Routledge Library Editions: James Joyce, 8-Volume Set 9781138638228, 9781315637907, 9781138183919, 9781138183957, 9781315645506

Table of contents :
Cover
Volume1
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on the pagination of extracts
Biographical note
Introduction to the Novels
1: Dubliners, page 358
2: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, page 232
3: Ulysses, page 139
4: Finnegans Wake, page 182
'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'
5: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, page 211
6: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, page 247
7: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pages 87-9
8: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pages 71-7
9: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pages 174-6
10: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pages 184-6
11: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pages 218-20
12: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, page 252
'Ulysses'
13: Ulysses, pages 6-9
14: Ulysses, pages 9-11
15: Ulysses, pages 32-4
16: Ulysses, pages 36-8
17: Ulysses, pages 516-7
18: Ulysses, page 674
19: Ulysses, pages 680-13
20: Ulysses, pages 814-5
21: Ulysses, page 65-6
22: Ulysses, pages 74-5
23: Ulysses, pages 114-5
24: Ulysses, pages 109-10
25: Ulysses, pages 444-9
26: Ulysses, page 507
27: Ulysses, pages 568-9
28: Ulysses, pages 606-12
29: Ulysses, pages 669-70
30: Ulysses, pages 702-3
31: Ulysses, page 765
32: Ulysses, page 827
33: Ulysses, pages 864-5
34: Ulysses, pages 881-2
35: Ulysses, pages 903-4
36: Dubliners, pages 510-14
'Finnegans Wake'
37: Finnegans Wake, page 231
38: Finnegans Wake, page 34
39: Finnegans Wake, page 51
40: Finnegans Wake, pages 5-6
41: Finnegans Wake, page 24
42: Finnegans Wake, page 29
43: Finnegans Wake, page 33
44: Finnegans Wake, page 57
45: Finnegans Wake, pages 85-6
46: Finnegans Wake, pages 86-7
47: Finnegans Wake, pages 93-5
48: Finnegans Wake, pages 107-8 & 111-2
49: Finnegans Wake, pages 169-79
50: Finnegans Wake, page 196
51: Finnegans Wake, pages 201-2
52: Finnegans Wake, pages 206-7
53: Finnegans Wake, pages 215-6
54: Finnegans Wake, pages 219-21
55: Finnegans Wake, pages 558-9
56: Finnegans Wake, pages 619-28
Bibliography
Volume2
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Note on References
Preface
I: The Early Stories in Dubliners
II: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Disengagement
III: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Drama
IV: Ulysses: Styles
V: Ulysses: The Symbolic Scenario
VI: Ulysses: Philosophical Themes
Notes
Index
Volume3
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Editor's Note
Introduction
A Working Outline of Finnegans Wake
Part I: Assessments
Dreaming Up the Wake
An Introduction to Finnegans Wake
Shem the Textman
The Femasculine Obsubject: A Lacanian Reading of FW 606-607
Quinet in the Wake: The Proof or The Pudding?
Finnegans Wake: All the World's a Stage
The Convertshems of the Tchoose: Judaism and Jewishness in Finnegans Wake
Joyce's "Blue Guitar": Wallace Stevens and Finnegans Wake
Part II: Joyce's Textual Self-Referentiality
Every Man His Own God: From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake
Joyce's Nonce-Symbolic Calculus: A Finnegans Wake Trajectory
The Female Word
Part III: Performance
"Group drinkards maaks grope thinkards or how reads rotary" (FW 312.31): Finnegans Wake and the Group Reading Experience
Notes for Staging Finnegans Wake
Mary Ellen Bute's Film Adaptation of Finnegans Wake
Thoughts on Making Music From the Hundred-Letter Words in Finnegans Wake
Index
Volume4
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Defusing the Patriarchal Can(n)on
1: Through a Cracked Looking-Glass : Desire and Frustration in Dubliners
2: Stephen Dedalus and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Narcissist
3: Interpreting Exiles: The Aesthetics of Unconsummated Desire
4: Uncoupling Ulysses: Joyce’s New Womanly Man
5: Molly Bloom : The Woman’s Story
6: Reading Finnegans Wake: The Feminiairity which Breathes Content
Ricorso: Anna Livia Plurabelle and Ecriture Feminine
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Volume5
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on the Text
1: Old Ireland
1 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Parnellite
2 Literature and the National Consciousness
2: Young Europe
1 Trieste
2 Rome
3: Perspectives: Socialism and Anarchism
1 'A Portrait of the Artist'
2 Stephen Hero
3 Dubliners
4 Ulysses
4: The National Scene
1 Ourselves, oursouls alone
2 'Zürichschicken': Waging the Inkbattle
3 'The Reawakening'
4 Forged Documents
5: Literary Politics
1 Dublin's Dante
2 'Creeping Jesus'
3 The Impossibilities of Siegfried Bakoonin
4 Literature and the Conscience
5 The Soul of the Artist under Anarchism
6 Finnegans Wake: 'Anarxaquy' and the Eternal Struggle
7 The Reaction to Fascism
Notes
Index
Volume6
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Joyce's 'Dubliners' and the futility of modernism
2: Two More Gallants
3: 'Planetary music': James Joyce and the Romantic example
4: Joyce and the displaced author
5: Leaving the Island
6: Nightmares of history : James Joyce and the phenomenon of Anglo-Irish literature
7: Martello
8: 'Ulysses', modernism, and Marxist criticism
9: 'Ulysses' in history
10: Reflections on Eumaeus: Ways of error and glory in 'Ulysses'
11: Joyce and literary tradition: Language living, dead, and resurrected, from Genesis to Guinnesses
12: Reading 'Finnegans Wake'
13: James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid
Index
Volume7
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Table of Periodical Abbreviations
Introduction
Part 1: Primary Bibliography
A: Major Works
B: Collected and Selected Works
C: Letters
D: Concordances
Part 2: Secondary Bibliography
E: Bibliographies
F: Biographies, Memoirs, Reminiscences, Interviews
G: Book-Length Critical Studies and Essay Collections
H: General Critical Articles or Chapters
J: Studies of Dubliners
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
iii. Studies of Individual Stories
K: Studies of a Portrait of the Artist as a Youngman
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
L: Studies of Exiles
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
M: Studies of Ulysses
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
iii. Studies of Individual Episodes
N: Studies of Finnegans Wake
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
P: Studies of joyce's Miscellaneous Writings
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
Part 3: Major Foreign-Language Studies
Q: Bibliographies
R: Biographies, Memoirs, Reminiscences, Interviews
S: Book-Length Critical Studies and Essay Collections
T: General Critical Articles or Chapters
U: Studies of Dubliners
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
iii. Studies of Individual Stories
V: Studies of a Portrait of the Artist as a Youngman
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
W: Studies of Exiles
X: Studies of Ulysses
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
iii. Studies of lndividual Episodes
Y: Studies of Finnegans Wake
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
Z: Studies of Joyce's Miscellaneous Writings
i. Books and Essay Collections
ii. General Critical Articles or Chapters
Appendix: Study Guides
Indexes
Author Index
Title Index
Subject Index
Volume8
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Original Title Page
Original Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: James Joyce's Method in Dubliners
1: "The Sisters": The Three Fates and the Opening of Dubliners
2: "An Encounter": Joyce's History of Irish Failure in Roman, Saxon, and Scandinavian Dublin
3: "Araby": The Self-Discovery of a Double Agent
4: "Eveline": Eveline and the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque
5: "After the Race": Our Friends the French, the Races of Castlebar, and Dun Laoghaire
6: "Two Gallants": a Walk through the Ascendancy
7: "The Boarding House": The Sacrament of Marriage, the Annunciation, and the Bells of St George's
8: "A Little Cloud": The Prisoner of Love
9: "Counterparts": Hell and the Road to Beggar's Bush
10: "Clay": Maria, Samhain, and the Girls Next Door in Drumcondra
11: "A Painful Case": The View from Isolde's Chapel, Tower, and Fort
12: "Ivy Day in the Committee Room": Fanning the Phoenix Flame, or the Lament of the Fianna
13: "A Mother": Ourselves Alone
14: "Grace": Drink, Religion, and Business as Usual
15: "The Dead": I Follow St Patrick
Conclusions: Joyce, Dublin, Dubliners, and After
Index

Citation preview

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: JAMES JOYCE

Volume 1

JAMES JOYCE

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JAMES JOYCE

ARNOLD GOLDMAN

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1968 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd This edition first published in 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1968 Arnold Goldman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

978-1-138-63822-8 978-1-315-63790-7 978-1-138-18391-9 978-1-138-18395-7 978-1-315-64550-6

(Set) (Set) (ebk) (Volume 1) (hbk) (Volume 1) (pbk) (Volume 1) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

James Joyce by Arnold Goldman

LONDON

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL NEW YORK: HUMANITIES PRESS

First published 1968 by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-'74 Carter Lane London, E.C.4 Printed in Great Britain by Northumberland Press Limited Gateshead

© Arnold Goldman 1968 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism SBN

7100 2951

9

Contents Acknowledgments A Note on the pagination of extracts Biographical note INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

Dubliners, page 358 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, page 232 3 Ulysses, page 139 4 Finnegans Wake, page 182 I

2

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

5 A Portrait of page 2I I 6 A Portrait of page 247 7 A Portrait of pages 87-9 8 A Portrait of pages 7I-7 A Portrait of 9 pages 174-6 10 A Portrait of pages 184-6 II A Portrait of pages 218-20 12 A Portrait of page 252

the Artist as a Young Man, the Artist as a Young Man,

page xi

xiii xv I

2

4 6 9

II

II I2

the Artist as a Young Man, 12

the Artist as a Young Man, the Artist as a Young Man,

15 20

the Artist as a Young Man, the Artist as a Young Man, the Artist as a Young Man,

22

25 28

'ULYSSES'

30

I3 Ulysses, pages 6-9 I4 Ulysses, pages 9-I I

30 33 vii

CONTENTS

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses, Ulysses,

pages 32-4 pages 36-8 pages 516-7 page 674 pages 68o-13 pages 814-5 page 65-6 pages 74-5 pages 114-5 pages 109-10 pages 444-9 page 507 pages 568-9 pages 6o6-12

Ulysses, pages 669-70

Ulysses, pages 702-3 Ulysses, page 765 Ulysses, page 827 Ulysses, pages 864-5 Ulysses, pages 881-2 Ulysses, pages 903-4 Dubliners, pages 51o-14

'FINNEGANS WAKE'

37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 viii

Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans Finnegans

Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake,

page 231 page 34 page 51 pages 5-6 page 24 page 29 page 33 page 57 pages 85-6 pages 86-7 pages 93-5 pages 107-8 & 111-2 pages 169-79

page 35 37 39 40 41 44 45 47 48 49 51

56 56

57

6o

6o 62 63 63 65 66 67 73 74 77 78 79

So

81 82 83 84

ss

86 87 90

CONTENTS

50 Finnegans 51 Finnegans 52 Finnegans 53 Finnegans 54 Finnegans 55 Finnegans 56 Finnegans

Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake, Wake,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

page 196 pages 201-2 pages 206-7 pages 215-6 pages 219-21 pages 558-9 pages 619-28

page 93 94 95 96 97

98

99 103

ix

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Acknowledgments

The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: The Bodley Head Ltd., for extracts from Ulysses; Jonathan Cape Ltd. and the Executors of the James Joyce Estate, for extracts from Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; The Society of Authors, as the literary representative of the Estate of the late James Joyce, for extracts from Finneyans Wake.

xi

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A note on the pagination of extracts

As Joyce did not number the chapters of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and divided A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into only five untitled chapters, it has been thought best to give page references for the extracts in The Proflle Joyce. The current British editions to which these page references relate are : for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Essential James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (Penguin Books, 1963); for Ulysses, the Bodley Head edition of 1960; for Finnegans Wake, the Faber & Faber edition of 1939, as corrected in I 964. The texts used for the extracts have been corrected by the present editor to conform with scholarly standards.

xiii

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Biographical note

James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882, in a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. Through a series of financial reverses and inability to hold a job, his father John Joyce gradually impoverished himself and his family. Through his father's connexions, and later by his own abilities, Joyce won a series of scholarships to two of the best Catholic schools in Ireland, Clongowes Wood and Belvedere Colleges. He was an exceptional young scholar and won a number of prizes for English in national Irish academic competitions. After a period during which he considered taking orders in the Roman Catholic Church, Joyce decided instead on a secular life. He graduated B.A. from Dublin's then Catholic Royal University, in 1902, where he specialised in English, French and Italian. His marks were erratic, high only in what took his present interest. He was an excellent linguist and for a time supported himself, and later his wife and children, by teaching in language schools on the Continent. Before he left Ireland in 1904, Joyce had composed a collection of thirty-six poems, Chamber Music, had written a number of chapters of an 'autobiographical' novel, and most of the short stories published collectively as XV

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Dubliners in 1914. In 1916, the final version of his first novel was published, titled A Portrait of the Artist as a Youny Man, and Joyce was already at work on his long

comic epic Ulysses, whose chapters appeared in periodicals as he wrote them and were printed together in 1922. From 1922 to 1939, at times incapacitated by a severe eyedisease, Joyce laboured at Finneyans Wake, a second comic epic, his 'summa' or consciously undertaken masterwork which, like certain other epics, was to engage its author for the rest of his writing life.

xvi

Introduction to the novels

Born in Dublin, Joyce lived on the Continent from 1904, notably in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, and died in 1941, at the age of fifty-eight, in Zurich. This 'European' life is an apt reflection of his place in the international artistic movement of the early twentieth century, a movement which encouraged a supra-national 'European' idea of the arts. Many of the artists and writers involved were as interested in the 'aesthetic' as the social aspect of culture, and the leading professors, Joyce included, have a reputation for artistic experimentation of a superficially traditionshattering nature. Literary experimenters can be of the slapdash or of the painstaking kinds: Joyce was the latter. He laboured with craftsmanlike precision over each of his works. Unlike the Victorian novelist Trollope, who also wrote in a workmanlike manner, Joyce did not turn out his novels at regular intervals. He took ten years to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, seven to write Ulysses and seventeen for Finnegans Wake. From the beginning Joyce found himself at the centre of those controversies which have been a characteristic

JJ-B

I

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

feature of experimental or avant-yarde art in this century. First his writing was thought too realistic, too detailed and even sordid in its depiction of ordinary and 'low' life. Objections on this score kept Dubliners from being published for a number of years after its completion in 1906. Eventually Joyce was to become controversial not only for his realism but also for a kind of writing which is realism's polar opposite and which goes under the names of formalism, symbolism, impressionism and modernism. Their common denominator is a decided emphasis on techniques of presentation, as distinct from subject-matter. The charge which the unsympathetic or uncomprehending levy against the formalism of Joyce-or Picasso in art, or Schoenberg in music-is that their work is of the head rather than the heart, is too difficult, artificial and cerebral for most readers either to understand or enjoy. Supporters deny the charge of heartlessness and claim that only such difficult art can engage their full attention as both feeling and thinking people. James Joyce straddled both major movements of modem literature, realism and symbolism. Their combination is undoubtedly a particularly characteristic feature of his writings. Even in Dubliners, the commonness, even sordidness of setting and action, is enfolded in a highly mannered prose style. Here, from the very first story in the collection, 'The Sisters', the narrator describes his visit as a boy to 'the house of mourning' wherein lies coffined a dead priest he had known. I

In the evening my aunt took me with her to visit the house of mourning. It was after sunset; but the window2

INTRODUC TION TO THE NOVELS

panes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds. Nannie received us in the hall; and, as it would have been unseemly to have shouted at her, my aunt shook hands with her for all. The old woman pointed upwards interrogatively and, on my aunt's nodding, proceeded to toil up the narrow staircase before us, her bowed head being scarcely above the level of the banister-rail. At the first landing she stopped and beckoned us forward encouragingly towards the open door of the dead-room. My aunt went in and the old woman, seeing that I hesitated to enter, began to beckon to me again repeatedly with her hand. I went in on tiptoe. The room through the lace end of the blind was suffused with dusky golden light amid which the candles looked like pale thin flames. He had been coffined. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman's mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side. Dubliners, p. 358 The clumsily hooked skirt and the trodden-down cloth boots point in the direction of realism, but the experience also includes 'the tawny gold' of the clouds and the 'dusky golden light' in the room. The almost romantic formality in not only in the words; it is in the rhythms as well. Note how the sentences which include these phrases flow on well past where they might end. The prose is heavily cadenced. Now that we have a fuller knowledge of Joyce's own life, we can see--from his letters and reported conversation-wha t this shaping and mannering of his prose meant to him. In part it may have been a form of condescension, a way of asserting that he was finer (more 3

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

subtle, discriminating and sophisticated) than the squalid Dubliners about whom he wrote. Equally important was the necessity he felt to wrestle this ordinary and crude material into 'beauty' by a form of expression which would satisfy his aesthetic sensibility. At times he saw these two dimensions as antithetical, contradictory: as a young man he wrote essays about the conflict of the 'realistic' (or 'classic') and the 'romantic' (or 'symbolic') in art. The young Joyce's divided loyalties are apparent in his earliest collection, Epiphanies. These are very short prose pieces-only published after Joyce's death-named after the discovery of the Christ child by the Magi, in the Roman Catholic year the Feast of the Epiphany. The word means a 'showing forth' of reality. Some of Joyce's 'epiphanies' appear designed to catch characters unconsciously exposing themselves, while others are obvious attempts of the writer to compose a prose poem, usually via natural description. In the following passage, the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist 'thinks' one of these epiphanies, musing about a man said to be descended from 'an incestuous love' : 2

The park trees were heavy with rain and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield. A game of swans flew there and the water and the shore beneath were fouled with their green-white slime. They embraced softly, impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet silent trees, the shieldlike witnessing lake, the swans. They embraced without joy or passion, his arm about his sister's neck. A grey woollen cloak was wrapped athwart her from her shoulder to her waist : and her fair head was bent in willing shame. He had loose redbrown hair and tender shapely 4

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

strong freckled hands. Face. There was no face seen. The brother's face was bent upon her fair rainfragrant hair. The hand freckled and strong and shapely and caressing was Davin's hand. A Portrait of the Artist, p. 232 In its context in the novel, this epiphany becomes less straightforward. There its romanticising appears as part of the personality of the character who thinks it. A moment later the character 'frown[s] angrily upon his thought', noticing that with the inclusion of 'Davin' (another character) he has drifted off into drean1-fantasy, into his subconscious, and away from proper artistic creation. Joyce was a natural mimic, and in a manner of speaking his works exploit mimicry more and more progressively. In Dubliners he often phrases things when speaking as the narrator in words the characters might have used. In A Portrait of the Artist, mimicry was extended even further. When Stephen Dedalus, the main character, is an infant, the novel is written for a few pages in baby-talk: He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt. 0, the wild rose blossoms On the little areen place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

0, the green wothe botheth. A Portrait of the Artist, p. 53 When Stephen is a schoolboy Joyce allows his own prose to approximate a schoolboy's: not entirely, but Joyce's prose covers a spectrum, with his personal comment at one end and Stephen and his boy-contemporaries' speech at the

5

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

other; in between is a mixed middle-ground, part Joyce, part Stephen. So the novel proceeds, altering its style to suit the age of the main character. Mimicry carried this far is sometimes called 'imitative form'. Joyce's interest in miming the speech-styles of his characters passes over into an interest in their thoughtstyles as well and his reproduction of the course of a character's thought is the feature of his mature writing for which he is undoubtedly most well-known. The technique which he developed for this purpose is usually called the 'stream of consciousness'. In the following example from Ulysses we can see how the character thinks in staccato bursts, but omits to 'punctuate' his thought when he 'remembers' a relevant fact.

3 Nice soft tweed Ned Lambert has in that suit. Tinge of purple. I had one like that when we lived in Lombard street west. Dressy fellow he was once. Used to change three suits in the day. Must get that grey suit of mine turned by Mesias. Hello. It's dyed. His wife I forgot he's not married or his landlady ought to have picked out those threads for him. Ulysses, p. 139 The paragraph is a little drama. Alas, Ned Lambert has fallen from his former heights of sartorial splendour! These 'streams of consciousness', while making up a large portion of Ulysses, are by no means the whole of the novel, nor are they its only literary innovation. For one thing, the whole present action of this very long novel takes place in some eighteen hours. Ulysses has a dedication to detail hardly matched in world litera6

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

ture: it has more plot in its one day than writers previously thought to include as relevant to action. Further, the novel follows, in a generally alternating way, two characters on their daily round in Dublin. One is the same Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist, now two years older, thinking of quitting his lodgings, leaving his job as a schoolteacher and perhaps abandoning Ireland for good. (His first trip abroad, to Paris, had lasted only a few months.) The other principal character is an advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom. During the day Bloom pursues his job in a desultory sort of way, but mainly his mind is on his domestic situation, for he has discovered that his wife has arranged an assignation with another man for that very afternoon. Among the ways by which Joyce organised his novel about these two 'wandering' characters, Dedalus and Bloom (who finally meet during the evening), is one startling method, signified by the book's title, Ulysses-the Roman name for the Greek hero of Homer's Odyssey. In Joyce's novel, Leopold Bloom becomes a kind of Odysseus (or Ulysses), who spent ten years attempting to return home after the Trojan War. The primary relationship between Ulysses and the Odyssey is apparently ironical: Bloom's wife, Molly, unlike Ulysses' Penelope, is not faithfully awaiting his arrival, holding her suitors at bay; Stephen Dedalus, the Telemachus of the novel (Ulysses' son), is searching for a 'father' (having abandoned his real father, his Church and his state) and discovers not a great hero, but only the cuckolded Bloom. But behind this irony there may be some sympathy: perhaps Bloom is a kind of hero after all, perhaps Stephen sees this. Joyce makes a number of events in Ulysses parallel those in Homer's epic. He thought of each chapter as 7

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

having a parallel episode in the Odyssey, although he did not publish his Homeric chapter-titles when Ulysses was printed. Some of the fun of reading Joyce's comic novel can come from recognising Joyce's Homeric allusions and their attendant ironies. For example, Odysseus uses a sharpened stick to attack the one-eyed giant Polyphemus: Bloom has only a cigar to flourish in front of a rabid Irish nationalist who attacks him in a pub. Not only does each of Ulysses' eighteen chapters have some reference to a Homeric episode, each had attached to it in Joyce's conception a particular symbol, colour, art (like medicine or law), even a particular organ of the body. Each (after the first half dozen) was also written in a recognisably different style. The reasons behind the chapter-by-chapter alteration of styles may best be described by saying that Joyce's Ulysses is not just the story of Stephen and Bloom; it is a specimen of the nearly infinite number of ways their story could be written. The matter of colours, organs and arts is on the other hand reminiscent of the liturgical year in the Roman Catholic Missal, and in a semi-jocular way Joyce thought of Ulysses (as many people have of the great literary epics of Homer and Virgil) as a 'sacred' book, mysteriously embodying hidden wisdom and even prophecy. This latter aspect of Joyce's work became more prominent in his writing after Ulysses, between 1922 and 1939. This eventually became one book, Finneyans Wake. Like the Bible, the Koran, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Finnegans Wake is about everything: a parable history of the universe from creation to dissolution-and in Joyce's conception, back to creation again, over and over. This 'cyclic' view of history is a comic one, unlike the Christian view, which is a one-way process towards eternal sal8

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

vation or damnation. Nothing in Finnegans Wake happens once and once only. Everything, everybody in the novel (and therefore, in history) has happened before, under different names. To keep before our eyes a sense of this ubiquity and repetitiveness of event and personnel, Joyce hit upon his most radical literary experiment, one so bold that in some quarters he has never been forgiven. Joyce based the language of Finnegans Wake on puns of many kinds, principally 'portmanteaux' words and rhythmic echoes of other contexts. Finnegans Wake is written largely in the verbal equivalent of photographic double exposure. Here is an unsympathetic description of the artist Shem, Joyce himself-or perhaps, better, of the Joyce-character in history-nearly blind, as Joyce became, in his old age. 4 Be that as it may, but for that light phantastic of his

gnose's glow as it slid lucifericiously within an inch of its page (he would touch at its from time to other, the red eye of his fear in saddishness, to ensign the colours by the beerlitz in his mathness and his educandees to outhue to themselves in the cries of girl-gee : gember! inkware! chonchambre! cinsero! zinnzabar! tincture and gin!) Nibs never would have quilled a seriph to sheepskin. By that rosy lampoon's effluvious burning and with help of the simulchronic flush in his pann (a ghinee a ghirk he ghets there!) he scrabbled and scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met, even sharing a preci pita tion under the idlish tarriers' umbrella of a showerproof wall, while all over up and down the four margins of this rancid Shem stuff the evilsmeller (who was devoted to Uldfadar Sardanapalus) used to stipple endlessly inartistic portraits of himself. Finnegans Wake, p. 182 9

INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVELS

The narrator of this diatribe sees only the realistic, critical side of a Joyce : his Joyce writes by the glow from his alcoholic-red nose, a 'lucifericious light, to suggest that his gift is Satanic in origin. The beer-lights (and Joyce was a language teacher at the Berlitz schools for a number of years) in his mathematically-crazed brain give his work its colours. The charge is the same that a student friend made many years before, that he 'scratched' . . . 'nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met'. (Note the narrator's confusion: a few clauses later he claims Joyce only 'used to stipple endlessly inartistic portraits of himself'.)

10

1

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

Thus, first and last, Joyce was concerned with the nature and place of 'the artist'. His artist is not a symbol of an Everyman representative of his fellows, but of man apart, defined by his differences from the generality of mankind, at odds with his society. The talents of Joyce's artist are developed and exercised only, as he thinks, in opposition to external pressures like the malice in the voice which describes Shem above. The precise nature of these pressures, in reaction to which the artist makes himself, found categorical expression towards the end of A Portrait of the Artist, when Stephen Dedalus is discovering his identity as an artist.

5 -When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe. -Too deep for me, Stevie, he said. But a man's country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or mystic after. II

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

-Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow. A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 211-12 'Language' here means Gaelic, the Irish language, whose use was then being revived, and Irish nationalists were asserting that Irish writers should write in it, rather than in English. Stephen resists this pressure when talking with Davin, a nationalistically-minded student, but when he restates his creed for Cranly, another student, he substitutes for 'language', the 'home'-that is, familial tiesas something the artist must reject in the name of art. 6

-Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunning. A Portrait of the Artist, p. 247 Many incidents in the novel combine to bring Stephen to his view of 'the nets' which Ireland 'flings out'. In the following passages we see that injustice at school, family dissention, politics and church authority all appear to Stephen in this light. 7

-You, boy, who are you? Stephen's heart jumped suddenly. 12

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

-Dedalus, sir. -Why are you not writing like the others? -1 ... my ... He could not speak with fright. -Why is he not writing, Father Arnall? -He broke his glasses, said Father Arnall, and I exempted him from work. ·-Broke? What is this I hear? What is this, your name is? said the prefect of studies. -Dedalus, sir. -Out here, Dedalus. Lazy little schemer. I see schemer in your face. Where did you break your glasses? Stephen stumbled into the middle of the class, blinded by fear and haste. -Where did you break your glasses? repeated the prefect of studies. -The cinderpath, sir. -Hoho! The cinderpath! cried the prefect of studies. I know that trick. Stephen lifted his eyes in wonder and saw for a moment Father Dolan's whitegrey not young face, his baldy whitegrey head with fluff at the sides of it, the steel rims of his spectacles and his nocoloured eyes looking through the glasses. Why did he say he knew that trick? -Lazy idle little loafer! cried the prefect of studies. Broke my glasses! An old schoolboy trick! Out with your hand this moment! Stephen closed his eyes and held out in the air his trembling hand with the palm upwards. He felt the prefect of studies touch it for a moment at the fingers to straighten it and then the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike. A hot burning stinging tingling blow like the loud crack of a broken stick made his trembling hand crumple together like a leaf in the fire: and at the sound and the pain scalding tears were driven into his eyes. His whole body was shaking with fright, his arm was shaking and his crumpled burning livid hand shook 13

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

like a loose leaf in the air. A cry sprang to his lips, a prayer to be let off. But though the tears scalded his eyes and his limbs quivered with pain and fright he held back the hot tears and the cry that scalded his throat. -Other hand! shouted the prefect of studies. Stephen drew back his maimed and quivering right arm and held out his left hand. The soutane sleeve swished again as the pandybat was lifted and a loud crashing sound and a fierce maddening tingling burning pain made his hand shrink together with the palms and fingers in a livid quivering mass. The scalding water burst forth from his eyes and, burning with shame and agony and fear, he drew back his shaking arm in terror and burst out into a whine of pain. His body shook with a palsy of fright and in shame and rage he felt the scalding cry come from his throat and the scalding tears falling out of his eyes and down his flaming cheeks. -Kneel down ! cried the prefect of studies. Stephen knelt down quickly pressing his beaten hands to his sides. To think of them beaten and swollen with pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else's that he felt sorry for. And as he knelt. calming the last sobs in his throat and feeling the burning tingling pain pressed in to his sides, he thought of the hands which he had held out in the air with the palms up and of the firm touch of the prefect of studies when he had steadied the shaking fingers and of the beaten swollen reddened mass of palm and fingers that shook helplessly in the air. -Get at your work, .all of you, cried the prefect of studies from the door. Father Dolan will be in every day to see if any boy, any lazy idle little loafer wants flogging. Every day. Every day. The door closed behind him. A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 87--9 Something has already been said about Joyce's mimicry 14

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

(or imitation) of his characters' responses or thoughts. In the three long paragraphs beginning with 'Stephen', what insights into Stephen's reactions do we gain from Joyce's technique?

8 It was his first Christmas dinner and he thought of his little brothers and sisters who were waiting in the nursery, as he had often waited, till the pudding came. The deep low collar and the Eton jacket made him feel queer and oldish: and that morning when his mother had brought him down to the parlour, dressed for mass, his father had cried. That was because he was thinking of his own father. And Uncle Charles had said so too. Mr Dedalus covered the dish and began to eat hungrily . . . . -Simon, said Mrs Dedalus, you haven't given Mrs Riordan any sauce. Mr Dedalus seized the sauceboat. -Haven't I? he cried. Mrs Riordan, pity the poor blind. Dante covered her plate with her hands and said : -No, thanks. Mr Dedalus turned to uncle Charles. -How are you off, sir? -Right as the mail, Simon. -You, John? -I'm all right. Go on yourself. -Mary? Here, Stephen, here's something to make your hair curl. He poured sauce freely over Stephen's plate and set the boat again on the table. Then he asked uncle Charles was it tender. Uncle Charles could not speak because his mouth was full but he nodded that it was. -That was a good answer our friend made to the canon. What? said Mr Dedalus. 15

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

-I didn't think he had that much in him, said Mr Casey. -I'll pay your dues, father, when you cease turning the house of God into a pollinybooth. -A nice answer, said Dante, for any man calling himself a catholic to give to his priest. -They have only themselves to blame, said Mr Dedalus suavely. If they took a fool's advice they would confine their attention to religion. -It is religion, Dante said. They are doing their duty in warning the people. -We go to the house of God, Mr Casey said, in all humility to pray to our Maker and not to hear election addresses. -It is religion, Dante said again. They are right. They must direct their flocks. -And preach politics from the altar, is it? asked Mr Dedalus. -Certainly, said Dante. It is a question of public morality. A priest would not be a priest if he did not tell his flock what is right and what is wrong. Mrs Dedalus laid down her knife and fork, saying: -For pity sake and for pity sake let us have no political discussion on this day of all days in the year. -Quite right, ma'am, said uncle Charles. Now Simon, that's quite enough now. Not another word now. -Yes, yes, said Mr Dedalus quickly. He uncovered the dish boldly and said : -Now then, who's for more turkey? Nobody answered. Dante said: -Nice language for any catholic to use! -Mrs Riordan, I appeal to you, said Mrs Dedalus, to let the matter drop now. Dante turned on her and said: -And am I to sit hear and listen to the pastors of my church being flouted? -Nobody is saying a word against them, said Mr Dedalus, so long as they don't meddle in politics. 16

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

-The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken, said Dante, and they must be obeyed. -Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may leave their church alone. -You hear? said Dante turning to Mrs Dedalus. -Mr Casey! Simon! said Mrs Dedalus. Let it end now. -Too bad! Too bad! said uncle Charles. What? cried Mr Dedalus. Were we to desert him 1 at the bidding of the English people? -He was no longer worthy to lead, said Dante. He was a public sinner. -We are all sinners and black sinners, said Mr Casey coldly. -Woe be to the man by whom the scandal cometh! said Mrs Riordan. It would be better for him that a millstone were tied about his neck and that he were cast into the depth of the sea rather than that he should scandalize one of these, my least little ones. That is language of the Holy Ghost. -And very bad language if you ask me, said Mr Dedalus coolly. -Simon! Simon! said uncle Charles. The boy.... -0, he'll remember all this when he grows up, said Dante hotly-the language he heard against God and religion and priests in his own home. -Let him remember too, cried Mr Casey to her from across the table, the language with which the priests and the priests' pawns broke Parnell's heart and hounded him into his grave. Let him remember that too when he grows

up.

-Sons of bitches! cried Mr Dedalus. When he was down they turned on him to betray him and rend him like rats in a sewer. Low lived dogs! And they look it! By Christ, they look it! J Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish political leader, who had died not two months before this dinner See p. 59·

JJ-c

17

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

-They behaved rightly, cried Dante. They obeyed their bishops and their priests. Honour to them ! -Well, it is perfectly dreadful to say that not even for one day in the year, said Mrs Dedalus, can we be free from these dreadful disputes! ... Dante broke in angrily : -If we are a priestridden race we ought to be proud of it! They are the apple of God's eye. Touch them not, says Christ, for they are the apple of My eye. -And can we not love our country then? asked Mr Casey. Are we not to follow the man that was born to lead us? -A traitor to his country! replied Dante. A traitor, an adulterer! The priests were right to abandon him. The priests were always the true friends of Ireland. -Were they, faith? said Mr Casey . . . . -Right! Right! They were always right! God and morality and religion come first. Mrs Dedalus, seeing her excitement, said to her: -Mrs Riordan, don't excite yourself answering them. -God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world! Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash. -Very well, then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland! -John! John! cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve. Dante started across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb. -No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God! -Blasphemer! Devil ! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face. Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back 18

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

into his chair again, talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes, repeating: -Away with God, I say! Dante shoved her chair violently as:de and left the table, upsetting her napkinring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easychair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and foll8wed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage: -Devil out of hell! We won ! We crushed him to death! Fiend! The door slammed behind her. Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain. -Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king! He sobbed loudly and bitterly. Stephen, raising his terrorstricken face, saw that his father's eyes were full of tears. A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 71-9 This extract establishes the political and social background for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This background-of a missed opportunity for some form of Irish political independence from England, missed because the Irish people could not agree among themselves to support the policies of Parnell-is behind each of Joyce's novels. Here we see how pro- and anti-Parnell feelings could split families. Later, as Stephen Dedalus approaches manhood, we realise the extent to which his possibilities as an Irish 'artist' .are severely curtailed by the demoralisation (as Joyce believed) of the young after the death of Parnell. For Joyce, Irish politics in the 189os and the first decade of the new century \\'ere a dispiriting spectacle of warring factions from the lowest 'ward politics' (after the 19

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

American model) to head-in-the-clouds Irish language and Gaelic sports reform. It is important in absorbing the feel of socio-political dissentions round the Christmas dinner table, from the spiteful to the sentimental, not to lose sight of the human drama. Can you identify who starts this argument, who carries it forward, who attempts to make peace, and so forth? This would be to describe the dramatic rhythm of the scene. The 'nets' appear to Stephen not only as simple forces of repression but sometimes as avenues of escape. Stephen first experiences, then learns to reject these 'lures'. 9

-I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to speak to you on a very important subject. -Yes, sir. -Have you ever felt that you had a vocation? Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word suddenly. The priest waited for the answer and added: -1 mean have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire to join the order. Think. -I have sometimes thought of it, said Stephen. The priest let the blind cord fall to one side and, uniting his hands, leaned his chin gravely upon them, communing with himself. -In a college like this, he said at length, there is one boy or perhaps two or three boys whom God calls to the religious life. Such a boy is marked off from his companions by his piety, by the good example he shows to others. He is looked up to by them; he is chosen perhaps as prefect by his fellow sodalists. And you, Stephen, have been such a boy in this college, prefect of Our Blessed Lady's sodality. 20

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

Perhaps you are the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself. A strong note of pride reinforcing the gravity of the priest's voice made Stephen's heart quicken in response. -To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the greatest honour that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No king or emperor on this earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself has the power of a priest of God : the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them, the power, the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come down upon the altar and take the form of bread and wine. What an a\vful power, Stephen! A flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this proud address an echo of his own proud musings. How often had he seen himself as a priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which angels and saints stood in reverence! His soul had loved to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young and silentmannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their distance from it. In that dim life which he had lived through in his musings he had assumed the voices and gestures which he had noted with various priests. He had bent his knee sideways like such a one, he had shaken the thurible only slightly like such a one, his chasuble had swung open like that of such another as he turned to the altar again after having blessed the people. And above all it had pleased him to fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He shrank from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to imagine that all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the 21

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

ritual should assign to him so clear and final an office. He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his shoulders covered with a humeral veil, holding the paten within its folds or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as deacon in a dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his hands joined and his face towards the people, and sing the chant Ite, missa est. If ever he had seen himself celebrant it was as in the pictures of the mass in his child's massbook, in a church without worshippers, save for the angel of the sacrifice, at a bare altar and served by an acolyte scarcely more boyish than himself. In vague sacrificial or scaramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality: and it was partly the absence of an appointed rite which had always constrained him to inaction whether he had allowed silence to cover his anger or pride or had suffered only an embrace he longed to give. A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 174-6 In this extract we can note precisely what it is about a life in the Church which appeals to Stephen. Note the language used to describe how Stephen would feel as a priest. What would be satisfied in Stephen if he became a priest, and, by implication, what would he be saved from?

IO

Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped city. Now, at the name of the fabulous

22

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

artificer, 2 he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of sorne medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been follJwing through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being? His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs .... His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain .... What were they now but the 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? His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly 2 Daedalos of Crete was the mythological inventor of the Labyrinth and of wings for himself and his son Icarus to use to fly home to Greece.

23

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable .... There was a long rivulet in the strand : and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the highdrifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him; and the grey warm air was still : and .a new wild life was singing in his veins. Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and sub-

terfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he? He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, _alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures, of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air. A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

24

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint flame trembled on her cheek. -Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy. He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him. Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 184-6 This is Stephen's visionary artistic experience, not so much a conversion as a confirmation. It provides him with both a 'mythic' forbear (a sanction) and a vision of the ideal which can yet be found on earth. Both images are 'birds', one of the air, one of the sea. The initial experience of 'beauty' may be immediate, undefinable, romantic, but Stephen is soon at work analysing it, putting his idea of it-and of the art which can create it--on a firm basis :

25

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

II

-To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas 3 says: Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur, inteyritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three

thinys are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehen-

sion? Are you following? -Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you. Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his head. -Look at that basket, he said. -1 see it, said Lynch. -In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is inteyritas. -Bull's eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on. -Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-I274), Catholic theologian. Author of Summa Theoloyica. Stephen proposes to base his theory of art on an interpretation of Aquinas though he no longer at this time considers himself a member of the Catholic Church. 3

26

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words the synthesis of immediate perception is folbwed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia. -Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is claritas and you win the cigar. -The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalisation which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase

27

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart. Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had called up around them a thoughtenchanted silence. A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 218-20 Stephen's 'theory of art' is a bold and precocious attempt to invent a personal tradition for himself as an artist. He feels he cannot create within the ordinarily available traditions, which he elsewhere calls either 'didactic' or 'pornographic', i.e., arts which either repel or attract. (One can see the rival traditions of realismnaturalism and aestheticism behind his distinction.) His art will be neither, but will be 'static', a hard, clear, concrete object which will have no obligation to his environment on the one hand and on the other will not merely be a projection of his own desires. Armed with both vision and theory, Stephen sets about the serious job of being an 'artist'. The novel closes with a fragment of Stephen's diary, wherein we see a kind of intermediate stage between his life and the art he intends to make out of it. Note the alternation between romantic and realistic modes in the entries. In the entry for April 26th, the first sentence has a realistic, wry twist ('new secondhand'), while the second attempts to remake the 'realism' of the mother's lament into a statement of his own, both by its rhythm and the appended 'Amen'. 12 16 April: Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices : the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall

28

'A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN'

ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say : We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth. 26 April: Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, 0 life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. 27 April: Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. A Portrait of the Artist, p. 252 With this invocation, A Portrait of the Artist as a Y ouny Man ends. Stephen presumably sets off from his native Ireland, testing his new wings, making a decisive effort to free himself from the 'nets' of family, nation and Church.

29

'Uiysses 1

1914 was an annus mirabilis for Joyce: he completed the Portrait, saw Dubliners finally published, began Ulysses and wrote his play Exiles. When the Great War broke out, Joyce took his family from Trieste to neutral Switzerland, and they lived in Zurich until 1919. Ulysses began, Joyce wrote H. G. Wells, as a 'sequel' to A Portrait of the Artist. In it we discover Stephen Dedal us returned to Dublin after a time in Paris. He is living a few miles south of the city in a converted coastline tower with two other young men. Here he is, early in the morning of June 16, 1904, in conversation with one of them, Buck Mulligan.

13 Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them. -It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, 1 is it? he said kindly. God knows you have more spirit than any of them. 1

30

Knifeblade-Mulligan's nickname for Stephen.

'ULYSSES'

Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steel pen. -Cracked lookingglass of a servant. 2 Tell that to the oxy chap~~ downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and thinks you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it. Cranly's arm. His arm. -And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? . . . . They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly. -Do you wish me to tell you? he asked. -Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything. He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes. Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said : -Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's death? Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said: -What? w·here? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God? -You were making tea, Stephen said, and I went across the landing to get more hot water. Your mother

Stephen, adapting a remark of Oscar Wilde's, has just called this 'a symbol of Irish art'. 3 Haines, the third roommate, an Englishman. 2

31

'ULYSSES'

and some visitor came out of the drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room. -Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget. -You said, Stephen answered, 0, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead. A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan's cheek. -Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that? He shook his constraint from him nervously. -And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It's a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it's injected the wrong way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor Sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it's over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother. He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly : -1 am not thinking of the offence to my mother. -Of what, then? Buck Mulligan asked. -Of the offence to me, Stephen answered. Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel. -0, an impossible person! he exclaimed. Ulysses, pp. 6--9 At first the prose alternates between Mulligan's speech

32

'ULYSSES'

and Stephen's silent thoughts. What is Mulligan's attitude to Stephen here? Stephen's memory of his dead mother and his remorse at having refused to kneel and pray at her deathbed recur prominently throughout the novel. As does Eveline in the Dubliners story of that name, Stephen alternates between obsessive recalls of the latter scene and attempts to free himself from the dead mother's hold over him.

I4 A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery. Where now? Her secrets : old feather fans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the terrible and laughed with others when he sang :

I am the boy That can enjoy Invisibility. Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

And no more turn aside and brood Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for JJ-D 33

'ULYSSES'

her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the childrenss shirts. In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te viryinum chorus excipiat. Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! No mother. Let me be and let me live. Ulysses, pp. 9-11 The Latin which Stephen recalls is from the Last Rites administered to the dying Catholic. Phrases from the Latin become a leitmotif in the novel, signifying Stephen's memory of the deathbed scene. In the above passage, Stephen is musing alone. The shift from Joyce's narration to Stephen's thought is only perceptible in the movement from 'he' to 'me'. Often it could be either speaking. Stephen also feels uneasy over his place among his contemporaries. He resents Mulligan, whom he considers a type of Irishman content to be a paid lackey of England. (In 1904, Ireland was still under British rule.) And he resents the Englishman Haines for his superior manner and his academic interest in the customs of the natives. An hour later, Stephen is teaching English at a school. In the following extracts we see him first with a student

34

'ULYSSES'

who stays behind after class and then collecting his wages from the headmaster. 15 A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called : -Hockey! They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their boots and tongues. Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open copybook. His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak ·eyes looked up pleading. On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent and damp as a snail's bed. He held out his copybook. The word Sums was written on the headline. Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent : his name and seal. -Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, _and show them to you, sir. Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility. -Do you understand how to do them now? he asked. -Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to copy them off the board, sir. -Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked. -No, sir. Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him under foot, a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? . . . 35

'ULYSSES'

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem .... Sargent peered askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field. Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors .... -Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself? -Yes, sir. In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive.4 With her weak blood and whey-sour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands. Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts : secrets weary of their tyranny : tyrants willing to be dethroned. The sum was done. -It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up. -Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered. He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his copybook back to his desk. -You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said as he followed towards the door the boy's graceless form. -Yes, sir. In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield. In Latin the phrase means either the love a mother bears for her child or the child's love of its mother. 4

36

'ULYSSES'

-Sargent! -Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you. Ulysses, pp. 32-4 The presentation of Stephen's unspoken consciousness makes him a more sympathetic character than he would have been had we seen him merely from the outside. Here, the sight of Cyril Sargent calls up in Stephen thoughts about his own childhood and his relationship to his now dead mother. We should note the difference between the restrained sympathy of his speech and the more emotional thought going on behind it. In the Homeric analogy (see pp. 7-8), Mr. Deasy, Stephen's headmaster, is Nestor, the wise giver of advice to Stephen's Telemachus, the son of Odysseus (Ulysses). An Ulster Irishman and a Protestant, Mr. Deasy-pronounced 'daisy'- is 'very English' in outlook, and he lays down for Stephen yet another path to follow, a very prudent one. 16

-Three twelve, he said. I think you'll find that's right. -Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers. -No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it. Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket. Symbols soiled by greed and misery. -Don't carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You'll pull it out somewhere and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You'll find them very handy. Answer something. 37

'ULYSSES'

-Mine would be often empty, Stephen said. The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times now. Three nooses round me here. Well. I can break them in this instant if I will. -Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say?

Put but money in thy purse. -Iago, Stephen murmured. He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare. -He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth? The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes 5 looked on the empty bay : history is to blame : on me and on my words, unhating. -That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets. -Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt 6 said that. He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail. -1 will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way. Good man, good man. -I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you? Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a 5 Englishmen are 'The seas' ruler'. Haines has the 'sea cold eyes', and has earlier blamed 'history' for England and Ireland's mutual difficulties. 6 Perhaps Victor Hugo.

