Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction From Joyce to Enright 0815653573, 9780815653578

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. Introduction: The Radical Irish Renaissance and Badiou
Part One | Philosophy
2. Joyce, Stephen’s Damnation, and Badiou’s Saint Paul
3. Badiou and the Multiple Subject of Joyce’s Ulysses
4. Beckett’s Lost Love
5. Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman as Infernal Deity
6. John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus: Lost in the Stars
Part Two | War
7. War 1: Victims
8. War 2: Heroes
Part Three | Family
9. Family: The Runaway Son
10. Anne Enright’s The Gathering: The Pursuit of Damnation
11. Conclusion: The Uses of Damnation
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

R evolu tiona ry Da m nation

Irish Studies James MacKillop, Series Editor

Select titles in Irish Studies A Chastened Communion: Modern Irish Poetry and Catholicism Andrew J. Auge Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue Vicki Mahaffey, ed. Irish Women Dramatists: 1908–2001 Eileen Kearney and Charlotte Headrick, eds. Israelites in Erin: Exodus, Revolution, and the Irish Revival Abby Bender Joyce/Shakespeare Laura Pelaschiar, ed. Memory Ireland, Vol. 4: James Joyce and Cultural Memory Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan, eds. Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace Stephen John Dilks Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker: A Study of the Prose Eugene O’Brien

Revolutionary Damnation B a d i o u a n d I r i sh F i c t i o n from Joyce to Enr ight

SH EL DON BR I V IC

Syracuse University Press

Copyright © 2017 by Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5290 All Rights Reserved First Edition 2017 17  18  19  20  21  22

6  5  4  3  2  1

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu. ISBN: 978-0-8156-3453-9 (hardcover)  978-0-8156-3435-5 (paperback) 978-0-8156-5357-8 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brivic, Sheldon, 1943– author. Title: Revolutionary damnation : Badiou and Irish fiction from Joyce to Enright / Sheldon Brivic. Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2017. | Series: Irish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017001836 (print) | LCCN 2017003325 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815634539 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815634355 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815653578 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—Irish authors—History and criticism. | English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)—Ireland. | Badiou, Alain—Criticism and interpretation. | Badiou, Alain—Influence. | Punishment in literature. | Hell in literature. Classification: LCC PR8803 .B75 2017 (print) | LCC PR8803 (ebook) | DDC 823/.91099417—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001836 Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations 1. Introduction: The Radical Irish Renaissance and Badiou

xiii 1

Pa r t O n e . Philosophy

2. Joyce, Stephen’s Damnation, and Badiou’s Saint Paul

29

3. Badiou and the Multiple Subject of Joyce’s Ulysses

54

4. Beckett’s Lost Love

81

5. Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman as Infernal Deity

114

6. John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus: Lost in the Stars

144

Pa r t T wo. War

7. War 1: Victims

169

8. War 2: Heroes

199

Pa r t T h r ee . Family

9. Family: The Runaway Son

223

10. Anne Enright’s The Gathering: The Pursuit of Damnation

252

11. Conclusion: The Uses of Damnation

276

Works Cited

295

Index

313

Preface Modernism focuses on subjectivity as a means to free people by bringing out and affirming human impulses that are suppressed by the orders of traditional authority. This led to the expansion of literature and thought in the twentieth century affiliated with the notion that each person had the right to invent his or her own reality rather than following an established one. Ireland, as a country that suffered from a brutal colonization and devoted itself to a conservative religious hegemony, bred rebellion against restrictive sovereignty, and this spirit of insurrection created a literature that was extraordinarily advanced in its techniques and embodied a philosophy that was phenomenally sophisticated. In fiction, this artistic and intellectual forward thrust centers on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and it goes on to inspire the other nine novelists I examine. My purpose is to delineate the forward progression of these writers, and to this end the philosophy of Alain Badiou is especially well suited because of the mathematical precision with which he distinguishes what is progressive from what is conservative. He does this by centering his thought on the event, by which he means something that is not thinkable before it emerges. In Philosophy and the Event, a late work that is a good introduction to his ideas, Badiou says that the history of art “is the history of the progressive incorporation within the domain of form of things that were, up until then, considered as unformed, deformed, or foreign to the world of form. . . . An artistic event is always the accession to form, or the formal promotion of a domain that had been considered vii

viii | P r e f a c e

extraneous to art” (2013, 68). This statement indicates that within Badiou’s field of concepts, the manifestation of a new artistic form is not only artistically exciting, but a philosophical and political advancement. This connection is at the core of my book, and the innovation of form abrogates the establishment of metaphysical structure. The rigid framework of the Church and state in Ireland sharpened awareness of the need to radically reshape the construction of knowledge. Badiou’s idealistic drive toward the future necessarily goes against the comforts of the existing order. It is inimical to the practicality of adjusting to the status quo. This oppositional spirit is fundamental to Modernism and is shared by a number of radical thinkers I discuss, such as Saint Paul, William Blake, Marx, Freud, Jacques Lacan, JeanFrançois Lyotard, and the leading aspects of all of the Irish novelists I analyze. The visionary attitudes of these thinkers are not at home in the existing world, but they thrive in the worlds of literature and philosophy, which they energize magnificently. Few would argue that the literature that succeeds Modernism is equal to it as literature. If Eugene O’Neill is seen as a diaspora Irish writer, then it may be argued that the greatest dramatist, poet (Yeats), and prose writers (Joyce and Beckett) in the English language in the twentieth century were produced by a country with a lower population than that of Connecticut. I argue that this happened because Ireland was a nation whose intellectuals were in revolt and that how it worked can be clarified by Badiou’s theories.

Acknowledgments I have been a Joycean for fifty years, my MA thesis on Exiles having been accepted by James Joyce Quarterly in 1966. For decades I taught Joyce in courses on British literature, but I always felt it was vital to see him as an Irish writer. A dozen years ago I tried a course in Irish literature, and happened to have an extraordinary group of students, such as Phil Mahoney. After this I alternated Irish and English classes, and while it may be coincidence, and there were exceptional English courses, the Irish ones were usually more exciting, after decades of teaching the British canon. It was refreshing to deal with writers who were new to me, generating “events” in Badiou’s term. I also taught courses in American literature, in which I myself only took one course, and wrote a book on the modern American novel, Tears of Rage. I agree with what I once heard Edward Said say at a conference: that the British canon should not be devalued because other points of view are considered. Yet the idea that the English Department is founded on an Anglophone tradition derived from England is somewhat arbitrary, especially in relation to the twentieth century. I never studied in Ireland, but I went to five Joyce symposia in Dublin and studied with Irish men of letters. I took a course with Vivian Mercier, Thomas Flanagan was on my dissertation committee, and Thomas Kinsella was a colleague of mine for years at Temple University and entertained me in Dublin. The person at Temple who helped me most with this book was Elizabeth Mannion, who provided a wealth of information on Irish studies. If it weren’t for Beth, I might not have included The Butcher Boy. My Temple colleague Dan O’Hara helped introduce me to the ix

x | A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

great Badiou. Another Philadelphia friend, Jean-Michel Rabaté, actually brought Badiou to our city so I could see him. Rabaté read my chapter on Beckett, and so did Chris Ackerley, who said that he couldn’t quite agree with it, but thought it should be published. People who have been on Badiou panels that I chaired at Joyce conferences include Tony Thwaites, Patrick McGee, Mia McIver, Edward Howell, Tudor Balinisteanu, Colleen Lamos, Erin Hollis, Teckyoung Kwon, and Cameron MacKenzie. I had an extensive e-mail exchange about Badiou with Thwaites. I also derived encouragement from Margot Norris, Sebastian Knowles, and Anne Fogarty, though the first two were not inclined toward Badiou’s theories. I had conversations about Ireland and its politics with Diarmuid and Charoline Curraoin. I talked about Badiou with the members of Dick Beckman’s Finnegans Wake reading group: Dick, Roy Carlson, and Rick Bojar. David Bloom, who discusses books with me weekly, has been reading Badiou for years, and can be teased into sounding like a fiery radical. My editors at Syracuse, Jennika Baines and Deborah Manion, have been very helpful and supportive, providing good insights. This book could not have been written without my wife of fiftytwo years, Barbara, since I wouldn’t be here. I am grateful to James Joyce Quarterly for permission to quote from my article “Joyce, Lyotard, and Art as Damnation,” in JJQ 41, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 701–17. Thanks to New Hibernia Review for permission to quote from my “The Third Policeman as Lacanian Deity: O’Brien’s Critique of Language and Subjectivity,” in vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer 2012). Thanks to Bloomsbury Academic for permission to quote extensively from Being and Event by Alain Badiou, translated by Oliver Feltham, © Continuum, 2005. Used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Permission to use the cover image, William Blake’s Capaneus the Blasphemer, has been granted by National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne. Excerpts from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett, English translation copyright 1955 by the Estate of Patrick Bowles and the Estate of

Acknowledgments | xi

Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any thirdparty use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Excerpts from The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien, copyright 1967 by Evelyn O’Nolan. Used by permission of Dalkey Archive Press. Excerpts from The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen, copyright © 1929, copyright renewed 1952 by Elizabeth Bowen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Also reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group, Ltd, London, on behalf of The Estate of Elizabeth Bowen. Copyright © Elizabeth Bowen, 1929. Excerpts from Reading in the Dark: A Novel by Seamus Deane, copyright © 1996 by Seamus Deane. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane, published by Jonathan Cape, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Excerpts from A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle, copyright © 1999 by Roddy Doyle. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and by permission of Roddy Doyle. Excerpts from The Gathering, by Anne Enright, copyright © 2007 by Anne Enright. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Also reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

Abbreviations References to the following texts are abbreviated and cited parenthetically. In the case of Ulysses, episode and line numbers, separated by a period, are cited. BB BE BL CW D DC De E G HI LS Mo Mu P RD SH SL St TM TN TP U W

The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe Being and Event, Alain Badiou The Blackwater Lightship, Colm Tóibín Critical Writings of Joyce Dubliners, James Joyce Doctor Copernicus, John Banville The Demonic: Literature and Experience, Ewan Fernie Exiles, Joyce The Gathering, Anne Enright House of Splendid Isolation, Edna O’Brien The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen Molloy, Samuel Beckett Murphy, Beckett A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Viking Critical Ed., Joyce Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane Stephen Hero, Joyce Selected Letters, Joyce A Star Called Henry, Roddy Doyle The Testament of Mary, Colm Tóibín Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Beckett The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien Ulysses, Joyce Waiting for Godot, Beckett xiii

R evolu tiona ry Da m nation

1 Introduction The Radical Irish Renaissance and Badiou

The Radical Irish Renaissance Irish literature in the twentieth century was moved by a revolution that intensified its insight and innovation, propelling it into a radical philosophical advancement that put it in the vanguard of modern intellectual striving, as exemplified by the international resonance of Joyce and Beckett. New ideas of freedom generated by these writers inspired a series of Irish novelists to write searching works that interrogated the political, psychological, and philosophical organization of society and pointed toward new conceptions for Ireland and the world. This revolution in thought began with a renaissance that shifted the country from a colony to a nation, and transformed it from a mindset dominated by medieval notions to a modern one. I will examine a series of brilliant Irish novelists from Joyce to Anne Enright, or from 1915 to 2015, to trace the unfolding of this intellectual breakthrough. Declan Kiberd explains this transition in comprehensive cultural terms in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, focusing on such independent innovations as “the self-invented man or woman” (1995, 6). But Kiberd’s outlook is more humanist and less theoretical than mine, and our interpretations rarely overlap. Vicki Mahaffey indicates why the liberating drive of Ireland led to such patterns as “fortuitous and transitory connections” that work “against a stable object or attitude that resists play” in States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment (1998, 5). Her alignment of postcolonialism with radical philosophical ideas (mainly Gilles Deleuze’s) 1

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has much in common with my thinking. But Mahaffey ends with Joyce, the figure with whom I begin, and does not examine either of the novels of his that I discuss. Joyce said that the Ireland he grew up in was a medieval world (Power, 1974, 92), and the medievalism that was rife in Irish culture late in the nineteenth century sprang from programmatic decisions by Church leaders, as I will indicate.1 I hold that Joyce’s militant Jesuit education prepared him to rebel into stronger innovations than moderation might have generated. I will delineate extreme features of the idea of a renaissance to explain why Irish fiction has had such far-reaching effects on European and American thinking. The main European Renaissance brought out systems of belief that were alternatives to Catholicism, such as Protestantism, occultism, and classical mythology—all features of the Irish renaissance, with the classics complemented by Celtic myths. In the Irish, Southern, and Harlem renaissances, feudal societies were confronted with modern ideas.2 C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler say the Renaissance passes “from a ritual and ceremonial view of life with absolute assumptions about meaning and reality, toward a psychological and historical view” (1986, 19), a shift from the sacred to the profane. The Christian Shakespearean Ewan Fernie argues in The Demonic: Literature and Experience (2013) that modern culture begins in the Renaissance with an emphasis on what is damnable as the source of individualism, and modern experience remains based on demonic opposition (De, 3).

1. A striking image of the medieval character of the world Joyce grew up in is the picture of Clongowes Wood College in Chester G. Anderson’s James Joyce and His World. Joyce’s first alma mater looks like a castle of the Middle Ages (1967, 14–15). In 1904, the Irish nationalist Michael Davitt, who is named on the first page of Portrait, published The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland. As Kimberly J. Devlin points out, this book “blames equally the British Empire and the Catholic Church . . .” (Devlin and Smedley, 2015, 231). 2. The leaders of the Harlem Renaissance generally came from the feudal world of the South or were reacting against it.

Introduction | 3

A renaissance may be the strongest stage of cultural production because it juxtaposes the intensity of absolute belief with the intellectual vitality of freedom.3 Earlier writers had limited ability to choose perspectives, while later ones can choose more freely, but their choices have less weight. The dreadfulness of the choice to displace tradition may charge the writer with a conviction that drives her onward. The most powerful choice takes one outside of what is acceptable, and the stronger one’s attachment to tradition, the more this step resembles sin that leads to damnation. When Stephen Dedalus begins to pursue vice in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, an action of self-expression that leads toward his becoming an artist, he feels that his soul “lusted after its own destruction” (P, 104), but this awareness seems to spur him onward rather than stopping him: knowing how harshly it is forbidden may make freedom more attractive. Saint Augustine, one of Joyce’s main sources,4 analyzes his youthful attraction to sin: “I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for what I had fallen but my fall itself” (City of God, 14.13). This passage is cited by Fernie (De, 14), who argues that evil, in its rejection of what is accepted, “involves a potential for creativity” that “may be a central component of the Good” in modern culture (De, 10). In line with this tendency, Stephen consistently maintains that the only way to develop himself is through sin (P, 103, 203).5 Such a turn toward resistance extracts the imaginative aspect of religion from its restrictive one so as to reformulate its creative ideals. One must engage outright damnation to clarify the limits of grace

3. I heard a lecture by Barber at Temple University in the early 1970s in which he said that the Renaissance combines the seriousness of the medieval with the freedom of the modern. 4. Augustine’s Confessions, a soul-searching autobiography of the fifth century that emphasizes inner conflict and transformation, is a major model for James Aloysius Augustine Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. 5. Fernie’s ideas are applied to Ulysses in Luke Thurston’s “Demonic Joyce” (2014).

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in the sharpest way, so damnation in its sensuosity has the power to comprehend new fields of perception that are barred by proper language. Likewise, one must separate the creative aspect of sin from its evil. Alain Badiou, in his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, claims that evil is based on claiming to know a total truth that feels justified in attacking what it excludes: “Every absolutization of the power of truth organizes an evil” (2001, 85). Here the essence of malice is a positive sense that one’s action is warranted. Hell, in contrast, is the ultimate negative choice, the exclusion from hope, order, and support; yet the fact that hell is excluded by the proper world defines it as a source of new possibilities. The strictures of orthodoxy make hell attractive in its alignment with freedom, so for those enclosed in a medieval or authoritarian world, a focus on hell may approach renaissance consciousness. Dante is drawn toward hell, but condemns it, thus developing Gothic horror by describing torture as punishment for sin. His denial of the Renaissance in advance is exemplified by his condemnation, in canto 10 of the Inferno, of the heretic Farinata degli Uberti, an Epicurean, one who seeks happiness in the world rather than in the afterlife. Joyce admired the novel Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater ([1885] 1970).6 Stern as Dante is in excoriating the damned, he cannot help being attracted to a few of them, including Capaneus, with whom Dante faintly prefigures Blake’s statement that Milton “was a true Poet, and [therefore] of the Devils party without knowing it” (Blake, 1988, 35). Capaneus was a warrior who exclaimed that Jove could not stop him. For this he is in the Seventh circle with the blasphemers, so that flames rain down on him incessantly. Capaneus “seems to scorn the fire / . . . so that the rain seems not to torture him”; he cries that if Jove were to use up all of his flames, he would “have no joy in his revenge” (14.46– 60) because Capaneus would never flinch. Dante refers to Capaneus, who is a giant, as a “grande,” and Robert and Jean Hollander translate

6. Badiou takes Epicurus as one of his philosophical heroes in Philosophy and the Event (2013, 125).

Introduction | 5

this as “hero” (Dante, 2000, 238–39, line 46), though the usage is mostly ironic. Dante often gives vital personalities to the damned, whereas the dogma of Joyce’s time insisted they were quite inert. The article on “Hell” in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 says under “Characteristics of the Pains of Hell” that the damned “have no joy whatever,” but it is hard to imagine consciousness subsisting in such a state. Joyce’s enormous involvement with Dante, which is treated in two ample books (Reynolds, 1981; Boldrini, 2001), afforded him a conception of hell at variance with views that were held to be unchangeable in his time. Capaneus, who is denounced for his pride, is a concrete image of people who were bad enough to be defiant when they were tortured or burned. Giordano Bruno, who provided one of the main philosophical foundations for Joyce’s works, seems to have been such a person. J. Lewis McIntyre, whose book on Bruno Joyce reviewed in 1903 (Joyce, 2000, 93–94), reports that when Bruno, after having been interrogated by the Inquisition for seven years, was told that he would be burned at the stake in 1600, he replied, “Greater, perhaps is your fear in pronouncing my sentence than mine in hearing it” (McIntyre, 1903, 94). One of Bruno’s chief offenses was to support Copernicus’s claim that the earth revolved around the sun, but he also attacked the Church. Near the end of Portrait Stephen speaks with his Italian teacher Ghezzi: “He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was terribly burned” (249). We will see that Bruno’s ideas match not only Joyce’s, but those of Badiou. Geert Lernout, in Help My Unbelief: James Joyce and Religion (2010), shows that Bruno was widely regarded as a martyr by the freethought movement struggling against the Church in the nineteenth century. Inspired by the American and French revolutions, secular politicians succeeded in expanding an area of freedom for themselves in much of Europe, but not in Ireland. Lernout points out that after the death of Parnell in 1891, secular Irish politicians, who had formerly disagreed with the Church, were afraid to say anything that did not follow Church directives: “the Irish bishops had

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acquired a de facto political monopoly that was unique in Europe and that would last for almost a century” (46). John Banville, in his editorial “A Century of Looking the Other Way,” says, “Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state ruled—the word is not too strong—by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions” (Banville, 2009). Terence Brown says in Ireland: A Social and Cultural History that the Free State set up a Committee on Evil Literature in 1926 (1985, 54) as part of a campaign to extirpate infidel writings. The public libraries of Galway, for example, put the works of George Bernard Shaw under lock and key, and elsewhere foreign newspapers were burned (58). In this context, Joyce’s belief in art and his attack on the Church were powerful political stances. Lernout describes his letter to his beloved Nora of August 29, 1904—in which he says that he hates the Church “fervently” and will devote his work to making “war upon it” (SL, 25–26)—as “the closest Joyce ever got to explaining his ideological and political commitment in writing” (2010, 103). That is, it indicates the political actuality within which Joyce’s devotion to socialism and anarchy—documented by Dominic Manganiello (1980) and explicated by Tudor Balinisteanu (2012)—bases its field of operation. Joyce’s opposition to strict nationalism also fits this cultural context. Andrew Gibson shows in The Strong Spirit that Joyce favored a radical wing of Irish nationalism that was inclined toward internationalism, socialism, and skepticism (2013, 18). But the mainstream of nationalism, which had more power, was more conservative. Brown explains that the Irish Ireland movement sought to cultivate “a properly Irish racial mind” preoccupied with “religion, nationalism, and the land” (1985, 53). Thereby it could escape from “the artificial cosmopolitanism of the Renaissance” and maintain “a brotherhood of feeling with . . . pre-Renaissance, pre-Reformation Catholic Europe” (Brown, 1985, 54). Central to the strongest nationalism is the maintenance of a purity of belief that goes back before the complications of the Renaissance.

Introduction | 7

The medievalization of Ireland was enforced by Church officials led by Archbishop Paul Cullen. As Gibson explains, Cullen was sent from Rome in 1849 with a mandate to tighten Roman control over the Irish Church (2013, 75). In his thirty years as a primate, he implemented many reactionary policies, including the use of retreats and domination of the educational system by scholastic philosophy. Stephen’s saturation with Aquinas reflects a Church/state turn against Renaissance values. As Fernie indicates (2013, 46–49), the work that brings the Renaissance to England with full force may be Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus ([1591] 1963), about an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge. Marlowe establishes the model for Elizabethan tragedy, and Shakespeare’s tragic heroes tend to be damned in his mature work. This is true of Brutus in Julius Caesar, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth. Hamlet fears that he may be damned, and is saved only when Laertes forgives him for killing Polonius (5.2.351). In Ulysses Stephen refers to Hamlet as murdering nine people (U, 9.132). King Lear describes himself as bound upon a wheel of fire (4.7.47). Here the way to hell involves nobility, making the Early Modern view of hell dualistic: a dreadful ordeal that may involve a kind of grace. The role of hell shifts through the centuries. Blake, whom Joyce referred to as “a fearless and immortal spirit” (Joyce, 2000, 179), sees the Renaissance poet Milton as being on the side of the devil in Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), which William York Tindall refers to as “one of Joyce’s favorite books” (1969, 11). Blake is followed by a series of Romantic, Symbolist, and revolutionary writers who favored the diabolic and who appealed to Joyce, such as Lord Byron and Rimbaud. A similar pattern may be found in Yeats’s occultism, which has much in common with Faustus’s magic. In nineteenth-century Ireland, possibly in reaction to public piety, several outstanding works of fiction had protagonists who were damned: Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer ([1820] 1960), Bram Stoker’s Dracula ([1898] 2002), and Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray ([1896] 1946). These works, which may be the bestknown novels of the century in Ireland, control the potential of

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damnation by using Gothic frameworks that limit the sympathy the reader can feel for the damned central figures. In my opinion, the greatest Irish novel of the nineteenth century is the diaspora Irish novel Wuthering Heights ([1847] 2003). Emily Brontë’s father, Patrick Brunty (possibly born O’Pronty), was a child of Irish peasants who had a career as a teacher in Ireland before he went to England in 1802, perhaps because of the terrible aftermath of the defeated rebellion of 1798. Brunty had trouble socializing in England because of his thick Irish accent (Wilks, 1975, 11–12). Though Emily was not born until 1818, her family remained isolated. The major treatment of Wuthering Heights as an Irish novel is Terry Eagleton’s “Heathcliff and the Great Hunger” (1996, 1–26). The central figure of the novel, Heathcliff, is ferociously demonic, and his beloved Catherine Earnshaw proclaims that she does not want to go to heaven (Brontë, 2003, 86). All four of these nineteenth-century works are Gothic novels, and Siobhán Kilfeather, in “The Gothic novel,” sees the Gothic as prominent in “almost all modern Irish writing” and related to the horrors of Irish history (Kilfeather, 2006, 83, 87). She claims that the Gothic in Wuthering Heights indicates that Brontë was “working through” her “Irish heritage” (85). Kilfeather sees a major source of the Gothic in the Jacobean tragedy with its ghosts, extreme sexuality, and monstrous violence (91). This takes us back to the Renaissance, and the first Jacobean tragedy was Macbeth, written to please James I. Virtually all of the books I examine have substantial Gothic features, leading up to the latest wave of the genre, the Bog Gothic led by Patrick McCabe, to which I will return. In Joyce’s Portrait, for example, Stephen, haunted during the sermons on hell by demons from the bureaucracy that manages damnation, is terrified to enter his own room: He waited still at the threshold. . . . Faces were there . . . —We knew perfectly well of course that although it was bound to come to the light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to . . . ascertain the spiritual plenipotentiary . . . (P, 136)

Introduction | 9

These devilish administrators may be aligned with the forces that terrorize Stephen into submitting to the Church. The most sophisticated of the nineteenth-century figures, Oscar Wilde, is pre-Modern, yet Kiberd says, “Dorian Gray is a highly moral critique of . . . intensified experience” (1995, 425). Stylistically, it has the form of a Victorian novel. Before Modernism, with its new techniques and its liberation of the self, can be active in Irish fiction, damnation must be not merely endured, but affirmed. This is the task approached by Emily Brontë’s eternally straying adulterers and accomplished by Joyce’s apostate Stephen. The acceptance of damnation has precedents in Irish politics, for Gibson demonstrates in The Strong Spirit that there was an Irish revolutionary tradition, the Fenians, that resisted the collusion of Church and state and engaged in dreadful blasphemy. They sometimes burned conservative priests in effigy, and were rumored by their enemies to actually burn the priests (2013, 82). In the Christmas dinner scene of Portrait, Simon Dedalus expresses Fenian sentiments, is scornful of Cullen, and refers to another bishop as a “tub of guts” (P, 33). In 1869 Cullen excommunicated the entire Fenian movement, and their excesses were later covered up (Gibson, 2013, 76).7 Stephen’s damnable decision to reject all existing institutions in his quasi-medieval world carries him toward a radical version of Modernism that sees through all truths that can be formulated and posits as its goal a perpetual reaching beyond, so that truth consists not in an entity, but in a path of shifting. This discarding of definable truth brings Stephen to a postmodern position, one that questions all certainty by techniques such as multiplicity of viewpoint, metafiction, and fragmentation to undercut the authority of language. Brian McHale argues that prior to the firm logic of the Enlightenment, the uncertain

7. In fact, as Charoline Curraoin told me in conversation, most Irish politicians were excommunicated in the last century, and this shows that while Gibson is right about politicians being restrained in confronting the Church after Parnell’s death, there was ongoing negotiation between Church and state.

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frameworks of postmodern literary techniques often appeared during the Renaissance (cited in Waugh, 1992, 55). This brings us to some theoretical points. Damnable Theory The prominent school of radical philosophy associated with the term “poststructuralism” may be said to begin with Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim, first published in 1916 after he died, that the connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (1966, 73). That is, the relation between a word and what it stands for is created by the system or derived from the surrounding words rather than being a direct link between the word and its object. This loss of contact between the word and what it stands for is parallel to perdition as loss of meaning or entrapment in a mechanical order. Another main source for the tradition this inaugurates is Joyce, whose works relentlessly elaborate the distance between words and their meanings: Stephen, for example, meditates on emptying words of their sense (P, l78).8 Jacques Lacan, whose expansion on the bar between the signifier and the signified in the 1950s was highly influential, claimed to have met Joyce and to have consulted his works continually (Rabaté, 2001, 158–59). Lacan’s longest treatment of literature, his seminar on Joyce of 1975–76, Le sinthome, derives its main ideas from Joyce (Lacan, 2005).9 Jacques Derrida, Lacan’s most famous successor, said that all of his early, influential works were dialogues with Joyce (Derrida, 1984, 150–51). Hélène Cixous published the lengthy The Exile of James Joyce (1972), and Julia Kristeva wrote “Joyce ‘The Gracehoper’” (1988) and treats Joyce as the exemplar of the most revolutionary writing (1980, 92; 2002, 58). Fernie calls Derrida’s deconstruction the most influential philosophical movement of our time (De, 8), and the impact of 8. Of the many poststructuralist studies of Joyce, a few of the more important ones are Norris, 1976; MacCabe, 1978; Attridge and Ferrer, 1984; McGee, 1988; Leonard, 1993; and Attridge, 2000. 9. For an account of how Lacan derived the sinthome from Joyce, see my Joyce Through Lacan and Žižek (2008, 11–16).

Introduction | 11

these French thinkers on cultural studies has been far-reaching. In crucial respects these theories are extensions of the demonic vision of the Irish Parisian novelist. Beckett, Joyce’s Parisian disciple, influenced the literature of existentialism and the absurd, which Fernie sees as a step toward deconstruction in its negativity (De, 9, 32). Beckett’s works are often seen as responses to the Nazi Holocaust, and this may be one reason that they are more rigidly tartarean than Joyce’s. Alain Badiou, the theorist whose ideas I make most use of here, has written three essays on Beckett that have been published as a book, On Beckett (2003a). In this work he says that he was devoted to and inspired by Beckett from his youth (38–40) and that he derives from Beckett some of his key notions, such as the subtraction of what is not essential (3). In this way, the tradition that runs from Lacan to Badiou, like the one that runs from Joyce to Enright, may be seen as Joycean. Two current thinkers may help to explain the fictional confrontation with hell. Jean­François Lyotard would see it as an assertion of the greatest postmodern skepticism, taking apart every system of belief. For Badiou, whose ideas are more developed than Lyotard’s (both in this book and in their works), the equivalent of hell is an ordeal that has to be faced to attain purpose and hope in a revolutionary spirit that corresponds to a frame of mind in which Joyce was educated, the militancy of St. Paul. Both Lyotard and Badiou focus on the seemingly insoluble suffering of an urgent need to say something that cannot be expressed. Lyotard calls the point of the inexpressible the differend, an infernally difficult division between two options; Badiou calls it “the event,” a forward motion. For Lyotard hell should be engaged; for Badiou hell is the ordinary or order-giving world insofar as it cannot be left behind. The foundation of Badiou’s skepticism is a belief that language cannot capture a reality outside itself, so the only reality we can know is symbolic structure. Badiou says in his second magnum opus, Being and Event, that his thesis is not about the world, but about discourse (BE, 8). To get an idea of how Badiou’s doctrine that language is separated from reality could apply to Ireland, we might glance at the

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powerful portrayal of Ireland’s hellish colonized state in Brian Friel’s Translations (1980), which focuses on the separation of the Irish from their language. The play begins with two students in a rural classroom or hedge school in 1833, Sarah, who has difficulty saying what her name is and is “considered locally to be dumb,” and Jimmy Jack Cassie, for whom the language of classical literature is more real than any other (Harrington, 1991, 320–21). Both her language deprivation and his indulgence in obsolete tongues are drastically out of touch with actuality, and the play finally seems to realize that language can never enclose the reality of history. For the schoolmaster Hugh concludes at the end that history appears through “images .  .  . embodied in language” and “we must never cease renewing those images, because once we do, we fossilize.” Hugh says he can provide “the available words and . . . grammar,” but he has “no idea” if that will help to interpret between privacies (Harrington, 1991, 373–74). The removal of language from adherence to knowable human reality can serve to reveal its abstract structure, which may be all we can trust. Badiou’s Being and Event begins with a fundamental claim that mathematics represents being, or what actually exists, better than other languages do because mathematical formulations are equal to themselves, whereas words claim to define a reality to which they can never be equal (BE, 4–8). What exists most certainly is what can be expressed most definitely. This recognition that the word can never equal what it stands for can be confirmed by trying to define a word completely unless the word is enclosed by a mathematical frame. One could spend a thousand pages explaining what an apple is without covering it. But mathematics becomes capable of representing ontology (“onto-logy . . . the sayable of being,” BE, 133), for it presents presentation itself in its numerical forms seen as structures that map out the operation of existence. Verbal statements that claim to represent reality are wrong (cannot speak without imposition for what they attempt to define), but mathematics is right in presenting the order of presentation—a framework that takes responsibility for what it frames.

Introduction | 13

Badiou’s work derives political value from the claim that the state always tries to contain subjects within its terms. Here “state” refers both to a mathematical state of numbers and to a government. The classifications into which states insert people can never contain them because a subject is always more complicated than what a single term can cover, so this term precludes individual identity. Set theory, a mathematical system formulated by Georg Cantor in the late nineteenth century to group objects of thought in a totality without overlooking their differences (BE, 38. See Cantor 1955) and further developed in the twentieth century, allows mathematics to recognize the infinite number of subsets that make up a subject. A person, for example, can be seen as tall, nervous, pale, old, happy, unhappy, liberal, joined with someone else, and so forth.10 As Stephen Pollard states in his Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory, “The special concern of set theory is the development of an abstract account of the infinite” (1990, 6). Set theory uses a series of axioms, or logical principles of extension, to derive larger and larger numbers until infinity can be expressed.11 So Badiou shows that set theory allows the infinite to be seen as something actual rather than unattainable: “Infinity has to be untied from the One (theology) and returned to multiple being, including natural being” (BE, 512). The measure by which actuality exceeds the categories of the law generates the event, a revolutionary unleashing of new possibilities that is the only source of truth for Badiou, since categories that can be clearly defined impose the control of the state. There can be no

10. One of Joyce’s more direct versions of this pattern appears at the end of Leopold Bloom’s fictional life in Ulysses, when he is portrayed as having gone on an infinite number of voyages with “Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler . . .” And so forth in a list that goes beyond the alphabet (U, 18.2322–26). 11. How set theory reaches the infinite is explained with remarkable clarity and logic in Being and Event, particularly parts 2 to 4 (BE, 81–190). A simpler explanation appears in Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou (2006, 10–16). Gibson’s is an outstanding application of Badiou’s theories to literature. Two more fine Badiouvian literary studies have been written by Patrick McGee (2009, 2016).

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general permanent truth, only a new one that springs forth: “I shall call ‘truth’ (a truth) the real process of a fidelity to the event: that which this fidelity produces in the situation” (Badiou, 2001, 42). This truth is created by the event as something that exceeds any existing identity, which is ordinary or follows orders. A fundamental principle for Badiou is that any unity, as opposed to a multiple, can only be formed by imposing rules or limits: “The operation by which the law . . . submits to itself the one which it produces . . . I term forming-intoone. . . . and what is presented always remains a multiple . . .” (BE, 91). The excess beyond the one corresponds to the difference of both the unconscious and the masses, who do not fit within the laws without coercion. The event is the discovery of a new term to include more of the subject than has been contained in established frames. The new term has not been known, so it is revolutionary and indiscernible. Both in the Renaissance and in the Christian event of St. Paul, the new element creates an active division of the subject in opposition caused by the need to believe in something that is impossible in existing terms. For Paul the impossibility is that Christ rose from death. The opposition between what is conceivable and what is not constitutes what Badiou calls the inconsistent multiple, and he defines this as a term that cannot be reduced to a rational number (such as 42) or counted as one (1x42) (BE, 25). Such division is indicated in most significant words in Joyce’s texts insofar as they combine opposed meanings. Every time Joyce does something new with words—as he does on virtually every page—it is a differend trying to say something between its two meanings and an event that cannot be explained in existing terms. It approaches damnation by finding that the situation is impossible, with no conceivable solution. Fernie suggests that such bafflement can be productive: “The demonic in [Karl] Jaspers is on the one hand the failure of everything I am. . . . But on the other hand it is all that I might be otherwise. It is vacant and infinite” (De, 27). Badiou is committed to the hope that the event will lead to a new freedom, but he sees that before this aim can be ventured, the world

Introduction | 15

must be seen as hellish, a place of dead automatisms based on the fixed determinations of selfishness (2003b, 82–83), what Joyce calls paralysis. So the strength of the new vision depends on condemnation of knowable reality. This matches the outlook of Philip Weinstein’s brilliant Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, which emphasizes that Modernism abrogates the assumption that the subject who knows and the object that she knows share the same epistemological structure (2005, 2). Such a disjunction gives force to damnation’s exclusion of every conceivable way out. Badiou reads St. Paul as finding that people are caught in death under the law and can only find life through the impossible event of resurrection by faith (2003b, 85). Lyotard focuses more on the problem than the solution. The insolubility of the crux that Lyotard dwells on is the grievance that leads to a breakthrough for Badiou. This breakthrough against all odds corresponds to the “satanic wager” that Gibson finds in the Fenians, “their sense of having gone beyond all bounds” (2013, 83), which repudiates every system in order to conceive of hell as a place that can be escaped, a demonic position. Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition is incredulity toward any metanarrative (1984, xxiv), a move that is parallel to Badiou’s event that breaks out of the unified situation. For Lyotard, there can be no all-encompassing narrative, only a series of small narratives, none of which can claim totality. As Alan Wilde argues in Horizons of Assent, Modernism uses irony as a procedure to reach the truth; but in postmodernism, there are only a series of ironies, and it is misleading to find a real truth behind them (1981, 127–47). This accords with the intellectual edge of Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien, all of whom were postmodern before World War II. It also corresponds to Badiou, who defines truth as what cannot be known (2005, 512, 525). What can be known for Badiou partakes of the falseness of the existing situation, and only what cannot be known has the potential to be realized. Badiou’s focus on hope for progress goes against the stereotype of postmodernism as absolute negation, but it aligns him

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with the searching aspect of postmodernism as a strict critique that aims at replacing assumptions to seek the most difficult hope. One must confront hopelessness to dissect the knot that binds ratiocination to hope and then to engender a new foundation for thought that is freed from the bondage to hope, free to see things as they are rather than as we wish they were. The bondage to hope is a theme of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. One of the most fundamental principles of Stephen’s thinking is that ordinary good must be separated from the beautiful. He insists on this repeatedly in the fifth chapter of Portrait (P, 186, 207), and the good he rejects is conventional: “In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth fire is a good” (P, 186). For if art is to portray actuality, the most serious danger is that it may be corrupted toward the view of actuality that is profitable within the existing system rather than the view that sees the need for change to eradicate the remainder of colonialism. At the core of the separation of beauty from good is the imperative to sabotage the myth of heroism by portraying Stephen as someone whose faults go as far as possible toward being irremediable—in fact obnoxious. This is why Stephen has to derive his doctrine from Satan and commit himself to damnation eagerly; and why he must be condemned by those who support authority. The thinkers he favors take on a cachet by being damned. A favorite thinker of Joyce’s who anticipated many of Badiou’s ideas was Bruno. In Cause, Principle, and Unity, one of Bruno’s speakers says, “Poor Aristotle. . . . He failed to arrive because he halted at the genus of opposition and remained shackled by it; he thus did not go down to the species of contrariety, did not break through and set his eyes on the goal. Instead he strayed . . . by stating that contraries cannot come together in the same subject” (Bruno, 1964, 149). Badiou also opposes Aristotle (BE, 70–77), and what Bruno defines here is essentially Badiou’s distinction between the consistent multiple (which is contained by a definition) and the inconsistent one (BE, 25). McIntyre explains that Bruno opposed Aristotle’s idea of the universe as a self-contained perfection with the idea of a universe that is endless and consists of an infinite number of worlds (McIntyre, 1903,

Introduction | 17

190–91). This idea matches theories of current physics,12 and is equivalent to Badiou’s notion of actual infinity. Another favorite thinker of Joyce’s who anticipated Badiou was Blake. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ([1793] 1988), Blake has a conversation with the prophet Isaiah and asks him if it is true that he talked to God. Isaiah responds, “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and . . . the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God . . .” (Blake, 1988, 38). Here there is no God except honest indignation that is discontented because it sees the infinite in everything, which matches Badiou’s emphasis on revolution and actual infinity. Of course Blake believed that he actually saw Isaiah, but he also believed that no element of religion existed outside the human “Poetic Genius” (Blake, 1988, 2): “All deities reside in the human breast” (Blake, 1988, 38). Thus Blake showed Joyce how to detach the creative aspect of religion from its paternal authority so that he could activate himself as a “priest of the eternal imagination” (P, 221)— one who worships the human power to form visionary images as the source of religion. Blake’s idealism is an aspect of Joyce’s thinking bound to though distinct from his scrutiny of social problems. Lyotard’s concentration on undecidability focuses on the existing situation, in which more possibilities are needed than we can know. This is analogous to the hell of colonialism powerfully portrayed in Translations, where the frustrated Irish woman Maire cannot help being attracted to the British Lieutenant George Holland, and her Irish lover Manus is bound to doom himself by attacking Holland. Their tragic entrapment in an oedipal hierarchical situation (the colonized as son rebelling against the colonizer as father) is without a solution because change does not seem possible. The novels I study generally follow the supposition that the survival of hierarchy indicates that the colonized mindset has not been left behind, that neocolonialism persists.

12. See Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Universe (2011).

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Tim Gauthier explains neocolonialism in “Identity, Self-Loathing and the Neocolonial Condition in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy.” Gauthier says that Ella Shohat “points to the inadequacy of the term ‘postcolonial’ for describing present-day situations” and quotes Shohat: “The term ‘post-colonial’ carries with it the implication that colonialism is now a matter of the past . . . ,” concealing “colonialism’s economic, political and cultural deformative-traces in the present. . . . [,] the fact that global hegemony, even in the post–cold war era, persists in forms other than overt colonial rule. As a signifier of a new historical epoch, the term ‘post-colonial,’ when compared with neo-colonialism, comes equipped with little evocation of contemporary power relations.” (Gauthier, 2003, 209n1; Shohat, 1996, 326)

The concept of neocolonialism reflects how colonialism has perpetuated itself. For Badiou, however, the ordinary situation of entrapment can be surpassed by affirming the excessive, prohibited aspect of damnation. The hell of hierarchy must be countered by asserting demonic liberation, as it is in Joyce’s novels, starting with Stephen’s rejection of authority in Portrait. In Ulysses, after Bloom follows Stephen into the hellish Nighttown, he, Bloom, and Molly reconfigure subjective relations in indiscernible ways that are outside conventional terms and have infinite potential for renewal. This idea of artistic, innovative freedom is passed on through Modernism to the other writers I examine, who engage it with varying degrees of success and frustration. All of the novels I read feature a central character who does not fit in, who is outcast, lost, or damned. This figure embodies what Badiou, in his essay “On Subtraction,” calls the generic, the new, undefinable term that leads to the truth of the unknown future possibilities of the event (Badiou, 2008, 117–18). Badiou’s use of generic goes against its popular usage to mean standard. For him, the generic creates a new genus: it “escapes all established classifications” (2001, 57n5). Generic means nonproprietary or not belonging to anyone. In the colonial situation of Translations, the generic figure is Manus, forced to flee at the end, being wanted as a murderer for his

Introduction | 19

response to the power structure. In fact he is bound to be condemned for attacking Holland even though he does not actually do so (Harrington, 1991, 352). Though he is probably doomed and is unable to comprehend his action, he is the one who speaks for truth and so he represents the eventual future of Ireland. With Stephen Dedalus, the trajectory of the excluded generic figure is affirmed as representing possibilities for the nation and humanity. In all of the other novels I focus on, the generic figure continues to prefigure liberating possibilities for Ireland or humanity even though he or she is effectively damned. In fact, the questioning of all reasonable standards for reality is already present in the Gothic novel that flowers from the debacle of 1798. Kilfeather says that the way to avoid the reductive conclusion that all Irish novels are Gothic (insofar as they are generally haunted by suppression and the sublime) is to consider that another prime feature of the Gothic is a radical questioning of apparent reality summed up by the continual refrain “This cannot be happening to me.” The Gothic requires a mode of reading that unsettles belief in reason (Kilfeather, 2006, 82–83), so there is a philosophical skepticism built into it. Kilfeather says, “The chief inheritor and explorer of the modernist impulses in the Gothic is Samuel Beckett” (94). Her recognition of skepticism is promoted by her awareness of theory. Dis-Contents: Damnation in Irish Fiction, 1915–2015 As Ireland approaches freedom in the twentieth century, the image of hell is pervasive in most of the important Irish fiction, where it represents both the existing nightmare of history and the conflagration that will be needed to cleanse the world. Of course there are some exceptions to this pattern, writers who are superlative though they are calm and traditional. The most outstanding example may be William Trevor.13 An account of the Irish novel in this period could be made

13. Trevor’s novel Felicia’s Journey (1995), for example, presents the contrast between Felicia, who is good, and Hilditch, who is evil. The complications of the plot involve concealments of their natures rather than any question of the distinction

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from this perspective, using the more sensible sides of some of the writers I cover, such as Bowen, Banville, and Tóibín. This would provide an apparently healthier picture; but radical innovation in thinking and form is more exciting because it allows for change. The existing criticism on modern Irish fiction already tends to focus through postcolonial perspectives on the rebellious outlooks of those who are condemned by the establishment. Two good examples of critical books with this emphasis are Gerry Smyth’s The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (1997) and Linden Peach’s The Contemporary Irish Novel (2004). Peach’s fine book supplements its main focus on Homi Bhabha’s idea of adding marginal voices with psychoanalytic theories that provide depth of insight. The most comprehensive and judicious book in this field is Derek Hand’s A History of the Irish Novel, which covers well over a hundred works from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. Hand focuses on social concerns in individual novels and on historical periods of the development of Irish fiction. I agree with Hand that the novel is suited to interpret the “inherent contradictions and tensions” of Irish life (Hand, 2011, 8). Damnation is more active in the works of the first half of the century, which present both a greater level of domination by the Church/state and a more furious resistance. In Joyce’s case, the vivid sermons on hell at the center of A Portrait of the Artist may be seen as parallel to the 150-page “Circe” episode of infernal vice and torment at the climax of Ulysses. The action of both novels consists of the encounter with hell in the most overwhelming section and the series of reactions to it. The Joycean artist, Stephen Dedalus or Shem the Penman, irrevocably rejects religion, excludes himself from propriety, and is between them. Linden Peach says the novel follows the pattern of “Little Red Riding Hood,” a warning tale “addressed to young women—cautioning the dangers in straying from the straight and narrow” (2004, 196). Such tales may serve a useful purpose without questioning the traditional moral order. Another first-rate writer who seems too realistic to fit my analysis is John McGahern.

Introduction | 21

perpetually tormented. This torment, the anguish of heightened consciousness, comes from casting off such conventional enclosures as family, nation, and religion, which support people by containing their freedom. The argument that the enclosure of the group allows one to feel free has been used to support bondage. That the discomfort of the generic outsider, “poena damni, the pain of loss” (P, 28) is the only true source of freedom is what Badiou insists on, and so do all of these novels at their sharpest. When Stephen takes as his motto Satan’s “I will not serve” (P, 239, 246) he means to free humanity from all servitude to traditional controls. He knows this is impossible, but feels that only by pursuing it can he imagine what humanity could be like without slavery; and on this basis he provides the drive behind Joyce’s conceptions of new possibilities for human life, language, and thought. Gibson emphasizes the key point that “Stephen’s refusal of servitude is central to Joyce’s work” (2013, 126). Though Stephen chooses damnation, his drive toward confronting the event of subjective development follows the method that Badiou brings out in St. Paul’s Epistles (2003b, 47–49). Yet Stephen applies the Christian idea of the event to attacking the strictures of Church and state, as St. Paul does according to Badiou. Beckett inherits from Joyce the relentless compulsion to cast off any assumption that provides comfort by claiming to know the truth about life, which for Badiou is precisely what cannot be known. Beckett’s skepticism springs from the colonial Irish position that is continually made jarringly aware that the dominant logical claims for order, value, and meaning are falsehoods promulgated by an unjust and inhuman system of trumpery run by criminals. Writing from a privileged position did not keep Beckett from being keenly aware of the persecution that prevailed in his homeland. James Knowlson’s biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, says that his mentor at Trinity College during the twenties, Prof. Thomas Brown Rudmose-Brown, inspired him to be a “freethinker” and, as “Ruddy” described him, a “great enemy of imperialism, patriotism, and all the Churches” (Knowlson, 1996, 66).

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In their equation of government with oppression, Beckett’s works generally take place in hell, with every possibility of hope an illusion. This is heavily emphasized in Waiting for Godot, and the falseness of hope leads to the falseness of human connection—which finds hope in the other. Such connection is sundered in the three novels that make up Beckett’s Trilogy (a term to which Beckett objected). If hell, as Dostoevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov, is the inability to love (1937, 338), then the progressive breakdown of human attachment in the Trilogy leads to the most isolated and disturbed hell in The Unnamable, but to see this hell is to partake of the highest level of truth. Joyce and Beckett, reacting against the full weight of colonial and theological oppression, are most intractable in their insistence that life has the hellish quality of being ruled by incomprehensibility. The writers who succeed them seem to carry on their precursors’ intellectual and artistic standard best when they sustain this infernal vision, but they are not as consistent, and often seem to fall away from the terrible source of newness. Flann O’Brien presents a powerful negative vision in his first three novels, but then he turns to being a humorist. Without Beckett’s devotion to Joyce and literature, O’Brien suspected that this denial of accepted truths was merely nonsense. In the face of rejections, he did not take the trouble to publish his greatest novel (in my opinion), which is certainly set in hell, The Third Policeman, written in 1939 and published posthumously in 1967 (1999). Yet here he comes very close to Beckett. The novel that seems to me to go furthest since Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien to link damnation to intellectual discovery is John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus ([1976] 1993a), which may be closer to their level than any Irish novel in the second half of the century. The alienation from God and established systems that is involved in scientifically reordering the universe torments Banville’s Copernicus so harrowingly that he denies his own theory, as the actual Copernicus did. The great final section of the novel, a horrendous account of Copernicus’s death, seems to lead him toward a demonic realm, though this turns out to be more complex than it appears to be. Badiou’s theories of the

Introduction | 23

mathematical structure of the event are illustrated by this novel about the mathematical breaking of rules. The inevitability of hell is diminished by seeing it as caused by history, and the continuing historical source for the idea of hell in modern Irish fiction is the series of wars fought through the century for independence from England, and their repercussions. I examine four novels that view these struggles from quite different perspectives, but damnation works intensely from every angle. In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September ([1929] 2000), the infernal derives from the fact that Bowen is writing about the Anglo-Irish, whom she regards as a beautiful but moribund culture. Virtually everything they do goes horribly wrong, and seeing the book as hellish brings out the sharpness of both its humor and its tragedy. Bowen develops a complex philosophical analysis of moments of personal and political misrecognition, each of which causes anguish. Here hell is the attachment to tradition, but to see it as hell may be liberating. The Civil War that followed on the War for Independence of Bowen’s novel is reflected in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark ([1996] 1998), and if The Last September showed that losing a civil war can be hell, Reading in the Dark shows that winning it can be as bad. This is partly because Derry, the scene of Reading, remains under British control in Northern Ireland. The main source of tragedy in Reading, however, is a dreadful concern among the rebels about how to judge informers. The family in Deane’s novel is torn because one of its members was executed for betraying the cause. The central mother figure, who stands for Ireland (which has been called “the poor old woman”), sobs for months and keeps exclaiming that everything is burning (RD, 144–48). In House of Splendid Isolation (1994) by Edna O’Brien, hell is the ideological clash between a revolutionary, McGreevy, and a conservative, Josie O’Meara, which causes their efforts to understand each other to lead to destruction in a world of violence and terror. War makes love virtually impossible here, but out of the impossibility of love, the generic is born in the form of the prophetic spirit of a child.

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Satan’s rebellion is a model for revolution, and A Star Called Henry (1999), Roddy Doyle’s sensational novel about the rebellions of 1916–22, begins by depicting the infernal horrors of Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century. The hero, Henry Smart, and his rebel comrades bring the hell of colonialism to the surface by turning Dublin into a raging inferno in 1916. As a valiant warrior, Henry is most happy when he feels the highest level of pain, sacrificing for the cause. When he realizes that a group of peasants he is organizing are too pious to have proper revolutionary spirit, he has them yell, “Fuck you, God!” (1999, 254). Their hearts are not really in this cry, and it is essentially because they cannot give up authority that Henry finds that things go wrong for the revolution. Three more recent novelists focus on issues of gender, family, and the struggle of love to overcome the hell of social conflict. Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992) deals with the lowest level of society, a psychopathic misfit born of two psychopathic misfits. Francie Brady suffers from and is an expression of the whole weight of the system society uses to distinguish better from worse. And the most terrible feature of his horrendous afflictions is that he has to misrecognize and do evil to anyone who loves him. Incapable of functioning socially, he has to be controlled by government institutions, and as a generic figure, he defines with great precision and complexity the inhuman way these systems are run, particularly by the main power that controls them, the Church. Francie reveals how the system of hell operates in the machinery of society and the methods of perception and conception that it configures. Insofar as Colm Tóibín sees Ireland as hellish in The Blackwater Lightship ([1999] 2001), the affliction seems to come from homophobia. But Tóibín seeks reconciliation with the Church here, and his writing is more realistic than Modernist. So he seems to reject damnation, and his use of rea1ism and the Church may get his message across effectively. In fact, most people cannot do without religion’s consolation, charity, and coherence. Tóibín urges the Church to admit nonconformists, and this seems to fall short of radicalism, yet

Introduction | 25

admitting homosexuality to the Church would bring in something traditionally damned. Tóibín works subversively within the Church’s framework in The Testament of Mary ([2012] 2014). He retells the Gospels from the point of view of a woman who sees her son’s Passion as expressing the madness, abstraction, and violence of men, which she rejects to cling to the simple physical life of women. Tóibín’s adherence to bare physical reality takes on force here as a reversal of tradition. The turning of physical reality into something extraordinary may serve as a transition to Anne Enright. Like McCabe, Anne Enright, a feminist, is a more avant-garde and radical writer than Tóibín, and seems to be carrying on the tradition of seeking supreme value in damnation. Her What Are You Like? (2000) presents a bizarre situation in which a mother dies in childbirth and her twin daughters grow up apart, each feeling that the real version of herself is somewhere else. The nightmarish desperation of these lost souls grows hellish and is eventually tied to Hades itself when the lost thoughts of the mother are recovered: “I am in hell” (Enright, 2000, 247), though this nightmare leads to a curiously happy ending.14 The Gathering (2007) also takes on infernal qualities as the heroine tries to understand her brother’s suicide, which in traditional terms means that he chose to go to hell, and it occurs to her that he has surpassed her in courage and honesty (2007, 78). Both of Enright’s best novels center continually on devotion to the damned, for the lost mother and the lost son are continually pursued as generic sources of ultimate truth, though they cannot be reached. These Irish writers sustain the power of the tradition established by Joyce and Beckett insofar as they come to grips with despair through 14. What Are You Like? is Enright’s best novel, but I decided to concentrate on the better known Gathering because What Are You Like? focuses rather exclusively on relations between women and some of the best ideas I had about the book are developed strongly in Susan Cahill’s excellent treatment of the novel (Bracken and Cahill, 2011, 87–106).

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comedy, rebellion, and insight. One central argument in my book will be that the break with established values involved in forming a new nation, together with the need to use religious notions against religious oppression—which did not let up after 1922 in the theocratically inclined Free State—caused the Irish to generate an oppositional world of ideas that fed their creativity. In speaking of how Joyce and Beckett were major sources for continental philosophy, I will attempt to explain why certain literary and philosophical notions cannot be approached through any other concept than that of damnation— which may be why Ireland pioneered these ideas. Every lesser affliction is a compromise of an intellectually necessary denial. And the affirmation of Badiou, like the affirmation he finds in Beckett, and indeed like Joyce’s comic vision, is the strength to confront hopelessness. Joyce becomes a comic writer in the last chapter of Portrait after Stephen gives up the Church and begins to focus on the false attitudes of his fellow students. He finds himself in an Irish hell so universal that it can only be escaped by going beyond what is knowable, forging ahead into absurdity.

Part One  

|  Philosophy

2 Joyce, Stephen’s Damnation, and Badiou’s Saint Paul Joyce’s positions with regard to damnation are so complicated that they can best be explained in three stages. First I will describe his satanic role as an artist, referring to Romantic influences and the theories of Lyotard. Then, using Badiou’s reading of St. Paul’s Epistles, I will show the power of Christian militancy that informed Joyce’s vision. Finally, I will turn to Badiou’s concept of the event to show how Joyce combined Christian thinking with anticlericalism to enlarge human potential. Joyce has Stephen Daedalus declare in Stephen Hero that “Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus . . .” (SH, 222). Fernie argues that in modern times sanctity is approached through sinfulness (2013, 6), a pattern that goes back to Paul, and Fernie adds that the spiritual must maintain contact with the demonic to develop itself (2013, 26–27, 31). As a demonic “priest of eternal imagination” (P, 222), Stephen, like Joyce, uses the strongest imagination of Christianity to go against its establishment as religion. As Hegel puts it in Phenomenology of Spirit, “For Enlightenment does not employ principles peculiar to itself in its attack on faith, but principles which are implicit in faith itself. Enlightenment merely presents faith with its own thoughts which faith unconsciously lets fall apart . . .” (1977, 344). Faith ignores contradictions that Enlightenment reveals. Lyotard and Art as Damnation Lyotard’s theories help us to explain why Joyce was so revolutionary and how he used the languages of the Church and the British Empire 29

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to attack these two colonial institutions.1 His pre-poststructural awareness of the contradictions in language helped him to criticize the establishment, but it was a parallel between damnation and art that charged him with the ability to overthrow the system. One key to Joyce’s perception of art as damnation may be found through Lyotard’s ideas about how alternative phrases are excluded. I will explain Lyotard’s theory of the differend, then show how Stephen uses a similar notion in Portrait and how this theory can serve to reveal the importance to the Joycean artist of the inseparability of art from damnation. The value of Lyotard’s analysis of what can be expressed in language is suggested by citing his forebears. Lacan laid the basis for poststructuralism by arguing that the structure of the unconscious was the structure of language—that is, that the subject is constituted in words by the interaction of modes of language that extend into culture and society. Earlier Mikhail M. Bakhtin argued that novelistic discourse consists of constant dialogue between different levels of language (Bakhtin, 1981, 259–367). For example, if I describe my relationship with my wife, it might involve legal, erotic, humorous, and psychological languages. These languages, however, clash, so that for Bakhtin the novel is revolutionary because its dialogism overthrows the claim of any particular language to encompass reality. Gerry Smyth and Linden Peach explain how Bakhtin’s theories apply to the Irish novel (Smyth, 1997, 29; Peach, 2004, 3–7 and later pages). In The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Lyotard analyzes the competition involved in framing discourse; seeing how linguistic structures compete in each phrase can help us to evaluate the moral and epistemological claims to validity that language makes. Lyotard contends that different genres of discourse—such as the cognitive, the

1. Two of Joyce’s more obvious statements about the Church as colonizer appear in Stephen Hero, which says, “The Roman, not the Sassenach, was for him the tyrant of the islanders . . .” (1963, 53), and in the first episode of Ulysses, where Stephen says that he is a servant of two masters, “an English and an Italian” (U, 1.638; episode number is followed by line number). Of course the Church had spiritual and charitable aims, but so did the British Empire often enough.

Joyce, Stephen, and Badiou  |  31

ethical, and the descriptive—involve different rules for connecting words (1988, 28, 30). Because of the opposed structures of different genres, a phrase in one genre cannot be translated with equivalence into another, yet important phrases tend to be attached to more than one genre. For example, a judgment is both cognitive and ethical, even though the cognitive involves a set of rules using discursive logic and the ethical involves a different arrangement based on social connections. This model—of a dispute in which two sides claiming to interpret a text use different standards that cannot be measured by each other—is applicable to the contest over meaning involved in any significant word, and the more the word is in dispute, the more meaningful it is (Lyotard, 1988, 29). The crucial word between categories corresponds to Badiou’s inconsistent multiple, which goes beyond containment by the set. While Badiou holds out hope for the unknown goal of the event, Lyotard sees the significant word as caught in distress between unacceptable alternates. In fact, Badiou has criticized Lyotard for reducing the world to phrases in conflict and Lyotard criticized Badiou for aiming at something that cannot be expressed.2 One could try to resolve this dispute by saying that what Badiou aims at is indicated by the conflict between phrases and that it may be useful to see the conflict Lyotard focuses on as aimed at the possibility of a progressive goal. Lyotard’s term for a phrase suspended between incommensurable regimes of rules is the differend, which he defines as “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” (1988, 13). It may be a state in which one cannot think of a word or in which the word one has seems inadequate, but it “suffers from the wrong” of not being expressible (1988, 13). Lyotard maintains that consolidating an issue in a single knowable phrase is always an injustice because any significant phrase involves opposing positions with incommensurable language systems.

2. For an account of the disagreement between Badiou and Lyotard, see Peter Hallward’s Badiou: A Subject to Truth (2003, 17, 81, 264, 412n48).

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The closest approach to truth is to map out the opposing systems so as to be aware of oppositions that would otherwise be overlooked. If an aspect of the issue is resolved, it loses interest: the real moral and intellectual issues lie in the area that cannot be expressed. This matches Badiou’s generic, the undefinable term that leads toward a truth Lyotard is criticized by the left because he does not allow for the determination of a single program that will inspire action. He holds that any particular ideology tries to use one genre of discourse to explain the world, a pattern he calls totalitarian (1988, 5). His revolutionary impetus is to seek the differend in any formulation so as to hear the voices that have been excluded. James Williams says that, for Lyotard, the avant-garde is political and the sense of the political is revolutionized by avant-garde art (1998, 6). This matches Joyce’s tendency to aim at multiplying possibilities rather than advocating policy. In Portrait, Stephen pursues the incommensurability of discourses, both in places where the meanings of words divide into opposing linguistic systems and in the impossible passages between these disparate discourses. Yet he is rarely aware until late in the book that incommensurability is what he seeks: he keeps trying to put words together into systems and failing. In exercising the critical role of judgment, which mediates between discourses, he gains authority when he is perplexed by a shift from one discourse to another. This is prefigured in his early meditation on how God can have different names in different languages, being Dieu in French (P, 16). He terminates this inquiry by insisting that God’s real name is God, but the idea that God must have more than one identity if he can be expressed in different languages remains a repressed presence in the passage. God as the first cause is traditionally the source of all language, so His name is the source that radiates the greatest number of connections. By seeking to displace the most extensive phrase, Stephen strives, without knowing it, to take control of his linguistic universe, a demonic procedure in Fernie’s terms. The idea that the subject arises out of discordance is indicated by Badiou, as summarized by Slavoj Žižek: “the subject emerges in the event of ‘exaggeration,’ when a part exceeds its limited place and

Joyce, Stephen, and Badiou  |  33

explodes the constraints of balanced totality” (Žižek, 1997, 92). By stepping outside identity, the subject assumes a position from which to see itself. Departing from oneself is constitutive of the demonic for Fernie, who repeats Iago’s “I am not what I am” (Othello, 1.1.66) as a refrain to signify the presence of the devil (2013, 1, 8, 9, 84, 117, 284). This dislocation fits the main term Stephen uses to describe his creative activities, sin: “his own soul . . . unfolding itself sin by sin” (P, 103). Stephen tends systematically to examine the linkages between terms, as he does in his musings on the words “belt,” “suck,” “cold,” and “white” (Brivic, 2008, 48–50). Each of these words that is not entirely what it is suspends Stephen between possibilities, so it generates his subject; his grasp of linguistic options increases his ability to tell his story, to change and violate the framework given to him. He is discovering that his feelings do not fit into the existing language, that active consciousness misbehaves. As the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses demonstrates exhaustively as Bloom and Stephen converse, no amount of explanation will account adequately for feeling, for explanation and feeling are incommensurate genres of discourse: they occupy different phrase universes involving different principles of linking. In chapter 1 of Portrait, Stephen is in a good position to see these divergences because at six he does not understand most verbal connections. His lack of comprehension defines his position as a colonized subject, the child being a model for the colonized. Lyotard says that the area of politics is all about how words are allowed to link together (1988, 138). Hegemonic discourse controls genres and linkages, which it maintains as correct and rational. It excludes as improper the verbal universes of children, women, minorities, and the poor, all of whom, insofar as they assert their own interests, are inclined to be execrable or diabolical. While the genres Lyotard isolates for analysis constantly mix in practice, in each chapter of Portrait Stephen approaches a certain kind of knowledge in which one genre predominates. For example, he approaches justice in the first chapter, and here cognition is featured. In the second, he approaches desire, which stresses feeling. The religion of the third chapter stresses the ethical genre. The fourth moves

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toward art, which centers on perception; and in the fifth he develops academic discourse, which involves argument. The key to his overall development is that all of these principles remain parts of him, and by being able to express himself in all of the genres, he gains an increasing ability to see that each is an illusion and that reality is an interplay between them. One of the crucial steps toward art for Stephen is his grand entry into sin through prostitution. In this act, he learns most about his body and his physical feelings: “No part of body or soul had been maimed, but a dark peace had been established between them” (P, 103). And the Joycean artist writes out of knowledge of the intimate secrets of his body, as suggested by the accursed Shem writing with his excrement on “his own body” (FW, 185). Stephen learns about himself only through sin, through departing from the established patterns imposed on him. Crucial to his education is a powerful sense that he is undertaking damnation: “He knew that it was in God’s power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy. His pride in his own sin, his loveless awe of God, told him that his offense was too grievous to be atoned for . . . by a false homage to the Allseeing and Allknowing” (P, 90). To give up his pride would be to falsify himself, so the magnitude of his consciousness is proportional to his fear of God, a fear without love. The idea that God sees his sin—an idea later reinforced when Stephen enters his religious phase—is deeply ingrained in him. At the end of the novel he is still “not at all sure” that he does not believe in God (P, 214), so he must have the fear of damnation always within him once he rejects the Church. God must be his enemy, and this unbearable antagonism makes his words unspeakable. One reason Joyce was able to make an extreme break with traditional authority was that his theological training made him aware of the violence of his opposition; so he saw clearly that the source of his innovation must be damnation. Insofar as he doubts his perdition, he will be less impelled to innovate. One of the synonyms for damned is “lost,” which suggests the potentially creative or exploratory situation

Joyce, Stephen, and Badiou  |  35

of being without one’s bearings or framework. The political value of the idea of damnation is indicated in Andrew Gibson’s Joyce’s Revenge: “Throughout . . . ‘Telemachus,’ Mulligan struggles to wheedle . . . and bully Stephen into a servile complicity with England. If Stephen refuses to surrender, it is because he takes ‘not serving’ to be the very condition of his integrity” (2002, 31). Stephen knows that the non serviam that saves him politically is the cause of Satan’s fall. Geert Lernout, in Help My Unbelief, substantiates the political meaning of Stephen’s defiance with historical evidence that after Parnell’s defeat in 1892, the Church had a “political monopoly” (2010, 46) over Irish aspirations. From the beginning of the third chapter of Portrait, where Stephen, having begun frequenting Nighttown, sees a developing vision of “his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin” (P, 103), he views sin as the major means to create himself. In chapter 5, for example, Stephen nauseates Davin with accounts of his debauchery, then tells his friend, “the soul is born . . . first in those moments I told you of” (P, 203). If the artist develops only through sin, then he or she as artist is always on the way to hell. In her 1953 essay “Some Readings and Misreadings,” the devout novelist Caroline Gordon compares Portrait to Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter; she says that while both novels are about “a soul choosing damnation, I think one reason why A Portrait . . . is superior is that Joyce is convinced that his hero is damned” (Gordon, 1962, 144). The Church presents Stephen with the most elaborate and dominant system of phrase linkages in his life, empowering creativity by charging words with radical extremes of interpretation. Sin, which Stephen insists is his only source of insight, inserts words into intense frames of connection. Father Arnall insists that sinful words, the words through which Stephen takes his identity, are filled with deicidal violence: “Every word of sin is a wound in His tender side . . . Every impure thought . . . is a keen lance transfixing that sacred and loving heart” (P, 134). Each sinful word, no matter what it means, literally murders God. The opposition or differend between sinful and pure frames of language is at the center of the most dramatic scene in the novel, the Christmas dinner scene—where the supporters and

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attackers of Parnell both accuse each other of using the wrong language (P, 31–34)—and is a constant clash in Stephen’s life. Consciousness of this raging antithesis can only be reached by going against the rules that enclose one and render the other side incoherent or nonexistent. Virtue denies the other side as vice does not. Stephen sees the pretense that one can be conscious—or in opposition—without being damned as an insidious temptation when Cranly, in the final section of Portrait, says that one can belong to the Church and oppose it (243, 245). Only by acknowledging the full panoply of the two language systems of vice and virtue in all their fury can one be fully conscious. Fernie, discussing Hegel, argues that consciousness is not possible without turning away from what is given, to the negative world of potential, and that the figure for this stage of human development is Lucifer (2013, 178). The artist thus develops by going outside the bounds of acceptable language. This transgression is the Church’s definition of evil, which is exactly the opposite of Lyotard’s definition of it as limitation, the “interdiction of possible phrases” (1988, 140). This context of what is forbidden to expression may indicate the creative aspect of damnation. The portrayal of the spiritual pains of hell, which make up the second, more thoughtful half of Father Arnall’s sermons in chapter 3, often sounds like a description of the creative mode of the Joycean artist recognized in Lyotard’s terms. The physical torments of hell come from outside and represent oppression, but the spiritual ones come from within, and are supposed to express feelings inherent in humanity. In canto 7 of the Inferno, after being amazed by all the torments he has seen in hell, Dante exclaims, “Why do our sins so waste us?” (Dante, 2000, 119, line 21). The belief here is that the tortures of hell are built into sinful human nature, and this exemplifies the general idea that the range of human types Dante unfolds represents the world ruled by evil.3

3. In his letter to Can Grande della Scalla, Dante says of the meaning of his Comedy, “allegorically, the subject is man, in the exercise of his free will, earning or

Joyce, Stephen, and Badiou  |  37

The first and greatest of the spiritual pains is the pain of the loss of God, poena damni (P, 128). Taking an image from Leonard Cohen’s song “Joan of Arc,” in which the saint marries the flames that consume her (Cohen, 1971), I would say that Stephen is married to the pain of loss. Katherine Ebury recently said that his economy seems to seek a surfeit of loss (2013). Not only is his vocation as an artist based on turning away from God and on endless exile, but all of his relations with women—from Mercedes to Molly—have as their ultimate goal renunciation. The goal of the Joycean artist (Stephen, Richard Rowan, Shem) is not to live life as it is, but to consider what it could be. From this point of view, every object is lost when it is perceived, though it may be possessed as a phantasm—and it may be known more completely in art than it would be in life. The second of the spiritual pains is conscience, something Stephen hopes to create for his race at the end of the novel (P, 253). Pope Innocent III referred to conscience as the worm of the “triple sting” (P, 112). The three stings are (1) memories of past pleasures, (2) late and fruitless sorrow for sins committed, and (3) regret for all the opportunities to repent that were wasted. As the preacher describes the tormenting internalized conscience for two pages, the emphasis is on all the beautiful opportunities that were lost. This corresponds to the role of the Modern artist in Lyotard, which is to focus on the “unpresentable” (1984, 78), on all the alternative possibilities of language that are left out by the conventions of realism or cast off by propriety. Like any damned person, the artist is afflicted because she is controlled by a strict order of regimentation; and what is excluded by this regime tends to become the beautiful, for what is attractive tends to be sinful (as in sinful chocolate cake). Lyotard says that the differend suffers from not being expressible (1988, 13), so it speaks for pain. The third spiritual pain is that of extension. The sermon says that in earthly life one is not capable of all evils at once, but in hell each

becoming liable to the rewards or punishments of justice.” (Kaplan and Anderson, 2000, 98). So his picture of the afterlife is a picture of the world.

