “[T]hat’s why I liked him,” Molly reflects on her courting days with Bloom, “because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is” (U 18.1578–79). John Hoberman has pointed out that for Weininger and many of his contemporaries extending into the Nazi era, Jews were by nature antichivalric: like women, they were constitutionally unable to participate in the adventure, the quest, that gives meaning to the life of the gentile male (Hoberman 145–47). Yet Joyce’s wandering Jew can be read as a knight errant, or—to use Joyce’s figure— a modern Odysseus. The Bloomsday saga of odyssey and nostos lends support to the speculation of Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove that the myth of the hero-cycle of withdrawal and return traced in Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces “very likely originated in the female monthly cycle” (Alchemy 13). As Declan Kiberd has argued in his moving essay “Joyce’s Ulysses: Past Eve and Adam,” the narrative of Bloom’s adventures offers a revolutionary representation of what it might be to be male. At a time when racial myths of Aryan and Saxon and Gaelic superiority were spreading exponentially, Joyce’s text offered Bloom; at a time when the “he-man” was becoming the ideal, the term “masculinity” was beginning to replace “manhood,” and Gerty MacDowell was

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dreaming of a “manly man” (U 13.210), Joyce offered his “new womanly man” (U 15.1798–99). In the imagery of Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” the hearts of political martyrs such as Pearse become stones that “trouble the living stream” (181). For Joyce, that stream includes the female “flux,” as menstrual blood used to be termed. Two great readers of Joyce—Richard Ellmann in “Why Molly Bloom Menstruates” and Robert Boyle in “Miracle in Black Ink”—have argued that Molly’s flow is Eucharistic. This is not the life-denying sacrament of the nationalists, however. Linking the words “menstrual” and “roses” in his notes for Ulysses (Herring 496), Joyce has Bloom refer to Molly’s cycle as her “roses,” a once-common term—as was “flowers”—for menstruation. Moreover, as Fritz Senn has pointed out, Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, a work Joyce pored over, connects “bloom” and “blood” (35). The cycles of Leopold and Molly Bloom present a life-affirming sacrament as an alternative to the bloodshed of violence. That Bloom is associated with the female cycle does not diminish him; it signifies what he himself speaks of at a crucial moment of the novel in the face of violent men who advocate force and hatred. The association of bloodshed with manhood in republican rhetoric is quite in keeping with the talk in “Cyclops” that celebrates violence and demeans Bloom as less than a man. But Bloom’s answer stands firm: “Love. . . . I mean the opposite of hatred” (U 12.1485). Vicki Mahaffey reminds us that Molly is both flower and flow-er. At the ecstatic close of Ulysses, Molly’s menstrual flow wondrously becomes roses; that Bloom is associated with those flowers, with Molly’s female flow and abundance, validates his passport to eternity. The female component in Bloom that makes him “one of those mixed middlings” to the loungers in “Cyclops” who gossip that he lies abed with menstrual periods contributes crucially to his polytropic role (U 12.1658–59). His “firm full masculine feminine passive active hand,” “Ithaca” says, is “reluctant to shed human blood even when the end justified the means” (U 17.289–90, 293–94). No conqueror, Leopold Bloom remains “unconquered hero” to capture and hold our attention and respect (U 11.342).

Notes 1. Ellmann’s essay appeared later under the same title as a section of “Ulysses” on the Liffey (159–76). 2. On the panel “Joyce and the Menstrual Cycle” that I chaired at the 2004 Dublin Symposium, I explained that some time before the conference I had learned that my co-panelist

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Frances Ilmberger of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation and I were intellectually ovulating in synch: we were working on papers with the same title—“Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates”— and were pursuing the same lines of research. After our panic passed, we agreed that Frances would continue on course and present on “Blood Curse,” the subject of the second section of this essay, and that I would develop a paper on “Blood Sacrifice,” which became the third section. I learned much from Frances’s excellent presentation and am grateful to her for sharing a copy of her paper with me. 3. Ilmberger saw this in electronic display at the National Library during the 2004 symposium, but because of the strict cautions against quoting from the Paul Léon acquisition, she did not record Joyce’s exact words. She also said in her conference paper that when Joyce wrote in the “Oxen” notebook, “Menses: breath stinks too LB” (Herring 180), he again indicated plans to have Bloom menstruate, but I wonder whether this note might simply refer to an opinion held by Bloom, who thinks about female menstrual odor just before turning to bad breath in men and women in U 13.1030–36. 4. Perhaps Bloom suffers from what Aristotle’s Masterpiece calls “the False Menses, or Whites,” one of the signs of which is “loathing of meat” (Aristotle’s Works 55), a revulsion that he feels in “Lestrygonians.” 5. In James Joyce’s Judaic Other, Marilyn Reizbaum points out that when Punch Costello says in “Circe” that Bloom’s “fetor judaicus is most perceptible,” the Latin foetur (“stench”) is replaced by fetura (“offspring”), an exchange combining “both the myth about a Jewish smell and its source, a combination that technically enables Bloom to give birth” (79). 6. Although Byrnes does not seem aware of the myth that Jewish men menstruate, he does propose an influence on Joyce’s portrait of Bloom in a Krafft-Ebing case history that tells of a man of Hungarian extraction who felt himself transformed into a woman and thereafter experienced monthly periods of menstrual discomfort (315). 7. In U 18.1151, Molly says her last period began on Whitmonday, the day Bloom was stung, according to U 4.484; we learn in U 17.1449 that he was stung on 23 May. 8. Gilman contends that Freud and Fliess were engaged in an effort to transform the “hidden sign,” the menstruation that linked the Jewish male with women, “from being a sign of difference to being one of universality” (Case of Freud 99). 9. A great deal has been written on Weininger and Joyce. See Steinberg 63–71 as well as the many titles cited in that essay in 63n2 and 76n35; and see the essays in Harrowitz and Hyams by John Hoberman (141–53), Marilyn Reizbaum (207–14), Natania Rosenfeld (215–26), and Elfriede Pöder (227–35). 10. Noting the obvious allusion to circumcision, Gifford and Seidman gloss “a bit off the top” as slang for “some of the best” and also quote from three verses of a comic music-hall song “All I Want Is a Little Bit off the Top” (UA 315). Can this number be the “A Little Bit Off the Top” that Ruth Bauerle does not quote but intriguingly describes as a song of “ritual dismemberment” that was “probably part of a rich oral tradition known to Joyce, though it would not have been considered printable in a world which refused Dubliners in 1912” (257)? 11. Weininger speaks of the slavish disposition of the Jews as demonstrated in their subservience to codes such as the Decalogue (313). 12. The poster is reproduced in Coogan 16. 13. See Elliott, plate 10, following page 84, which the caption identifies as “the classic portrait

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that informed later representations.” For many other portraits of Emmet, see O’Donnell. Emmet’s memory would be particularly green in the 1904 of Ulysses because of the commemoration the year before of the 1803 Rising and Emmet’s subsequent execution. 14. Flood’s thesis in “James Joyce, Patrick Pearse and the Theme of Execution” is that in sharply different ways both men “saw the process by which Ireland was to be definitively separated from England as so drastic that they could not survive it” (104). Darcy O’Brien attributes similarities he traces between writings by Pearse and Joyce to the fact that both “were born of the same ghost-ridden mother, Ireland” (77). 15. Charles Townshend quotes the chilling line on three separate occasions in Political Violence in Ireland (258, 282, 410). Pearse blithely conceded that “we may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people” (98–99). 16. Leo Braudy’s From Chivalry to Terrorism traces a long tradition of war as a perceived means of restoring manhood. A recent book encourages hope that the attack on the World Trade Center may prove a “blessing” that will help the United States “recover the wellsprings of manly virtue” (Newell xiii). 17. For intelligent discussion of what they term “gender trauma” and “anxious masculinity” in Joyce’s work see Boheemen-Saaf and Schwarze, respectively. 18. Ironically, but perhaps not completely surprisingly, despite his insistence on “manliness,” Pearse seems to have felt a powerful homosexual attraction to boys, though he was probably unaware of just what he was feeling. See Edwards 52–54, 126–28; Moran 120–24 et passim; and Nugent. 19. A Hungarian participant at the 2004 Joyce symposium told me that although either sex can bear “Virag” as a family name in Hungary, it is a first name there only for women. 20. Citing a note on the “limp father” in Gifford and Seidman that refers to a plant sometimes known as the “mother of thousands” because of the way it propagates by means of runners that seem to float flowers (UA 100), Byrnes says that Joyce is suggesting that Bloom’s genitals “are symbolically ambiguous, hermaphroditic” (317). As is so often the case, Joyce’s symbolism is ambiguous: limp or not, the “mother of thousands” is, after all, a plant more commonly known as “saxifrage” (Saxifraga stolonifera)—“rock-breaker.” 21. Hughes seems based as well on Louis J. Walsh, who attacked Joyce’s paper on Mangan before the University College Dublin Literary Society (JJ 96). 22. Observing that the identification of Irish republicanism with the erotic is often embarrassingly evident, Seán Moran offers in evidence the full and fulsome text of Joseph Mary Plunkett’s sonnet “The Little Black Rose Shall Be Red at Last”; as Moran notes, Plunkett equates his blood with “semen that impregnates the flesh of female Ireland” (105). 23. See “War Metaforms” in Grahn 269–71. 24. In “Sacrifice and Political Legitimation,” Mary Condren takes the history of male political self-sacrifice in Ireland as her point of departure for a stimulating exploration of “the gendered nature of such violence” in general (160). 25. In this 1905 letter to Stanislaus, Joyce continued, “and that there cannot be any substitute for the individual passion as the motive power of everything. . . . For this reason, Hairy Jaysus [Francis Skeffington] seems the bloodiest impostor of all I have met.” Richard Ellmann’s note comments, “Skeffington had probably defended the notion that the individual should sacrifice himself for the sake of the group” (Letters II 81n4).

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26. Bloom’s Masonic connection may be reflected in “foundation of a building.” A modern handbook for Masons says that whereas the “primitive mind” required a blood sacrifice for the laying of a cornerstone, Masonic ritual replaces blood with corn, wine, and oil (“Fellowcraft”). 27. Gilman speculates that the myth of Jewish male menstruation may well have a pathological basis in symptoms produced in early adolescence by a parasite that causes urethal bleeding. He notes that even today “male menstruation” is taken as a marker of sexual maturity in parts of Africa (Case of Freud 256n114). The West African protagonist of Nuruddin Farah’s Maps undergoes such a rite of passage. For more on male cycles, physical and psychological, see Delaney, Lupton, and Toth 228–35; Shuttle and Redgrove, Alchemy 67–68 and Wise Wound 276–79. Havelock Ellis, whose work Joyce knew, believed that men carried rudimentary traces of the menstrual cycle (Kiberd, “Joyce’s Ulysses” 183). For rituals of male menstruation see Delaney, Lupton, and Toth 221–26; and Froula 269–70n17. For male fantasies of male menstruation see Faergeman. 28. Although “he-man” entered popular currency around the turn of the century, it was coined around 1832, “just about the same time,” Leo Braudy engagingly notes, “that machinists were distinguishing between male and female screws” (396). For “masculinity” versus “manhood” see Boheemen-Saaf 255. 29. For more on Eucharistic blood in Ulysses see Dervin and Shanahan. 30. Mahaffey says that Molly’s “view of herself as a flower endows the flow of her thoughts with a more stable form, verbally bridging the distance between Molly and ALP in Finnegans Wake, as the ‘-er’ in ‘flower’ metamorphoses into the suffix of the verb ‘flow,’ turning momentary bloom to neverceasing motion” (181).

Works Cited Adams, Robert M. Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” 1962. New York: Galaxy-Oxford University Press, 1967. Aristotle. Generation of Animals. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Rev. Oxford trans. Vol. 1. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. 1111–1218. Aristotle’s Works: Containing The Master-Piece, Directions for Midwives, and Counsel and Advice to Child-Bearing Women, with Various Useful Remedies. London: Published for the Booksellers, 1850. Bauerle, Ruth, ed. The James Joyce Songbook. New York: Garland, 1982. Boheemen-Saaf, Christine van. “Postcolonial Masculinity and Gender Trauma.” Masculinities in Joyce: Postcolonial Constructions. Ed. Christine van Boheemen-Saaf and Colleen Lamos. European Joyce Studies 10. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001. 219–60. Boone, Joseph Allen. “A New Approach to Bloom as ‘Womanly Man’: The Mixed Middling’s Progress in Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly 20 (Fall 1982): 67–85. Boyle, Robert. “Miracle in Black Ink: A Glance at Joyce’s Use of His Eucharistic Image.” James Joyce Quarterly 10 (Fall 1972): 47–60. Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Knopf, 2003.

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Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960. Búrca, Marcus de. Michael Cusack and the GAA. Dublin: Anvil, 1989. Byrnes, Robert. “Bloom’s Sexual Tropes: Stigmata of the ‘Degenerate’ Jew.” James Joyce Quarterly 27 (Winter 1990): 303–23. Condren, Mary. “Work in Progress: Sacrifice and Political Legitimation: The Production of a Gendered Social Order.” Journal of Women’s History 6–7 (Winter/Spring 1995): 160–89. Coogan, Tim Pat. 1916: The Easter Rising. New York: Cassell, 2001. Deane, Seamus. “Pearse: Writing and Chivalry.” Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880–1980. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985. 63–74. Delaney, Janice, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth. The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation. New York: Dutton, 1976. Dervin, Daniel. “Why Does Molly Menstruate? A New View of Psychoanalysis and Creativity.” Literature and Psychology 28 (1978): 125–36. De Valera, Eamon. Speeches and Statements by Eamon De Valera, 1917–1973. Ed. Maurice Moynihan. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980. Edwards, Ruth Dudley. Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure. 1977. Swords, Ireland: Poolbeg Press, 1990. Elliott, Marianne. Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend. London: Profile, 2003. Ellmann, Richard. “Ulysses” on the Liffey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Faergeman, Paul M. “Fantasies of Menstruation in Men.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 24 (1955): 1–19. Farah, Nuruddin. Maps. New York: Pantheon, 1986. “Fellowcraft: The Wages; Corn, Wine and Oil.” 4 Dec. 2004 . Flood, Jeanne A. “James Joyce, Patrick Pearse and the Theme of Execution.” Irish Studies 1 (1980): 101–24. Froula, Christine. Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. “The Gaelic Athletic Association: A Synopsis of the History of the GAA.” 2 Jan. 2004 . Gilman, Sander L. The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ———. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1991. Gogarty, Oliver St. John. Tumbling in the Hay. London: Constable, 1939. Grahn, Judy. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Boston: Beacon, 1993. Harrowitz, Nancy A., and Barbara Hyams, eds. Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Herr, Cheryl. “‘Penelope’ as Period Piece.” Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies. Ed. Richard Pearce. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. 63–79. Herring, Philip, ed. Joyce’s “Ulysses” Notesheets in the British Museum. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972. Hoberman, John M. “Otto Weininger and the Critique of Jewish Masculinity.” Jews and Gen-

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der: Responses to Otto Weininger. Ed. Nancy A. Harrowitz, and Barbara Hyams. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. 141–53. Horowitz, Elliott. “‘The Vengeance of the Jews Was Stronger Than Their Avarice’: Modern Historians and the Persian Conquest of Jerusalem in 614.” Jewish Social Studies 4 (Winter 1998). 23 Dec. 2004 . Hyman, Louis. The Jews of Ireland. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972. Katz, David S. “Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern England.” Review of English Studies ns 50 (Nov. 1999): 440–62. Kenner, Hugh. “Ulysses.” Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1980. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. ———. “Joyce’s Ulysses: Past Eve and Adam.” Men and Feminism in Modern Literature. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. 168–203. Mahaffey, Vicki. Reauthorizing Joyce. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Moran, Seán Farrell. Patrick Pearse and the Politics of Redemption: The Mind of the Easter Rising, 1916. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994. Newell, Waller R. The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country. New York: Regan Books, 2003. Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism. New York: Routledge, 1995. Nugent, Joseph. “Patrick Pearse and Homosexual Panic.” Berkeley McNair Journal 4 (Winter 1996). 10 Feb. 2009 . O’Brien, Darcy. “Pearse and Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly 22 (Fall 1984): 75–77. O’Donnell, Ruán. Remember Emmet: Images of the Life and Legacy of Robert Emmet. Bray, Ireland: Wordwell, 2003. Pearse, Pádraic. Political Writings and Speeches. Dublin: Talbot, 1966. Reizbaum, Marilyn. James Joyce’s Judaic Other. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. “When the Saints Come Marching In: Re-Deeming ‘Cyclops.’” Ulysses—En-Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes. Ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 167–84. Resnick, Irven M. “Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses.” Harvard Theological Review 93 (July 2000): 241–63. Savino, Jennifer Ann. “Bloom’s Bust.” James Joyce Quarterly 39 (Winter 2002): 346–47. Schwarze, Tracy Teets. “‘Do You Call That a Man?’ The Culture of Anxious Masculinity in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Masculinities in Joyce: Postcolonial Constructions. Ed. Christine BoheemenSaaf and Colleen Lamos. European Joyce Studies 10. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001. 113–35. Senn, Fritz, “Book of Many Turns.” James Joyce Quarterly 10 (Fall 1972): 29–46. Shanahan, Dennis M. “The Eucharistic Aesthetics of the Passion: The Testament of Blood in Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly 27 (Winter 1990): 373–86. Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Shaw, George Bernard. Heartbreak House. 1919. New York: Penguin, 1964. Shuttle, Penelope, and Peter Redgrove. Alchemy for Women: Personal Transformation through Dreams and the Female Cycle. London: Rider, 1995.

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———. The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman. Expanded ed. New York: Marion Boyars, 1999. Sisson, Elaine. Pearse’s Patriots: St. Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2004. Steinberg, Erwin R. “The Source(s) of Joyce’s Anti-Semitism in Ulysses.” Joyce Studies Annual. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. 63–84. Steinem, Gloria. “If Men Could Menstruate: A Political Fantasy.” MS Oct. 1978: 110. Townshend, Charles. Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Trachtenberg, Joshua. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945. Walkley, R. Barrie. “The Bloom of Motherhood: Couvade as a Structural Element in Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly 18 (Fall 1980): 55–67. Weininger, Otto. Sex and Character. 1903. Reprint of trans. of 1906 6th German ed. New York: AMS, 1975. Whelan, Kevin. “Robert Emmet: Between History and Memory.” Feature 11 (Autumn 2003). 26 Nov. 2003 . Yeats, William Butler. The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1983.

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4 Mixing Memory and Desire Narrative Strategies and the Past in Ulysses Richard P. Lynch

As Stephen Kern has pointed out, in modernist fiction the value attached to the historical past is often displaced by a belief in the importance of the personal past (61)—and yet both in their commonly accepted meaning are “historical” in the sense that they are recollections of past events. Memory, John Rickard reminds us in Joyce’s Book of Memory, is both a major theme and the primary method of Ulysses. We have the personal memories of Stephen and Bloom, of course, but we also have textual memory—the text remembering or echoing itself—and intertextual memory: both the characters remembering other texts (often song lyrics) and the text remembering or echoing other texts. And as we know, Ulysses also contains many instances of proleptic memory, or remembering the future, so to speak, in which figures and events appear in advance of where they would naturally occur in a traditional linear mimetic narrative. In effect, the text remembers what it is going to do later. Memories are always narratives, but there are different kinds of memory, as there are different kinds of narrative, and as it turns out, the two fall into very similar categories. Edward Casey defines two kinds of memory: passive and active. In the passive model, the mind serves as a sort of recorder, “registering and storing incoming impressions” (15). Here, as Casey puts it, the events of the past are reduced to “dead weight” (4)—an appropriate metaphor for the past in Dubliners. Passive memory appears at first to be the kind Bloom uses when he recalls that magical time with Molly on the Hill of Howth. He is in Davy Byrne’s for a snack—a glass of burgundy and a cheese sandwich—and chatting with Nosey Flynn. In a parody of Proust, the memory is triggered by the taste of the wine: “Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. . . . Seems to [be]

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a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered” (U 8.897–99). No one who reads the passage, however, can see it as simple recollection, for Bloom has sanctified that moment on Howth Hill fully as much as Stephen sanctifies his encounter with the bird-like girl in A Portrait, and he does it using the same method: language—in this case, Bloom’s own brand of sensuality in words. Given the proximity of Nosey Flynn (“Hope that dewdrop doesn’t come down into his glass. No, snuffled it up” [U 8.804–5]), it is an even greater achievement than Stephen’s, who at least has a nearly deserted beach to work with. Bloom’s imaginative recollection shades it more toward the activist view, which sees memory as both a “more unreliable and more powerful function of the mind.” Here, Casey explains, “memory involves the creative transformation of experience rather than its internalized reduplication” (15). Bloom, in fact, is in the habit of using memory this way. Declan Kiberd points out that Bloom “creatively misinterprets past moments, in keeping with his current needs” (353), and, like his counterpart in Homer’s Odyssey—also a master storyteller and creator of experience—he is more “oral” than Stephen and therefore more free to invent. Stephen’s success in Ulysses is that he applies the active model of memory to Ireland’s past and, as we will see, manages to create a liberating symbolic narrative in the process. His failure is that, in his attempts to escape a socially constructed identity and create his own self, he only erases (or tries to erase) the empirical past, and has no effective substitute for it. And the failure is one of narrative. Kiberd writes about Joyce’s realization, in Ulysses especially, that mimetic narrative is the leftover tool of the colonizer, and that postcolonial writers must move beyond the modes of expression left behind by their former masters (346). Unlike Bloom, however, Stephen is excessively “literary,” and so is stuck in “historical” and literary roles, because he doesn’t, or can’t, use active memory—and that is the real “nightmare” aspect of history from which he is unlikely to escape. When Stephen attempts to deal with his personal past, he still thinks in terms of that traditional form of narrative expression. Passive memory seems to be the type Kern refers to in his statement about the shift in value from the historical to the personal past, and at first glance it would seem to be the more reliable of the two. As Casey argues, since the time of Aristotle, “passivism has been the predominant, and typically the ‘official’ (i.e., the most respected and respectable), view of memory” (15). The ninthcentury Irish philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, however, called stories based on these recollections “mystery” narratives, since they can never be known entirely. As Umberto Eco says in The Role of the Reader, total knowledge of the

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world of reference is unattainable; we can only take a perspective on that world for the sake of interpreting experience, or a text, and we are especially limited when that world of reference is in the past (228). The other kind of master narrative Eriugena called “symbolic.” These “symbolic” narratives are not stories based on historical events but, as Stephen G. Nichols explains in his foreword to Michael Riffaterre’s Fictional Truth, “discourses recounting things that did not happen as though they had happened for didactic purposes. . . . [S]ymbolic narrative may invent scenarios at will for the purpose of conveying truths that transcend specific situations” (x). So “mystery” (or mimetic) narratives correspond to passive memory, just as “symbolic” narratives parallel active (or “creative”) memory. If history is a nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus is trying to awake, then reality in his view must lie elsewhere, and it is necessary that he find that reality through his own symbolic reality—not in a way that eliminates the past, but in a way that incorporates it. Symbolic narratives are not based on historical events in the sense that realistic narrative is, but nor do they attempt to rise above the level of human experience. Instead, they use those events and transform them in ways that give them the significance of “truth.” Stephen manages to accomplish this task with his nation’s past, but not with his own personal history. In his account of Nietzsche’s attitude toward the individual’s past, Kern writes: “the personal past constitutes a necessary obstacle in human consciousness that forces the will to make something of itself in the face of all the pernicious influences of habit and tradition” (62). And this, as Seamus Deane points out, is precisely Stephen Dedalus’s aim: to construct himself as an act of will, rather than allowing himself to be a socially constructed character (xlii–xliii). But one of those “pernicious influences” Nietzsche worried about had to be narrative itself, one of the two meanings of “history,” and specifically the “habit” or “tradition” into which narrative had fallen by the late nineteenth century. James Fairhall notes that Stephen’s determination to escape the nets of family, country, and religion in A Portrait of the Artist becomes, in Ulysses, “a generalized desire to escape the authority of the word and the imprisonment of narrative” (10). One of the “nets” he must fly past, in a sense, is traditional mimetic narrative, which threatens him as much as recollections of his own past, or of his family’s or his country’s past. We are immediately drawn into Stephen’s consciousness in A Portrait with the opening words, “Once upon a time”—an appropriate beginning not only for subject and style but because the fairy tale is Stephen’s ideal narrative mode. There is no more “symbolic” narrative (in Eriugena’s sense of its insistence on

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“truth”) than a fairy tale. As Jack Zipes points out, a key initial impulse for fairy tales was to express an essential human desire for a better world, and to express faith that such a world was possible, was in fact the real world in a moral or transcendent sense (2). Fairy tales differ from symbolic narratives, however, in one key way, and the difference is another symptom of Stephen’s problems with narrative. While they are an expression of how things ought to be, they also represent escape rather than incorporation, removing the subject from the dimension of time entirely. Instead of dealing with the past, they replace it. “Once upon a time” is not about the past. Fairy tales are not located in a definite time or place. They are more about an indefinite “utopian” future (4). There are effective symbolic uses for what might be termed utopian narratives, but these do not involve elimination of the past, or of time altogether. Ned Lukacher uses the term “utopian” in this sense in his book Primal Scenes, where he writes about Freud’s discovery, specifically in the case of a patient known as the Wolf Man, of the impossibility of recovering “history” (i.e., the “forgotten situations” in his patient’s past). As in Eriugena’s “mystery” narratives, these memories cannot be reproduced effectively or fully as simple recollection. Instead, Freud had to help the patient construct narratives that transformed the story of the past and that recognized the “utopian nature” of the psychoanalytic process. This kind of narrative was, according to Freud, a “remodelling analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about its early history” (19). So A Portrait begins in a narrative mode that was originally an attempt to escape the past (and the present), and ends not with the more empirical view one might expect a young adult to have grown into but with legend (Daedalus—the “fabulous artificer”), and with the statement that the past is “consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future” (P 273). Stephen cannot deny that the past exists, but he insists that it exists only as memory, not as emotion (P 87)—an idea that is proven to be wishful thinking in Ulysses. Stephen’s determination to create himself anew, in defiance of cultural conditioning, explains why, as he thinks of the “prophecy” in his name, he reflects, “all ages were as one to him” (P 183). In order to escape history’s shaping influence and design a self, he has to get outside that history. But he does not want to repeat his own past, either, or his father’s, and so in some respects he does not want to have a past at all. Unfortunately, his efforts in A Portrait lead him to embed his identity in what Raymond Williams called a “residual culture,” that of the aesthete, and a Pre-Raphaelite aesthete at that. Even his classmates at the

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university know what pigeonhole to put him in. Stephen’s 1902 villanelle looks backward, in spite of his professed fear of the past, and suggests a subjectivity preserved in amber rather than a living self—but that is after all the meaning of a past that exists only as memory and not as emotion. Because he is unable to apply creative memory to his personal past, Stephen is burdened by the necessity of forgetting, a necessity that Nietzsche insisted upon in a more general way: “It is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting” (62). Because of the “dark, invisible burden” or “chain” of the past that Nietzsche says runs with us through life (61), humans must engage in “active forgetting,” a practice Stephen Dedalus attempts with little success, and a practice, moreover, that has its own dangers. Milan Kundera describes the hazards of such forgetting as what at first appears to be “splendid lightness”: “The absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant” (5). What more accurate description of Stephen Dedalus could there be, not only in the scene in A Portrait where he imagines his soul “soaring in an air beyond the world” (P 183), but in Ulysses, where what freedom from the past (memory) he has been able to achieve has rendered his movements precisely “as free as they are insignificant.” Active forgetting, unlike active memory, is a way of becoming “half real.” In Ulysses, Stephen deals more effectively with the historical past than with his own personal memories. The contrast between passive and active models of memory is made most clearly in the “Nestor” episode. As Stephen drills his students on historical facts, he thinks, “Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess” (U 2.7–9). That is, the past exists somehow, even if not as it is recollected in memory, the implication being that passive memory is unreliable, or inadequate. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake says, “Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration” (544). For Blake, memory was a lesser activity of the mind, and a danger to the creative imagination. It was not only the unreliability or inadequacy of memory as recollection that bothered Blake (and Joyce), but the danger of memory as “habit,” memory that repeats, for habit in Joyce, as Rickard reminds us, “is the great enemy of change and the great enforcer of stagnation and paralysis” (60). Or as Blake puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “The man who never alters his

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opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind” (58). If we apply Stephen’s thought—“it was in some way, if not as memory fabled it”—to narrative, we also have a rejection of traditional mimetic or causal narrative. The narrative of Ulysses itself, in its most impersonal episodes, suggests the same view. In the “Aeolus” episode, for instance, we have what Gifford and Seidman refer to in “Ulysses” Annotated as a “stylistic echo” of Dickens (146). The passage reads: “I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself . . . that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives” (U 7.763–65). Gifford and Seidman cite a passage from David Copperfield as an example, but there is one in Great Expectations that exhibits more than a stylistic parallel: “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been” (72). This is Pip’s reflection on the importance of his first visit to Miss Havisham’s and his first exposure to Estella, and it shows that the echo in Ulysses is thematic as well as stylistic—specifically, a parody of the faith in linear causation embedded in the plots of Victorian novels and the firm belief, reflected in the plot of Great Expectations, that all events can finally be accounted for, all secrets revealed. It seems more than chance that the echo of Dickens is followed immediately by a reference to “Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was” (U 7.882). In theosophy, Akasa is, as Gifford and Seidman define it, the “infinite memory of eternal nature” in which every thought is preserved forever (118)—in other words, the impossibly perfect historical record. And immediately after we are reminded of that impossibility, at least on the human plane, we are treated to Stephen’s Parable of the Plums. Parables are, by their nature, symbolic narratives. Eriugena also called this kind of narrative historia, and he used a geographic metaphor to define it. As Stephen G. Nichols explains in his discussion of Eriugena, historia is like a deep valley, “in which events take place without the participants being able to see beyond the immediate situation.” But even though historia is an account of events in that valley, on the horizontal plane, and not the comprehensive view from a mountain summit that Eriugena called theologia, it has value because it “provides an occasion for continuing interpretative dialogue between events in the world and their symbolic meaning” (Nichols, Romanesque Signs 8). In Stephen’s parable, Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe exist entirely on that horizontal plane, and their exhausting climb to the top of Nelson’s pillar does not lift them from it. They are afraid of the dark going up, and they are afraid of the height when they reach the top (they lift their skirts to avoid looking down). Peering up at the

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statue of the “onehandled adulterer,” as Stephen says, “gives them a crick in their necks . . . and they are too tired to look up or down or to speak,” and so they eat the plums and spit the stones out between the railings (U 7.1010–27). The parable is vividly realized, completely grounded in empirical details, right down to the crubeen and bottle of double X Florence MacCabe has for supper every Saturday. But historia, as Eriugena said, was not mimesis in the usual sense—not a simple imitation of phenomenal reality. Instead, it was a rewriting of that reality. It “did not seek to describe events as they were, but to transform them into texts” that separated “the imperfect reflections of the sensible world from the Truth.” And it did this by establishing parallels between historia and sacred history (the scriptures and theology). These two forms of history—historia and sacred history—combine to reconcile the principles of change and continuity and demonstrate how the “multiplicity of events in the world could be shown to be part of divine intentionality” (Nichols, Romanesque Signs 9). The application of Eriugena’s concept of historia to Stephen’s parable can be better understood through comparison with a similar process, “figural interpretation,” as Erich Auerbach describes it in Mimesis. In figural interpretation, “a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally—a connection which it is impossible to establish by reason in the horizontal dimension [or, one might add, in traditional narrative modes of thinking]. . . . It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding” (73–74). In narrative terms, Divine Providence or divine intentionality can be translated as what Eco, in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, calls a “model author,” or an entelechic or end-directed text (14–15). Stephen makes the intention of his parable evident when he compares it to Moses’ view of Palestine, which Moses may observe from the top of Pisgah but may not himself enter and take possession of. The parable is generally read as a metaphor for the situation of the Irish people, who can see their country (though only by climbing up a symbol of British dominance) but will not live to possess it. What Stephen is attempting to do is to transform the horizontal, so that, as Auerbach says, “the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events; it is simultaneously something which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future” (73–74). That is, the situation of the Irish in Stephen’s parable is part of a sort of universal history, and therefore has meaning (and perhaps hope) beyond its individual occurrence. But it is, at the same time, the “here and now.” It is still historia, an

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account of events in the valley. One other hopeful sign here is that Stephen is using symbolic narrative in a less solipsistic way than he has earlier. Instead of attempting to wish Irish history away, he is trying to place it in a context that makes it meaningful, but not with the kind of meaning conferred by closure in a linear narrative. Again, there are always gaps in history as recollection, whether national history or personal history. We fill in the national historical gaps with myth and legend, or what Peter Brooks calls “prehistoric truth.” We do the same with our personal histories or narratives, and with much the same purpose—as Brooks puts it, “to show the individual as a significant repetition of a story already endowed with meaning” (280). And at a more general level, this is what Stephen attempts to do for Ireland with his parable. Stephen’s ability to use symbolic narrative on a personal level, however, is limited by his idea that the past exists only as memory, not as emotion. He sees his problem with paternity as an intellectual one and tries to deal with it on an intellectual or empirical level, in his Hamlet theory, for instance, and he has attempted to deal with his mother in the same way—but the real crisis for Stephen is emotional, an element of the past he is prepared neither to deal with nor even to recognize, and maternity cannot be reasoned away as a “legal fiction” (U 9.844). In some ways, Stephen is making the same mistake Freud did initially—assuming that a mimetic narrative will suffice. In the climactic scene of “Circe,” Stephen tries to rationalize his behavior in a dialogue with his mother’s ghost, to rehearse it as recollected fact: “They say I killed you, mother. . . . Cancer did it, not I. Destiny” (U 15.4187–88). But in the reader’s mind, the phrase that follows the word destiny is, “It seems history is to blame”—a phrase repeated by Stephen, in fact, a few pages later (U 15.4371–72), and a phrase he cannot accept from the lips of Haines in the first episode. Stephen’s act of striking the chandelier with his ashplant is accompanied by a repetition of the image associated with Blake in the “Nestor” episode: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame” (U 2.9–10). Fairhall reads this image as evidence of Stephen’s view of world and Irish history as a series of intolerably violent and bloody events, and perhaps the primary sense in which history is a “nightmare” for him (33). But why would it occur after a reference to Blake’s impatience with “memory,” and then later in the chandelier-smashing incident? What is “the ruin of all space”? In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell it refers to the consumption of the entire creation by fire, after which, far from nothing, it will appear “infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt” (38). In Blake the event is

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catastrophic but positive, and his work is devoted to the importance of the necessary change in vision suggested by those seeming contraries. But at the end of the reference in “Nestor,” Stephen’s thought is “What’s left us then?” (U 2.10), and it is clear that he does not know. Later, as he strikes the chandelier, he cries out “Nothung” (U 15.4241), which is the name of Siegfried’s sword, but also suggests a sort of embracing of the void on Stephen’s part. The result is anticlimactic, as the sensible Bloom estimates the damage and concludes, “There’s not sixpenceworth of damage done” (U 15.4290–91). If Stephen’s act is meant as a rejection of memory (in the form of his mother’s ghost) or an attempt to destroy it, it fails. Later, he repeats, with a difference, “History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory” (U 15.4371–72)—thus associating his mother with memory, history, and linear narrative, but unable to find anything beyond them. Stephen can apply new narrative methods to his country’s past, then, but not to his personal past, in part at least because he is too busy denying (or fearing) its emotional impact. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode, one of the rocks Stephen must beware of is his younger sister, Dilly, who has spent a precious twopence on a French primer. She gets more sympathy from her brother than from her father, whom she has run into shortly before the encounter with Stephen at the bookseller’s cart and who, when she insists he has money to give her, calls her and her sisters “an insolent pack of little bitches” (U 10.682). From her father, however, Dilly gets a shilling and two pennies. From Stephen, who has more money in his pocket than Simon does, she gets nothing. Stephen feels guilty, but he is determined not to be destroyed: “She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her” (U 18.875–76). In the threat the past represents to him, the “old sow that eats her farrow” has become a much more personal and a more frightening “corpsechewer” (U 15.4214). Cheryl Herr says the “controlling aim of Stephen’s agonized self-examination” is to create some kind of “unifying code” that will connect all aspects of human experience (31), but he cannot do that intellectually or “mimetically,” through a rational assembling or reassembling of facts. At the personal level, symbolic narrative must be an emotional rewriting, because it is always about desire, never merely about memory. Or as Brooks puts it in his account of Freud’s study of the Wolf Man, “unconscious desire has its own history, its version of an unsatisfactory past and what would give it satisfaction, a history unavailable to the conscious subject” (278). In the “Proteus” episode, Stephen asks himself, “What is that word known

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to all men?” (U 3.435). He wants a key, the secret to a completed subject, one wholly connected to the natural and human worlds, and in an intellectualizing episode like “Proteus,” perhaps it is appropriate to speculate on such a key. But in “Circe,” the very opposite of “Proteus” in terms of conscious control of the self, it is all Stephen can think to ask his mother about: “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men” (U 15.4191–92). His reaction to her emotional/religious appeal to him (the same appeal she made on her deathbed)—smashing the chandelier with his ashplant—shows that he hasn’t yet learned what Freud discovered. Again, as Brooks says, “The past needs to be incorporated as past within the present, mastered through the play of repetition in order for there to be an escape from repetition: in order for there to be difference, change, progress” (134). Stephen is so focused on escaping the past that he does not realize that his salvation lies in the incorporation of the past into his present—just as Ireland is incorporated into a larger whole in the Parable of the Plums. He will not resolve his emotional difficulties until he moves beyond mere remembering and forgetting in his relationship with the past and understands that traditional closure—the “word known to all men”—is always a fiction.

Notes 1. Fairhall appears to assume here that all narrative “imprisons,” but I hope to show that this is not the case in Ulysses. 2. As Seamus Deane has suggested in his edition of A Portrait, Stephen’s wishful daydreaming about finding a green rose “somewhere in the world” (P 9) is probably a reflection on what is possible in words rather than in the world (P 281). 3. Quoted in Lukacher. We can find more general parallels for this kind of transformation in the work of Lévi-Strauss on myth. As Richard Kearney points out in “Myth and Motherland,” Lévi-Strauss identified myth as operating “according to a different kind of logic, a logic of unconscious symbolism, which is quite as rigorous as scientific logic. In Tristes Tropiques . . . LéviStrauss describes this mythic logic as ‘the fantasy production of a society seeking passionately to give symbolic expression to the institutions it might have had in reality’” (66n). The “might have had” refers to the absence of social and political conditions necessary to realize the dream, in which case, as Kearney says, “myth can serve as an ideological strategy with the purpose of inventing symbolic ‘solutions’ to problems which remain irresolvable at the socio-political level” (66n). Kearney is describing the “mythic logic” of the IRA, which turns defeat into victory, but as both Fairhall and Deane point out, that logic was used widely by the Irish and may well figure in Stephen’s thinking about history. Deane, speaking of the fall of Parnell and the failure of Home Rule, explains how the Irish dealt with the disappointments of history: “imagination figured powerfully as true what fact could not provide. The crowned king of Ireland, Edward VII, is a sorry figure beside the uncrowned king, Parnell” (qtd. in Fairhall 34). In both

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the society examined by Lévi-Strauss and in Irish society, memory—the intolerable historical reality—is replaced by desire. 4. Using symbolic narrative on the personal level to rewrite a “historically” incorrect or inadequate or incomplete self is always dangerous. Such an attempt can easily be channeled into mere nostalgia for an unrealized subject. Father Conmee, for instance, in the “Wandering Rocks” episode, inspired by a book called Old Times in the Barony, muses on its account of intrigues and adultery among the upper classes until we read, “Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawing room” (U 10.174–76). This is no more mature a fantasy than Stephen’s momentary delight in A Portrait at the thought of knowing the sins and sinful longings of women and girls in the confessional, should he become a priest (P 172). Or in the “Sirens” episode, Bloom catches Richie Goulding reinventing the past to supply his need for nostalgia. Richie misremembers Joe Maas singing a tenor air called “Sonnambula”: “Never would Richie forget that night. As long as he lived: never. . . . And when the first note. . . . Speech paused on Richie’s lips.” And Bloom thinks, “Coming out with a whopper now. Rhapsodies about damn all. Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a good memory” (U 11.623–27). 5. Stephen is engaged in backtracking here. While the Parable of the Plums suggests a more mature attitude toward his relationship with his country, the Hamlet theory is a return to the theme of escape. Part of Stephen’s purpose is to deny paternity by demonstrating that Shakespeare, like Adam, was a father but not a son, and could therefore see himself as “father of all his race.” In his analysis of Stephen’s theory, Hugh Kenner remarks, “Mere fact is for the artist to subsume, that he may be free from its claims” (114), and that is indeed Stephen’s method from the beginning—from the wistful thought of a green rose to the re-creation in verse of the tram car incident to the linguistic re-creation of the bird-like girl—all the way to the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, where Stephen says of the “past and its phantoms” that he is “lord and giver of their life” (U 14.1112–16). But escaping the claims of “mere fact” is a different thing from using imaginative vision to remedy their inadequacy as expressions of truth.

Works Cited Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Blake, William. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1965. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Deane, Seamus. Introduction. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By James Joyce. New York: Penguin, 1992. vii–xliii. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Penguin, 1996. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

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———. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Fairhall, James. James Joyce and the Question of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Herr, Cheryl. “Art and Life, Nature and Culture, Ulysses.” Joyce’s “Ulysses”: The Larger Perspective. Ed. Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987. 19–38. Kearney, Richard. “Myth and Motherland.” Ireland’s Field Day. Field Day Theatre Company. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. 61–80. Kenner, Hugh. “Ulysses.” Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York: HarperCollins, 1984. Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Nichols, Stephen G. Foreword. Fictional Truth. By Michael Riffaterre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. vi–x. ———. Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 57–124. Rickard, John S. Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of “Ulysses.” Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Zipes, Jack. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1999.

5 Inventing Identity in Ulysses “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom Tracey Teets Schwarze Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled with stones. That one day he will come again. Ulysses 6.923–24 That bitch, that English whore, did for him. . . . She put the first nail in his coffin. Ulysses 16.1352–53

The fabled image of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party throughout the 1880s, continued to pervade Irish culture after his death on 16 October 1891. Vilified in both the English and Irish press after being named co-respondent in the O’Shea divorce trial in November 1890 and subsequently ousted as head of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Parnell, the brilliant Home Rule strategist, was labeled a “serpent” in the O’Sheas’ Eden of (dubitable) domestic bliss, a defamer of morals and hospitality, and an arrogant, blinded Samson who, in Michael Davitt’s words, had “pulled the pillars from beneath the temple of a great cause in his own downfall” (642). Yet among many of his followers, these epithets also morphed into a resurrection mythology, with Parnell serving as its Christ figure that would one day return and deliver Ireland from its subservience to the British Crown. James Joyce’s Critical Writings mount an unmistakable defense of “the Chief,” while Joyce’s fiction both details and propagates Parnell’s curious rehabilitation. In contrast to Davitt’s claim that the Parnell-O’Shea affair was “unredeemed by a single romantic feature which could offer any excuse for [this] course of conduct” (637), Joyce admits no blame against the former political leader and

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offers an unmistakably romantic view of his hero’s amorous liaison. In Joyce’s eyes, Parnell sacrificed all for love and was unfairly punished by both English and Irish castigators. In his 1912 essay, “Shade of Parnell,” Joyce writes: [Parnell] fell hopelessly in love with a married woman, and when her husband, Captain O’Shea, asked for a divorce, the ministers Gladstone and Morley openly refused to legislate in favour of Ireland if the sinner remained as head of the Nationalist Party. . . . He was deposed in obedience to Gladstone’s orders. . . . The Irish press emptied on him and the woman he loved the vials of their envy. . . . They did not throw him to the English wolves; they tore him to pieces themselves. (CW 227–28) Yet if one unpacks the references to Parnell in Joyce’s fiction, it becomes clear that Joyce veers away from merely defending the Irish leader to exploring the shape of identity discourse itself. Parnell’s reputation—that is, the popular perception of his character and actions—never fully stabilizes in the public discourse. The Portrait Christmas dinner scene, set a few months after Parnell’s death in 1891, dramatically illustrates this schism of perception, as well as Joyce’s own condemnation of Parnell’s detractors. Dissension apparently remains as late as the anniversary of Parnell’s death in 1902, even though Mr. O’Connor declares with unintentional irony in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” “We all respect him [Parnell] now that he’s dead and gone—even the Conservatives” (D 132). For its part, Ulysses continues to reinscribe in 1904 not just the theme of Parnell’s shifting reputation but also rumors of his un-death and future return: “one morning you would open the paper . . . and read: Return of Parnell,” predicts the “Eumaeus” cabman. “Dead he wasn’t. Simply absconded somewhere. . . . He changed his name to De Wet, the Boer general” (U 16.1297–98, 1304–5). While some of these oscillations in identity discourse were propelled by Parnell’s real-life predilection for aliases—Mr. Fox, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Preston—that helped to conceal his rendezvous with O’Shea as they rented houses along the English seacoast, Joyce’s references acknowledge more than his hero’s awkward cover-ups and his own Parnellite sympathies. Joyce’s fiction captures the ways in which selfhood, as illustrated by these multiple, communal constructions of Parnell, becomes a moving target. The author’s fondness for Parnell, of course, is well known to Joyce scholars. But what has not been considered is the way in which another appropriated, misconstrued, and divided narrative of identity also enveloped the character of Parnell’s paramour and later wife, Katharine “Kitty” O’Shea. The discourse

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on “Kitty O’Shea” was as vitriolic as that aimed at Parnell but was subsequently undefended and unredeemed by any public voice save her own—and, as I will argue, that of James Joyce. In 1914, O’Shea broke the public silence she had maintained for more than thirty years regarding her relationship with Parnell, publishing an intricately layered, two-volume chronicle of her association with the Irish leader. In spite of the emphasis of its title, Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life answers not just Parnell’s critics but also O’Shea’s, who had cast her variously as whore, demon temptress, political saboteur, and Destroyer of a Great Man. In its pages and along its spine, the memoir reasserts a personal claim to identity construction and attempts to wrest back the representation of “Katharine O’Shea (Mrs. Parnell)” from a public discourse that had usurped and sullied it. In a powerful but finally ambivalent reassertion of self as speaking subject, the book’s divided female voice professes a series of self-contradictory claims and revelations that foreshadow the voice of Joyce’s Molly Bloom. Joyce’s use of O’Shea, like his treatment of Parnell, fuels his prolific exploration in Ulysses of the ways identity is produced, circulated, and subverted. Completed in 1921, seven years after the publication of O’Shea’s memoir and in the year of her death, both the “Eumaeus” and “Penelope” episodes of Ulysses ironize and deconstruct the public formulations of “Kitty O’Shea.” In “Eumaeus,” an episode permeated by the instability of publicly circulated identities as well as the associated unreliability of newspaper “truth,” Leopold Bloom considers the courtroom reports of O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell and offers a perspective that calls the official—and one-sided—narrative of the divorce into question. Bloom in fact offers a viewpoint never produced in court: Katharine O’Shea’s. Intriguingly, though not necessarily anachronistically, Bloom produces arguments and details dovetailing those that appeared in O’Shea’s 1914 memoir and establishes parallels between Katharine and his own wife, Molly. In “Penelope,” Joyce continues and complicates this indirect defense of O’Shea. Her ambivalent narrative converges with Molly Bloom’s text to foreground not just the disruptiveness of female-centered desire but also the profound instabilities of identity discourse as it circulates through both public and private arenas. In memoir and episode, each woman refutes other-constructed representations of her persona and highlights the potent subversiveness of the Self who speaks. Joyce owned O’Shea’s memoir and consulted it as he wrote Ulysses, according to Michael Gillespie, but when O’Shea is mentioned in Joyce criticism,

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the references tend unwittingly to repeat the accusations of sexual destruction heaped upon her by her contemporaries: Bonnie Kime Scott remarks that O’Shea serves as a “modern example of female treachery” inside Garrett Deasy’s misogynistic rhetoric in “Nestor” (13), a point with which Robert Spoo concurs, indicating that Deasy’s list features “women who tempted world-historical men to their beds” (22). Stuart Gilbert calls O’Shea “the woman who wrecked Parnell’s career” (358), and Marilyn Reizbaum locates her in the company of various “Eves one and all, lost or loose women, who threaten or bring about the downfall of men and civilizations” (169). Margot Norris’s work on “A Painful Case” is an important exception to these representations of O’Shea. Norris astutely argues that the Parnell-O’Shea liaison serves as a probable subtext for Joyce’s short story as it examines the devastating impact of unrealized desire; she also draws some thoughtful biographical parallels between the affairs of Joyce’s protagonists and the real-life lovers: among them, that “these are mature relationships” initiated in middle age, that “Captain Sinico, like Captain O’Shea, is frequently absent from home and judged . . . to be indifferent to his wife,” and that adultery is, in the case of both husbands, either implied (Captain Sinico’s “gallery of pleasures”) or alleged (Katharine O’Shea countercharged William O’Shea’s own adultery when he filed for divorce) (Norris 161–62). But correspondences between Katharine O’Shea and Emily Sinico resonate even beyond those Norris suggests. The story provides an important jumping-off point for Joyce’s interest in more than the Parnell-O’Shea affair; it also aligns him with the fate of the silenced woman. Katharine O’Shea, like Emily Sinico, was for several years distraught and despondent following the unexpected loss of her lover (now husband) in 1891: after a period of hysteria and nervous collapse, O’Shea spent two years in an asylum (Callaghan 172–74) and may have developed a drinking problem. But more intriguing than the evident parallels between the post-relationship distresses of Mrs. O’Shea and Mrs. Sinico is the thirdhand way in which we receive the information about Emily Sinico’s demise. Much like Katharine O’Shea in the years following Parnell’s death, Emily Sinico herself is silent, but she is certainly talked about—by her family, in court, by the press—inside narratives constructed by others that smack of rumor and innuendo. But unlike Emily Sinico, Katharine O’Shea will recover her voice, and this emergence from silence into speech finds a clear analogy in James Joyce’s women. The stifled, co-opted voice of Emily Sinico will shortly erupt into the insistent locutions of Molly Bloom.

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Constructing “Kitty” O’Shea: Silence and Resistance Friends and family called Katharine O’Shea “Katharine,” “Katie,” “Dick,” or “Queenie” (the last was Parnell’s particular pet name for her, along with “Wifie”). In spite of contemporary representations to the contrary, Katharine Wood pronounced her married name “O’Shee,” not “O’Shay,” and never, ever used the pejorative diminutive “Kitty.” Yet such negative, sexually charged epithets circulated freely and derisively in the public discourse during and after the 1890 divorce trial, representing O’Shea as a wantonly transgressive and powerful woman, a political operator who wielded influence touching both Gladstone and Parnell, and a seductive hoyden who betrayed Parnell and his beloved Ireland. As O’Shea recounted later, “The anti-Parnellites were extremely ingenious in inventing new forms of scurrility in connection with my supposed name. From one end of chivalrous Ireland to the other . . . the name of ‘Kitty’ O’Shea was sung and screamed, wrapped about with all the filth that foul minds, vivid imaginations, and black hatred of the aloof, proud Chief could evolve” (O’Shea 2: 170). But the virulence of the slanders Katharine O’Shea endured attests to more than hatred of Parnell; it also indicates the profound disturbance she herself caused inside the political patriarchy. Seen as somehow having usurped political power herself through the conduit of her sexuality, O’Shea was maligned by Parnell’s principal Irish Parliamentary Party opponent, T. M. Healey, as a “proved British prostitute” (“Ireland” 5), denigrated by illustrations in Punch, and riffed in Vanity Fair: “Some call her ‘The Political Princess.’ Others, ‘O’Shea who must be obeyed’” (438). Remarkably, O’Shea’s 1921 obituary in The Times, published nearly thirty years after Parnell’s death, continues to accuse her of sexual and political treachery, while Irish newspapers treated her no better. The Freeman’s Journal distastefully and dismissively acknowledged her passing, reporting it in terms of “the fall of the great leader” and “two unsavoury volumes” published in 1914 (qtd. in Callaghan 175). For her part, O’Shea never attempted while Parnell was alive to counter or subvert these caustic identity constructs. Parnell ignored the couple’s detractors and even refused to defend the divorce action; O’Shea, however, was greatly disturbed by both. Although she proclaims, “Never for one moment have I regretted that I made his point of view my own” (2: 233), the pages of her memoir, in fact its very existence, register a subconscious rift—a tension between loyalty to her lover and resistance to the public silence he imposed upon her. When Katharine complains about the “scurrilities” flung at “Kitty” O’Shea, for instance, Parnell responds gently, “It would really have hurt, my

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Queen, if those devils had got hold of your real name, my Queenie, or even the ‘Katie’ or ‘Dick’ that your relations and Willie called you.” Immediately—and somewhat suspiciously, given the withering sarcasm and unmistakable anger evident against “chivalrous Ireland” at the start of this passage—O’Shea reverses her position to submerge it within Parnell’s: “And then I was glad, so very glad that the gallant company of mud-slingers had with one accord leapt to the conclusion that those who love me called me ‘Kitty’” (2: 170–71). O’Shea’s declaration of joy here is forceful but not altogether convincing. This conflict becomes increasingly evident in the couple’s respective responses to the divorce proceedings. While Parnell remained stubbornly disengaged from the divorce suit, refusing to appear in court or even to appoint representation (although he did file a belated denial of the adultery charge), Katharine O’Shea engaged two solicitors and filed a series of countercharges, including neglect, cruelty, infidelity, and connivance. Of the divorce action O’Shea writes, “Parnell would not fight the case, and I could not fight it without him,” but she continued to try to persuade him until the last possible moment (2: 147). It is clear both in the newspaper account of the trial and in O’Shea’s memoir that she intended to defend the suit aggressively, repeatedly filing countercharges and proffering the required details to support them. That these details are “remarkable” (in the words of the solicitor-general)—even damning—in their implied confession of her own adultery suggests that Katharine O’Shea was less interested in winning the suit than in defending her name and reappropriating it from the degrading communal dialogue. Yet directed by a telegram sent by Parnell the morning of the trial while O’Shea still slept, her lawyer rose to announce her non-participation in the proceedings. As a result of this withdrawal, Captain William O’Shea was the only one of the principals who told his story in court and in the press, a scenario that so disturbed at least two jurors that they attempted to question him on their own. His wife would wait in silence for another twenty-three years before defying the public discourse on “Kitty O’Shea” and reconstructing her own narrative of self.