38

'ULYSSES'

guinea, Kohler, three guineas, Mrs McKernan, five weeks' board. 7 The lump I have is useless. -For the moment, no, Stephen answered. Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savings box. -1 knew you couldn't, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it. We are a generous people but we must also be just. -1 fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy. Ulysses, pp. 36-8 In the latter portions of Ulysses, the narrative voices are varied and themselves become more and more considerably a part of the novel. One of the chapters contains versions of the Dublin story as it might have been told at various periods of English literature. Here is Stephen's situation as John Bunyan might have seen it. 17 But could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth the bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed not for Grace was not there to find that bottle. Heard he then in that clap the voice of the god Bringforth or, what Calmer 8 said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard? Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged up the tube Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he and make more shows according as men do with wives which Phenomenon has commanded them to do by the book Law. Then wotted he 7 8

The list is of Stephen's debts : his salary can hardly reduce it. Leopold Bloom.

39

'ULYSSES'

nought of that other land which is called Believe-on-Me, that is the land of promise which behoves to the king Delightful and shall be for ever where there is no death and no birth neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall come as many as believe on it? Yes, Pious had told him of that land and Chaste had pointed him to the way but the reason was that in the way he fell in with a certain whore of an eyepleasing exterior whose name, she said, is Bird-in-the-Hand and she beguiled him wrongways from the true path by her flatteries that she said to him as, Ho, you pretty man, tum aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is named Two-in-the-Bush or, by some learned, Carnal Concupiscence. Ulysses, pp. 516-7 Interpret the allegorical names, especially 'Bringforth' and 'Phenomenon', as they purport to explain Stephen. Do you think 'the Bunyan view' is Joyce's view of Stephen? Late in the night, Stephen has found his way to a local brothel. Joyce composed this chapter as a surrealistic drama. As what is said in the chapter is not necessarily what they 'really' said, but a fantasy version of it, we may expect to meet both the most arbitrary seeming appearances (here, of Stephen's father Simon as a buzzard and of his dead mother) and the most penetrating insights into the depth of Stephen's (and Leopold Bloom's) beings. 18 STEPHEN:

Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon.

zoE : Go abroad and love a foreign lady.

LYNCH: Across the world for a wife. FLORRY: Dreams go by contraries. STEPHEN:

40

(Extending his arms) It was here. Street of

'ULYSSES'

harlots. In Serpentine Avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where's the red carpet spread? BLOOM : (Approachiny Stephen) Look ... STEPHEN: No, I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World without end. (He cries) Pater! Free! BLOOM: I say, look ... STEPHEN: Break my spirit, will he? 0 merde alors! (He cries, his vulture talons sharpened) Hola! Hillyho!

(Simon Dedalus' voice hilloes in answer, somewhat sleepy but ready) SIMON: That's all right. (He (He swoops uncertainly throuyh the air, wheeliny, utteriny cries of heartening, on strong ponderous buzzard winys) Ho, boy! Are you going to win?

Hoop! Pschatt! Stable with those halfcastes. Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ass. Head up! Keep our flag flying! An eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed. Ulster king at arms! hai hoop! ... Ulysses, p. 674 19 STEPHEN :

Ho !

-(Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark throuyh the floor in leper grey with a wreath of faded orange blossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with grave mould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth utteriny a silent word. A choir of viryins and confessors sing voicelessly.) THE CHOIR:

Liliata rutilantium te confessorum. Iubilantium te virginum ... (From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured

jester's dress of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curliny bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand) 41

'ULYSSES'

She's beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother. (He upturns his eyes) Mercurial Malachi. THE MOTHER: (With the subtle smile of death's madness) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead. STEPHEN: (Horrorstruck) Lemur, who are you? What bogeyman's trick is this? BUCK MULLIGAN : (Shakes his curling capbell) The mockery of it! Kinch killed her dogs body bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. (Tears of molten butter fall from his eyes into the scone) Our great sweet mother! Epi oinopa ponton. THE MOTHER: (Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted ashes) All must go through it, Stephen. More wom·en than men in the world. You too. Time will BUCK MULLIGAN:

come.

(Choking with fright, remorse and horror) They said I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny. THE MOTHER : (A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth) You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery. STEPHEN: (Eayerly) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men. THE MOTHER : Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen. STEPHEN: The ghoul! Hyena! THE MOTHER : I pray for you in my other world. G·et Dilly to make you that boiled rice every night after your brain work. Years and years I loved you, 0 my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb. zoE : (Fanniny herself with the yrate fan) I'm melting! FLORRY: (Points to Stephen) Look! He's white. BLOOM: (Goes to the window to open it more) Giddy. THE MOTHER: (With smouldering eyes) Repent! 0, the fire of hell! STEPHEN:

42

'ULYSSES' STEPHEN :

(Panting) The corpsechewer! Raw head and

bloody bones!

(Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen breath) Beware! (She raises her blackened, withered right arm slowly towards Stephen's breast with outstretched fingers) Beware! God's hand! (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart) STEPHEN: (Stranyled with rage) Shite! (His features yrow drawn and grey and old) BLOOM: (At the window) What? STEPHEN : Ah non, par exemple! The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam! FLORRY: Give him some cold water. Wait. (She rushes out) THE MOTHER: (Wrings her hands slowly, moaniny desperately) 0 Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, 0 divine Sacred Heart!

THE MOTHER:

No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you if you can ! I'll bring you all to heel ! THE MOTHER: (In the agony of her deathrattle) Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my sake ! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary. STEPHEN:

Nothung! (He lifts his ashplant hiyh with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.) STEPHEN:

THE GASJET: Pwfungg! BLOOM : Stop! LYNCH: (Rushes forward

and seizes Stephen's hand) Here!

Hold on! Don't run amok! BELLA: Police!

(Stephen abandoning his ashplant, his head and arms thrown back stark, beats the ground and flees from the room past the whores at the door) Ulysses, pp. 68o-83 43

'ULYSSES'

What do the fantasy-appearances of Stephen's parents suggest about his present difficulties? Leopold Bloom, who has followed Stephen to the brothel, takes him home with him afterwards. The chapter is given as a series of questions and answers. 20

What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make to Stephen, noctambulist? To pass in repose the hours intervening between Thursday (proper) and Friday (normal) on an extemporised cubicle in the apartment immediately above the kitchen and immediately adjacent to the sleeping apartment of his host and hostess. What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolongation of such extemporisation? For the guest : security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the host: rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the hostess: disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian pronunciation. Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and a hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew's daughter? Because the way to daughter led through mother, the way to mother through daughter.... Was the proposal of asylum accepted? Promptly inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined. . . . Ulysses, pp. 814-5 While the older figures in Dubliners tend to be trial 'projections' of Joyce himself-what he might turn into if

44

'ULYSSES'

he were to remain in Dublin-the thirty-eight year old advertising canvasser who balances Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses is not. Nor is he that other adult figure, the restrictive parent. Bloom is no pushing, successful man, nor is he one of Dublin's pub-crawling indigents. He has plans, rather too many, and too fancifully conceived, but while their fancifulness is an indication of their ineffectuality, it also indicates the quickness and humour of his mind. 2I

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high. -Mkgnao! -0, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire. The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr. Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly, the lithe black form. Clean to see : the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees. -Milk for the pussens, he said. -Mrkgnao! the cat cried. They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive to. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me. -Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

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Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. -Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly. She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor. -Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap. He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps. He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for a mutton kidney at Buckley's. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better a pork kidney at Dlugacz's. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough? To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced round him. No. On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter she likes in the morning. Ulysses, pp. 65-6 'She' is mostly the cat, but sometimes Bloom's wife Molly. The ambiguity suggests Bloom is meditating as much on femininity (as he knows it) as on cats. Joyce develops the relationship between Bloom and his wife with deft dialogue. 46

'ULYSSES'

22

Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stopped and gathered them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quick heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs Marion. -Poldy! Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm yellow twilight towards her tousled head. -Who are the letters for? He looked at them. Mullingar. Milly. -A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you. And a letter for you. He laid her card and letter on the twill bedspread near the curve of her knees. -Do you want the blind up? Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow.

-That do? he asked, turning. She was reading the card, propped on her elbow. -She got the things, she said. He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back slowly with a snug sigh. -Hurry up with that tea, she said. I'm parched. -The kettle is boiling, he said. But he delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled linen : and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed. As he went down the kitchen stairs she called: -Poldy! -What? -Scald the teapot. Ulysses, pp. 74-5 Elsewhere full comment on his own creation, here Joyce is laconic. Two points are at issue : that Bloom has received 47

'ULYSSES'

a letter and Molly only a card from their daughter, who is away for the summer working, and that Molly has received a letter she does not want to open with Bloom present. In fact, as Bloom knows, it is a letter from Molly's manager (she is a singer), Blazes Boylan, and the letter confirms a tryst the two have arranged for that afternoon under cover of a meeting to discuss concert plans. A few hours later, Bloom is thinking (as he does so often during the day) of that meeting.

23

He's coming in the afternoon. Her songs. Plasto's. Sir Philip Crampton's memorial fountain bust. Who was he? -How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow in salute. -He doesn't see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do? -Who? Mr Dedalus asked. -Blazes Boylan, Mr Powers said. There he is airing his quiff. Just that moment I was thinking. Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the white disc of a straw hat flashed reply: passed. Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees? Fascination. Worst ~an in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I am just looking at them : well pared. And after: thinking alone. Body getting a bit softy. I would notice that from remembering. What causes that I suppose the skin can't contract quickly enough when the flesh falls off. But the shape is there. The shape is there still. Shoulders. Hips.

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Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks behind. He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant glance over their faces. Mr Power asked : -How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom? -0 very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It's a good idea, you see . . . -Are you going yourself? -Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other. Ulysses, pp. 114-5 Can you comment on the 'irrelevance' of what Bloom thinks of both before and after Boylan is brought to his notice? Mr. Bloom and his acquaintances including Stephen Dedalus's father Simon, are here riding together in a funeral carriage, going to the interment of an old crony, Paddy Dignam. A few moments earlier, Bloom had noticed Stephen in the street.

24 All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the smoother road past Watery lane. Mr Bloom at gaze saw a lithe young man, clad in mourning, .a wide hat. -There's a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus, he said. -Who is that? -Your son and heir. -Where is he? Mr Dedalus said, stretching over across. The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup roadway before the tenement houses, lurched JJ-E 49

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round the corner and, swerving back to the tramtrack, rolled on noisily with chattering wheels. Mr Dedalus fell back, saying : -Was that Mulligan cad with him? His fidus Achates? -No, Mr Bloom said. He was alone. -Down with his aunt Sally, I suppose, Mr Dedalus said, the Goulding faction, the drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump of dung, the wise child that knows her own father. Mr Bloom smiled joylessly on Ringsend road. Wallace Bros the bottleworks. Dodder bridge. Richie Goulding and the legal bag. Goulding, Collis and Ward he calls the firm. His jokes are getting a bit damp. Great card he was. Waltzing in Stamer street with Ignatius Gallaher on a Sunday morning, the landlady's two hats pinned on his head. Out on the rampage all night. Beginning to tell on him now : that backache of his, I fear. Wife ironing his back. Thinks he'll cure it with pills. All breadcrumbs they are. About six hundred per cent profit. -He's in with a lowdown crowd, Mr Dedalus snarled. That Mulligan is a contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks all over Dublin. But with the help of God and His blessed mother I'll make it my business to write a letter one of those days to his mother or his aunt or whatever she is that will open her eye as wide as a gate. I'll tickle his catastrophe believe you me. He cried above the clatter of the wheels. -1 won't have her bastard of a nephew ruin my son. A counter-jumper's son. Selling tapes in my cousin, Peter Paul M'Swiney's. Not likely. He ceased. Mr Bloom glanced from his angry moustache to Mr Power's mild face and Martin Cunningham's eyes and beard, gravely shaking. Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. 50

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Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Ulysses, pp. 109-10 This section defines the differences between Bloom and Simon Dedalus. Bloom's reaction to Dedalus's tirade is complex, and proceeds from instinctive dislike of the man to admission that 'He is right' and a certain sympathy with him. This movement of mind is typical of Bloom, who is capable of responding sympathetically under adverse conditions. But typical, too, is the way he allows his sympathy to spill over into a fantasy about his own son, 'little Rudy', who died in the second week of infancy, nine years before. In the late afternoon we see Bloom again in company, having called in at a pub to keep an appointment. The chapter has a new narrator, who relates unsympathetically how 'the citizen', an ardent Irish Nationalist, picked a fight with Bloom.

25 But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the dropsy and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him. -Let me alone, says he. And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and he bawls out of him : -Three cheers for Israel ! Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ's sake and don't be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there's always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about bloody nothing. Gob, it'd turn the porter sour in your guts, so it would. 51

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And all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation round the door and Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew and a slut shouts out of her: -Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister! And says he: -Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God. -He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead. -Whose God? says the citizen. -Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me. Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop. -By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here. -Stop! Stop! says Joe. A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid farewell to Nagyasagos uram Lip6ti Virag, late of Messrs Alexander Thorn's, printers to His Majesty, on the occasion of his departure for the distant clime of Szazharminczbrojugulyas-Dugulas (Meadow of Murmuring Waters). The ceremony which went off with great eclat was characterised by the most affecting cordiality. An illuminated scroll of ancient Irish vellum, the work of Irish artists, was presented to the distinguished phenomenologist on behalf of a large section of the community and was accompanied by the gift of a silver casket, tastefully executed in the style of ancient Celtic ornament, a work which reflects every credit on the makers, Messrs

52

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Jacob agus Jacob. The departing guest was the recipient of a hearty ovation, many of those who were present being visibly moved when the select orchestra of Irish pipes struck up the wellknown strains of Come back to Erin, followed immediately by Rakoczy's March . ... Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play in the Queen's royal theatre. -Where is he till I murder him? And Ned and ]. G. paralysed with the laughing. -Bloody wars, says I, I'll be in for the last gospel. But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag's head round the other way and off with him. -Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop. Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the sun was in his eyes or he'd have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old mongrel after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street. The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli 's scale, and there is no record extant of a sin1ilar seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of I 534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre appears to have been that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn's Quay ward and parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods and one square pole or perch. All the lordly residences in the vicinity of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble edifice itself, in which at the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which it is to be feared all the occupants have been buried alive. From the reports of eyewitnesses it

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transpires that the seismic waves were accompanied by a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character.... Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed south west by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received from all parts of the different continents and the sovereign pontiff has been graciously pleased to decree that a special missa pro defunctis shall be celebrated simultaneously by the ordinaries of each and every cathedral church of all the episcopal dioceses subject to the spiritual authority of the Holy See in suffrage of the souls of those faithful departed who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst. The work of salvage, removal of debris human remains etc has been entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son, 159, Great Brunswick Street and Messrs T. C. Martin, 77, 78, 79 and 8o, North Wall, assisted by the men and officers of the Duke of Cornwall's light infantry. . . . You never saw the like of it in all your born puff. Gob, if he got that lottery ticket on the side of his poll he'd remember the gold cup, he would so, but begob the citizen would have been lagged for assault and battery and Joe for aiding and abetting. The jarvey saved his life by furious driving as sure as God made Moses. What? 0, Jesus, he did. And he let a volley of oaths after him. -Did I kill him, says he, or what? And he shouting to the bloody dog. -After him, Garry ! After him, boy ! And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding the corner and old sheepface on it gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his lugs back for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb from limb. Hundred to five! Jesus, he took the value of it out of him, I promise you. When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to 54

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heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel. Ulysses, pp. 444-9 This is the 'Cyclops' episode (in the Homeric parody) and Ulysses-Bloom is pitted against the Cyclops-'citizen' Bloom's own mind now clearly established for us, Joyce is here embarked on that stylistic experimentation which characterises the latter portions of Ulysses and in this passage there are three distinct parodic sections which set the present action in various heroic ('cyclopean') lights, two pseudo-newspaper reports-in the then florid style of popular journalism-and one biblical. Each inflates the issue at hand, but with what effect? Who or what is being got at by these parodies? The same question-what is the effect of Joyce's parodystyles as a commentary on his Dublin action-may be asked about the next extract, from the hospital chapter of Ulysses: late in the evening, Bloom joins Stephen and his medical companions round a table at a Dublin maternity hospital. (Bloom's meeting with Stephen is thus accidental: he has stopped by to inquire after a woman in labour.) In the style Joyce chose to suit his subject in this chapter-the recapitulation of English prose styles to match the stages of human gestation-the naming of the company and Leopold Bloom's interest in Stephen come out in a parody of the chivalric style of Sir Thomas Malory. 55

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26 Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be drunken an they might. There was a sort of scholars along either side the board, that is to wit, Dixon yclept junior of saint Mary Merciable's with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, scholars of medicine, and the franklin that hight Lenehan and one from Alba Longa, one Crotthers, and young Stephen that had mien of a frere that was at head of the board and Costello that men clepen Punch Costello all long of a mastery of him erewhile gested (and of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the most drunken that demanded still of more mead) and beside the meek sir Leopold. But on young Malachi they waited for that he promised to have come and such as intended to no goodness said how he had broke his avow. And sir Leopold sat with them for he bore fast friendship to sir Simon and to this his son young Stephen and for that his languor becalmed him there after longest wanderings insomuch as they feasted him for that time in the honourablest manner. Ruth red him, love led on with will to wander, loth to leave .... Ulysses, p. 507 The chapter in which Bloom follows Stephen to a Dublin brothel is the longest in the novel. It is written in the form of a play, with dialogue and extended stage directions. This 'play' is a surrealistic fantasia imagined by Joyce about his characters, who probably never said, as it were, what he attributes to them. As Bloom enters Dublin's 'red-light' district he is confronted by the apparition of his long-dead father, Rudolph Virag, who committed suicide by poison.

27 (The retriever approaches sniffling, nose to the ground. A 56

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sprawled form sneezes. A stooped bearded figure appears yarbed in the lony caftan of an elder in Zion and a smoking cap with mayenta tassels. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yell ow poison streaks are on the drawn face.)

Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with drunken goy ever. So. You catch no money.

RUDOLPH:

(Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat) ]a, ich weiss, papachi. BLOOM:

RUDOLPH:

What you making down this place? Have you

no soul? (With feeble vulture talons he feels the silent face of Bloom) Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob? Ulysses, pp. 568-9 It is in this chapter that Joyce can give free rein to Bloom's schemes for private and public improvement. (The implication is that ordinarily these schemes never become this articulate and remain only possibilities in the 'ideal' Bloom here presented.) But while the imaginary Dubliners of Joyce's surrealist fantasy-drama first applaud 'Bloom's' ideas, they soon, at the prompting of the priest Father Farley, turn on him in the classic pattern of the Irish betrayal of her leaders.

28 My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter in to the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future. 57

BLOOM :

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(Thirtytwo workmen wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland, under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem. It is a colossal edifice, with crystal roof, built in the shape of a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. In the course of its extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. Numerous houses are razed to the ground. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with letters: L. B. Several paupers fall from a ladder. A part of the walls of Dublin, crowded with loyal sightseers, collapses.) THE SIGHTSEERS: (Dying) Morituri te salutant. (They die) . ...

BLOOM : I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses. Com.. pulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival, with masked licence, bonuses for all, esperanto the universal brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors. Free money, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state. . . . FATHER FARLEY: He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. MRS. RIORDAN: (Tears up her will) I'm disappointed in you! You bad man! MOTHER GROGAN :

(Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom)

You beast! You abominable person! . . . THE VEILED SIBYL : (Enthusiastically) I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on earth. BLOOM: (Winks at the bystanders) I bet she's a bonny lassie. THEODORE PUREFOY: (In fishing cap and oilskin jacket)

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He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature. THE VEILED SIBYL: (Stabs herself) My hero god! (She dies) (Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also com-

mit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelson's Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gas ovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys) ALEXANDER J. DOWIE: (Violently) Fellowchristians and anti-

Bloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery recalling the cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Cali ban! THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He's as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!

(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheeps' tails, odd pieces of fat.) Ulysses, pp. 606-12

The Irish Parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, was similarly treated after being denounced by the Irish Catholic clergy as an adulterer. (Mr. Fox was a pseudonym he used when visiting his mistress.) Once the 'hero god' Bloom is 'lynched' by the crowd, the scenario shifts to more private affairs. All day Bloom has refused to face the question of his own wife's adultery that

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afternoon. Now Joyce makes him face it with vengeance, acting as a lackey at the assignation.

29 BOYLAN : (Jumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear) Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom up yet? BLOOM: (In a flunkey's plum plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockinas and powdered wig) I'm afraid not, sir, the

last articles . . . BOYLAN: (Tosses him sixpence) Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash. (He hanys his hat smartly on a pea of Bloom's antlered head) Show me in. I have a little private business with your wife. You understand? BLOOM: Thank you, sir. Yes, sir, Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir. 9 MARION : He ought to feel himself highly honoured. (She plops splashina out of the water) Raoul, darling, come and dry me. I'm in my pelt. Only my new hat and a carriage sponge. BOYLAN: (A merry twinkle in his eye) Topping! Ulysses, pp. 669-70 Despite the abyss of depravity in which this plunges him, shortly thereafter he appears as the old Bloom as he hovers nervously over Stephen (who has been knocked unconscious by a drunken soldier). His feelings of pity and concern mingle with his own feelings of loss over the son Rudy who didn't live and whose death has cast a blight over his relations with his wife. 30

Poetry. Well educated. Pity. (He bends again and undoes the buttons of Stephen's waistcoat) To breathe. (He

BLOOM: 9

6o

Marion Tweedy, Mrs. (Molly) Bloom's maiden name.

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brushes the wood shavings from Stephen's clothes with light hands and fingers) One pound seven. Not hurt anyhow. (He listens) What! . shadows . . . the woods . . . . white breast . . . dim . . . 10 (He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his body.

Bloom holding his hat and ashplant stands erect. A dog barks in the distance. Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. He looks down on Stephen's face and form.) BLOOM: (Communes with the night) Face reminds me of his poor mother. In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl. Best thing could could happen him . . . (He murmurs) ... swear that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or arts . . . (He murmurs) in the rough sands of the sea . . . a cabletow's length from the shore . . . where the tide ebbs . . . and flows . . .

(Silent, thoughtful, alert, he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.) BLOOM : (W onderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy! RUDY: (Gazes unseeing into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.) Ulysses, pp. 702-3 Stephen, nearly unconscious, is murmuring phrases from a poem by W. B. Yeats. His mother, lying on her deathbed, used to ask Stephen to sing it to her in its musical setting. See p. 33· 10

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Bloom's subsequent rescue of Stephen Dedalus from a scrap suggests that an occasion has presented itself whereby Stephen might, with proper handling, become a substi tute son for Bloom. This hope is, of course, of a piece with many of Bloom's other desires, and Joyce treats Bloom's attempt to manipulate Stephen into a relationship with him ironically by writing the entire chapter which follows the brothel scene in cliches. 31

Anyhow, upon weighing the pros and cons, getting on for one as it was, it was high time to be retiring for the night.

The crux was it was a bit risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue (somebody having a temper of her own sometimes) and spoil the hash altogether as on the night he misguidedly brought home a dog (breed unknown) with a lame paw, not that the cases were either identical or the reverse, though he had hurt his hand too, to Ontario Terrace, as he very distinctly remembered, having been there, so to speak. On the other hand it was altogether far ~nd away too late for the Sandymount or Sandycove suggestion so that he was in some perplexity as to which of the two alternatives ... Everything pointed to the fact that it behoved him to avail himself to the full of the opportunity, all things considered. His initial impression was that he was a bit standoffish or not over effusive but it grew on him someway. For one thing he mightn't what you call jump at the idea, if approached, and what mostly worried him was he didn't know how to lead up to it or word it exactly, supposing he did entertain the proposal, as it would afford him very great personal pleasure if he would allow him to help to put coin in his way or some wardrobe, if found suitable. At all events he wound up by concluding, eschewing for the nonce hidebound precedent, a cup of Epp's cocoa

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and a shakedown for the night plus the use of a rug or two and overcoat doubled into a pillow. At least he would be in safe hands and as warm as a toast on a trivet. He failed to perceive any very vast amount of harm in that always with the proviso no rumpus of any sort was kicked up. Ulysses, p. 765 In the penultimate chapter Stephen turns down Bloom's offer of a night's lodging and goes off into the night. Joyce 'reduces' Bloom's reactions after Stephen has left, in the question-and-answer style of the chapter.

32 Alone. what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Farenheit, Centigrade or Reumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn. Ulysses, p. 827 'Alone', Bloom mulls over his long day. Despite his many resolutions, quickly taken, quickly abandoned, to either confront Molly and Boylan with his knowledge or to leave her, he finds himself 'home', with an unfaithful 'Penelope'. Joyce offers an analysis in the style of a clinical report.

33 With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections affected? Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity. . . . Equanimity? As natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance with his, her and their 63

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natured natures, of dissimilar similarity. As not as calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in consequence of collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money under false pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason, felony, mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking, practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field, perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king's enemies, impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and premeditated murder. As not more abnormal than all other altered processes of adaptation to altered conditions of existence, resulting in a reciprocal equilibrium between the bodily organism and its attendant circumstances, foods, beverages, acquired habits, indulged inclinations, significant disease. As more than inevitable, irreparable. Ulysses, pp. 864-5 So in the end, Bloom 'accepts' the situation, acting either in a cowardly manner or in a brave and heroic one, depending on your point of view. Joyce takes no sides here, though he presents many, his various 'styles' enforcing different attitudes. The style of the present chapter he himself called in the list of Ulysses' styles he made for a friend 'impersonal', and we fade out on a Bloom mulling over, 'the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars.' Joyce put in a large egg-shaped full-stop after this chapter, to signify that in a way his novel was finished, though it had one chapter yet to go. In that final chapter we do not see any further action by Bloom or Stephen, only the cogi64

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tations of Bloom's wife Molly as she lies next to him, droping off to sleep. This chapter, which is known as Molly Bloom's 'soliloquy', has no punctuation, but runs on and on at a level of consciousness below that which we have marked in the waking Bloom and Stephen. Perhaps this is the way women 'think' (according to Joyce), or perhaps Bloom and Stephen think like this, too, when they are nearly asleep. In any case, the chapter provides a coda to Bloom's hopes and fears, and we are left to judge how likely it is that he will resolve his difficulties satisfactorily with a woman like this.

34 Bartell dArcy too that he used to make fun of when he commenced kissing me on the choir stairs after I sang Gounods Ave Maria what are we waiting for 0 my heart kiss me straight on the brow and part which is my brown part he was pretty hot for all his tinny voice too my low notes he was always raving about if you can believe him I liked the way he used his mouth singing then he said wasnt it terrible to do that there in a place like that I dont see anything so terrible about it Ill tell him about that some day not now and surprise him ay and Ill take him there and show him the very place too we did it so now there you are like it or lump it he thinks nothing can happen without him knowing he hadnt an idea about my mother till we were engaged otherwise hed never have got me so cheap as he did he was 10 times worse himself anyhow begging me to give him a tiny bit cut off my drawers that was the evening coming along Kenilworth square he kissed me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off asking me questions is it permitted to inquire the shape of my bedroom so I let him keep it as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always JJ-F

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skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin starling right against the sun so he could see every atom she had on Ulysses, pp. 881-2 The course Molly's consciousness takes is interesting to follow: she remembers past amours, enjoys the memory, begins to feel guilty, blames Bloom, exonerates herself, and so over again. As she thinks on, her memories of the past centre on her only really happy time, the period of courting before she married Bloom.

35 I never thought that would be my name Bloom when I used to write it in print to see how it looked on a visiting card or practising for the butcher and oblige M Bloom youre looking blooming Josie used to say after I married him well its better than Breen or Briggs does brig or those awful names with bottom in them Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of a bottom Mulvey I wouldnt go mad about either or suppose I divorced him Mrs Boylan my mother whoever she was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely one she had Lunita Laredo the fun we had running along Willis road to Europa point twisting in and out all round the other side of Jersey they were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them I was jumping up at the pepper trees and the white poplars pulling the leaves off and throwing them at him he went to India he was to write the voyages those men have to make to the ends of the world and back its the least they might get a squeeze or two at a woman while they can going out to be drowned or blown up somewhere I went up windmill hill to the flats 66

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that Sunday morning with Captain Rubios that was dead spyglass like the sentry had he said hed have one or two from on board I wore that frock from the B Marche Paris and the coral necklace the straits shining I could see over to Morocco almost the bay of Tangier white and the Atlas mountain with snow on it and the straits like a river so clear Harry Molly Darling I was thinking of him on the sea all the time after at mass when my petticoat began to slip down at the elevation weeks and weeks I kept the handkerchief under my pillow for the smell of him there was no decent perfume to be got in that Gibraltar only that cheap peau despagne that faded and left a stink on you more than anything else I wanted to give him a memento he gave me that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck that I gave Gardner going to South Africa where those Boers killed him with their war and fever but they were well beaten all the same as if it brought its bad luck with it like an opal or pearl must have been pure 16 carat gold because it was very heavy I can see his face clean shaven Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that train again weeping tone once in the dear deaead days beyond recall Ulysses, pp. 903-4 The following extract describes yet another middleageing husband in the act of losing 'control' of his wife, not, by an act of determined will, nor like Bloom in Ulysses to an actual present lover. Gabriel Conroy in 'The Dead' (19o6), after an evening of minor but telling contretemps, has been romanticising to himself his relationship to Gretta, his wife, as a kind of 'compensation'. It does not last.

36 He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm swiftly about her body and drawing her towards him, he said softly: 67

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'Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?' She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly : 'Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?' She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears: '0, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Auyhrim.' She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-stili for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, wellfilled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror and his glimmering giltrimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said: 'What about the song? Why does that make you cry?' She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice. 'Why, Gretta?' he asked. 'I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.' 'And who was the person long ago?' asked Gabriel, smiling. 'It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother,' she said. The smile passed away from Gabriel's face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins. 'Someone you were in love with?' he asked ironically. 'It was a young boy I used to know,' she answered, 'named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Auyhrim. He was very delicate.' Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.

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'I can see him so plainly,' she said, after a moment. 'Such eyes as he had : big dark eyes ! And such an expression in them-an expression ! ' '0 then, you were in love with him?' said Gabriel. 'I used to go out walking with him,' she said, 'when I was in Galway.' A thought flew across Gabriel's mind. 'Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?' he said coldly. She looked at him and asked in surprise : 'What for?' Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said : 'How do I know? To see him perhaps.' She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence. 'He is dead,' she said at length. 'He died when he was only seventeen. Isn't it a terrible thing to die so young as that?' 'What was he?' asked Gabriel, still ironically. 'He was in the gasworks,' she said. Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure ... a nervous wellmeaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead. He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent. 'I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,' he said. 69

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'I was great with him at that time,' she said. Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, carressed one of her hands and said, also sadly: 'And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?' 'I think he died for me,' she answered. A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again for he felt that she would tell him of herself. Her hand was warm and moist : it did not respond to his touch, but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that spring morning . . . . She was fast asleep. Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have been then. in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death .... The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full 70

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glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him tum to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, soft] y falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. Dubliners, pp. 5ID--I4 Joyce surrounds his finale with ambiguity: is Gabriel overcoming his egotism, learning to accept his limited share of life, or is he giving up the fight, relaxing into a kind of 71

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living death? Or can both be true? This last story in Dubliners, written a few years after the others in the volume, turned out to be oddly prophetic of Joyce's concerns for the next fifteen years and more. Within a year of writing it, he was already planning Ulysses.

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1

Finnegans Wake'

For the next seventeen years, between bouts of iritis (an excruciatingly painful eye disease), Joyce worked at a book which came to be called his 'Work in Progress'. Its final title, Finnegans Wake, only became generally known with its publication in 1939. After Joyce completed Ulysses he was asked what he

was going to write next and he replied, 'a history of the world', which is what Finnegans Wake is: an allegorical history of the universe, from creation to judgement day. Like Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub (which Joyce often alludes to), the Wake presents its essentially comic version of history in the guise of events happening to particular individuals. But where in Swift, Peter, Martin and Jack stand for Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism (and later the Church of England) and Calvinism, Joyce's characters stand for no particular institutions, but rather for general forces ~nd impulses and 'principles' underlying universal history. Often the events in Joyce's homely domestic plot -which concerns a Dublin publican, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE) and his family-are made to stand simutaneously for a number of historical events. Joyce effects this by punning. 73

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For example: one of Earwicker's sons is the 'artist-type' of person, very like James Joyce himself. (The Earwicker family story is often an allegory of the Joyce family.) One of the questions asked this artist is, 'Was liffe worth leaving?' This means both 'Was life worth living' and 'Was Liffey worth leaving?' The River Liffey runs through Dublin and so the second question means, was it worth it for the artist to leave Dublin (and go to live on the Continent). A little later, the same questioner says,

37 But, by Jove Chronides, Seed of Summ, after at he had bate his breastplates for, forforget, forforgetting his birdsplace, it was soon that, that he, that he rehad himself. By a prayer? No, that comes later. By contrite attrition? Nay, that we passed. Mid esercizism? So is nicht. Finnegans Wake, p. 231 This is an explanation of how the Artist regained his selfconfidence (rehad himself), which he had lost (as did Stephen Dedalus) sometime after his first 'leaving' of Dublin. The stuttering of the speaker here (for, forforget, forforgetting ... that, that he, that he rehad), the reader of Finneyans Wake comes to recognise as the trait of the artist's brother, who is in every way his polar opposite, and so we must be wary of the 'explanation' offered. That explanation is obscure, no doubt deliberately, for such things are very difficult to explain. The Artist rehad himself 'Mid esercizism', says the speaker, and it is the reader's job to sort out the real words which have gone to make up this phrase: Mid is short for amid, but it is also the way a German pronounces mitt (which means with). 'Esercizism' is harder, perhaps finally impenetrable though con74

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tinually teasing: it appears to contain parts of the words exorcism, exercise, esoteric. All these and others (essor is a root stem meaning flight) are serio-comic explanations of the regaining of self-confidence which should have obvious significance for the reader familiar with Joyce's own life and writing. But at the same time as the real reason is held out to us it is shrouded in even darker mystery. Some readers will think this kind of thing very funny; others will not, and they will never think much of Finneyans Wake. 1oyce calls his book, a grand funferall this sound seemetery this claybook this allaphbed the meandertale and a meanderthalltale the book of Doublends Jined this Eyrawyggla saga the humphriad a puling sample jungle of woods this oldworld epistola the gobbleydumped turkery this prepronomial funferall the Tiberiast duplex Miliken's Make your new Irish stew the Wake These are only a few of what the names for the Wake itself, all taken from the first two hundred pages, and the actual title is not used until page 607. In addition to hundreds of others, similar phrases refer to the book at second hand: that is, they describe its hero or a mysterious letter supposed to have been dictated by his wife to his artist son. The letter is an attempt to exonerate the hero 75

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from certain accusations made against him, and so, in a manner of speaking the letter is a symbol for Joyce's book as a whole. The letter is called at one point 'this radioossilating epiepistle', a description which fits Finneyans Wake itself, oscillating like radio waves (perhaps between the Dublin Earwickers and all of history) and if not a full-fledged 'epistle' (as say, the Bible is complete from Genesis to Apocalypse then at least an 'epiepistle', a letter 'based on' (epi) a larger epistle, as an epicycle is a small circle revolving on the circumference of a larger one. In the first chapter we read of the death of Finnegan 1 he falls off his ladder-and of his wake. The hod-carrier is here a symbol for the mythic Irish hero Finn (and both are further associated with many other heroic figures of the past). When Finnegan (or Finn) sits up at his wake, the mourners ask him to lie down again and play dead : 'Aisy now, you decent man, with your knees and lie quiet and repose your honour's lordship!' The heroic age is over and the great Finn's modem replacement, domestic, bourgeois Earwicker's story begins. A plot outline begins to form and we are introduced to Earwicker, his ancestry, how he got his name, etc. As is usual in Finneyans Wake, there are many alternative explantations presented for each 'fact', and even different facts are put forward, with varying (and usually mutually contradictory) authority. Among many other humorous confusions about Earwicker is the extremely important one of the 'alleged misdemeanour'. At first, without giving us the facts, our author is inclined to take Earwicker's side. 1 The original 'Finnegans Wake' is a ballad about a hod-carrier who sits up in his coffin when a mourner inadvertently pours whisky over him.

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38

Slander, let it lie its flattest, has never been able to convict our good and great and no ordinary Southron Earwicker, that homogenius man, as pious author called him, of any graver impropriety than that ... of having behaved with ongentilmensky immodus opposite a pair of dainty maidservants in the swoolth of the rushy hollow whither, or so the two gown and pinners pleaded, dame nature in all innocency had spontaneously and about the same hour of the eventide sent them both. Finnegans Wake,

p. 34

This seem to imply that Earwicker had exposed himself to the two 'dainty maidservants', but our 'pious author' immediately casts doubt on their 'testimonies' and attempts to excuse his hero: 'a first offence ... with such attenuating circumstances ... an abnormal Saint Swithin's summer and ... a ripe occasion to provoke it.' On the other hand there is little doubt that Earwicker acts guiltily. One day 'ages and ages after the alleged misdemeanour' he is asked the time of day by 'a cad with a pipe', and instead of a normal answer, Earwicker defends himself at immense length ('there is not one little of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications'-like the son who takes after him, Earwicker is a stutterer). But rumour gets around, and a ballad is even made up on the subject of the hero, 'The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly'. (Persse O'Reilly is Earwicker. Earwicker is often punned with 'earwig', which in French is perce oreille.) Joyce arranges an extravagant trial for Earwicker, with many accusers and much cross-evidence presented. Eventually we come to his wife's defence, the letter mentioned

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before, but by this time the matter has become so obscure that the narrator becomes a kind of professor of philology, who attempts to explain the letter as though it were one of the great mysteries of the world. (Here also Finnegans Wake is like A Tale of a Tub, which has many digressions equally intended as satires on the learned world.) This explanation only complicates things further, and the joke comes to be on the 'explainers' of this world. When we finally get back to the Earwickers, it begins to look like much, if not all of what we have been reading, is really Humphrey's dream-the pattern of glorification and accusation is similar to Bloom's treatment in the surrealist fantasy of the brothel chapter in Ulysses. The latter part of the Wake seems to carry us through to morning and many phrases suggest that in the worldhistory allegory morning is Resurrection Day ('Array! Surrection. Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world. 0 rally, 0 rally, 0 rally!'). There has been much debate over just who is the dreamer in Finnegans Wake. Humphrey has been objected to, as not likely to have in his head all the miscellaneous and esoteric knowledge with which the book is packed. But that is not really a proper objection. The Wake can be Humphrey's dream, or James Joyce's dream or the Dream of Mankind or life itself, perhaps the greatest dream of all. In Finnegans Wake none of the characters is an 'individual'; they are all composites, like photographic prints made from a number of superimposed negatives, 39 Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would 78

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indentifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone . . . . Finneyans Wake, p. 51 First the Fall of Finnegan and the lamentation (and celebration) at his wake.

40 What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? . . . . Heed! Heed! It may half been a missfired brick, as some say, or it mought have been due to a collupsus of his back promises, as others looked at it. (There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same) . . . . His howd feeled heavy, his hoddit did shake. (There was a wall of course in erection) Dimb! He stottered from the latter. Damb! he was dud. Dumb! Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm, when a mon merries his lute is all long. For whole the world to see. Shize? I should shee! Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diie? of a trying thirstay mournin? Sobs they sigh did at Fillagain's chrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans of the nation, prostrated in their consternation and their duodisimally profusive plethora of ululation. There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and ci therers and raiders and cinemen too. And the all gianed in with the shoutmost shoviality. Agog and magog and the round of them agrog. To the continuation of that celebration until Hanandhunigan's extermination! Some in kin kin corass, more, kankan keening. Belling him up and filling him down. He's stiff but he's steady is Priam Olim! 'Twas he was the dacent gaylabouring youth. Sharpen his pillowscone, tap up his bier! E'erawhere in this whorl would ye hear sich a din again? With their deepbrow fundigs and the dusty fidelios. They laid him brawdawn alanglast bed. With a bockalips of finisky fore his feet. And a barrow load of guenesis hoer his 79

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head. Tee the tootal of the fluid hang the twoddle of the fuddled, 0! Finnegans Wake, pp. 5-6 The whisky (usquebagh) wakes Tim Finnegan up, but the mourners ask him to remain dead. Healiopolis is Dublin, renamed for the politician Tim Healey. Reasons are advanced why Finnegan is better off dead and with the heroes of the past (Brian Boru, Genghis Khan, etc.). Moreover, they'll look after his grave.

4I Usqueadbaugham! Anam muck an dhoul! Did ye drink

me doornail? Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure like a god on pension and don't be walking abroad. Sure you'd only lose yourself in Healiopolis .... Meeting some sick old bankrupt or the Cotterick's donkey with his shoe hanging, clankatachankata, or a slut snoring with an impure infant on a bench. 'Twould tum you against life, so 'twould. And the weather's that mean too. . . . You're better off, sir, where you are, primesigned in the full of your dress, bloodeagle waistcoat and all, remembering your shapes and sizes on the pillow of your babycurls under your sycamore by the keld water where the Tory's clay will scare the varmints and have all you want, pouch, gloves, flask, bricket, kerchief, ring and amberulla, the whole treasure of the pyre, in the land of souls with Homin and Broin Baroke and pole ole Lonan and Nobucketnozzler and the Guinnghis Khan. And we'll be coming here, the ombre players, to rake your gravel and bringing you presents, won't we, fenians? And it isn't our spittle we'll stint you of, is it, druids? Not shabbty little imagettes, pennydirts and dodgemyeyes you buy in the soottee stores. But offerings of the field. Finnegans Wake, p. 24

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'Already' Finn (Mr. Finnimore) has been replaced (Finnno-more) by Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker ('Humme the Cheapner, Esc'), ' a big rody ram lad'. He is the height of a chimney and he humphs and he has 'a pocked wife' and three children, two boys and a girl. 42

Repose you now ! Finn no more ! For, be that samesake sibsubstitute of a hooky salmon, there's already a big rody ram lad at random on the premises of his haunt of the hungred bordles, as it is told me. Shop Illicit, flourishing like a lordmajor or a buaboabaybohm, litting flop a deadlop (aloose!) to lee but lifting a bennbranch a yardalong (ivoeh!) on the breezy side (for showm! ), the height of Brewster's chimpney and as broad below as Phineas Barnum; humphing his share of the showthers is senken on him he's such a grandfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that's a flyfire and three lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midgit pucelle. And aither he cursed and recursed and was everseen doing what your fourfootlers saw or he was never done seeing what you cool-pigeons know, weep the clouds aboon for smiledown witnesses, and that'll do now about the fairyhees and the frailyshees. . . . But however 'twas 'tis sure for one thing, what sherif Toragh voucherfors and Mapqiq makes put out, that the man, Humme the Cheapner, Esc, overseen as we thought him, yet a worthy of the the naym, came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide on another.... Finnegans Wake, p. 29 'Cursed and recursed' puns of the corso and recorso, the cycle of history in the philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1668 1744), a jurist and professor of 'eloquence' at the University of Naples. (See Books I and IV of his The New Science.) JJ-G 81

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We see here a capsule version of Earwicker's 'alleged misdemeanour' : HCE, in the course of his Dublin life, was seen 'doing what your fourfootlers saw'. (The 'fourfootlers' are his four principal accusers, sometimes the four gospellers and the Four Masters, authors of a famous Irish history, as well.) Whatever the truth, HCE 'came at this timecoloured place' to Ireland. A lengthy story is told of how Earwicker got his odd surname-suppo sedly conferred for a remark he made about earwigs by an 'ancient' king who has the 'walrus moustaches' of Edward VII but is also called 'Our sailor king'. Immediately, however, three other versions of the story are suggested, which eventually lead us to the story of the misdemeanour.

43 A baser meaning has been read into these characters the literal sense of which decency can safely scarcely hint. It has been blurtingly bruited by certain wisecrackers (the stinks of Mohorat are in the nightplots of the morning), that he suffered from a vile disease. Athma, unmanner them! To such a suggestion the one selfrespecting answer is to affirm that there are certain statements which ought not to be, and one should like to hope to be able to add, ought not to be allowed to be made. Nor have his detractors, who, an imperfectly warmblooded race, apparently conceive him as a great white caterpillar capable of any and every enormity in the calendar recorded to the discredit of the Juke and Kellikek families, mended their case by insinuating that, alternately, he lay at one time under the ludicrous imputation of annoying Welsh fusiliers in the people's park. Hay, hay, hay! Hoq, hoq, hoq! Faun and Flora on the lea love that little old joq. To anyone who knew and loved the christlikeness of the big cleanminded giant H. C. Earwicker throughout his

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excellency long vicefreegal existence the mere suggestion of him as a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in a boobytrap rings particularly preposterous. Truth, beard on prophet, compels one to add that there is said to have been quondam (pfuit! pfuit!) some case of the kind implicating, it is interdum believed, a quidam (if he did not exist it would be necessary quoniam to invent him) abhout that time stambuling haround Dumbaling in leaky sneakers .... Finneaans Wake, p. 33 The Jukes and the Kallikaks were American hillbilly families whose histories were said to prove the degeneracy resulting from consanguineous marriages. The rumours ('unfacts') about Humphrey will not hold up under legal scrutiny. Nevertheless there is something odd about the portrait of him in the National Gallery. And there was a trial.

44 Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthy irreperible where his adjugers are semmingly freak threes but his judicandees plainly minus twos. Nevertheless Madam's Toshowus waxes largely more lifeliked (entrance, one kudos; exits, free) and our notional gullery is now completely complacent, an exegious monument, aerily perennious. Oblige with your blackthorns; gamps, degrace! And there many have paused before that exposure of him by old Tom Quad, a flashback in which he sits sated, gowndabout, in clericalease habit, watching bland sol slithe dodgsomely into the nethermore, a globule of maugdleness about to corrugitate his mild dewed cheek and the tata of a tiny victorienne, Alys, pressed by his lim per looser. Yet certes one is. Eher the following winter had overed the pages of nature's book and till Ceadurbar-atta-Cleath 83

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became Dablena Tertia, the shadow of the huge outlander, maladik, multvult, magnoperous, had bulked at the bar of a rota of tribunals in manor hall as in thieves' kitchen, mid pillow talk and chithouse chat, on Marlborough Green as through Molesworth Fields, here sentenced pro tried with Jedburgh justice, there acquitted contestimony with benefit of clergy. His Thing Mod have undone him : and his madthing has done him man. His beneficiaries are legion in the part he created : they number up his years. Greatwheel Dunlop was the name was on him : behung, all we are his bisaacles. As hollyday in his house so was he priest and king to that: ulvy came, envy saw, ivy conquered. Lou ! Lou ! They have waved his green boughs o'er him as they have tom him limb from lamb. Finneyans Wake, p. 57 Ritually 'torn limb from lamb', HCE is here a kind of Orpheus and also like Christ, the Lamb of God. Dozens of witnesses appear, giving much contradictory testimony. Eventually one of HCE's sons is charged as well-a new trial which, dream-like, merges with the father's trial-and we begin to meet the younger generation.