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torment enhances the others: “moreover as the internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses, so they are more capable of suffering” (P, 130). This sounds like the sensitivity of the Joycean artist, who multiplies levels of discourse by feeling everything at once. For example, when Stephen kisses the prostitute, his senses get mixed up in synesthesia: “darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour” (P, 89). That this artist approaches his work through suffering is highlighted in the second chapter as Stephen begins gathering epiphanies: “He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret” (P, 67). The pain of intensity follows that of extension, and Arnall insists that one can never get used to pain or make it a habit in hell because it has a “continual variety” (P, 131). This matches the obligation of the Modern artist to keep being original by finding new ways to express alienation. The crowning spiritual torment is eternity, or being outside of time: “time shall be no more” (P, 113). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce put his work in the context of eternity by using cyclical time, and he aimed at this throughout his career. In the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, Stephen, paraphrasing Blake, says, “time’s ruins build eternity’s mansions” (U, 14.289–90). Blake says, “The Ruins of Time builds [sic] Mansions in Eternity” (Blake, 1988, 705). When Stephen makes his statement on June 16, 1904, he may be on the brink of becoming an artist. This is an extension of St. Paul: “if our earthly house . . . were dissolved . . . we have an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5:1) Joyce was involved in building mansions in eternity by taking time apart, but these mansions were less like heavenly ones than like Satan’s Pandemonium in Paradise Lost: the mansion in hell that ends up being the place where language breaks down (10.504–46; Milton, 1957, 406, 418–19). Pandemonium corresponds to the “Oxen” and “Circe” episodes that make up the central third of Ulysses (or the majority of its main body) and to most of the Wake. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a key work for Joyce, Blake says, “As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity” (Blake, 1988, 35).

Joyce, Stephen, and Badiou  |  39

There are many nineteenth-century versions of the artist as damned soul, including two of the youthful Joyce’s favorite writers, George Gordon, Lord Byron, in Manfred and Cain (Byron, 1907, 478–502, 767–802) and Arthur Rimbaud, in Une Saison en Enfer (Rimbaud, 1962, 299–346). For Blake, Byron, and Rimbaud, the satanic nature of art has to do with the sublime as a revolutionary gesture reaching beyond the conceivable. The focus on the sublime is intense at the ends of all of Joyce’s fiction: the snow at the end of Dubliners, Stephen’s concluding dream of transforming humanity in Portrait, Molly Bloom’s indefinite rapture, and Anna Livia Plurabelle’s transformation from the end to the beginning. Every earlier phase in these books prepares for these final phases that approach the complexity of inhabited galaxies. For Lyotard, the pain of the sublime results from the fact that the imagination goes beyond its capacity to present (1988, 166). The distress of feeling the limit of imagination results in the joy of discovering greater possibilities within discordance, extending complexity through incommensurability. Stephen goes through this cycle of pain and joy in each chapter of Portrait: the pain of being torn away from his established identity and the joy of finding a new one that feels more free. Lyotard says that the sublime “entails the finality of nonfinality” and that, in the form of enthusiasm, it is the surest sign of the progress of history toward a better, fairer mode of human relations (1988, 165). This notion of Lyotard’s may be criticized in that enthusiasm need not be progressive. Thus it is helpful to supplement Lyotard with Žižek’s idea of the sublime object of ideology, which holds that the sublime is based on a contradiction: our belief in what is transcendent is always spurred by our sense that it is incomprehensible and illusory (Žižek, 1989, 31). In each chapter of Portrait, the sublime object that Stephen reached at the end of the previous chapter (such as the prostitute or the Church) is always negated in the new chapter, and this critical move is crucial to Stephen’s development. His progress is intellectually tremendous, but it also has the infernal form of the myth of Sisyphus or Tantalus, since it can never satisfy for long. The most valuable insight it can provide is a realization of its falseness.

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Joyce alternates the sublime aim and the critical negation in Portrait, and the interaction of the two leads to progress by repeatedly drawing out what is excluded by the known order of language, by bringing out exclusion itself. A Lyotardian view of the sermons shows that conscience—the consciousness of the damned—is to be cultivated as a sense of the potential debarred by propriety. If this is true, then we can see a new sense of why the demonic artist wants to forge in his soul the conscience of his race. They can only free themselves from Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles” of religion (Blake, 1988, 27) by accepting and pursuing their own damnation. And Blake’s spirit of creativity, Los, takes the demonic form of a blacksmith working in fire, smashing and reshaping hard forms. Joyce, who was often described by friends as satanic in his pride (R. Ellmann 1982, 100, 435, 494), was able to treat his demonic role as a joke, as in a letter to Stanislaus Joyce of September 25, 1906, that refers to “the perverse devil of my literary conscience” (SL, 110). But he was well aware of the torment of his satanic position and of the power it afforded him. I see this as one meaning of Joyce’s assertion in “The Holy Office” that he has strength because he is “steeled in the school of old Aquinas” (CW, 152). The Church taught him that ideas must be seen in the full context of their diverging consequences. Stephen tells the dean of studies that he is “sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws” (P, 187). Stephen and Joyce, however much they aim at freedom, realize that the human need for authority (Lacan’s law of the father) cannot be dismissed permanently. In his seminars on Joyce, Lacan concludes that the name of the father can be bypassed through art by assuming the father’s position (Brivic, 2008, 15). This procedure remains problematic in relation to Joyce’s more realistic aspect. As Gibson points out in Beckett and Badiou, people spend most of their lives in the remainder, the lifeless period between events in which we are forced to depend on authority (Gibson 2006, 19, 23, 85–86). Joyce’s awareness of such desolation made his version of socialism more realistic and resolute than many because he realized the price of freedom in defiance.

Joyce, Stephen, and Badiou  |  41

In fact, we will see that his militance was distinctly Christian, for it is possible to see socialism as a version of Christianity. Even when Stephen is at his most ecstatic on the beach in chapter 4, his is “an ecstasy of fear” because he does not lose sight of the fact that in sinning, especially in creating life, he is inviting the wrath of God (P, 169). Stephen’s assumption of the role of the God of creation matches the central sin of Satan. In terms of political reality, Joyce’s theology makes it manifest to him that modern artistic originality must always entail damnation because it has its source in what is outside the field of the acceptable. Lyotard puts this view decisively: “In modern times, great inspiration can only be demoniacal” (Lyotard, 1974). Because Joyce never loses sight of this or allows himself to cling to the lovely delusion that there could be a vital exception, he never stops being original or opposed to the establishment. Joyce never recanted, so insofar as one believes in Christianity, one must believe that he is in hell. He has situated himself in a position from which he will continue to speak of liberation to humanity forever. Joyce’s Stephen as Badiou’s Paul In rejecting Christian belief, Joyce could hardly deny the valuable features of the Christian system that pervades and shapes his fiction. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, for example, Stephen’s sisters have virtually nothing to eat except soup given them by a nun (U, 10.276–88). It is ironic that in a chapter that portrays Dublin as a hellish field of automata (wandering rocks) dominated by British and Roman imperialism, a chapter that repeatedly emphasizes the absence of God—“Our father who art not in heaven” (10.291, .685)—the family must depend on this conservative source. Yet most people would find it difficult to live without the charity, comfort, cohesiveness, and morality provided by religion. I might add that when Frederick Douglass first came North, he doubted that society could operate well without slavery (Douglass, 2000, 359). It is possible to worship Christianity without believing in a supernatural God. Blake, whom Joyce admired, was a passionate Christian,

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but identified God with the imagination and maintained that He did not exist outside of the human mind: “God only Acts & Is in existing beings or Men” (Blake, 1988, 40). Blake’s figures of Urizen and Nobodaddy, whom Joyce refers to (U, 9.787, 14.419), are pernicious images of the repressive aspect of God that represent Blake’s hatred of organized religion. Badiou’s book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (1997 French, 2003 English) presents a powerful argument for the creative and progressive value of Christianity that is based not on the existence of God, which Badiou does not accept, but on the myth of the Resurrection as an event that expands human subjectivity and hope. Badiou’s Paul is parallel to Stephen in casting off nationality, language, and established religion to pursue the event of subjective creativity.4 Because Badiou sees Paul’s vision as a system of liberation that does not focus on a deity, but on an event, it is possible to see Badiou’s Pauline conceptions as forceful and extensive in their correlation to Stephen’s views. Badiou sees Paul as separating the liberating aspect of religion from its authoritarian side. To this end, Badiou draws out progressive ideas from Paul’s epistles, but the contexts include disturbing features such as hatred of the body and absolute theocracy. A statement like “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth” (Rom. 8.33) insists that a Christian should have no other authority than that of God. Joyce also found freedom within an overriding belief, but his faith in art was less rigid and more focused on change. Badiou maintains that Paul’s fundamental orientation is not toward God, but toward His Son, and this is the basis of the overturning of ethnic distinctions that makes Paul the first internationalist: “Greek and Jewish discourses are both discourses of the father. That 4. To underscore the innovative nature of Paul’s intervention, Badiou insists that the evidence is clear that Paul’s Epistles, which were written in 50–58 AD, “predate, by a long way, the composition of the Gospels” (Badiou, 2003b, 32, his emphasis). The Norton edition of the New Testament confirms that Paul seems to have influenced the Gospels (Hammond and Busch, 2012, 79).

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is why they bind communities in a form of obedience (to the Cosmos, the Empire, God, or the Law). Only that which will present itself as a discourse of the Son has the potential to be universal” (Badiou, 2003b, 42). Paul says that it does not matter whether you are a Greek or a Jew if you believe in the Resurrection. Stephen is brought into the Church through the discourse of the Father with fear and obedience centered on images of a punitive hell that drive him to seek peace (P, 119–40). But Badiou states that “no mention is made of hell in Paul’s preaching”: he never appeals to fear, always to courage (2003b, 71), and he does not believe in hatred or resentment, but in love (2003b, 94). Paul finds the ordinary world (under orders) hellish in that the domain ruled by law is an automatism of death (Badiou, 2003b, 84), and in this world the Christian must seek suffering as a means of release: “we rejoice in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces patience and [ultimately] . . . hope” (Badiou, 2003b, 95; Rom. 5.3–4). Stephen is parallel to Paul insofar as he seizes on the sufferings of an afflicted society through the sensitivity and opposition of the artist that will lead to a new dispensation for mankind, the consciousness of his race that has not been created (P, 253). As he begins to gather epiphanies around the age of thirteen, for example, he processes each artistic image by “tasting its mortifying flavour in secret” (P, 67), or extracting its affliction. Perhaps no one before Joyce had depicted in literary fiction the poverty and oppression (and repression) of Ireland so forcefully. Badiou says that the Christ-event of resurrection, because it goes against logic, is essentially the abolition of the law, which for Paul is nothing but the empire of death (Badiou, 2003b, 86). Paul repeatedly says, “where no law is, there is no transgression” (Rom. 4.15). Likewise Stephen, once he accepts the spiritual torments of separation from authority, overcomes the physical limits of the state: “What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death—the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without— cerements, the linens of the grave?” (P, 169–70). He sees himself as unafraid of the constraints that the system may impose on him, and

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the limits of his bravery relate to the physical pains of hell, part of the system he must work against. He uses Paul’s central image of resurrection for artistic, antireligious purposes, but the religion of art carries on religious principles. Unlike Paul, Joyce realizes that the resurrection is part of a cycle of experience, but Stephen recognizes it as the phase of advancement: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph . . .” (P, 172). The sense of ascension or transcendence that Stephen feels will be followed by disillusion as Portrait is followed by Stephen’s affliction in Ulysses; but that does not mean that he should not concentrate on moving ahead. Only by realizing that one is subject to cycles of falling back into self-interest can one maintain the forward movement of the discipline of fidelity to the event (Gibson, 2006, 67). Only through being seized by the nightmare of paralysis can one be driven to go beyond what is possible. The fulcrum of such forward movement is the separation of the beautiful from the good, which Stephen insists upon when he defines esthetics both with the Dean of Studies and with Vincent Lynch (P, 186, 207–8). The good corresponds to animal self-interest, which Badiou sees as producing the falsity of shared opinions, which are the opposite of a truth that creates a subject (Badiou, 2001, 51–52). This is why Paul invents internationalism by denying the importance of particular ethnic customs that interfere with the universality of the resurrection event: “the moment the real is identified as event . . . the figures of distinction in discourse are terminated because the position of the real instituted by them [ethnic identity] is revealed through the retroaction of the event to be illusory” (Badiou, 2003b, 57). If reality lies in the event, it cannot lie in existing distinctions. These distinctions of ethnicity, religion, and nationality are what people fight wars over. This is why Joyce is so inveterate in his opposition to nationalism despite his love of Ireland, which he renders international. His antipathy to nationalism runs from Stephen’s mockery of Davin (though he wonders whether Davin may have a truth he lacks, P, 228) to the portrayal of the Citizen in “Cyclops,” who wants to kill Bloom, the true version of Christ who is attacked by conventional Christianity (U, 12.1812).

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Stephen says to Lynch that Aquinas’s definition of beauty as what pleases the sight “is clear enough to keep away good and evil, which excite desire and loathing” (P, 207–8). What Paul says is “You are not under the law, but under grace” (Badiou, 2003b, 63; Rom. 6.14). He means that Christians should not be controlled by what can be measured, but by an excess beyond measurement. Yet when Stephen is devoted to orthodox religion, his life is a series of calculated rituals: “His daily life was laid out in devotional areas . . . / Every part of his day, divided by what he regarded now as the duties of his station in life . . .” (P, 147–48). This routine is deadening, though Stephen perversely enjoys it. The period in which Stephen’s religion is alive with beauty is the one following the dreadful ordeals of the sermons and the confession. For Joyce there may be no possibility of attaining grace without passing through hell, and the first thing Christ did after the Passion (hell on earth) was to go down to hell to free the virtuous pagans. Following the experience of hell, possibilities arise that did not seem imaginable: “Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would wake” (P, 146). Joyce presents this rebirth as an illusion, for twenty lines earlier, Stephen’s enchantment is described in these terms: “In a dream he fell asleep. In a dream he rose. . . . In a waking dream he went through the quiet morning . . .” (146). Joyce realizes that the attainment of one’s goal is an illusion. Likewise, Badiou holds that Paul is less interested in some future deliverance than in the present grace of giving love (2003b, 95), and Stephen remembers this as a happy period of his life and the time he came closest to loving (P, 240). Badiou sees Paul as separating the event from the steps of dialectical progression: “This de-dialectization of the Christ-event allows us to extract a formal, wholly secularized conception of grace from the mythological core. Everything hinges on knowing whether an ordinary existence, breaking with time’s cruel routine, encounters the material chance of serving a truth, thereby becoming, through subjective division and beyond the human animal’s survival imperatives, an immortal” (Badiou, 2003b, 66).

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Removing the event from the chain of causality allows one to see its form in terms of a mathematical excess that calls out a truth that reaches beyond the constraints of the situation, approaching immortality by aiming at the unknown of the future. The myth of resurrection has value in that it breaks out of established reality. Michael Bell, in “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” sees the critical purpose of myth in Modernism as to show by framing an alternate cosmos that our primary construction of reality is “a construction within a void” (Bell, 2011, 14). Badiou holds that for Paul the Resurrection is a myth, not a fact: “not . . . falsifiable or demonstrable. It is pure event . . . transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible. . . . not in terms of facticity, but . . . of subjective disposition” (Badiou, 2003b, 45). The subject for Badiou is created as divided by the event that cannot be expressed in knowable terms. The truth of the event is an ability to believe in what cannot be known, so it rests on accepting reality that is not testable and is opposed to all established knowledge. It is actually a realization that the truth cannot be known. This creates a subject capable of passing beyond the containment of being counted as one by the state. Paul’s placing of the truth outside knowledge is a step toward Joyce’s building of a more skeptical truth by denying all assumptions, a truth beyond where knowledge can reach. The notion that Paul and Joyce share the idea of going beyond knowledge is the basis for Fr. Robert Boyle’s sensitive James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (1978). Badiou takes Paul’s line “He who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Cor. 8.2) to mean that the truth of a declaration emerges where knowledge breaks down (Badiou, 2003b, 45). And he interprets Paul’s “God has chosen the things that are not [ta me onta], in order to bring to nought those that are [ta onta]” (Badiou’s Greek, 1 Cor. 1.28) as follows: “The Christ-event causes nonbeings rather than beings to arise as attesting to God; that it consists in the abolition of what all previous discourses held as existing . . . gives a measure of the ontological subversion to

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which Paul’s antiphilosophy invites the declarant or militant” (Badiou, 2003b, 47).5 Paul’s conviction that all men are grievous sinners (Rom. 3.10), combined with his awareness that the truth is unknowable, perceives the actual world as infernal. He refers to his followers as “refuse” (King James “filth,” 1 Cor. 4:13) and is eager to take on the worst suffering. Badiou claims that it is to consolidate his leadership that Paul boasts of the torment he has brought on himself: “Often near death, five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods, once I was stoned” (Badiou, 2003b, 67; 2 Cor. 11.24–25).6 This martyr mania corresponds to the series of tortures Bloom undergoes in “Circe,” the enormous hellish climax of Ulysses that acts out Bloom’s need to punish himself by allowing his wife to cheat on him. Molly appears at the start of the hallucinations as a supercilious mistress of ceremonies (U, 15.294–353). Those who patronize prostitutes degrade themselves by paying for an imitation of love, and “Circe” expands on the way the ordinary man is debased by the restrictive powers of the Church and the state. Paul’s emphasis on the idea that “where no law is, there is no transgression” (Rom. 4.15) anticipates Blake’s “Prisons are built with stones of law, Brothels with bricks of religion” (Blake, 1988, 36). That Bloom’s moral superiority is not separable from his need to be punished is illustrated by the scene in which he imagines himself

5. In Fernie’s terms, this makes Paul demonic, and we will return to Fernie’s idea that “God and Satan are ultimately one” (Fernie, 2013, 17), a marriage of heaven and hell. 6. Perhaps the main thesis of my chapter on The Third Policeman is René Girard’s notion that the person you kill becomes your deity (Girard, 1977, 1, 258). Saul of Tarsus was a leader in the stoning of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr (Acts 7–8). After Stephen’s death, Saul converted to Christianity and became preoccupied as Paul with a drive to be martyred (as he probably was), as though Stephen were his model.

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flagellated by three society women, a scene that also shows how the lower classes are continually humiliated in their minds by the upper ones. After Mrs. Bellingham says, “Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life” (U, 15.1104), it says of Bloom, who has panted cringing (1085–86) and evidently bent over, “he offers the other cheek” (15.1109). This is a parody of Jesus’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount, “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matt. 5.39). It implies that the consideration for others at which Bloom and Christ excel always involves a desire to sacrifice oneself. Badiou argues that it is because the event must be “a completely precarious having-taken-place” that Christian declaration must be “borne humbly” and “accomplished in weakness” (2003b, 54). Paul repeatedly stresses that “when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12.10). This assertion goes against the mainstream of heroism that has built on strength, and Stephen and Bloom are unprecedented in the history of the novel as heroes overwhelmed by their weaknesses. What differentiates them from prior protagonists who were flawed, such as Hardy’s Jude Fawley or Conrad’s Lord Jim, is precisely the affirmation of the strength of their positions that resides in their weakness. The weakness is the heart of Paul’s doctrine, so Badiou says, “the message must be accomplished in weakness, for therein lies its strength” (2003b, 54). The course of Stephen’s development involves an endless series of defeats: he is paddled by a priest in the first chapter, beaten by classmates in the second, reduced to regurgitation by sermons in the third (P, 138), eliminated from the vocation he was raised for in the fourth, and persuaded in the fifth that he can no longer stay in his homeland. As he decides to give up to Cranly (who may not be interested in her) the woman he has loved, Stephen expands on his fears, the chief of which seems to be fear of God: “I fear many things: dogs, horses, firearms, the sea, thunderstorms, machinery, the country roads at night” (P, 215). Without these weaknesses, he would have no chance of serving as the agent for Joyce’s conquest of the literary world of Modernism: and he single-mindedly pursues this victory by affirming

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rather than denying weakness. So he puts himself up there beside such pathetic figures as the withdrawn Proust, the neurotic Kafka, and the suicidal Woolf. It is not hard to see how such a multiplication of misfortune leads Joyce to comedy. Stephen’s campaign follows a principle largely parallel to that of Paul, who says, “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but they have divine power to pull down strongholds” (Badiou, 2003b, 53; 2 Cor. 10.4). This power is connected to Paul’s claims that “my strength is made perfect in weakness” (Badiou, 2003b, 51; 2 Cor. 12.10). While the Church used more force than it acknowledges in conquering Europe, a good deal of its success came from charity, humility, and martyrdom. It may be that human progress is generally a matter of giving people chances to express their weaknesses. Perhaps the study of humanity consists of disability studies, advancing into areas formerly defined as faulty or invalid. In Joyce’s case, the strength in weakness rests on his ability to deny the supportive assumptions of authority. This corresponds to Paul’s iconoclasm, for Badiou’s Paul rejects virtually all existing institutions, starting with the Apostles who are founding the Church (Badiou, 2003b, 18), and this denial of every known truth claims superiority: “Philippians (2.9) speaks of Christ as ‘the name which is above every name,’ It is always to such names, rather than to the closed names proper to particular languages and sealed entities, that the subject of a truth lays claim” (2003b, 110)—the inconsistent multiple that cannot fit in any frame. Stephen is parallel in his flying by the nets of language to Paul’s forging a new discourse, and Joyce enacts the tendency to posit a supreme name, which is his own, as Leo Bersani argues in “Against Ulysses” (Bersani, 2004, 201–29). But Joyce takes his name in vain. Like Stephen, he is always mocking himself, and the strength of his insight lies in disintegrating his authority: “he had found this rudeness also in himself toward himself” (P, 232). This matches Paul’s self-abasement and is the way his mind progresses to new ideas: “His thinking was a dusk of doubt and self–mistrust . . .” (P, 177). Joyce’s self-mockery has led critics to think he condemns Stephen.

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Joyce’s denial of every comforting belief, including the authority of the subject, a denial he passes on to Beckett and O’Brien, invents a more rigorous level of truth for literature. By casting off every support, he puts himself in a defenseless position, but intelligent readers credit him with facing the utmost reality. If Paul takes suffering on himself to join divine power, Stephen insists that the pity and terror of the tragic or dramatic emotion enable the artist to comprehend both human suffering and its obscure secret cause (P, 205). The connection that Paul throws himself into is acted out and analyzed as artifice by Joyce. For Joyce, the power of truth is not the certainty of God, but doubt, and the esthetic image that must continually be formed again. In The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce (1989, 1–32), Umberto Eco explains lucidly how Aquinas’s idea of beauty as something eternal is turned by Stephen into a momentary impression (quoted in Joyce, 2007, 329–48). The work of art is displaced from reality into what Lacan calls a voluntary symptom (le sinthome, Brivic, 2008, 13–15), something that can be seen critically because it is an illusion. Joyce’s main divinity is a woman toward whom belief depends on uncertainty, since she would lose her interest if she were certain. This replaces the unified, authoritative male deity with a sympathetic female multiplicity. The bird girl who is without shame or wantonness is an event of humanity (P, 171). The temptress weary of ardent ways (P, 217) is like the women who give up their conventional powers to appear in the actuality of their indecision at the ends of Ulysses and the Wake. For the male writer they are the embodiment of “living, wounding doubt” (E, 112). Badiou finds in Paul a similar appreciation of the greatest cause of doubt in reversal: “we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that sufferings produce patience, and patience produces enduring fidelity, and enduring fidelity produces hope, and hope does not disappoint” (Badiou, 2003b, 95; Rom. 5.2). Here Paul rejoices in suffering more than in the hope of sharing God’s glory because suffering is the actuality that gives access to a more remote glory, producing the patience

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and fidelity that lead to real hope. It is suffering that produces hope by confronting uncertainty in the most arduous terms through the work of faith. The word for “suffering” here in the King James version is “tribulation,” or “severe suffering,” suggesting that the worst suffering is best. Badiou says, “The subjective dimension named ‘hope’ is the ordeal that has been overcome, not that in the name of which it has been overcome” (2003b, 95). Neither Badiou nor Badiou’s Paul approve of hell as a punitive destination, but their emphasis on the ordeal suggests something like hell as a crucial launching base or underpinning. Badiou explains that “Hope does not disappoint” “indicates the real of fidelity in the ordeal of its exercise” (2003b, 95). This means that the feeling of hope provides its own satisfaction, which Badiou describes as being not an ideal that will be attained eventually, but “charged with .  .  . what accompanies the patience of truth, or the practical universality of love, through the ordeal of the real” (2003b, 96). This is something like the pleasure an athlete gets in exercising vigorously, even though it hurts. Her excellence as an athlete may be defined more accurately by her exertion and seriousness than by her luck in competing. Here we approach one of the great differences between Paul and Stephen: Paul’s central activity is communicating, spreading the word that he sees as giving love. Stephen, although he engages in many active dialogues, especially in the last chapter of Portrait, is relatively withdrawn and doubts whether he can realize love with another person (P, 240, 244–45). One way to handle this problem is to recall that Stephen never stops wanting to reach people with his message: his devotion to art means that he is trying to communicate in new, honest ways. Moreover, Paul’s love also works through writing and is not free from abstraction, especially in view of Paul’s hostility to the sexual and the physical (“who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Rom. 8.24). Stephen, who says that he is “not at all sure” that Jesus was not the son of God (P, 243), associates himself with Jesus several times at the end of the novel, a Jesus who stands for a radical spiritual truth that

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has been corrupted by the Church Stephen despises.7 In his debate with Cranly, he justifies his rejection of his mother by saying that Jesus treated his mother discourteously (P, 242). In his diary, he sees Cranly as his precursor or John the Baptist; then he expresses his feelings through a line of Jesus’s: “Let the dead bury the dead” (P, 248; Luke 9.59). This line matches Paul’s notion that the conventional world of shared values is a satanic world of death, so Stephen’s hatred of organized religion is consistent with Paul’s revolutionary drive as elicited by Badiou. Just as Paul, following Jesus, delivered a new dispensation that focused on love defined by weakness and universalism, so Joyce delivered a new dispensation based on art and multiplicity. Some of the main features of Joyce’s universe include the replacement of religion by art, the subordination of the male deity to a human multiplicity led by a female deity, the recognition of the unconscious through language, the replacement of the state by the event, the replacement of capitalism by socialism (which Joyce seems to have seen as prefigured by Jesus), the enlargement of sexuality to include polymorphous perversity (masturbation, homosexuality, infidelity, sadomasochism, and so forth), the displacement of colonialism by subaltern cultures, the displacement of hegemonic reason by narrative and feeling, the refutation of monistic philosophy by pluralistic antiphilosophy, and the discovery of love outside its known definitions. These ideas will remain potential in a world ruled by traditional power structures, as indeed the truths of Christianity, Marxism, psychoanalysis, art, philosophy, and love are generally reduced to lifeless

7. Lernout points out that in a set of January 1904 notes for Stephen Hero in The Workshop of Daedalus, a collection of manuscript material for Portrait, edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, there is a page of notes on Jesus and other religious figures which lists features of Jesus that match Stephen, such as “Christ’s unique relations with prostitutes,” “Enigmatical Christ,” “His pride and hatred of his race,” and “intellectual type” (Scholes and Kain, 1965, 72). Lernout suggests this indicates that Joyce conceived of his protagonist from the start as an iconoclastic version of Jesus (Lernout, 2010, 114).

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conventions. This is why nothing less than seeing the world as hell can prepare to deliver us from it into human potential by burning away the consolations that enclose us. Hell leads Dante to purgatory and paradise, but Joyce keeps the ideal anchored to the real: his teleology ends in a woman’s body in revolt in Ulysses and the Wake. The form of spiritual militancy that Stephen shares with Paul need not be harmfully inconsistent with Stephen’s choice of damnation, for the subjective liberation that Paul saw as leading to faith in a preChristian era leads Stephen to revolt in a society dominated by the Church. The idea that the visionary is demonic, developed in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, allows the revolutionary aspect of Jesus to be satanic, and Joyce was inclined to see the Savior and the devil as sides of the same figure, as we see when Stephen Hero says that “Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus . . .” (222). It is because Joyce fully activates both sides, enlisting the spiritual torments of alienation against the physical ones of control, that he can see life whole and carry humanity to a new level of freedom.

3 Badiou and the Multiple Subject of Joyce’s Ulysses Lyotard’s focus on the subversive disparities of language may be combined with Badiou’s drive toward the hope of the event that breaks free of established forms. And together they can enable a process of multiplying excluded conceivabilities in order to augment human freedom by undermining a series of models so as to see any given model as an entrapment. In such a process, the innovation of Badiou’s generic should be guided by confrontation with the disturbance of Lyotard’s differend so that the hope of heaven takes its reality from being grounded in hell, the grand future of Ireland from its terrible present. This brings us to the core of Badiou’s ideas of multiplicity and subtraction, and to the pounding heart of Ulysses. Subtraction Badiou says that what presents itself is always a multiple before it is reduced to unity (BE, 23). In every situation, or numerical scene, a “multiple is retroactively legible therein as anterior to the one, insofar as the count-as-one is always a result” (BE, 24). Every object of perception can be seen either as a unity that can be counted (the consistent multiple) or as a multiplicity that exceeds any count (the inconsistent multiple, BE, 25). The inconsistent reaches beyond enclosure, so it corresponds to the excess of the event that breaks down boundaries. The logic of Badiou’s concept of multiplicity is capable of shedding light on the multiple structure of the event in Ulysses, which brings people together through transgression. 54

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We recall that this excess is the Church’s definition of sin, though it is inspirational for Lyotard and Paul. Therefore the drive toward infinity is a drive toward damnation, just as eternity is the worst part of hell. In the passage from Portrait to Ulysses, Stephen’s embrace of perdition allows him to imagine crucial elements of Ulysses. He projects the subjectivity of someone excluded from salvation when he thinks in “Nestor” of the Jews who know “the rancours massed about them” and cannot escape the “dishonours of the flesh” (U, 2.360–72).1 In “Scylla and Charybdis” he presents someone saved by damnation when he sees Shakespeare as becoming immortal through cuckoldry, predicting Bloom, as he did in “Nestor.” The events of Ulysses enact a range of activities that are damnable, focusing on areas of life that are excluded from decency. Bloom as a Jew is regarded as unmanly and marked for extermination. The Citizen wants to crucify him in “Cyclops” (12.1812) and thanks heaven when he is burned at the stake in “Circe” (15.1933). Bloom’s cuckoldry is presented as damnation through the tortures he goes through in Nighttown. Molly’s adultery is damnable, and Stephen (U, 7.717–21) quotes from a description of Paolo and Francesca, the first lost souls that Dante encounters in the Inferno, who are in hell for adultery (Dante, 2000, 88–89, canto 5, lines 92–96; see Gifford 1988, 143). The subject matter is as improper as the fragmentary Italian is strange. Badiou’s focus on how actuality exceeds restricted terms corresponds to the Revolution of the Word, a literary movement founded by Eugene Jolas in 1926 in Paris (R. Ellmann, 1982, 587–89), which embraced the relentless drive of all of Joyce’s work to steadily increase the multiple levels of each word. Colin MacCabe’s Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (1978) sees this drive as serving a radical political purpose.2 Badiou’s theories allow a critic to see mathematics structur1. References to Gabler’s edition of Ulysses give the episode number followed by the line number. 2. The political purpose of multiplying to the limit is one factor that differentiates Badiou’s ideas from Thomas Jackson Rice’s Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity (1997), the best book on Joyce’s use of mathematics. Rice does not mention Badiou.

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ing the activity of semantic multiplication in literature, but this multiplication involves division. Badiou speaks of ontological being as occupying a “radically subtractive dimension” and opposes the rigor of subtraction to the illusory “temptation of presence” (BE, 10, 27). One reading of this is that the most definite way to approach the complexity of the subject is to run through a series of definitions in order to realize and subtract the inadequacy of each and ultimately the inadequacy of all. Peter Hallward says of Badiou’s typical procedure, “the first task of any generic practice of thought is the ‘subtraction’ of whatever passes for reality so as to clear the way for a formalization of the real” (Hallward, 2003, xxxi). Badiou defines a generic set succinctly as “one that escapes all established classifications” (2001, 57n5). The real approached by escaping classification is the indiscernible, what cannot be defined by existing language. Within the concrete reality framed by language, “the real is the impossible . . .” (BE, 282). What is most significant is what is most excluded.3 A similar process of subtraction is gone through by Stephen Dedalus in Portrait, when, moving between levels of subjectivity, he embraces a different version of the truth of the subject in each chapter and then realizes that it doesn’t fit him or cover reality: practical justice in the first chapter, vice in the second, and religion in the third. In the fourth chapter he adopts art, but his art pursues change, and in the fifth, he defines the goal of art as an esthetic object that begins to fade as soon as it is perceived (P, 213) and must be perceived in a new form a million times (P, 252–53); then he determines to combine art with exile. So his art goes from the ecstatic in chapter 4 to the subtractive in chapter 5. Stephen’s realization during his religious period that he can only “encounter reality” through rituals (P, 159) implies that reality can only be known as a mathematical process, and follows

3. In 2015 the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders was real in the sense that it was impossible.

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from his devout feeling that the world exists only “as a theorem of divine power” (P, 150). His rituals involve subtracting to reach purity, which is not really parallel to Badiou’s notions because he has not yet reached Badiou’s realization that the goal is the emptiness of a conflicted multiple.4 The sermons on hell that the Church uses to subdue Stephen end with an elaborate image of a bird pecking at a mountain of grains of sand. This is meant to inculcate in Stephen the idea that eternity is beyond human conception (P, 131–32), but Stephen chooses to conceive of eternity by claiming the artistic position of the god of creation behind and beyond the world (P, 215). Here is an analogue to Badiou’s principle that infinity should not be put outside of human knowledge when set theory can take the most comprehensive view (Gibson, 2006, 6–16). At the end of Portrait Stephen twice takes as his motto “I will not serve” (P, 239, 246). This expresses a satanic desire to free humanity from subjection to any larger authority. He realizes that this aim seems impossible, but he believes it can carry humanity forward. It parallels Badiou’s event that propels the subject beyond any known definition (BE, 173–77). To apply Badiou’s terms to Stephen, by a series of events of sundering himself from all conventional belonging, he approaches pure being. Hugh Kenner, the great critic, whose politics were conservative,5 developed the idea that Stephen is a different person from Joyce, and that Joyce condemns his attempt to exceed the limits of ordinary life. Kenner’s classic essay “The Portrait in Perspective” ([1948] 1968) refers to Stephen’s desire to change the world as “indigestibly Byronic” (P, 239). Joyce, however, in his 1930 interview with the Marxist Adolf Hoffmeister described Portrait as “the picture of my spiritual 4. Badiou’s most complete account of the procedure of subtraction, which involves four stages, appears in the essay “On Subtraction,” in Badiou’s collection of essays, Conditions (2008, 113–28). 5. From 1958 to 1967, Kenner published fifty-three literary reviews (with no explicit politics) in the highly conservative National Review.

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self” (Hoffmeister, 1986, 132). So Kenner’s influential idea that Joyce saw Stephen as someone else is doubtful,6 or it refers to Joyce’s abundant irony about himself, which climaxes in the portrayal of the abject Shem in Finnegans Wake. Insofar as condemnation is seen as Joyce’s main attitude toward the artist as a young man, Stephen’s active role in Joyce’s fiction is occluded, yet the novel has been enormously popular partly because it inspired young people for a century with ideas of freedom. Lernout refers to “the catholic and more complex critic Hugh Kenner” (2010, 94), noticing that there is an adventurous skepticism about Kenner that keeps him from being a doctrinaire Catholic. Likewise, while Lernout is right to align Joyce with atheist freethinkers (2010, 103–12), he also notices that Stephen in Ulysses is not atheistic, but “anti-theistic” (Lernout, 2010, 189), and Joyce may likewise be in conflict or competition with God.7 But for a person in this position, God exists and plays an active role. God is in charge of the existing world, and Stephen and Joyce want to challenge Him in order to change it. Stephen’s determination to change the world is expressed in “Nestor,” the chapter of Ulysses about the injustice of history. Here Stephen thinks, “It must be movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible” (2.67), meaning that the possibilities excluded by

6. There is no greater critic of Joyce than Kenner, and his critique of Stephen had substantial value in questioning the tendency to idealize him. It may be that Joyce in 1930 saw his “spiritual self” as quite limited. But Kenner’s brilliant arguments may have led to a widespread tendency to overly deprecate Stephen. Stephen is denounced further in Kenner’s Ulysses (1980, 16–17), and other critics who have taken negative views of Stephen include Joseph Buttigieg (1987, 67–94; Suzette Henke (2006, 317–36); and Mark Wollaeger (2003, 343–56). Gibson refers to “the assassination job he [Kenner] carries out on Stephen’s character” (2013, 77n) 7. Lacan calls Joyce a heretic, meaning someone who chooses (Lacan, 2005, 15), and Roy Gottfried is perceptive in calling Joyce a schismatic, explaining that whereas heresy is a mistake by someone trying to be right, schism is an attitude of opposition that one knows to be considered wrong (Gottfried, 2008, 16–17).

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oppression can be created by change. His focus on change is behind the changes of styles in Ulysses, a book that is organized by Stephen’s violation of rules. He predicts this transformation in “Proteus,” where he strenuously unfolds violent changes in language, perception, and feeling at a rate without precedent. After this (and the next three chapters, which take place before the end of “Proteus”), each episode will have its own style, focus, and system of values, its own world. One correspondence Joyce lists on his Gorman schema for Ulysses is “Proteus—Primal Matter” (R. Ellmann, 1972, after 187). The constant change in this episode invokes the general idea of matter before it is anything in particular. This matches Christopher Norris’s definition of the generic in his Badiou’s Being and Event: A Reader’s Guide: “the politically as well as mathematically crucial role of the generic part—is that this universally shared because minimal property of ‘mere’ being is just what provides the basic orientation for any project of thought that would seek to go beyond received ideas of legal membership or proper belonging” (2009, 227). As Proteus tells Menelaos where Odysseus is, Stephen’s encounter with indiscernibility connects him to the multitudinous event of Ulysses. To approach actual infinity, Ulysses uses every unit of the text to build a greater complexity than had ever been imagined in literature. Joyce’s structural schemata operate to expand the maximum possible range of opposed values and dimensions in each chapter and among them. Just as the Greeks had disparate gods, the schemata present authority as a series of inconsistent categories. They operate as a system of axioms or undemonstrated assumptions to represent the framework of reality as an arbitrary construction, just as set theory is built on axioms as a way to avoid claims on a prior reality. Every active unit of Ulysses goes beyond itself to add more levels of complexity than have been possible. This matches Badiou’s definition of the event as “something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable” (2013, 9). The second three episodes, taking place at the same time as the first three, add levels on which Stephen and Bloom are interacting with each other. For example, at eleven o’clock, young Stephen confronts the sea, the source of life,

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while the middle-aged Bloom confronts the graveyard. The seventh episode, “Aeolus,” adds headlines, assuming the power to bring in material from beyond the realistic frame. Badiou’s term for such patterns, derived from the work of Paul J. Cohen, is forcing, the adding of a new element that changes the set (Gibson, 2006, 12–13, 136, 410–30). As Tony Thwaites observes, the consciousness that speaks on the first page of “Aeolus” tends to be “a hubbub of things traveling in all directions” (2011). Rather than an individual consciousness, it is a plenum of multiplicity toward which the characters are proceeding (U, 7.1–32). In “Lestrygonians” the body speaks as the prose imitates digestion; and in “Scylla and Charybdis” Stephen speaks through Shakespeare to anticipate the cuckold Bloom. In “Wandering Rocks” the city speaks, and the music in “Sirens” calls attention to multiplying, simultaneous voices. Ideology speaks as the submerged political levels of discourse in “Cyclops”; and desire projects its fantasies, calculations, debasements, and rhythms in “Nausicaa,” which mixes the minds of two people in a transitional paragraph between Gerty MacDowell and Bloom in which their thoughts run together (13.742–50). Each style is a new attempt to capture reality and uses itself up to be replaced by the next, continuing the process of subtraction begun in Portrait. Joyce testifies to this progressive subtraction in a 1919 letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver: “each successive episode, dealing with some province of artistic culture (rhetoric or music or dialectic), leaves behind it a burnt field. Since I wrote ‘Sirens,’ I find it impossible to listen to music . . .” (SL, 241). The styles can be observed using themselves up in “Cyclops,” where the parodies often start seriously, then decline into the ridiculous, as in the nationalistic one that begins “In Inisfail the fair there lies a land . . .” and leads to “other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated” (12.68, 73). By using up a category of ideology, each parody “indiscerns” an area of knowledge, going outside its coherence. Joyce, however, generates an enormous field of indiscernibility by multiplying levels of subjective activity, the opposite method from Beckett’s stripping of language down toward silence, as described in Badiou’s On Beckett (2003a, 11).

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“Oxen of the Sun”: Indiscerning the Subject of Ulysses The procedure of subtraction has its most concentrated development in “Oxen of the Sun,” which anatomizes this process to indiscern the subject of Ulysses. Kiberd is right when he says in Ulysses and Us that “‘Oxen of the Sun’ is the episode in which Joyce’s book is finally born, in that its author can now sense that it will take a definite, living shape” (2009, 206). I believe the shape of the novel that is born in “Oxen” takes its most concrete form in the meeting of Stephen and Bloom. Up to “Oxen,” they have been in different frames or sets, but from “Oxen” on, they start to share an indiscernible identity. “Oxen” identifies the subject of Ulysses through their meeting and every phrase of “Oxen” serves to constitute this subject. This is because the identity of the subject consists of a series of differences or negations, and each of the styles of “Oxen” uses up a possible way of seeing reality so as to point to a real that is beyond any particular discourse. By reaching the real beyond language, one can generate a powerful connection, but Lacan’s real, what is outside the artificiality of language (Fink, 1995, 24–25),8 can never be reached by words—it can only be approached by stripping away levels of appearance. Kiberd recognizes that the main effect of the styles in “Oxen” is subtraction: “By aligning so many styles side by side, it makes the reader keenly aware of just how little any style can do, how much more is excluded than included in it” (2009, 212). Joyce says in a letter to Frank Budgen in 1920, “Bloom is the spermatozoon, .  .  . Stephen the embryo” (SL, 252). This indicates that the two men are meant to join together in a single totality or set, but the constant shift from one style to another—before any style gets established, as Kiberd notes (2009, 213)—demonstrates that this

8. In book 20 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (1998), Lacan defines the real, what is supposed to exist before the imposition of language, as follows: “The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse in formalization” (93), which means that the real can only appear when language is conflicted or errant. The real component of every word is the part that does not make sense.

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totality is a multiplicity that is not consistent. The building of the embryo toward birth is a process of division, not only because the single cell formed by the sperm and the egg divides exponentially, but because what starts as undifferentiated tissue separates into differentiated layers that become different organs, structures, and systems of the body—such as digestive, skeletal, muscular, nervous, hormonal, and reproductive. Joyce’s notesheets for “Oxen” include a diagram listing features for each of the nine months of gestation (Herring, 1972, 162–63), and there are indications in “Oxen” that the text is divided into nine months (Janusko, 1983, 39–54). The differences between the styles, each of which carries its own systems of history, philosophy, culture, temperament, and so forth, also represent the different vital systems that interact within the body, though each system has its own interests, as far from the others as the digestive system (Sir John Mandeville, 14.141–59) is from the brain (Sir Thomas Browne, 14.380–400?). Between these two passages is one in the style of John Wycliffe in which Stephen says that he is interested in wine and not bread (281–84), and this may suggest the separation of the intellectual or spirit from the physical. None of the systems of the body can define its identity, which is situated between them. We may say that this identity belongs without being included to indicate that it is more like a contained indiscernible than a frame. Cognitive psychology recognizes that human discourse is the product of different systems in the brain (sensory, memory, judgment, and so forth) interacting, as well as influences from elsewhere in the body (Damasio, 2006, xxiv, 139). Each style subtracts from the real it claims to represent, ousting possibilities that might have developed if it had not taken its particular form. Kiberd points out that the anthology of English prose by William Peacock that Joyce used as the main source for “Oxen” was an imperialist parade of English civilization (2009, 212). The fact that only a few of the writers imitated in “Oxen” are Irish, and they are Anglo-Irish, means that the language that the newborn will inherit is one in which the conquerors have obliterated sensitive native voices. The baby who is actually born in “Oxen,” Mortimer Edward Purefoy,

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has a graceless English name, and this suggests that what is born between Stephen and Bloom may be subject to the limits of its colonized situation. Its potential, however, may take it beyond colonization. This potential is developed more richly than that of just about any baby in Western literature but Christ. In mathematical terms, each author’s stylistic, historical, intellectual, and personal features constitute a series of subsets belonging to the larger subset of that author, just as each level of organic development has its own needs and structures. They interact in ways more complex than ordinary mathematics can calculate, ways that are suggested by Paul J. Cohen’s 1963 concept of forcing in set theory, in which the adding of a new element changes the nature of the set (BE, 410–30). Badiou says that by turning the indiscernible to the undecidable, or turning what could not be seen to a problem, forcing articulates “a possible being of the subject” (BE, 426). All of these styles are displaced by a revolutionary Irish context to the extent that what they really express is alienation or disruption, and this displacement brings about the birth event of the new Irish subject. The more one attends to the apparatus by which identity is constructed, the more one approaches what Badiou calls the presentation of presentation; and he says that this presentation squared is the way one constitutes the purest being as one realizes in the fullness of its negation the arbitrary, imposed nature of any particular identity.9 It is a realization of the groundlessness of any appearance that is the real level of actuality. In fact Badiou argues that the key contribution of Greek philosophy through Plato was to replace the paradigm of the poem with that of the matheme, transforming being from an authentic presence to a subtraction of multiplicity (BE, 125–26). Consciousness is built on taking responsibility for the presentation of so-called reality, and it is purified by being cleansed of illusions.

9. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit speaks of the pure insight of consciousness in which all particulars are dissolved (1977, 331).

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The rationale for the changing stylistic frameworks of the other episodes of Ulysses is presented in “Oxen” in hyperactive, accelerated form. Identity shifts utterly from paragraph to paragraph. The multiple interactions of “Oxen” figure forth the actual infinity of the human subject. This multiplicity of multiplicities is the main thing born in Ulysses. And the fact that it involves both Stephen and Bloom is a powerful model of the way that identification reaches beyond any particular unity. If the shifts in “Oxen” cause it to be a presentation of presentation, then it manifests the mathematical activity of being that precedes any frame, including individual personality. The multiplicity that the two protagonists may or may not have access to is a field of infinite potential that allows their connection to be the central event of the book. Unfolding the Void The combining of identities and the adding of voices in “Oxen” are extended powerfully in “Circe,” where the unconscious reveals a range of illicit fantasies not approached earlier and objects speak more expressively, difference within speaking through difference without. In Badiou’s terms, this material is included without belonging as a series of subsets that cannot be defined or counted (BE, 81). The pattern of people’s thoughts overlapping is grotesquely exaggerated as everyone’s unconscious mixes with everyone else’s in the phantasmagoria (15.4140–50). If the extravagant hallucinations of “Circe” may readily be seen as carrying forward the snowballing of possibilities in Ulysses, the following “Eumaeus” episode seems to halt this advance. The style of “Eumaeus,” which imitates tiredness, apparently shows a dwindling of multiplicational drive. But because Bloom and Stephen are exhausted, the language of the chapter introduces new levels of possibility through mistakes—by revealing that there is a penumbra (a term of Badiou’s) of errors surrounding every supposedly correct choice, just as “Eumaeus” claims that unfaithful romantic attachments surround every faithful one (16.1541–49). Most phrases in “Eumaeus” are wrong in some way, but they express things that could only appear in incorrect language. “Stephen thought to think of

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Ibsen” (16.52) expresses the difficulty Stephen has framing his association, so it reveals the machinery of his thinking before it is finalized. When we are told that Bloom “threw an odd eye at the same time now and then at” the suspicious John Corley (16.215), the contradictory redundancy that confuses time expresses Bloom’s uneasiness. From a traditional perspective, the margin of what is wrong is affiliated with the demonic as a continuing emergence of what is not permitted. At one point Bloom reflects on Stephen, “though you wouldn’t think he had it in him, yet you would” (16.1478). This contradiction indicates how indiscernible Stephen is to Bloom. The youth is debauched, disheveled, and incoherent. What he says—such as “Ireland must be important because it belongs to me” (16.1164)—makes no sense to Bloom. Yet Bloom follows Stephen because he suspects that Stephen may be a genius with something invaluable to offer, despite the evidence and even though Bloom cannot comprehend Stephen’s value. This pattern, which predominates in Bloom’s relation to Stephen, is a strong example of the indiscernible (which must not be known) forcing something inadmissible into Bloom’s life. It is central to the evental action of Ulysses, especially because it is inseparable from Bloom’s allowing Molly to cheat on him without knowing why. Stephen and Molly, as we will see, may be parts of the same event. The creatively important thing about Ireland is that it belongs to Stephen as the indiscernible. Bloom asks, “What belongs [?]” (16.1166), seeing Stephen as mistaken, and readers who share Bloom’s ignorance miss out on Stephen’s importance for him. If we recognize that the set of “correct” (or Standard English) phrases can be multiplied by using incorrect phrases to express things that cannot be put properly, we increase the possibilities of presentation exponentially and give each wrong phrase event an accent of liberation. What the wrongness of language indicates in Badiou’s terms is that “language does not go so far as to institute the ‘there is’” (BE, 47), and the realization that being is outside representation leads to “Ithaca,” which presents the world as a mathematical abstraction. The errors of “Eumaeus” lead to the void of “Ithaca” because, as Badiou says, “the void is the latent errancy of the being of presentation” (BE,

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76). That is, behind every coherent expression is an incoherence linked to the void. “Ithaca” is the episode that focuses on math, suspending reality between a question and an answer. While the identities of asker and responder switch and become general, the usual pattern is for Stephen the guest to raise the questions and Bloom the host to reply. Many questions are answered accurately, but the important implied questions about the feelings of the characters remain unanswered. As Margot Norris puts it, the “catechism frequently obscures rather than elucidates what is going on between Bloom and Stephen” (2011, 199). The piling up of facts produces a void, and the possibilities of Stephen and Bloom getting to know and develop each other remain seemingly unrealized as Stephen refuses Bloom’s hospitality after showing his anxiety about Bloom by singing an anti-Semitic song (18.801–28). When Bloom sees the stars at the end of the time the two men share, he meditates first on the greatest possible expansion of space and then on its tiniest contraction. So he focuses on the limits where numbers are carried so far that they become incomprehensible, just as the meticulous multiplication of details in the chapter ends up essentially revealing nothing: “if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere never was reached” (18.1068). This abandonment of calculation at its limits expresses Bloom, who gives up complex lines of thought because they seem fruitless, as Janina Levin pointed out to me in conversation. As Bloom and Stephen approach parting, Stephen is described as moving from the known to the unknown through the void, while Bloom “proceeds energetically” from the unknown to the known through the same void (17.1013–20). Stephen, as a “conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void,” knows that he is an interaction between interior and exterior and that it is impossible to escape the fact that both are founded on the void. Bloom, however, as a competent citizen who manages without a key, moves from the unknown to the known, seeing the void incertitude in which he dwells less as

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something he concentrates on than as something he hopes to escape, though it is the source of his creativity. In fact, Bloom’s getting into the house without a key parallels his occupying Molly without opening her door. The complementary situations of the two men correspond to Badiou’s argument that the void is the foundation of all numbers and therefore of all being that can be spoken of. “The sole term from which ontology’s compositions without concepts weave themselves is necessarily the void” (BE, 57). Stephen’s movement from the known to the unknown defines what Badiou calls the inconsistent multiple. The inconsistent multiple results from the fact that to count one, you must assume a multiplicity behind it, so clearly defined numbers are always the result of an undefinable (“without concepts”) multiple underlying them, which corresponds to the void. Badiou says, “every structured presentation unpresents the void” (BE, 55), meaning that to give a coherent form to anything is to deny the void behind it. Therefore “it is necessary to think, under the name of the void, the outside-place on the basis of which any place—any situation—maintains itself with respect to its being” (BE, 77). The inconsistent multiple breaks the laws and gives rise to the event and the possibility of new realities, so Stephen’s position attaches him to all of the new developments in the novel. Badiou says, “every reference to the void produces an excess over the count-as-one, an irruption of inconsistency . . .” (BE, 75). Stephen says in “Scylla and Charybdis” that the world is founded upon the void (9.842), and it is his movement toward the void that propels Ulysses toward levels of creative perception that could not have been conceived before it.10 Bloom’s situation as the consistent multiple is linked to rational numbers that can be counted, and much of Bloom’s thought in “Ithaca” consists of adding up his list of property, such as the contents of his house and his budget for the day. His greatest and most

10. Edward Howell sees Stephen as following Badiou’s “truth procedures” in his unpublished paper “Epiphany and Event: Joyce through Badiou.”

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satisfying summation is his seven-page vision of his estate in Flowerville (17.1497–1753), but this does not exist, so it demonstrates that materialism is based on fantasy—and suggests Bloom is more dependent on inconsistency than he can realize. In contrast to Stephen, Bloom reacts to the problems of the world by desisting from speculation “Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other more acceptable phenomena in place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed” (17.1009–11). Though Kiberd is impressed by Bloom’s wisdom, Bloom is in bondage to established categories, and the masochism he projects in “Circe” articulates the crux of his life. A Bloom who was not afflicted by cuckoldry would have far less wisdom and no need for Stephen because Bloom would not sense that he was incomplete and that Stephen could relieve his entrapment. Kiberd’s support for Bloom is justified in that Bloom is frequently contented, but the Dedalian side of Ulysses realizes that Bloom’s contentment rests on an illusion of possession. It has often been observed that Stephen and Bloom share thoughts without communicating.11 These overlaps suggest that the two men are meant to meet, but it may be that they are so unable to communicate that their meeting may be an ironic portrayal of the failure of their two sides—artist and citizen, son and father, spirit and matter, and so forth—to be reconciled. Cheryl Herr says that the coincidences express a nostalgia for unrealized wholeness that haunts the novel (2004, 77). This corresponds to Badiou’s statement that since the Greek mathematical model displaced the earlier poetic one that sought natural presence, poetry remained as a supplementary temptation toward a return that Heidegger saw as nostalgic (BE, 126). But this does not explain why the coincidences exceed probability so far, suggesting a need for the supernatural.

11. Some of the main examiners of these coincidences are Robert M. Adams, who discovered them (1962, 95–98); myself (1985, 145–53); and John Rickard (1999, 90–92).

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The Multiple Subject The mathematical perspective invoked in “Ithaca” provides a good solution to this quandary. The possibility that Stephen and Bloom can fuse—and Joyce wrote “Fusione di Bloom e Stephen” over the last three episodes on the schema he sent to Carlo Linati (R. Ellmann, 1972, after 187)—exists; but so does the actuality that they do not seem to. It is not necessary to reject either possibility, or to imagine a spiritual realm in which the men unite. In terms of the actual infinity that the book builds toward so prodigiously, both possibilities exist, together with a huge penumbra of alternatives that extend over a field in which any reigning reality is constantly undercut. In this margin individuals overlap on the most active levels of their lives. They enact the principle that a single individual mind, as it has been shaped by culture and its situations, is incomplete, and can only contain part of human consciousness. In Ulysses, where Stephen is generally seen with Bloom’s compassion and Bloom is generally seen with Stephen’s irony, what is usually speaking at any point is neither Stephen nor Bloom, but a circulation between the two. This pattern is more pronounced between Shem and Shaun in the Wake, where each is virtually always described by the other. Bloom represents what Stephen denies and Stephen represents what Bloom denies, so that the knowledge of each would allow the other to see how he is destroying himself, Bloom through unselfishly tormenting himself for Molly’s sake and Stephen by selfishly refusing human connections. Therefore as each approaches the other, he approaches belief in his doom, and this may be why they come together as “Blephen” and “Stoom” (17.549–51). But to see the devilish inconsistence of their positions is liberating, so Bloom and Stephen enlarge each other by failing to communicate, by confronting the otherness of each other, the void of indiscernibility as the source of possibility. Badiou says “art, science and politics do change the world, not by what they discern but by what they indiscern therein” (BE, 343). In one of Badiou’s set theorems, a quasi-complete situation undergoes generic extension into a larger set (BE, 510), and Badiou says that

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the action of the event can extend to many people. The major event of Ulysses is an action that forms an inconsistent set and expands subjectivity into a multiple subject that includes Bloom, Stephen, Molly, Boylan, and others. In “Proteus,” Stephen mentions Adam Kadmon, the cabalistic concept of the giant who united all of humanity (3.41), and this conception appears in HCE in the Wake, who includes everybody. The cabalistic model of the origin of the universe is the primary model of the creation of the world developed in the Lesson chapter of the Wake (especially 261–62). This model corresponds to Badiou’s thinking in that it starts with the void and unfolds itself through a series of numbers. Badiou’s model and Joyce’s differ from the Cabala in that the subject of both is a series of encounters that do not have a fixed order or shape. Northrop Frye, in Fearful Symmetry, says of Adam Kadmon that this “universal man who contained within his limbs all heaven and earth” is central to Blake’s vision and to all poetic mythology (1962, 125). So one cannot develop a model of imaginative thought without it. Frye adds, “whether we see the larger unit as one man or as a multitude of individuals is a matter of perspective.” In Badiou’s terms, this refers to the distinction between the consistent multiple, which forms the one of authority (a single number) and the inconsistent one that leads to the revolutionary event. The most vital effects of imagining the union of all may lie in realizing its impossibility, just as the connection between Stephen and Bloom may be most generative in its failure. Badiou speaks of four generic procedures through which the event works toward progress—science, art, politics, and love (BE, 16)—and they all depend on the idea of people joining together. Science seems the least inclined toward such fusion, yet scientists rely on reinforcement from each other and aim at the ideal of the most inclusive bodies of theory that can be universally shared, and Badiou believes in universality. Art is based on the assumption that people will perceive what the artist intended, as though reactions were not idiosyncratic. With politics, the idea of people joining together is obvious, as in the socialist belief that people can give up selfishness. Patriots and

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revolutionaries may die for their sisters. As for love, the idea of people fusing together defines it, and the central event in Ulysses is primarily erotic, a sublimated version of the union of father and son that Stephen describes in “Scylla and Charybdis” as the most forbidden sexual connection (9.850–52). Here he says that “the church is founded” on the “mystery” of fatherhood “and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude . . .” (9.840–42). In the Ethics, Badiou speaks of the event as fusing people: “For example, the subject induced by fidelity to an amorous encounter. . . . The lovers as such enter into the composition of one loving subject, who exceeds them both. / In the same way, the subject of a revolutionary politics is not the individual militant. . . . It is a singular production, which has taken different names (sometimes ‘Party’, sometimes not)” (2001, 43). So Badiou’s subject created by an event includes more than one person in many of its strongest forms. It stands for both the personal excess and the excess of the people as an incalculable group, the driving force of political history. The action of Ulysses is designed with the elaborate construction of an asymmetrical profane cathedral so as to show people joining together in ways that posit the nonexistent unity of a set. For Badiou, a set, as an inconsistent multiplicity, can never be a whole: “it is impossible that every part of a multiple belongs to it” (BE, 89, also 83). While this statement appears amid weighty paradoxes, it is supported by the “excess of inclusion over belonging” (BE, 89), which is related to the idea that the frame cannot be part of the set, so the set reaches beyond itself. The inconsistency of the set generated by the evental action of the joining of these figures expands subjectivity to explode traditional notions of action, property, gender, and individuality. The love involved in this action is provided by Bloom, who, on a major, partly unconscious level, sacrifices himself to allow Molly to get together with Boylan because he wants to enhance the beauty of his wife by liberating her. It is clear that Molly and Boylan have no love for each other, so the love that is expressed by their passion is Bloom’s. Molly

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might find Boylan too degrading if she did not have Bloom’s love, while Boylan might not be so attracted to her if she had no husband, and her affair with Boylan might make her a fallen woman if she were not married. Moreover, the novel ends by affirming resonantly that Molly returns the love Bloom has shown for her through Boylan, a love that could not be expressed without Boylan. Molly mentions several times that Bloom is excited by her affair with Boylan. She thinks about Bloom, “the last time he came on my bottom when was it the night Boylan gave my hand a great squeeze” (18.77), indicating that Bloom, who seems to have been with Molly when Boylan squeezed her (“in my hand there steals another,” 18.79), was aroused by it. She also thinks, “hed never have the courage with a married woman that’s why he wants me and Boylan” (18.1254), and “Ill let him know if thats what he wants that his wife is fucked” (1510). So Boylan provides stimulation that revives feelings between Bloom and Molly, adding a pathological but active dimension to their marriage. That Blazes satisfies Bloom’s homosexual desire is a strong area of Bloom’s feeling that Molly has much more access to than Bloom, who represses it. This is an example of how his subjectivity is distributed to her, mapping out the multiplicity of the subject. Among the various models of groups that form a totality in the Wake, such as the “Antonius-Burrus-Caseous grouptriad” (FW, 167.4), the closest to Bloom’s version of the eternal triangle may be the bizarre legal case of Honuphrius in 3.4, a version of HCE’s family that entangles a double-digit number of people in incest and perversion and is referred to as “the commonest of all cases arising out of umbrella history” (573.35). “[U]mbrella history” brings people together. In the Ethics Badiou supports Lacan’s maxim “do not give up on your desire,” which he translates as “do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know” (Badiou 2001, 47). This means one should take on new relationships for “the engagement of one’s singularity,” so Badiou is capable of recognizing situations in which adultery may be productive. This last notion is suggested in Joyce’s story “A Painful Case,” which condemns Mr. Duffy morally for not committing adultery with Mrs. Sinico, who kills herself after Duffy

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rejects her because she is married, and who is mentioned in Ulysses (6.997, 17.947, 1454). Badiou supports “reasoning via the absurd . . . the adventurous .  .  . procedure of fidelity, its freedom .  .  .” which involves a mathematical “obligation to infidelity” (BE, 251). He adds, “Being, as pronounceable, is unfaithful to itself” (BE, 280), meaning that it exceeds any particular formulation. This argument illuminates the logic of Ulysses by revealing infidelity to be an inevitable step in discovering new potentials. The idea that Bloom is a sensible person who just happens to be (isn’t really) a cuckold is as useful for harnessing conventional values to Ulysses as the idea that Joyce condemns Stephen. We must recognize that Bloom has no chance of being Bloom without being cuckolded. That infidelity is eminently damnable, as in Dante’s vision of Francesca da Rimini (Inferno, canto 5), highlights the tendency for all of the extra levels of life that Ulysses asserts to be as traditionally accursed as the Jews. Cuckoldry is not usually seen as damnable, but it approaches damnability in cases where it is sexually satisfying to the cuckold. Moreover, in Bloom’s case, cuckoldry is accompanied by continual anguish. The freedom for the group event is provided by Molly, and Bloom certainly would not meet Stephen if Molly did not take the initiative to make love to Boylan, forcing Bloom out of the shelter of home and the convention of completeness. If Molly is courageous in breaking rules, Blazes seems less free in his compulsion to seduce every attractive woman he meets. Boylan exhibits hardly any subjectivity, and Joyce may be justified in being unfair to the aggressive male, who has usually been glorified. Boylan could be seen as a sex tool that Bloom and Molly use to make love to each other, but his Boylan battery provides energy. At the same time that Molly is the freest character on one level, she is enslaved on another in her need to be dominated by a man, which is related to the unfairness of her position as a woman. This need tends to project a primary authority, so it may be related to her belief in God (18.1563–70). Hélène Cixous argues in The Exile of James Joyce that Joyce’s male protagonists generally find that the women they love have fantastic attachments to other men that cannot be overcome (1972,

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523–54). This represents the impossibility of both the man’s desire to possess the woman completely and the woman’s desire for a man who will be more than human. It is the excess that the unity of monogamy cannot contain. Both Molly’s freedom and her slavery can only operate through Bloom because only Bloom could allow her to have Boylan, to multiply herself creatively by having one man who loves her and another who overwhelms her. This shows how much of her is invested in Bloom. Yet even this is not enough for her. The symbol of the freedom Bloom gives her is Stephen. Stephen allows Bloom to express his imaginative side, and Bloom uses Stephen to win Molly’s love back when she dreams of Stephen (or Bloom’s sensitivity) at the end and realizes that Boylan is a swine (18.1310–70). In appreciating Stephen, she is appreciating Bloom’s freedom, which allows him to give her away. There is also a level on which Stephen may learn from Bloom how to accept the uncontrollable aspect of women; for Stephen earlier projected cuckoldry as a solution to his problem when he described Shakespeare in “Scylla and Charybdis,” the central indication of the extent to which Bloom is Stephen’s projection, an example of “meeting ourselves” (U, 9.1046). But Stephen resists Bloom’s offerings and maintains an impossible position, resolutely refusing food, shelter, and companionship. He cannot live for long at this rate, and Bloom has to rescue him. But this is the function that Stephen represents in the multiple of Ulysses, the inconsistent situation presented on this day, and to the extent that he would learn his lesson, he would lose his function. Kiberd concludes that Stephen as the avant-garde is wrong because his attitude is not viable (2009, 64–66), while Bloom in his conventional wisdom is right (2009, 257, 352–56). But rather than positing right and wrong, Ulysses follows the principle Joyce presents in his 1903 essay “The Bruno Philosophy” and repeats later: “Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation . . .” (Joyce, 2000, 94; FW, 92.8–10). Bloom as consistency and Stephen as inconsistency are both necessary aspects of multiplicity, its ability to follow the law that counts it, and its ability to extend beyond the count into creative truth.