History, Herstory: Leopold Bloom, “Kitty O’Shea,” and Identity Discourse in “Eumaeus” The scandals provoked by O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell and resurrected by Katharine O’Shea’s memoir reveal the protean nature of identity as it is molded and manipulated in public discourse. Certainly identity is constructed within

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language; we each represent ourselves to others—and to ourselves—through the veil of language, and others characterize us through the same erratic medium. O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell and its aftermath make clear that once identity begins to circulate publicly, the self loses control of its public representations, and the other exerts an ever-increasing influence over its transmutations. As Leopold Bloom so aptly puts it, “The lies a fellow told about himself couldn’t . . . hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him” (U 16.845–47). Bloom’s observation points to several key facets of identity politics, including the proliferation of selves in the public discourse—representations sponsored not only by the self (“the lies a fellow told about himself ”) but also by the other (“the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him”)—and the unreliability and inauthenticity of both. Problems of multiplicity and authenticity are intensified in the case of public scandal, especially when the press becomes involved. O’Shea’s memoir, Joyce’s “Eumaeus,” and Molly Bloom’s “Penelope” narrative all recognize and illustrate these axioms, making clear not just that the public discourse plays fast and loose with representations of self but also that individuals themselves promulgate contradictory self-constructions. Preoccupied with issues of inauthenticity, imprecision, and even misprision in public representations of self, “Eumaeus” offers Joyce’s most detailed exploration of the mutable phenomenon of identity discourse and the role of the press in (re)producing a host of both minor and wholesale inaccuracies, especially as manifested in O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell. Identity as promulgated by the self through language is called into question early in this episode and is shortly followed by unmistakable indictments of the press’s reporting of the same. As if on cue, once Stephen Dedalus observes that names and other self-descriptions are “impostures” (U 16.362), we are introduced to a parade of potential linguistic frauds, among them D. B. Murphy, the mysterious redbearded sailor who spins a series of fantastic yarns about himself for public edification, and “the once famous Skin-the-Goat, Fitzharris,” the man public rumor has pegged as driver of the getaway car in the Phoenix Park murders— “assuming he was he” (U 16.323–24, 985). Newspaper reports collude in and extend this theme of fraudulent representation. As Bloom picks up the “pink edition extra sporting of the Telegraph” that “lay . . . beside his elbow,” Joyce’s text immediately and punningly disparages it: “tell a graphic lie” (U 16.1232–33). As Bloom begins to scrutinize the paper, he notes the “usual crop of nonsensical howlers of misprints” (U 16.1267), including the wholly inaccurate account of attendees at Paddy Dignam’s funeral.

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These observations about the press position Bloom in early sympathy with O’Shea, whose 1914 memoir shares Bloom’s disdain for purportedly “authentic” representations of identity by newspapers. Pursued by paparazzi who had staked out their home for interviews and images after she and Parnell married in June 1891, O’Shea recaps an article that appeared in an American paper: “I must admit that even if not exactly accurate, it was distinctly ‘bright.’ It was an illustrated ‘interview,’ and Parnell and I appeared seated together on a stout little sofa, he clad in a fur coat, and I in a dangerously decollete garment, diaphanous in the extreme, and apparently attached to me by large diamonds” (2: 240). The problem of authenticity is exacerbated in this example, as the reporter who conducted the research for the article never actually spoke with O’Shea, and her only contact with Parnell occurred as he escorted her out of the couple’s bedroom into which she had sneaked (2: 240). Such inauthentic narratives set the stage for Bloom’s divergent meditations on Parnell’s death and, subsequently, on O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell. Bloom reveals the shortcomings of both divorce court proceedings and newspaper reports by presenting a perspective elided by both—Katharine O’Shea’s. Immediately upon the cabby’s prediction of Parnell’s return—the implausibility of which is signaled by his belief that the event would be heralded first in the newspapers—Bloom begins to offer the first of his expansive viewpoints on the Parnell-O’Shea saga. Parnell’s demise was attributed in the press variously to a severe attack of rheumatism, congestion of the lungs and bronchitis, and congestion of the liver, brought on by a severe chill incurred during a campaign stop in Dublin when he stood for three hours in a cold rain. As he considers Parnell’s death, Bloom fixes on the diagnosis of “acute pneumonia” and then adds a detail absent from the press accounts—that Parnell’s illness might have been avoided if he had not “neglected to change his boots and clothes after a wetting” (U 16.1313–16). This detail is, however, present in O’Shea’s memoir— O’Shea writes that she always packed a special change for Parnell in case of inclement weather, but his host had mistakenly taken the satchel home, and Parnell “had had to sit in his wet things for some hours” (2: 249–50). The addition of this mildly anachronistic point is important here because it signals Joyce’s willingness, through Bloom, to present a perspective on O’Shea unavailable in 1904 Dublin discourse: the tender, thoughtful lover supplants the calculating, adulterous woman. Bloom continues to provide this unusual angle in two additional interpolations as he ponders the details of the divorce trial itself. The first follows and contrasts an exchange that represents the popular construction of “Kitty

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O’Shea” as the sole scapegoat for Parnell’s fall, his death, and William O’Shea’s humiliation: —That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the shebeen proprietor commented. She put the first nail in his coffin. —Fine lump of woman all the same, the soi-disant townclerk Henry Campbell remarked, and plenty of her. She loosened many a man’s thighs. (U 16.1352–55) There is Joycean irony evident in the way these statements, intended to demean O’Shea by representing her as wanton, actually undermine their speakers by inverting the power relationships they hope to assert. Men here are rendered unintentionally impotent in this specifically feminine pose, their thighs “loosened” by O’Shea, and their Irish autonomy endangered by her predatory Englishness. But there is more to see in this passage, which, as it stands, elides any consideration of O’Shea as a potentially wronged wife. Thus it also reflects the dynamic of the trial itself, which heard only Captain O’Shea’s version of events. When one juror, attempting his own cross-examination, asked Captain O’Shea about the countercharge of neglect filed by his wife, Captain O’Shea was allowed, incredibly, to assert only the evidence of his own diary. He told his questioner, “No one has ever made the slightest pretence that there was a want of attention on my part. In fact, my diaries show clearly that I was a kind husband and a kind father. The diaries are put in and would be enough to satisfy anybody” (“O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell,” 18 November 1890, 13). In contrast to the divorce court and newspaper reports, however, Bloom refuses to condone this singularly narrow perspective, pointedly refusing to smile or to laugh at the Kitty-blaming banter. Instead, Bloom recounts to himself the official facts of the “historic story” (U 1361) and subverts them with several points sympathetic to O’Shea. First, he wonders how such a scandal could have ensued when “the thing was public property all along” (U 16.1368–69), a point O’Shea also makes in her book, especially in regards to the supposed shock of Parnell’s lieutenants and Gladstone at the allegation of adultery. She writes, “For ten years Gladstone had known of the relations between Parnell and myself, and had taken full advantage of the facility this intimacy offered him in keeping in touch with the Irish leader” (2: 153). In the second instance, Bloom completely contravenes the one-sided public account of the trial, which affirmed William O’Shea’s innocence of all countercharges. Rather than accepting William O’Shea’s blamelessness, Bloom considers in abstract terms the possibility that the husband

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might have connived in the adultery, and arrives at the following extraordinary conclusion, given the evidence presented: “It was simply a case of the husband not being up to scratch, with nothing in common between them beyond the name, and then a real man arriving on the scene” (U 16.1379–82). In the next interpolation, in which Bloom recollects returning Parnell’s hat during the fracas that destroyed the offices of United Ireland—the loss of which is specifically noted in O’Shea’s text (2: 168)—he again thinks kindly of O’Shea, noting that she “was the first to perceive” that the Irish had placed Parnell on a pedestal that he ascended only with reluctance (U 16.1509). Before Bloom ends his public-discourse-subverting reverie, he makes another connection that solidifies his sympathy with O’Shea’s position. He fuses his wife, Molly, with Katharine O’Shea, supposing that Katharine, like Molly, was of Spanish descent. Bloom has obviously learned from the papers that the O’Sheas briefly lived in Spain after their marriage, and he assumes—incorrectly, in keeping with the ethos of the episode—that the roots are Katharine’s. He thinks to himself, “it was just the wellknown case of hot passion, pure and simple, . . . and just bore out the very thing he was saying as she also was Spanish or half so, types that wouldn’t do things by halves, passionate abandon of the south, casting every shred of decency to the winds” (U 16.1406–10). Just before pushing Molly’s photograph across the table, Bloom says aloud to Stephen, “Just bears out what I was saying . . . about blood and the sun. And, if I don’t greatly mistake she was Spanish too” (U 16.1411–13)—then referring to Molly’s picture: “Do you consider . . . that a Spanish type?” (U 16.1425–26). Bloom’s mingling of Katharine with Molly here completes his sabotage of the identity politics that had continued to cast Katharine Parnell as “Kitty O’Shea.” Bloom steadfastly refuses to blame Katharine for her relationship with Parnell, acknowledging desire but not culpability. Similarly, Bloom’s position also indicates sympathy with Molly’s fledgling affair and suggests his own complicity with that event, thus acknowledging its inherent complexity. Most importantly, Bloom’s reflections set the stage for Joyce’s emphasis in “Penelope” on the elided perspective of the maligned, adulterous wife, told in her own words. As Molly Bloom reappropriates the discourse that has represented her throughout Joyce’s text, her synchronicity with Katharine O’Shea becomes increasingly apparent.

Identity Discourse, Memoir, and Molly Bloom In episode 18 of Ulysses, Joyce exploits the opening Leopold Bloom has created in “Eumaeus.” Here Molly Bloom, discussed and denigrated throughout

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the day and kept silent by her author for more than five hundred pages since her initial appearance in episode 4, finally erupts into speech. Just as “Kitty O’Shea” was bandied about in communal dialogue from Dublin to New York to London, so also “Molly Bloom” circulates freely in the public discourse of Ireland’s capital: she is labeled a “gamey mare” by Lenehan (U 10.566–67), an exhibitionist by Simon Dedalus (“Mrs. Marion Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions” [U 11.496–97]), and, as we have seen, a dark siren by her husband (“a Spanish type”) as he tries to interest Stephen Dedalus in her physical charms. As Molly Bloom reflects on the silence often required of women—the various ways in which husbands and lovers can shut them up—her narrative interrogates and undermines these public constructions of her persona. It also ranges freely through the day’s events, her personal history, and her familial relationships, presenting an intricately layered and often contradictory selfaccounting, thus establishing a subtly textured bond with Katharine O’Shea’s memoir. Molly’s text has been referred to as monologue, soliloquy, polylogue, star turn. I would add “memoir” to the list. If “Eumaeus” can be seen as Leopold Bloom’s oral rehearsal of “My Experiences in a Cabman’s Shelter,” then “Penelope,” perhaps, can function similarly—as an early, oral draft of Molly Bloom’s memoir. Memoir writing is an intricate project, requiring a rhetorical strategy that allows engagement with various publicly circulated personae as well as the construction and assertion of more private renditions of self. Memoir presents its case in a mode that is necessarily self-contradictory, in a quasi-private, quasi-public venue: it reads like a diary, yet it is written with a specific, exterior audience in mind. Written at a remove, usually years, even decades, following the events and relationships it recounts, memoir is also temporally unstable in terms of its accuracy and reliability. And if it recounts tangled relationships, such as extramarital affairs, memoir becomes still more complex as it attempts to navigate the thicket of subterfuge, moral stricture, guilt, self-protection, and public exposure. For all these reasons, memoir presents identity as a multi-layered, many-voiced, and often contradictory construction, qualities exhibited by the narratives of both Katharine O’Shea and Molly Bloom. Intricate layers of self proliferate inside memoir, including identity constructs propagated by others. Both Katharine O’Shea and Molly Bloom refute other-sponsored usurpations of their identities. For her part, Katharine challenges the discourse on “Kitty O’Shea” circulated by both the Irish and British political establishments, countering the “political princess” moniker by proving that Parnell and not she (as was usually supposed) had refused to defend the adultery charges, and that she had urged conciliation, not intransigence, in

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Committee Room 15. Every sentence of O’Shea’s book, moreover, is designed to contest the charges of promiscuity levied against her, and to show her utter fidelity to Parnell, the man both he and she considered her “true” husband. By undercutting the ethics of her detractors—for instance, charging Gladstone and his cronies with hypocrisy for their protestations of shock at the affair— O’Shea manages to deflect the credibility of their assertions, a tactic that Molly Bloom will also employ. Molly, like Katharine, responds vociferously to the identity discourse that purports to represent her around Dublin. Molly counters other-constructed visions of herself, answering each of her critics in turn and asserting a divergent and complexly layered version of personal identity. Like O’Shea, Molly refutes the discourse that presents her as a “loose woman” by undermining the sources of her disparagement. Lenehan becomes “that sponger he was making free with me after the Glencree dinner” (U 18.426–27); Simon Dedalus is rendered “such a criticiser” (U 18.1088) and observed to be “always turning up half screwed” (U 18.1290–91); Bloom is mocked as an unwitting pimp: “I wonder he didn’t make him a present of it [the photograph he shows to Stephen] altogether and me too” (U 18.1304–5). Molly also counters those critics who would impose upon her their definitions of Irishness. She apparently has been yanked from the Dublin stage, her incorrectly imperialistic program replaced by young Kathleen Kearney’s more nationalist repertoire. Nonetheless, Molly is unapologetic and utterly disdainful of “Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers” (U 18.878). She considers Home Rule and Land League politics to be “blather” and, like Katharine O’Shea, holds no high opinion of Irish politicians (U 18.1187). Most significantly, she refuses to let “Irishness” be defined by the popular nationalist discourse and herself to be positioned outside it. Instead, Molly offers her own definition of Irishness—her face. “I had the map of it all” (U 18.378). Such vociferous stances by Molly Bloom and Katharine O’Shea reappropriate with varying success the right of self-representation over other-sponsored versions of identity. As they find their voices, both women begin to exorcise the public discourse that has attempted to define and contain them. But this is not to say that they manage to create and promulgate a unified identity inside their narratives. Instead, Katharine O’Shea and Molly Bloom offer up multi-layered, many-voiced constructions, rife with contradictions in their depictions of others and of themselves. Katharine O’Shea, for instance, affirms her lover’s virility by proclaiming Parnell to be “of immense muscular strength,” able to lift a downed horse to its feet (with the aid of a few stalwart

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policemen) (2: 71), but she subconsciously impugns his prowess by also reporting him to be an oddball hypochondriac who feared that her green carpet was the cause of his sore throats (1: 138). Molly Bloom’s descriptions of Leopold Bloom and Blazes Boylan similarly vacillate, although Molly is more overtly critical of her men than is Katharine. Bloom, too, apparently behaves in a lessthan-manly fashion when he is ill: “if his nose bleeds youd think it was O tragic” (U 18.24), but he measures up well to another masculine benchmark. “He . . . looks after his wife and family” rather than spending all his money at the pub (U 18.1279). Blazes is evidently a well-endowed and vigorous lover— yet “Poldy has more spunk in him” and is thus more likely to get her pregnant should she decide she wants another child (U 18.168). In these paradoxical renditions of identity we begin to intuit just how unstable identity constructs are, created through the prisms of perspective and observed behavior. Not insignificantly, these destabilizations all occur before such discourse begins to circulate in the broader oscillations of the public arena. Such incongruities also extend to the women’s self-constructions. Katharine O’Shea’s inconsistencies are evident throughout her text, which at once avows her desire to defend her reputation and then acquiesces in Parnell’s refusal to do so, and asserts the openness of her relationship with Parnell then repeatedly describes their efforts at subterfuge. Most remarkable among the contradictions in O’Shea’s memoir, perhaps, is the way it serves, as her countercharges in the divorce trial would have, as both self-confession and self-justification in terms of her adultery. She couples a disingenuous defense of her first husband with an unmistakable indictment of his connivance in the affair, artfully asserting his innocence of the liaison while at the same time building a case that makes his ignorance utterly implausible. Although Katharine recounts several instances of deceiving Willie and denying the affair to him, she also straightforwardly reports that Parnell took up residence at Eltham in December 1880, and that William O’Shea challenged Parnell to a duel over the issue, having discovered Parnell’s presence at Eltham in January 1881 (1: 176). But Parnell did not cease stopping there; in fact he ensconced himself there with increasing permanence, constructing a cricket pitch in 1882, building a study/workroom in 1885, stabling two horses (President and Dictator) in the neighborhood, and bringing two dogs to live at the residence. Such narrative detail, offering physical evidence of another man’s presence at his wife’s abode, even in the context of her subterfuge and denial, strains the credulity of the claim—made halfheartedly by Katharine in her memoir and stridently by William O’Shea at the divorce trial—that any further suspicions he may have had

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during this period were allayed. These details point indirectly and subversively to William O’Shea’s connivance in the adultery, as well as to a neglect of his wife that borders on abandonment. Thus Katharine O’Shea’s contradictory and inconsistent text manages handily to affirm and subvert the one-dimensional rendering of “Kitty O’Shea” born at her divorce trial in 1890, substituting Katharine—adulteress, yes, but also neglected wife, lover, and faithful companion to Charles Stewart Parnell—in her stead. The divided voice of O’Shea’s memoir truly—and brilliantly—shatters her own “silence of years.” Molly Bloom’s divided text also sets before us an inconsistent self-representation, a fractured identity discourse, which both indicts and endorses her affair with Blazes Boylan. Molly’s narrative establishes the irrefutable fact of her adultery, yet it also suggests a variety of extenuating circumstances for her actions, among them sexual neglect, loneliness, and desire. Justifying her afternoon’s activities on the grounds of Leopold’s sexual negligence, Molly wonders, “what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young still can I its a wonder Im not an old shriveled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep” (U 18.1397–1401). She appears in places to channel aloud the defiance expressed in Emily Sinico’s eyes—“I suppose he thinks Im finished out and laid on the shelf well Im not no nor anything like it” (U 18.1021–23)—and her despair: “as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit” (U 18.746–47). More directly, Molly also charges connivance against Leopold. She accuses him of already knowing about the affair begun that afternoon—“he [Bloom] has an idea about him [Boylan] and me hes not such a fool” (U 18.81)—and even of expediting it, theorizing why Bloom has sent their daughter, Milly, away for the summer to be a photographer’s apprentice: “on account of me and Boylan thats why he did it” (U 18.1007–8). In full voice, Molly appears to reject the indirection exercised by Katharine O’Shea regarding her husband’s complicity in her affair, first blaming Leopold entirely and then, perhaps, excusing them both. “Ive a mind to tell him every scrap . . . serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress . . . if that’s all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much” (U 18.1515– 18). These ruptures in Molly Bloom’s narrative reflect the myriad complexities of her relationships. Why haven’t Leopold and Molly had sex since before their son Rudy’s death (for ten years, five months, and eighteen days) (U 17.2282)? Why would Leopold connive in his wife’s affair? Why would he not try to stop the tryst if he knew of it? Will Molly reinitiate sexual relations with Leopold or serve him breakfast in the morning as he evidently has requested (U 18.1–2),

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or will she flaunt her lover and continue to see him? To cope with and accommodate these multiple instabilities in her life, Molly’s identity discourse splinters, undergoing an elaborate series of negotiations and compensations as she explores her options and considers how she might have arrived at this place. What we begin to see in both Katharine’s and Molly’s texts as they recursively construct, contradict, and reconstruct themselves is that self-authored identities are not entirely consistent or reliable, either, in their representations. The layering of identity in memoir extends far past refutations of other-sponsored selves and into multiple, divided, self-sponsored representations. Katharine O’Shea represents herself as “a Parnellite” to Willie, yet in other passages her antagonism to the Irish Parliamentary Party is evident; more tellingly, she attempts to depict a self that is frank and earnest in its utterances, yet she elides important but inconvenient details about her relationship with Parnell, such as the two additional daughters he fathered after the birth and death of Sophie Claude in 1882. Molly Bloom also presents herself as a straight shooter, someone who hates “that pretending of all things” (U 18.491), yet she pretends all the time: she feigns ignorance of the dirty words in the letter Bloom writes her (“of course I had to say no for form sake dont understand you I said” [U 18.324– 25]); she pretends “not to be excited” when she gives a hand-job to Mulvey on Gibraltar so many years ago (U 18.810); she may have even faked orgasms early in her marriage (“no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway” [U 18.98–99]). Most significant among Molly’s pretenses, perhaps, is the one that has occurred that very afternoon: her inability to express herself candidly with Boylan during their lovemaking. “I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only . . . who knows the way hed take it” (U 18.588–90). Devlin has asserted that Molly’s pretending can signify both subversion of social convention and oppression by the same force, but the multiple self-constructions of Joyce’s protagonist also suggest something simpler and just as profound. Molly Bloom’s ubiquitous contradictions evoke the stories, even falsehoods, we each tell ourselves when our ideals of selfhood—unified, noble, honest—fail to measure up to the person we, or public discourse, has put forth in the world. Molly Bloom mentions “Kitty O’Shea” just once in her narrative, admiringly, in the context of complimenting another woman’s hair (“tossing it back like that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street” [U 18.478–79]). But this is not the Kitty O’Shea, who did not reside in, or ever visit, Ireland. That Joyce’s Molly Bloom invents another “Kitty O’Shea,” one to be admired for her physical beauty, in no way disparaged, and seemingly in no way related to the infamous

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lover of Charles Stewart Parnell, helps to underscore the ultimate mutability of identity discourse in Joyce’s fiction. Ultimately, Joyce’s defense of Katharine O’Shea Parnell is subtle and profound. As he presents the public discourse on “Kitty O’Shea,” Joyce also consistently and irrefutably undermines the construct. Joyce’s representation of O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell is “history repeating itself with a difference” (U 16.1525–26): subversive of the divorce courts, the press, and public-sponsored renditions of relationships and identities. Allowing Katharine O’Shea to have her say in his novel, through the agency of both Leopold and Molly Bloom, Joyce once again insists on the way in which multiple perspectives render elusive or even nonexistent the nature of “truth,” especially as regards identity politics. O’Shea’s memoir and Joyce’s final episode demonstrate that the presentation of self in memoir is just one more version of identity, no more or less authentic than all the other versions, signifier and signified forever shifting.

Notes 1. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph called Parnell “a traitor to his Queen, a traitor to his friend, a conspirator against the law of the land, a rebel against the canons of the most high, the desolator of the home in which he was a hospitably entertained guest, the serpent which . . . left its slimy trail upon the domestic Eden into which he had crept” (qtd. in Vanity Fair 438). 2. The messianic myth of Parnell extended far beyond the British Isles, to the farthest reaches of the empire: “He could have saved us all, perhaps, as he saved Ireland, or would have saved her had they let him live,” writes Lucinda Sharpe of Brisbane, Australia, in a letter to United Ireland in January 1892 (qtd. in D. R. Pearce 250). 3. A brief chronology of the Parnell-O’Shea relationship: in July 1880, Katharine O’Shea met Charles Stewart Parnell, and based upon the growing intimacy of their letters, it appears they consummated their relationship by October. By this point, O’Shea and her husband of thirteen years, Captain William O’Shea, had maintained separate residences for several years, most recently he in London and she with their three children at Eltham (about eight miles from central London), visiting one another occasionally and writing frequently. Parnell took up regular residence at Eltham in December 1880. Between 1882 and 1884, Katharine O’Shea bore three daughters, all fathered by Parnell, one dying shortly after childbirth. In December 1889, William O’Shea sued for divorce and won the undefended case, heard after several delays, in mid-November 1890. Parnell lost the chair of the Irish Parliamentary Party two weeks later. He and Katharine O’Shea married on 25 June 1891, slightly more than three months before Parnell’s death. O’Shea published her memoirs in 1914. She died in 1921. 4. Joyce wrote to Carlo Linati on 18 February 1921 that he had finished “Eumaeus” (Letters III 38–39); he finished “Penelope” later in the year. O’Shea died on 5 February 1921. Fritz Senn notes that Herbert Howarth was the first to wonder if Joyce had been inspired to write “Eumaeus” after reading O’Shea’s memoir following its May 1914 publication; Senn himself has

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suggested that O’Shea’s cliché-filled, often sensational prose may have inspired the episode’s style (175). 5. R. F. Foster notes: “A letter from her daughter Norah to Henry Harrison delicately hinted at a taste for the bottle” (207). 6. O’Shea served as an intermediary between Gladstone and Parnell from 1882 until 1886, carrying messages from one to the other and helping to facilitate negotiations between the British prime minister and the Irish delegation leader (O’Shea 1: 256–58). 7. Evidently O’Shea was prompted to publish her memoir, which she had intended to do posthumously, when one of Parnell’s former colleagues, William O’Brien, alleged in the Cork Free Press in September 1913 that if Parnell had testified at the divorce trial, he would have shown himself to be “rather the victim than the destroyer of a happy home” (qtd. in Foster 199). 8. Subordinated in most discussions of style in “Eumaeus” are the implicit connections between language and identity: Budgen notes the episode’s “tired” language (255), which Gilbert takes as a symptom of Bloom’s exhaustion (360); by contrast, Kenner continues the association of the style with Bloom’s own but claims, “tired it is not” (130). Leckie has produced the most cohesive reading of the episode’s style and its fascination with adultery; she argues that it mimics divorce court journalism, and points out that the episode’s “tripartite obsession with boats, adultery, and questions of identity” mirrors the tripartite English court system, which arbitrarily linked admiralty court, divorce court, and probate court (the settlement of wills “often hinged on disputed questions of identity,” she notes) (733–34). 9. For more on the intersections of Irish masculinity and nationalism, see my chapter “‘Do you call that a man?’ The Discourse of Anxious Masculinity in Ulysses” in Joyce and the Victorians. 10. Certainly, given the hallucinatory evidence in “Circe,” Bloom is also registering unconscious parallels here between himself and William O’Shea, and Parnell and Blazes Boylan, Molly’s lover. 11. Senn also points out this association, and notes with interest that O’Shea’s information itself is unreliable, produced (as she admits) from another printed source (an appropriately Eumaean gesture). For his part, however, Joyce creates an actual, if fictional, eyewitness to the event (174). 12. “Monologue” and “soliloquy” had long been the conventional but unanalyzed descriptors of Molly’s voice, but in 1994, Cheryl Herr, Kimberly Devlin, and Susan Bazargan pointed out the performative and multivocal nature of Molly’s text. Herr notes that it resembles a theatrical performance; Devlin suggests that Molly impersonates conventions of femininity in order to parody, expose, and flout them; Bazargan recharacterizes Molly’s narrative from monologue to colonized dialogic, pointing to its extended engagement with competing voices. 13. Such a possibility also helps to explain certain typographic curiosities of the episode, places in which the conventions of writing, versus those of recitation, seem to take precedence. Consider, for instance, the truncated, abbreviated address Molly supplies for Gardner, “Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt” (U 18.389) and the strikeouts of a second “h” in “sympathy” and an extra “w” in “nephew.” “I always make that mistake” says Molly (U 18.730). 14. Daughter of an Irishman who served in the British army, Molly recounts that she sang

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Kipling’s jingoist ballad, “the absentminded beggar,” while “wearing a brooch for Lord Roberts” at her last outing at St. Teresa’s hall, more than a year ago (U 18.377–79). I assume this is why her current concert will be held in Belfast, where she might be better received. 15. Her son Gerald O’Shea’s reputed “pugilistic” editing on behalf of his father’s reputation (Foster 203) might explain the fissure in how Katharine presents William O’Shea’s knowledge of the affair, but it does not illuminate other rifts in her narrative, especially those that emerge as she reports her own and then Parnell’s responses to her public denigration. 16. Not insignificantly, Katharine O’Shea gave birth to three daughters, Sophie (1882), Clare (1883), and Katie (1884), all fathered by Parnell. She mentions only one—Sophie Claude, who died shortly after birth—in her memoir. William O’Shea likewise omits these difficult-to-explain daughters in his courtroom testimony. 17. Of Katharine O’Shea’s six children, Gerald (b. 1870), Norah (b. 1873), and Carmen (b. 1874) were William’s.

Works Cited Bazargan, Susan. “Mapping Gibraltar: Colonialism, Time and Narrative in ‘Penelope.’” R. Pearce 119–38. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses.” London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Callaghan, Mary Rose. “Kitty O’Shea”: A Life of Katharine Parnell. London: Pandora Press, 1989. Davitt, Michael. The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland or the Story of the Land League Revolution. London: Harper and Brothers, 1904. Devlin, Kimberly J. “Pretending in ‘Penelope’: Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom.” R. Pearce 80–102. Devlin, Kimberly J., and Marilyn Reizbaum, eds. “Ulysses” Engendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Foster, R. F. “Love, Politics, and Textual Corruption: Mrs. O’Shea’s Parnell.” High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889–1939. Ed. Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 197–211. Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” New York: Vintage-Random, 1955. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. James Joyce’s Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1986. Herr, Cheryl. “‘Penelope’ as Period Piece.” R. Pearce 63–79. “Ireland.” The Times 5 Nov. 1891: 5. Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Leckie, Barbara. “The Simple Case of Adultery.” James Joyce Quarterly 40.4 (2003): 729–52. Norris, Margot. Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. O’Shea, Katharine (Mrs. Charles Stewart Parnell). Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life. 2 vols. New York: George H. Doran, 1914. “O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell.” The Times 17 Nov. 1890.

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“O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell.” The Times 18 Nov. 1890: 13–14. Pearce, Donald R. “‘My Dead King!’ The Dinner Quarrel in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.” Modern Language Notes 66.4 (1951): 249–51. Pearce, Richard, ed. Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Reizbaum, Marilyn. “When the Saints Come Marching In: Redeeming ‘Cyclops.’” Devlin and Reizbaum 167–84. Schwarze, Tracey Teets. Joyce and the Victorians. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Senn, Fritz. “Trivia Ulysseana IV: ‘The Kitty O’Shea Touch.’” James Joyce Quarterly 19.2 (1982): 173–76. Spoo, Robert. “Genders of History in ‘Nestor.’” Devlin and Reizbaum 20–29. Vanity Fair 22 Nov. 1890: 438.

6 Barracks and Brothels Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses Greg Winston I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to do, you know, and the young man run up behind me. But I’m faithful to the man that’s treating me though I’m only a shilling whore. Ulysses 15.4381–83 The processes of military manpower acquisition are gendered processes. . . . Ignore gender—the social constructions of “femininity” and “masculinity” and the relations between them—and it becomes impossible adequately to explain how military forces have managed to capture and control so much of society’s imagination and resources. Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives

In her study of culturally and historically diverse militarized settings, feminist historian Cynthia Enloe examines numerous roles women assume for their social and economic survival. Prominent among these is the role of prostitute. Ranging from medieval Europe to late-twentieth-century Thailand, Enloe’s work constantly underscores the socioeconomic interdependency of soldiers and prostitutes. Her argument focuses closely on how military authorities frequently manipulate ideologies and economies of sexuality to serve their purposes of troop recruitment and retention. Women who work in the sexual commerce surrounding bases of military operations are therefore central to building and maintaining the ranks of volunteer armed forces. Like Enloe’s historiography, James Joyce’s fiction observes a significant and essential connection between male warriors and female camp followers. The visit to a brothel by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man hints briefly at the interrelation of the military and sexual workforces, which effectively subverts or at least redirects the power arrangements in male-female,

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English-Irish, and soldier-civilian relations. Joyce’s portrayal of a day in the life of Dublin in June 1904 revisits this connection in still greater depth, often defining the colonial city as a place in which men as sexual competitors and women as sexualized commodities are further complicated amid the tangled nets of social value and territorial controversy that result from a military occupation. As rival to native men and purchaser of native women, the occupier represents a dual threat, what Sheldon Brivic describes as “an extension of the general historical principle that the conqueror has a right to the women of the conquered, with men’s competition deciding women’s fates” (48). This is indeed the case for Cissy Caffrey, in her metamorphosis from seaside nanny to Nighttown whore, and for the unnamed “nightwalker” Bloom and Stephen encounter during her nocturnal reconnaissance beside the cabman’s shelter. Both women are conscripted to serve an economy of male sexual desire that depends upon the militarization of women’s lives. When reading Ulysses with an eye to its sexual and martial economies, it helps to consider how June 1904 belonged in its own right to an era whose social order and economic opportunity were to a great extent shaped by expectation of, and preparation for, military action. If 1904 did not include major armed engagement for British imperialism or Irish nationalism, the year still bore witness to the terms of a dominant, escalating militarism throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe. As during the cold war some five decades later, or the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” a century hence, the sheer anticipation and anxiety over global conflict did much to create its own enveloping ideology and local conditions, some intended, others incidental. For both civilian and red-coated residents, life in an occupied city generated a unique set of socioeconomic circumstances that Joyce records in his fictional accounts of Dublin. Arguably, those most affected were the soldiers who found themselves stationed there and the local women left with limited options for economic survival.

In the Company of Men Near the close of Ulysses’ “Circe” episode, Cissy Caffrey keeps time with Privates Compton and Carr in a scene that rewrites her minding (in “Nausicaa”) of her volatile twin brothers, Tommy and Jacky, whose own apparel (“sailor suits with caps to match and the name H.M.S. Belleisle printed on both” [U 13.13– 14]) and argument about Martello-tower methods of sandcastle construction prefigure the row of British regulars. As Cissy explains in her alibi during the

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mock-inquest into the assault on Stephen Dedalus, she was “in company” with the soldiers. From the caregiving role of older sister she resurfaces in Bloom’s subconscious fantasy to perform domestic service of another sort. Exchanging private intimacy for private pay, she assumes the new role of prostitute and with it the camaraderie and jargon of the barracks. As “only a shilling whore,” even her bargain price echoes the famous king’s shilling earned by nineteenthcentury Royal Army recruits. Such military punning resituates her character and, in so doing, extends a parallel of sexual and armed services seen across Joyce’s writing. The night after Bloomsday is just one more link in a discursive chain that illustrates the interdependent economies of prostitution and militarism. Mark Osteen sees in Cissy’s association with Compton and Carr “a grouping that implies the collaboration of political and economic exploitation: Britain has prostituted the Irish economy by limiting employment and industry, enforcing this oppression with military power” (349). I would go even further, recognizing that Cissy, not to mention the entire Dublin economy, exists primarily to serve the soldiers of the “brutish empire” (U 15.4569–70). The hallmark of militarism is that all areas of social and economic life evolve to serve the military machinery of the state; the notion of armed service to the country is replaced by its corrupt inversion: the compelling sense that citizens exist primarily to service the armed forces. Cissy’s metamorphosis into shilling whore thus shows a troublesome trend. The connection of the martial and sexual economies in Joyce derives primarily from the heightened sense of militarism that pervaded Dublin life prior to the Great War. While notable studies by James Fairhall and Robert Spoo already consider Joyce’s work in the context of World War I, the interest here is less with actual armed conflict than with Joyce’s depiction of the social and ideological consequences of constant military preparation and occupation, to the extent that other activities of society are relegated to serving the military aims of the state. Militarism in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland was a primary support of British imperialism. The 1901 British census of Ireland recorded “21,000 troops and officers, nearly 4,000 militiamen and yeomanry, and over 2,000 members of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines” (qtd. in Fitzpatrick 381). With such formidable troop numbers, one was hard-pressed not to witness some display of British force in Ireland on a daily basis. As David Fitzpatrick explains, “The presence of these forces in more than eighty barracks, with their parades, drills and ceremonies, provided Ireland with reiterated reminders of the military presence and power of the state” (381–82). In Dublin that power

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and presence announced themselves in rather systematic spatial terms. Herbert Gorman describes “swaggering British soldiers” as a constant in the Dublin of Joyce’s youth (39). These troops had their counterparts in the gathering militia and numerous volunteer secret armies of the Irish republican movement, which played a competing role for manpower and political support while they sought to militarize the population for nationalist purposes. But the social and economic impacts of the nationalist armies in 1904, though burgeoning, remained slight in comparison to those of colonial forces on Irish soil. The residential arrangement of the British military in Ireland’s largest city had a symbolic as well as functional role, with soldiers barracked at strategic locations so as to encircle and bisect the entire city. On the north side of Dublin, in Phoenix Park, were the Magazine Fort and Marlborough (Royal) Barracks. Closer to the city center were the Aldborough Barracks in Portland Row, opened in 1853 as the central supply depot for all troops stationed in Dublin. South of the river, the Richmond, Wellington, Portobello, and Beggars Bush barracks, from west to east, mirrored the north-side configuration to complete the engirding pattern. A number of these barracks are given direct mention or oblique reference in Joyce’s fiction. For example, the Pigeon House, the boys’ failed destination in “An Encounter,” was for most of the nineteenth century a naval fort and barracks controlling the mouth of the Liffey and gateway to Dublin harbor; and in “Counterparts” the beleaguered central character Farrington finds himself, in one of his darker moments and as precursor to his own militant patriarchy, near his house on Shelbourne Road “in the shadow of the wall of the barracks” (Dubliners 93). The somber location gives the reader cause to consider if the military presence does not have more than a little to do with the violent domestic scene with which the story concludes. The abundant dispersion of troops, when combined with high unemployment rates for young women, solidified the rise of prostitution in the nineteenth-century Dublin economy. Unlike Belfast to the north, Dublin had not developed a strong industrial base; most employment in some way served the British civil and military administration headquartered there. The vast majority of jobs for women were in the service sector, mainly hotels, restaurants, and private residences. The large number of female emigrants who poured into Dublin to escape the Famine in the countryside only added to an employers’ market, forcing many young women to seek other ways to earn a living. Prostitution became the chief source of income. Bonnie Kime Scott notes how “Brothels flourished, as Ulysses testifies, furnishing outlets for men who could

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not satisfy themselves with angels and income for single, ineligible women, who needed an independent wage for survival” (14). The high-water mark for Dublin prostitution came in 1845 with 419 brothels in the city; the number declined in the post-Famine decades but still averaged around 80 through the turn of the century (Luddy 57). In 1871 the anti-prostitution advocate William Logan was appalled at the vast number of nightwalkers in the city: “In a back-street in a neighborhood of the barracks there were, it was said, some 200 of those wretched girls” (qtd. in Fagan 11). Not surprisingly, Logan saw the most solicitation occurring within close proximity of military installations, whose location by this time corresponded rather predictably with the red-light districts of Dublin. Though he does not specify the name, there is every reason to believe Logan was describing the most famous of these, the neighborhood known as Monto. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the focal point of the Dublin sex industry was the district bounded by Mecklenburgh Street Lower (renamed Tyrone Street and later Railroad Street), Lower Gardiner, and Montgomery (now Foley) streets. It came to be called Monto, an abbreviation for Montgomery Street, but was also known as “The Kips,” “The Digs,” and “The Village.” Another variant, “Nighttown,” was coined by journalists and came to be preferred by Joyce, whose characters in Ulysses access the area from Mabbot Street, near Amiens Street (now Connolly) Station. Readily accessible from all the north-side barracks, Monto certainly thrived as a nighttime destination for the rank-and-file soldier. Additional clients included the military officer class, sailors, merchants, businessmen, and members of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Police were known to visit, in occasional vice raids, but more often on illegal monetary shakedowns that were frequently combined with sexual recreation. An elaborate system of tunnels, some rediscovered during 1980s public works projects on Gardiner Street, provided quick escape from several brothels in the event of a police raid. The same subterranean network was used by the rebels of Easter Week for transporting weapons, personnel, and information to and from the city center, a fact that suggests the spatial duality of “Nighttown” with regard to sexual economy and military reconnaissance. The wide variety of Monto brothels catered to the different social strata of the clientele. Streetwalkers carried on a brisk outdoor trade in casual sexual favors, while basic brothels offered modest rooms and beds for those willing to spend a little more. The best-maintained and priciest establishments, called “flash houses,” were run by madams of considerable influence. These attracted the highest class of customer, including King Edward VII during a 1904 royal

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visit, for an evening entertainment that moved from musical lounges to private boudoirs. Among the top tier of flash houses, Bella Cohen’s on Mecklenburgh Street Lower became the setting for “Circe.” Joyce would have even found entries for Cohen and several other notable madams in his frequent sourcebook for Dublin commercial and residential listings, Thom’s Directory. He also likely experienced some of these establishments firsthand during his own Monto sojourns between 1898 and 1904. Lesser red-light districts grew up in close proximity to the Magazine Fort and Marlborough Barracks, at the southern edge of Phoenix Park along Conyngham Street. Thus in Finnegans Wake Joyce lends the name Lili Coninghams to a streetwalker known for turning her tricks and conning the hams (men) of that neighborhood. South of the Liffey, French Street and its environs were home to a number of successful houses, all within close range of the Portobello and Wellington barracks. (It was later renamed Mercer Street in an unsuccessful bid to confuse and discourage repeat customers.) Indeed, if not for the sizable population of “garricksons” (FW 55.35), the bordellos of Monto and these smaller districts could never have thrived in such volume or duration. In some parts of the country prostitutes systematically rotated between military depots; in others they joined together in semipermanent encampments quite literally in the shadow of military bases, in a sort of unofficial feminine parallel to the sanctioned masculine camaraderie just beyond the wall. Testifying before the 1881 Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Acts, one witness noted prostitutes “always moving about from Fermoy to Kinsale, and the garrison towns . . . and sleeping under forts, and behind the barracks” (qtd. in Luddy 59). One renowned group composed of both prostitutes and common-law wives was nicknamed the Wrens of the Curragh after establishing their camp outside Ireland’s largest army barracks some thirty miles west of Dublin (Luddy 60). Such social juxtaposition saw female camp followers in somewhat contradictory roles—one maternal, family-centered, and financially dependent, the other sexually unabashed, socially unfettered, and financially independent. In this regard, the Wrens share something in common with Cissy Caffrey, who in her two incarnations (in “Nausicaa” [U 13.13–77] and in “Circe” [U 15.41–72, 4380–4405]) represents both woman’s sanctioned place as caregiver within the patriarchal family and her morally suspect role as whore, posing a grave threat to traditional monogamy and economic dependence. If by today’s standards this might seem a favorable reading of the unenviable position of sex worker, Joyce for one saw little to distinguish that occupation from

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the role of wife, observing in Stephen Hero that “A woman’s body is a corporal asset of the State: if she traffics with it she must sell it either as a harlot or as a married woman or as a working celibate or as a mistress” (SH 202). For all the limitations on both aspects of her character, Cissy is still the hand that rocks the cradle and a minor governess in Bloom’s sexual subconscious. Once constructed, barracks remained obvious, fixed reminders of the military presence; brothels, on the other hand, were often covert and fluctuating establishments, springing up wherever conditions were optimal, and shrinking into the background whenever the local economy or municipal policy grew less hospitable. The return of regiments to Dublin following the Boer War led to overcrowded conditions in several barracks and the need to billet soldiers in nearby lodging houses, where they lived in close proximity to women. In many neighborhoods faced with mounting economic pressures and declining opportunities, the slippery transition from lodging house to brothel was neither long nor complicated (Fagan 10), a point well illustrated by the Dubliners story “The Boarding House.” The result was a de facto elision of barracks and brothels into a kind of dual-purpose urban space intermingling male and female, soldier and prostitute, colonizer and colonized. In such close quarters, the interpersonal politics of occupation were most immediately felt and intimately realized. But any conceptual similarities quickly dissolve in a comparison of the material realities in the lives of the two groups, one tended to by the state, the other well exploited (but for the most part ignored) by official policy. As one medical officer observed in the Hardwicke Fever Hospital Report of 1818, “the pay of the soldier is ample, he is well clothed, well fed, well lodged, and well looked after, and all his wants in health as well as in sickness are provided for. Not so the women of the town” (qtd. in Prunty 33). Examining the continuum from domestic to sexual servitude, and also the odd symbiosis of soldiers and sex workers, Joyce’s fiction develops its own inquiry of the complex historical link between barracks and brothels. While some studies treat the topic of prostitution in Joyce, none concentrates primarily on the relation of soldier to streetwalker. Nor does any trace the constant thread of this subject that extends backwards and forwards from “Circe.” The rest of this essay attempts just that, by reconsidering some of the relevant but overlooked details in Joyce’s early fiction before returning to Ulysses. At the confluence of the two industries, Bella Cohen’s becomes a meaningful and dynamic space for examining issues of gender and sexual identity, politics and power, occupation and surrender. In the economic and ideological transactions of soldiers and sex workers, the Bloomsday visit to Nighttown depicts the

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combination of forces at work behind a mutually exploitative system of illusory power.

Photographic Memory Joyce first explores the link of private and prostitute in A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, where it emerges in Stephen’s combined memory and anticipation of a “gloomy secret night” in the red-light district (Portrait 96). He pictures the “squalid quarter of the brothels,” where his feet will lead him with a will of their own back through dark streets of sexual desire (Portrait 96). He sees the gas lamps being lit and envisions the whores emerging from the houses in preparation for another night’s trade. At last his senses recall various minutiae from inside the brothel, concluding with the visual: “his eyes, a ring of porter froth on a clothless table or a photograph of two soldiers standing to attention or a gaudy playbill; his ears, the drawling jargon of greeting” (Portrait 96–97). It is on the second of these details, the soldiers’ photograph, that I will initially focus. While the function of photography in the semiotics and structure of Joyce’s writing has received recent attention, the content and context of this particular picture seem altogether overlooked by analyses of Portrait. The photograph seems mundane enough, another of Joyce’s realistic brushstrokes and part of the expected decor of the location. Yet, it also seems to say more owing to its surroundings and the limited omniscient perspective of the narrative. “Standing to attention” suggests not simply upright infantry but the double entendre of phallic readiness, a meaning perhaps only fully realized in its display on a brothel wall. If in other locales—say, a post-office billboard or recruiting station door—pictures of soldiers might just be soldiers, here they are sexualized objects and sexual clientele. Awaiting their turn, the privates see themselves in the pinup on the wall, reinforcing their regular status and occupation—of the brothel and the women’s bodies, of the city and the country. The other determining context of the soldiers’ photograph is of course Stephen’s own sexuality. His thoughts select and frame the entire remembered scene as he counts the soldiers’ photograph among a cluster of images that “wounded or shamed” his senses: the melodramatic word choice not only speaks to Stephen’s inner conflict about his liaisons with hookers but also evinces two probable outcomes for the soldier in combat: the glory of returning wounded from battle or the public humiliation of returning unscathed.

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Prior to announcing the photograph, the passage equates other terms of battlefield engagement with sexual encounter. For example, the pursuit of prostitutes is conflated with the heightened tensions surrounding military patrol and surprise ambush: Stephen sees himself “waiting for a sudden movement of his own will or a sudden call to his sinloving soul” (Portrait 96). Like a soldier poised for combat, he stands aloof from conscious thought, merely awaiting instinctive reaction from himself or official order from his commander. The description renders ambiguous the question of whether the greater power resides with the attacker or the target that lures him. Still another phrasing—“As he prowled in quest of that call” (Portrait 96)—combines the base language of sexual/military predation (“prowled”) with the high-minded tones of courtly love and chivalric honor in the field (“in quest of that call”). In this manner, the textual as well as the spatial surroundings of the photograph alert us to a host of associations and, in so doing, reinforce a connection between armed conflict and sexual commerce. In Stephen’s Nighttown and Joyce’s Europe, the two are inextricably and dangerously linked. These are some possible readings of the content and context of the photograph, but what might be said of its pretext? Who put the picture there in the first place, and why? Perhaps the house madam or one of her employees, in a gesture of genuine admiration or clever advertisement? Or a soldier/customer in a boastful statement of conquest? Neither confirming nor denying such possible explanations, the narrative simply makes room for speculation. Thus, the photograph serves as a dynamic interpretive space, another of Joyce’s resonant lacunae or meaningful “(w)holes” that Richard Pearce describes. The one thing we do know in most certain narrative terms is that Joyce’s writing (and Stephen’s perspective) puts up the photo for our interpretation. What emerges from its placement is a uniform semiotics that couples the British occupying force with the Dublin skin trade.