45 ... little headway, if any, was made in solving the wasnottobe crime cunundrum when a child of Maam, Festy King, of a family long and honourably associated with the tar and feather industries, who gave an address in old plomansch Mayo of the Saxons in the heart of a foulfamed potheen district, was subsequently haled up at the Old Bailey on the calends of Mars, under an incompatibly framed indictment of both the counts (from each equinoxious points of view, the one fellow's fetch being the other fellow's person) that is to see, flying cushats out of his ouveralls and making fesses immodst his forces on the 84

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field. Oyeh! Oyeh ! When the prisoner, soaked in methylated, appeared in dry dock, appatently ambrosiaenculised, like Kersse's Korduroy Karikature, wearing, besides stains, rents and patches, his fight shirt, straw braces, souwester and a policeman's corkscrew trowswers, all out of the true (as he has purposely tom up all his cymtrymanx bespokes in the mamertime), deposing for his exution with all the fluors of sparse in the royal Irish vocabulary how the whole padderjagmartin tripiezite suet and all the sulfeit of copperas had fallen off him quatz unaccountably like the chrystalisations of Alum on Even while he was trying for to stick fire to himcell, (in feacht he was dripping as he found upon stripping for a pipkin ofmalt as he feared the coold raine) it was attempted by the crown (P.C. Robort) to show that King, elois Crowbar, once known as Meleky, impersonating a climbing boy, rubbed some pixes of any luvial peatsmoor o'er his face, plucks and puss as, with a clanetourf as the best means of disguising himself and was to the middlewhite fair in Mudford of a Thoorsday, feishts of Peeler and Pole, under the illassumed names of Tykingfest and Rabworc picked by him and Anthony out of a tellafun book, ellegedly with a pedigree pig (unlicensed) and a hyacinth. Finneyans Wake, pp. 85-6 The accused at this trial is Shem ('short for Seumas'), the Artist. Here his brother Shaun appears for the first time as the accuser. Eventually whole chapters are given over to Shaun's accusations. 46

Remarkable evidence was given, anon, by an eye, ear, nose and throat witness, whom Wesleyan chapelgoers suspected of being a plain clothes priest W.P., situate at Nullnull, Medical Square, who, upon letting down his rice and peacegreen coverdisk and having been sullenly cau85

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tioned against yawning while being grilled, smiled (he had had a onebumper at parting from Mrs Molroe in the morning) and stated to his eliciter under his morse mustaccents (gob bless!) that he slept with a bona fides and that he would be there to remember the filth of November, hatinaring, rowdy 0, which, with the jiboulees of Juno and the dates of auld lanxiety, was going, please the Rainmaker, to decembs within the ephemerides of profane history, all one with Tournay, Yetstoslay and Temorah. Finneaans Wake, pp. 86-7 At the end of HCE's trial we hear of 'the letter', and 'the four'-the trial judges-discuss over and over what has happened, always returning to gossip about Humphrey, 'the great Howdoyoucallem'.

47 And so it all ended. Artha kama dharma moksa. 2 Ask Kavya 3 for the kay. And so everybody heard their plaint and all listened to their plause. The letter! The litter! And the soother the bitther! Of eyebrow pencilled, by lipstipple penned. Borrowing a word and begging the question and stealing tinder and slipping like soap. . . . The solid man saved by his sillied woman. Crackajolking away like a hearse on fire. The elm that whimpers at the top told the stone that moans when stricken. Wind broke it. Wave bore it. Reed wrote of it. Syce ran with it. Hand tore it and wild went war. Hen trieved it and plight pledged peace. It was folded with cunning, sealed wjth crime, up tied by a harlot, undone by a child. It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art? The old hunks on the hill read it to perlection. It made rna make merry and sissy so shy and rubbed some shine off Shem and put some shame into Shaun .... So there you are now there Success, pleasure, duty, enlightenment: the four Hindu 'ends of life'. 3 The poet (Hindu). 2

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they were, when all was over again, the four with them, setting around upin their judges' chambers, in the muniment room, of their marshalsea, under the suspices of Lally, around their old traditional tables of the law like Somany Solans to talk it over rallthesameagain. Well and drul y dry. Suffering law the dring. Accourting to king' s evelyns. So help her goat and kiss the bouc. Festives and highajinks and jintyaun and her beetyrossy bettydoaty and not to forget now a'duna o'darnel. The four of them and thank court now there were no more of them. So pass the push for port sake. Be it soon. Ah ho! And do you remember, Singabob, the badfather, the same, the great Howdoyoucallem, and his old nickname, Dirty Daddy Pantaloons, in his monopoleums .... And so they went on, the fourbottle men, the analists, unguam and nunguam and lunguam again, their anschluss about her whosebefore and his whereafters and how she was lost away away in the fern and how he was founded deap on deep in an ear, and the rustlings and the twi tterings and the raspings and the snappings and the sighings and the paintings and the ukukuings and the (hist!) the springapartings and the (hast!) the bybyscuttlings and all the scandalmunkers and the pure craigs that used to be (up) that time living and lying and rating and riding round Nunsbelly Square. Finnegans Wake, pp. 93-5 Interest transfers to the Letter and its author, Earwicker's wife, usually called some variant of 'Anna Livia Plurabelle'-as Ann, Anna, ALP. The narrator metamorphoses into a philologist, who decides, among much else, that the letter \Vas scratched up by a hen (Belinda Doran), herself a version of ALP

48 Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multi-

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plicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document _and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough before any suitable occasion for it or them had so far managed to happen along. In fact, under the closed eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody. . . . Say, baroun lousadoor, who in hallhagal wrote the dum thing anyhow? Erect, beseated, mountback, against a partywall, below freezigrade, by the use of quill or style, with turbid or pellucid mind, accompanied or the reverse by mastication, interrupted by visit of seer to scribe or of scribe to site, atwixt two showers or atosst of a trike, rained upon or blown around, by a rightdown regular racer from the soil or by a too pained whittlewit laden with the loot of learning? Now, patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience. A good plan used by worried business folk who may not have had many momentums to master Kung's doctrine of the meang or the propriety codestruces of Carprimustimus is just to think of all the sinking fund of patience possessed in their conjoint names by both brothers Bruce. . . . Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others . . . . to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstan-

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tiating it is just as hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) .... [It is notable how few punning neologisms there are in this section.]

The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans, a more than quinquegintarian (Terziis prize with Serni medal, Cheepalizzy's Hane Exposition) and what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodish-sized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome's health well only the hate turned the mild on the van Houtens and the general's elections with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty and with grand funferall of poor Father Michael don't forget unto life's & Muggy well how are you Maggy & hopes

soon to hear well & must now close it with fondest to the twoinns with four crosskisses for holy paul holey comer holipoli whollyisland pee ess from (locust may eat all but this sign shall they never) affectionate largelooking tache of tch. The stain, and that a teastain (the overcautelousness of the masterbilker here, as usual, signing the page away), marked it off on the spout of the moment as a g~nuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant pottery of that lydialike languishing class known as a hurry-me-o'er-thehazy. Why then how? Well, almost any photoist worth his chemicots will tip anyone asking him the teaser that if a negative of a horse happens to melt enough while drying, well, what you do get is, well, a positively grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse. Tip. Well, this freely is what must have occurred to our missive (there's a sod of a turb for you! please wisp off the grass!) unfilthed from the boucher by

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the sagacity of a lookme:Iittle likemelong hen. Heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound had partly obliterated the negative to start with, causing some features palpably nearer your peeker to be swollen up most grossly while the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Finneyans Wake, pp. 107-8 and pp. 111-2 The analysis of the Letter blossoms into a full-fledged lecture in the form of a dozen questions and answers. The narrator has become a Shaun-character, a sober, stick-inthe-mud citizen, who devotes an entire chapter to reviling his brother Shem, often recognisable as Joyce himself.

49 Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob. A few toughnecks are still getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable stemming (he was an outlex between the lines of Ragonar Blaubarb and Horrild Hairwire and an inlaw to Capt. the Hon. and Rev. Mr Bbyrdwood de Trap Blagg was among his most distant connections) but every honest to goodness man in the land of the space of today knows that his back life will not stand being written about in black and white. Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at. Shem's bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip, a trio of barbels from his megageg chin (sowman's son), the wrong shoulder higher than the right, all ears, an artificial tongue with a natural cur I, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver, two fifths of two buttocks, one gleetsteen avoirdupoider for him, a manroot of all evil, a 90

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salmonkelt's thinskin, eelsblood in his cold toes, a bladder tristended .... Rosbif of Old Zealand! he could not attouch it. See what happens when your somatophage merman takes his fancy to our virgitarian swan? He even ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland's split little pea. Once when among those rebels in a state of hopelessly helpless intoxication the piscivore strove to lift a czitround peel to either nostril, hiccuping, apparently impromptued by the hibat he had with his glottal stop, that he kukkakould flowrish for ever by the smell, as the czi tr, as the kcedron, like a scedar, of the founts, on mountains, with limon on, of Lebanon. 0! the lowness of him was beneath all up to that sunk to! No likedbylike firewater of firstserved firstshot or gulletburn gin or honest brewbarrett beer either. 0 dear no! Instead the tragic jester sobbed himself wheywhingingly sick of life on some sort of a rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying applejack squeezed from sour grapefruice . . . . You see, chaps, it will trickle out, freaksily of course, but the tom and the shorty of it is: he was in his bardic memory low. All the time he kept on treasuring with condign satisfaction each and every crumb of trek talk, covetous of his neighbour's word, and if ever, during a Munda conversazione commoted in the nation's interest, delicate tippits were thrown out to him touching his evil courses by some wellwishers, vainly pleading by scriptural arguments with the opprobrious papist about trying to brace up for the kidos of the thing, Scally wag, and be a men instead of a dem scrounger, dish it all . . . without one sigh of haste like the supreme prig he was, and not a bit sorry, he would pull a vacant landlubber's face ... and begin to tell all the intelligentsia admitted to that tamileasy samtalaisy conclamazzione ... the whole lifelong swrine story of his entire low cornaille existence, abusing his 91

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deceased ancestors wherever the sods were and one moment tara booming great blunderguns (poh!) about his farfamed fine Poppamore, Mr Humhum, whom history, climate and entertainment made the first of his sept and always up to debt, though Eavens ears ow many fines he faces, and another moment visanvrerssas, cruaching three jeers (pah ! ) for his rotten little ghost of a Peppybeg, Mr Himmyshimmy, a blighty, a reeky, a Iighty, a scrapy, a babbly, a ninny, dirty seventh among thieves and always bottom sawyer, till nowan knowed how howmely howme could be, giving unsolicited testimony on behalf of the absent, as glib as eaveswater to those present (who meanwhile, with increasing lack of interest in his semantics, allowed various subconscious smickers to drivel slowly across their fichers), unconsciously explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane, the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech he misused . . . [H]e had flickered up and flinnered down into a drug and drunkery addict, growing megalomane of a loose past. This explains the litany of septuncial lettertrumpets honorific, highpitched, erudite, neoclassical, which he so loved as patricianly to manuscribe after his name. It would have diverted, if ever seen, the shuddersome spectacle of this semidemented zany amid the inspissated grime of his glaucous den making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles, edition de tenebres, (even yet sighs the Most Different, Dr Poindejenk, authorised bawdier and censor, it can't be repeated!) turning over three sheets at a wind, telling himself delightedly, no espellor mor so, that every splurge on the vellum he blundered over was an aisling vision more gorgeous than the one before. . . . Finnegans Wake, pp. 169-79 The 'usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles'? Ulysses, of course, written by that Shem-figure James Joyce. A chapter is given over to the Mother. It is spoken by

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two old women washing the Earwicker laundry on the banks of the Liffey, which flows through Dublin. They gossip about the family.

so 0 tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear. Well, you know, when the old cheb went futt and did what you know. Yes, I know, go on. Wash quit and don't be dabbling. Tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talk tapes. And don't butt me-hike!when you bend. Or whatever it was they threed to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park. He's an awful old reppe. Look at the shirt of him! Look at the dirt of it! He has all my water black on me. And it steeping and stuping since this time last wik. How many goes is it I wonder I washed it? I know by heart the places he likes to saale, duddurty devil! Scorching my hand and starving my famine to make his private linen public. Wallop it well with your battle and clean it. My wrists are wrusty rubbing the mouldaw stains. And the dneepers of wet and the gangres of sin in it! What was it he did a tail at all on Animal Sendai? And how long was he under loch and neagh? It was put in the newses what he did, nicies and priers, the King fierceas Humphrey, with illysus distilling, exploits and all. But toms will till. I know he well. Temp untamed will hist for no man. As you spring so shall you neap. Finnegans Wake, p. 196 This chapter has the names of hundreds of riverswoven into it (here the Moldau, Dneiper, Ganges and what 93 JJ-H

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others?). Mother Anna Livia Plurabelle-whose own name enshrines the Liffey-is the river itself in the 'nature allegory' of the Wake. Working backwards in time, they speak of Anna's children and then Anna herself in the days before her marriage.

5I Onon! Onon! tell me more. Tell me every tiny teign. I want to know every single ingul. Down to what made the potters fly into jagsthole. And why were the vesles vet. That homa fever's winning me warne. If a mahun of the horse but hard me! We'd be bundukiboi meet askarigal. Well, now comes the hazel-hatchery part. After Clondalkin the King's Inns. We'll soon be there with the freshet. How many aleveens had she in tool? I can't rightly rede you that. Close only knows. Some say she had three figures to fill and confined herself to a hundred eleven, wan bywan bywan, making meanacuminamoyas. Olaph lamm et, all that pack? We won't have room in the kirkeyaard. She can't remember half the cradlenames she smacked on them by the grace of her boxing bishop's infallible slipper, the cane for Kund and abbles for Eyolf and ayther nayther for Yakov Yea. A hundred and how? They did well to rechristen her Pluhurabelle. 0 loreley! What a loddon lodes! Heigh ho! But it's quite on the cards she'll shed more and merrier, twills and trills, sparefours and spoilfives, nordsihkes and sudsevers and ayes and neins to a litter. Grandfarthring nap and Messamisery and the knave of all knaves and the joker. Heehaw! She must have been a gadabount in her day, so she must, more than most. Shoal she was, gidgad. She had a flewmen of her owen. Then a toss nare scared that lass, so aimai moe, that's agapo! Tell me, tell me, how cam she cam lin through all her fellows, the neckar she was, the diveline? Casting her perils before our swains from Fonte-in-Monte to Tid-

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ingtown and from Tidingtown tilhavet. Linking one and knocking the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty and palling in and pie taring out and cl yding by on her eastway. Finnegans Wake, pp. 201-2 Anna 'making up'.

52 First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils. Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to sole. Next she greesed the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and n1ole and itcher, with antifouling butterscatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and eslats dun, quincecunct, allover her little mary. Peeld gold of waxwork her jellybelly and her grains of incense anguille bronze. And after that she wove a garland for her hair. She pleated it. She plaited it. Of meadowgrass and riverflags, the bulrush and waterweed, and of fallen griefs of weeping willow. Then she made her bracelets and her anklets and her armlets and a jetty amulet for necklace of clicking cobbles and pattering pebbles and rumbledown rubble, richmond and rehr, of Irish rhunerhinerstones and shellmarble bangles. That done, a dawk of smut to her airy ey, Annushka Lutetiavitch Pufflovah, and the lellipos cream to her lippeleens and the pick of the paintbox for her pommettes, from strawbirry reds to extra violates, and she sendred her baudelaire maids to His Affluence, Ciliegia Grande and Kirschie Real, the two chirsines, with respecks from his missus, seepy and sewery, and a request might she passe of him for a minnikin. A call to pay and light a taper, in Brie-on-Arrosa, back in a sprizzling. The cock striking mine, the stalls bridely sign, there's Zambosy waiting for Me! She said she wouldn't be half her length away. Then, 95

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then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slang over her shulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came. Finneyans Wake, pp. 206-7 Joyce was especially proud of his achievement in this chapter, particularly for its rhythms and sound. Indeed he claimed the whole book would make immediate sense to anyone who heard it read aloud! When a recording was made of Joyce reading a portion of Finnegans Wake, he chose to read the last pages of this chapter, ending with the following words. (The old women are slowly turning into a tree and a stone by the river's side as they gossip about Anna.) 53 Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice hawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thorn Malone? Can't hear with hawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia's daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night! Finneyans Wake, pp. 215-6 The following chapters are given over to the children. The first is taken up with their games and with an improvised play they perform, titled 'The Mime of Mick [St. Michael], Nick [the Devil] and the Maggies'. Shaun, of course, plays the good St. Michael and Shem, the 96

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wicked Devil. The 'Mime', whose 'playbill' Joyce gives us, is yet another version of the Earwicker family history, and the rivalry of the brothers for the favour of their sister lssy comes to the fore.

54 Every evening at lighting up o'clock sharp and until further notice in Feenichts Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open, Diddlem Club douncestears.) Entrancings: gads, a scrab; the quality, one large shilling. Newly billed for each wickeday perfumance. Somndoze massinees. By arraignment, childream's hours, expercatered. Jampots, rinsed porters, taken in token. With nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing of ghosters, with the benediction of the Holy Genesius Archimimus and under the distinguished patronage of their Elderships the Oldens from the four coroners of Findrias, Murias, Gorias and Falias, Messoirs the Coarbs, Clive Sallis, Galorius Kettle, Pobiedo Lancey and Pierre Dusort, while the Caesar-inChief looks. On. Sennet. As played to the Adelphi by the Brothers Bratislavoff (Hyrcan and Haristobulus), after humpteen dumpteen revivals. Before all the King's Hoarsers with all the Queen's Mum. And wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids. W4ile fern may cald us until firn make cold. The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, adopted from the Ballymooney Bloodriddon Murther by Bluechin Blackdillain.... Time : the press ant. With futurist onehorse balletbattle pictures and the Pageant of Past History worked up with animal variations amid everglaning mangrovemazes and beorbtracktors by Messrs Thud and Blunder. Shadows by the film folk, masses by the good people. Promptings by Elanio Vitale. Longshots, upcloses, outblacks and stagetolets by Hexen97

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schuss, Coachmaher, Incubone and Rocknarrag. Creations tastefully designed by Madame Berthe Delamode. Dances arranged by Harley Quinn and Coollimbeina. Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the properties of the late cemented Mr T. M. Finnegan R.l.C. Lipmasks and hairwigs by Ouida Nooikke. Limes and Floods by Crooker and Toll. Kopay pibe by Kappa Pedersen. Hoed Pine hat with twentyfour ventholes by Morgen. Bosse and stringbag from Heteroditheroe's and All Ladies' presents. Tree taken for grafted. Rock rent. Phenecian blends and Sourdanian doofpoosts by Shauvesourishe and Wohntbedarft. The oakmulberryeke with silktrick twomesh from Shop-Sowry, seedsmanchap. Grabstone beg from General Orders Mailed. Finnegans Wake, pp. 219-21 Finnegans Wake has no basic concrete plot, for it is liable to vary from the cosmic to the domestic level in the twinkling of an eye. Late in the book there is a wholly domestic scene which has led some to believe that we finally hit on the 'real', all the rest being the dream of the man here described. But this too is a little play, and soon the kaleidoscope will shift again.

55 A cry off.

Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space? I don't understand. I fail to say. I dearsee you too. House of the cedarbalm of mead. Garth of Fyon. Scene and property plot. Stagemanager's prompt. Interior of dwelling on outskirts of city. Groove two. Chamber scene. Boxed. Ordinary bedroom set. Salmonpapered walls. Back, empty Irish grate, Adam's mantel, with wilting elopement fan, soot and tinsel, condemned. North, wall with window practicable. Argentine in casement.

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Vamp. Pelmit above. No curtains. Blind drawn. South, party wall. Bed for two with strawberry bedspread, wickerworker clubsessel and caneseated millikinstool. Bookshrine without, facetowel upon. Chair for one. Woman's garments on chair. Man's trousers with crossbelt braces, collar on bedknob. Man's corduroy surcoat with tabrets and taces, seapan nacre buttons on nail. Woman's gown on ditto. Over mantelpiece picture of Michael, lance, slaying Satan, dragon with smoke. Small table near bed, front. Bed with bedding. Spare. Flagpatch quilt. Yverdown design. Limes. Lighted lamp without globe, scarf, gazette, tumbler, quantity of water, julepot, ticker, side props, eventuals, man's gummy article, pink. Finneyans Wake, pp. 558-9 The final gestures of Joyce's characters divide between the intr=tnsigence of Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait and Ulysses (see pp. 12 and 43), and the attempts at acceptance and reconciliation by Gabriel Conroy in 'The Dead' (p. 71), Bloom, and perhaps even Molly. Finnegans Wake closes on an even surer current, as Joyce once again gives the woman 'the last word'. The speaker here is the river that flows through Dublin, the Liffey, and she describes her own symbolic role.

56 Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have failed on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves. The woods are fond always. As were we their babes in. And robins in crews so. It is for me goolden wending. Unless? Away! Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long! Or is it only so mesleems? On your pondered palm. Reclined from cape to pede. With pipe on bowl. Terce for a fiddler, sixt

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for makmerriers, none for a Cole. Rise up now and aruse! Norvena's over. I am leafy, your goolden, so you called me, may me life, yea your goolden, silve me solve, exsogerraider! You did so drool. I was so sharm. But there's a great poet in you too. Stout Stokes would take you offly. So has he as bored me to slump. But am good and rested. Taks to you, toddy, tan ye! Yawhawaw. Helpunto min, helpas vin. Here is your shirt, the day one, come back. The stock, your collar. Also your double brogues. A comforter as well. And here your iverol and everthelest your umbr. And stand up tall! Straight. I want to see you looking fine for me. With your brandnew big green belt and all. Blooming in the very lotust and second to nill, Budd! When you're in the buckly shuit Rosensharonals near did for you. Fiftyseven and three, cosh, with the bulge. Proudpurse Alby with his pooraroon Eireen, they'll. Pride, comfytousness, enevy! You make me think of a wonderdecker I once. Or somebalt thet sailder, the man megallant, with the bangled ears. Or an earl was he, at Lucan? Or, no, it's the Iren duke's I mean. Of somebrey erse from the Dark Countries. Come and let us! We always said we'd. And go abroad. Rathgreany way perhaps. The childher are still fast. There is no school today. Them boys is so contrairy. The Head does be worrying himself. Heel trouble and heal travel. Galli ver and Gellover. Unless they changes by mistake. I seen the likes in the twinngling of an aye. Sam. So oft. Sim. Time after time. The sehm asnuh. Two bredder as doffered as nors in soun. When one of him sighs or one of him cries 'tis you all over. No peace at all. . . . Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lathed to me. And I am lathing their little warm tricks. And lathing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy IOO

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gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all! And me letting on to meself always. And lilting on all the time. I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage. You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You're but a puny. Home! My people were not their sort out beyond there so far as I can. For all the bold and bad and bleary they are blamed, the seahags. No! Nor for all our wild dances in all their wild din. I can seen meself among them, allaniuvia pulchrabelled. How she was handsome, the wild Amazia, when she would seize to my other breast! And what is she weird, haughty Niluna, that she will snatch from my own est hair! For 'tis they are the stormies. Ho hang! Hang ho! And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free. Auravoles, they says, never heed of your name! But I'm loathing them that's here and all I lathe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. 0 bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toyfair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bus softlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys IOI

'FINNEGANS WAKE'

to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the Finneyans Wake, pp. 619-28 There is no fullstop, because th·e sentence continueson the very first page of the book. Like the symbol of the snake with its tail in its mouth, signifying completeness, circularity, eternity, or like the river which runs into the sea, is absorbed into the clouds, rains on the land and drains into the river, Finneyans Wake runs on forever.

102

Bibliography

A

Reference list of Joyce's works

Chamber Music (1907) ed. William York Tindall, Columbia University Press, New York, 1954.

The Critical vVritings of ]ames joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, Oxford University Press, London and New York, 1959. Dubliners (1914) Jonathan Cape, 1967, and Penguin Books, 1965, Lodon; Compass Books (The Viking Press), New York, 1958. The Essential ]ames joyce, ed. Harry Levin, Jonathan Cape, London, 1948; Penguin Books, London, 1963. Contains complete texts of A Portrait of the Artist, Col-

lected Poems, Exiles and Dubliners. Exiles (1918) Jonathan Cape, London, 1952; The Viking Press, New York, 1951. Finne9ans Wake (1939) Faber & Faber, London, 1964; The Viking Press, New York, 1964. ]ames joyce's Scribbledehobble, ed. Thomas E. Connolly, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1961. Letters of james joyce, Vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert, Faber & Faber, London, and The Viking Press, New York, 1957; 103

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vols. II and III, ed. Richard Ellmann, Faber & Faber, London, and The Viking Press, New York, 1966. The Portable ]ames joyce, ed. Harry Levin, The Viking Press, New York, 1947. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Jonathan Cape, 1956, and Penguin Books, 1960, London; Compass Books (The Viking Press) New York, 1964. Stephen Hero (1944) ed. Theodore Spencer, Jonathan Cape, London, 1956; New Directions, New York, 1955· Ulysses (1922) The Bodley Head, London, 1960; The Modern Library, New York, 1961. The Workshop of Daedalus, ed. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1965. Contains Epiphanies.

B Bibliographies DEMING, ROBERT H.,

A Biliography of ]ames Joyce Studies,

University of Kansas Libraries, 1964. Includes studies of separate works to December 1961. The ]ames Joyce Quarterly, ed. Thomas P. Staley, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. First issue, Fall 1963. Besides articles on Joyce, publishes a yearly Joyce bibliography. SLOCUM, JOHN J. and CAHOON, HERBERT, A Bibliography of ]ames joyce, Yale University Press, London and New Haven, Conn., 1953. Editions, translations, manuscripts, musical settings of Joyce's own works to 1950. C

Biographical works

BEACH, SYLVIA,

Shakespeare and Company, New York,

1959. Memoirs of the American bookseller who pub-

lished Ulysses from her shop in Paris. COLUM, MARY and PADRAIC. Our Friend James Joyce, Doubleday & Co., New York, 1958. The authors, Irish 104

BIBLIOGRAPHY

artists in their own right, comment on their university days and other meetings with Joyce. ELLMANN, RICHARD, james joyce. Oxford University Press, London and New York, 1959· The standard biography. HEALEY, GEORGE HARRIS, ed. The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus joyce. Faber & Faber, London, and Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1962. A diary kept in 1903-4 by Joyce's precocious younger brother. JOYCE, STANISLAUs, My Brother's Keeper, Faber & Faber, London, and The Viking Press, New York, 1958. A memoir of the relationship between the Joyce brothers. D

Critical works Surface and Symbol, The Consistency of ]ames joyce's ~ulysses', Oxford University Press, New York, 1962. The 'factual' basis of Ulysses and

ADAMS, ROBERT MARTIN,

comments on its relation to 'symbols' sometimes mistaken.

The Books at the Wake, A Study of Literary Allusions in ]ames joyce's ~Finneyans Wake',

ATHERTON, JAMES s.,

Faber & Faber, London, and The Viking Press, New York, 1960. With an alphabetical list of literary allusions. BLAMIRES, HARRY. The Bloomsday Book, Methuen & Co., London, 1966. A condensed straightforward paraphrase of Ulysses. Useful for beginners. BUDGEN, FRANK,

]ames joyce and the Making

of

Ulysses,

Grayson, London 1934; Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind., 1960 Part 'guide', part memoirs of the English artist's friendship with Joyce in Zurich. CAMPBELL, JOSEPH and ROBINSON, HENRY MORTON, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, Faber & Faber, London, and Harcourt Brace, New York, 1944. 105

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ed., joyce's Portrait, Criticisms and Critiques, Peter Owen, London, 1964; Appleton-CenturyCrofts, New York, 1962. Reprinted articles by scholars. GILBERT, sTUART, james joyce's 'Ulysses', second edition, revised: Faber & Faber, London, 1952; Vintage Books, New York, 1955. An early guide by a French scholar who knew Joyce in Paris. Good on Homeric and esoteric symbolism. GIVENS, SEON, ed., ]ames Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism Vanguard Press, New York, 1948. Essays by prominent scholars and writers. GLASHEEN, ADLINE, A Census of Finneyans Wake, Faber & Faber, London, 1957; Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1956; A Second Census, Northwestern University Press, 1963. Alphabetical listing of all characters, fictional and factual. GOLDBERG, s. L., The Classical Temper, A Study of James joyce's 'Ulysses', Chatto and Windus, London, and Barnes and Noble, New York, 1961. GOLDBERG, s. L., Joyce, Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh and London, 1962; Grove Press, New York, 1963. Short introductory survey, weak on Finneyans Wake. GOLDMAN, ARNOLD, The joyce Paradox, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, and Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1966. The development of structure in Joyce. CONNOLLY, THOMAS E.,

HANLEY, MILES L.,

Word Index to ]ames Joyce's 'Ulysses',

University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wise., 1953· Pagination and lineation to the pre-1961 Random House/Modern Library text. HART, CLIVE, Concordance to Finneyans Wake, University of Minisota, Minneapolis, Minn., 1963. Even parts of words are listed, with page and line references. HART, CLIVE,

106

Structure and Motif in Finneyans Wake,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Faber & Faber, London, and Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 1962. Not a complete exposition of the novel's structure, but excellent on the portions it describes. HODGART, MAITHEW and WORTHINGTON, MABEL P., Song in the Work of ]ames joyce, Columbia University Press, New York, 1959. Including an alphabetical listing of songs mentioned in Joyce. KAIN, RICHARD M., Fabulous Voyager, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill., 1947, and Compass Books (The Viking Press), New York, 1949. Guide to Ulysses with indices of motifs, characteristics of Bloom, etc. KENNER, HUGH, Dublin's joyce, Chatto & Windus, London, 1955; Indiana University Press, Bloomington Ind. 1956. Spirited, inventive, ultimately ambivalent and undersophisticated, about symbolism. LEVIN, HARRY, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, New Directions, Norfolk, Conn., 1941; revised edn. Faber & Faber, London, and New Directions, New York, 1960. Best introduction. LITZ, A. WALTON, The Art of ]ames joyce, Oxford University Press, London and New York, 1961. Joyce's literary methods and revisions in his later work.

Time of Apprenticeship: The Fiction of Young ]ames joyce, Abelard-Schumann, London and New York, 1959. Mainly on Dubliners. MAGALANER, MARVIN, ed., A james joyce Miscellany, New York University Press, New York, 1957; A james joyce Miscellany: Second Series, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Ill., 1959; A james joyce Miscellany: Third Series, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbon..

MAGALANER, MARVIN,

dale, Ill., 1962. Essays by critics and scholars. MAGALANER, MARVIN and KAIN, RICHARD M., joyce: the Man, the Work, the Reputation, New York University 107

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Press, New York, 1956; John Calder, London, 1965. MORRIS, w. E. and NAULT, c. A. ]nr., eds., Portraits of an

Artist: a Casebook on ]ames Joyce's 'A Portrait', Odyssey Press, New York, 1962.

The Sympathetic Alien, New York University Press, New York, 1959· Joyce and Catholic

MORSE, J. MITCHELL,

themes. NOON, WILLIAM T.,

Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University

Press, London and New Haven, Conn., 1957. Particularly valuable on theoretical aesthetic elements. PREscorr, JOSEPH, Exploring ]ames joyce, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Ill., 1964. Good on the various manuscript stages of Ulysses, and on how Joyce built up his characterisation of Bloom and Molly. RYF, ROBERT s., A New Approach to Joyce, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962. Uses A Portrait to explore Joyce's other fiction, oversimplifies symbolism. SCHUTTE, WILLIAM, Joyce and Shakespeare, Yale University Press, London and New Haven, Conn., 1957. Includes tabulation of allusions to Shakespeare. SULLIVAN, KEVIN, Joyce Among the jesuits, Columbia University Press, New York, 1958. SULTAN, STANLEY, The Argument of 'Ulysses', Ohio State University Press, Columbus, Ohio, 1965. Chapter-bychapter analysis.

]ames Joyce, His Way of Interpreting the Modern World. Scribner's, New York, 1950. Best on Finnegans Wake. TINDALL, WILLIAM Y., A Readers Guide to ]ames Joyce,

TINDALL, WILLIAM Y.,

Thames and Hudson, London, and Noonday Press, New York, 1959. 108

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: JAMES JOYCE

Volume 2

THE JOYCE PARADOX

This page intentionally left blank

THE JOYCE PARADOX Form and Freedom in his Fiction

ARNOLD GOLDMAN

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1966 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited This edition first published in 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1966 Arnold Goldman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

978-1-138-63822-8 978-1-315-63790-7 978-1-138-18398-8 978-1-138-18399-5 978-1-315-64546-9

(Set) (Set) (ebk) (Volume 2) (hbk) (Volume 2) (pbk) (Volume 2) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

THE JOYC E PAR ADO X FORM AND FREEDOM IN HIS FICTION

BY

ARNOLD GOLDMAN

LONDON

ROUTLE DGE & KEGAN PAUL

First published 1966 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited Broadway House, 68-7 4 Carter Lane London, E.C.4 Printed in Great Britain by The Alden Press, Oxford Copyright Arnold Goldman 1966 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

CONTENT S

I.

II. III. IV. V. VI.

Note on References page vi Preface vn The Early Stories in Dubliners I A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Disengagement 22 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Drama 5I Ulysses: Styles 74 Ulysses: The Symbolic Scenario I I8 Ulysses: Philosophical Themes I 38 Notes 168 Index 177

v

NOTE ON REFERENCES

References to Joyce's own wntmgs are included as far as possible within the text and identified only by page numberand by short title where necessary. The editions referred to are:

The Critical Writings of James Joyce, eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard EHmann, London: Faber & Faber and New York: The Viking Press, 1959. *Dubliners, London: Jonathan Cape, 1954 and New York: The Modern Library, 1954· Exiles, A Play in Three Acts, London: Jonathan Cape, 1952. Finnegans Wake, London: Faber & Faber and New York: The Viking Press, 1939, etc. Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, London: Faber & Faber and New York: The Viking Press, 1957. *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Jonathan Cape, 1956 and New York: The Modern Library, 1944. *Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer, London: Jonathan Cape, 1956 and New Directions, 1955· *Ulysses, London: The Bodley Head, 1960 and New York: The Modern Library, 1946. In citing from the American edition of Ulysses, the pagination of the pre- I g6 r text has been retained, this being the basis of the Hanley Word-Index, Richard EHmann's biography ofJoyce and the other critical works here quoted.

* In page references separated by a stroke--as, (35{72)-the first number

is the page of the British edition and the second, the American.

Vl

PREFACE

of cognate themes, I hope to relate if not reconcile major critical approaches to the fiction of James Joyce. That there are radically opposed positions available is evident on even a perfunctory glance at past and current criticism. The major issues, in the last analysis, are questions of the mode of existence of 'symbols' in the fiction and of the quality of Joyce's feeling, the extent of his human sympathies. Attitudes to these, and to other matters, combine variously, in ways I discuss. Only through an understanding of the ways in which conflicting responses can be related does it seem to me possible to make sense out of the criticism of Joyce to date; and only in this manner can the varieties of critical opinion hope to appear functions of Joyce's work itself. Syntheses have a knack of being but old theses writ large, as everyone who confronts the history of 'solutions' to the continuing problems of philosophical debate knows. Even the acknowledgement of radical and perpetual conflict provides no easy answers. The terms of conflict must still be elaborated in specific contexts, and language-let alone personal ineptitudehas its ways of betraying the most careful of balancing acts. In adducing analogues for my particular balancing, the notions of Soren Kierkegaard come in for some emphasis. To my knowledge there is no direct proof that Joyce read much Kierkegaard, either in the original-though the DanaNorwegian he learned in order to read Ibsen would have enabled him to--or in translation or criticism.* To be sure, BY PURSUING A GROUP

* See ahead, p. 6sff. Ibsen wrote in riksTTI(lal, the cultivated Danish of the Norwegian urban class of his time. Vll

Preface there are a handful of allusions in Finnegans Wake to Kierkegaard's name and to the titles of some of his works,* but only one of them implies any relation between Kierkegaard's world and Joyce's own: when, near the end of the Wake, HCE's cyclic 'rebirth' is being predicted, he-and by implication all mankind-is described as 'sorensplit and paddypatched' (596). The implications of this pun have been my pillars of cloud and fire. I have, however, stopped short of discussing Finnegans Wake. Whether the Wake confronts at a different level problems like potentiality for human development or evades them altogether is moot. Ulysses, it seems to me, does obviously imply a radical, even self-conscious confrontation of the major problems raised by Joyce's earlier fiction. If Charles N. Feidelson is correct, the Wake does too, for he calls it 'a symbol of the tension between the infinity of symbolic aspiration and the conclusiveness which the objective work entails' .1 Proper expansion of that would require as many pages again as I have written here. I am under obligation to the following publishers for permission to quote from books whose copyright is in their possession: John Calder (Publishers) Ltd. (for Alain RobbeGrillet's Jealousy), Jonathan Cape Ltd. (for Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero), Chatto & Windus Ltd., Barnes & Noble, Inc. and S. L. Goldberg (The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce's Ulysses), The Clarendon Press, Oxford (for Werner Jaeger's Aristotle), Faber & Faber Ltd. (for Stanislaus Joyce's My Brother's Keeper), Indiana University Press and Chatto & Windus Ltd. (forHughKenner'sDublin'sJoyce), New Directions Publishers (for Stephen Hero), Penguin Books Ltd. (for J. A. K. Thomson's translation of Aristotle's Ethics), Princeton University Press (for S0ren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments) and The Viking Press (for Dub liners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and StanislausJoyce's My Brother's Keeper). For their assistance at various stages of this study I wish to

* Adaline Glasheen thinks Kierkegaard's Either/Or 'rather important' in Finnegans Wake, but she does not give her reasons (A Second Census of Finnegans Wake [Northwestern University Press, 1963], p. 140). Vlll

Preface thank J. S. Atherton, Ann Congleton, Richard EHmann, Dorothy Emmet, John V. Kelleher, Frank Kermode, Martin Price, Thomas K. Swing, J. Heywood Thomas, Bjorn Tysdahl, Judith Wilde and Dorothy Goldman, my wife. A. G.

Manchester, England, I g6 I -.5

lX

Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual -ELIOT: 'The Dry Salvages' at the same instant predestinate and free, creation's very self -YEATS: The Trembling of the Veil

I

THE EARLY STORIES IN

DUBLINERS

Our nature is one of movement; to be completely still is to be dead. -Pascal SHORTLY BEFORE AUGUST I 3th, I 904-on on which date 'The Sisters', the first story in Dub liners, was printed in the Irish Homestead-joyce sent a short note to Constantine Curran: 'I am writing a series of epicleti-tenfor a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city.' 1 The tone Mulliganesque-acknowledged, we might say, when Joyce began Ulysses with an epiclesis, Buck Mulligan's blasphemous invocation of the Holy Ghost to enter into and consecrate his shaving bowl-should alert us not to expect extraordinary precision from this sanguine outpouring. The analogy SOMETIME

epiclesis :mass: :Dub liners :Joyce's teuvre

seems more suggestive than useful. That Joyce should think of his fiction and his task in religious terms, and vice versa, is, however, characteristic.*

* It was at about this time that Joyce was saying to Stanislaus, on one of their 'interminable' peripaties 'across the city to the National Library', 'Don't you think ... there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some I

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' The stories are not only intended as epicleti, however, they are to be betrayals as well, exposures of 'the soul' of Dublin. Further, we are told something of this 'soul': it is half-paralysed 'or'-another quick transition-wholly paralysed. This the stories will, apparently, demonstrate-unless it is totally presupposed and in no need of proof. A glance at a second letter of Joyce's will prepare us to dip into Dubliners and see. The ten stories grew to fifteen, and in the long agony of finding a publisher began. On May sth, Igo6, an exasperated Joyce wrote from Trieste to Grant Richards, 'My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.' 2 If the identification of Dublin and 'paralysis' seems off-hand in the note to Curran, here it is established with schoolmasterly fussiness. From beginning to end in the writing of Dubliners, however, the association of Dublin and paralysis persisted in Joyce's mind. It reappears in a passage in Stephen Hero to which I will be turning shortly.* kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own.... The Mass on Good Friday seems to me a very great drama' (Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, James Joyce's Early Tears [London and New York, 1958], pp. 103-4. See ahead, p. 133ff.). *Joyce had used the word in concluding the sketch titled 'A Portrait of the Artist' written in early 1904-'amid the general paralysis of an insane society' (Tale Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 3 [Spring 196o], p. 366). In their prefatory note R. M. Kain and Robert E. Scholes comment on Joyce's uses of'paralysis' (p. 358). The syphilitic note of 'g.p.i.'-which found its way into U(ysses, where Mulligan claims someone he met says Stephen has it (5/8)-is to be found elsewhere as well. In his diary, Stanislaus joyce noted on or about August 13th, 1904, that James Talks much of the syphilitic contagion in Europe, is at present writing a series of studies in it in Dublin, tracing practically everything to it. The drift of the talk seems to be that the contagion is congenital and incurable and responsible for all manias, and being so, that it is useless to try to avoid it. He even seems to invite you to delight in the manias and to humour each to the top of its bent. (The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce, ed. George Healey [London, 1962], p. 47.) At one stage of composition, at any rate, Joyce was willing to phrase his intention allegorically. The incidents in the stories are to be referred back to the pre-existent condition for their cause, and that condition is held to be sufficient explanation for all particular events. Joyce had, it is said, read every word of Ben Jonson during his first Paris stay in 1903, and there is something of Jonson's humours in the contagious manias to be delighted in. (See Herbert Gorman, James Joyce [London, 1941], p. 94·)

2

The Early Stories in 'Dub liners' I

Turning to Dubliners, we meet one of our terms on its first page, handled with much self-consciousness, or at least much elaborateness: There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: 'I am not long for this world,' and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficient and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work. (7/7)

The young boy has no comprehension of the meaning of the 'word paralysis', but he concedes it a mysterious power. As a non-discursive focus of attention, it both repels and attracts, creates 'fear' and longing. The image of 'paralysis', detached almost from the afflicted and dying Reverend James Flynn, provides if not a tragic experience, the embryo of one according to the definition of Joyce's own young artist: -Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause. (Portrait, 209/239) 3

Interestingly, when 'The Sisters' appeared in the Irish Homestead (under the nom de plume 'Stephen Daedalus'), its first paragraph, subsequently largely rewritten by Joyce, did not include any reference to 'the word paralysis'. That Father Flynn should need to have been paralysed may seem gratuitous in the context of the whole story. Marvin Magalaner, who calls Flynn's paralysis 'a literary expediency', thinks it a 'symbol'

3

The Early Stories in 'Dub liners' (of metaphorical paralysis in the Church, in Dublin, in Ireland). 4 If the word stands now on the first page of Dub liners primarily because a young writer was anxious that we take his meaning, we may well be considering the only concession thatjamesjoyce ever made to the reading public. The position of the word invites attention, and, in the way of symbolical readings, has received it, but the 'expediency' ought more properly to restrain us from having too much depend on it. If the notion is pervasive, perhaps even structural, it should reappear in other contexts. To examine each story in Dubliners for analogies to physical paralysis can take us some way into the stories. 5 Father Flynn's 'scruples' and his torpid life, his sisters' constricted round of duties seem analogous and not difficult to relate, loosely, to a notion of paralysis. Similarly, Eveline is powerless to leave Dublin and Bob Doran (in 'The Boarding House') succumbs to the pressures of convention and Mrs Mooney-with what disastrous result we see in Ulysses. Little Chandler ('A Little Cloud'), Farrington ('Counterparts'), Maria ('Clay'), Mr Duffy and Mrs Sinico ('A Painful Case'), to name only a few, lead severely restricted lives, unable or unwilling to break out of webs of containment which seem overpowering, whether they are self-created or imposed from outside. When Farrington returns to his child the blow dealt him at his office, we taste a sub-human form of repetition: of such incidents Blake built his dull round, the meaningless, endless cycle of mundane triviality. We could probably probe further along these lines, always with our trope in mind, watching it radiate outwards. Or we might discriminate the particular nature of the paralysis in each instance, even without prejudicing our commitment to the ontological status of our thematic term. If, on the other hand, we could not also discover a polar term (in this case some radical notion of freedom of movement, say) and an opposing set of illustrative incidents-or an opposing interpretation of the same incidents-it would be proper to decide that our first term constituted an aesthetic presupposition and had the action of an unobstructed magnetic node. Paralysis, having nothing to oppose it, would reign supreme as a controlling trope, and there would be no definition of its limits. (Hence,

4

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' the tendency of symbolic readings to proliferate endlessly: they are not held in tension with any contrary limiting force.) Even more significant would be the human consequences-the consequences for the fictional characters as imagined persons: we might conclude metaphorically that the patients, like Rev. Flynn, had all 'died' before the stories began, that the fiction was autopsy, that Joyce's Dublin world was, as Henry Miller has claimed, 'The Universe of Death'. 6 More literally, radical tension and conflict in the relationships between characters or between character and environment cannot be posited (or discovered) in such a universe. It is finally indifferent whether the environments are thematic reflections of characters' personalities (symbolic expressionism) or whether the personalities themselves are only functions of the environment (determinism). Both of these versions of experience are controlled from outside, holistically, according to the rules of a thematic monism, and become finally indistinguishable. Much of what follows will be an attempt to clarify and illustrate these last statements, first through the following parergon: that the focus of attention in a writer who prosecuted thoroughly such a thematic intent would be on his own methods of exposure. Oliver Gogarty understood Joyce's notion of 'epiphany' as a key to such an intent in his one-time friend: Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class-for Joyce knew no Greek-that 'Epiphany' meant 'a showing forth'. So he recorded under 'Epiphany' any showing forth of the mind by which he considered one gave oneself away.