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One problem involved in seeing Badiou’s evental activity in Ulysses is that Badiou specifies four generic procedures, love, art, science, and politics. While it is important to distinguish the operations involved in these fields, it is clear that they overlap. A revolutionary novel can be artistic and political, as can science, and a sonnet can combine art and love. Badiou tends to see art as mathematical, as in “Qu’est-ce que la littérature pense?” which says that art turns the infinite into the finite (2005b, 36). Gibson uses the term événementialité for an evental play that is not tied to a particular moment (2006, 138–42), and Badiou’s events may be as large as the French Revolution and the twentieth century. The eventiality in Ulysses seems to be primarily erotic, and Badiou says that love is individual “because it interests no-one apart from the individuals in question” (BE, 340). He doesn’t specify the number, but seems to be thinking of two. Before Ulysses, Joyce presented in Exiles an erotic situation involving four people, and in 1899 Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fleiss, “I am accustoming myself to regarding every sexual act as an event between four individuals” (Freud, 1961, 33n). Badiou places importance on the idea of fidelity to the event. Bloom shows his fidelity to the event of Ulysses by accepting Molly’s infidelity and phenomenally by kissing her rear end, which suggests that he subordinates himself. The multiplicity of unity is reflected by the fact that fidelity tends to involve accepting infidelity. Molly shows her fidelity to excess by affirming her attachment to the multiplicity of Bloom, Boylan, Stephen, and Lieutenant Mulvey, all of whom she is stimulated by at the end. But the greatest practice of fidelity is Stephen’s, for he writes the novel, every phrase of which manifests the event of multiplicity. This is clear as soon as we remove the blinders imposed by the extreme idea that Joyce’s first novel is not a portrait of the artist as a young man. The best defense of the realization that Stephen will be the author of the novels that present him may be given by John Paul Riquelme in Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction (1983, 84–85). It is remarkable—a tribute to Kenner’s genius—that such an evident fact should require defense. Joyce put emphasis on making it clear that Stephen would write Joyce’s works. For example, in “Aeolus,” Stephen improvises a story

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called “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, or The Parable of the Plums” (7.923–1057). This story is close to the ones in Dubliners, and Joyce precedes it with the line “Dubliners” (7.922). In “Wandering Rocks,” Mulligan says of Stephen, “He is going to write something in ten years” (10.1089). This refers to Portrait, on the last page of which Joyce wrote “Dublin 1904 / Trieste 1914.” Joyce did not finish Portrait until 1915, but he inscribed it so as to honor Stephen’s pledge as recorded in Ulysses. Joyce originally planned to have the action of Portrait, when it was Stephen Hero, extend to June 16, 1904,12 and Portrait and Ulysses are to a great extent one novel that gives equal time to its two protagonists. Ulysses is an expanded sixth chapter of Portrait (the fifth already expands) in which Stephen discovers—though he struggles to deny it—that people are connected to each other. Fidelity to this discovery is carried on by the Wake, in which everyone is part of an inconsistent unity. In the Hoffmeister interview, Joyce says that all of his works are a single work that is always in progress (1986, 131). Badiou says, “fidelity surpasses all the results in which its finite-being is set out” (BE, 236), so Joyce’s fidelity to Bloomsday involved the expansion of Ulysses far beyond what he imagined at the start of its composition into a multiplicity in which every part changes the nature of every other one endlessly. If one imagines the characters outside of the entangled set Ulysses constructs, they become like a digestive system without a respiratory system, or subsets without a set to contain them. The novel has been seen as projecting a trinity,13 but Boylan may make it a quaternity, May Dedalus a quincunx, and Gerty MacDowell and Mulvey are two other figures who play active roles. In fact, every figure in the book is part of the shifting totality. It is true that this totality plays the role 12. Richard Ellmann reports that in 1905 Joyce intended to have Stephen Hero include the argument in the Martello Tower (1982, 207). 13. The best treatment of this idea is Robert Boyle’s “Worshipper of the Word: James Joyce and the Trinity.” Fr. Boyle finds a theological basis for seeing Molly as the Holy Ghost (1982, 123–40).

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of God, and a complex version of God; but a more specific truth is that this totality has its greatest being and reality as a mathematical multiplicity. God may or may not exist in Ulysses, as in the world, but mathematical form does exist. Badiou argues that the idea of unity entails the idea of God (BE, 113), an argument Joyce could derive from Aquinas (Aquinas, 1955, 158–64). But set theory shows that the idea of unity is an illusion—the One is always constructed or formed—and supports Joyce’s replacing God with a multiplicity on whose inconsistency life depends. The including of God within a larger mathematical context is a key move of Ulysses, parallel to similar proliferative operations performed on the institutions of marriage, property, fatherhood, government, and identity. In his analysis of Spinoza’s theology, Badiou says, “metastructure is . . . causality . . . understood as the immanent production of the divine substance” (BE, 115). This means that causality is always a comprehensive mathematical arrangement that allows a situation to make sense, taking on God’s power to control reality. So in expanding Ulysses toward actual infinity, Joyce places emphasis on the author playing the role of God (in “Scylla and Charybdis,” for example). His purpose in taking on divinity is to reform the idea of God in the direction of liberation, focusing on its impossibility and self-division and on the inconsistencies of the world, which propel creativity into escape from any unifying order, aiming at giving each novel a new world in every section. Molly realizes that writing has this effect: “see it all round you like a new world” (18.739). This is a god function of multiplicity and change, which may reflect the historical fact that God is different for each era; but it may add up to pandemonium, Satan’s kingdom, an uproar of displaced gods, such as the hubbub of the Wake or the central core of Ulysses. Such inconsistency is revolutionary because it breaks out of every container, every count-as-one, and the virtually endless multiplicity that Ulysses builds is replete with possibilities of freedom that actually exist as possibilities. Within this vast field God is an endless series tangled in uncertainty, English literature gives birth to an Irish baby,

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the oppression of the state is calculable and surpassable, the wife plays a more active role than the husband, the father can act creatively by making no claim on the son—in fact he is not his father—and the husband is creative by freeing his wife. All of these breaches of expectation—the denial of unity; the confusion of God; the postcolonialization of English literature; the attacks on authority, paternity, and monogamy—may be seen in traditional terms as leading in the direction of Hades. Yet in the endlessly opening framework of Badiou’s event, the evils that define the hell of conventional restrictions expand into new possibilities of liberation. But the limits of damnation must be recalled to keep the ideal from becoming unreal, to keep the personal in touch with the political. The political implication of cuckoldry is indicated by Levi-Strauss’s observation that in patriarchal societies the key object of exchange is women (1969, 36), so that they are the basis of all property. Men desire money to get the best women. But in Ulysses every propriety in my last paragraph is surpassed by an excess that undoes it. The principle of giving up property seems to be an impossible one to realize, but it exists as a possibility that Stephen and Bloom share: they are both attracted to it as they are attracted to each other. Bloom’s desire to give his wife away is parallel to Stephen’s continual desire to give up his money (U, 15.3546, 17.195). Finally, the multiplicity of Ulysses as an evental field beyond measurement has as one of its most vital purposes to allow the son to continue to represent his unreconciled position as an active force in the book’s unfolding of change, the son as new possibility. All of the characters are involved in the multiplication that constitutes the new worlds that may become possible—extending beyond our comprehension—which Ulysses resolutely explores. Without the life of the subtractive multiplication that surpasses existing forms, the book would be permanently limited to the ordinary. In “Qu’est-ce que la littérature pense?” Badiou says that that the purpose of literature is to convey “the real,” something “outside the world,” “the unspeakable” (2005b, 38). In the presentation of actual infinity that Ulysses embodies, the resistance of the son is a crucial agency that charges the event to go

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beyond unity: “The ultimate essence of the evental ultra-one is the Two, in the especially striking form of a division of the Divine One— the Father and the Son—which, in truth definitively ruins any recollection of divine transcendence into the simplicity of a Presence” (BE, 213). To carry out this opening up requires both Bloom’s focus on actuality and Stephen’s thrust toward the future: “To the situation, in which the consequences of the event are at stake, corresponds, for a fidelity, both the one-finite of an effective representation and the infinity of a virtual presentation” (BE, 236). Only the opposition between the consistent and inconsistent sides can articulate unlimited newness. Badiou describes Cohen’s forcing in these terms: “Foreclosed from ontology, the event returns in the mode according to which the undecidable can only be decided therein by forcing veracity from the standpoint of the indiscernible” (BE, 429). Forcing uses the indiscernible to enact the event by deciding on the basis of the future, the revolutionary pattern of what will have been. Stephen, as I have shown, is the embodiment of the indiscernible for Bloom, who devotes himself to following Stephen without knowing why. Badiou insists that the purpose of the event must not be known: its purpose must be created by the future (2001, 46). What is not known is both revolutionary and unconscious. The same impulse to follow the incomprehensible that operates with Stephen makes Bloom give his wife freedom without knowing why, thus possibly generating a new level of consciousness for women in literature, augmenting their possession of their bodies. Bloom’s throwing of himself at Stephen and his abasement with Molly are parts of the same event, the comprehensive event of Ulysses, which signifies that the average person has more potential to liberate humanity than he or she realizes. Stanislaus Joyce said of his brother that “freedom was a necessity: it was the guiding theme of his life” (S. Joyce, 1964, 107–8). Joyce shared with Badiou the desire to promote infinite prospects of human emancipation, and Badiou’s ideas help us to see the drive toward freedom in Ulysses. Early in the novel Stephen thinks of the “infinite possibilities” that have been “ousted” by the oppressive realities of history

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(2.50–51). The protagonists of Ulysses are motivated by desires for freedom that make them do things that depart from the dictates of self-interest. These actions are events leading to the inconceivable fortuities that the novel maps out. And these points lead to the characters joining each other in a combined subject filled with new formations of human development. Stephen becomes part of a subject constituted by the Blooms because Stephen leaves his habitation and Bloom exposes his wife for reasons that are indiscernible. In Modern literature, Joyce’s devotion to the indiscernible, flowering in language on every page of his work, leads to the explorations of Woolf, Beckett, Faulkner, Pynchon, and other Modern and postmodern novelists. In regard to theory, it leads through Lacan and Derrida to Badiou, who unfolds the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis of the indiscernible in mathematical terms to demonstrate how the subject is continually reformed and multiplied by the incomprehensibility of the revolutionary event. This analysis is illustrated in action by Joyce’s fiction as a product of a culture in transformation that is able to see beyond culture, an Irish culture becoming international. Moreover, Stephen is succeeded and essentially replicated by a figure who breaks with authority and brings the unknown at the cost of damnation in all of the remaining novels that I examine; and this figure always represents the potential to revitalize a dogmatic, stifled Ireland. The freedom and multiplicity that these figures pursue by living fully may be the vital creative principle of God that goes beyond any reduction of the divine principle to inadequate particulars.

4 Beckett’s Lost Love By unfolding possibilities, Ulysses moves toward release from traditional values through encounters with the unprecedented. Joyce’s characters tend to be enclosed by belief and compelled to seek escape from it through exploration of the forbidden. Beckett’s characters, on the other hand, are outside belief and hopelessly trying to find their way in. So Beckett’s figures are always in hell, the excluded realm of the demonic: their escapes are evanescent.1 The work of Beckett that describes hell most definitely may be Waiting for Godot, so I will use this play to survey the illusory field of human relations—a field for which Beckett’s Trilogy explores the internal basis, which turns out to reveal the self as a projection of a demonic power. To deny the basis of the self most rigorously is to free the subject from domination by a first cause; but to be empowered to make this denial, one must take apart the formations of human attachment with complete penetration. This is what Godot does, so I will use the play (a form of fiction built on human interaction) to prepare for my main subject, the novel Molloy. Godot maps out the entrapment of human relations that is instituted by the malignant nature of the foundation of subjectivity, which Beckett’s Trilogy delves into.

1. This distinction between Joyce’s focal point inside belief and Beckett’s outside it could well be related to the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. The demonic that Fernie discerns is mainly a Protestant tradition developed by Luther, Milton, and Blake, though Fernie discusses others, especially Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.

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Waiting for Pozzo: Badiou and Godot Vladimir and Estragon or Didi and Gogo, the attendants of Beckett’s En Attendant Godot, first produced in French in 1953, believe they can give meaning to their lives only by encountering Godot, an authority who will save them by showing concern for them, giving them a place in the universe. For them to stop receiving the message that he is coming would be to lose both consciousness and their animated ability to relate to each other. Yet the play emphasizes that all they can ever encounter is Pozzo, the principle of power that generates all idealism by exerting brutality. It is their need to keep hoping for Godot, combined with their inability to recognize the form that he actually takes, that puts them in hell. Actual progress in the play consists of recognizing such illusion, but Didi and Gogo (like the narrator of The Third Policeman) are unable of sustain this awareness. The polarity into which they divide the world is introduced near the start with Didi and Gogo’s presentation of the two thieves in Luke’s Gospel (23:43). Didi explains that one of the thieves was saved and the other was damned (W, 4–5), implying that a person must be one or the other. Later, as Pozzo the landowner is approaching in act 2, Didi says, “triumphantly,” “It’s Godot! We’re saved!” (W, 64); whereas Gogo, who sees his visitors as approaching from both sides as threats, says, “I’m in hell!” (W, 64). That he sees them coming from both sides is one of a number of indications that what the tramps see is projected. Didi corresponds to the thief who was saved, and Gogo to the one damned. But then when Pozzo actually appears (in act 1), Gogo thinks he is Godot, while Didi denies it: “Not at all!” (W, 14). This is because Gogo sees the truth in reality, whereas Didi is intent on separating Godot from Pozzo in order to maintain his ideal beyond reality, the aim of his salvation. What they encounter is the procession of Lucky and Pozzo, and what they cannot face, with Didi as their leader, is the fact that this is Godot because this is the only authority they will ever encounter. Beryl S. Fletcher and John Fletcher report that Beckett wrote on the

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manuscript of the play, “Suggest that Pozzo is perhaps Godot after all . . .” (1978, 59). Before Pozzo’s first appearance, Didi explains to Gogo what they have asked Godot for: “nothing very definite” (W, 10). Gogo says, “a kind of prayer. . . . And what did he reply?” (W, 10–11). Didi says that he’d have to think it over and consult many sources before making a decision. When Gogo asks, “Where do we come in?” (W, 11), Didi says, “On our hands and knees” (W, 15). Gogo says, “We’ve lost our rights?” and Didi says, “We got rid of them.” This leads Gogo to ask, “We’re not tied?” and he explains that he means tied to Godot (W, 11–13). It is when Gogo brings out the artificiality of their attachment to Godot that Pozzo begins to appear (both on 13). Gogo continually wants to leave, but his natural impulses probably could not survive without Didi’s rationality, which is linked to Godot, who appears only as Pozzo. Pozzo, whose name suggests a pose and a bad smell, 2 represents authority. He claims that his name should be meaningful to “human beings” (W, 15), but their version of the name doesn’t exactly fit because he has to differentiate himself from any version of his name but his own. He says that though they are inferior, they are “of the same species as Pozzo, made in God’s image” (W, 15). Pozzo is always concerned with his image: “How do you find me?” (W, 29). He cannot sit, having risen, without appearing to falter, but he solves this by ordering his servant Lucky to give him a stool (W, 20). Those in control delegate their weakness to others, and as the epitome of success, Pozzo can control everyone: “The more people I meet the happier I become. From the meanest creature one departs . . . more conscious of one’s blessings” (W, 21). He likes to be with unfortunates because they make him feel how superior he is—a jab at the idea of charity. He does not want to be questioned: “A moment ago you were calling me Sir, in fear and trembling. Now you are asking me questions. No good will come of this!” (W, 21). What he wants

2. In Italian pozzo means “well or shaft,” pozzo nero means “cesspit,” and un pozzo di scienza is “a walking encyclopedia or mine of information” (Love, 1992).

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is fear and trembling (intense faith), and he realizes without being told that Didi and Gogo see Godot as having their “future in his hands” (W, 21).3 Pozzo derives his forward movement and his intellectual and poetic attainments from Lucky, whom he abuses and humiliates monstrously. Pozzo has worn out his whip on Lucky (W, 17), who has a running sore on his neck from the rope by which he pulls Pozzo (W, 28). Since Pozzo has no wagon, the function Lucky serves in pulling Pozzo is more a matter of being abused than of carrying Pozzo forward, though the two aspects are inseparable. Lucky appears to be at his last gasp (W, 24), but he does not put down his burdens, which include a bag of sand (W, 102), because he is anxious to please Pozzo, who cannot stand him and is on his way to sell him in a market, though he thinks it might be better to kill him (W, 23). Lucky is lucky because he has something to believe in, and his belief cannot fail to be proportional to his suffering. Pozzo says that years ago Lucky taught him all he knows about beauty and truth (W, 24–25), and Lucky used to caper for joy (W, 31). This might stand for an earlier period in which religion was more inspired. Lucky is still the only character in the play capable of dancing or being brilliant, showing that Beckett realizes that the delusion of belief can be creative. Pozzo says, “he carries like a pig It’s not his job” (W, 23, 18). His real talent is as a visionary, but he is harnessed to pulling Pozzo forward, as writers have to serve commercial, religious, or ideological interests. This includes carrying a sandbag because Pozzo cannot enjoy being Pozzo without being oppressive. Lucky’s great tirade demonstrates two important points for my argument. First, its ranging through religion, philosophy, science, and culture supports the idea that Pozzo is Godot because it presents the sum total of human knowledge, and this fits what the tramps hope to get from Godot. Godot represents the Other in Lacan’s sense of

3. Alice and Kenneth Hamilton realize that Godot will never come and see Pozzo as an oppressive image of God (1976, 150–62).

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the totality of language that every signifier depends on in striving for meaning, though this totality can never be encompassed.4 Second, Lucky’s tirade shows that all human knowledge has been crippled and demented because it is harnessed to domination, the exertion of power through cruelty, which is here depicted as the source of all spiritual values. The control of Lucky by Pozzo indicates that knowledge has always been controlled by power, just as technology has developed out of war. Moreover, this power has always been religious at base, predicated on the idea that a benevolent God exists and progress is imperative. The idea of knowledge is inconceivable without this compulsion, which is inseparable from the torture that drives Lucky forward. Lucky’s speech, which is forced out of him helter-skelter with a mad rush as incoherent gibberish, combines all levels of thought to insist that God exists, has a white beard, and loves us dearly (W, 33), and all of the knowledge, value, and pleasure of human activity including poetry, politics, research, and sports must be “better than nothing” even though the only evidence for it consists of suffering and disorder. Ironically, the incoherence of the speech is beautiful and moving. Slavoj Žižek argues that all ideas of transcendence arise only from suffering and loss, and it is only the hurt that actually exists, so the uplift is imagined just because of torment (Žižek, 1993, 115–16). This is confirmed by the true religious principle that it is only by material suffering that one can attain spiritual development. As Blake put it, “The Ruins of Time builds [sic] Mansions in Eternity” (Blake, 1988, 705). It is also confirmed in reverse by the evil practice of believing that religion will give you wealth and power, which is the way religion often operates—as Pozzo abusing Lucky and demanding everybody’s attention to himself. His superiority implies that he will reward

4. This concept follows from the fact that the meaning of any signifier depends on the entire network of signifiers in which it is enclosed. Our knowledge of an apple depends on biology, language, color, and so forth. A good explanation of Lacan’s Other as language appears in Fink, 1995, xi–xii, 3–7.

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them, though his only rewards are chicken bones (W, 19) and Lucky’s entertainment. Lacan says that all knowledge comes from slaves, who are in touch with the reality of life, and this knowledge is then stolen by philosophers, who turn it into abstractions used to control the poor (Lacan, 2007, 21). No one contains this knowledge better than Lucky, who cannot express it: that the engine that drives civilization forward—in the French text, Pozzo says, “En avant!” (Beckett, 2010, 332)—is the satisfaction that the rich get in being superior to the poor. This may be why St. Paul said, “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6.10), meaning that evil always derives from greed.5 Lucky cannot live without believing that God “suffers . . . with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment” (W, 34). He repeats “for reasons unknown but time will tell” because he is firmly hitched to the idea that though it seems impossible that God could love him and abuse him so, the purpose of his intelligence can only be to explain this horror. He is in hell, but needs to believe he has access to heaven, and because it speaks out of pain and inconsistency, Lucky’s critique of authority is sophisticated. He describes God’s position as “the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia” (W, 33), meaning that God’s authority keeps him from having any feeling, terror, or understanding. Pozzo says, “Do I look like a man who could be made to suffer?” (W, 26). Yet Lucky weeps at the thought that Pozzo wants to get rid of him, so Lucky’s need to be loved by Pozzo is extreme, though Pozzo calls him slave and scum. The dominant member of any relationship plays the role of dominus or lord. Beckett believes that Lucky’s need for heaven is what puts him in hell: “plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that 5. To be fair, the Norton Edition of the New Testament says that the Epistles to Timothy are among the ones probably not written by Paul, and the idea that money is the root of evil was “a commonplace in Greco-Roman popular philosophy” (Hammond and Busch, 2012, 456, 464), but the line has generally been taken as Paul’s, and it accords with Christ’s virulent hatred of money.

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continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm” (W, 34). The existing situation will inevitably put hell in the place of heaven, yet heaven must be there “better than nothing” because the labors of men must mean something, though they remain unfinished for reasons unknown. There is meaning in life and Godot will answer us because “it is established beyond all doubt all other doubt than that which clings to the labors of men . . .” (W, 34). In Badiou’s terms, he needs to believe in an established reality though the actuality always goes beyond this construction. Lucky’s tirade ends when his hat is taken by Didi, who will put it on. The exposure of the content of the Pozzo-Lucky combine, insofar as this content is made known by Lucky’s monologue or the unfolding of civilization, causes them to lose a series of powers: Lucky’s hat and voice, Pozzo’s vaporizer (inspiring eloquence), pipe (pleasure), watch (control over time), and eyesight (ability to see the divine literally). This may lead to progress in the Nietszchean sense that men should free themselves from subservience by assuming the powers they have delegated to divinity (Nietzsche, 1954, 124, 315–16, 398). For example, men used to believe that thunder was caused by the anger of a god, but now they attribute it to physical causes. This separates phenomena from moral and spiritual significance, and the characters are not ready for it. Lucky seems to have been driven berserk by the unleashing of the contradictory desires for truth and devotion in his mind. He has to have his bag of sand restored before he can recover his senses (W, 36), suggesting that human consciousness cannot exist without being burdened by obligation. Didi returns Gogo to waiting for Godot when Pozzo is gone (W, 39). Sure that Pozzo is not Godot, Didi must maintain his idealistic hopes by denying that brutality is the ruling power, that the source of spirituality and happiness is force. Didi’s illusion and Beckett’s critique are explained by Foucault in Discipline and Punish: “We should abandon the belief that . . . renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produces knowledge .  .  . that power and knowledge directly imply one another” (1997, 27–28).

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What Didi seeks in Godot is what Foucault says is impossible: knowledge that is not compelled. Now Didi seems disturbed by a feeling that Pozzo and Lucky have changed, repeating, “Unless they’re not the same .  .  .” three times (W, 39, Beckett’s ellipsis), as if he needs them to remain consistent even though he tries to separate them from his ideal. The references to Lucky’s earlier creativity, like his tirade on the decline of man (W, 34), suggests that change in Pozzo and Lucky is for the worse. At this point of Didi’s anxiety, the boy arrives to reassure him that Godot will be there tomorrow. As the spirit of youth, the boy knows little about any prior reality: Martin Esslin points out that he never has any memory of seeing the tramps before even though the French text specifies that the same boy appears in both acts (Boxall, 2003, 25). The second act begins with Didi singing the round about the cook who beat the dog. Didi stops twice at the point where the round begins to repeat and contain itself by saying, “And wrote upon the tombstone” (W, 48). The heavily repetitious structure of the play is a powerful substantiation that there is no chance that any version of Godot but Pozzo will ever appear. By enacting a set that contains itself, the round suggests both a rigid containment that is in force in the play and an extension beyond this containment that does not get to be realized because Didi and Gogo can never stop waiting for Godot and being subject to the fact that he can only appear as Pozzo. The way the plot stalls is the basis for a fine interpretation of the play by Thomas Cousineau in “Beckett contra Aristotle: A Choral Reading of Waiting for Godot” (2013). The essay starts with the facts that Greek tragedy involved two main components, the chorus and the plot, and that Aristotle insisted in his Poetics that plot was the most important part. But the plot of tragedy features a hero such as Oedipus who must be sacrificed to purify the city. By not following the order of the plot, Beckett eliminates the need for a designated victim to be subjected to sacred violence and instead shifts into a structure in which everyone suffers throughout the play to constitute an ongoing chorus.

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Questions can be raised about this argument in that it assumes that the audience of tragedy condemns the hero and that the chorus in its lamentation separates itself from the ethos of sacrifice and achieves an esthetic victory through the beauty of song. Whether Beckett affirms such liberation through grief is debatable, but Cousineau approaches seeing Godot as an epochal event in the history of the theater, an emancipation from scapegoating rituals. Among the factors Cousineau does not consider adequately are the role of Pozzo and the sense that people cannot do without ideas like sacrifice and the need to project one’s misery onto others. So an action of consequence in which something is lost occurs even though Aristotle’s tragic plot is left behind. And the key idea that Godot is Pozzo is parallel to Cousineau’s assertion that it is artificial to set the tragic hero apart from others, to see him as transcendent. In act 2, when Pozzo appears, he is blind and falls down, yet both Didi and Gogo spend a page believing that he is Godot and that they are saved (W, 67). The weakness of Pozzo and Lucky in this act may stand for the debility of the modern Church and modern authority, which, having had their ideas examined critically, can no longer generate the inspiration or power they wielded when they were relatively unquestioned. Yet people still cling to belief despite its flaws, and Didi and Gogo are moved by compassion to help the now pitiful Pozzo (W, 69–72). This may be Beckett’s sardonic view of a trend that could be seen as positive: that the formerly commanding religion now has to appeal to people’s compassion and liberalism, which were always part of Christianity. For Beckett the need for something to believe in remains inescapable even when the object of belief appears ridiculous. Didi knows that Pozzo is reprehensible, for Didi says, “It’s that bastard Pozzo again,” and hits and curses him (W, 73). Yet Didi makes a pious speech about representing mankind by answering cries for help (W, 70). This helps Pozzo to go on taking Lucky to the market. Pozzo, in losing his watch, loses his ability to handle historical time, which corresponds to the teleology of plot. In act 1, when Didi says, “Time has stopped” (W, 28) because night never seems to come, Pozzo says, “Don’t you believe it,” and insists that he must follow his

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schedule—to do business or sell Lucky. Doing business tends to center on selling Lucky, or getting the maximum value from the worker.6 Now, however, Pozzo says that the blind have no notion of time (W, 77), and his final speech denounces time and says that birth and death take place at the same instant: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” (W, 80). This powerful statement could be seen either as an intensely religious vision of the shortness of life or a radically skeptical assertion that life is meaningless, the latter seeming more prominent. The collapse of authority slides insensibly from fanaticism into nihilism. Pozzo touches on wisdom, but it does not stop him from going about his business. After Pozzo has gone, Didi expresses doubt that Pozzo is blind (though stage directions say that he is on page 67): “It seemed to me he saw us” (W, 80). This may reflect his need for response from the Other. Gogo, realizing that they can’t go because they still have to wait for Godot, thinks of freeing themselves by recognizing that Pozzo was Godot: “Are you sure it wasn’t him?” (W, 80). Didi says, ‘Not at all! (Less sure.) Not at all! (Still less sure.) Not at all!” (W, 80). The stage directions about being less and less sure were added for the English. The French simply had “[un temps]” between the second and third “Mais non” (Beckett, 2010, 336). The repetition of Mais non protests too much. After this heavily emphasized loss of certainty, Didi does not “know what to think anymore” (W, 81). If he cannot trust in Godot, he cannot trust in anything. Then he wonders what truth there could be in the repeating day spent waiting for Godot, and takes on Pozzo’s final negative view of life, making Pozzo in effect Godot, the source of his truth: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. . . . We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener” (W, 81). Life provides no meaningful content before death, and only habit

6. Joyce criticizes the Church for turning religion to a business in the story “Grace,” in which Father Purdon urges his flock to say to themselves, “Well, I have verified my accounts” (2007, 151).

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keeps us from seeing its pointlessness. Beckett spoke of the obliterating effect of habit in his 1931 study Proust (Beckett, 1970, 7–8, 11–12). Now Didi looks at Gogo sleeping and says that he himself may be seen as asleep. He says, “I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said?” and “goes feverishly to and fro” (W, 81). As he reaches the height of despair, the boy shows up and Didi says, “Off we go again” (W, 81). The appearance of new life holds out a promise that allows Didi to go back to clinging to a hollow belief, though he attacks the boy for repeating his story (W, 82–83). Like Pozzo, he cannot give up the plot of redemption or going about his business. Both Didi and Gogo agree at the end, as they did earlier (W, 9), that the best thing they can do is hang themselves because they are in the hellish Tantalus position of longing for something whose attainment they can only believe in by deluding themselves. On the last page Gogo says, “I can’t go on like this” and Didi says, “That’s what you think” (W, 84). So their life consists of a series of further degradations in realizing how hopeless they are and how meager the resources with which they are compelled to fool themselves. But if suicide is the only alternative they can conceive, in the unlikely event that they had the courage, this only illustrates how ineluctable faith is for them. Didi says, “We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow (Pause.) unless Godot comes” (W, 84). It is clear that the hanging project will never be realized. The tree does not look close to being strong enough. The status of suicide as too good to be true underlines the infernal nature of their situation. The notion that they should give up the idea of being saved or damned and the action of waiting for Godot seems to be a way to escape the hell of frustration, but the fact that they cannot move on at the end means that they have no purpose in life but to endure greater levels of anguish at the realization of the falsehood of all they can believe. Badiou, in his second essay on Beckett, “Tireless Desire,” argues that “all of Beckett’s genius tends toward affirmation” (2003a, 41). What he means by this is that Beckett wants to strip humanity of artificial encumbrances to reveal what is essential to being. Beckett “attempts, at one and the same time, to speak unrepentantly of the

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stony ingratitude of the Earth, and to isolate . . . that which exceeds it” (2003a, 44). Badiou’s argument is valid in that the most absolute denial must be motivated by desire for truth. But this could be seen as a dilemma. As Gibson points out in Beckett and Badiou, Waiting for Godot is a work of Beckett’s that seems to contradict Badiou’s idea that Beckett is always aiming, by dwelling on restraints, to prepare for progress (Gibson, 2006, 88). Godot emphasizes the destructive falseness of waiting for a solution to arrive—for that waiting stays within the established framework. It is possible, however, that the solution suggested by the play is that of casting off the need for salvation and accepting the emptiness of life. The play often suggests that if Didi and Gogo were to go anywhere else, it would be as bad; but maybe it is only the ingenuous Gogo who is bound to get beaten on his own. Didi says they once worked picking grapes in the Macon country (W, 52), so they once had a viable life. There are a series of absurd hints of hope in the play, such as the leaves that appear on the tree (W, 56). They are too scattered to be more than pointless suggestions of what might be if the world were different. At the beginning, for example, when Didi says “Nothing to be done,” “Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot” (W, 3). This suggests that something might be done with extraordinary effort, which fits Badiou’s idea that things could be changed by a radical reorganization. Badiou’s idea of the event is the emergence of a new way of seeing things that could not be predicted and that changes the situation utterly (Badiou, 2001, 41–44). The possibility of an event may be evoked when Gogo thinks of leaving or when Didi thinks Godot may be Pozzo, but Gogo has to come back and Didi has to meet or project the boy. Beckett suggests that freedom is barely conceivable but not attainable in this world. It is the situation that Gibson refers to in Badiou’s terms as the remainder, ordinary life (life under orders) in which the event seems impossible (Gibson, 2006, 38). The focus of the play on the state of waiting for Godot implies that human beings cannot do without faith.

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Ironically, it is within this blighted situation that human relations are possible, based on habit. Didi and Gogo are firmly attached to each other because of the need each has for what the other embodies. Gogo wants to free himself, but is incapable and needs Didi to control him. Didi uses the idea of Godot to exert power over Gogo by telling him they have to wait, but this attaches Didi to a higher authority. They have one of the most successful relationships in Beckett, but this union is founded on authority, the small other of the other person being based on the big Other of total truth, which allows one to believe that the other person returns one’s feeling. So the success of their bond is inseparable from illusion. Moreover, a huge portion of their bond is resentment. The freedom and truth they seek together have their strongest forms in activities that make them inimical to each other, such as Didi’s enthralling of Gogo to the expectation of Godot. Gogo shows the strength of his antagonism in one of his longest statements about how he would like to leave Didi/Godot. After he says it would be better to part and Didi says, “You wouldn’t get far,” Gogo says, “That would be too bad, really too bad. (Pause.) Wouldn’t it, Didi, be really too bad?” He goes on seething with fury like this for several lines until Didi says, “Calm yourself” (W, 8). The antipathy they have for each other is part of what binds them by giving intense energy to their personalities. Some of the main demonstrations of the hollowness of their connection appear early in act 2, when they go through a series of exercises in relating to each other that seem more pathetic than successful. For example, they agree to say that they’re happy “even if it’s not true” (W, 50): “ESTR AGON: . . . What do we do now, now that we are happy? / VLADIMIR: Wait for Godot. (Estragon groans.)” (W, 50). The claim on happiness is empty because their need for each other depends on having a purpose outside themselves. When Didi tries to use Lucky’s hat to think and dance, he is unable. Perhaps one reason he cannot perform is that he has no master: first he orders Gogo to say, “Think, pig!” then he has to order himself: “Dance, hog!” (W, 63). Neither call can work without a higher authority.

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Didi and Gogo have need of Godot to be compatible, even though he only appears as Pozzo. The active capacity of their conversation is always about his power. Gogo knows that Didi’s belief in Godot is an illusion and Didi knows that Gogo’s dream of escape is unreal. They are interwoven in a discourse that ties them to Godot and falsehood. Gogo and Didi add up to Godot. This establishes how inevitable it is that active human relationships that work have to be based on denial; and the sharing of this awareness of illusion generated by questioning is important in keeping the connection going. Only by insisting on the most terrible negation in Beckett can we approach the level on which the positivity that Badiou affirms irradiates the play. This is the level of humor, but uproarious as it is, the humor is bound to the task of looking into the abyss. If humor desists from its purpose of confronting nightmare, it easily becomes servile. In passages such as the suicide plans or the happiness above, it approaches freedom only by being aware that it can never escape damnation. In the history of the development of literature, realism begins by making fun of mythology, as in Don Quixote. Having considered the falseness of intimacy and the spurious expectations it projects, I will turn from the play in which people relate to each other to the Trilogy, which examines the underlying structure that renders such relations deceptive—the false constitution of the individual that makes any attempt to draw on the other destructive insofar as it succeeds. Molloy: The Craving for a Fellow The Overture Molloy, published in French in 1947, is, among other things, about the impossibility of relationships, as symbolized by the way Molloy and Moran never meet; and it is about the way people destroy each other through the connections that make them imperative to each other. By focusing on the potential for relationship, the novel brings out the conditions of thought that cause human relations to be disastrously misdirected. What Molloy and Moran do to each other in effect is

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to kill each other by striving after each other’s identities. The novel enacts the principle developed in Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! (Wilde, 1946, 610)

As Wilde suggests, this destruction may take many forms, and some of them may be positive, including a long, successful marriage, such as the one between Didi and Gogo. One of their means of destroying each other is forcing each other to wait for Godot, or to follow ideology, which gives them a constrained life. In Molloy the delusions of compromise that Didi and Gogo dance around are stripped off and the way in which the two protagonists of the novel are irrevocably drawn to each other causes them to murder each other through surrogates with straightforward violence. The play shows the surface of communication; the novel shows what goes on at a deeper level, what cannot be communicated and why. Molloy starts with a barely concealed emphasis on the intense emotions that draw men together, while stressing that these feelings are not enacted. Molloy, or a narrator who will soon turn out to be Molloy, sees two men, A and C,7 pass each other, and he exposes his desire to follow one of them as “my soul’s leap out to him, at the end of its elastic” (TN, 7; Mo, 13).8 He says here that this man was one of a number of things (including the landscape) “towards which . . . my soul was straining wildly.” This fierce attraction, which causes his hand to tremble (TN, 7; Mo, 13), emerges suddenly from an explanation of why the man he watches needs a dog for company, and becomes a realization that all men, like Wilde’s prisoners, are constrained from

7. Beckett as B may be the missing term between A and C. 8. Page numbers for Molloy in Three Novels (2009) will be followed by page numbers for Molloy ([1954] 1994).

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dangerous expressions of affection: “the fellow-convict you long to stop, embrace, suck, suckle and whom you pass by, with hostile eyes, for fear of his familiarities?” (TN, 8; Mo, 14). The combination of attracting and repelling may be related to Mr. Duffy’s aphorism in Joyce’s “A Painful Case”: “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse . . .” (Joyce, 2006, 94). This theme of the ferocious need of men for each other may be seen as forming an overture to the novel: “And am I sure I never saw them [A and C] again? And what do I mean by seeing again? An instant of silence, as when the conductor taps on his stand, raises his arms . . . Smoke, sticks, flesh, hair, at evening, afar, flung about the craving for a fellow” (TN, 11; Mo, 19). The failure of Molloy and Moran to meet takes place within this framework of the yearning of men or individuals for each other, which is so extreme that it is usually repressed and unconscious. The materials of life are “flung about” this craving like a hasty disguise. The theme may be represented by A and C passing each other without meeting, who suggest Molloy and Moran in the body of the book. After the other man has gone without speaking, Molloy realizes that now that he is alone, he is “free to know . . . the laws of my mind” (TN, 9; Mo, 16). This is parallel to the chapter in Murphy, Beckett’s first published novel, in which Murphy derives the greatest satisfaction by withdrawing from external interference to concentrate on the oppositions within his mind (Mu, 65–68). Such a direction is followed by the Trilogy, which moves unrelentingly from external connections to internal ones. The meeting that does not take place, as Molloy announces here, feeds subjective development and dissects the idea of the Other (including divinity) by making it internal. Badiou says that the sayable of being is disjunct from the sayable of truth (BE, 355), and Moran and Molloy cannot exist in the same world though they are both parts of the situation: first its existing reality, Moran as being, and then its drive toward change, Molloy as truth. Truth for Badiou is a revolutionary force that springs from the ability to change ([1993] 2001, 41–44). This is parallel to Badiou’s distinction between the consistent multiple, what can be measured as a single number or

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counted as one, and the inconsistent multiple, the numerical complexity of any situation that exceeds measurement (BE, 25). Moran starts in a situation of certainty in which everything can be measured and moves toward Molloy’s inconsistent drive for which nothing can be measured. Molloy What Molloy says is always too much or too little (TN, 30; Mo, 45): words and things never match each other (TN, 27; Mo, 41), and he cannot figure out how to behave because he cannot fit his behavior into a system (TN, 21; Mo, 32). His mathematical calculations demonstrate the absurdity of calculation: his farts are first frequent and then infrequent by the same count (TN, 26; Mo, 39); and his explanation of a method for equably circulating his sucking-stones demonstrates that it is impossible to find such a method (TN, 63–69; Mo, 93–100). In fact, Molloy affirms the value of irrational numbers: “to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in. . . . It is then the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven, for example, and the pages fill with true ciphers at last” (TN, 59; Mo, 86). True ciphers lead onward forever toward infinity. Edith Kern argues in her ingenious “Molloy-Moran: The Hero as Author,” that Moran turns into Molloy as the author of the novel (Kern, 1970, 35–45), but this is too literal. Rather the two move toward each other’s positions, finding that the life of each is focused on a yearning for that of the other. But they fail to reach each other, so their needs for the other remain poignant and indiscernible. The shift from Moran’s consistent multiple or rationalized life to Molloy’s inconsistent one is the event, the opening of new possibility that Molloy/Moran writes out at the expense of his life. (Molloy announces that he is dying on his first page.) Yet this new dispensation is surrounded by deterrents, particularly the way the order of the two halves dealing with Molloy and Moran is reversed. The two men who are meant to meet in Molloy, unlike Stephen and Bloom in Ulysses, never see each other in the act of misrecognition around which the book is organized. The difference between Joyce’s focus on protagonists who meet and Beckett’s on a pair who fail to

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meet corresponds to a contrast Beckett drew in a 1956 interview with Israel Shenker: Joyce tended “toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance .  .  .” (quoted in McDonald, 2006, 15). Beckett elevates the discordance of Joyce’s ambivalent communion into his main principle. Moran refers to Molloy as “just the opposite of myself,” and their distance and contradictory natures form the basis of a novel constructed around the impossible necessity of their fusion. Molloy’s recurring conflict with the law (TN, 16–20, 29; Mo, 26–30, 43–44), which is parallel to Gogo’s tendency to get beaten, is caused by the fact that he is never able to act with propriety. When the first policeman interrogates him, he says that he is “resting” (TN, 16; Mo, 25), but this turns out to be a crime in a society where “people .  .  . need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and joy, without which they might collapse” (TN, 20; Mo, 31–32). Ordinary identity imposes restraint. Molloy’s most respectable activity is searching for his mother, whom he does not reach in the present. He is also seeking his home town, a place where he fits in, but he never figures out where it is or what its name is. “All roads were right for me” (TN, 26; Mo, 40). Actually, he begins the novel dying in his mother’s room but does not know how he got there (TN, 3; MO, 7). Because Molloy does not belong to any state, nothing he does fits into any measurable form, and his thoughts and actions tend to be accompanied by alternatives that he makes up as he goes along: “I got to my knees, no, that doesn’t work. I got up” (TN, 24; Mo, 37). His story changes to fit the complex activity of his mind, which is not attached to any consistent image: “the pale gloom of rainy days was better suited to my taste, no that’s not it, to my humour, no that’s not it either . . . Chameleon in spite of himself, there you have Molloy . . .” (TN, 25; Mo, 39). His alienation fills him with terror and dismay (TN, 49; Mo, 72), and he repeatedly insists that he wants to behave well: “I have only to be told what good behaviour is and I am well-behaved, within the limits of my physical possibilities. And as far as good-will is concerned, I had it to overflowing. The exasperated good-will of the

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overanxious” (TN, 20; Mo, 32). The joke about his goodwill is that he thinks it is there in plenty, but it is practically never manifested externally. In fact he behaves awfully. Molloy’s drive toward freedom continually leads him to defy any comfort offered him, as when he smashes the food presented by a social worker (TN, 19–20; Mo, 30–31), or leaves Mrs. Lousse (TN, 54–55; Mo, 79–80).9 He realizes that his resistance to restraint impels him toward the greatest self-negation: “had I been able to conceive something worse than what I had I would have known no peace until I got it, if I know anything about myself” (TN, 41; Mo, 61). This self-annulment, which is accompanied by a dreadfully rapid increase in physical ailments (TN, 74; Mo, 107–8), has to exhaust itself and to deplete his active defiance if it is carried to the limit. Molloy’s last major action is to brutally beat and probably kill an old man for showing him affection. Molloy says, “I might have loved him I think if I had been seventy years younger” (TN, 77; Mo, 112). This is one of Molloy’s closest approaches to love, and it is because of this love that he destroys the man. In the context of the maximum leap of the soul toward the longing to embrace someone that is suppressed, this virtual murder is balanced by the almost certain murder of the dim man at the end of the Moran section (TN, 145; Mo, 207). They are the climaxes of the reaching toward each other by the protagonists that comprises the novel. Once Molloy has destroyed the charcoal burner, he realizes it is too late to reach his mother (TN, 81; Mo, 117). Then he hears a gong, such as the one that sounds in Moran’s house (TN, 83, 110; Mo, 121, 158). Now he reverses his former independence and maximizes his need to belong by hearing and accepting a voice that offers comfort: “Don’t fret, Molloy, we’re coming. Well. I suppose you have to try 9. Rónán McDonald says in The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett that Beckett’s mother, May Beckett, was religious, domineering, and stern, and “it seems his later decision to settle permanently in France was as much a flight from mother as from motherland” (2006, 7). This resistance to maternal authority may be seen as formative of Beckett’s attitudes.

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everything once, succour included, to get a complete picture of the resources of their planet” (TN, 85; Mo, 123). Not only is he accepting authority more than he has, but he is considering seeing the world as a consistent multiple that can be summed up completely, though he still refers to it as theirs. Molloy’s tendency to turn into Moran is not as marked as Moran’s tendency to turn into him, but he continually longs for rationality even as he defies it. Moran Moran initially is preoccupied with control of the world through cognitive procedures. He is sure that his rational constructions cover reality, and he says at the start that he especially loves watching other people do things that he could do better (TN, 88; Mo, 126). His energetic cultivation of cognition is entirely devoted to proving he is superior, and he is relentlessly sarcastic and cruel to his priest, his neighbor, his servant, and especially his son. His respectability is the ability to torment people, and he sees his giving an unwanted enema to his ailing son and beating him viciously as quite rational. The rational Moran is more explicit than Molloy about the fact that the aim of his life is to encounter his opposite, Molloy. He lies in bed because it is the best place “to discern my quarry, sense what course to follow, find peace in another’s ludicrous distress. . . . him who has need of me to be delivered, who cannot deliver myself. . . . His life has been nothing but a waiting for this . . .” (TN, 105–6; Mo, 151). The imagery fits intense love: seeking a quarry (venery), finding peace, being delivered, giving meaning to someone’s life. Moran cannot deliver himself, but he hopes he may do so by delivering Molloy, about whom he has extensive interior knowledge. Whereas Didi and Gogo did this for each other, Moran, who is preoccupied with masturbation (TN, 97; Mo, 140), can only think of it with himself in bed. In his activity in the world, he spends his story avoiding and repressing thoughts of the mission from the quasi-divine Youdi that the messenger Gaber assigns to him. Moran’s recumbent vision of his quarry and of salvation causes him to see the world in a new way: “I get up, go out, and everything is

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changed” (TN, 106; Mo, 151). In his little fiefdom he has been firmly anchored to the consistent multiple, controlling everyone and everything by reason: “a man like me, so meticulous . . . reining back his thoughts within the limits of the calculable . . .” (TN, 109; Mo, 156). But after his dream of Molloy, the multiplicity of his milieu grows hyperactive: “the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena” (TN, 106; Mo, 151). This subjection to inconsistency—which resembles the spiritual pains of hell in Joyce’s Portrait—is a strong early step of Moran’s moving toward Molloy. It also matches the activity of Fernie’s demonic in making Moran expand his intellectual horizon by growing aware of alternative realities. Fernie quotes the existential theologian Jaspers: “the very achievement of the good seems to involve a guilt toward another world” (Fernie, 2013, 25). This other world consists of the alternatives excluded by proper behavior, and Moran is drawn toward the decidedly demonic Molloy. “It was only by transferring it to this atmosphere, how should I say, of finality without end, why not, that I could venture to consider the work I had at hand” (TN, 106; Mo, 152). This atmosphere of “finality without end” resembles the world in which Molloy lives: “What possible end to these wastes . . . forever lapsing and crumbling away” (TN, 35; Mo, 53). Even the phrase “why not” goes against Moran’s bondage to rationality, using Badiou’s apagogic logic or reasoning by the absurd (Gibson, 2006, 87–89). When Moran thinks about Molloy, he becomes Molloy, whom he understands well, implying that Molloy is within him. Kern argues that Moran creates Molloy (1970, 36), and Moran says, “Perhaps I had invented him” (TN, 107; Mo, 152). “This was how he came to me at long intervals. Then I was nothing but uproar, bulk, rage, suffocation, effort unceasing, frenzied and vain. Just the opposite of myself, in fact” (TN, 108; Mo, 155). Moran becomes absorbed in Molloy’s identity. Yet the idea that he could become Molloy may be a temptation that has to be resisted.

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Contact with Molloy as the Other of totality brings the infinity of the universe into focus, but actual contact with the Other as otherness is impossible. The closest one can come to it is sharing an illusion, as in Godot. Moran realizes that the space in which he and Molloy could meet is a space of anti-matter: it is the Molloy world of endlessness that now begins to encroach on him, a “massive world, where all things move . . . and where . . . no investigation would be possible” (TN, 106; Mo, 152). Here Molloy himself could not exist in the sense of having a definite identity, and Moran envisages five versions of Molloy (TN, 110; Mo, 157). So the two men cannot meet: “For where Molloy could not be, nor Moran either for that matter, there Moran could bend over Molloy” (TN, 106; Mo, 152). This is the goal of his mission, but it is impossible for his mind to conceive it, so he spends virtually all of his story avoiding the central aim of his life. There are many occasions on which he realizes that he should be thinking about the orders Gaber read to him as to what he is to do with Molloy, but he keeps distracting himself with judgments of others, rationality blocking out his need to confront the irrational (TN, 91, 93, 101, 110, 116–17; Mo, 131, 134, 144, 145, 158, 167). And when he reaches the Molloy country, he realizes that he has forgotten Youdi’s directions completely (TN, 132; Mo, 188).10 The strongest statement about this avoidance explains his whole life, both on this day and in a pattern that lingers: “in describing this day I am once more he who suffered it, who crammed it full of futile anxious life, with no other purpose but his own stultification and the means of not doing what he had to do” (TN, 116–17; Mo, 167). His ordinary life consists of cognitive maneuvers that attack others and maintain his superiority, and he sustains this pattern to avoid

10. In Beckett’s Dedalus, his study of Beckett’s works as a critique of Joyce’s, Peter James Murphy suggests that Youdi, whose orders Gaber carries, stands for Joyce, the artist as God (2009, 192). If this is true, then to follow Joyce’s orders would be to bring Moran and Molloy together as Bloom and Stephen meet.

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confronting his deepest needs, which, as he suspects without realizing it, are attached to Molloy. Moran’s sense of the larger importance of his meeting with Molloy is made clear: “For what I was doing I was doing neither for Molloy, who mattered nothing to me, nor for myself, of whom I despaired, but in behalf of a cause which, while having need of us to be accomplished, was in its essence anonymous, and would subsist, haunting the minds of men, when its miserable artisans should be no more. It will not be said, I think, that I did not take my work to heart” (TN, 109–10; Mo, 157). How can it be that he sees his mission as supremely important, offering meaning to his existence, yet he assiduously avoids having any idea of what to do with Molloy? The answer may include the fact that Moran’s complete lack of precepts means that he may have an open encounter with the possibility of contact with the Other; but he suspects that this totalizing contact may be impossible. What Moran is unable to face is not just that he never had any idea what to do with Molloy, but that this lack of idea is the basis of the quest he imposes on himself. He is searching for the situation in which there is no answer, though all he can do is attack it. The situation with no answer is what Badiou calls the event, the emergence of a new reality; it is the truth of Molloy. In the forest, as Moran approaches the goal of his quest, he meets a man with a club. This figure resembles C, the man with the stout stick toward whom Molloy’s soul leaped in the overture. Like C, this man has an “uncertain step” (TN, 5, 141; Mo, 10, 201). Moran gives the man bread and holds his stick (TN, 141; Mo, 201). Having been benevolent, Moran feels himself changing in a way that suggests the world of Molloy and the disintegration of Moran’s orderly defenses: “a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all that I was always condemned to be” (TN, 143; Mo, 203). His meticulous identity is now passing away amid the “great changes I had suffered . . . my growing resignation to being dispossessed of self” (TN, 143; Mo, 204). This loss of the protection of who he was is followed

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by the approach of another man who disturbs him dreadfully, and who may represent the consequences of reaching out to the first man. He hears this man hail him and starts “violently,” then distracts himself with the chore he is engaged in: “I collected myself and continued to busy myself with my fire as if nothing had happened” (TN, 144; Mo, 205). As he frequently blocks out what bothers him, so now he concentrates on burning twigs; yet his thoughts of skinning branches are interrupted by odd feelings of love and pity for the tree (TN, 144; Mo, 205). This is parallel to the passage at the start of the book where Molloy’s attraction to the man with the dog leads to a page on dogs that slips from the need for pets to “the fellow-convict you long to . . . embrace” (TN, 8; Mo, 14). Having diverted himself with the fire for fifteen lines, Moran now has a “spasm of fright” at realizing that the man “has come right up to me without my knowledge. If there is one thing infuriates me it is being taken myself by surprise” (TN, 144; Mo, 205), yet he himself arranged the surprise, as the word “myself” suggests. This being taken by surprise corresponds to Lacan’s real, being confronted by what cannot be predicted by established formulas. Earlier, Moran said, “Now if there is one thing I abhor, it is someone coming into my room, without knocking. I might just happen to be masturbating before my cheval-glass” (TN, 97; Mo, 140). The image of his erotic selfie captures the essence of his superiority. There are quite a few one things that infuriate him, for examples “Vagueness I abhor” (TN, 94; Mo, 135) and “I don’t like men and I don’t like animals” (TN, 100; Mo, 144). In short, the one thing Moran cannot stand is life, unless it is reduced to a situation of cognitive control. At the fire, Moran continues to pretend he’s alone until the man puts a hand on his shoulder. Then Moran spins in anger and sees a “dim” man who says, “Put it there” and “you unexpected pleasure” (TN, 144; Mo, 206). He expresses affection, and looks like Moran, with the same moustache, eyes, nose, and mouth (TN, 145; Mo, 206). He may stand for Moran’s kindly side. He asks if Moran has seen an old man with a stick and Moran denies it. When the dim man reaches out his hand toward Moran, Moran goes blank, and without knowing

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what he does, assaults the man brutally, leaving him on the ground, “his head in a pulp” (TN, 145; Mo, 207). Later Moran finds one of his ears. As with Molloy’s attack on the charcoal burner, the victim appears to be dead, but it seems more certain here. Once Moran has pulped him, the man no longer resembles Moran (TN, 146; Mo, 208), so perhaps he clobbers the man to erase his own face as a mark of sympathy that is unbearable. The dim man whom Moran kills seems to stand for the effects of Moran’s kindness to the man with the club who resembles Molloy as C, the man leaving town. The reactions to the two men, club and dim, add up to the sequence of the craving for a man in which one reaches out and then draws back. The meeting of these men constitutes the meeting with Molloy as the maximum reaching out toward the other. Moran keeps hoping to meet Molloy after this, but now his dream Molloy is like Godot, an ideal in opposition to reality: “Molloy . . . would grow to be a friend” (TN, 156, also 152, 161, 169; Mo, 222, also 216, 230, 240). Having effectively killed Molloy, Moran idealizes him. The plot of the novel is built around Molloy’s murder of the old man and Moran’s of the dim one. These are the scenes in which the two men reach for the potential of union between them and find that this potential cannot be expressed without homicide. What is enacted is that the real force of connection between people has to be destructive. After Molloy and Moran achieve their greatest possible connection by destroying each other, they tend to turn into parodies of each other though they never meet. As I’ve suggested, Moran’s turning into Molloy is much more developed than Molloy’s turning into Moran. Therefore the placement of Moran’s section last allows emphasis on the shift toward the inconsistent multiple that carries the event forward: the reader can see Moran taking on Molloy’s features. Molloy’s turning into Moran is a collapse, while Moran’s turning to Molloy is an expansion; but they are both trapped short of each other by driving toward what they cannot reach. A concentration of lines revealing Moran’s Molloyan identity appears on the last two pages. As Kern suggests, the facts that he is

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“clearing out” and wearing crutches (TN, 169; Mo, 240) show his tendency to assume Molloy’s role (Kern, 1970, 42). Both men were conveyed by bicycles while crippled and lost the bikes to circumstances. Moran says, “I have been a man long enough, I shall not put up with it any more, I shall not try any more” (TN, 169; Mo, 240). This involves a whole framework of proper manhood and effort that Molloy was constantly rejecting, both in his jibes at law-enforcers and in his play with language and reality. Moran is increasingly receptive to a voice he now hears: “It did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in turn had taught to his little one. So that at first I did not know what it wanted. But in the end I understood this language. . . . I understood it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report” (TN, 169–70; Mo, 241). Speaking of Moran in the third person, the Molloyan Moran says that the voice is bringing him into a language that Moran did not have access to when he spoke the consistent language passed on by tradition. In his new relation to words, it does not matter whether he understands correctly. He is now writing his report, which is the book he is writing with Molloy, a book in which every line of Molloy’s interacts with every line of Moran’s. He is entering a Derridean field of writing as the activation of difference. For Derrida in Of Grammatology, as for Molloy, words tend to be interplays between alternatives: “There is not a single signified that escapes . . . the play of signifying references that constitute language. The advent of writing is the advent of this play” (Derrida, 1976, 7). There seems to be a contradiction between Moran writing his story and “clearing out,” or embarking on a journey, but this is a fruitful contrariety. Starting to write is setting out on an expedition, and Molloy’s presentation of alternatives frequently gives the impression he is making up his story as he goes along, or writing his life: “ask yourself questions, as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes how long it will still go on, anything at all to keep you from losing the thread of the dream” (TN, 44; Mo, 65–66). To write oneself may be the best way to be free, and Moran wonders as he sets out to write his story at the end whether he may

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be liberated: “Does this mean I am freer now than I was? I do not know. I shall learn” (TN, 170; Mo, 241). The mode of apprehension he adopts, which is not unlike the stages of perception of Stephen’s esthetic theory, does not claim knowledge, but intends to discover truth by a series of investigations. This is parallel to Badiou’s notion of the subject as a series of encounters (BE, 434). Likewise, Badiou emphasizes that the new truth of the event can never be knowable when it is undertaken. As Moran assumes the writing of himself, he takes on the full latitude of this position by expressing the most extreme contraries: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” (TN, 170; Mo, 241). This repeats and then denies the first two sentences of the Moran section (TN, 87; Mo, 125). So it undercuts the opening initiative of Moran’s writing with the submerged Molloyan division that has always been immanent. Likewise, Moran’s movement toward Molloy is undercut drastically by the structure of the novel, which has already shown Molloy following Moran’s projected course toward galloping incapacity, domestication, and even death, since Molloy announces that he is dying in his mother’s room on the first page. Life outside of rationality and social connections is not viable. Molloy and Moran are parts of humanity that need each other to live, but they can only make contact by destroying each other. The arrangement of Molloy points toward a repeating cycle that is inevitable. It occurs to Moran that Sisyphus, as he rolls his stone up the hill eternally, may think that “each journey is the first. This would keep hope alive, would it not, hellish hope” (TN, 128; Mo, 182). As in Godot, hope exacerbates the situation, and Moran concretizes the affliction when he says that not even Sisyphus should be “required to . . . rejoice . . . at the same appointed places” (TN, 128; Mo, 182). Rejoicing may be part of the torture, and it is when Didi and Gogo realize that they are bound despite the evidence to keep hoping for Godot that they feel a need for suicide, which itself becomes a pipe dream (W, 107–8).

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The endless round of Molloy and Moran consists of their moving toward each other, striving to form a subject that includes them and can never come into being, never meet. Beckett suspects that there may not be any other kind of desire. Badiou’s idea that Beckett aims at progress is only justified insofar as the crucial step of progress consists of realizing how hopeless the situation is. The hopeful impulse must be seen as part of the trap. Badiou says, “a truth is always that which makes a hole in knowledge” (BE, 327). To recognize the inevitability of the fate of Beckett’s protagonists, we should realize the uniformity of his plots. In Murphy, an asylum nurse called Bom speaks of “despairing of a world in which the only natural allies are the fools and knaves . . .” (Mu, 103). This matches Swift’s definition of happiness in A Tale of a Tub as being well-deceived (Swift, 1973, 351), being a fool who has found his knave. It reappears in a more limited form when Banville’s The Sea observes that in every relationship, one partner loves more than the other (Banville, 2006, 122). But it may be a general principle in Beckett that there is no other possibility of human connection. In Murphy the characters may be divided into the idealistic fools Murphy and Celia, who fall in love, and the opportunistic knaves Neary, Wylie, and Miss Counihan, who take advantage of the ill-starred couple while being inevitably drawn to them. The link between knave and fool is obvious in the case of Pozzo and Lucky, and repeated more subtly between Didi and Gogo.11 More remarkable is the parallel to Molloy, which struck me on reading this line from Badiou’s first essay on Beckett, “The Writing of the Generic”: “the countryside . . . where Molloy undertakes to search for his mother, and Moran his search for Molloy” (Badiou, 2006, 6). This is the same pattern as in Murphy, with Molloy looking for his mother corresponding to the idealistic Murphy seeking love and transcendence, while Moran matches the predatory Neary and company.

11. The same pattern of active and passive recurs in Beckett’s great last novel, How It Is, where the central action consists of one character cutting a message on the skin of another called Pim (1964, 61–71).

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This may be the major model of exterior action in Beckett’s works, the main alternative being interior seeking. The interior level, which implies absolute dominance, allows the fantasy of equality. The dependence of Molloy and Moran on each other reveals that each is a projection of the other. Badiou says that the object is not a category for independently existing things: it always implies a relation from the start (Gibson, 2006, 179). This is even more true of the subject, with its dependence on the parental Other. Everyone starts as a projection and never really stops being one. Molloy and Moran can only subsist in a form like that of M. C. Escher’s famous image of two hands drawing each other (Escher, 1996, 88). And these hands not only create each other, they cancel each other out insofar as each is revealed as an extension or discharge from the pencil point wielded by the other. As in the story of the dog in the round in act 2 of Godot, neither hand quite exists because it passes into the other. The Trilogy Once Molloy and Moran are seen not as active individuals, but as extensions of each other caught in a cycle, character is emptied out into an extension of something prior. This leads to Malone Dies ([1951] 2009), the second novel of the Trilogy. Malone is an author who is himself outside active life, but projects his life as a series of fictions, mainly Saposcat or Sapo and Macmann, who have less volition and individuality than Molloy and Moran, whom Malone also mentions creating (TN, 229). Seen from outside, Sapo and Macmann are static, blank figures who represent the ridiculousness of life in its early and late phases respectively. In his relentless subtraction, Malone sees himself in his youth as Sapo confronting the falseness of education and the horror of manhood as cruelty embodied by Lambert (TN, 194–95)—and of womanhood as victimization in his wife (TN, 210). Malone demonstrates the preposterousness of “maturity” through Macmann, who needs to blame himself either for stopping in the rain or for not stopping (TN, 232–34). Later, Macmann’s relationship with Moll shows the abject nature of passionate love (TN, 253–57), and Lemuel shows the

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murderousness contained in the edifice of reason (TN, 260, 280). Lemuel bears the name of the greatest English hero of the Enlightenment, and he anticipates, as Lemuel Gulliver does by going mad, Foucault’s argument in Madness and Civilization that insanity is a product of that Enlightenment (Foucault, 1967). Lemuel is a parody of rationality, which believes it is justified in using force to control people. Malone enjoys destroying his creations. As he begins telling his stories, he looks forward to their end: “I have time to frolic ashore in the brave company I have always longed for, always searched for . . .” (TN, 188). This refers to the horrendous scene at the end of the novel in which Lemuel murders the members of a picnic party. During this scene, Lemuel’s murder weapon is confused with Malone’s pencil: “or with his pencil or with his stick” (TN, 281). Malone realized earlier that his notes tended “to annihilate all they purport to record” (TN, 252), and when he speaks of wiping something out (in this case Sapo’s dog), pleasure emerges: “It is time I had him destroyed. There’s a nice passage. Soon it will be even better .  .  .” (TN, 186). Soon the insultingly named Sapo will disappear, and the awful treatment of characters is relatively generous and considerate in Malone Dies as compared to The Unnamable. There seems to be a positive point at the end of Malone Dies, for Malone says of Lemuel, “he will not hit anyone any more . . .” (TN, 280–81); but positive points in Beckett should be handled gingerly, like explosive devices. Unfortunately, the fact that there will be no more killing means there will be no more narrative, and the text now disintegrates, ending with the unpunctuated line “any more” (TN, 281). In After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, Cousineau sees a progressive dismemberment of the body and disappearance of identity as advancing continuously through the entire Trilogy; and he uses the concepts of Anti-Oedipus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983), to argue that this dismemberment serves to liberate the multiplicity of originary desire from the constraints of Oedipal structuration (Cousineau, 1999, 18–21). A penetrating claim, but what Cousinou sees most clearly is destruction, and Badiou holds that to focus on the goal of the event is to vitiate its innovative force.

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Malone’s joy at liquidation, which takes us back to Molloy’s pride in kicking the poor charcoal burner (TN, 79; Mo, 114–15), may express not only the demonic side of man (which may be inseparable from the energy of heroism), but that of God. The fact that God appears to kill everyone is explained in terms of the afterlife and the idea that death is the source of spirituality.12 As Wallace Stevens says in “Sunday Morning,” “Death is the mother of beauty . . .” (1972, 7). Yet the spiritual productivity of death may recall Pozzo, who inspired faith, especially in Lucky, by being brutal. Fernie considers that God and Satan may be one, and that we are obliged to separate them because of our limitations, our need to idealize God, which keeps us from seeing the whole picture (2013, 17).13 In Badiou’s terms the problem may be that we need to see God as a unity rather than a multiplicity. Lucky’s monologue insists God must be good, but to conceive the first cause as two-sided could be a shift in philosophy parallel to Copernicus’s removal of the earth from the center of the universe. There may be no more crucial underpinning of human oppression than the belief that authority must be benevolent, since one can hardly live without it. Beckett’s mockery of this principle may parallel Stephen’s separation of the beautiful (what actually is) from the good. Shakespeare presents a view similar to Malone’s demonism in King Lear when the Duke of Gloucester says, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport” (4.1.36–37). The bard can indulge in skepticism here since Gloucester is mad and Lear’s world is pagan (with plural gods). Stephen Greenblatt says in “Shakespeare and the Exorcists” that Lear expresses a “demonic principle” (1988, 120?). This radical doubt may contribute to the greatness and modernity of Lear. In Peter Brook’s fine 1971 film of Lear, the sardonic fool is played by Jack Macgowran, who specialized in Beckett.

12. There is also a harsh explanation that we are bad and deserve to be punished. 13. Fernie’s sources for this argument include a passage from Kenneth Burke, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the Book of Job, in which Satan appears as God’s servant or enforcer.