Disgraced Irish Capital In the opening of “Lotus-Eaters,” Bloom, like Stephen, notices a posted military image, also in a context of illicit sexual preoccupation. Eagerly anticipating a note from typist Martha Clifford, he spies in the Westland Row Post Office a “recruiting poster with soldiers of all arms on parade” (U 5.56–57). It moves him to think not along politico-military lines but in personal and sexual terms: “He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket, reviewing again the soldiers on parade. Where’s old Tweedy’s regiment? Castoff soldier. There:

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bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he’s a grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is: royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats. Too showy. That must be why the women go after them. Uniform. Easier to enlist and drill” (U 5.65–69). In his study of British recruiting posters in Ireland, Mark Wollaeger sees in this passage Bloom’s “insight into uniforms as a technique of recruitment and social control” (97). But Bloom’s critical reading of the poster goes even further in that it both acknowledges and undermines the sexual appeal of the uniform. By trying to locate his father-in-law among the ranks, he in essence seeks his lost connection with Molly in her ceaseless infatuation with military men. Like Stephen’s photograph, the recruiting poster indicates how militarist ideology can become purposefully and dangerously entangled with male sexual identity. But rather than inspiring him to enlist and become one of its showy figures, the poster images inspire feelings of inadequacy in the civilian Bloom. Feeling privately outmanned, he seeks refuge in the rhetoric of the aforementioned public debate: “Maud Gonne’s letter about taking them off O’Connell street at night: disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith’s paper is on the same tack now: an army rotten with venereal disease: overseas or halfseasover empire. Half baked they look: hypnotised like. Eyes front. Mark time” (U 5.69–73). He further undercuts the soldiers’ potency by allusion to the syphilis epidemic, an ongoing problem in Dublin and other garrison towns. Policies of regulation and encouragement to the Irish sexual economy were as much a part of the British army as battle plans and supply lines. Bloom’s thoughts about the public health risks of the standing army echo a concern expressed by Oliver St. John Gogarty in “Ugly England,” a series of three articles for “Griffith’s paper” (the United Irishman) in the fall of 1906. The first of these declaims the hypocrisy of Sludge (a nickname for the average Englishman), who “cries out again at the godlessness of the foreign Governments regarding their treatment of those women who associate with their soldiers.” In language that suggests a definite source for Joyce/Bloom, Gogarty asserts the British army to be “rottener and more immoral than any or all of the armies in Europe put together” (3). For evidence he highlights the sexual behavior of troops stationed in India, where women are held captive in a state of sexual slavery worse than a harem and “debauched at the good pleasure of the Army, a body of men who, as their own statistics show, are already more than half leprous from venereal excess” (3). It is difficult to read such accusations of hypocrisy without recalling that Gogarty himself was a frequent visitor to Nighttown during his medical student days. Writing as a doctor and married Irishman with an anti-British agenda, “O.G.” assumes his own safe distance, even if his reinvention as Buck Mulligan—not

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to mention his own memoir, mischievously titled Tumbling in the Hay—would ensure his eternal association with the flash houses of Monto. After reading Gogarty’s article, Joyce too seemed intent on making the issue a matter for further public discussion. It may have already become a pressing private concern if, as some suggest, Joyce himself contracted syphilis during a 1903 or 1904 visit to Monto. At any rate, he forwarded the editorial to Stanislaus on 24 September, followed with a letter saying, “I hope you will appreciate the full flavour. The part about the chummies is particularly rich” (Letters II 164). The topic apparently remained on Joyce’s mind when he wrote his brother ten days later, “I wish some unkind person would publish a book about the venereal condition of the Irish; since they pride themselves so much on their immunity. It must be rather worse than England, I think. I know very little of the subject but it seems to me to be a disease like any other disease, caused by anti-hygienic conditions. I don’t see where the judgement of God comes into it nor do I see what the word ‘excess’ means in this connection” (Letters II 170–71). To some extent, in Ulysses, Joyce did go on to write that book. The theme of sexually transmitted disease, especially syphilis, recurs throughout the novel, from private thoughts to bawdy jokes. It represents a matter of both personal humiliation (in the case of Mr. Breen) and national security. Syphilis becomes an equal threat to British and Irish, soldier and whore, occupier and occupied. Thus in “Cyclops” when Bloom comes to the defense of the Nelson policy, certain rights of British colonies, and civilization, there comes the Citizen’s rejoinder: “Their syphilisation, you mean . . . sons of whores’ gets! No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. The only civilization they have they stole from us” (U 12.1197–1200). To ardent Irish nationalists, syphilis and other maladies of the brothels could prove more effective than armed uprising at ousting the occupying force. The implication is that prostitution might play an unexpected role in the military liberation of the country: prostitutes in a sense become soldiers in a silent battle, armed with their own biological weaponry. British authorities knew as much and responded to the crisis with the passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864–69, under which all women suspected of prostitution were subject to medical examination. Any woman discovered to have a sexually transmitted disease could be held for as long as nine months in a city Lock Hospital and upon release had to be licensed with the police as a prostitute. In reference to the nightwalker plying her trade close to the cabman’s shelter, Bloom comments to Stephen, “It beats me . . . medically I am speaking, how a wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital

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reeking with disease can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his sober senses, if he values his health in the least . . .” (U 16.728–31). By the time of Bloom’s remark the direct regulation of prostitution had ceased following repeal of the acts under mounting public pressure. Moreover, a calculated military policy continued to rely on and encourage the Dublin red-light district in order to appeal to young, single men and fill regimental ranks. To this end, in the spring of 1904 British authorities were permitting troops stationed in Dublin to spend free evening hours away from the barracks. The policy was part of a wider recruitment effort during the final stages of the Boer War, when forces had become overextended across the empire. Scores of young regulars roamed Dublin city center with the dangerous mixture of money in their pockets and time on their hands. Such a typical roving band moves through Finnegans Wake: “Tap and pat and tapatagain, (fire firstshot, Missiers the Refuseleers! Peingpeong! For saxonlootie!) three tommix, soldiers free, cockaleak and cappapee, of the Coldstream. Guards were walking, in (pardonnez-leur, je vous en prie, eh?) Montgomery Street” (FW 58.23–26). Whatever their regiment, whether Coldstream Guards or Royal Fusiliers, this raucous band will not “refuse a leer” at any woman as they navigate the Monto. They are “three tommix”—that is, three Tommies, slang for British infantry— but also “free to mix” with women of the town, all the more so owing to the extended curfews and relaxed off-barracks restrictions that, as mentioned, were now standard operating procedure in the post–Boer War army. Like so many roving soldiers, they also exhibit some of the sure and fluid signs (“cockaleak and cappapee”) of sexually transmitted diseases. What Joyce expresses in the multiplicity of wordplay was voiced more directly and deliberately in June 1904 through open letters and newspaper editorials that regarded the situation as, in the very least, creating a public nuisance and, at worst, representing a public health risk that could rival or even surpass that which had inspired the Contagious Diseases Acts several decades earlier. A column in the United Irishman of 11 June complains how “in the heart of the city at night-time conduct has been openly carried on by the British soldiery and the women who consort with them that could not be witnessed in the streets of any other city in the world” (“Dublin Corporation” 5). One Dublin Corporation member rated the “immorality and indecency” along Westmoreland and O’Connell streets as worse than anything he had seen in Paris, Port Said, Cairo, or Bombay. Yet, the columnist makes the issue more about national sovereignty than public decency, noting how, “Under the British flag, in the

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twentieth century, the Corporation of Dublin has not power even to regulate the traffic in the streets” (“Dublin Corporation” 5). While free off-base evenings for all recruits might have expanded the economy of prostitution, opponents like the United Irishman saw British military authority as pandering Dublin itself (“the streets of the capital”) to men in British uniform, with debauchery and sexual conquest serving as metaphors of the city’s colonized status. The column concludes with a firmly voiced doubt that any Tory member of the Corporation who opposed measures to remedy the situation and has a daughter “would attempt to walk with her along the west side of O’Connell-street on a Sunday evening” (“Dublin Corporation” 5). One remarkable feature of the United Irishman editorial is its ability to turn a blind eye to the issue of prostitution and the condition of those engaged in it. Control of the streets is of primary political and strategic concern, while the well-being of the women, physical and moral, goes unmentioned. Young women are only referred to as daughters to be protected from the danger of free-roaming soldiers or those who “consort” with such soldiers; the commentator stops short of discussing the economic role in which women find themselves catering to the military. By contrast, during the sobering conversation of “Eumaeus,” the arrival of the streetwalker in the black straw hat elicits a guilt-ridden sympathy from Bloom: “Unfortunate creature! Of course I suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition. Still no matter what the cause is from . . .” (U 16.731–33). If Bloom is vague about just who “some man” might be, that is due to the fact that it is he: he was once her customer (“Yes, it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane” [U 11.1253–54]) and has already tried to avoid her once earlier in the day outside the Ormond Hotel bar. Meanwhile, the striking metaphor of surveillance used to describe the anonymous nighttwalker announces another association. She is said to be “palpably reconnoitering” (U 16.705) beside the cabman’s shelter; much like Cissy Caffrey, she resembles the actions and assumes the mien of the militarized culture and military men that constantly occupy her body and her country. In what Katherine Mullin calls “a disquieting gaze of retaliatory female spectatorship” (191), the streetwalker stares straight into the masculine scene. If only for reasons of social and economic survival, she has come to imitate and even intimidate those who buy her services. In their commercialized sexual roles, both the unnamed streetwalker and Cissy Caffrey challenge contemporary representations of the Irish female. They are Dublin women with economic agency and sexual freedom, and as such they function as antitypes to Cathleen ni Houlihan, the feminine personification of

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Ireland awaiting her male suitor and savior, that was so frequently touted by the core writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance. (The decrepit milkwoman of “Telemachus” represents Joyce’s earlier invocation and deflation of this female archetype.) In reply to Bloom’s rather paranoid and paternalistic call for invasive state regulation of prostitutes, Stephen offers an alternative view (that echoes his prior rumination in Stephen Hero) stressing the woman’s fundamental mercantilism: “In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not the power to buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap” (U 16.737– 38). Within Ulysses, the language harkens back to his earlier retort against Mr. Deasy’s anti-Semitism, while at the same time undoing the argument Bloom has proposed for essentially reenacting the Contagious Diseases Acts of three decades before. Clair Wills regards the prostitute in Joyce’s colonial city as being “a sign of both imperial domination (in her link with the barracks) and, through her association with venereal disease, the corruption of that political/ military system” (90). This exchange of Bloom and Stephen illustrates her opportunity for exploitation by both adherents and opponents of that system. To the republican mind-set, women serve as the feminized personification of Ireland-as-victim, a metaphor Stephen seeks to elude in his characterization of the nightwalker; to British command, Dublin women potentially represent either a strategic threat or enabling accomplice to national defense, a powerful role that Bloom, distracted and distressed by his own potential exposure, refuses to comprehend. In such depictions of prostitution and its effects, Joyce critiques the possibility of pandering Irish womanhood, whether physically or symbolically, to either militant nationalism or military imperialism. In Joyce’s Dublin, whether soldiers’ nightly presence on the street amounts to heightened surveillance or increased solicitation remains unclear, as evidenced by Bloom’s appropriation of the ambiguous expression “disgrace to our Irish capital” (U 5.70) from Arthur Griffith’s newspaper. The phrase points, on the one hand, to the moral hazards of military or sexual submission (or both), and on the other, to the physical, political city (i.e., Dublin as capital of Ireland) or the human capital that nightly walks its streets (or both). Even if the debate were seemingly about two very different kinds of streetwalking, Bloom’s distillation invites reading their precise connection within the ironic vagary of euphemism. Thus, certain potency resides not simply with armed forces patrolling for sexual opportunity but in the merger of the two effected through the guise of imprecise language. Much like the architectural elision of barrack and brothel in Monto and the other red-light districts, this linguistic

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merger establishes in Ulysses a dynamic ideological space in which to examine the interplay and interdependency of Edwardian Dublin’s sexual and military economies. It is in that space that Joyce constructs the combative brothel of “Circe.”

Setting Things Rite During the altercation with soldiers at Bella Cohen’s, the intercourse of martial power and sexual commerce undergoes a fascinating re-visioning. This occurs when the stage directions amplify the moment of Stephen’s assault by Private Carr into an epic battle scene: “Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech. Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. . . .” (U 15.4661–65). A gathering host of screaming war birds adds Irish mythic connotations while the darkened midnight sun lends a biblical dimension (of the battle of Jericho) to the scene. In the warriors sprouted from dragons’ teeth, the symbolic roots of civil-military strife in ancient Thebes are notably present, as they “exchange in amity the pass of knights of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabers” (U 15.4681–82). All of this coincides with a continuous female entourage of diverse backgrounds and identities, some menacing, others vulnerable. Some become participants in armed struggle, others its innocent bystanders or potential victims: the screeching whores are followed by flying witches, half-undressed society ladies, and fancily dressed factory lasses who “toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs” (U 15.4677), a corrupted revision of the lyric earlier performed in “Wandering Rocks” by the highland troops of the viceregal cavalcade (U 10.1251–57). While the initial cause of trouble is Cissy Caffrey’s jostling by Stephen, the social miscue escalates to more serious internecine strife. Dueling Irish statesmen from several eras establish a dialectic of physical force and constitutional nationalism: “Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O’Brien against Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M’Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond” (U 15.4687–4688). The fundamental question of whether to use force against the outside invader threatens to undo society by causing it to unleash its own forces upon itself. These conflicts are soon displaced by anagrammatic revisions of individual names set hilariously against themselves—“John O’Leary against Lear O’Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The O’Donoghue of The Glens against The

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Glens of The O’Donoghue”(U 15.4685–4688)—each suggestive of the eternal divisiveness of individual as well as nation. The psychological chaos and political disarray of the narrative can apparently only be righted—or rited—by the capable hands of Father Malachi O’Flynn and Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love, the clerical reincarnations of Mulligan and Haines. In a reiteration of the mock mass from the book’s opening, the current ritual seeks a proper realignment of female and male. The poor old milkwoman is replaced by the fecund Mina Purefoy on the altar of the sacred feminine; the phallic military stronghold of the Martello tower morphs to an open umbrella, an image representing the ancient heraldic symbol of the masculine as well as a precise inversion of the feminine/chalice that rests on Mrs. Purefoy’s pregnant belly. This heraldic semiotics is previously visible in the “gilt chevrons” of Major Tweedy’s uniform, when he “gives the pilgrim warrior’s sign of the knights templars” (U 15.4614–16), the first of two references to the legendary military protectors of the sacred feminine and Grail symbology. While critics from Stuart Gilbert to Patrick McCarthy refer to the ritual as a “black mass,” the stage directions refer to a “camp mass” (U 15.4695), thereby sustaining the battlefield conceit. The inherent paradox of the repeated phrase “back to the front,” applied to the physical positioning of O’Flynn and Love, carries a connotation of gender reversal, evidenced by the “lace petticoat and reversed chasuble” worn by O’Flynn. Moreover, O’Flynn’s “two left feet” point to the ancient idea of the left (L. sinister) in its association with the female as sinister to Christianity. Perhaps most significantly, going “back to the front” suggests returning to the front lines in a military theater of operations, a term that had come into increasingly common usage during the entrenched combat of World War I (e.g., the western and eastern fronts). The potential of a return to warfare, and the ambivalence of the entire scene, seems to suggest the utter precariousness of history, specifically Ireland and Europe in their periods of civil and international upheaval. The question of whether to turn back to the front or have one’s back to the front—and all the destructive masculinities and marginalized femininities there created—becomes integral to pacifying the world through love and a return to the sacred feminine. “Circe” thus extends the alignment of warrior and harlot, the camp mass serving as climactic antidote to primarily masculine orthodoxies of calculated violence and sexual oppression. By purposefully enmeshing questions of political loyalty and physical sacrifice within an economy of desire, Joyce’s fiction repeatedly underscores how the British garrison remained an industry co-dependent with prostitution.

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Mark Osteen observes how “British soldiers in Nighttown claim to ‘protect Ireland’ but treat her as a whore” (337). To be sure, Joyce’s fictional representation of sexual commerce in 1900s Dublin describes women in the unsavory aspects of militaristic domination and economic competition. At the same time, it asks readers to consider how the existence of armed forces interweaves questions of political loyalty and social acceptability. Whether from psychosexual causes or for reasons of simple financial survival, many young women found employment in the sex industry of early-twentieth-century Dublin. In that realm, their connection to men in military service was virtually inescapable. If brothels and brothel workers seemed to exist somewhere beyond the social, legal, and financial norms, Ulysses shows how the women of Nighttown, like the soldiers they so often served, were both objects and agents of looming surveillance and calculating control in a highly militarized society.

Notes 1. The brothers’ names are also slang terms for English soldiers and native Dubliners, known as Tommies and Jackeens, respectively. 2. Writing to Nora of brother Tom Barnacle’s 15 December 1915, enlistment in the British army, Mrs. Barnacle complained, “at present he is only getting a shilling a Weeke he sined me half his pay than I am getting seperation allowance” (qtd. in Maddox 139). 3. The last of the Monto brothels was razed in 1925. 4. In his chapter “Terrorism, Prostitution, and the Abject Woman,” Enda Duffy reads the episode as a discourse on the “intimate revenge” of terrorism. Margot Norris considers theatricality and performance to be the driving force in “Circe.” 5. Its mere existence as photograph is relevant to numerous other moments in Joyce, a number of which Brandon Kershner considers in his essay situating Ulysses within the cultural context of nineteenth-century photography. 6. Though several degrees milder than a brothel visit, his correspondence with the typist Martha Clifford nevertheless represents a transgression of sexual propriety and marital fidelity, not to mention postal decency: why else the alias Henry Flower? 7. In her reading of “Penelope,” Suzette Henke observes how Molly Bloom’s long-standing attraction to soldiers—Lieutenant Harry Mulvey and British officer Gardner—stems from her “having initially courted the attentions of a detached and distant patriarch” (132), her father, himself a career officer. 8. I will not attempt here to resolve a long-running debate as to whether for Joyce syphilis went beyond the literary. Burton Waisbren and Florence Walzl analyze the symbolic role of the disease in Dubliners; Vernon Hall and Waisbren regard syphilis as a dominant theme and preoccupation of Ulysses. J. B. Lyons dismisses much of their view in his argument that Joyce suffered from neither contracted nor congenital syphilis. Martin Bock argues that simply living in fear of the disease was enough to influence Joyce. Bock convincingly locates the source of Joyce’s syphilitic descriptions in contemporary medical dictionaries. More recently, in a

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chapter about Joyce in Pox, a study of syphilis in the lives of historical and cultural celebrities, Deborah Hayden resuscitates the matter by considering Joyce’s consultation on the matter with medical friend Gogarty. 9. See Luddy 56–62 and Prunty 263–66 for more on the Contagious Diseases Acts. 10. Suffragist and activist Anna Maria Haslam was a leading force in the movement for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. See Mary Cullen’s chapter on Haslam in Women, Power and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (161–96). 11. As a geographic term, the word capital is either inaccurate or wishful thinking, since Dublin had not technically served as a capital since the Irish parliament was abolished in the 1800 Act of Union. Had it succeeded, the Home Rule movement would have reestablished an Irish parliament and returned the city to capital status. 12. The chevron (inverted V), ancient representation of masculinity (phallus) and inverted counterpart to the chalice symbol of femininity, still holds a prominent place on the epaulettes of European and American military uniforms. In Finnegans Wake the chevron also functions as the symbol of Shaun (the Post). 13. The OED gives the date 1665 for the first recorded use of the term front to signify a place of military engagement, in Manley Grotius’s Low Country Warres. It becomes prevalent throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II.

Works Cited Bock, Martin. “Syphilsation and Its Discontents: Somatic Indications of Psychological Ills in Joyce and Lowry.” Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul Tiessen. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. 126–44. Brivic, Sheldon. Joyce’s Waking Women. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Cullen, Mary. “Anna Maria Haslam.” Women, Power and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Ed. Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy. Dublin: Attic Press, 1995. 161–96. “Dublin Corporation.” United Irishman 11 June 1904: 5. Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern “Ulysses.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Enloe, Cynthia. Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives. London: Pluto, 1983. Fagan, Terry. Monto: Madams, Murder, and Black Coddle. Dublin: Inner City Folklife Project, 2002. Fairhall, James. James Joyce and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Fitzpatrick, David. “Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922.” A Military History of Ireland. Ed. Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 379–406. Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Gogarty, Oliver St. John. “Ugly England.” United Irishman 15 Sept. 1905: 3. Gorman, Herbert. James Joyce. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939. Hall, Vernon, and Burton A. Waisbren. “Syphilis as a Major Theme of James Joyce’s Ulysses.” Archives of Internal Medicine 140 (1980): 963–65. Hayden, Deborah. Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

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Henke, Suzette. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1990. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Terence Brown. New York: Penguin, 1992. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. R. B. Kershner. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1993. Kershner, R. B. “Framing Rudy and Photography.” Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (1998): 265–92. Luddy, Maria. “Prostitution and Rescue Work in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.” Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Ed. Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1989. 51–84. Lyons, J. B. “‘Thrust Syphilis Down to Hell.’” James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium. Ed. Morris Beja, Philip Herring, Maurice Harmon, and David Norris. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. 173–83. Maddox, Brenda. Nora. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. McCarthy, Patrick. “The Jewel-Eyed Harlots of His Imagination.” Éire-Ireland 17.4 (1982): 91– 109. Mullin, Katherine. James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Norris, Margot. “Disenchanting Enchantment: The Theatrical Brothel of Circe.” “Ulysses” Engendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes. Ed. Kimberly Devlin and Marilynn Reizbaum. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 229–41. Osteen, Mark. The Economy of “Ulysses”: Making Both Ends Meet. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Pearce, Richard. “Teaching for the (W)holes.” Approaches to Teaching Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Ed. Kathleen McCormick and Erwin R. Steinberg. New York: Modern Language Association, 1993. 97–104. Prunty, Jacinta. Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998. Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Spoo, Robert. “‘Nestor’ and Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses.” Twentieth Century Literature 32.2 (1986): 137–54. Waisbren, Burton, and Florence Walzl. “Paresis and the Priest: James Joyce’s Symbolic Use of Syphilis in ‘The Sisters.’” Annals of Internal Medicine 80.6 (1974): 758–62. Wollaeger, Mark. “Posters, Modernism, Cosmopolitanism: Ulysses and World War I Recruiting Posters in Ireland.” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.2 (1993): 87–132. Wills, Clair. “Joyce, Prostitution, and the Colonial City.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95.1 (1996): 79–95.

III

Mixed Media Image and Performance

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7 ”In the Beginning Was the Gest” Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” Anthony Paraskeva

From 1902, when he stayed at the Grand Hôtel Corneille, two miles from the Thêatre Robert-Houdin owned by Méliès, until Paris in the 1920s, when according to Patricia Hutchins “he went frequently to the movies, usually between dusk and dinner time when he could no longer work” (Hutchins 11), Joyce witnessed the development of early film history, from the exhibitionist “cinema of attractions” circa 1904 to the gradual formation of syntactic conventions, perceptual fields, and the dismemberment of the gesturing body. In “Circe,” the waltz and twirl between acoustic patterns and iconic performance style occur under a narrative gaze trained to read gestures in films, from their earliest inception to the episode’s composition in 1920–21. I wish to extend the territory of scholarship on Joyce’s film-literate prose by relating the episode’s “art of gestures”—his own category in his notesheets (Herring 288)—to the history of performance style in early cinema, in light of his description of the episode’s figures as “Cinema fakes” (Scribbledehobble 119), and his fraught relations with the theater. As David Hayman and Fritz Senn argue, physical routines in “Circe” are partly an aspect of mimographic evocations which enact movement through acoustic effects. At the same time, the technical language and proxemic stage codes, the detailed blocking of the cast, the elaborate physical routines in the stage directions, according to Katie Wales, foreground the episode’s essential iconicity. As Derek Attridge observes, the language in Ulysses, in one view, “draws attention to itself and its configurations independently of its referential function,” and in the other, it wills its own disappearance “in an enhanced experience of referentiality” (133). This dialectic in “Circe” is significantly informed

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by Joyce’s fascination with the perceptual reality of cinema’s “mute world” (U 15.2575). At a showing of the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train at the Grand Café Lumière in 1895, one spectator was heard to announce “la langue universelle est trouvée” (Sadoul 288); this is echoed by Stephen in his opening declaration: “so that gesture . . . would be a universal language” (U 15.105–6). Joyce had begun to think about representational overlaps between film and writing as far back as 1906, for instance, in a sixty-miles-an-hour hyperbole to Stanislaus that ends with the line: “The Italian imagination is like a cinematograph, observe the style of my letter” (Letters II 202). His remark in 1924 that “the book [Ulysses] could not be translated into another language, but might be translated into another medium, that of the film” (JJ 561), testifies to the compositional energy of these aspect shifts between acts of reading and spectatorship. Stephen and Bloom spend 16 June distracting their minds from two painful thoughts, the death of a mother and a wife’s infidelity, until they reach Nighttown’s midnight movie, when those secrets, no longer kept, are projected onto a screen for Dublin’s assembled throngs to watch aghast. In “Telemachus,” Stephen’s mother “In a dream, silently . . . had come to him” (U 1.270): the past perfect tense keeps the apparition, a remembered dream, at a safe distance. The stage directions in “Circe” place the afflicted dead mother presently before the horrorstruck eyes of an audience: “emaciated, she rises stark through the floor, in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould . . . She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly” (U 15.4157–62). These shock tactics gain their iconic impetus by harking back to the origins of cinematic movement. Joyce re-creates the first spectators’ unfamiliarity, their perceptual shock at the sheer visibility of mechanically recorded motion. Maxim Gorky’s 1896 commentary on the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train—“it is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre. . . . All this in a strange silence . . . no sound of footsteps or of speech” (qtd. in Leyda 407–9)—also serves to describe the rising of Stephen’s mother, who “opens her mouth . . . uttering a silent word,” just as Bloom “calls inaudibly” (U 15.4962) after Rudy, both instances rendered in the style of mute utterance in silent cinema, where the lips are seen to move but no sound is heard. Noël Burch pinpoints the predominant quality of the first public screening: “The first spectators of L’arrivée d’un train, reacting with their whole bodies to what they fleetingly perceived as an external manifestation, were indeed in a brief hallucinatory state, their unfamiliarity with the messages received,

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the mode of vision, induced a state of mild sensorial confusion” (244). The sensorial confusions and hallucinatory states in “Circe,” the tawdry operatics of the zombie resurrection, allude to the spectacular rising ghosts and ghoulish transformations of early trick films. Austin Briggs and Keith Williams amply demonstrate the influence between stop-motion effects in trick films and cartoons, and Joyce’s display of instantaneous transformations in “Circe” (Briggs 151; Williams, “Ulysses in Toontown”). The predominant nondocumentary film genre up to 1904, the trick film emerged through the coincidence of magic theater traditions and the earliest film cameras. The origins of cinema are inextricably bound to the history and practice of magic, conjuring and legerdemain (Barnouw 45), as is “Circe,” whose symbol in the Linati scheme is “Magic.” One of the first filmmakers to buy a machine from Lumière, the Italian magician Leopoldo Fregoli, used primitive cuts and reverses to modify his signature trick, the transformation of his face into the appearance of famous characters, a trait mimicked by Bloom when “he contracts his face to resemble many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur” (U 15.1844–49). In the climactic transformation of Stephen into Rudy, Bloom’s dead son materializes “against the dark wall” (U 15.4956) as though “Stephen’s face and form” (U 15.4948) engender his shadow, an effect that recalls the silhouette films of Lotte Reiniger and the combination of legerdemain and shadowgraphy in the work of Felicien Trewey, whom Lumière introduced to England (Barnes 19). Katherine Mullin’s analysis of stylistic allegiances between “Nausicaa” and the Mutoscope takes film history in Ulysses even further back than trick films (155). This peephole machine, observed through an eyepiece using large photographs flipped through with a hand crank, was introduced the same year as the first public screening of the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train at the Grand Café in 1895. The language of peephole pantomime that passes between Gerty and Bloom is Mutoscopic: it remains a private fantasy seen only by him. The fantasy is ended mid-thought, or rather mid-flick, as Gerty limps away, just as Bloom himself goes limp: “She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because—because Gerty MacDowell was . . . Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O! Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away” (U 13.769–72, ellipsis in original). Gerty reappears lasciviously in “Circe,” pawing Bloom’s sleeve, after which “She slides away crookedly” rather than limping away: the pun on “slides” alludes to the photos prepared for use

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in a Mutoscope, and Gerty’s crooked movement suggests the jerkiness and irregularity of those hand-cranked slides. Bloom’s reflections in the past tense— “he watched her as she limped away”—mutate into Nighttown’s stage direction, which incarnates its referent by placing the movement in the present tense and before an audience, exploding private Mutoscopic peepshow into public cinema projection. In “Circe,” Bloom is held fast as a subject while being compelled to attend a public exhibition of versions of himself and his hidden sexual proclivities. Isolated voyeurisms are screened for an awestruck staring audience as he finds himself locked in a turn-of-the-century “through the keyhole” film. These tableau films, which reproduced “the peepshow perspective of kinetoscope or mutoscope parlors” (Hansen 40) in their transition to public exhibition space, show characters peeping through a device, such as a telescope or keyhole, before a cut to what is seen, often an incriminating scene: A Search for Evidence (1903) displays a series of points of view as the deceived wife accompanied by a private detective observe a row of hotel rooms through keyholes that frame the tableaux, eventually finding her unfaithful husband in the last room. “Circe” harks back to this arrangement when Boylan offers Bloom a view of Molly: “You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times,” to which Bloom asks if he can “take a snapshot” (U 15.3788–92). These films offered incipient identifications between the spectator-subject’s orientation and what the audience sees; the relation between the Mutoscopic drives in “Nausicaa” and the sense of collective spectatorship in “Circe” is suggested by the historical shift from the Mutoscope to the cinematograph. Bloom’s spectacular embarrassment at having his fantasy reconstructions exposed is imagined as an act of voyeurism played over the “coughs and feetshuffling” (U 15.2169) of an audience, in the style of tableau films such as The Story the Biograph Told (1904), in which an unseen office boy films the proprietor kissing his secretary, then screens the film to an audience that includes the proprietor and his wife. Bloom’s private guilt is turned into a masochistic spectacle in which he is not only a member of the audience but also its ideal reluctant spectator. The majority of extant films up to 1904 required a mediating agent, for instance a keyhole or lens, to co-represent a person looking and the object looked at. Aside from the keyhole films, film historians place the identification of the film’s spectator with the diegetic viewpoint at around 1910–11. Early cinema is predominantly framed from a centered frontal position that excludes the spectator’s gaze from the gaze of the figures on screen (Burch 164). This is an

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aspect of a performative style derived from tableau gestures for the stage: prior to 1910, film actors would gesticulate by standing center stage and facing front, as though playing to the gallery. Standardized gestures, inherited from acting manuals and handbooks for the stage (e.g., Boucicault, The Art of Acting) developed from the idea that “the natural size of the human body should be the unchanging unit of measurement” (Brewster and Jacobs 148). Roberta Pearson names this convention of gestural performance “the histrionic code” (21): it recommends actors not to use—according to Dion Boucicault, a leading Irish American playwright and actor of nineteenth-century melodrama— “gesticules, or little gestures” (The Art of Acting 33). Joyce was evidently aware of both this convention and Boucicault himself, who is mentioned in “Lestrygonians”: Bloom sees Bob Doran “sloping into the Empire [Theatre]. . . . Where Pat Kinsella had his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran the Queen’s. Broth of a boy. Dion business with the harvestmoon face in a poky bonnet” (U 8.599– 602). Vitagraph’s Francesca de Rimini (1907), shown as part of the Volta program in 1909, is a salient example of this performance style. The film, in its depiction of a distinctly anti-Bloomian event, the murder of an adulterous wife and her lover, contains fifteen tableau shots, acted in the classical mime style. The actors are shown in full length, and their bodies speak with exaggerated extended gestures of the arm. The performances consist of a series of codified gestures and exemplify Pearson’s “histrionic code”: hands on both sides of the face signify distress, hands covering the face indicate despair, and resolution is displayed with a “fist clenched in the air, and then brought down sharply to the side of the body” (2). Francesca de Rimini was based on a theatrical version written in 1855 and first staged at the Star Theatre in New York in 1882. Surviving detailed sketches of this production, which show the iconography of actors’ bodies in speech, closely parallel the gestures enacted in the film (Uricchio and Pearson 99). Vitagraph’s version is a typical instance of the transferral of a work for the stage to tableau cinema’s replica proscenium arch. Gerty’s reappearance in “Circe”; Stephen’s rising mother; Bloom’s guilt-ridden keyhole introspections; Privates Carr and Compton marching “unsteadily rightaboutface” (U 15.49); the deafmute idiot, “shaken in Saint Vitus’ dance” (U 15.15); and the Hobgoblin “kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms”(U 15.2157–58) all represent allusions to the stagey demonstrativeness and histrionic style of early cinematic performance. Exaggerated gesticulations in cinema were more or less eliminated by 1913

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once focal points had become dispersed across sequences of body parts (Keil 141). The abandonment of the “histrionic code” in favor of discrete accumulations of small-scale gestures emerged from the twofold advance in camera technique and editing, and inaugurated the new capacity to write the gesturing body in its extremities, together with a more nuanced acting style. These innovations are mainly attributed to D. W. Griffith’s Biograph films of 1907–13 (Gunning, D. W. Griffith 114–16). The difference between the two styles of gesture can be observed in two versions of the same narrative by Griffith, After Many Years (1908) and Enoch Arden (1911). In the first, histrionic coded gestures show the married couple embracing before the departure of the husband, who points to his chest, and then upward, raises his hand to his forehead, and clenches his fist in the air. The 1911 version concentrates on their hands rather than their outspread arms. For the same scene, closer shots show the wife’s hand cutting a curl from the head of their baby and hanging it round her husband’s head; she then plays with the lock while whispering to her husband. Bloom’s performance style, as distinct from the ritualized histrionics he is forced to observe, is given in a downplayed assemblage of discrete shot sequences: “Bloom, holding in his hand Stephen’s hat, festooned with shavings, and ashplant, stands irresolute. Then he bends to him and shakes him by the shoulder” (U 15.4920–23). “Bloom” and “stands irresolute” name the full shot, which is interspersed with a detailed close-up of the hat; this is followed with a medium-close shot as Bloom shakes Stephen’s shoulder. Sequences move in an instant from the proscenium body to dismemberment of the unified body image: “Bloom trickleaps to the curbstone and halts again. He brushes a mudflake from his cheek with a parcelled hand” (U 15.196–97). Bloom’s gesturing body tends toward fragmentation; the audience sees him unfold in a series of focal points or body parts: a close-up of his “left foot” then cuts to his “impelling fingers” as he “gives the sign of past master,” cuts again as he draws “his right arm downwards from his left shoulder” (U 15.2723–25). Bloom’s dual status as spectator and subject is partly expressed in the tension between the theatricality of the cinema of 1904 and the advent of the shot sequence. The dialectic between these two kinds of spectatorship, and the sense that an audience, including a shame-faced Bloom, watches versions of Bloom engaged in voyeuristic acts, frames the composition of his many-angled variousness. The stage directions evidently transgress the confines of the proscenium arch, where the spectator would observe the enacted scene as a whole in space, according to the total measurements of the actors’ bodies: “Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson’s

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Pillar, hangs from the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals several sufferers from king’s evil . . . turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger” (U 15.1841–51). Textual directions conventionally operate across a dual plane of signification: they are both fictional representation and directives for performance, commands issued to an actor physically to enact a gesture before the eyes of an audience (Pavis 89). “Circe” invokes the technical language of the proscenium arch stage—“From left upper entrance with two sliding steps Henry Flower comes forward to left front centre” (U 15.2478–79)—only to undermine its capacity to prescribe doable acts of the staged body. Joyce mercilessly cuts up the proscenium in “Circe,” and this is partly the consequence, I would argue, of his difficult relations with the theater. Since university Joyce had planned to write a play, and he regarded his novels and stories, from 1900 to at least 1909, as preparation. In 1900 he had already written his first play, A Brilliant Career: no copy of this survives, although it was read by William Archer, who denounced it as “wildly impossible for the stage” (qtd. in JJ 79). The moment dated 23 April 1900, when Ibsen sent Joyce a telegram, via William Archer, saluting him for his generous review, according to Ellmann, “kick starts his career as a writer” (JJ 74). From as early as 1893, Joyce “went to the theater as regularly as he could afford it” (JJ 54). He watched plays by Strindberg, Yeats, Synge, and Sudermann, among others, and through reading and watching Ibsen on the stage he became “convinced of the importance of drama” (JJ 54). Yet his writing for the stage met largely with disappointment and failure. The rejection by Yeats in 1904, on behalf of the Abbey Theatre, of his translations of Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise and Michael Kramer anticipated Yeats’s eventual rejection of Exiles, on behalf of the Abbey Theatre, in 1915. Exiles sustained years of rejection by theaters. As Joyce approached the writing of “Circe”—his only text, other than Exiles, to make extensive use of stage directions—he remained desperate for the play to be performed in Paris, remarking: “an unperformed play is really a dead deportee” (Letters I 148). The problem of Exiles in performance is to a large extent related to the intricate patterns of hand gestures in the stage directions. The significance of these small-scale iconic utterances, as they map out the developing tensions and crises, passes unnoticed within a proscenium arch. Richard’s struggle to keep interior deliberation hidden from view circumscribes his hand movements and is barely perceptible from the stage. His most characteristic gesture involves “Clasping his hands quietly” (Exiles 23); he only ever “Joins his hands earnestly” (21), and this serves to keep to himself his emotional strategies and

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bearings. When his blood is up, he halts, “thrusting his hands in his pockets” (71), or “restrains a sudden gesture” (52). Robert consistently tries to goad him into disclosing his possible resentment against Bertha, though Richard holds out with unflagging self-command: ROBERT: Not only for your sake. Also for the sake of—your present partner in life. RICHARD: I see. [He crushes his cigarette softly on the ashtray and then leans forward, rubbing his hands slowly.] (52) In situations when his tactile distance from Bertha is breached, when he speaks with emotional directness, he quickly “lets her hand fall” (Exiles 103) or “releases his hand” (162), and this obstructs a straightforward reading of his intentions by disavowing gesture’s merely illustrative function. As Robert’s attempted seduction of Bertha becomes more apparent, Richard’s facade of self-possession begins to reveal barely perceptible cracks, in the form of Freudian symptomatic gestures, small movements that betray a previously concealed intention. Joyce’s meticulous attention to the slightest movements of the hand testifies to an encounter with Freud’s work on symptomatic actions. In Freud’s view, “states of mind are manifested, almost without exception, in the tensions and relaxations of facial muscles, in the adaptations of the eyes, in the amount of blood in the vessels of the skin, in the modification in vocal apparatus and in the movements of limbs and in particular of the hands” (“The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Standard Edition 14: 286). These suggestive nonverbal phenomena, which let slip an unconscious intention, obstruct the attempted concealment of a mental process. This “concurrent action—or perhaps rather the mutually opposing action—of two different intentions” (“Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Standard Edition 15: 27) is a conspicuous phenomenon in Exiles. When Richard attempts to speak calmly to Robert—“Your advances to her, little by little, day after day, looks, whispers. [With a nervous movement of the hands.] Insomma, wooing” (Exiles 83)—his hand escapes his control, involuntarily hints at his secret, and a split complex of attitudes toward his wife. On the one hand, he embraces the hypothetical situation of her infidelity with Robert and takes steps to arrange it: accepting her sexual liberty means freeing his mind from jealous suspicion. But this distance, the moral attitude on which he prides himself, is a performed deception, for others and himself, in order that Bertha and Robert may act unhindered and of their own volition. His conscious intentions arrange the scene so that his wife and friend are free to lie together; his unconscious intentions, signalled by his hands, are

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directed toward the prevention of this ever happening. Richard’s striking composure in those rare instances where he confesses his suffering draw attention to the timing of his confession as insincere. Yet his nervousness when speaking calmly to Robert reveals his attitude toward his wife as split between jealous possessiveness and libertarian distance. This nuanced, minute downplaying of gestures of the hand, signs of nervous apprehension briefly emerging from paralysis, demands a representation that gives it a valency equal to speech. These mutually opposed intentions, easily overlooked in a proscenium arch theater, require an iconic language, beyond the scope of the stage, that can bestow upon those gestures an emphasis equivalent to speech. It was not until the fifteenth episode of Ulysses that Joyce again used stage directions. He writes “Circe” against a background both of his personal failure in the theater and of a period of crisis for European theater in general, which was losing its audiences to the cinema. As early as 1914 in France, “the cinema had largely supplanted the theater and café-concert . . . in the provinces and had become a strong rival to them in the larger cities” (Dureau 14). In its satire of Irish Revivalist theater (see Platt), “Circe” takes energetic revenge on the theatrical institution that refused his playscripts and frustrated his long-held ambition. The cinematic shot sequence, with its heightened emphasis on smallscale gestures and its incorporation of spectator-subject identification, articulates Bloom’s distinct style of performative gesture in “Circe” as a counterforce to the gesticulating screen personas and tableau mock-ceremonies unfolding before him. His counter-histrionics are an aspect of Joyce’s parody, not only of theatrical overemphasis in early cinema, but also of the grand gesture in Yeatsian Revivalist theater. Tableau gestures combine the ceremonial elements of Revivalist theater with the historical reconstructions of early cinema, in order to critique both the histrionic style, which came to signify, for Joyce, the kind of melodrama that invariably leads to bloodshed, and the false historiography of Anglo-Irish Revivalism at the Abbey Theatre. The attack on Irish Revivalism is Joyce’s affront to the rejection of Exiles by Yeats, who declined to recommend it “to the Irish Theatre because it . . . is too far from the folk drama” (JJ 401). “Circe” parodies the gestural conventions that assert Celtic ceremony as Ireland’s most distinguished “folk drama” by alluding to the performative overemphasis in early cinema. For Yeats, the Abbey Theatre was the province in which the ceremonies of a distinctly Anglo-Irish history could be enacted. The unity of a nation was “like an audience in a theatre,” and the Abbey should strive to become a contemporary theater of Dionysus, a national theater in which the people would

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watch “the sacred drama of [their] own history” (qtd. in Flannery 65). Pagan ritual gestures, preserving ancestral relations to Celtic Ireland, hark back to the patterns of movement, unchanged over centuries, of Ireland’s heroic age. In On Baile’s Strand, Cuchulain’s oath of fealty to the High King Conchubar is performed as a grand-scale ritual in which his sword is joined in the fire with those of the lesser kings, to the inaudible murmur of chanting female voices, a symbolic rite directly borrowed from the Celtic Mysteries (Yeats 262–63). These ceremonies at the Abbey embodied a solemn, hieratic acting style, described in a review of On Baile’s Strand at the Abbey as “an art of gesture admirably disciplined and a strange delicacy of enunciation . . . in the method of . . . ritual” (Flannery 27). While Revivalist theater played at the Abbey—its inaugural play, Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen was staged at the Abbey in 1899, and Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World in 1907—Dublin’s Erin Theatre would screen the tableau historical reconstructions of early cinema. Lumière programs interspersed documentary footage of current affairs of state with “vues historiques,” presented in a style identical to their documentaries, as unmediated actuality (Abel 91). Méliès produced tableau reconstructions of solemn rituals of state, for instance the Coronation of Edward VII (1902), which displays a procession of gifts, with the king swearing his allegiance, the presentation of the sword of justice and his adornment with an orb, crown, and sceptre. The presentation of historical events as contemporary documentary, in the style of the ostentatious grand gesture, was quickly taken up by Pathé, with works such as Epopée napoléonienne (1903). These spectacles of national identity, commonplace in the prewar French Third Republic, particularly after the success of Film D’Art’s L’assassinat du Duc de Guise (1907), which exemplifies the histrionic style, had become by 1911 one of French cinema’s most distinctive genres (Abel 92). The ceremonies of state and empire in “Circe,” of the trials, executions, and coronations that Bloom both watches and is made to enact, serve as mocking acknowledgments of Yeatsian Anglicization, in the style of the historical pseudo-documentary of early cinema. Joyce detected in both a similar false historiography, particularly in the historical claims made for the grand gesture. Against the ritual style of the historical tableau, with its sweeping gestures, Joyce pitches tentative, small-scale movements. The shift between the historical tableau, in which the spectator is externalized, and the technique of perceptual identification available since the evolution of the shot sequence, a phenomenon that emerged in 1910–12, in the films of Griffith and the system

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of parallel editing and shot/reverse shot (Salt 94), is incorporated into the dialectic of Bloom’s dual status as spectator and subject. His “apologetic toes turned in,” Bloom “opens his tiny mole’s eyes and looks about him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead” (U 15.957–59); while he appears onscreen “in a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing Saint Edward’s staff, the orb and sceptre” (U 15.1442–44). Edward the Seventh appears “slowly, solemnly” singing a song about “coronation day” (U 15.4562), but it is Bloom’s coronation: the Archbishop of Armagh “pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom’s head” (U 15.1487), an aspect of the ceremony whereby an oath is taken and the sovereign is anointed with holy oil to indicate the sanctity of his person. Symbolic ceremonies further invest Bloom with the imperial mantle: “Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. . . . The peers do homage, one by one, approaching, genuflecting” (U 15.1490–96). These symbolic ceremonies of Anglo-Irish history summon Bloom, and by extension, Ireland, to a role Joyce regards as contrary to their natural tendencies. Once Bloom is made sovereign, he is observed enacting an idealized version, not of the grand heroic gesture, but of his own small-scale domestic routines: “shaking hands with a blind stripling . . . Placing arms round shoulder of an old couple . . . He wheels twins in a perambulator. . . . He consoles a widow. . . . He kisses the bedsores of a palsied veteran. . . . He whispers in the ear of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly. . . . He gives his coat to a beggar” (U 15.1600–1615). These are Bloom’s versions of the grand gesture. His instinctive distaste for ritual is an aspect of his independence of mind. When he finds himself in situations of ritual behavior, his mind slips into its own routines, removing him from the scene, as it does at Dignam’s funeral. His private commemorations demonstrate a resistance to mechanical templates of imposed physical behavior, just as his small-scale gestures contrast with the falsely historicizing folk rituals of theatrical Revivalism and historical pseudo-documentary. Bloom’s acts of heroism are found in the littleness of the diurnal, rather than the grandly ceremonial. It is a performance style precisely suited to the mockepic. As counter-Revivalist drama, “Circe” stages the small-scale intimate gesture, in the language of the shot sequence, against the histrionics of false ceremony. Bloom’s naturalist gestures subvert the hieratic solemnity of the ritual body and its capacity to depersonalize the expressive life of the body. Joyce found in the language of the shot sequence an ideal method to show forth tiny gestures,

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in particular of the hands, which are given amplified significance throughout Ulysses. Bloom not only talks with his hands but is seen thinking aloud with them. Earlier, in “Sirens,” bored Bloom tambourines gently with “I am just reflecting fingers” (U 11.863), his hands as attentive as those in “Scylla and Charybdis” which “fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming of the Shrew” (U 9.1062). Hand gestures in Ulysses are forms of self-reflexivity, symptoms of (dis)engagement of the self with itself. Michel Serres describes how an internal sense of one’s own body derives from manual self-reflection in his account of cutting his fingernails: “Where does the subject settle itself? . . . I take the implement in my left hand, and present the open blades to the end of my right index fingernail. I position myself in the handles of the scissors, the I situates itself there, and not at the tip of the right finger. . . . The left hand participates in the I, suffused with subjectivity, the right hand is of the world” (qtd. in Connor). Steven Connor remarks of this passage that “the hand is a principle and agency of this capacity . . . bringing oneself to oneself.” As it is also for Bloom’s: in “Hades,” when Boylan is sighted by the others, Bloom instantly “reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand” (U 6.200), after which “he clasped his hands between his knees” (U 6.209). In “Lestrygonians” his hands search his pockets in a dumbshow of misdirection: “I am looking for that. Yes, that.” The episode ends after he tries “all pockets” and locates his potato soap and purse: “Safe!” (U 8.1188). Recurrently throughout his day, Bloom prevents himself from disintegrating at the thought of his wife’s infidelity with small gestures that serve both to distract his mind and to restore his bodily self-integrity. In “Circe” these gestures help ease his sense of spectatorial shock: “His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself” (U 15.3815). By the time Joyce had begun to compose “Circe,” the iconic language of close-ups, with its capacity to show the exact visual form of a hand movement, the stretch or curl of a finger, the position of the palms, had achieved international status. According to theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, writing in 1921: “The amplifying close-up demands underplaying. It’s opposed to theater where everything is loudly declaimed” (qtd. in Epstein 237). Griffith remarked, in an interview in 1914: “the close-up enabled us to reach real acting, restraint” (qtd. in Pratt 110–11). In Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience (1914), the scene with the protagonist, Walthall, at the police station is constructed from close-ups of Walthall’s hands as he nervously pleads innocence: his hands pull at his clothes and stroke his knees, he plays with his thumbs, puts his hands in his pockets. Cecil B. De Mille’s The Whispering Chorus (1918) constructs an elaborate series of close-up hand gesture motifs. John Tremble, an accounts clerk, attempts to

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convince himself that stealing money from his office might be justified. The intertitle, an interior voice, reads: “Clumley has more than he can use: take what you need.” We see his hands, in medium close-up, interrupt his counting motion to tap nervously the wad of notes, his hands seeming to make their mind up for him. After taking some of the money for himself with his right hand, his left hand grasps the right, as though to conceal its guilt. The right hand appears to act with an autonomous criminal agency of its own. We next see it in extreme close-up, falsifying the figures in the account book in order not to arouse suspicion, and then later, a disembodied extreme close-up of the hand appears in superimposition. In place of the voice of conscience, or an accusing face, we see an enlarged double of his right hand in handcuffs, next to a medium shot of Tremble, whose left hand, anxiously feeling his right, falls into the same clasping position as when he had stolen the money. The rest of the film shows Tremble, as an intertitle puts it, “feeling suspicion in every smile he meets—and handcuffs in every welcome.” In the final extreme close-up of his right hand, it is strapped to an electric chair, as though the hand were assuming responsibility for the crime on the man’s behalf. Bloom often keeps his hands in his pockets, partly because he keeps his magic potato soap there, but also to conceal himself, to prevent his hands from speaking about him against his will: when a “male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside,” Bloom immediately adjusts his features, and then “places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly” (U 15.2727–29). Put on the spot, he enacts the physical equivalent of an embarrassed change of subject. Hand gestures in “Circe,” liberated from the contingencies of the stage and its demands for spectatorial wholeness, are imagined as symptomatic close-ups, unfolding on a screen. The notesheets for “Circe” on sleights of hand and palm reading describe these gestures in extreme close-up. The view of film theorist Hugo Münsterberg, writing in 1916 of “an enlarged play of the hands in which anger and rage or tender love or jealousy speak an unmistakeable language” (36), uncannily describes Stephen’s and Bloom’s speaking hands. We learn that Bloom’s fingers are shorter than Stephen’s, and his fingers have round tips, and that this indicates his pragmatic materialism (Herring 46). The first and second bend easily, indicating shyness (Herring 266). Zoe sees Bloom’s secret in his hands, remarking, “Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That wrong?” (U 15.3706). The notesheets open out the fields of reference from which she reads Bloom’s palms: the first and second finger, if “far apart,” show the subject is “self-willed”; the third and fourth finger apart signal impulsiveness; long and white fingernails signify cruelty (Herring 266).

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Joyce reverses the terms that allocate coded significance only to “histrionic” gestures by magnifying tiny symptomatic actions, as hand gestures move toward resembling a microlinguistic system in themselves. The effect is achieved by allowing the terms that ordinarily govern speech and gesture to become interchangeable. Particular coded movements of the hand make inanimate objects speak, and often in the give-away voice of the symptomatic unconscious. Bella’s fan as she moves it toward her face speaks with a voice of its own: “The Fan: (flirting quickly, then slowly) Married, I see” (U 15.2755). The speech-gesture complex increases in significance when the tempo in the movement is referred back to the code for “fan flirt” in the notesheets, where “quick=engaged,” and “slow=married” (Herring 296). Whereas the notesheets correlate the placing of the fan on the ear with “forgot me?” the script literally gives voice to the gesture: “The Fan: (folding together, rests against her left eardrop) Have you forgotten me?” (U 15.2764). By cross-breeding coded gestures with discursive speech, these complex movements approach the condition of a natural language system. A movement of the parasol toward the shoulder indicates indifference; holding it with “2 hands” means “well?”; “high=darling”; “shut=dare all.” Swinging an umbrella “over hand=I am a nuisance.” A twirl of the handkerchief in the right hand means “love another,” whereas a twirl in the left hand connotes “riddance”; a folded handkerchief signifies a “wish to speak” (Herring 295–96). These elaborate correspondences between the Freudian symptomatic act and the isolation and analysis of cinema’s “unconscious optics” anticipate Walter Benjamin’s explicit comparison between Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” in which symptomatic actions receive their most extensive account, with the “precise statements” given by enlarged fields of view in filmed behavior and the revelation of “entirely new structural formations of the subject” (230). Derek Attridge’s observation that Ulysses “frequently fails to conform to the syntactic norms of a language which allows little independence to the organs of the body” (160) finds iconic correlates in the way Bloom’s hands speak as though independent of his conscious sensation of movement, and the detachment of movement from agency in a filmed close-up. When Mrs. Breen “surrenders” her “soft moist meaty palm” to Bloom’s “finger and thumb” (U 15.46–47), their hands are observed, split from the dialogue, conducting their own conversation separately from the dialogue. As “Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan,” the fan remarks: “We have met. You are mine. It is fate” (U 15.2775), partially echoing Bloom’s entrance into Nighttown, just after Stephen demonstrates his view of gesture as a “universal language”: “Stephen thrusts

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his ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands, his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down turned in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left being higher” (U 15.124–27). The planes of Stephen’s hands symbolize the intersection of his lines of fate with Bloom’s. Instantaneously “On the farther side under the railway bridge Bloom appears” (U 15.141–42), as though summoned by Stephen’s palms. A medium shot of Stephen thrusting his ashplant is cut with a close-up of his intersecting palms, superimposed over the appearance of Bloom under the railway bridge. The gesture serves to instigate the coincidence of Stephen and Bloom. The mutual dreams of elective paternity and metempsychosis finally intersect and culminate in the transformation of Stephen into Rudy. Stephen experiences in this transformation the “cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity” that Roland Barthes describes in speaking of the photographic subject, or rather, “neither subject nor object, but a subject who feels he is becoming an object” (12–14). This is also Bloom’s condition throughout the episode, as he struggles to keep a zone of himself that is private, against which various images of himself, in the form of screen personas, attempt to encroach. Screen representations of his body image—as Stephen Heath puts it, “the body in its conversion into the luminous sense of its film presence” (180)—alienate his volitional agency, as for instance in the doppelgänger projections of Henry Flower and Virag, who resemble the reproducible demon images of screen personas like Douglas Fairbanks and Max Linder: “Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb and gives a cow’s lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head” (U 15.2627–31). Bloom’s “trickleaps” as he “darts forward suddenly” (U 15.184) and “blunders stifflegged” (U 15.191), later transposed into Virag’s “ungainly stilthops” (U 15.2630), resemble the style and gait of Max Linder. When Joyce showed the film A Conquest (1909) as part of the Volta program, Linder had already established a reproducible star persona from his distinctive style of movement. Bloom’s personas, aspects of an alienated consciousness dissociated from his physical identity, approach the condition of the film actor, who “feels as if in exile—exile not only from the stage but also from himself. . . . his body loses corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice . . . in order to be changed into a mute image” (Benjamin 223). The range of Bloom’s alter egos in “Circe” make iconic reference to the film

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actor’s exile from his “mute image,” and more specifically, to the dialectic between theatricality in tableau cinema, in which the spectator is externalized and refused perceptual identification, against the technique of spectator-subject identification available since the historical shift from film tableaux to the shot sequence. The Joycean alienation effect is situated at this intersection of the performative gesture in theater and cinema. When Brecht notes that “it is conceivable that other kinds of writer, such as playwrights or novelists, may for the moment be able to work in a more cinematic way than the film people” (Willett 47), it is possible he has Joyce in mind, as he does when he mentions “the Verfremdungseffekt in Ulysses,” and how Joyce “alienates both the way of representing (mainly through the frequent and rapid changes) and the events” (Silberman 10). The time lag between his reflexive intelligence and his body, inhabited by the imperatives of its role, generates an effect whereby Bloom becomes conscious of his own representations. Cinematic dissociation compels Bloom, as we read his gestures, to become his own spectator.