Which ofus had endowed him with an 'Epiphany' and sent him to the lavatory to take it down? 'John,' I said, seeking an ally, 'he is codding the pair of us.' 7 [my italics] Gogarty here illuminates, perhaps not intentionally unkindly, a connotation of 'epiphany' (to give oneself away) viewed as an artistic strategy. If it is the task of the writer to expose, one method of exposure is to have one's characters do the job for you. (The question of whether the artist discovers or makes epiphanies is not thereby prejudiced. Aside from biographical

5

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' considerations-how Joyce in fact went about his businessthese two may be different ways of talking about the same thing.) The posthumously published Epiphanies 8 alone, though, suggest the limitations of Gogarty's understanding, though Joyce may himself have held such a view at some stage. Joyce's only exposition of 'epiphany', in Stephen Hero, demonstrates that he was not solely tied to the Gogartian moral-satirical intention. The implication that an epiphany is the revelation by the artist of a previously existent-though hidden-state persists, however: it is either the accident or the engineering of exposure. It does not concern the relationship of character to event. The personality of the observing artist (Stephen Daedalus) is not involved in the epiphanic scene before him; except that he is in a position to see it, he is unnecessary: It was hard for him [Stephen] to compel his head to preserve the strict temperature of classicism. More than he had ever done before he longed for the season to lift and for spring-the misty Irish spring-to be over and gone. He was passing through Eccles' [sic] Stone evening, one misty evening, with all these thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain when a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses which he entitled a 'Vilanelle of the Temptress'. A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railing of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely. The Young Lady-(drawling discreetly) ... 0, yes ... I was ... at the ... cha ... pel. ... The Young Gentleman-(inaudibly) [sic] ... I ... (again inaudibly) ... I ... The Young Lady-(softly) ... 0 ... but you're ... ve ... ry ... wick ... ed .... This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told

6

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. (215-I6j2IO-I 1) There is more on the subject, to the effect that 'epiphany' is the moment of Aquinian claritas and that 'Claritas is quidditas' (218/213), all notions shrewdly revised before inclusion in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where 'epiphany' is noticeably absent. The 'theory' of epiphany 'is not of much use to a dramatist', wrote Theodore Spencer, glossing too quickly, perhaps, over its links with the classical anagnorisis. 9 If, however, an epiphany constitutes the 'showing forth' of an already established condition-the exposure of being, rather than itself part of the process of becoming-that which is paralysed ('one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis') forms a congenial subject-matter. It is available, as is 'the vulgarity of speech or of gesture'. The glib addition of 'or in a memorable phase of the mind itself' complicates the situation immeasurably, for it suggests the involvement of the recording mind as an essential agent, actively constituting the epiphany. What follows in Stephen Hero, identifying claritas ('radiance') as the 'moment which I call epiphany', when the soul of the aesthetic image (or, apparently, real event) 'leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance', allows for, without insisting on, the implications of this new dimension. 'The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted,* seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany' (2 18/2 13). Through its association with the supposed Aquinian aesthetic, the notion of epiphany is here raised to a level from which Joyce possibly saw fit to demote it when he omitted the word from the aesthetic of the Portrait. 10 Such terms are worth carrying along in lengthy discussion of Joyce, not because they turn out to be the controlling vision behind his fiction, but because he invariably turns them into the subject of later work. Though the term epiphany is not present in Portrait, it appears in Ulysses, as Stephen, a little older now, walks along the beach towards Dublin, thinking, Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world,

* Who makes the adjustment or what is adjusted? Does the 'structure' include the observer? B

7

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners'

including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. (50/41) This is critical-and distanced enough to suggest it would be unfruitful to pursue the term further as an index of Joyce's own continuing method. 11 A mahamanvantara is the great cycle of eternity, the 'eternal return' of Mircea Eliade's study of 'the archaic ideology of ritual repetition', after which all things begin over again.* Joyce had used the expression, which probably came to him through the theosophists, in his broadside 'The Holy Office' : Those souls that hate the strength that mine has Steeled in the school of old Aquinas .... Though they may labour to the grave My spirit shall they never have Nor make my soul with theirs as one Till the Mahamanvantara be done.t 12 As the 'eternal return' would cancel out the soul-difference Joyce so values, it is the enemy of art. The trail of the epiphany despite its clouds of glory, returns us to the notion of a dull round. It maintains, as hitherto examined, intimate connections with the notion of paralysis. II

Thus far it has been suggested that there is one tendency in 'epiphanic' perception (or composition) to gravitate towards the exposure of a static situation. (It is moot, in Joyce's texts,

* Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1959), p. 114. Stuart Gilbert quotes A. P. Sinnett's explanation in Esoteric Buddhism: 'Man has a manvantara and pralaya every four-andtwenty hours, his periods of waking and sleeping; vegetation follows the same rule from year to year as it subsides and revives with the seasons. The world too has its manvantaras and pralayas, when the tide-wave of humanity approaches its shore, runs through the evolution of its seven races, and ebbs away again, and such a manvantara has been treated by most exoteric religions as the whole cycle of eternity' (James Joyce's Ulysses [New York, 1956], p. 123). t Clive Hart in Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London, 1962), pp. 55-6, discusses Joyce's use of the Mahamanvantara in the Wake, where it forms an essential ingredient in the notion of cyclic form on which Hart considers the structure is grounded. Hart thinks that joyce took his knowledge of eastern worldcycles from the theosophists, particularly Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877). 8

The Early Stories in 'Dub liners' whether aesthetic 'apprehension' occurs in an instant of time.) Epiphany, under this aegis, does not imply either the recognition or the creation of a reality in which the act of perception alters the perceiver, or is conditioned by his human individuality as distinct from his presumably shareable aesthetic sense. It is inflexible in its determination of the relationship between subject and object. The matter can be complicated when the character in, rather than the author of a fiction apparently lays claim to 'having' an epiphany, for the question enters at a more obvious level as to whether we are to allow ourselves to be bound by the character's own rules of epiphany in interpreting the nature of the bond between artist and artifact. What is supposed to change is apparently not the 'character' of the observer-fictional person, artist or reader-but his understanding of what is observed: his apprehension of as distinct from his relationship to the object epiphanized. One sees-and think that the subject matter is characteristic-in some 'triviality' or 'vulgarity of speech or of gesture' what had existed sub specie aetemitatis before being seen. The long passage from Stephen Hero previously quoted continues with Stephen's description of how the Ballast Office clock becomes epiphanized: 'I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany' (216(21 1). While this particular strategy of approach has obvious alignments in earlier literary theories of suggestion and in the history of the pictorial arts, I would like to stress its similarity to the epistomological and ontological assumptions of certain of Freud's explanations of the methods of the psychoanalyst. Lecturing in 1915, Freud stated, with characteristic mock-selfdepreciation, It is true that psychoanalysis cannot boast that it has never

occupied itself with trifles. On the contrary, the material of its observations is usually those commonplace occurrences which have been cast aside as all too insignificant by other sciences, the refuse, so to speak, of the phenomenal world .... Is it not possible, under certain conditions and at certain times, for very important things to betray themselves in very slight indications ?13

9

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' There is a direct line here from 'the psychopathology of everyday life'-the 'Freudian slip'-to the psychoanalyst's couch ('under certain conditions and at certain times'). Betrayal through only apparently trivial detail is a crucial point in the Freudian epistemology, and not only by way of verbal slips, mistakes, and lapses of memory. Further, these betrayals through trivialities only reveal what was present but hidden in situations: Psycho-physiological factors such as excitement, absent-mindedness, distraction of attention, obviously provide very little in the way of explanation. They are mere phrases; they are screens ... They facilitate the slip ... [and] cannot provide the real explanation of them. 14 In this, his most careful exposition of psychoanalysis, Freud begins with the analogy of mistakes and proceeds to the analogy of dreams (he is recapitulating the history of the development of psychoanalysis, a little ideally, as a pedagogical device). There likewise, 'the external and internal stimuli operating upon the sleeper are merely the occasion of the dream and afford us no insight into its true nature'. 15 For the psychoanalyst then, temporal events merely facilitate or are occasions of manifestations of pre-existent psychic 'conditions'; they do not alter these conditions. They only reveal them as they already are. It is easy to see from this how any real crises of personality would tend to be pushed back in time: the infantile familial complex is, on this account, a buffer against dissipating entirely any notion that events have more than a demonstrative status. An ideal literature constructed according to a corollary aesthetic would tend to find congenial the exposure of psychic conditions. That is, exposure would function as a modus operandi: the reader, in turning the pages, would come to know more and more about the characters, to erect provisional concepts of the 'true state' of being of the characters and test these against the following incidents. The end of this approach -and it does not finally signify whether one speaks in terms of the reader, the writer or the meaning of the work-is to arrive at an understanding of what characters are. Like Stephen, one would circle around and around until one perceived the IO

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' quidditas. While this attitude ought to be difficult enough to maintain in tracing the career of an individual over any length of time in any minuteness, it is done all the time by literary critics of symbolist persuasion. Their attitude is bolstered by the implicit Freudianism in which significant change through events would hardly be looked for in anyone over, say, four years of age. Since novels persist in being, in good part, about adults-or at least not about infants-the terminus of this approach to fiction would be to understand fictional adults as analogies of early stages of psychosexual development. To the extent that these early stages are felt to be more significant than the adult manifestations of personality, analogy shades into allegory. As is evident from Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud finally came to read the whole history of culture by such a light. The history of religious movements is governed by an iron law of compensation which merely recapitulates ontogenesis. It is significant that culture so understood is presumed to be a cyclic process: the religion of Ikhnaton is rejected by the next generation of Egyptians, revived by Moses, rejected by the Jews during the Exodus, revived by the Prophets, rejected by Christianity. Freud himself, as the newest avatar of the Primal Father, must expect to be rejected by his 'sons' (Jung, Rank et al.). 16 Our analogy to the procedure involved in the epiphany likewise brought us to the eternal return, which may help to illuminate the morphology of the exposure (or betrayal) of pre-existent conditions through trivial detail.* The anecdote which Stephen Dedalus tells of 'Two Dublin vestals ... [who] want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson's pillar' in Ulysses, preceded as it is by the single word 'Dubliners' (183/143), might be called in to justify the reading of the stories in Dubliners as a series of literary epiphanies. The anecdote itself is enigmatic and might well be

* That the vehicle of exposure should be an alogical 'symbol'-an image, for example, part of a narrative context, whose significance lies in its pointing to another, suprasyntactical context ('displacement')-points to a further rapprochement between psychoanalysis and literary interpretation, as has been suggested by Graham Hough in Image and Experience (London, 1g6o), Ch. III (esp. pp. 122-8). Hough maintains that modern criticism owes its success in discriminating 'the shifting boundaries of the symbol' (p. 124) to Freud's influence-his 'researches on symbolism and on the dream mechanism-"distortion", "projection", "condensation" and "displacement" ' (p. 123). I I

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' an epiphany gone bad, or still imperfectly formulated. It tells us something about Stephen. But while Stephen's predilection for the epiphanic mode may tell us this, Stephen did not write Dubliners, and epiphany is only a single element to be related to others in Joyce's own work. I return to an earlier question: whether there is anything in the stories which might serve as a counter-principle in tension with the syndrome of 'paralysis'. Hugh Kenner, whose short view is that Joyce's whole terrain is a blasted wasteland of paralysed being, will not allow, for example, that the very young boy in 'The Sisters' is anything but a prisoner in the procession. For Kenner, the boy 'is' young Stephen Dedalus (another damned soul) and will 'most probably be a cheerful habitual inhabitant of the boot-heel world' which the other characters occupy. 17 This denominated judgement is intended to fix the character of the boy once for all and to see in a particular moment of time what he has been, is and cannot help but become. For Kenner, then, there would be no counter-principle. Kenner's phrase 'boot-heel world' derives, however, from a passage in Joyce's text which does not entirely support the weight of authority he expects it to have. One of Father Flynn's sisters, the boy and his aunt enter the bedroom where the deceased is laid out: I went in on tiptoe. The room through the lace end of the blind was suffused with dusky golden light amid which the candles looked like pale thin flames. He had been coffined. Nannie gave the lead and we three knelt down at the foot of the bed. I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman's mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side. The fancy came to me that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin. (I 3/ I 3-4)

This passage does not seem necessarily to imply cosmic damnation, or even certain indication that the character is not in a state of grace, what Kenner considers a telling failure of nerve to contemplate the 'mystery'. Using a vocabulary-and therefore finally an ontological supposition-closer to the narrator's own, we might say that 12

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' the boy's wandering of attention implies a dissatisfaction with and lack of ease in the scene of which he is a part, a desire to dissociate himself from it and from the feeling he thinks required of him, perhaps a flicker of sensibility, for the precision of his observation is underlined ('I noticed how'). As the transcendental significance of this would vary greatly depending on one's particular standpoint-damnation, or on another hand, right behaviour-it seems difficult to insist on any particular one. Nor can any wider context be called in to determine this larger significance: it can only suggest the possibility of one. Of this, more later. Here it is enough to suggest that close inspection of the basis for determinate judgement has loosened rather than tightened our grip on the blanket application of a particular theoretical approach to the text. To dethrone the approach does not, however, impair its thematic relevance. Kennerian 'fixity' and the potential freedom of dissociation may share the passage. In 'The Sisters' it is the relationship between Rev. Flynn and his sisters that forms the centre for the notion of paralysis, under the aspect of society or of Joyce's social donnie. This relationship is a paradigm for Stephen's claim in the Portrait that there are three 'nets flung' at the soul of an Irishman 'to hold it back from flight' (207/238). While these are first named as 'nationality, language, religion', they are later replaced by the more dangerous (as Stephen thinks) triad: 'I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church' (251/291). These three elements are conjoined in a single situation in 'The Sisters'. They form a nexus of pressures under which Flynn, given his particular sensibility, became immobilized, 'scrupulous'. He retreated into insentience. The failed priest is the first of Joyce's trial self-projections in Dubliners-what he might have become had he remained in Dublin. (The method was being used contemporaneously in short stories by Henry James, most notably perhaps in 'The Jolly Corner'.) An impoverished Irish family like the Flynns-'all born down in Irishtown' (16jq)-would nevertheless have sunk all its meagre resources into the education of a son who claimed a call to the priesthood, even to the deprivation of other children, 13

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' In such a situation, the uneducated daughters would probably have been precluded from making a 'good' marriage (they would have no dowry) and would more likely not marry at all. In return for an education gained at the expense of other members of his family, the priest would be expected to take on, in later years, the support of any unmarried sisters. Often they would become his housekeepers. Though celibate, he would be held by Irish society to a strict accounting in the way of familial obligation. Consequent upon Flynn's having been relieved of parish duties-that his mind seems to have given way we learn in the story's last words-this expected pattern of responsibility had been reversed. His support had devolved upon his sisters: 'God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are' (I 4/ I 6). They seem to have been forced into running a 'drapery'. Their conversation with the boy's aunt reveals a current of illfocused and hardly acknowledged animus against their dead brother as well as a clear strain of the feeling that they have been obscurely cheated in life. Eliza tells a good deal more about James than she originally intends. In this last crisis of all, her censor is weakened, but she would be upset to be told that her feelings are ambiguous. There is something of a similar animus in the way one of Joyce's sisters spoke of 'Jim' in the I950 British Broadcasting Company 'Portrait of James Joyce', and of the parents who would have done 'anything' for Jim in the days when they hoped he was going to become a priest. Anything for Jim, nothing for them. As an emblem of social immobility, Joyce could hardly have found a better implication of Church, state and family in a single situation to set at the head of his published fiction. But the young boy who sometime later narrates the story has no part in this, except as it represents one possibility for him: My uncle explained to old Cotter. 'The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal mind you: and they say he had a great wish for him.' (8/g) Yet oddly enough, the boy does sense the priest's death as a release for himself, and we learn that Flynn's 'teaching' had been more in the way of a confusion, an inculcation of his own scruples than an enlightenment for the boy: I4

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' I walked away slowly along the sunny side of the street, reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows as I went. I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death .... he had explained to me the meaning of ... the different vestments worn by the priest. Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, asking me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. The duties of the priest towards the Eucharist and towards the secrecy of the confessional seemed so grave to me that I wondered how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake them .... Often when I thought of this I could make no answer or only a very foolish and halting one upon which he used to smile and nod his head twice or thrice. (1 1-12(1 1-12) This smile had come to the boy the previous night, in a dream he is at this juncture trying to recall: the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin. (9(10)

It is not until the moment when the boy's attention wanders from his prayers to Nannie's clumsily hooked skirt and her 'trodden down' cloth boots that this sinister smile is dissipated: The fancy came to me that the old priest was smiling as he lay there in his coffin. But no. When we rose and went up to the head of the bed I saw that he was not smiling. (13(14) The boy, like Eliza later, tells us more about his relationship to the priest than he himself understands about it. He also shows us his first steps, barely self-comprehending, beyond the priest's influence. He even still seems to believe he feels as 15

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' he did. His progress, while ambiguous, displays the first tentative glimmerings of dissociation. It seems one of those 'small gradual readjustments' in which Edmund Wilson saw Joyce's major focus of attention. 18 It is a readjustment by means of a dream of a dead parent-figure rejected: the icon which will reappear, in a more complicated context, in Ulysses. There is nothing in 'The Sisters' which insists on the permanency or impermanency of this adjustment: at thirteen one can hardly be trapped or freed for life-unless, of course, the incidents at hand are supposed to be 'symbolic' of an assumed condition. In 'The Sisters' there seems nothing which could prove this'latter, though evidences ofsymbolical correspondance-as Flynn's physical paralysis-might be counted for it. Similarly, no particular determinate moral judgement seems implied in the boy's involuntary withdrawal from the priest's sphere of influence, unless one believes the opposite of Hugh Kenner's symbolist reading, namely that Joyce's is 'the gospel of individualism'. 19 The rhythm of constraint and freedom need not necessarily be tied to either moral position, despite the difficulty of talking without implying one or the other. This short story lays down the relationships and dynamic of opposed forces, and while it does not disallow transcendental interpretation, it does not force it. The problem becomes necessarily more complex as a protagonist's course is traced over a longer period of time. III

When the young boy protagonist of the second and third short stories in Dubliners, 'An Encounter' and 'Araby', meets with frustration it begins to look as though the shades of the prisonhouse are closing about him. This is to assume that the firstperson narrator of the first three stories is the same person. In any case, the narrative alters to third-person in the fourth story, 'Eveline', and never reverts, so at least one issue looming on the horizon cannot be referred to further incidents : is the boy going to be a 'failure' ? whose fault would it be, his own or circumstance's? is the possibility of 'freedom' suggested in 'The Sisters' rendered illusory by the action of 'An Encounter' and 'Araby'? 16

The Early Stories in 'Dub liners' Here are readings based in good part upon symbolist interpretations of these stories: The theme of the two modes of priesthood runs from 'The Sisters' through 'An Encounter' to 'Araby', at which point, with the passing of childhood, the scrupulous and imaginative mode loses its resilience for good. 2 0 [my italics] The only explication of 'An Encounter'-that of Marvin Magalaner in Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation-treats the excursion of two truant schoolboys as an attempt to escape from the paralysis of Dublin life by visiting the Pigeonhouse Fort, which is interpreted as a religious and paternal symbol. 'The Pigeonhouse, then, is identified in Joyce's mind with the "father" of Christ and with fathers in general' (77). The pervert whom the boys encounter after they have abandoned their attempt to reach their destination is, according to this interpretation, both a perverted God and a perverted father .... For a long time I did not understand why a visit to the Pigeonhouse should be the climax of a day spent in seeing foreign ships; I then learned that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the Pigeonhouse was the Irish terminus of the Irish-English packet service .... Thus, much of the pathetic futility of the boys' attempt to escape lies in the fact that they try a path that had been closed before they were born. 21 [my italics] In the last comment, the writer comes to take his own metaphor ('escape') literally. Yet the confidence that Joyce belonged to a certain school of symbolist thought-in which narrative plot, for example, is only 'symbolic' of some other 'real' levelcan produce such interpretation ad irifinitum. Why else, for instance, is the vessel whose 'legend' the boy fails to 'decipher' 'Norwegian' (23/25)? Does this mean that the 'attempt to escape' being made here is wholly frustrated or merely premature, since knowledge of 'Norwegian' will later, when James Joyce encounters Ibsen, lead to a true escape? In the case of 'An Encounter' and 'Araby', the 'theme' of escape or of a search for freedom needs little illustration. It is there, even if our understanding of what it means is clouded: The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape .... 17

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad .... (18-20/21-2) School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane. (22/25)

What I want to note here is the image which opposes itself to the linear movement of escape. It is twice-repeated. The man who accosts the boys when they have, with 'jaded thoughts' (24/26), abandoned the 'project of visiting the Pigeon House' (23/26), gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetized by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit .... He repeated his phrases over and over again .... (26/29) He began to speak on the subject of chastizing boys. His mind, as if magnetized again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new centre. (27/30) The image of circular fixity and repetition has been glanced at earlier; it will demand attention when we arrive at Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. Generally appearing in a context of futility, it will attract some strange and prominent bedfellows. IV

The structure of 'Eveline' is a progressive alternation of themes. The attractions of escape from Dublin oscillate with the forces conspiring to keep Eveline there. It is a simple pattern: will the energy of the shop-girl-'Her head was leaned against the window curtains ... She was tired' (37/42)-be sufficient to enable her to 'go away like the others, to leave her home' (37/43), 'run away with a fellow' (38/43), 'to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her' (39/45)? Realism tugs against romance, in motive and style simultaneously: the 'fellow' is 'awfully fond of music and sang a little' (40/45),

18

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' but when Eveline 'heard a melancholy air of Italy', her father had said, 'Damned Italians! coming over here!' (41/47). At first the rhythm of oscillation is leisurely and the formulation of alternatives vague, undemonstrative and tangential to the specific items of greatest emotive call on Eveline. Attractive memories of the neighbourhood in her childhood, when 'father was not so bad' (37/42), a ruminating glance around the room at 'those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided' (38/43) are followed by a repellent aspect of the Dublin scene for her, a reminiscence of the shop where she works. Thus detaching her emotions she proceeds to a thought of 'her new home, in a distant unknown country' (38/44), but a memory of the family life since her mother's death-'now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life' (39/45)-recalls her to the sense of obligation to stay. As the shortest of the stories in Dubliners proceeds, the pace of the alternations-on the one side, home and family responsibilities; on the other, Frank, escape and freedom-increases, and the individual images become more sharply detailed. Against Frank's 'tales of distant countries' are set her father's commands 'forbid[ding] her to have anything to say to him' (40/46). The attractive side of 'Dublin' is illustrated by a vivid memory of a family 'picnic to the Hill of Howth' (41 /46). Then follows a memory of the focal experience of the forces of restriction, Eveline's 'promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could', made on the 'last night of her mother's illness' (41/47). Here, given her dreams, is the occasion of remorse, what will in Stephen Dedalus be the 'Agenbite'. It is the most vivid expression for the object of one cluster of feelings in Eveline; it is immediately followed by its polar opposite: 'She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! ... she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank ... would save her' (41-2/47). These oscillations form a resonance, of the kind that tears suspension bridges apart. Similar resonances comprise the structural basis of numerous works. 22 In Arthur Miller's drama Death of a Salesman, episodes of alternating family happiness and unhappiness culminate in the dinner Willy 19

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' Loman's sons give him. This proudest moment ends in desertion and the hallucination/flashback of the scene in which his son Biff had discovered a prostitute in his father's hotel room. Out of this incident the whole plot has grown; to it, it obsessively returns. A dream-fantasy /nightmare resonating alternation likewise informs the structure of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, where the apparent success of the hero's 'romantic' desires is always followed by the occurrence of a feared nightmare of equal magnitude (the wound, the retreat from Caporetto): as the happy events increase in magnitude of importance, so do the disasters, the escape to Switzerland and the death of Catherine in childbirth being the last of each. Hemingway's use of resonance is, however, linear, while Joyce's and Miller's, mixing memory and desire, weave backwards and forwards in time, culminating in the simultaneous linear plot crisis and the uncovering of the 'traumatic' past experience, after which whatever is left of the plot-if anything-is predictable. The growing tension of 'Eveline' can be partly accounted for by the greater pressure Dublin 'reality' amasses as the story proceeds over the necessarily vaguer pressure of Eveline's desires. This is true linguistically as well as psychologically. That is, the reality is determinate, it has occurred, it has the vernacular on its side; the desire is indeterminate, in the future, couched in the terms of romance and adolescent longing. The longer the story goes on, the more does the language bully the girl. The linguistic situation here produced is a function of the existential situation: it recurs, more importantly, in Portrait of the Artist. Now the stage is set for the last scene, which will, apparently, demonstrate the result of Eveline's reminiscences. 'At the North Wall', Eveline is in 'a maze of distress'. A riot of conflicting feelings and images possesses her mind. At the last instant she pulls back, and her refusal or inability to leave is described initially by the metaphor of fear of drowning: All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing. 'Come!' No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish! 'Eveline! Evvy!' 20

The Early Stories in 'Dubliners' He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. (42-3/47)

The boldly sketched symbolism of fear of water as an inability to face the 'sea' oflife has been familiarized by Jung. It returns in different, more expanded and articulated versions throughout Joyce as the artist's necessary 'choice of flux rather than any already created order'. 23 A death by drowning similar to the one Eveline foresees for herself if she boards ship is to be found in Ulysses, where Stephen's sister Dilly, as Marvin Magalaner has noted, 24 is a version of Eveline. Only in the novel, the positions are apparently reversed: Eveline, fearing that Frank and the unknown would be a drowning, prefers to stay in Dublin; Dublin itself, on the other hand, is drowning Dilly-and Stephen too, as he thinks: She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. (313/240)

Whether it was ever possible for Eveline to have escaped seems hardly worth asking. It is answered, negatively, if we elevate a notion like 'paralysis' to any ontological status. Does Eveline end in Dublin because she was paralysed? Why not say Dublin is 'the centre of paralysis' because such things happen as happened to Eveline? This simple distinction becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the action of a character complicates, partly under the inherent pressure of a longer form of fiction, partly because of certain artistic strategies we will be analysing. In a more complicated situation, given a more complex character like Stephen Dedalus, the 'flight' from Dublin which ends Portrait of the Artist, the return which precedes Ulysses, cannot be said so confidently to 'mean' what Eveline's unwilling decision seems to mean for her: that we have witnessed the crucial event of a life, that she has had and missed her one chance for self-assertion. If therefore, we 'interpret' the concrete actions of Portrait or Ulysses by reference to a supposed causal condition, like 'paralysis', we risk going (very strictly speaking) outside the text. We posit, as the enabling act of criticism, an allegorical intent in Joyce. 21

II

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A TOUNG MAN: DISENGAGEMEN1_,

You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art. -Blake

is to suggest why critical preoccupation with 'symbolist' elements in Joyce's fictionrecognizable in the use of terms like verbal motif, correspondance, the universe of verbal discourse, image-pattern, theme- or key-word-renders a less favourable portrait of the character of Stephen Dedalus than in their absence. One aim is hopefully synthetic-to demonstrate the equal necessity of major 'opposed' views in Joyce criticism. Not that their opposition is less than complete: it is, on many levels. But the holding of irreconcilable, mutually exclusive views circumscribes the only areas of 'total meaning' which can properly delimit, in different ways, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. That the presentation of character and action in the Portrait or Ulysses should be finally paradoxical-what Kierkegaard called the 'absolute paradox' 1 -should not be particularly troublesome as a concept, however difficult its articulation may prove. Criticism is acclimatized to the notion in respect of metaphor, where 'tensions' established in the presence of

ONE BURDEN OF THIS CHAPTER

22

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement discrete meanings attachable to one and the same image have been long held a poetic virtue. 'Paradox' has been less rigorously applied, however, to the interpretation of fiction, 2 where it has met vigorous opposition from the insistence that an author is obliged to have a particular moral vision which the action ofhis story somehow demonstrates (mere authorial assertion of values being insufficient). But an author's refusal to commit himself to a particular quasi-ethical interpretation of his created action, while it may appear 'immoral' at one level, may lead us on to another as the ground of his commitment. This is not to dissipate the 'immorality' at the first, but to recognize it as part of a wider meaning: Kierkegaard's Abraham (in Fear and Trembling) is 'ethically' immoral for offering to sacrifice Isaac, but equally (possibly) 'religious' in another sphere. To assert that such contradictions make nonsense of moral vision assumes that an author must judge-or put himself on record as attempting a judgement-of the ultimate meaning of his creation, and further, make it appear that the action of his story offers a moral comment on the characters involved. The outline of a defence can be found in Chapter Seven of the earliest lengthy study of poetic paradox, Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity: A contradiction of this kind may be meaningless, but it can never be a blank; it has at least stated the subject which is under discussion, and has given a sort of intensity to it such as one finds in a grid-iron pattern in architecture because it gives prominence neither to the horizontals nor to the verticals, and in a check pattern because neither colour is the ground on which the other is placed; it is at once an indecision and a structure, like the symbol of the Cross.*

Extending our attention from Empson's spatial metaphors of pattern to existential antinomies such as the relationships between individuals and their experience, freedom and neces*William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1955), p. 128; 'when the two meanings of the word, the two values of the ambiguity, are the two opposite meanings defined by the context' (p. 217). Cf. also, 'Opposites, again, are an important element in the Freudian analysis of dreams' (p. 218); 'I have been searching the sources of the Nile less to explain English verse than to cast upon the reader something of the awe and horror which were felt by Dante arriving finally at the most centrique part of earth, of Satan, and of hell ... the secret places of the Muse' (pp. 221-2).

c

23

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement sity, possibility and actuality, some further systematization of paradox can be attempted. I hope to prove that a 'symbolist' reading of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist will be essentially different from a 'realistic' reading. It will be a further task to describe their relationship and to show that this relationship is by way of a description of the novel's meaning. In writing of 'symbolism' I shall be making use of a distinction from Graham Hough's A Preface to the Faerie Q_ueene. Hough distinguishes 'symbolism' from definitions such as Coleridge's in The Statesman's Manual (1816), according to which a symbol must 'partake of the reality which it renders intelligible'. 3 Hough calls this, and similar notions of symbolism, 'incarnation', and he reserves the term 'symbolism' for the basis of a more historical phenomenon in art: symbolism [is] like incarnation a form in which theme ['the moral or metaphysical "abstract" element'] and image ['the "concrete" characters, actions or objects'] have equal weight, but opposed to incarnation because the relation between the two elements is different. In symbolism there is none of the harmonious wholeness of incarnational literature ['in which any "abstract" content is completely absorbed in character and action and completely expressed by them']. Theme and image are equally present, they assert their unity, but the unity is never achieved, or if it is, it is only a unity of tension. The archetype for incarnationalliterature is the union of soul and body in the human person, but symbolism resists this human and accessible integrity. It seeks for the union of theme and image not through the representation of living, acting and suffering human beings, but through words as talismans, alchemie du verbe .•. [one version of which is characterized by] a realm of stratagems and devices, dereglement de tous les sens, things seen as the equivalent of concepts, fragments that mysteriously contain wholes .... 4 The problems of symbolism and 'realism' in Joyce can be clarified if Hough's distinction is borne in mind. They can be too easily dissipated by allowing the attempt to discover the nature of Joyce's symbols to shelter under the banner of 'incarnation'. A more vitalizing notion of their nature does not neutralize distinctions of genre, mode or strategy, but rather

24

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement sharpens them in order to perceive the limiting conditions they impose upon the fictions they inhabit. In the case of symbolism, this will require seeing it not at its nearest approach to realism, 'incarnation', but from its further side, where 'images tend to acquire magical properties. They engage in mysterious correspondences and enter into occult relations with vision'; or where 'the image shrinks and becomes stereotyped, and theme expands. We think of emblems ... '. 5 It is to a critique of this dimension of a Portrait qf the Artist-or to determine the status of such a dimension-that we turn first. I

The option of tracking constellations of images and verbal recurrences, in fiction as well as poetry, is for us 'live'. That the unthinking pursuance of 'symbolist' critical method has led to a degree of reaction is not occasion to dismiss it as merely an illegitimate extension of either a particular historical phase of art or a critical fashion in the explication of poetry. That Joyce's attention in the construction of Ulysses was in great part given over to the discovery of correspondences and systematic schematizations is alone attested by his letters to Frank Budgen or his worksheets, lately studied by A. Walton Litz in The Art of James Joyce. 6 Let us examine the view of a critic who asserts a full symbolic claim for the Portrait. Hugh Kenner understands the first two pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a symbolic overture of motifs awaiting later development. This means for him that they 'enact the entire action in microcosm' : Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo .... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face .... (7/1) But as we can see from the vantage-point of Finnegans Wake, the whole book is about the encounter of a baby tuckoo with the moocow: the Gripes with the Mookse. The father with the hairy face is the first Mookse-avatar, the Freudian infantile analogue ofGod the Father. 7 [my italics] 25

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement Similarly, after this exchange in the novel-a near-transcript of the sixth 'Epiphany' in the University of Buffalo manuscript-0, Stephen will apologize. Dante said: -0, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.Pull out his eyes, Apologize, Apologize, Pull out his eyes, [etc.] (8/2) Kenner comments, '[Stephen's] own grown-up failure to apologize will blend with gathering blindness'. 8 In this last comment, the usage 'blend with' allows Kenner to skirt precise specification of the relationship between Stephen's physical short-sightedness and his moral behaviour. If pressed, Kenner might claim he did not intend to suggest that the failure to apologize was the cause of physical blindness, nor that the blindness was the reward of failure. He merely means that the notions are 'symbols', 'blended' together in a mixture. It may well be that no moral judgements ought to be passed upon the actions of characters in symbolist fiction-as they ought not in a 'determinist' world-the environments and events which meet these characters being merely expressions of their inner selves. (This is to transfer to a character what is often said of the symbolist author: 'If Baudelaire, for instance, calls up the image of a woman with black hair or green eyes, these are not so much personal characteristics [of the woman] as a definition of his own kind of sensibility' .9 ) Yet it is undeniable that Kenner does Judge Stephen Dedalus-adverselyand that he implies the judgement is Joyce's own. On a symbolist reading, events from Stephen's earliest years can be conflated with others some twenty years away in time and either held to 'contain' the other. If the notion of individual character is given any status in a symbolist fiction, the rapprochement between symbolism and determinism becomes evident. The casualty, in both symbolist and determinist fiction, is time. T. S. Eliot set the problem out in the opening lines of 'Burnt Norton': 26

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. 10 Sartre, in his essay 'Franc;ois Mauriac and Freedom' (r939), has made a complex association offictional determinism-under which he includes authorial pretence to absolute judgement in the sphere of morality-and a temporality: The time has come to say that the novelist is not God .... The introduction of absolute truth or of God's standpoint constitutes a twofold error of technique. To begin with, it presupposes a purely contemplative narrator, withdrawn from the action .... And besides, the absolute is non-temporal. If you pitch the narrative in the absolute, the string of duration snaps, and the novel disappears before your eyes. All that remains is a dull truth, sub specie aeternitatis. * The loss of 'the string of duration' is equally true of symbolism as of determinism. Though any one of a number of instances may be taken to symbolize the whole, Freudian approach to personality stands as an invisible guarantor that the earliest is the crucial incident. It would, however, be more proper to say that all individual 'emblems' are only particular examples of an underlying hypostatized substance, an unchanging core predisposed to respond along certain lines. Temporal events, when not just arbitrary symbols devised by the artist to reveal to us the character's inner state, may be considered as displaying facets of this hypothetical entity, for our fuller understanding of it. The earliest of these events, if not the cause of the latter, may be considered their definition, as the infantile Oedipal situation may be held to define, if not to cause, the more complex, sublimated adult situation. (Kenner's easy allusion to 'the Freudian infantile analogue' is here relevant.) It may be seen that this understanding of the symbolic relationship between character and event restricts severely *Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (London, 1955), pp. 14-15. Cf. Joyce's complaint (of 1903) that Ibsen's women in Catilina 'are absolute types, and the end of such a play cannot but savour of dogma-a most proper thing in a priest but a most improper in a poet' (Critical Writings, p. 100).

27

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement what can be meant by both 'development' and freedom. In a symbolist work the writer may develop his fictional character by displaying in 'time' various facets of the character's inherent personality-though any tendency to intensify (or pack) individual incidents will suggest that all are present at any one moment. This we have before described as epiphanic. But there is no question of the character himself developing as a human being. The terms of the relationship between the individual and experience are shrunk by the pure symbolist approach to one side of a metaphysical antinomy. Insistence on the total absence of symbolist intent-that, in our instance the first pages of Joyce's Portrait are devoid of any denominative judgement on the character-is to determine the matter solely in favour of the other horn of the dilemma. As a determinism of the interior is implicated in the former, so a determinism of the exterior circumstances appears involved in the latter. Symbolist hypostatization, then, not only tends to limit the possible significances of 'development', but in permitting a conveniently limited range of interpretation based on a fixed notion of character it can radically short-circuit our normal processes of judgement. In the case of the Portrait's 'apologize' tableau, the symbolist interpretation very nearly identifies all failures to apologize, conform or submit as ethically equivalent. The refusal to apologize for an unspecified childish misdemeanor is taken as a 'symbol' of the whole position of the artist: 'Dante' (so-called innocently enough by Stephen that Joyce may intimate she 'symbolizes' the Church and all authority) requires of the artist submission for a Promethean daring to see too much. 11 Such analysis contains no criterion of reasonableness (why should Dante Alighieri represent either religious authority or unjust religious authority?), but a symbolist work need not be thus reasonable. In interpreting all events from a conveniently fixed point, it may be assumed that Stephen Dedalus is, constantly, 'the artist', his every childish motion an un-artistic response and that the novel is a portrait of the infant, child, youth and young man as an artist. Now the artist-figure in a symbolist work-or, to preserve the critical figure, a work so interpreted-can hardly add any new tricks to a basic repertory, nor discard any. On this

28

'A Portrait of the Artist' : Disengagement interpretation no radical transvaluation of values or 'new' response to a supposed objective reality could be allowed for. 12 Symbolist literary analysis predisposes one to expect a fictional character who spins his universe out of his own entrails, whose reported experience-in the autonomy of the individual work, his whole experience-demonstrates the entirety of his possibilities, perhaps in every individual event. Symbolist aesthetic presuppositions tend to exact from fictional characters, in other words, corollary inclinations. The more a work seems to satisfy these presuppositions, the more does a character seem what Jean Piaget calls an 'assimilative' personality. In a categorization sometimes reminiscent of the Hedgehog and the Fox, Piaget defines the dimensions of the adaptions by which organisms reach equilibrium in their environments as 'assimilation' and 'accommodation'. Assimilation 'describe[s] the action of the organism on surrounding objects' and accommodation the converse, the environment's action on the organism ('it being understood that the individual never suffers the impact of surrounding stimuli as such, but they simply modify the assimilatory cycle by accommodating him to themselves'). 13 Elsewhere Piaget extends his classification to psychological types, whereby certain people are more accommodative or assimilative than others. 14 The assimilative personality converts all external reality into its pre-existent mode of perception. Thus Piaget refines the tendency of Freudian epistemology analysed in Chapter I into one element in a dynamic of personality types.*

* 'Of course, Miss Tray. But we know, don't we, that many an atom-bomb is merely a Mrs. Finch? Think of her as a piece of film, wedged deep in the unconscious. We cannot eject her, so we place behind her the powerful light of guilty evasiveness, which projects her upon the screen of the outer world, distorted into the likeness of a bomb. Thus we rid ourselves of an internal mother, by transforming her into an external explosive.' 'Then the atom bomb does not exist?' 'Some of my colleagues say that it doesn't: they lump it in with all the other internal problems, like road-accidents, industrial injuries, cancer, death, and so on. Personally, I'm a middle-of-the-road sort of man: I believe that machinery, and motor-cars in particular, are intrinsically dangerous. I even claim that they have the power of moving quite often in a direction opposite to the one demanded by their victim's neurosis. But be good enough not to repeat my remark in the presence of any of my colleagues: any rehabilitation of the external world injures them far more than could the heaviest motor-lorry' (Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity [Harmondsworth, rg6o], p. 65).

29

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement If there is a tendency to assume that 'all time is eternally present' in a novel, and if the end product is certified an 'artist', it may be assumed that he must always be on the road to artistic success or failure. The 'artistic response' to experience seems always present to Hugh Kenner. As in the implications of the Freudian statements discussed in the first chapter, conditions and particular events only serve to display a basic prior complex in various poses. They may 'bring out' or 'call forth' certain responses in a character-albeit in a particularly limited meaning of these terms. They seem, however, to have little real part in the creation of these responses. The relationship between individual and environment is governed on a priori assumptions by a symbolist aesthetic: it is unchanging. These assumptions are the reverse of the coin of naturalistic ones, which also posit a constant relationship, but not qualitatively different from them. In both, the character and his 'universe' are in a determinate and unalterable relationship. If this accounts for the artist-protagonist's always being seen in a constant path towards artistic success or failure, it is considerably easier to hold that Stephen Dedalus 'is'-or 'is becoming' (as time is finally irrelevant in symbolist analysis, where such distinctions are 'blended')-a failure than to maintain, as a few zealous admirers have, that his progress displays an unbroken series of successes. Let us take, as an example, Stephen's first successful attempt to compose a poem: Before him lay a new pen, a new bottle of ink and a new emerald exercise. From force of habit he had written at the top of the first page the initial letters of the jesuit motto: A.M.D.G. On the first line of the page appeared the title of the verses he was trying to write: ToE-- C--. He knew it was right to begin so for he had seen similar titles in the collected poems of Lord Byron. When he had written this title and drawn an ornamental line underneath he fell into a daydream and began to draw diagrams on the cover of the book. He saw himself [etc.] . ... Now it seemed as if he would fail again but, by dint ofbrooding on the incident, he thought himself into confidence. During this process all those elements which he deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There remained no trace 30

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement of the tram itself nor of the tram-men nor of the horses: nor did he and she appear vividly. The verse told only of the night and the balmy breeze and the maiden lustre of the moon .... [T]he letters L.D.S. were written at the foot of the page and, having hidden the book, he went into his mother's bedroom and gazed at his face for a long time in the mirror of her dressing table. (72-3/77-8) Though one critic sees Stephen's method as an occasion for high praise and claims it was Joyce's own process as he revised Stephen Hero into the Portrait, 15 it is rather a jejune idealizing and romanticization which accounts for the absence of' common and insignificant' elements, specification of the scene. Joyce's own language here, through its use of negatives, includes those very elements Stephen left out: the tram, the tram-men, the horses. Joyce is bearing down on Stephen here, in the description of the elaborate self-consciousness of the fledgling effort (new pen, new ink, new paper), the automatic jesuit superscription, the inability to concentrate, the narcissism. The poem is blatant wish-fulfilment: 'the kiss ... withheld by one, was given by both' (73/78). If one looks no further than the immediate context as one focuses on Stephen's artistic moments, assumes that each incident is a microcosmic reproduction of the whole novel, and inclines to be rather solemn about children, one's notion of Stephen will be darkly coloured. Alternately, attention to a wider context-that is, away from the 'symbolism' towards the individuality of the momentcan suggest another limiting pole. Stephen is at this point very young; having left Clongowes, he has not yet entered Belvedere. His poem is written after a 'long spell of leisure and liberty' (73/78) during which he has been at a loose end. Immediately following the poem episode, there is a family scene whose milieu resembles very closely that in 'The Sisters'. It opens with Stephen's sullen response to his father: 'he knew that his father would make him dip his bread in the gravy' (ibid.). Stephen's unformulated reluctance to admit the claims of poverty is similar to the young boy's attitude in the Dubliners story. In the Portrait this scene ends with a harsh and ironic picture of the way the adult world can betray a child: Father Conmee, it seems, has told Simon Dedalus about Stephen's 31

'A Portrait

of the Artist': Disengagement

earlier protest at having been pandied: 'Father Dolan and I and all of us we all had a hearty laugh together over it. Hal Hal Hal' (74/8o). Simon's relation of this in front of Stephen may be unintentionally crass or intentionally mean; in either case the effect is the same and the psychological-and structural-crest reached with the protest here finds its trough. Comparison with 'The Sisters' suggests that the protagonists may be in comparable stages, their eventual lines of travel comparatively unfixed, their attitudes towards their environment only beginning to crystallize. Given what we know of Stephen's experience of the world at the moment he wrote his poem-e.g. that Conmee had taken seriously his appeal against Father Dolan-the naivete there displayed would seem to be less significant than if it had occurred after the revelation of Conmee's particular kind of 'diplomacy'. The conditions which make the composition of 'To E-- C--' relatively harmless in its meaning for Stephen at the time alter with time. Repetition, which on a symbolic view would make no difference, would make the most significant point when it is seen that Stephen will be a free and developing character to the extent that he can leave this poem, as it were, behind him. To the degree we think that he might, he remains charged with potential, not a determined failure or success. This can be decided, not by inspection of the local verbal context, but only by inference from the action which follows. This may help us to preserve a certain respect for the limitedness of the individual incident, its inability to encompass a denominated judgement of the whole action. Nevertheless, the Portrait carries its protagonist further than does 'The Sisters', and one gravitates, even on an insistently unsymbolic reading, towards an expectation that the line of development will become more clear. When a novel's course does not appear to give in in this way, critics often balk: [Sons and Lovers] has two themes: the crippling effects of a mother's love on the emotional development of her son; and the 'split' between kinds of love, physical and spiritual, which the son develops, the kinds represented by two young women, Clara and Miriam. The two themes should, of course, work together, the second being, actually, the result of the first:

32

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement this 'split' is the 'crippling'. So one would expect to see the novel developed, and so Lawrence, in his famous letter to Edward Garnett, where he says that Paul is left at the end with the 'drift towards death', apparently thought he had developed it. Yet in the last few sentences of the novel, Paul rejects his desire for extinction and turns toward 'the faintly humming, glowing town', to life-as nothing in his previous history persuades us that he could unfalteringly do. 16 Mark Schorer expects the last event in Sons and Lovers to suggest a definitive direction for Paul Morel and that the previous course of the novel should support the feasibility of that end. That Sons and Lovers should support neither a definitive 'drift towards death' nor an unfaltering turn to life-the hyperbole is symptomatic of the similarity of expectation-does not enter into Scharer's view. Yet that Lawrence himself desired a thoroughly problematic presentation of his themes seems denied by the certainties of his language. That Paul might or might not survive the 'crippling' does not seem to be a suspension which Lawrence was much interested in sustaining, and thus he invites criticisms like Scharer's with some justice. The canons of what constitutes 'suspension' will come into discussion later; here I am interested in pointing what an approach similar to Scharer's decides about the Portrait. Accounts of Stephen Dedalus which assume that his end (success or failure) must be visualizable in his beginnings do not permit of any thoroughgoing dramatic interpretation of the novel. Ifjoyce is supposed to take a position about the outcome of Stephen's relationship with his environment, then must not each incident selected be a stage showing us the rightness of the outcome? At this point the artist-figure begins to assume his God-like attributes. The analogy between the work of art and created nature has a long and pre-Flaubertian history. Torquato Tasso, writing of the unity of the 'heroic' poem, claimed for it the variety of the creation itself. Though he includes a comparison between the artist and God-'I assert that the sublime poet (called divine for no other reason than that he models himself in his works on the supreme artificer and arrives at sharing thus his divinity)' 17 -Tasso's main focus is the nature of the incidents to be comprehended by a heroic poem. Subsequently, with

33

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement Romantic thrusts towards process and personality, creation as natura naturans and the creator have become the more welllighted portions of the analogy. For present purposes, it is a single feature of this last which is of import. The artist/God analogy is often explored in the light of the extent of an author's 'control' over his material and this is held to have direct relation to the degree of 'freedom' which individual fictional characters may have. As a metaphoric statement of a tension of conflict apperceptable within a work of art, the positing of auctorial 'interference' has its utility. The necessity of enforcing his thesis, we say, has made the author modify his characters; or, contrariwise, remaining faithful to the probabilities of action, the author has had to qualify the meaning he had intended. Such statements are descriptive either of a hypothetical genesis of the whole work as we have it or of alteration in the work as it progresses.* To say that the metaphor is really unnecessary, as what is being described takes place within the work, would, however, be an undue limitation inasmuch as the internal tension may be said to be symbolic of the relationship between author and work. If, given the analogy of the artist to God, a number of relations are potentially present-at least as many as there are theological statements of the relationship of God to creation-further matters suggest themselves. The question of the 'freedom' of characters in fiction is not necessarily settled by appeal to a particular author's awareness of the analogy of his craft to the processes of the deity-which may vary greatly with his theological position. In Joyce's case the matter is complicated by the fact that it is a character, and not the author, who points the analogy to 'the god of creation'. But if Stephen Dedalus is correct in holding that the artist is the God of his creation, then his statement is valid for all authors, and thereby not especially valid for Joyce. Further, analysis of what Stephen intends by the comparison is no necessary key to the nature of the relationship as establishable inJoyce's fiction. Following Stephen out might *'Interference' may even describe a work thematically: in Muriel Spark's

The Corriforters (1957) a character attempts to resist the narrator at his task. The

narrator, who is not a character in the action, but a standard 'omniscient' author, takes his revenge.