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Once Malone has traversed or used up the rationales that impose the reality of established terms, he looks forward to being given “birth to into death” (TN, 276). Now the Trilogy reaches The Unnamable ([1953] 2009) as Malone passes into what projects him. As Derek Hand says of the Trilogy, “The move ever inwards, away from the world, is a move toward something basic and essential” (2011, 207). The Unnamable exists immobilized in an empty space in which static figures from earlier in the Trilogy, including Malone, pass before him. The Unnamable generates a rapidly shifting series of insubstantial images that ceaselessly change his frame of reality. He sees these images as imposed on him by demonic figures: “things . . . they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am . . .” (TN, 318). By seeing all of his constructions of reality as false, the Unnamable represents a higher level of mentality as the source that projects the other possibilities in endless multiplicity: “I have been here ever since I began to be, my appearances elsewhere having been put in by other parties” (TN, 287–88). But his position as first cause is infernal in its increasingly frenzied anguish. The link between creation and destruction manifests divinity as torment, just as the creative power of Irish literature may derive from a historic nightmare. The Unnamable can go on creatively only because he can’t go on (TN, 407). The Trilogy presents the projection of a series of characters that moves backward to the prior projector and then backward again. This is a retrogressive alienation and negation of consciousness that moves in the opposite direction from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which moves forward to the next more advanced projection (Hegel, 1977). Hegel elaborates the growth of consciousness, while Beckett, who sees such growth as malignant, seems to show a retreat. Yet consciousness advances through the Trilogy toward questioning itself, and the overflowing frameworks of the Unnamable make him superabundant in consciousness, except that he is perpetually tormented and unable to sustain any coherence. Here is a passage where the disintegration mounts toward the end: “So long as one does not know what one is saying and can’t stop to enquire, in tranquility, fortunately, fortunately, one would like to stop,

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unconditionally, I resume, so long as, so long as, let me see, so long as one, so long as he, ah fuck all that, so long as this, then that, agreed, that’s good enough, I nearly got stuck. Help, help, if I could only describe this place . . .” (TN, 392). He emphasizes that it is fortunate that he does not know what he is saying, and makes progress toward shorter attention spans. His environment is utterly and hopelessly beyond his comprehension. One of the psychoanalytic books Beckett took notes from during the thirties was Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth (Knowlson, 1997, 172, 652n49); but what if the heart of creative freedom were an endless return to the trauma of birth? So the Trilogy shows a rigorous progress toward the roots of human thinking that are covered over by artificial impositions. But the ultimate source of consciousness turns out to be an agitated and agonized version of the unceasingly various spiritual pains of hell described in the Portrait. Yet this locus of torment that generates everything and has nothing to believe in is the position of God, a god defined by the idea that the highest level of truth is negation. In “On Subtraction” Badiou refers to the ultimate goal of subtraction as the unnameable, which is “something like the point-like ground (fond en form de point) of every order in which terms are presented. This radical underside of nomination . . . designates that which of being shows the inadequacy of the principle of the One . . .” (Badiou, 2008, 122). Badiou may refer to Beckett’s term here. The conclusion of the Trilogy may thus be seen as parallel to Joyce’s taking on the role of God in order to show both its raging impossibility and its terrible necessity. And to be able to see things in the most completely, fundamentally new ways may be the deepest basis for progress.

5 Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman as Infernal Deity O’Brien’s Critique Like Joyce and Beckett, Flann O’Brien used the postcolonial position of being in revolt against the ruling order to question established claims to control and advance life. These three writers used laughter as a support for denial of the fundamental assumption that leans on mythology to make life livable, that one can know the principles that govern the universe. Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien were all born as colonial subjects, none more native than O’Brien, who grew up speaking Irish in the West. Their intellects made visible the pervasive deployment of imperial injustice as a model of rationality, and this spurred them to anticipate the radical denial of all ideology by poststructuralist criticism late in their century. Colonial ideology systematically made sense of the world to provide advantages in English terms, and for the Irish this could cast doubt on the very manufacture of sense. Because English was his second language and linked to oppression, O’Brien saw words as separated from the reality they tried to describe, so he anticipated one of the founding principles of poststructuralism, Lacan’s emphasis on Saussure’s notion that the signifier can never reach the signified, a word can never equal the concept it stands for. We have seen that this idea is fundamental to Badiou’s thought, and Badiou is devoted to Lacan and derives many of his main concepts about language and the mind from the enigmatic analyst. In Jacques Lacan, Past and Present, his dialogue with Lacan’s biographer, Elizabeth Roudinesco, for example, he describes the Lacanian cure as a 114

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breaking of form to confront the indescribable point of the real (2014, 16–18). This process is equivalent to Badiou’s event as the emergence of a point of indiscernibility, and Badiou affirms in this book his belief in the progressive value of Lacan’s thinking. This chapter will use Lacan’s notions of language and subjectivity to clarify the philosophical content of O’Brien’s novel, with indications of where Badiou’s thinking carries comprehension further. The idea that the signifier cannot reach the signified is active everywhere in The Third Policeman ([1939] 1999), which is often regarded as O’Brien’s greatest novel. It is especially evident in the book’s many typical scenes that focus on names that do not fit their objects, running through series of proper nouns that are rejected as inappropriate, as when the narrator is questioned about his name at a police station: “Would it be Mick Barry?” “No.” “Charlemange [a squalid emperor] O’Keefe?” “No.” “Sir Justin Spens?” “Not that.” (TP, 100–101, see also 41, 43–44, 45, 154–55)

This particular passage goes through twenty-three possibilities, which it describes as “An astonishing parade of nullity,” in its effort to find the name for the protagonist. This narrator is a farmer devoted to studying books by a deranged sage named de Selby. John Divney, who works for the narrator, uses his wish for money for books on de Selby to lead him into participating in the murder of the wealthy Phillip Mathers. Then Divney hides Mathers’s money box, and blows up the narrator when he tries to get it. Unable to remember his own name, the narrator has an eerie conversation with Mathers, who suggests that he can find the answers to his questions in a police station. Though O’Brien wrote before Lacan, The Third Policeman enacts a number of Lacan’s concepts, even a radical thesis of his seventeenth volume of seminars: that all knowledge is created by slaves and philosophy is a system for converting the concrete knowledge of slaves into the abstract property of masters (2007, 23). The central figure

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of The Third Policeman loses his knowledge of reality because he is enthralled by theories, and he is a slave insofar as the life he supposedly “leads” follows orders from a source he cannot comprehend. As the narrator, he creates the concrete knowledge in the novel because everything that appears is his projection from the second chapter, in which he dies without knowing it, to the last; yet everything seems amazingly out of his control. Psychoanalysis tries to explain irrational behavior, so it may be useful for speaking of this novel, in which the protagonist is continually confounded by what happens to him even though he causes it. This fantastic plot abolishes realities that conventional plots are built on. It may be that O’Brien noticed disturbing undercurrents in his satiric murder fantasy, and this may be one reason he denounced the novel after it was rejected several times, as Anthony Cronin’s biography reports (1998, 101–2), so it appeared posthumously in 1967 as a postmortal narrative. Lacan argues that the subject of consciousness is formed by the field of language that extends through society and operates unconsciously. This principle is extended by the Marxist Louis Althusser (who used Lacan’s theories) into the realization that “a subject endowed with a consciousness in which he freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in which he believes” is an ideological construction imposed on us by the systems of belief with which society frames us (1971, 167). The narrator of The Third Policeman is continually shocked out of such beliefs through the long process of his death, which takes him beyond earlier protagonists in his role as an outsider to the dominant system of ideology. This should give him insight into how consciousness is constructed by belief, but in view of Althusser’s observation that conscious choice depends on ideology, the narrator can never stop striving to be enclosed by the system. The system cannot serve the narrator in any real way, but only oppress him because he is in hell. To adopt the viewpoint of the damned is to take a potentially revolutionary position within the Catholic framework that O’Brien was subjected to. The insurrectionary attitude that Brian O’Nolan (his real name Anglicized) flaunted at University College Dublin is indicated by the founding editorial of

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Blather, the graduate satirical magazine that he edited, together with his brother and a friend, for five issues in 1934: “We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. . . . A sardonic laugh escapes us. . . . It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men” (quoted in Cronin, 1998, 72). O’Brien, who had to support his family by being a civil servant, was not consistently able to sustain such defiance, but he was able to sense the strategic intellectual value of damnable attitudes in a pious society, their ability to loosen through parody the grip of domination. Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien insisted that the most immediate and indispensable comforts, the most urgent certainties of reality, were fantastic distortions imposed on us by a criminal empire of oppression.1 Thus, by confronting a more absolute void than had ever been conceived, they made it possible for humanity to free itself more completely than had ever been imagined. One procedure that they used was to deconstruct the name or detach it from its subject, and this process can be traced from Finnegans Wake, where every name is an approximation, through The Third Policeman, in which the narrator develops through a series of actions aligned with his inability to remember his name, to Beckett’s The Unnamable, which expands on the idea that every name is an imposition. In all of these cases the name is a split signifier, divided by its formation through a crime that stands for the inability of language to have a legitimate basis. The phenomenal lack of self-possession in the narrator of The Third Policeman matches Lacan’s theory of the empty subject. This indefinite term for the narrator seems to fit Badiou’s idea of the event as a way of starting from nothing, and O’Brien does open up new ways of seeing the world; but his pessimism is so obdurate that it serves to reveal Beckett by contrast as the idealist Badiou finds him

1. In Joyce’s Ulysses, for example, the mental burden of authority on the minds of the characters is expressed most directly by Stephen Dedalus’s continual brooding on how he is subject to the Church and the State (e.g. U, 1.638, 15.4433–37, 4471–74). It may be argued that Leopold Bloom is more seriously oppressed because he doesn’t realize it, though his subjugation emerges on an unconscious level in the “Circe” episode (15.1013–1180, 2802–3225).

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to be. The narrator of The Third Policeman, learned though he may be, is so utterly unable to learn anything meaningful that I will call him Narr, German for fool; and I find that the concept of the empty subject best fits his immurement in nonsense. Juliet Mitchell explains that there is no innate prior subject for Lacan, but the subject is constructed by language around an empty or split center (“Introduction-1”; Lacan and the école freudienne, 1982, 4–5). The human subject never appears except as a signifier, for one can only exist through signs. The signifier’s meaning is not attached to any signified, but always depends on the structure of activities through which it appears in relation to other signifiers. This leads to a model of the plot of narrative as a movement of the signifier through stages of misunderstanding, parallel to the idea of a series of names being applied to the Narr of The Third Policeman, none of which fits. This is a negative version of the process of subtraction Stephen goes through in Portrait. The action of O’Brien’s plot constitutes a subject that takes its meaning from a series of false positions as it strives toward the true meaning it can never reach. The narrative movement supported by the idea that the signifier can never reach the signified goes against the Freudian model presented by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, which assumes that narrative always moves toward or delays a reachable goal (1992, 90–112). Narratologist Mieke Bal takes a similar position: “the model starts from a teleological relation between the elements of the story. The actors have an intention; they aspire toward an aim” (1997, 202). The Lacanian model accords with postmodernism, a term generally seen as fitting Third Policeman, insofar as the idea of the grand or coherent narrative is overturned, which is like saying that a name cannot be given to the whole.2

2. Keith Hopper (2009) develops O’Brien’s postmodernism, which he defines on 4–16; and Terence Brown’s essay “Two Post-modern Novelists, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien” appears in J. W. Foster’s Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (2006, 205–22). Thomas F. Shea’s treatment of TP, while using the terms

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The pattern of narrative without a goal is unfolded in Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (2006, 6–41). Lacan sees Poe’s letter as the signifier passing through a series of stages of deception between people. The meaning of the letter (whose content is never revealed) depends on its relation to those who transmit it, and anyone who reaches a point of thinking that he or she possesses the letter is from that point deluded and defeated. Lacan suggests that Detective Dupin’s belief at the end of the tale that he has outwitted the minister may backfire (2006, 29–30). Here Lacan extends Saussure’s detachment of the signifier from its signified by focusing on how the meaning of the signifier is constituted by its interplay with other signifiers. The lack of legitimacy of the signifier is underlined by how it enters and passes through the story by a series of crimes, being purloined. All signification (in saying something new) is a destruction of prior signification, a crime. As Fernie puts it, “the demonic encompasses all active originality which, in bringing something new into being, transgresses the limits of what is” (2013, 22). The Infinite Regress “Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers .  .  . ,” the opening line of The Third Policeman, is parallel to a line at the start of Finnegans Wake, which was a major model for O’Brien’s previous novel, At Swim-Two-Birds ([1939] 1967):3 “not yet . . . had a kidscad

“extravagance” and “transgression” (which match postmodernism), provides an account of many postmodern features. Comparing TP to the work of Thomas Pynchon (1992, 129), Shea says that in the novel language does not fit reality (1992, 116) and the laws of logic break down so that knowledge is seen as an artificial structure as the world behaves absurdly (126–32). Writers who were postmodern before World War II, like O’Brien, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges, were generally devoted to Joyce. Kevin J. H. Dettmar describes Joyce as a postmodernist (1996). For accounts of postmodernism, see J.-F. Lyotard (1984) and Patricia Waugh (1992, 3–65). 3. Cronin indicates that by 1938 O’Brien knew “Work in Progress” through transition (1998, 55).

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buttended a bland old Isaac” (lines 10–11).4 The creation of the world begins with the murder of an old man by a younger one (or ones), the origin of symbolic culture in Freud’s Totem and Taboo ([1913] 1955), just as most nations begin by rebelling against their controllers. The world is created by murder in most mysteries, and The Third Policeman has the shape of a mystery engaged in a quest for a solution, though in this case, as with Oedipus, the solution convicts the quester. Third Policeman is actually a reverse of the usual mystery pattern in that it is written from the point of view of the murderer (or one of them, though they are finally joined), like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or its American descendants, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Richard Wright’s Native Son.5 In these novels the murderer occupies a revolutionary position, and in both American versions the author was a Marxist. If “I killed old Phillip” is a writer’s hook, it grabs the reader’s desire in order to anatomize a rebellious aspect of it, exploring the hell of guilt created by the murder of the colonial or capitalist father. As in Totem and Taboo, the killing of the old man creates God, and there is a tendency for a person we kill to assume the role of a divinity, a pattern that extends from Jesus through the Mayan sacrifices to the Noh drama.6 Mathers appears as a god on the instant of the narrator’s death through a cough that calls the sinner to account and has cosmic overtones: “the utterance of the cough seemed to bring with it some more awful alteration in everything, just as if it held the universe standstill for an instant, suspending the planets in their courses,

4. The Wake line refers to Parnell replacing Isaac Butt as leader of the Home Rule Party, but also to the idea of a young person bumping an old one out of his place. The Wake also refers to “her totam in tutu” (397). 5. The most famous mystery in which the detective turns out to be the murderer is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1928), by Agatha Christie. There is also an example by Scott Turow, but I will not list such works because it would give away endings. Thanks to Margot Norris. 6. The standard treatment of how people who are sacrificed are worshipped is René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (1977). See, for examples, 1 and 258.

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halting the sun and holding in mid-air any falling thing the earth was pulling towards it” (TP, 23). Mathers’s control over gravity and the heavenly bodies signals that Narr’s world will never for a moment stop being Mathers’s creation from here to eternity. The most elaborate image of Mathers’s divinity in the first half of The Third Policeman is that of his eyes: [T]he eyes were horrible. Looking at them I got the feeling that they were . . . mechanical dummies . . . with a tiny pinhole in the centre . . . through which the real eye gazed out secretively and with great coldness. Such a conception . . . disturbed me . . . [with] interminable speculations as to . . . whether, indeed, it was real at all or merely another dummy with its pinhole on the same plane as the first one so that the real eye, possibly behind thousands of these absurd disguises, gazed out through a barrel of serried peep-holes. (24–25)

The infinite regress tends to indicate divinity,7 as in Kafka’s famous parable “Before the Law,” in which a man who asks to be admitted to the law is told that beyond this gate is another and beyond that is another and another and so on. Cronin’s biography mentions that Kafka was admired in O’Nolan’s circle during the 1930s (1998, 58). Indeed Kafka’s well-known attempt to destroy his works is parallel to O’Brien’s hiding of his masterpiece, and both bureaucrats were influenced not only by the difficulty of greatness, but by the colonized or minority position that tends to see divinity as overbearing and distant. Kafka’s story does mention that each succeeding gate has a gatekeeper who is more powerful, and that even the third cannot be looked at; and as the man approaches death, he sees a radiance issuing from the gate

7. M. Keith Booker says, “The infinite perspective to which O’Brien’s various regressions lead can be interpreted either as an argument that there must be a God (because only God can be infinite) or as an argument that the very concept of God as a stopping point for such regressions makes no sense” (1995, 60). In opting for the second alternative, Booker may not consider the powerful role played by Mathers, though Booker might respond that Mathers is a projection with many absurd features.

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(1961, 61–63). Nevertheless, to a considerable extent the authority of the law is constituted by its being at a remove so multiplied, and the features of radiance and unseeableness are present in O’Brien’s version. This vision of God approaches the Lacanian Other in that His power consists of incomprehensibility. The Other, which Lacan identifies with God (1998, 43), is the totality of language from which we derive our meaning although it is beyond comprehension.8 So the deity rests on the inscrutability of the Symbolic system, and Mathers attributes his success to denying everything (TP, 30). The source of this distant, unintelligible image of God may be traced through Irish history to the idea of the absentee landlord, who controls your fate but cannot be approached because he is in England. And it extends through the range of colonists who are incomprehensible to the colonized so that they appear as gods.9 In The Year of the French, Thomas Flanagan describes the absentee Lord Glenthorne, who believes that he is being benevolent toward the Irish because the theories of Malthus show the need to “adjust [decimate] population”: “Glenthorne is the absent centre of our Mayo world and the estate is his tarnished Eden. Like the Lord of Creation, he is everywhere and nowhere, centre and circumference” (1979, 509). The Irish mocked their landlords, but this was not inconsistent with the lords’ power, which may be suggested by Pozzo in Waiting for Godot. Mathers’s argument that it is best to say no to everything because most of the things you could accept are sinful (TP, 27–30) makes him parallel to God as defined by Milton. A. J. A. Waldock points out in Paradise Lost and Its Critics that as the embodiment of immaculate

8. Lacan’s big Other (Autre, as opposed to the small other or objet a, which is the object of desire that stands for the big Other) stands for the principle of otherness itself. The meaning of a word depends on another set of words that depends on another set; and so on. So the Other is the totality of language as the ultimate source of meaning. See the entries under “a” and “A” in the glossary of Fink (1995, 173) and entries under “Other” in Fink’s index. 9. Stephen Greenblatt examines some early examples of explorers who passed as gods (1980, 226–28).

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perfection, God in Milton’s epic tends to be defined in terms of all the things he is not ([1947] 1961, 97–100). Milton’s unapproachable God is the image of the deity most inimical to Ireland, the God Cromwell brought with him when he ravaged Ireland in 1649, precisely the figure Narr cannot help killing and being attached to. The inevitability of Narr’s murder of Mathers is suggested by Žižek, who speaks of “the structural necessity of parricide” because people who live under a prohibitory patriarchal God have a strong desire to attack Him and it is the reaction to this rebellion that consolidates devotion to Him (1999, 316). Narr’s “life” is under Mathers’s control for the rest of the novel, a point that is emphasized when Mathers finally appears near the end as the third policeman. First Mathers sends him to the police, who regulate his admission to the law by confronting him with a series of infinite regresses, such as the spear whose point is too fine to be perceived (TP, 67–68), the chests that enclose smaller and smaller chests until they grow invisible (TP, 71–74), and eternity, which leads to an endless number of repeating rooms (TP, 131–34). The infinite regress is parallel to the series of incorrect names. In eternity, which has an elaborate entrance (TP, 128), Sergeant Pluck sounds like Kafka’s gatekeeper: “you can walk on till you reach the next doorway and you are welcome. But it will do you no good . . .” (TP, 134). The police appear to be benevolent and jovial, but it turns out that they want to take Narr’s life. The law represents the force that limits one’s life in the economic sense that legislation decides to allot certain advantages to some people and take them from others, with the likelihood that that this will lengthen or shorten their lives. On an internal level, law limits one in that one can never quite grasp it or fulfill it completely. The infinite regress and the series of wrong names both put off and suggest the goal. Sergeant Pluck represents the stern aspect of the law as punisher, while Officer MacCruiskeen speaks for the rewards that it offers. For example, after Pluck says that going further into eternity will do no good, MacCruiskeen, who presents the aspect of the infinite regress that holds out hope, tells Narr that eternity has the advantage that one’s beard does not grow: “What do you think

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of the no-shaving?” (TP, 134). After this, when Pluck upsets Narr by telling him that he cannot transport the pile of ridiculous treasures he has generated, MacCruiskeen soothes him by offering him candy (140–41; later Mathers offers strawberry jam, 186). The cosmetic or confectionery rewards that the law offers tend to be devices to conceal the violence behind its power. Whether the violence of the law is necessary to support its benefits (“I’m doing this for your own good”) or whether the good things in life are bribes to justify that violence is a matter of perspective, and O’Brien’s sardonic outlook inclines toward the latter view. His image of law and religious authority may be related to his education at a religious school. Whereas Joyce went to the upper-class Clongowes where it was rare for his hands to be paddled, O’Brien, after a protected childhood in which he spoke Irish, was sent from the ages of eleven to fourteen to the demotic Christian Brothers, where he was continually beaten brutally. Cronin sees his account as “accurate,” at least for this one school: “No matter how assiduous and even intelligent a student was, he was bound to get a hiding every day of his school life” (O’Brien quoted in Cronin, 1998, 25). This history of abuse may have to do with both O’Nolan’s adherence to the establishment and his black resentment of it, his brilliance and his self-sabotage. Kafka’s gatekeeper is friendly, and much of the time police would rather avoid conflict by soothing the person they arrest. Yet the jollity of the constables is not merely strategic. They and Narr play delightful games with verbal exaggeration: “each was very pleased with himself and with the other and had good reason to be” (TP, 66). Within the Symbolic system of the law that compels the police to take Narr’s life, they can have a grand time with big words and nonsense. This game, for which the term may be blarney, resembles the games Henry Louis Gates refers to as Signifying, African wordplay whereby the colonized turn English into their own language (1988, 74–88). That many features of O’Brien’s work derive from his Irish heritage is indicated by Alan Titley’s essay “The Novel in Irish” in Foster’s Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Titley says that the greatest novelist in Irish is Máirtín Ó Cadhain, and his major novel is Cré na

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Cille (“Graveyard Clay,” or The Dirty Dust, 1949). All of the characters in this novel are dead. (The idea of such underground voices seems more pagan than Christian.) Their repartee is filled with “the flavor of inventiveness and word-fencing which was part of the craft of speech as practiced by Gaeltacht people . . .” (Titley, 2006, 181). Titley also says Ó Cadhain’s works mix humor with what is solemn “where it was least expected” (181). Adding excessive meaning to the words provides delight and freedom that are Irish and Joycean, but O’Brien does not see this game as practical. In his bleak view of the world, one may as well have fun with one’s enemies, for this is the main enjoyment available. As I mentioned, Swift, who may be O’Brien’s main model, defined happiness in A Tale of a Tub as “being well Deceived” (1973, 351). The inflated words that Narr bandies with the police often have serious undertones. For example, Officer MacCruiskeen compliments Narr’s cleverness by saying, “you are a sempiternal man” (TP, 66). This means that he can never die, and it is quite true since he is already damned. Often the uproarious parts of the book turn out to have a chilling edge when examined.10 Sergeant Pluck says, “This is not today, this is yesterday” (TP, 60), since time is frozen by death. When Narr approaches the black box supposedly contained in Mathers’s house, he passes through a portal that keeps receding, which is parallel to Kafka’s theological series of entrances: “I clambered through the opening and found myself, not at once in a room, but crawling along the deepest window-ledge I have ever seen. When I reached the floor and jumped noisily down upon it, the open window seemed very far away and much too small to have admitted me” (TP, 22). When Narr enters the house again, he follows Mathers as the third policeman, Fox, who here confirms his identity as a deity and turns out to be in control of the other policemen as well as Narr. Officer Fox enters the house through a small window, “putting his

10. Sue Asbee (1991, 53–57) emphasizes that features of TP have a tendency to become disturbing when we realize that Narr is dead.

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immense body in through the tiny opening. I don’t know how he accomplished what did not look possible at all” (TP, 181). This may imply the idea associated with Christ’s phrase “strait is the gate” (Matthew 7.14), that the passage to grace is narrow, and it suggests the distance between man and God. Outmoded Frames The thickness of the walls of Mathers’s house relates to the power of authority and matches the massiveness of all of the policemen as representatives of the law. The thicker the walls, the more “the big house” (TP, 194) embodies the status of the Ascendancy. Since the office of Mathers as the third policeman is inside the walls, this thickness is the space from which he exerts his power as a light that seems to shine out of nowhere. When Narr searches for the source of the light in the empty rooms of the house, he finds that when he goes into one dark room, the light seems to come from his right, and when he goes in the next dark room on the right, the light comes from his left (TP, 177– 78). One suggestion involved is that the light is coming from inside him. This massiveness is also the established structure of Irish society, the fastness that protects the ghost of the Anglo-Irish estate from the impoverished Irish. At “this” point the house has been exploded for sixteen years, but it continues to haunt Narr because he cannot give up the idea that it holds the treasure (TP, 178). That Mathers’s house has been demolished for sixteen years may imply that in 1938 Ireland was still in the grip of the authority from which it was supposed to have freed itself in 1922. The patricide that inaugurates the Irish Free State is figured forth appropriately as the murder of the owner of the big house. The destruction of an Anglo-Irish estate is the subject of Bowen’s The Last September ([1929] 2000), and hundreds of them were burned in Ireland during the 1920s.11 While Mathers is identified as a businessman

11. Maud Ellmann reports that “The months from 6 December 1922 to 22 March 1923 saw 192 Big Houses destroyed by fire in the South of Ireland” (2003, 55).

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rather than gentry, he is the wealthiest person with the biggest house in the area; and his name is Scottish, so he suggests colonialism as well as capitalism, since Scots were often colonizers in Ireland. And the bizarre features of his house, which seems to have considerable grounds as well as thick walls, strange lights, and haunting, evoke the old estate. The guilt the Irish felt for liquidating British hegemony is registered indelibly in Frank O’Connor’s powerful story “Guests of the Nation” (1931), in which IR A men execute two British prisoners whom they have befriended, and one of the executioners is traumatized permanently by his action: “anything that ever happened me after I never felt the same about again” (1981, 12). A useful perspective on the revolutionary damnation that arises in striking down British authority may appear by turning to the distant situation of America in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” This 1829 tale is set before the Revolution and focuses on the psychological impact of casting off paternal authority. Young Robin comes to Boston seeking support from his uncle Molineux, the governor. The country youth has no idea that people have begun to attack British-appointed governors, and the story involves his going from a pious farm to the city where values are questioned (medieval to modern). Robin walks through the town at night, asking everyone where to find his kinsman the Major, and they all mock him, leading him to feel he is under a spell in a topsy-turvy world in which nothing makes sense. Finally he is confronted by a noisy, hellish mob dressed as demons leading a cart in which Molineux sits tarred and feathered. Though Robin is horrified to see the old man shaking with fright, the youth cannot help participating in the patricidal laughter. The modern alienation that renders the world absurd for Robin stands for the shock of losing traditional sources of belief. The revolutionary pandemonium throws open a sense that all values are arbitrary. In Yeats’s well-known words, “All changed, utterly changed. / A terrible beauty is born.” Hawthorne’s demonic imagery insists on the reality of damnation as a separation from knowledge and unity. One of the rebels is painted two colors: “The effect was as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united

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themselves to form this infernal visage” (1987, 12). Robin shares with Third Policeman’s Narr, who finds himself in hell, a loss of knowledge of who he is, where he is, or where he is going, as the meaning of his goal is overturned in a world whose events violate logic. Regret for the passing of the old authority and horror at the chaos unleashed by its destruction enter Irish literature most eloquently as they echo through Yeats’s poetry. He laments in 1910 that the revolutionary spirit would have “hurled the little streets upon the great” (“No Second Troy,” Yeats, 1983, 91) and feels that “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (“The Second Coming,” 1983, 187), reaching a climax in the nightmarish vision of seditious war that concludes “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” (1983, 209–10), and summing up in “The Great Day”: “Hurrah for the revolution and cannon come again, / The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on” (1983, 312). While he is far from Yeats’s patrician views, O’Brien takes the parallel position that the loss of authority can only lead to a new authority in a world where all ideas are absurd. This may have a historical basis, for Cronin points out that after the Irish Free State was formed in 1922, the government tended to be conservative and locked in a bloody, bitter civil war with the IR A, so that there was a great sense of disillusionment and cynicism (1998, 22). Joyce refers to the repressive government of Eamon de Valera in the Wake as a “devil era” ([1939] 1999, 473). Carol Taaffe sees The Third Policeman as attacking Irish political stagnation in 1939, particularly Ireland’s neutrality in World War II (2008, 66–67). The endless damnation of Narr is rooted in the tendency to cling blindly to authority, but he also has moments of vision, though he is unable to hold on to them. Narr’s devotion to de Selby’s theories, which are ludicrous but have the advantage of leading outside the conventional world, causes him to commit his crime and enslave himself to Divney: “It was for de Selby I committed my first serious sin. It was for him that I committed my greatest sin” (TP, 9). Divney, the deceitful man of strength, may indicate that some of the worst abuses of colonialism are imposed on the colonized by each other, for the first chapter seems to be the

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most intensely direct vision of colonial oppression: “even if I did own everything, he owned me” (TP, 11). As Anne Clissman first pointed out, absurd as de Selby’s ideas are, they “gradually gain the status of a vision of this very universe” (1975, 161), a world in which there is no shelter, travel is an illusion, life is “a succession of static experiences” (TP, 50), reflections are more real than originals, and existence can only be “one directional” unless a new direction is found so that “a world of entirely new sensation and experience will be open to humanity” with the likelihood of death (TP, 95). In Žižek’s resonant argument, it is the deprivation of actual experience that generates the phantasms of transcendence (1993, 116), so that the Irish have been great dreamers because they were greatly persecuted. And de Selby’s work as a means of escape follows the theological route of infinite regress through endlessly reflecting mirrors (TP, 65), roads that go on and on, and endlessly interpretable texts. Lacan says that Aristotle’s idea of God as an unmoving sphere is what the break “induced by scientific discourse obliges us to do without” (2006, 88), so de Selby is on the side of science in turning God into an incomprehensible multiplicity. And the mechanisms surrounding Mathers’s divinity are presented in scientific terms, including his eyes not only in the complicated device at the beginning (TP, 24–25), but at the end, when Fox looks in Narr’s eye and he is temporarily blinded as if he had seen the sun (TP, 186). There is a level on which Mathers and de Selby join in a demonic parody of God, but this is the only God that appears in the novel. The effort to see the world in new terms is compromised by the power this effort exerts to promote itself and ends up being indistinguishable from traditional authority, so that the new dispensation ends up being destructive; and the most meaningful freedom Narr has may appear merely in his inability to accept. Unnaming The gesture that imposes the affliction that divides Narr from his identity and sets him on a quest that will lead to further and further division occurs at the spine-chilling moment when Mathers asks him,

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“What is your name?” (TP, 31). This corresponds to Althusser’s interpellation—in which the state calls the subject and commits him to an ideological identity (1971, 170–74)—in that it gives Narr his purpose. But it differs from Althusser in that Narr loses his name instead of getting it. One explanation for this is the postcolonial level in which the Irish person cannot accept the Anglo-Irish one’s designation. Flann O’Brien did not have a single actual name. Narr thinks he has backed Mathers into telling him where the black box containing the treasure is, and “What is your name?” is the answer to the question “where is it?” This answer shakes up Narr because what the box contains is the loss of identity. That is, the box turns out to contain omnium, the most powerful element in the book, and the substance through which the third policeman controls everything. Omnium is described as having no particular form, color, or any other quality (TP, 110, 154). It is the infinite regress concretized as a substance, the unsatisfiable margin that drives all desire. So the narrator disintegrates as he realizes that his name is only part of an endless series of names. In his essay “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan identifies male power with the ability to signify and says that this power is always an illusion that cannot bear examination because the signifier can never connect with what it signifies, so its power lies in not being recognized (2006, 579–81). Omnium is the signifier with no signified. In one of his rare and futile aggressive gestures, Narr shocks Sergeant Pluck to gain the upper hand for a moment by suggesting that Narr cannot be legally punished because he has no name (TP, 100). The power of the deity that one partakes of consists of being outside existing paradigms, just as He traditionally cannot be named. For this reason, Mathers reaches his apotheosis when he realizes that he is dying and says something completely irrational, a statement that cannot be identified: “something like ‘I do not care for celery’ or ‘I left my glasses in the scullery’” (TP, 16)—a touching, uproarious, and terrifying line that takes the book for the first time outside bleak ordinary reality. This omnium line says that there is a dimension in him that cannot be calculated. The realization that he has no name leads

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Narr to Mathers’s account of virtually invisible colored garments, an identity of infinite gradations that cannot be seen (TP, 32–35). Mathers tells him that the police produce these garments, which indicate the length of one’s life, and this leads Narr to believe that they know where the box is (TP, 36). The three police measure life, like the ancient Fates. The unnaming of Narr by Mathers when he says “What is your name?” as a negative version of Althusser’s interpellation (1971, 173–82) is what Lacan calls the creation of a master signifier.12 Lacan emphasizes that when society calls the subject, or the master installs his signifier, the identity he receives may be more in doubt than certain, which may be why he is attached to it. Lacan says that at the instant when the master signifier or new idea intervenes in the symbolic field, “the subject as divided, emerges” together with a sense of “loss” (2007, 15). Narr now has a soul who is capable of opposing him and he is attached to the black box as a goal he can never reach. The black box is the object of desire that Lacan calls objet a (see note 8), and Lacan, citing Marx, says that this object is a surplus of pleasure that is used to attach the subject to the Master, who turns it into surplus profit (2007, 20). The one who profits is the Master. This dreadfully skeptical version of the traditional quest has much in common with Moran’s engagement to serve Youdi in Molloy, which likewise partakes of projection. Mathers’s name may suggest master, and he is consistently presented as a figure for whom economic expansion is unlimited. Lacan says that the wealthy “buy everything. . . . But . . . they do not pay for it. . . . Buy from the wealthy, from a developed nation, you believe— and this is what the meaning of the wealth of nations is—that you are simply going to share in the level of a rich nation. However, in the process, what you lose is your knowledge, which gave you your status. The wealthy acquire this knowledge on top of everything else”

12. O’Brien’s unnaming seems to differ from Badiou’s concept of the event, which allows one to try to perpetuate a new set of values (2001, 40–57).

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(2007, 82–83). When Narr kills Mathers, the master does not die; instead he takes away Narr’s name and his knowledge of himself. This is how divine law operates as the idea of origin, strengthened by being attacked. Realizing how deeply embedded divinity or the opposition between heaven and hell is in society can reveal the social structure of oppression. The line from Virgil’s Aeneid that Freud uses as epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams may apply here: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (7.312), or “If I cannot move the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions” (Freud, 1953, 608). One implication may be that to confront the underworld may be the most necessary way to change the upper one. The operation of eschatology in social domination is one reason why O’Brien’s Narr, like Kafka’s figures and Beckett’s, may be the truest picture of the citizen of bureaucratic ideology.13 And this may be even truer for Narr than for the others because no matter how this poor clown keeps being shocked by violations of his code, he still keeps responding to stimuli and following the maze like a mindless rat. There is a sense in which no writer grasps the deepest persecution further than O’Brien, and in this sense he is revolutionary because he is certain of the unalterable implacability of the heavenly order. If the unnaming of Narr is compared to Michelangelo’s famous image of God passing life to Adam, this ironic version suggests that subsequent events will reveal that God is handing Adam a disaster. Such a viewpoint suggests a pagan outlook, and O’Brien now has such an attitude expressed by the first person that Narr meets on his quest, Martin Finnucane, who seems to be a leprechaun. The signs that he is a leprechaun include his being a small man found in the countryside who is “tricky,” a word applied to him five times (TP, 43–46). Padraic Colum says that leprechauns have the power to direct one to treasure,

13. Hand says of O’Brien and TP, “In keeping with his own position as a civil servant, he highlights the bizarre logic at work at the heart of the state, its impersonality and baffling expediency (2011, 190).

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but they end up cheating one, and he describes them as a variety of fairies, which means that they can be terrifying (1967, 396). Finnucane’s attitude toward life is decidedly not Christian: “Is it life? . . . I would rather be without it.” He goes on for seventeen hilarious lines describing life as a “great mistake,” ending with “a certain death trap” (TP, 44–45). The Third Policeman portrays life as hell, and the part before Narr dies is not much better than the sequel. O’Brien’s portrayal of the Irish countryside in The Poor Mouth is appalling and uproarious in the grotesqueness of its absolute misery. Dante’s Inferno suggests that there may be Christian roots to the vision of life as hell, and the idea that the world is ruled by the devil was widely accepted in the Middle Ages. But of course Dante provides uplift (and supports the system), while for O’Brien the uplift, while it can be beautiful and touching, is what one feels before the truth hits one. If everything after Mathers is a projection, Narr may project Finnucane and his speech to reflect an uneasy suspicion that Narr is dead, and like Fox at the end, Finnucane ends up turning his threat to support, shifting toward illusion. The approach to the police involves the projection of a de Selbian road that creates a sense of direction and leads to a house that appears at first to be two-dimensional: “The appearance of the house was the greatest surprise I had encountered since I saw the old man in the chair and I felt afraid of it” (TP, 53). The many shocks to Narr’s sense of order are extensions of Mathers-Fox and propel Narr forward by making him realize that he has no identity and is therefore compelled to aim at one. The postcolonial postmodern deity takes the form of a series of shocks to one’s metaphysics by which authority forces one to react by reorganizing oneself. As he moves nearer to the police station, it takes on depth because he enters its world and creates the dimensions of its reality, which are the conditions of the authority of the police—the law that implies eternity as a reward that can be withheld. The three-dimensional perspective is itself an infinite regress pointing to the distance, which sees ordinary reality from the other side. The transformation of two dimensions into three corresponds to the realization that the arbitrary category of bicycles (which the

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Irish usually depended on for transportation) can fill the entire area of value.14 Jorge Luis Borges says, “a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect” (1964, 10). The idea that all crimes involve bicycles is not very far from the idea that most crimes involve drugs, as they often do now, or religion or sex, as they often have. Samuel Butler’s satire Erewhon (1872) indicates the arbitrariness of criminalization by portraying a civilization in which people who are sick are punished for crimes while people who commit crimes are treated medically. Not unusual. The scene in The Third Policeman in which the police steal a bicycle and plant the evidence (TP, 80–82) corresponds to social mechanisms by which the law puts certain kinds of people (such as the poor and minorities) in the position of being criminals. The bicycle is what Lacan calls the master signifier, imposed by the Master system as the center of everything, an empty phallic power. The prejudging of the law is a key indicator of the realization that all assumptions of value are arbitrary, which should make us able to stand outside of all of the constructions that contain us. The pattern recurs on many levels: for example, the police believe that virtually all health problems are caused by the teeth (TP, 54), and this may not be far from the widespread beliefs that they are caused by nutrition or genetics. Just as Foucault maintains that authority dictates not only our restrictions but our enjoyments (1978, 45, 48–49), arbitrary linkages are not only unavoidable, but attractive, and The Third Policeman sees love as a phantasm imposed on one. Narr gets drawn into the world of the law to such an extent that he falls in love with a bicycle. His subjugation to the law in all of its absurdity—the law’s absurdity and his love’s—is indicated by the fact that according to the novel’s boundary-breaking atomic theory, 14. While the aspect of the bicycle as an arbitrary signifier that depends on its place in the system rather than its nature is powerful, it may also be said that the bike has many features that evoke philosophical significance; for examples it rests on two wheels that may point in different directions, allows one to move while sitting, and only stands as long as it is in motion.

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bicycles exchange identities with their owners to varying degrees (TP, 83–90). So a substantial percentage of his beloved is composed of his oppressor, the formidable Sergeant Pluck, whose bike she is. This enacts the idea that when one falls in love with a woman, one is enthralled by another man whom she also loves, an idea emphasized in Joyce’s “The Dead,” Exiles, and Ulysses.15 When Narr says of the bike, “How desirable her seat was . . .” (TP, 171), he is also talking partly about the Sergeant’s seat. His daring attempt to escape remains attached to authority. The same compulsion toward illusion that keeps shocking the narrator with the strangeness of this world that he is projecting also makes him unable to exert meaningful volition. Yet Cronin is inaccurate to see O’Brien as enclosed by conventional Christianity (1998, 104–5), because O’Brien takes the viewpoint of the damned, so he is not inclined to morally blame anyone. The conventional limits of Christianity must be insisted upon strenuously because they cannot really contain the subject. This is why another way to see Narr’s position of damnation, which pertains to my main argument, is that Christianity includes within itself a strain of resentful resistance or even furious opposition, which the overall frame of the religion is obliged to accommodate or struggle with through the strong recognition of sin or the demonic. The grand claims of faith can generate radical doubt because they address the fundamental nature of being and will. Narr’s need for a comprehensive theory makes the fantastic proliferate, starting with the virtual world of de Selby, while his need for the concrete attaches him continually to a series of ridiculously paltry goals. He demonstrates this in the scene in eternity when he piles up a set of objects that turn out to be absurd, like a glass that

15. The standard expression of the idea that one cannot fall in love with a woman without imagining another man is Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1966). An example appears at the end of O’Brien’s Dalkey Archive (1964), when Mick, who was about to denounce Mary, is told that she is engaged to his best friend Hackett and immediately proposes to her (201). In the novel’s last line, as Mick is moving toward marrying her, we are told that she is pregnant by Hackett.

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magnifies to invisibility (TP, 136), bananas, and a gun that can turn anyone to powder (TP, 138). He cannot approach the fact that what gives the box its value is its indeterminacy. The advance that O’Brien makes intellectually, which is carried on by Beckett, is to propose that purpose itself involves illusion. To realize this is to abandon much of the ability to justify what is unfair, as well as what is fair. But it is an impossible (derealized) level of realization, so that Narr, despite moments of terrible penetration that temporarily make him a visionary, always falls back on his folly, and even O’Brien can only sustain all of this negation through laughter. His cynical side allows him to unfold his radical intellectual side by not taking it seriously. The Failure of Vision The police, as agents of Mathers, the third policeman, demonstrate to Narr that his attempts to define reality are misguided, that he can never grasp their point, which indeed cannot be grasped. As Officer MacCruiskeen demonstrates, after emphasizing intellectual analysis (TP, 67), what one sees as the logical point of something depends on perspective: “What you think is the point is not the point at all . . .” (TP, 68). And the chest that tries to contain reality only contains other chests that become invisible as you refine them (TP, 73). Eternity, though it can allow you to pile up fantasy objects, cannot change the real condition of your life embodied by your weight (TP, 140). These demonstrations provide commentaries on science, which has long been emphasized by critics as a central topic of the novel (Clissman, 1975, 152–65; Shea, 1992, 113–32). Science projects a real world hidden beyond perception and is informed by the realization that every explanation it offers is hypothetical. The locus from which it operates is one of displacement and relentless alienation from ordinary reality. The Third Policeman highlights the disparity between this creative position and human limits by forcing Narr to keep readjusting his epistemology. While some of the scientific machinery turns out to be delusory, omnium remains powerful as a shifting of perspective that is the source of originality and vision. Yet omnium cannot be apprehended or grasped. By enforcing authority absurdly, the police

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prove its irrational basis, generating a terrible freedom. This freedom brings with it sublime qualities despite O’Brien’s mordant view of life. Narr unfolds beautiful lines about transcendence for two pages late in the novel when he is supposedly about to be hung and he thinks of what will become of him after he dies: “I would perhaps be the chill of the April wind. . . . some certain arrangement of sun, light and water, unknown and unbeheld . . . I might belong to a lonely shore or be the agony of the sea when it bursts upon it in despair” (TP, 158–60). These lines include parodic touches (making the sea melodramatic), and parody goes further when the narrator’s soul Joe repeats them (TP, 162). But their functions cannot be reduced to parody. They have a kind of logic, for if one’s mind contains a vivid image, that moment of one’s consciousness is repeated if that image appears after one is dead, so that perhaps all that is lost at that moment is selfishness. (Though only the same mind could produce that image exactly.) Moreover, the above lines gain dramatic force by being intercut with the haunting story of a man named Quigley who went up in a balloon and stayed up after his neighbors abused him (TP, 158–60). The strength of the lyrical passages expresses the maximum human yearning for the survival of consciousness, and gives Narr his greatest poignancy and subjectivity. The longing for the infinite takes on force because it is impossible. Yet these pages serve an ironic purpose, one that heightens their emotional intensity, for the text makes it clear that Narr’s dreams exist just because he is about to be hung, the traditional fate of Irish rebels. Here again, in Wallace Stevens’s words, “Death is the mother of beauty, mystical . . .” (1972, 7). Narr stands on the scaffold as Pluck tests it: “He seemed to dominate the half of the world that was behind my back with his presence . . . filling it up with himself. . . . The other half of the world which lay in front of me was beautifully given a shape . . . faultlessly suitable in its nature. But the half behind me was black and evil and composed of nothing at all except the menacing policeman .  .  . arranging the mechanics of my death” (160). It is the fear behind that makes Narr project the beauty in front. Žižek argues that transcendence is always based on deprivation (1993,

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116), that what actually exists is negation, and it causes us to project imaginary visions. In fact, Pluck states that disaster produces imagination: “necessity is the unmarried mother of invention” (TP, 81). Whenever beauty or satisfaction appears in The Third Policeman, it always implies the terrible behind it, as with the beauty of the scenery that Narr sees as he sets out toward the police, entering the world of death (TP, 38–39). The threat behind attraction also appears when Narr is falling for Pluck’s bike and says, “Both of us were afraid of the same Sergeant” (TP, 171). This antinomy works in two directions: inspiration is ridiculous and based on deception, but that actually makes it more deep and moving. Yet the poignancy includes political destruction, for just as his attraction to Pluck’s bike compromises his freedom, so his vision of transcendence on the scaffold would encourage him to accept his death. Terror sets Narr on his quest and terror concludes it. The moment when Mathers asks Narr, “What is your name?” is reprised at the end when Narr tells Mathers as the third policeman, “I have escaped,” referring to execution, and Mathers says, “Are you sure?” (TP, 183). In both cases the shock is precipitated by Narr’s feeling that he has solved his problem and can get Mathers to yield satisfaction. This corresponds to the movement of the Lacanian plot in which a subject believes that he possesses or knows the letter. When the quester reaches his goal and finds God, it is like looking into the sun. It is the birth of a new master signifier that splits the narrator by hitting him with a conflict he cannot contain, just as the originary murder of Mathers divided Narr from Divney dreadfully while binding them together, and created the Narr’s soul Joe. At his final interpellation by Mathers, Narr feels “horribly ill as if the spinning of the world in the firmament had come against” his stomach (TP, 183), an echo of cosmic images in the first scene (TP, 23). At this point Narr and the reader may get inklings that this is taking place in a house that has been blown up for sixteen years, that the Irish are still fixated on an order long gone. As de Selby argues that travel is an illusion, The Third Policeman moves toward the idea that life is an illusion. This matches observations about life by cognitive

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scientists that Žižek reports: the substratum of life is a series of chemical neuronal reactions that are not conscious and may not be regarded as animate, or having a soul. Consciousness and life move over them like a skater on ice [or a bicycle], staying aware by avoiding sinking into the welter (2006, 206–11). If the world science tells you about is incomprehensible to human coherence, then on a physical level, to meet your maker, as Narr does when Mathers stops him short, is to realize your death. As Lacan puts it, “it is indispensable for life that something irreducible . . . does not know that I am dead” (2007, 123). The astonishing level of negation involved in The Third Policeman is indicated by Sue Asbee, who points out that if one asks what the narrator’s point of view is in the novel, it is a recollection of the past by someone who has lost his memory (1991, 55). This position evokes the creature called Worm in Beckett’s The Unnamable. Worm is described as the earliest form that the Unnamable has taken and the one who will survive the others (TN, 337), “The one outside of life we always were in the end . . .” (TN, 346). He “knows no more than on the first day” (TN, 356), and has no memories or voice. I think he is the figure “made of silence” on the next-to-last page of the novel and the Unnamable summons him at length here because he embodies a level of life prior to all of the lies by which one is afflicted. Yet of course after passing through these negations, the Unnamable goes on speaking and seeking, “the beginning again” (TN, 413). Both at the start and at the end, by confronting one with the real of one’s death, the word that shakes one out of one’s existing language (the master signifier) produces desire that allows one to dream about new possibilities. In the third policeman’s inner office, about to be armed with omnipotent omnium, Narr believes he can reach transcendence beyond any he has known: “I could do anything, see anything and know anything with no limit to my powers save that of my own imagination. Perhaps I could use it even to extend my imagination” (TP, 189). Here Narr is able to wish for progress beyond selfishness, inventing new ways to help people: “I would present every poor labourer in the world with a bicycle made of gold” (TP, 189). But the gold bicycle reflects Narr’s narcissistic inflation, and it appears in

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a context of delirium driven by terror after Fox has asked Narr, “Are you sure?” Transcendence is a sign of doom. As Narr builds his plans for the wonderful things he could do with omnium, he is claiming to believe in himself and to know how to act, constructing a plot. At this point he begins to feel superior to Fox and he has “an account to settle” with Pluck and MacCruiskeen (TP, 190), so his idealization actually leads to malice. In fact the reverberation of dread that follows this searching question goes far to reveal the conflicts in Narr’s mind and the extraordinary conjunction in The Third Policeman of what is extremely terrifying with what is extremely funny. He feels his mind “tottering . . . to its knees”: I knew that I would be dead if I lost consciousness for one second, I knew that I could never awaken again or hope to understand afresh the terrible way in which I was if I lost the chain of the bitter day I had had. I knew that he was not Fox but Mathers. I knew Mathers was dead. I knew that I would have to talk to him and pretend that everything was natural and try perhaps to escape. . . . I would have given everything . . . in the world . . . to get . . . one look at the strong face of John Divney. (TP, 183)

He repeats “I knew” four times because he senses the gravity of holding on to knowledge, which he equates with holding on to life and which he senses will not be possible. The knowledge will be taken from him by the system that does not give him strength to hold it. In fact one implication of Finnucane’s speeches is that life and knowledge are opposed and cannot be held at once because the desire to cling to life negates the knowledge that what is real is impossible. Indeed Narr’s longing for the strength of Divney is based on massive obliteration of all Divney has done to him. Mathers/Fox, chattering self-effacingly, soon has Narr believing in the policeman’s benevolence though Narr just insisted that to forget Mathers’ deathly nature is to be lost eternally, which he is. In Lacan’s system of discourses the Master produces the object of desire that stands as the image of truth for the hysteric (2007, 39,

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42–44), or needy person, in this case the black box. The object of desire attaches the hysteric to slavery, or living death (endless waiting). Narr’s situation is that of someone who cannot free himself from colonization. Earlier Pluck told Narr that if he tried to escape, “Policeman Fox would be sure to apprehend you single-handed on the outskirts” (TP, 99). What draws Narr to Mathers’s house uncannily is that he cannot escape the sense that the treasure is still there: “I could not take my eye from the lighted window and perhaps it was that I could [not] resign myself to going home with no news about the black box so long as something was happening in the house where it was supposed to be” (TP, 178, corrected). His compulsion toward the ideology of wealth embedded in the building he projects means that he is still following Divney’s orders and that the pressure of those closest to him pushes him toward status so as to attach him to the vanished Ascendancy. Mathers/Fox tells Narr that he will find the box when he gets home (TP, 188), but what Narr finds is a scene of horror. When the middle-aged Divney sees Narr, a ghost whom he murdered sixteen years earlier, Divney goes berserk and falls into a fit that kills him. This is consistent with finding the box, because the treasure has long been the power to overcome Divney, since the box became the thing they competed for. It is now made amply clear to Narr that Divney destroyed him, but he seems to be bothered most by the loss of Divney as a bulwark (TP, 196–97). Narr has often thought of Divney in kindly terms throughout the book, though he had to forget a lot not to realize that Divney killed him as the last of a series of oppressions. This may be one of the main reasons that Narr forgets his name: to serve the master is to forget that he is killing you. Narr cannot do without Divney, and when Divney joins him at the end, the final approach of Divney, the minor divinity who leads Narr to the major one, echoes the final approach of Mathers. In both cases Narr stops moving outdoors and does not look around when he hears heavy footsteps approaching from behind him (TP, 180, 199). Althusser says that when ideology hails subjects, it is “usually behind them” (1971, 174) because its force lies in taking them by surprise and

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making them turn around completely. While the parallel seems valid, Althusser’s summoner makes one comfortable, whereas O’Brien’s causes uneasiness, perhaps because Althusser describes people who are decently adjusted, while O’Brien’s are fundamentally alienated. When the first murder was committed, Narr used Divney to allow himself to act for his profit. He remained attached to Divney despite mistrust, and the first chapter has a weird tone because the idea that they remain friends is not merely ironic (though it is that). The permanent intensity of Divney’s connection to Narr is shown by Divney’s fit when he returns. The physical closeness between them following the murder was a sign that they combined as a single will with two aspects, and this may be the main reason they appear to join in repeating the journey to the law together. They cannot exist without each other, and are parallel to Beckett’s combination of the fool and the knave. Perhaps they will return to concealing their feelings from each other, for it seems like a dreadful journey they embark on. It should have its moments of grace and hilarity if it follows the course of the first quest, but it cannot be the same. The two men will be in a position to see their implication in each other’s faults, but the ending suggests a high degree of oblivion for them. When the text repeats the description of the police station turning from two dimensions to three, showing Narr getting enthralled by the law again—giving up his unbearable knowledge to affix himself to authority and sustain “consciousness”—he says, “The appearance of the house was the greatest surprise I had encountered ever, and I felt afraid of it” (TP, 198). The main difference in the earlier version was “the greatest surprise I had encountered since I had seen the old man in the chair” (TP, 53). The narrator apparently forgets not only his earlier approach to the police, which ended up revealing their malevolence, but the killing of Mathers as well. Likewise, believers repress their ongoing responsibility for killing their deity, and this may subjugate them. For the sermons on Hell in Portrait insist that every sinful thought is a lance transfixing Jesus’s heart (P, 134). On this level, the lives of Narr and Divney may go back to being like they

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were. They have always been walking side by side, have always been murdering each other. O’Brien presents in Narr a figure who is unable to follow his best perceptions because he relapses into conventionality, so that O’Brien is showing how we avoid seeing the fundamental falsifications, enclosures, and denials that make up ordinary reality (the reality that gives orders). There may be a level on which O’Brien is hell-bent on pinpointing the danger of compromise. But it may be a weakness of his work that he sees utopian vision as hopeless because its support in human nature has a false basis. Yet this serves to warn people about the obstinacy of human inertia that makes us fool ourselves. Perhaps it was the hopelessness of the book, its nihilism or its probing of a deep affliction in Irish subjectivity, that led O’Brien to renounce it after the first rejections, pretending the manuscript was lost (Cronin 1998, 101–2). But humanity may learn much from the denial of every program and comfort, and Beckett’s works help us to see the courage and compassion that give liberating power to O’Brien’s novel. Likewise such theories of Lacan’s as the empty subject, the discourse of the master, the dependence on the Other, and the movement of the signifier serve to reveal the organization of the book’s plot and the rigor of its philosophical critique. If Third Policeman, in its portrayal of a world of endless repetition, seems defective in relation to Badiou’s insistence on the need to discern hope for progress in the event—as if the liberation of Ireland was merely a disaster—it nevertheless excels in an attitude Badiou admires in Beckett: the stringency to pare away the most deeply rooted, tenaciously clutching assumptions of metaphysics.

6 John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus Lost in the Stars

The Postmodern Perplex In recent years John Banville has come to the conclusion that Doctor Copernicus (1976), one of his most celebrated novels, was either misguided in its conception or misinterpreted by critics. In a talk he gave at Temple University in 2005, “Literature and the Dream,” Banville said that the book did not work because it was a novel of ideas that was not properly understood. He seemed to be suggesting that the novel of ideas is a problematic form. Doctor Copernicus may incline toward a facet of Banville’s thinking that he was more susceptible to in 1975, and this facet may be aligned with postmodernism. In John Kenny’s 2009 study John Banville, written with Banville’s cooperation, it is made clear that while there has been a “frequent supposition that Banville’s aesthetic is overwhelmingly a postmodern one,” this is erroneous. His questioning of language and reality was always intended to further a “precise” realism and ultimately to assert the value of words (Kenny, 2009, 88). One could say that Banville has turned away from postmodernism as he has turned away from Doctor Copernicus, written some thirty years before his turning was clarified; but the logic of Banville’s articulation of his views has antecedents throughout his career and has to be taken seriously. After all, the value of Nicolas Copernicus’s confrontation with chaos has to be that it leads to a more comprehensive picture of the universe, and the final beauty that Nicolas finds in the earth at the end could have been won in its full transcendence 144

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only through the entirety of the struggle. In reading the novel, I will observe the postmodern features that match the period in which it was written, and I will also consider the value of Banville’s arguments, especially as I conclude. An early version of the postmodern reading that Banville objects to appears in John Banville: A Critical Introduction, by Rudiger Imhof, which refers to Doctor Copernicus as a novel of ideas (Imhof, 1989, 78). While Imhof is often perceptive, he may overemphasize the negative thrust of postmodernism by concluding that in Doctor Copernicus “the gap between man and the universe” is “unbridgeable” (1989, 85) and that language is not capable of accommodating reality (1989, 79). This part of Imhof’s argument may express only a cynical wing of postmodernism, for postmodern writers like Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami decidedly use language to say important things about life.1 Postmodernism may complicate the relationship between language and life in useful ways rather than sundering it. The idea that postmodernism is nihilistic may be parallel to the implication of the Faust legend that science is demonic. It is true from a strictly religious standpoint or even a humanist one, but it does not do justice to science unless one grants the creative value of the demonic, as Fernie does. Perhaps the best of the postmodern readings that Banville and Kenny are responding to is Kiberd’s brilliant essay “The Art of Science: Banville’s Doctor Copernicus.” In an argument that could almost be addressed to Joyce, Kiberd focuses on Banville’s estheticism, his belief in the beauty of language and art for themselves, and claims

1. For examples, Beckett has been seen as addressing humanity after the Holocaust, and Kiberd sees Waiting for Godot as being about the Irish as uprooted people (1995, 535–40). Pynchon, De Lillo, and Wallace present profound treatments of America, technology, and twentieth-century history. Morrison examines gender and African American history, and Rushdie has powerful things to say about India, Pakistan, and Islam, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of the deepest studies of marriage and desire ever written.

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that this controls the portrayal of Copernicus. After noting that “The space in Copernicus’s world once occupied by God has been replaced by nothing . . . ,” Kiberd speaks of the consequence of the absence of God: “If the world is not in fact an imitation of a more perfect one, then art and science can no longer be renditions of the world, . . . just stylistic arrangements . . . which make no serious attempt to enter into a contest with reality” (Kiberd, 2006, 184). Kiberd supports this argument by quoting the fictional Copernicus’s recognition that “His book was not about the world, but about itself” (DC, 116; Kiberd, 2006, 184). Kiberd says that such science is “useless” in that it cannot teach us “how to live” (2006, 184–85). It may be valid to critique the dependence of scientific thinking on esthetics, but Kiberd on the other hand seems to imply that science should be determined by morality. Yet the awareness that Copernicus’s book is about itself may help us to approach a level of reality that the novel uses this self-involution to reveal. Neither Banville nor Copernicus loses track of the fact that the revolution of the earth around the sun is an enormously significant reality for humanity. In his reductive view of postmodern art, Kiberd seems to equate secularism with the absence of values or even nihilism. Fernie goes further, linking secularism to the demonic, but he is more positive about its liberating results. Kiberd ends his essay by suggesting that Copernicus finds God on the last lines of the novel (2006, 188), an argument that seems to fit the book’s sublime conclusion, but may only be one aspect of it. Copernicus overcomes the gap between man and the universe by a highly significant description of the cosmos. And Kenny is entitled to argue that “Banville’s thematic self-deconstruction of language is a set-up for the ultimate reassertion of the value of words, especially as figured in the art of the novel” (2009, 88). Yet the afflictions and complications involved in the need to take the universe and language apart, and the tormenting division that must be gone through in the effort to reassemble them, may enforce the strict necessity of the idea of perdition.

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A novel that Banville much prefers to Copernicus, The Book of Evidence (1989), is a dazzling work and hellish to such a degree that it could be called white hot. The problem with The Book of Evidence for my purposes is that while it does an incredible job of bringing out the attraction of evil, it may finally fit into the nineteenth-century Gothic pattern. Readers may be inclined to condemn the murderous Freddie Montgomery, and so the idea of damnation as a source of insight is hampered, despite the novel’s amazing evocation of the perceptive power of depravity. Assaulted by Language Doctor Copernicus starts with an image of a tree: “Tree. That was its name. And also: the linden. . . . nice words” (DC, 3). This is parallel to and could even be based on Saussure’s diagram of the gap between the signifier and the signified, which has a picture of a tree on top (the signified) and the word tree (the signifier) on the bottom, separated by a bar (Saussure, 1966, 67). This diagram was fashionable among critics from the 1960s to the 1990s to illustrate that a word could never directly equal what it stands for, so that the meaning of the word has to depend on its relation to other words. Young Nicolas Koppernigk’s sense of the distance between words and things, as Derek Hand observes in John Banville: Exploring Fictions, establishes a basic pattern in the novel (Hand, 2002, 74–75). Whereas a modernist novel tries to make words fit reality as closely as possible, the value of words in a postmodern work (like Doctor Copernicus?) depends on the distance of the words from their objects, which makes it necessary to consider how the word is implicated in the system of language in order to ascertain its actual relation to reality—to rethink the system, not to abandon language. Like Stephen Dedalus—a model he is based on, as Imhof observes (1989, 79)—the child Nicolas ponders different levels of the relation between language and reality. And this leads him to abstraction, a separation of language from the concrete that allows him to reshape language as a field outside the conventions of appearance, a field of

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textuality that departs from the given structure. A further level of abstraction apprehends names that signify no substantial thing. When his mother asks Nicolas whom he loves best, he thinks that love, unlike the tree, “had no leafy arms to shake, yet when she spoke that name that named nothing, some impalpable but real thing within him responded . . . as if it heard its name spoken. That was very strange.” (DC, 3–4). Thus love gives the effect of immediacy, but is beyond perception. This corresponds to a passage in which Stephen meditates on his mother kissing him—“What did that mean, to kiss?” (P, 15)—and finds it quite incomprehensible. That love is intangible when abstracted makes it an extreme version of the distance between the signifier and the signified, since the signified of love cannot be visualized except in radically indirect terms. The most concrete image of love for Nicolas is his mother. But she soon dies and becomes an empty object, furthering his separation (DC, 6). It is indicated at the end of the novel that Nicolas could never face love (DC, 241). After his mother dies, Nicolas’s father offers him love by playing the role of a prosperous merchant attached to his son. Here again love takes the form of something that cannot be perceived when his father explains money by saying that coins “are only a kind of picture of the real thing, but the real thing itself you cannot see. . . . When I do business. . . . I give my word, and that is sufficient . . .” (DC, 6). Nicolas does not grasp this and is mistrustful of the show of affluence that his dad wants to share with him; and after his father dies, the evidence seems to indicate that he was a fraud whose business was failing (DC, 15). Love is a sharing of faith that Nicolas either sees through or is jolted out of. Koppernigk’s intellectual development consists of a series of versions of his sense of the distance between ideas and things. His sense of separation from what is out there, the inability of his language to reach its object, is built up by a chain of crises. The deaths of his parents, his conflicts with his brother, Andreas, and his being sent by his severe uncle Lucas to study in a monastic school all lead him to feel that his better life is elsewhere (DC, 16) and then that he has two

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selves, a “mind among the stars” and a fork of flesh planted in excrement (DC, 27). This accords with medieval emphasis on the distance between the spiritual and the bestial in man. In Fernie’s view, the sense of a doubled self that is displaced from its proper position shows an inclination toward the demonic, or the modern, which he equates with the demonic (2013, 7–8). It may be a microcosm of the idea that the earth is not the center of the universe. Nicolas’s relationship to desire and knowledge is consolidated in a striking passage of bizarre sexual imagery that is brilliant enough to be amply puzzling. It may be clarified through medieval culture by reference to Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund ([1930] 1968). The numerous references to Hesse in Doctor Copernicus are themselves bizarre since the two writers are opposites, Hesse being one of the most idealistic of novelists and Banville one of the most sardonic. Conceivably Banville may be mocking himself for approaching sublimity. Copernicus uses a printer named Haller (DC, 104), and this seems to refer to Harry Haller, the hero of Hesse’s Steppenwolf. The title of the second part of Doctor Copernicus is “Magister Ludi” (DC, 87, Master of the Game), the title of Hesse’s greatest novel (1943). And Anna Schillings, the main woman character in Copernicus and a beautiful soul, has a best friend named Hermina Hesse (DC, 142). These zany allusions suggest the postmodern view of history, associated with Hayden White, which emphasizes that we can never know history as it took place, but only as we see it from our point of view. Shortly after Copernicus was published, Banville said, “the past doesn’t exist in terms of fact. It only exists in terms of the way we look at it” (cited in Kiberd, 2006, 181). White makes a similar statement: “the conflict between ‘competing narratives’ has less to do with facts . . . than with the different story-meanings with which the facts can be endowed by emplotment” (1997, 393). So White is concerned with the pervasive tendency to see reality by projecting plots about it. Banville’s statement that we cannot know the facts goes against Fredric Jameson’s well-known critique of postmodernism, which centers on the notion that postmodernists need to connect with the reality of history (1991, 52, 94). For decades Jameson’s historical reality

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was driven by a noble plot that aligned it with the Soviet Union. The value of communism may lie in what it aims at rather than the facts of its existence, so the reality of history may be debatable. Doctor Copernicus is thoroughly researched and replete with accurate details. It does an amazing job of reproducing the life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Copernicus lived from 1473 to 1543). Yet virtually every sentence contains anachronisms because it is written in our language and in a superb literary style. For example, “the great bundles of steely light above the river” (DC, 7) could not have been written by anyone in the fifteenth century, but such a person might have perceived something that she could not express. Banville chooses to playfully foreground these anachronisms rather than undertaking the hopeless task of trying to eliminate them. The postmodern point is that only by realizing how impossible it is to recreate the thinking of this period can one have a chance to capture it in its distance from us, thus approaching reality indirectly. Hand reports that an early draft of Doctor Copernicus “intended to conclude by unmasking entirely the novel’s fictive nature with a narrative that would see Banville’s own journey to modern-day Poland . . . and his continuing search for the real Copernicus” (2012, 222–23). Narcissus and Goldmund ([1930] 1968), one of Hesse’s main novels, is about two medieval monks linked together as opposites, the intellectual Narcissus and the sensual Goldmund, who are parallel to Nicolas and his sensual brother Andreas, though Goldmund is virtuous. At one point Goldmund leaves the monastery and visits the town, where a young girl gives him “a child’s kiss” (1968, 24). Goldmund is so upset by this kiss that he grows ill and takes to his bed: “at the first beckoning of femininity he had felt that there was an enemy, a demon, a danger: woman” (1968, 29). As a sensitive monk, he sees her affection as diabolic. The strange, riveting scene that confronts the reader with the eccentricity of Nicolas’s position occurs after he observes his fierce teacher Caspar Sturm unleashing some dreadful falcons (DC, 23). Nicolas dreams of “monstrous hawklike creatures” attacking him and wakes in intense sexual excitement that he brings to a climax by

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pulling on his sex organ, which is referred to in scientific terms as a lever. This grotesque vision is startlingly original because a wet dream is expected to involve an attractive image or at least a sexual one. As I’ve indicated, part of the explanation for this weirdness is the medieval monastic tendency to see sex as infernal, and the loss of mother may also be a factor; but Nicolas’s version has him overwhelmed by a force from the sky. He feels “tumbled into” “the firmament” (DC, 24) as the hawks attack him with their talons and beaks, and he ejaculates. After this “his inner sky was empty” and he feels an infinite music coming from everywhere (DC, 24); and in the following days he aches with desire for “something made of light and air” (DC, 25). The power from the sky that attacks him is his vocation, a desire for the heavens. Badiou says that the subject can only be created if it is seized by a truth that breaks it and leads it toward the immortal (2001, 51). He adds that one must encounter the voice of a master (52), a figure for which Sturm can temporarily serve. This pattern matches religious ideology with which Nicolas was surrounded, but the birds are decidedly demonic. When Copernicus later realizes that the sun is the center of the universe, he has a sensation of a vast bird alighting in his head (DC, 84), an image that recurs (DC, 229). Reaching Beyond Before Nicolas has his intellectually generative orgasm, he realizes that there is someone near him. It turns out to be brother Andreas, as Nicolas may have known when he climaxed. There is no moment in the book when Andreas is not beside Nicolas (“I was there always . . .” DC, 240), and Andreas plays a central role in the formation of Nicolas’s desire/knowledge. By childhood, Nicolas is firmly perceived as more advanced than his older brother, a drastic reversal for that period (DC, 9). Andreas was apparently disturbed before Nicolas competed with him (DC, 5), but Nicolas soon defines himself as superior in relation to Andreas’s inferiority. Andreas accuses Nicolas of “feeding off me, eating me alive” (DC, 40), and it may be that Andreas’s bitterness about being second-rate contributes to his self-destructive tendencies. Every time Nicolas has a new idea, he is fighting against the

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corruption of the world that Andreas embodies; so Andreas is right to see that Nicholas is continually attacking him. Because Andreas is incorrigibly vicious, Nicolas’s love for him settles into an effort to control his destructiveness. The main possibility of reciprocal love that Nicolas encounters before his touchingly feeble and inhibited bond with Anna in his old age is his intense friendship with Girolamo Fracastoro during his sojourn in Italy. Girolamo is the opposite of Andreas, for Andreas destroys himself by getting syphilis from prostitutes, while Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1553) was actually the doctor who coined the term syphilis, and he may have taught Copernicus. Syphilis was brought to Europe by the earliest explorers of the Americas, so it is a product of the Renaissance. Such breakdowns of the boundary between fact and fiction are associated with the postmodernist Pynchon, who seems to be an influence on Doctor Copernicus.2 Italy and Fracastoro give Nicolas a sense of freedom and vitality that helps him to expand his imagination, and he actually conceives his heliocentric idea while staying at Fracastoro’s villa (DC, 84). But his medieval sensibility is unable to accept the liberation of Renaissance Italy or the sensual reality of love that Fracastoro offers him. The Italian section (DC, 45–85) is the least realistic part of the novel, and this is partly because the independent and sophisticated behavior of the Renaissance appears to Nicolas to be theatrical (DC, 53). There may be an analogy here to Banville coming from Wexford to cosmopolitan Dublin, and there is a more pronounced analogy to the 1960s, with references to “the new age” (DC, 47). But this phrase is roared by Andreas when he is very drunk, and Nicolas’s reality, insofar as he has any reality, is back in medieval Ermland. Kiberd reports of Banville, “Once, when asked how he had managed . . . to document

2. Pynchon’s V. ([1963] 2005) has a long chapter set in Florence in the past (1899) that contains many references to the Renaissance (2005, 165–228). This chapter, like the whole novel, is loaded with fantastic events that may or may not be historical.