Notes This paper was first published in Bloomsday 100: The 19th International James Joyce Symposium CD-ROM (Dublin: Hyperfecto and the James Joyce Centre, 2005). 1. Tom Gunning’s term for the emphasis in early cinema (1895–1906) on the sheer “act of showing and exhibition” in the use of fixed frame “theatrical display over narrative absorption.” See Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions.” 2. For an illuminating comparative analysis of Joyce and cinema, and for close engagement with film history and theory, see Spiegel; Briggs; Williams; Burkdall; Danius. 3. Films were shown in Dublin from April 1896, for instance, at the Erin Variety Theater and Rotunda. There was no cinema until 1909, when Joyce opened the Cinematograph Volta (Williams, “Joyce and Early Cinema” 1). 4. This reading favors the 1922 edition over Gabler’s, whose update from “slides” to “glides” (15.386) obscures the Mutoscope reference. See Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson 420.

Works Cited Abel, Richard. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Attridge, Derek. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. London: Methuen, 1988. Barnes, John. The Beginning of the Cinema in England. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970. Barnouw, Erik. The Magician and the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. London, 1993. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Cape, 1970. 211–44.

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Boucicault, Dion, The Art of Acting or Guide to the Stage. Boston: William V. Spencer, 1855. Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. Theater to Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Briggs, Austin. “‘Roll Away the Reel World, the Reel World’: ‘Circe’ and Cinema.” Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium. Ed. Morris Beja and Shari Benstock. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. 145–57. Burch, Noël. Life to Those Shadows. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: BFI, 1990. Burkdall, Thomas L. Joycean Frames: Film and the Fiction of James Joyce. New York: Routledge, 2001. Connor, Stephen. “Modernism and the Writing Hand.” 1999. . Danius, Sara, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Dureau, George. “Theater in Crisis.” French Film Theory. Vol. 1, 1907–1929. Ed. and trans. Richard Abel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 12–22. Epstein, Jean. “Magnification.” French Film Theory. Vol. 1, 1907–1929. Ed. and trans. Richard Abel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. 235–40. Flannery, James. W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. London: Hogarth, 1953–57. Gibson, Andrew, ed. Reading Joyce’s “Circe.” Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: BFI, 1990. 56–62. ———. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Hayman, David. “Language of/as Gesture in Joyce.” Ulysses: Cinquante Ans Après. Ed. Louis Bonnerot. Paris: Didier, 1974. 209–21. Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Herring, Phillip. Joyce’s “Ulysses” Notesheets in the British Museum. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972. Hutchins, Patricia. “James Joyce and the Cinema.” Sight and Sound 9 Dec. 1951: 9–12. Joyce, James. Exiles. London: Grant Richards, 1918. ———. Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961. ———. Ulysses. Ed. Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Keil, Charles. American Cinema in Transition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: Allen & Unwin, 1960. Mullin, Katherine. James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: Appleton, 1916. Pavis, Patrice. “From Text to Performance.” Performing Texts. Ed. Michael Issacharoff and Robin Jones. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. 86–101.

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Pearson, Roberta. Eloquent Gestures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Platt, L. H. “Ulysses 15 and the Irish Literary Theater.” Gibson 33–63. Pratt, George. Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film. Greenwich CT: New York Graphic Society, 1966. Sadoul, Georges. Histoire générale du cinema. Vol. 1. Paris: Denoël, 1973. Salt, Barry. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. London: Starword, 1983. Senn, Fritz. “‘Circe’ as Harking Back in Provective Arrangement.” Gibson 63–92. Silberman, Marc, ed. and trans. Brecht on Film and Radio. London: Methuen, 1999. Spiegel, Alan. Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976. Uricchio, William, and Roberta Pearson. Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Wales, Katie. “‘Bloom Passes through Several Walls’: The Stage Directions in ‘Circe.’” Gibson 241–76. Willett, John, ed. and trans. Brecht on Theater. London: Methuen, 1964. Williams, Keith. “James Joyce and Early Cinema.” James Joyce Broadsheet 58 (February 2000): 1. ———. “Ulysses in Toontown: ‘Vision Animated to Bursting Point’ in Joyce’s ‘Circe.’” Literature and Visual Technologies: Writing after Cinema. Ed. Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 96–121. Yeats, W. B. Collected Plays. London: Macmillan, 1953.

8 Reading Music, Performing Text Interpreting the Song of the Sirens Katherine O’Callaghan What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for. Finnegans Wake 482.34–36

According to George Borach’s anecdote, Joyce claimed that in writing the “Sirens” episode he had “explored the resources and artifices” and “seen through all the tricks” of music (JJ 459). It is unlikely that he was merely referring to the use of musical allusions or to descriptions of instruments and recitals. Indeed, he was not simply hoping to borrow musical forms so as to produce a literary equivalent. On the contrary, Joyce’s words imply that he was engaging not merely with those aspects of music that might be closest to literature (lyrics, phrasing, rhythm), and which have long been considered shared elements of the two art forms, but rather the more elusive and perhaps intrinsic elements of music (performance, interpretation, meaning or the lack thereof) which he felt could be injected into, and drawn from, prose writing. Joyce reveals the performative qualities of prose writing, most particularly in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, through an association of language with music. He also uses this interplay of the two art forms to alter the manner in which we approach the interpretation process of prose literature. Music, within his texts, acts not solely as a cultural reference point or a symbolic or thematic intensifier, but rather as a marker of a text-performance dynamic inherent within literature and unfolded by the reading process. Thus by drawing on two of the key elements of the musical art form, interpretation and performance, Joyce can evoke qualities of simultaneity, multiplicity, and audience interaction normally considered to be beyond the scope of the prose literary form. This rather

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complex engagement with musical aspects pervades his corpus. Within this dialectic of music and language, the “Sirens” episode therefore is by no means unique; however, it singularly harnesses many of the multiplicities of interaction between these two art forms, and thus for the purposes of this essay it will be used to provide a framework and epistemological gateway for engaging with those very multiplicities. The sound effects of the episode can be found within the written text: in onomatopoeic phrases, in soundscape passages, in descriptions of noise, in instructions to “Listen!” But they also manifest themselves in the act of reading, in the reader’s performance of the text. The urge to read the book as a whole aloud is strong, and the free-flowing temporality of streams of consciousness encourages an awareness of a non-static oral quality to the work. The book draws on a legacy of oral literature—that of Homer’s Odyssey and of the Irish storytelling tradition. The text exists on the page, visually, but it can also be played out by the reader in a manner that lifts the words from the page and into the realm of the auditory. Joyce’s frequent use of music in his work can be read within this context.

Music and Literature: “It’s What’s Behind” In the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, Stephen contemplates the idea of a bifurcation of the art forms using Gotthold Lessing’s terms: nebeneinander, in reference to the “one next to another” aspect of the spatial arts, such as painting and sculpture; and nacheinander, in reference to the “one after another” aspect of the temporal arts, a category that includes both music and literature (Lessing 77). This division was disputed by Richard Wagner and many modernists who aspired to the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art work,” but Lessing strongly believed in the strict separation of the arts: the sense of space frozen in time that should be captured by a painting or a sculpture, and the sense of time, of movement, that should be suggested in literature and music in particular. Why try to evoke time in a painting? Why try to present a picture in music? It was Lessing’s belief that because painting exists in space it “must completely renounce time” and also should avoid temporal subject matters, the description of “progressive acts.” Music and literature should also desist from evoking or describing a static, spatial world, because they present themselves temporally. As Stephen walks along Sandymount strand he mentally follows Lessing’s theory: both he and the reader are carried through the nacheinander of his

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movement, his “progressive act.” Stephen suggests that as he walks in the dark, the reader following his progression through consecutive sounds “Five, six” (U 3.12), he is “safe,” as Bloom is when he passes through the gates of the National Museum at the end of the “Lestrygonians” episode—he too has experimented with temporary blindness (U 8.1193). The difficulty arises when Stephen opens his eyes, and the reader’s focus, to the nebeneinander, an entity that has the potential to pull Stephen into it: “Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably’ (U 3.14–15). He decides that he is “getting on nicely in the dark” (U 3.15). Stephen’s fear is that opening his eyes, and thus entering the spatial world, might result “for ever in the black adiaphane” (U 3.26). There is already within Stephen’s language an understanding of the visual and auditory interplay inherent within the literary form, a sense of interdependence between the two rather than complete separation. Stephen does not just close his eyes and hear; he closes his eyes to hear: “Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells” (U 3.10–11). The audible becomes clear only when the more dominant sense, vision, is diminished. When the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man composes his poetry he “spoke the verses aloud . . . then copied them . . . to feel them the better by seeing them” (Portrait 240). As Stephen writes, thus transcribing the sounds visually, his sense of the words’ meaning is heightened. Thus in this early stage of the book Joyce presents the artistic dilemma of his project: to evoke both space and time in the temporal art of literature. It is my contention that in order to do so he draws on particular qualities of music, a temporal art that, as I will show, retains the ability to step out of the relentless progression of time, “[t]he ineluctable modality of the audible,” the seemingly inevitable process of “walking into eternity” (U 3.18). The art of music, though naturally within the realm of the auditory, has nonetheless developed within the Western classical tradition on the basis of a synthesis between text and sound. The aural is represented on a visual plane (the score) which is then reproduced in sound once more (the performance). Music is understood to exist both in a textual (visual and spatial) sense and in a performative (auditory and temporal) sense. An acceptance of this duality, of the fluid, indefinable dynamic between these two aspects of music exists, one that does not transfer easily to the field of literature. Within the realm of the written word, notions of the work existing externally or parallel to a classical urtext provoke a deep anxiety. Certainly interpretations are acceptable but these interpretations are markedly different from those within the musical

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world, whereby, as Theodor Adorno has stated, interpretation “is not an accidental attribute of music, but an integral part of it” (3). Even within the nacheinander arts, therefore, there is debate regarding the uniqueness or sovereignty of each form. Daniel Albright has noted that in relation to music and literature, “it has always been difficult to tell exactly where one ends and the other begins: both of these artistic media consist of sound that varies over time, though in one case those sounds are called notes and in the other case phonemes” (23). There are several reasons why literature is considered an inhospitable ground for the art of music. While both arts work in a temporal manner, in that they move through time, music is capable of holding multiple ideas at once, it can achieve simultaneity, and can do so in a manner overcoming that dilemma which vexed Stephen on the beach, providing a means of stepping outside a linear singular temporality. This is not generally thought to be the case for language. Also, language is considered to be referential; each unit represents something or some idea. Music, on the other hand, is self-reflexive; it does not mean something in the same sense. A note does not refer to something in the way that a word does. Furthermore, and this is specifically in reference to prose, music is a performed art, while literature is not. Although poetry and drama contain overt rhythmical and performative qualities that might lend themselves to a natural affinity to music, prose literature generally does not. To say that music is a marker of a text-performance dynamic within Joyce’s writing is not to suggest that the long-drawn-out debate concerning the interrelationship between language and music in his work is somehow invalid. The core questions remain: can music become language, and can language become music? Can literature, following the Paterian dictum, aspire to (and attain) the status of music, and can music speak? The concept of music speaking indicates that it might have something to say which, given the right translation skills, the audience could decipher. It might be taken as implying that music is “about” something, rather than “that something itself.” When we speak of lyrical poetry or prose there is often a suggestion of a musical element to the language. Attempts to analyze, however, what makes a piece of literature musical rather than simply rhythmical can often lead to an effort to prove whether or not the literature has become music. This is particularly obvious in critical writing in the area of Joyce and his use of music: a dominant strain of argument judges the success or failure of his engagement with music on the basis of whether he has succeeded in writing music rather than prose. This line of thought can also get caught up in a debate regard-

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ing whether the “Sirens” episode, for example, is music becoming literature or literature becoming music. This argument, for all its heuristic value, has a self-canceling aspect. “Sirens” is an episode in a book, not a piece of music— that much is reasonably clear. The real point of interest is whether Joyce has succeeded in evoking music through language, and whether he has succeeded in engaging with processes we traditionally associate with music, such as performance and interpretation, in the art form of prose literature. We can only read a text with our eyes open. Unlike Stephen, we must open our eyes to hear him speak. In the “Sirens” episode we are ordered to “Listen!” (U 11.33) and are told of things that are “heard, not seen” (U 11.240), but the notion of “see-hearing” is also explored. In this way the temporal art of literature is recognized to have a visual aspect in the act of reading, and furthermore the inclusion of a blind man and a deaf man in the episode, highlighting the opposite ends of the visual-aural spectrum, underlines the ability of all of the other characters to “see-hear.” “Sirens” undoubtedly places the ear and listening above the eye and sight, but the eye is never fully absent, any more than the musical art exists solely in the aural, temporal domain. That “Sirens” is full of musical references, allusions, and puns has been well documented. Some critics have gone further to analyze the sound effects, the use of what might be considered musical phrasing and form, and the general musicality of the episode. What might be explored further is why Joyce would choose to use these musical ideas—what specific qualities might music have with which he wished to engage? In other words, discussions on the topic have tended to refer to the aspects of music that correspond closest to literary texts: focusing on the words of referenced songs rather than on their melodies, selecting terminology that is not unique to music but rather overlaps with literary terms. Even those attempts to engage beyond the lyrics or libretti, the attempts to analyze musical form or style within the text, have tended to disregard essential qualities of music.

The Opening Section “Sirens” begins with a series of disjointed fragments that we stumble over, willing them to make sense, to fall into place. Anthony Burgess has suggested they might be the legendary piles of bones of the sailors who fell into the lure of the Homeric Sirens (83). The opening section is not simply about confusing us but forcing us to see words in an unfamiliar setting, to defamiliarize them, so that we become aware that this is what text is made up of. This technique

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is not unusual in Ulysses, which regularly employs self-reflexive strategies, deliberately acknowledging its status as a piece of writing. In this case, however, the dislocating effect is taken a step further due to the fact that we have neither sentences nor, in many cases, recognizable words to work with. There is no doubt at this point that the reader must play a role. If the first words, “Bronze by gold” (U 11.1), are visual, the first action heard brings us into the realm of the ear. “[H]oofirons” that are “steelyringing” (U 11.1) confirm the fact that this episode requires the reader to listen as well as see. The most common explanation of the opening is that it forms an overture of sorts. Zack Bowen, in his essay “The Bronzegold Sirensong,” writes that the “first two pages of the episode . . . clearly constitute an overture” (Bloom’s Old Sweet Song 26). Daniel Albright comments that “[i]t is possible to imagine this passage as a bundle of Leitmotive” (44), employing the notion of the Wagnerian leitmotif, whereby a theme is used repeatedly to represent a character or situation. Albright’s interpretation shares with others the notion that the opening is meaningless in itself and is to be understood only in terms of what follows in the main body of the episode. Albright contends that the opening forms “a sort of thematic catalog of sound-intensive phrases, phrases that will appear later in the chapter in a more intelligible narrative context” (44). The idea that the opening is proleptic is continued by Udaya Kumar, who comments that “the justification of repetition seems to be at the level of narrative organization, in the use of fuga per canonem as the technic of the episode” (19; Kumar adds: “the only ground for the coherence of the overture is the appearance of the elements later” [42]). Comments such as these bring into stark relief how problematic the notion of an overture is. A musical overture is described as “[a] piece of music of moderate length, either introducing a dramatic work or intended for concert performance” (New Grove Dictionary of Music). It has its own form, its own communication of musical ideas. Some overtures can be thought of as “standalone.” We can certainly trace melodies from the coming work within them, but the melodies are not presented as mere snatches in a manner incomprehensible to the audience waiting patiently for a main body of music to explain the opening. The equivalent of an overture in writing would be more akin to an abstract than a collection of disjointed phrases from the text. The word overture may appear to ring true in both a literary and musical sense. As in an overture to an opera, fragments of the opening section are recognizably developed through the main body of the work. However, I would suggest that the idea of the overture limits our understanding of the opening and its impact on the reader’s experience of the rest of the episode.

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Canon Joyce himself assigned the term fuga per canonem to the episode, causing much confusion as critics struggle to fit it to the form of the writing. It is not a commonly used term in music, although Joyce seemed fairly confident of his application of it, writing to Harriet Shaw Weaver: “Perhaps I ought not to say any more on the subject of the Sirens but the passages you allude to were not intended by me as recitative, on page 12 in preface to the song. They are all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem: and I did not know in what other way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels” (SL 242). A fugue is a piece of music based on canonic imitation, one voice chasing another. The New Grove Dictionary comments that the Latin fuga is related to both fugere, “to flee,” and fugare, “to chase.” The word canon is used today to describe the most straightforward form of fugue: several lines or voices, each repeating essentially the same melody. Heath Lees’s article “The Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the Fuga per Canonem” overturns many assumptions regarding the opening and suggests that the fugal idea referred to in fuga per canonem can be found in the opening as well as the main body of the text. Furthermore, Lees suggests that the opening section is canonical in a medieval sense, as in the Middle Ages “the canon was usually verbal” (52). The canon was a textual encryption written at the start of a piece of music to explain to the musicians how the music was to be textured. Because the most commonly used canon was a description of strict imitation, the name canon became associated with that formal technique. “When viewed as a canon,” Lees writes, “the introduction becomes more like an inscription, embodying the ‘secret technic’ of the chapter, which now begins” (52). He suggests that the opening “embodies the Canon” and contains the coded message that we are entering the realm of music, that “ineluctable modality of the audible” (52). Using Joyce’s term “seehear,” Lees also points out that the episode “has to be approached with a musical ear in order that its total resonance can be ‘realized’” (41).

Canon as Score: Performing the Opening If we think of the term “seehear” in relation to music, we might relate it to two aspects of a piece: the text and the performance of that text. Put simply, we see the score and we hear the music. It is not necessary to revert to a medieval technique to establish the presence of an encoding system in music. The most obvious form of encryption in music is the musical score. The composer encodes the music he or she hears; the musician then decodes the score and performs

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the music. This encryption and deciphering are such obvious aspects of music that they are readily overlooked. The mystery of music comes, to some extent, from the fact that it can be reduced to dots on a graph of lines and spaces and again reignited through the act of performance. Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim discuss in Parallels and Paradoxes whether a pure music exists or whether there is simply a score and multiple performances, with performance being necessary for the music to come into itself. Each rendition of a musical piece is different but true in itself. Barenboim comments: “When Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony, it simply existed as a figment of his imagination and was subject to physical laws that he imagined only in his brain. And then, he used the only known system of notation, which is black spots on white paper. And nobody is going to convince me that these black spots on white paper are the Fifth Symphony. The Fifth Symphony comes into being when an orchestra, somewhere in the world, decides to play it” (111). I believe that this is the phenomenon that Joyce addresses in “Sirens.” Rather than reading the main body of the episode as a simple development of the ideas presented in the opening, perhaps it should be read as a performance of that score. The change that happens in the performance (or reading) of the score is representative of what happens when musicians present a piece of music, when they read a score and we then hear it. The main body can then be read as one interpretation of what happened, but it is also what makes sense of the metaphorical dots, lines, and spaces of that opening section. They hold everything, but without the following playing of them we cannot interpret their meaning. Yes, there can be fugal forms traceable within the score, or the opening, but to hear their value a performance must be given. Joyce lays out all the clues for us by assigning the “Ear” to this episode, telling us to listen, not to see the score and read out loud a, b, c, c#, and so forth, but instead to listen to it being played or performed. Bloom’s own musings on the structure of music led him to conclude: “Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. . . . Do anything you like with figures juggling . . . and you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is” (U 11.830–37; emphasis added). The idea of the main body representing a fugue has been dismissed on the grounds that we cannot hear the eight voices that Joyce claimed were present. However, once more there is a strange emphasis on the written form of music in this argument. Certainly, when looking at a score someone with musi-

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cal knowledge can decipher the different strands or voices that make up the whole, but when a fugue is performed the different voices are not always so obvious. The performed music may often sound vertically, for example, the listener more aware of the chords that the lines are producing than the horizontal melodies of individual voices. The final fugue may not be always recognizably itself—so why should Joyce’s final product have its technic fully on display?

Busoni and the Problems of Notation Indeed, the concept of musical scoring and performance can be taken a step further by considering the insight that their relationship gives us into the creative process. Joyce owned a copy of Ferruccio Busoni’s “Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music” (1907), in which the composer and critic wrote that “Notation, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later” (84). Busoni held the view that the writing down of music was only ever an estimation of the original moment of inspiration, of the music that the composer heard in his or her head: “notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model” (84). He believed therefore that it was “for the interpreter to resolve the rigidity of the signs into the primitive emotion” (84, his emphasis). When Joyce writes “What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for” (FW 482.34–36), he suggests that there is that which does not necessarily appear in the traditional “coding” of language but can be “decorded” from the text through the application of see-hearing. Viewing through our postmodern (indeed post–Lewis Carroll) lens, we can see the literary and aesthetic value in the seeming nonsense of the opening section. Yet it remains the case that we can only appreciate the full pathos and emotion of Leopold Bloom listening to Simon Dedalus’s rendition of M’Appari during an hour in which his wife will betray him when we read the full text of the episode. It cannot be felt by the reader of the opening alone, even if it holds the essence of notation of what is to come. Without Joyce’s interpretation or performance of that notation in the main body of the episode, the “primitive emotion” referred to by Busoni is not accessible to the reader. There is an impression created by those opening fragments that the episode is being sketched out by Joyce as it comes to his mind, to be developed later. However, we know from Joyce’s papers that early versions of the episode did not include the opening section. He is thus, in a sense, re-creating retrospectively the impression of inspiration coming to him and of the creative process at work. However, made

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apparent within that process is the inaccuracy or rigidity inherent in the transcription (or writing down) of the artist’s idea. To represent the initial source as elusive is to acknowledge the transcendental nature of the creative point of origin. This critical trajectory suggests a broader issue at play (one that cannot be covered in an article of this length) regarding Joyce’s cultural heritage and the unsettling process, not unfamiliar to the Irish, involved in the transference of a literary and musical heritage previously based on oral transmission into a formalized rigidity (for example, the transcribing of Irish modal melodies into a standardized tonal format by Edward Bunting).

Interpretation While reading the opening section of “Sirens” as an overture may seem neat, an alternative reading may open up far more insights into what this episode’s aesthetic ambition challenges and, I would argue, successfully re-creates. A reading of the main body of the episode as a performance of the initial section opens up the text because it suggests a musical rather than literary idea of the act of interpretation. As noted above, Adorno has referred to interpretation in music as not “accidental” but rather as “integral” (3). He notes a demarcation between interpretation in literature and in music, in the sense that in the field of literature interpretation involves understanding, and in the field of music it involves performing (3). However, his reading of literary interpretation may be too restrictive, and not just from our present position, but from a further critical appreciation of the aesthetic categories of reading. Susan Sontag’s description of literary interpretation appears to share common ground with Adorno’s sense of musical interpretation. Although Sontag maintains a critical approach to the whole idea of interpretation—“to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world” (7)—she is also presenting a model of it that is far more radical than Adorno’s. For example, she suggests that to interpret a text is to alter it, and even to revamp it. Whereas Adorno proposes that to interpret is “to understand,” Sontag suggests that in contemporary times, “[t]o understand is to interpret” (7). The interpretation she describes is an active one, one that engages with the text. This is presented as negative in the framework she sets up, precisely because it is unacknowledged—as she puts it: “the interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meanings” (6). For Sontag, “Interpretation seeks to resolve discrepancies,” but in the “Sirens” episode, and later in Finnegans Wake, the interpretative process

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encourages discrepancies and defers resolutions. In “Sirens” Joyce incorporates both senses of interpretation into his art, or to put it another way, his text resists choosing between the two. In music, interpretation is not a resolving force because it is not singular but multiple. If music is made up of multiple performances of a score, and the “Sirens” episode is playing with this idea, then the main body of the text is not only a performance but one of many possible performances of that score or opening. In other words, “imperthnthn” may not necessarily be “impertinent” mimicked by a boot boy. We might read, interpret, the words “bronze,” “gold,” and “irons” in the opening line as three colors, as three metals, or as three sounds. This, of course, is a process in which we always engage when reading a text, but usually the interpretations collapse and one is privileged. At the opening of “Sirens” that does not happen. This can be seen on a micro-level by an examination of the following segment: A husky fifenote blew. Blew. Blue bloom is on the. Goldpinnacled hair. (U 11.5–7) While the word “bloom” seems to grow out of the repeated play on the sound “blew/blue,” the reader is also alerted to the idea of Bloom’s “blueness” or sadness. In contrast, the next fragment suggests that the word “bloom” refers instead to a flower “on the. / Goldpinnacled hair.” The flower then appears to be a rose on a blouse: “A jumping rose on the satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile’ (U 11.8). However, the sense of Bloom’s sadness in “blue bloom” returns when we reach the phrase “I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming” (U 11.32). The two meanings are entwined toward the end of the opening section in the phrase “Last rose of Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone” (U 11.54). This kernel of ambiguity is played on throughout the episode proper, with Bloom taking on the uncertain names of “Bloowho” (U 11.86), “Bloowhose” (U 11.149), and “Bloohimwhom” (U 11.308). When we reach the unembellished name of “Bloom” (U 11.102), it is immediately followed by “On her flower frowning miss Douce said” (U 11.103), thus reintroducing ambiguity as well as uncertainty from our perspective as readers. The episode revels in the disorientation of the reader; while Odysseus’s men may have had their ears blocked to the song of the Sirens, the reader of this episode is more likely to feel blindfolded. Clues come to us aurally: we hear the movement of the tapping blind piano tuner, of the jingling Blazes Boylan moving up O’Connell street toward Molly Bloom, of the “steelyringing” viceregal cavalcade. The lack of geographi-

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cal signposting creates its own layers of ambiguity and misunderstanding. The reader is uncertain as to whether the musically named barmaids Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy are using the term “greaseabloom” (U 11.180) to refer to the old fogey from Boyd’s or to Bloom, who has yet to arrive at the Ormond hotel, and yet whose progress we are also aware of. The playing out of the bloom/flower motif is far more expansive and layered than in the earlier “Lotus-Eaters” episode. Now the “language of flow” (U 11.298) constantly interrupts narrative realism: “thick syrupy liquor for his lips, looked as it flowed (flower in his coat: who gave him?), and syrupped with her voice” (U 11.365–67). The reader feels on surer ground when the phrase “Blue bloom is on the rye” (U 11. 230–31) occurs, as it appears to be an obvious reference to the song “When the Bloom Is on the Rye.” The word rose in its various meanings is also played on continually: “Bronzedouce communing with her rose that sank and rose sought Blazes Boylan’s flowers and eyes” (U 11.398–99); “She rose and closed her reading, rose of Castile: fretted, forlorn, dreamily rose” (U 11.331–32). The rose motif is overtly associated with music: Lenehan’s riddle on Balfe’s opera The Rose of Castille, the Thomas Moore song “The Last Rose of Summer” (which is used in Flotow’s opera Martha), and Bloom’s memory of buying Blumenlied for Milly. The sense throughout the episode that words are resonating against each other creates a text that resists singular interpretations and insists on the notion of performance. The essence of the play on the words “Bloom,” “rose,” and “flower” (as examples) is contained in the opening phrases of the episode but requires the temporal expansion of the main narrative to create the reader’s role as the performer, a role that involves suspending the resolution of meaning, resisting singular interpretation, and allowing the interplay of meaning and resonance to operate outside a strict linearity. The penultimate word of the opening, “Done” (U 11.62), can be read as the last of Robert Emmet’s words from the dock—“Let my epitaph be written. I have done”—as pondered over by Bloom at the end of the episode proper (U 11.1291–92). However, it must also be considered in relation to the last word of the opening section, “Begin!” (U 11.63). “Begin” is not repeated at the end of the episode. Its inclusion suggests something new is about to happen with the body of the episode. Rather than considering the opening to be meaningless without the ensuing episode, “Begin!” suggests that something has been put in place which then allows the performance to begin. And yet this opening resists retrospectively assigned singular meanings and the idea that such fragments are in themselves a starting point in the creative process. The

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question remains: what reading process do we engage in as we encounter those fragments? Sebastian Knowles writes that “Joyce, by overdetermining his opening phrase, is ensuring that it cannot be understood. Only then can it be heard, only then does the line approach the meaning of music” (Bronze by Gold xxvii). Even the limited analysis of the words “blue” and “rose” above challenges the notion that the opening section does not contain meaning itself. If anything, as Knowles suggests, it is rich with meaning. However, the notion that literature will only approach the meaning of music when it is incomprehensible is not the sole key to Joyce’s text. On the contrary, it is possible to see the reader’s interpretation of those multiplicities of meaning over a prolonged passage as a performative reading, one approaching a musical performance. If we read “Sirens” as a score followed by a performance of that score, then what we are being shown is how a text, as much as music, can move out from the page through an interpretation or performance. This process is not unique to the “Sirens” episode—throughout the book we encounter a recurrent motif suggesting a multiplicity of perspectives and the repetition of events. The morning of 16 June is performed twice (we return to 8 a.m. at episode 4). In the “Wandering Rocks” episode, also an attempt to depict simultaneity (more ambitiously attempted in “Sirens”), we have a sense of perspectives, not simply as different angles on one thing (Bloom’s “parallax”) but as different renditions of the same event. While Joyce himself can be seen as both composer and performer in the “Sirens” episode, the implication of alternative interpretations hands power over to the reader. If we accept that multiple interpretations of the opening section can be performed, then we are truly encountering what Umberto Eco calls the “opera aperta,” or “open work” (3). An interpretative process thus emerges more akin to that of musical interpretation, whereby in each individual reading experience the text can be seen as being performed. Thus the activity of interpretation is not external to the work but rather is the work, much as it is necessary in order for music to come into itself. Without it, the music can exist only visually, as dots on lines and spaces on a page: what is required is a performance of that score, and within each performance it is necessary for an interpretation to be made. Joyce’s repositioning of the novel form within an interpretative, performative context need not be seen as an aspiration toward the status of music. Rather, our commonplace acceptance of these radical properties within the realm of music assists in our understanding of how Joyce is drawing them from the

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world of language, within which they are latent. The “Sirens” episode, then, is not exclusively the text on the page but also an ongoing interpretative experience, much as Mozart’s Requiem is not exclusively a score on a page but an ongoing experience reimagined in each performance of it. As Daniel Barenboim notes, “the score is not the truth. The score is not the piece. The piece is when you actually bring it into sound” (33); or as Leopold Bloom puts it, “It’s on account of the sounds it is” (U 11.830–37).

Notes 1. The essences of time and space, sound and object are combined in Stephen’s words on Sandymount strand: “Sounds solid” (U 3.17). The solid sound produced by his tapping ashplant also lets him know that solidity sounds. 2. This phrasing draws on Samuel Beckett’s comment about Finnegans Wake: “His writing is not about something, it is that something itself” (Beckett et al. 4). 3. See, for example, Bowen, Musical Allusions; Hodgart and Worthington; Bauerle; and Bauerle and Hodgart. 4. See Knowles, Bronze by Gold; Bowen, Bloom’s Old Sweet Song; and Lees. 5. The concept of the Wagnerian leitmotif in Joyce’s writing has been discussed by many. See Martin. 6. By suggesting that the main body of the text can be read as a performance of the opening score, I do not mean to imply that the opening represents a particular piece of music that might be deciphered. Sebastian Knowles takes to task those seeking to force the opening to “act as a cryptogrammatic vehicle for musical notation, no matter how pleasant and plausible the resulting melodies may be” (“That Form Endearing” 213). It is in terms of the relationship between the score and the performance that the musical analogy is important. 7. Knowles argues that the opening section can be compared to the keys on a piano: “The twenty-ninth note on the opening keyboard is ‘I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming’” (“That Form Endearing” 219). 8. Declan Kiberd has made the astute point, in lectures and private conversation, that all of Ulysses may well be the oblique narration of an alternative version of 16 June 1904 on which the young Joyce did not meet Nora Barnacle. In a sense, that day is released through literature to inhabit “the room of the infinite possibilities” (U 2.50–51). 9. I do not suggest that Joyce himself created the main body of the text out of the opening, but rather that the final product evokes this effect. In this sense, the opening could even be read as a slightly inaccurate dictation of the main body of text. 10. Within the field of musicology, a failure to explore music in its performed, rather than written, aspect has been recognized by critics such as Abbate and Cook. A critical approach to musical performances as temporal, unique, ephemeral events involves challenges that do not occur in a critical reading of the spatial, unchanging written document that is the musical score. Evaluations of performances tend to be left to newspaper reviewers, while academics focus to a greater extent on written music.

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Works Cited Abbate, Carolyn, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30.3 (2004): 505–36. Adorno, Theodor. Quasi una fantasia. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1992. Albright, Daniel. Modernism and Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Bauerle, Ruth. Picking Up Airs: Hearing the Music in Joyce’s Text. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Bauerle, Ruth, and Matthew Hodgart, eds. Joyce’s Grand Operoar: Opera in “Finnegans Wake.” Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Beckett, Samuel, et al. Our Exagmination round His Factifaction for Incamination of Work in Progress. 1929. London: Faber, 1972. Bowen, Zack. Bloom’s Old Sweet Song. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. ———. Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through “Ulysses.” Albany: SUNY Press, 1974. Burgess, Anthony. Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. London: Deutsch, 1973. Busoni, Ferruccio. “Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music.” Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music. 1907. New York: Dover, 1962. 73–102. Cook, Nicholas. “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance.” Music Theory Online 7.2 (2001) 1 June 2004 . Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Hodgart, Matthew J. C., and Mabel Worthington. Songs in the Works of James Joyce. New York: Columbia University Press for Temple University Press, 1959. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane. London: Penguin, 2000. Knowles, Sebastian D. G., ed. Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce. New York: Garland, 1999. ———. “That Form Endearing: A Performance of Siren Songs; or, ‘I was only vamping, man.’” Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays. Ed. Morris Beja and David Norris. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. 213–36. Kumar, Udaya. The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in “Ulysses.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Lees, Heath. “The Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the Fuga per Canonem.” James Joyce Quarterly 22.1 (1984): 39–54. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. 1766. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962. Martin, Timothy. Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Said, Edward, and Daniel Barenboim. Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1966.

9 Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama Timothy Martin

Both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom have their moments in Ulysses, single occasions on which they transcend their surroundings, contradict their own characters, perhaps even exceed the naturalist ethos of the work in which they appear. Bloom’s histrionic moment comes at the end of “Cyclops,” when he forgets the prudence that has made him a byword in Dublin and confronts his antagonist in deliberately provocative terms: “Your God was a jew,” he shouts at the Citizen. “Christ was a jew like me” (U 12.1809–10). The weight of this occasion is increased by recollection of its apparent inspiration in Homer, the point when, in a similar (and similarly unique) lapse in character, Odysseus taunts his own Polyphemus: “Kyklops / . . . Odysseus, raider of cities, took your eye: / Laertes’ son, whose home’s on Ithaka!” (Od. 9.472–76). Stephen’s moment comes in the climax of “Circe,” arguably the climax of Ulysses as a whole, at a point when, confronted by what appears to be the risen corpse of his mother, he shouts a Wagnerian epithet—“Nothung!”—and smashes Bella Cohen’s chandelier: “No! No! No! Break my spirit, all of you, if you can! I’ll bring you all to heel!” (U 15.4235–42). Elsewhere in the work Stephen’s demeanor is anything but operatic. A “lovely mummer” (U 1.97), he is parsimonious of speech, action, and emotion, parrying anti-Semitism with irony and indirection, using his “best French polish” (U 9.315) on behalf of Garrett Deasy and of Irish cattle, “chang[ing] the subject” instead of trying to “change the country” (U 16.1171). On these unique occasions characters defined by self-possession and reserve forget themselves; they make scenes. Each of these grandiose moments in Ulysses is inflected by the theater and its conventions. As Bloom leaves Barney Kiernan’s at the height of the conflict, the narrative suddenly transports him to another plane: “When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He

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stood ascend to heaven. . . . And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai!” (U 12.1910–15). The triumphal death, here inflated to apotheosis, is a staple of opera: nearly all Wagner’s operas, most notably Tristan and Isolde and The Flying Dutchman, conclude with some variation on this theme. And the dramatic rescue is common in both melodrama and opera: examples may be found in Dion Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn and Arrah-na-Pogue and in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Stephen’s crisis in “Circe” draws on the motif of the risen dead, a motif foreign to naturalist fiction but indigenous to melodramas like Boucicault’s immensely popular Corsican Brothers and Paul Potter’s Trilby; to melodrama more broadly defined, such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore and Mozart’s Don Giovanni; and to melodramatic fiction like Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. Joyce has taken pains to make the drama inherent in these scenes of antagonism and confrontation theatrical. Ulysses is among the most open-ended and naturalistic of novels, but it is striking how frequently Joyce, especially toward the latter half of the book, resorted to the theater—and to the melodramatic idiom in particular—to create moments of intensity and smaller climaxes that offer local and intermittent drama even if Ulysses as a whole does not. For example, grandiloquent speech is characteristic of melodrama, and Joyce has long been known to have borrowed Robert Emmet’s famous “speech from the dock” in order to give the “Sirens” episode the sense of an ending: “When my country takes her place among . . . [the] Nations of the earth . . . Then and not till then . . . Let my epitaph be . . . Written. I have . . . Done” (U 11.1284–93). Joyce might have seen Emmet’s words in a shop window, as Bloom does in “Sirens.” But the melodramatic quality of the speech, and Emmet’s own suitability for melodrama, are suggested by the fact that Joyce’s countryman Dion Boucicault used it—his wording is nearly identical to Joyce’s—to create an especially weighty moment in the last act of his 1884 play Robert Emmet (383–84). In “Nausicaa” Bloom realizes that his watch has stopped, and he makes an inference that Molly’s recollections in “Penelope” will ultimately bear out: “Funny my watch stopped at half past four. . . . Was that just when he, she?” (U 13.846–48). In The Corsican Brothers, a clock stops inexplicably at ten minutes past nine, when one of two twin brothers feels a sudden spasm of pain in his chest. We later learn that his twin was killed in a duel, hundreds of miles away, at ten minutes past nine on the same day. This powerful strain of the numinous reflects the paranoia that is at the heart of the genre. The avalanches, fires, and floods of the more spectacular nineteenth-century melodramas have their mundane counterparts in the

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occult powers of clocks, mirrors, and family portraits. Eric Bentley has written of the strain of paranoia in melodrama: “we are being persecuted, and we hold that all things, living and dead, are combining to persecute us. Or rather, [that] nothing is dead. Even the landscape has come to life if only to assault us” (202). Other moments in Ulysses, especially the endings of later episodes, are more generally theatrical. Cheryl Herr has found that the vision of Rudy with which “Circe” concludes is indebted to the transformation scene that is usual in the English pantomime (Anatomy 173–79), and Bloom’s fantastic escape from the Citizen in a heaven-sent chariot is a reminder of the probable origin of the dramatic rescue in the venerable tradition of deus ex machina. Two episodes, finally, evoke sentimental endings characteristic of a good deal of popular theater: the reunion of long-lost family members in the case of “Eumaeus,” when symbolic father and son go off together, arm in arm; and the acceptance of a proposal of marriage, if only in recollection, as “Penelope” and Ulysses as a whole achieve their naturalist denouement. Joyce’s engagement with popular culture must have been apparent to his earliest readers, and Joyce scholars like R. B. Kershner and Cheryl Herr have made important strides in charting its range and implications. Among studies of Joyce and the theater, Herr, in Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture, devotes a good deal of attention to Joyce’s debt to pantomime and the music hall. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few scholars have written on Joyce and melodrama. The most notable exception is Stephen Watt, whose Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Stage gives an account of the tradition of melodrama on the Irish stage, especially at the Queen’s Royal Theater in Dublin, and charts its influence on Joyce and O’Casey. “If allusions to popular culture in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were traced to their origins,” Watt writes, “the trek would frequently lead to the theater . . . from which Joyce, O’Casey, and many of their characters derived so much pleasure—and in which Shaw and Yeats discovered so much vulgarity” (30). Watt reminds us that Joyce developed names for his divisive twins in Finnegans Wake from two nineteenth-century melodramas: Shaun from the character Shaun the Post in the 1884 Arrah-na-Pogue, and Shem from the title character in Charles Young’s 1886 Jim the Penman (37–38). In this essay my aim is less to trace the presence of individual works in Ulysses or to show, as Watt does, how “melodrama taught historical lessons to its audience” (55) than to describe and assess the book’s exploitation, intermittently, of a melodramatic ethos. The origins of melodrama were in late-eighteenth-century France and in the romantic movement. The term may have been first used by Rousseau with

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reference to his own play Pygmalion, which consisted of dramatic monologues interspersed with pantomime and musical interludes (the latter, of course, accounting for the presence of melos in the term’s etymology). After melodrama made its way onto the English stage in 1801, with the production of Thomas Holcroft’s Tale of Mystery, strict licensing acts assured that it would flourish. In London, only the so-called patent theaters—Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and eventually the Haymarket—enjoyed the right to present traditional drama, including Shakespeare, while the scores of other theaters that grew up in London in the early nineteenth century were obliged, until midcentury, to provide some sort of musical accompaniment for their plays. These and other circumstances help explain how Victorian melodrama earned its poor reputation. Lack of copyright for playwrights—there was no international protection before the 1880s—made originality unprofitable, so most melodramas were cobbled out of historical material, legends, and especially novels. In many cases hack writers simply translated and plagiarized what they saw in Continental theaters. (Holcroft’s Tale of Mystery was based on a play by Pixerécourt produced in Paris just months before.) The increasing size of Victorian theaters, built to accommodate rising urban populations, encouraged stilted diction, strident declamation, and exaggerated gestures. Finally, strict codes of censorship enforced by the Lord Chamberlain created many barriers to free expression. One critic has described the heyday of melodrama as a kind of theatrical Dark Ages, sandwiched between a Golden Age of Restoration theater and a modern Renaissance represented by Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov, Strindberg, and Wilde (Kilgarriff 15). George Steiner has linked the rise of melodrama to the decline or “death” of tragedy, and Peter Brooks considers the form to be the expression of a “post-sacred era” “where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics . . . is of immediate, daily, political concern” (15). Notwithstanding the poor reputation of nineteenth-century melodrama, many critics acknowledge its emotional power and its ubiquity in both theater and fiction. In Tragedy and Melodrama, Robert Heilman describes these two forms of drama as both “artistic structures” and “general categories of human experience” (88–89); that is, both art and life can be, or seem, tragic and melodramatic. If tragedy deals with the divided human, basically good but capable of wrongdoing, “melodrama separat[es] good and evil and treat[s] them as independent wholes,” and personifies them as heroes or villains (90). Heilman calls the dominant effect of melodrama “monopathic,”

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where plot, character, and theme channel our responses into intense streams of unmixed feeling: “the exaltation of victory, indignation at wrongdoing, the pitiableness of victims . . . the warming participation in courage, the despair of defeat . . . the sadness of death” (95). Tragedy is by contrast “polypathic,” requiring the audience to experience ambivalence rather than singleness of emotion as it focuses on characters caught between conflicting imperatives and impulses. Heilman links tragedy with religion, with “action within the soul,” and melodrama, perhaps unexpectedly, with politics, with “action within the world” (97). “Melodrama,” he writes, “is concerned with making right prevail in the world and between persons, or with observing that it does not prevail; tragedy, with the problem of right in the self ” (97). And it is in the preoccupation with setting things right that melodrama is monopathic, for one must shed ambivalence, suppress the contradictory imperative, and “assume wholeness” if one is to act (97–98). The vigorous tradition of political melodrama on the Dublin stage, documented by Stephen Watt and by Cheryl Herr in For the Land They Loved, helps justify Heilman’s claims about the topical nature of melodrama. Heilman’s attachment of melodrama to politics, social action, and right and wrong gives us considerable purchase on the melodramatic qualities of “Cyclops.” The episode in Kiernan’s pub is at once the most political and the most dramatic in the novel. Its art, according to Joyce’s schema, is politics, and its plot reveals the standard dramatic trajectory of conflict and rising action, culminating in what may be regarded as the only real “scene,” leaving aside the question of “Circe,” in Ulysses. The dominant emotion of the episode—indignation—is the melodramatic emotion par excellence, the monopathic certainty that one is right and that others are wrong. It runs like a leitmotif throughout the episode, as the cast of minor characters confronts political questions like lynchings in Georgia, corporal punishment in the British navy, capital punishment in contemporary Dublin (the prospective hangman an Englishman bearing the name of a man against whom Joyce held a grudge), and, most promising of all these subjects for melodrama, a demanding landlord thrown out of court by a righteous judge: “A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children? Ten, did you say? . . . And the wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court immediately, sir . . . I dismiss the case” (U 12.1104–10). Though the landlord may be justified in asking that his rents be paid, Sir Frederick Falkiner, the judge with a “[h]eart as big as a lion” (U 12.1097), has put the law aside and, like the sympathetic audience for melodrama, made his feelings whole.

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Politics provokes the conflict between Bloom and the Citizen, and indignation provides its fuel. The Citizen lives in a world of black-and-white distinctions and monopathic certainty about national questions: “The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us” (U 12.523–24). Bloom antagonizes him not only because of his dubious ethnic identity but also because he cannot muster undivided emotion on the political issues that so move the Citizen. “I mean,” Bloom reasons, “wouldn’t it be the same here if you put force against force?” (U 12.1361–62). The irony, of course, is that, for all his patriotism, the Citizen is apparently a villain in his own right, wanted by the Molly Maguires “for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant” in Limerick (U 12.1314–16). Heilman writes that “[i]n indignation, we eliminate [our own] complicity and guilt” (96). Or, as Bloom puts it, his own feelings provoked, “Some people . . . can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own” (U 12.1237–38). Ambivalence in argument or in political life is overmatched by unmixed feeling, and it is only when republicanism becomes xenophobia and anti-Semitism—when Bloom feels personally threatened— that he rises, uniquely in Ulysses, to the occasion: “And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. . . . Robbed. . . . Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. . . . At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle” (U 12.1467–72). According to Heilman, “Stress makes the unified hero or coward, the samitaran or the savage. . . . [O]ccasion may confer on divided man the oneness for a selfless act, for a killing in the market, or for a murder in the bedroom” (98). It is a commonplace of Joyce criticism to attribute a narrowness of vision, a monocularism, to the Polyphemus of this episode. A sense of the melodrama in the episode helps us to see a similar narrowness of emotion, a monopathy, shared by the two main characters and creating the episode’s basic conflict. And it is this melodramatic deployment of indignation that gives this episode much of its rhetorical power, just as it does the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait—two scenes where Joyce’s writing is most old-fashioned and, not coincidentally, most affecting. It may be possible to see “Cyclops” as the expression of an impulse toward the histrionic that is latent or repressed in Bloom. Bloom’s flirtation with Martha Clifford, with its pseudonyms and secret correspondence, partakes of melodramatic intrigue in some ways. The melodramatic diction in Martha Clifford’s letter to Henry Flower—“O how I long to meet you. . . . Then I will tell you all” (U 5.253–54)—is very much in keeping with the confessional tradition that links melodrama with its Romantic origins, a tradition in which heroes and heroines often vow to “tell you all.” (“You shall know all,” says Fabien

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in The Corsican Brothers. “From my brother’s friend I will have no secrets” [Boucicault 103]). Bloom’s relationship with Martha has become a surrogate for a marital one, just as his histrionic behavior in “Cyclops,” following the events of “Sirens” so closely, may be a substitute for the action traditionally expected of the outraged husband in opera and in melodrama. But Bloom’s capacity for self-knowledge and for seeing both sides of a question distinguishes him from the Citizen; his own sense of complicity in and partial responsibility for Molly’s adultery balks the indignation that might prompt action; he is unable to muster the Citizen’s monopathic conviction about “strangers” in either oikos or polis. In “Ithaca,” Bloom imagines what a husband’s reaction should be. “What retribution, if any?” he asks himself. “Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witness), not yet. Suit for damages . . . not impossibly. Hushmoney by moral influence, possibly” (U 17.2200–2206). One of the theatrical possibilities that Bloom doesn’t quite reject—“exposure by mechanical artifice”—would make an excellent opera scene, and certainly the “concealed ocular witness” has a distinguished tradition in the theater. But a melodramatic solution to the problem of adultery—assassination or duel by combat—is clearly outside the boundaries of the work. Bloom’s temperament, though he exceeds it for his moment in Kiernan’s pub, is not fundamentally histrionic; Ulysses is more even-tempered and dispassionate than is Don Giovanni. In “Telemachus,” the ghost of May Dedalus is a gentle visitant, easy to explain naturalistically: “In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes” (U 1.270–72). In “Circe,” however, the guise of dream is absent, and her appearance is grisly, uncanny, and, to Stephen, inexplicable: “She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word” (U 15.4160–61). A small detail that emphasizes the theatrical underpinnings of this moment is found in Joyce’s stage direction: “Stephen’s mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor . . .” (U 15.4157). Passage through walls and floors was a standard indication of the presence of a ghost: when the murdered Louis dei Franchi appears to his twin in The Corsican Brothers, the stage directions tell us that “he glides across the stage, ascending gradually through the floor at the same time” (Boucicault 112). In Sweeney Todd, a variant of this motif occurs when one of the barber’s victims rises through a trapdoor—the door that is underneath the mechanical barber’s chair—to con-

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front and upbraid his murderer: “His face is deadly pale; his hair is dishevelled, and his clothes marked with blood” (Kilgarriff 256). The established parallel for the ghost of May Dedalus in “Circe” is of course that of Hamlet the king, who confronts his son at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play (UA 15.4157n). But the appearance of Stephen’s mother at or near what must be regarded as the climax of Ulysses recalls the standard “sensation scene” of melodrama, the point during which lurid action, the advancing technical skill of the nineteenth-century stage, and the natural dramatic climax combine to provide the play’s most chilling effects. Judith Fisher, writing on “The ‘Sensation Scene’ in Dickens and Boucicault,” offers the examples of a ship explosion in Boucicault’s Octaroon, the escape from prison in Arrah-naPogue, and, outside melodrama proper, the scene in Oliver Twist when Bill Sikes is accidentally hanged. Many sensation scenes in opera and melodrama involve confrontation between the protagonist, whether hero or villain, and a figure from the dead who represents an absolute moral claim—this motif an echo, perhaps, of the pursuit of Orestes by the Furies. In The Corsican Brothers, for example, the ghost of the dead Louis dei Franchi makes the same demand of his surviving twin—revenge—as does the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In the sensation scene of Gilbert and Sullivan’s parody Ruddigore, an entire portrait gallery of ancestors comes to life to remind the protagonist of his hereditary responsibility to commit at least one crime every day. A common variant is the appearance of the assumed-to-be-but-not-actually dead, a motif that provides for a more completely happy ending: in The Corsican Brothers, the killer of Louis dei Franchi is terror-struck when he is surprised by the vengeful twin in the forest of Fontainebleau; in Sweeney Todd the demon barber is confronted in court by his first murder victim in the play, a victim who has miraculously survived. The shock forces total submission: “Ha, Ha!” Todd exclaims, “‘tis useless to deny my guilt; the very dead rise from their cerements to prove Sweeney Todd a murderer!” (Kilgarriff 262). Often, as in this case, the effect of the revenant’s appearance is to force a collapse on the part of the miscreant and a confession of guilt. It is a mark of Don Giovanni’s intransigent villainy that he struggles against the Commendatore’s vivified monument in the graveyard and supper scenes of Mozart’s opera and dies unrepentant. Peter Brooks has written eloquently about the ethical basis of melodrama, arguing that “the melodramatic mode . . . exists to locate and to articulate the moral occult,” that is, “the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality” (5). The rise of melodrama in what Brooks calls a “post-sacral age” is a response to the sense

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that a moral and ethical basis for existence seems absent (15–16). The figure of the revenant—almost always an innocent victim of violence—may be seen as attached to this “moral occult” through his or her sacrifice and charged with asserting its claims and insisting on a restoration of the moral order, a restoration to be achieved through acts of revenge or repentance. In “Circe,” Stephen’s confrontation with his mother is unique, and melodramatically so, qualitatively different from the episode’s other hallucinations in that Stephen does not enter its ontological realm. Whereas Bloom greets his visions with tokens of recognition—“Ja, ich weiss, papachi” (U 15.257)—and with a degree of cooperation—“I so want to be a mother” (U 15.1817)—Stephen is “horrorstruck,” and the image remains starkly outside him: “Lemur, who are you? No. What bogeyman’s trick is this?” (U 15.4176). The uncanniness of the ghost is of course crucial to its moral force and to the melodramatic idiom generally: the task of the unjustly killed (and an image of Buck Mulligan, a witness to this confrontation in “Circe,” reminds us of the idea that “Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody” [U 15.4178–79]) is to represent the occult realm of moral values that has been outraged by the miscreant, who is by definition estranged from it. Throughout this brief but climactic scene Stephen’s mother is relentless and rigid, refusing—like moral principle itself—to engage in dialogue with Stephen, iterating variants of an insistence that he repent. For his part, Stephen assumes the role of Don Giovanni rather than that of Sweeney Todd, resisting the ghost’s claims and, at least temporarily, escaping them. If melodrama is latent in Bloom’s flirtation with Martha Clifford, it may be somewhat more palpable in Stephen’s vexed relationship with his mother. Stephen, in fact, may be able to avoid repentance because he believes another antagonist, perhaps a cosmic one, is responsible for her death: “Someone killed her,” he tells Buck Mulligan obscurely (U 1.90). In the 1960s, the great drama critic Eric Bentley wrote that “As modern persons we are willy-nilly under the spell of Naturalism. However often we tell ourselves the contrary, we relapse into assuming the normal and right thing to be a subdued tone, small human beings, a milieu minutely reproduced” (215). The lowered voice of Naturalism accords well with the early Joyce, including the opening episodes of Ulysses, which chart the motion of “Woodshadows float[ing] silently by through the morning peace” (U 1.242), the sound of a door creaking open and shut, the sight of a street person emptying a stony boot. The emergence of an element of melodrama represents one of many populist voices in the book’s polyphony, a voice whose integration in what is initially a muted, realist sequence of events contributes to a developing sense of carnival

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and exuberance. Its presence in the emotional climaxes of the novel and in the climaxes of individual episodes may reflect nostalgia for an old way of writing and for a more emphatic ordering of values and of experience. The melodramatic strain in Joyce’s work speaks to the many ways in which Joyce began to chafe at the narrowness of the modernist aesthetic, including many of his own contributions to it: its elitism, naturalism, and formal integrity. As Bentley has written, “The curious thing is that, while our age generally is dedicated to Naturalistic principles, the outstanding writers of the age are forever protesting against them” (210).