34

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement well lead to Hugh Kenner's conclusions, but whether one will wish to apply them beyond Stephen to the novel is another matter. In denying, or ignoring the possibility of Stephen's 'freedom', his potential for contrary lines of development, we inflict on ourselves a one-sided picture, a deterministic burden. It can lead to taking Stephen up on particular issues before he reaches the age of reason because they seem 'symbolic' ofwhat happens later, according to an interpretation of what happens later. Since y happened and means b, x (which appeared to be able to mean a or b or c, etc.) must also have meant b and only b, and What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation- 18 that is, not in this world. The reality of the 'world of speculation' becomes suspect. This is one of the things which perplexes Stephen most in Ulysses: Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass ?19 (30/26) The 'symbolist' critical position is correlative with an affirmative answer. Let us take an example from the Portrait. As a baby, Stephen muddles a song into '0, the green wothe botheth' (7/ I). At his desk in Clongowes he decides, 'But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere you could' (I 2/8). 'Improving the work of nature is his obvious ambition', writes Hugh Kenner, quoting this passage as evidence. 20 At what age does Kenner mean green rose-making is Stephen's 'obvious ambition'? At nine, as here? The fact is that Kenner is not concerned with Stephen's age at all. He has 'spatialized' the novel and for him only that is the meaning of any given situation which later comes, as he thinks, to pass. This is equivalent to eliminating time from the novel and possibility from the life of the character. By positing Stephen's 'obvious ambition', Kenner finds it 'latent' in his childish reflections; moreover, he voices no other possibility of meaning in them.

35

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement Kenner reads Stephen's day-dreaming as a parable of art and the (ineffectual) artist. Further attention to the particular temporal context can produce more about the green rose. Stephen's train of associations begins with the two opposing teams for sums, called 'Lancaster' and 'York'. Having been pushed into the cesspool the previous day by the school bully Wells, Stephen is coming down with a fever, and just as he shrank from playing rugby, he doesn't really want to 'race' for the answers to the sums. The classroom War of the Roses is for him an unwanted combat. The only thing which pleases him in his discomfort is to think about the colour of the prize card, which is pink, the reconciliation of red and white: 'pink roses were beautiful to think of' (12/8). After tea, the colours in his geography remind him of the day when Mrs Riordan 'ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell'. Red was for Michael Davitt. 'He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon .... He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it .. .' ( 1 7/13). Stephen may be mistaken in setting the colours at odds, but the significance is not lessened thereby.* Green and red-like red and whitesymbolize for him another opposition of the sort he has been trying to avoid. The place where you could have a green rose blossom would reconcile his family. The events of the Christmas dinner that year soon prove that Stephen's apprehension has valid grounds. It seems possible to domesticate this train of associations within the mind of young Stephen and to refuse the notion of any trans-personal system of correspondences in the 'world' of the novel. This does keep alive the integrity of the fictional character-as distinct from any function as a passive receptor of verbal motifs-and promote the possibility of mental creativity by him. Evaluation of this creativity still remains double-edged: Stephen's reverie can reflect an instinctive revulsion from the conflicts of life, partly excusable in the particular case by the onset of a genuine illness; or it may embody an embryonic version of a genuine creative mental

* Davitt's part in the Committee Room 15 deposition of Parnell is probably unknown to him, and at any rate 'Dante' Riordan deserted Parnell at the bishops', not the party's call (Ulysses, 61 1{481). 36

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement talent, if only at a barely conscious and unreflective level; or, the possibility of both. None of this potential range of meaning is available, however, if the 'symbolism' is taken to be over Stephen's head, as it were. If the reds and greens exist as a pattern in the Joyce-universe only, 21 Stephen's integrity as a dramatic creation is shattered, and the process by which the 'symbols' are manipulated cannot be attributed to him-which is to say it affords us no insight into the nature of his character as a developing entity in time. II

A few episodes from Joyce's Portrait have already been considered with a view to eliciting analogies to freedom and fixity and to suggesting what the presupposition of each does to our understanding of fictional characters. What is now required is an examination of the extent to which they are the subjects of the novel itself; otherwise, interesting as they may be in themselves, the notions would have no special relevance to Joyce's work. By this it will become evident that the fixed reading I have loosely typed as symbolist is the very one Stephen himself would apply were he a critic of the novel in which he is a character. Without taking the matter further, S. L. Goldberg has asserted as much: 'Indeed, to view Joyce's own art through the theory in the Portrait would lead to just that kind of formalistic analysis and evasion of judgement it has received from some of its commentators.' 22 This will suggest finally an implicit conflict between Stephen's view of art and the barely glimpsed vision of the life he wishes to lead: 'I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and wholly as I can' (25 I /29 I). To see this conflict growing, unsuspected by Stephen himself in the Portrait, we must attempt to relate Stephen's ideas (of art and life) and his (fictitious) life. Stephen's aesthetic 'conversation' with Lynch falls into two main parts, which Stephen connects verbally by reference to two 'senses' of the word beauty, a 'wider' (that is, literary) sense and a 'marketplace' sense (2I8j250). His discussion of the

37

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement literary sense subdivides into his remarks on pity and terror and on the requirements for beauty. Exposition of the 'market place' sense concerns the relation of the art object-which Stephen calls the 'esthetic image'-to audience and author. His key terms are 'arrest', 'stasis' and 'indifference'. Pity and fear, Stephen says, both 'arrest the mind' (209/239): -The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both ofwhich are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. (2ogj240) On this account, both pity and terror are 'static' responses. Each arrests its 'kinetic' opposite, desire or loathing (see 209/239: 'Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind [etc.] ..•• Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind [etc.] .... '). True tragic art arrests not by presenting or inducing a tensional balance of desire and loathing, not through the co-presence of pity and terror pulling in opposite directions, but by including two logically independent arresting actions. Stephen's use of 'stasis' as the opposite to didactic and pornographic (erotic) involves respect for aesthetic autonomy, but in attempting to eliminate 'kinetic' response he exposes a weak side. Sir Kenneth Clark, who begins his study of 'the nude' by defining its difference from 'the naked' as a matter of form, nevertheless allots to a 'kinetic' response a valid role in aesthetic apprehension: 'If the nude', says Professor Alexander, 'is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad morals.' This highminded theory is contrary to experience. In the mixture of memories and sensations aroused by the nudes of Rubens or Renoir are many which are 'appropriate to the material subject'. And since these words of a famous philosopher are often quoted, it is necessary to labour the obvious and say that no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even although it be only the 38

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement faintest shadow-and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals. 23 One need not assume that Lynch has Clark's awareness of the significance of the position, but his immediate response to Stephen crudely makes the same point: -You say that art must not excite desire-said Lynch! told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?-1 speak of normal natures-said Stephen-You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming carmelite school you ate pieces of dried cowdung.- (209/240) After this supercilious interlude, Stephen calls Lynch's response 'simply a reflex action of the nerves': Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm ofbeauty. (210/241) Focusing on the effect of the work of art upon the mind of the beholder, Stephen implies that the proper effect of true art is a continuous-if not instantaneous-state of mind, 'the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure' (217/250). This follows naturally on the elevation of both pity and terror to the status of independent arresting forces. Recalling Clark's 'mixture of memories and sensations' as he regards Rubens and Renoir, we might say that Stephen's view is 'contrary to experience'. Still, he thinks it true to his own experience. He does not state directly that 'stasis' is a structural property in a work of art, but by defining it as the end result of the mind's process of apprehension, he suggests that the experience of art is a recreation of the process of creation in the mind of the artist. Stephen is at pains to eliminate from the apprehension of art all consideration of temporal extension. Lest the description of 'stasis' as 'called forth, prolonged and at last dissolved' be taken to represent any notion of movement in the work, his D

39

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement definition of 'the rhythm of beauty' immediately spatializes the concept: -Rhythm-said Stephen-is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.- (2I0/24I)

Stephen will generally bolster a shaky argument with quasischolastic or quasi-legalistic formulae (like 'awakens ... awaken ... induces ... induce'). His termini are more important to him than the bridges he builds to span them. Here, directly considering for the first time the properties of art-as distinct from the processes of creator or beholder-he once again eliminates suggestions of temporal development and flux. He sees experience as valuable only in atemporal terms, apprehended instantaneously in congeries of discrete events. He projects the conditions of experience as hostile to his values, which, despite his dismissal of the notion of an 'esthetic image' which 'outshine[s] its proper conditions' (217/250), lends an idealizing cast to his argument: -We are right-he said-... to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand-that is art.They had reached the canal bridge and, turning from their course, went on by the trees. A crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water, and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the course of Stephen's thought.

(2 I I /242)

To Stephen at this stage, the 'proper conditions' of 'esthetic images' of Dublin are crudity and sluggishness, from which he is turning away.* Having drawn 'rhythm' into line with the atemporal implications of 'arrest' and 'stasis', Stephen's Aristotelian revision is complete. As with the 'epiphany', it is suggested that a temporality is a property of the work itself, mainly by defining

* See, 'the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity' (69/73), and 'The spectacle of the world which his intelligence presented to him with every sordid and deceptive detail' (Stephen Hero, 45/40). 40

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement the proper response to art as unaffected by 'kinetic' claims. This is similarly the major thrust of Stephen's interpretation of Aquinas, to which he passes next. First he manreuvres a paraphrase of Aquinas, 'pulchra sunt quae visa placent', towards the favoured stasis: -He uses the word visa, said Stephen, to cover esthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away good and evil, which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. (212(243) One wonders, of course, if 'any other avenue of apprehension' might not include Lynch's (or Clark's) reaction. More importantly, 'it' in the last line refers to 'visa'. Stasis becomes a faculty of apprehension, not a property of the beautiful. It is the way one looks at art which 'keeps away good and evil', not that some art keeps them away and some does not. A definition which moves from the operational ('keeps away') to the essential ('means') is suspect. For Stephen to end with stasis seems to be more important than the strict logic of the argument, as in the cavalier sweep of the following lines: 'How about the true? It produces also a stasis of the mind' (212(243). Stephen's second 'Aquinian' point, in which the three requisites for beauty are viewed as stages in the mind's perception of the work of art, rather than as qualities inhering in the object, moves to a similar conclusion: The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani ... called the en chan tmen t of the heart. (2 17/2 50) Even as an aesthetician he considers himself something of an artist, and he thinks that his discourse has the power to produce the very state which it undertakes to prove exists: Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had called up around them a thoughtenchanted silence. (218(250) 41

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement Stephen's aesthetic, in its direction, does hold fast to the subject's etymological meaning as a science of feeling. The kind of feeling he posits as 'esthetic' does characterize his own understanding of his emotions to this point in the novel. So far, the young man is an artist by his own definition.* Finally, if stasis is the fitting response in the beholder, indifference is the corresponding state in the creator of art. As the former means for Stephen an absence of conflicting pulls, not their tension, so the other tends towards an uncaring, rather than an equally caring (disinterested) attitude: The personality of the artist ... finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak .... The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (2 I g/252) The parting shot is a throwaway, a bit of conscious irony at his own expense, directed at the implications of his own abstractions. An ambiguity hovers as well over the word 'refined', which can suggest moral etiolation as well as alchemical purification. As Stephen knows, it was 'Lady' Boyle at Clongowes who was 'always at his nails, paring them' (44/44).t In U(ysses Joyce has Stephen offer a theory of the relation of an author to his work which is in some ways the converse of the one he offers in the Portrait. 24 There, the author is held to be unable to retire 'within or behind or beyond or above' his work. Shakespeare must perforce appear in each of his characters; like Shem in Finnegans Wake (192) he is bound to the cross of his own cruelfiction. Our knowledge that Joyce had alternative formulations helps support the suggestion that the myth of impersonality has its primary significance in its relation to Stephen's own character. In fact, it has just been illustrated rather baldly: -This hypothesis, Stephen began. A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of sir Patrick Dun's hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh roar of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed

* Stephen's subsequent composition of a villanelle is described predominantly in sexual (kinetic) terms, which reflects either on the aesthetic theory (which is tacitly abandoned) or the process (which deserts the theory). tIn Ulysses, Bloom regards his in order to avoid noticing Boylan (115/91). 42

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement his ears and gave out oath after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his companion's illhumour had had its vent. -This hypothesis, Stephen repeated.... (213/245) This response, or lack of it, instances one term in a growing process of disengagement which Stephen has been undergoing. The rhythm of the Portrait, like 'Eveline' in Dubliners, approximates a pattern of resonance. It alternates, with increasing scope, episodes of engagement and disengagement, ordering and disordering. Stephen engages himself with various 'orders' only to disengage himselffrom them. Hugh Kenner has pointed this out, though with his usual pejorativeness: Each chapter closes with a synthesis of triumph which the next destroys. The triumph of the appeal to Father Conmee from lower authority, of the appeal to the harlots of Dublin, of the appeal to the Church from sin, of the appeal to art from the priesthood (the bird-girl instead of the Virgin) is always the same triumph raised to a more comprehensive level. 25 S. L. Goldberg comments that Stephen 'has to balance a necessary engagement with the outer world and a necessary separation from it', 26 and as Kenner details the engagements, so we may point the 'necessary separation'. As Stephen's perceptions of the differences between things widens, it is paralleled by a progressive indifference, a detachment of the individual who reacts and suffers from the mind which observes. III

There is considerable reference to Stephen's growing indifference in the Portrait. In human terms, the instances most often reflect forms of self-protection against a hostile environment. They extend over a wide period of time and the analogy between the artist and the indifferent God with which Stephen completes his 'esthetics' is their culmination (or quasitheological justification). The novel in this respect moves towards an explicit statement of its implicit concerns. The first hint of detachment is a single short reference. Unjustly pandied at Clongowes,

43

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement Stephen knelt down quickly pressing his beaten hands to his sides. To think of them beaten and swollen with pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else's that he felt sorry for. (52/55) The merest suggestion of a distancing is present here. Stephen's response should be contrasted with the self-pitying reverie of his own death as he lay in the infirmary earlier-'He might die .... Wells would be sorry' (24/22). Verging on adolescence in Dublin, Stephen was angry with himselffor being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret. (69/73) As 'chronicled' hints, this detachment is synchronized-whether as cause or result-to the growth and expression of his artistic nature. The relation between experience and perception stated here is interesting. Instead of Stephen's 'kinetic' response (his anger) diminishing the value of his perception by introducing an element of bias, it leaves it unaffected ('lent nothing'). There follow some pages of his 'chronicled' observations, his aunt's kitchen (69/73-4), 'the narrow breakfast room' (69-70/ 74-5), 'a children's party at Harold's Cross' (70-I/75-6), related almost inconsequentially, in the manner of the Epi-

phanies.*

When Stephen is in this mood, however, the detachment seems to hinder action. On the tram with Emma, 'he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him' (71/76). It is through this narrow wedge that the image of the artist as a renouncer of personal experience enters the novel, in tacit conflict with Stephen's desire for such experience. t Here,

* 'Each of the three passages beginning with ["He was sitting"] forms an "epiphany" ' (J. S. Atherton in his edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a roung Man [London, 1964], p. 59). t See Cyril Connolly's description, apropos of Thomas Mann, of the artisttype 'content to remain an observer of life and of one's own life, often deprived of the experiences which render more rounded and full those of other human beings' (The Condemned Playground [London, 1945], pp. 63-4, and see Frank Kermode, Romantic Image [London, 1957], Ch. I and passim). 44

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement Stephen's unpremeditated, almost undesired, indifferent response to Emma's flirting becomes the apparent precondition for his first poem, already discussed. As the artist, in such a situation, becomes more self-conscious of what appears a necessary response in him if he is to turn his experience into art, his problem acquires complexity. Later, remembering the night he had been attacked by Belvedere classmates, Stephen wondered why he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him. He had not forgotten a whit of their cowardice and cruelty but the memory of it called forth no anger from him. All the descriptions of fierce love and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore unreal. Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones's Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that sudden woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel. (84/9 I-2) *

The objects of Stephen's detachment broaden to include his parents and their contemporaries. In a Cork barroom, embarrassedly watching his father drink with cronies, he thinks, An abyss of fortune or of temperament sundered him from them. His mind seemed older than theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness and regrets like a moon upon a younger earth. No life or youth stirred in him as it had stirred in them .... Nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust. . . . (g8f 107-8)

As the point of view holds the narrator to the present instant, we can have no comment on the permanence of this mood. How basic it is is for us to decide, and to the extent that we think it is, Stephen is deprived of essential freedom. But the mode of the narrative leaves it equally moot whether Stephen's later panting desire for a wide experience of life means, on the other hand, that he has passed beyond stages of indifference and coldness directed towards that which he feels hostile to him. In the present context, Stephen's indifference is brought into contact with the notion of cyclic movement ('vast inhuman cycles of activity'). The connection is soon made even more

* See also 8g/g6, 'A power, skin to that which had often made anger or resentment fall from him, brought his steps to rest'.

45

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement explicit as Stephen, with a month's initiation into Dublin brothels, sits at his schoolroom desk: The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine star-dust fell through space. The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. They were quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos. A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had carried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded: and no part of body or soul had been maimed, but a dark peace had been established between them. The chaos in which his ardour extinguished itself was a cold indifferent knowledge of himself. ( 106-7/ II6-I 7) The 'soul going forth to experience' also 'fold[s] back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires'. The form of movement embodied in the various metaphors is a diastolic-systolic cycle.* This too has its antecedents in the novel: the 'roar like a train at night' made by closing and opening the flaps of the ears in the Clongowes refectory (13/9), later explicitly connected with the rhythm of school lifeterm, vacation, term, vacation, etc. ( 17/13); the reading down

* A 'Kinetic' cycle essentially dissimilar to 'that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani ... called the enchantment of the heart' (217/250). 46

'A Portrait

of the Artist':

Disengagement

and then up of the geography flyleaf inscription (Stephen DedalusjClass of ElementsjClongowes Wood College/etc.) ( I5-I6/I I-I 2) ;*the celebration of Stephen's protest to Conmee among a shower of thrown caps by a circle of boys who 'closed round [Stephen] in a ring' and then 'broke away in all directions', leaving him 'alone ... happy and free' (5g-6oj63-4). The movements implied in Stephen's meditation on the scribbler suggest his developing formulation of his relation to his experience. It appears as a process of alternate entrance into and immediate disengagement from experience, paralleled psychologically in the movements of desire and indifference, attraction and repulsion, longing and fear. Stephen's attention moves in and out, centripetally and centrifugally, in towards himself and out towards the universe. t The alternations increase in force and significance-the pattern of resonance-as the novel proceeds. Rejection of the Church and acceptance of the artist's calling comprise the final major oscillation in the novel's structure-though the contrary modes are by then so implanted as to hover about the remainder in implication, as has been seen in the case of the 'esthetics' and as will be discussed apropos of Stephen's diary. The structural utility of an increase in force in each episode accounts for two alterations which Kevin Sullivan has noted Joyce made when refashioning the events of his own life into the novel: that 'Joyce's refusal of a vocation is quite distinct from his later rejection of Catholicism'-in the Portrait they are conflatedand that 'Joyce thought longer and more seriously about becoming a Jesuit' than does Stephen, whose rejection of the order is immediately consequent upon his 'temptation'. 27 By not carrying the different possibilities of a career in the

* 'Cette double tendance, centrifuge et centripete' (Harry Levin, 'James Joyce et !'Idee de Litterature Mondiale', Contexts of Criticism [Cambridge, Mass., 1957], pp. 273-4). t Carl Jung's reflections on the systolic-diastolic cycle are apposite to Stephen's case: 'In extraversion and introversion it is clearly a matter of two antithetical, natural attitudes or trends, which Goethe once referred to as diastole and systole. They ought, in their harmonious alternation, to give life a rhythm, but it seems to require a high degree of art to achieve such a rhythm. Either one must do it quite unconsciously, so that the natural law is not disturbed by any conscious act, or one must be conscious in a much higher sense, to be capable of willing and carrying out the antithetical movements' (Two Essays on Ana{ytical Psychology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1956], p. 69). 47

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement Church and a calling in Art along together, Joyce relinquishes the opportunity to present Stephen's choice as between alternatives equally distinct. The meaning of the priesthood to Stephen is concrete enough-'He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of the subdeacon at high mass' (162/184)-for however much he romanticizes the 'voice bidding him approach, offering him secret knowledge and secret power' (162/185), he knows the very feel of the life'The trembling odour of the long corridors of Clongowes came back to him and he heard the discreet murmour of the burning gas flames' (164/186). What he is rejecting thisfor cannot be so precisely rendered. It is 'some instinct' which turns him against acceptance, but the burden of detail is on what is being rejected -'the raw reddish glow ... on the shaven gills of the priests' (I64/187). The narrative moves on negative wheels: 'He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest' (I 65/188). The irony of the situation, and Stephen recognizes it, is that the disengagement precedes any definite engagement. The alternative to the Order is 'disorder':

He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul. (I 65/ I 88)

The point is brought home a moment later: He pushed open the latchless door of the porch and passed through the naked hallway into the kitchen. A group of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table. Tea was nearly over and only the last of the second watered tea remained in the bottom of the small glass jars andjampots which did service for teacups. Discarded crusts and lumps of sugared bread, turned brown by the tea which had been poured over them, lay scattered on the table. Little wells of tea lay here and there on the board and a knife with a broken ivory handle was stuck through the pith of a ravaged turnover. (I 65-6/ I 8g)

The 'remorse' which Stephen feels at the sight of this is the emotion by which Ireland-home, fatherland and Churchattempts to keep her own. It is clear to Stephen that if he would go into orders he could rescue his family from this squalor. It was for that, he has been told, he has been educated: 'All 48

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement that had been denied them had been freely given to him, the eldest' (r67(r8g). It is the 'net' of 'The Sisters' once again. Towards the end of this chapter Stephen is vouchsafed the vision of the wading girl, who appears as if in reply to his ecstatic choice of vocation: This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him .... His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable. ( r 74(197)

But if 'no word [broke] the holy silence of his ecstasy' ( r 76/200) in her presence, one has but to turn the page to realize that there is still an area of life to which Stephen is attached, as artist and man: He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar. ... The box of pawn tickets at his elbow had just been rifled ... . -Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet? (I n-8/202-3)

That Stephen's latterly presented 'engagement' is merely a flourish imperfectly grafted upon a basically cold and retiring nature is at the root of much uneasiness over Stephen, even among his admirers. To his detractors, the engagement is a 'set-up': the exalted instant, emerging at the end of the book, offreedom, of vocation, of Stephen's destiny, winging his way above the waters at the side of the hawk-like man: the instant of promise on which the crushing ironies of Ulysses are to fall. 2 8

Richard EHmann goes half the distance here with Hugh Kenner, agreeing that the flight at the Portrait's end is based on an illusory notion, but claiming that the fallen state pictured in Ulysses contains a saving grace: Flying for Stephen turns out to be paradoxically a lapse from humanity, a failure; while falling is a recognition of life's

49

'A Portrait of the Artist': Disengagement saving lowliness, a success .... Through flying beyond life we learn only our own presumption; through falling into life, even into low life, we educate ourselves into community with others. 29

Rarely does a critic hold out against seeing the ending as unironical. Eugene Waith, writing against the views of Kenner and Caroline Gordon, claims they emphasize 'the theme of the fall while neglecting the theme of creativity'. 30 Waith attempts to relate the two so that 'the fall is assimilated into the preparations for the flight .... The flight of Daedalus is not only an escape but a widening of consciousness, an investigation of the unknown'. 31 That what we comprehend under the 'themes' of flight and fall may enter into other relationships Waith does not consider. It is, however, equally likely that fall and flight both increase in scope as the novel proceeds and yet can be regarded as undermining each other.

50

III

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN: DRAMA

It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. -Stephen Dedalus remembering St Augustine, Ulysses (I 8o/ I 40)

o LIFE! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience' (257/299), Stephen's diary exuberantly asserts. The entry echoes an earlier description of Stephen at Belvedere: 'In vague sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth to encounter reality' ( 1 62/1 84). Is the verbal echo evidence that Stephen is held fixedly by his past, the timeless Image of the Aesthete? The qualifications in the Belvedere passage invite ironical evaluation of Stephen, especially the adjective 'vague', the alternative 'or', the exclusive 'alone', and the passivity of 'drawn'. The diary, however definite in its assertion, is itself'vague' in that it is unencumbered by such qualifications. If we think that Stephen's character has altered, we do so by imputation: the kind of life which he is unconditionally welcoming is not specified. Let us examine the effect which joyce's inclusion of conditioning factors at this juncture would have had. If they permitted 'wELCOME,

51

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama us to view Stephen's final gesture ironically, as the earlier qualifications lead us to view the acolyte's sacerdotalism, the balance of the story would be tilted once for all towards fixity of character in Stephen. Such a 'fixed' finale would add immeasurably to the impetus of reading fixity back into the earlier portions of the novel. By altering his point of view in the last pages ofthe novel to the direct record of Stephen's diary, Joyce contrives to let up on Stephen at the very end, to suspend his irony. On the other hand, the very absence of qualification which follows on the shift from indirect discourse withholds any final approbation from Stephen. If Joyce had qualified favourably the 'life' Stephen welcomes, writing approvingly of the values of, let us say, St Germain-des-Pres, the significance of Dublin as an Enemy of Promise would be lessened by just so much. Dublin would no longer be both a symbol of all constraining and inimical environment and simultaneously the artist's necessary subject, that with which he must come to terms. 'Provincial life' is less of a symbol of environmental frustration in Middlemarch by virtue of the discovery of a constituency for Will Ladislaw. Given such a constituency, Middlemarch itself shrinks to a sociological phenomenon which the sensitive must, but can escape. Alternatively, if Joyce had 'conditioned' Stephen's flight from Dublin with a letter from Lady Gregory and a send-off by Yeats, and treated them ironically (as was his wont), we might come more strongly to doubt the value, even the existence of Stephen's 'promise'.* Joyce made Stephen in many ways less accomplished, less rounded, less cheerful, altogether less appealing than he himselfhad been.t To have made Stephen stronger would have been to endow him with an inherent and invincible power to stand out against Church, state and family. Stephen's victory would have been merely muscle-flexing, as Christ's in Paradise Regained is often claimed to be. To have made him weaker would have been tantamount to an assertion that a hostile environment can ruin a bad poet (or a bad poet gets the environment he deserves), again to the detriment of a dramatic

* After writing the pages in Ulysses in which Stephen remembers his Paris trip, Joyce said to Budgen, 'I haven't let this young man off very lightly, have I?' (Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses [Bloomington, Indiana, I g6o], p. 51). t Compare the 'Sunny Jim' ofEllmann's James Joyce, Chs. V-VII (18g8-Igo2). 52

'A Portrait

rif the Artist':

Drama

conflict. The dramatic problem Joyce set himself-in this view -was to poise Stephen, at each point of the way, on an edge between success and failure; to weaken him to the precise point at which he may be taken in by the nets, in order to define how little in the way of natural endowment is necessary to retain the possibility of flying by them and how much it is possible to have and still be capable of failing. Only this postulates a 'dramatic' mode of action for the novel. I

The suspensiOn of potentiality and possibility I am calling dramatic-and which Sartre calls 'freedom'-may be located in a wider context than the technique of plotting the book's ending. In the Portrait Joyce extended the point of view attributed by Percy Lubbock to Henry James: let the book [The Ambassadors] stand as the type of the novel in which a mind is dramatized-reflecting the life to which it is exposed, but itself performing its own peculiar and private life .... The author does not tell the story of Strether's mind; he makes it tell itself, he dramatizes it. Thus it is that the novelist pushes his responsibility further and further away from himself. The fiction that he devises is ultimately his; but it looks poor and thin if he openly claims it as his, or at any rate it becomes more substantial as soon as he fathers it upon another. 1 Lubbock's assumption of the language of James's prefaces is never entirely happy, and there are more explanations for 'dramatization' than the desire to cloak poverty and thinness in substantiality. Dramatization of this sort permits an additional dimension of awareness in James, an opportunity to represent Strether's responses without committing himself to editorial interpretation: here is the way Strether sees things, but it is only the way Strether sees them. Lubbock does seem to assume that the words James uses to paraphrase Strether's responses are the words Strether either did use to himself or would have used. The formula 'he was later to think' does show that James was interested in not allowing analysis to go beyond the bounds of what was probable to his character. Le style indirect libre, however, logically permits

53

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama a range of attributions running from (I) the presentation in indirect discourse of what the character said in so many words to himself (or to others) to, (2) what he might have said had he thought to say it, to (3) the kind of thing he might have said, to (4) the author's definition in his own words of the character's thought or mood.* The fact is, it is extremely difficult to locate precisely any remark on a scale which stretches from Stephen's formulation to Joyce's. James's dramatization of the mind of Lambert Strether undergoes little alteration in texture in the course of The Ambassadors, whatever claims we may make for Strether's widening moral andjor aesthetic vision. Joyce, following his protagonist over a larger span of time, alters his dramatization to imitate Stephen's age. Because of the shifts in narrative style, even the ordinary suppositions we make by attention to the artist's tone become suspect, for Joyce cannot be held wholly 'responsible' for the tone of a descriptive passage, while Stephen may not be responsible for the words in which it is rendered. The episode which relates Stephen's encounter with the girl wading in a rivulet by the shore presents a clear instance of the problems involved here: He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies: and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast. He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest

* Sartre's comments on 'the ambiguity of the "third person" ', are relevant, though his distinction between the character regarded as subject and as object is so uncalibrated as to be only a rough linguistic tool (Sartre, p. I Iff.). On Joyce's use of le style indirect libre see Harry Levin, pp. I36 and I62. 'I do not suppose that Joyce means us to think of Bloom as actually formulating these words in his mind: it is the author's way of conveying in words a vision which on the part of Bloom must have been a good deal less distinct, or at least a good deal less literary, than this ... we are not, I take it, to suppose that Joyce's hero necessarily frames all these sentences to himself' (Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle [London, Ig6I], pp. I82, I8g). 54

•A Portrait of the Artisf: Drama rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than other. ( 1 76-7/200- 1 )

Kenner is certain this is part of a condemnation of Stephen's Pateresque romanticizing. 2 But the style which approximates a close paraphrase ofthe character's point of view has in Joyce's hands a tendency to pull simultaneously in opposing directions, towards the notation of limitation in Stephen's outlook (and towards parody), and, since the author seems at the moment caught up in his character's version of experience (at least is unwilling to risk another directly), towards raising a sympathetic response. Joyce's technique, like James's in The Portrait of a Lady, seems both to support the version of reality present to his major figure and to criticize it, to place it as only a version. As Richard Poirier has written, 'James's tone ... is above all self-confident. By the moderation of voice in the narrated style ... James constrains us to habits of response and understanding that make us sympathetic observers of Isabel's career and partisans of the values to which she subscribes'. 3 Further, We are to admire Isabel's eager responsiveness ... while feeling compassionate about the fact that the responses themselves are a function of her innocence .... In the effort of James's style to bring about this mixture of reactions, we can observe his desire to keep us from solidifying our attitudes about too uninclusive a manifestation of character. 4

James 'places' Isabel, in Poirier's view, by assuming the ironic and knowing 'comic tone' of the Gardencourt society in handling her while he simultaneously puts the most damaging interpretations of her behaviour in the mouths of the most unsympathetic comedy figures. What the ironic social tone achieved for James, the imitative or 'parodic' style did for Joyce: it brings us finally to value the protagonist's effort and simultaneously to hold in judgement the actual products in which particular efforts culminate. James achieved his complexity of vision through the assumption of the voice of a social milieu, partly of his own contriving, but social none the less; lacking this milieu, Joyce contrived to achieve a like complexity stylistically, employing a range ofliterary 'styles' as a principle of order and of suspension. Further exposition of Poirier's account of James's Portrait can E

55

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama reflect more light on Joyce's. He sees James's novel in terms of a conflict between 'free' and 'fixed' characters, between 'those characters who "express" themselves ... and those who "represent" something and whose expression is, therefore, theatrical and conventionalized to the point of self-parody'. 5 The conflict is, moreover, mirrored in James's own style, at once ironic and sympathetic. Isabel Archer, who carries James's own values, strives to become-and James strives to see her asa 'free' character in a milieu dominated by 'fixed' characters like Henrietta Stackpole, Mrs Touchett, the Countess Gemeni and most importantly Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmund, all of whose capacities for full human response are submerged in the roles they must play. Since it is precisely her responsiveness and development which James is attempting to keep alive, no one episode can be allowed to epitomise Isabel. 6 It is such a caution I have been exercising in the case of Stephen Dedalus, but logically it is requisite that we further hold even the possibility of epitomization-or absolute typing-in suspension. The view of Hugh Kenner and most symbolist critics is that each episode in Joyce's Portrait is an epitome: Stephen-at-nine performs actions which are a perfect reflection of Stephen-as-awhole. It is, as in James, a question of Stephen's freedom to develop responsively. If he is developing, episodes are not emblems; if he is not, they are. Poirier concludes that James might have written an even greater novel if he had only developed 'the implication that there can be no such thing as the "freedom" which Isabel wants and which Ralph and James want for her'. Though critical emphasis on this implication would be unfair to 'the experience which the novel offers as a whole', its elaboration by James would have meant that each and every one oflsabel's responses made in the name of the desired 'freedom' could be viewed simultaneously as 'the rationalization of an attempt to escape from ... the "common passions" ', a rationalization, that is, of 'sexual fear'. 7 Such an Isabel would be poised between freedom and fixity, each a possible interpretation. The node of James's attention, to extend Poirier's speculation, would have altered: it would now consider freedom and fixity as permanent and mutually exclusive possibilities, contrary modes of apperception which intersect in the dramatic action.

56

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama II

Wyndham Lewis applied to 'the mind of James Joyce' rather than to the mind of Stephen Dedalus the tendency he saw in the Portrait towards an elevation of 'timelessness'. He quotes, Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos! Their banter was not new to him .... Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. (173/rg6) 8 Lewis's use of the concept of time is notoriously confused, and has even, in its application to Joyce, confused his biographer Geoffrey Wagner. Wagner points out Stephen's tendencies towards the static reading ofliterature, but concludes that it is 'almost inexplicable' that Lewis should have considered Joyce 'the enemy'. 9 Much of the difficulty lies in Lewis's association of time with the internal mental life of characters and space with the external description of action. His sympathies in Time and Western Man are against the former and for the latter: 'I am for the physical world.' 10 Moreover, he does recognize Stephen's tendency-which he callsJoyce'sto shy away from 'the physical world' and turn towards his own mind, a tendency acknowledged in the Portrait in a passage which just precedes the one Lewis quotes: Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose. (171/193-4)

'Reflection' versus 'contemplation' is a version of naturalism versus symbolism, a problem broached by Joyce as early as the paper on Mangan which he delivered as a university student. 11 The passage later appeared-with significant alterations-in

Stephen Hero :

The artist, he imagined, standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his

57

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama dreams .... Such a theory might easily have led its deviser to the acceptance of spiritual anarchy in literature had he not at the same time insisted on the classical style .... [Classicism] is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. The romantic temper ... is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures .... The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered. (82-3/77-8) Stephen favours the classical temper, but is himself faced with an environment where 'to bend upon these present things' would result in a naturalism antipathetic to the imaginative values he cherishes. What Stephen discovers around him, in both Stephen Hero and the Portrait, is an environment hostile to his values, concentration on the externals of which (in both space and time)as Wyndham Lewis would seem to require-would leave scant room for the development of those values. Thus, while Stephen desires experience, he finds himself defeated by experience and forced to turn in on himself, on his own emotions and ideals, to preserve his moral and imaginative integrity. For all his dislike of the 'internals' and the presented consciousness of characters, Lewis realized the necessity: There is nothing for it today, if you have an appetite for the beautiful, but to create new beauty. You can no longer nourish yourself upon the Past; its stock is exhausted, the Past is nowhere a reality. The only place where it is a reality is in time, not certainly in space. So the mental world of time offers a solution. More and more it is used as a compensating principle. 12 Lewis's problem and Stephen's are identical, only they turn in opposite directions. (I am speaking of the Stephen of the Portrait, who does not have 'the classical temper' passage.) Lewis opts for concrete presentation; Stephen hypostasizes a theory of apprehension which empties the universe of temporal extension, and he applies his theory both to art and to his response to the life about him. At the same time, Stephen, like Lewis, desires the best of both worlds: Lewis wants to concen-

58

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama trate on 'the physical world' but wants beauty as well, Stephen has the beauty of his aesthetic stases, the 'rhythmic rise and fall of words', but he wants 'experience' of the concrete world as well. The problem is not solved by Stephen in the Portrait; it develops. By the end of the novel he has cut himself off from all the conditions the representation of which in art would be 'plot'. He is left with no context by which to express imaginative value. He is becoming an artist without a symbol of active, present value.* Such a progress is no 'sport' in the history of ideas since the Romantic rebellion. It is perhaps an adumbration of the archromantic problem, one which all writers have been faced with since the dissolution of the neo-classical hegemony. In neoclassical eras, the deed is taken as fully expressive of the intent. In art, writers have confidence that the event symbolizes fully the value inherent in the character. As a movement, romanticism signals the breakdown of this confidence. The problem of presenting a plot which could be faithful to historical reality and simultaneously exhibit the triumph of value seems to be impossible to writers considering a worsening social situation. Literature moves in two directions, towards naturalism, Pound's 'cult of ugliness', and towards romantic symbolism, Pound's 'cult of beauty'. Nothing exists, in Yeats's words, 'to hold in a single thought reality and justice'. 13 (For Yeats this was the function of his 'gyres', which we incline to see as being more 'just' than 'real', more symbolic than naturalistic.) Byron's public and artistic careers present parallel cases of this predicament, and perhaps mark its inception in the English scene. He attempted to find in real life some situation for himself where he might realize the inner potential of which he believed himself possessed, and which he came to feel was offered no field of action in England.t Those he sought out, *Stephen's dilemma is reflected (rather sanguinely) in Ezra Pound's 1913 portrait of 'The Serious Artist': 'the cult of ugliness' is the naturalistic novel, 'diagnosis' of moribund society; 'the cult of beauty', expressed by 'sun, air and the sea and the rain and the lake bathing', is imagist poetry, which presents its material statically, avoiding a temporal dimension in its determination to present beauty (Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London, 1g6o], p. 45). tHis response to the news of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo shows Byron's full realization that his political career in England was finished. See Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, ed. GeorgeS. Hilliard (Boston, 1876), I, 52.

59

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama in Italy and Greece, were to become a proving ground for his potentiality. An 'objective correlative' was precisely what he felt himself to lack, both in life and in art. What artistic 'solution' he made came by the symbolization of the very problem with which he was beset, and one can trace in 'Childe Harold' and Manfred an exiled search for a context-a space-susceptible of the implication of imaginative values. These works are about attempts and failures to discover such contexts, and therefore allow of a limited perfection unavailable in his personal life. The lack of a so-called objective correlative for his emotion is not a derogation of these works, but precisely their subject. Joyce's portrait of an artist whose favourite poet is Byron* describes the genesis of a situation which by its end faces this major romantic paradox. Literature seems both obligated to and inhibited from fidelity to both the world and to values, to 'reality and justice'. In this respect, the symbolist movement and Pound's Imagism appear continuous with Romanticism, 'a second flood of the same tide', as Edmund Wilson put it. 14 Value can be preserved by a shrinking of the temporal extension of symbolic action to the presentation of instantaneous 'symbolic' images, where plot (duration of time) leads only to naturalism. Pound's manifesto proclaiming the desirability of 'absolute' poetic notation, one image for one emotion, is effectuated only by eliminating the temporal element, coming to view experience, that is, much as Stephen Dedalus does, in terms of moments of static apprehension. Artistic achievement under these conditions bifurcates towards the 'deadness' (Henry Miller) 15 of the naturalistic novel or the 'deadness' (Lewis) 16 of the 'timeless' symboliste apprehension of reality. There is thus only a single apparent artistic synthesis, a dramatic presentation of the process by which the dilemma comes to pass. For Mark Scharer, What has happened to Stephen is, of course, a progressive alienation from the life around him as he progressed in his initiation into it, and by the end of the novel, the alienation is complete .... In essence, Stephen's alienation is a denial of the human environment; it is a loss; and the austere discourse of the final section, abstract and almost wholly without sensuous

* 'Byron was a heretic and immoral, too.

- I don't care what he was, cried Stephen hotly' (83/go).

6o

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama detail or strong rhythm, tells us of that loss. It is a loss so great that the texture of the notation-like prose here suggests that the end is really all an illusion, that when Stephen tells us and himself that he is going forth to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, we are to infer from the very quality of the icy, abstract void he now inhabits, the inplausibility of his aim. 17 Scharer proceeds from 'suggests' to 'implausibility', gradually sliding into the presentation of Stephen as finally fixed by the novel's last page-for him the diary 'reverts ... to the romantic prose of Stephen's adolescence' and displays 'excessive relaxation'. 18 Some of the diary entries are, as Scharer notes, romantic, but not all are 'lyrical'. The diary is Stephen's attempt to convert his experience into art, or at least to capture it as prospective material. It becomes for Stephen what Charles Feidelson, writing of Thoreau's, has called 'an autonomous series ofvisionary events'. 19 Its order is 'fortuitous', 20 but in depending as it does on present event, the diary represents a forward thrust.* Most romantic and 'lyrical' when it concerns the past or the future, it is more spare when notation of the present. This alternation is counterpointed by an oscillation between feelings of freedom and fixity. Imagining Cranly as 'the precursor' (252/293), he fixes his idea of himself as the Christ. That night, however, he feels free: March 21, night. Free. Soul free and fancy free. Let the dead bury the dead. Ay. And let the dead marry the dead. (252/293)

The next day he is betrayed into an instinctive reaction which shows him less 'free' than he had assumed: March 22. In company with Lynch followed a sizeable hospital nurse. Lynch's idea. Dislike it. Two lean hungry greyhounds walking after a heifer. (252/293)

Still, the humorous self-criticism detaches him somewhat. On April 5th, it is '0 life!', but a day later he is worrying if Emma 'remembers the past' (255/296). Stephen's hope lies

* Richard

Ellmann considers the diary 'Joyce's first interior monologue'

(James Joyce [New York, 1 959] p. 368) and notes its similarity to Stephen's thought in the first chapters of Ulysses.