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the late-medieval period in such convincing detail, he laughed and said: ‘That was easy. I grew up in Wexford in the 1950s’” (Kiberd, 2006, 173). This probably refers to provincial orthodoxy, but Hand sees a parallel between the grim violence of Banville’s medieval world and the eruption of the Troubles in Ireland that was going on while Banville was writing Copernicus and working as a news editor: “the onslaught to the senses of the daily horrors of murder and mayhem” (2011, 221). Ermland, squeezed between Poles and Prussians, may stand for Ireland as a country oppressed by occupiers. No matter how uncle Lucas the Bishop tries to maneuver diplomatically, he cannot save Ermland from being plundered (DC, 97–99). At the point where hope is defeated, Andreas arrives to represent the injustice of the world (DC, 99). Earlier Nicolas recognized the reality of oppression when he told Girolamo that fishermen had to die to provide his grand feast (DC, 80). And when war arrives, the ravaging of Ermland has a tremendous impact on Copernicus, who testifies to the plight of his people with great intensity: “The wench ( . . . hardly more than a child) had been tortured to death by the soldiery. . . . the image of that poor torn thing is burned ineradicably upon my recollection. They had worked on her for hours . . . to ensure her as agonizing a death as it was possible for them to devise” (DC, 130). The effect of these and other horrors, such as the atrocities of the so-called “crusaders” on the pilgrimage (DC, 42), is to produce in Copernicus a “lack” or “void” that is “more than the natural aloofness and other-worldliness of a brilliant scientist” (DC, 132). If Copernicus goes beyond the usual scientist, it may be because he feels the persecution of his land. For years he works hard to help his people as a doctor and Church official, and his good works are not merely making up for destructive consequences that he suspects his ideas will have. If he concludes that political causes are hopeless and that his real interest is outside the world (DC, 114–16), this has to be to help humanity by going beyond it; and it is because the human goal never stops being important that Copernicus is so troubled by his work as to be accursed. He is like Joyce and Beckett, who could do more for Ireland

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by taking on exile than by staying, or like a writer who distorts reality to change it. The distance he assumes is like what Badiou refers to in Theory of the Subject ([1982] 2009) as the outplace from which one can lead the world forward (2009, 10–11, 16, 43). As a sign of Nicolas’s removal from his world, Banville provides notes that reveal that some of Copernicus’s lines come from Kierkegaard and Max Planck (DC, 244). One implication of this postmodern technique of putting words in quotes is that Copernicus is outside his place in history. This would have to be true because Copernicus reversed the whole framework of knowledge. To suggest the changes involved, Harry Prosch points out that a medieval man would look into the sky and see the true motions of the heavenly bodies (which measure time) based on an earth that was standing still; but after Copernicus, the earth was moving (Prosch, 1966, 13), and the motions of the heavenly bodies were incomprehensible without abstractions. To represent Copernicus as thinking in the terms of his time, although he had to use those terms as points of departure, would be to misrepresent the event of his discovery, the scope of its indiscernibility. However he may have been enclosed by the culture of his time, there is a crucial level on which he was absolutely beyond it. Badiou in Saint Paul opposes the term culture to art. Culture is what can be measured and communicated or commercialized, while art reaches toward the infinite possibilities of truth (Badiou, 2003b, 12). Copernicus is referred to as an artist (DC, 236), as scientists were in his day. His aim is to perceive beyond what is accepted and he is dreadfully afflicted at the thought of destroying the existing world (DC, 180) and bringing death and despair (DC, 207). Copernicus’s ability to see the universe in a new way depends on his being outside the existing order, so he is in a position of damnation from the orthodox point of view. Certainly he is tormented, and his work is described as “bloody butchery”: a series of failures that proceeds by destroying one hypothesis after another. This relentless Sisyphean perdition makes him suffer and bleed internally (DC, 93). The surrealistic image of him chopping off parts of himself matches

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Dantean monstrosities,3 and may fit a medieval worldview that would see his ideas as extensions of his soul. But this torture satisfies him: “Despite the pain and the repeated disappointments . . . there was not happiness anywhere in the world to compare with his rapturous grief” (DC, 93). Copernicus’s enjoyment of his torment has affinity with the revolutionary aspect of damnation that corresponds to a figure with a name similar to his, Dante’s Capaneus. Nicolas’s attachment to negation, which never really allows him to forget that he is destroying Andreas, keeps him from the acceptance of his theory that would make him unjust. The situation of being separated from certainty that he pursues as a rigorous scientist fits the medieval definition of damnation, as suggested by the legend of Faust, who was accursed in proportion to his scientific insight.4 The positive, convinced aspect of system building for self-interest is represented most strongly by the proto-Nazi conqueror Grand Master Albrecht of the Teutonic Knights, who insists that Copernicus shares his ruthless ability to subdue the ordinary: “The people .  .  . are my tool as math is yours, by which I come directly to the true, the eternal.  .  .  . you and I .  .  .” (DC, 136). Nicolas is troubled by Albrecht’s resemblance to him, but one difference between them is that Nicolas does not believe in his cause, and this keeps him in the field of creativity. In his youth, Nicolas sees “the absolute necessity for action. Yet action horrified him, tending as it did inevitably to become violence” (DC, 28). His statement that all princes are bad (DC, 133) implies that

3. Two cantos of the Inferno that show people being divided or torn apart in grisly detail are 25 and 28. In 25 Vanni Fucci defies God even more violently than Capaneus did in 14, making the sign of the fig at Him (25.2–3), but Fucci has none of Capaneus’s nobility. 4. The medieval view of the scientist as demonic may still be reflected in the twentieth century in the portrayal of the savant de Selby in Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman. De Selby is a maniacal figure, and his books cause the narrator to commit his crime.

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any claim to authority is a crime. It is generally hard to tell whether he withholds his book because it involves harming the existing world or because he fears the Inquisition, and both strictures express for him the same system of world control that he fears violating. He concludes that his work is not true because it is only true outside the coherent world (DC, 206–9), as the event leads outside the situation in Badiou’s theories, and for Copernicus to give final form to his conception is to lose its life. Coming Home to the Void This life of possibility is enacted by the miracle of the appearance of Anna Schillers, who is spared from the catastrophe of prostitution by chance because she happens to be Nicolas’s cousin (DC, 145). The sensitive feelings in her section (DC, 139–48) appear in her gentle style as a narrated monologue that is unlike any of the numerous levels of narrative in the book. By accident, goodness survives, and the event of love takes Nicolas out of his mummification without his being aware of it (DC, 148). Copernicus’s pitifully limited ability to accept love is parallel to the limitation of his ability to accept his theory, and both allow for the truth of the events of science and love to go beyond ordinary limits. When he calls Anna “My child,” though it is the acceptable term in context, he may be giving birth to her in the sense of saving her life; and now the world is animated by magic: “The books, the couch, the desk, all crouch like enchanted creatures frozen in the midst of a secret dance, and those strange ghostly instruments lift their shrouded arms into the shadows starward, mysterious, hieratic and inexplicable things” (DC, 148). This magic, combining love with astronomy, seems to be sustained without being properly articulated through the dozen or so years of the relationship, which never ends despite pressing obstacles. This is an unusually beautiful account of love for Banville, and seems to depend on its not being known by its subjects. Nicolas’s Book of Revolutions is about the event that shifts from a known center to an unknown one, symbolized by a sun that cannot

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be looked at. The world portrayed in the novel is an environment of facts that are hypothetical, subject to radical alteration, and the narrative has fun with this visionary level. At one point Copernicus’s friend, the tediously virtuous Tiedemann Giese, is visiting Copernicus, and he looks at a “window with panes of bottled glass” and notices something curious when a gull alights on the windowsill: “he gazed thoughtfully at the bird’s pale eye magnified in the bottled glass. (Magnified?—but no, no, a foolish notion .  .  . )” (DC, 122, Banville’s ellipsis). The idea that glass can magnify what one sees outwardly could revolutionize our relation to the universe, since, as Arthur Koestler points out in The Sleepwalkers, in Copernicus’s time, “astronomy had not yet discovered the uses of glass” (1963, 123). Giese dismisses the notion, but the passage suggests that potential miracles could be all around us if we could notice them. The world is a series of occluded possible realities, a pattern parallel to the animation of the astronomical instruments two paragraphs above. And of course the entire novel centers on Copernicus’s difficulty in accepting the magnitude of his vision, human knowledge confronting limits of tradition or habit. Speaking of blindness, Georg Joachim von Lauchen, known as Rheticus, is the self-appointed disciple who utterly misunderstands Copernicus’s book, but gets him to publish it, and even understands it in reverse. Rheticus claims to be an expert on the Book of Revolutions, and describes it as “an engine which destroys itself”: “each succeeding conclusion or hypothesis seemed to throw doubt on those that had gone before!” (DC, 217). That every idea negates itself keeps the book active. Because the center of earth’s orbit is not quite at the sun by Copernicus’s calculations, Rheticus concludes that “at the center of all there is nothing,” which matches Badiou’s idea that the void is the origin of all constructions (BE, 57). The most important feature of what Copernicus finds is that the center cannot be located. Actually, of course, Copernicus is immeasurably closer to the truth than Rheticus. At one point, when Rheticus is editing Copernicus’s manuscript, he comes on the notion of elliptical orbits. Rheticus finds this ridiculous and crosses it out (DC, 202); but the orbits of the

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planets are elliptical rather than conventionally circular, and if Copernicus had followed up on this idea, it would have helped to explain why the center of the solar system appeared to be at a certain distance from the sun. Because Copernicus does “not believe in truth” (DC, 163), Rheticus concludes that “Lucifer sits at the centre of that book” (DC, 218), that the power of De Revolutionibus Orbis Mundi is infernal, as indeed it is from the orthodox viewpoint. The infernal (but devout) Fernie proceeds from Hegel’s definition of consciousness as being in opposition to itself and breaking out of enclosure to argue that Lucifer’s rebellion is the point of origin that “kick-starts” human consciousness. He describes Lucifer as the firstborn son who brings light (De, 177). Copernicus recognizes the negative operation of his work indirectly through a comment on Ptolemy’s Almagest (the proof that the sun revolves around the earth), which he never ceases to admire, as Joyce remained in awe of Aquinas. Copernicus says that Ptolemy’s system “is nothing, as far as existence is concerned, but it is convenient for computing the inexistent” (DC, 186). Rheticus assumes this is an attack on Ptolemy, but it may posit the claim that any system is of value insofar as it delineates what it excludes, providing a basis for future work. The way to use language to reach reality is to recognize the falsehood of the existing words. This is why Copernicus works by demolishing a series of hypotheses, starting with geocentrism. In Theory of the Subject, Badiou argues that whenever logical continuity is broken by a “leap from one hypothesis to another,” it reveals “the causality of the lack” (2009, 87). He argues that whenever we put together a whole, it is based on something missing, and the “absent cause” is revealed by a break in continuity. So when Copernicus is engaged in his “true work” of “progressive failing” (DC, 93), what he is revealing is the void behind causality that is the source of innovation. What Copernicus’s system defines most crucially is what is not knowable, which takes the form of opposition to the actual world, a world identified with the fleshly Andreas, against whom Nicolas is always working. When Andreas returns at the end, it shows Nicolas

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realizing that he has cut himself off from the ordinary world to imagine a new world outside of existence. Andreas transforms himself out of Andreas Osiander, Nicolas’s self-righteous, worldly enemy, who publishes the Book of Revolutions with a preface denying that it is true (though this was a necessary strategy to avoid prosecution). This mangled publication is parallel to the discourse of Lucky in Waiting for Godot, who can only express truth in distorted fragments because he is in harness to a master. Osiander shows how Copernicus’s work can be repudiated, and so forces Nicolas to realize that he believes it when he is angered by Osiander’s preface of denial (DC, 236). When the dying astronomer finds that the preface is rejecting scientific truth for religious truth, Nicolas is no longer able to speak, but in his mind he exclaims, “You, Andreas, have betrayed me .  .  .” (DC, 236), and Andreas is there. Andreas was always the opposition out of which Nicolas’s brilliance emerged. Created by and creating Nicolas, as he substantially has been for a long time, Andreas now comes to return the love he might have given if Nicolas had not corrupted him from the start—if that were possible. And he can do this only by what he calls “the descent into Hell” (DC, 225). Andreas says that he is “the angel of redemption” (DC, 237) and analyzes the flaw in his brother’s reasoning: “Unable to discern the thing itself, you would settle for nothing less; in your pride you preferred heroic failure to prosaic success” (DC, 238). Nicolas always had to aim at the true thing, the signified that never could be reached, so his findings were a series of debacles. Though these defeats led to new comprehension, Nicolas cannot realize it. Andreas adds that Nicolas’s strongest feeling was always “embarrassment” at “disorder and vulgarity” (DC, 238). Unable to face the muddle that was actually there, he transformed the lights in the sky into an order through his faith in a true reality (DC, 239). Nicolas’s attempt to isolate “the thing itself” (DC, 238) was what Badiou would call the count-as-one, or adding up to a unity, which for Badiou is an illusion because what is there is always a multiple (BE, 91). Andreas says that what Nicholas denied is that “It is not the thing

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that counts, . . . only the interaction of things . . .” (DC, 239). This corresponds to Saussure’s idea that the meaning of any word depends on its place in the system of language. Nicolas clung to the idea of a center and made the mistake of thinking that the sun was the center of the universe because he could not make the complete shift from unity to multiplicity. His assumption that the solar system was central to the universe serves to illustrate Badiou’s use of infinity to argue that one can always go further. The supposition that there is such a thing as a center would not be refuted until Derrida’s seminal essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1978, 278–93). Copernicus says, “You are preaching despair”—as if Andreas can offer no alternative to the thing itself except disintegration or nihilism. But Andreas presents a further level that sounds like a realistic solution that would suit Kiberd. The spirit says, “Call it rather redemptive despair, or, better still, call it acceptance. The world will not bear anything other than acceptance” (DC, 239). He explains that if you take a chair and analyze it down to the tiniest particles, you end up “dreaming in a vacuum” (DC, 239). The abstraction that Nicolas built up in response to his losses and his alienation was outside the actual world to which Andreas now calls him back. His life was lived in an artificial void that allowed him to reshape the universe because he was not contained by it. Possibly he could reshape the cosmos only if he didn’t believe in his system, and it may also be that Nicolas’s denial of his book is as equivocal as Banville’s denial of his. Like Rheticus’s attack but selfdirected, Nicolas’s denial is a supreme tribute that consists of condemning the book as demonic. Roget’s International Thesaurus says that to “betray itself” means to reveal (1962, 704); and this vision may only be revealed by betraying itself. A related pattern is the pessimism that led O’Brien to write Third Policeman but not publish it. This is a key theme of Doctor Copernicus: that many people could have enormous visions if they were not limited by strictures of authority and circumstance.

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Andreas adds that to reach his loftiness, Nicolas had to contend with Andreas: “I was the one absolutely necessary thing. For I was there always to remind you what you must transcend. I was the bent bow from which you propelled yourself beyond the filthy world” (DC, 240). Andreas tells Nicolas that he has always turned away from “the great miracle” of love (DC, 241). Nicolas says that it is too late, and Andreas says, “No, Nicolas, not too late. It is not I who have said all these things today, but you” (DC, 241). As Imhof points out, Andreas speaks for something within Nicolas (1989, 94). Now Andreas smiles, his face is healed of its syphilitic decay, and as the angel of redemption he leads Nicolas back to the eternal world of childhood in a passage that echoes the first pages of the novel (DC, 242). Insofar as Nicolas accepts the world and recognizes the love he gave up and what his brother might have been, it confirms that his theories are valid because they were based on the full humanity he always contained, the potential that he subtracted from Andreas. The scientific detachment in which he enclosed himself was an unnatural state that had the denied reality of his human connections behind it. Though he could not have changed the world toward truth and progress without this disjunction, it crippled and disembodied him. This matches the fault in his attitude that Kiberd recognizes. He can now return to human feelings because he was always attached to them unbeknown. And the fullness of humanity he carried within him corresponds to the level on which what he discovered was true: despite the limits of his knowledge: he did immensely increase the universe and humanity, taking a big bite out of God’s power. Or from an expansive religious point of view, he might be described as enlarging God’s power by extending the universe and human consciousness, but such a view moves toward seeing God as a function of humanity. Nicolas’s final stage of return to the earth may fit Banville’s recent claims, as reported by Kenny, that his questioning of language and reality has been aimed at an ultimate reconstruction of realism and the value of words (Kenny, 2009, 88). In this perspective, Nicolas’s analysis finally brings him back to the actuality of the world, which he feels

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deeply because he has passed through the refrigerator of abstraction and realized that it leads to the void (the creative void). The ending is moving and beautiful, avoiding sentiment because we have seen the vastness of Nicolas’s alienation and the terror of its necessity. He has lived through the fact that the most intellectually powerful act is the most accursed. Therefore the last page is poignantly lyrical, and may, as Kiberd says, evoke “the absconded God” (2006, 188)—yet there is another level of irony behind it, and of terror, a level indicated by how unreal it is. For when Nicolas goes back to the innocent world of his childhood in Torun, this is an illusion, since he discovered early in the book that his father’s world was a fraud, and indeed that love was an emptiness. He cannot exist in the ideal world of science in which he has been creative, but this world is closest to truth, the truth of the event. He extended himself into this inhuman sphere, but now he is called back into the world of life in which he also cannot live because it is imaginary. It is not there. The love that Andreas gives him is touching because it is what Andreas might have felt or should have felt; but Andreas, it seems, was virtually always spiteful, so his love is no less a dream than cosmology. If we say that Andreas must have had love in him somewhere, we are energetically using idealism. There was an early scene in which Andreas showed kindness by returning Nicolas’s cap, but both brothers were acutely embarrassed by it (DC, 10–11). And this scene was preceded by the statement that Andreas’s hatred for his brother is “a kind of anguish” (DC, 9). For Andreas’s body, which was mortified by syphilis, to turn clear is a miracle, as is the disappearance of the hostility that constituted his personality. The vanishing of pain and evil on the last page fits what Thomas Mann describes in The Magic Mountain as a hormonal uplift that sometimes appears with death: “Illness so adjusted .  .  . sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis; nature came to the rescue with measures of spiritual and moral relief . . .” ([1924] 1955, 451). This psychedelic syndrome may generate visions of paradise. The suffering that generated the genius has now evaporated, together with reality.

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An infernal pattern in Doctor Copernicus is that man is split between a symbolic world that alienates him from himself and an imaginary sensual world that may be no more real, and that may depend on debilitating his consciousness. The voices calling Nicolas away at the end repeat for several lines phrases from the beginning, and the return of childhood is touching. They seem to be calling him away to something superlative beyond knowledge, but in the earlier version the voices called him to sleep (DC, 5). Earlier he actually heard the earth, but now he is repeating and hallucinating as he approaches death. Language is approaching the deepest reality here, as it is throughout the novel, but only through a terrible division. So the reality it approaches is a self-indulgent regressive decomposition, of much less value than the critical reality of opposition that led Copernicus to make one of the most important advances in human understanding of the millennium. It is touching that he finally declines into a hallucination of transcendence, but this is not the meaning of his life. Tetralogical Appendix The difference between the deconstructive drive, more prominent in the 1970s, and the reconstruction that was always there but has been emphasized in the 2000s, is not a matter of right and wrong; but we may say that the postmodern questioning is more productive of originality. The “rage for order” that Kenny sees as Banville’s main concern (2009, 15) has to be strong enough to keep chaos from disintegrating Nicolas. These two forces are divided between the first two novels of the Science Tetralogy (Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter, and Mefisto). I have not studied the last three novels as I have the first one, so I hazard only a few conjectures about the group. Doctor Copernicus only portrays part of the process of creation, though it may be the most vital part. Badiou says, “An intervention consists . . . in identifying that there has been some undecidability, and in deciding its belonging to the situation” (BE, 202). A new discovery involves realizing something outside the system and then fitting it into the system, and Badiou adds that these two stages contradict each other. Copernicus was the tormented genius who conceived a new

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order for the universe, but could not believe in it. Johannes Kepler, the subject of Banville’s next novel (Kepler, [1981] 1993b), was a sensible person who worked out the details of Copernicus’s system so that the math was sounder, making it credible. The man who conceives it and the man who believes it cannot be the same. This implies that an intellectual advance is divided between figures who play different roles, just as the part of Copernicus who changed the world had to be quite different from the part of him who lived in it. So the event of creativity is distributed between people, as it was in Ulysses. Copernicus was overwhelmed by the Other and never able to establish a stable relationship with a woman or the world, though his relations to Anna and the world were extraordinary and generative. Kepler, on the other hand, was married reasonably well, with relatively normal conflicts, and was functional in his career moves. The protagonist of the third novel in the Science Tetralogy, or Freedom Tetralogy, has a dominating attitude toward women that leads him to debase one while fantasizing about another. The central figure of The Newton Letter ([1982] 1999a) is at a further remove from creativity than the other two: in the course of the novel he gives up trying to write a study of Isaac Newton and grows inactive. A major pattern in the Tetralogy seems to be that the more one is overpowered by the object of love or by the world, the more open one is to new ideas—though one may be unable to reciprocate that love— while the more one controls the object, the less one generates creative perception. Mefisto ([1986] 1999b), the last of the four, is a brilliant and deeply mystifying novel, maybe the second best of the group; but it can be reduced to the model I have drawn. Gabriel Swan, the protagonist of Mefisto, is a mathematical genius who falls in love sequentially with two young women, both attached to older mathematicians. The first, Sophie (“wisdom”), he admires without getting together with her; and she comes very close to destroying him because he falls into a burning pit (as she does fatally) while he is pursuing her (1999b, 120). The second woman, Adele, is destroyed by him because he gives her drugs in exchange for sex and then she apparently overdoses. After

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Adele is dead, Gabriel loses his mathematical ability, having mastered the woman completely (1999b, 232–33); yet he keeps hoping he can find the numerical secret to everything. His expectation of a total solution, which has run through the book, seems pathetic at the end, when he can no longer add “two and two” (1999b, 233). He claims in the last lines of the book that this time it will be different because he will “try to leave things, to chance” (1999b, 234). The possibility of an alternative view of math cannot be ruled out, but the main impression this grim, enigmatic book gives is that the search for a universal mathematical explanation is a kind of madness. And chance is not friendly to Gabriel, who has been turned into a monster by the fiery depths. Moreover, Gabriel is led toward his mathematical and romantic engagements by an execrable, grinning Mephistopheles figure named Felix, who says that he shows people what they really want (1999b, 176). The Tetralogy may be said to follow the overall movement of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: the first volume, like the beginning of the play, puts forward the dream of changing the universe by inconceivable notions (Marlowe, 1963, 360:1.1.54–63); but the next two novels expand on the limits of such grand schemes. This may be parallel to the comic interludes in the middle of Marlowe’s play, in which Faustus’s aspirations become ridiculous. And the last novel, like the end of the play, sees such a dream as a sordid delusion. This may indicate Banville’s movement away from idealism toward a skeptical acceptance of the actuality of power. Banville may find me naïve, but I am inclined to say that the universe does get changed and Doctor Copernicus is a great novel, partly because its recognition of the divided, tormented nature of idealism and the generic is an invaluable delineation of the most real truth.

Part T wo  

|  War

7 War 1 Victims

The novels I have read up to now saw hell as a philosophical problem that had to be engaged to find freedom through intellectual progress that proceeded in terms of negation. The manifestation of hell as a historical product was less directly emphasized in these works, but in those that follow, while damnation persists, it is seen more as a social problem than a philosophical one. In many cases, this may be because the later writers were less subjugated by colonialism in their youth. The conviction that desolation is so ineluctable that unheard of new ideas must be sought continues to drive the next generations, but they focus this drive more on the possibility or impossibility of changing the social order. Philosophy is less explicit in these works, but it may have advantages in emerging from action. In fact, these later works may be more suitable to the theories of Badiou insofar as he aims at social change. The novels in the next two chapters present hell as the affliction of revolutionary war, suspended between the dire necessity of history and the volition of courage. Between the two novels in this chapter and the two in the next, there is a shift from a hell that is imposed to a hell chosen heroically, but in both cases the effort to find the truth through suffering and inquiry is so infernally difficult that it is impossible. The Last September: The Excess in Love and War The characters in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September live in hell because they are on the wrong side of a revolution. Their words, 169

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perceptions, and ideas are wrong because they belong to an order that has essentially been obsolete for more than a century. After the Act of Union transferred the government of Ireland to England in 1800, the Anglo-Irish aristocracy no longer were active rulers though they maintained cultural leadership. In Bowen’s novel the injustice of their dying colonialism generates grotesque examples of the ways in which established terms fail to enclose reality, so that the actions based on these states of containment can only lead to disaster. The main structure of the plot is built around a parallel between love and war, between the conventional romance of Lois Farquar and Gerald Lesworth and the conservative campaign to defend British sovereignty in Ireland. The infernal quality of the book is reinforced not only by the way the romantic and martial activities depend on each other, but by the inability to imagine an alternative to the defunctive torment people are caught in. This is Badiou’s remainder, a lifeless life caught up in opinions without the truth of the event. Gibson, in Beckett and Badiou, says, “the remainder is the psychic deprivation of lovelessness; political oppression or reaction; the triumph of conservatism in the arts and of obscurantism over the sciences. . . . [S]ince events are rare, the remainder comprises and must comprise the larger part of historical experience” (2006, 18). But in The Last September, this remainder is acutely threatened. In Badiou’s thinking, every term includes an excess that can go beyond its limits to lead to progress, but in Bowen’s novel, the excess has to be controlled to hold on to guidelines of the established and threatened world. The margin by which actuality exceeds existing terms must be denied to sustain traditional self-interest rather than being re-cognized to generate a vital subject. Badiou says, “Every truth .  .  . deposes constituted knowledges, and thus opposes opinions. Opinions are representations without truth”; he adds that “opinions are the cement of sociality” (2001, 50). The inhabitants of The Last September are addicted to a social life made up of opinions, ideas people agree on. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, in Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives, see Bowen as an important

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innovator because she breaks down the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate by seeing objects as people and people as objects (1995, xvii–xviii). The inhabitants of Danielstown, the estate in which the novel is set, are in danger of becoming archaic furniture, for the elegant forms of the mansion irradiate every articulation of their lives. The moribund situation of the Anglo-Irish accentuates the radical social critique that Terry Eagleton finds in tragedy in Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003, 27–29). No matter how fond Bowen is of her expiring world, she critiques it politically by revealing what Hand calls “the deadening and ghostly ceremonies of AngloIrish existence” (2011, 183). Neil Corcoran, in Elizabeth Bowen; The Enforced Return, refers to The Last September as a comedy of manners (2004, 39). It is true that the novel has funny lines on almost every page, but the humor is usually black, as when Sir Richard Naylor speaks of a tank: “You’ll do no good . . . in this unfortunate country by running around in a thing like a coffee-pot” (LS, 30). If this is a comic novel, it is one that ends with the hero shot to death and the house burning down. The comedy is contained and skewed by tragedy. Bowen, like Faulkner attached to an outmoded aristocracy based on atrocious injustice, could do a definitive job of demolishing this order, though she could appreciate its wry and exquisite aspects. Because Anglo-Irish civilization is founded on the crime of stealing the country and uses a language imposed by conquest, the usual tendency of upper-class language to be artificial is exaggerated into a monstrous regime of falsehood. Early and continuous stress is placed on how the operation of manners consists of expressing the opposite of the truth. When Francie Montmorency sees Myra Naylor for the first time in a dozen years, Francie’s reaction is forceful: “‘Myra’s aged!’ she thought with a shock.” What she says is “You look wonderful” (LS, 16). Francie has a weak heart, and the trip to Danielstown was too much for her, but when she suggests this, her husband, Hugo, says, “Nonsense, that she was fit for anything nowadays” (LS, 18). Hugo married Francie because he could impose his opinions on her (LS, 151, 233–34), just as he did not marry Lois’s mother and ghostly

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double Laura Naylor because he could not impose them on her. He uses Francie to inflate his ego by taking control of the margin beyond reality in his terms. Lois, the heroine of The Last September, makes a definitive statement about the emptiness of the book’s language: “I’ve got nothing to say and I’m sick of having to go on saying it” (LS, 194). That Lois’s personal life is hollow despite her social engagements is shown by the fact that she has remained infatuated with Hugo for a dozen years after she saw him sleeping when she was ten. He seemed “melancholy . . . and wise” (LS, 9) in his slumber. Partly because he is the man her mother might have married, she continues to have fantasies about him (LS, 93) despite increasing evidence that he is obnoxious. The insistent denial of reality that Lois recoils from but cannot escape is the vampiric lifeblood of these people. It gives them their graciousness, which is a series of demonstrations that the margin by which reality exceeds their system is under their control, taken for granted. When Sir Richard denies that the Anglo-Irish war is serious, he has to justify himself by using the Irish point of view, from which he is indeed inseparable. He is included in Ireland without belonging. He says, “This country . . . is altogether too full of soldiers . . . ,” and he expands on the idea that it is the presence of all these troops that is upsetting Ireland (LS, 30). This is funny in a disturbing way. It avoids the fact that he can only maintain his position with the support of English brutality. The intrinsic self-interest of his Irishness requires claiming a margin of freedom that is false, false because this excess must be contained rather than allowed to open up as excess. Bowen presents a sharp critique of genteel liberalism. A simplification of some of Badiou’s terms may help to visualize the arrangement involved here. He distinguishes between belonging, in which all of the elements fit into a multiple, and inclusion, in which all of the subsets cannot be contained by the multiple. Elements can be counted, but subsets are more complex, each being itself multiple. Paradoxically, the attempt to include the subsets involves counting them all, and this adds a number that goes beyond the original multiple itself: “the ‘passage’ to the set of subsets is an operation in absolute

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excess of the situation itself.” This leads to the point of excess and to evental multiplicities (BE, 84–85). The Anglo-Irish here are a subset with its own complexity that can be included in Ireland, but cannot belong to Ireland as one of the parts that add up to a unified nation. The opposite of Sir Richard, though sharing a similar margin of grace that allies them, is Gerald Lesworth, the British soldier who loves Lois. Gerald lives in a margin that promotes the idea of war, whereas Richard lives in a margin that denies it. Only on this unstable basis can they cooperate. Lesworth speaks to the awkward Hartigan sisters, who are suffering infernal torments from midges, but nevertheless insist that the party at which the English and the Anglo-Irish try to mix is “most enjoyable” (LS, 48). Yet they do let slip that the English are “unnatural” (LS, 49). When the Hartigans say, “one wouldn’t call it a war,” Lesworth responds, “If anyone would, we could clear these beggars out in a week!” (LS, 49). The idea that a full-scale genocidal war would eliminate Irish resistance is quite unbelievable for several reasons. The use of maximum force against Ireland in 1916 had energized the revolution greatly. Moreover, England had depleted her military resources in World War I and was already drawing on her dregs for the Black and Tans. But Gerald (calling him by his first name fits his impetuosity) believes that the English are holding back because they are civilized, and that this civilization justifies their dominance. Gerald explains to Lois’s skeptical cousin Laurence that “right is right. . . . from the point of view of civilization. Also you see they don’t fight clean” (LS, 132). What he means by civilization is “ours” (LS, 132): “looking back on history . . . we do seem the only people” (LS, 133). His attempt to unify all value is ludicrous, but it is attached to his incandescently passionate romantic ardor. It makes him a genuine hero, but a hero has less worth than we assumed (Corcoran notices this pun, 2004, 40). Thinking of the empire to which he is devoted, Gerald “looked ahead to a time when it should be accurately and finally fenced about and all raked over” (LS, 125). His attitude toward Lois also concentrates on such an impossibly consistent enclosure not subject to question: “He did not conceive of love as a nervous interchange but as

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something absolute, out of the scope of thought. . . . He . . . was satisfied with a few—he thought final—repositories for his emotions: his mother, country, dog, school . . . , now—crowningly—Lois. Of these he asked only that they should be . . . not impinged upon, not breaking boundaries from their generous allotment” (LS, 53). This enshrinement of the beloved in a reliquary as utterly unique matches a high level of erotic idealism. So Gerald is very attractive in conventional romantic terms not only because he looks good (almost like Douglas Fairbanks [LS, 70]), but because he is an absolute believer who projects certainty. He is ready to give his life for the empire or for Lois: “You know I’d die for you” (LS, 128). She first recognizes how he appeals to her when she dances with him: “he had not missed a step, was most dependable. . . . that was what she wanted most; his eagerness and constancy” (LS, 41). But she finally realizes that the way he is clearly defined makes him empty because he has no access to his own indiscernible excess: “But when she looked for Gerald there seemed to be too much of him. He was a wood in which she counted from tree to tree—all hers—and knew the boundary wall right round. But how to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees . . . ?” (LS, 258–59). The basis of his commitment is too narrow to include the inconsistency in either of them, and this stricture will finally compel her to reject him. To see how this works, we must consider the role of Marda Norton in developing Lois. Marda is an independent woman who upsets everyone by speaking the truth instead of the language of politeness, expressing desire instead of self-interest. Of Francie and Hugo, Marda says, “Isn’t she his mother—practically?” (LS, 110). Lois says of Marda, “she seems quite mad” (LS, 111), and is relentlessly drawn to her. In fact, Lois expresses desire for Marda before meeting her by putting on her fur coat: “oh the escape . . . !” (LS, 109). Everyone considers Marda “very modern” (LS, 112) because she goes against standards: “her speech was a lightning attack on one’s integrity out of the stronghold of her indifference” (LS, 114). She stirs a sense in the Danielstown community that everyone is untruthful, so the conventional members are bound to condemn her.

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Marda sees that Lois is desperate to find romance: “I’ve never met any woman so determined to love well . . .” (LS, 118). Marda can see this because she stirs desire in everyone. To use a term current in 1920, she is a female Pan, embodying the force of nature. When Gerald is on his way to kiss Lois on the hand, Marda intensifies his drive by looking into his eyes: “she recalled some lovely certain excitement, as of his first approach to the War. Now he meant to go past the hands, to . . . stamp her [Lois’s] uncertain mouth with his own certainty” (LS, 121). His first sentence shows how elaborately the novel interweaves ideas of love and war. Marda makes Gerald kiss Lois’s mouth. Without Marda, Lois and Gerald might not get together as much as they do. When Gerald reaches Danielstown, he finds a glove in the hall and kisses it without knowing whether it is Lois’s or Marda’s (LS, 125), so he is kissing both. And when Lois shows Marda her drawings, Lois is first captivated by Marda, and then realizes that Marda is engaged and does not seem interested in her; so Lois decides that without the alternative of Marda, “I must marry Gerald” (LS, 141). In fact, Lois finds that Marda has been worn down by the system that sees her as improper (inconsistent) and is desperate to marry a businessman who will give her security if she adjusts to his requirements: “I’m sick of all this trial and error” (LS, 146). She will put her excess under control to belong to society. The withdrawal of Marda, a decline in the energy of resistance, may be a factor in the collapse of the vitality of Lois’s relationship to Gerald insofar as that relationship was inspired by Marda. If Marda brings Lois as close as she can get to love, she also brings her as close as possible to the revolution, to which Lois expressed attraction when she walked among the laurels, heard a rebel striding, and thought of saying “Up Dublin!” to him (LS, 42). The abandoned mill that Marda forces Lois to enter represents Ireland in its revolutionary state. The country is “full of” mills put out of operation by “English law” (LS, 178), and this one contains a rebel soldier. John Banville’s screenplay for Deborah Warner’s film of The Last September (2006) presents this soldier as Peter Connor, the insurgent Gerald is hunting for, though he is called Peter Connolly in the film.

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The walk to the mill is accompanied by a sense of approaching the truth that is desirable and disturbing. On the way, Marda sees an attractive view, but realizes that it is on the other side of the river, so she says, “Why does one always seem to be on the wrong side?” (LS, 177). Her receptivity to alternative political and emotional possibilities allows her to realize that the safe position, the existing one, is always wrong. The scene at the mill also brings the lesbian undertone between Lois and Marda as far as it goes. With Marda’s arm around her waist, Lois enters “in an ecstasy at this compulsion . . . Fear heightened her gratification; she welcomed its inrush . . . ,” and she says, “You’d make me do anything” (LS, 180). It may be Lois’s strongest sexual experience in the book, but it is categorically suppressed by Lois’s world. In Banville’s screenplay Lois leaves Danielstown with Marda.1 The necessity for Lois to marry Gerald is prescriptive insofar as in Anglo-Irish society, if a man kisses a woman, she must marry him. The scene in which Gerald first kisses Lois is black comedy in showing the dire level of her repression: She stops him from finishing the line “I love—” by saying, “what are you doing in the drawing room?” (LS, 126). She reacts to his kiss with “inside blankness” and says, “It wouldn’t have mattered as much at the seaside” (LS, 127). She measures his ardor in minus terms and characterizes the encounter as “his attack” (LS, 130). During the approach to the mill, Hugo Montmorency is revisiting a scene he frequented with Lois’s mother, Laura, and realizes in the presence of the fascinating Marda that “he had never loved” Laura. Marda is about to leave and is content: “And for this, his anger, released from Laura, settled on her. He loved her, a sense of himself rushed up, filling the valley” (LS, 176). While Hugo is an unusually reprehensible person, the idea that a man who falls in love is focusing his aggression is not limited to him. Marda hates Hugo (LS, 140) and

1. The book on the lesbian aspect of Bowen’s work is Renee Hoogland, Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation in Writing (2004).

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tries to avoid him, but she ends up being linked to him in gossip by the pernicious Myra Naylor (LS, 165–66). Sharing impulses with Hugo, Gerald’s drive to control the most beautiful woman or the greatest empire is enacted on the margin of his heroism or passion. Though he justifies himself by sacrificing himself, his devotion aims at conquest. He maintains the margin of his nobility in love by believing Lois is perfect, just as he believes the British Empire is perfect as an ideal. Lois tells Gerald she wants to be freed from the protection of ideal womanhood: “I never can see why women shouldn’t be hit, or should be saved from wrecks when everybody is complaining they’re so superfluous.” Gerald responds, “You don’t understand: it would be ghastly if those things went” (LS, 66). And he thinks that as a woman she shouldn’t be expected to comprehend, any more than a colonized subject: “When he said, ‘You will never know what you mean to me,’ he made plain his belief in her perfection. She wasn’t made to know. . . . She was his integrity . . . of which to her he would never speak” (LS, 67). He is protecting his manhood by protecting her in her perfection from knowledge of inconsistency, just as he is protecting the empire from irrational forces. John Tenniel’s cartoon “Two Forces” appeared in Punch in 1881. It portrays a stern figure of Britannia wearing Classical garb and a warrior’s helmet and holding a big sword labeled “The Law” to protect a weeping fair maiden labeled “Hibernia” from a raging stereotypical Irish brute marked “Anarchy” (Joyce, 2006b, 237). The idea that Ireland must be protected from the Irish is equated with the idea that the innocent virgin must be protected from the world; and Lois’s questioning of gender roles is linked to her desire to wander outside the feudal enclosure and make contact with the rebels, which she expresses on her night walk among the laurels, thinking how her assigned role is alien to her (LS, 40) and “daring a snap of the chain” (LS, 41). The actual nature of the struggle to protect the immaculate female Ireland from the rebels who “don’t fight clean” is presented through the thoughts of the warhorse Reggie Daventry at the dance Lois attends. He has been searching for hidden guns with “special

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orders to ransack the beds and to search with particular strictness the houses where men were absent and women wept loudest and prayed” (LS, 212). The insurgents use women to conceal guns, so Daventry’s work consists of yanking screaming women off their beds and probably cutting open the mattresses. Daventry is severely traumatized, and feels that if he doesn’t keep drinking and dancing, he will lose his mind (LS, 212). The distraught, stupefied Daventry fastens himself on Lois and dances with her repeatedly: “Anxiously dancing, she merely constituted Mr. Daventry’s revenge” (LS, 219). He is both expressing hostility at an elegant woman and trying to attach himself to the one who belongs to Gerald, the most outstanding of the troops. As he presses himself, “she saw there was not a man here, hardly even a person” (LS, 229). And when he refers to Gerald as “our young friend” (LS, 230), the words echo in Lois’s mind: “Our young friend, our young friend, our young friend” (LS, 231). She is appalled to suspect that Gerald’s connection to Daventry implicates him in the same brutal mentality. Yet Daventry shows positive qualities when he brings the news of Gerald’s death in the last chapter, revealing that it is not his nature but his duty that destroys him. If war is hell (and love is not much better), this colonial war is particularly depressing because unlike hell, it keeps getting worse. The justifications are hollow, and the defenders of Anglo-Ireland can feel history turning against them. Laurence, Lois’s cousin the intellectual, who sympathizes with the rebels, looks up at a mountain: “In some gaze—of a man’s up there hiding, watching .  .  . they seemed held, included and to have their only being. The sense of a watcher, reserve of energy and intention, abashed Laurence .  .  .” (LS, 173). Increasingly the Anglo-Irish see their existence defined by the Irish Other, and Laurence realizes that the excess margin necessary to life is in the hands of the insurgents. Gerald soldiers on in the face of a declining situation and virtually endless frustration. Finally, he has a stroke of luck, capturing a wanted rebel, Peter Connor, whom he finds in bed (LS, 131). Though catching someone sleeping is not the most heroic form of warfare,

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this is Gerald’s only victory, but it probably costs him his life. For Sir Richard, who is familiar with the Connor family, reflects, or avoids reflecting, at the end on who shot Gerald: “Peter Connor’s friends: they knew everything, they were persistent: it did not do to imagine . . .” (LS, 298, Bowen’s ellipsis). If the approach to victory draws Gerald toward doom in colonial warfare, his success in preserving traditional romantic attitudes also leads him to defeat because Lois is trying to escape from the enclosure of chivalry. He picks a woman who is vital: “I suppose you are what I mean by life . . .” (LS, 280, Bowen’s ellipsis). And so he picks one who is searching for flaws in the customary notion of love that Gerald adheres to and that Lois hopes to be able to make acceptable by criticizing it. For example, when Gerald says, “Doesn’t love finish off people?” Lois thinks, “was Gerald, sublimely, the instrument of some large imposture?” (LS, 252); did his idealism serve a false system? It is Gerald’s idealism that allows the invidious Lady Myra to use the system to sabotage his love by persuading him that his love for Lois must be connected to her wealth and that to touch her would be taking advantage (LS, 265–66). Lady Myra Naylor is the evil stepmother who destroys true love, and may even be said to nail her victims. She seems to reject Gerald fiercely because he is low-class, English, and lacking money; but it may be that for all of Myra’s boasting about how romantic she was when she was young (245–47), she is driven to destroy the love of Lois and Gerald because it may be true love. Yet one of the terrible things about Myra is that she tends to be right: Lois and Gerald might have gone wrong without Myra’s meddling, and going abroad may be good for Lois. In the final confrontation between Lois and Gerald, when he is unable (because of Myra) to answer her “beseeching movement” asking to be touched, she shouts, “Gerald, you’re making us lose each other!” He replies, “But I mean to say: what would you lose?” (LS, 280). His first five words express lower-class hesitation that matches the self-abasement of his point. For he sounds like Joe Gargery, the humble blacksmith in Dickens’s Great Expectations, who tries to be polite by prefacing his statements to the wealthy Miss Havisham with

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the formula “Which I meantersay .  .  .” (Dickens 1999, 82). It is a paradox of male gender that he feels he would debase himself by being aggressive. When Gerald asks what she would lose, Lois says, “Everything”; he says, “Do you mean that?” and Lois “saw now where they were” (LS, 280). This is the point at which she could save their love: “She thought of going, hesitating with delight, to the edge of an unknown high-up terrace, of Marda, of getting into a train. ‘No,’ she cried, terrified, ‘why should I?’” (LS, 280). The edge of the terrace may represent the risk of freedom, and so may Marda and getting into a train. The thoughts of these possibilities, in contrast to her view of Gerald as circumscribed, impel her to realize that the romantic language does not work. Gerald is not everything, for there is a great extension of leeway beyond him. Gerald now says, “Then we don’t mean the same thing” (LS, 280), reversing his earlier assertion to Lady Myra that he and Lois both meant the same thing by love (LS, 264). Either Myra poisoned his love or the earlier view was naïve, probably both. Lois says, “Why don’t you make me . . . something?” (LS, 280). Bowen’s ellipsis means that Lois doesn’t know what she wants to be made: she hopes to use him as an event to get beyond herself. She wants his belief to give her an identity, as her concern for him made her feel like a wife earlier (LS, 251). But in order for him to make her something, she would have to believe in him, as Lacan says that love demands that the beloved be the source of one’s being (Lacan, 2006, 580). Instead, Gerald says, “I thought I could. I know I can—when I’m not with you” (LS, 280). He can see her as ideal when she isn’t there, but not when she confronts him. She herself undermines his conviction. Yet he stalwartly resists her critique and maintains or enshrines her in his mind as a paragon: “Whatever’s impossible, you will always be perfect . . . you know I’m not giving you up” (LS, 282). He will not give up his idea of her even if it means losing her disturbing actuality. The failure of the relationship results from the interaction of his male conservative English rigidity and her radical female Irish skepticism. But the active cause of the defeat is not his fixation/limitation, but her

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relentless questioning. So she is responsible for the tragedy, and this is what puts her deep in hell. As a remarkable reflection of the displacement of Anglo-Irish sensibility onto social surfaces and manners, the brunt of the tragedy is acted out as a series of faux pas between the English and the AngloIrish in the next-to-last chapter of the novel. These spring from the fact that the English pay social calls in the morning and the Anglo-Irish do not. Gerald and Lois are a failed Romeo and Juliet: as Shakespeare’s lovers brought the feuding Montagues and Capulets together, the love of Lois and Gerald could have consolidated the union with the English that the Anglo-Irish are trying to fight for (though they do not fight here). But the book repeatedly makes it clear that the English see the Anglo-Irish as primitives and the Anglo-Irish see the English as inhuman and brainless. Now the torments of Hades appear as a series of excruciating and often uproarious social mishaps, Corcoran’s comedy. As the Englishwomen are stalled outside Danielstown, they speak of the “darling cows” and audibly hesitate to tell Sir Richard that an offensive is planned, as if he were one of the enemy (LS, 288). As the British visitors are unable to gain entry to the not-yet-ready Naylors, Lois is in hiding because the loss of Gerald has depressed her dreadfully. The deplorably foolish English army wives, Betty Vermont and Denise Rolfe, are just saying that Lois is “what I should call rather affected” (LS, 289) when they realize Lois is there. “Their looks ran over her form like spiders” (LS, 289). Her suffering, as they cruelly go on wondering why she hasn’t heard from Gerald, is horrendous: “they nudged each other. There must be something odd about her, really, if [even] they had noticed; she must clearly be outside life” (LS, 291). Her agony is increased by Gerald’s death, especially since he died for her. Banville’s screenplay has Lois form a passionate attachment to the rebel Peter, who actually kills Gerald in the film. This may be described as bringing out implications about Lois’s division and guilt in the novel. When Laurence tries to comfort her by saying, “one probably gets past things,” Lois says, “there are things that one can’t— (she meant: He loved me, he believed in the British Empire.) ‘At least, I don’t want to’” (LS, 299).

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Pain that one cannot get beyond is hellish, and one reason Lois’s affliction is so intense is that she has to feel responsible for Gerald’s death. She cast him off, and he was described as being shockingly desolate afterward (LS, 288). He might not have been careful, in his despair, to keep his head down when he was shot. The pattern of a woman causing a man’s death by rejecting him (implied with Michael Furey in Joyce’s “The Dead”) recurs in Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1947), in which the heroine, Stella Rodney, is haunted by her husband, Vincent, a soldier who died shortly after she divorced him (Bowen, 2002, 90, 146–47). There is bitter irony in Lady Myra’s saying, “She did not take it as hard as I feared . . .” (LS, 301) because Lois contains her emotions. It is likely that Lois will find a meaningful life for herself in studying abroad, staying with a French family in Tours (LS, 300), and accompanied by Laurence, who has always provided reassurance for her by assailing her remorselessly: “She had reattained confidence, expanding under his disapproval” (LS, 9). He is politically radical, though he is self-destructive about it, hoping to be attacked (LS, 58, 152–53), and he is the opposite of Gerald, who told Lois she was everything. Kiberd is sure that she is lucky to get out of the stifling situation of Danielstown (1995, 372). If she acts on the excess that makes her included without belonging, she may write a brilliant critique of Anglo-Irish society. But the novel avoids speaking of Lois’s possibilities and concentrates on her misery. In the end, Danielstown is turned to an inferno: “The doors stood open hospitably upon a furnace” (LS, 303). This is where the book was always headed, and the poignant combination of beauty and destruction was operating on every page. The parallel between the opening and the closing, pointed out by Maud Ellmann in Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (2003, 67), involves cars approaching Danielstown at the start and leaving it at the finish, both signaled by the twang of the gate (LS, 3, 303). In the perspective of this fated house, the rise of civilization entails its downfall, and every beauty of human culture derives its splendor from its doom. “Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, not saying anything, did not look at each other, for in the light from the sky they saw too distinctly” (LS,

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303). The light in the night sky comes from the flames, making “an extra day,” a hellish parody of daylight that suggests that enlightenment is artificial. What was excluded by enlightened constructions now bursts in and disintegrates all the boundaries of the repressive structure. The relationship of Myra and Richard was based on the structure of the house, whose empty beauty excluded what was beyond it. Now that the outside has broken in, the clarity of perception becomes an affliction. In hell to see clearly is to see that one is dispossessed, a true realization of the vanity of one’s claims. At the point of excess the new order becomes visible, but only through the ruin of the old one. Deane’s Reading in the Dark: Marriage as Revolutionary Damnation If The Last September demonstrates the damnation entailed by losing a war for a false cause with little justification, Reading in the Dark brings out the damnation involved in winning one for a cause of truth that is justified—especially if you live in Northern Ireland, and victory in the war to free the country seems to remain on hold, like a hand about to throw dice, for decades. The justification of rebellion is founded on the situation of colonial injustice; and injustice puts one under pressure to compromise one’s principles. Perhaps this is the crux of injustice, and driven by it, revolutionary militancy creates standards that are hard to follow and easy to break—putting large numbers of people under a curse generated by the disparity between human feeling and abstract principle. As Eóin Flannery points out, Reading in the Dark raises disturbing questions about standard representations of the Northern Ireland conflict (2003, 71). Deane’s method of investigation as a Modern artist, which Flannery sees as complex and multileveled, carries the inquiry toward the procedure Badiou describes in Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “A Throw of the Dice” (“Un Coup de Dés,” [1897] 1994), staging the event as a series of clues that lead to its undecidability (BE, 194), suspending its forward movement to map its multiplicity. This brings out contradictions covered over by reducing everything to a conclusion. “Mallarmé is a thinker of the event-drama, in

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the double sense of staging its appearance-disappearance .  .  .” (BE, 191). This is because “[t]he paradox of an evental-site is that it can only be recognized on the basis of what it does not present in the situation in which it is presented” (BE, 192). One of the main clues that Mallarmé presents is the ship “buried in the depths” (BE, 192). This submerged level would recover purpose and direction if it were raised, but within the staging of the event its purpose is to remain sunken to represent “the inexistence of which the site is the presentation” (BE, 192). Reading in the Dark presents a world that represents something that is submerged. Early in his history of the Irish novel, Hand mentions the theory that because the novel depends on middle-class realism, stories are a more natural form for the Irish; then he finds this a simplification because the novel has always featured uncertainty and multiplicity (2011, 2–4). Later he sees Reading in the Dark as a series of stories that resonate with each other to weave a unity in multiplicity (2011, 250), an Irish form. As a (terrific) poet, Deane sees forces operating through the excess of human feelings rather than the measurement of sociological abstractions. These feelings appear as vivid images that may be more complex than calculable terms, images that reach across the boundaries between separate narratives to express constellations of meaning. In “Stairs,” the brief first episode of the book, the nameless narrator is separated from his mother by a shadow (RD, 3–4). This shadow is a ghost, a demon, the specter of history, the revolution, those who were lost, and mother’s own crime. The revolutionary provincials of Derry are inhabited by the supernatural. The next section speaks of people who were taken by fairies and a magician who disappears (RD, 5–6). The section after that speaks of the central figure of Uncle Eddie, who has vanished into inexistence, and then it gives a gripping account of an exorcism that traps an evil spirit in a pane of glass (RD, 7–9). In the section that follows the one after this, “Feet,” the narrator sees his sister’s ghost (RD, 17). The narrator’s family lives in a Gothic world in which spirits, often spirits outside orthodox religion, are a continuous submerged force.

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The narrator’s father, Frank, explains some of the functions of these spirits when he takes the narrator and his brother Liam to see a stretch of land that reaches to a cliff over the sea. He says that this is the Field of the Disappeared, where dwell “the souls of all those from the area who had disappeared, or had never had a proper Christian burial, like fishermen who had drowned. . . . any who heard their cries should cross themselves and pray out loud to drown out the sound. You weren’t supposed to hear pain like that. . . . close the doors and windows to shut them out, in case that pain entered your house and destroyed all in it” (RD, 54). Reading in the Dark is about a house entered by such pain. The father tries to separate himself from this superstition by calling it a belief of local farmers (RD, 53), but he apparently believes it. These lost souls seem to enact a pagan alternative to damnation. Riana O’Dwyer presents anthropology that seems relevant in her account of Stefan Czarnowski’s Le Culte des Héros et ses Conditions Sociales: Saint Patrice, Héros National de l’Irlande (1919), a book that Joyce was enthusiastic about and used in the Wake. Czarnowski reports that in ancient Irish wakes over heroes, the soul of the dead man was not departed from his body in the first part of the ceremony, but he inhabited “a middle state of existence, awaiting the call to renewed action” (O’Dwyer, 1980, 285–86). There is a possibility that the condition of the Disappeared could be changed, but their agony is terrifying. It is a hell not quite without hope. This is what Lacan refers to as being between two deaths (Lacan, 1992, 217): literally dead, but not symbolically dead. And as Hedwig Schwall observes in “Reading in the Dark: Flying by the Nets of Politics and Psychoanalysis” (2000, 223), it is a state around which the plot of the novel revolves. So do the plots of the Wake, Banville’s The Sea ([2005] 2006, in which the narrator’s wife is not quite dead), and Enright’s The Gathering (2007). Looking at the field one last time, the narrator “could have sworn” he “saw someone standing there, right at the edge, a man peering down at the waters . . .” (RD, 55). This is a figure of the Disappeared, Frank’s brother Eddie, around whom the lives of the main characters revolve.

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The public story is that Eddie went elsewhere to continue working for the IRA (Irish Republican Army), but insiders know that he was shot as an informer. The narrator, who spends the book investigating his parents’ tangled and tortuous history, ultimately finds out that Eddie was framed by the police to get revenge on grandfather, Frank and Eddie’s father, who had gotten away with killing a policeman (RD, 216).2 In the elaborate web of suspicion, concealment, and revenge, everyone’s role is contradictory. The narrator’s father continues to his death to believe that Eddie is a traitor, but as a victim of injustice, Eddie is the highest kind of hero to the cause, if only his ship could be raised. Irish revolutionary activity was often plagued by informers. The most famous novel about the revolution was traditionally Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer ([1925] 1980). In Joyce’s Portrait, Stephen says, “When you make the next rebellion . . . and want the indispensable informer, tell me. I can find you a few in this college” (P, 202). Revolutionaries working underground in a heavily policed society dominated by the opposition like Northern Ireland must constantly be on guard against informers, and cannot afford careful systematic judgments of those accused of being stool pigeons. The field of uncertainty in which they are compelled to operate corresponds to the limited knowledge of the colonized, who are not allowed to know what is really going on. They must bury this level of indecision that corresponds to the primitivism of Celtic mythology, the margin that is outside of control, and they must assert a level of rationality that matches their conquerors if they are to succeed. The disturbing possibility of truth must remain submerged like Mallarmé’s ship.3 This arrangement is mapped out in Reading when the narra-

2. This crucial point, which I only realized after years of teaching RD, portrays the police, particularly Sergeant Burke, very negatively, though they are seen more sympathetically elsewhere (RD, 10–11). 3. A parallel situation appears at the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), when the revolutionary African folk spirit Beloved must be submerged as African Americans advance into responsibility: “They forgot her like a bad dream” (Morrison, 2004, 323).

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tor is in Grianan, the Celtic cave that turns out to be the likely place where Eddie was killed (RD, 192). Seated in the wishing chair in a secret passage of the fortress cave, the narrator imagines he could hear “the breathing of the sleeping warriors of the legendary Fianna who lay below” waiting for the person who would make the wish that would bring them to life again to fight the last battle that would drive the English away (RD, 56). O’Dwyer points out that Finn, leader of the Fianna, is one of the main heroes “who have remained in the state of provisional death” (1980, 286). This myth survived centuries of dispossession. At ten years of age, the narrator is terrified to think that he might be the one to rouse them to their fell intent (RD, 56). So his view of them is disturbingly ambivalent. He thinks that if he concentrates, he can scent the herbal perfumes of druid spells and hear the women sighing in sexual pleasure (RD, 57). These Celtic elements deep underground demote paganism to hell and show awareness that paganism was less sexually repressed. When the narrator is locked away by his friends, however, he realizes the seriousness of the threat, so he has to explain the situation in empirical terms: the breathing of the Fianna is only the sound of wind or sea, the druid spells are the scent of the heather, the women sighing are underground water (RD, 58). The rational system defeats the mythological one. So the numerous images of buried fire are forces that must be held down though they suggest an extreme truth. For example, after burning rats out of their warren, “I imagined the living rats that remained, breathing their vengeance in a dull miasmic unison deep underground” (RD, 80). Insofar as Eddie was a stool pigeon, as the narrator believes here, he was a rat, and Grianan turns out to be (probably) where he was killed. The buried level that contains those who are excluded represents an archaic Irish incoherence as well as the feelings that have to be held down by the political reality of a state dominated by conservative Protestants. The Gothic chapter called “Katie’s Story” represents the terror of losing coherence and the ability to make distinctions. The frightening children Frances and Francis are linked to the most ancient Irish language (RD, 63)—indeed they finally sing in a language that

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cannot be known at all (RD, 71)—and linked to the most dreadful affliction of Irish history, since their parents died at the time of the Famine (RD, 63). As the children exchange hair color, eyes, complexion, gender, and so forth, they break down all distinctions and are finally sucked back into the womb of their parents. It is as if the fear of not being rational that attacks victims of colonialism amounts to a fear of not fully being born. The green light that issues from the grave that swallows the children matches the hellish idea that what is buried is on fire. Conflagration beneath the surface is continual in the novel. When the dead child Una is carried in a stretcher with red handles, “The lino itself was so polished that there were answering rednesses in it too, buried upside down under the surface. . . . Una had been so hot . . . she made me think of sunken fires like these” (RD, 13). After the narrator attacks his father by burying his roses, “Walking . . . where the bushes had been was like walking on hot ground below which voices and roses were burning, burning” (RD, 111). The buried fire may be internal, as with the ghost of Daddy Watt, whose distillery was destroyed by a revolutionary battle: “the shape had a mouth that opened and showed a red fire raging within” (RD, 33). The main character filled with fire, a fire that emanates from the vicinity of Eddie, is the narrator’s mother, whose father, the fiercest rebel in the book, ordered Eddie killed. When she realizes that her father killed her husband’s brother, she falls into a nervous breakdown or period of hysteria, during which she keeps repeating, “Burning; it’s all burning” (RD, 145). The narrator calls her “possessed” and feels she must be “grieving . . . for a lost soul, someone woven into the fires of hell . . .” (RD, 145). When she says, “Paradise was not far away when I died” (RD, 149), he realizes that she must have been in love, perhaps because of the suggestion that she destroyed herself for happiness, or perhaps because her voice is clear and young (RD, 149). Then he weeps to realize that “[s]he had been in love with someone else, not quite my father” (RD, 150). Among the mysterious things mother says in her new voice is “To go halfway round the globe and never speak again. The poor coward.

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The lonely soul” (RD, 150). The person she loved, Tony McIlhenny, was the actual informer and betrayed Eddie (RD, 216). He also jilted the narrator’s mother for her younger sister Katie, whom he then deserted while she was pregnant. He appears to be an awful villain, but mother’s lines indicate that she still loves him. She watches a fire and says, “The pain is terrible. The flame is you; and you are the flame. But there’s still a difference. That’s the pain. Burning” (RD, 145). The most incandescent part of her flame is that she still loves McIlhenny. Her love is based on pity that responds to his dreadful actions by believing that his suffering for them is as great as their evil. The phrase “poor coward” includes a recognition that for a man to be a coward is a great anguish. The only time we see McIlhenny himself is in a late section soon after his guilt is made clear called “People in Small Places,” a story Katie told the narrator about her absconded husband. As a bus conductor, McIlhenny became fixated on a passenger named Sean whose infant daughter had died and left only one sock. Sean carries a case containing this sock and devotes himself to searching for its mate, though McIlhenny realizes that “Sean would have said no anyway, to any sock, that it wasn’t the match” (RD, 220). McIlhenny foresees his own fate by realizing that the infant is caught in a hellish state between two deaths, for as Schwall points out, “McIlhenny is [symbolically] dead in the sense that he is unmentionable” (Schwall, 2000, 223): “He said that the worst punishment of all was the one Sean of Malin had created for his child—not being able to let it die properly, getting it caught between this world and the next. The air of Donegal, of all Ireland, was full of such people, he had claimed, because of our bad history” (RD, 221). McIlhenny goes on to tell of a ghost caused by injustice. The state of the Disappeared is seen here as pandemic to Ireland.4 Such a revenant dominates another novel from Northwest Ireland, The Third Policeman. McIlhenny (or

4. A parallel in Beloved appears when Sethe suggests her family could move to escape the house haunted by the murdered infant Beloved: “‘What’d be the point?’

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Katie) derives a moral from Sean’s story: “people in small places make big mistakes. Not bigger than the mistakes of other people. But . . . there is less room for big mistakes in small places” (RD, 221, also see 241). Those deprived of perspective make wrong moves that cannot be escaped.5 It is possible that McIlhenny made a new life for himself in America, so that the image of his torment is a projection of mother and Katie, but this image of the Disappeared plays an important role in the world of the novel; and I believe that those who knew him best are probably right. The evidence suggests that McIlhenny was a sensitive person who saw that people are subject to forces beyond their control, and that mother’s love for him is based on pity, as was her love for her husband, Frank. Both loves draw her into deceit and wrongdoing because of the incommensurability between the requirements of war and personal feelings. It is easy and perhaps necessary to blame her, but just as Eddie seems to be a criminal but is actually a martyr, mother’s passion based on sympathy includes a high level of nobility. As Marilynne Robinson observes in Gilead, “It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity” (2004, 186). There is a relevant line in Borges’s fiction “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the protagonist murders the man he admires the most because it is strategically necessary: “a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men . . .” (Borges, 1964, 23). The point is that one cannot be an enemy of a person, only of certain moments of his. To condemn McIhenny may be as unfair as to condemn mother, which may be as unfair as to condemn Eddie. That it is necessary does not make it right. Deane’s political credentials are strong, but the novel is filled with the spirit of forgiveness that would make possible the miracle of Ireland’s passage beyond civil war.

asked Baby Suggs. ‘Not a house in the country ain’t packed to the rafters with some dead Negro’s grief’” (Morrison, 2004, 6). 5. The analogy for this in Morrison is Sethe’s murder of Beloved.