Notes 1. The primary allusion here is to the translation of Elijah into heaven, recounted in 2 Kings (UA 12.1910–12n). The scene of the Crucifixion, especially as described in Matthew 27, when Jesus seems to ask for Elijah’s intervention, may play a part as well. “By Jesus,” the Citizen has said, “I’ll crucify him so I will” (U 12.1812). 2. R. B. Kershner drew my attention to the melodrama of the stopped watch. 3. Two paragraphs from my essay “Operatic Joyce” (35) contributed some material to the foregoing discussion here. 4. Among the plays that Robert Heilman describes as fundamentally melodramatic are such diverse works as Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (74–87). 5. In claiming that melodrama tends toward the local and topical, Heilman lists “slavery, ‘big business,’ slums, totalitarianism, the mechanization of life, war, the varieties of segregationism” among subjects attacked in such plays (94). For background on the history of melodrama, see Baugh, Kilgarriff, and Smith. 6. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that, among the episodes of Ulysses, Joyce and the American composer George Antheil chose “Cyclops” as the basis of an opera. According to Paul Martin, however, Antheil’s “Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops” may not have advanced beyond a few pages of manuscript. 7. Paradoxically, melodrama both resists and contributes to the book’s Naturalism. Joyce recognized that the melodramatic imagination is at work in everyday life as well as on the stage: few of us can resist the lure of the numinous in stopped clocks, and many of us are acquainted with Garrett Deasys of our own, “surrounded by difficulties, by . . . intrigues by . . . backstairs influence” (U 2.343–44).

Works Cited Baugh, Albert C. “The Drama in Decline.” A Literary History of England. 4 vols. New York: Appleton, 1967. 4: 1264–69. Bentley, Eric. The Life of the Drama. New York: Antheneum, 1964.

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Boucicault, Dion. Selected Plays. Irish Drama Selections 4. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Fisher, Judith L. “The ‘Sensation Scene’ in Charles Dickens and Dion Boucicault.” Dramatic Dickens. Ed. Carol Hanbery MacKay. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. 152–67. Heilman, Robert Bechtold. Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968. Herr, Cheryl, ed. For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890–1925. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991. ———. Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1961. Kershner, R. B., ed. Joyce and Popular Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. ———. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Kilgarriff, Michael, ed. The Golden Age of Melodrama: Twelve 19th Century Melodramas. London: Wolfe, 1974. Martin, Paul. “‘Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops’: Joyce and Antheil’s Unfinished ‘Opéra Mécanique.’” Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce. Ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles. New York: Garland, 1999. 91–105. Martin, Timothy. “Operatic Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly 38.1–2 (2000–2001): 25–43. Smith, James L. Melodrama. The Critical Idiom 28. London: Methuen, 1973. Watt, Stephen. Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991.

IV

Counterparts Intertextualities

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10 Modernity and Its Discontents Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” Yu-chen Lin

Blazes Boylan stands out among the hundreds of ill-clad characters in Joyce’s Dublin. With his fine taste in clothes he is no doubt one of the most eyecatching Dubliners to stroll the city streets on 16 June 1904. Attired this day in an elegant, mass-produced dark blue suit matched with a sky-blue necktie (which in turn matches the color of his eyes and socks), Boylan incarnates the modern ideal of the dandy. The dandy is meticulous in his dress and can easily charm women while remaining himself immune to their charm (Boucher 363); Boylan, for his part, is probably Dublin’s most notorious lady-killer, and aspires to play this playboy role to the full. He advertises himself not only by his apparel but also by carrying between his lips a flower he takes from the shopgirl at Thornton’s after he has briefly flirted with her. Perhaps not incidentally, his self-conscious womanizing ways are punctuated and counterpointed in “Wandering Rocks” by “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” a popular song about a desirable working woman that serves as the “theme” of Boylan’s promenade (as well as of a sporting event held at Trinity College). The significance of this song has not escaped the attention of Zack Bowen, one of the most attentive readers or “auditors” of the music in Ulysses. He suggests that the song forms the center of “an elaborate and delicately interwoven tapestry of music based on the rivalry and usurpation themes” culminating in “a political allegory” (95). In this reading, Rose, the Yorkshire girl of the song, becomes the epitome of female characters who betray the male protagonists and, by extension, Ireland. As a woman who manipulates her husband and her former lovers, Rose anticipates Molly Bloom, who is fought over by several lovers, including her husband and, by the far the most formidable

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combatant, Blazes Boylan. In “Circe,” Rose provokes Stephen’s oedipal aggression when this song is played in Bella Cohen’s brothel, accompanied by the patrons’ wild dancing; the latter becomes a “[d]ance of death” (U 15.4139) triggering Stephen’s confrontation with the ghost of his dead mother and a choir of confessors singing a hymn to the Virgin. Within the logic of compression and displacement that rules this episode, Rose becomes a synthesis of May Dedalus and the Holy Mother Church, whose oppressive presence Stephen expels by wielding his ashplant at the chandelier. Finally, Rose is also conflated with Cissy Caffrey, an Irish girl emerging in this context as a prostitute who privileges Privates Carr and Compton over Stephen, allegorically a suitor of Ireland (Bowen 92–95). Sensitive to the song’s figurative bearing on the central themes of Ulysses, Bowen’s reading nonetheless elides its materialistic particulars, which are so historically gender-specific and yet self-contradictory that they call attention to its underlying ideology. In this regard Andrew Gibson’s discussion, in Joyce’s Revenge, of Joyce’s decolonizing gender politics is inspiring even if Gibson is silent about this particular lyric. In contrast to current postcolonial Joyce studies, which largely focus on Joyce’s place within the domain of Irish nationalism, Gibson takes into consideration English cultural nationalism in order to explore how Joyce exacts his revenge on the empire in Ulysses. This often-neglected phase of English culture originated, on the one hand, from the empire’s anxiety over the loss of its economic supremacy, under the pressure of international competition, during the period 1880–1920, and on the other hand from its apprehension about its stability under the threat of a democratic economy and popular culture. In this crisis the English people looked to cultural institutions—guardians of national character—for a response to the demand for renewed leadership. This explains why the question of the “English spirit” was, in the early twentieth century (Gibson 8–13), a preoccupation of English cultural institutions, which relentlessly promoted an ethic of “national fitness” as the cornerstone of “national efficiency.” Such an ethic, in turn, builds on a domestic ideology that entails the virtues of “motherhood, domesticity, and self-sacrifice” (Gibson 131), leading to the appropriation of women’s labor. Pursuing Gibson’s line of argument, I would suggest that, more than a gendered figure of internecine betrayal, Rose is deployed as an ideal woman in order to celebrate the English spirit as a force of modernization, an epitome of the empire’s golden age when national efficiency was the order of the day. This gender ideal takes on an asymmetrical significance, however, when it is introduced to Ireland in order to assimilate colonial

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subjects to imperial values, because the colony is not on a par with England in terms of economic power, a fact all too visible in everyday consumption, especially of clothing. What begins as an imperial power’s propagandizing via an innocuous song consequently becomes the ruthless teasing of an Irish modernity characterized by disempowerment. To unravel the unequal power relations lying behind this slippage of intention and consequence, I would like to begin with an inspection of fashion in relation to Irish modernity, and then proceed to relate this fashion to Rose’s sartorial preference as highlighted in the song “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.” Fashion originated from a desire to imitate the aristocracy in order to elevate oneself to a social class otherwise unattainable (Slater 19, 156). In other words, fashion in its origin is a form of what Thorstein Veblen calls “conspicuous consumption” (27), through which one “socializes” with the class model as well as with one’s fellow aspirants, paradoxically enough, by differentiating oneself sartorially (Simmel 301). Fashion thus understood flourished in the nineteenth century, when empires transported from their colonies exotic material for the making of clothing, and the rise of mass production made the latest fashions more affordable to the populace. In such a context, fashion became an indicator of modernization and, by extension, economic supremacy and military power. This explains why French and English modes dominated the world of fashion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Boucher 291, 333). What is more, as a commodity fashion was integrated into the daily life of the common people so that it also became in effect no longer a luxury but a necessity. Georg Simmel’s notion of modernization sheds light on this shift. Modern life, suggests Simmel, is characterized by an exorbitant excess of stimuli brought about by modernization, including urbanization, new forms of transportation, and new occupations. The urgent task for modern metropolitans in this regard is to protect the self from the flood of nervous stimulants and sensory incitements. To address such a need, Simmel proposes two possible “survival” skills—the adoption of a blasé outlook in order to lift one’s threshold of response to new stimuli, and “self-fashioning” (326, 331). As a crucial strategy of self-fashioning, fashion thus becomes highly relevant to modernity in that it protects the self from the turbulence of modern life by weakening one’s “nervous energy” (302). It is to be noted that as a technology of the self, fashion calls for a certain expertise, thereby introducing fashion magazines, or “maps of modernity” (Slater 86), into the market. Modern culture, in other words, is an “expertise culture” (Bauman 200–205) in which one paradoxically becomes

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both laborer and commodity in order to produce a self that can remain untouched by the hassle of modernity. If fashion involves two seemingly contradictory impulses—individuality and uniformity—then Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century presents an even more interesting case, inasmuch as its “fashion” entails anomalous patterns of differentiation and socialization, conditioned as it is by a colonial economy. Joyce’s Dublin is not without citizens who are highly conscious of fashion. Maginni, for instance, is nothing less than an outstanding piece of “self advertisement” (U 8.98–99) in Bloom’s view. On 16 June 1904 he dresses meticulously in a “silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots” (U 10.56–58). Ned Lambert, for his part, arouses Bloom’s admiration for the “[n]ice soft tweed” of which his purple suit is made (U 6.828). While Bloom pays visual tribute to Lambert for his distinctive sartorial taste, Tom Kernan is aware of Mr. Grimm’s silent compliment–”Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Nothing like a dressy appearance” (U 10.738–39)—and does not hesitate to award himself the title “[k]night of the road” (U 10.748). The list of dressy Dubliners also includes Gerty MacDowell, who constantly consults fashion pages in girls’ magazines in order to navigate the vast sea of “expertise culture.” She learns from Princess Novelette about the magic of eyebrowleine (U 13.111) and from Lady’s Pictorial that “electric blue will be worn” (U 13.151), a piece of knowledge she methodically puts into practice. To the extent that Joyce’s Dubliners partake of the general impulse toward self-fashioning in the wake of modernization and mass production, they do it so scrupulously that they demonstrate the symptoms of a colonial economy. Gibson suggests that social relations in colonial Ireland involve “little calculations of or tussles for advantage, however small, or . . . claims to status, however trivial” (88), and it is in these Dubliners’ trivial claims to status through maintaining their own personal appearance that their little calculations most poignantly reveal their disempowerment within the sphere of colonial modernity. Granted that Gerty is extravagant enough to spend “[t]hree and eleven” (U 13.499–500) on her silk stockings—a sum roughly translating into four days of Eveline’s wages—this is just about her limit economically. What she cannot afford she does by herself. She hand-dyes her shirt a trendy electric blue, puts her hat on the waterjug overnight to keep it in shape, and spends all Tuesday afternoon at Clery’s summer sale to hunt for a “slightly shopsoiled” butterfly bow to match her eggblue chenille hat (U 13.155–56). She readily congratulates herself on the success of her labors, totally unwilling to acknowledge, or

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perhaps unaware of the fact, that her “product” might not measure up to her expenditure of “labor.” Bloom, for instance, does not seem to appreciate all the calculating investments she has made in fashioning herself. He knows that the rose perfume she puts on the cotton cloth, inserted in lieu of a handkerchief in her shirt pocket, is “[s]weet and cheap: soon sour” (U 13.1009). What is more, he favors her expensive stockings to the rumpled stockings of the woman he met earlier (U 13.929–31), but fails to notice the tremendous effort Gerty puts into embellishing her hat, except to understand that the hat’s wide beam is intended to “hide her face” (U 13.838). Dublin males adopt other survival skills to make themselves presentable, primarily skills not endorsed by the imperial modernizing agenda for maintaining public health. Tom Kernan, for instance, purchases a secondhand “[s]tylish coat” at an incredible bargain price, and admires his own shrewdness immensely (U 10.743–45). Bloom, in turn, plans to remodel an old suit for the second time (U 6.830–31). Even the affluent and dandyish Buck Mulligan is not above possessing a pair of secondhand breeches, which he gives to Stephen along with other articles of clothing to dress up his Bohemian friend (U 1.112–19). This representation of Dubliners’ want of adequate clothing was historically accurate, Gibson suggests, since the use of secondhand clothes was very common in Joyce’s time, so common that it contributed to the spread of disease (89), though this particular aspect is totally absent from Joyce’s Dublin. Indeed, health is not a primary concern in a colony where survival is the order of things. Bloom and Molly even undertook “the other business” (U 11.487) of selling secondhand clothes and stage costumes when they were “on the rocks” (U 11.485) in Holles Street. Tellingly, Bloom’s plan for renovating his secondhand suit is triggered by the pathetic sight of threads hanging down from Ned Lambert’s otherwise elegant suit: “His wife I forgot he’s not married or his landlady ought to have picked out those threads for him” (U 6.831–32). Here Bloom’s pragmatic and nonchalant response to Ned Lambert’s degraded elegance suggests the blasé outlook Simmel prescribes for the metropolitan to protect his or her self from the excessive stimuli characteristic of modern life. Indeed, Bloom does not seem troubled by the recollection of a younger Ned Lambert, who used to “change three suits in the day” as a “[d]ressy fellow” (U 6.828–30). In this remembrance he partakes of the Dubliners’ nonplussed attitude toward their fellow citizens’ sartorial degeneracy, although he is an outsider in many ways. Barely able to keep body and soul together in the Iveagh home (U 11.1014–15), a charity lodging house for the poor working class, Ben Dollard, for one, attempts to impress others

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by sporting a worn-out cheap blue suit (U 10.940–41); this invites Simon Dedalus’s derisive comment: “Hold that fellow with the bad trousers. . . . That’s a pretty garment, isn’t it, for a summer’s day? . . . They were made for a man in his health, Ben, anyhow” (U 10.905–15). Ben Dollard responds with a stoic protest: “I threw out more clothes in my time than you ever saw” (U 10.916–17). By engaging each other in mutual mockery, these two Dubliners reconfirm their camaraderie in and of (non)fashion, one that builds on a blasé tolerance of impoverishment and a cooperative commitment to those in dire need. In other words, they make do with an alternative fashion that, for all its “individualizing” impulse, calls attention to its opposite impulse toward a conformity rooted in poverty. Indeed, Ben Dollard comes to meet Father Cowley with the purpose of steering the clergyman away from immediate eviction (U 10.885–98). This help seems to be offered in return for Father Cowley’s timely tip to Ben, several years earlier, that he should borrow a concert dress suit from Molly, a woman in possession of a large collection of used stage costumes (U 11.476–97). As in innumerable other cases where Dubliners resort to secondhand clothing to fashion their desired self, the result of this contingent arrangement verges on the farcical, since, as Bloom recalls, the suit does not fit the stout man at all: “Trousers tight as a drum on him. Musical porkers. Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself back across the bed, screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show” (U 11.556–58). Still, Ben Dollard is grateful because the Blooms’ generosity “save[s] the situation” (U 11.480). This is one of Bloom’s rare moments of being included in the Dubliners’ “socializing” occasions, thanks to the anomalous state of Irish modernity. It is not clear whether Ben Dollard seeks help from people he barely knows because he is too large or too economically hard up, but Bloom is aware of his addiction to alcohol, which has led to his decline and current status as resident in a charity home: “Remember: rosiny ropes, ships’ lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh home. . . . Number one Bass did that for him” (U 11.1013–16). In diagnosing alcoholism as the cause of Ben Dollard’s decline, Bloom might have conflated cause with effect, for Ben is not an isolated case. In fact, hunger, disability, illness, and poverty seem to be the norm in the colonial Irish economy, as revealed in the grim scenes Bloom witnesses from the carriage on his way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Alcohol, then, is for Irish males a ready panacea for frustrations, yet ironically it becomes the problem rather than the solution as it invariably leads to domestic violence. Gerty, for instance, is a typical victim of this vicious cycle, a bleak fact not to

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be glossed over by the “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy” style of “Nausicaa” (Budgen 205): Had her father only avoided the clutches of the demon drink, by taking the pledge or those powders the drink habit cured in Pearson’s Weekly, she might now be rolling in her carriage, second to none. . . . But that vile decoction which has ruined so many hearths and homes had cast its shadow over her childhood days. Nay, she had even witnessed in the home circle deeds of violence caused by intemperance and had seen her own father, a prey to the fumes of intoxication, forget himself completely. (U 13.290–300) Pathetic as her condition is, Gerty can still afford to fashion herself, in her own way, into a competitive piece of merchandise on the marriage market. By contrast, the Dedalus girls are compelled to devote all their energy to mere survival. As Kimberly Devlin suggests, the mother’s presence accounts for this difference: May Dedalus may have significantly contributed to the family economy by taking in laundry, a task taken over by her daughters less successfully after her death, even though this fact is systematically suppressed in the text (82–83). In this view, the Dignam family, with its loss of the father, is the counterpart of the Dedaluses (78). Yet, granted that Patrick Dignam has to put up with an ill-fitting mourning suit (“The blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming end to it”) (U 10.1154–56), his siblings are relatively well fed, unlike the Dedalus girls, who remain hungry and have to depend on charity for their food. Ironically enough, woman’s economic contribution is not recognized in Ireland at the turn of the century. Bloom volunteers to intercede on behalf of Dignam’s widow so that she can make claims on her husband’s insurance policy, whereas no such effort is made for Simon Dedalus, presumably because May is not insured at all (Devlin 84). This perspective sheds new light on Molly, who seems to be idling around at home on 16 June 1904 except to consummate her liaison with Blazes Boylan under the pretext of discussing the program for a concert tour to Belfast, while Bloom fully shoulders all the financial responsibilities. As an advertisement canvasser Bloom seems relatively well-to-do; at least he can afford occasional luxuries he fancies, including a silk petticoat for Molly (U 11.189–90). Molly, however, is much less optimistic about their financial prospects, having experienced worse days with Bloom; she is even worried that he will soon lose his job at Freeman’s Journal, just as he lost his jobs with Thom’s, Hely’s, Mr. Cuffe’s, and Drimmies (U 18.1215–26). In fact, to lift the family out of financial crisis she

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had to work part-time as a pianist at the “coffee palace” and sell secondhand stage costumes (U 11.485–87). Indeed, so employable was she that Bloom even speculated on exploiting her full potential as a source of productive labor— as a nude model (U 18.580), a family music teacher, and the proprietress of a boardinghouse (U 18.980–82). In other words, Molly is an unacknowledged laborer like many other Irish women, and her tour to Belfast might be financially motivated rather than what Bloom suggests it is, in his blasé comment to Joe Hynes: “Just a holiday” (U 12.992). This picture of Molly as an invisible female worker brings us back to “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” in which an English working woman’s place in modernity is most palpable. In this song the Yorkshire girl emerges as an idealized woman, one who contributes her labor to the nation’s collective move toward modernization without partaking of the rampant “fashion consumerism”: “she’s a factory lass / And wears no fancy clothes” (U 10.1251–52). While it can be argued that Rose is too poor to have any use for fancy clothes, her abstention from fashion consumption is still exceptional. For fashion is, as we have seen, an imperative for modernity and not even Dubliners can resist it, even though they can ill afford this status marker. This conformity is testified to by their desperate attempt to distinguish themselves sartorially, and also in Mina Douce’s and Lydia Kennedy’s all-too-envious admiration of Lady Dudley, a real lady who heralds a fashion they are to emulate in their own way. The only conceivable reason for Rose’s eschewing of fashionable dresses, then, would be her unusually long working hours, a condition that makes it impossible for her to spend time on adorning herself. But this possibility is ruled out by the fact that she still has time to manage her love affairs before running a family. Indeed, if Gerty takes great pains to fashion herself into a desirable love object, Rose’s disdain for fashion is all the more anomalous in that it does not at all diminish her status as an object of desire, as one of her former suitors confesses: “Yet I’ve a sort of a / Yorkshire relish for / My little Yorkshire rose” (U 10.1254–56). In fact, Rose has not just one suitor but multiple lovers, one of whom becomes her husband. This anomaly seems to suggest that Rose’s special attraction for men comes less from her outer appearance than from her character strengths. Seen in this light she may well be an emancipated woman, one who seeks to differentiate herself by imitating the “personality and activity of the male sex,” especially man’s relative indifference to fashion (Simmel 310). This speculation makes sense, since Rose’s personality coincides with the “Protestant ethic”—“hard work, sobriety, frugality and personal economic advancement”—which con-

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tributed to the development of capitalism and the definition of masculinity (Davis 38). Thus, in contributing to the modernization project Rose presents an unprecedented challenge to the traditional notions of gender and class identity. By divesting herself of any share in the general ethos of modernity, she becomes an autonomous, “masculine” being insofar as she refuses to be a victim of fashion, choosing rather to generate her own meaning—well ahead of her times, since the “New Look” constructed by working-class women was not fully visible until the 1950s (Barnard 75–76)—by opting for “anti-fashion” in order to articulate her gender and class identity. Paradoxically, Rose’s sobriety and frugality fit “sensibility,” a primarily male “character ideal” that combines with fashion to indicate one’s class distinction (Campbell 48–51). In other words, her working-class ethic is conjoined with a certain aristocratic character ideal to compensate for her lack (or rejection) of the general impulse toward fashion consumption. A difficulty arises, however, when such a character ideal is taken as part of Rose’s “desirability.” Instead of sustaining the wayward tendencies of lower-class women—as deplored by English commentators in 1904 (Gibson 146)—which might account for her love triangle, she behaves like a genteel English lady by sensibly staying away from the ugly final scene. She leaves her husband to deal with her two former suitors, who belatedly attempt to claim her after realizing that they share a common love object. That is to say, her “English-genteel” womanhood readily negates her autonomous desire, thereby serving conventional gender norms. Given this construct of Rose’s character-ideal, it is not surprising that, having crossed the gender-class boundary as an autonomous woman, she nonetheless emerges as neither a speaking agent nor a desiring subject, even though she promises to be both. Rather, she is configured as a conventional woman and thus a commodity to be circulated among men. What begins as a portrait of an independent woman therefore ends up as a picture of ideal femininity shot through with a Victorian and Edwardian domestic ideology subsumed under English nationalism, thereby betraying the contradictions inherent in the empire’s nostalgia for its own golden age. If Gerty toils to keep up with the latest fashion, and Mina and Lydia pay their own way to fabricate themselves in order to achieve the kind of glamor appropriate to a Lady Dudley, Rose’s modernity is preposterous, both literally and metaphorically, inasmuch as she contributes her labor to modernization only to be alienated from its fruits and stranded in premodern gender-class ideology. In other words, her individuating potential is appropriated in such a way that it conforms to the “English spirit.” As a result, Rose is held up as a serviceable

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model to articulate the national desire for modernization while masking the fact that, as a consumer of modernity, she is a mere surplus. A fictional construct notwithstanding, Rose’s superfluity reflects woman’s place in English modernity. As Gibson suggests, drawing on Jane Mackay and Pat Thane’s “The Englishwoman” (1986), English women were encouraged to settle in colonies from the 1880s onwards, not only to relieve the nation from the economic pressure stemming from the surplus of women but also to serve England’s “civilizing mission,” which was to “ensure the survival of the national ideal in an alien environment” (qtd. in Gibson 131). In the light of this imperial attempt to appropriate working women to serve the nationalist agenda, at home and in the colonies, it is not surprising that a seemingly innocuous popular lyric like “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” is elevated to a semi-official status on 16 June 1904 to promote, in colonial Ireland, the English cause of physical fitness and public health, the “corporeal” foundation of the English spirit. The song is played by the Second Seaforth Highlanders at a sporting event held at Trinity College and is employed as the theme music for the Mirus bazaar—a charity fund-raising drive whose goal is to modernize the Mercer Hospital (Gibson 90)—to be opened by the Lord Lieutenant. Nor is it a coincidence that this song reemerges in the brothel scene as part of “the sound of Englishness” (Gibson 187), in the phantasmagoric fashion show (Galef 420) that is “Circe,” where colonialism and capitalism—one consequence of modernization—converge (Jastrebski 159–60) in a specific Irish context to reveal their implications in colonial modernity. The phantasmagoria in “Circe” operates in a peculiar logic, one that condenses and displaces Rose into perverse emblems of Englishness, now conflated with fashion, but only to puncture its own pretensions. Rose’s workplace is, first of all, transposed to a Dublin brothel, where the charm of female bodies replaces her character strengths to define woman’s desirability. Then her name is literalized as the “roses” which adorn the alluring “womancity” (U 15.1327–29) that is Bella Cohen’s brothel, a place that features the “Yorkshire born” (U 15.1983–84) Zoe, whose lips are smeared with “salve of swinefat and rosewater” (U 15.1332–33; emphasis added), and who fascinates Bloom with her English accent (U 15.1336). Indeed, Englishness seems to be a sign of class distinction—however compromised—within this Irish brothel. Not only does Zoe reassure Bloom that she is authentically English and therefore “clean” (U 15.1346–47), but Bella Cohen takes pride in the fact that she sends her son to Oxford (U 15.1288–89) with the money she earns from her “tenshilling house” (U 15. 4281–82). Even Professor Maginni proudly informs Bella Cohen’s pros-

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titutes that he is to teach them “[t]he Katty Lanner step” (U 15.4044), which originates in England (UA 515). In step with his sartorial distinction (he wears “a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a gorget of cream tulle, a green lowcut waistcost, stock collar with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent pumps and canary gloves”) (U 15.4034–39), Maginni represents the upper-class character-ideal by upholding his good name and his distinctive self (Campbell 48–51): he privileges his dance, characterized as “the poetry of motion, art of calisthenics,” over its lower counterpart at “Madam Leggett Byrne’s or Levenston’s” (U 15.4042–43) in Dublin. In other words, he promises to offer his students a feel of “prestige” exclusive to the English upper class. This aristocratic pretension is preempted by his entry, however, which reminds one of a routine entrance in a circus performance: “Between the curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins a silk hat. With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his crown and jauntyhatted skates in” (U 15.4032–34). Nor are his students English aristocrats, but local prostitutes or Irish working women led by Zoe the Yorkshire girl. As this overplayed dance lesson is offered by a circus-actor-turned-dance-master, so is it conducted to the tune of “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” played in waltz time on a jukebox and available at the price of two pennies (U 15.4016). As if to lend elegance to itself, this mechanically reproduced song soon transforms into the live but unlikely performance of the senile Professor Goodwin, a striking synthesis of Rose and the mainstream Dubliners in his genteel, feminine grace and fashionable, albeit pathetic, apparel: Professor Goodwin, in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a stained Inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the room, his hands fluttering. He sits tinily on the pianostool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the keyboard, nodding with damsel’s grace, his bowknot bobbing. (U 15.4017–27; emphasis added) In this way Rose becomes a working woman who sells her body in a colony where degenerate fashion consumption replaces her own anti-fashion, and her inconsequential challenge to the established gender-class categories is turned inside out. By positing the Yorkshire girl as a surplus English woman who emigrates to Ireland, not to advocate the English ideal of modernization by revitalizing what Lily H. Montague, an early-twentieth-century English commentator, called “the life of the State” (qtd. in Gibson 146) despite the meaning of her name (Zoe means “life”) but rather to spread venereal disease as a circulating and thus secondhand commodity, Joyce exercises his “Celtic revenge” (Gibson

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1) on the empire’s insidious intent to lock the Irish people, and working-class women, in their proper place within the national cause. This hilarious act of revenge stems from an awareness of the bleak prospects for Irish women in colonial modernity. If the English popular song pays an ambivalent tribute to a female worker, this recognition is not available to her Irish counterparts at all. As invisible workers, their contribution to the national economy is not acknowledged by any institutions. Even worse, they seldom work outside the home because job opportunities are so scarce. In fact, Ireland from 1904 to 1921 was structurally a consumer culture and economy (Duffy 155); the amount of capital it accumulated could not match the sum total of its consumption (Leonard 44). In view of this historical fact, it is not surprising that Joyce’s Dublin is more of an agricultural polis than an industrial city (Lehan 107). This explains why the Irish factory lass is absent from Joyce’s Dublin; the closest equivalents are Eveline, the anonymous slavey in “Two Gallants,” Maria of “Clay”—who works in a Protestant laundry intended for reformed prostitutes—and the aforementioned prostitutes in Bella Cohen’s brothel. Like Rose, Eveline is marketable as a love object even though she wears no fancy clothes. But their similarity is probably less significant than their difference, because Eveline cannot afford to indulge herself in either self-fashioning or marriage, burdened as she is by her commitment to her family. Nor does she even try to challenge the gender role imposed on her. Indeed, she has become so inured to her assigned role that she stops short just at the moment she is about to flee domestic misery with Frank. The slavey, in turn, seems to transgress gender norms in a much bolder way than does Rose, since she pursues her desire rather than forfeits it, but with an ironic twist: she has to purchase her romance from the jobless Corley out of her modest income, thereby testifying once more to the petty calculations that constitute the social relations of colonial modernity. As for Maria, she is barely marketable as an object of desire even when she is arrayed in her Sunday best, or as a representative of feminine gentility for that matter. Zoe’s fellow prostitutes, for their part, are desirable only when they stay in their proper place. Outside the brothel they are viewed by the middle class as being untouchable, indeed the carriers of disease, if not as average poverty-stricken Dubliners who count on used clothing, another secondhand commodity that is also a hazard to public health. In order to survive, these women are sometimes compelled to moonlight by taking in laundry, as is the case with the overworked streetwalker who approached the Blooms to solicit laundry services. Compassionate and egalitarian as Bloom

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has always been, he nonetheless partly internalizes the English ideology of modernization; thus his feelings toward this “glazed and haggard” (U 16.704) Irish Yorkshire girl are mixed, varying from compassion (“O, well, she has to live like the rest” [U 11.1260]) to abhorrence (“Looks a fright in the day. Face like dip. Damn her” [U 11.1259–60]) to condemnation (“It beats me . . . how a wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital reeking with disease can be barefaced enough to solicit” [U 16.728–30]), as he consistently avoids her on the street (U 11.1260–64; 16.708–10). If this undesirable streetwalker-cum-laundry maid is a perverse Irish Yorkshire girl, with a rose on her lapel and a penchant for catching up with the latest fashions, Mina Douce might be another lesser candidate for the advocated ideal womanhood. However, Mina is more of a desiring subject whose desire is unrequited, in terms of both fashion and love, than an object of desire. Likewise, even though Gerty MacDowell takes pains to wear cheap rose perfume to upgrade her value and to conform to the femininity prescribed by the fashion pages, which internalize an imperial domestic ideology (Gibson 127–49), she has to be “left on the shelf ” (U 13.773) because of her handicap. We have finally to look to Molly to localize the Yorkshire Rose: she was born on the same day as the Virgin Mary, whose emblem is the rose; as a maiden she used to wear a red rose on her head; she plans to navigate between two lovers by seducing Stephen (probably wearing a white rose) and dating Boylan, and at the same time make up with Bloom. However, the Yorkshire Rose does not need to commodify herself in order to become a hot commodity, whereas the aging Molly cannot afford to forgo fancy clothes. She dresses up not only to remain attractive but probably also to steer her family away from financial crisis; thus she “dresses up” when trying to help her husband keep his job with Mr. Cuffe, but she fails presumably because of her “old rubbishy dress . . . just like the shop itself rummage sale a lot of trash” (U 18.514–18). Given the incommensurability between “labor” and “product values” common to Irish women, there is no telling whether Molly might prevail over the fashionable Blazes Boylan and the Bohemian Stephen Dedalus, even if she manages to arm herself with “two other good chemises” (U 18.438), “one of those kidfitting corsets” (U 18.446), and “a nice pair of red slippers . . . a nice semitransparent morning gown . . . a peachblossom dressing jacket” (U 18.1494–97). After all, Molly is only a degraded Yorkshire Rose, more a consumer than a laborer, and thus constantly awakens to the cruel reality that she cannot really afford what she wants: “I hate those rich shops get on your nerves” (U 18.514).

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In consideration of this sameness-in-difference of the Yorkshire Rose and her Irish version, we must come to terms with the poignant fact that “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” also serves as the theme song for both the quarter-mile flat handicap (held at Trinity College) and the Mirus bazaar. If the sporting event is meant to cultivate healthy, intellectual subjects for the empire, its theme music inadvertently calls attention to that “handicap” with which most Irish people are inflicted, be it psychological, physical, or sartorial, at a time when the empire celebrates wholesomeness in material progress. The Mirus bazaar, for its part, begins as a fund-raising drive for the purpose of modernizing a charity hospital for poor Irish Catholics, but ends up lending itself to a double display of imperial modernization—the fireworks show and Lady Dudley’s fashion exhibit; the latter highlights the futility of Gerty MacDowell’s and Mina Douce’s labor in fashioning themselves into desirable femmes fatales despite their aspiration to sartorial distinction. Seen in this context, “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” aptly epitomizes the gap between words and meaning in both of these “Irish” events, creating an alibi for colonial misrule—much as the Iveagh home is meant to address Irish debility, but does so only by concealing the imperial indifference to its cause: “Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them cubicles to end their days in. Hushbaby. Lullaby. Die, dog. Little dog, die” (U 11.1018–19). Georg Simmel suggests that the most important task confronting human life in the modern age is to protect one’s inner life against the exorbitant nervous incitements produced by the drastic changes consequent upon modernization. However, in addition to this task Dubliners are laden with quite another burden: they often cannot afford those desirable commodities mass-produced by the empire, including the fancy clothing essential to a weakening or releasing of one’s nervous energy through self-fashioning. Consumer culture thus becomes at once a tantalizing seduction and an incommensurable, impossible labor, and Irish disempowerment—along with the marginalization of English women workers—is the central, sad, and cruel fact glossed by the upbeat song “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.”

Note This essay is part of a research project sponsored by the National Science Council, Taiwan (NSC 91-2411-H-110-003-BB). I am indebted to the following scholars for their insightful comments on an early draft: Kimberly Devlin, Vincent Cheng, Ellen Carol Jones, Nam Kiheon, Morris Beja, Anne Fogarty, and Frank Stevenson.

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Works Cited Barnard, Malcolm. Fashion and Communication. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Bauman, Zygmunt. Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Boucher, François. 20,000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment. Expanded ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987. Bowen, Zack. Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960. Campbell, Colin. “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character Approach.” Consumption and the World of Goods. Ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter. New York: Routledge, 1994. 40–57. Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Devlin, Kimberly J. “Visible Shades and Shades of Visibility: The En-Gendering of Death in ‘Hades.’” “Ulysses” Engendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes. Ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 67–85. Duffy, Edna. The Subaltern “Ulysses.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Galef, David. “The Fashion Show in Ulysses.” Twentieth Century Literature 37 (1991): 420–31. Gibson, Andrew. Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in “Ulysses.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Gillespie, Michael Patrick, ed. James Joyce and the Fabrication of an Irish Identity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. Jastrebski, Joan. “Pig Dialectics: Women’s Bodies as Performed Dialectical Images in the Circe Episode of Ulysses.” Gillespie 151–75. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Leonard, Garry. “Holding on to the Here and the Now.” Gillespie 39–51. Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. Ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Malden, MA: Polity, 1997. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Mentor, 1953.

11 Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman Gerald Gillespie

That Joyce maintained an interest in the famous philosopher of pessimism and religious atheist, Arthur Schopenhauer, is clear from Schopenhauer’s appearance in Finnegans Wake, in one of the funniest open references amid a string of allusions to German romantic thinkers. It occurs early on in the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, when the “apologuis[ing]” Shaun sets out to “spinooze from the grimm gests of Jacko and Esaup” (FW 414.16–17), that is, to give an uplifting twist like Spinoza, the favorite Dutch-Jewish philosopher for many romantics, to the often dark materials cultivated by the Grimm brothers of fairy-tale fame, whose realm of fiction is conflated with the biblical story of those archetypal rival brothers, Jacob and Esau (with a nod to the Greek fabulist Aesop). In an oblique reference to Nietzsche, this twist is slyly an Apollonian act of shaping (“apologuise”). That Joyce would favor the Gracehoper is clear from the description of him “always jigging, ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity” and grappling to and with the female “till she was puce for shame and also fourmish her in Spinner’s housery at the earthsbest schoppinhour so summery as his cottage” and so forth (FW 414.22–23, 32–34). It seems a high time (“earthsbest schoppinhour”) for what is exhibited by the Gracehoper, a frolicking of the life-force or will of which Schopenhauer taught much less cheerfully. But the countervailing tendency soon puts in its appearance. Indignant over the Gracehoper’s ways, the inimical Ondt (Danish for “evil”), “not being a sommerfool, was thothfully making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass of his windhame, which was cold antitopically Nixnixundnix” (FW 415.27–29). This triune nay-saying embedded in the Ondt’s home name pretty well establishes once again the complex of oppositions between the Shem and

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Shaun polarities. Here is not the place to expand on various underground allusions in the much longer passage in the Wake—for example, the Spinozan “apologetic” idea of an intellectual love of God’s creation or the way in which Schopenhauer redefined the “thing-in-itself ” as a will inherent in nature. Of immediate interest is that Schopenhauer is still hovering as a presence in the narrating mind or voice, although the protagonist capable of thinking about these matters, the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses, has faded away as a concretized intellectual hero and is now dispersed in Shem and some Shaun attributes all across the later Wake, scattered in traces we can punctiliously pursue in guides such as Tindall’s. But it is not the same experience as observing and listening to a character like Stephen who is a kind of creative force in his own right in Ulysses. In my Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, as its index shows, I paid attention to the Schopenhauerian presence in the French and German novelists but neglected his relevance for Joyce. Yet, even in Ulysses, things no longer are as easy and straightforward for assessing what’s streaming in a character’s mind as when earlier we had our first encounter with Stephen in the Portrait. Upon the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, students of Joyce hardly need reminding that a particular allusion or strand of allusions in Ulysses ought to be appreciated, finally, for how it fits within strata and webs of reference and functions at different levels of authority in various contexts. This consideration motivates me to supplement my book and call attention to a particular shadow among the many shadows falling over Stephen in the “Proteus” episode. When at its close he senses, “Behind. Perhaps there is someone,” and looks “rere regardant” at the arrival of “a silent ship” (U 3.505), whether it be Odysseus’s, the Flying Dutchman’s, or others’ more menacing, Stephen’s looking also serves as an invitation to us readers to apprehend the looming shadow of all our bodily and spiritual ancestors. Just before that gesture of regard, we are privy to Stephen’s worrying about himself: “My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the superman. What is that I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?” (U 3.494–97). Joyce nudges us awake with this question for contemporary and future readers. Readers today still correctly hear the Nietzschean pointer in the word “superman” (e.g., UA 66), and readily see how the “shell” motif relating currency, language, and pilgrimage gets linked further to “tooth.” Even as rugged a concretization of the life-force as a tooth seems evanescent and fragile like the emblematic “shells” on the beach that once contained something living;

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and we are justified in sensing an analogy to what Proust frequently terms an “envelope” in À la recherche du temps perdu. Because the superman concept has already surfaced in the “Telemachus” episode with such comments of Buck Mulligan’s as “I’m hyperborean as much as you” and “Thus spake Zarathustra” (U 1.92, 727–28), we know that Nietzsche’s hyperbolic rebel from Also sprach Zarathustra is also and probably more present in Stephen’s thoughts. Buck needles Stephen by keeping alive the thought of being coupled with him as another human failure, not a cultural hero: “I’m the Übermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen” (U 1.708–9). As Davison has shown (108), Nietzsche helped Joyce rise above the older dichotomization of Hebrew and Hellene attributes in nineteenth-century cultural discourse. Unmistakable is also the rankling thorn of a higher ambition such as Nietzsche had suggested. But here, in addition, the shadow of Nietzsche’s teacher, Schopenhauer, lurks in Stephen’s rotten teeth and his anxious question to himself, as it does in Buck’s jibes. In them resonate all those passages where, as in this illustrative snippet from The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer explains that the body is “the phenomenal appearance of the will, its becoming visible, the objectivity of the will,” and that the body serves “the chief demands and desires by which the will manifests itself. . . . Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse,” and so forth (WWR 1: 108). In the virtual eternity of evolution that produced us, even that latest product, “knowledge remains subordinate to the service of the will” according to Schopenhauer; “in fact, it sprang from the will, so to speak, as the head from the trunk. . . . Even in the higher animals, head and trunk are still more one than in man, whose head seems freely set on the body, only carried by the body and not serving it” (WWR 1: 176, 177–78). Facing the biological groundedness of life, the philosophizing head seems inherently in an awkward position. Nietzsche’s turning away from Schopenhauer’s disciple Wagner (see Rather) and his invention of “yea-saying” in response to Schopenhauer’s religious atheism (most pronounced in book 4 of The World as Will and Representation) were moments in a high drama that had dominated the European intellectual and artistic scene during the decades when Joyce and Thomas Mann were growing up. We know that, while in Trieste, though a firm admirer of Aquinas, Joyce had discussed Nietzsche and the younger Freud, who was yet another of Joyce’s contemporaries indebted to Schopenhauer (Freud, “Schwierigkeit”); and Joyce already owned Schopenhauer’s principal works (JJ 341–42; Davison 141, 167–68). So it was unnecessary for Joyce to lift the Schopenhauerian “tooth” reference

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from such well-known literary instances as Huysmans’s À rebours (1884). There, readers witness a horrific visit to the dentist by the decadent-symbolist hero Des Esseintes, an experience that triggers Des Esseintes’s musings on Gustave Moreau’s painting of the presentation of the head of John the Baptist to Salomé. Besides repeatedly extolling Schopenhauer, À rebours enacts his teaching that spirituality eventually emerges from the head, itself an evolutionary outgrowth of the body; and thus Huysmans agrees with Schopenhauer that liberation from captivity to the life-force or will is an ultimate goal—better to martyr your head than just lose it by default. At the turn of the century, in the same spirit, the symbolist painter Odilon Redon is pouring out a profusion of liberated heads, or in another even more concentrated synecdoche, balloon-like eyes, floating free over our sublunary world on his canvases. Joyce might also have noticed that, in Mann’s novel of 1901, Thomas Buddenbrooks undergoes a fatal tooth extraction right after his rediscovery of Schopenhauer’s teachings, an upsurge that signals a final sapping of his desire to live. The horrid four roots of Thomas’s failed tooth ironically suggest the title of Schopenhauer’s treatise On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason (Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde). In any event, Joyce places a contrastive tooth reference prominently on page 1 to anticipate Stephen’s fretting. The antagonist figure Buck Mulligan, ever prone to sarcastic anatomical and physiological observations, not only exudes a kind of animal strength by virtue of a face “equine in its length” and hair “hued like pale oak,” but also sports “even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points” (U 1.15, 16, 25–26). The papal colors in assertive dental form may appear here, as well as Stephen’s surfacing thought of rhetorical prowess in Cardinal Newman and St. John Chrysostomos—an instance of what Fritz Senn terms “metastisis” in Joyce’s Dislocutions (138–44). The dead mother’s “shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice” and her implied teeth as “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!” (U 1.268–69, 278) have something of Schopenhauer’s dour descriptions of women, even more so than of men, as animals equipped with claws and mouths to stuff themselves with life in order to live, life as circular predation. There is furthermore a danger-boding, metaphoric extension of “tooth” in the conflicted Stephen’s private refrain, “Agenbite of inwit” (U 1.481); he is being eaten up by his discovery of the stark facts of life, that is, by his own spiritual development. But will Stephen become a John the Baptist in opposition to toothsome life? There are many things Stephen will yet have to discover. Since his sense of a presence behind him in “Proteus” clearly anticipates Bloom’s presence in

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the “Library” episode, I will focus for a spell on the legacy of Schopenhauer latent not only as “Proteus” ends but also as it begins, without disentangling all the other matters in Stephen’s mind. Senn is credited with the correct attribution of Stephen’s reflections on the ineluctable modalities of the visible and audible to Lessing’s contrast between sculpture and poetry as spatial and temporal media in the treatise Laokoon (1766). It is still a rewarding reminder when we revisit Senn’s compact notes of forty years ago (“Esthetic Theories”) on this important echo out of the eighteenth century. However, because we find our artist-elect walking on the edge of the oceanic realm in a classic mode of meditation—meditation not just on aesthetic principles but on the mysteries of being and identity—it is important to acknowledge the intervening Schopenhauerian echo, too. It is as if, anachronistically, a nineteenth-century mentality is looking over Lessing’s shoulder while Stephen is engaged in thinking with the aid of standard vocabulary of the age. This vocabulary includes the virtually unavoidable, well-shaped Lessing spatial and temporal categories to which Schopenhauer himself turned. However, an epochal cleavage separates Lessing’s Enlightenment rationalism from the romantic revolution to which Schopenhauer contributed so enormously. Aside from Nietzsche, no figure after the Kantian turn in philosophy was more crucial for suggesting the waning of ego-centered subjectivist individualism in art and the significance of the unconscious. Schopenhauer was crucial in the second half of the nineteenth century as a standard philosopher for symbolism because he affirmed the primacy of art over life (most notably in book 3 of The World as Will and Representation). And as Morris Beja has shown (30–32), by its emphasis on intuition, the Schopenhauerian view exercised an important general influence on the concept of epiphany in modernism; Beja notes in particular that Schopenhauer’s comments on art are strikingly similar to those of young Stephen Dedalus: he grades works “according to their degree of impersonality” (31). A thumbnail reminder may be useful here. Kant had argued that the categories of time and space and the moral imperative inhered in the structure of the human mind, and his work incited others to draw extreme subjectivist conclusions. In contrast, Schopenhauer insisted that the phenomenal realm of time and space was a direct expression or “representation” of the numinous “thing-in-itself ”; he argued we encounter the “thing-in-itself ” as the unstoppable laws of nature which govern the human species like everything else in the cosmos. Only occasionally might a special mind break through the veil of illusion, that is, pierce through our experience in the phenomenal time-space realm, and glimpse something of the operations of the will, its working out of

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the destiny of the species through the agency of the unconscious and the body. As he broods, sardonic Stephen is trying to gain clarity as to the real basis of life, to cope with painful separation from the mother, to sustain confidence in his own sense of mission, and to transcend the limits of his own situation and personality. Thus it is hardly surprising that there should be a strong Schopenhauerian flavor in the catchy German terminology of the nebeneinander and nacheinander which presses to the surface of Stephen’s thoughts. The following passage from Schopenhauer’s The Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason known to Joyce can serve to illustrate this echo. I have left untranslated the key words that recur in the “Proteus” episode: If time were the sole form of these representations [i.e., phenomena], then there would be no simultaneity and therefore nothing persistent and no duration. For time is only perceived insofar as it is fulfilled, and its advance only through the change in what fulfills it. The persistence of an object is thus only known through the contrast of the change of others that are coeval with it. The representation of conjointness is not, however, possible in mere time; but only, for the other moiety, conditioned through the representation of space; because in mere time, everything is nacheinander, but in space nebeneinander: thus this [representation of simultaneity] only arises through the union of time and space. On the other hand if space were the sole form of representations of this class, then there would be no change: for change or alteration is the succession of states, und succession is only possible in time. Hence one can also define time as the possibility of opposite modifications in the same thing. (Sämmtliche Werke 3: 137) The crucial new element here that makes Schopenhauer’s view distinct from Lessing’s is the ontological emphasis. Schopenhauer’s attempt to grasp “conjointness” offers a key to unlocking the mystery of the intersection between temporal existence and eternity—and thus his thought is relevant for modernist artists who experiment with ways to arrive at privileged moments, at epiphanies. It is apparent why Schopenhauer’s temporal-spatial “veil” of illusion could have a bearing on Stephen’s aesthetic ideal, but more is involved. In the opening words of “Proteus,” Stephen is capable of leapfrogging from a theosophical stance, a Boehmean sense of reading the “Signatures of all things” (U 3.2), over Aristotle’s ideas of sensory perception, to a Blakean gnostic concern over the possibility we are trapped in a fallen creation made by the demiurge. His conscious testing of the nebeneinander and nacheinander as a venturous