61

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama not in the past, but in the present, and in the present only because of the promise of the future: 'The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future' (ibid.). This provokes Stephen's gloss on Yeats's 'Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty': Stephen, unlike Robartes, 'desire[s] to press in [his] arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world' (255/297, my italics). 21 Still, the nature of this future, when the claims of the romantic temper ('loveliness') and the classical temper ('the world') will be equally acknowledged, must remain for him indeterminate. The diary carries forward the novel's radical ambiguity. As dramatic postulation would have Stephen neither hopelessly weak nor pre-eminently strong, so what is here required is as sweeping a personal separation as is possible without assuring the destruction of the value Stephen intends to protect. The action of the novel must occur at just that point at which Stephen's 'indifference' becomes so great that his protective posture endangers his gift: he may separate himself from so much that what is left to protect is inconsequential. Dramatically, the novel arrives at a point where Stephen is forced to hazard everything: 'I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too' (251/292). Stephen's successively broadening disengagement from the life around him is required by the widening circles of force to whose claims on him he becomes awakened, 'my home, my fatherland ... my church' (251/291). In their last interview, Cranly states the claims of all these, and of 'a mother's love' (246/285). His reaction in the Portrait leaves him at the point where it has endangered his gift most drastically, while leaving him the possibility of success; on the other hand, he may have arrived at just the point where he may lose, for 'eternity'. The ambiguity would need to be sustained if drama and human potentiality are to be preserved. III

Joyce's early essay on Ibsen makes a similar point about both An Enemy of the People and The Master Builder:

62

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama How easy it would have been to have written An Enemy of the People on a speciously loftier level-to have replaced the bourgeois by the legitimate hero! Critics might then have extolled as grand what they have so often condemned as banal. A lesser artist would have cast a spiritual glamour over the tragedy of Bygmester Solness. 22 These remarks imply Joyce's early understanding of a radical form of ambiguity as the core of the 'drama' in Ibsen, that what appears to be 'life' to some characters-as Rubek and Irene in When We Dead Awaken, the subject of Joyce's essay-is delusion and death to others, or from another point of view. In the paradoxical treatment of subject, these opposed points of view are not reconciled, nor is one chosen in preference to another; but the full extent of their opposition is exposed. Some would deny that Ibsen always resisted casting 'a spiritual glamour' over his heroes. G. Wilson Knight feels that 'everything possible is done' in The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken 'to show their heroes' death as an extension of living'. 23 In this view Ibsen's romantic, 'spiritualistic' 24 leanings triumph over his more analytic and realistic appraisal ofhuman nature. Joyce, here and in a passage from Stephen Hero, apparently felt the absence of such bias in Ibsen, and indeed that the conquering of the conflict between romanticism and realism was Ibsen's great achievement: [Stephen] had all but decided to consider the two worlds [of 'sordid' external reality and 'the monster' interior world of romantic idealism and passion] as aliens one to anotherhowever disguised or expressed the most utter of pessimismswhen he encountered through the medium of hardly procured translations the spirit of Henrik Ibsen. He understood that spirit instantaneously. (45/40) However much Stephen thinks that Ibsen had solved the conflict between romance and reality, Ibsen's own career shows his struggle with the same conflict. What is more, whenever this question has been canvassed in respect of Ibsen, it is the example of Seren Kierkegaard which has provided the terms of definition. In the chapter of his Life of Ibsen titled 'The Divided Mind' Halvdan Koht has written,

63

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama Even deeper and more bitter is the self-judgement in the longer poem, On the Fells, which he wrote ... toward the close of the year 1859· Here he is in the midst of the crisis, divided between two basic tendencies of his mind, in the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical view of life. As he himself formulated the contrast, we find the question most clearly and fully expressed in the life philosophy of S0ren Kierkegaard, and it is undoubtedly from Kierkegaard that Ibsen has learned to raise the question in this form. This does not mean, however, that it is to Ibsen a mere philosophical theory. On the contrary, it goes down to the deepest depths of his soul, raising a conflict which year after year filled his inner life until the victory was finally won by the stronger element in him, the ethical demand. And still the question recurred in his old age, whether the aesthetic had not after all conquered the ethical. 25 What the 'basic tendencies' here called 'aesthetic' and 'ethical' refer to will require some exposition of Kierkegaard, whose reputation was being kept alive in the English-speaking world only as footnotes to Ibsen. That they have a relationship to 'romantic' and 'classical', or idealistic and realistic approaches to life is, however, obvious. Koht examined the problem as it appeared to Ibsen in 1859: The poem, On the Fells, is an exposition of aestheticism as a power that captivates and makes itself master of the mind. Aestheticism is a philosophic view which makes of life a drama, a subject matter for art, while the artist himself remains outside as a mere spectator, or-like the 'Seducer' in Kierkegaard's Either-Or-gives impetus to intellectual and emotional conflict, always, be it noted, in others, so that he can himself enjoy the drama fully. The aesthetic view thus robs romanticism of all manly vigour, makes it what the Danish philosopher, Sibbern, describes as 'hollow-eyed'-a way of thinking by which everything is seen as in a mirror and reaches the mind only by reflection. 26

Brand ( I86s)-Ibsen's first work after his self-imposed exile from Norway-seemed from the start to hew so close to Kierkegaard's thought that it was often held that its hero was modelled on the philosopher. 27 The 'hardly procured translations' of Ibsen which Stephen read would have included C. H. Hereford's translation of Brand (1894), whose introduction quoted from 'Kierkegjaard's' Either fOr a passage 'strikingly 64

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama recall[ing]' Brand and commented, 'This and similar parallels to Brand's thinking led the Danish critics to assume as a matter of course that Brand was intended as a portrait of him: and the idea was widely accepted in Germany'.* Georg Brandes wrote that 'Almost every cardinal idea in this poem is to be found in Kierkegaard'. t On August Ist, 18gg, shortly before the then seventeen-yearold Joyce 'wrote the editor of The Fortnightly Review, W. L. Courtney, to ask brashly if he would like a general article on Ibsen's work'/ 8 the Fortnightly published an article titled 'New Lights on Ibsen's "Brand" ', by M. A. Stobart. This article presented the first extensive exposition of the relation between Ibsen's play and Kierkegaard's philosophy to be written in English. (It is perhaps the first exposition of Kierkegaard in English.) Mrs Stobart appears quite conversant with Kierkegaard's amvre, and illustrates it from the Danish texts, covering such major Kierkegaardian topics as the difficulty of the religious struggle, its conflict with mere ethics, the aesthetic, ethical and religious stages of life and their mutual exclusivity (the 'either for') .t

* Brand: A Dramatic Poem in Five Acts by Henrik Ibsen, trans. C. H. Hereford (London: William Heinemann, 1894), p. !iii. t Brandes three 'impressions' of Ibsen were translated into English in 1899: 'To Danes it could not but seem as if Ibsen had had Kierkegaard in mind [when he conceived Brand] .... But this misapprehension arose from our having no acquaintance with Ibsen's Norwegian models. From what the poet himself once gave me to understand, I conclude that some such Norwegian dissenting pastor as Lammers had more lot and part in the production of the character of Brand than any directly Danish influence. It must not be forgotten, however, that it was Kierkegaard's agitation that gave the stimulus to Lammers's course of action' (Henrik Ibsen; Bjornsijerne Bjornson, trans. Jessie Muir and Mary Morison, revised with an Introduction by William Archer [London, 1899], pp. 70-1). See also HenrikJaeger, The Life of Henrik Ibsen, trans. Clara Bell, with the verse done into English from the Norwegian by Edmund Gosse (London: William Heinemann, 189o), pp. 155-6: 'Danish critics, among them Brandes, followed by the majority of German critics who have written on Ibsen within the last few years, have connected Brand with Soren Aabye Kierkegaard.' The Fortnightly Review, n.s. 66 (August 1st, 1899), pp. 227-39. There is every reason to believe that Joyce was an avid reader of the journal which published, among much else, Yeats, George Moore, 'Fiona Macleod' and others of the Celtic Revival, Arthur Symons (including the essays later to become The Symbolist Movement in Literature), essays on Wagner and continental philosophers and dramatists. Mabel Annie (Boulton) Stobart (1862-1954) wrote under the name Mrs St Clair Stobart. After the death of St Clair Stobart she married John Stobart Greenhalgh. There is a notice of her in Who Was Who, 1951-196o. She died December 7th, 1954.

t

65

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama Stobart's article on Kierkegaard and Ibsen hoped to wm readers to a study of Kierkegaard, a philosopher whose writings, outside the British Isles, already hold a high place in the esteem of the literary world. It would be not uninteresting to discuss the reasons for the neglect with which Kierkegaard has hitherto been treated by English readers, but this article will have attained a twofold object should it-in addition to the possible fulfillment of its primary motive [to illustrate Brand from Kierkegaard]-be the means of inducing any to turn in curiosity to a writer whose works may be with truth-as Dr Georg Brandes is agreed-be described as unparalleled in Danish literature for force, strength, and purity ofideal. 29 In coming shortly to a 'Kierkegaardian analysis' of Joyce's

Portrait and Ulysses, I will refer to the particular notions

Joyce would have met in Stobart's essay, but whether Joyce did 'turn in curiosity' to Kierkegaard himself remains unknown. There is only one tantalizing remark in Stephen Hero dangled before us. When Stephen 'encountered ... the spirit of Henrik Ibsen', he began 'to study Danish instead of preparing his course for the examination and this fact was magnified into a report that he was a competent Danish scholar' (46/41). This Danish study is begun, apparently, in Stephen's second year at university (1899-1900), but near the end of his fourth and last year (1901-2), in a conversation with Lynch which has no counterpart in the Portrait, Stephen says, 'I was walking along the Canal with my Danish grammar (because I am going to study it properly now. I'll tell you why later on)' (239/233). We never learn why Stephen has resumed the study of Danish, long after being made free of Ibsen, as the Stephen Hero manuscript breaks off half a page later (p. 902 of the manuscript), before the conversation with Lynch has returned to Stephen's promise.* In theJanuary 1st, 1902, issue oftheFortnightly, Mrs *This is Chapter XXVI. Joyce could not have written much more of Stephen Hero. EHmann says Joyce 'bogged down after Chapter XXV' (op. cit., p. 231), in the spring of 1906. He did not work on the manuscript during his abortive stay in Rome (July 31st, 1906- March 7th, 1907), wrote 'The Dead' in Trieste into the autumn of 1907 and began revising Stephen Hero immediately after he finished the short story (ibid., p. 274). While in Rome Joyce spent badly needed money on Danish lessons from a man named Pedersen (ibid., p. 244) and wrote on February 1 Ith, 'I have a new

66

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama Stobart published a second article on Kierkegaard, 'The "Either/Or" of S0ren Kirkegaard', 30 which elaborates the paradox of the mutual exclusiveness of the aesthetic and ethical existences (with a tendency to sympathize more with the aesthetic) and touches on two other themes-again, both in respect of Brand-which will need development in the context of Joyce's work: (r) 'Kirkegaard [said], in words that Ibsen has vitalized in dramatic concepts, "the great thing in life is not to be this or that, but to be one's self; and everyone who chooses can be this" '; and (2) the relation of the hero to his mother is a symbol of the past and of the pressure of heredity: 'the Aesthetic Brand, who makes it his work of life to "blot out his mother's debt of sin" .' 31 Ibsen's Brand is well qualified to be the work which united the two worlds for Stephen. It appears to have produced an equal (if equally temporary) 'sense of jubilation' in Ibsen himself, whose reputation was made overnight-like Byron's with 'Childe Harold'-by it: while writing Brand, he had felt as if he were taking part in strife and action, and there had been a sense of jubilation within him. Writing this drama gave an outlet to the thoughts that tormented his soul. 32

In reviewing When We Dead Awaken, Joyce makes incidental reference to 'the will-glorification of Brand', and it is interesting that this phrase hews so close to Stobart's exposition of the Kierkegaardian basis of Brand's character-more eccentric on the matter of 'Will-evolution' than elsewhere-as possibly to constitute an allusion for readers of The Fortnightly Review. 33 While Brand (r866) is the focus, both in the years after it was published in Denmark, Germany and England and now, for the relation of Ibsen and Kierkegaard, 34 earlier and later Ibsen plays have been seen in Kierkegaardian terms. Love's Comedy ( r862) has been related to Kierkegaard's paradoxical view of marriage. 35 Early in 1900, The Fortnightly Review published 'A Scene from Ibsen's "Love's Comedy"', translated, with commentary, by Hereford. The whole was published later in the year. To upstage his friends, 'When they evinced an hat and boots and vests and socks and a Danish book and Georgie has a new coat and hat and I gave a dinner. Now when you get this you will have to send me IO crowns' (ibid., p. 249). 'You' was Stanislaus.

67

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama interest in Ibsen's thought, [Joyce] responded by discoursing instead on the technique, especially of lesser known plays like

Love's Comedy'. 3 6

Just as some, like Stobart, have seen a Kierkegaardian Brand as wholly paradoxical-unethical from one point of view, spiritual* from another-and others have emphasized one or the other aspect, a similar group of opinions clusters around Ibsen's next work, Peer Gynt ( r 867) : it would not be very far beside the mark to see in Peer Gynt the tragic consequences of not being a Kierkegaardian. Peer Gynt is obviously one whom Kierkegaard would think a base creature for remaining unmoved in the 'aesthetic stadium [or stage], carefully 'going round about' when an opportunity presents itself to qualify for the 'ethical stadium' . ... The kernel of the thought implied in Peer Gynt is not only a Kierkegaardian notion, but even phrased in the language of Kierkegaard. Over and over again, the Danish moralist insisted on the vital importance for every man to 'be himself' ('vreresig selv'). 3 7 Richard EHmann has recorded his puzzlement over Joyce's notion, when in the autumn of rgo7 he was revolving the idea of the book which was to become Ulysses in his mind, of a Dublin Peer Gynt: On November 10 [1907] Stanislaus noted in his diary: 'Jim told me that he is going to expand his story "Ulysses" into a short book and make a Dublin "Peer Gynt" of it. I think that some suggestion of mine put him in the way of making it important. As it happens in one day, I suggested he should make a comedy of it, but he won't. It should be good .... ' In what sense Ulysses was to be a Peer Gynt is not altogether clear, except that the hero was to sample all aspects of Dublin life. How he could be at once the clear-eyed Ulysses and the self-deceived Peer Gynt is also unexplained. 38

* While Stobart understood the nature of categorical paradox, there seems to be a suggestion in the article that Brand represents an aesthetic/ethical conflict rather than an ethical/religious one, and that Brand asserts the superiority of the aesthetic. Arne Garborg thought this too, and wrote, 'Brand is ideally what Kierkegaard wanted the man of his day to be in reality. Herein lies the way of escape. The absolute ethical demand is translated into aestheticism; thereby its sting is broken.' This is bad Kierkegaard, but seems to have had some credence. 39

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'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama Joyce, in 1903, thought Peer Gynt the 'masterpiece' of Ibsen's 'romantic' period, 'recognizing its own limitations and pushing lawlessness to its extreme limit'. He has just caught up, in his review of Catilina, the distinction between the classical and romantic tempers broached in the essay on Mangan and which found its way into Stephen Hero, and he uses it to distinguish 'between Ibsen's earlier manner and his later manner, between romantic work and classical work'. 40 Peer Gynt ends the romantic period, perhaps by facing its character with the Kierkegaardian 'absolute paradox' of stages. Joyce's notion of a Dublin Peer Gynt followed closely on his beginning to rewrite Stephen Hero 'in five chapters-long chapters', 41 and the Peer Gynt of the novel may apply to Stephen as well as to 'Hunter' (later Bloom), both of whom may be defined in terms of the Kierkegaardian crisis-states. IV

Analysis in Kierkegaardian terms, to describe the protagonist's state of mind (and 'being'), his basic difficulty and attempts at its solution, and a certain paradox of presentation which comprises the literary mode of expression, illuminates the case of Stephen Dedalus. Kierkegaard's formulation of the 'aesthetical' character forms a close analogy to Stephen's psychological situation. Stephen, in the Portrait, runs the course of Kierkegaard's aesthetic mode. The aesthete attempts to turn all his experience to artistic account, finally, that is, to make of his life a work of art. For treating his experience as aesthetic experiment, he is upbraided by the representative of the ethical life, Kierkegaard's Judge William ('B'), who simultaneously points out the static and 'epiphanic' nature of the apprehension entailed: since it is likely that in real life you will find very little that is beautiful if you strictly apply the requirements of art, you give another meaning to the beautiful. The beautiful about which you talk is the individually beautiful. You view every particular man as a tiny factor or moment of the whole, you view him precisely in his characteristic peculiarity, and thus even the accidental, the insignificant, acquires significance, and life has the impress of beauty. So that you regard every particular man as a moment. 6g

'A Portrait of the Artist': Drama ... If there is to be any question of teleology there must be a movement . ... What you call beautiful manifestly lacks movement .... you require movement~ history~ and with this you have passed beyond the spheres of nature and of art and are in the sphere of freedom and of ethics. 42

Thus, in the 'ethical' view, aesthetics and freedom are mutually exclusive. Freedom requires choice, and 'A' has a basic indifference to alternatives. For him, all things are equally thinkable and none preferable, nor does he feel the possibility of change: his soul 'has lost its potentiality. If I were to wish to anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible'. 43 This artist-type's most abiding passion is an antagonism towards the 'ethical', burgher class who have jobs, marry and get on. But as 'B' maintains, 'A's' own life seems to play itself out since it does not contain within itself any principle of continuity and expansion. The discreteness of his existence is admitted by 'A' in a grammatical parable: My life is absolutely meaningless. When I consider the different periods into which it falls, it seems like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which means in the first place a string, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth, a dust-brush. 44

A's own epitome of the aesthetic character is Mozart's Don Juan, who 'constantly finishes, and constantly begins again from the beginning, for his life is the sum of repellent moments which have no coherence ... .' 45 The ambivalent relation between his life and his art is clear from another diary entry: My grief is my castle, which like an eagle's nest, is built high up on the mountain peaks among the clouds. Nothing can storm it. From it I fly down into reality to seize my prey; but I do not remain down there, I bring it home with me, and this prey is a picture I weave into the tapestries of my palace. There I live as one dead .... 46

This type of personality, unlike the 'ethical' with which it is contrasted, is confessedly 'static' : 'Time stands still', the Kierkegaardian aesthete writes of himself in his aphoristic

70

'A Portrait of the Artist' : Drama diary, 'and I with it'. 47 'A's' diary makes clear his lack of a feeling of continuity and change: The result of my life is simply nothing, a mood, a single colour. My result is like the painting of the artist who was to paint a picture of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. To this end, he painted the whole wall red, explaining that the Israelites had already crossed over, and that the Egyptians were drowned. 48 Kierkegaard's aesthetic type and Stephen Dedalus have a similar dynamic of personality, and a tendency to view their own experience in similar lights. They characterize this experience by notions of repetition and endless cyclic movement in which they see no possibility of development. (See, for example, the 'endless reverberation' and 'recurrent note of weariness and pain' [Portrait, I 68 f I go].) Simultaneously their view of beauty commits them to a formulation which lifts it out of time. Yet they are not willing to relax their grip totally on the world of experience as the subject-matter of their art. Nevertheless, both cut themselves off progressively from the ordinary life of the community, leaving them as their 'subject' only the process of severance or the adumbration of their feelings in isolation, and they waver between formal aesthetic presentation and 'excessive lyrical relaxation', to use Mark Scharer's words.* Volume I of Either/Or is devoted to the aesthetic view; Volume II is the ethical 'review' of the first volume and is prefaced with a quotation from Chateaubriand: 'Les grandes passions sont solitaires, et les transporter au desert, c' est les rendre a leur empire.' Just so by the end of the Portrait has Stephen been cut off, and though it may have been necessary for him to do so, the position entails certain limitations. Any further progression lies beyond the pages of the novel. For Stephen in the Portrait has not yet been confronted with the ethical alternative-that is what happens in Ulysses: it becomes clear to us, if not to Stephen Dedalus, not simply that his first conception [of the task before him] is inadequate

* See, in Either/Or, Vol. I, the difference in tone between the analytical 'The Ancient Tragical Motif' and the 'lyrical' 'Diary of the Seducer' (which Mrs Stobart praised in 1902 as 'the literary gem ofKirkegaard's masterpiece'). 49 Both modes are often present alternately in a single essay. Kierkegaard himself functioned most freely when alternating analysis and lyricism. Vol. II of Either/Or, the presentation of the 'ethical case', deliberately eschews the lyrical and is one of his dullest works stylistically. F

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'A Portrait

of the Artist':

Drama

but that with experience and growth Stephen will find it inadequate himself ... what [the aesthetic theory in the Portrait] leaves out [is] precisely the moral responsibilities Stephen has still to learn that his vocation entails .... Stephen's militant Aestheticism and its collapse under the pressure of the social conditions and beliefs he had violently rejected, was a symbol such as Ibsen might have used. 50

Kierkegaard, however, having divided the human character into the two nodal types of personality, aesthetical and ethical, hesitated to assign to any one person the abstract qualities of the type, and in so doing elevated the problem to the fuller paradoxical level. This 'existential' recognition first forces itself upon the ethical spokesman, in Volume II of Either/Or: That a man may thus suffer damage to his soul is certain; how far such is the case with the particular individual can never be determined, and let no man venture on this point to judge another. A man's life may appear strange, and one may be tempted to believe that such is the case with him, and yet he may possess an entirely different interpretation which assures him of the contrary. 51

This view is of course correlative to Kant's insistence that morality can be judged by intention only, not by effects;* a romantic ethic, certainly, called out when men feel their values thwarted by the social nexus. Kierkegaard used this transcendentalizing insight more systematically in Fear and Trembling, where the burden of his argument is: I do not know what motivated the historical Abraham to offer up Isaac at God's command, but if he was acting 'religiously', his motivation would have to be as follows. Denomination of motive withdraws into the subjunctive mood; a particular motive cannot be assigned to a particular character definitely. The philosopher only says if he acted from a particular motive, then the meaning of his action is such and such. t Stephen's view of his own experience, as it develops in the Portrait of the Artist, projects a Kierkegaardian aesthetical

* 'Truth for Kirkegaard, lies in Subjectivity alone. "Subjectiviteten, Inderligheden er Sandheden." Objective faith, objective works, are of no avail. To will, not do, the good, is all important' (Stobart, 'New Lights', p. 228). t For claiming that the Pope could condemn heresy abstractly, but had no power to decide whether the particular heresy was lodged in a particular work, the followers of Jansen were declared heretics.

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'A Portrait

if the Artist': Drama

trajectory, a subjectivist interpretation in which outer events serve merely to display basic unchanging characteristics in a permanent and static complex. This is not, however, the only possible understanding of the nature of his experience. It calls into being, logically, an alternative view which is a permanent complementary possibility in the interpretation of the action. We may not be able to adjudicate in a particular instance whether Stephen Dedalus is really 'fixed' or 'free'. In the absence of a definitive judgement by Joyce, we are forced to carry the alternative explanations forward to the novel's end, to maintain what Kierkegaard called 'dialectical suspense'. They are equally possible interpretations at each stage of Stephen's career and one's full understanding of A Portrait if the Artist as a Young Man depends upon our ability to perceive and sustain the nature of the paradox and contrasting alternatives it presents.

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IV

ULYSSES: STYLES

I understand that you may begin to regard the various styles of the episodes with dismay and prefer the initial style much as the wanderer did who longed for the rock of Ithaca. -Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, August 6th, 1919 (Letters, p. 129) CRITICISM OF Ulysses, like that of A Portrait, subdivides cleanly in respect of Joyce's attitude towards his major characters and towards the direction in which they are assumed to be heading. The direction of the plot, the end to which it apparently moves, is often assumed to be the most telling means of assessing the characters, for by it is constituted a judgement on them by their world, and not immediately by their author. Thus we might expect the 'end' of Ulysses to have become a moot issue, and William Schutte's review of the various attitudes critics have taken to Stephen and Bloom's meeting alone proves it has. 1 Kierkegaardian categories help arrange the critical responses. Stephen is 'liked' by those who feel he is moving from his 'aesthetic' phase into an ethical one, in which he gains sympathy with the common life of mankind from his contact with Leopold Bloom. He is disliked by those who think-with, say, Hugh Kenner-that he is fixed in the aesthetic mode of expenence. Bloom's detractors think him fixed in the ethical mode, albeit unhappily. His today was as his yesterday and is the THE

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'Ul;,sses' : Styles prevision of his tomorrow. There, as here, he will be doggily humane and equally ineffectual, his ghosts unexorcized. Bloom's supporters-Ellmann would, I suppose, be the most prominent example-find Bloomsday a crucial turning-point for Bloom. In it he transits from the purely bourgeois ethical existence into the category of the 'religious'. He accepts; he becomes resigned. Here, the meeting with Stephen is perhaps a contributory event, but Bloom's crisis is his response to Blazes Boylan and the adultery which occurs at four o'clock in the afternoon: With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections affected? Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity. (864/717)

The first two are in the realm of the ethical-the true Kierkegaardian aesthete would feel no such breathing human passions. But the final two may belong to another realm entirely. The context which in the text helps define 'abnegation' and 'equanimity' does not shut the door on speculation. In each case varying and 'exclusive' meanings are given to the terms.* I will continue to emphasize the 'religious' possibility, as it is generally more slighted, while logically it is required as an equal counterweight. Bloom's newly found 'equanimity' is, I think importantly,

not handled quite as ironically by Joyce as are the catechistical responses to the three previous terms, where, for example, Bloom's desire to cash in on Molly's projected 'provincial musical tour' is listed alongside less disreputable reasons for 'abnegation'. His feelings of equanimity arise from reflecting that the adultery was 'natural', 'not as calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet', 'less reprehensible than theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals [etc., etc.]', 'As more than inevitable, irreparable' (864/717-18). This sentiment dies away and is replaced by others 'antagonistic' (864/7 I 7) to it, but neither the statistical norm of Bloom's thoughts nor their 'curve' are the same as the meaning of the action and a possibility has been planted.

* By exclusive is meant that any one but not the others could be, indeed must have been the true explanation; or, that the terms we use to describe such actions are too imprecise and cut, in their definitions, across the integral whole of meaning.

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'Ulysses' : Styles The defence of Bloom cannot be conducted on the ethical plane. Those who find him unsatisfactory (as a man, not a literary creation, which is another matter) judge his resignation merely a rationalization, a self-delusion. They hold him, that is, to the ethical level, on which he is a failure. Those who accept the resignation as a responsible gesture in the face of reality move him on to a quasi-religious plane of existence. Kierkegaard's 'knight of faith' has many of the outward lineaments of a Bloom. 'Having made the movements of infinity' (that is, of 'infinite resignation'), faith 'makes those of finiteness'. 2 Having given up all expectations ('by virtue of the absurd' in all existence), they are entitled to return to the everyday world: The knights of the infinite resignation are easily recognized: their gait is gliding and assured. Those on the other hand who carry the jewel of faith are likely to be delusive, because their outward appearance bears a striking resemblance to that which both the infinite resignation and faith profoundly despise ... to Philistinism. I candidly admit that in my practice I have not yet found any reliable example of the knight of faith, though I ,would not therefore deny that every second man may be such an example . . . . As was said, I have not found any such person, but I can well think him. Here he is .... 'Good Lord, is this the man? Is it really he? Why, he looks like a tax-collector!' However, it is the man after all .... I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping. No! He is solid through and through .... [He] belongs entirely to the world, no Philistine more so .... He takes delight in everything he sees, in the human swarm, in the new omnibuses, in the water of the Sound; when one meets him on the Beach Road one might suppose he was a shop-keeper taking his fling, that's just the way he disports himself, for he is not a poet, and I have sought in vain to detect in him the poetic incommensurability .... As it happens, he hasn't four pence to his name .... On the way he comes past a building site and runs across another man. They talk together for a moment. In the twinkling of an eye he erects a new building, he has at his disposition all the powers necessary for it .... [He] is interested in everything that goes on, in a rat which slips under the curb, in the children's play, and this with the nonchalance of a girl of sixteen. And yet he is no

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'Ulysses' : Styles genius, for in vain I have sought in him the incommensurability of genius. 3

Again, on the ethical plane Bloom is merely condoning adultery, sin or shabbiness. His rescue is attempted only after the example of Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, Abraham's offer to sacrifice Isaac, considered ethically, was a sin, 'for the ethical had for Abraham no higher expression than the family life'\ but considered religiously, it was right. If Kierkegaard is interested in the creation of categories, he is, when he comes to discuss human beings, even more interested in those who exist in border-states, 'between' categories. That is, he devotes his attention to those who may be moving from one to another. He has a high sense of the difference between abstraction-characters invented to fit categories-and existentiality-'real' characters who give every appearance of being in either of two categories. Allegorical characters are definite and fixed; real ones most often permit of a dual, and opposed interpretation. A description similar to this one of Kierkegaard's 'knight' has been applied to Bloom by Father Noon, who proceeds to apply Kierkegaard's definition of irony to Ulysses. 5 Let us note in our context that 'irony' is the mode which Kierkegaard applies to the boundary between the aesthetical and the ethical, while 'humour' applies to that between the ethical and the religious. 6 The Kierkegaardian ironical mode-which Noon calls 'specifically Christian satire' 7 -could best be applied to the parts of Ulysses concerned with Stephen alone. Humour, which Noon finds lacking in the novel, is more the mode of approach to Bloom. This suggests that a critical synthesis, rather than a particular determination among already existent views, is to be sought. We need not dismiss, in the main, any of the major critical positions which have been taken up, if we argue that Stephen and Bloom, being 'real' in the context of the fiction, exist not as illustrations of particular categories, but as border-figures. As such, they are either figures moving from one condition to another or fixed in one realm. Further, either one of these two possibilities may be true or it may be our own modes of analysis which so divide experience in itself unitary. The novelist, working from the outside, must create the whole possibility and

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' Ulysses' : Styles need not determine which of these things is finally true of his characters. In fact, he would wish to prevent us from being able to say, being as interested in creating the whole structure of possible meanings, with its particular internal dialetic, as in deciding which of the possibilities to make true in the individual case. Diagrammatically, Ulysses appears like this: STEPHEN

BLOOM

• ethical

aesthetical4

religious

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~

Kierkegaard later complained that the picture he had given of the 'knight' in Fear and Trembling was presented 'in a state of completeness [i.e. as an allegorical figure] and hence in a false medium, instead of in the medium of existence'. 8 In the medium of existence, the picture demands incompletenessthat is to say, radical ambiguity. Such a presentation, in the words of Reuben Brower commenting on the 'double vision' of A Passage to India, 'enjoys to the full the freedom of giving varied and even opposite meanings' to the action of the novel. 9 If Ulysses is such a presentation, we do not wish to strike through the mask to discover which of the alternatives is right, we wish to enjoy the drama of the alternatives. To consider next the way Joyce has created these alternatives, will also adumbrate the particular ontological status of the action and characters in Ulysses. The first six chapters of Ulysses excite no especial concern in us respecting differences between the ways in which the protagonists, Dedalus and Bloom, perceive their worlds and the ways in which we ourselves might be assumed to perceive it had we been present at the scene. The style 'indirectly free' at the beginning of the novel will modulate into something different, what EHmann calls 'the undependable narrator'. 10 But for six chapters it is not undependable, and for a purpose.

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'Ulysses' : Styles When the voice of the narrator is a mimic of his charactersa systematization of a possibility always latent in indirect discourse-it is, as already discussed, extremely difficult to make definitive descriptions. Any particular instance not part of actual dialogue may be Stephen thinking, Joyce describing Stephen thinking, Joyce describing how Stephen might have thought, or some indeterminate state between these. The method is not, of course, original in Joyce, nor is its systematic application, which is to be found, for instance, in The Ambassadors. A single passage taken from the first chapter of Ulysses can be used to illustrate it and also to suggest the purpose which the technique has in respect of the whole: Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she [his mother] had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had been bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. (4/7)

Though there is no indication, one can only assume that Stephen had some thought of the 'bowl of white china', however wordless it might have been. The rhythms, which here shape indigestible material rhetorically to the point at which they assume a fin-de-siecle beauty, may belong to Stephen or to Joyce or to both in common. More importantly, while this indeterminateness invites a suspension of judgement, it is never broken, suggesting the existence of a real action being filtered through a particular consciousness. It is to the establishment of this real action as a substructure which will lie beneath the technical presentations to follow that the first chapters function. The introduction of Bloom in the fourth chapter alters our expectation radically. It is, in all but pagination, a new beginning to the novel. The fourth, fifth and sixth chapters retrace

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'Ulysses' : Styles the first, second and third in time (one and four, 8 a.m.; two and five, I o a.m.; three and six, I I a.m.) and this is the only time in the novel which such chronological retracing occurs. It has, in fact, to be avoided elsewhere, when Stephen and Bloom are not together, and the decision to omit Stephen's day at I p.m. (when Bloom is seeking lunch), 4, 5, and 8 p.m. (Bloom at the Ormond, Barney Kiernan's and at the beach) is deliberately taken. The fourth, fifth and sixth chapters do over what the first three had done. Joyce adjusts his own tone (however much one can ascribe directly to him) to suit Bloom. Bloom's rhythms, his syntax, his vocabulary all differ significantly from Stephen's. Again, a passage can illustrate: Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in the black open space. Mr Bloom moved behind the portly kindly caretaker. Well cut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next. Well it is a long rest. Feel no more. It's the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can't believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to I haven't yet. Then darkened bedchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid in your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow .... People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don't forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other. (139-40/109) Stephen's meditation on death had been centripetal: all day he will be haunted by the deathbed scene. 11 All things conspire to remind him of it: Dublin Bay becomes the white china bowl at the bedside holding the 'green sluggish bile'. (It is interesting to note that the symbolic 'correspondence' is a function of an anxiety-state.) Stephen's mind cannot move forward-it can only circle round and round, to perch at last on the ghastly memory. Bloom, on the other hand, knows that 'people' -if not Stephen-do forget. His attitude permits even humour over the thought of the deathbed, where the dying

8o

'Ulysses' : Styles man cries out to Death, 'Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite'. Bloom's mind here can move forward, noting details carefully, arranging a little drama, concluding with a reflection on the transitoriness of grief, a reflection which incidentally does not encompass the Stephen Dedaluses of the world. Bloom of course has had his own point of repair, which turns his otherwise linear, though not passive, flow of consciousness inward: Molly's tryst with Boylan. But here I am interested primarily in pointing the magnitude of the difference between points of view on which Joyce insists. For three chapters we follow Stephen, at the Martello Tower in Sandycove, at Deasy's, along Sandymount Strand, until the rhythms of his mind, his way of looking at things, are firmly present to us. Joyce abets this effect by consistently aping his character's own mode of apprehension. These first three chapters give us a norm for Stephen. They involve us in the postulation of a real and human action for Ulysses. The introduction of Bloom does not detract from this postulation, but submits us to an awareness of an equal and opposite apprehension, another way of looking at what is by now assumed to be going on. Had both Stephen and Bloom been introduced, antiphonally, into the first chapter-or, further, had any of the technical experimentation with narration been introduced at that point-the effect would have been far different. (Nabokov's lightning shifts of the substantive level in certain of his novels have the effect of attenuating the credibility of any primary level.) Only with the existences of Stephen and Bloom clearly established does Joyce begin, in the seventh chapter, the systematic exploitation of technical experimentation in his narrative.* But the major arbitrary narrative intrusions-the newspaper headlines, the illustrations of rhetorical devices, the

* The 'flower' motifs of Chapter Five are almost unique in this respect. They were added between periodical publication and the final text. It is difficult for someone who knows that they were added to comment on how far they stick out in the final version. That they should not seem to emanate from a source other than Bloom's consciousness [or Joyce's redaction of it) I would think desirable. The method of accretion to his text which Joyce followed sometimes makes Bloom seem a more abstracted man from his surroundings than he did in the earlier version. This can be seen, I think, in the passage quoted on p. So, where 'Try the house opposite' through 'yellow ... ' and 'Don't forget to pray' through 'Ivy day dying out' are additions. 81

'Ulysses' : Styles 'wind' motif-however obvious and prepossessing they now are, were also added after the first publication in the Little Review for October 1918. Thus they are not as integral to the chapter as certain of the tehniques to follow-' Circe' cannot be imagined apart from its technique-and the chapter forms a kind of half-way stage between what has preceded and what is to come. In it we may read the continuing human action, in which the events in Dublin are a mimesis, behind the narrative presentation. Besides the sixty-three newspaper titles, which, as has been noticed, generally reproduce a history of titles from 'dignified' Victorian to modern 'slickness', 12 there are passages like the following: Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and polished. Parked in North Prince's street His Majesty's vermillion mailcars, bearing on the sides the royal initials, E.R., received loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels, insured and paid, for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery. (147-8/II5) This is, of course, neither Bloom's stream of consciousness nor any analogous representation of it. The voice is 'Joyce's', and while it appears at times to combine the rhythms of Stephen with the observation of Bloom, it is capable of shading into various parody languages, such as no human voice would speak: the non-human voices of public notices, bills of lading, legal writ. The newspaper titles are also an example of the non-human voice, in so far as their origin is not vocal. While figures of speech and 'wind' allusions are generally worked into the dialogue, and ideally, one might suppose, would not stand out, functioning equally as part of the human action, I doubt if this is the experience of most readers. They do call attention to themselves, which makes 'fusion' of symbolist techniques and human action a practical failure I cannot help but think part of the book's meaning. We experience both reactions, and keep them distinct. It is one of a large number of instances in which the book forces us to keep separate the way it talks about things and the things it is talking about. More important, for example, than the notation of the particular rhetorical figure being employed at any one moment

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'Ulysses': Styles is the recognition that the symbolist techniques in Ulysses, with which Joyce has had little to do for six chapters, begin in 'Aeolus' to gather head, initiating a process by which we are to be progressively detached from the mimetic action of the novel, from the primacy of the Dublin scene. But because of the preparation we do not thereby reject the reality of that scene; though the events may come to be described in hallucinatory terms, we do not therefore assume that the dead really walk in the Dublin of I 904. Though a chapter is written entirely in cliches, we do not believe that the characters spoke entirely in cliches. The opening chapters-and there are strategic returns to their styles, to remind us of the real Stephen and the real Bloom-have predisposed us to assume we are reading about 'an action at a real place at a real time', 13 and so we assign the symbolist techniques entirely to the narrative voice. In this way Ulysses can incorporate surrealism without becoming (in its entirety) a surrealistic fantasy. We begin, in Chapter Seven, to grasp that the words (and techniques) of Ulysses stand between us and the Dublin action. The voice which is speaking to us for much of the time is speaking about that action, but it is not representing that action. There is a deliberately played-on gap between the narrative styles and the material which is their subject. The eighth ('Lestrygonians') and ninth ('Scylla and Charybdis') chapters return us to the styles of the first six chapters, reacquainting us with the 'styles' of first Bloom and then Stephen. (It was perhaps the problem of what to do when both, or neither, figured in one chapter, which suggested to Joyce the extensive use of symbolist techniques-a voice or voices not belonging to the human context-as an aesthetically consistent retreat from that context, and which occasioned the back-writing of the additions to Chapter Six.) Bloom's mind, as he searches for lunch, is perhaps at its most active in the day, compared to its early morning sluggishness ('Calypso', Chapter Four) and the soporific overtones of 'Lotos-eaters' (Chapter Five). The problem of the adultery is an accelerating excitation for him, and Chapter Eight ends-Joyce's attempt to make each chapter a self-contained unit in itself is very evident in this and the next-with Bloom's near meeting with Blazes Boylan :

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'Ulysses' : Styles Mr. Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library. Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is. His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to the right .... Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes. The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute. No didn't see me. Mter two. Just at the gate. My heart! ... Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart. His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah, soap there! Yes. Gate. Safe! (234{r8o-r) Bloom's excitement, whether over hunger or Boylan, permitted Joyce, I think, the latitude for the stylistic 'return' at this point. Because of the excitement, the danger of anti-climax, of there being just more of the same of old Bloom, was minimized. Similarly, the set-piece quality of Stephen's 'lecture' on Hamlet and Shakespeare constitutes an increase in vitality and agility on his part. Here too tension is maintained. Wyndham Lewis complained at the lethargy of Stephen in the novel's first chapter, 14 but this is explained enough by the hour of the morning after what must have been for Stephen as sleepless as it was an upsetting night. Chapter Nine ('Scylla and Charybdis') compares only with Chapter Three ('Proteus') as an exploitation of Stephen's brilliance. The problem was, at this stage, once more to present a character whose mental life would have to be recognizably the same in quality as it had been in the earlier chapters, and at the same time, without offending that expectation, to present enough new material from it not to bore. I expect it was done, for one last time in the novel, only by arbitrarily withholding and segregating the materials used. There is justification for this withholding in that 'Proteus' presents Stephen alone, as 'Scylla' presents him in the Dublin literary context, each levying different requirements on him. Yet it may seem lingeringly odd that the mind so intent on certain metaphysical speculations earlier intrudes so few three hours later-this is obscured by the intervention of five whole chapters-or, perhaps more

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'Ulysses' : Styles telling, that so few of the allusions available to him in Chapter Nine occur in Chapter Three.* Still, there are important, and even overriding relationships between the 'Shakespeare' chapter and the rest of Stephen's day which minimize the tour de force aspect of the chapter, though by this point in the novel any 'jarring'-such as a recognition of a disparity between the postulated human action and the manner of its presentation, however accidentally come by-represents a foretaste of more systematic detachments to come. Like the noticeable flower-imagery of Chapter Five, imagery which threatens to break the bounds of Bloom's consciousness (or Joyce's narrative mimicry of it), the presentation of Stephen's Shakespeare tends to threaten the integrity of Stephen's imagination. Each represents a shadow-version of later, more systematic breakage. Like 'Lestrygonians', which ended with Bloom's evasion of Boylan, 'Scylla' has a 'form' and a climax to enforce its self-containedness. The whole chapter has a tendency to approach drama, which it actually does for two pages (268-g/206-7)-parodied by 'Ballocky' Mulligan's 'Everyman His Own Wife, or, A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three orgasms)' (278/214). As the parody suggests, it is Mulligan who represents Stephen's adversary and potential 'usurper'-as Boylan is Bloom's-and the 'Entr'acte' which occurs at the moment of his entrance-Amen! responded from the doorway. Hast thou found me, 0 mine enemy? Entr'acte.

A ribald face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forwards then blithe in motley, towards the greetings of their smiles. (252-3/195)corresponds to the 'quopping' of Bloom's heart at the sight of Boylan.f It is a kind of 'arrest' or disenchantment of the heart, to misquote the Portrait, and its place, if not its meaning, will be taken inFinnegans Wake by the hundred-letter thunder-words.

* Perhaps I overstate. Stephen quotes from Shakespeare fifteen times, according to Schutte, 15 in his walk along the beach. Ten of these are from Hamlet. But the effect of comparison is lessened by Joyce's determination almost never to quote the same line twice in the novel. t Joyce added the word 'Entr'acte' after the Little Review publication in April 1919, presumably after abandoning the plan outlined to Budgen on October 24th, 1920, of writing an actual entr'acte to follow the chapter (Letters p. 149). 85

'Ulysses' : Styles Mulligan's 'playlet' is the outcome of his wilful misinterpretation of Stephen's finale: The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself. -Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka! (273-4/210-1 1) Mulligan has been trying to interrupt-to ruin-Stephen's flow of argument, and it is difficult to know whether he has here succeeded. It is a satisfaction Stephen would not give him, and the lack of knowledge is as much his as ours. Stephen leaves Mulligan to his travesty ('Jest on. Know thyself.' [277/213]), which is functionally a satyr-play, and his last thought is a resignation which parallels the scene in Portrait (236/273) when he suspects Cranly of having to do with E[mma] C[leary]. There he had resigned his 'girl' to his 'friend'; here he realizes it is futile to joust for the good graces of literary Dublin: Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline, hierophantic: from wide earth an altar. (28oj215) The tenth chapter of the novel ('Wandering Rocks') is the last in which the narrative stance-or better, style-bears obvious relation to what has preceded. Once more, after alternate chapters devoted mainly to Stephen and BloomBloom does put in a momentary appearance in the ninth chapter, as had Stephen in 'Hades'-there is a 'Dublin' chapter, here not the confined (if micro-urban) newspaper office, but the entire city. The stance gives Joyce the opportunity to choose anyone he wishes-within limits, as the viceregal cavalcade touches upon many, but not all of the sketches-and while it may turn out that each person chosen will seem to have a particular relevance to the story, it cannot be allowed to seem so at first. Thus a tension must be set up between freedom (even randomness) and necessity, a tension which is to be found in 86

'Ulysses' : Styles the book at large.* Here the appearance of chance and arbitrariness must be preserved to suggest the convincingness and completeness of the picture of Dublin, at the same time that coincidence must be permitted to suggest a unity, as at the vanishing-point of a perspective. At the same time that 'Wandering Rocks' takes a more extensive view of Dublin than 'Aeolus', it affords correspondingly less room for Stephen and Bloom, who appear in only four of the nineteen episodes. In a sense, this takes the pressure off Joyce's having to deal once more at length, and in the same 'style', with Stephen and Bloom, and he can turn to aping the speech and thought of Father Conmee, Miss Dunne, Tom Kernan, Martin Cunningham, Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, et al. This widening out of the 'initial styles' of Ulysses to include, momentarily, many of the characters tangential to Stephen's and Bloom's 'stories' is partial acknowledgement that whatever persons Joyce chose to focus on here, the results would have been similar. After this Dublin panorama is completed in Chapter Ten, Joyce can return to Stephen and Bloom, having also reinforced, in one dimension, the notion of their representativeness. (In other dimensions, their singularity is emphasized, of course. It was this chapter which influenced John Dos Passos, to similar purpose, in U.S.A.) What has been done with Stephen and Bloom, individually, is now done with a 'cross-section' of Dublin. In one sense, this chapter marks the end of a whole phase of the novel. The next chapter will open with a startlingly new narrative technique, the page and a half of 'fugal' themes. Widened to include all Dublin, the common mimicking style, except for a shadow-appearance in the Ormond Bar (the converse of the previsions of symbolist techniques), is now done with. The 'Wandering Rocks' contains one 'jarring' narrative technique, to imply the simultaneity of various of the occurrences. In the section on Corny Kelleher is inserted a reminder, carried over from three pages before, that Conmee was at that moment boarding a tram. The Elijah 'throwaway' skims down

* Cf. Gilbert, p. 235: 'Here, again, we see a reason for regarding this episode as the microcosm of the universe of Ulysses, inspired by its creator with the breath of life, yet fashioned by the practised hand of an artificer, maker of labyrinths: a living labyrinth.' G

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'Ulysses' : Styles the Liffey at the end of the section on the Dedalus girls at home: it reappears to Mr Kernan. Also in that section is inserted a sentence out of the Conmee section. Something of this sort happens in nearly every section, and at least once the reference is to something occurring outside the whole chapter: 'Bronze by gold [etc.]' appears on p. 316/242, and, after a repetition in the nineteenth (summary) episode, begins the next chapter (328, 331/252, 253). When, elsewhere in the novel, a phrase of Stephen's-'In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard's, herbalist, he walks, greyedauburn' (259/rgg)-turns up as a separate paragraph between two which are clearly Bloom's 'consciousness' (362/276), at least one critic has been given pause, but the compositional principle is clearly the same, 16 only simultaneity of occurrence does not occasion the narrative 'reminder', which here points to a thematic parallelism.* From the published letters, it would appear that Joyce began only at this point in the writing of Ulysses to run into troublesome opposition (or criticism) from the inner circle. On June rgth, rgrg, Joyce wrote Budgen-who always stuck by him and soon, the Joyces removing first back to Trieste and then to Paris, began to bear the brunt ofJoyce's correspondence on U(ysses-'Pound writes disapproving of the Sirens' and wishing to see more of Stephen and less of Bloom.n 7 On July 2nd, rgrg, he confided to Harriet Shaw Weaver that he feared Pound 'does not like the book' and eighteen days later he was writing to her to answer her complaint that 'the last episode sent [Sirens] seems to you to show a weakening or diffusion of some sort'. 18 He goes on, Mr. Brock also wrote to me begging me to explain to him the method (or methods) of the madness but these methods are so manifold, varying as they do from one hour of the day to another, from one organ of the body to another, from episode to episode, that, much as I appreciate his critical patience I could not hope to reply .... If the Sirens have been found so unsatisfactory I have little hope that the Cyclops or later the Circe episode will be approved of. ... 19 This is the first time that Joyce broached, in a letter, the notions like 'organ[s] of the body' later enshrined in the *When Stephen is thinking of his 'pawned schoolprizes', Joyce tells us what Conmee is doing at that moment (3II/2gg).