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The weight of mother’s oppression is brought out when the narrator buys her an iris and she recites verses while tearing off and dropping its three petals: “If you want to, you can tell /. . . . If you don’t, that’s just as well / . . . Get it over, get it done, / Father, lover, husband, son” (RD, 227). In this Ophelia-like scene, she is probably taunting him when she accuses him of wanting to tell Frank what he knows about McIlhenny and her father, which would be a disaster, but she is right about his having a great desire to reveal the truth. “Get it over” indicates that the tension of the withheld secrets afflicts her every hour. Every close relation she could have to a man—Father, lover, husband, son—is locked in an infernal torment in which each party is perpetually wounding the other. The conflict between the imperatives of politics and human weakness is presented in the chapter called “Reading in the Dark.” The narrator, at eight, is reading a novel called The Shan Van Vocht, or the poor old woman, the image of Ireland as a suffering mother. The novel features two lovers, Ann and Robert. Robert “just kept on about dying and remembering her always, even when she was in front of him . . .” (RD, 20). The narrator feels impelled to correct this: “So I talked to her instead and told her how beautiful she was and how I wouldn’t go out on the rebellion at all, but just . . . let her know that now was forever and not some time in the future when the shooting and the hacking would be over .  .  .” (RD, 20). This is a sadly irresponsible reaction to the dismal but necessary revolution of 1798, but it is a human reaction to noble heroism.6 The “Reading in the Dark” section ends with the narrator’s awareness of the gap between his romantic notions of literature and a simple, earnest description of ordinary life written by a classmate (RD, 21). This may suggest that the narrator’s drive toward a higher truth separates him, like Stephen Dedalus, from the loyalty of those who serve the cause without question. As with Stephen, it may lead

6. Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French is a powerful novel about the revolution of 1798.

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to a more advanced insight at the expense of personal relations. Hand says that the narrator, like Stephen, faces an “awful vista of alienation” (2011, 251). The pathological aspect of the narrator’s searching and questioning is represented by Crazy Joe, a demented figure who introduces the narrator to art and who shares secrets with the narrator and his mother. Joe brings the narrator into the art room that is “Reserved for Adults” in the public library and shows him “Miss O’Murphy,” by François Boucher (RD, 83), a highly erotic nude that is upsetting to the repressed narrator. Joe tells the narrator that an even more demented man named Larry McLaughlin knew “that woman” carnally (RD, 85), though Miss O’Murphy, Louis XV’s mistress, lived in the eighteenth century. Joe claims that it was being seduced by a succubus, presumably equivalent to Miss O’Murphy, that caused Larry to lose his mind so that he never spoke again (RD, 86–89). But later we are told that Larry was fed information to frame Eddie (RD, 216), and the narrator claims that Larry executed Eddie for the rebels and that this was on the night he “met the devil woman and stopped speaking” (RD, 192). This is puzzling, but the killing of Eddie seems more credible than the supernatural story as the cause of Larry’s muteness; and they add up to link the secrets of political violence to the secrets of sex, both of which may be affiliated, as may Joe’s mental problems, with Bohemianism, an area the narrator may approach as a budding poet. Joe saw McIlhenny talking to the police and warned mother that McIlhenny should flee (RD, 200), so he is close to mother, but when he puts a hand on the narrator’s leg at a party, the boy’s parents see him as unnatural and banish him from their son (RD, 232). The entire novel is propelled by the narrator’s endless pursuit of the truth about the relationship between his parents, which is also the truth about the emotional stresses of the revolution. Perhaps the son’s key question is what his parents knew when they married (RD, 217), which corresponds to what psychoanalysis calls the primal scene, the child’s primary image of the intercourse between his parents; but the terms here constitute a political unconscious. Like the primal scene,

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the initial situation does not stop reverberating: mother is trapped in the position in which she suffers for her reprehensible love for McIlhenny; father is trapped with the false idea that his brother is a traitor. She cannot reveal the truth and he cannot ask it. The military exigencies of the revolution (combined, perhaps, with a religious spirituality that is intertwined with revolutionary impulses) generates the marriage of a compromised woman to a deceived man. This may be because the Irish revolution, unlike the contemporaneous Russian one, was accompanied by a nationalist/religious ideology that insisted on a constrained version of marriage. These are the burdens this couple had to endure to fight for freedom by upholding a revolutionary standard in contravention of their desire, and it caused them endless grief, putting them into a virtual hell. One consequence of their dedication to freedom and truth was that they raised a son who was driven to question everything. By pursuing truth, the narrator ends up embodying knowledge that is unbearable. He assumes the role of the ghost that his mother and he sensed on the stairway in the first chapter: “Now the haunting meant something new to me—now I had become the shadow” (RD, 228). By threatening to confront her with the reality of history and the reality of the marriage that she can only live by stifling, he becomes an affliction: “I had wanted to know what it was that plagued her, then to become the plague myself” (RD, 242). As he comes to know the terrible nature of the secrets, he says of his mother and himself, “We were pierced together by the same shaft” (RD, 133). It could be argued that this shaft is the necessity of preserving the illusion of the father’s manhood, which keeps them both from speaking. (In a way, this is a problem of Irish manhood to which Bloom’s acceptance of cuckoldry in Ulysses is a solution.) His mother suffers more than anyone else because she knows more, and he has an intense desire to join her in this knowledge. In gathering the clues to the drama of the evental site that combines the marriage and the revolution, he is penetrating to her interior. The explicitness of the sexual imagery that joins the narrator to his mother is grotesque, as sexual imagery often is explicit among people who are highly repressed. Here he is thirteen: “I dreamt of a

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magic syringe that I could push up into the inside skin of her arm and withdraw, black with grief, and keep plunging it and withdrawing it, over and over . . .” (RD, 146). The mother’s performance of agony is a way of relating sexually to the male members of her family. During her period of greatest hysteria, everything they do is a reaction to her suffering: “Liam and I played football . . . our movements quick and loud with the panic we both felt. If we fought, we did so in the same high-edged way. . . . and she went on, . . . haunted and burning, audibly, inaudibly” (RD, 147). Their strength and courage are exerted to save her, articulated and generated by her anguish. In the system of stresses that suspends the family in morality and exalted principles of virtue, feelings are defined negatively, so that the characters express affection for each other by withholding information and suffering for each other from the restraint. This ordering, in which one’s desires operate in reverse, has the structure of hell. It sustains the Christian tradition that the more strictly one believes, the more one sees the world as ruled by the devil. This tradition is illustrated by the devout Brother Regan early in the novel. Regan inaugurates the labyrinth of secrecy and regret by telling the boy about the killing of a policeman by his grandfather. The murder of a policeman (who had shot a rebel) is the strongest revolutionary action. Though Regan does not name the killer, it seems likely that the narrator will soon find out, as he does from one of the boys (RD, 27). Regan wants the boys to realize they are moving toward a society ruled by evil: “a world of wrong, insult, injury, unemployment, a world where the unjust hold power” (RD, 26). In a typical demonstration of negative family relations, the narrator gives his mother a birthday present that consists of his going away for years (to college) so she won’t feel the pressure of his knowledge. It appears that his gathering of clues is destructive, but Badiou says that one must not conclude that the assemblage of the drama of the event is “nihilism.” Even if it must be impossible to tell from the standpoint of the situation whether the event exists, “it is given us to bet; that is, to legislate without law in respect to this existence” (BE, 198). Because the event is fundamentally new, it cannot be detected

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in existing terms; so one must project a possibility with no established framework to fit it. A good name for this procedure is reading in the dark: “I’d switch off the light . . . and lie there . . . re-imagining all I had read, the various ways the plot might unravel, the novel opening to endless possibilities in the dark” (RD, 20). The narrator’s advance into probing the incomprehensible parts of his parents’ lives leads him to realize that a final truth cannot be found and that he is doing a good deal of harm. As the chapter where he destroys his father’s roses indicates, he is trampling on his parents’ feelings to hold them accountable to his idea of factuality. Despite his doubt, there is a level on which the narrator is proceeding to map out the historical and psychological events of his parents’ marriage in the revolution—even though his discovery of the event has to include its incomprehensibility and his distortion. Late in the novel the youth’s family gets a record player, and his favorite song is an aria from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice: “Orpheus having turned around too soon and lost Eurydice—Che faro senza Euridice?” (What will I do without Eurydice? RD, 229). This represents the plot of the novel as the hero’s attempt to rescue his mother from hell. It includes the idea of overcoming hell, and though Orpheus fails because of his own desire, he is able to sing about it sublimely. I call the narrator a hero not only because he tries, but because something is rescued, a poetic vision of a truth that confronts damnation. The idea of rescuing the beloved from hell appears in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses (with Stephen’s mother), in an ironic form in Beckett’s Molloy (whose aim is to reach his mother), in Banville’s The Sea (2006), and in Enright’s What Are You Like? and The Gathering.7 To some extent, on some level, Euridice (in Italian) tends to be Eire, or the truth excluded by (the English name) Ireland. When the revolution returns or acts up in 1968, the mother has a stroke that makes her unable to speak. This deprivation, making it

7. The greatest version of the Orpheus myth in our time may be The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami ([1995] 1998, 406).

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impossible to tell her secrets, brings her close to her loved ones: “Now we could love each other, at last, I imagined” (RD, 242). As the house is surrounded and damaged by British soldiers, the parents grow closer, as if they can communicate in this dreadful element without speech: “All through this, my father remained as silent as my mother. I imagined that, in her silence, in the way she stroked his hand, smiled crookedly at him, let him brush her hair, bowing her head obediently for him, she had told him and won his understanding. I could believe now as I never had when a child that they were lovers” (RD, 243). Maybe she tells him by her silence of her great regret, which confirms his suspicion of her mental infidelity to the marriage and the revolution. Maybe he lets her know that he knows he’s been keeping a secret for her. They realize the prices they have paid to the revolution and to marriage, as well as to the restrictions that the revolution opposed. Their constraints and afflictions extend to the fact that the Irish government in its first decades had to maintain narrow-minded policies to keep control and maintain independence from England. Terence Brown says in Ireland: A Social and Cultural History that “independent Ireland was dominated by an overwhelming social and cultural conservatism” (1985, 17). The political vision of Reading in the Dark realizes that these postcolonial strictures were caused by the reverberations of colonialism. The novel has little to say about the pride of going through these sufferings to free the nation and to raise an intellectually active generation—the mother pushes her son to excel academically (RD, 225). Such pride would be a ponderous topic. To convey the limitless sorrow may be the best way to convey the pride. So what the narrator discovers is liberating for all its uncertainty. It constitutes an event because of its uncertainty. In the passage quoted above we find out that when the boy saw his parents kissing in the fifth section, “Feet,” he sensed that their love was hindered. Perhaps it took him a decade to be ready to see their love, but he may be right both early and late. The early embrace of which he sees only the feet (RD, 15) is obstructed by what they are hiding from him and themselves. The later one, in which they scarcely

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touch, is a realization of what they have sacrificed for each other and, whether or not they know it, for the cause of freedom that blighted and irradiated their lives. The truth of their love that reaches through obstacles is the truth of the revolutionary event that can only justify the struggle if it is seen in all of its grievous handicaps. The narrator is heroic in that he has drawn together the symbolic drama of the event as embodied by mother’s damnation, the ache of father’s innocence, the loss of Eddie, and the afflictions of all, including himself. These define the margins on which their humanity could hardly be equal to the terrible thrust of historical and political reality. The fact that Frank has a heart attack shortly before he was to become eligible for a pension (RD, 243) becomes an emblem of the way their human limits clash with the abstract strictures of government. And the clash between their feelings and historical principles shows not only the price of freedom, but the incompleteness of freedom, the differend or need to reach toward further possibilities of expansion. One could tabulate all of the facts and inferences that the narrator uncovers and interpret them to come to a conclusion about what really happened and where the blame and credit should be affixed, and this is an imperative that accomplishes much and can never be left behind. But Reading is finally postmodern in being filled with the realization that such a procedure could never be completed. McIlhenny, the one who is most to blame, holds the love of mother, who commits emotional crimes for virtuous reasons. Father makes the whole plot possible, suborning and sustaining the family by deceiving himself, though he has suspicions. The book ends with the nobility of his innocence (RD, 246), which dies believing that Eddie is a traitor. The son’s efforts to clear things up spread distress and perpetrate an incalculable series of distortions. The trio may be seen as a somewhat demonic parody of the Holy Family, with Frank as the spiritually cuckolded Joseph, mother as the sinful, hysterical Mary, and the narrator as the troublemaking son. Nevertheless, it is the incoherence of the plot that allows it to approach in terms of personal experience the reality of the revolution

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as it is enacted in the family. A conclusion that put truth here, blame there, and glory in another place would leave behind the complex of forces operating at every level. If war enforces the need to make sharp distinctions, this increases the need to realize that such distinctions are tangled in contradictions. One of the last scenes in the book has father expressing sympathy for the father of a slain British soldier (RD, 244–45), even though the book ends not long before the British massacre of Bloody Sunday (January 1972). History must be read with an awareness of its internal conflicts, and with the realization that one is reading in the dark. The recognition that the plot cannot be completed may be a basis for reconciliation.

8 War 2 Heroes

Whereas the last chapter dealt mainly with ways in which people are victimized by war, this one treats two novels in which protagonists assert the revolutionary value of armed resistance. This brings us back to the philosophical radicalism of Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Banville insofar as hell here is not just a historical situation forced on people, but a chosen means of approaching the most difficult truth. The attempt to grasp the power of the event is Badiouvian, but it strays from Badiou’s discipline, which requires that the event remain unknown. As Ireland enters an expansive phase (The Celtic Tiger), these writers tap into the popular mythology of romance and action to inspire people with progressive ideals. The Splendid Isolation of Edna O’Brien’s House Michael Harris, in “Outside History: Relocation and Dislocation in Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation,” cites with approval a statement by Christine St. Peters that O’Brien’s 1994 novel presents “the most sympathetic portrayal of an IR A character in Irish women’s fiction” (Harris, 2006, 123). This is McGreevy, a not quite named generic figure like the narrator of Reading in the Dark, since none of McGreevy’s first names is true and his last labels him as a son of grievance. The portrayal of McGreevy could be condemned by a radical Republican such as David Lloyd (1993), for it sees him as a dangerous maniac hardly capable of changing his mind, and doing harm as the old revolution approaches a cease-fire. The question of whether 199

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IR A militance was necessary to reach a just peace or was an obstacle to such a peace depends for its answer on which side one is on, and the book portrays most Catholics in the Free State as ambivalent, but against militants as extreme as McGreevy by the 1990s. But to see this question as undecidable is a step toward a solution that O’Brien finds in a subtraction from knowledge, or a realization of what cannot be known. Josie O’Meara, the widow whose big house the gunman McGreevy invades, embodies many of the faults of the traditional gentry, both as a supporter of the system and as a female victim of it—her crude landlord husband, James, picked her out as a barmaid (HI, 32) and treated her abominably. Now Josie soon becomes sympathetic to McGreevy, as he does to her, and she ends up defending him furiously. The extreme opposition of both protagonists to themselves as well as to each other generates what Bakhtin refers to in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics ([1929] 1984) as a polyphonic novel. Bakhtin says that to be alive, an idea has to enter into “genuine dialogical relationship with other ideas” (Bakhtin, 1984, 88); it must interplay with other views to avoid becoming fixed dogma. An idea should never try to be a total explanation, but should be seen as “one orientation among other orientations” (1984, 98). This corresponds to Stephen Dedalus’s dramatic form, in which the vitality of the artist “fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes . . . esthetic life” (P, 215). It also matches Lyotard’s condemnation of what he calls totalitarian thought (1988, 5). The great advantage of polyphony is that it precludes the possibility of anyone having a correct position, which is fatal to the life of fiction, giving it the dreary quality that Stephen refers to as kinetic. In this arrangement the right ideas are knowable and concern focuses on how the plot allows the character to reach the proper goal. It follows the model of a rat in a maze, and though it is often the basis of the best seller, this cognitive focus is far removed from human feelings and is deleterious to active intelligence. As Danine Farquharson and Bernice Schrank point out, House of Splendid Isolation deconstructs its plot through “multiple plotlines

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.  .  . fragmented and seemingly disconnected actions and remembrances, the past spilling into the present .  .  .” (Farquharson and Schrank, 2006, 112). Causality is made to stand on its head, as when people find a wig that may or may not be McGreevy’s (HI, 71–73) or when Josie is killed by a bullet that rebounds from another (HI, 221). Harris agrees with Farquharson and Schrank that the novel has a postmodern construction (1997, 126). The intentions and positions of the characters work in opposite directions from those in which they aim. These twists vitalize elements of the thriller that the book uses to reach out to the public. Josie and McGreevy, like Stephen and Bloom, or Molloy and Moran, embody the maximum extension of irreconcilable opposites: a young male lower-class radical from the North and an old female genteel conservative from the South. (Though the daughter of a pub owner before her marriage, she has cultivated refinement for decades.) They have no definite erotic connection, yet somehow they fall in love and generate the voice of the unborn heard at the beginning and end of the novel. This child cannot be born yet, but is able to frame the book that could lead to the generic knowledge that is to be. Without courtship or kiss, they partake of the myth of romantic love. This myth sprang up in Europe in the twelfth century with the spread of the courtly love movement. Denis de Rougemont argues in Love in the Western World that it began with the Catharist heresy in the south of France in the eleventh century. De Rougemont claims that this sect represented the ultimate spiritual transcendence in terms of a man and a woman dying together in love. The doctrines of Catharism were eradicated when the group was exterminated in the Albigensian crusades early in the thirteenth century (de Rougemont, 1956, 75–90). Great love stories tend to end with lovers dying together, as with Romeo and Juliet, and Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, whose family emigrated from Ireland. The primary model of the myth of love, the story of Tristan and Isolde, is set in Ireland (though the main Irish version of the myth is the tale of Diarmuid and Grianne). The crucial component of

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romantic love that the relationship of Josie and McGreevy embodies is that they choose to be destroyed by each other. Tristan and Isolde, because of their situations, drink their death with the love potion. This matches Oscar Wilde’s idea that we each must kill the thing we love (1946, 589). Badiou’s In Praise of Love argues that the event of love changes one’s thinking from a selfish mode that is limited to a dual mode that sees things from the beloved’s point of view as well as one’s own: The world is seen “from the point of view of difference and not identity” (2012, 22). Fernie defines such focus on difference as demonic (2013, 8–9) and sees Tristan and Isolde as plunging into a demonic world of passion (27–28). But Badiou argues that the sharing involved in the double mind of love is a model for the kind of mentality needed for the success of socialism (2012, 62–63). The remorseless McGreevy goes against his principles by liking Josie because she is brave and sympathetic though conservative. He regrets the harsh rules he has to impose on her (HI, 106), so he makes concessions that put him in danger and compromise his conviction that his struggle is the only way to a just peace. Josie is impressed by a radiance in his smile when they approach this topic, so she begins to compromise her own views and her safety even though she suspects he is mad (HI, 122). After McGreevy has left the house and it is clear that it is very dangerous to approach it, he returns to it though it has been rifled by the police searching for him. This may be because he has a mission (probably an assassination) to perform, but his return remains mysterious, and Harris says, “McGreevy strangely decides to return to the big house, where he is caught. . . . O’Brien leaves the question of his motivation open, as McGreevy himself doesn’t have the answer . . .” (Harris, 2006, 133). Now he tells Josie the story of his wife, Shiona, who was shot by masked men for her revolutionary activities (HI, 195). He says he still lives with his dead wife (HI, 204), and he feels her presence as the house is being raided. He dreams that it is “[t]ime to go. All that stops him is Shiona. Waiting for her to touch him . . .” (HI, 218). I feel that this female spirit is connected to Josie.

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Earlier, when McGreevy had left the mansion, Josie set out desperately into the wilderness in pursuit of him and almost lost her life to a fever. She is rescued by a revolutionary girl named Creena who is infatuated with McGreevy. Creena shows Josie a poem to him that includes the lines “How your life / Reaches / Into mine” (HI, 129). Creena is embarrassed at exposing her passion and says, “Old people know nothing of young love” (HI, 129). But she retracts this statement (HI, 159) after Josie tells the story of the romance in her life, which was pitifully thwarted. Josie’s earlier passion is the subject of the fourth chapter, “A Love Affair” (HI, 133–59), which is written in a mawkishly parodic style that reflects the deformity of Josie’s wretchedly limited life with her coarse, abusive husband. Pathetically, Josie developed a crush, during her marriage, on a young priest, who first flirted with her and then repudiated her. This grotesque chapter shows how two very different women share the common fate of being obsessed with desire for men who are unattainable. So when Creena ends the chapter by saying, “I’m sorry for what I said about old people and love” (159), it has become evident that Creena and Josie are both besotted with McGreevy, and that this love of Josie’s is deeper than her ludicrous non-affair with Father John or her marriage to a husband for whom the most she finally could feel was pity (HI, 64). In Creena’s words, McGreevy’s life reaches into Josie’s insofar as they sacrifice themselves for each other, which turns out to be completely. In step after step of their connection, they throw away protection for themselves in order to engage with each other’s dreams. In their last moments together, as they are watched through a night telescope by soldiers, he whistles to her a song about the Holy Ground of Ireland and explains to her his justification. When they are startled by a noise, which turns out to be wasps, she wants to stay within the embrace in which he seizes her to the floor even though the noise was not yet troops: “‘Oh, what fools,’ she says, but remains for a moment in his grasp, within something, within reach of the murmur of him” (HI, 206). The guards who watch think they are making love (HI, 207).

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They have reached into each other, and Josie loses her life because she rushes toward the fray to save him, taking on the bravery that characterized him: “The woman has no fear” (HI, 221). She becomes his double, and her charging aggressiveness leads the soldiers to conclude that there is “a second gunman” (HI, 221). McGreevy’s sacrifice for her may be more terrible than hers for him because it is emphasized repeatedly that he absolutely cannot bear to be taken alive (HI, 113, 119, 223, 225). The situation of war that spurs their love makes it necessary that the manifestation of love destroy the beloved as well as oneself. Only this love-as-hell can engender redemption for the land. The child who speaks for the children they lost to their historical situations—his daughter Kitty and the child she aborted (HI, 210–11)—represents the hope for Ireland that comes from the terrible passage through their irrevocably opposed positions. So the ending of the book in the child’s voice is prophetic, for only by encountering opposition can they go inward: “To go in, within, is the bloodiest journey of all. Inside, you get to know—that the same blood and the same tears drop from the enemy as from the self. . . . To go right into the heart of the hate and the wrong and to sup from it and to be supped. It does not say that in the books. That is the future knowledge. The knowledge that is to come” (232). Writing as the IR A is about to declare a truce in 1994 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 is approaching (Peach, 2004, 235, 237), O’Brien wants to propound its strongest support by indicating that it will fail if it assumes a false harmony. It can only work through a process of subtraction that suffers the full irreconcilability of the two sides. That it is not “in the books” means not in the ancient prophecies of endless war until victory: “the land cannot be taken” (HI, 232). It is outside knowledge because it is the generic, undecidable and indiscernible, a knowledge that can only exist in the future, and in recognizing the unknowability of the other side, as Josie and McGreevy do not know what happens to them. If they could comprehend where they were going, they could not reach the crucial goals of

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displacement. It is the isolation of its inhabitants from themselves that makes O’Brien’s house of Ireland so splendid. A Revolution of the Mind: A Star Called Henry A Star Called Henry (1999) is a product of a period when revelations about Church abuses stirred skeptical attitudes; and the skepticism and radicalism of the nineties may express prosperity and optimism. This novel is a clear example of revolutionary damnation because the hero affirms his damnation through armed insurrection; and I hope to show that through his perdition he defines what Ireland, in Doyle’s view, really needs. As Fernie says, “in its antagonism to the limitations and corruptions of being, the demonic can . . . function as a revolutionary good . . .” (2013, 17). Yet the novel begins with the hell of colonialism that Henry Smart and his radical comrades attack by revealing its devilish nature and replacing it with an active hell of their own creation. The crucial difference is between the controlled or rationalized or consistent hell of the state and the excessive, inconsistent hell of the outburst that the rebels unleash. The book starts with the fiendishly destructive poverty and degradation regulated by the empire and the Church. On every street of the slums of Dublin one hears tubercular coughing and sees hunger, vice, and violence. Melody Nash, Henry’s future mother, who was “never a child” because she was poor (St, 6), looks around her as an adolescent at the “piled, sagging fever nests” and sees “the four corners of hell” (St, 4). The God who runs this hell, like the Church and the state, uses a rationalized system of accounting, and the infernal operation of the slums maintains an account of relentless deprivation, even in relation to birth: “God waited for no baby in the slums. He took them back as soon as He’d given them, but He threw them away if their souls were still stained. He delivered them soiled but expected them back spotless. It was a race. . . . to stay a few inches in front of the greedy hand of God. God’s gift, Original Sin, had to be washed away in case God sent another of his gifts—fever, typhoid or whooping cough, smallpox, pneumonia or rats. So I’d been baptized” (St, 33).

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God seems to take babies almost as fast as He gives them. The situation of constant struggle to stay in front of the “greedy hand of God” parallels the colonial arrangement of the tenant farmer who can never make enough to pay off his debt. This is the economy into which these people are born in a country where starvation was endemic within historical memory. Henry’s father is said to have had his leg eaten by hungry peasants (St, 10). Mrs. Smart had two children born before Henry, named Henry and Lil. After they died, she convinced herself that they were still there as spirits in the sky in the form of stars. Melody did not want to give the name Henry to the boy who survived because it was already the name of the lost son shining above. But Henry senior insisted on using the name again: “My father didn’t believe in heaven or after-life reunions. His children were gone. Naming me Henry would take the pain and weight away; it would let them start again” (St, 37). Henry junior’s name thus carries the meaning of a rejection of the otherworldly. He never stops resenting his exalted version in the sky. At birth, Henry inspires everybody as the “Glowing Baby,” for these poor people have never seen a healthy infant (St, 27), and he is enormous and filled with vitality. He is portrayed as aimed at an amazing destiny from birth. This flies in the face of realism and presents him as a symbolic figure who represents human aspiration bursting out of limits. As his parents are arguing about naming him, with father insisting that the stars are only stars, little Henry keeps chiming in with “What about me?” (St, 26, 27, 32, 37). His infantile selfishness is taken seriously as the power behind revolution, the excess behind the event. He is analogous to Bigger Thomas, the hero of Richard Wright’s Marxist African American novel Native Son (1940). Thomas is named Bigger because he is too big for the social limitations that contain him as a “Negro,” and his demand for more leads him to revolutionary violence.1

1. Fernie says that adolescent rebellion is hard to separate from rebellion in general, and that while it is destructive, it may be necessary for self-determination and freedom (2013, 21).

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Henry’s mother regularly sits on the stairs before their tenement and pays devotion to the stars. When she does this, the infant Henry objects by thrashing and wailing furiously on behalf of physical reality: She lifted her hand and chose a star. Her index finger swayed, then stiffened. —There he is, she said. I bucked and tossed. I screeched blue murder. —There’s my little Henry. (St, 40)

Melody resents the heavenly name being given to her living son: “I was the other Henry. The shadow. The imposter” (St, 38). He is bitter about how his actuality is subordinated to an abstract conception. Mother stops eating and starts to fade (St, 38–39). Melody rejects her husband, and he regrets giving his name to his son, so he expresses anger by performing his job poorly. He is a preemptive bouncer who turns unsuitable men away from Dolly Oblong’s fancy brothel. Now “the violence and hurt poured out of him . . .” (St, 44) and he attacks everyone who approaches Dolly’s, so no one enters, and she calls him in and tells him he is bad for business. Dolly uses the word business seven times on two pages (St, 46–47), and continues to use it often until her final appearance in the climax at the conclusion of the novel (St, 379). Here she says, “That is how society works. Money. Making it, taking it, spending it. Without money we are nothing . . .” (St, 48). The image of capitalism as prostitution, which may be traced back to Revelation and the medieval doctrine that the world is ruled by the devil, is given its greatest modern development in Joyce’s Ulysses. Bella Cohen, the “whoremistress” in the “Circe” episode, is like Dolly, enormous, aggressive, and dangerously attractive. Bella refers to her stock market dealings and her friends in the upper classes, and actually turns into a businessman and smokes a cigar (U, 15.2897–98, 2931–37, 3081–84). Enda Duffy refers to her as “late-capitalist Britannia” in The Subaltern Ulysses (1994, 156). Descriptions of how Henry Sr. is dominated by Dolly resemble lines on how Bloom is dominated by Bella: “He was so overpowered by her magnificence, by the eyes made huge by belladonna” (St,

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56). Bloom refers to Bella as “magmagnificence,” and her eyes are “deeply carboned” (U, 15.2744–46). Dolly takes on the role of deity for Henry: “She was God” (St, 49). She lowers his pay (St, 47, 49) and soon has him murdering people for her concealed master, the tycoon Alfie Gandon, who turns out to be the ultimate center of power in the novel’s universe (St, 57). Henry thinks that Dolly is Gandon, and this corresponds to how Bella turns to Bello in Ulysses, the power behind beauty, the boss behind the fantasy images of commodified desire. Henry Jr. is also overwhelmed by a woman, but he is attracted to her freedom, not her oppression, and she reveals the truth to him rather than concealing it. This is the teacher Miss O’Shea, who breaks the rules by admitting two street Arabs into her class. Miss O’Shea discovers that Henry is remarkable at math when he deals not with clearly defined numbers, but with the inconsistent forms of concrete objects. She makes him feel that he can learn whatever he wants (St, 90). A strict nun, however, visits the class and orders Henry and his younger brother Victor to leave, condemning them as “Pagans” (St, 89). Henry realizes at eight years that the nun represents the prevailing order and that Miss O’Shea is the exception, inconsistent with the machinery of causality: “Miss O’Shea had just been a bit of good fortune. . . . The nun had been the normal one . . . Fuck her. And religion. I already hated it . . . That was one good thing that had come from all the neglect: we’d no religion. We were free. We were blessed” (St, 90). Doyle, who has a gift for portraying the lower classes, makes Henry stand for a segment of the lumpenproletariat, or ragged ones without legitimate jobs,2 a group that Doyle sees as resisting religion and authority. Such attitudes may not be usual, but they are supposed

2. Marx defines the lumpenproletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (written in 1852): “Alongside decayed roués with doubtful means of subsistence and of doubtful origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jail-birds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni [beggars], pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati . . . in short, the

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to represent what the oppressed should feel if they see their situation accurately. They reveal Henry as a prodigy, for people who give up religion rarely give it up by eight. Henry sees an advantage in being neglected, outside the ideology of the family. When his anger at those with power and prosperity leads Henry to join the revolution, he aligns himself with the socialist wing of the republicans by joining the Citizen Army, which sees the struggle as between the lower classes and the elite, including the Church. Their leader is James Connolly, the only head of the Easter Rebellion who is clearly identified here as an active socialist. He tells his disciple Henry that they are “surrounded by gobshites” (St, 131) because while all of the rebels are fighting for freedom, for most of them it is freedom to support religion and ownership: “Catholic and capitalist, Henry. It’s an appalling combination” (St, 131). Almost all the fighters in the Easter Rising are there to back the Church and to claim the British property of Ireland. Only Henry and his buddies Paddy Swanzy and Felix Harte of the Citizen Army support Connolly’s views, though he is presented (and idealized) as the most effective and inspiring leader of the Rising. These four are disgusted to see the mass of the troops reciting rosaries on the floor of the post office (127). When Connolly is drawing up the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, Henry tells him to cut references to God. Connolly says, “Can’t do that, son. We need Him on our side. And all His followers” (110). Like Jesus and Paul, Henry believes that the best thing to do with money is give it away. (He takes 10 percent from funds entrusted to him, but does not hold on to it.) So when a group of wives besieges the General Post Office occupied by the Volunteers, demanding their husbands’ pensions, Henry has the rebels give them money from the post office till. And when people start looting stores in Central Dublin. Henry supports them because he is opposed to ownership and to

whole, indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown hither and thither, which the French term la Boheme . . .” (Tucker, 1972, 479).

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the stores’ withholding valuables from the people. An armed conflict almost breaks out within the post office as Henry confronts an officer who wants to make an example of the looters (St, 129–30). The rebels bring the hell of colonialism to the surface by turning Dublin into an inferno: “splashed sparks and ropes of fire everywhere” (St, 144). The streams of looters carrying weird objects constitute a demonic carnival of misrule (St, 128). The principle of excess that Henry supports is enacted by his intense sex with Miss O’Shea beneath the General Post Office. When she tears her skirt off, she says, “I’ll say I tore it for Ireland . . . And it’s no lie” (St, 135). Their furious copulation in the foundation of the building that is facing bombardment is at the heart of the insurrection. It establishes the idea of seeking the highest level of suffering that runs through the book’s revolutionary activity; for it emphasizes her attacking him with the utmost violence, from “She prodded and glided, looking for ways to kill me” (St, 135) to “She hammered. . . . She pounded. . . . She cut. . . . She gave me a hiding I never recovered from” (St, 137). This is not a matter of sadomasochism as such: it is a show of strength, like that of an athlete who eagerly confronts pain. Two people are making love with supreme fervor, so that a less demonic act would be less powerful. It resembles Paul’s boasting of his torture as it sets the mode for the most valid, robust revolutionary striving in the book. The fantasy image that is most potent in bringing the lovers to climax is that of being caught by people who would shame them and by the authorities who would attack. This is what they recite as the orgasm mounts:

Her mouth was on my ear. —What if they came in now, Henry. —Who? I said—the other women? [in the Cummann na mBan auxiliary] She grunted. Pearse and Plunkett? She licked my ear.

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The pious nationalist Patrick Pearse (perhaps most responsible for the Rising) and the elderly Sir Joseph Plunkett are among the more proper or conservative leaders of their own group. During the crisis over the looters, Henry “got ready to shoot Commandant Pearse” (St, 130). But it is British soldiers he settles on to stroke her with in this twenty-two-line sequence that ends as follows: —The Scottish—oh fuck—The Scottish Borderers —Maithu, Henry —The Sherwood Fah Foresters? —Maithuuuu—oh- Maithu —The Bengal Fuckin Lancers! And we came together . . . (St, 137)

The various distortions and interruptions in their speech—such as his “oh fuck,” the italics on the last syllable of “Borderers,” “Fah Fah Foresters,” and the four u’s and breathless dashes of her last line— indicate that they are overwhelmed by the feeling gripping them and its explosive rhythm. This is one of a very large number of Joycean effects (such as the absence of quotes and the idea of capitalism as whorehouse) that Doyle uses despite his notorious denunciation of Joyce (Chrisafis, 2004). Henry and Miss O’Shea continue to use this pattern of naming interlopers when they make love throughout the novel (St, 262). It excites them to defy authorities, and she breaks into Irish for her cry of climax, maithu (“well done”), leaving behind the rational containers of the English language. Less than this distress would be less triumphant, a weaker expression of the demonic spirit of rebellion, which grows more exciting as it is more forbidden. It is droll that this revolutionary couple can hardly come without imagining the enemy. It indicates the hellish nature not only of war, but of passion, which has been emphasized by the Church—that lust requires devastation. Another of Doyle’s best novels, The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1997), presents Paula and Charlo Spencer,

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who are so intensely passionate that they cannot help destroying each other. Both are brutalized by their lower-class backgrounds, especially Charlo, who comes from a family of criminals. His violent love for her leads him to beat her dreadfully, but she is the one who ends up killing him, for she throws him out and this causes him to enact a suicidal crime. She is hardly objective, but she is quite certain that he kills himself for love of her (Doyle, 1996, 191). A Star Called Henry cuts back and forth from the ardent sex to the siege (St, 135–40), and the lovers’ secularly Pauline quest for tribulation is echoed by other rebels. When Thomas Clarke hears that a huge British force is about to arrive, he says, “Our time has come,” and Henry observes, “I’d never seen a man look so happy” (St, 133). When Connolly—who will be terribly wounded in the siege before being executed by the British while wounded—hears that rebel positions in Dublin are being heavily bombarded, he “was delighted. He clapped his hand and thumped his chest./ —Now they’re taking us seriously!” (St, 134). Now hell has been brought to the surface. Even after the post office has been blasted and burned into surrender and the rebels have been captured and his friends shot, Henry feels exultation: “I felt the blood running through me. I’d wrecked the place [probably the colonial capital Dublin], brought it to its knees. I wanted Miss O’Shea. Now. On the street. I wanted to celebrate and cry. Felix and Paddy [shot]. We’d really wrecked the place” (St, 153). His readiness to have intercourse in the middle of the crowded street is essential to the force of revolutionary vitality that he embodies. Yet he is outside the border of a famous de Valera photo because the input of a street person cannot be recognized (St, 156). The eagerness to embrace damnation shown here is also reflected when Henry works on the docks. The work is hell in appalling terms (St, 173), but he loves it (St, 175). When Henry rejoins the movement after his mistress Piano Annie’s husband returns, he finds that the nationalist position has hardened. Dermot McCarthy sees the novel perceptively as a postmodern satire of the conservative aspect of nationalism that has too often been sanctified in Ireland (2003, 204). McCarthy demonstrates that A Star

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Called Henry refers extensively to Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins (Jordan, 1996), but in his emphasis on satire, McCarthy speaks of the book as an attack on the film. Michael Collins, however, is a great film, and while it idealizes Collins, it presents a complex conflict between de Valera the politician and Collins the warrior. In the film Collins knows the truth that de Valera has to cover up, which is that the war cannot be won without compromising on Northern Ireland. De Valera treats Collins as expendable, and this makes Collins parallel to Henry. De Valera may be justified in eliminating his heroic competitor by sending Collins to sign the treaty because Collins could perhaps not have led the country much better than Henry; but de Valera made the Free State a conservative theocracy. A radical program might have been better in many ways, but it might not have worked, if only because people need authority. Alfie Gandon joins the movement at the moment when the odds tip in its favor. He represents rational calculation rather than the free energy of the event. The oracular Granny Nash says that now that Gandon has joined the rebels, “we wouldn’t be long in getting the English to pack up and go home” (St, 186). This is undeniable because Gandon is the power elite who can make the revolution practical as business. Jack Dalton, who initiates Henry into the new phase of the Volunteers, denounces socialism as “old Jewish shite” (St, 193); and his fellow strict nationalist Dinny Archer says that class warfare is pernicious because it sets “Irishman against Irishman” (St, 204). So he wants Connolly’s portrait removed from the meeting hall. What Dalton and Archer want to do is build Irish business. The leader who embodies the true revolutionary spirit for Henry at this point is Collins, the head of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), who devises the plan to murder government agents. Collins tests Henry by sending him on a difficult, pointless mission and forcing him into a fight by attacking him. Once Henry has proven his fighting spirit by knocking Collins down, “I was in now” (St, 223). Yet Henry as Collins’s man is not really in politically: “I was one of Collins’s anointed but, actually, I was excluded from everything” (St,

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233). He does not have the school, the home, the family, and the social identity that would allow him to be a known quantity, to belong rather than merely being included: “none of the other men of the slums and hovels ever made it on to the list. We were nameless and expendable. . . . We were decoys and patsies. We followed orders and murdered” (St, 233). The lumpenproletariat, who do not have regular jobs, are the people who are oppressed most, but they remain subhuman in the new order even though they may be glorified, like the bold Henry of a popular song. Henry’s exploits tend to be impossibly risky, but he and Miss O’Shea take delight in overturning the rules of probability, and they express the miraculous event of the new nation. They occupy a mythological realm in which nothing can really hurt them, for any injury they sustain can only do them good in a field suffused by the glory of martyrdom and the life force of the people. McCarthy takes an ironic view of Henry: “By constructing Henry as an unbelievably heroic character, Doyle parodies the very notion of the ‘great man’” (McCarthy, 2003, 217). A sharp point, but Henry’s heroism is not just a mockery, and the book does not mean to say that striving for freedom is meaningless just because it is arduous. So it ends with Henry taking significant action against Gandon. The desire to lift humanity through suffering may often cause unnecessary pain, but to take the hellish view that it is hopeless is more like Beckett’s discipline than Doyle’s excess. McCarthy’s emphasis on satire runs the risk of dismissing Henry, but Henry embodies the link between bravery and freedom. This link creates subjectivity for Ireland, which, like all subjectivity, begins at the point where self-interest ends. The risk that goes against probability in the most extreme way is the event that does most to create Ireland. Like Paul’s followers, Henry seeks the highest level of suffering. After a scene in which Henry and Miss O’Shea have been shot four times, he says to her, “I bet my pain’s worse than yours.” “Men,” she replies, “You always have to win.” He says, “I’m not doing this to best you,” and he faints (St, 307). When he escapes from prison, his body is in dreadful condition, but he feels wonderful on the upper deck

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of a bus: “I looked down at the world and loved the feel of the seat against my back” (St, 343). But on the next page we find that this is his situation (part of it): “My feet were sore and bleeding. A chunk of my brow was flapping over my left eye. My jaw ached, my teeth were loose, and some gone. There were ribs broken, toes smashed. My back was killing me. My ear was ripped. My balls were kicked huge and screaming” (St, 344). One reason he feels good is that he has escaped after being tortured by the British for months, but another reason he loves the feeling of the seat against the back that is killing him is joy at having paid his dues beyond measure to the revolution, his most absolute accomplishment. He seeks the most extreme anguish, and like Blake’s Satan, he seeks it in the name of freedom: “I was free as long as I looked ahead” (St, 343). Much of Henry’s activity for the IRB consists of training young rebels around the country, and the key to this is overcoming their subservience. His radical friend Ernie O’Malley had emphasized the need to “rid them of that fear and respect they have for the planter.” “They’re frightened of their betters. . . . It’s the result of hundreds of years of colonialism. . . . We have to convince them that they have no betters. . . . This is a revolution of the mind” (St, 244). The idea that no human should serve a higher power is parallel to Stephen Dedalus’s “I will not serve,” and as with Stephen, it is asking for something in excess of reality in order to transform reality. As a final stage of preparing his country lads, Henry orders them to line up and curse the deity: —Fuck you, God! Straight up at the stars. —Fuck you, God! —Right, boys, I said—You’re in. (St, 254)

The description, “Straight up at the stars,” by echoing Henry’s infant resentment of his mother’s devotion to stars, shows his whole life to be opposed to divinity. The line “You’re in” means that they are confirmed as strong members of the movement, but it is unrealistic to expect these boys to give up their familiar consolation (or debasement)

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for a political abstraction. The men won’t really give up God, and this is why Henry’s idea of the revolution will fail. Socialism, like Christianity, asks people to give up selfishness, but they fall back on the old power structure. Henry’s leading recruit in this area, Ivan Reynolds, ends up making himself a “lord” in the region (St, 291), a term that combines feudalism and divinity, and in Ivan’s case it centers on his killing anyone he wants to kill (St, 351, 353). The only man Henry finds after the socialists have been wiped out who gives up power is David Climanis, and Climanis loosens Henry’s devotion to the cause: “I couldn’t understand what was happening to me . . . he was a good man” (St, 273). An exiled Latvian Jew, Climanis does not believe in any ideology, so he does not impose order on anyone. He says, “I thank the Russians [who destroyed his belief in Marxism by killing his first wife] for. . . . making me a man with no country” (St, 274). The nationalist Jack Dalton warns Henry to keep away from the Jew Climanis, and when Henry goes away and returns, he finds that Climanis has disappeared. Dalton tells Henry that Climanis and his wife were killed because he was a spy, which seems to Henry to be a term the IRB uses for people it wants to kill (St, 263). From Dalton’s viewpoint, a Jew who gets intimate with an Irish rebel must be a spy because a freethinking Jew must represent an alien power, Judaism or Marxism. Dalton does not distinguish the two international unchristian movements. The nationalist Irish government of the 1930s passed a law protecting Jews,3 but this may have been a symptom of a problem rather than its solution. Doyle, while he is not always scrupulous about facts, seems to be right in seeing anti-Semitic elements among the nationalists, for the historian K. Theodore Hoppen refers to “the IR A’s

3. This was mentioned in a lecture by historian Diarmaid Ferriter at the 23rd International James Joyce Symposium at University College Dublin on June 14, 2012, “‘That crooked Spanish bastard will get the better of that pastyfaced blasphemous fucker from Cork’: Ireland’s Conservative Revolutionaries, 1922–39.” The title may refer to de Valera and Collins. Ferriter emphasized how imperative it was for the Irish to separate themselves from the English.

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dalliance with the Nazis” (Hoppen, 1989, 185). Dermot Keogh, in Twentieth-Century Ireland, speaks of the extensive involvement of Irish nationalists with the right during the thirties: “Many of those who remained in the organization [IR A] after 1936 were of a green fascist mentality and it was no coincidence that they sought to collaborate with Nazi Germany during World War II” (Keogh, 1995, 81). Ireland had few troops to lend the Allies, but it might have made a statement supporting them. German and Irish nationalists (or Nazis) had features in common, such as beliefs in the purity of the race and of women, and the sacred value of bloodshed. Pearse revered “blood sacrifice” (quoted in Hoppen, 1989, 136). Though the Irish did secretly provide intelligence to the English (Hoppen, 1989, 185), their main reason to remain neutral probably was a nationalist one: to prove their independence from England. When Henry tells Dalton that Climanis did not believe in religion, Dalton says, “Worse yet.  .  .  . He believed in nothing. A wandering bloody Bolshevik” (St, 363). One implication of the wandering Jew is that he did not belong to any land. As a person who cannot be contained in any nation, religion, or ideology, Climanis is what Badiou calls the indiscernible, the generic that reaches beyond any construction or state. For this reason he represents what the revolution should be aiming at, yet for this reason he has to be eliminated by those who take over the state. Dalton also says that Henry will have to be eliminated for a similar reason, his independence: “there are those who reckon that you’re always going to be against us. And they’re probably right. You’ve no stake [investment] in the country, man. Never had, never will. We needed trouble-makers and very soon now we’ll have to be rid of them. And that, Henry, is all you are . . .” (St, 365). In the event of the revolution, the nationalists needed inconsistent figures to create change. But now they want to consolidate the possession of the country that people like Henry won for them, and Henry, like Jesus, is incapable of owning property consistently. Granny reveals to Henry that the main source of the names that are distributed for assassination is Alfie Gandon and that Gandon said

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hello to (killed) Climanis (St, 370). Henry also is told by his friends Dalton and Ivan that his name is marked for death. With the last round of assassinations—including an especially awful one, after which Archer goes to mass—Henry realizes that he can no longer take part in the war (St, 322). Moreover, Dalton and Ivan revealed that the war is controlled by business interests who use both sides for gain (St, 353–54). This picture resembles Pynchon’s vision of World War II controlled by international corporations in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973, 165–67, 258, 520–21). Henry straightaway heads for Dolly’s brothel to kill Gandon. Dolly turns out to assist in Gandon’s death, for she realizes that she, like Henry, will have to be killed to purge Gandon’s disreputable past so he can be a statesman in the new nation. He has changed his name to the more Irish O’Ganduin and taken credit falsely for being in the post office in 1916. Dolly reveals that he seduced her when she was thirteen (St, 375), so she is his creature. Dolly’s relationship to Gandon represents the control of public images of desire by corporations described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1990, 120–67). The murder of Gandon by Henry is a rich and powerful climax to the novel that shows Henry taking meaningful action based on his outsider position, though it may be undercut by its fantastic nature. After knocking Gandon down, Henry announces, “David Climanis says Hello” (St, 376). Since Henry uses his father’s wooden leg to strike Gandon down, he might as well have said, “Henry Smart says hello,” and Dolly soon reveals that Gandon probably killed Henry Sr. because, as an assassin, he knew too much (St, 378). When Henry asks Gandon why he killed Climanis, Gandon says, “He stole something that belonged to me” (St, 376). This was Maria, Climanis’s devoted wife, who had been a prostitute for Gandon. Climanis’s crime against property consisted of transferring Maria from the calculated system of prostitution to the evental fidelity of love. When Gandon repeats “She belonged to me,” Henry whacks him again (St, 377). Gandon groans, laughs, and offers Henry a job as a bodyguard, presumably because he hits hard. When Henry says no,

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Gandon says, “Why not? You’ve been working for me for years. Just like your father” (St, 377). This confirms that Gandon has been running the whole theater of war, and it makes Henry hit him harder. Gandon says, “You could look after my business interests, Henry. While I steer the ship of state. It would work” (St, 377). This confirms that Gandon expects to hold the trump cards to control the country. The last point would be true if Henry were capable of owning interests. All of Gandon’s rational calculations of the profit he can offer Henry infuriate Henry into striking him again and again. Even after Henry has broken his skull, Gandon keeps calculating: “But still, he wasn’t dead. I could see it in his back, life, intelligence waiting for the chance” (St, 378). Gandon is an allegorical figure of the rational drive for control, and as such he will continue to rule the world after this particular incarnation is gone. This is parallel to the technological imperative that rules the world in Gravity’s Rainbow. But the opposition between his rationalization and Henry’s charisma impels Gandon to hasten his own destruction. Yet he never gives in, and nothing in the system can make him improper. Henry later hears that the official report of his death says that he died coming from his sodality, so he must have been in a state of grace (St, 381). In the available factual terms, he is in heaven. Henry sees that Gandon, who is generally credited with having been in the post office, will be “[a] nother martyr for Ireland” (St, 381). When Henry realizes this, it clinches his conviction that he has to leave: “I was going. I couldn’t stay here. Every breath of its stale air, every square inch of the place mocked me, grabbed at my ankles. It needed blood to survive and it wasn’t getting mine . . . / I’d start again. A new man” (St, 381). This sounds like Stephen Dedalus, who, like Henry, sees himself as withheld by society from the woman he loves (E—— C——), and refuses to sacrifice himself for Ireland. In Ulysses Stephen feels Irish ground sucking his feet (U, 3.150). And Henry’s borrowed “suit that didn’t fit” (St, 382) corresponds to Stephen’s “new secondhand clothes” (P, 224). Neither man is contained by the garments Ireland forces him to adopt. Stephen, quoting Christ (Luke 9:60), says, “Let the dead bury the dead,” and Henry

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sees Ireland in the demonic form of a vampire, needing “blood to survive.” Both men are subtracting the generic from the state, and this is Badiou’s way to approach a truth. Just as Stephen takes an unknown path at the end of each chapter, Henry says, “I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know if I’d get there” (St, 382); and these are necessary conditions of uncertainty for the event. He seems to be flying off like a by-product, but even if he goes astray, he is as he has been, the element that has the ability to save Ireland. Even though Doyle was unable to sustain Henry’s revolutionary power through the two volumes of the trilogy that followed A Star Called Henry, he has projected here the force of the people that drives toward liberation and he has exposed the fraudulence of history. The real Ireland is generic, a genus of its own. Badiou defines a generic set as “one that escapes all established classifications” (2001, 57n5). Ireland is not the British Empire or the Roman Church that have occupied Ireland with their puritanical rationalized regulation, though these controls are being retained by the new rulers. The real Ireland is the freedom of the people represented by Henry. Badiou says, “The generic is, at bottom, the superabundance of being such as it evades the hold of language .  .  .” (2008, 118). This subjectivity that exceeds every container is what Henry has been fighting for. It may not be realizable in practical terms, just as postmodernism is condemned for evading political reality, as Christianity or Marxism is seen as aiming beyond actuality. But literature has to affirm it, to insist on how false and destructive practicality is bound to become without the generic. The inevitability of the division between what is possible and what is called for must be asserted in the most vivid way through the image that emerges in Henry’s final, vampiric vision of Ireland, the image of hell.

Part Thr ee  

|  Family

9 Family The Runaway Son

The novels about the family that I treat all define the structure of this set by means of a son or daughter who is excluded as unacceptable, and this figure represents inconsistencies in the group that must be recognized. Historically, the focus on the family as an objective moves toward assembling a social situation that is stable and independent as Ireland grows into autonomy, a situation in which hell can be left behind. But it never can, and we start with the most atrocious assault on the family in a novel that speaks with a serpent’s hiss about pathology inherited from colonialism and orthodoxy. The Butcher Boy: Oppression as Insight Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1992) tests the limits of Badiou’s anti-philosophy because, like Beckett’s work, it denies all belief. The protagonist, twelve-year-old Francie Brady, who is both demonic and heroic, thinks and acts out the most penetrating protest against the understood order: family, religion, society, and logic. Yet his thoughts are hopelessly distorted and destructive, and he knows he is to blame and is firmly set against any exculpation. His refutation of the illusions that pervade his world gives him an intellectual splendor that is inseparable from his self-destruction, sealing impregnably the walls of hell in which he is enclosed. The reader is forced into a new perspective by sympathizing with the rightness of Francie’s anger while realizing how appallingly wrong he is. 223

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As Tim Gauthier puts it, “The reader . . . is never quite sure to what extent Francie’s perspectives are delusions or are incisive commentary on the narrow community in which he lives. That ambiguity allows Francie to embody the Other for the community; he becomes that by which they define themselves” (Gauthier, 2003, 197). In fact Francie’s vision is continually both delusory and incisive. The idea that an image of oppression can be a source of insight and beauty goes back to Joyce’s Portrait, where the main object Stephen uses to demonstrate his esthetic theory is “a basket which a butcher’s boy had slung inverted on his head” (P, 212). One question about Badiou’s ideas that The Butcher Boy raises is whether the generic has to be progressive. An innovative person could be a reactionary like Ezra Pound. As Gibson explains, Badiou deals with this by emphasizing that the event must be tempered with the discipline of the truth procedure (2006, 56, 81). Francie, who is a murderous lunatic, is limited indeed in his ability to test reality in normal terms. He does, however, have his own significant discipline, and its distance from “reality” and stability allows Francie to speak for the oppressed even more than Henry Smart (who may never be really broken by oppression). Francie’s role as a generic figure has to do with the massive institutional abuses of the underprivileged in Ireland that Banville speaks of in his 2009 editorial “A Century of Looking the Other Way.” The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse issued a report of “the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914 to 2000 . . .” (Banville, 2009). Francie is altogether a product and son of such abuse. Of the various versions of Stephen Dedalus, the egotistical, rebellious adolescent of the Irish novel, Francie has little of the intellectual, purposive quality of Stephen, Copernicus, or the narrator of Reading in the Dark. The closest to Francie may be Doyle’s Paddy Clarke, the rather brutal but also meditative child protagonist of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Doyle, 1993). But Francie, for all his outbreaks, sticks to his principles. Because he is at the very lowest level of society, a demented

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criminal who is a repository for stereotypes, his models are all negative in effect. The novel begins with a cruel stereotype of class distinction: the upwardly mobile Mrs. Nugent, whose name suggests recent status, denounces the Bradys as “no better than” pigs because the father, Benny, is often drunk and Francie has swindled her son Philip out of many of his comic books (BB, 4). Francie was trying to partake of Philip’s culture by tricking him out of his fine collection, but all of Francie’s methods for advancement take him backward and he is branded as a pig. There is a tradition associating lower-class provincial Irish folks with pigs, and one of its main examples is Flann O’Brien’s hilarious send-up of the glorification of the Irish peasant, The Poor Mouth (1996, published in 1941 in Irish as An Beal Bocht). O’Brien’s second chapter is about the smell produced by a pig who lives in the house, a stench so powerful that it threatens the lives of the inhabitants (1996, 22–28). In chapters 3 and 4, a group of language experts descends on the village seeking the purest example of the Gaelic tongue. They find it in a pig, whose grunts they record and analyze (1996, 42–49). Francie cannot escape from this subhuman stereotype, only project it on others. He has no viable conception of himself between ideal fantasies of the wilderness and degraded images of criminality. Because Francie is excluded from society as a system that works, he is in a position to see the malformations of thought and perception that are invisible to those who live by them. Like Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas of Native Son, a revolutionary murderer who pioneers existentialism in American fiction in 1940, Francie embodies a radical philosophical critique, and he is aware of its outlines at times. The Bradys are at the bottom of the social scale primarily because Benny is an abusive drunk although he apparently once was a talented musician. The main cause of Benny’s chronic failure seems to be that he was institutionalized as an orphan child. James M. Smith presents an analysis of the sociopolitical context of the novel in his article “Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment: ‘Telling’

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Stories in The Butcher Boy and States of Fear.” He argues that for half a century state institutions run by the Church were designed to exclude and punish those who did not fit ideals of moral purity. Anyone in a sinful category, such as an abandoned child, might be institutionalized and pass on her transgression to descendants, as in a Greek tragedy. “Francie Brady embodies these generational reverberations: his father’s disdain stems from unresolved psychological traumas suffered during his own childhood incarceration in a Belfast orphanage . . .” (Smith, 2001, 126) When one says the word home in Benny’s presence, he turns pale and is likely to plunge into drink and burst out in accusations (BB, 34–35). He can’t begin to get over the shame and humiliation of being an unwanted child in a harsh institution. His inability to speak about it suggests abuse, but the abuse may only be an objectification of the defilement of the boy’s subhuman status. To turn someone into a pig is to rape or violate him, to turn him into a creature who defecates in public. And as Francie runs away, he sees his father and uncle before his birth introduced to the children at the orphanage as “Bernard and Alo . . . Pig” (BB, 39). The orphanage Benny was in was run by priests, and when he visits Francie in the reformatory run by priests, he is upset: “the sight of the place put the fear of God in him it reminded him of the Belfast school for pigs” (BB, 88). (A Belfast institution might have not only priests, but Protestant overseers who looked down on Catholics.) Francie perceives that these institutions indoctrinate people to think of themselves, insofar as they do not obey, as pigs. “His eyes . . . kept darting about. I knew it was the priests looking down at him; Well Mr Pig are you back again?” (BB, 88). Benny’s eyes that cannot keep still are like those of his wife, Annie, who whizzes around when she gets back from the asylum (BB, 21). The problems of Benny’s wife are aggravated if not caused by his mistreatment. She seems to try to be reasonable: “It destroyed you that place, can’t you see that?, she said. You can’t even talk about it, can you? . . . Its no shame Benny that you were put in there!” (BB, 37). Benny is infuriated by these sensible, perhaps kind words: “He

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said at least he never had to be took off to a madhouse to disgrace the whole family” (BB, 37). This makes it clear to Francie that his mother is insane. The provincial Irish were subject to the malignant notion that mental disease is caused primarily by heredity rather than social factors. Benny says Annie “was mad like all the Magees” (6). The Bradys, alcoholic, madwoman, and juvenile delinquent psychopath, occupy categories defined by society only in deleterious terms. The patterns of action they try to assemble to deal with reality—drinking, preparing cakes for a party, going to Missouri—are resoundingly futile in terms of dealing with the Nugent reality that runs the world. But they are shockingly effective in delineating how the Nugent hegemony depends on an arrangement that attacks them, how the family, as a mechanism for human survival, depends on the social organization around it. The self-respect of the individual and the family depend on fitting in, on having a definite identity, but all of the connections that the Bradys make with others are unworkable, demanding what is impossible, constituting a series of debts that cannot be paid. Francie’s thoughts keep being interfered with by invasions from Mrs. Nugent, his father, mother, Joe, Philip, Mrs. Connolly, the Virgin, and others who make unbearable accusations or offer rewards he cannot claim. They are all like Father Alien, the priest with a huge wasp’s head based on a science fiction movie, who stares at him the first time he is put in an asylum after gorging on drugs (BB, 153–54). All represent the incomprehensible authority he cannot reach. The situation of being controlled by a sovereignty one cannot understand is characteristic of both the colonized and the lower classes, two groups that may be hard to separate; and this differential abyss could be involved in all human relations. Francie is increasingly surrounded by monsters who express his sense of the world attacking him, and this is a key feature of McCabe’s version of horror. Kilfeather says McCabe “coined the term ‘bog Gothic’ to characterize his own reformulation of the genre. ‘Bog Gothic’ might be pitched in opposition to the ‘big house’ Gothic which has continued to surface in the last fifty years in the works of

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John Banville, Aidan Higgins and William Trevor” (Kilfeather, 2006, 94). The traditional Gothic uses an upper-class setting to express fear of disturbing elements linked to the lower classes. Traces of this pattern are evident in Bowen’s Last September, and Bowen had a talent for terrifying tales such as “The Demon Lover,” in which a respectable woman fears an intruder. In Bog Gothic, the characters are lower class and the malign forces that threaten them represent social authorities. Hints of this arrangement may be found in Beckett’s Molloy, in Flann O’Brien’s dispossessed narrator, and even in Máirtín Ó’Cadhain’s Cré na Cille (Graveyard Clay or The Dirty Dust), in which the voices that are speaking come from underground (see pp. 124–25). Another term McCabe uses for his perspective is the “social fantastic” (FitzSimon, 1998, 176), the appearance of society as a series of disconcerting fantasms. More and more, as the novel goes on and Francie’s connections to other people disintegrate, he is surrounded by incoherent, frightening apparitions.1 Unable to form a consistent relation with anyone, Francie cannot occupy a definite place, and this means that he is aware of the multiplicity involved in the unity people rely on. Badiou says that the one is always an operation based on a multiplicity: “every situation is structured. The multiple is retroactively legible therein as anterior to the one, insofar as the count-as-one is always a result” (BE, 24). Francie is aware that he is caught in a maelstrom of voices that represent the relations of individual, family, and society—conflicting relations that most people suppress as society suppresses unwanted utterances. Badiou says, “the multiple is the regime of presentation; the one, in respect of presentation, is an operational result” (BE, 24). But the act of presentation, for Badiou, is all we can actually know as existing, while the result is only a wish. So the multivocal reality Francie

1. John Scaggs, in “Who Is Francie Pig? . . . ,” sees Butcher Boy as a Gothic novel because of its focus on the return of “past events, hidden secrets, and painful truths . . .” (2000, 52).

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inhabits is a philosophical truth as well as a social one. He is aware of what others conceal, and this is because what they hide encroaches on him. At the heart of the hope that the Brady family might work is Uncle Alo, who seems to succeed in reaching out. He has long been in England, so eleven-year-old Francie fantasizes that his English accent will be so much better than Mrs. Nugent’s that she will plead for the attention of the Bradys (BB, 22). But after Alo wants to sing a song “the priest had taught them in the home” (BB, 34), Benny’s outburst destroys Alo’s pretensions and the family gathering built around them, and brings out the hopeless deadlock between the parents. The confrontation with this family reality drives Francie to flee into a fantasy of being “The Boy Who Could Walk for Ever” (BB, 39). As usual he seeks the magic of escape that he believes he shared with his friend Joe when they were small children. Yet there is a level of him that remembers that his mother implored him to “never let me down” (BB, 5), and knows that by deserting her—repeating his father’s failure to help her—he will become accursed. Every decision is defeated by conflicting voices. Moreover one of the strongest aspects of The Butcher Boy is its focus on the severe affliction of male shyness, which has been highly developed in Ireland, and which can lead men to lash out at women. While he is in Dublin recklessly enjoying himself, a line from a science fiction movie he goes to, “in this town,” reminds him of the town he came from and he imagines Mrs. Nugent and the local grocer, Mrs. Connolly, talking about how he has deserted his mother. Nugent says her superior son Philip would never do such a thing and Connolly says Annie is “at her wits end” (BB, 42). This dreadful selfgenerated indication of the seriousness of his crime may cause him to begin to turn back; yet it is followed by a scene in which he reaches the sacred goal of his quest—as if only the awareness of how wrong it is could bring the ultimate Grail. This is a scene where the demonic generates the sacred, and Fernie says it is possible “to invest . . . demonic risk with a real aura of the sacred” (2013, 25) through a sense of passing beyond the limits of the world.

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Francie hears a girl singing in a chapel and this evokes transcendent beauty and the happiness he knew with Joe at “four or five”: “The notes . . . were clear as spring water rolling . . . and they made me think about Joe. . . . Those were the best days I ever knew, before da and Nugent .  .  .” (BB, 43). Then he wonders whether he only imagined those days (BB, 43–44). One’s later memory of life at four is likely to be distorted. His happiness makes him free enough to realize that his most sacred belief is an illusion. One of the best features of spiritual experience is that it can lift one above one’s assumptions. Francie knows he is destroying his mother at the same time that he is reaching the quintessence of his dream of her, like an inflamed or pestilential version of the narrator of Reading in the Dark, who probes his mother’s secrets. Francie ran away partly because he could not bear to see his mother abused and because he wanted to prove to her that he could be independent. His ability to hold the most violently opposed impulses in his mind allows him to see powerful forces no one else could explain and to define the nature of oppression beyond existing models—realizing in the flesh that oppression works by seizing on one’s love for mother to make one behave irrationally. Though Butcher Boy is written in an unusually demotic Irish prose and has a raggedy surface, befitting a monologue by a twelve-year-old maniac, McCabe seems to have some learning, and The Dead School (1995), one of the best of his uneven novels, is about education. So it is likely that the girl singing in the chapel is a reference to the line from Verlaine’s Parsifal that is quoted in Eliot’s Waste Land (Eliot, 2001, 12): “Et o ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!” (And o those children’s voices singing in the dome!). This indicates the presence of the Holy Grail. But although McCabe is out to show complexity and profundity in the mind of a preadolescent misfit, Francie has little notion of what a grail could be. Since it held Christ’s blood, the Grail could stand for the combination of exaltation and agony in the lost son who pierces his mother’s heart. Francie tries to make up for his betrayal of his mother by buying her a sentimental souvenir (BB, 44), but he returns to find she has committed suicide. He avoids realizing this, even when Mrs. Nugent

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tells him that it is a pity he missed the funeral (BB, 45–46). After this he looks into the Nugents’ window and sees Philip sleeping by his mother with an expression of utter filial devotion. This endearment rankles Francie, who sees family love as a criminal privilege because he feels the pain that subtends this happiness. Francie imagines that Philip thinks, “I’ll never do anything in the world to hurt her” (BB, 47). And this entails an inexorable contamination of Philip’s love, for love requires a negative extension to define it, the existence of those who cannot love. From here on, having destroyed his mother, Francie is a murderer: he soon attempts to murder Philip and is stopped by Joe (BB, 52). Joe is his link to normality and is forgiving several times, but gives up after Francie almost kills Mrs. Nugent’s brother Buttsy. It is only logical for Joe to turn to the successful Philip rather than the malevolent, demented Francie; but Francie’s fiendish agency is assembled by the damage done to him through the order that distinguishes better from worse. The quite incredible idea of actually making everyone in society equal is carried to its extreme in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which Badiou supports resolutely. When Francie butchers Mrs. Nugent, he says, “You did two bad things Mrs Nugent. You made me turn my back on my ma and you took Joe away from me” (BB, 209). He realizes that the higher level she set by calling his family pigs made him look down on his mother. All of their pitiful strivings to avoid being disgraceful pigs are retrograde efforts to reach the ideal that the Nugents claim. His desire to destroy the Nugents is inseparable from a desire to join them. When he breaks into their home, he dresses in Philip’s clothes and talks and acts like him (BB, 63). He imagines Philip saying, “He wants to be one of us” and Mrs. Nugent adding, “I’ve known it for a long time” (BB, 64). Her awareness of the anguish of the lower depths is as inseparable from her self-respect as her disdain is from the torment of the Brady lives. At the heart of the plague that afflicts these people, bringing destruction on the Nugents as well as the Bradys, is the principle that it is evil or sinful to be low class and good or virtuous to be upper class in both the colonial and ecclesiastical systems.