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Siegfried with “ash sword” at his side, as well as his Telemachus-Hamlet search for a father or creative source, also contains and exhibits a genuine puzzlement. He wonders whether he is truly “walking into eternity,” and whether his personal identity must therefore disappear or can somehow persist, given that the world is “There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end” (U 3.18, 28–29). In terms of the narrative action, Stephen’s thoughts seem virtually to pull something important onto the beach in a parade; it passes before our eyes, too, a troupe of women, that otherness to which he is misaligned, the “sisterhood” (U 3.35) most representative of the “will” because women give birth. Through the “allwombing tomb” (U 3.402) of earthly existence we arrive by birth as spectators who in our turn are entranced by the veil of Maya, as Schopenhauer termed the phenomenal realm, and through it we generate our progeny to continue in that role. Stimulated by these other wanderers through time and space, “trekking to evening lands” like him, this multifarious, collective “she” that in his words “trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load” (U 3.392–93), Stephen moves straightway into speculations on the entire ontology of what is human, and he imagines how the “cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh” (U 3.37) to the mystery of Adam and Eve, to Adam who has God as his mother and father, to Eve who has Adam as her mother and father, and to these first children of a father-mother, Adam and Eve, who together initiate bringing forth the human experience in its manifoldness. Stephen ponders whether Father and Son could be “consubstantial” through the channel of the feminine, because life as begetting in the flesh is inherently “sin.” Nonetheless, sitting within his own physical shadow, he feels a shadow as of an earlier incarnation of himself, himself as a shadow, and tries to cast “this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form?” (U 3.412–14). Another pointed question thus is addressed also to us readers then, now, and in the future. Schopenhauerian anxiety is one of several factors spurring Stephen as a thinker, but an undertow in his meditations on singularity and endlessness pulls Stephen in a direction that in the longer run more resembles that taken by Rabelais’s and Bruno’s predecessor Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century. Nicholas’s treatise Visio Dei holds that “Absolute infinity includes and embraces all things” (Bond 259); and his De Docta Ignorantia assures, “Nor is the earth’s darkness proof of its inferiority” (Bond 161); and because “God is the Form of all forms,” accordingly “every creature is, as it were, a finite infinity or a created god” (Bond 133–34). Stephen must still

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learn how to approach that divine potential so that form of his form and Form converge. Here is not the place for an excursus on Joyce’s treatment of this great mythologem of Christianity, the symbolic relationships between the story of Adam and Eve and Christ and the Virgin, which he lets Stephen agonize over as clues to the divine mystery of creation. I only want to illustrate the nuances in the Schopenhauerian echo, a background that will eventually give way to Joyce’s own, more complex revision of the entire ensemble Schopenhauer-WagnerNietzsche-Freud. Key, I believe, is that in Schopenhauer Joyce would have noticed one of several great statements of a seemingly paradoxical relationship which post-symbolist artists confront. This is the necessary conflict between singularity and plurality, between the artist’s own entrapment as a person because of incarnation in the time-space continuum and the artist’s special role as a channel for a reality that transcends any individual identity. The following passage from The World as Will and Representation in Payne’s translation illustrates how Schopenhauer links the problem of individual identity to timespace, that is, the phenomenal veil of illusion or principle of sufficient reason: I shall call time and space the principium individuationis, an expression borrowed from the old scholasticism. . . . For it is only by means of time and space that something which is one and the same according to its nature and the concept appears as different, as a plurality of coexistence and successive things. Consequently, time and space are the principium individuationis. . . . It is apparent from what has been said that the will as thing-in-itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient reason in all its forms, and is consequently completely groundless, although each of its phenomena in time and space are innumerable. It is itself one, yet not as an object is one, for the unity of an object is known only in contrast to possible plurality. Again, the will is one not as a concept is one, for a concept originates only through abstraction from plurality; but it is one as that which lies outside time and space, outside the principium individuationis, that is to say, outside the possibility of plurality. (WWR 1: 112–13) In Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context (chs. 8 and 14) I have dealt at some length with what we will eventually overhear in the “Library” episode: Stephen’s mellower thoughts about how humanity is constantly reweaving its body thanks to the mother goddess and how the artist must go through a plurality of roles, while transcending his own personal limits, in order to

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apprehend life both in its variety and in its fullness. In a brilliant synthesis, Stephen draws together the Penelope or weaving function (our involvement in the phenomenal veil) with the possibility of a privileged moment out of time, when the artist glimpses, and thus becomes a channel of, the creator principle at work—in a necessarily diminished state (for reasons which cabalistic teaching, a covert influence here in the hidden or super-narrator, makes clear). The creator principle shines through the veil as the potential of its own rebirth: “As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. . . . so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be” (U 9.376–83). Stephen’s own “becoming” in the mode of the older Bildungsroman is thus directly pertinent to the insight he is achieving as a protagonist in the modernist novel Ulysses. Our penetration with him, as readers, behind the phenomenal veil is a parallel enactment to that on the highest plane: our participation in the mind of the supreme narrator. The point of citing the great misogynist Schopenhauer above, at some length, is to illustrate that Stephen’s meditations on the nebeneinander and nacheinander have a bearing on more than aesthetics; their relevance is also distinctly and importantly metaphysical. Plurality manifests the principle of individuation, but according to Schopenhauer the special individual capable of insight into manifoldness subsumes it in a privileged, timeless moment of art. The following is one of many passages that bear directly on the artist as the mortal creature whose insights, when as a “pure subject of knowing” he breaks through the emotional barrier of his own incarnation, bring us in touch with absolute reality: although the individual phenomenon of the will begins and ends in time, the will itself, as thing-in-itself, is not affected thereby, nor is the correlative of every object, namely the knowing but never known subject, and that life is always certain to the will-to-live. This is not to be numbered among those doctrines of immortality. For permanence no more belongs to the will, considered as thing-in-itself, or to the pure subject of knowing, to the eternal eye of the world, than does transitoriness, since passing away and transitoriness are determinations valid in time alone, whereas the will and the pure subject of knowing lie outside time. (WWR 1: 282) Schopenhauer acknowledges art of the highest order as capable of expressing

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profound religious insights: “And now art ends by presenting the self-abolition of the will through the great quieter that dawns on it from the most perfect knowledge of its own nature” (WWR 1: 233). But he carefully distinguishes the authentic saint from the artist as a human type: “This purely knowable side of the world and its repetition in any art is the element of the artist. . . . That pure, true, and profound knowledge of the inner nature of the world now becomes for him an end in itself; at it he stops” (WWR 1: 267). Resignation is not the goal of art, but art transcends by attaining deeper knowledge. Characteristic of the role of Stephen midway into Ulysses is that it permits Joyce one more of those amazing syntheses which, after he pulls it off, we admire and grasp in retrospect. The symbolist idea that the disappearance of the artist into his work is a new goal beyond romanticism fits congenially with the Schopenhauerian idea that the greatest artists ultimately rise above the phenomenal scene of human striving and suffering. This level of comprehending the world is already implicit in moments of Stephen’s thinking, even though he is still anguished or groping in his approach. We hear the potential for his understanding that the artist should recede as a person and be totally devoted to acting behind the world he discovers for us. Attaining a universality beyond any personal identity surfaces in a passage such as “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” (U 9.1044–46). In terms of generic substructures, Stephen functions like a linchpin that holds together the tradition of the Bildungsroman inherited from the romantics and the emergent post-symbolist consciousness that actually already is present in the practice of the unnamed super-narrator who shows Stephen to us. The ground pattern of the Bildungsroman will no longer be attached to a post-romantic philosophic superman in the Wake; rather, it will be spread dialectically over the columns in the children’s “study” program (book 2, ch. 2), because what’s being narrated is the whole evolution of the human race on its colossal pilgrimage; our “educational” material has definitively attained the scope predicted in Goethe’s Faust: everything in history and reaching back into the archaic, traces from before history, and qualitatively the “eternity” of the human mind as it has been constituted over eons. Showing us a nay-sayer on the road to yea-saying (and to a capacity analogous to that of the Schopenauerian pure subject outside time) is itself implicitly one version of the magical trick of subsuming the nay in the yea. That is, in yet another great act of synthesis, Joyce lets the Schopenhauerian shadow contrast and intermingle with the refulgence of divine light in a Cusanan-Brunonian coincidentia oppositorum. As in the case of other Joycean

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fusions, here we can readily shift over to a viewpoint far more congenial to Joyce in the longer run. The Schopenhauerian coloration will prove ultimately to be a mere tinge in Stephen’s sensibility; it helps lead us further into a cabalistic understanding of the same relationships (Gillespie, “Nein oder Ja”). In “Proteus,” and still in “Circe” in a more comic vein, Stephen as Telemachus-Hamlet-Siegfried (Gillespie, “Portraits”) still evidences emotional attachment to the role of “nay-sayer,” a role Goethe’s Mephisto defined so aptly in “The Prolog in Heaven” of the cosmic drama Faust. Right next to the sign of the father’s power, Stephen thinks fondly of the luminous rebel: “Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum” (U 3.486–88). But everywhere there are hints of a more complex resolution of Stephen’s and art’s disturbed relation to the feminine, genitive, and dative in the making. For example, Stephen entertains cabalistic notions that promise a meaningful approach to God through our lowly incarnated state; chief among these is his awe in thinking of the All-Mother to whom all is connected. There are indeed many veils in Ulysses. I hear not just a Blavatskian or theosophical, but also especially an echo of Schopenhauer’s veil in “Proteus” when, ruminating on All Mother Eve and the “darkness . . . in our souls,” Stephen asks himself: “Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil?” (U 3.424–25). This is Schopenhauer’s famous veil of Maya (WWR 1: 8) borrowed from Hindu scripture. To hear the aspirant superman muttering to himself is a very refreshing, human touch. I believe we can read this kind of utterance, underground, as the hope that an ineffable, ungraspable unity will shine through the multifarious phenomenal veil; we hear in Stephen’s yearning to glimpse the ground of being for a tremulous instant out of time the promise that our world can be reconceived by the artist in an artifice of eternity. Comparing Joyce with Kafka, I have spoken elsewhere of Joyce as a modern mystic who attempts nothing less than to intimate the coincidence of opposites to reach a meta-junction when not just the modalities of the audible and visible, but nay-saying and yea-saying converge (Gillespie, “Nein oder Ja”). Joyce is one of those rare authors in the train of Rabelais who have a sense for implementing in literature Nicholas of Cusa’s assurance that “the unknowable God reveals himself knowably to the world in imagery and symbolism (as, for example, when the Apostle rightly said that with God there is not both Yes and No but is only Yes)” (Hopkins 159). Therefore it is fitting to close by repeating the question Stephen puts to himself, but I will extend it to the whole of Ulysses: “does it mean something perhaps?”

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Works Cited Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971. Bond, H. Lawrence, ed. and trans. Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. [Contains On Learned Ignorance, Dialogue on the Hidden God, On Seeking God, On the Vision of God, On the Summit of Contemplation] Davison, Neil R. James Joyce, “Ulysses,” and the Construction of Jewish Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. “Eine Schwierigkeit in der Psychoanalyse.” Imago 5 (1917): 1–7. Gillespie, Gerald. “Nein oder Ja: Kabbalistische Züge in den Romanen von Kafka und Joyce.” Kafka und die Weltliteratur. Ed. Manfred Engel and Dieter Lamping. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. 263–75. ———. “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Siegfried: Mann’s Felix and Joyce’s Stephen Approach the Supreme Mysteries.” The Finer Grain: Essays in Honor of Mihály Szegedy-Maszák. Ed. Péter Nemes and Richard Aczel. Bloomington: Indiana U, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 2003. 161–68. ———. Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Die Faustdichtungen: “Urfaust”; “Faust, ein Fragment”; “Faust, eine Tragödie” . . . . Ed. Ernst Beutler. Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1950. Hopkins, Jasper. A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1986. [Contains Trialogus de Possest (On Actualizedpossibility)] Huysmans, Joris-Karl. À rebours. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 7. Geneva: Slatkine, 1972. Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1901. Rather, L. J. Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde. 2nd, rev. ed. (1847). Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. Paul Deussen. Vol. 3. Munchen: R. Piper, 1912. ———. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. 3rd, rev. ed. (1859). Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. Paul Deussen. Vol. 1. München: R. Piper, 1911. ———. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969. Senn, Fritz. “Esthetic Theories.” James Joyce Quarterly 2 (1965): 134–36. ———. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake.” New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1959.

12 Days of Our Lives The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce Robert Weninger

The Expansion of Time through the Reduction of Time In his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” T. S. Eliot famously argued that Joyce’s use of myth as a “continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (177) would provide a model for many generations of writers to come. Twentieth-century literary history amply proves him accurate; Joyce’s deployment of myth as, again in Eliot’s words, “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (177) indeed serves as the blueprint for numerous writers’ works. But it holds no less true in terms of Joyce’s prototypical interior monologue, the literary device he employed to capture the scintillating minutiae of the mental households, the streams of consciousness, of his three main protagonists as well as some of the minor figures in Ulysses. While Joyce’s employment of interior monologue may not have been novel per se—as is well known, the French writer Édouard Dujardin and the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler preceded Joyce by some decades—the subtlety and sophistication of the Irish writer’s usage were so unprecedented, his technique seemed so mature and compelling, that it was not their works but rather Ulysses that became the universal paradigm of this particular modernist innovation, putting his stamp on any future adaptation. Indeed, the Dublin Odyssey of Mr. Bloom and the interior monologues of Stephen, Leopold, and Molly became Joyce’s most celebrated achievements, and rightly so, at least in literary historical terms. But Joyce’s novel was innovative in yet another formal respect. Early crit-

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ics were stunned by the fact that a novelist could devote some 730 pages to depicting just one day in the lives of a mere three main characters. By reducing his novel’s narrative time span to just one day—give or take a couple of hours—Joyce had achieved something that had never been attempted in this way before in the epical genre. In other words, Joyce was no less innovative in this regard than he was in deploying myth and interior monologue. But where did the idea originally stem from? What inspired Joyce to write a 700-page novel that spanned only one day in the lives of its protagonists? The answer usually given is of course Aristotle’s “On the Art of Poetry,” a work that Joyce read in Paris in early 1903. At the very outset of their introduction in “Ulysses” Annotated, Don Gifford and Robert Seidman are quick to point out the close relationship between Joyce’s Ulysses and Aristotle’s poetics: The action of Ulysses takes place at the confluence of two orders of literary time: dramatic and epic time as Aristotle defines them in the Poetics: “Tragedy [drama] endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun; . . . whereas the Epic action has no limits of time.” A modern translator might be inclined to render this passage as applying not to the action imitated but to the time of performance: a drama to be performed in a single day, an epic to be performed over a period of several days. But earlier translators, such as Butcher (a copy of whose translation was in Joyce’s Trieste library), assumed Aristotle to mean that drama was to imitate the events of a single day, as Ulysses does. . . . And Ulysses enjoys the other unities Aristotle recommended for drama: it has unity of place (Dublin and environs); unity of action (all action takes place in a single day); and, as good Sophoclean drama, Ulysses has three central characters . . . as well as a chorus (of Dubliners) that, as Aristotle said it should, functions collectively as a fourth character. (UA 1–2) There are of course many more parallels between Ulysses and Aristotle’s “Poetics” than Gifford and Seidman, or I, have space to discuss, not least among them the fact that a tragedy should have three main parts and that Aristotle’s main prototype and frame of reference for many of his arguments is Homer, and in particular Homer’s Odyssey. But, as telling as the correspondences between Joyce’s Ulysses and Aristotle’s “On the Art of Poetry” may seem, there are substantive differences that should not go unmentioned. It would be misleading to create the impression that Joyce conceived Ulysses as the epical putting into practice of Aristotle’s theory of the tragedy, as Gifford and Seidman’s comments might seem to suggest. Ulysses clearly is an epic, and Joyce is a master of

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making use of epical or—adjusted to more contemporary models and genres of literature—prose narrative’s advantages. Take the following example: in chapter 24, on “Epic Poetry,” Aristotle writes: In tragedy it is not possible to represent several parts of the story as taking place simultaneously, but only the part that is actually being performed on the stage by the actors; epic poetry, on the other hand, being narrative, is able to represent many incidents that are being simultaneously enacted, and, provided they are relevant, they increase the weight of the poem, and give it the merits of grandeur, variety of interest, and diversity in its episodes. (67) Of course, one can question whether Joyce, or any prose author for that matter, ever succeeded in representing genuine simultaneity, or what Stephen, following the German writers Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Karl Gutzkow, in “Proteus” calls the nebeneinander—after all, the first three and second three episodes of Ulysses are sequential and must be read sequentially in time. There is no escaping Lessing’s ground rules. In another important respect, too, Joyce’s Ulysses deviates from one of Aristotle’s central prescriptions for a successful tragedy; Aristotle claims: “Now in the same way as living creatures and organisms compounded on many parts must be of a reasonable size, so that they can be easily taken in by the eye, so too plots must be of a reasonable length, so that they may be easily held in the memory” (42). While one might argue that the plot of Ulysses is of a reasonable length—as opposed to the book—it is more than questionable whether it is “easily held in the memory.” These differences notwithstanding—and let us not forget that they have to exist for Joyce’s work to be classifiable as a novel and not as a tragedy—it is genuinely remarkable how closely Joyce’s Ulysses conforms to Aristotle’s most central prescriptions for tragedy. And the most remarkable correspondence among them seems to be just how much, and how successfully, Joyce was able to tighten and reduce, contract, and shrink epic narrative’s traditionally loose temporal frame of reference with its lengthier temporal parameters—which would typically have meant an action spanning some weeks or months, if not years—to a mere day, and that without losing bulk; quite to the contrary. This reduction in time entails an expansion in time, which is only seemingly a paradox: if we reduce a novel’s action and time span to one day, we are—assuming the same number of pages—simultaneously expanding the narrative space that can be devoted to any given moment in time. This paradox, the expansion of

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time through the reduction of time, is surely one of the prime characteristics of the modernist novel.

The Same and Not the Same Examples abound in which novelists have chosen to depict just one day, or less, in the life of a character or, more usually, a set of characters. A recent example in English literature is Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, published in 2005, describing a day in the life of the London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. In the first and, if I am not mistaken, only article to date on the topic of one-day novels, published in Finnish in 1982, Dietrich Assmann lists some forty texts within this subgenre, many of which were composed in the wake of Ulysses. Indeed, Joyce might have savored the fact that many of them are written in one of the four Scandinavian languages. The earliest, predating Ulysses, is Hjalmar Bergman’s Markurells i Wadköping (1919), which plays on a June day in 1913; among the others are Joel Lehtonen’s Putkinotko (1920), Reino Rauanheimo’s Aamusta iltaan (1930), Sigurd Hoel’s En dag i oktober (1931), Volter Kilpi’s Alastalon salissa (1933), Arvid Brenner’s En dag som andra (1939), and Franz Emil Sillanpäa’s Elokuu (1941), all written and published during Joyce’s lifetime. And Assmann’s list is by no means complete. But rather than survey this field once more (Assmann has done this competently and engagingly, and I am grateful to him for supplying me with a German translation) I would like to focus our attention on a limited subset of one-day novels, namely those that not simply take up and rework the one-day structure but simultaneously reference and acknowledge their precursor, James Joyce, by metanarratively paying homage to their prototype, Ulysses, either through direct quotation, intertextual allusion, or metapoetical commentary, or a combination thereof. There may be no better place to start than Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, her counterweight to Joyce’s one-day novel. Written very much under the spell of Joyce’s Ulysses, but quite distinct from it in narrative tone, timbre, and flow, Mrs. Dalloway—set on a June (!) day in the London of 1923—was published three years after Ulysses, in 1925. As is well known, Woolf was reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Joyce’s Ulysses more or less simultaneously while conceiving her own novel; equally well known is that her attitude toward Joyce was at best ambivalent. But even if she used Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as the preferred model for her own style of writing rather than Joyce’s Ulysses, the figure of Mrs. Dalloway is clearly configured on one level as Woolf ’s well-bred, upper-class counter-image to Joyce’s “under-

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bred” Molly Bloom. While Molly is cast as an immobile, bed-bound symbol of the earth, representing female desire and womanly sensuality, a peculiarly desexualized Mrs. Dalloway navigates her way through London’s inner city, walking past Piccadilly, up Bond Street, along Oxford Street, a flaneur no less than the more pedestrian Leopold Bloom, possibly seeing the queen ride by in her car, gravitating in the end toward her home and that evening’s party with the British prime minister. Preoccupied no less than Molly with her domestic circumstances and memories of adolescence, no thought of marital infidelity (for example with Peter Walsh, freshly returned from India) crosses her mind. As close as London and Dublin get in geographical terms, the two novels, and their two female protagonists, seem to be located at opposite ends of the empire, the empire of politics as much as the empire of lust. And yet, besides the obvious parallel that it is set on a June day in a capital city, Woolf ’s novel contains a number of passages that can be interpreted as echoes of, maybe even tributes to, Joyce’s “masterpiece” (Common Reader 191—as she calls Ulysses in her 1919 essay “Modern Fiction”—despite its also being a “memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster,” as Woolf later says in her essay “How It Strikes a Contemporary” [Common Reader 297]). One of these passages, seemingly fusing the cloud of Ulysses (1.248 and 4.218) with the snow of “The Dead,” runs: “As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind” (Mrs. Dalloway 49). In another, while saluting Joyce in acknowledgment, Woolf seems to be reproaching him for his lack of proportion: “Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing,” we read in Mrs. Dalloway, “the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one” (102). Surely the “commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street,” is meant to remind the reader who knows Ulysses of the clock at the Ballast Office in Dublin which is on Bloom’s mind shortly after 1 p.m. on June 16, 1904: “Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time. . . . Parallax. I never exactly understood” (U 8.108–11). With her allusion to Ulysses, Woolf is creating her own version of a parallax, namely an intertextual one. Similarly, a motorcar in Mrs. Dalloway—“the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime Minister’s?,” no one knows for sure (14 and 16)—circulates through London’s

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inner city, the center of empire, much as the vice-regal cavalcade proceeds through the heart of the Hibernian metropolis in “Wandering Rocks,” “shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing” the city. Using a very different kind of tripartite structure than Joyce in Ulysses, a structure she will emulate in To the Lighthouse, Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway maps out three geographical and spiritual strata of life in London: first, the city of London with its streets and shops, its hustle and bustle, its comings and goings: “Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals” (128); second, the house which the Dalloways inhabit in Westminster, a house that is currently being prepared for a party that evening that even the prime minister will attend; and finally, Clarissa Dalloway’s private drawing room. Correspondingly, these three strata or layers of public and private life are subtly reflected in Mrs. Dalloway’s three names: first she is Mrs. Richard Dalloway, the wife of a senior government official; second, she is Clarissa Dalloway, her public self; and finally, she is Clarissa, her private self. Her triadic identity is spelled out early in the text when we read: “up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway” (11). Moreover, as in Ulysses, three figures, or more precisely, three minds, two male and one female, dominate the novel: Clarissa Dalloway herself, who is for much of the day perambulating the streets of London in preparation for the party that evening; Septimus Warren Smith, the volunteer soldier returned from World War I, who is plagued by memories and no longer able to cope with life, and who is going to commit suicide that very afternoon; and, finally, Peter Walsh, recently returned from India after thirty years of service, who is looking forward to seeing Clarissa again, whom he had once hoped to marry. In many respects, Woolf, in Mrs. Dalloway no less than in her later works, aspires precisely to what she claims in “Modern Fiction” Joyce accomplishes in Ulysses: “Let us record,” she says, “the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small” (Common Reader 190). This poetics of the trivial, of what is small and insignificant, is borne out by another one-day novel by Woolf, her last work, Between the Acts, which was conceived in 1938 and completed in February 1941, but published only posthumously four months after her death in July 1941. Woolf herself

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calls the novel “too silly and trivial” to merit publication (Woolf, Letters 6: 486). While Between the Acts contains only a few indirect echoes of Joyce’s Ulysses, some of the themes Woolf touches upon—in particular the focus on time, change, and history (“Memories; possessions. This is the burden that the past laid on me” [155]; “Time went on and on like the hands of the kitchen clock” [174]; “Change had to come, unless things were perfect; in which case she supposed they resisted Time” [174]; “‘You don’t believe in history,’ said William” [175])—make this novel the perfect intermediary between Joyce’s Ulysses and our next one-day novel, Graham Swift’s The Sweet-Shop Owner of 1980. Although its narrative mood resembles that of Woolf much more than that of Joyce’s Ulysses, Swift’s The Sweet-Shop Owner contains more references to its Joycean pre-text than does any other English-language one-day novel. Like Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and Between the Acts, all three of which may well have served as sources for Swift’s novel, it too is set on a June day. It is the last day in the life of its central protagonist, the sweet-shop owner Mr. Chapman, whose wife, Irene, died in 1970 and who, on this “hot June day” (Sweet-Shop 10) in 1974, senses that it is his turn to die of the angina pectoris—“that little pain, with its name like a rare butterfly’s” (182)—that has plagued him for far too long. While written in an impersonal voice (third-person singular), the novel is dominated by Mr. Chapman’s thoughts, given mostly in free indirect speech; his mind revolves around memories of his and his wife’s wedding in June 1937, their very different social backgrounds, the purchase of the sweet shop in November 1937, the birth of their daughter in 1949, their numerous holidays in Teignmouth and Dorset in the 1950s and early 1960s, their daughter’s education, and his wife’s death. As in Woolf ’s last novel, there is a distinct tone of melancholy about Mr. Chapman’s meditations as he goes about arranging his affairs. As much as Swift may be indebted to his precursors, he does not parade his obligations. Most correspondences between Swift’s and Joyce’s novels will not be apparent to any untrained reader of The Sweet-Shop Owner, so hidden and even arcane are the allusions. But to any Joycean the similarities should be obvious, and they are fun to detect: first, Chapman’s daughter, Dorry, reminds us of Milly, not just because their names have a similar ring; on this very June day it is Dorry’s twentieth birthday, as it was Milly Bloom’s fifteenth on June 15, and both fathers have their daughters on their minds. “There was always the sunshine. It had shone then—June 1949—through the windows of the nursing home,” Mr. Chapman muses, thinking back to the day Dorry was born. “Trees brushed outside and bees had buzzed in and out of the open windows.

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Should they have allowed that, with all those babies? . . . And today, Dorry, is your birthday. He could almost smile at the neatness of it” (10–11). While Bloom muses, thinking back to Milly’s childhood: “Silly Milly’s birthday gift. Only five she was then. No, wait: four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke. Putting pieces of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring” (U 4.284–86). Similarly, when Mrs. Chapman met and married her husband, it was not a grand love affair: “He would do” (Sweet-Shop 27), she admits to herself at the time, echoing Molly Bloom’s “I thought well as well him as another” in the final passages of “Penelope.” And the relationship between mother and daughter is not unlike that of Molly and Milly, as illustrated by the following excerpt from Mr. Chapman’s interior monologue: “And after that, letters once a month, which said little. Irene never read them, though she recognized them from the envelope. She left them to me as if they weren’t hers to touch” (182). It is the father who from that point on communicates with the daughter. And in one of her letters Dorry informs her parents that she is giving up her university studies to be with a man, something that preoccupies the father’s thoughts no less than Bloom’s mind is preoccupied with Milly’s suitors. Like Bloom, Mr. Chapman would go down every morning to make breakfast (136). He always has “two eggs, soft-boiled” (11), a roguish allusion to Bloom’s demand for a “couple of eggs,” as Molly gripes at the opening of her monologue. Mr. Chapman is a rather undistinguished, nondescript man who is known largely because of his wife, “the Harrison girl” (40), the daughter of the “laundry Harrisons,” not unlike Bloom, who too is known around Dublin primarily for his wife. And like Bloom, Mr. Chapman nearly forgets his keys on this last morning of his life: “Sunshine gleamed in the hall. He picked up his hat and briefcase. Only then did he remember. The keys. The keys to the house, to Briar Street, to the till, to the safe in the stock room, to Pond Street. They were on the bedside table, by Dorry’s letter. He went to fetch them. He paused by the sheet of notepaper, breathed heavily, then folded it into his breast pocket. She’s come” (13). Thematically, too, the novels revolve around similar patterns, and the upsetting of patterns. If history is a nightmare from which Stephen is trying to awake (U 2.377) and if it is “history [that] is to blame” (U 2.246–47), in Swift’s novel Mr. Chapman’s daughter is writing, of all things, a thesis about the “sense of history”: “What was the name of that thesis you were writing, Dorry? ‘Romantic Poetry and the Sense of History’? And now you are living with a historian. What do you learn from history, Dorry?” (Sweet-Shop 216). Indeed, the underlying moral of both novels seems the same, history and its repetition, but invariably repetition with a difference: “Nothing new under

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the sun” (U 13.1105), “See, things remain” (Sweet-Shop 218) on the one hand, “history repeating itself with a difference” (U 16.1525), “The same and not the same” (Sweet-Shop 88, 117, 187, and 189), on the other. These and many other references to Joyce in Swift’s novel are intentionally submerged; they are woven as seamlessly into the fabric of Swift’s text as the references to the Odyssey are woven into Joyce’s Ulysses. In both cases, one needs to be alerted to the relationship in order to detect the parallels. My fourth and final English-language example is Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, a novel published in 2003 but situated—“upsetting the pattern,” as Swift’s narrator would put it (Sweet-Shop 159)—on an April day of the year 2000. Eric Packer, the multibillionaire protagonist, is shown navigating around Manhattan in his chauffeur-driven stretch limousine; around him, New York City has come to a near standstill because the president is visiting. We recall how, on June 16, 1904, Dublin is twice cut in half by processions of one sort or another— Paddy Dignam’s funeral procession moving northwest from Dignam’s house in Ballsbridge to Prospect Cemetery, and the vice-regal cavalcade moving in the opposite direction from Phoenix Park to the Mirus Bazaar near Sandymount— making people stop and eyes turn, to watch, reflect, and occasionally greet. Like Joyce’s Hibernian metropolis, DeLillo’s American Cosmopolis too finds itself cut in halves, causing not just havoc but a state of paralysis, a word well known to Joyceans: “State of chaos. This. The question of the president and his whereabouts. He is fluid. He is moving. And wherever he goes, our satellite receiver reports a ripple effect in the traffic that causes mass paralysis. This also. There is a funeral proceeding slowly downtown and now deflecting westward. Many vehicles, numerous mourners on foot” (Cosmopolis 65). Mostly from the safety of his car, this polar opposite of the man of the street, the kind that Leopold Bloom and Mr. Chapman represent, fills his day with oftentimes hollow, at other times profound-sounding conversations with his chief of security, his chief of technology, his currency analyst, his chief of finance, his doctor, his wife, his lover. But even in this high-tech world of financial markets, skyscrapers, elevator banks, heliports, limos, cell phones, “voice-activated firearms” (18), and “surveillance cameras” (15), a “videostreamed” (15) world that revolves in “ritualistic cycles” (16) around nothing but money and sex—much like Ulysses itself!—Bloom’s mind never seems far removed: “We want to think about the art of money-making,” Vija Kinski [his chief of theory] said. She was sitting in the rear seat, his seat, the club chair, and he looked at her and waited.

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“The Greeks have a word for it.” He waited. “Chrimatistikós,” she said. “But we have to give the word a little leeway. Adapt it to the current situation.” (77) As we know, Leopold Bloom has his own rather caustic take on this kind of vocabulary: “Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound” (U 8.115), he comments laconically. Like Woolf, DeLillo subtly generates a kind of parallax—or is it metempsychosis, another big Greek word that might be “adapted to the current situation”?—between his and Joyce’s pre-text, a time loop joining early-twentieth-century Dublin to early-twenty-first century New York City. In an interview with DeLillo reported in the German daily Die Welt shortly after the publication of Cosmopolis, interviewer Thomas David cuts right to the chase when he addresses the obvious link with Joyce. He asks (my translation): “In interviews you have occasionally mentioned the fact that reading Joyce’s Ulysses was one of your most formative reading experiences during adolescence [Jugend]. With Cosmopolis you have now published a novel that takes place on one day. Is this your way of paying your respect?” DeLillo responds: “One of my first readers told me that Cosmopolis is a Ulysses at the speed of light. I consciously worked not to make my novel a copy [Neufassung] of Joyce’s book. Until quite recently there was a pub on 47th Street called Molly Bloom’s. My protagonist is driving down 47th Street, but even if it still existed I would never have mentioned it. But there are a number of mythological allusions, among them to Icarus” (“Jede Art” 27). Despite DeLillo’s disclaimer, his novel cannot conceal its ancestry; beyond what I have already detailed, many twists of the plot and turns of expression are reminiscent of Bloom’s wanderings and Joyce’s language. There are numerous sentences with a distinctly Joycean ring, such as: “It seemed, the food, to make her draw back. Green tea and toast untouched before her” (18). Like Bloom, Eric Packer observes “a hundred gulls trail a wobbling scow downriver” (7). And even the “old Times Tower,” projecting ominously and incessantly from above the passerby’s head, seems to provide the quintessential postmodern gloss on Dublin’s Ballast Office timepiece of yore: “These were three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a hundred feet above the street. Financial news, stock prices, currency markets. The action was unflagging. The hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of multinational news, all too fleet to be absorbed” (80).

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“You Can’t Copy a Genius” My second group of examples is taken from German literary history. One of the earliest German-language writers whose work was to be transformed by the encounter with Joyce’s Ulysses was the Austrian novelist and critic Hermann Broch. His most famous novel is arguably Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil), published during the immediate aftermath of World War II in 1945. Broch is best known among Joyceans for his seminal essay “James Joyce und die Gegenwart: Rede zu Joyces 50. Geburtstag” (“Joyce and the Present Age: Speech on His 50th Birthday”), delivered as a lecture in 1932 and first published in 1936. Here Broch comments extensively on Joyce’s “everyday world of the epoch” (“Welt-Alltag der Epoche” [64, also 67 and 69]) and the “word and sentence polyphony” (“Wort- und Satzpolyphonie” [67]) and “allegorical cosmogony” (“allegorische Kosmogonie” [73]) of Joyce’s “Gesamtkunstwerk” (71). The Death of Virgil, Broch’s most demanding novel, is an impressive 450-page tour de force of mostly interior monologue, couched predominantly in free indirect speech, interspersed with occasional lyrical outbursts and dialogues between the dying Virgil, the emperor Augustus, and some of Virgil’s closest friends and acquaintances. The Death of Virgil is considerably more philosophical and lyrical than Joyce’s Ulysses and more symphonic in its linguistic texture; except that it is written in “normal” German, the flow of language resembles Finnegans Wake more than it does Ulysses, not to mention the fact that, like the Wake, The Death of Virgil contains four chapters or sections, the last of which in its brevity and lyrical ebb and flow comes surprisingly close to ALP’s final monologue. Coming close in tone also to the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, Broch’s streamof-consciousness sentences frequently extend to more than a page in length. His language is deep in resonances, swirling from thought to thought, shifting from present to past and past to present. For obvious reasons, time and temporalness play a crucial role in Broch’s novel: we are experiencing the last hours of Virgil’s life, living with him through his last minutes and seconds, all while the Roman poet laureate is trying to recapture in his meandering train of thought his past life’s full expanse. Each breath contains a plenitude of memories: of that which stored in its breath all starry spaces and would itself be preserved in even the tiniest point of the spheres, breathing itself in and out, streaming in and out, the reflection of a symbolization sheerly unutterable, sheerly unrememberable, sheerly unpredictable, the salvation of knowledge that by its effulgence outreached every lapse of time and transformed each split-second to timelessness. (72)

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In his death throes Virgil is seeking a language, “a speech which would help the [inner] eyes to perceive, heartbreakingly and quick as a heart-beat, the unity of all existence” (72). This profound relationship between time and language is ultimately reduced to the formula, recorded in Broch’s self-commentary on the novel: “One sentence—one thought—one second.” Broch here suggests that each sentence, each sequence of words encompassed by two periods, however long or short, corresponds to the brief space of just one second. The novel was originally conceived around 1936, but by the time of its publication in 1945 Broch had undertaken at least five revisions. Hölderlin and Rilke are major influences on theme, style, and tone, but Broch openly acknowledges that Joyce was his major source of inspiration in particular for his extensive use of interior monologue. But the Austrian author is also quick to point out the differences in their treatments of stream of consciousness: “in this respect my Virgil-narrative is nothing less than a lyrical poem that like any poetry is meant to express a single moment of life, here of course encapsulating the moment of dying,” he wrote to Benno Huebsch at Viking Press in New York. In another self-commentary, he says: “By necessity, the representation of such circumstances led to the interior monologue, but one in the third person since the process of dying cannot be expressed in the first person. This peculiar form also allowed me to move beyond the realm of the psychological and to gain entry into realms of the metaphysical.” “The method that I use in my novel,” he continues elsewhere, “is therefore a lyrical one; the interior monologue proceeds as lyrical prose but switches to verse when it climaxes. This was all the more permissible as we are dealing with none less than Virgil. The result was an unbroken chain of lyrical images that come to overlap and illuminate one another so that, in the end, one could speak of a ‘lyrical commentary’ that elucidates what is unreal from the perspective of the real but that also dissolves the real into what is unreal.” “I did not follow Joyce in his footsteps,” he concludes, “you can’t copy a genius . . . Joyce responded to the antinomial structure of the human spirit with an associative impressionism of language, and with that he has accomplished a creative and intellectual feat that will, in all probability, be trend-setting for generations to come and may not even be understood for some generations yet.” Interestingly, Broch nowhere explicitly acknowledges the fact that Joyce also provided the blueprint for the one-day novel. As I see it, the difference between the one-day structure and the interior monologue is one of linguistic shape: the one-day structure is an idea, a mold, and as idea or mold it can be filled with any kind of linguistic form or arrangement; the interior monologue, by con-

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trast, insofar as it is a prose technique used to encapsulate a person’s stream of consciousness, already possesses a fairly defined and concrete linguistic shape. Since Joyce through Ulysses had defined this shape for his generation, any writer using interior monologue after him was forced either to copy the modernist maestro or swerve away—in any variation of the Harold Bloomian trope of anxiety of influence. An influence in terms of interior monologue was in most instances much more palpable than a writer’s adapting the idea of the one-day structure. Consequently, critics were much quicker to reproach writers (Alfred Döblin in German literature, for example, or Arno Schmidt) for being imitators and duplicators of Joyce, thereby implicitly alluding to their unoriginality, when it came to the interior monologue than with the more loosely defined one-day structure. As a result, authors who followed in Joyce’s footsteps in depicting their characters’ streams of consciousness felt a much greater urgency to diverge from Joyce’s practice or, if they found it difficult to diverge from his example, to acknowledge the similarities and stress the differences of treatment, as we saw with Broch. Another famous instance of this in German literature is Arno Schmidt. When he wrote his one-day novel, Zettels Traum (Zettel’s Dream, 1970), between July 1965 and March 1969, he knew, and openly admitted as much both in Zettels Traum itself and in a number of accompanying critical essays on Joyce’s works, that he was competing with his Irish counterpart. Anyone who has ever studied Arno Schmidt knows how severe a crisis his preoccupation with Joyce brought about; reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake marked a turning point in Schmidt’s career as a writer. Zettels Traum, the book with which he seems at last to have exorcized Joyce’s stifling influence, is a gigantic attempt at one-upmanship—it contains over thirteen hundred typescript pages measuring thirteen by eighteen inches (A3 format). Three columns of text meander their way through eight books (originally bound in one heavyweight volume) covering the time span of only one day in June or July in an unspecified year, but most probably 1968. According to Schmidt himself, the action spans precisely twenty-four hours from about half past three in the morning to half past three in the morning of the following summer’s day (Vorläufiges 4). It should come as no surprise to see Schmidt, on page 273 of Zettels Traum, nodding his head in the direction of his precursor when his main male protagonist, the writer Daniel Pagenstecher, declares: “We’re not that far away from ‘Bloomsday’” (“Wir sind ja gar nich so entfernt vom ‘Bloomsday’” [273]). Later, on page 988, he reiterates that it is not quite the sixteenth of June (“nicht ganz-genau der 16.6.”).

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Most academic (and even many non-academic) German readers at this time probably would have quickly identified Joyce’s Ulysses as the prototype for Schmidt’s one-day novel. Hence Schmidt himself makes no secret of this relationship, both in the novel and in his statements about it. For example, in an interview taped shortly after completion of the manuscript of Zettels Traum, the interviewer, Christian Gneuss, immediately addresses the obvious kinship: “The action takes place as you said within 24 hours of one July day,” he notes, only to ask: “Does this not remind us of Bloomsday?” Schmidt’s response is typical, conceding the influence at first, but then—as any “strong” or strongwilled author (in Harold Bloom’s sense) would—stressing the differences between their approaches rather than the similarities: “Indeed that could be the case,” he says, adding: But I don’t think so—I am a Joyce-aficionado—and I have done some work on Joyce—but his concern was different from mine. Joyce was— hmm—an asphalt-walker [Asphalttreter] down to the core, quite contrary to me. That is, his setting is the city, and he of course had the opportunity just based on the number of people he would have encountered in the city the many shops in the labyrinth of streets—he simply had other kinds of opportunities to fill his book; with many many details. By locating my story [literally: reality] in the [Lüneburg] heath I rob myself of, well, I can’t really call it the opportunity simply because I don’t like city life. One could object that my foundation is rather slim for such a gigantic edifice. If Joyce covered one day in the life of a city, Schmidt claims to cover a day in the life of the countryside where much less happens, and yet he is going to use three times more text than Joyce to describe the events, or rather non-events, of this most singular day. How then does Schmidt resolve the dilemma of filling over thirteen hundred elephantine pages with rural non-content? He subsumes within his deceptively simple story line a hypercomplex and protracted psychoanalytical discussion—disputation might be a more fitting term—about the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, even outdoing Marie Bonaparte’s extensive 1930s psychobiographical analysis. It is here, as well as in a number of critical essays written during the same period, especially those on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, that Schmidt advances his agonistic Etymtheorie (“etym” theory) and the concept of a Vierte Instanz (fourth instance). Indeed, the concept of “etym” itself is derived from the Wake, where Schmidt found the term in Joyce’s phrase “the abnihilisation of the etym” (FW 353.20); Joyce himself is later in Zettels

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Traum identified as “the (to date) best representative of the ‘4th INSTANCE.’” Although Schmidt’s depiction of Joyce as the twentieth century’s supreme master of “etymistical” language—in particular, of course, in Finnegans Wake—is a fascinating subject and worthy of study in its own right, it has little bearing on our subject, the one-day novel. Suffice it to say that in Zettels Traum Joyce figures as the only modern writer—besides Arno Schmidt himself, naturally— who is able to recognize and consciously deploy the unconscious psychosexual carnivalism of etyms raging behind the surface of our everyday language. The author of my third and last German example likewise pays homage to Joyce and his Ulysses within the framework of his own one-day novel, a book that is structured like an amalgam of “Wandering Rocks” and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, a novel that itself is heavily indebted to Joyce’s Ulysses without adopting its one-day structure. The 230 pages of Wolfgang Koeppen’s Tauben im Gras (Pigeons on the Grass), published in 1951 during the early postwar period, consist of some 220 narrative subsections, some of which span a mere couple of lines, others a page or two, with the longest extending to some thirteen pages. Within its mosaic-like texture, the novel relates the occasionally interconnecting but mostly unconnected lives of roughly twenty characters and a dog. The action spans one day from early morning until midnight, but neither the precise date nor the location is recorded; however, a number of signals suggest that the novel’s action most likely takes place in Munich in 1948. The concept of time plays an important role in Koeppen’s somber tale of postwar German depression; it provides a symbolic grounding for the author’s portrayal of his novel’s characters as transient and ephemeral beings. “Philipp had problems with time,” it is said of one of the many protagonists. “The moment was like a living image, the droll object of a solidification, life cast into plaster.” Dasein, human existence, has frozen, solidified into an immobile presence, and people, too, seem hardened and frozen in time. At the novel’s conclusion, time is likened to a “meagre span, . . . a second to catch one’s breath, a breather on a damned battlefield.” And yet, “at the same time, while time was speeding it was stationary, too, representing the Here and Now, a moment of eternal duration.” Koeppen pays tribute to Joyce in this novel in particular through the naming of one of his male protagonists: Odysseus (!) Cotton is an African American soldier doing duty in Munich, where the local America House, ironically lodged in a National Socialist Führer-building (“Führerbau des Nationalsozialismus”), is compared to a storehouse of “the spirit, the myths and the Gods” of antiquity (“der Geist, die Heldensagen, die Götter” [231]), on the one hand,

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while simultaneously representing a “colossal tomb of antiquity” (“kolossales Grabmal der Antike” [231]), on the other. Unlike Joyce’s handling of myth in Ulysses, Koeppen does not attempt to conceal his allusions to classical mythology. What follows are two exemplary descriptions of Odysseus and his German girlfriend Susanne, separated by some seventy pages, which illustrate how far removed Koeppen’s style and technique are from Joyce’s, and how close he is to Dos Passos and Alfred Döblin: “Susan was Circe and the Sirens,” the narrator announces, “and maybe she was Nausicaa, too. No one in the pub noticed that others lived under her skin, age-old beings; Susan did not know who all she was; Circe, the Sirens and maybe Nausicaa; the simple-minded person she was, she thought she was Susan, and Odysseus had no idea which mistresses he was encountering with this girl.” The second passage runs: “They lay together, white skin, black skin, Odysseus Susan Circe the Sirens and maybe Nausicaa, they meshed, black skin white skin, in a chamber that was supported by a couple of beams and hung suspended, almost like a small balcony, above the depths, because the foundation walls of the house had been cut away by a bomb, and never would they be rebuilt.” If Joyce keeps his mythological substrata submerged, Koeppen lets them surface openly, bringing into focus the evocative parallelism between antiquity and modernity. It took quite some unraveling—and considerable guidance: Joyce’s schemata did much to help us along—to recognize Bloom as a reincarnation of Odysseus and Stephen as Telemachus; in Koeppen’s novel, the correlation is laid bare for everyone to see: the Americans are the victorious Greeks and Odysseus Cotton is Odysseus, the conquered Germans are the Trojans and Munich/Germany is their Troy, while his German girlfriend is the seductress, keeping him from returning home.

The Primum Mobile of the One-Day Novel Three English-language authors (Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift, Don DeLillo) and three German-language authors (Hermann Broch, Arno Schmidt, and Wolfgang Koeppen), all of whom pay homage, some of them reluctantly for sure, to their precursor James Joyce, each in his or her respective text or its commentary refers metapoetically or intertextually to their pre-text, Ulysses. In the words of the German modernist writer Hans Henny Jahnn, who was writing his novel Perrudja (published in 1929) when he first encountered Ulysses, Joyce’s book “represents a turning point of literary technique and an explosion in our means of expression.” Around the same time, in 1928 and just one year after the publication of the first German translation of Ulysses, Bertolt

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Brecht, one of the great luminaries of twentieth-century German literature, wrote, responding to a questionnaire about the best books of the year: “The novel Ulysses by James Joyce, because—according to Döblin—it has changed the whole status of the novel and represents, as a collection of various approaches to representation (introduction of the interior monologue and so forth), an indispensable reference work for writers.” An “explosion in our means of expression” indeed, a “reference work” to be sure, that too; but Ulysses was also a (psychological) barrier, an inhibition and constraint, a (literary) obstacle and disincentive for authors working in his shadow. In a study of the impact of Ulysses on Italian literature, Serenella Zanotti relates how, “in 1930, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa considered writing a novel based on a day in the life of a Sicilian aristocrat, which he provisionally entitled La giornata di un siciliano (The Day of a Sicilian). . . . He only started writing it in 1954, but had to abandon the idea of a one-day action and finally admitted: ‘I don’t know how to write Ulysses’ [Non so fare l’Ulysses]” (338). In a similar vein, Hermann Broch once admitted to his English translator Willa Muir: “The most radical consequence that one could draw from this beyond Joyce is to stop writing altogether, even philosophy, and to retreat into the esotericism of mathematics instead. As a matter of fact, this is precisely what I should do.” But he did not. Fortunately for us, he forced himself instead to find other means of continuing to write in the wake of Joyce. What all this suggests is that Joyce’s Ulysses, from the moment of its publication in 1922 (if not earlier), became the twentieth century’s prime example of what I have elsewhere called a “foundational” literary text, a notion derived from Michel Foucault’s seminal essay “What Is an Author?” If “Joyce”—as persona rather than person—perfectly embodies what Foucault described as an “author-function,” someone who performs a “classificatory function [that] permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others” (147), Ulysses correspondingly emerges as the prime example of the analogous “text-function” (a concept, incidentally and rather surprisingly, that Foucault does not introduce in his essay). Viewed from this vantage point, Joyce becomes—again in Foucault’s terms—a veritable “founder of discursivity” (154), with Ulysses representing the “foundational” text par excellence of twentieth-century literature. It served as the discursive node of numerous programmatic literary and literary theoretical discussions, even about the characteristics and features of socialist realism, and was, as I mentioned at the outset, the mainspring of at least three different literary traditions, or trajectories, for one of which—the one-day novel—I have

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here provided a partial and selective outline. The one-day aspect of Ulysses functions precisely as Foucault specifies, namely as a “classificatory function [that] permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others” (147). Or, to put it another way: Stephen Dedalus’s and Leopold and Molly Bloom’s Dublin day is the oneday novel’s primum mobile, a term that is maybe doubly appropriate not just because it means the prime mover; in Ptolemaic cosmology it also relates to the tenth and outermost of all concentric spheres of the universe, causing all the other spheres to repeat their own revolution around the earth once every twenty-four hours. In this sense, Ulysses is the quintessential text and pivot that gets the one-day novel spinning.

Notes 1. As Dietrich Assmann (1982) points out, a number of attempts to reduce narrative time to one day or less had preceded the publication of Ulysses, but none handled the task as successfully as Joyce. As main contenders he mentions Maria Jotuni’s story “Arkielämää,” Hjalmar Bergman’s Markurells i Wadköping, Joel Lehtonen’s Putkinotko, Carl Spitteler’s novella “Conrad der Leutnant,” Arthur Schnitzler’s story “Leutnant Gustl,” and Richard Beer-Hofmann’s Der Tod Georgs, many of which, however, were not full-fledged novels, nor did they have the prominence or circulation to ever make them formative. 2. Early essays on this topic by Joseph Frank (1963) and Erich von Kahler (1970) belong among the most illuminating that I know. 3. It is surely also no coincidence that a Mr. Joyce appears as a character in Swift’s novel; the estate agent company that Mr. Chapman and his wife dealt with when they bought the shop in Briar Street is called “Hancock, Joyce and Jones.” 4. “das in seinem Atem jeglichen Sphärenraum aufbewahrt und dabei von jedem noch so kleinen Sphärenpunkt aufbewahrt wird, sich selbst ein- und ausatmend, sich selbst einund ausstrahlend, Widerschein eines vor Sinnbildhaftigkeit schier unaussprechbaren, schier unerinnerbaren, schier unverkündbaren Erkenntnisheils, das mit seinen Strahlen jeglichen Zeitenablauf überholt und jeden Sekundenbruchteil zur Zeitlosigkeit verwandelt” (Der Tod des Vergil 85) 5. “die es dem Auge gestattete, herzschlagend und herzschlagrasch, die Erkenntniseinheit des Seins zu erfassen” (Der Tod des Vergil 86). 6. “Ein Satz—ein Gedanke—eine Sekunde” (Der Tod des Vergil 492); this passage is from Broch’s commentary on his novel, which was not included in the English edition (the translations of Broch’s commentary in the text are my own). 7. “in diesem Sinne ist meine Vergil-Erzählung nichts anderes als ein einziges lyrisches Gedicht, das wie jede Lyrik als Ausdruck eines einzigen Lebensmomentes zu gelten hat, eines einzigen Lebensaugenblickes, der hier allerdings der des Sterbens ist” (Der Tod des Vergil 458). 8. “Die Darstellung dieser Sachverhalte hat notwendigerweise zum innern Monolog geführt, allerdings zu einem in der dritten Person, da ein Sterbensprozeß nicht in der ersten aus-

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gedrückt zu werden vermag. Diese eigentümliche Form erlaubte auch, den Bereich des rein Psychologischen . . . zu verlassen und in metaphysische Bereiche vorzudringen” (Der Tod des Vergil 461–62). 9. “Die Methode, welche ich im Vergil verwende, ist demnach eine lyrische; der innere Monolog läuft in einer lyrischen Prosa ab, die in letzten Höhepunkten zum Vers übergeht, und dies war umsomehr gestattet, als es der Monolog des Dichters Vergil ist. Es ergab sich solcherart eine ununterbrochene Kette lyrischer Bilder, welche sich übereinander schieben und gegenseitig erklären, so daß man gewissermaßen von einem »Lyrischen Kommentar« sprechen dürfte, der das Irreale vom Realen her begreift und hinwiederum das Reale ins Irreale auflöst” (Der Tod des Vergil 462). 10. “Ich bin nicht den Joyceschen Weg gegangen, das Genie läßt sich nicht nachahmen . . . Joyce ist [der antinomischen Struktur des Menschengeistes] mit einem assoziativen Sprach-Impressionismus begegnet, und er hat damit eine künstlerische und geistige Tat vollbracht, die wahrscheinlich für Generationen richtunggebend sein wird, ja, wahrscheinlich erst von künftigen Generationen voll erfaßt werden kann” (Der Tod des Vergil 462). 11. “Die Handlung spielt Sie sagten es—an einem Juli Tag—innerhalb von 24 Stunden. Drängt sich da nicht die Erinnerung an den Bloomsday auf, also nicht nur Poe sondern auch Joyce?” (Vorläufiges 12; my translation in the text). 12. “Zweifellos könnte man das meinen. Ich glaube es aber nicht ich bin nun Joyce-Kenner—und habe auch über Joyce mehrfach gearbeitet; aber sein Anliegen war ein gänzlich anderes. Joyce—war—hm—ein Vollblut Asphaltreter, ganz im Gegensatz zu mir. Also sein Schauplatz ist die Stadt, und—da hatte er nun natürlich die Möglichkeit—lediglich aufgrund der Anzahl der ihm begegnenden Personen bei einem Gang durch die Stadt der Vielzahl von Geschäften des Straßenlabyrinths—er hatte ganz andere Möglichkeiten, sein Buch zu füllen; mit vielen, vielen Details. Ich—beraube mich praktisch dadurch daß ich die Wirklichkeit hier in die—Heide verlege—dieser—ja ich mag es nicht Möglichkeit nennen, ganz einfach weil ich das Stadtleben nicht mag. Man kann einwenden die Basis sei nun etwas schmal für ein solches Riesengebäude” (Vorläufiges 12; my translation in the text). 13. “der (bis jetzt) beste Repräsentant der ‘4. INSTANZ’” (Zettels Traum 1247; translation in the text is my own). 14. “Philipp kam mit der Zeit nicht zurecht. Der Augenblick war wie ein lebendes Bild, der possierliche Gegenstand einer Erstarrung, das Dasein in Gips gegossen” (Tauben im Gras 22; translations in the text are my own). 15. “karge Spanne, . . . eine Sekunde zum Atemholen, Atempause auf einem verdammten Schlachtfeld” (Tauben im Gras 238). 16. “Zugleich aber raste dieselbe Zeit, die doch wiederum stillstand und das Jetzt war, dieser Augenblick von schier ewiger Dauer” (Tauben im Gras 23). 17. “Susanne war Kirke und die Sirenen, und vielleicht war sie auch noch Nausikaa. Niemand im Lokal merkte, daß andere in Susannes Haut steckten, uralte Wesen; Susanne wußte nicht, wer alles sie war; Kirke, die Sirenen und vielleicht Nausikaa; die Törichte hielt sich für Susanne, und Odysseus ahnte nicht, welche Damen ihm in dem Mädchen begegneten” (Tauben im Gras 164). 18. “Sie lagen zusammen, weiße Haut, schwarze Haut, Odysseus Susanne Kirke die Sirenen und vielleicht Nausikaa, sie schlängelten sich, schwarze Haut weiße Haut, in einer Kammer, die

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sich windig auf ein paar Balken stützte und fast wie ein kleiner Balkon über der Tiefe schwebte, denn die Grundmauern des Hauses waren an diese Seite fortgerissen, eine Bombe hatte sie zur Seite gerissen, und nie würden sie wieder errichtet werden” (Tauben im Gras 232). 19. “ein Wendepunkt des Schreibstils, eine Steigerung der Ausdrucksmöglichkeit jetziger Sprachen” (quoted in Füger 235–36). 20. “Der Roman Ulysses von James Joyce, weil er nach Ansicht Döblins die Situation des Romans verändert hat und als Sammlung verschiedener Methoden der Betrachtung (Einführung des inneren Monologs und so weiter) ein unentbehrliches Nachschlagewerk für Schriftsteller darstellt” (82). 21. “Die radikalste Konsequenz, die daraus zu ziehen wäre, über Joyce hinaus: überhaupt nicht mehr schreiben, auch keine Philosophie mehr schreiben, sondern sich auf die Esoterik der Mathematik zurückzuziehen. Und im Grunde habe ich die größte Lust dies zu tun” (Briefe I 182). 22. See also my essay “‘Ulysses’ in Quotation Marks.”