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'Ulysses' : Styles 'schema' that he gave Herbert Gorman. 20 It is not important whether Joyce had the entire scheme thought out before he began the novel. It is important that, though he revised the earlier chapters after their Little Review appearances, and in many cases added certain recognizably 'symbolic' tones to them, he did not recast them entirely to match the extravagances of 'Cyclops', 'Circe', 'Oxen of the Sun', 'Eumreus', etc., as he might have done. The style of the novel required a gradual lead into these extravagances. Despite the schema's listing of an 'art', 'colour', 'symbol' and 'technic', the appositeness of the particular determinations are much less taking with respect to the earlier chapters. Joyce did not even bother to list an 'organ' for the first three chapters, and the 'technics' of the early chapters (narrative, catechism, monologue, narrative) are so much more general and common than the terms he chose for the later chapters (like fuga per canonem, gigantism, tumescence detumescen[ ce], embryonic development, hallucination) whose specificity and uniqueness can both be recognized. On August 6th, rgrg,Joyce wrote to Miss Weaver for one last time on the subject of what seems to have been her first boggling at Ulysses. 21 By this date he had settled on his phrase for the 'technic' of 'Sirens', fuga per canonem, and added the comparison of his reader with the 'wanderer' which is the epigraph to this chapter, implying that his decision to abandon the streams of Stephen's and Bloom's consciousnesses was deliberately taken and part of his plan. 'Such variation' he claimed was necessary and 'not capricious'. The narrator's 'intrusions' in 'Sirens' are embodied in the text itself, not, as in 'Aeolus', as set-apart sub-titles. As such, they point up more clearly the extent to which significant comment and correlations are now made on the 'story' not by the free imitation of the characters but by a distinct voice which does not belong to the Dublin plot. Throughout the chapter, this voice threatens and breaks through the integrity ofBloom's consciousness-similar to the threatening of Stephen's (in a much less systematic way) in 'Scylla and Charybdis'. As this new voice, or variants of it, take over the management of the novel from the 'imitative' voice, a form of withdrawal is constituted. This is a secondary withdrawal, more radical than the one constituted by the mimicking of consciousnesses, in so 8g

'Ulysses' : Styles far as neither characters nor novelist could there be held responsible for what was not direct speech. Besides the 'overture' of leitmotifs-attacked by Curtius as meaningless without the following text (and supererogatory with it); defended by Gilbert as just as meaningful as any Wagerian overture of motifs 22-what Gilbert called 'the hundreds of musical forms verbally reproduced in the course of this episode' are the main agent of the breaking of 'the initial style'. I use some of Gilbert's examples: Her wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair un comb: 'd (trillando) Will? You? I. Want. You. To (staccato) luring, ah, alluring (appoggiatura) Rain. Diddle, iddle, addle, oodle, oodle, oodle (portamento) Blmstup (quinto vuoto) 23

Gilbert has four pages of these, and we have Joyce's testimony that he worked hard at including them 24-as compared to 'Aeolus' where the figures of'rhetoric' could probably be found in any other chapter as well. Despite Gilbert's claim that 'the meaning ..• is ... intensified by the combination of the two arts [language, music] ; sense is not sacrificed to sound but the two are ... harmonized', and that the technique is 'evocative of the theme itself',Z 5 Curtius seems to have been, if pejoratively, on a better track: the technique produces not fusion but awareness of disparity in the reader, and the figure, here of Bloom, retreats. The 'meaning' of his day is becoming public property, as the voice which exists to point it up ceases to be the indeterminate author/character's voice/consciousness. As Simon Dedalus sings 'Martha', Leopold Bloom and he may become 'symbolically' one, 'high in the effulgence symbolistic' (355/271 ) -Co-me, thou lost one! -Co-me, thou dear one! ... -Come! ... -To me! Siopold! Consumed.

(355-6{271)-

but this is not something which really occurs to either Simon or Bloom. Nor is the authorial voice of the 'initial style' go

'Ulysses' : Styles responsible. The voice which makes this 'symbolistic' correspondence is the 'effulgent' one of this particular chapter. The version of the story's meaning which we are given belongs to a particular kind of interpretation. Goldberg, who appreciates the 'Siopold' correspondence, nevertheless considers 'Sirens' as exhibiting 'that precarious intellectualization of structure under which some of the later writing collapses completely'. He then criticizes 'the attempt at fuga per canonem form' as 'unsuccessful in practice' and 'meaningless in conception'. 26 The phase 'fuga per canonem' belongs, however, not internally to the novel, but externally to the criticism, and it is unfair to demand it precisely of the chapter. It does seem to me to bear some convincing analogy, though, to the experience of the chapter, if not in the supposed theory of simultaneity of perception which writers like Gilbert hold to be desirable. Gilbert insisted that one should not read the chapter 'with the parts kept mentally distinct in four, or less, independent horizontal lines of melody', but should read chordally, in order to experience 'the curious emotive quality of Joyce's prose in this episode'. 'The musical "high-brow" ', who keeps the parts separate, misses 'most of the sensuous value of music, the enthralment of the Sirens' song'. 2 7 Despite the mocks at 'highbrows', it was specifically Ulysses whose salvation lay in resisting the Sirens' song, and we may be excused our own attempt to fight against merging the horizontal lines, recognizing that 'Siopold', which is such a merging in the text, is part of the 'symbolistic' Siren-song. Less metaphorically, we should recognize that the chordal apperception (or presentation) is the property of the narrator, and at the same time the separateness of the 'lines'-whether they are the barmaids' chatter, Bloom, Boylan, etc. or not-also contributes to the progressive withdrawal of the totality of the novel from presenting a determinative interpretation of Bloom's day. Despite, then, such critically orthodox pronouncements as: The truth is that the 'objects' are presented to us only as Stephen sees them [in Chapter Three] and they are what he sees. We are not given two separate bits of reality-the 'real' sea or midwives and the 'real' stream of subjective impressions -but one: Stephen's experience, 28 91

'Ulysses' : Styles it can be seen that however true this may be of the 'initial style', it is not true of much of the novel. Goldberg's dictum is more true in the earlier stages of the novel, and progressively less true in the later. There we begin to see the deliberately played-on gap between narrative style and the material which is its subject. The new narrator of Chapter Twelve ('Cyclops') is, in his own voice, the most 'undependable' so far. But into his garrulous Dublin narrative are interlarded such passages as: For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog, of 13 Saint Kevin's parade, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty, Esquire, of 29 Arbour Hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward, gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings per pound avoirdupois and three stone avoidupois of sugar, crushed crystal, at three pence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser debtor to the said vendor [etc., etc.,] ... (377/287-8)

Strictly this is not 'parody': it is the thing itself, an invoice. No one reads it out; it is in the hands of the character who narrates the events in the pub. In a manner similar to collage, Joyce interrupts the flow of his narrative to give it to us. The other kinds of interruption to the chapter are more 'human', or at least literary, being 'Homeric', 'Ossianic', newspaper reports, literary essays (on the 'verse' which Garryowen 'recites'), a report of a theosophical meeting. Besides keeping us at a distance from the 'action' in Barney Kiernan's pub-an action we remain convinced is going onthis chapter begins to exploit, for the first time in the novel, encyclopaedic dimensions. There are lists of fish, 'faison of the fields', farm animals, 'Irish' heroes, 'the picturesque delegation known as the Friends ofthe Emerald Isle' (397/302), clergy, the 'fasionable international world [who] attended ... the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan' [i.e. various trees] (424/32 1), the scenes depicted on the 'muchtreasured intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth' (430/326), the 'blessed company' (440-2/332-4), and places where bonfires were lit to celebrate the eviction of Bloom from Kiernan's. All that distinguishes this chapter from many sections of Finnegans Wake 92

'Ulysses' : Styles is the sporadic appearance of the 'actual' scene in the pub. As in the Wake, the incipient encyclopaedism promotes a sense of the randomness and arbitrariness of any one particular 'interpretation' of the action, or direction of the narrative. Where so many are available at all times, the choice of one mode of vision (here, the straightforward action) is demoted in importance. At the same time, its difference from the various pseudo-heroic modes of apperception is emphasized. The thematic appropriateness of the 'heroisms' of the style is pointed by the deliberate underplaying of Bloom's 'opinions' (which are always voiced in the dialogue), -But, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere? I mean wouldn't it be the same here if you put force against force? (427/323) -Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations. (430/325) -I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom.

(432/327)

-But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life. -What? says Alf. -Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. (432/327)

Bloom's loquacity may come as a surprise-we had not thought him so articulate. Feeling this is partly covered by the masses of material which surround each of Bloom's small outbursts, but the notion that what is here in direct quotation as Bloom's words may not have been said by him need not be suppressed, or written off as a fault in Joyce. It may point, rather, to just how 'undependable' the narrator of the scene in the pub-who is only one of the chapter's 'voices' -may be. That even what is here directly attributed to 'characters' may in fact be a variation, what Goldberg, referring to 'Circe' and 'Ithaca', calls an alteration of 'dramatic integrity'. 29 Like the 'interpolated' material in 'Cyclops', which represents various imaginative (and usually 'heroic') potentialities of the postulated human

93

'Ulysses' : Styles action, the actual pub scenes supposedly related by the narrator may themselves be a 'literary' possibility of the scene which really took place. It is, possibly, only a 'realistic' literary version-infected by that naivete which has characterized conversation in literary 'realism'-which accounts for the 'finished' quality of Bloom's remarks, as the other aspects of the chapter are 'Homeric' or 'Ossianic' literary variations. The simple dichotomy between the scene in Barney Kiernan's pub, which is what really happened, given to us in the actual words which were spoken, and the interpolated 'technic' of'gigantism' is perhaps too simple. The scenes in Kiernan's related by the debt-collector are better seen as just one more version of what might have happened that day to Bloom. In this sense we are not alternately 'let in on' the action and pushed back from it, we are held uniformly at a distance. Only our own prejudice in favour of the superior reality of literary realism could think otherwise. The style of 'Nausikaa' is, for a little more than half the chapter, similarly a literary parody. It bears some relation to certain of the parodies in 'Cyclops', and is, of course, handled at much greater length than any of them. While in 'Cyclops' the shorter parodies were punctuated by similarly short returns to a 'realistic' scene, here the longer single one is balanced by a full return to the opening treatment of Bloom. The latter part of the chapter is thus our last touching of the home base, preparatory to the launching out of the last six chapters (which take up roughly a little more than half of the novel's length). The cento of romantic cliches-dangerously close perhaps to the style of 'Euma:us' (Chapter Sixteen)-is hardly to be considered the actual reportage of Gerty Macdowell's speech, stream of consciousness, or even mode of perception. The statement that this is the way Dublin girls think is, after all, a generalization from the text without its authority. It is, however, the way certain sub-literature presents certain material; or rather, that is the working hypothesis which permits us to recognize inJoyce's prose the standard equipment of the mock'heroic' -here mock-romantic-stance: 'lower' material to work on and a more systematic application of the romanticization. 'Oxen of the Sun' contains no alternation of parodies with returns to earlier narrative modes, but rather a number of

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'Ulysses' : Styles parodies, like 'Cyclops', here presented continuously and on a chronological plan, from pseudo-Anglo-Saxon through a large number of Romantic prose-writers to a kind of pidgin-English. This extends encyclopaedically the manner in which the action of Ulysses could be presented. It points up the arbitrariness of any particular presentation by showing that the individual interpretations of the action are part of the historical ethos of the writer-as, the courtesy of Bloom (his consideration for Mrs Purefoy's labour) is the Malarian interpretation, while to emphasize the ethical plight of Stephen is to bring a Bunyanesque allegorical presentation to bear on the subject. By presenting all interpretations (a very large number standing for 'all'), Ulysses contrives to subscribe to no one. It becomes therefore more concerned with the relatedness of the various versions. In this chapter, the spectrum of interpretations is presented as inherent in the literary-historical process. Further, the styles in 'Oxen of the Sun' are the narrator's. They do not belong to Stephen or Bloom or Dublin. Nor are they approximations in other 'languages' of the way in which any one present may be supposed to have felt. This is to insist on the distance which we are being kept from the major characters and on the difference between the techniques which the artist has for presenting his material and that material itself. The theory of the 'organic whole' of style and subject will not work for Ulysses, whose symbolic dimension (including its 'styles') wars with its human dimension. Ulysses seems to posit a noumenallevel which does not deny the multiplicity of phenomenal interpretive ones, but which is behind and beyond them, necessary to them inasmuch as without it, they could not exist at all. As Ulysses proceeds, the phenomenal dimension discovers that it can enjoy itself almost, as it were, at the expense of the noumenal one, but only at the cost of relinquishing a denominative, or final interpretation of it. This is reflected in Stephen Dedalus's problem, here adumbrated by the Bunyan parody, the contention of 'the god Bringforth' and 'the hubbub of Phenomenon' (516/389). The method of Ulysses is an accommodation of the total potentiality of a subject and the particular version(s) of it brought into being. Ulysses is most particularly an encyclopaedic fiction in this respect. Its claims to be one on the basis of an encyclopaedic 95

'Ulysses' : Styles range of knowledge and information have been denigrated, and rightly. Nor is it a cosmological fiction, like Finnegans Wake, which would imply that the plot itself contains analogues to the beginning and ending of all things. The plot of Ulysses is extended not so much to cosmological dimensions, but by means of an encyclopaedia of styles, each of which implies a different approach to its meaning.* While I have been insisting on the reality of a difference between 'subject' and 'style' in Ulysses, at a particular level of conception there is no difference. It is the juxtaposition of many episodes each of which cannot, as Goldberg points out of the early chapters on Stephen, be separated into matter and manner, which, taken together promote a further difference. The 'subject' cannot be projected from a scrutiny of each individual chapter, or portion of a chapter, by discounting in some manner from the style of it. Such subjects would be different in each case. The readings of Bloom's case according to the Anglo-Saxon or Malory or De Quincey parodies would be mutually exclusive. 'Circe', which is the most complex chapter in Ulysses ontologically, has always been in danger of oversimplification by way of a too narrow application of the notion of 'hallucination' taken over from the authorized 'technic'. And this oversimplification has been in the nature of precisely the making of simple differences between what really happened and Joyce's manner of telling. While a real difference exists-we do project that something really did happen-there is no use dividing 'Circe' up between what Bloom, Stephen or others really said in an around Bella Cohen's and what is hallucinatory. The only way to accommodate into one conception, into a single ontological level, the entire chapter is not to make such divisions (which won't work), but to assume that the whole is the surrealistic fantasy of a man who knows what went on in Nighttown on June 16th, 1904, and who has read (or written) the fourteen previous chapters of Ulysses. 'Circe' is, if we will, The Dream of James ] oyce. t

* Cf. Joyce to Carlo Linati, September 21st, 1920: 'It is also a sort of encyclopaedia. My intention is to transpose the myth sub specie temporis nostri' (Letters, pp. 146-7). Not to transpose the story sub specie aeternitatis. t See Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London, 1927), p. 121: 'the g6

'Ulysses' : Styles There is no other way to explain certain things in the chapter other than to assume that nothing of what Bloom or Stephen 'really' said appears in it verbatim-or rather that nothing which we could prove does. As Harry Levin has noticed, 30 the 'Moorish' phrase which 'Molly' (who isn't, of course, there) shouts out athercamel, 'Nebrakada! Feminimum.' (570/432), is the talismanic phrase 'to win a woman's love' which Stephen has read in a book picked off a barrow in front of Clohissey's bookshop, Nos. 10-11 Bedford Row (312/239). Within Ulysses, only Stephen and the author know the phrase. It is a reasonable assumption that Bloom, who is tired but not drunk, would have no way of 'hallucinating' the phrase-he shouts it at the Nymph, later (662/540)-and there is no indication that this is Stephen hallucinating what Molly says to Bloom. The obvious conclusion is that the episode is the fantasy of their creator about them. That Joyce began to so dream about his characters we know from his description to Gorman: I saw Molly Bloom on a hillock under a sky full of moonlit clouds rushing overhead. She had just picked up from the grass a child's black coffin and flung it after the figure of a man passing down a side road by the field she was in. It struck his shoulders, and she said, 'I've done with you.' The man was Bloom seen from behind. There was a shout of laughter from some American journalists in the road opposite, led by Ezra Pound. I was very indignant and vaulted over a gate into the field and strode up to her and delivered the one speech of my life. It was very long, eloquent and full of passion, explaining all the last episode of Ulysses to her. ... She smiled when I ended on an astronomical climax, and then, bending, picked up a tiny snuffbox, in the form of a little black coffin, and tossed it towards me, saying, 'And I have done with you, too, Mr. Joyce'. I had a snuffbox like the one she tossed to me when I was at Clongowes Wood College. 31

Within a general description much like 'Circe' we see the mixture of levels in which the author appears alongside his characters. Besides giving the appearance of independent existence to the fictional characters, it reduces the author's claim to controlling the interpretation of their action. The admirable Goya-like fantasia in the middle of the book, in which all the characters enjoy a free metaphysical existence.'

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' Ulysses' : Styles presence of strictly autobiographical elements in 'Circe'-not just ones which Stephen and the young Joyce shared, but ones unique to Joyce-such as the inclusion of 'My literary agent, Mr. J. B. Pinker' (585/45I) and Carr and Bennett of the Zurich Consulate, helps underwrite the view that the chapter is Joyce's fantasia on his own novel. There are many other sections in the chapter which can be best 'explained' in this way. Levin also noticed that, It was Bloom who noted at the funeral that Martin Cunningham's sympathetic face was like Shakespeare's ([ 1 20/]95), yet it is now to Stephen that Shakespeare appears in the guise of Cunningham. ([672/]554) 32

J. J. O'Molloy's metamorphoses into John F. Taylor and Seymour Bus he (590- I /456)-triggered by the associative chain Agendath-Moses-Taylor-should not be available to Bloom's mind, as he was not present in the Freeman's Journal office when Molloy had quoted Bushe (as defence counsel in the Childs murder case) on Michelangelo's 'Moses' and Professor MacHugh had capped that with Taylor on 'The Language of the Outlaw' (q6-8I/I37-4I; see 'EXIT BLOOM', I64j128, and Bloom's phone call, 173/135). Stephen was then present, but in at least two similar instances he was not, and the substance of 'Circe' is there solely available to the narrator: (I) 'Paddy Dignam's spirit' appears to 'Bloom', and after exhorting him to keep Mrs Dignam 'off that bottle of sherry', 'He looks round him', saying, 'A lamp. I must satisfy an animal need. That buttermilk didn't agree with me' (597/464). 'That buttermilk' -a whole quart of it-had been given 'the apparition of [Paddy's] etheric double' (389/296) in the theosophic parody which follows Alf Bergan's claim to have seen Dignam some hours after the funeral (388/295). Bloom is not even in the pub at the time; outside, pacing back and forth, he enters only two pages later. (2) When Zoe Higgins, reading Bloom's palm, points to his 'Short little finger' and says he is a 'Henpecked husband', 'Black Liz, a huge rooster' appears, with the line, 'Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook' (668/549). Black Liz makes her other appearance in 'Cyclops' as a five-line parody amplifying the debt collector's unspoken reflection that Bloom would 'have a soft hand under a hen' (4o8/310). g8

'Ulysses' : Styles We might say, then, that by its fifteenth chapter, Ulysses has begun to provide its author enough in the way of material to become self-perpetuating.* The cross-referencing which the author had injected before to remind us of similarities between characters (as, Stephen's 'Gerard's Rosery' inserted in Bloom's monologue) here takes on an appearance of autonomy, as 'characters' belonging to other contexts or even ontological levels rise up to confront the characters in the Dublin action, in the meeting ground of the author's imagination which is the true locus of 'Circe'. Yet this is merely one place among many in the novel, and it does not provide a skeleton key to the true inwardness of the characters. On the assumption that the fantasies are really Bloom's hallucinations, S. L. Goldberg has argued that 'Bloom is finally unable to sustain any of his visions [sic] because none of them is finally adequate to his real character'. 33 This is equally true if we are not dealing with Bloom's 'hallucinations' and is, further, transferable to the whole conduct of the novel. Like each of the other 'styles' in Ulysses, which approach, more and more radically, discrete and often incompatible modes of vision, the 'Circean' style appears inadequate as a comprehensive explanation of the protagonists. The inadequacy is suggested by consideration of the whole; in the part, the claims of each style become progressively more importunate. It is significant that the strongest line of interpretation which 'Circe' puts on Ulysses draws extremely close to the conduct of Finnegans Wake. As in the Wake, the protagonist (here, Bloom) is successively accused of sexual misconduct, tried, condemned to death, elevated to Messianic status, turned against-like Parnell first by the Church ('Father Farley') and then by Mrs Riordan-immolated; then, in a new 'incarnation', turned into a woman-Bella/Bello Cohen, who accomplishes this, enters pat upon Bloom's unmanning suspicion that Blazes

* In 'Ithaca', Bloom is described as having earlier 'proceeded towards the oriental edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths, I I Leinster street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction' (78g-go/66o). In 'Aeolus', MacHugh had recited Taylor's speech, describing Moses' descent from Sinai, 'with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw' (I8I/I4I). Bloom was not then present, and the pun on 'race' (Jews, Ascot Cup) is available only to author and reader. 99

'Ulysses' : Styles Boylan is at the brothel (640-I /5I4-I5 and 652-3/529)humiliated, sacrificed. The cyclic pattern, the hero-god status'THE VEILED SIBYL' 'Stabs herself and dies' with the words 'My hero god!' addressed to Bloom (6 I 2/482) when the populace turns against the founder of the New Bloomusalem-the trial for sexual misdemeanor, the metamorphoses of costume and character, all combine to make 'Circe' a close approximation to the Wake, a Wake's-eye view of Ulysses. A. Walton Litz, discussing the 'designs' in Ulysses-'a network of interlocking motifs and cross references'-concludes that 'the principles which governed [Joyce's method of composition] in I 920 and I 92 I did not differ greatly from those he followed in writing Finnegans Wake'. 34 This may be extended beyond Joyce's method to his basic conception, although it need not involve him in any ultimate aesthetic botch, a position Litz gets close to at times. Conflict has been transferred in Ulysses from a struggle between characters who represent opposed ways of envisioning one and the same event to a struggle between these opposing modes themselves, as part of the way of telling the story. The closer Joyce comes to specifying the 'meaning' of Ulysses, the more hedged is the mode of presentation chosen. In 'Circe', while the springs of Stephen's and Bloom's motives are laid most bare, we are prevented by the ontology of the presentation-its relation to the Bloom and Stephen of the first chapters-from asserting its right to control our view of the whole. While we may wish to recognize the relationship of the manner of presentation to a mode of perception congenial to Joyce, who later spent seventeen years 'mining' it, we must simultaneously acknowledge its logical function in Ulysses' spectrum of styles. The 'interpretation' it presents has no unique claim to determine the situation-this should, by now, be clear of all the 'styles'-but rather it belongs to the structure of suppositions which the totality of styles provides. The 'tired' cliches of 'Eumceus' strike most readers as a letdown. Probably this was in the nature of the case, after the pyrotechnics of 'Circe', and it must be acknowledged that Joyce has not gone out of his way to prevent the reactionrather the opposite. The effect of the 'imitative form' (tired characters: tired prose) appears disastrous-though perhaps JOO

'Ul_)'Sses' : Styles we ought to abandon any notion that Ulysses makes, read cover to cover, a beautiful experience-mainly because the style chosen contains little by way of density in itself. It was approached by certain of the parodies in 'Cyclops' (the ones which seem to be newspaper reports) and by Gerty Macdowell's 'reflections'. The effect of parody of a literary (or sub-literary) source, whose major point lies in showing the inability of the rhetoric to encompass the human content-this is especially true of 'Ithaca' -seems to be inversely proportional to length, as it is only the same effect gotten over and over again. Nevertheless, in the spectrum of styles there is a clear place for it. There are attempts within the chapter to exploit its general mode, as when Stephen answers Bloom's loquacious 'I don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you leave your father's house?' (713/603) with a blunt 'To seek misfortune'. ('Bloom', I assume, speaks 'in the style' of the chapter: that is, Bloom did not really say this in this way. Stephen's answer, on the other hand, very probably is in his own words.) Here the effect is gotten by the breaking in upon the 'style', not by any effect inherent in the style itself. Thus, while the 'style' is devoid of much local interest, its existence is available to induce a maximum effect from the material within it which is not sui generis. This happens tellingly in at least three other places: the other [Bloom], who was acting as his [Stephen's] fidus Achates[,] inhaled with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke's city bakery, situated quite close to where they were, the very palatable odour indeed of our daily bread, of all commodities of the public the primary and most indispensable. Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, 0 tell me where is fancy bread? At Rourke's the baker's, it is said. (7o6/598) The second occurs when the sailor mentions his 'little woman' in Carrigaloe whom he has not seen in seven years. Mr Bloom 'could easily picture' the sailor's 'advent on this scene', but that 'picture', which begins in the cliche-style of the whole, shortly becomes a little drama on the same model as the graveyard meditation quoted before: The face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he finally did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned

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' Ulysses' : Styles upon him anent his better half, wrecked in his affections. You little expected me but I've come to stay and make a fresh start. There she sits, a grass widow, at the selfsame fireside. Believes me dead. Rocked in the cradle of the deep .... No chair for father. Boo! The wind! Her brandnew arrival is on her knee, post mortem child. With a high ro! and a randy ro! and my galloping tearing tandy 0! Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I remain with much love your brokenhearted husband, W. B. Murphy. (719-2oj6o8-g)

'That particular Alice Ben Bolt topic' (719/6o8), as told in Bloom's interior monologue, owes more to cliches ('Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it.') than most of his 'thoughts', but it still rises to an interest above that of many passages of similar length in 'Eumreus'. As it is directly concerned with the 'Penelope theme', it has obvious relevance to Bloom's own plight and presents a version of his own later 'abnegation', if an interpretation at the level of cliche. The subject crops up again momentarily in another example of a 'fracturing'-the term is R. M. Adams's 3 5-of the fictional surface of the chapter: Nevertheless, he [Bloom] sat tight, just viewing the slightly soiled photo [of Molly which he is showing to Stephen] creased by opulent curves, none the worse for wear, however, and locked away thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the other's possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving embonpoint. In fact, the slight soiling was only an added charm, like the case of linen slightly soiled, good as new, much better, in fact, with the starch out. Suppose she was gone when he? ... I looked for the lamp which she told me came into his mind but merely as a passing fancy of his because he then recollected the morning littered bed etcetera and the book about Ruby with met him pike hoses (sic) in it which must have fell down sufficiently appropriately beside the domestic chamberpot with apologies to Lindley Murray. (75g-6o/637-8)

The sudden welling-up of a thought about Molly, not as she was in the picture but as she might be in the present, seems to unfix Bloom's mind. The phrase 'Suppose she was gone when he? .. .' discomposes Bloom. The paragraph continues in a 102

' Ulysses' : Styles jumble of phrases and finally regains a precarious balance at the level of cliche.* Another kind of diversion from the main style of the chapter occurs when Corley accosts Stephen in the street for a handout: 'Lord John Corley, some called him, and his genealogy came about in this wise' (7ogj6oo), which is followed by a fourteenline 'genealogy'. After the chapter has returned from this epical excursus to the matter at hand, there is intruded, on no pretext whatever, a hashed and bathetic counter-genealogy: No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen that was fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected through the mother in some way ... if the whole thing wasn't a complete fabrication from start to finish ....

(7ogj6o1)

Both the pseudo-heroic and the botched comedown are not cliche-ridden. This is a unique example in 'Eumreus' and it may be questioned whether it really belongs in the chapter, being more in the style(s) of 'Cyclops'. There seems, for instance, no intention to recall 'Cyclops' at this point, which would constitute an aesthetic defence. It suggests once again that the ground-style of 'Eumreus' has little local interest of its own, that what interest is present is manufactured by using devices not inherent in the general manner of presentationas, for instance, the 'lies' which Joyce told Budgen he put 'into the mouth of that sailorman'. 36 WhenJoyce wrote Harriet Shaw Weaver on July 12th, 1920, announcing his arrival in Paris from Trieste and his intention 'to remain here three months in order to write the last adventure Circe in peace ( ?) and also the first episode of the close', he added that 'A great part of the Nostos or close was written several years ago and the style is quite plain'. 37 ·whether any material later used in 'Ithaca' is here intended is doubtful. In any case, Joyce seems to have hit on the 'styles' of the 'Nostos' quite late, as he announced that of 'Ithaca' to Budgen only in February 1921, in words which suggest that Budgen would have seen no earlier version. 'Circe' was 'finished'

* Lindley Murray, the grammarian, is mentioned in Finnegans Wake (26g:6g); see also Letters, p. 278. Murray's A New English Grammar proceeds largely by exempla barely above the level of cliche. It may have fertilized joyce's imagination much as the Assimil L'Anglais Sans Peine did Ionesco's in La Cantatrice Chauve. H

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'Ulysses' : Styles by Christmas I 920. 'Ithaca' was begun almost immediately afterwards. On December I oth, I 920, Joyce had said in a letter to Budgen, 'Eumeus you know, and in February he was telling him about the 'lies'. 38 This suggests that the basic style of 'Eumreus', the accumulation of cliches, existed from the start, and that the 'quite plain' style was not later rewritten. In so far as the major stylistic features of Ulysses developed in the course of writing and were perceived by Joyce as 'necessary' only as he came, as it were, to review his existing achievement, it seems to suggest itself that 'Eumreus' does not participate in the logic of styles to the same extent that other chapters do. Fabricated in advance, and programmatically fashioned (with additions-a letter of'Early I92I' to Claude Sykes calls it 'about 30 pp.'), 39 'Eumreus' may seem to jar. Mainly, it seems to have been done already in the novel. Given its early composition, one can begin to speculate about the chapter as a practice run for Joyce, and as providing yet another medium of existence for Stephen and Bloom. In the logic of styles, 'Eumceus' is a reduction of the action to a superficial account, and the manner of it only exposes its own inability to encompass the matter. 'Ithaca', on the other hand, represents an attempt to probe the significance of the action to a great depth by the assumption of an apparently 'objective' method. This method too exposes its own shortcomings. Whether Ulysses is itself a deterministic novel, as Clive Hart asserts 40 and others imply, the parody of 'Ithaca' maintains an ambivalent relationship with determinism: in so far as it is parodic, it is critical of determinism; in so far as it is not, determinism is presented as adequate to understand the meeting of Bloom and Stephen. Internally there is perhaps no way to decide, except in certain cases; externally, as we cast our eye over other 'versions' of the situation, we may be inclined to take at discount the 'Art' of the chapter, 'Science' (in the Schema). Oddly enough, the scientific rationalism (or literary naturalism) of the chapter, which ought on the face of it only to report, seems to run off into mythologizing. This paradox is notable, for instance, in Zola, where avowedly repertorial novels like Germinal tend to develop a 'mythic' dimension, or in I04

'Ulysses' : Styles Frank Norris's MacTeague and The Octopus, where an antimythic naturalistic programme cannot banish mythic (naturecycle) structural elements. This myth/fact paradox enters 'Ithaca' with Joyce's very first announcement of the chapter in the letter of February, I 92 I, to Budgen: I am writing Ithaca in the form of a mathematical catechism. All events are resolved into their cosmic, physical, psychical, etc. equivalents, e.g. Bloom jumping down the area, drawing water from the tap, the micturating in the garden, the cone of incense, lighted candle and statue so that the reader will know everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.*

Between the baldness and coldness and the 'heavenly bodies, wanderers' falls the 'but', which acknowledges the antithetical potentiality of the form, yet another instance of radical ambiguity in the novel. Critics have emphasized one or another of the poles of this fact/myth ambiguity according to their particular interpretation of Bloom's and Stephen's characters. Deprecators of Bloom and Stephen emphasize the validity of the 'baldest and coldest way'. Hugh Kenner, though seeing humour in it, thinks it always shows up the characters: the 'periphrastic absurdities' may be 'sometimes pathetic', but they reflect accurately Joyce's judgement of Bloom, 'the epiphanization of industrial man'. 41 Supporters of Bloom and Stephen are, on the other hand, drawn to exposing the shortcomings of the method, and this is often accompanied by an elevation of the 'mythic' dimension. S. L. Goldberg, who takes particular concern to emphasize the vitality of Bloom and the 'potentiality' of Stephen, is most articulate in formulating this position: 'Ithaca' ... turns back on the action and forms an abstract, choric commentary on it as a whole .... In 'Ithaca' the action may be said to reach towards a conscious statement of itself. ... [The] narrative must now move outside the consciousness of the characters altogether-not merely outside the 'streamof-consciousness' (which disappears between 'Nausicaa' and *Letters, pp. 15g-6o. In spring 1921 Joyce called 'Ithaca' 'A mathematicoastronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico sublimation of Bloom and Stephen' (Ibid., p. 164-).

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'Ulysses' : Styles 'Penelope', and is used only intermittently in any case), but even outside any reflecting consciousness in Henry James's sense .... Now the 'reflector' is replaced by an intelligence utterly superior to the whole action, an ironic persona directing us from beyond or above it .... 42

Goldberg then quotes from Joyce's letter to Budgen on 'Ithaca' and comments, The cold, catechistic, 'objective' style is indeed a parodic mask, as for example Mr Kenner has so pertinently shown. But the point of the chapter is the difference between what the mask represents and its actual dramaticifect. The mask proceeds with its ruthless vivisection of the 'scientific' facts of modern society and of the sensibility characteristic of that society-a sensibility, rif course, that Bloom largely shares. This vivisection, however, is not the final comment on Bloomsworld; it is only one term in the dialectic of the chapter. For its effect is again like that of the pervading irony of the whole work, not to demolish Bloom and Stephen into scattered, fragmentary 'facts', but rather to show their ultimate invulnerability to this view of them .... The deeper affirmation does emerge nevertheless .... In the event, the 'scientific' perspective only heightens our sense of an imperishable dignity and vitality in the two characters ... it points to what it cannot reduce to its terms ... it parodies the method and outlook of naturalistic Realism in order to suggest what lies beyond its grasp. 43

Goldberg's own grasp of 'the dialectic of the chapter' is less than sure, for while he posits one, and admits Bloom's 'share'that is, the adequacy of the 'mask'-he is clearly more drawn towards the pole of 'affirmation'. Ultimately, Goldberg's view empties 'Ithaca' of ambiguity by denying the supremacy of 'fact'. But he does perceive the significance of the 'mathematicoastronomico-physico-mechanico-geometrico-chemico' myth as the extrapolation of the affirmative pole of meaning: Stephen's departure leaves Bloom alone once more .... We begin here to see him completely objectively and representatively; the narrative moves us away from all sympathetic identification with him towards a more abstract, depersonalized perception rifhim. He becomes less himself and more a symbol, now consciously and explicitly abstracted from the action. Only his most general outlines-or rather, his most essential

106

'Ulysses' : Styles qualities-now remain. We examine him as a symbol of his society and its material ideals; then reduced ... 'to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity' ... then as a prospective wanderer and exile from home ... become at last an interstellar wanderer .... [We] see them as a completed action, which is fulfilled both by the book itself to which it points as its goal and in the silent luminous stasis wherein all men appear as adventurers, all adventurers appear as one, and all adventure, all process, a simultaneous, static, eternal pattern-the entelechy of all history .... It is thus that Stephen and Bloom achieve their apotheosis, 'wanderers like the stars at which they gaze' .44 Because Goldberg is unwilling to admit that in true 'dialectical suspense' the opposing forces exist in permanent contradiction, he too easily assimilates the darker side of the progressive mythicizing of 'Ithaca' and the 'entelechy of all history' appears as a kind of liberal humanism-or worse as the 'one great goal, the manifestation of God' which is Mr Deasy's definition. The staticness of his picture might have put Goldberg on his guard, but the term is part of his vocabulary of praise. Just as Kenner's praise of 'Ithaca' for reducing Bloom and Stephen hovers on the edge of acknowledging that the prose can only reflect on itself-the 'pathetic' and 'periphrastic absurdities'-Goldberg's patronage of them comes near to evidencing the hopelessness and cyclic fixity of the total pattern. Neither the approach from 'fact' nor the approach from 'myth' can alone satisfy our experience, nor can an approach which pretends to a comfortable synthesis-the celebrated 'fusion', correspondance or parallelism. What both critical versions of 'Ithaca' share, however, is an emphasis on isolation, a separation between persons and things, or the reduction of persons to things. The language of 'Ithaca', in terms of a subject/object relationship, is at the furthest remove from that of the first six chapters, what Joyce called 'the initial style'. There, as Goldberg insists, subject and object are indistinguishable. In dialectical terms 'Ithaca' is the logical extremity of the separation of subject and object which, in one manner or another, by one literary strategy or another, has become increasingly prominent since Chapter Seven ('Aeolus'). Ulysses' final chapter, 'Penelope', describes one last swing of the 107

'Ulysses' : Styles pendulum, all the way back to the indistinguishability of subject and object of the first chapters. The vein of 'Ithaca' has been re-opened in recent French novels. There the entire novel may be in the style of Joyce's chapter, the programmatic intention of the artist being to circumvent the metaphysical antinomy of subject and object by treating everything as an object. For example, from Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy: [A] sits down in front of the dressing-table and looks at herself in the oval mirror, motionless, her elbows on the marble top and her hands pressing on each side of her face, against the temples. Not one of her features moves, nor the long-lashed eyelids, nor even the pupils at the centre of the green irises. Petrified by her own gaze, attentive and serene, she seems not to feel time passing. Leaning to one side, her tortoise-shell comb in her hand, she fixes her hair again before coming to the table. A mass of the heavy black curls hangs over the nape of her neck. The free hand plunges its tapering fingers into it. A ... is lying fully dressed on the bed. One of her legs rests on the satin spread; the other bent at the knee, hangs half over the edge. The arm on this side is bent toward the head lying on the bolster. Stretched across the wide bed, the other arm lies out from the body at approximately a forty-five degree angle. Her face is turned upward toward the ceiling. Her eyes are made still larger by the darkness. Near the bed, against the same wall, is the heavy chest. A ... is standing in front of the open top drawer, on which she is leaning in order to look for something, or else to arrange the contents. The operation takes a long time and requires no movement of the body. She is sitting in the chair between the hallway door and the writing table. She is rereading a letter which shows the creases where it has been folded. Her long legs are crossed. Her right hand is holding the sheet in front of her face; her left hand is gripping the end of the armrest. A ... is writing, sitting at the table near the first window [etc., etc.] .... 45 The supposed effect of 'objectivity' is secured in part through a sympathetic subject-matter ('requires no movement of the body', etc.), but also through continual reference to portions of the body ('her hands pressing', 'the free hand plunges', etc.)

108

'Ulysses' : Styles used as attenuated metonymic subjects, generally with active verbs. The verbs attached to 'A ... ' or 'she' are more often than not neutral ('seems', 'is lying', 'is standing'). The effect of reducing the integrity of personality to components no different in status from other objects in the room is additionally secured by the absence of verbs to follow A ... 's movement from one place or position to another. (Robbe-Grillet and his 'school' have eschewed the use of active verbs in occasional manifestos.) The whole procedure, in terms of the scale of 'styles or genres in description' suggested by W. K. Wimsatt, constitutes a diminution of the use of both 'the abstract or less than specificsubstantive style' and the 'extra-concrete, the detailed, or more than specific style' in favour of a 'minimum concrete or specificsubstantive style'-neither 'implement' nor 'rusty garden spade', but 'spade'. 46 Wimsatt calls 'the purely specific or substantial' level probably the rarest, citing Hemingway's 'The Killers' and the description of Brobdingnag in Book II of Gulliver's Travels as examples. While he does not define the effect of the use of this level, it may be inferred from his description of the others: Both the more than substantive style and the less than substantive are pre-eminently internal and reflexive modes of description-expressing on the one hand the intricately sensitive, Proustian awareness of experience in detail, and on the other the dreamy abstractness, the suffused vagueness of reverie. 47

These descriptions of style touch, at their outer limits, on philosophical, if not metaphysical positions. It is doubtful, of course, that a particular technique alone could secure the intended effect, and congenial subjects-such as human apathy and alienation-help. Similar effects have been gained without the stylistic (or quasi-metaphysical) programme, as in Camus's L' Etranger. * On the other hand there is little doubt that particular 'styles', as can be seen from Wimsatt's comment on his three-part scale ('Proustian awareness ... dreamy abstractness'), seem likely conventions for certain 'interpretations' of their subjects.