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The machinery that misconstructs Francie’s mind corresponds to the institutions that are in charge of the lives of the defective, inconsistent Bradys. Slave narratives like Morrison’s Beloved tend to focus on the breaking up of the family; and for the colonized and the lower classes, the self-respect that allows a coherent family is scarce, so people’s lives are controlled by institutions. But just as Francie sees that the goodness of the Nugents has a foundation of spite, so the institutions that claim perpetual rightness are actually vindictive in their superiority. The major development of this arrangement is the reformatory that Francie is sent to for making a pig of himself at the Nugents’. The mechanism that distinguishes what is high from what is low has two levels, represented by Father Bubble and Father Sullivan. Bubble, the name Francie gives to the priest who runs the reformatory, maintains a high moral, inspirational tone. Though he is capable of hitting Francie hard (BB, 73), he places more emphasis on “cheery smiles” (BB, 79) and sayings like “it was nice talking to you Francie. Keep up the good work” (BB, 81). Father Sullivan is the more intense, theologically learned priest whom Francie assists at morning Mass. Francie impresses him by claiming to have visions of the saints, and Sullivan becomes Father Tiddly when Francie’s devotion excites him so that he masturbates (BB, 85). He involves Francie in an erotic routine in which Tiddly calls him “my beautiful girl” (BB, 86) and says, “I love you” (BB, 88). Tiddly tells Bubble that Francie has a vocation for the priesthood (BB, 87). This sets Bubble “purring away happily to himself” (87) at the thought that he has succeeded in helping Francie. Father Bubble protects Father Tiddly and avoids confronting the truth about him, which reveals the lower urges that result from the world of purity Father Bubble sustains. This arrangement implies that the pious aspect of the Church supports its abuses. Francie’s vocation has a parallel in Reading in the Dark when the unnamed narrator wants to get a bishop to do him a favor; so he tells the bishop he thinks he has a vocation, and although this is not true, it works (RD, 115). Deane is not as aggressively anticlerical as Doyle or McCabe, and the bishop is trying to do the right thing. Yet Deane’s

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picture of the way the Church operates is damaging because, although Deane doesn’t focus on delinquent priests, the boy knows that this is the way to use the system. Such maneuvers may be common, and in this case, pretending to have a vocation is actually a terrible sin. Father Tiddly gets especially overwrought in pressing Francie to tell him “the worst bad thing you ever did. . . . something you are afraid to tell anyone .  .  .” (BB, 87). This combines spiritual intensity with erotic intimacy, implying that confession can be corruptive. Francie is able to resist him and stop him by biting his wrist because Francie hears his mother say, “it wasn’t your fault Francie . . .” (BB, 88). Here is a striking indication that from the time Francie concludes he has killed his mother (BB, 69), she becomes his deity (as Mathers becomes the narrator’s deity in Third Policeman), and he never stops being in her service, immolating himself for her near the end. The pattern of boys afflicting their mothers and worshipping them is common. Now Francie’s father arrives at the reformatory, and this has the effect of mixing critique of the family with that of the Church, both suffering from idealization. Benny says that Francie is “coming along grand” (BB, 89) and launches into a two-page rhapsody on how wonderful his honeymoon was and how much he loved Annie. Francie finally tells Benny to shut up and reminds him that he often cursed his wife: “You have no son. You put ma in a mental home” (BB, 89). Benny responds by harking back to the idea that Francie caused his mother’s death (“after what you did,” BB, 91) and Francie tells him to fuck off. After Benny goes, Father Bubble returns and says, “wasn’t that a nice surprise?” (BB, 92). Christianity can inspire people to beautiful actions, but Francie sees how out of touch Christianity is with the reality it needs most to address. The good father lives in a bubble by denying the active nature of evil. Francie shows a fierce integrity here that makes him admirable, insisting on real crimes covered up by pretenses. Though Father Tiddly is gentle and pitiful and does not seem to bother Francie much by rubbing against him, he greatly compounds Francie’s ruin, for Francie tells Joe that Tiddly molested him, and this aggravates Joe’s rejection of him by putting him in the category of queer (BB, 105). People in

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town now avoid him as if the charge of homosexuality were attached to the disgrace of being incarcerated. McCabe indicates that the crimes committed by Tiddly and Francie are not so much in their actions as in the social structure, just as the meaning of a signifier depends on the system that defines it. Joe will complete a list of all the people Francie has lost, who are all the people he supposedly could believe in (BB, 174). From here the disparity between the purposes he finds in life and life’s actuality becomes more glaring. We all relate to our imagination of people rather than the actual people; but Francie, clinging to the obsessive, distorted vestiges of what used to (seem to) connect him to people attains a (per)version of tragic nobility through his conviction of the value of objects—such as the music book with which he hopes to win Joe back (BB, 197)—in the face of evidence, in defiance of his own realization. To make up to his father for rejecting him, Francie tends to the old man’s rotting corpse, holding conversations with it and buying treats for it for weeks (BB, 127–52). This is an ironic version of King Lear’s refusal to admit Cordelia is dead at the end of his play, denying his crucial role in killing her. Francie tends to be elated by disaster: when he realizes as far as he ever does that he has lost Joe, he calls it “the best yet” (BB, 174). His ability to laugh at the worst life offers, like the side of Lear embodied by his fool, opens a great space of consciousness.2 How this works is mapped out by my student Thomas Moore Kelly. When Francie’s mother goes to the asylum, he adopts the pattern of laughing at what is terrible: “That was a good one I thought, ma towed away off up the street . . .” (BB, 9). And eventually his dissociation from his own self allows him to take pleasure from his own suffering (Kelly, 2015). This corresponds to a line that echoes through the history of African American music, “laughing to keep from crying.”

2. Peach argues that postmodern theories of the conflicting spaces of mental disease reveal the complexity of The Butcher Boy’s mapping of social critique (2004, 178).

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Filled with a sense of hope that part of him knows is unreal, Francie sets out on his final quest to Bundoran. The fact that the town where his parents honeymooned is also the place where Joe has gone to St Vincent’s College (a high school) means that he seeks to recover mother’s love with his friendship. What he finds out at the honeymoon inn is that his father never was able to love his mother (BB, 193–94), so she was broken from the start. When Joe rejects him at St. Vincent’s, he feels himself draining away (BB, 203). He is sure Mrs. Nugent is pulling strings behind the scenes at St. Vincent’s (BB, 198, 204). The evil mother has replaced the good one in the world because the one that told him he was not to blame never “actually” existed, but she remains as an ideal. Francie returns to a town overflowing with excitement because they expect the Blessed Virgin to arrive: “the brightest, happiest town in the whole world” (BB, 208). As the people await the arrival of the truest mother, Francie goes to destroy the false mother and return to his true one. In a brilliant scene in the film of The Butcher Boy (1997), directed by Neil Jordan and written by Jordan and McCabe, Francie emerges from the Nugent home after butchering Mrs. Nugent. The crowd outside sees a boy covered with blood and cries out that this is a sign of the Virgin and the end of the world. It is indeed a sign of the power of the mother to bring ultimate fulfillment. When Francie is caught, he laughs hysterically while the police beat him furiously (BB, 216), then he escapes and burns his body from head to toe, though he is unable to die. As images of hell go, this is no lightweight. His destiny gives nightmarish power to the novel’s Gothicism. Returning to his home, Francie piles up all the things the family valued, spreads paraffin on them, and puts on the record of “The Butcher Boy,” the song his mother sang, which emphasizes committing suicide for love: “I was crying because we were together now” (BB, 222–24). He has been moving toward this since he knew that his mother died, perhaps since he left home. He unites with his mother by destroying himself to embody the absolute denial they both share. He does not want to be rescued or spared from hanging when he is

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caught. He ends up, as the first page suggested, being institutionalized and avoiding activity or contact, sustained by the truth within which he joined Annie, that everything is false. He turns into his father—being played in the film by Stephen Rea, the father—living on the guilt of his betrayal and the dream of union. Then one day as he is hacking ice, he meets another inmate. This is the situation in which he first met Joe, and the old idea of what to do with a fortune, which he posed with Joe (BB, 43), returns now. The new man says, “tell none of the bastards in here. They’ll only fill you full of lies and let you down,” and Francie replies, “don’t you worry nobody’s letting me down again” (BB, 231). But he and the man start hacking together and speaking of plans, and at the end of the novel Francie thinks, “it was time to go tracking in the mountains, so off we went . . .” (BB, 231). He is projecting his favorite fantasy again, both in the escape and the friendship. Kelly thinks the friend is imaginary. The ending resembles that of Godot, when Vladimir goes back to the expectation of salvation with an imaginary boy; but Francie may be more advanced because he does not seek a solution and he knows his dreams are lies. Francie realizes (deny it as he may) the penchant of his mind for flip-flopping between belief and skepticism. Once when he was with Joe after his mother’s death, he saw a snowdrop flower, children playing, and an orange sky: “I looked at my marble-white hands and wondered what it was like to be dead like the woman in the song. You’d think the beautiful things of the world aren’t much good in the end are they? I’m going to stay dead” (BB, 54). His mother’s death made beauty worthless. But later, in the reformatory, he dreams about going on adventures with Joe and changes his mind: “The beautiful things of the world, I had been wrong about them. They meant everything” (BB, 79). When Tiddly proposes marriage to Francie, the boy thinks that he could be “Little Miss Snowdrop . . . Queen of All the Beautiful things in the world” (BB, 92). The beauty is ironic here, and the irony remains on a level beyond him when he tells his dead father about the original scene: “They do make a difference these beautiful things da” (BB, 139). The irony is more lyrical as Francie imagines

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talking to his father about the honeymoon when Benny and Annie lay thinking of “all the beautiful things in the world” (BB, 142). Just as lyrical images in Third Policeman are always fatal, beauty here is always undercut by negation, and Flann O’Brien seemed to imply that the good things of life are bribes to extenuate the violence of an infernal deity (see p. 124). When Francie is in an asylum he hears a song about children playing and thinks, “Maybe all these things are beautiful and worth having” (BB, 154), but he is hallucinating here. Finally, as he looks at Mary—a woman whose life was destroyed by her frustrated love for the pathologically shy Alo (BB, 30–35)—she is a “half ghost” who in effect says, “All the beautiful things of this world are lies” (BB, 212). Francie’s demented version of discipline is to realize that the beautiful things are not true, but to pursue them anyway. He shares with his mother the realization that this is truer than believing they are true. His hellish position as a victim of social prejudices, a person whose worst affliction is to be condemned to be evil, allows him to span in his mind the most extreme division between ideal and degradation. He finally does not want to be excused as a “humane killer” (BB, 230), and in fact he does not seem evil. Thus he seizes in anguish levels of truth about reality and society that have not been expressed before. And this is because his wildly disordered discourse may give complex articulation to a depth of oppression that has not been sounded. In the terms of Badiou’s Ethics, Francie follows the ethics of an event, which develops the subject induced by the process of a truth (2001, 47). It is parallel to Stephen Dedalus’s and Molloy’s ironic revelations of not belonging to the social order. Francie produces a dissension that elicits or draws out of concealment both social oppression and the artificial linkages that maintain the world that makes sense by enforcing privilege. So Francie’s tormented vision extends not only to the state’s denial of human freedom and to the denial of actual experience by logical containment, but to the overall formation in which human enclosure and intellectual restriction are aspects of the same order. And to see it is all one can do to pass beyond it, for to pass beyond it is to lose sight of it. Just as Francie embodies a critical

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stage in the liberation by making public of Ireland’s social structure in the nineties, he stands for a phase of the enlargement of Irish thought in the literary and intellectual world. He carries Beckett’s critique of epistemology forward by applying it to social reality, and thereby discloses configurations of mental bondage that must be seen to reconceive of freedom. Colm Tóibín, in The Blackwater Lightship and The Testament of Mary, also deals with young men who are condemned by society for breaking the rules in ways that are defined as unnatural and therefore provide strong indications of what society has to expand to include. If McCabe finds a new truth by confronting existing limits, seeing Francie’s dreams as momentous delusions, the very different Tóibín eschews the transcendent aspects of his generic victims. He sees them from the viewpoints of their afflicted female relations who emphasize their suffering. Tóibín wants to stay focused on the reality of martyrdom rather than the attraction of its glory, and this physical reality rests on the persistent problem of the family. Tóibín’s Blackwater Lightship: Lost at Sea Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship ([1999] 2001), the most realistic and least modernistic of the novels I treat, concentrates on using a clear, simple style to present ordinary reality with a restraint that could be called classical. The powerful images in it spring directly from actuality. For example, when a lighthouse flashes into a dark room, “it was like a moment from a film . . .” (BL, 113). This accurate realism may be related to the book’s being perhaps the least actively opposed of the novels I examine to the Catholic order of life, which it sees as inevitable. Tóibín’s opposition emerges more clearly in The Testament of Mary ([2012] 2014). In Badiou’s terms Blackwater Lightship takes place in the remainder, the world between events, ruled by death, death which hangs over the two works by Tóibín that I discuss. It is a hell that cannot be escaped except by faith, and yet one in which no faith can be found. In fact Tóibín indicated in 1993 that he was an atheist as well as being gay (Walshe, 2008, 115). These positions define him as an advanced

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figure whose values point to the future, but Tóibín seems intent on observing how these values are situated in the existing world. He may be too stern to credit dreams because (to reverse Yeats) dreams overlook responsibilities.3 The Blackwater Lightship takes place in the space between the appearance of the AIDS epidemic and the arrival of medical treatment for it (around 1981 to 1997),4 so it is located in the space of the differend in which the event is necessary, but cannot be reached. Eibhear Walshe indicates that the year is 1993 (Walshe, 2013, 86). It is not quite a hell of homophobia, for the gay characters are able to negotiate prejudicial terms, though such prejudice contributes to the spread of the disease by spurring recklessness and to the delay of the cure by withholding resources. But AIDS is related to the hellish nature of life by way of the vast power of mortality. The heroine, Helen, whose nickname is Hellie, finds herself increasingly confronting what cannot be escaped: “Mostly, when she worried . . . it was about things which could be solved or would pass, but this was . . . something that would not go away, that could only get worse” (BL, 40). Unlike the other generic lost children we have seen, from Stephen Dedalus to Molloy to Andreas Kopernigk to Lois Farquar to Henry Smart to the Butcher Boy, Declan Breen, though he does represent a truth society must confront, is remarkably acquiescent: as his suffering from AIDS increases, “there was a strange contentment in the way he lay without moving” (BL, 155). His sister Helen, the protagonist from whose viewpoint the narrative is seen, sees him as submitting to their dominant mother, Lily: “Declan had . . . enacted the fantasy she had feared so much. He had come back asking for comfort and forgiveness . . .” (BL, 120).

3. The first epigraph of Yeats’s 1914 book of poems, Responsibilities, is “In dreams begins responsibilities” (Yeats, 1983, 100). 4. Nell Boyce (2001) gives a timeline for the United States, saying that deaths from the disease were first identified in 1981 and began to decline in 1997, though it was many years before care became consistently effective and there are still parts of the world where such care is not available.

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The overbearing Lily had avoided seeing her son and daughter for half a year when her husband died. She had “always felt with Declan that he wasn’t able for things” (BL, 203), and she may have had a role in making him weak. His perceptive friend Paul says that Declan returned to his mother to be with her at his death: “he wants to be there with your mother” and “he was so afraid that your mother would refuse to see him . . .” (BL, 161), afraid because of his shame. Helen, long hostile to Lily, thinks that Declan “must have been trying to bring” her and her mother “together” (BL, 193). Politeness is a cardinal virtue for Tóibín, and his characters live in a hell of manners almost as restrictive as that of Elizabeth Bowen, another admirer of Henry James. Near the end of the book, when Declan is so sick he is “almost green,” he continues “smiling now and laughing. . . . making an effort” (BL, 247). Finally the pain makes him rude—“Do you have a problem with my being here?” (BL, 248)—and then incoherent. One of the last coherent statements he makes is “I wish it was over” (BL, 255). Then he falls to repeating, “Mammy, mammy, help me, Mammy” (BL, 258). Someone I knew died of AIDS, and when I visited him in the hospital, he was angry, perhaps because he realized that he was a victim of historical circumstances. In Declan and his friends there is little indication of protest. Though the book strongly helps to build awareness of AIDS and of gay life, the dimension of progress in the book is the conservative one of reconciliation with parents. Declan and his gay friends Paul and Larry manage to enjoy pointing out incorrect phrases and attitudes in the older generation, but these are negotiations to reach a considerate agreement. Walshe says in “‘This Particular Genie’: The Elusive Gay Male Body in Tóibín’s Novels” that Tóibín, born in 1955, is a writer who grew up before homosexuality was decriminalized in Ireland in 1993, and has difficulty focusing on homosexual eroticism in his work (Walshe, 2008, 115–17). Walshe criticizes The Blackwater Lightship for subordinating Declan’s subjectivity to the family problems that concern Helen (BL, 120–22). This may be true, but Tóibín is also

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portraying the exclusion from consciousness to which homosexuality was still subject in the early nineties in Ireland. To display gay sexuality more actively might falsify the historical situation, eradicating the weight of oppression that homosexuality was subject to at the time. Moreover, Walshe exaggerates when he says Declan is allowed “no erotic past” (2008, 121). There is a nine-line passage about how he was very active: “everybody fell for him” (BL, 175), though as Walshe points out in his book on Tóibín, this is reported indirectly (Walshe, 2013, 92). Though Declan and Larry have had promiscuous adventures, all of the gay friends want to be included by the Church. Paul tells how he and a lover named François—who attracted the shy Paul because of how “polite,” “clear,” and “careful” he was (BL, 166)—succeeded in getting an open-minded priest in Brussels to perform a marriage ceremony for them. Though this surreptitious wedding was illicit, both participant spouses derived spiritual satisfaction from it: “we felt the light of the Holy Spirit on us,” Paul says, and then, “We felt that we had been singled out to receive a very special grace. All three of us knelt and prayed for a long time” (BL, 173). After this, the priest serves them a lavish feast and says, “Welcome to the Catholic Church” (BL, 173). The word catholic, which may become oppressive insofar as it demands that everyone subscribe, is used here in a positive sense of bringing in everyone. Tóibín’s emphasis on sanctity is, among other things, a useful ploy to persuade the orthodox. There is a formidable, undeniable wisdom in Tóibín’s effort to bring homosexuality into the Church. As Robinson Murphy puts it, “He re-appropriates Catholic language to allow for gay voices .  .  .” (quoted in Walshe, 2013, 99). Religion is not about to disappear from Ireland, and Tóibín’s avoidance of antagonizing the Church, together with his plain style (the book reads quickly) may be more effective in bringing significant change than more avant-garde and radical works. The terrible abuses by the Church that have been exposed may render it more transparent than other religions. And though the Church has been intransigent, it may be more practical to see this exposure as leading to reform rather than abolition in the foreseeable future.

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There have been priests who have performed homosexual marriages, the best known being Father Pat Buckley. Buckley had long been in conflict with the Church and was excommunicated in 1998 after he had himself appointed a bishop and announced that he was gay (“Excommunicated,” 1999). He claimed that he had officiated at seventy gay weddings in the past decade when he held a public one in 2001 (Murray, 2001). Such priests have established a precedent that may well be carried on. Tóibín’s urging the Church to admit nonconformists may not seem strongly oppositional, and Walshe refers to The Blackwater Lightship as “a progressive and enlightened AIDS narrative for a mainstream Irish literary culture” (2008, 123). But the novel attains an oppositional force precisely because it brings in a category that has been damned. The homosexuals whom Dante encounters in cantos 15 and 16 of the Inferno are in the third ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, the violent against God and Nature. This is the same area that Capaneus occupied in the previous canto. There are three zones in the third ring, blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers, including people who invest money (perhaps the most valid of the charges). They are all against Nature, and endure the same punishment, which is to have fire rain down on them. The sodomites Dante encounters are all men of learning, refinement, and sensitivity. The main figure is Brunetto Latini, a poet and intellectual (he wrote an encyclopedia in French) whom Stephen quotes in Ulysses, appreciating him as a messer (Irish slang for troublemaker) rather than a master: “Messer Brunetto, I thank thee for the word” (U, 9. 375). Dante was inspired by Brunetto’s poetry, and says to him, For I remember well and now lament the cherished, kind, paternal image of You when, there in the world, from time to time You taught me how man makes himself immortal. (15.82–85; Dante, 2000, 257)

That the sodomites Dante sees are all admirable men except for their unnatural vice makes it clear that they are in hell for no other

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reason except homosexuality. The traditional damnation of gays may help to explain why Paul and François are eager to get the Church’s approval. Moreover, though no one in Declan’s family actually censures him for being gay (Walshe, 2013, 92–93), this specter may cast a shadow over his sufferings. His placement in this blighted position may show the depth of his persecution better than a narrative free to express his desires. To be able to express yourself is a privilege denied to the downtrodden. The figure who is closest to Declan, and who interprets his inability to express himself, is Helen, from whose point of view the novel never departs, the main voice through which he can speak. Helen blames her mother for leaving her and Declan alone with their grandmother Dora while Lily tended to her husband, who had cancer. The children did not understand why Lily stayed away, and after they were reunited for father’s funeral, Lily, who had almost become a nun in her youth (BL, 150), remained a proud, withdrawn person, though she was fabulously successful in the computer business. Tending to Declan brings about a reconciliation between Helen and her mother, within limits. Late in the book, after accusing each other and being changed by the ordeal of Declan’s anguish, they discover their deepest and most irrational secrets to each other and even through each other: Lily tells Helen how ashamed she was to lose her husband and Helen admits that she always believed that mother took father away and locked him up (BL, 245). She was able to cling to this unreasonable belief because she did not know it was buried in her. Blackwater Lightship is replete with psychoanalytic concepts such as the idea that the most irrational and unconscious motives are the most powerful. Early in the novel, Declan sees Helen’s little sons clinging to her and refusing to listen to their father, and this leads Declan to make his most intellectually developed statement, saying it was “proof . . . that boys wanted to sleep with their mother and kill their father” (BL, 9). He adds that “gay boys want the opposite” (BL, 9). At this point Helen confirms a common analytic position by saying that she still wants to kill her mother (BL, 9). If Declan wants to sleep with his

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father, as he says he does, then it becomes clear why his father’s death had an especially harmful effect on him. Helen, indeed, is never really able to accept the reconciliation with her mother or the religious framework that subtends it, and this makes her a remarkable character. In a stance that is ironically parallel to her mother’s, Helen has always held herself at a distance since being abandoned by her parents—distant from her marriage (BL, 11, 25) and from all human relations and beliefs. At the end, when others pray for Declan in his extremity, she cannot do so (BL, 254). And although she now socializes and sympathizes with the mother she has avoided for years, “She would have done anything not to have to make tea for her mother” (BL, 272). When Lily asks whether she thinks they were a comfort to Declan, Helen responds, “I don’t know” (BL, 271). This extreme answer may be a final indication that she is closer to Declan than anyone else, realizing his distance and affliction. Earlier, when Helen says it was “lucky for all of us” that Lily didn’t become a nun (for her children would not have been born), Declan says, “It must have seemed like that at the time, anyway” (BL, 153). While this is witty, the idea that he would have been better off unborn suggests hell, which links his tribulation to the Church’s traditional view of his status. And this is an expanse of his mind that Helen is in touch with and to a considerable extent inhabits. The climax of the book occurs near the end, after Declan has become “abject” and “desperate” enough to call out “Mammy, Mammy . . .” (BL, 258). Now Helen looks at the sea at dawn with no human presence: “monumental and untouchable. It was clear to her now, as though all week had been leading up to the realisation, that there was no need for people, that it did not matter whether there were people or not” (BL, 260). Now Declan’s illness, her memories, and “the love for her family she could not summon up, these were nothing” (BL, 260): “They meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea . . . they hardly existed. . . . It might have been better, she felt, if there never had been people, if this turning of the world . . . happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering or dying, or trying to love” (BL, 260).

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A negative interpretation of this vision in Badiouvian terms would argue that Ireland is in the remainder, the realm of death, and has nothing to believe in but authority, so Helen sees only emptiness. The whole novel is a mounting confrontation with mortality, and this is often supposed to lead to faith, but Helen resists. This might apply to a person living in a world overborne by orthodoxy without either believing in it or being able to conceive of an alternative that could lead to an event. It might match the position of Cranly in Joyce’s Portrait, who tells Stephen to stay in Ireland though he has no faith (P, 245), or the irony of Flann O’Brien. It is a tough, oppositional Catholicism-in-reverse that sticks to the staunch realism of the enduring Church suggested by Joyce’s phrase, “steeled in the school of old Aquinas” (R. Ellmann, 1982, 167). So a defense of Helen’s position might argue that Badiou’s kind of idealism (Platonic in opposition to Aristotelian Scholasticism) is unrealistic. Though Tóibín’s writing is sometimes flat,5 he gives an impregnable feeling of showing the world as it actually is, the ordinary world itself. The discipline of orthodoxy gives Helen the strength to go beyond visionary illusions. In nothingness she finds a purer truth than dreams of purpose. I am inclined to support Badiou’s view because, having been around a long time, I believe the world has changed—as evidenced by views of women, minorities, gays, and the Irish themselves over the last century—and continues to change. This is why Walshe can critique the pioneer Tóibín for not being actively gay enough. If gays are to be admitted by the Church, if Lily and Helen are to communicate with each other, if Declan is to derive some “happiness” (BL, 271) from their kindness before he goes, the strength of Helen’s denial, her closeness to Declan, is the only force that can make it real. The

5. “She heated the soup that her grandmother had left in a saucepan beside the range and made toast and tea. She put two bowls on the table and went back to the range” (BL, 176). Eagleton refers to the book’s “austere monkish prose, in which everything is exactly itself . . .” (quoted in Walshe, 2013, 98).

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utter desolation she sees is the reality the book has to approach as the basis on which to validate its compassion. Again we see that in a world enclosed by the walls of orthodoxy, the position that has active perceptual force is a position of hopelessness corresponding to hell. Mary’s Realism Tóibín’s opposition to religious idealism is made clear in The Testament of Mary (2012), in which Saint Mary condemns her son’s followers as misfits and troublemakers (TM, 6). The wrongness of their attitude stands out for her when John the Evangelist, whom she generally finds annoying, uses terms that correspond to Badiou’s event to say that it is a good thing that her son will be crucified: “It is the beginning of our redemption, the great new dawn for the world” (TM, 52). Mary is appalled by this fanaticism, which she sees as male aggression destructive of the peaceful life of families in the countryside. The lifestyle she supports goes back thousands of years and makes no provision for resisting the Roman Empire. The Testament, while only eighty pages, is a more successful work than Blackwater Lightship, partly because Tóibín’s realism becomes postmodern when it is wielded by a woman of the first century describing world-shaking events 1,700 years before the development of realism. In postmodern historical novels such as Doctor Copernicus, Star Called Henry, and The Testament, accepted history is turned around to show what was really involved as we can now understand it. In this case a huge factor is the lives of women, which were obliterated for millennia—or subjected to a mythology that idealized them at the expense of their realities. This mythology is rampant in Irish fiction. Paula Spencer, the heroine of Doyle’s Woman Who Walked into Doors, is constantly confronting a dilemma when she appears in public in her youth: if she behaves properly, boys will jeer at her as a tight bitch or a “Virgin Mary,” but if she does anything that expresses freedom, such as wearing makeup, they will jeer at her as a slut (Doyle, 1997, 47–49). She gets together with the brutal Charlo partially because he can protect her from such

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verbal abuse. The ideology of the Virgin tends to require women never to desire and always to forgive. Tóibín’s Mary, in contrast, espouses a robust feminism: “all my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty . . .” (TM, 6). She is also multicultural, and though she is Jewish, feels she can tell her story to a statue of Artemis, “radiating abidance and bounty, fertility and grace” (TM, 9), better than she can tell it to any figure from a patriarchal religion (TM, 9–10, 80).6 As with Copernicus or Henry, it is conceivable that someone living at a time of historical upheaval could have had thoughts so far from the conventions of her culture. But Mary, unlike the other two, seems to see the rule of the empire—which is here equated with capitalism (“the pull of money,” TM, 10)—as incapable of being changed, as perpetual. The logic behind Tóibín’s adherence to realism is unfolded here in terms that parallel Žižek’s observation that what actually exists is loss and that transcendence is merely a reaction to loss (1993, 37). Tóibín’s Mary is ashamed that she left the Crucifixion—which Tóibín depicts in harrowing detail—before Jesus died because it seemed clear that if she stayed to the end, she would be killed soon after as one of Jesus’s most dangerous followers. She dreams vividly that she holds her broken son in her arms (TM, 66) and that he rises from the earth and comes back to life (TM, 70–71). These are supreme images of inspiration for Christianity, the Pieta and the Resurrection. But Mary is intensely committed to insisting on the daylight actuality of brutal horror (the Crucifixion) and her own weakness, even though she is utterly tempted to sink into the nighttime dreams of beauty and glory. This denial of the dream is the heart of the testimony of Tóibín’s Mary, and she analyzes her situation sharply: “We had left others to bury my son, or perhaps he has not

6. The cult of Diana was the main religion in Ephesus in Mary’s time (Davies, 1959, 195).

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been buried at all. We had run to a place where what happened in our dreams took on more flesh, had more substance, than our lives when we were conscious, alert, aware” (TM, 72). This indicates that humanity (or sane humanity) is not capable of superhuman action, and that is why we are addicted to the falsehood of myth: because we cannot do justice to reality, we have to live in spiritual dreams. Although her son’s miracles seem probable to her, they destroy him and cannot save the world. Lazarus is the main example: as a child, he seemed free from weakness and fear (TM, 21), but Jesus cannot perpetuate that freedom. Mary sees Lazarus after Jesus apparently brings him back from death, but he is feeble, incoherent, and dying (TM, 32–34). Though her devout cousin Miriam suggests that Jesus may lead a revolt “against everything we have known before, including death itself” (TM, 30), Mary ultimately concludes that it is nonsensical to try to abrogate the grounding principles of reality. Mary insists that the terrible world run by men is not capable of salvation: “when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it” (TM, 80). She feels that human dignity consists in facing the actual conditions of life and oneself rather than escaping into a delusion that causes destruction. This gives moral force to the denial of Christian vision in which she persists: “From then on I wanted dreams to have their place, to let them belong to the night. And I wanted what happened, what I saw, what I did, to belong to the day. Until I died I hoped that I would live in full recognition of the difference between the two” (TM, 72). Such extreme skepticism has precedents in Joyce, Beckett, Banville, McCabe, and particularly Flann O’Brien. Its vision of a world ruled by evil rejects the possibilities of Badiou’s event. And yet Mary’s fidelity to the truth of what she saw aims to deliver humanity from fundamental falsehood, to be true to the reality of her son rather than his fantasies. It does represent a new truth insofar as it speaks for the reality of women. It seems more faulty in relation to men, however, for it assumes there will always be a male system of power that will destroy those who resist it, so that she puts the blame on the rebels for trying

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to exceed the limits of life: “Gather together misfits . . . and it will lead to what I saw and live with now” (TM, 7). Badiou’s perspective maintains that by imagining progress, we can make it possible. Yet it may be that the same formation of authority will remain in effect; and that the greatest progress may be accomplished by giving full weight to the sufferings of women and to the fact that the active power in the world is more hellish than heavenly, more like Pozzo than Godot. Tóibín’s subjecting of the Gospels to a feminine gaze that reveals the disciples as degenerates and their messianism as pathological delivers a fierce blow to religion, yet it follows the Gospels for the most part, objecting only to specific points such as John’s introduction of the Pieta in the last Gospel to be written.7 Its greatest value may lie in its determined opposition to uplift. It operates in a Christian context that seeks to impose honesty on the Church, but can only do so by blocking off salvation as completely as possible. Here again nothing less than hell may do, and the misery of Mary and her son as she sees him is awful enough. A terrible description of a hell that cannot be escaped because this is how it seems the world will always be run by the male system that forces people to fit patterns: “Five or six of the men had to hold him and stretch out his arm along the cross and then, as they started to drive the first nail into him, at the point where the wrist meets the hand, he howled with pain and resisted them as jets of blood spurted out and the hammering began . . .” (TM, 58–59). Mary wants to replace the idea that this image has absolute value as the uttermost goal or highest aim of life with a feminine reality of fruitfulness. On her last pages she is furious at the apostles for their talk of redeeming the world for eternal life: “‘Oh, eternal life!’ I replied” (TM, 78). She is also annoyed by their claim that her husband was not the father of her son: “‘His father?’ I asked” (TM, 76). The “rage” in her

7. Dana Greene, defending the novel in the National Catholic Reporter, says, “literalists have been quick to condemn it as a vile, despicable betrayal of the Christian story, an anti-Catholic diatribe” (2013).

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face alarms them and they depart, feeling “exasperation and disgust” at her (TM, 79–80). She rejects their myth of death leading to rebirth through violence, and she sees herself moving, at the end, as she seems to approach death, toward a city of plural “gods” flowing with fertility (TM, 81). If this departs from the usual pattern of the event, that may give it more force through originality as a new configuration. One dimension of the confounded nature of Mary’s life is that though she struggles to cling to the truth, the actions of the world and her own weakness add up to give her fantasies “more flesh” and “substance” than her conscious life (TM, 72). This situation parallels that of the narrator in Third Policeman, who is forced by circumstances to live in a dream, but Mary clings to reality. So she is divided in her strongest impulses. She may be the opposite of Veronica Hegarty in Enright’s The Gathering, who tries to be true to the lost male rebel, but is dismayed to feel herself attached to the ordinary world. Like Mary, Saint Veronica tried to help Christ, but couldn’t keep him from his chosen fate. Perhaps the ultimate question about Tóibín’s Mary is whether she is closer to the historical woman than is the glorified Virgin of Christian tradition. Support for Tóibín’s view comes from the Gospels, where the dialogues between Jesus and Mary present her not as a follower, but as someone from whom He is estranged. In Mark (3.31– 35), when they tell Christ that His mother and brethren are there, he responds, “Who are my mother and brethren?” and concludes that those who “do the will of God” are his true relatives.8 He may not consider her a member of his family. This accords with the break with existing social ties that Badiou admires in Jesus and Paul, but it does not consider that Mary may have a will of her own. The example that Tóibín focuses on is the wedding at Cana, where Jesus says to Mary, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John 2.4;

8. The Norton edition of the English Bible: The New Testament points out that Mark is generally regarded as the earliest of the Gospels (Hammond and Busch, 2012, 2:2–3).

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TM, 36). This line suggests alienation from the feminine side of life, so it corroborates Mary’s supposition that Jesus’s self-destruction is situated in a male system of values, one in which heroic allegiance to a masculine cohort may be decisive. This is a framework of self-sacrifice that Mary strives to overcome. Joyce’s works move toward a deification of the feminine, as indicated by a line from the Wake: “In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!” (FW, 104). This sentence makes a saint of Eve and insists on multiplicity (“Plurabilities”), abolishes containment (“unhemmed”), and turns will to an onflowing rill. But the prodigious women toward which Joyce’s two greatest works move have trouble overcoming their attachment to male authority. Anne Enright is a novelist who advances the expression of the freedom of women’s will, but her characters have to struggle with the same problem.

10 Anne Enright’s The Gathering The Pursuit of Damnation

Reckless Pursuit What Are You Like? and The Gathering, Anne Enright’s best novels, both take the form of elaborate quests for figures who are in the position of being damned and who are taken seriously as objects of devotion. In What Are You Like?, which I will only touch on, this figure is the lost mother Anna Delahunty. In The Gathering, it is the suicide brother Liam Hegarty. In both cases these figures—to whom we may apply Giorgio Agamben’s term homo sacer in that they are at once accursed and sacred (Agamben, 1998, 7–9)—generate despite their misery powerful senses that they can confer truth and reality to those who struggle to reach them. But when they are reached at the end, the redemption they provide is only ordinary reality, though it may become extraordinary through contact with the damned. The mother and brother who are lost embody the indiscernible, the area of subjectivity excluded by ordinary life, and this is why the protagonists have to search for the concealed answer to what happened to them. This pattern of searching for a sacred damnation that leads to a renewal of the ordinary world may be traced back to Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Bloom follows Stephen into the demonic Nighttown.1 Or to Beckett’s Murphy, in which Celia, Neary, and Miss Counihan 1. The primary source for this pattern is Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus has to go to Hades before he can return home.

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pursue the suicidal Murphy. Caught in the selfish, neocolonial, capitalist world that Murphy refers to as “the mercantile gehenna” (Mu, 25), they have no choice about chasing after the salvation posited by Murphy’s active renunciation. The astonishing What Are You Like? presents twin sisters separated at birth and unaware of each other. As the novel proceeds, each twin is disturbed by a sense of another self elsewhere and they embark on quests that lead them to each other and to the mother who died giving birth to them. When Anna finally appears, she is encompassed by images of damnation as dislocation. Anna inherited from her mother a housekeeping code whereby everything had a place with a secret significance: a saucer upside down meant she had to get shoe polish (Enright, 2000, 234). When Anna grows fatally ill, she scrambles the order of womanly space: “She put the cup into the milk” (Enright, 2000, 5). The twins were born through a decision to save them rather than the ailing mother (Enright, 2000, 225), and when Anna is finally revealed to the sisters, her damnation involves a denial of motherhood, confusing the order of maternal space: “I am in hell. This is what I see. . . . I see my own private parts. . . . I shift them around the room. I give my husband breasts. . . . I shit through the noose and I cry through my backside. . . . I rearrange my life in hell” (Enright, 2000, 247). Once this vision of the lost mother has been recovered, the nightmarish alienation of the twins dissolves, the mother may be released, and the twins reach a happy ending in which they join in chatter (257–59). Susan Cahill describes the novel as a feminist project to recover the mother who has been silenced (Bracken and Cahill, 2011, 101–2). The attractor in The Gathering, Liam, seems to attain his damnation mainly as a victim of childhood sexual abuse from which he does not recover. Yet this abuse may be as much hallucination as reality, perhaps because such traumatic memories have been blocked out. The central act imagined in the novel is a sex act between nine-year-old Liam and sixty-seven-year-old Lambert Nugent. The novel’s narrator, Liam’s sister Veronica Hegarty, remembers seeing this act when she

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was eight, but her memory is surrounded by uncertainties, so that it may not have happened. Yet the book assembles an ideological framework that makes this child molestation effectively true whether or not it literally took place. It is a product of pathology in the social order. Preparation for the sex scene between the child and the old man begins in the novel’s first sentence: “I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house when I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen” (G, 1). The rape is seen as the crucial cause of Liam’s suicide, to which the entire book is a reaction. In order to explain the scene between Liam and Lamb, Veronica has to imagine a scene thirty-six years before her birth: “The seeds of my brother’s death were sown many years ago” (G, 13). She constructs this scene in a hotel in 1925 with emphasis on its arbitrariness: “This is the moment I choose” (G, 13). Each detail is a willful expression that goes beyond confirmable limits. The brilliance of Enright’s style consists of seeing reality as made up of a series of extreme, daring metaphors or images that signify beyond standard meanings, as when Veronica sees her mother as “forgetfulness itself” (G, 31). This continual leaping into unprecedented images is a version of the infernal blarney I described in Third Policeman as a postcolonial way of rendering normal words contingent. It is also a feminist procedure for asserting the impetuous drive to see things in strikingly new ways that depart from a traditional reality that is masculine. The daring of the language combines feminine intuition with the proleptic to move forward toward a new realization in a way that matches Badiou’s idea of forcing: “Forcing concerns the point at which, although incomplete, a truth authorizes anticipation of knowledge, not statements about what is, but about what will have been if the truth reaches completion” (Badiou, 2008, 138). This truth based on incompletion is illustrated by something Veronica says about Charlie Spillane, the great male lover in the novel: “When he does fall in love it is only because he finds that it is already slipping away from him” (G, 31). Charlie, Veronica’s grandfather, died when she was a child, but she uses her imagination to sense that his male power in 1925

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was based on loss (he found his beloved ensconced with Nugent), and so Veronica advances consciousness in a way that is poetic, Irish, and feminine. Veronica strives to reconstitute the world according to what Badiou calls a generic vision, “one that escapes all established classifications” (Badiou, 2001, 57n). Enright highlights the arbitrariness of her method by constructing a 1925 scene between Nugent and her maternal grandmother, Ada Merriman, that is not based on any evidence but indirect impressions. She later says, “I know nothing about Lambert Nugent; who he was and how Ada met him . . .” (G, 224). In her version of postmodern history, the facts are less important than what she imagines, and this involves a radical critique of society. “The only things I am sure of are the things I never saw . . .” (G, 66). Facts may conceal deeper levels that appear through shifts in perspective. This is illustrated when—often and typically in Enright—one finds oneself emotionally struck by a realization that comes out of nowhere: “I realised that I did not know how to leave” (G, 254). Emphasis is placed on the artificial, mechanical innovation of her construction of Nugent, replete with bizarre images: “He must be reassembled; click clack; his muscles hooked to bone and wrapped with fat, the whole skinned over and dressed in a suit of navy or brown. . . . and the smell on his hands would be already a little finer than carbolic” (G, 14). His suit and scent indicate that he is motivated to use propriety to raise himself within the class order: “He had it down, even then, the dour narcissism of the ordinary man, and all his acts of self love were both subtle and exact. He did not preen. Lamb Nugent watched. Or he . . . let it enter into him—the world in all its nuance of who owed what to whom” (G, 14). Nugent, whose name suggests rising to gentility (a tribute to McCabe?), is circumspect about measurable economy. Veronica, whose style is inclined to preen in the sense of showing off excess, sees his careful, good-boy quality as a fault: “If Nugent suffered from anything, it was decency” (G, 15). In fact, while this scene builds a stirring of erotic compulsion between Nugent and Ada, who sits in a hotel lobby because she is a prostitute, Nugent is unable to act on his fascination. Ada is aware of

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his watching her, and she actually says, “So?” (G, 16). As for Nugent, “The need to move surges through him, but he does not move” (G, 17). The possibility of love between them is an event outside of his limited conception of the situation: He cannot believe “that she should love him as he loved her; suddenly, completely, and beyond what had been allocated to them as their station” (G, 16). Ada makes Nugent see “a life in which no one owed anyone a thing” (G, 33), a life outside calculation, and he cannot conceive it. So she is taken by the improvident, freewheeling Charlie Spillane, who spills his seed freely. Nugent marries and has a family, but his life with them is portrayed as a nullity in ways typical of the conformist. After the lusty but hapless Spillane’s death, Nugent wants Ada “to pity him for his perfectly pleasant life and the fact that it does not belong to him; . . . that he is a ghost in his own house, looking at his wife, who drives him up the wall, and his four children, who rob each breath as it comes out of his mouth” (G, 136). Nugent cannot control his family so that it belongs to him. Think of Joyce’s “A Little Cloud” (D, 57–70). At the viewing of Charlie’s body, Veronica sees Nugent praying and remarks, “I have never trusted men who pray. Women have no option . . . but . . . men. . . . I do not think it is their nature to pray. They are too proud” (G, 65–66). Nugent’s prayer is hypocritical in that Charlie was his rival; but Veronica believes that men should be proud, and that prayer is another sign of Nugent’s defectiveness. Since Nugent visits Ada frequently, Veronica imagines him making love to her after Charlie’s death and decides it could not have happened (G, 140). It is suggested that it is because Nugent cannot make love to Ada that he molests Liam, and the scene in which Nugent fails with Ada is followed by the chapter that remembers Nugent forcing Liam to masturbate him (G, 142). Nugent’s lack of manhood is presented as a “gaping wound” (G, 106) that Ada could help him to forget. But she only stirs his injury, for when he is with her, he remembers a ghastly dream of “a gap opening in his chest” and a “girl flowering inside him” (G, 109). Here he can “find a gorgeous kind of rest and enter or be entered” in “the

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soul’s sweet ecstasy, until he wakes to the horror of his blasphemous thoughts and the after-shock of his seed just spent .  .  .” (G, 110). This is not unlike Nicolas’s adolescent wet dream in Banville’s Doctor Copernicus (DC, 24), and Enright has compassion for Nugent here. But the pathology of his lack of manhood, which may be linked to his tendency to affect gentility and pursue wealth, is responsible by a submerged route for the concealed brutality with which, according to Veronica, he uses his power against those who are weak: “When Nugent saw a child he saw revenge” (G, 236). Veronica considers the lack of manhood to be a disease. And while she allows for men who are attractive without being unpleasant, they must have aggressive features: Spillane and Veronica’s husband, Tom, both have “violent” courtships (G, 57, 70). She finds the man who is not unpleasant at all, Michael Weiss, boring even though he is good at sex, so she can only imagine loving him after he is long gone (G, 82). She says she could never love a nice man (G, 145), and believes that men are impelled by a phallic power that is relentless. In Venice, a strange man follows her with his erection in his hand for blocks, and once she escapes him by ducking into a church, “he is everywhere” (G, 51). On the following page, a man sleeping next to her on a train seems to get an erection, and she senses “the blood pooling in his lap; the thick oblong of his penis . . .” and thinks, “Here comes another one” (G, 52). This makes her wonder whether Liam might have survived if he didn’t have to support the male torpedo: “if Liam would still be alive if he had been born a woman and not a man” (G, 52). Veronica’s husband, Tom, is sympathetic and puts up with a good deal of mistreatment at her hands. She first falls in love with him when he belongs to another woman, and this intensifies their passion to such a pitch that for the first weeks of their love they are impelled to have orgasms before they can get their clothes off (G, 70). She imagines he is trying to kill her in the sex act (G, 40), which she conceives of as murderous in one of its strongest forms: “in the early-early days, when it wasn’t like sex so much as killing someone or being killed” (G, 73). One morning she wakes at four to see him asleep on his back with

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“a livid tumescence” rising from him “a cock so purple and dense it was a burden to him” (G, 133). The central image of the monstrous male organ, however, emanates from Nugent, who illustrates Lacan’s idea that the phallus can only arise from a threat or deprivation (Lacan, 2006, 575) because Lambert’s impotence gives him the greatest phallic power in the novel as the phallus operates in the economic and social system. The primary image of this monster is the scene between Liam and Lamb that Veronica almost believes she caught sight of in 1969, though an even more hideous scene with Nugent and Veronica appears later. Here Liam becomes for a crucial moment an extension of Nugent’s organ, an image of the most complete domination in accord with the age differential: “It was as if Mr. Nugent’s penis, which was sticking straight out of his flies, had grown strangely, and flowered at the tip to produce the large and unwieldy shape of a boy, that boy being my brother Liam . . .” (G, 143). Liam is an affected, possibly homosexual pronunciation of Lamb, and the two are opposite ends of a single structure. The Irish name and the English one represent the dominated and dominator of colonialism. Veronica says, “though I know it is true that this happened, I don’t know if I have the true picture in my mind’s eye . . .” (G, 144). Though the event is true, her image of it may not be, and she later realizes that she could not have seen it (G, 223). So the question is how it could be true even though she didn’t see it, and one answer is that it represents a symbolic truth, a truth in the symbolic order. The image is so strange that it could not be realistic, yet its verisimilitude could be increased insofar as shock could produce a distorted, surrealistic image, so that a realistic image would be less realistic in this situation. Modernism is more real than realism. Veronica’s first denial of the scene tends to reverse itself: “I think it may be a false memory, because there is a terrible tangle of things that I have to fight through to get to it, in my head” (G, 144). The difficulty of confirming the material may enhance its seriousness in line with the psychoanalytic theory of repression, and Enright says that she read “all of Freud” and loved him when she was in college (Bracken and Cahill, 2011, 2).

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Moreover, trauma theorists point out that traumatic events cannot be remembered because they were too unbearable to be perceived clearly, so that they disappear as they arise. As Christine van Boheemen puts it, “trauma is marked by the inability to remember the event which gave cause to the symptoms” (Boheemen-Saaf, 1999, 60).2 The key scene is described as revelatory: “before the scene became clear to me, I remember thinking, So that’s what the secret is. The thing in a man’s trousers—this is what it does when he is angry; it grows into the shape of a miserable child” (G, 146). Like many of the most fanciful lines in the book, this is given weight, and it is confirmed in the last lines of the chapter: “You know everything at eight, but it is hidden from you, sealed up in a way you have to cut yourself open to find” (G, 147). Veronica’s equation of male excitement with anger may be a basis for her later tendency to see male sexuality as violent.3 This is what Freud called a primal scene, the earliest impression of sex that shapes subsequent patterns of perception (Gay, 1989, 421–26). Her vision encapsulates or prefigures the system of power: when a man asserts his phallus, it entails an injured boy on the other end. The superiority of the aggressive man over the passive boy, as well as that of the landlord (which Lamb is) over the freeloader (Veronica and Liam have been taken in by their grandmother) means that Liam’s destruction is the other end of Lamb’s assertion. The force of this hierarchical system makes the question of whether Veronica actually saw Lamb abusing Liam less important. The opposition between Liam and Lamb embodies the main ideological conflict in the book, for Liam is a revolutionary who represents the inconsistent multiple, while Lamb is a businessman and property owner who enacts the consistent one. Veronica and Liam were always

2. Cathy Caruth observes that trauma is always “the story of a wound that cries out . . . in its attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what is unknown in our very actions and our language” (Caruth, 1996, 4). 3. Of course male sexuality has usually been seen as violent throughout history.

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apart from the other eight siblings of the Hegarty family, who had conventional values. They turned against the selfish ordinary world controlled by authority: “I was not good. I am not sure why. . . . I just didn’t buy it, and neither did Liam” (G, 184). Liam first appears in the novel as a spirit who embodies Veronica’s point of view by floating above the material actuality. Animism, which is linked to references to Celtic mythology, is perhaps stronger here as a competitor to Christianity than it is in Reading in the Dark, though the earlier novel is more provincial. Celtic myth was more alive in Reading though it was defeated; here it is more intellectual, but more active. Animism represents going beyond limits, and if it is again defeated by the ordinary here, its energy is carried on. Gina Moynihan, the protagonist of Enright’s next novel, The Forgotten Waltz, practiced “Astral Flying,” in which her mind departed from her body, when she was twelve (2011b, 196). What Are You Like?, which may be Enright’s best novel, is largely about out-of-body experience, which is of course linked to paganism and witchcraft. When normality is assumed at the end of What Are You Like? it is still as strange as an out-of-body experience (2000, 254–57). Liam’s first appearance is as an embodiment of one of the extravagant metaphors that are the life of Veronica’s style and her life. She is angry about the price she has to pay for having achieved something she and Liam used to condemn, namely material success. Because she has “husband, car, phone bill, daughters,” it is her “duty” to be the one who tells her mother that Liam has died (G, 10): “Quite literally, I am beyond myself. I am so angry I have a second view of the kitchen, a high view, looking down . . . / This is where Liam is. Up here. I feel him like a shout in the room. This is what he sees . . .” (G, 10). Her vivid metaphor, or simile, “like a shout” combines sharp perception of what she actually feels with an affirmation of an excessive alternate reality. Her vision at its strongest overlaps with Liam’s. When Veronica thinks about how Liam condemned her prosperity, she realizes that his position is faulty, but she cannot help agreeing with him deep down: “My brother blamed me for twenty years.

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He blamed me for my nice house with the nice white paint. . . . He treated me like I was selling out on something, though on what I do not know—because Liam did not allow dreams either of course. My brother had strong ideas about justice, but he was unkind to every single person who tried to love him” (G, 168). Though Liam, like Badiou’s generic, offers no viable alternative, he is able to see through people (G, 125), and he brings out the deceptions and crimes involved in ordinary life. So that when Veronica releases herself from control, she feels the rightness of his view, “Sometimes I look at the whiteness of my walls and, like Liam, I say, ‘Pull the whole thing down’” (G, 168). Such radicalism is parallel to the insistence of St. Paul that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). But Liam also stands for Veronica’s demonic side, and Fernie quotes Jaspers on the demonic: “the very achievement of the good seems to involve a guilt toward another world” (2013, 25). Veronica says she was living at “‘home’” in inverted commas and did not mind being in quotes until her brother died (G, 181). Her maximum extension into her brother’s opposition occurs when she looks out at the sea where he drowned: “I think I have a smaller life, alive as I am in this sunlight, than my brother, walking out in the darkness; blood and whiskey into salt sea. Liam pissed [drunk], just the skin that separated himself from his yearning self. Just for a moment, I think it is more heroic not to be” (G, 78). He makes her realize that ordinary life is pointless (“just feeding the grave,” G, 79) (a Beckettian epiphany), and that she must deceive herself in order to carry it on. But this contact with the transcendent desire of “his yearning self” impels Veronica to understand the forces that produced him and to communicate her perception. He represents the generic not through any desire he could attain, but through the displacement of his desire. Yet his suicide is not merely a negation, but an affirmation of longing for an infinite self, and to recognize this is to see something society excludes. Liam can only approach “his yearning self” in the sea through torment. Only by his damnable position, only by confronting Veronica with his absolute denial, can he drive her to realize what his life

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meant and to see society through his point of view. Yet her perception of him will always be deceptive, a series of misunderstandings of the indiscernible he represents. In his essay “On Subtraction,” Badiou emphasizes that to pin a name on the unnameable is wrong, and evil (2008, 127). Veronica advances toward awareness of Liam by grasping a series of situations in which she misrecognizes him. When he was arrested as a teen and beaten by the police, she assumed he was lying (G, 166). And when he visits her in a hospital on the birth of her daughter and drinks her champagne, she realizes that for some time people have been explaining him as an alcoholic, but that this is only the most obvious index of his more complex problems (G, 54). Any name put on the truth of the subject falsifies it. A name put on the truth may have particular force insofar as it is unspeakable. The book never mentions the theory that Liam may have destroyed himself by going to England, where they called him “Mick” (G, 123). Veronica herself cannot help being attracted to the glamour of England (G, 79), and the fact that she can be beguiled by a young English undertaker though she has every reason to know that a relationship with him would probably be degrading shows the insidiousness of colonial class (G, 75). Another explanation for Liam that is not made explicit is insanity. Because insanity is submerged, it is capable of evoking powerful unexpected emotions. When Ada and the children visit St. Ita’s, which is referred to as not quite a hospital, a lunatic appears and the reader may be stirred to tears (G, 114–15). During the visit to St. Ita’s, Liam seems agitated. After the visit, he becomes frightened at night, has terrible dreams, and issues strange visions (G, 117). Insanity is an unmentionable topic for the Hegartys, partly because Irish society places a harmful emphasis on mental disease being hereditary. Focus on psychological illness being passed on can be pernicious. In Flann O’Brien’s satire on Irish government, Faustus Kelly (1943), written under his pen name as a humorist, Myles na cGopaleen, a character called the Stranger (actually Mephistopheles) is told that if he is not sanctioned by the Department, he will be ostracized so severely that he would be better off convicted of murder: “Tis like

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havin’ insanity on the mother’s side” (O’Brien, 1986, 189). This weak play ends with the devil finding Irish politics so restrictive that he flees back to hell. Veronica’s visit to the graveyard of St. Ita’s, by placing the lifelong incarceration of the insane within the limits of the date of the institution, 1922–89, brings out the artificial historical situation of imprisoning and obliterating people in the category of insanity, revealed by Foucault in Madness and Civilization (1967, 42–61). The appearance of Uncle Brendan, Veronica’s mother’s brother, who had been locked in St. Ita’s, as the last of the ghosts in the climactic wake scene indicates that he is a singularly important figure in this calling forth of the afflicted family spirits, which Veronica refers to as “Christmas in Hades,” a Walpurgisnacht. He appears after the ghosts of Ada, Charlie, and Nugent, as if they added up to the structure out of which he emerges. These four, like all the family members, are here seen as specters caught in a lifeless world of authority. Brendan is a figure of Dantean horror, his body filled with “a turmoil of souls muttering and whining under his clothes” (G, 216). “[T]he souls of the forgotten who must always be crawling and bulging” inside him and constantly leaking out (G, 216) are based on the description of the graveyard at St. Ita’s, where the dead are not buried separately: “boiling with corpses, the ground is knit out of their tangled bones” (G, 160). The confrontation with this profusion of monstrosity emphasizes that Liam’s insanity and its causes must be buried no longer, but also that it is a product of social restrictions and isolated from reality. The graveyard is parallel to the Field of the Disappeared in Reading in the Dark, as Liam is parallel to Eddie, the odd man out. The Created Goal The next or accompanying stage of Veronica’s revelation of the truth about Liam’s indiscernibility is the finding of the rental books after mother Maureen reveals that one reason Nugent frequented Ada was that he was her landlord (G, 213). These records quickly give Veronica “a sickening sense of what these books meant to the possessor, the rights they might afford” (G, 217). The word landlord has grim

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overtones in a historical context in which he was usually either English or a Protestant extension of English power. At this point Ada seems to appear at the door (G, 217), but now the text cuts to a scene later that night in which Veronica has intercourse with Tom. This scene appeared earlier (G, 39–40), but now we are prepared to understand it and learn from it. Such cutting is typical of the progression of effect in The Gathering. Progression of effect is a technique developed by Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford at the start of the twentieth century, an arrangement in which a series of scenes appears not in chronological order, but in an order that jumps back and forth in time to reveal more and more of the truth the novel approaches (see Hoffman, 1967, 75–78, 99–100). Many novels use flashbacks, but in progression of effect chronology is subordinated to a decontextualizing sequence that unfolds subjective reality step by step. Among the most fragmented examples are Conrad’s Lord Jim and Nostromo, Ford’s The Good Soldier, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. The Gathering is ostentatious about reshuffling time, as when Veronica earlier went back to 1925. The process of rearranging the temporal sequence of memories and events may be referred to as gathering. The concentration in the novel on changing and reversing time is phenomenal and central to both the book’s structure and its themes. A key meditation on the complexity of narrative time appears when Veronica is riding a train through England on her way to Liam’s body and looks out at the land: “It moves past me, but at different speeds. In the middle distance a swathe of countryside moves serenely on, while the far hills run backwards slightly, in a narrow strip. I try to find the line in which the landscape holds still and changes its mind, thinking that travel is a contrary kind of thing, because moving towards a dead man is not moving at all” (G, 41). This vision is based on the fact that if you look out the window of a train traveling across flat country, closer and farther tiers of landscape

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appear to move at different speeds.4 If one close layer of the countryside appears to move backward rapidly in comparison to a level moving forward slowly in the distance, Veronica tries to locate her mind at the point between retreat and advance, though she suspects that this point does not exist. This is the point of continual decision as to whether to move the narrative behind or ahead. One factor is the retreat of movement toward the dead. Such backward and forward manipulation of the plot, which carries a range of implications as wide as “the countryside, in all its different speeds and directions” (G, 42), plays active roles in interpreting the events of the story. To make the reader aware of the activity of constructing the plot is a deconstructive move. Badiou affords a strong insight into the significance of progression of effect in Theory of the Subject when he speaks of a break in continuity in a sonnet by Mallarmé: “This leap in meaning or direction alone enables . . . the exhibition of the concept of the causality of lack” (2009, 87). That is, when the narrative changes its direction, it reveals the vanished cause that is its deepest motivation. Liam enacts this never-to-be-recovered cause at the unlocatable center of the novel. But the break in continuity that speaks for the lack as cause is already active at the root of Modernism, in the Symbolism of Mallarmé and in the fundamental operation of the stream of consciousness, which depends on breaks in continuity. The last major statement on the change of direction in the novel reduces it to something more binary and practical by claiming that the direction of travel is always ideological. As Veronica watches the activity in an airport, “I look at the people queuing at the till, and I wonder are they going home, or are they going far away from the people they love. There are no other journeys” (G, 258). Every movement is either away from home, a direction that corresponds to Liam’s

4. It may also be based on a passage in the “Time Passes” section of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which reflects that when one looks out from a moving train, one sees things in a new, modernistic way (2005, 133).

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rebellion, or back to home, the direction she is finally compelled into by her attachment to her husband and children. This final perspective on travel may be narrower than the earlier one. Likewise the movement of the narrative forward and backward in time has bearing on such issues as in what sense Liam was molested. Veronica’s recognizes the impact of her responsibility for each shift in the direction of the narrative; so each diversion is construed as part of a discourse built on diversions. These transformations reveal the process of presentation that constitutes the emotional and political conditions of people’s lives. Now that we have considered the meanings of the actions of progression of effect, we are in a position to interpret the bizarre overload of sudden and strange switches of time and reality that makes up the climax of the novel. At the illusory point where we left off, at the end of Liam’s wake, after Ada seems to appear, the later scene is presented of the “horrible sex” with Tom (G, 219). Then we return to the figure in the door, who turns out to be not the deceased Ada, but Veronica’s sister Ita. Veronica’s impression of Ada, however, brings back a colossal, incredible scene she thinks she remembers from when she was eight: Ada is accompanied by Nugent, who has put his penis in Veronica’s hand (G, 221). What she learns at the wake about the family and its ghosts, and Nugent being a landlord, as well as what she learns about male sexuality from Tom (which happens later, but reveals what is in her mind), these are all involved in Nugent’s phallic juggernaut, but this does not rule out the possibility that the order of the narration may reveal what happened to Veronica when she was eight. How does Tom contribute to Nugent? It seems unlikely in view of Tom’s benevolence. He has sex with Veronica after the wake because “he loved me; he wanted to drag me back to the land of the living” (G, 218). This is his conscious intention, but he also wants “to leave his mark” on her (G, 218–19). This combination of love and conquest may be involved in most sex, and we have seen that Veronica needs her male to be aggressive. But now she is filled by the novel’s recit or order of telling with a sense of the power of the economic and cultural system that oppresses the sensitive side she shares with Liam, so

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she feels intensely the destructive edge of Tom’s aggression. She says to him, “Your daughters will sleep with men like you. Men who will hate them just because they want them” (G, 219). This means that the man attacks the woman with hostility because he cannot fully possess her. Poor Tom is upset and perplexed by her fury, but is good enough to admit that he cannot always control his phallic power (G, 220). In Lacanian terms, this means that he is controlled by a larger symbolic system. Now we return to Ada’s imaginary appearance at the door accompanied by Nugent, who brandishes the most appalling image of phallic power in the novel. Veronica remembers that at eight she held his penis in her hand, and in strangely distorted pictures made up of words, she presses her eye against the “eye” of his organ,5 and goes on to “pull” and “suck” him. She cannot tell if this image is true, and in fact her two-page vision of how she was violated by Nugent’s sexuality is replete with sexual, psychological, cultural, linguistic, and philosophical insights she could not have had access to at the age of eight. One reason the word “suck” is put in quotes is that the meaning of this term is conditioned by her subsequent experience; yet the statement that “you know everything at eight but it is hidden from you” (G, 147) indicates an attempt to recover the actuality of the traumatized child, and it is not unusual for an eight-year-old today to say something sucks. As Terry Eagleton argues, children have radical insights that are erased by the conventional conditioning of adulthood (Eagleton, 1986, 170). The reflection that Veronica’s reaction to Nugent “comes from a place in my head where words and actions are mangled .  .  . from the very beginning of things, and I cannot tell if it is true” (G, 221– 22) imposes an elaborate overlay of later contemplation on the earlier scene, an effort to be true by denying ordinary truth, that is far from

5. This refers to the glans surrounded by the foreskin, with the urethra as pupil. See U, 18.816.

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the eight-year-old, but may be the only way to approach her. Likewise, “the feeling that Lamb Nugent is mocking us all; that even the walls are oozing his sly intent” (G, 222) involves a sophisticated perspective that the child could not access, yet it may affirm her terror strongly. Then there is the ultimate image of her holding his member “hot in my grasp and straight and, even at this remove of years, lovely, Nugent’s wordless thing bucks, proud and weeping, in my hand” (G, 222). The extravagant language, such as “weeping,” seems beyond the child, yet a child might see an ejaculating penis as crying. Veronica describes Nugent elsewhere as having an expression of pain on his face when he has an orgasm (G, 144). Because he is the lord of the home, she holds his organ in the sense that he controls her. The most terrible word in the passage may be “lovely,” for the male organ must be beautiful to her if she is to approach the normal female role. This is one of the ways in which he controls her through the operations of gender or power whether or not he touches her. She is obliged as a woman to support his authority, so she holds his mace. The passage includes a paragraph stressing the difference between events that are real and those that are unreal (G, 223), but this difference becomes problematic. Events become real insofar as they have effects that are not what one expected because they make contact with otherness. But in this sense the events with Nugent at Broadstone are real because they create unexpected shock. Perhaps the reality that Nugent’s rape of the children depends on is its expression of the pervasive societal structure. And the entrainment of the rape within the motion of progression of effect indicates that its force should be seen as an operation of the social order rather than as a provable occurrence. The real cause can never be visible, and the paragraph on what is real is followed by the statement that Veronica could never have seen Nugent molesting Liam (G, 223). The reality of the scenes with Nugent is substantiated by its enormity, by the way Veronica concentrates on it with a ghastly intensity so that she feels his evil as an ejaculation “shoot out of his opening mouth and stain the entire world” (G, 222). The word he utters is “Ada” (G, 222), and Veronica concludes now that Ada was to blame

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for everything. In her ex-prostitute’s desire for propriety, she both held back from making love to Nugent, which might have prevented the pathological overflow of his desire, and maintained the proper relationship with him that allowed him to dominate her household. This is consistent with the selfishness that produced Brendan and Maureen, “a mad son and a vague daughter” (G, 223). Ada grew up in a colonized state that left her with a firm attachment to material reality and made her unable to sympathize with others. The main demonstration that the evil that springs from Nugent’s decency has spread over the world is the main scene in the book, Liam’s wake, and the main sign of this evil may be the false prosperity of the Hegartys. Veronica said earlier that one thing her mother was good at producing was “Money,” and though the Hegartys often do not have proper jobs, they are quite successful (G, 186). Veronica’s husband, Tom, is a “corporate boy” (G, 152). Mossie, whom the children referred to as “psychotic” because he was always physically abusing them,6 now “has a nice job and a nice wife and . . . sends around a nice newsletter . . .” (G, 201, 204). The general level of opulence at the wake is brought out by Ivor’s jacket. Sister Kitty says that the less prosperous Uncle Val “could live for a month on the price of your jacket” (G, 209). But the affluence of the wake is stained by the symbolic operation of Nugent because the Hegartys are all haunted by “the way we all failed” to help Liam (G, 203), so that “It is like we were all dead . . .” (209). The destruction of Liam shows the failure of Ireland to provide for those really in need. At a reading Enright gave at the Free Library of Philadelphia in 2011, she suggested that The Gathering predicted the economic collapse of Ireland in 2008 (2011a). Tana French recently reported that audio tapes have provided clear evidence that the meltdown was caused by bankers who lied to the government about investments that they knew could not succeed (French, 2013). This may correspond to the deceptive prosperity at the wake.