Works Cited Aristotle. “On the Art of Poetry.” Classical Literary Criticism. Trans. with an introduction by T. S. Dorsch. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. 29–75. Assmann, Dietrich. “Yhdenpäivänromaani: Mietteitä erään tutkimuksen perustaksi.” “Siivilöity Aika” Ja Muita Kirjallisuustutkielmia. Ed. Toimittanut Eino Maironiemi. Publications of the University of Joensuu, Series A, No. 25. Joensuu, 1982. 5–22. Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst 1. 1920–1932. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967. Broch, Hermann. Briefe I (1913–1938). Vol. 13.1 of Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. ———. The Death of Virgil. Trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. ———. “James Joyce und die Gegenwart: Rede zu Joyces 50. Geburtstag.” Schriften zur Literatur 1: Kritik. Vol. 9.1 of Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975. 63–94. ———. Der Tod des Vergil. Roman. Vol. 4 of Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976. DeLillo, Don. Cosmospolis. New York: Picador (Pan Macmillan), 2003. ———. “Jede Art von Macht verlangt auch nach ihrer Ausübung. Das Wichtigste ist ihm die Sprache: Ein Interview mit dem Schriftsteller Don DeLillo über seinen neuen Roman Cosmopolis.” Die Welt 22 Sept. 2003: 27–28. Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 141–60. Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963. 3–62. Füger, Wilhelm. Kritisches Erbe. Dokumente zur Rezeption von James Joyce im deutschen Sprachbereich zu Lebzeiten des Autors. Ein Lesebuch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

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Kahler, Erich von. “Untergang und Übergang der epischen Kunstform.” Untergang und Übergang: Essays. Munich: DTV, 1970. 7–51. Koeppen, Wolfgang. Tauben im Gras. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Schmidt, Arno. Vorläufiges zu “Zettels Traum.” Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1977. ———. Zettels Traum. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1977. Swift, Graham. The Sweet-Shop Owner. New York: Vintage (Random House), 1993. Weninger, Robert. “‘Ulysses’ in Quotation Marks—Toward a Theory of the Foundational Text.” Comparative Critical Studies 1 (2004): 71–83. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co. (Harvest Edition), 1970. ———. The Common Reader. First Series. London: Hogarth, 1968. ———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 6, 1936–1941. Ed. Nigel Nicholson. London: Hogarth, 1980. ———. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Co. (Harvest Edition), 1990. Zanotti, Serenella. “James Joyce among the Italian Writers.” The Reception of James Joyce in Europe. Vol. 2. Ed. Geert Lernout and Wim van Mierlo. London: Continuum, 2004. 329–61.

V

“Almosting It” Ulysses and the Reader

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13 Past Its Sell-by Date When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism Michael Patrick Gillespie

What Is to Be Done? Insecurity functions as a driving force throughout the academic world and at every stage of an individual’s professional life. Insecurity causes a graduate student to assume that his or her admission to a particular school was a clerical error that might be discovered and corrected at any moment. Insecurity leads an assistant professor to spend hours dissecting the implications of a tenured colleague not saying (or, sometimes worse, saying) hello when passing in the corridor. And insecurity compels a senior faculty member to complain to the department chair that the size of his wastebasket is incommensurate with the length of his publication record. Sadly, no matter what position an individual occupies on the academic great chain of being, nearly everyone falls victim to the most common of scholastic anxieties: the fear of being exposed as a person who does not know as much as everyone else. This phobia generally centers on what one has read, or more accurately what one has yet to read. (In his novel Changing Places, David Lodge brilliantly satirizes the sadomasochistic feelings this fear inspires.) In a field like Joyce studies, this apprehension can become especially intense for anyone attempting to engage the range of critical commentaries now in print. Diverse methodologies jockey for pride of place in scholarly journals. Specialization makes overviews of critical resources increasingly difficult to articulate. Even common assumptions about the texts with which one works have all but disappeared. Although the problem appears to be particularly acute at this time, schol-

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ars have obsessed about dealing with the mass of criticism of Joyce’s works for decades. Fifty years ago writers began using the term “the Joyce industry” to describe the onslaught of interpretations largely emanating from America (Magalaner and Kain 209). However, despite the work of Hugh Kenner, Father William Noon, Chester Anderson, J. Mitchell Morse, Maurice Beebe, S. L. Goldberg, David Hayman, A. Walton Litz, and Mackie Jarrell, to name only a few of the more prolific writers of that period, the total output remained relatively modest. In the 1950s only fifty books and articles on Joyce and his work appeared, and the James Joyce Review, begun in 1957 by Edward Epstein, only lasted for three issues. The same was true of Magalaner’s A James Joyce Miscellany, which published three sets of essays in 1957, 1959, and 1962. By the mid-1960s the pace began to pick up. Bernard Benstock, Thomas Staley, and Fritz Senn had launched the James Joyce Foundation (later the International James Joyce Foundation), Staley had begun the James Joyce Quarterly, and a number of energetic scholars were laboring mightily to bring not just American but international Joyce criticism to widespread notice and respectability. By the late 1960s these efforts began to produce impressive results. A strong and continuous output of first-rate Joyce scholarship appeared, so that in the last three years of the decade alone 375 books and articles were published. The volume of production has remained strong; the number of publications that have appeared since the turn of the millennium illustrates the scope of the problem (with apologies to those who assert that the millennium did not begin until 2001). From January 2000 to the fall of 2004, 695 books and articles relating to Joyce’s works were published. Over that same period, 60 dissertations were completed, all written in the hope of joining the deluge of interpretations pouring out of university presses. (All of the figures cited in these two paragraphs come from the MLA online bibliography.) Today the Joyce industry finds itself well established as a formidable, multinational conglomerate that, on an annual basis, produces an inundation of books and articles relating to Joyce and his works. This condition has led to an ongoing reconfiguration of the critical landscape. One now finds a vast number of elaborately delineated, and what can seem to some mutually exclusionary, fields of study operating sometimes uncomfortably side by side within what remains the broadly delineated field of Joyce studies. Genetic critics appear to converse in a language very different from those interested in postcolonialism. Topics like Joyce and gender can encompass such a range of possibilities that even critics who find themselves drawn

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to this area of study may have little interest in the writings of others ostensibly working on the same subject. And anyone with the temerity to attempt to determine the proper principles to follow when editing one of Joyce’s works quickly finds that he or she must sift through a wide range of often conflicting claims in an effort to discern the best critical methodology. All this is a long way around saying that the amount of Joyce criticism that currently exists is more than anyone could possibly keep track of—much less read, assimilate, and then critique. Furthermore, the problem continually worsens as scholars keep adding to the list every day. As a result, having admitted this fact, one nonetheless feels an obligation to be more or less aware of the critical heritage, and sanity cries for a reasonable plan for selected perusal. Of course, I am aware of the irony of decrying the sheer volume of Joyce studies in a collection of yet more essays on Joyce and his work. However, my point is not that all criticism of Joyce’s work should cease. Although that would produce the benefit of forestalling some very bad writing, it would also preclude the expression of some very useful insights. Rather, I am saying that critical approaches have become so diverse, and in some cases so mutually exclusive, that even all good Joyce criticism (assuming it were possible to identify that group) cannot appeal to everyone interested in Joyce. One needs therefore an economical method for choosing the most satisfying criticism. Being the perennial bad student, I have no idea of what methodologies might already exist to address this difficulty, and further I am far too lazy to take the trouble to discover and then master them. Searching for an easier way to make somewhat informed choices, I fell back on an approach that buoyed me up when I was a penurious graduate student, comforted me as an assistant professor of limited means, and now delights me as a miserly senior faculty member with too much time on my hands: shopping on a tight budget. Once I settled on using the marketplace as the arbiter for allocating my intellectual capital, it seemed an obvious choice to turn to the most mundane element of consumer activity, a trip to the grocery store, to provide the framework for my investigations. At this point, I really must ask the indulgence of Brandy Kershner, Cheryl Herr, Mark Osteen, Garry Leonard, and all of the other Joyceans who have a much stronger grasp of materialist criticism than I do for the metaphoric flights of fancy that follow. I am not attempting to emulate the work of any of these scholars. Rather I am trying to assuage my own intellectual obsessions and professional insecurities by drawing upon comforting images from American commodity culture to find the same reassurance in dealing with the

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consumption of literary criticism that as a child I found in a bag of groceries after a quick trip to the local market with Mom. Admittedly, nostalgia and selective memory play equal parts in shaping the images I evoke here. However, no matter how subjective these perceptions may be, my representations still benefit from the model I have chosen: the clearly defined parameters that one associates with confident choices that address visceral appetites. Before commercial establishments around the world began to emulate Harrods by trying to make possible the purchase of every imaginable domestic necessity in a single building, shopping for food was a very specialized task. Economies of space and finance made shopkeepers keenly aware of the need to lay out their stores in a fashion that balanced customer desire against the limitations of inventory. Such constraints challenged consumers to develop highly refined skills yet offered the promise of immediate gratification. (This was, and still is, at least true for shoppers like me who invariably arrive at the cashier with a handful of empty candy wrappers, the remnants of items that I could not wait to purchase before consuming.) To that end, I have attempted to apply the same self-indulgent approach that can make grocery shopping so pleasurable to gleaning from the vast amount of works on Joyce the most satisfying amount of criticism with the least possible effort. I seek to enter fully into this process, and I ask your indulgence if I refer to products from my childhood that lack currency in today’s commercial emporiums. I will try to guide you through the aisles with a minimum of jargon, but a certain number of colloquialisms are bound to accrue. However, before beginning to fill our shopping carts (or trolleys if you prefer), we need to confront the conflicting attitudes that inform the process.

Truth in Advertising Just as extratextual forces always influence our reading, concerns that fall well outside the realm of practical needs can have a powerful impact on our most mundane purchases. More often than not, this motivation comes from the aura created by the merchandizing promoting the product. Before entering the grocery store, the wary shopper seeks to disentangle misleading assertions from useful information. Likewise, when approaching criticism, we need to consider the claims and promises that drew us into this excursion. Some criticism attracts our attention by offering wide-ranging commentaries about a work or an author. These studies provide generalizations that can serve as the foundation for more specific readings, often starting trends

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in critical thinking that go on to far more elaborate conclusions. One often finds this approach in the earlier works on Joyce’s canon from authors like Harry Levin in James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. Because these books appeared decades ago, some contemporary readers may be tempted to dismiss them as rudimentary and dated, and thereby sidestep the commitment required actually to read and understand them. However, that generalization often proves reductive and surely unfairly ignores the difficulties that initial respondents to complex artistic efforts face. For those like myself, always looking to cut corners, actually reading all those studies has all the appeal of a trip to the all-night dentist. Instead, I recommend looking at Re-viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism, edited by Janet Dunleavy. Despite the portentous reverberations of its title and the self-important tone of its introduction, the book is full of essays that provide concise summaries and useful critiques of the critics studied there. Other critical works claim to offer specific interpretive ideas for readers to build upon. These studies often act as goads for developing new perspectives of a work or for extending readings that have already proved insightful. For well over three decades Jacques Derrida did this sort of thing very dramatically, though I frankly confess that his approach has produced mixed results for me. (When Derrida spoke in French about the “Penelope” episode at the 1984 Frankfurt Joyce symposium, I thought for the first five minutes of the talk that he was concerning himself with Molly’s “yes.” Only when I glanced down at the conference program did I see that what I heard as “oui” was really “huit,” an allusion to the eight sentences in the episode. That convinced me that leaving to have a coffee at a café across the street made far more sense that straining my inadequate sense of the French language with additional misprisions of the lecture.) Again, it is often better to ingest this material in condensed form. Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce offers a digested version that helps one avoid the acid reflux of ponderous Gallic prose. Finally, whether intentionally or not, some Joyce criticism gives one a vivid sense of what does not work. More often than not in these cases, the line between a courageous failure and unintentional self-parody proves to be extremely narrow. Kathleen Ferris’s James Joyce and the Burden of Disease falls into this category for me. Ferris simply bases too many of her interpretive efforts on dubious assumptions relating to syphilis and Joyce’s medical history. (This is all the more egregious, because Ellmann’s revised Joyce biography, published thirteen years earlier, reprints the autopsy report on Joyce’s death, pp. 741–42, confirming that no sign of syphilis existed.) Although it can be dif-

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ficult to predict before one begins to read which category will fit a particular book, one should never hesitate to abandon the effort once it becomes clear that an author’s ideas are simply too much to swallow.

The Lure of the Marketplace Whatever one thinks of individual works noted above, each work presumes that one will read it in order to form an opinion. Most academics take a more pragmatic, and frankly less idealistic, approach to analytic studies. Both in reading and writing, appearance often trumps substance. Further, the primary impulse governing critical writing and critical reading is avoidance. Authors generally wish to say as little that is concrete as possible, so that the inaccuracies, misjudgments, and simple errors for which they can be held accountable is kept to a minimum. The rest of us wish to read as little as possible, because we become tired moving our lips as our eyes scan the printed page. Consequently, we like sound-bite criticism, works that offer easily excerpted passages that give the reader an aura of intelligence or at the very least the sense of being. It also helps if we can achieve this sense with a minimal engagement with the text. I realize that in some cases this goal proves to be challenging. Nonetheless, most books adhere to a structure that can be adapted to this approach. They summarize their chapters in the introduction. They tell us what their analyses prove, so that we need not figure that out on our own. And they invariably invoke a critical approach utterly new to us, ambiguous if not outright contradictory, and yet with a name that is easy to remember. (The late, lamented Deconstruction was possibly the finest instance of this.) This process is best accomplished with the incorporation of polysyllabic words that are difficult to pronounce, mean absolutely nothing, and yet intimidate anyone hearing them for the first time. I do not mean that the only acceptable form is one that is incomprehensible. As readers we are irresistibly drawn to authors who say the nasty things we do not wish to articulate in print. Hugh Kenner’s delicately understated deflation of Richard Ellmann’s revised version of his Joyce biography provides a model of this sort of writing. Given the timorous nature of most academics, instances of this sort of criticism prove extremely difficult to find. Thus, because of the rareness and venom that often color these assessments, such pieces have a particular attraction. Of course, pious bromides assert that the best criticism comes from diligent

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research, thorough scholarship, and lucidly argued interpretations. That may well be true. However, the concentration demanded in reading such criticism, much less writing it, far exceeds the capabilities of most academics.

The Pitfalls That the Canny Consumer Avoids Given the conflicting appeals and contradictory demands of various critical works, how then does one proceed? The conventional views summarized in the “Truth in Advertising” section of this essay offer no clear guide for addressing the mind-numbing amount of material anyone adhering to them would have to wade through. The cynical, and frankly gratifying, attitudes expressed in the “Lure of the Marketplace” passage cut down the volume of reading in terms of specific works, but they still provide no organized way of winnowing down the stacks of books one must at least peruse. The supermarket approach to Joyce criticism supplies an answer to these difficulties, but even following this method requires a clear grasp of certain caveats. Whether shopping or reading, the most appealing approach, because it requires the least effort, is to ignore it all. Unfortunately, that compels one to attempt to survive by eating the rancid mayonnaise found in a jar at the back of the refrigerator. In critical terms this means recycling, usually with dyspeptic results, the same few authors that one read in graduate school to get past comprehensive exams. If one following this practice has the temerity to attempt to publish, readers for scholarly journals, taking full advantage of their anonymity, will alternate heaping scorn on the writer’s parochialism with citing tedious lists of critics who should have been mentioned. In the classroom, a bright-eyed, industrious individual who actually reads beyond the syllabus will inevitably appear. I need not elaborate on the consequences. The situation comes down to a confrontation between the preference for inertia and the abhorrence of humiliation. Bitter experience proves that one cannot ignore Joyce criticism. What, then, for slothful scholars is the course demanding the least exertion? Often, academics find themselves struggling with the same impulse that bedevils shoppers: grab whatever catches the eye. However, wandering through the library stacks and picking up the books with the most arresting bindings has at least two obvious drawbacks. It leaves one with a chaotic, idiosyncratic impression of Joyce criticism, and it still compels one to read or, at the very least, check out the pile of books pulled off the shelves. A less demanding plan of action is required.

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A clear sense of specific need will limit the number of works that must be sampled. Like the last-minute shoppers who wait until they are in the middle of preparing their meals to rush to the store to get the ingredients that the recipe calls for, some academics follow the plan of first writing an interpretation and then reading the available criticism on the topic to see what they must include in their Works Cited pages. This approach will generally result in one of two equally unpleasant revelations. Last-minute bibliographers will find that the ideas which they thought so brilliant as they committed them to paper have been published already (occasionally multiple times), or they will be confronted with the unpleasant fact that their ideas are so banal that no one would ever dream of printing anything relating to them. Finally, readers must eschew the equivalent of purchasing only frozen pizza and prepared dinners. One finds this practice exemplified in those who try to develop a superficial knowledge of a body of Joyce criticism by using book reviews as if they were Cliff ’s Notes. This tactic stands as perhaps the greatest gamble of all, for its success, however modest, relies upon the assumption that the various reviewers consulted actually read the work or works under consideration. Given that the reviewer is probably another academic, this supposition is at best a dubious proposition, leaving one with little more than a synopsis of the reviewer’s speculations on the author’s suppositions.

The Proper Approach: W.W.M.D. Fortunately, a straightforward option for getting a sense of the available criticism without making the commitment to reading it all does exist. It grows out of a wealth of good sense to which we were exposed in our formative years. Before going off to the critical marketplace for perusal of Joycean goods, one should simply ask the following questions: what would Mother do? The first thing she would inevitably tell us is to make a shopping list. This is the equivalent of having a plan before beginning to read. While this seems a painfully obvious point, one must remember that we are academics, and grasping the obvious is not always our strong suit. Simply showing the discipline to decide what one needs to know or wishes to extract from Joyce criticism may dissuade many of us because it seems like a great deal of work, and in fact it requires more effort than many of us are accustomed to expending. Nonetheless, that is a small price to pay to avoid looking vacuous. Once we have drawn up our lists, Mother would alert us to stick to them, but she would also advise us to keep an eye out for values. Again, knowing

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one’s area of interest while remaining flexible about modifying one’s approach has the distasteful side effect of requiring some thought. However, having the option of straying outside these parameters does provide a degree of self-indulgence that shopping lists generally militate against. Mother also would tell us never to shop when hungry. This translates into a caution against bibliographic engorgement. Being desperate for sources should not lead one to pick up the first thing that comes to hand. Quite simply, don’t let your need for citations overwhelm your sense of the absurd. Even without Mother to guide us, we should by now realize the wisdom of reading the label. Abstracts, tables of contents, even subtitles can give us a clear idea of what we are going to get, although titles can often violate the truth-in-advertising code alluded to above. More to the point, these adjuncts can help us avoid that painful feeling, akin to heartburn, that one gets by realizing one is halfway through an utterly worthless piece of criticism. It is one thing to kill brain cells with alcohol and quite another to do so with turgid prose. Since few of us aspire to be ascetics, complete self-denial is both impractical and distasteful. Some gratification is essential for one’s sanity, so, when self-indulgence occurs, simply accept what you have done. When you make an impulse purchase, don’t pretend that it’s anything but that. If you simply cannot resist a title or an abstract, go ahead and pick it up, but do not then force references to it into the argument you have constructed based on more relevant works. The final bit of wisdom that Mom might bestow would be an exhortation to remember that this is one of many trips to the store. Do not try to buy everything at once, and do not be discouraged if you cannot get all you want the first time you venture out. This is a crucial insight, for it not only guards against discouragement but also curbs any dangerous inclination actually to try to read all of the material available.

Wandering through the Aisles Now that we have addressed the dos and don’ts of supermarket shopping, how do we begin to fill our carts? Begin by looking for staples. Not tiny wire fasteners, but the food that your mother told you was good for you. This means looking for solid interpretive works that provide the nourishment for building strong bodies of criticism. Unfortunately, these works are often fairly boring and generally rather bland. Nonetheless, they appear time and

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again in the footnotes of critics who specialize in writing for the New York Review of Books (and who always refer to that publication as the New York Review). Richard Kain’s Fabulous Voyager is an early, although alas not an isolated, version of this type of criticism. You may never read a work like this from beginning to end (and indeed I adamantly urge you not to do so), but its index will help you find the quotations necessary to make it seem that you have. While in among the staples, take care not to pick up something that seems essential but which will only bring gastric distress. Books in this category are akin to sour milk, losing its flavor faster than you realize. Unfortunately, they do not carry sell-by dates to alert us to the danger, but there are a few general principles that can help us avoid the discomfort of indigestible reading. Avoid anything with garish packaging; that is, books with titles promising sensational revelations. They are the academic equivalent of the teasers one sees as commercials for the Entertainment Network, and like their electronic counterparts they rarely deliver. Bruce Arnold’s The Scandal of “Ulysses” has that effect on me. Most obviously, never consume anything written by someone who has given a bad review to your own work. This seems patently obvious, but those with a false sense of noblesse oblige might insist on giving everyone a fair chance (a most ephemeral condition in a postmodern world). In response I ask how you can respect a mind who has so badly misjudged your own brilliance. (In this regard, I find myself blessed with never having to look at John Nash’s writings.) Despite all of these guidelines, inevitably, as a test of resolve, one encounters shelves of junk food near the staples, and the most deceptive of these is the Twinkie—that sponge cake shaped like a hot dog and with a filling that seems to be spun lard laced with cheap confectioners’ sugar. It lasts forever, yet provides little real nourishment. This is the sort of work on Joyce that is, more often than not, very well written. In consequence, it enjoys a broad popularity, particularly among people who find it much more accessible than Joyce’s own work, but has few solid insights into the actual canon. Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography exemplifies this category. While the world according to Stanislaus gives us a clear rendering of the jaundiced views of the dissatisfied younger sibling, the effects of imbibing this bile on efforts to understand Joyce’s writing are minimal. Since everyone partakes, you can sample something like this without real guilt. Just don’t expect genuine sustenance. Of course, while junk food has its obvious drawbacks, not all impulse pur-

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chases produce such deleterious effects. A very different response comes from an item generally found in the featured display section. It may be going through a special publisher’s clearance. It may be the beneficiary of extra advertising. Or it may simply enjoy pride of place on a bookseller’s table. For whatever reason, it catches my eye even though its approach does not interest me. It’s simply too tempting to pass up. Despite my ingrained sloth and cynicism, a book that shows a keen sense of its topic, even if the subject matter has little relevance to my own methods of reading, and an enthusiastic approach to the critical problem it takes on invariably engages my interest. When Sheldon Brivic writes about Joyce and Lacan or Joseph Valente applies queer theory to Joyce’s canon, I know I am encountering in the first instance a methodology in which I have no faith and in the second a topic that I see as far less important than a great many other issues in Joyce studies. Nonetheless, the sheer joy that each brings to the task more than makes up for my lack of interest in the subject matter. These are the sort of books to have on hand when I want to convince myself that I really do have broad critical interests. Exotic treats and guilty pleasures bear some striking similarities to the preceding group, although at times the legitimacy of works in the category comes under question. These categories identify writing that I feel I should not like but in fact do. This type of criticism generally presents insightful or provocative commentaries on issues or subjects that seem to fall outside conventional Joyce criticism. Nonetheless, a wit, an energy, and an engaging quirkiness characterize each, and they more than repay the energy expended in reading them. Michael O’Shea’s Joyce and Heraldry is devoted to a topic that seems, at first glance, worth little more than a footnote, yet, in talking about coats of arms and iconic representation, O’Shea holds my attention more easily than many writers who attempt to expound upon headier topics. Paul Van Caspel’s Bloomers on the Liffey is a very different kind of book. It delights in pointing out the mistakes that others have made in writing about Ulysses. Reading it is like watching the meanest teacher in high school make a fool of someone else in class. One knows it is a terrible thing to enjoy, and that makes it irresistible. And finally, Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon’s Understanding “Finnegans Wake” is wonderful for its determinedly idiosyncratic reading and obvious delight in sarcasm, lets us fantasize about how that seeming dolt from the previous example would sound if he were in fact bright enough and sufficiently selfconfident to ignore received wisdom and follow individual inclinations.

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The Best Buys Although much of what I have already written concentrates on avoidance and self-indulgence, there are a good many worthwhile books of criticism on Joyce. I would be remiss to conclude this study without at least identifying them. However, in keeping with the tone of this essay, I also feel the need to offer strategies for getting the most from them with the least effort. One of the most dependable areas of Joyce criticism is the category of nonperishable goods. These are works, generally of the reference variety, that remain impervious to time. They present information that is as useful now as when it first appeared, and, like a jar of peanut butter in the back of the cupboard, they provide immediate sustenance whenever they are consulted. Also like peanut butter, one would not want to consume them exclusively or even at great length, but, when sampled, they never disappoint. These books should always be close at hand, although one would probably never read any of them cover to cover. Weldon Thornton’s Allusions in “Ulysses,” Don Gifford’s “Ulysses” Annotated (even if it seems to repeat many of Thornton’s entries), A. Nicholas Fargnoli’s James Joyce: A Literary Reference, and Roland McHugh’s Annotations for “Finnegans Wake” offer just the sort of information that one will find useful today or twenty years from now. (I must confess that I do not know if peanut butter has a shelf life of that duration, but I would be surprised if it did not.) Interpretive works written in the same voice that a good teacher uses to present ideas clearly and without condescension are also worth noting. A book in this category has an approach that is so level-headed that age cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite variety. Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce combines an engagingly quirky style, a tremendous facility for sensitive close readings, and a delight in esoteric digressions. At the same time, it is never opaque, never self-congratulatory, and never mean-spirited. It is the sort of book that reminds us of a time in graduate school when we thought all criticism would be this good. A. Walton Litz’s The Art of James Joyce remains the most lucid discussion to date of the composition of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. David Hayman’s The Mechanics of Meaning is a deceptive treasure. It seems little more than a basic introduction to Ulysses. However, it is charged with an excitement for the work that is bound to reinvigorate our own jaded palates, and it has a delightful willingness to take risks often absent in contemporary studies. (Whether or not, for example, one embraces the idea of “The Arranger” as a valid narrative device, the clarity of its explanation and the directness of its challenge to received thinking are a welcome change

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from the obfuscations of most interpretive studies.) Margot Norris’s The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake” is a wonderful example of how easily one can miss a top-notch work because it unabashedly features an idea or a methodology no longer in fashion. The book’s subtitle—A Structuralist Analysis—tempts the glib and the facile (I am guilty on both counts) to reject it as terribly dated, quaint at best, horribly old-fashioned at worst. In fact, Norris’s examination of the Wake stands as a wonderful guide to careful reading and informed critical thinking. It is a model of logical analysis and artful connections. With the other works named above, its date of publication stands as the common feature that would allow a hasty reader to pass each of them by. In fact, these views have matured and become more robust as they have aged, and they provide insights into Joyce’s canon that one can find in few books being brought into print today.

The Final Hurdle Before proceeding to the checkout counter, be sure that you have not picked up more items than you can carry. Once you have learned the tricks offered here, it is easy to let hubris influence how much you wish to take on. Further, there is always the temptation to look at one more piece of criticism because it forestalls the obligation to begin the task of writing. These responses in fact undermine the very purpose of this instruction—cutting corners. The point is to read as little as you can and still get away with it. To ensure that you stay within the limits laid out here, follow this easy rule of thumb. When it looks as if you will have a greater number of footnotes than pages of your own prose, stop looking for citations. The final bit of advice with which I leave you is to remember the store’s exchange policy. In most instances, after you take the item out the door, the purchase is final. Likewise, every act of reading involves time and effort that you can never reclaim. What seems like an indispensable piece of writing now may soon become expendable. Even the most judicious shopper can end up with a shelf full of goods that have already become indigestible in the time it takes to get them home. Some books, like cans of creamed corn, will never provide you with the slightest satisfaction. Just as every food drive becomes an outlet for grocery purchases that you still cannot explain, opportunities for relieving yourself of unwanted books do come along. When they arrive, do not hesitate to donate these albatrosses to whatever charitable organization is gullible enough to accept them, and don’t forget to write off their full monetary value on your taxes.

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Works Cited Anderson, Chester G. “James Joyce’s ‘Tilly.’” PMLA 73.3 (1958): 285–98. Arnold, Bruce. The Scandal of “Ulysses.” London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991. ———. The Scandal of “Ulysses”: The Life and Afterlife of a Twentieth Century Masterpiece. Expanded and updated ed. Dublin: Liffey, 2004. Beebe, Maurice. “James Joyce: Barnacle Goose and Lapwing.” PMLA 71.3 (1956): 302–20. Brivic, Sheldon. Joyce the Creator. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. ———. The Veil of Signs : Joyce, Lacan, and Perception. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. Ulysses gramophone; Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Dunleavy, Janet Egleson, ed. Re-viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New and rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Fargnoli, A. Nicholas. James Joyce: A Literary Reference. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Ferris, Kathleen. James Joyce and the Burden of Disease. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Rev. and expand ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Goldberg, S. L. “Art and Freedom: The Aesthetic of Ulysses.” ELH 24.1 (1957): 44–64. Hayman, David. “From Finnegans Wake: A Sentence in Progress.” PMLA 73.1 (1958): 136–54. ———. “Ulysses”: The Mechanics of Meaning. Rev. and expand ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Herr, Cheryl. Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Jarrell, Mackie L. “Joyce’s Use of Swift’s Polite Conversation in the ‘Circe’ Episode of Ulysses.” PMLA 72.3 (1957): 545–54. ———. “Swiftiana in Finnegans Wake.” ELH 26.2 (1959): 271–94. Kain, Richard. Fabulous Voyager: James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947. Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. London: Chatto & Windus, 1955. ———. Rev. of Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce. Times Literary Supplement 17 Dec. 1982. Kershner, R. B., ed. Joyce and Popular Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. ———. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Leonard, Garry Martin. Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Lernout, Geert. The French Joyce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941. Litz, A. Walton. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. ———. “Early Vestiges of Joyce’s Ulysses.” PMLA 71.1 (1956): 51–60. Lodge, David. Changing Places. New York: Penguin, 1975. Magalaner, Marvin, and Richard Kain, Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation. New York: New York University Press, 1956.

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McHugh, Roland, and James Joyce. Annotations to “Finnegans Wake.” Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Morse, J. Mitchell. “Augustine’s Theodicy and Joyce’s Aesthetics.” ELH 24.1 (1957): 30–43. ———. “The Disobedient Artist: Joyce and Loyola.” PMLA 72.5 (1957): 1018–35. Noon, William, S. J. Joyce and Aquinas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Norris, Margot. The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake”: A Structuralist Analysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. O’Shea, Michael J. James Joyce and Heraldry. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986. Osteen, Mark. The Economy of “Ulysses”: Making Both Ends Meet. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Rose, Danis, and John O’Hanlon. Understanding “Finnegans Wake”: A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce’s Masterpiece. New York: Garland, 1982. Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in “Ulysses”: An Annotated List. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Valente, Joseph. Quare Joyce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Van Caspel, Paul. Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

14 Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” Margot Norris

Fritz Senn, one of the most incisive readers ever to tackle Ulysses, calls “Calypso” “probably the easiest chapter in the novel” (189). This is certainly true for veteran readers of the novel, who can bring the knowledge of the whole work to bear on figuring out nearly everything that goes on in this episode. But how would “Calypso” strike a first-time or virgin reader, as we might call such a hypothetical figure? Attempts to posit an “actual” first-time or virgin reader of Ulysses are quickly subject to challenge on a number of fronts. Can we imagine anyone reading Ulysses without first having heard about it? What would one hear about the novel that would impel one to read it? If one heard even the simplest elements of the plot (for example, “Ulysses is about a man whose wife has an affair . . .”) the first-time reading is no longer “virgin” in the sense of an absolute innocence of knowledge of what will transpire in the novel. The novice, first-time, or virgin reader to whom I refer is therefore an artificial or hypothetical construct. Yet positing such a hypothetical figure, and reading even such an accessible episode as “Calypso” through its eyes, proves to be an extremely revealing exercise. “Calypso” is titled after the goddess whose name means “the Concealer” (UA 70), and the device or construct of the virgin reader allows us to see not only that the characters in the episode are concealers but that the narration itself functions as a “Calypso” or Concealer. In the exercise of novice reading that follows, it is important to remember that the virgin reader is a heuristic device, designed to explore the workings of narrative, rather than a re-creation of a literal first-time reading experience of Ulysses. With this caveat, let us assume a hypothetical literate reader, already familiar with Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,

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who began to read Ulysses for the first time in 1922. Leaving aside the problems created by the still novel stream-of-consciousness technique in the first three episodes, such a reader would at least be familiar with Stephen Dedalus and his religious conflicts with his mother from the end of Portrait. But “Calypso” introduces Leopold Bloom, his wife, Molly, and their daughter, Milly, to readers for the very first time. The virgin reader consequently approaches them with a tabula rasa, a clean informational slate untainted by either past knowledge or foreknowledge of what is to come in the ensuing episodes. How do we get to know the Blooms in these circumstances, when confronted with a narration that largely eschews exposition in favor of focused description continually sliding into the interior monologue of Leopold Bloom? Hugh Kenner contrasts Bloom with Buck Mulligan, who “is all outside,” and Stephen Dedalus, who “by the end of ‘Proteus’ has become virtually all inside,” by noting that the Bloom of “Calypso” is a balance between the two: “we move in and out, in and out, the ‘out,’ however, closely in touch with the ‘in,’ prompting, controlling” (45). Yet Kenner’s elaboration of the episode’s narration suggests that while “Calypso” may seem easy to read, its narration is actually surprisingly complex. He finds, for example, all sorts of narrative “skips,” as he calls them, that lead him to note: “‘Calypso,’ the first Bloom episode, abounds in little skips of that sort, hiatuses, narrative silences. There is much that the Blooms do not say to each other, much also that the book does not offer to say to us. Pondering such instances, we may learn how largely Ulysses is a book of silences despite its din of specifying, and may notice how eloquent is the Blooms’ rhetoric of avoidance and also the author’s” (48). I would go much further and argue that “Calypso” is full of secrets, secretiveness, and innuendo largely invisible to a veteran reader but designed to create suspense and curiosity about the Blooms for the novice reader. The reader who knows nothing about the Blooms and has no idea how the day will proceed or what will be its outcome, will be confronted with suspicious behavior, enigmas, and possible scandals that create a worrisome first impression of the Blooms. How does the narration create, keep, and betray secrets—the secrets of the characters, secrets kept from the characters, and secrets kept from the readers? And more importantly, why would Joyce write his introduction of the Blooms in such an enigmatic and potentially misleading way? A discussion of how narrative strategies operate to create secrets and suspense is greatly abetted by contemporary narratology, and I will appeal particularly to the theories of Paul Grice for help in illuminating a number of Joycean strategies in this episode. Grice is a philosopher of language whose

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special focus is the logic of ordinary language—conversations, for example. One of Grice’s most provocative concepts, introduced in the essay “Logic and Conversation,” is a practice he calls implicature. The imaginary conversation Grice uses to illustrate implicature begins with A asking B how C is getting on with his new job in a bank, and receiving the answer, “Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet” (24). Grice writes, “At this point, A might well inquire what B was implying, what he was suggesting, or even what he meant by saying that C had not yet been to prison” (24). This example of implicature draws our attention to the ability of some utterances to say something in a way that suggests meanings beyond what is actually said in the words. The unspoken but implied meaning becomes available to the interlocutor by way of a shared context that gives a sense to the implied matter, or implicatum, as Grice calls it. But what happens if the context is not, in fact, shared and is kept from one party in the conversation? I hope to show that this happens repeatedly to the virgin reader of “Calypso,” who is confronted with implicature in the narration whose context is withheld or deferred. Grice embeds his notion of implicature in a model of conversation as rule-governed by what he calls the cooperative principle. The first category of maxims under this principle concerns “quantity” and directs that speakers should make their contribution to conversation as informative as required by the present purposes of the exchange, but no more (26). If we construe the reading experience on the model of a conversation, Kenner’s narrative skips, hiatuses, and silences could then be seen as Joyce’s violation of the quantity maxim. But Joyce supplements a dearth of information with occasional excess in “Calypso,” producing a situation that provokes the reader to try to remedy the text’s implicatures by using the excess material to draw risky and occasionally faulty inferences. In “Calypso,” Joyce uses implicature not only to create suspense but also to demonstrate that the relationship between narration and the deployment of knowledge can be used to implicate and even incriminate the reader in the suspicious behaviors, secrets, and possible scandals of the characters. Such a situation is established early in “Calypso” when the narration tells us, “He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White slip of paper. Quite safe” (U 4.70–71). What is the narration of Bloom’s thoughts implying? We are not allowed to see what is on the white slip of paper and therefore cannot know why Bloom peeps quickly inside his hat to make sure it is there. Why must the slip of paper be kept safe, and from whom? The novice reader here encounters both a mystery and a secret, and as long as it remains unsolved we risk connecting it to another, more alarming mystery that confronts us very

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soon thereafter. As Bloom pays for his kidney in the butcher shop, a curious ocular exchange takes place between the butcher and Bloom: “A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze after an instant. No: better not: another time” (U 4.186–87). Again, what are Bloom’s thoughts implying? What is better done at another time? The narrator doesn’t tell us, and a novice reader might not unreasonably connect this mystery to the white card surreptitiously hidden in the hatband and wonder if Bloom is looking for an assignation—possibly a homosexual assignation. It is important here to remember that nothing in “Calypso” tells us that Bloom is Jewish. As a result, we are missing a critical context for the scene in the butcher shop, where we might also be excused for being misled by Dlugacz’s non-kosher operation. But even if we register the implication of the advertisement for Agendath Netaim, Bloom’s inference, “Moses Montefiore. I thought he was” (U 4.156), could as easily imply anti-Semitism as identification. Nor does Bloom’s crude desire to follow the next-door girl allay possible suspicions about his sexuality, since his thoughts of her “Sodachapped hands. Crusted toenails too” (U 4.175–76) are unromantic and unerotic. It is true that when Bloom returns to his home and we learn that the woman in bed is his wife, and that they have a daughter, the suspicion that Bloom may be on the lookout for a homosexual assignation appears ridiculously flimsy and threatens to embarrass the virgin reader. Bloom’s smile at his wife’s mocking eyes—“The same young eyes. The first night after the charades” (U 4.344–45)—so clearly implies his attraction and affection that we would feel foolish about our hypothetical suspicions. And yet the disturbing implication from before seems momentarily reinforced at the end of “Calypso,” when Bloom, on his way to the outhouse, wonders where he put the hat with the secret card inside. He then thinks: Picking up the letters. Drago’s shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment. Brown brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and brushup. Wonder have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap in the paybox there got away James Stephens, they say. O’Brien. Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. (U 4.487–492) Why will Bloom be picking up the letters when letters have already been delivered to the house that morning? What was Bloom thinking when he heard the shopbell? Of whom was he thinking when he saw a recently barbered man emerging from Drago’s hairdressing salon—and why does the memory make him wonder “have I time for a bath this morning” and subsequently recall to him Dlugacz’s deep voice? The suspicion that the card and the Dlugacz inci-

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dent are somehow related is reinforced even more at the beginning of “LotusEaters,” when we finally learn that the card will be used to retrieve a letter for a “Henry Flower.” To whom does the effeminate name refer? Is Bloom carrying on a homosexual correspondence? Not until we are actually given the text of Martha Clifford’s letter is the mystery of the card resolved and shown to have been unrelated to the meaningful ocular exchange between Bloom and the butcher. When we later learn that Bloom is Jewish—information held back in “Calypso”—it becomes retrospectively clear that the meaningful glance did indeed signify desire for an “outing” between the two men, but of a racial rather than a sexual character: the mutual acknowledgment of their common Jewishness. What precisely is the source of the implicatures consequent to the mystery of the paper in the hatband and Bloom’s ocular exchange with Dlugacz? In both cases, they appear to be produced by Bloom’s thoughts: “White slip of paper. Quite safe” (U 4.70–71) and “No: better not: another time” (U 4.187). But can interior monologue—which is, after all, a conversation with the self—produce implicature at all, given that the tacit context it requires is by definition fundamentally shared in such a case? One possible exception to the communality of knowledge in interior monologue could be created by repression—when consciousness conceals the subject’s own thoughts and feelings from itself. We find such a situation in a later episode of Ulysses, “Lestrygonians,” when we are given the following interior monologue: If he . . . .? O! Eh? No . . . . . . No. No, no. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t surely? No, no. (U 8.102–7) We may well ask, what are Bloom’s thoughts implying here? And the answer made available to us by the context in which they occur—Bloom’s memory of public toilet advertisements for quack clap medicine—is that they are implying the possibility that Boylan could infect Molly with a venereal disease. In this case, Bloom’s thoughts may actually produce the implicature, since we can as readily assume that he has such difficulty verbalizing this threatening thought even to himself that its expression remains inchoate and unformed in his mind. This would hardly be the case with the two earlier examples from “Calypso,” which suggest an alternative explanation. The narrator in those cas-

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es seemed to produce the implicature with a telegraphic rendition of Bloom’s thoughts in order to create an impression of Bloom as secretive and as hiding unsavory thoughts from the narrator. This impression is reinforced by another trait exposed by the interior monologue of Bloom’s thoughts in “Calypso”— namely, his inclination to suspicion and cynicism. When Bloom thinks of Major Tweedy’s purchase of the brass bed in Gibraltar—“Bought it at the governor’s auction. Got a short knock” (U 4.62)—he seems to be implying that “the auctioneer cut the bidding short in favor of Tweedy” (UA 71). A few lines later, Bloom generalizes his suspicions when he thinks, “Daresay lots of officers are in the swim too” (U 4.68), implying a more general corruption in the military. Bloom has similar suspicions about the corruption of publicans—“Where do they get the money? . . . Doing a double shuffle with the town travellers. Square it you with the boss and we’ll split the job, see?” (U 4.126–33). Bloom’s suspicious and cynical perspective on the public world carries important implications into what we see of his relationship to his family. For Bloom is, of course, not the only figure with a secret in “Calypso”; his wife, too, is a Calypso or Concealer. In a self-reflexive gesture that comments on the ability of writing to be secretive, Joyce has the Blooms conceal pieces of paper with writing on them from each other and from the reader in this episode. “Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs Marion” (U 4.243–45). Neither Bloom nor the reader will ever see the content of this letter, yet the narrator’s observation of Bloom’s somatic response and piqued attention to the handwriting and address transform the letter into an implicatum. Bloom is obliged to ask, “Who was the letter from?” and receives a surprisingly straightforward answer that instantly dissolves its enigma. “O, Boylan, she said. He’s bringing the programme” (U 4.310). Bloom’s subsequent question—“What are you singing?” (U 4.313)—permits the novice reader to infer that Molly Bloom is a singer who will be visited by her impresario Boylan with the concert program later in the day. We need to remember here that a hypothetical virgin reader would have no idea of the progress and outcome of the novel and therefore have no way of knowing that adultery will, in fact, take place in the Bloom home that afternoon. What we learn of the letter at this point should arouse no suspicions about Molly Bloom. Instead, the evidence of Bloom’s suspicious nature on his walk to the butcher shop—introduced before he sees the mysterious letter on the hall floor on his return—primes us to suspect that the husband’s arousal by the letter may be an overreaction. This suspicion is hardly allayed when we catch Bloom surreptitiously spying

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on Molly’s reaction to the letter—“Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow” (U 4.256–57). It is not until Bloom returns from the kitchen with the breakfast tray that the narrator (rather than Bloom) turns the letter into an implicatum: “A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow” (U 4.308). This moment of narratorial implicature is produced not only by the facts—that the letter has been opened, read, and seemingly concealed—but also by the narrative language with its implications of peeping and dimpling coyness. This moment in turn retrospectively transforms the innocent urgency of Molly’s request for tea (“Hurry up with that tea, she said. I’m parched” [U 4.263]) into an implicatum. Presumably she sends Bloom out of the room and prolongs his absence by reminding him to scald the teapot in order to give herself ample time and privacy to read the letter from her impresario. Many episodes later we learn from Molly herself that Boylan’s letter wasn’t much of a love letter—“I wish somebody would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan” (U 18.734–36). But by then we also know that Bloom’s suspicions were not unfounded. Molly’s adultery with Boylan will actually turn out to be the only significant scandal in the Bloom family by the end of the novel. Yet the narration of “Calypso,” deliberately or not, allows the novice reader’s suspicions about the characters and their secrets to proliferate. The question of Boylan’s relationship to the family becomes complicated as soon as we are given the text of the letter Bloom receives from his daughter, Milly. She mentions a student who “sings Boylan’s (I was on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan’s) song about those seaside girls. Tell him silly Milly sends my best respects” (U 4.408–9). There is something disconcertingly familiar about the way the fifteen-year-old girl writes about her mother’s impresario. She refers to him as “Boylan” without the formal “Mister,” she alludes to his proscribed “Blazes” nickname, and she signs her greeting to Boylan with her father’s affectionate nickname for her, “Tell him silly Milly sends my best respects.” The first-time reader is left to wonder what the adolescent girl is implying about her relationship to her mother’s impresario, even though her father also registers several times her mention of a “young student” and has to reassure himself that “she knows how to mind herself ” (U 4.428). However, Bloom’s thoughts of her as a “wild piece of goods” (U 4.429) leaves open several sexual possibilities for Milly and consequently opens paternal anxiety about her on several fronts. Bloom’s recollection of Boylan’s song (“All dimpled cheeks and curls, / Your head it simply swirls” [U 4.437–38]) triggers a train of thought ambiguous with respect to whether its referent is the young

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student of Milly’s letter or Boylan: “Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers’ pockets, jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls, he says. Pier with lamps, summer evening, band” (U 4.439–41). Since both young Bannon and Boylan sing the song about the seaside girls, Bloom may conflate them in his mind—although the reference to the “jarvey off for the day” remains a mystery in either case. And Bloom confuses the matter further when he subsequently thinks of Milly, Boylan’s song, the torn envelope, Milly’s maturation, and Mrs. Marion, in a sequence that could be read as linking his anxieties about daughter and wife to the mysterious Boylan: “Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can’t move. Girl’s sweet light lips. Will happen too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now. Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman’s lips” (U 4.447–50). The free indirect discourse implies that Bloom may fear that Boylan—“Friend of the family” (U 4.440)—will seduce both daughter and wife. Both maxims of quantity appear to be simultaneously violated in what the “Calypso” narration does and does not tell us about Milly. Even before we see her letter, Bloom’s thoughts introduce her with a strange little verse: O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling. You are my lookingglass from night to morning. I’d rather have you without a farthing Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden. (U 4.286–90) The “ass” in the last line gives the verse a potentially vulgar turn, until we realize that it may merely refer to the domestic animal. Irish readers of Joyce’s day would have recognized the corruption of the rhyme by Samuel Lover, though Lover’s last line, “Than Brian Gallagher wid house and garden” (UA 77), is less suggestive than the ambiguous “ass.” Who composed this little poem, and was it actually presented to Milly? The reader is here obliged to speculate on the basis of some odd juxtapositions. Just before the text cites the verse, Bloom thinks, “Putting pieces of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring” (U 4.285–86). If we interpret this to mean that silly Milly liked to get play letters in a toy letterbox, then we might construe the little poem as a Valentine or other sweet note that her Papli wrote for her as part of the game. But the verse is followed immediately by “Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case. Still he was a courteous old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform” (U 4.291–93). These thoughts introduce Professor Goodwin as an earlier impresario of Bloom’s wife and imply that he might have composed the little verse. Conversely, it may have been the “lookingglass” in the rhyme

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that triggered Bloom’s memory of Professor Goodwin, who, we learn, carried a “little mirror in his silk hat” (U 4.293). Why? We are not told, which puts us at a loss to understand the anecdote about little Milly finding the small mirror in Goodwin’s hat and bringing it into the parlor: “O, look what I found in professor Goodwin’s hat! All we laughed. Sex breaking out even then” (U 4.293–94). What are Bloom’s thoughts implying when he translates Milly’s announcement about the little mirror into “Sex breaking out even then”? We are not given the context of the joke, although our sense, that even as a small girl Milly was quite pert with another of her mother’s impresarios, reinforces the troublesome implicature with respect to Boylan in her letter. If we put these enigmas and secrets signaled by Bloom’s hidden card, Molly’s hidden letter, and the ambiguities in Milly’s letter together for the first time, we could get the idea that the Bloom family is embroiled in goodness knows what sorts of sexual ambiguities and entanglements. We are prepared for the possibility of a married man on the lookout for other men, with a wife and daughter on the verge of sexual seduction of or by the same man. The novice reader is thus set up to experience a sensation we rarely associate with Ulysses—namely suspense. Narratologist Mieke Bal’s definition of suspense as the product of procedures by which “the reader or the character is made to ask questions which are only answered later” (160) clarifies its relationship to the violation of implicature when the conversational context is deferred. Of the various scandals that threaten to proliferate in “Calypso,” only one—Molly’s adultery—will actually materialize. Yet a perceptive first reader alive to the nuances of implication and innuendo could be titillated into expecting a novel with the plot, if not the style, of the quasi-pornographic Sweets of Sin—the genre of racy, sensational writing that Molly Bloom enjoys for her recreational reading. Why would Joyce begin his story of the Blooms in this way? The strategy certainly arouses our curiosity and creates suspense about the nature and outcome of the family secrets. But we are given a more serious possible motive in “Calypso” itself, where Molly has been reading an ostensibly sadomasochistic novel called Ruby: the Pride of the Ring. Bloom infers this genre from the illustrations and captions: “Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath” (U 4.346–49). But this implicatum suggests an erroneous context, as Molly herself certifies when she notes, “There’s nothing smutty in it” (U 4.355). As Mary Power discovered some years ago, the actual novel that is glossed in the episode is a reform novel aimed at the cruelties of circus life—Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl,

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by Amye Reade. Joyce must have seen the possibilities of using a titillating come-on to lure readers (like Molly Bloom) into delving inadvertently into a work with a serious intention. The novice reader, confused and excited by the possible sensational directions Ulysses may take, may be tricked into engaging with a work of mounting narrative difficulty only to discover that the novel, like Ruby, has a serious intention and that “There’s nothing smutty in it.” Is this bit of misleading merely a little joke, or does it have a larger purpose? The repeated violations of implicature—by deferring the context that would clarify the implications made by the narration and the interior monologues— oblige the reader repeatedly to speculate in order to invent possible contexts that might make the implicatum intelligible. “Calypso” consequently makes its narrations highly interactive in ways that incriminate the reader in the proliferation of further implicatures. Like the Freudian infant who is deprived of an original innocence and is posited as always already sexualized and unconsciously sexually aware, the virgin reader of “Calypso” is likewise stripped of innocence. Forced to dredge up latent suspicions of lurid sexual possibilities in order to make sense of the narrative innuendos, the novice reader is prodded to conjure up indecent future scenarios that never materialize in the text. But while this entrapment of the reader into unsavory speculation may sound like a sadistic stratagem on Joyce’s part, its purpose may actually be heuristic and didactic. If we remember the protracted censorship problems Joyce endured in wrangles with George Roberts over the publication of Dubliners, we realize that he could not have helped but anticipate far greater censure of the sexual frankness of Ulysses. Joyce’s 2 April 1932 letter to Bennett Cerf confirms that his Dubliners wrangles did indeed make publication of Ulysses seem a difficult prospect to him. We may reasonably speculate that even as Joyce was writing his novel, he had to posit a potential readership that included a hypocritical bourgeois establishment eager to indict his sexual realism for obscenity while perfectly knowledgeable about his writing’s difference from the stuff of tabloids and pornography. Such expectations were confirmed when even before Ulysses was published in France in 1922, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were “prosecuted at the instance of some society” in the United States for printing the eleventh episode in their Little Review (Ulysses 1961 xiv). When Ulysses was finally exonerated on the charge of obscenity by Judge John M. Woolsey in 1933, his decision reminded everyone that legal obscenity was defined as a response of the reader to text. “The meaning of the word ‘obscene’ as legally defined by the Courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts” (xi). Joyce’s incrimination of the reader in the

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practices of implicature in Ulysses served as a demonstration that virgin readers might indeed bring their own impure thoughts to a novel that would, in fact, frustrate their expectations.

Notes 1. Since the reader is obliged to speculate whenever a context is withheld by the narration, one is prompted to try to puzzle out enigmas by connecting various dots, as it were. Not long after Bloom leaves the butcher shop, he sees a man whose name he fails to recollect. “There’s whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn’t see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back is like that Norwegian captain’s. Wonder if I’ll meet him today” (U 4.213–16). Whom does he see? Bloom clearly doesn’t know the Norwegian captain by name, yet he has noticed his back sufficiently to use it as a point of comparison. What was the context of this observation? Why might he expect to meet the Norwegian captain again on this day? It is not unreasonable for the novice reader to try to link these questions to the question in Dlugacz’s foxeyes. Other possibilities might later occur to us, for example, that the Norwegian captain’s back might be conspicuous because he is hunchbacked. This different context does not present itself in “Calypso,” however. 2. Bloom’s implicature is repeated in “Lestrygonians” when the narration tells us “Mr Bloom’s eye followed its line and saw again the dyeworks’ van drawn up before Drago’s. Where I saw his brillantined hair just when I was.” (8.1083–85). When Bloom was what? We are still not told, though by now the reader has enough information about Bloom’s suspicions to infer that the brillantined hair belonged to Boylan. 3. We might be tempted to extol this passage in Ulysses as an example of what Dorrit Cohn calls “psycho-narration,” the narrative representation of subverbal states. This technique can not only “explain a character’s conscious thoughts better than the character himself, it can also effectively articulate a psychic life that remains unverbalized, penumbral, or obscure” (46). However, psycho-narration in Cohn’s sense is still produced by a narrative voice. Bloom’s inarticulate interior monologue, in contrast, is more a psycho-dramatization than a psychonarration. 4. This characterization seems oddly contradicted by Bloom’s simultaneous observation that Milly’s letter shows her “[c]oming out of her shell” (U 4.422). 5. Joyce produces a narrative account of just such parodic jumbles of scandals in the Honophrius section of Finnegans Wake: “Honophrius is a concupiscent exservicemajor who makes dishonest propositions to all. He is considered to have committed, invoking droit d’oreiller, simple infidelities with Felicia, a virgin, and to be practising for unnatural coits with Eugenius and Jeremias, two or three philadelphians. Honophrius, Felicia, Eugenius and Jeremias are consanguineous to the lowest degree” (FW 572.21–26). However, it is important to note the total absence of implicature in this unequivocal narrative assertion. In the Wake, the scandals are produced by narration; in “Calypso” they are hinted at, or suggested, by an impaired implicature and therefore produced by the reader. 6. This letter to Bennett Cerf was reprinted in the 1934 Modern Library edition and many subsequent Random House editions. My allusions to this letter, and to Judge Woolsey’s deci-

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sion, refer to Ulysses, New Edition, Corrected and Reset (New York: The Modern Library, 1961). The Cerf letter is also reprinted in Letters III 241.

Works Cited Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kenner, Hugh. “Ulysses.” Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Power, Mary. “The Discovery of Ruby.” James Joyce Quarterly 18.2 (1981): 115–21. Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984.

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Contributors

Morris Beja is Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University. His books include Epiphany in the Modern Novel, Film and Literature, and James Joyce: A Literary Life. With Anne Fogarty he was co-coordinator of the academic program for Bloomsday 100, the International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin, June 2004. Austin Briggs retired in 2008 as Tompkins Professor of English from Hamilton College, where he taught for fifty years. The author of The Novels of Harold Frederic, he has published many articles on Joyce in a variety of venues. Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin (UCD) and president of the International James Joyce Foundation. She is director of the UCD James Joyce Research Center and editor of the Irish University Review, a premier Irish studies journal. She is coeditor with Timothy Martin of Joyce on the Threshold and with Fran O’Rourke of James Joyce: Multidisciplinary Approaches. With Luca Crispi she is editor of the newly founded Dublin James Joyce Journal, a co-publication with the National Library of Ireland. She has co-directed two international Joyce symposia and has been Academic Director of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School since 1997. She is the recipient of the 2008 Charles Fanning Prize in Irish studies. Gerald Gillespie is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and a former president of the International Comparative Literature Association. His more recent publications include Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context; By Way of Comparison: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Comparative Literature; Echoland: Readings from Humanism to Postmodernism; and the edited volume Romantic Prose Fiction.

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Contributors

Michael Patrick Gillespie is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University. His most recent book is The Myth of an Irish Cinema. John Gordon is professor of English at Connecticut College. He is author of James Joyce’s Metamorphoses; “Finnegans Wake”: A Plot Summary; Physiology and the Literary Imagination; Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back; Notes on Issy; and Almosting It; and of many articles on modern literature. Richard P. Lynch is chair of the English Department at Misericordia University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish literature. He has published essays on John Fowles, Evelyn Waugh, and Nathanael West. Timothy Martin is author of Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence; coeditor, with Vincent Cheng, of Joyce in Context; and coeditor, with Anne Fogarty, of Joyce on the Threshold. He was guest editor of a special double issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on Joyce and opera. He teaches at Rutgers University, Camden. Margot Norris is Chancellor’s Professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of six books, including four on Joyce: The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake”; Joyce’s Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism; Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners”; and an Ireland into Film series monograph on the 1967 Joseph Strick film of Ulysses. She also edited A Companion to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” for Bedford Books and the Norton Critical Edition of Dubliners. Katherine O’Callaghan has taught courses on Joyce, on Anglo-Irish literature, and on the role of music in Irish literature. She currently holds a postdoctoral research position in Paris 3–Sorbonne Nouvelle and is in the process of completing a monograph titled The Space Between: Music and Language in the Writings of James Joyce. She is also coediting two collections: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (with Oona Frawley) and Musical Modernism: Essays on Language and Music in Modernist Literature (with Katie Brown). Anthony Paraskeva is a lecturer in film and literature at the University of Dundee. He is currently completing a monograph titled The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema.

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Tracey Teets Schwarze is associate professor of English and vice provost at Christopher Newport University. She is the author of Joyce and the Victorians and several articles on Joyce and Victorian culture. David Spurr is professor of English at the University of Geneva. His books include Conflicts in Consciousness: T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism; The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration; Joyce and the Scene of Modernity; and an edited volume, The Space of English. Robert Weninger is professor of German at King’s College London and editor of Comparative Critical Studies. He has published six books and edited or coedited six further volumes, including Arno Schmidts Joyce-Rezeption 1957–1970; The Mookse and the Gripes: Ein Kommentar zu James Joyces “Finnegans Wake”; Literarische Konventionen: Theoretische Modelle/Historische Anwendung; Framing a Novelist: Arno Schmidt Criticism, 1970–1994; Arno Schmidt Bibliographie; and Streitbare Literaten: Kontroversen und Eklats in der deutschen Literatur von Adorno bis Walser. Greg Winston is associate professor of English at Husson University. His research interests are in twentieth-century Irish and British literatures, especially their intersections with postcolonial history and geography. His writing has appeared in Colby Quarterly, Études Irlandaises, and James Joyce Quarterly, among other publications. Yu-chen Lin is professor of foreign languages and literature at National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. She is the author of Justice, History, and Language in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and the Chinese translator of James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1882–1915, by Peter Costello. She has also published articles on Sean O’Faolain, Joyce Cary, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Irish studies in Taiwan, and the Chinese Ulysses.

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Index

Aamusta iltaan (Rauanheimo), 193 Abbate, Carolyn, 148n10 Abbey Theatre, 123; Anglo-Irish Revivalism in, 125–26 Acting, histrionic style of, 121–22, 125, 126 Adams, Robert M., 43 Adorno, Theodor, 16, 28–29, 138, 144 After Many Years (dir. D. W. Griffith), 122 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 180, 193; parodied, 65–66 Alastalon salissa (Kilpi), 193 Albright, Daniel, 138, 140 Alcohol consumption in Ireland, 168–69 Allusions in “Ulysses” (Thornton), 224 Also sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 180 Anderson, Chester, 214 Anderson, Margaret, 237 Anglo-Irish Revivalism, 125–26, 127 Annotations for “Finnegans Wake” (McHugh), 224 Antheil, George, 159n6 Anti-Semitism: myths of, 43–46; in Ulysses, 42, 109, 150, 231 Archer, William, 123 À rebours (Huysmans), 181 Aristotle: “On the Art of Poetry,” 191–92; Works, 56n4 Aristotle’s Masterpiece, 45, 56n4 “Arkielämää” (Jotuni), 207n1 Army, British: presence in Dublin, 97–100, 101–3; prostitution, relationship with, 111; recruiting posters, 104–5; sexually transmitted diseases, 105–8 Arnold, Bruce, The Scandal of “Ulysses,” 222 Arnold, Matthew, The Study of Celtic Literature, 49 Arrah-na-Pogue (Boucicault), 151, 152, 157 Arrivée d’un train, L’ (dir. Lumière brothers), 118–19

Art of James Joyce, The (Litz), 224 Arts, Sports, and Tourism, Department of, 3 Assassinat du Duc de Guise, L’ (prod. Film D’Art), 126 Assmann, Dietrich, 193, 207n1 Attridge, Derek, 117, 130 Austen, Jane, Emma, 15 Avenging Conscience, The (dir. D. W. Griffith), 128 Bal, Mieke, 236 Balfe, M. W., The Rose of Castille, 146 Balzac, Honoré de, Le cousin Pons, 15–16 Barenboim, Daniel, Parallels and Paradoxes, 142, 148 Barnacle, Mrs., 112n2 Barnacle, Nora, 3–5, 112n2, 148n8 Barnacle, Tom, 112n2 Barracks, military, in Dublin, 99, 102 Barthes, Roland, 131 Bazargan, Susan, 93n12 Beach, Sylvia, 1 Beckett, Samuel, 1–2, 28, 148n2 Beebe, Maurice, 214 Beer-Hofmann, Richard, Der Tod Georgs, 207n1 Beethoven, Ludwig van: Fidelio, 151; Fifth Symphony, 141 Before Sunrise (Hauptmann), 123 Beja, Morris, 176, 182, 241 Benjamin, Walter, 130; Passagen-Werk, 25–26 Benstock, Bernard, 214 Bentley, Eric, 152, 158–59 Bergman, Hjalmar, Markurells i Wadköping, 193, 207n1 Between the Acts (Woolf), 9, 195–96 Blake, William, 25; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 69–70, 72–73; A Vision of the Last Judgment, 69

246

Index

Blanchot, Maurice, 22 Bleak House (Dickens), 16, 21 Blood: libel, 44–45; sacrifice, 46–49, 51–55 Bloom, Leopold: hand gestures in “Circe,” 127–28, 129; and implicature in “Calypso,” 230–6; and melodrama, 150–51; menstruation of, 41–58; and passive memory, 65–66; receptivity to sounds, 32, 35–36; sympathy for Katharine O’Shea, 79, 84–86; and throwaways, 17–19, 25; voyeurism of, 120, 122 Bloom, Milly, 90, 196–97, 229; paternal anxiety about, 234–36 Bloom, Molly: economic circumstances of, 169–70; monologue, 86–92, 93n12; and secrecy in “Calypso,” 233–37 Bloom, Rudy, 90, 118, 119, 131, 152 Bloomers on the Liffey (Van Caspel), 223 Bloomsday: 100 Symposium, 2–3; centennial, 3, 10; origins, 1–2; significance of date, 4–6 “Bloom’s Sexual Tropes: Stigmata of the ‘Degenerate’ Jew” (Byrnes), 43, 56n6, 57n20 “Boarding House, The” (Joyce), 102 Bock, Martin, 112n8 Bonaparte, Maria, 203 Boone, Joseph, “New Approach to Bloom as ‘Womanly Man,’” 42 Borach, George, 135 Boucicault, Dion, 121; Arrah-na-Pogue, 151, 152, 157; The Colleen Bawn, 151, 152; The Corsican Brothers, 151, 155–56, 157; Octaroon, 157; Robert Emmet, 151 Bowen, Zack, 163–64; “The Bronzegold Sirensong,” 140 Boylan, Hugh “Blazes,” 89, 90, 91, 163–64, 169, 175, 233–36 Boyle, Robert, “Miracle in Black Ink,” 55 Braudy, Leo, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 57n16 Brecht, Bertolt, 132, 205–6 Brenner, Arvid, En dag som andra, 193 Briggs, Austin, 7, 41–61, 119, 241 Brilliant Career, A (Joyce), 123 Britain/British: militarism, 97–112. See also Army, British; British Empire British Empire, 97, 98–99, 104, 164–65, 176; and “Celtic revenge,” 174; and colonial economy, 166; women encouraged to settle in colonies, 172 Brivic, Sheldon, 97, 223 Broch, Hermann, 205, 206; Der Tod des Vergil, 200–201

Bronze by Gold (Knowles), 147, 148n6 “Bronzegold Sirensong, The” (Bowen), 140 Brooke, Rupert, 48 Brooks, Peter, 73, 74; melodrama, 153, 157–58; prehistoric truth, 72 Brothels: Bella Cohen’s, 110–11, 172; frequented by soldiers, 107; Joyce visits, 106; in Monto area, 100–101; proximity to barracks, 109, 112n3 Budgen, Frank, 93n8 Bunting, Edward, 144 Burch, Noël, 118 Burgess, Anthony, 139 Burns, Christy, 32 Bush administration, 97 Busoni, Ferruccio, “Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music,” 143 Byrnes, Robert, “Bloom’s Sexual Tropes: Stigmata of the ‘Degenerate’ Jew,” 43, 56n6, 57n20 Caffrey, Cissy, 97–98, 101, 108, 110, 164 “Calypso”: cat sounds in, 33–34, 35; detecting musical “third” in, 33; parallels “Telemachus,” 34–35; secrecy and implicature in, 228–38; “virgin” reading of, 10, 228–38 Campbell, Joseph, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 54 Cantimpré, Thomas de, 44 Case of Sigmund Freud, The (Gilman), 43 Casey, Edward, 65–66 Céline, Louis Ferdinand, 28 Celtic masculinity, 49 Censorship, 153; and Dubliners, 237 Cerf, Bennett, 237, 238n6 Changing Places (Lodge), 213 Chapman, Mr., 196–97, 198, 207n3 Char, René, La parole en archipel, 22 Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life (O’Shea), 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87–91, 93n7 Cheng, Vincent, 176 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 151 “Ciceri,” 39n8 Cinema: close-ups, 128–29; Joyce influenced by, 8, 117–32 Cinematograph Volta, 121, 131, 132n3 “Circe,” 8, 9; cinematic influences in, 117–32; hand gestures, 127–28, 129–31; Irish Revivalist theater satirized in, 125–27; physical routines in, 117 Circumcision, 44, 45–46, 56n10 Classical Temper, The (Goldberg), 32 Close-ups, cinematic, 128–29

Index Cohen, Bella, 101, 102–3, 130, 164, 172, 174; altercation at brothel, 110–11, 150 Cohn, Dorrit, 238n3 Colleen Bawn, The (Boucicault), 151, 152 Colonialism. See British Empire Condren, Mary, 57n24 Connor, Steven, 128 Conquest, A, 131 “Conrad der Leutnant” (Spitteler), 207n1 Consumer culture, 176 Consumption, conspicuous, 165 Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864–69, 106–7, 109, 113n9, 113n10 Cook, Nicholas, 148n10 Cork Free Press, 93n7 Coronation of Edward VII (prod. Méliès), 126 Corsican Brothers, The (Boucicault), 151, 155–56, 157 Cosmopolis (DeLillo), 9, 198–99 Countess Cathleen, The (Yeats), 126 Cousin Pons, Le (Balzac), 15–16 Couvade, 54 Covent Garden Theatre, 153 Creator principle, 186 Crispi, Luca, 3, 241 Critical Writings of James Joyce, The (Joyce), 77 Criticism, guide to works of Joycean, 213–25 Cullen, Mary, 113n10 Culture, consumer, 176 Curse, The (Delaney), 54 Cusack, Michael, 7, 50 “Cyclops,” 9; and trash, 21, 24 David, Thomas, 199 David Copperfield (Dickens), 70 Davison, Neil R., 180 Davitt, Michael, 77 Deane, Seamus, 49, 67, 74n2, 74n3 Death of Virgil, The (Broch), 200–201 Debris: in modern art, 28–29; in the modern novel, 16; in Ulysses, 15–25, 29 Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake,” The (Norris), 225 Dedalus, Dilly, 73 Dedalus, May, 118, 156–57, 158, 164, 169 Dedalus, Stephen: contemplates art forms, 136–37; narrative mode of, 67–74; Parable of the Plums, 70–72; and passive memory, 66; sees mother’s ghost, 118, 150, 156–57, 158, 164; and soldiers’ photograph, 103–4, 105; walks on shells, 31

247

De Docta Ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa), 184 Degeneration (Nordau), 43 Delaney, Janice, The Curse, 54 DeLillo, Don, 205; Cosmopolis, 9, 198–99 De Mille, Cecil B., The Whispering Chorus, 128–29 Der Archipelagus (Hölderlin), 22 Derrida, Jacques, 217 De Valera, Eamon, 50 Devlin, Kimberly, 91, 93n12, 169, 176 Dickens, Charles: Bleak House, 16, 21; A Christmas Carol, 151; David Copperfield, 70; Great Expectations, 70; Oliver Twist, 151, 157; Our Mutual Friend, 16 Disempowerment, Irish, 163–76 Dlugacz, 231–32 Döblin, Alfred, 202, 205 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 151, 156, 157, 158 Dos Passos, John, 205; Manhattan Transfer, 204 Drury Lane Theatre, 153 Dublin: interdependence of sexual and military economies, 110; lack of employment opportunities, 99, 174; military barracks, 99; rise of prostitution, 99–100. See also Brothels Dublin Corporation, 107–8 Dubliners (Joyce), 21, 23, 65, 102, 237 Dublin’s Joyce (Kenner), 224 Duffy, Enda, 112n4 Dujardin, Édouard, 1, 190 Dunleavy, Janet, Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism, 217 “Easter 1916” (Yeats), 55 Easter Week, 100 Eco, Umberto, 147; The Role of the Reader, 66–67; Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 71 Ecrits (Lacan), 27, 29 Edward VII, King, 100–101 Elijah, 23–25, 159n1 Eliot, T. S., 190 Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce, 5, 123, 217, 218, 222; “Why Molly Bloom Menstruates,” 41, 55 Elokuu (Sillanpäa), 193 Eltham, 89, 92n3 Emma (Austen), 15 Emmet, Robert, 53; execution, 47–48, 50; portrait, 56n13; speech from the dock, 146, 151. See also Robert Emmet (Boucicault) Employment, women’s. See Women, and employment En dag i oktober (Hoel), 193

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Index

En dag som andra (Brenner), 193 English nationalism, 164 “Englishwoman, The” (Mackay), 172 Enloe, Cynthia, 96 Enoch Arden (dir. D. W. Griffith), 122 Epopée napoléonienne (prod. Pathé), 126 Epstein, Edward, 214 Epstein, Jean, 128 Erin Theatre, 126, 132n3 Eriugena, John Scottus, 66–67, 68, 70, 71 Etymological Dictionary, Skeat’s, 55 “Etym” theory, 203–4 “Eumaeus,” identity discourse in, 82–86 Euripides, The Trojan Women, 159n4 Europe: escalating militarism, 97; militarism and prostitution, 104 Exiles (Joyce), 8, 123–25 Fabulous Voyager (Kain), 222 Fahy, Catherine, 3 Fairbanks, Douglas, 131 Fairhall, James, 67, 72, 74n1, 74n3, 98 Fargnoli, A. Nicholas, James Joyce: A Literary Reference, 224 Fashion in Ulysses, 163–76 Faust (Goethe), 187, 188 Ferris, Kathleen, James Joyce and the Burden of Disease, 217 Feshbach, Sidney, 5 Fictional Truth (Riffaterre), 67 Fidelio (Beethoven), 151 Fifth Symphony (Beethoven), 141 Film D’Art, L’assassinat du Duc de Guise, 126 Films. See Cinema Finnegans Wake, 152; appearance of Schopenhauer, 178; and “etymistical” language, 203–4; litter cf. letter, 17, 27–29; manuscript pages discovered, 20; prostitution in, 101; River Liffey in, 23; textual economy, 26–27; thresholds of perceptual mechanics, 37–39 Fisher, Judith, “The ‘Sensation Scene’ in Dickens and Boucicault,” 157 Fitzpatrick, David, 98 Fliess, Wilhelm, 45, 56n8 Flood, Jeanne A., 57n14 Flying Dutchman, The (Wagner), 151 Fogarty, Anne, 1–11, 176, 241, 242 Foreign Affairs, Department of, 3 For the Land They Loved (Herr), 154

Foster, R. F., 93n5 Foucault, Michel, “What is an Author?” 206–7 Francesca de Rimini, 121 Frank, Joseph, 207n2 Freeman’s Journal, 81 Freemasonry, 58n26 Fregoli, Leopoldo, 119 French Joyce, The (Lernout), 217 Freud, Sigmund, 185; indebtedness to Schopenhauer, 180; and menstrual cycles, 45, 56n8; Wolf Man study, 68, 73; work on symptomatic actions, 124, 130 From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy), 57n16 Fuga per canonem and “Sirens,” 141 Gabler, Hans Walter, 4, 132n4 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), 50 Gender: and class identity, 171, 173; and Joyce studies, 214–15; politics, 164–65; roles, 174 Gestures, hand. See Hand gestures Gibson, Andrew, Joyce’s Revenge, 164, 166–67, 172 Gifford, Don, “Ulysses” Annotated, 70, 191, 224 Gilbert, Stuart, 1, 80, 93n8, 111 Gilbert, W. S., Ruddigore, 151, 157 Gillespie, Gerald, 9, 178–89, 241; Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, 179, 185–86 Gillespie, Michael Patrick, 10, 79, 213–27, 242 Gilman, Sander, 58n27; The Case of Sigmund Freud, 43; The Jew’s Body, 43 Gladstone, William Ewart, 81, 85, 88, 93n6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 187, 188 Gogarty, Oliver St. Jean, 113n8; Tumbling in the Hay, 54, 106; “Ugly England” articles, 105–6 Goldberg, S. L., 214; The Classical Temper, 32 Goodwin, Professor, 173, 235–36 Gordon, John, 6–7, 31–40, 242 Gorky, Maxim, 118 Gorman, Herbert, 99 Great Expectations (Dickens), 70 Greenham Common protest, 52 Grice, Paul, 10, 229–30 Griffith, Arthur, 105, 109 Griffith, D. W., 126; After Many Years, 122; The Avenging Conscience, 128; Enoch Arden, 122 Grimm brothers, 178 Grocery shopping guide to Joyce studies, 216–25 Groden, Michael, 4 Gunning, Tom, 132n1 Gutzkow, Karl, 192

Index Hand gestures: in cinematic close-ups, 128–29; in “Circe,” 127–28, 129–31; in Exiles, 124–25 Hardwicke Fever Hospital Report, 102 Haslam, Anna Maria, 113n10 Hauptmann, Gerhart: Before Sunrise, 123; Michael Kramer, 123 Hayden, Deborah, 113n8 Hayman, David, 117, 214; The Mechanics of Meaning, 224–5 Haymarket Theatre, 153 Healey, T. M., 81 Heap, Jane, 237 Heartbreak House (Shaw), 52 Heath, Stephen, 131 Heilman, Robert, Tragedy and Melodrama, 9, 153–55, 159n4 Hellman, Lillian, Watch on the Rhine, 159n4 Helmholtz, Herman, 32 Henke, Suzette, 112n7 Henry, O., “The Last Leaf,” 38 Heroism, 46–49 Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell), 54 Herr, Cheryl, 73, 93n12, 215; For the Land They Loved, 154; Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture, 152; “‘Penelope’ as Period Piece,” 42, 45 History in Ulysses, 65–74 Histrionic style of acting, 121–22, 125, 126 Hoberman, John, 54 Hoel, Sigurd, En dag i oktober, 193 Holcroft, Thomas, Tale of Mystery, 153 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 201; Der Archipelagus, 22 Homer, The Odyssey, 19, 22, 66, 136, 150, 191 Homosexuality, 231–32 Houlihan, Cathleen ni, 108–9 Huebsch, Benno, 201 Hutchins, Patricia, 117 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, À rebours, 181 Ibsen, Henrik, 123 Identity: and discourse, 82–83, 86–92; in Ulysses, 77–92 “If Men Could Menstruate” (Steinem), 53 Ilmberger, Frances, 41, 56n2, 56n3 Imperialism, British. See British Empire Implicature in “Calypso,” 228–38 In First Century Ireland (Pearse), 49 Interior monologues. See Monologues, interior International James Joyce Foundation, 2, 214 In the Shadow of the Glen (Synge), 126

249

“Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the Fuga per Canonem, The” (Lees), 141 Inventing Ireland (Kiberd), 48–49, 50, 66 Irish: alcohol consumption, 168–69; disempowerment, 163–76; Literary Renaissance, 109; republicanism, 97, 99; Revivalist theater satirized in “Circe,” 125–27; storytelling tradition, 136 Irish Parliamentary Party, 77, 81, 91, 92n3 “Ithaca,” measurements in, 43 “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” (Joyce), 23, 78 Jahnn, Hans Henny, Perrudja, 205 James Joyce (Ellmann), 5, 123, 217, 218, 222 James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Levin), 217 James Joyce: A Literary Reference (Fargnoli), 224 James Joyce and the Burden of Disease (Ferris), 217 James Joyce Miscellany, A (Magalaner), 214 James Joyce Quarterly, 214 James Joyce Review, 214 James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Reizbaum), 56n5 Jarrell, Mackie, 214 Jesus Christ, 19, 24, 47 Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 159n4 Jews, myths about, 42–46 Jew’s Body, The (Gilman), 43 Jim the Penman (Young), 152 j.n.d. (just noticeable difference), 32, 34, 36, 37, 39n2, 39n8 John Chrysostomos, Saint, 181 Jones, Ellen Carol, 176 Jordan, Francis X., 35 Jotuni, Maria, “Arkielämää,” 207n1 Joyce, James: 2004 exhibition, 3; Bloomsday 1929, 2; connection between militarism and prostitution, 96–112; defense of Katharine O’Shea, 92; explores role of press, 83–84; guide to studies of, 213–25; homage paid by one-day novels, 190–207; influence of early cinema on, 8, 117–32; and male blood sacrifice, 41–58; parodies Irish Revivalist theater, 125–27; plays, 123–25; sensations in writings, 31–39; sympathy for Parnell, 77–79; and syphilis, 106, 112n8, 217. See also individual works Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater (Watt), 152, 154 Joyce and Heraldry (O’Shea), 223 Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Herr), 152 Joyce’s Book of Memory (Rickard), 65 Joyce’s Dislocutions (Senn), 181

250

Index

Joyce’s Revenge (Gibson), 164, 166-67, 172 “Joyce’s Ulysses: Past Eve and Adam” (Kiberd), 54 Just noticeable difference (j.n.d.). See j.n.d. Kafka, Franz, 188 Kahler, Erich von, 207n2 Kain, Richard, Fabulous Voyager, 222 Kandinsky, Wassily, 28 Kant, Immanuel, 182 Katz, David, “Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern England,” 44 Kearney, Richard, “Myth and Motherland,” 74n3 Kenner, Hugh, 75n5, 93n8, 214, 229, 230; Dublin’s Joyce, 224; measurements in “Ithaca,” 43; range of cat sounds, 34; review of Ellman biography, 218 Kern, Stephen, 65, 66, 67 Kernan, Tom, 21, 166, 167 Kershner, R. B., 112n5, 152, 215 Kiberd, Declan, 148n8; Inventing Ireland, 48–49, 50, 66; “Joyce’s Ulysses: Past Eve and Adam,” 54 Kiheon, Nam, 176 Kilpi, Volter, Alastalon salissa, 193 Knowles, Sebastian, ix–x, 148n7; Bronze by Gold, 147, 148n6 Koeppen, Wolfgang, Tauben im Gras, 204–5 Kumar, Udaya, 140 Kundera, Milan, 69 Lacan, Jacques, 223; Ecrits, 27, 29 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, 206 Laokoon, 182 Larbaud, Valery, 1 “Last Leaf, The” (Henry), 38 “Last Rose of Summer, The” (Moore), 146 Leckie, Barbara, 93n8 Lees, Heath, “The Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the Fuga per Canonem,” 141 Lehtonen, Joel, Putkinotko, 193, 207n1 Leonard, Garry, 215 Lerm-Hayes, Mia, 3 Lernout, Geert, The French Joyce, 217 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 136–37, 182–83, 192 “Leutnant Gustl” (Schnitzler), 207n1 Levin, Harry, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, 217 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 74n3 Liffey, River, 21–22, 23 Linati, Carlo, 92n4 Linder, Max, 131

Little Review, 237 Litz, A. Walton, 214; The Art of James Joyce, 224 Lodge, David, Changing Places, 213 Lodging houses, 102 Logan, William, 100 Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill), 159n4 “Lotus-Eaters” and throwaways, 17–18 Lover, Samuel, 235 Lukacher, Ned, Primal Scenes, 68, 74n3 Lumière brothers, 126; L’arrivée d’un train, 118–19 Lynch, Richard P., 7, 65–76, 242 Lyons, J. B., 112n8 MacDowell, Gerty, 119–20; and fashion, 166–67, 168, 169, 170–71, 175 Mackay, Jane, “The Englishwoman,” 172 Maddox, Brenda, 5 Magalaner, Marvin, A James Joyce Miscellany, 214 Mahaffey, Vicki, 55 Male menstruation. See Menstruation Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), 204 Manliness, 46–49 Mann, Thomas, 180, 181 “Man on the Dump, The” (Stevens), 26 Manuscript pages discovered, 20 Markurells i Wadköping (Bergman), 193, 207n1 Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta, 159n4 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake), 69–70, 72–73 Martin, Paul, 159n6 Martin, Timothy, 9, 150–60, 241, 242 Masculinity, 46–49 McCarthy, Patrick, 111 McEwan, Ian, Saturday, 193 McGreevey, Thomas, 1 McHugh, Roland, Annotations for “Finnegans Wake,” 224 Mechanics of Meaning, The (Hayman), 224–5 Méliès, Georges, Coronation of Edward VII, 126 Melodrama in Ulysses, 150–59 Memoirs: Katharine O’Shea’s, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87–91, 93n7; Molly Bloom’s, 86–92, 93n12 Memory in Ulysses, 65–74 Menstruation: Leopold Bloom’s, 41–58; myth of Jewish male, 42, 43–46, 56n6, 58n27 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 44 Michael Kramer (Hauptmann), 123 Militarism and connection with prostitution, 8, 96–112

Index “Miracle in Black Ink” (Boyle), 55 “Modern Fiction” (Woolf), 194, 195 Modernism, 163–76. See also Novels, modern Monnier, Adrienne, 1 Monologues: in Death of Virgil, 200–201; and implicature, 232–33, 237; interior, 190–91, 197; Molly Bloom’s, 86–92, 93n12; and one-day novels, 201–2 Montague, Lily H., 173 Monto. See Brothels Moore, Thomas, “The Last Rose of Summer,” 146 Moran, D. P., 49 Moran, Seán, 57n22 Morel, Auguste, 1 Morse, J. Mitchell, 214 Moses, 24, 71 Movies. See Cinema Mozart, W. A., Don Giovanni, 151, 156, 157, 158 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 9, 193–96 Muir, Willa, 206 Mulligan, Buck, 35, 46, 167, 181; contrasted with Leopold Bloom, 229 Mullin, Katherine, 108, 119 Münsterberg, Hugo, 129 Music in Ulysses, 9, 135–48, 163–76 Muskeljudentum, 50 Mutoscope, 119–20, 132n4 “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” 9, 163–76 “Myth and Motherland” (Kearney), 74n3 Myths about Jews, 42–46 Narratology in “Calypso,” 228–38 Nash, John, 222 National College of Ireland, 2 Nationalism: English, 164; Irish, 97, 99 National Library of Ireland, 3, 20, 41 Naturalism in Ulysses, 151, 158–59, 159n7 “Nausicaa” and the Mutoscope, 119–20 “New Approach to Bloom as ‘Womanly Man’” (Boone), 42 Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 181 New York Review of Books, 222 Nicholas of Cusa, 188; De Docta Ignorantia, 184; Visio Dei, 184 Nichols, Stephen G., 67, 70 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 67, 69, 178, 179, 182, 185; Also sprach Zarathustra, 180 Nighttown: Bloomsday visit, 102–3; link between militarism and prostitution, 104, 112; spatial du-

251

ality of, 100; visited by Oliver St. John Gogarty, 105–6 Nolan, Emer, 51 Noon, Father William, 214 Nordau, Max, 50; Degeneration, 43 Norris, Margot, 10, 80, 112n4, 228–39, 242; The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake,” 225 Novels: modern, 16, 193, 194, 195; one-day, 190–207 O’Brien, Darcy, 57n14 O’Brien, William, 93n7 Obscenity, 237 O’Callaghan, Katherine, 8, 135–49, 242 O’Casey, Sean, The Plough and the Stars, 48, 52 O’Connor, Frank, 31–32 Octaroon (Boucicault), 157 Odyssey, The (Homer), 19, 22, 66, 136, 150; prototype for Aristotle, 191 O’Hanlon, John, 4; Understanding “Finnegans Wake,” 223 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 151, 157 O’Molloy, J. J., 43 On Baile’s Strand (Yeats), 126 One-day novels, 190–207 O’Neill, Eugene, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 159n4 “On the Art of Poetry” (Aristotle), 191–92 On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason (Schopenhauer), 181, 183 O’Rourke, Fran, 241 O’Shea, Carmen, 94n17 O’Shea, Clare, 94n16 O’Shea, Gerald, 94n15, 94n17 O’Shea, Katharine “Kitty”, 7; affair with Parnell, 77–92, 92n3; Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Political Life, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87–91, 93n7; compared with Molly Bloom, 87–94; Gladstone–Parnell intermediary, 93n6 O’Shea, Katie, 94n16 O’Shea, Michael, Joyce and Heraldry, 223 O’Shea, Norah, 93n5, 94n17 O’Shea, Sophie Claude, 91, 94n16 O’Shea, Captain William, 77, 92n3; adultery of, 80; court appearance of, 82, 85; knowledge of wife’s affair, 89–90 Osteen, Mark, 98, 112, 215 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 16 Overture and opening of “Sirens,” 140, 144

252

Index

Parable of the Plums, 70–72, 74, 75n5 Parallels and Paradoxes (Said and Barenboim), 142 Paraskeva, Anthony, 8, 117–34, 242 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 4–5, 7; affair with Katharine O’Shea, 77–92, 92n3; fall of, 74n3; myth of, 92n2; negotiations with Gladstone, 93n6 Parnell, Mrs. See O’Shea, Katharine “Kitty” Parole en archipel, La (Char), 22 Passagen-Werk (Benjamin), 25–26 Pathé, Epopée napoléonienne, 126 Pearce, Richard, 104 Pearse, Patrick/Pádraic, 7; In First Century Ireland, 49; and notion of blood sacrifice, 47–49, 53; sexuality of, 57n18 Pearson, Roberta, 121 “‘Penelope’ as Period Piece” (Herr), 42, 45 Performance reading of “Sirens,” 144–48 Perrudja (Jahnn), 205 Photography: in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 103–4, 105, 112n5; in Ulysses, 112n5 Pigeons on the Grass (Koeppen), 204–5 Pixerécourt, René Charles Guilbert de, 153 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge), 126 Plays by Joyce, 123–25 Plough and the Stars, The (O’Casey), 48, 52 Poe, Edgar Allan, 203 Political Violence in Ireland (Townshend), 57n15 Porter, William (pseud. O. Henry), 38 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce): debris in, 23; narrative structure, 67–69; prostitution in, 96–97, 103; soldiers’ photograph in, 103–4, 105, 112n5; sounds in, 36 Postcolonialism, 66, 164, 214 Posters, recruiting, 104–5 Potter, Paul, Trilby, 151 Power, Mary, 236 Primal Scenes (Lukacher), 68, 74n3 Prostitution: and British army, 111–12; connection with militarism, 96–112; in Finnegans Wake, 101; opposed by United Irishman, 107–8; in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 96–97; in Ulysses, 8, 9, 96–112, 164, 173, 174–75 “Proteus,” 9; and bifurcation of art forms, 136; sounds in, 35, 137 Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context (Gillespie, G.), 179, 185–86 Proust, Marcel, 28, 31; À la recherche du temps perdu, 180, 193; parodied, 65–66 Punch, 81

Putkinotko (Lehtonen), 193, 207n1 Pygmalion (Rousseau), 152–53 Queen’s Royal Theatre, 152 Rauanheimo, Reino, Aamusta iltaan, 193 Reade, Amye, Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl, 236–37 Recruiting posters, 104–5 Redgrove, Peter, 54 Red-light districts. See Brothels Redon, Odilon, 181 “Red Rose Tree, The” (Yeats), 126 Reiniger, Lotte, 119 Reizbaum, Marilyn, 80; James Joyce’s Judaic Other, 56n5; “When the Saints Come Marching In: Re-Deeming ‘Cyclops,’” 42 ReJoyce 2004, 2–3 Republicanism, Irish, 97, 99 Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism (Dunleavy), 217 Revivalism, Anglo-Irish, 125–26, 127 Rickard, John, Joyce’s Book of Memory, 65 Riders to the Sea (Synge), 159n4 Riffaterre, Michael, Fictional Truth, 67 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 201 Robert Emmet (Boucicault), 151 Roberts, George, 237 Role of the Reader, The (Eco), 66–67 Rose, Danis, 4; Understanding “Finnegans Wake,” 223 Rose of Castille, The (Balfe), 146 Rotunda, 132n3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Pygmalion, 152–53 Royal Hibernian Art Gallery, 3 Rubbish. See Debris Rubbish Theory (Thompson), 20 Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl (Reade), 236–37 Ruby: The Pride of the Ring, 236 Ruddigore, 151, 157 Sacrifice in Ulysses, 19–20 Said, Edward, Parallels and Paradoxes, 142 Saturday (McEwan), 193 Savino, Jennifer Ann, 43 Scandal of “Ulysses,” The (Arnold, B.), 222 Schmidt, Arno, 9; Zettels Traum, 202–4, 205 Schnitzler, Arthur, 190; “Leutnant Gustl,” 207n1

Index Schopenhauer, Arthur, 178–88; On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason, 181, 183; The World as Will and Representation, 180, 182, 185 Schwarze, Tracey Teets, 7, 77–95, 243 Scott, Bonnie Kime, 80, 99–100 Search for Evidence, A, 120 Secrecy in “Calypso,” 228–38 Seidman, Robert J., “Ulysses” Annotated, 70, 191, 224 Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Acts, 101 Senn, Fritz, 92n4, 93n11; “bloom”-“blood” connection, 55; on “Calypso,” 228; Joyce’s Dislocutions, 181; launches James Joyce Foundation, 214; metastisis, 181–2; motion before identification, 32; physical routines in “Circe,” 117 “‘Sensation Scene’ in Dickens and Boucicault, The” (Fisher), 157 Sensations in Joyce’s writings, 31–39 Serres, Michel, 128 Sex and Character (Weininger), 45, 49 Sexually transmitted diseases, 106, 107. See also Syphilis Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, 44 Shaun the Post, 27, 46, 152, 178–79 Shaw, George Bernard, Heartbreak House, 52 Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 92n1 Shem the Penman, 27–28, 46, 152, 178–79 Shuttle, Penelope, 54 “Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern England” (Katz), 44 Sicilian Vespers, 39n8 Sillanpäa, Franz Emil, Elokuu, 193 Simmel, Georg, 165, 176 Sinico, Captain, 80 Sinico, Emily, 80 “Sirens,” 8; and fuga per canonem, 141; music-language associations in, 135–48; opening section, 140; performance reading of, 144–48; sound in, 32–33 Sisson, Elaine, 49 Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Eco), 71 Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, 55 Skeffington, Francis Sheehy, 57n25 “Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music” (Busoni), 143 Soliloquy, Molly Bloom’s, 86–92, 93n12 Sontag, Susan, 144–45 Soupault, Philippe, 2 Spinoza, Baruch, 178, 179

253

Spitteler, Carl, “Conrad der Leutnant,” 207n1 Spoo, Robert, 80, 98 Spurr, David, 6, 15–30, 243 Stage directions: in “Circe,” 118, 122–23, 125–27; in Exiles, 123–24 Staley, Thomas, 214 Steinberg, Erwin, 42 Steinem, Gloria, “If Men Could Menstruate,” 53 Steiner, George, 153 Stephen Hero (Joyce), 43, 49–50, 51–52, 102, 109 Stevens, Wallace, “The Man on the Dump,” 26 Stevenson, Frank, 176 Storytelling tradition, Irish, 136 Story the Biograph Told, The, 120 Study of Celtic Literature, The (Arnold, M.), 49 Sullivan, Arthur, Ruddigore, 151, 157 Superman concept, 178–88 Suspense in Ulysses, 236 Sweeney Todd, 156–57, 158 Sweet-Shop Owner, The (Swift), 9, 196–98 Sweets of Sin, The, 236 Swift, Graham, 205; The Sweet-Shop Owner, 9, 196–98 Synge, J. M.: In the Shadow of the Glen, 126; The Playboy of the Western World, 126; Riders to the Sea, 159n4 Syphilis: epidemic, 105; and Joyce, 106, 112n8, 217; theme in Ulysses, 106 Tale of Mystery (Holcroft), 153 Tauben im Gras (Koeppen), 204–5 “Telemachus” as parallel of “Calypso,” 34–35 Thane, Pat, “The Englishwoman,” 172 Theater: Joyce plays, 123–25; melodrama in Ulysses, 150–59. See also Acting, histrionic style of “The Boarding House” (Joyce), 102 Thompson, Michael, Rubbish Theory, 20 Thom’s Directory, 101 Thornton, Weldon, Allusions in “Ulysses,” 224 “Three Songs to One Burden” (Yeats), 53 Throwaways in Ulysses, 18–21, 23, 24–25 Times, The, 81 Tod des Vergil, Der (Broch), 200–201 Tod Georgs, Der (Beer-Hofmann), 207n1 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 195 Townshend, Charles, Political Violence in Ireland, 57n15 Tragedy and Melodrama (Heilman), 9, 153–55, 159n4

254

Index

Trash. See Debris Trewey, Felicien, 119 Trilby (Potter), 151 Tristan and Isolde (Wagner), 151 Trojan Women, The (Euripides), 159n4 Tumbling in the Hay (Gogarty), 54, 106 Tweedy, Major, 104, 111, 233 Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (Schopenhauer), 181 Ulysses (Joyce): anti-Semitism in, 42, 109, 150, 231; Bloomsday, 1–6; cinematic influences, 117–32; debris theme in, 15–25, 29; fashion in, 163–76; history and memory in, 65–74; identity in, 77–92; manuscript pages discovered, 20; melodrama in, 150–59; menstruation themes in, 41–58; militarism in, 8, 96–112; music in, 9, 135–48, 163–76; Naturalism in, 151, 158–59, 159n7; obscenity charges, 237; photography in, 112n5; position of sun in, 39n5; Prefatory Notebook, 41; processes of sensation in, 31–39; prostitution in, 8, 9, 96–112, 164, 173, 174–75; referenced by one-day novels, 190–207; sacrifice in, 19–20; significance of hand gestures in, 127–28, 129–31; suspense in, 236; syphilis in, 106; textual economy of, 26; throwaways in, 18–21, 23, 24–25 “Ulysses” Annotated (Gifford and Seidman), 70, 191, 224 Understanding “Finnegans Wake” (Rose and O’Hanlon), 223 United Ireland: myth of Parnell, 92n2; offices destroyed, 86 United Irishman, 109; opposition to prostitution, 107–8; “Ugly England” articles, 105 United Kingdom. See Britain/British Valente, Joseph, 223 Valéry, Paul, 1 Van Caspel, Paul, Bloomers on the Liffey, 223 Vanity Fair, 81 Veblen, Thorstein, 165 Virility, 46–49 Visio Dei (Nicholas of Cusa), 184 Vision of the Last Judgment, A (Blake), 69 Vitagraph, 121 Volta, Cinematograph, 121, 131, 132n3 voyeurism, 120, 122 Wagner, Richard, 136, 180, 185; The Flying Dutchman, 151; Tristan and Isolde, 151

Waisbren, Burton, 112n8 Wales, Katie, 117 Walkley, R. Barry, 54 Walsh, Louis J., 57n21 Walzl, Florence, 112n8 “Wandering Rocks,” 73, 147, 163, 195; and debris, 21–22 “War on Terror,” 97 Waste. See Debris Watch on the Rhine (Hellman), 159n4 Watt, Stephen, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater, 152, 154 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 141 Weininger, Otto, 54, 56n9, 56n11; Sex and Character, 45, 49 Welt, Die (Berlin), 199 Weninger, Robert, 9, 190–210, 243 “What is an Author?” (Foucault), 206–7 Whelan, Kevin, 47 “When the Saints Come Marching In: Re-Deeming ‘Cyclops’” (Reizbaum), 42 Whispering Chorus, The (dir. De Mille), 128–29 Whittaker, Stephen, 35 “Why Molly Bloom Menstruates” (Ellmann), 41, 55 Williams, Keith, 119 Williams, Raymond, 68 Wills, Clair, 109 Winston, Greg, 8, 96–114, 243 Women: economic contribution, 169–70; and employment, 99, 172, 174; encouraged to settle in colonies, 172 Woolf, Virginia, 205; Between the Acts, 9, 195–96; “Modern Fiction,” 194, 195; Mrs. Dalloway, 9, 193–96; To the Lighthouse, 195 Woolsey, Judge John M., 237, 238n6 World as Will and Representation, The (Schopenhauer), 180, 182, 185 Wrens of the Curragh, 101 Yeats, W. B.: The Countess Cathleen, 126; “Easter 1916,” 55; On Baile’s Strand, 126; “The Red Rose Tree,” 126; rejects Joyce’s work, 123, 125; “Three Songs to One Burden,” 53. See also Anglo-Irish Revivalism Young, Charles, Jim the Penman, 152 Yu-chen Lin, 9, 163–77, 243 Zanotti, Serenella, 206 Zettels Traum (Schmidt), 9, 202–4 Zipes, Jack, 68

The Florida James Joyce Series Edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles The Autobiographical Novel of Co-Consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf, and Joyce, by Galya Diment (1994) Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music, by Zack Bowen (1995) Joyce’s Iritis and the Irritated Text: The Dis-lexic Ulysses, by Roy Gottfried (1995) Joyce, Milton, and the Theory of Influence, by Patrick Colm Hogan (1995) Reauthorizing Joyce, by Vicki Mahaffey (paperback edition, 1995) Shaw and Joyce: “The Last Word in Stolentelling,” by Martha Fodaski Black (1995) Bely, Joyce, and Döblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel, by Peter I. Barta (1996) Jocoserious Joyce: The Fate of Folly in Ulysses, by Robert H. Bell (paperback edition, 1996) Joyce and Popular Culture, edited by R. B. Kershner (1996) Joyce and the Jews: Culture and Texts, by Ira B. Nadel (paperback edition, 1996) Narrative Design in Finnegans Wake: The Wake Lock Picked, by Harry Burrell (1996) Gender in Joyce, edited by Jolanta W. Wawrzycka and Marlena G. Corcoran (1997) Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce, by R. J. Schork (1997) Reading Joyce Politically, by Trevor L. Williams (1997) Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce, by Garry Leonard (1998) Greek and Hellenic Culture in Joyce, by R. J. Schork (1998) Joyce, Joyceans, and the Rhetoric of Citation, by Eloise Knowlton (1998) Joyce’s Music and Noise: Theme and Variation in His Writings, by Jack W. Weaver (1998) Reading Derrida Reading Joyce, by Alan Roughley (1999) Joyce through the Ages: A Nonlinear View, edited by Michael Patrick Gillespie (1999) Chaos Theory and James Joyce’s Everyman, by Peter Francis Mackey (1999) Joyce’s Comic Portrait, by Roy Gottfried (2000) Joyce and Hagiography: Saints Above!, by R. J. Schork (2000) Voices and Values in Joyce’s Ulysses, by Weldon Thornton (2000) The Dublin Helix: The Life of Language in Joyce’s Ulysses, by Sebastian D. G. Knowles (2001) Joyce Beyond Marx: History and Desire in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, by Patrick McGee (2001) Joyce’s Metamorphosis, by Stanley Sultan (2001) Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises, and Countersignatures, by Tony Thwaites (2001) Joyce and the Victorians, by Tracey Teets Schwarze (2002) Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic: Epic Mimesis and the Political History of the Nation State, by Andras Ungar (2002) James Joyce’s “Fraudstuff,” by Kimberly J. Devlin (2002) Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce, by Jennifer Margaret Fraser (2002) Joyce and the Scene of Modernity, by David Spurr (2002) Joyce and the Early Freudians: A Synchronic Dialogue of Texts, by Jean Kimball (2003) Twenty-first Joyce, edited by Ellen Carol Jones and Morris Beja (2004) Joyce on the Threshold, edited by Anne Fogarty and Timothy Martin (2005) Wake Rites: The Ancient Irish Rituals of Finnegans Wake, by George Cinclair Gibson (2005) Ulysses in Critical Perspective, edited by Michael Patrick Gillespie and A. Nicholas Fargnoli (2006)

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