6. Mossie is called a psycho on 9, 154, 184, 196, 201, 204, and 211.

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Once the novel has established the combination of economy and desire responsible for Liam’s fate, it is ready to grant that the scenes of child molestation are not factual. The scene of Veronica holding Nugent’s organ is as fantastic as the one of Liam as an extension of that organ. But while such traumatic events may survive only as unbelievable distortions, the real point may be that Nugent’s perverse phallic power would afflict the children within the libidinal economy of capitalism even if he did not actually touch them. In Libidinal Economy (Crome and Williams, 2006; published in French in 1974), Lyotard maps out all the surfaces of the body, interior and exterior, and combines them with the objects and atmospheres through which desire flows. Thus he imagines a vast continuum of feeling that he sees as a field of operations that embodies the reality of political economy (Crome and Williams, 2006, 50–51). He recognizes that power operates through this continuum, or rather that the system reduces this continuum to operate power. Now that The Gathering has unfolded this system, we are told, “Whatever happened to Liam did not take place in Ada’s good room— no matter what picture I have in my head. Nugent would not be so stupid. The abuse happened in the garage” (G, 223). This negates the only concrete evidence that Nugent molested Liam. It still insists that the abuse happened, but from now on it can hardly be attached to a factual level. This has the effect of avoiding the reduction of Liam to a product of a single occurrence. Instead, his problems emerge from a larger field. This is the opposite of Nugent’s focus on actual details, and Veronica now hears Nugent saying, “Now look what you’ve got” (G, 224). He means that she is stuck with something insoluble, but this is the only way to access the reality of the undecidable that Liam embodies. Now that Veronica realizes that the event at Broadstone was more than factual, she is in a position to take a comprehensive view of its significance: “I know he [Nugent] could be the explanation for all of our lives, and I know something more frightening still—that we did not have to be damaged by him in order to be damaged. It was the air he breathed that did for us. It was the way we were obliged to breathe

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his second hand air” (G, 224). His effect works through a system that makes him generate the atmosphere they live in, and Lyotard specifies atmosphere as a component of libidinal economy (Crome and Williams, 2006, 50). It is considered as possible “that my uncle Brendan was driven mad by him, that my mother was rendered stupid by him . . .” (G, 224) even if Nugent hardly met them. His rational male propriety separates the mentally ill and subordinates women. Moreover, Veronica’s review of Ada’s rent books shows that her life from 1939 (the year Ireland decided not to oppose Hitler) was preoccupied by a series of negotiations in which she was obliged to be charming for him and “her whole life dribbled away into his hand” (G, 235). This is a reverse image to those of the children masturbating Nugent (G, 143–44, 222), and Veronica may see masturbation as wrong because it is one-sided. So he continually reinforced the selfishness that Veronica sees as causing the malformation of Ada’s children. Veronica imagines that Charlie once owned the house, but lost it to Nugent on a horse (G, 232). The irresponsible ne’er-do-well was bound to lose the property to the acquisitive businessman bent on revenge. Now that I have mapped out the context of Nugent’s acts (which he was always performing though they only reached climaxes at times) with the children, I will apply some theory to show their significance. In his essay on “Truth” in Conditions, Badiou uses Lacan’s concepts to build on his own tenet that truth can only emerge from an event. Here he maintains that truth, which can never support anything pre-given, can only emerge “in the course of successive operations.” Moreover, because truth is the emergence of something incomprehensible, it “originates in a disappearance” (2008, 132). Such a truth can only be seen as the impossible, like the scenes between Nugent and the children. Badiou also says here, “The event in philosophy is clearly analogous to what Freud called the primal scene, which, since it only has a force of truth in its abolition, or since it has no site except the disappearance of the having-taken-place, means that it is pointless to ask, within the realist categories of the situation, whether it was real or

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invented” (2008, 132). The link between the event and the primal scene may serve to indicate the relation of history to sexual trauma. The primal scene, the child’s first traumatic image of sex, operates here not between mother and father, but between Nugent and the children. That they are living with Ada at the time means that Nugent, the owner of the house, is in the position of the father. His domination of Ada may stand for the domination of Ireland, with its history of colonialism, by the conservative business interests who, as Terence Brown indicates, controlled the Free State under de Valera (1985, 38). So the representative model of desire that Veronica and Liam were subject to is the control of sensitive individuality by phallic authority—and allowed by the circumspect Ada, who won’t tell. One theory this matches is Luce Irigaray’s view, in “Women on the Market,” that in patriarchal society women and children are shaped and regulated by phallic authority (1985, 170–91). Moreover, having been separated from their parents—in this case primarily by uncontrolled childbearing—the children are put under the authority of an administrator; and this fits the classic dysfunctional family arrangement of the colonized, the impoverished, the ghettoized. The recognition of this pattern, which Veronica pursues throughout the novel, is the event that realizes the actuality of neocolonialism, a realization to which she must be faithful if she is to operate in the generic to liberate Ireland. Once Veronica understands how Ada and her dependents were enslaved by Nugent, she sees the full force of Liam’s position as someone whose life was taken from him by the social order. She has subtracted him completely from this order and is ready to see him as someone who has passed beyond. She imagines revenging Liam by destroying Ada’s home (G, 238); then she asks him, “Is that all right?” (G, 239) and sees him. Yet she can only see him in a disguise because what he really is is indiscernible: “He looks like an extra from a film . . . wearing a . . . suit, that he would never wear in real life . . .” (G, 239). He is a monumental figure gazing out to sea from the headland, one of a series of watchers, but he does not know what he sees because he is so filled with his death (G, 239). Veronica repeats, “Is that all

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right?” because she imagines Liam has the power to understand and forgive; but his power lies in his inscrutability. By looking into the unknown, he can see what she is looking for, the infinity for which he gave his life. Liam maintains the principle of his suicide by trying hard to die completely: “He is full of his own death. . . . It is a serious business, being dead. He would like to do it well” (G, 239). That he insists on his damnable defiance is the key to her adoration of him. And he affirms his suicide by the last gesture he makes, for he “sets his face towards the sea” (G, 239). We have seen that the sea represents his infinite desire. This defiance brings out the corruption of prosperity that has been revealed to her, and she decides rather spontaneously to leave this false world and board a plane (G, 239). When Veronica says, “I feel like I have spent the last five months up in the air” (G, 259), this implies she has been with the airborne Liam. When she decides to return and tell the truth at the end, it proceeds from what she has learned by following him as far as she could outside the assumptions of her life. It is the truth of victimization that exposes the social arrangement. Earlier, surrounded by the compromises of the family that denied Liam, she felt that the truth could be of no use to them now (G, 210). But at the end she says, “I know what I have to do—even though it is too late for the truth, I will tell the truth. I will get hold of Ernest and tell him what happened to Liam . . .” (G, 259). She has to communicate through Ernest, a defrocked priest who has the manner of a spiritual advisor without the substance (G, 195), for she does not feel able to support her argument herself. It is a bizarre dispensation, for it is “too late,” and her idea of the truth is too complicated to go over with people. Yet this is the truth she has learned to tell. Veronica’s orientation toward the future anterior of the event is shown by the fact that she places her faith in children—both her daughters and Liam’s son Rowan, who miraculously appears out of nowhere. Rowan looks like Liam, and seems fated to be an outsider as the child of an alienated couple. When Veronica looks at the monumental form of Liam, she remembers that she had the idea of having

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a last child with Tom (G, 239). When she decides to go back to Tom, because sex with him put her together as often as it took her apart, she sees a child as the future, a word for which one of the synonyms in Webster’s New World Thesaurus is “infinity” (Laird, 1985, 307): ”the future, come back to annoy me. Some new soul, with eyes like plums” (G, 260). Liam the watcher of the sea had eyes like plums (G, 239), and when Veronica asks Tom in her mind to have a child, she hopes it will be a boy and plans to call it Liam (G, 260). This boy who may come back “to annoy” her will never stop annoying her if he is like his namesake. The end of the novel struggles to follow Veronica’s and Liam’s vision forward despite misgivings. For one thing, her investment of hope in the potential of children is touching, but too close to tradition. And she says that she does “not want a different life. I just want to be able to live it, that’s all” and “I just want to be less afraid” (G, 260–61). Will she be able to carry on in the everyday world her radical theories and her inconsistent memories of rape and the family as hell? The final image of her crashing into her life (G, 261) suggests that she will continue to see the ordinary as extraordinary and carry on Liam’s spirit of opposition. Yet there are problems. A child, like a narrative, is something you create moment by moment. On one hand the child is the product of your actions, but on the other, it must resist you to exist. The more Veronica knows about how she creates Liam, the better she can be true to him, but there has to be a level on which he escapes her, as emphasized by his final position of distance (G, 239). If the goal of the quest is to realize that you create the goal of the quest, the unreachability of that goal obtrudes tenaciously. Perhaps Veronica’s final return home is recognized as an illusion, like Didi’s return to believing in Godot. But maybe Enright’s womanly perspective is too ensnared by the maternal role (which is supported by some feminists, but critiqued by others) to maintain freedom from convention. The question of whether Veronica can sustain her demonic truth leads to the question of whether the Irish novel in the twenty-first century can maintain the oppositional inspiration of Joyce and Beckett.

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The Gathering was less avant-garde than Enright’s previous three novels, and her following one, The Forgotten Waltz (2011b), left the visionary behind for the realistic. It is concerned not with seeing new realities, but with showing what everybody does. This makes one consider whether a shift from philosophy to realism has been dominant through the latest decades, why it has taken place, and what it means. I will take these questions up in my conclusion, which may bring me back to the idea of the renaissance.

11 Conclusion The Uses of Damnation

Badiou separates truth from opinions, the commonplaces shared in ordinary discourse; opinions are false because they are motivated by self-interest to preserve a status quo that in Ireland and elsewhere is descended from colonial feudalism. Tana French’s account of the current situation in Ireland says that if one is born into the elite class, one will probably remain in that class, whatever one’s merits (French, 2013). If the existing system is fundamentally false and unjust, truth is what is capable of change. Badiou defines truth as what “cannot be totalized under a predicate, however sophisticated that predicate may be” (Badiou, 2008, 127). The best efforts to make language express the truth directly will never get there because a truth begins where language ceases to operate efficaciously. The wish to create a new language appeared in the Irish language movement that added a level of discourse filled with obscurities. But as Terence Brown points out, the teaching of Irish in the Free State for decades, which should have accompanied “transformation of the social order,” was instead “characterized by reaction and dogmatism” (1985, 48). New language was developed in more creative terms by the innovations of Modernism. This is the voice of the freedom of the imagination that speaks through the often incomprehensible and condemned works of the radical Irish renaissance. The distance these works would point forward is reflected by the facts that Joyce and Beckett wrote from exile. They felt they needed distance from Ireland to write freely, felt they had to be outside the 276

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container of traditional culture, in an avant-garde environment. Joyce and Beckett are remarkable in that they continued to push ahead with the most advanced Modernism until their last years, producing works like the Wake and How It Is, which stand as high points in the history of literature. Among their peers in Anglophone fiction, Faulkner declined after Go Down, Moses (1942), and Woolf, I fear, after The Waves (1931). Perhaps the distance the Irish works had to go is also indicated by the fact that O’Brien and Banville both rejected the novels that may have been their best because they felt there was something unworkable about them.1 Maybe for O’Brien the improper feature was nihilism, while for Banville it was idealism. O’Brien’s effective career as a novelist lasted from 1938 to 1941; after that he turned to being a humorist, and his later attempts to write novels are disappointing. Banville has continued to write superb novels for more than four decades, and may yet produce his best work, but he has recently begun to write mysteries as a profitable diversion from his serious works. These detective novels are sometimes critical of society and the Church, but they tend to follow convention. Subsequent writers are less firmly committed to the use of damnation as an instrument to undermine the entire system of thought, though this demonic tendency persists. They are more inclined to see hell as a product of history, and this realism may have to do with Ireland possessing a world of its own, not being externally controlled or possessed. Attempts to recapture the primal Joyceo-Beckettian foundation of skepticism rarely obtain full traction (and the notion of a foundation of skepticism is shaky). McCabe’s radicalism, for example, seems too tenuously linked to reality, and the same might be said of Bowen’s elegant semi-exile (even within Ireland). Edna O’Brien,

1. Of course Banville may not want to luxuriate in having written a masterpiece. When he spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia in 2010, he was eager to separate himself from Copernicus. He said a professor once showed him an exam in which students were asked to identify a passage from the novel and Banville could not get it.

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Doyle, and Tóibín, on the other hand, may be too attached to reality or convention to fully unleash imagination. In this context, Banville, Deane, and Enright have done best at bringing reality and imagination together. The crucial point may be one I started with: the most creative period for Irish literature was the renaissance between colony and nation, when everything seemed open to question. Joyce, Beckett, and the others at their best carry on the gravity of a history of rankling injustice, and that propels them to imagine everything with a wonderful newness. The Third Policeman, for example, approaches the level of Alice in Wonderland and Swift’s Travels—books in which the imagination qua imagination attains an overwhelming reality by exploding ordinary reality, and similar statements may be made about Beckett’s Trilogy and Joyce’s Wake. The need for renewal speaks most powerfully in Joyce, Beckett, and the Flann O’Brien and Banville novels I select. These works deny the entire construction of the world and the metaphysical scheme behind it. Orthodox means “right opinion,” and the orthodox view of the world confines things in reductive categories that Badiou refers to as making up the encyclopedia (BE, 328). Badiou sees this knowledge that is contained as the opposite of truth, which is alive because it breaks out of orthodoxy. It may be that for Badiou, hell consists of being enclosed by definite categories. He comes close to defining the infernal when he comments on Lacan’s use of the word worse: “the worst arrives when instead of and in the place of a void, a fundamental not-being, the presence of an idol is imposed by force” (Badiou and Roudinesco, 2014, 56). Entrapment in prefabricated forms is the structure that loses life and serves authority by eradicating the openness to change that makes up consciousness. Revolutionary consciousness is living consciousness, but revolution seems to have lost credibility both in Ireland and in the Western world. As Gibson puts it in The Strong Spirit, “ours is a time that has given up on emancipatory projects . . . ,” believing them to be either pernicious, already accomplished, or achieving themselves slowly and

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haphazardly (2013, 240). The contrast between the earlier and later phases of the modern Irish novel may be parallel to that between the Renaissance and the Restoration, which settled into traditional forms. What does it mean to give “up on emancipatory projects”? Badiou’s emphasis on radical politics may seem outdated, but it is actually timely. I was bothered by his critique of democracy in Philosophy and the Event, written in 2010: “The Left is the process of a truth, the Right merely the management of things, of what there is. That is why, in almost all representative democracies, the Right is usually in power . . .” (2013, 5). This seemed unfair when we had a progressive president, but Obama was blocked at every turn by a conservative congress, and now democracy has elected the fascist Trump. All of the novels I read here center on a figure of this emergence of truth, a person who embodies the generic potential that will have to be recognized if Ireland and humanity are to be freed from the lingering grip of colonialism and slavery. This person is always lost, as Stephen wanders off unredeemed and homeless at the end of Ulysses. The pattern recurs with variations in Beckett’s Trilogy, the damned narrator of Third Policeman, the demon-haunted Copernicus, the afflicted exiles Lois Farquar and Henry Smart, Edna O’Brien’s platonic lovers, the accursed Eddie and Liam, Tóibín’s Declan Breen, and the incinerated butcher boy. Tóibín’s Mary enacts an event by introducing independent motherhood into Catholic culture, perhaps the very motherhood that was lost in Enright’s What Are You Like?. Mary is lost because she sees her son as lost. One of the readiest signs that the central figures of these novels enact Badiou’s idea of truth is the fact that many of them lack fully proper or actual names. Stephen establishes the pattern since his “strange name” (P, 168) comes from outside his situation: “Dedalus” is a “voice from beyond the world” (P, 167), leading him to the indiscernible. The absurdity of the names of Beckett’s characters is manifest, and at the end of the Trilogy, these names are swallowed by the unnamable. Lois Farquar—with a first name that suggests loss and a last that is awkward—is named for her truly awful father, and her name loses significance when her world is destroyed. Doctor

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Copernicus is Nicolas Koppernigk’s quite stagy scientific name, and at the end it may be shown to be outside his real identity though it is his main one. When these figures begin to get names more often, starting in the nineties, with Henry Smart, Francie Brady, Declan Breen, and Liam Hegarty, this is possibly but not necessarily a sign that the oppositional force is fading. McCreevy’s name does not claim the position that names usually claim because it indicates dispossession: “the son of grievance.” And in Enright’s best novel, What Are You Like?, the two sisters Maria and Marie are nameless because they have the same name, like Francis and Frances in “Katie’s Story” in Reading in the Dark (RD, 63–72). The parallel between the narrators of Third Policeman and Reading in the Dark, two nameless men pursuing impossible quests that lead to greater disorientation, helps us to see how the narrator of Third Policeman represents the fate of his nation. For Deane’s protagonist does so with great eloquence, and with a reconciliation whose fragility may be brought out by the O’Brien parallel. As Ireland takes responsibility for itself, it is less able to defy authority. The opposition to ordinary reality maintained in the first generation is sharpened and made more explicit by the focus on war and the destruction of the family (which is devastated in all four of the warbased novels) in the second generation. But this hellish state is also vitiated and made provisional because war is supposed to be voluntary and temporary. War and revolution (and warriors tend to assume they are battling injustice) generally aim at a truth in the future. Advances such as the independence of Ireland may demonstrate that war has a definite end. Yet the real changes that the shifting labels proclaim remain remote. As Frank, the father in Reading in the Dark, puts it, indicating a crucial distinction in the book, “Eddie was fighting for freedom. He [Frank] shook his head bitterly at that. Freedom. In this place. Never was, never would be. What was it, anyway? Freedom to do what you liked, that was one thing. Freedom to do what you should, that was another. Close enough to one another and far apart as well” (RD, 47).

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Freedom requires two positions that cannot be reconciled. This is why Badiou says the truth is separate from itself (2008, 139), so to claim the real truth is always a lie and the only way to approach reality is to recognize that it is a lie and divided. By realizing he is split, father Frank achieves true consciousness, inventing Ireland in Kiberd’s phrase. This is because, as Hegel puts it, “Consciousness starts with the idea that, for it, morality and reality do not harmonize . . .” (1977, 377). Just as transcendence is based on deprivation, true freedom consists in being aware that one is not free. The innocent Frank—who “knows” his brother is a traitor and suspects his wife loves a villain and his son will drive him to violence— illustrates the truth of the radical Irish renaissance that his speech above articulates, that one cannot be saved without being damned. Joyce, in his 1909 essay “Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salomé’,” spoke of “the truth inherent in the spirit of Catholicism, that one cannot reach the divine heart except across the sense of separation and loss that is called sin” (Joyce, 2000, 151). If one can only be saved through damnation and the essence of damnation is that it cannot be escaped, then salvation is as bleak and deceptive as in Beckett. War has a catastrophic effect on the family in Reading in the Dark, making them lie to each other endlessly. Yet war ultimately cannot defeat this family, for mother, father, and son all realize at the end that they love each other. The overcoming of war by family at the end is moving and beautiful. It provides hope that the country can find peace. But it works against the truth of the revolution, for they find peace by deceiving each other, not telling what is most important. The ordinary regime offers deep consolations, but it is false and lifeless, as the parents are reconciled by their dying. The authority of parents depends on their deaths, on lines like “When I’m gone, you’ll appreciate me.” The son can only keep truth alive by telling about the revolutionary suffering, the falsehood, and the central question that can never be solved. His vision can only be valid insofar as it is hellish. The notion of the family as hell refers to a dysfunctional family, whereas war is hell by nature. So while people have argued that the

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bourgeois family or the patriarchal or nuclear family is inherently terrible, it is hard to avoid the inclination to think that the right kind of family must be highly beneficial. So the family model is of less value than war as a rejection of the idea of order. When I taught The Gathering, women in the class objected that Veronica was wrong to leave her children. I responded that because women are trapped by childbearing, it is necessary for them to have the option of leaving, but this was not convincing to the class. Enright may be right to argue that women can hardly help being religious, while men can hardly help resisting it (G, 65–66). Yet Enright’s point may be as much a warning as an inevitability, for there are many exceptions such as Tóibín’s Mary or the men of the Church. Mary resists religion better than the men around her, but returns to it in her dreams and her devotion to Diana. Enright’s distinction between male and female, insofar as it has any truth, indicates the weakness of the dogmatic idea that everyone should consolidate a single correct view of religion. For Badiou faith expresses a need for unity that is part of everyone’s experience: one should work against it, but has to come back to it. Joyce realizes that the idea of God cannot be avoided in Ireland. When Mr. Casey, at the Christmas dinner scene of Portrait, says “no God for Ireland!” (P, 39), he is hysterical. And when Joyce gives an atheist freethinker, Temple, a chance to express his views in the last chapter, everyone laughs at him, including Stephen (P, 198–200, 229–31, 235–37). Yet Stephen remembers in Ulysses that he owes Temple money for “two lunches” (U, 2.257). I would like to support Temple, and there is a margin on which he allows Joyce to include radical ideas; but when Stephen calls him an “emotional man” (P, 200), the implication that he has not thought out his position seems conclusive. Joyce lays down a precedent for others by determining that if the idea of God can neither be avoided nor unified, its avatars should be arranged so as to distinguish its imaginative aspect from its authoritarian one. Stephen identifies with Christ as a rebel against the deadening imperialism that Stephen sees in the Church. Badiou’s St. Paul

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may follow Christ when he turns against the established church of Peter and against the requirement of Jewish rites (Badiou, 2003b, 18–26). When Stephen says Christ is “like a son of God” (P, 243), he may refer to a rebellious imagination. And this leads to the demonic idea of the artist playing the role of the God of creation, Satan’s central sin, and perhaps the main charge against Jesus, as Tóibín reminds us by presenting Jesus’s trial (TM, 55). When Molly affirms her belief in God at the end of Ulysses, (U, 18.1562–71), it has a considerable logic in that everyone has a need to believe that there is a unified personality at the origin of a uni-verse (which means “turned one way”). This reflects Molly’s need to believe in her own unity, which is generated by the fact that she is divided, as shown by her devotion to a series of men. Her adherence to religion, which is spurred by the fact that she is a flagrant sinner, makes her yearn for coherent construction because she is a creature of ceaseless flow. Her craving for transcendence is parallel to the need of Tóibín’s Mary to believe in dreams, but Mary resists. Molly’s need to be dominated causes her to be seduced by a Christian man in a society where Jews are considered inferior. The strongest element of her theophany may be a flood of images of Nature’s fertility that converts religion to creative imagination as multiplicity (U, 18.1558–63). God is not a unity but a multiplicity here, in accord with the four men for whom Molly expresses passion simultaneously at the end (Bloom, Mulvey, Boylan, and Stephen). I have argued that Joyce could have derived from Blake the idea that God consists of seeing the infinite in everything and asserting honest indignation as a priest of the imagination. One of the strongest arguments for God as unity that I know of appears in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit ([1807] 1977), which follows the Enlightenment in seeing God as a creation of the human mind. Hegel maintains that even though superstitions may be delusory, the idea of God cannot be avoided because it is fundamental to the sense of a unified self: “in the knowledge of that essential being in which consciousness has the immediate certainty of itself, the idea of delusion is quite out of the question” (Hegel, 1977, 336). After this

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proof of the need for faith, however, Hegel goes on to argue that the Enlightenment, which sees “every determinateness” as limited (1977, 340), is “equally necessary” (342), and is continually locked in a dialectical interchange with faith. Either view is inadequate to support life as an ongoing process. Joyce and his followers, including the poststructuralists, refute Hegel’s argument for the certainty of faith by demonstrating that the unified self cannot be apprehended. Stephen and Bloom change their selves in every chapter, and the major self of Ulysses combines both of them with others. Today many intelligent people are inclined to see the idea of a unified self as wishful thinking, and dangerous in its exclusivity. In fact a major Christian tradition associated with St. Augustine sees both God and the self as trinities rather than unities. This does not mean that the divided self does not involve stress. The elimination of God as a unity matches Badiou’s idea that the one does not exist except as a construction. He reveres Plato for presenting in the Parmenides “inconsistent multiplicity, which is to say pure presentation anterior to any one-effect, or to any structure. . . . Since being-one is prohibited . . . what presents itself is immediately, and entirely infinite multiplicity . . .” (BE, 33). This open field before structure or unity is imposed is the necessary basis of the most active creativity, and may correspond to what Molly’s flowing material vision in “Penelope” has in common with Stephen’s abstract flowing material vision in “Proteus.” Stephen thinks “Why not endless . . . ?” (U, 3.408), and Molly’s flow seems endless, an endlessness fully extended by ALP’S unending flow in the Wake. Badiou’s Theory of the Subject revises Hegel’s dialectical movement (from thesis to antithesis to synthesis), positing a forward movement that goes on indefinitely, without Hegel’s sense of conclusion. Whereas Hegel’s dialectic starts with a (male) first cause, Badiou’s dialectic starts with matter (which may be linked to mater) coming from the void. The forward movement is Badiou’s subject, which can only form itself by moving beyond any definable identity, which is a mere object (2009, 18–20). Hegel starts and ends with unity, but Badiou starts and ends with multiplicity.

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Badiou uses Epicurus’s atomic theory as the first logical system to explain the material formation of the universe. In the primary distinction between the void and the atoms, the undifferentiated atoms are set on parallel paths and have no way to relate to each other. The action that allows the atoms to form things is a clinamen, a deviation or swerve on the part of one atom that leads it to connect with others. But the clinamen is erased when things are seen as wholes, so the deviation at the foundation of every whole has to disappear so that wholeness can be claimed (2009, 59–60). Joyce was insistent about the idea of the artist creating a world. In the 1930 interview with Hoffmeister, Joyce said, “My work is a whole and cannot be divided by titles. . . . My work from Dubliners on, goes in a straight line of development.  .  .  . My whole work is always in progress” (Hoffmeister, 1986, 129–31). Wholeness here is an ongoing process. Badiou’s principles can be used to trace this dialectical development. A unity for Badiou is always preceded by a multiple, and Joyce’s work begins with a series of isolated individuals in Dubliners. They have no way to come together because they are set on parallel lines by authority.2 The clinamen or deviation that allows these atoms to come together is approached by Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead” and enacted by Stephen’s sinful art in Portrait, which makes people aware of their positions. Badiou speaks of “the well-known dialectical axiom: ‘the Son is consubstantial with the Father’” (2009, 16), meaning that the Son carries the Father forward into a dialectic that is an ongoing mystery. What Joyce calls the “Fusione” of Stephen and Bloom (R. Ellmann, 1972, following 187) produces the ongoing world of Ulysses in the sense that their endless efforts to connect with each other inform the endless multiplicity of the novel. The step that leads to the larger world of the Wake, in which every particle is connected to every other one, is the disappearance of the

2. Badiou may be defining authority in the quote above when he speaks of “an idol . . . imposed” “in the place of a void” (Badiou and Roudinesco, 2014, 56).

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clinamen, so Stephen fades out of Ulysses. And the artist behind the Wake, Shem, can only be seen through his antithetical, conservative brother, Shaun, who likewise can only be seen through Shem. Shem the Penman, who writes the letter dictated by ALP (the Wake) is to Shaun the Post, who delivers the letter, as Copernicus is to Rheticus. The Wake emphasizes that the two brothers create each other, as Molloy and Moran do. Not only does the inconsistent Shem create Shaun, but the consistent Shaun creates Shem; and Copernicus says that the theory that earth is at the center is valuable because it reveals what is nonexistent (DC, 186). The principle of subtraction unfolded by Joyce and Beckett continues to smolder beneath the surface in the more ordinary works as well as the inspired ones of their successors: the element of damnation charges them with dynamism. Henry Smart’s revolutionary spirit is still there as a submerged cause in Doyle’s completion of his second trilogy. Banville’s mysteries have plenty of points that cannot be solved and room for the attraction to evil, as well as critique of authority. In Enright’s Forgotten Waltz (2011b), Gina Moynihan puts herself in Hades by pursuing her personal truth. Damnation is here reduced to leaving a husband for a married man who is more exciting partly because he is cruel (Enright, 2011b, 113, 199, 201). The reality of hell as anguish keeps this vision from being reduced to satire as Moynihan realizes that she is where she wants to be, but she doesn’t know where she stands. For all of the writers I discuss the new way of seeing things must be decentered or cut off from a center so that elements can be recombined not only to be original but to eliminate hierarchy, which is measured from the center. Of course, hierarchy keeps creeping back as a need to distinguish better from worse. I myself have a tendency to use words like best. The distinction between better and worse is always partly a lie based on elevating some criteria at the expense of others. Hierarchy being ineluctable, those who seek progress must combat it forcefully. The strongest way to pull the root of hierarchy is by eliminating the center, and the more it is eliminated, the closer one

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approaches to the hell of many gods without order called pandemonium, the negative image of plurality. As Fernie emphasizes, Modernism is thoroughly informed with the demonic, as was the “Early Modern” Renaissance. Therefore, from the point of view of preserving civilization, well-being, and tolerance, Kiberd is right to criticize the excesses of Stephen and Copernicus, which are deranged and hardly allow for decent living. But Joyce in literature, like Copernicus in science, is opening a vast range of truth and life for humanity. The modern mind and the decentered universe could not be discovered without courting damnation. The assumption that morality depends on religion may be refuted by a creative morality of freedom. Badiou sees truth as a creative principle that is the opposite of self-interest. Such self-sacrifice can be separated from its religious basis by recognizing that the strongest way to free oneself from authority is to accept damnation. This acceptance of damnation may be crucial to the flourishing of Irish fiction from 1915 to 2015. To review how this works, I will turn back to Joyce, and to Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel says, “Action is in its own self its truth and reality, and individuality in its setting forth or expression is, in relation to action, the End in and for itself” (1977, 236). The truth of action aims at individuality. Moreover, Hegel later adds that “action takes place only on the assumption of a negative which is to be set aside by the action” (1977, 376). That is, if it is not in opposition, it is not action. Stephen realizes that under the Church and the state of colonized Ireland (and colonization may not entirely disappear if Church and state remain), the only meaningful action entails sin and damnation. In fact, Fernie argues that Hegel’s process of dialectic, because it proceeds through conflicts between thesis and antithesis, involves evil as a necessary stage in the development of the good (2013, 171–72). As Fernie says in relation to Blake, “Evil ventures beyond creation and into its own world” (2013, 165). That is, by breaking the rules, evil translates one from the established world into a world one creates. No wonder Stephen’s damnation leads so many readers to object to him: he finds no good except in evil.

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Bloom’s problem is that he is good, and so has little awareness of evil. He has virtually no idea that he is choosing to be a cuckold, and misunderstands why he follows the insolent Stephen. That Bloom’s goodness brings a substantial element of subservience into his life is indicated by the fact that his wife has been seduced by a Christian, and it is amply demonstrated by his fantasies in “Circe” and by his humiliating job. His satisfaction comes from serving others in the hope that he can win their support, and whether Molly and Stephen will return his love remains suspended. The hope that they will—that Molly will love him and Stephen will be transmuted—gives the event of Stephen and Molly infinite potential for subjectivity and change. But this transformation cannot be realized in the novel’s actual world, in which the characters remain alienated, consciously separated except by way of Bloom’s subservience. This is a clinamen he is unaware of because its active function is vested in the other man he requires to live his life for him, whether it is Stephen or Boylan or Mulvey. Bloom’s dispossession is one of exile by the waters of Babylon, and he is frequently reminded that his real home is elsewhere, in the East. Imaginative Irish nationalists sometimes compared the Irish to the Jews and the comparison recurs in Ulysses (U, 7.845–69, 17.724–60). Insofar as Bloom, the hero of the modern Irish epic, represents the Irish, they are exiles in their own country, dominated by the foreign formations of Church and state. The Church, which has converted him (18.540–47), defines Bloom as damned unless he is a Christian, and the hostility of the state is expressed both by British colonialism and by the narrow nationalism of the Citizen, who wants to kill him. Bloom, however, has access to freedom, and this freedom is represented by Stephen, who leads him to “Circe” and to the possibility of realizing his bondage or accepting his hell. Joyce said that Ulysses is “the descent into hell” (Power, 1974, 89). By making the loss of his wife voluntary, or giving her up, Bloom actually holds her love. Stephen may help him to do this by acquainting him with uncertainty. The generic, damned figure that Stephen embodies and develops, the source of Bloom’s freedom, is carried on in various forms by all of the novels I examine.

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In Badiou’s terms, Molloy as a generic figure rejects existing frames to confront the void and prepare for a new way of seeing things that is disturbing but true, and this is why Moran is attracted to him, though he has to destroy him. The narrator of Third Policeman finds in hell that no existing logic makes any sense, generating an absolute relativity; and the truth of that relativity is defined by the fact that he cannot realize it, cannot undo his division from himself. The strongest illustration of the idea that the generic agent represents what Ireland needs may be the tormented Copernicus, who reshapes the universe to advance civilization and who, like Faustus, could not represent what is necessary to move from the medieval to the modern if he could accept it—because he is outside situation. Lois Farquar, of The Last September, ends as an afflicted exile because she realizes that Anglo-Irish civilization is obsolete and its alliance with England is impossible. Lois moves toward the eventually possible freedom of being an artist and an independent woman, but she can only make this move by being damned. All of these figures reveal Ireland as a displacement from itself. With the revelation in the nineties of massive abuses by government institutions run by the Church, Francie Brady in The Butcher Boy and Henry Smart in A Star Called Henry are conceived in stridently anticlerical terms. The idea that hell is caused by social institutions shows a shift toward secularization without quite eluding the irreparable quality of hell. And though these novels question whether any definable social reorganization could solve the problem of the excessive multiplicity of the subject, yet they use the activity of hell to insist on the need for change. So the shift from metaphysics to realism may mean that the abstract theories of the earlier generation can promote practical results for the later one, as the revolutionary ideas of the Romantics led to social reform for the Victorians. In particular the often vehement fictional attacks on the Church and religion participated in and partly led an onslaught that put pressure on the Church to reform. The omnipotent, anti-modern Church that Joyce and his followers assailed has become a more vulnerable institution; and it seems to be related to these attacks that the Church has chosen a progressive pope—an event that would amaze Joyce.

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The inspiring Pope Francis is bringing out the best qualities of the Church and emphasizing many of the ideas that Badiou promotes in his study of St. Paul, such as internationalism, tolerance, concern for human suffering, opposition to capitalism, and seeing the Resurrection as a symbol of hope. Eamon Duffy, who describes these positions in his article “Who Is the Pope?” says, “The best religious leaders in his view are those who leave ‘room for doubt’” (Duffy, 2015). The pope’s opponents within the Church charge him with weakening religion, but he seems to be strengthening it on the leading edge of its persuasiveness in an area of excess in which devotion and skepticism may overlap, what Badiou might call an evental site. My appreciation for the pope is tempered by the fact that, as Duffy states, he aims to support traditional religious authority. But he may also liberate the Church, giving the modern spirit a means to sustain itself until more comprehensive advances appear—until people can pass beyond the need for supernatural command. The Church has often seen itself as an organization that uses itself up, preparing for the Last Judgment. Insofar as it annuls the fixed framework of tradition, it may return to the primal, creative religious activity of discovering the unknown.3 And this may consort with Badiou’s pursuit of the indiscernible, though Badiou strives to keep artistic and philosophical generic procedures separate from the authority of religion. The pope has written an appealing book of interviews, The Name of God Is Mercy (2016), in which he says that Mercy “really is the Lord’s identity” (9). This is not far from Blake’s belief that God is an image of human feeling in “The Divine Image”: And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk or jew, Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too. (Blake, 1988, 13)

3. Tudor Balinisteanu explained this idea to me in conversation.

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The word heathen means that even someone who does not believe in religion creates God by feeling human kindness. By realizing that God has no existence except as a symbol of beautiful human feelings, it is possible to sustain a high level of spirituality without believing in an old man in the sky. A strong presentation of this position appears in Ronald Dworkin’s Religion without God (2013). The most valuable mission of the writers I treat may be not only to restrain the Church—as they may have—but to substitute a multitude existing in reality for the archaic, authoritarian abstract unity of metaphysics. Stephen Dedalus may be the remarkably perfect historical agent of this mission. And his epoch-making success in carrying it out around the world is the spearhead that makes Joyce parallel to such figures as Marx and Freud as a modern Copernicus.4 This success is radiant in the torches of freedom that Joyce passed on to all of these Irish authors, who owe their technical, emotional, and intellectual excitement to Joyce’s influence—as do Woolf, Faulkner, Pynchon (who was also influenced by Beckett), and so forth. Insofar as these writers are sensible or aim at reconciliation, this may be a deficiency. Stephen may have been condemned because he is an infidel or because he does not support a definite ideology such as nationalism, Marxism, realism, masculinity, or feminism. But this may be why he is the greatest hero of modern Irish fiction, or perhaps of Modernism, as his progeny, the generic figures in all of these novels, indicates. Just as the Church is at its most vital when it has the strength to relax its authority, so Ireland is most vital when it has the strength to question itself, rather than showing weakness by boosting itself. In the phase of renaissance or rebirth, one has the scope of vision to

4. Stephen was usually seen as a hero of rebellion in the first half of the twentieth century. It was not until Portrait was converted from a revolutionary work to an academic classic that he began to be condemned as improper by Joyceans. He had already been condemned as improper by opponents of Joyce. I have discussed Joyce’s influence on non-European writers such as Borges, Derek Walcott, and Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha (Brivic, 1998, 2012).

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see problems as philosophical or psychological rather than in terms of immediate circumstances and fixed positions. This is the ability to see the event that leads beyond what is known into inconceivable eventualities. All of these novels, insofar as they avoid being atrophied by convention, carry the Dedalian impulse to recreate humanity forward to give Ireland a big place on a changing literary map.

Wor k s Cited Index

Works Cited Adams, Robert M. (1962) 1967. Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Agamben, Giorgio. (1995) 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazan. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press. Althusser. Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, 294–304. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, Chester G. 1967. James Joyce and His World. London: Thames and Hudson. Aquinas, Thomas. 1955. On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa Contra Gentiles. Translated by Anton C. Pegis, 1259–64. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Asbee, Sue. 1991. Flann O’Brien. Boston: Twayne. Attridge, Derek. 2000. Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.    , ed. 2004. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Casebook. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.    , and Daniel Ferrer, eds. 1984. Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Badiou, Alain. (1993) 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso.    . 2003a. On Beckett. Translated and edited by Alberto Toscano and Nina Power. Manchester, UK: Clinamen Press.    . (1997) 2003b. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.    . (1988) 2005a. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum. 295

296 | W o r k s C i t e d    . 2005b. “Qu’est-ce que la littérature pense?” (Literary thinking). Translated by Alistair Clark. Paragraph 28, no. 2:35–40.    . (1992) 2008. Conditions. Translated by Steve Corcoran. New York: Continuum.    . (1982) 2009. Theory of the Subject. Translated by Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum.    , with Nicolas Truong. (2009) 2012. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush. New York: New Press.    , with Fabien Tarby. (2010) 2013. Philosophy and the Event. Translated by Louise Burchill. Cambridge, UK: Polity.    , and Elisabeth Roudinesco. 2014. Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue. Translated by Jason E. Smith. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.    . (1929) 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Bal, Mieke. 1997. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 3rd ed. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press. Balinisteanu, Tudor. 2012. Violence, Narrative and Myth in Joyce and Yeats: Subjective Identity and Anarcho-Syndicalist Traditions. New York: Palgrave. Banville, John. (1976) 1993a. Doctor Copernicus. New York: Vintage.    . (1981) 1993b. Kepler. New York: Vintage.    . (1982) 1999a. The Newton Letter. Boston: David R. Godine.    . (1986) 1999b. Mefisto. Boston: David R. Godine.    . (1989) 2001. The Book of Evidence. New York: Vintage.    . 2003. Adaptation. The Last September. By E. Bowen. Film directed by Deborah Warner.    . 2005. “Literature and the Dream.” Talk at Temple Univ., Philadelphia, Nov.    . (2005) 2006. The Sea. New York: Vintage.    . 2009. “A Century of Looking the Other Way.” New York Times, May 23, 2009, A.21.    . 2010. Reading at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Feb. Barber, Cesar L., and R. P. Wheeler. 1986. The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Works Cited | 297 Beckett, Samuel. 1964. How It Is. New York: Grove.    . (1931) 1970. Proust. New York: Grove Press.    . (1954) 1994. Molloy. Translated by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author. New York: Grove Press.    . 2009. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press.    . 2010. Waiting for Godot/En Attendant Godot: A Bilingual Edition. New York: Grove Press.    . 2011a. Murphy. New York: Grove Press.    . 2011b. Waiting for Godot: Tragicomedy in 2 Acts. New York: Grove Press. Bell, Michael. 2011. “The Metaphysics of Modernism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 2nd ed., edited by Michael Levenson. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. 1995. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives. London: St. Martin’s Press. Bersani, Leo. 2004. “Against Ulysses.” In James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Casebook, edited by Derek Attridge, 201–29. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Blake, William. 1988. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Rev. ed. Edited by David V. Erdman. New York: Anchor. Boheemen-Saaf, Christine van. 1999. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Boldrini, Lucia. 2001. Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake. London: Cambridge Univ. Press. Booker, M. Keith. 1995. Flann O’Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Edited by D. Yates and J. Irby. New York: New Directions. Boucher, François. (1752) 1972. “Miss O’Murphy.” Varieties of Visual Experience, Basic Edition. Edited by E. B. Feldman, 242. New York: H. N. Abrams. Bowen, Elizabeth. (1929) 2000. The Last September. New York: Anchor.    . (1948) 2002. The Heat of the Day. New York: Anchor. Boxall, Peter, ed. 2003. Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame. New York: Palgrave.

298 | W o r k s C i t e d Boyce, Nell. 2001. “Cruel Lessons from an Epidemic.” U.S. News and World Report 130, June 4, 2001, 48–50. Boyle, Robert. 1978. James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press.    . 1982. “Worshipper of the Word: James Joyce and the Trinity.” In A Starchamber Quiry: A James Joyce Centennial Volume, 1882–1982, edited by E. Epstein, 109–51. New York: Methuen. Bracken, Claire, and Susan Cahill, eds. 2011. Anne Enright. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Brivic, S. 1985. Joyce the Creator. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.    . 1998. “Toni Morrison’s Funk at Finnegans Wake.” Joyce Studies Annual 1998:158–73.    . 2008. Joyce through Lacan and Žižek: Explorations. New York: Palgrave.    . 2012. “Joyce and Asia: Joyce and Cha’s Dictee.” James Joyce Journal 12. Brontë, Emily. (1847) 2003. Wuthering Heights. 2nd ed. Edited by Linda H. Peterson. Boston: St. Martin’s. Brook, Peter, director. 1971. King Lear, with Paul Scofield. Brooks, Peter. (1984) 1992. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Brown, Terence. 1985. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922 to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press. Bruno, Giordano. (1585) 1964. Cause, Principle, and Unity. New York: International Publishers. Butler, Samuel. (1872) 1934. Erewhon. 2nd ed. New York: Heritage Press. Buttigieg, Joseph A. 1987. A Portrait of the Artist in Different Perspective. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press. Byron, George Gordon. 1907. The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron. Edited by Leslie Stephen. New York: Macmillan. Cantor, Georg. (1915) 1955. Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers. Translated by Philip E. B. Jourdain. New York: Dover. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Catholic Encyclopedia. 1911. London: Caxton. New Advent. www.new advent.org/cathen/index.html.

Works Cited | 299 Chrisafis, Angelique. 2004. “Overlong, Overrated and Unmoving: Roddy Doyle’s Verdict on James Joyce’s Ulysses.” www.theguardian.com/uk /2004/feb/10/booksnews.ireland. Cixous, Hélène. 1972. The Exile of James Joyce. Translated by Sally A. J. Purcell. New York: David Lewis. Clissman, Anne. 1975. Flann O’Brien: A Critical Introduction to His Writings: The Story-Teller’s Book-Web. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Cohen, Leonard. 1971. “Joan of Arc.” Songs of Love and Hate. Record released Mar. 19. Columbia L-C 30103. Colum, Padraic. 1967. A Treasury of Irish Folklore: The Stories, Traditions, Legends, Humor. New York: Crown. Corcoran, Neil. 2004. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. London: Oxford Univ. Press. Cousineau, Thomas J. 1999. After the Final No: Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press.    . 2013. “Beckett contra Aristotle: A Choral Reading of Waiting for Godot.” In In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts, edited by Ranjan Ghosh, 51–64. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Crome, Keith, and James Williams, eds. 2006. The Lyotard Reader and Guide. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Cronin, A. [1989] 1998. No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien. London: Grafton. Damasio, Antonio. (1994) 2006. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. London: Vintage. Dante, Alighieri. 2000. Inferno. Translated by Robert and Jean Hollander. New York: Doubleday. Davies, A. Powell. 1959. The First Christian: A Study of St. Paul and Christian Origins. New York: Mentor. Davitt, Michael. 1904. The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland: Or the Story of the Land League Revolution. London: Harper and Bros. Deane, Seamus. (1996) 1998. Reading in the Dark. New York: Vintage. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

300 | W o r k s C i t e d    . 1978. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass, 278–93, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.    . 1984. “Two Words for Joyce.” In Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Dettmarr, Kevin. 1996. The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Devlin, Kimberly J. 2015. “Salvation, Salves, Saving, and Salvage: The Linguistic Underpinnings of III.1.” In Joyce’s Allmaziful Plurabilities: Polyvocal Explorations of Finnegans Wake, edited by Kimberly J. Devlin and Christine Smedley. Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida. Dickens, Charles. (1861) 1999. Great Expectations. Edited by Edgar Rosenberg. New York: W. W. Norton. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1937. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett. New York: Modern Library. Douglass, Frederick. 2000. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Slave Narratives. Edited by William Andrews and Henry Louis Gates. New York: New American Library. Doyle, Roddy. (1993) 1995. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. New York: Penguin.    . 1997. The Woman Who Walked into Doors. New York: Penguin.    . 1999. A Star Called Henry. New York: Penguin. Duffy, Eamon. 2015. “Who Is the Pope?” http//www.nybooks.com/articles /archives/2015/feb/19/who-is-pope-francis/. Duffy. Enda. 1994. The Subaltern Ulysses. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Dworkin, Ronald. 2013. Religion without God. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1986. “Brecht and Rhetoric.” Against the Grain, 167–72. London: Verso.    . 1996. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture, 1–26. London: Verso.    . 2003. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Ebury, Katherine. 2013. “‘A. E. I. O. U.’: Joyce, Intertextuality, and Debt.” Panel on Joyce and Intertextuality. MLA Convention, Boston, Jan. 5.

Works Cited | 301 Eco, Umberto. (1962) 1989. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. Translated by Ellen Esrock, 1–32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Quoted partly in Joyce, 2007, 329–48. Eliot, T. S. 2001. The Waste Land. Edited by Michael North. New York: W. W. Norton. Ellmann, Maud. 2003. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. Ellmann, Richard. 1972. Ulysses on the Liffey. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.    . 1982. James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Enright, Anne. 2000. What Are You Like? New York: Grove Press.    . 2007. The Gathering. New York: Black Cat.    . 2011a. Reading at the Free Library of Philadelphia.    . 2011b. The Forgotten Waltz. New York: W. W. Norton. Escher, M. C. 1996. The Graphic Work of M. C. Escher. New York: Wings (Random House). “Excommunicated Priest Says Church Violates Rights.” 1999. National Catholic Reporter, Jan. 8. Farquharson, Danine, and Bernice Schrank. 2006. “Blurring Boundaries, Intersecting Lives: History, Gender, and Violence in Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid Isolation.” In Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Fernie, Ewan. 2013. The Demonic: Literature and Experience. New York: Routledge. Ferriter, Diarmaid. 2012. “‘That crooked Spanish bastard will get the better of that pastyfaced blasphemous fucker from Cork’: Ireland’s Conservative Revolutionaries, 1922–39.” Address at 23rd International James Joyce Symposium, University College Dublin, June 14. Fink, Bruce. 1995. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. FitzSimon, Christopher. (1992) 1998. “Interview with Patrick McCabe: St. Macartan, Minnie the Minx and Mondo Movies: Elliptical Peregrinations through the Subconscious of a Monaghan Writer Traumatized by Cows and the Brilliance of James Joyce.” Irish Univ. Review 28, no. 1 (Spring/Summer): 175–89.

302 | W o r k s C i t e d Flanagan, Thomas. 1979. The Year of the French. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Flannery, Eóin. 2003. “Reading in the Light of Reading in the Dark.” Irish Studies Review 11 (2003): 66–82. Fletcher, Beryl, and John Fletcher. 1978. A Student’s Guide to the Plays of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber and Faber. Foster, John Wilson, ed. 2006. The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Foucault, Michel. 1967. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Mentor.    . 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.    . (1975) 1997. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Francis, Pope, with Andrea Tornielli. 2016. The Name of God Is Mercy. Translated by Oonach Stransky. New York: Random House. French, Tana. 2013. “The Psychology of an Irish Meltdown.” New York Times Sunday Review, July 28, 5. Freud, Sigmund. 1953. The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol. 2. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 5. Translated by James Strachey et al., 339–630. London: Hogarth Press.    . (1913) 1955. Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 13. Translated by James Strachey et al., 3–164. London: Hogarth Press.    . (1923) 1961. The Ego and the Id. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19. Translated by James Strachey et al., 3–67. London: Hogarth Press. Friel, Brian. (1980) 1991. Translations. In Modern Irish Drama, edited by John P. Harrington. New York: W. W. Norton. Frye, Northrop. (1947) 1962. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Boston: Beacon Press. Gates, Henry Louis. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Gauthier, Tim. 2003. “Identity, Self-Loathing and the Neocolonial Condition in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy.” Critique 44 (Winter): 196–211.

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Index Adams, Robert Martin, 68n11 Adorno, Theodor, 210 African American music, 234 Agamben, Giorgio, 252 Althusser, Louis, 116, 130, 131, 116–42 Anderson, Chester G., 2n1 Aristotle, 16, 88–89, 129, 245 Asbee, Sue, 125n10, 139 Attridge, Derek, 10n8 Augustine, Saint, 3, 3n4, 284 Badiou, Alain (ideas), 4n6, 11–15, 22–23, 29, 31, 42–43, 56–57, 87, 103, 113, 147, 170–73, 207, 220, 231, 245, 249, 278, 282; belonging and inclusion, 7, 172–73, 182, 214; count-as-one, 46, 54, 96–97, 159, 228; event, 11, 13–14, 21, 92, 115, 117, 131n12, 156, 183–84, 196, 220; generic, 19, 70, 224, 261, 288–89; inconsistent multiple, 14, 16, 19, 31, 48, 54, 67, 74, 77, 79, 96–97, 101, 105, 177, 208, 217, 255, 259, 286; indiscernible, 154, 174, 217, 262–63, 279; infinity, 7, 17, 57, 373–74; set theory, 13, 69, 74, 172–74, 220; subtraction (see Badiou, Alain [works]: “On Subtraction”); truth, 14, 154,

159, 162, 165, 174, 191, 230, 262, 271–73, 276, 285, 287 Badiou, Alain (works): Being and Event, 11–14, 54, 56–57, 59, 63, 65, 67, 73, 76, 97, 108, 157, 163, 183–84, 213, 228, 278, 284; Conditions, 271; Ethics, 4, 44, 56, 71, 72, 79, 96, 170, 237; In Praise of Love, 200; Jacques Lacan, 285n2; On Beckett, 11, 60, 91, 108; “On Subtraction,” 10, 54–57, 57n4, 60–61, 63, 113, 200, 262; Philosophy and the Event, viin6, 4n8, 59; “Qu’est-ce la littérature pense?,” 75, 78; Saint Paul, 42–44, 45–51, 154, 250, 282–83, 290; Theory of the Subject, 154, 158, 284–85 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 31, 200 Bal, Mieke, 118 Balinisteanu, Tudor, 6, 290n3 Banville, John: The Book of Evidence, 147; “A Century of Looking the Other Way,” 6, 224, 239; Doctor Copernicus, 20, 22–23, 144–65, 224, 246–47, 277, 277n1, 278–80; Kepler, 164; Last September (screenplay), 175, 176, 181; “Literature and the Dream,” 144; Mefisto, 164–65; The Newton Letter, 164; on post­modernism, 144–46;

313

314 | I n d e x Banville, John (cont.) The Sea, 108, 185, 195; talk at Free Library, 2010, 277n1 Barber, Cesar Lombardi, 2, 3n3 Beckett, May, 97n9 Beckett, Samuel, 11, 15, 19, 21, 25, 49, 60, 81–113, 114, 117, 132, 136, 142, 145n1, 153–54, 248, 261, 276–79, 281, 291; Badiou on, 11, 60, 91, 108; How It Is, 108n11, 277; Malone Dies, 109– 12; Molloy, 94–113, 131, 195, 200, 228, 237, 239, 286; Proust, 91; The Unnamable, 22, 112–13, 116, 139, 279; Waiting for Godot, 22, 81–94, 111, 122, 139, 236, 249 Bell, Michael, 46 Bennett, Andrew, 170–71 Bersani, Leo, 68 Bhabha, Homi, 20 Blake, William, 4, 7, 17, 38, 40–42, 53, 57, 85, 111n13, 215, 283, 287, 290–91 Blessed Virgin, 235, 247 Bloom, Leopold. See Joyce, James (main protagonists) Bloom, Molly. See Joyce, James (main protagonists) Boheemen, Christine van, 259 Boldrini, Lucia, 6 Booker, M. Keith, 121n7 Borges, Jorge Luis, 11n2, 134, 190 Boucher, François, 192, 258 Bowen, Elizabeth, 20, 240; AngloIrish, 170–71, 181; “The Demon Lover,” 228; The Heat of the Day, 182; The Last September, 23, 169–83, 239, 279, 289 Boxall, Peter, 88 Boyce, Nell, 239n4

Boyle, Fr. Robert, 46, 76n13 Brontë, Emily, 8–9 Brook, Peter, 111 Brooks, Peter, 118 Brown, Terence, 5–6, 118n2, 196, 272, 276 Bruno, Giordano, 5, 16, 74 Brunty, Patrick, 8 Buckley, Fr. Pat, 242 Budgen Frank, 91 Burke, Kenneth, 111n13 Busch, Austin, 42n4, 86n5, 250n8 Butler, Samuel, 134 Buttigieg, Joseph, 88n6 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 7, 39 Cahill, Susan, 25, 253, 258 Cantor, Georg, 13 Capaneus, 4–5, 155 Caruth, Cathy, 259 Catholic Church, 7, 9n3, 29, 30n1, 35, 36, 40, 53, 200, 241, 288–90 Catholic Encyclopedia, 5 Celtic myth, 184–85, 187, 260 Cervantes, Miguel de, 94 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 291n4 Chrisafis, Angelique, 211 Christie, Agatha, 120n4 Cixous, Hélène, 10, 73 Clarke, Thomas, 212 Clissman, Anne, 125, 131 Cohen, Leonard, 37 Cohen, Paul J., 60, 63, 79 Collins, Michael, 213 colonialism, 18–19, 124, 186, 188, 215, 258, 269, 279, 287. See also neocolonialism Colum, Padraic, 132–33 Connolly, James, 209, 212, 213 Conrad, Joseph, 48, 264

Index | 315 Copernicus, Nicolas, 5, 111, 287, 291. See also Banville, John Corcoran, Neil, 171, 173, 181 Cousineau, Thomas, 88–89, 110 Crome, Keith, 270 Cronin, Anthony, 116, 117, 121, 124, 128, 135 Cullen, Archbishop Paul, 7, 9 Curraoin, Charoline, 7n7 Czarnowski, Stefan, 185 damnation, 36, 281, 286–87, 289. See also hell Dante (Alighieri), 4–5, 36n, 37n, 53, 55, 83, 133, 155, 155n3, 219, 242–43, 263, 268 Davies, A. Powell, 247n6 Deane, Seamus: poetry, 184; Reading in the Dark, 23, 183–98, 224, 230, 232–33, 260, 263, 278–81 deconstruction, 265 Dedalus, Stephen. See Joyce, James (main protagonists) Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 119 DeLillo, Don, 145n demonic, 24, 220, 223, 229, 261, 277, 287. See also Fernie, Ewan Derrida, Jacques, 10, 105, 160 Dettmar, Kevin, 119n2 De Valera, Eamon, 128, 212–13, 272 Diana (Artemis), 247, 247n6 Dickens, Charles, 179–80 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 22, 120, 200 Douglass, Frederick, 41 Doyle, Roddy, 24; Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, 224; A Star Called Henry, 205–20, 239, 246–47, 278–80, 286–87; The Woman Who Walked into Doors, 211–12 Dreiser, Theodore, 120

Duffy, Eamon, 290 Duffy, Enda, 207 Eagleton, Terry, 8, 171, 245n5, 267 Easter Rebellion, 209–12 Ebury, Katherine, 37 Eco, Umberto, 50 Eliot, T. S., 250 Ellmann, Maud, 126n11, 182 Ellmann, Richard, 39, 55, 59, 69, 76n12, 245, 285 Enright, Anne, 25; The Forgotten Waltz, 260, 275, 286; The Gathering, 25, 185, 251–75, 278–80, 282; progression of effect, 264–65; reading at Free Library, 269; trauma, 258–59, 259n2; What Are You Like?, 25, 195, 253, 260, 279, 280 Epicurus, 4, 285 Escher, M. C., 109 Esslin, Martin, 88 existentialism, 11, 225 Fairbanks, Douglas, 174 Farquharson, Danine, 200–201 Faulkner, William, 80, 171, 264, 277, 291 Faust, 145, 155, 165, 262–63, 289 feminism, 50, 74, 79, 174–76, 180, 254, 272–74 Fenians, 9–15 Fernie, Ewan: The Demonic, 2–3, 3n5, 7, 10–11, 14, 29, 32–33, 36, 47n5, 81n1, 102, 111, 111n13, 119, 145–46, 154, 158, 202, 205, 206n1, 229, 261, 287 Ferriter, Diamaid, 216n3 Fink, Bruce, 61, 85n4, 122n8 Finn, Fianna, 187 FitzSimon, Christopher, 228

316 | I n d e x Flanagan, Thomas, 122, 191n6 Fleiss, Wilhelm, 75 Fletcher, Beryl, 82–83 Fletcher, John, 82–83 Ford, Ford Maddox, 264 Foster, J. W., 124 Foucault, Michel, 87–88, 110 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 152 Francis, Pope, 289–90 freedom, 17, 79, 254, 281–82, 288 French, Tana, 260, 276 Freud, Sigmund, 75, 118, 120, 132, 258–59, 271–72, 291 Friel, Brian, Translations, 12, 17–18 Frye, Northrop, 70 Gabler, Hans Walter, 55n1 Gates, Henry Louis, 124 Gauthier, Tim, 18 Gibson, Andrew, 6–7, 9, 9n7, 13n11, 15, 21, 35, 40, 44, 57, 60, 75, 92, 102, 109, 170, 224, 278–79 Gifford, Don, 55 Girard, René, 120n5, 135n15 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 195 God, 32, 41, 47n6, 76–77, 80, 85–86, 111, 120–23, 130, 146, 205, 209 Gordon, Caroline, 35 Gothic, 8, 19, 147, 184, 187–88, 227, 235 Gottfried, Roy, 88n7 Greek tragedy, 226 Greenblatt, Stephen, 111, 122n9 Greene, Brian, 17n12 Greene, Dana, 249n7 Greene, Graham, 35 Guattari, Felix, 110 Hallward, Peter, 31n2, 56 Hamilton, Alice, 84n3

Hamilton, Kenneth, 84n3 Hammond, Gerald, 48n4, 86n5, 250n8 Hand, Derek, 20, 112, 132, 134, 147, 150, 153, 177, 184, 192 Harris, Michael, 199, 202 Harrison, John P., 12, 19 Hegel, G. W. F., 29, 36, 63, 122, 281, 283–84, 287 Heidegger, Martin, 68 hell, 4–5, 11, 19–20, 58, 113, 160, 181–83, 188, 205, 210–12, 220, 235, 237–39, 244, 246, 249, 252, 262, 278, 281, 288–89 Henke, Suzette, 38n6 Herr, Cheryl, 68 Hesse, Hermann, 149–50 Hitler, Adolf, 271 Hoffman, Charles, 264 Hoffmeister, Adolf, 57–58, 76, 285 Holy Family, 197 Holy Grail, 229–30 Hoogland, Renee, 126n Hoppen, K. Theodore, 216–17 Hopper, Keith, 118n2 Horkheimer Max, 218 Howell, Edward, 67n10 Imhof, Rudiger, 145, 147, 151 Innocent III (pope), 38 IR A (Irish Republican Army), 127, 128, 185, 199, 204, 216–17 Ireland, 65, 79, 220, 238, 269, 279, 282, 287, 289 Irigaray, Luce, 272 Irish language, 114, 124, 187, 276 Isaiah, 17 James, Henry, 240 Jameson, Frederic, 149–50 Jaspers, Karl, 14, 102, 201

Index | 317 Jesus, 29, 48, 51–52, 52n7, 246–50, 283. See also God; New Testament Job, Book of, 111n13 Jolas, Eugene, 55 Jordan, Neil, 213, 235 Joyce, James (person and works), 1–2, 10–11, 14–18, 21, 25, 29–30, 114, 153–54, 158, 211, 245, 248, 276–78, 285, 287–89, 291; Dubliners, 39, 72–73, 76, 90n6, 96, 182, 256, 285; Exiles, 75; Finnegans Wake, 34, 38, 39, 53, 58, 69, 70, 72, 76, 77, 117, 119, 120, 185, 251, 277–78; “The Holy Office,” 40, 245; “Oscar Wilde,” 281; Portrait of the Artist, 3, 8–10, 15–16, 18–19, 20, 29–53, 56–57, 76, 102, 107, 111, 113, 142, 147–48, 186, 191–92, 200, 215, 219, 224, 237, 239, 245, 282–83, 285; Selected Letters, 60–61; Stephen Hero, 29, 30n1, 53, 76; Ulysses, 13n10, 18, 20, 33, 35, 38–39, 41, 44, 47, 54, 117n1, 195, 201, 207–8, 219, 252n1, 267n5, 279, 282–86, 288 Joyce, James (main protagonists): Leopold Bloom, 13n10, 18, 44, 47–48, 55, 59–61, 63–75, 79, 285, 288; Molly Bloom, 18, 39, 44–45, 69, 76, 76n13, 78, 79, 283–84, 288; Stephen Dedalus, 8–9, 16, 20–21, 26, 29–53, 29n4, 57, 59, 63–69, 70–76, 78–80, 191–92, 200, 224, 237, 239, 287–88, 290–91, 291n4 Joyce, Stanislaus, 40, 79 Kadmon, Adam, 70 Kafka, Franz, 121, 126, 132

Kain, Richard M., 52n7 Kelly, Thomas Moore, 234, 236 Kenner, Hugh, 57–58, 57n5, 58n6 Kenny, John, 144, 146, 161 Keogh, Dermot, 217 Kern, Edith, 97, 102, 105n6 Kiberd, Declan, 1, 9, 61, 62, 68, 74, 145–46, 152–53, 160–62, 183, 271, 287 Kierkgaard, Soren, 154 Kilfeather, Siobhan, 8, 19, 227–28 Knowlson, James, 21, 113 Koestler, Arthur, 157 Kristeva, Julia, 10 Lacan, Jacques, 10, 10n9, 30, 40, 50, 58n7, 61, 61n8, 84–85, 85n4, 104, 106, 114–17, 122, 129–31, 134, 139–40, 180, 185, 258, 267, 278 Leonard, Garry, 10n8 Lernout, Geert, 35, 52n7, 58 Levin, Janina, 65 Lloyd, David, 199 Lyotard, François, 11, 15, 17, 36, 39–41, 55, 119n2, 239, 270–71; “Adorno as the Devil,” 41; The Differend, 11, 14, 29–33, 36, 39, 200, 239; Libidinal Economy, 270–71; The Postmodern Condition, 11, 15 MacCabe, Colin, 55 Mallarmé, Stephane, 183–84, 186, 265 Mann, Thomas, 162 Mao Zedong, 231 Marlowe, Christopher, 7, 165 Marx, Karl, 32, 131, 208n2, 291 Maturin, Charles, 7

318 | I n d e x McCabe, Patrick: Bog Gothic, 8, 227–28; The Dead School, 230; The Butcher Boy (novel), 24, 223–38, 239, 248, 255, 277, 279–80, 289; The Butcher Boy (screenplay), 235–36 McCarthy, Dermot, 212–14 McDonald, Ronan, 98, 99n9 McGahern, John, 20n13 McGee, Patrick, 10n8 McHale, Brian, 9 McIntyre, J. Lewis, 5, 16 Michelangelo (Buonarroti), 132 Milton, John, 7, 8–9, 38, 122–23 Mitchell, Juliet, 118 Morrison, Toni, 145n1, 186n3, 189n4, 190n5, 232 Murakami, Haruki, 145n1, 195n7 Murphy, Peter James, 103n10 Nabokov, Vladimir, 119n2 neocolonialism, 18, 262, 272, 287 New Testament, 42n4, 86n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 81 Norris, Christopher, 59 Norris, Margot, 10n8, 65–66, 120n4 O’Brien, Edna, 23, 179–80, 277–78 O’Brien, Flann, 15, 22; The Dalkey Archive, 135n5; Faustus Kelly, 262–63; The Poor Mouth, 225; The Third Policeman, 47n6, 82, 114–43, 155n4, 189, 228, 238, 245, 248, 250, 264, 279, 289 Ó Cadhain, Máirtín, 124–25, 228–29 O’Connor, Frank, 127 O’Dwyer, Riana, 185, 187 O’Flaherty, Liam, 186 Orpheus and Eurydice, 195, 195n7

Pan, 175 pandemonium, 287 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 35–36, 120n4 Paul, Saint, 11, 14–15, 21, 29, 38, 42–43, 45–47, 47n6, 55, 86, 210, 212, 244, 261 Peach, Linden, 20, 20n13, 204, 234n2 Peacock, William, 92 Pearse, Patrick, 28, 217 Peter, Saint, 283 Planck, Max, 154 Plato, 4, 63, 245, 284 Plunkett, Sir Joseph, 211 Poe, Edgar Allen, 119 Pollard, Stephen, 13 postmodernism, 9–11, 15–16, 118, 118n22, 143–47, 149–50, 234n2, 246, 255 poststructuralism, 10, 114, 284 Pound, Ezra, 224 primal scene, 272 Prosch, Harry, 154 psychoanalysis, 243, 258. See also Freud, Sigmund Ptolemy, 158 Pynchon, Thomas, 80, 119n2, 145n1, 152, 152n2, 218–19, 291 Rank, Otto, 113 Renaissance, 2–3, 6, 10, 14, 152, 152n2 Rice, Thomas Jackson, 55n2 Rickard, John S., 66n11 Rimbaud, Arthur, 39 Riquelme, John Paul, 75 Robinson, Marilynne, 140 Roudinesco, Elizabeth, 114, 278, 285n2

Index | 319 Rougemont, Denis de, 201 Royle, Nicholas, 170–71 Rudmose-Brown, Thomas Brown, 21 Rushdie, Salman, 145n1 Sanders, Bernie, 56n3 Satan, 4, 7, 10, 15, 16, 21, 24, 29, 35, 38–41, 47n6, 57, 77, 111, 111n13, 158, 194, 215, 262–63, 283 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 10, 114, 119, 147, 160 Scaggs, John, 228 Scholes, Robert, 52n7 Schrank, Bernice, 200–201 Schwall, Hedwig, 185, 189 set theory. See Badiou, Alain (ideas) Shakespeare, William, 7, 8, 33, 111, 181, 234 Shaw, George Bernard, 6 Shea, Thomas F., 118n2, 136 Shenker, Israel, 98 Shohut, Ella, 18 Sisyphus, 30, 107, 154 Smith, James M., 225–26 Smyth, Gerry, 20 Sophocles, 120 Spinoza, Benedict, 77 Stevens, Wallace, 111, 137 Stoker, Bram, 7 St. Peters, Christine, 199 Swift, Jonathan, 108, 110, 125, 218 Taafe, Carol, 128 Tantalus, 39, 91 Tenniel, John, 177 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 40, 45, 50, 77, 158 Thwaites, Tony, 60 Titley, Alan, 124–25

Tóibín, Colm, 20, 278; The Blackwater Lightship, 24–25, 238–46, 279–80; The Testament of Mary, 238, 246–51, 279, 282 trauma, 259, 270 Trevor, William, 20, 20n13 Tristan and Isolde, 201–2 Tucker, Robert C., 208–9n2 Verlaine, Paul, 230 Veronica, Saint, 250 Virgil, 132 Virgin, Blessed, 235, 247 void, 66–67 Walcott, Derek, 291n4 Waldock, A. J. A., 122–23 Wallace, David Foster, 145n1 Walpurgisnacht, 263 Walshe, Eibhear, 238, 240–41, 242–43, 245 Warner, Deborah, 175 Waugh, Patricia, 119n2 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 60 Weinstein, Philip, 15 White, Hayden, 149 Wilde, Alan, 15 Wilde, Oscar, 95, 202 Williams, James, 32, 270 Wollaeger, Mark, 58, 117 Woolf, Virginia, 80, 265n4, 277, 291 Wright, Richard, 120, 206, 225 Yeats, William Butler, 127–28, 239, 239n3 Žižek, Slavoj, 32–33, 39, 85, 123, 129, 137, 139, 247

Sheldon Brivic is professor emeritus of English at Temple University. He has published widely on modernism and literary history and is known especially for his work on Joyce. He is the author of numerous books, including Joyce through Lacan and Žižek: Explorations. He will be publishing a novel called “Stealing.”