* Sartre's analysis makes Camus' style the father of Robbe-Grillet's and finds its origin in the 'American neo-realists' and Hemingway (Sartre, p. 39). rag

'Ulysses' : Styles As Robbe-Grillet may be said to embody an Ithacan mode, Virginia Woolf may be said to have used the stream of consciousness to Penelopean purpose, subjectifying all. 48 The 'Ithaca episode', Joyce wrote Harriet Shaw Weaver on October 7th, I 92 I, 'is in reality the end [of Ulysses] as Penelope has no beginning, middle or end'. 49 It is perhaps best conceived as a process which goes on all the time during the novel, not just in Molly Bloom and between waking and sleeping. The style of 'Penelope' is, then, an approximation to a level of consciousness (or unconsciousness) which is during the day working below the level of the 'stream' reproduced for Stephen and Bloom in 'the initial style'. Its verbalization by Molly is something of a pretext, but acknowledgement of the style's function in the logic of Ulysses' styles may help divert attacks from Molly herself by those who object to her supposed Great Motherishness. The reasons why Joyce allowed 'the last word' 50 to Molly, rather than to Bloom, may be manifold, but like so much in the novel it functions to protect Joyce from appearing to put a definitive stamp upon his portrait of Bloom. To have exhibited Bloom's psyche at this level at this point without appearing to commit himself to one or another 'interpretation' he may have felt beyond him. He could go all down the line in presenting particular interpretations in various parody-styles, because our recognition of their 'literary' origins prevents us from ascribing the interpretations at face value to Joyce, but in the matter of an apparently direct representation of consciousness, no immediate similar recognition is possible. As it is, Molly seems, by virtue of her presentation in the last chapter, too programmatic for many tastes, the springs of her behaviour only too clearly revealed. 51 We are not yet so conditioned as to regard an author's presentation of consciousness as a literary mode, though 'Joyce himself came later to regard the interior monologue as a stylization, rather than a total exposition, of consciousness'. 52 Whether in this instance Joyce's avoidance of telling us, in the manner of Molly, what Bloom was then 'thinking' constitutes an arbitrary refusal, whether the author has led us to ponder questions and entertain expectations whose answers and satisfactions he then deliberately withholds is a perennial JIO

'Ulysses' : Styles question in dealing with the ellipticality of many modern 'story-telling' methods. As V. S. Pritchett has remarked of the method of Ford Madox Ford: His art-particularly the theory of the time-shift-was in part based on an analysis of talk, the way it plunges back and forth .... It often becomes a device for refusing to face a major scene. 53

Joyce has the right to make 'Ithaca' the end of his story of Bloom: the often unprinted egg-shaped full-stop may be said to underscore this intention. It is equally allowable that, as Joyce has already in the novel suggested the infinite extensibility of the potential treatments of his story material, we be shown one of these extensions-to stand for a potentially large number-that of entry into the consciousness of another character. There is more justification here, perhaps, than for Joyce's ducking the 'very unpleasant scene at Westland Row terminus' (713/604). Mulligan had presumably made a 'Gothic' exit from the Bolles Street hospital, saying, 'Meet me at Westland row station at ten past eleven' (539/405). Bloom, arriving in Nighttown, 'thinks', 'Scene at Westland row' (579/444). The matter is broached again only by Bloom, with the suggestion that what has happened must mark a turning-point in Stephen's relations with Mulligan, and by implication with all his Dublin contem-

poraries. Asking Stephen where he will sleep that night, Bloom appears to suggest that even if Sandycove were not out of the question because it would be too long a walk, 'you won't get in after what occurred at Westland row station' (713/604). Bloom's 'interpretation' is a recognizable cliche, and therefore to be taken at discount: 'Except it simply amounts to one thing and he is what they call picking your brains, he ventured to throw out' (715/605). Stephen's mind, however, never seems, in 'Eum~us' or 'Ithaca', to run on the subject. Thus, when he has turned down Bloom's offer to let him stay the night at Eccles St, 'Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully' (815/68o), and has gone off into the night, the extent to which 'Westland row' is important to him remains undefined. To withhold information as to whether Stephen felt the 'scene' significant, even determinative, may constitute a 'refusal' (in Pritchett's terms). Or, if Stephen had just not yet thought I I I

'Ulysses' : Styles about the matter, then he is not brought, in Ulysses, to a personal impasse of the magnitude of Bloom's in respect of his marriage.* That Joyce intended to present Stephen in this novel as heading towards but not yet arrived at a clear predicament may appear doubtful. tIt seems clear that Bloom arrives at a defined predicament on Bloomsday, never before having had to contemplate his position vis-a-vis Molly as he does on it. In this respect the 'ordinary day' theories of Ulysses seem deficient and it is more likely that both Bloom and Stephen were to be presented as in individual moments of crisis, Stephen facing what the psychologist Erik Erikson calls an 'identity crisis' and Bloom the second of the major crises of adult life, the 'integrity crisis' .t The stylistic manipulations of Ulysses to which the previous pages have been devoted, all that which deviates from 'the initial style' (and in particular ways) are part of the symbolist dimension of the novel and cumulatively suggest what Ortega y Gasset has called the 'dehumanization of art': the use of style to 'deform reality' and to 'shatter its human aspect'. 54 S. L. Goldberg, writing of Ulysses' 'Ithaca' chapter, alludes to Ortega; he believes that Joyce 'drifted towards' dehumanization (or abstractionism). 55 But that Ulysses (or Joyce) moves towards it is no indication that the structure of Ulysses cannot accommodate the movement. Ulysses does not begin as a 'dehumanization', as its first chapters humanize the subject-object totality by lend*Joyce told Budgen that Ulysses was a more rounded character than Christ, because Christ 'never lived with a woman[, s]urely ... one of the most difficult things a man has to do' (quoted by EHmann, p. 449). 'Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other frequently engaged his mind? What to do with our wives,' (Ulysses, 8o2/67o). t See Stephen's advice to Corley, in the cabman's shelter, to seek a job 'tomorrow or the next day ... in a boys' school at Dalkey for a gentleman usher' (709-10/601), and on the other hand, William Empson, 'The Theme of Ulysses', in A James Joyce Miscellany, Third Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale, 1962), pp. 127-54, esp. p. 136. ~ Erik Homburger Erikson, 'The Problem of Ego Identity', Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, No. 4 (1956), pp. 56-121; Childhood and Society (London, 1961), chapter on 'Integrity'; and Toung Man Luther (London, 1959), pp. g8-g, 248-56, which uses Stephen Dedalus's religious crisis in the Portrait to adumbrate particular points. Erikson's whole exposition of the two complementary crises bears striking resemblances to Kierkegaard on the transitional stages of experience. 112

'Ulysses' : Styles ing support, alternatively, to Bloom's and Stephen's recognizably human versions of experience. The encroachment of modernist stylistic experimentation into the novel can, at one extreme, be seen as attacks on the characters. According to Goldberg, Joyce 'does the worst that can be done to the characters and yet in doing so reveals their human validity'. 56 Having established the 'human validity' of Stephen and Bloom in the early chapters, Joyce initiates a process whereby he criticizes them, ethically, psychologically, ontologically, with all the weapons of 'modern art'. Whether they survive is moot and perhaps the only success desirable is that their survival remain an open question, providing the kind of drama of point of view discussed in respect of the Portrait of the Artist. Symbolism (or, as Ortega has it, 'stylism') has, of course, not merely a destructive force, for 'dehumanization' can involve a super- or supra-humanization as well, as in the suggestions that Bloom is the Christ (745/627), though these are carefully guarded by being made part of Stephen's consciousnessStephen sees Bloom as 'The traditional figure of hypostasis', but it is only a 'quasisensation' (8o8/674). Dehumanization has, then, both a depreciative and an appreciative pole. Corresponding 'naturalistically' to the depreciative is the sense of the way things weigh the characters down, the predicament outlined in Chapter Two, where Stephen's difficulty in finding a field of action for himself in Dublin was discussed. This was George Bernard Shaw's point about Ulysses when in the Preface to Immaturity he wrote, In 1876 I had had enough of Dublin. James Joyce in his Ulysses has described, with a fidelity so ruthless that the book is hardly bearable, the life that Dublin offers to its young men, or, if you prefer to put it the other way, that its young men offer to Dublin .... A certain flippant futile derision and belittlement that confuses the noble and serious with the base and ludicrous seems to me peculiar to Dublin. 57 Shaw's subordinate alternative ('if you prefer to put it the other way') suggests that the 'derision and belittlement' may belong equally to Stephen.* Questions of responsibility aside, Goldberg notes the same of Bloom:

* It is questionable whether Shaw read beyond the first chapter. 113

'Ulysses' : Styles What Joyce portrays is a man whose genuine impulse is toward Love but who can not discover any adequate image of himself as a social being practising it .... The process points to his essential humanity as well as to the absence of any available idea of social or personal relationships adequate to it. 58 The issue Goldberg's arguments raise is whether Ulysses, by moving towards more and more radical stylistic versions as the novel proceeds, commits itself to the direction of these chapters. Goldberg obviously thinks not ('essential humanity'), but to arrive there he attributes the accumulating symbolisms to Joyce personally. 'Trust the tale', he quotes from Lawrence: but the teller is the tale. Kenner, discussing the 'technics' of the novel, is almost alone in taking up the question of the styles as structuring the novel. He sees a progression of styles in Ulysses: As the day runs on, everything moves towards death. Entanglement in matter, in cliche, and in weariness .... Epilogue is not simply to Prologue as parody to exemplar. It is also as reductio ad absurdum to thing reduced. The social matter (Bloom's menage) vulgarizes the intellectual matter (Stephen's mind) because the latter already contains seeds of perversion.* Kenner erects a structure for the 'technics': the 'Telemachia' and the 'Nostos' are mirror-versions, 'Eumreus' is a hyperbole of the 'parodied theological cliches of "Telemachus" ', the 'impersonal' catechism of 'Ithaca' 'perfects' the 'personal' one of'Nestor',' "Proteus" circles around its protagonist just as does "Penelope" ', 'Molly has merely resolved the tensions of the earlier episode by accepting with smug satisfaction the body with which Stephen is at once so obsessed and so displeased.' 59 The structural parallels may be more convincing than the judgements of value which Kenner places on them, and once again the question of whether that which occurs later demolishes that which appears earlier cannot be finessed: it is a general problem inherent in the nature of romantic irony. 60 Presently more important is Kenner's belief that by inspecting the 'technics' of 'the Odyssey' proper (Chapters Four to *Kenner, p. 241. As the last sentence shows, Kenner's subscription to the primacy of an allegorical substantive level allows him to assert that 'vulgarization' is not merely a description of'Bloom's menage'. It is for him a reflection back upon Stephen, whose prior imperfection ('seeds of perversion') is thereby proved.

114

'Ulysses' : Styles Fifteen) 'we can see that the progression of styles enacts a drama even at this tabular level of abstraction'. 61 His 'table' is reproduced on the next page (p. I 16); the prose explication he offers of it hardly seems adequate to the logical rigour the table itself suggests. His conclusion-'Thus the action of the book resembles the running down of an immense clock' 62 merely echoes what he has said about 'mirror' chapters. His claim here, however, as it concerns progression and therefore the internal dialectic of the whole novel, is wider. If a single progression can be determined in the style, it may well amount to the most persuasive definite comment on the action available. On the other hand, the usual objections suggest themselves: Ulysses concerns the action of only one day-there will be others; the progression of different styles may only be an imitative approximation to ordinary diurnal psychic change and therefore make no individual comment on the human action. The situation is analogous to the variety of response possible to romantic irony, only in respect of point of view rather than subject-matter. In the Byronic irony, Don Juan protests eternal fidelity to his first love as he becomes progressively more seasick. 63 If a Kenner would claim that Juan's 'retching' 'vulgarizes' his protestations-because these 'already contain seeds of perversion'-a Goldberg would hold that the passage, while 'doing its worst' to Juan 'yet reveals his human validity' (or 'essential humanity'). It would appear that a permanent 'dialectical suspense' of these views offers the only firm ground, however indeterminate it might leave particular cases. While earlier romantic ironists might embody suggestions of each view in the text itself (protestations v. retching), others might carefully avoid reference to either. If it seems possible to say of Ulysses that one can see in it either no progression or progression in two major, though contrary directions, the whole of the proposition must be the novel's 'structure'. Another pattern than Kenner's is, however, perceptible in the progression of styles, a further refinement of the pattern of 'resonance' described earlier. Here resonance is not particularly to be found either in the order of plot incidents or directly in the contents of the characters' consciousnesses. It has moved outwards to the narrative technique. 115

O'l

.....

.......

in cubism

narcissism

narrative

PSYCHIC

incubus dealt with in turn by

dialectic

peristaltic

enthymemic

COGNITIVE

gigantism

fugue

labyrinth

(Kenner, p. 242)

Impasse handled in three modes

COMMUNAL

dichotomy breeds three oscillations

tumescence, detumescence embryonic development hallucination

NEURAL

~ ~~L

"

~ i"

~

:

'Ulysses' : Styles Seven chapters introduce Stephen, then Bloom, then Dublin, 'realistically', and three more recapitulate these, in characteristic activity (Bloom hunting lunch, Stephen expounding Shakespeare), with the Dublin scene then widened from the synecdoche of the newspaper office. Henceforth the chapters, or their parts, oscillate more and more strongly between 'symbolic' and 'realistic' presentation, between literary parody (of high and low literature) and the parody, or extension of common speech, between the super-conscious and the subconscious. The final swing has been characterized by Ian Watt as explicitly fulfilling the major implicit concern of the novel form in English: Joyce's Ulysses, which is in so many ways the climax of the novel's development, is certainly its climax in the treatment of the dualist extremes: in its last two books [sic] the graphic presentation of Molly Bloom's daydream and the cataloguing of the contents of her husband's drawers are defiantly unadulterated examples of the adjustment of narrative manner to the subjective and the objective poles of dualism. 64

Progressive withering away of 'adulteration' is perhaps the key to the order of styles in Ulysses. And further, the progressive approach to-and, according to Watt, touching of-the ultimate extremes of 'the internal and the external approach to character' or 'the reality ... of the ego [and] of the external world' demonstrates the limited efficiency of extreme presentations in wholly accounting for the human action related according to that 'narrative adjustment' which constitutes 'formal or presentational realism' in literature. 65 In this way, the 'styles' of Ulysses clearly demonstrate the 'limits' of the novel.

117

v ULYSSES: THE SYMBOLIC SCENARIO

his farced epistol to the hibruws .... a most moraculous jeeremyhead sindbook for all the peoples. -Finnegans Wake (228-g)

progression in Ulysses may be further investigated in reference to the homogeneous symbolist texture of the novel (as distinct from the 'styles' ofparticular chapters). Here, we may allow full play to our perception of such symbolist paradigms as 'cyclic return'. Joyce's structural use of 'cycles' in Finnegans Wake is well known and undisputed, though their source, whether in Vico or elsewhere, is often a point at issue. 1 Besides the numerous smaller cycles in the Wake, the hundredletter thunder-words end major cycles and initiate the next. The notion of cyclic experience is double-faced. That nothing is ever 'new', that every action is destined to be repeated over and over again may suggest on the one hand Sisyphus at his eternal task. We have already had occasion to glance at this possibility in earlier chapters. On the other hand, cyclic return can be taken, as does Mircea Eliade, to represent a flight from 'the terror of history', towards 'the "staticisation" of becoming, toward annulling the irreversibility of time'. 2 In this view of 'archaic ontology', the reintroduction of the new cycle brings a 'regeneration' and: THE QUESTION OF

it is justifiable to read in this depreciation of history (that is,

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'Ulysses': The Symbolic Scenario of events without transhistorical models), and in this rejection of profane, continuous time, a certain metaphysical 'valorization' of human existence. 3 Thus, 'cyclic periodicity' 4 can represent either the 'bad karma'* in which repetition in history is seen as a futility of the spirit's expense from which the wise man attempts to detach himself, or the regenerativeness of which Eliade and some anthropologists write. And while Eliade finds that the work of two of the most significant writers of our day -T. S. Eliot and James Joyce-is saturated with nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition and, in the last analysis, for the abolition of time, 5 it is not incumbent on us to believe that in the developed dialectic of these two writers 'eternal repetition' will be as unambivalent as Eliade apparently believes. Not only is the use of cyclism, then, uncommitted to either a cosmic optimism or pessimism-and we may compare the debate over the comic or tragic import of Finnegans Wake-but there is a further sophistication available for its mode of existence in a work of art: in Ulysses Joyce manages both to suggest the presence of cyclic return and to limit its warrant to exclusive control of his meaning. There are many evidences of Joyce's predilection for the 'end' of a cycle. His personal interest in the Mass of the Presanctified-historically celebrated just prior to the Easter resurrection, during which time Christ is harrowing Hell and the Church awaits his 'return'-is discussed later in this chapter.6 As early as the story 'Counterparts', whose scope does not invite allegorical expansion into the full 'myth of eternal return', Joyce was observing the repetitiveness of experience: Farrington, bullied at his office, fortifies himself at Davy Byrne's and totters home to bully and strike his son, the two bullyings being the 'counterparts' of each other. In 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room', six men (and the caretaker) celebrate the anniversary of Parnell's death, both deliberately and unconsciously. But the Uncrowned King will not, like the Christ

* Ulysses, 237(183; and see 233(18o, Bloom's 'Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration for sins you did in past life the reincarnation met him pikehoses'. I

IIg

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario with whom MrHynes'spoemcompares him (Dubliners, I5I /I6g), rise again. Their 'celebration' is ambivalent, both containing and lacking the psychic regeneration of which Eliade writes.* The reading of Hynes's 'The Death of Parnell' lifts the assembled out of the small-minded political bickering in which they have been engaged and even compels the respect of Crofton, the 'Conservative'. Another 'tak[es] out his cigarette papers and pouch the better to hide his emotion' (I 52/ I 70). The story ends before their emotion is either eroded by the re-introduction of their more mundane interests or allowed to spill over into sentimentality. We know of course that this annual observance will have no outward effect on Irish political life-in Ulysses Bloom notes, 'Ivy day dying out' (I40/IOg)-and so the outer 'cycle' will not renew; but the potential for inner renewal is suggested in 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room'. It is the same Hynes who, at Paddy Dignam's funeral in Ulysses, suggests, -Let us go round by the chief's grave .... We have time . . . . With awe Mr Power's blank voice spoke: -Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled with stones. That one day he will come again. Hynes shook his head. -Parnell will never come again, he said. He's there, all that was mortal of him. Peace to his ashes. ( 142-3/ II 1)

The use of cyclic experience in two other stories in Dubliners, 'Clay' and 'The Dead', is equally significant. Both these stories are set at what, in the 'archaic ontology' is the end of the old cycle or the 'threshold' of the new. This is what Frazer calls the 'intercalary' episode, to which he devoted a whole section of The Golden Bough.t Various cycles imply, naturally, various intercalary periods, as Shrove Tuesday/Ash Wednesday, Hallowe'en, the days between Christmas and Epiphany * Thomas Mann, in 'Freud and the Future', makes a similar point about

'lived myth', quoting Ortega to the effect that 'the man of antiquity, before he did anything, took a step backwards, like the bull-fighter who leaps back to deliver the mortal thrust. He searched the past for a pattern .... For life in the myth, life, so to speak, in quotation, is a kind of celebration, in that it is a making present of the past, it becomes a religious act ... it becomes a feast ... (in Essays, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter [New York, 1958], pp. 319-20). t Part VII ('Between Old and New'), pars. 471-81; see The New Golden Bough, ed. Theodor H. Gaster (New York, 1959), pp. 55g-78. This portion of The Golden Bough was first published in The Fortnightly Review, n.s. 68 (July-December 1900), PP· 653-76,825-49· 120

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario (Twelfth Night), the days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday; but what Eliade calls the 'scenario of the end and the beginning of the year' 7 has a number of recurrent features. In speaking of 'the relations between the New Year ceremonies and the cult of the dead', Eliade notes, the beliefs, held almost everywhere, according to which the dead return to their families (and often return as 'living dead') at the New Year season (during the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany) signify the hope that the abolition of time is possible at this mythical moment, in which the world is destroyed and recreated.* The dead can come back now, for all barriers between the dead and the living are broken (is not primordial chaos reactualized ?) , and they will come back because at this paradoxical instant time will be suspended, hence they can again be contemporaries of the living .... How could the invasion by the souls of the dead, for example, be anything but the sign of a suspension of profane time, the paradoxical realization of a coexistence of 'past' and 'present'? This coexistence is never so complete as at a period of chaos when all modalities coincide. The last days of the past year can be identified with the pre-Creation chaos, both through this invasion of the dead-which annuls the law of time-and through the sexual excesses which commonly mark the occasion .... [t]he abolition of all norms and ... an overturning of values ... in a word a reversion of all forms to indeterminate unity. 8

The 'invasion of the dead' in Joyce's 'The Dead', whether tropically in the memories of the past during the dinner party or more pointedly in that of the 'ghost' of Michael Fureywho, in so far as his spirit contends with Gabriel Conroy for the possession of Gretta, becomes the 'carnival king' temporarily enthroned, with Gabriel the ousted sovereign 'humiliated' by him 9-is a noted feature of the story. 'Clay', too, being set on Hallowe'en, when witches or ghosts are said to walk among the living producing 'inversions of rank', 10 forms a secular trope for the mysterious and dread time in which normal categories of experience are jeopardized and the conditions for the 'karma'

* Cf. C.]. Jung's initial reaction to Ulysses, that it is 'creative destruction' in a world given over to 'eternal repetition' which has 'no place for value', written in 'a mood befitting a cosmic Ash-Wednesday' ('Ulysses, A Monologue', trans. W. S. Dell, Nimbus, Vol. 2, No. 1 [June-August, 1953], pp. g, 13, 18); his subsequent discovery of the creative aspect of Ulysses is discussed below, pp. 16o--1. 121

'Ulysses': The Symbolic Scenario of the next cycle are posited and potentiated. Maria, who has seemed to some a kind of 'witch', picks 'clay' in the fortunetelling game, which is the neutral substance, and the 'death' which is her 'fortune' has radiations of possible meaning. During the Hallowe'en party Maria has dreams of reinstating remembered conditions, which she unconsciously projects by singing 'I Dreamt that I Dwelt'But I also dreamt, which pleased me most That you loved me still the same. (II8/I32)-

and of restoring the antagonistic brothers Joe and Alphy, the first of a line culminating in Shem and Shaun, to friendship. It is the task of an ALP (as at Finnegans Wake, 194) and Maria fails: So Maria let him have his way and they sat by the fire talking over old times and Maria thought she would put in a good word for Alphy. But Joe cried that God might strike him stone dead if ever he spoke a word to his brother again and Maria said she was sorry she had mentioned the matter. Mrs Donnelly told her husband it was a great shame for him to speak that way of his own flesh and blood but Joe said that Alphy was no brother of his and there was nearly being a row on the head of it. But Joe said he would not lose his temper on account of the night it was and asked his wife to open some more stout. The two next-door girls had arranged some Hallow Eve games and soon everything was merry again. ( 116/ I 30)

But the girls play an unsentimentalized version of their game, and Maria chooses 'death', the clay. After this she sings, her song affecting Joe as does Mr Hynes's poem the men in the Committee room; but here the effect is pointedly sentimental, and ironic on Joyce's part: Joe was very much moved. He said there was no time like long ago and no music for him like poor old Balfe, whatever other people might say; and his eyes filled up so much with tears that he could not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell him where the corkscrew was. (r r8jr32)

And so withJoyce's deliberate delay of the word 'corkscrew' the story ends. 'Clay' is an end-of-the-year celebration gone sour, 122

'Ulysses': The Symbolic Scenario and no 'regeneration' may be assumed to have taken place. The stories in Dubliners are usually more open-ended than 'Clay', more ambivalent in their outcomes, like the remembrance ceremony (or mass) for Parnell dead but not risen in 'Ivy Day', and this is especially true of 'The Dead'.* : 'The Dead' is set on the last night of the twelve-day 'intercalary' period following Christmas, that is, on the Feast of Epiphany itself. The night is the traditional European analogue of the Saturnalia 11 and socialized versions of all Eliade's conditions for the Epiphany feast are realized in Joyce's story. Kate and Julia Morkan's 'annual dance' 'was always a great affair' (I 99/224). Gabriel Conroy, a teacher in 'the college' (214/241),t prepares his usual speech for people whose 'grade of culture differed from his' (203/229). His disaffection from Dublin provinciality he bears like a chalice through the crowd, but the 'bitter and sudden retort' of a serving-girl discomposes him (202-3/227-9) and the banter of Miss Ivors, a nationalist, unnerves him further, perhaps by forcing him to formulate for the first time the precise nature of his disaffection, his un-'lrishness': '0, to tell you the truth,' retorted Gabriel suddenly, 'I'm sick of my own country, sick ofit!' (216/243) His self-possession gutters in the course of the story and the ghosts of the past begin to assume more tangible shape than 'those great singers' (232/261) discussed by the guests and recalled by Gabriel in his speech. When Bartell D' Arcy sings 'The Lass of Aughrim' for Gretta Conroy, the spectre of yet another singer from the past arises. Perhaps the extent to *As we have seen in the first chapter, many hover on the edge of 'entrapment', but by one means or another Joyce usually contrives to suspend judgement, to avoid blank failure for the characters. In the case of 'The Boarding House', the usual strategy seems to be reversed, and we watch the setting of the trap and its jaws closing.Joyce underlined his meaning by recreating Bob Doran, the trapped suitor, as a drunkard in Ulysses. He goes on 'periodical bends' (89/72) and is blind drunk by five in the afternoon (386ff.f294ff.). On the other hand, to strike a balance, there is a suggestion that Martin Cunningham (in 'Grace') may be more 'free' in the novel than in the short story. Cf. Dub liners, I 77/ I gg, on Cunningham's wife, with Ulysses, 672/554, where he gazes 'impassivel[y]' at her and says, 'Immense! Most bloody awful demirep!'. t Frazer notes the custom of colleges appointing a Lord of Misrule for the Twelve Nights (or from the Eve of All Saints' Day to Candlemas, February 2nd [Joyce's birthday] or from St Stephen's Day), 'to regulate the games and diversions' (Frazer, p. 566).

123

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario which his wife's memory of the boy who 'died for [her]' (252/283) humiliates Gabriel goes beyond Gretta's intruding Michael Furey into the current of egoistic possessiveness in which Gabriel is just at the moment enveloping her, remembering 'moments of their life together, that no one knew or would ever know of' (244/275). 'He longed to be master ofher strange mood' (248/279), only to discover that she was engrossed with a buried life in which he had no part. Perhaps Gabriel's own previous refusal to come to terms with 'Irish' Ireland, with what EHmann calls 'the primitive, untutored, impulsive country' 12'Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany,' said Gabriel awkwardly. 'And why do you go to France and Belgium,' said Miss Ivors, 'instead ofvisiting your own land?' (215/242)precipitates his discomfiture by the memory of Michael Furey of Galway. For whatever reasons, 'the dead' come to control Joyce's story, first the old singers and old Patrick Morkan, and lastly Michael Furey, all walking among the living. David Daiches has written, 'The theme of "The Dead" is the assault on the walled circle of Gabriel's egotism'. 13 In this account the story is a parable of the breaking down of the 'norms' of Gabriel's life and a 'reversion to indeterminate unity'. 14 'The Dead' ends with the completion of this process of destruction and we do not see the further outcome of Gabriel's new recognition of the separateness of his wife's existence, of the world outside whose claims he has resisted. We know only that he becomes 'shy of intruding on her grief', that he 'looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and her half opened mouth', that 'It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life' (253-4/285). A trace of sentimentalizing grows as his meditation extends. This tone becomes clearest in One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age, (255/287) and the rising tide of sentiment must be borne in mind as a paradoxical alternative to Richard EHmann's summarization: The tone of the sentence, 'The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward', is somewhat resigned. It suggests 124

'Ulysses' : Tlze Symbolic Scenario a concession, a relinquishment, and Gabriel is conceding and relinquishing a good deal-his sense of the importance of civilized thinking, of continental tastes, of all those tepid but nice distinctions on which he has prided himself. The bubble of his self-possession is pricked; he no longer possesses himself, and not to possess oneself is in a way a kind of death. It is a selfabandonment not unlike Furey's, and through Gabriel's mind runs the imagery of Calvary. 15 'The final purport of the story' for EHmann is 'the mutual dependence ofliving and dead' . 16 He points out that 'Ivy Day', 'A Painful Case' and the fantasias of both Bloom and Stephen in 'Circe' concern the relationship of the living and the dead. 17 He might have added, as we have seen, 'The Sisters' and 'Eveline'. But if Gabriel's unresentfulness approaches Bloom's 'abnegation' and 'equanimity' or the advice Stephen gives to himself as he leaves the library ('Cease to strive'), we might expect to see it surrounded by the same ethical paradoxes as theirs. The suspicion of sentimentality-the gratuitous Shropshire Lad heroics of 'better pass boldly'-is a part of this paradox, as is the ambiguity of the 'death' Gabriel suffers. For we see the death only, and not the rebirth. The action at the end of a year-cycle culminates in the unfixity of the period 'between old and new'.* Many items from the 'scenario' of cyclic ontology dot the texture of Ulysses. They help suggest that the action of the novel, like that of 'The Dead', takes place in the interim between periods of clearer definition-between Stephen as he appears to himself at the end of A Portrait and Bloom untroubled by the 'wife's admirers' (405/307) and whatever conditions appertain from June qth, 1904, onwards. During this time we may expect problems latent in the former precarious equilibria to be sharpened to clearer focus, with a corresponding unfixity, a moment of crisis where the conditions out of which the future will arise are searched for their prediction-the period between crucifixion and resurrection; a chronological analogue for Kierkegaard's 'dialectical suspense'.

* ]. V. Kelleher suggests to me that the Celtic myth of 'The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel' influenced Joyce in 'The Dead'. 'The Destruction' relates the death of a king (Conaire >Connery> Conroy) and the end of a cycle. Other parallels may represent conscious influence or may testify to both stories' belonging to the same portion of a 'cycle'. 125

'Ulysses' : Tlze Symbolic Scenario This scenario would suggest items concerned with the 'eleventh hour', the moment-before-the-last, the questioning of the present for the future as its emblems; and to these, as they appear in Ulysses, I now turn. In this connection, two regular features of epic which concern the replacement of one order by another-in the Aeneid, the supplanting of Turnus; in The Faerie Queene, from Elizabethan England to the New Jerusalem; in Paradise Lost a reverse movement, from pre-lapsarian existence to the human condition-are the visit to the Underworld and the vision of the future. Ulysses has its 'Hades' (the sixth chapter), but it is to the emblem of augury, occurring as it does just before the end of epics, that our attention must be directed. Adam on 'a Hill/Of Paradise the highest', 18 the Redcrosse knight on 'the highest Mount'* find their counterpart in Ulysses in Stephen's 'nuBLINERs' story which he would title 'A Pisgah Sight of Palestine' (189/148). 'I see,' says Professor MacHugh, 'Moses and the promised land. We gave him that idea, he added to J. J. O'Molloy.' O'Molloy and MacHugh had been reciting from memory great Dublin orations, and O'Molloy's remembrance of Seymour Bushe on the law of evidence had recalled Bushe's remarks on 'the Moses of Michelangelo in the Vatican' ( 177/

* Spenser encyclopaediacally assimilates Redcrosse's Mount to its analogues: That done, he leads him to the highest Mount; Such one, as that same mighty man of God, That bloud-red billowes like a walled front On either side disparted with his rod, Till that his army dry-foot through them yod, Dwelt fortie dayes vpon; where writ in stone With bloudy letters by the hand of God The bitter doome of death and balefull mone He did receiue, whiles flashing fire about him shone. Or like that sacred hill, whose head full high, Adorned with fruitfull Oliues all arownd, Is, as it were for endlesse memory Of that deare Lord, who oft thereon was fownd, For ever with a flowring girlond crownd: Or like that pleasaunt Mount, that is for ay Through famous Poets verse each where renownd, On which the thrise three learned Ladies play Their heavenly notes, and make full many a Iouely lay. (The Faerie Queene, I, x, liii-liv.) J26

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario 38; it isn't). This had prompted MacH ugh's recital of John F. Taylor's defence of the Irish language, ending, I

had the youthful Moses ... bowed his will and bowed his spirit ... he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai's mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light qf inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw. (r8r/qr)

This passage, which Joyce, as we have seen, later applies to Bloom, has its relevance for Stephen, who feels that he is being asked to accept 'our culture, our religion and our language' -versions of the Portrait's 'nets'. But if Taylor's vision of Moses ends in a kind of triumph, the triumph of the restored law ('the tables'; for Stephen, art), it also suggests personal 'failure': J. J. O'Molloy breaks the silence that follows with, 'And yet he died without having entered the land of promise' (181/141).* Success in the task and personal disappointment. Stephen thinks to himself, Gone with the wind. Hosts and Mullaghmas and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of porches. The tribune's words howled and scattered to the four winds. A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that every anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more, (r8r-2/141-2)

and '[to] free his mind from his mind's bondage' (272/209), he suggests going for a drink. But MacHugh returns him to the subject: -Come along, Stephen, the professor said. That is fine, isn't it? It has the prophetic vision. Fuit Ilium! The sack of windy Troy. Kingdoms of this world. The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today, ( r 83/142)

and Stephen thinks, 'Dublin. I have much, much to learn'.t He then launches 'A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums', in which 'Two Dublin vestals' (183/143), having climbed the local 'highest Mount', Nelson's Pillar, take fright,

* The reference is to Deuteronomy 32:52 and 34:4. Joyce's title for the section is 'OMINOUS-FOR HIM!'.

t See, 'And here what will you learn more?' (43/35) and 'What here I learned? Of them? Ofme?' (276/2I2). 127

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario 'afraid the pillar will fall' ( 187 /146). 'It makes them giddy to look up' at 'the statue of the onehandled adulterer>1 9 Nelson: -It gives them a crick in their necks, Stephen said, and they are too tired to look up or down or to speak. They put the bag of plums between them and eat the plums out of it, one after another ... spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings. (187-8/146) It is, as Kenner comments, 'a parable of infertility', 20 * an aborted epic vision. Bloom, later hearing Stephen retell the 'parable' (and other 'scenes'), realizes the relief Stephen finds in the telling, 'by which potential narration was realized and kinetic temperament relieved' (8o2j66g). Here MacHugh proposes that Stephen title his story, in part self-reflexively, 'deus nobis haec otia fecit' (I8g/I47)· For the story is also a reproach to 'the life that Dublin offers to its young men', a personal Improperia. Here a complex association begins to form. Stephen's story, being a reproach, can be titled A Pisgah Sight of Palestine by analogy to Moses' own report of the original sight, 'The Song of Moses' (Deuteronomy 32), which he delivers as a reproach to the people of Israel just upon his ascent to the top of Pisgah (Deut. 34:1), where he will receive his vision of the Promised Land and die. Stephen is shortly concerned to connect Moses with Shakespeare-each with a 'celestial phenomenon' to guide him (270/207)-and with Aristotle (8os/671), but he is equally aware of the assimilation at this point to Christ.f His longest speech in the 'Oxen of the Sun' begins in the style of the Authorized Version (514/387) and recalls 'in structure and theme ... the Improperia of the Catholic liturgy for Holy Week'. 21 In the Improperia-or Reproaches-during the Adoration of the Cross in the Good Friday Office, the identification of Moses with Christ is explicit and sustained-e.g. Christ's 'Quia eduxi te de terra Aegypti: parasti crucem Salvatori tuo.' The Improperia are, of course, Christ's reproaches addressed to the Jews, read out each year in the period between his death and resurrection.

* A Pisgah view is defined by The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church as 'any vision or hope of which a man will not see the realization'. t The biblical locus is Hebrews 3:1-6. Cf. Spenser, quoted above p. I 26. 128

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario Stephen's own explicit reproaches to 'Erin' conflate, m part, the lmproperia with its sources in Deuteronomy: Remember, Erin, thy generations and thy days of old, how thou settedst little by me and by my word and broughtest in a stranger to my gates to commit fornication in my sight and to wax fat and kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou sinned against the light and hast made me, thy lord, to be the slave of servants. Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, 0 Milesian .... Look forth now, my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and from Pisgah and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk and money. But thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and my sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou has left me alone for ever in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou kissed my mouth. (514/387)*

Stephen extends his reproaches into a Brownean encapsulation of man's (and Moses') life, 'First saved from the waters of old Nile, among bulrushes' to 'at last the cavity of a mountain, *Joyce may also have known the apocryphal 'Assumption of Moses', which contains among other things Satan's interruption of the Archangel Michael at his task of burying Moses and a disputation over the body (Michael wins)-but I cannot discover any use of this apt item in Finnegans Wake. The 'Assumption of Moses' contains an important development of the notion of the Kingdom of God, for in Ch. 1 o we are given to understand that 'The reign of God will not only be established by a judgement (and destruction) of men and nations. Evil is conceived as a cosmic force and the world as the Kingdom of Satan and his demonic powers (an idea found also in the new Hebrew [i.e., "Dead Sea"] scrolls); and the final triumph of the reign of God will bring the total destruction of the reign of Satan' (M. Black, 'The Development of Judaism in the Greek and Roman Periods', in Peake's Commentary on the Bible, eds. Black and Rowley [London, 1962], p. 698). There was an edition of 'The Assumption of Moses' in 1897 by R. H. Charles, in which the text was first translated into English from the Latin text of 1861, its first publication. Charles was Professor of Biblical Greek at Trinity College, Dublin, from 1898 to 1906. He was 'the greatest authority of his day ... in matters of Jewish eschatology and apocalyptic' (The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross [London, 1957], p. 268) and he published editions in English of the whole corpus of late Jewish writings between 1893 and 1913. Stuart Gilbert comments of the present passage in Ulysses, '[it is] undoubtedly personal, a remonstration in which, perhaps, many another artist out of Ireland might join. There is no blasphemy here, only a great sorrow which, in solitude, invokes its greatest prototype'. Gilbert connects the last words of the passage with Stephen's mother, to whom he 'for a moment likens his country' and points ahead to the appearance of the 'phantom of his mother' in 'Circe' (Gilbert, p. 302). Cf. '[The] Eighth and ninth books of Moses' which Stephen sees on a book barrow (3II/239). Finnegans Wake (4), alludes to the first seven books of the Old Testament, to Moses and to the Pentateuch. 129

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario an occulted sepulchre' (515/387). The 'Pisgah' material is thus the formal conclusion of the 'Exodus' (or life-journey) theme in the novel. The association of Ireland under the British yoke with Israel in Egypt is a Celtic commonplace: 'those that came to the land of the free', says the Citizen of Irish emigrants to America, 'remember the land of bondage' (428/324), and a mental slip of Bloom's associates the Exodus with the Odyssean journey of life: That brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage. Something in all those superstitions [the mezuzah 'poor papa's father had on his door to touch'] because when you go out never know what dangers. (494/372)

Just as he cannot remember the word mezuzah, Bloom has earlier failed to remember Jewish lore in a striking instance of the presence and use of cyclic materials in the novel. 'AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF PASSOVER' reads the 'newspaper headline' of a section of 'Aeolus' in which the backwards distribution of type-'mangin. kcirtaP.'-prompts Bloom to remember the Hebrew of his fathers: Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, 0 dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu. No, that's the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob's sons. And then the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the butcher and then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all. (I 55/ I 2 I)

The Passover (Pessach) seder (ritual meal) remembers the 'day in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage; for by strength of hand the Lord brought you out from this place: there shall no leavened bread be eaten'.* In the Roman Catholic liturgical year, the place of this remembrance is the Second Lesson in the Good Friday Office; Bloom's recall of Passover is his analogy to Stephen's lmproperia. The meal itself commemorates and recapitulates the *Exodus 13:3. Bloom remembers the 'mazzoth' (unleavened bread) on p. ggf7g.

130

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario Exodus whose story is told in the special prayer book used, the

Haggadah. The word 'haggadah' means a 'telling', and specifically in this context, the passing on of the history of the Jews from fathers to sons: In every generation, one ought to regard himself as though he had personally come out of Egypt. As it is said: 'And thou shalt tell thy son on that day, saying: This is on account of what the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt.' Not only our forefathers did the Holy One, blessed is He, redeem, but also ourselves did He redeem with them. As it is said: 'And us did He take out from there, in order to bring us hither, to give us the land which he had sworn unto our fathers.'* The 'hither' of the Haggadah began to have a bitter sound to the Jews of the Diaspora, and the Passover seder came to have two complementary aspects, a strong sense of the weariness of a yearly repetition which did not regenerate in the wilderness of Europe-had not the Lord brought them 'into the house of bondage' after all ?-and a messianic yearning for a time when the exodus of history would end-'Next year in Jerusalem' (' L' shonoh ha' bo-oh beeroosholoim'). Ashkenazic copyists added to the end of the Haggadah the children's song 'Chad Gadya' ('One only Kid') which Bloom is attempting to recall. The song is a house-that-Jack-built with an allegorical history: [It isJ interpreted as the history of successive empires that devastate and swallow one another (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, etc.). The 'kid', bottom-most and most injured of all, is, of course, the people of Israel. The killing of the Angel of Death marks the day when the Kingdom of the Almighty will be established on earth: then, too, Israel will live in perfect redemption in the Promised Land. 22 Bloom has remembered the song only as far as the next-to-last verse, in which the Angel of Death kills the butcher. Stopping here he may indeed ruminate on 'everybody eating everybody else'. Once again in Ulysses we are left one before the last term of a series, suspended between the apparently unalterable human condition where 'Next year in Jerusalem' is like 'jam

* The Haggadah of Passover (New York, 1956), p. 31. After this is said, the cup is lifted, and then praise is said, concluding with the alleluia Bloom remembers. 131

'Ulysses': The Symbolic Scenario tomorrow' and the tantalizing possibility of regenerative change when, the Holy One, blessed is He, came and killed the Angel of Death, that slew the slaughterer that slaughtered the ox that drank the water that quenched the fire that burned the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the kid that father bought for two zuzim. One kid. One kid. 23 Bloom's 'association' with Charles Stewart Parnell in Ulysses comprises an equally striking instance of Joyce's employment of the emblem of cyclic transit, representing a fusion of the materials already considered as well as an important addition to them. 'Parnell will never come again', Hynes had said at the Chief's grave (I 43/ I I I). But his memory returns again and again in Ulysses. Bloom's own denunciation in 'Circe' follows the pattern of Parnell's 'fall'FATHER FARLEY: He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. MRS RIORDAN: (Tears up her will.) I'm disappointed in you! You bad man! MOTHER GROGAN: (Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom.) You beast! You abominable person! (6II/481)

After midnight the cabman announces, -One morning you would open the paper ... and read, of Parnell. He bet them what they liked .... Dead he wasn't. Simply absconded somewhere. The coffin they brought over was full of stones .... He made a mistake to fight the priests. (753/633) Return

Bloom thinks it 'highly unlikely' that Parnell was not dead and 'even supposing' he was alive, that 'a return (was] highly inadvisable, all things considered'. Still, the cabman's words set Bloom off on a train of thoughts about the Uncrowned King and twice over we are told (754, 760-2/634, 639)-and at extraordinary length-of the single occasion on which Bloom and Parnell 'met'. It was precisely at the time when Parnell was suffering, in a complex figuration which can be limned in Joyce's imagination, his 'agony' or 'Passover'.

132

'Ulysses' : The s_ymbolic Scenario When Parnell led his men in an attack on the offices of the

United Ireland, His hat (Parnell's) was inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost celerity) who, panting and hatless ... turned round to the donor and thanked him with perfect aplomb, saying: Thank you, sir . ... (761-2/639) This 'Homeric struggle'-Kitty O'Shea (Parnell) 's phrase 24occurred in December, 18go, after the meeting in Committee Room 15, when his 'trusty henchmen round[ed] on him with mutual mudslinging' (Ulysses, 754/634), but while he yet fought on, refusing to submit to demands for his resignation as leader of the Parliamentary party. The image of the leader, 'falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall' exercised a hold hardly to be underestimated on Joyce's imagination. Perhaps even more central than the theme of betrayal-we remember This lovely land that always sent Her writers and artists to banishment And in a spirit of Irish fun Betrayed her own leaders, one by one. Twas Irish humour, wet and dry, Flung quicklime into Parnell's eye 25 is the notion of the leader who works on in the face of betrayal, knowing he will be betrayed but carrying on nevertheless. The explicitness of such an interpretation can be assigned directly to Joyce, from the article 'L'Ombra di Parnell' which he contributed toIl Piccolo della Sera (Trieste) in May 1912: The melancholy which invaded his mind was perhaps the profound conviction that, in his hour of need, one of the disciples who dipped his hand in the same bowl with him would betray him. That he fought to the very end with this desolate certainty in mind is his greatest claim to nobility. 26 Stanislaus Joyce has commented on the relevance of this view of Parnell in My Brother's Keeper: My brother was always of the opinion that a dramatist could understand only one or two of life's tragedies, and that he 133

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario always presented different aspects of the few he understood. One of the tragedies that obsessed my brother's imagination, beginning from the time when he first understood the Mass as drama, was the tragedy of dedication and betrayal. In later life, the story of Parnell became for him another aspect of that tragedy. 27

Earlier, Stanislaus outlined just what 'the Mass as drama ... the tragedy of dedication and betrayal' had signified to his brother: On one of these strolls [across Dublin] I announced out of the blue that I would refuse to do my Easter duty. Jim made a half-hearted attempt to dissuade me from my purpose .... -Don't you think, said he reflectively, choosing his words without haste, there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own ... [sic] for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift, he concluded glibly. -1 don't know, I said ... what symbolical significance the Mass may be made to bear ... and in any case it is quite impossible now to sift the ounce of truth from the bushel of legend. -What do you consider legendary? -The virgin birth, for example. In Roman history, long before Christianity was heard of, the legend was told of a vestal virgin, Rhea Silvia, and the alleged father was a god. -The Christian legend is more interesting, said Jim. The Mass on Good Friday seems to me a very great drama .... The mention of the Mass of the Presanctified was not made with the intention of diverting the discussion .... He understood it as the drama of a man who has a perilous mission to fulfil, which he must fulfil even though he knows beforehand that those nearest to his heart will betray him. The chant and words of Judas or Peter [it is Peter] on Palm Sunday, 'Etsi omnes scandalizati fuerint in te, ego numquam scandalizabor', moved him profoundly. He was habitually a very late riser, but wherever he was, alone in Paris or married in Trieste, he never failed to get up at about five in all weathers to go to the early morning Mass on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. 28

And in Stephen Hero, Stephen had described the Good Friday Mass to Cranly thus: 1 34

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario Isn't it strange to see the Mass of the Presanctified-no lights or vestments, the alter naked, the door of the tabernacle gaping open, the priests lying prostrate on the altar steps? ... -Don't you think the Reader who begins the mass is a strange person. No-one knows where he comes from: he has no connection with the mass. He comes out by himself and opens a book at the right hand side of the altar and when he has read the lesson he closes the book and goes away as he came. Isn't he strange? ... -You know how his lesson begins? Dixit enim Dominus: in tribulatione sua [mane] consurgent ad me; venite et revertamur ad Dominum .... -He pleads, said Stephen. He is what that chalk-faced chap was for me, advocatus diaboli. Jesus has no friend on Good Friday. Do you know what kind of a figure rises before me on Good Friday? -What kind? -An ugly little man who has taken into his body the sins of the world. Something between Socrates and a Gnostic Christa Christ of the Dark Ages. That's what his mission of redemption has got for him: a crooked ugly body for which neither God nor man have pity. 29

For young Stephen interest in the Resurrection is overshadowed by the tragic nature of the 'Christian legend' or 'drama'. Holy Saturday, by comparison, has an altogether different effect: it is a comedy, which Stephen 'likes', but as a comedy. [T]he Church seems to have thought the matter over and to be saying, 'Well, after all, you see, it's morning now and he wasn't so dead as we thought he was.' The corpse has become a paschal candle with five grains of incense stuck in it instead of its five wounds. The three faithful Mary's [sic] too who thought all was over on Friday have a candle each. The bells ring and the service is full of irrelevant alleluias. It's rather a technical affair, blessing this, that and the other but it's cheerfully ceremonious. (I22/II7)

The 'lesson' Stephen quotes is the 'Prophecy from Osee' (Hosea 6:I-6). The Second Lesson is the institution of the Paschal meal (Exodus 12 : I- I I) and makes even clearer the extent to which Christ is friendless,* for many Missals print at

* Some of the force of this enters Cranly's 'Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend' (Portrait, 251/292). K

I35

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario its head the allegorization, 'The children of Israel are to sacrifice the Paschal Lamb; the Israelites will put the Lamb of God to death on the Cross'. 30 The passage describes God's orders to Moses and Aaron when they were yet in Egypt, containing instructions as to the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb (the blood to be smeared on door-posts and lintel), and concludes (in the Vulgate), 'est enim Phase (id est transitus) Domini'. 31 The Gospel which follows is StJohn's version of the crucifixion, after which the lmproperia are recited. The association between Moses and Parnell and their typification of Christ thus formed an unbroken circle for Joyce, for whom Parnell was 'like another Moses, [and] led a turbulent and unstable people from the house of shame to the verge of the Promised Land.' 32 Each is seen at the moment of his Pasce, which is his agony and only triumph-or rather, since the technical outcome is less important than the present reality, his 'nobility'. The place of the Passover in the cyclic ontology is as a 'borderline or transitional situation'.* The action of Ulysses, in so far as it partakes of cyclism, is positioned in the Paschal phase, and this extends to Stephen and Bloom alike. They celebrate it by initiating an Exodus of their own as Stephen departs from Bloom's: In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony

* I use the phrase to denominate a portion of the complete cycle, but I have borrowed it from another context. It is J. N. Findlay's, from his discussion of Hegel's notion of 'becoming', which 'involves a perpetual borderline hesitation or vacillation between notions, which never settles down to a harmonious compromise. Hegel is not wrong in pointing out that our thought hates borderline or transitional situations, that it is averse to anything that would now be called a three-valued logic, and that it seeks to break up its subject-matter into mutually exclusive aspects or phases, so that the conceptual position of anything is immediately clear' (Hegel, A Re-examination [London, 1958], p. 158). If this points to an alignment of ontological and metaphysical notions, one further extension may be relevant. Richard B. Sewell uses the notion of a 'boundary-situation' to describe the nature of tragedy and traces its origins as follows: 'Karl Jaspers has used the phrase since 1919, obviously inspired by his reading of Kierkegaard. It has had some currency, notably in Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, University of Chicago Press, 1948: "The human boundarysituation is encountered when human possibility reaches its limit, when human existence is confronted by an ultimate threat" (p. 197)' (The Vision of Tragedy [New Haven and London, 1962], p. 151).just as the Hegelian 'borderline' is an approach to the kind of 'drama' I have been arguing for Joyce, so the tragic 'boundary' may apply equally to the cyclic phase and the human action involved. 136

'Ulysses' : The Symbolic Scenario was the exodus from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected? Lighted Candle in Stick borne by BLOOM

Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by STEPHEN

With what intonation secreta of what commemorative psalm? The 1 13th, modo peregrinus: In exitu Israel de domus Jacob de populo barbara.*

(818/682)

Bloom is 'the centripital remainer' and Stephen 'the centrifugal departer' (826/688). Bloom has walked through his days and his crisis is domestic; Stephen exits to begin his odyssey, wandering, exodus. Stephen's class-riddle was set when 'The bells in heaven f Were striking eleven' (32/27), and when he remembers it in Bella Cohen's, he initiates the train offantasies which culminate in the appearance of 'THE MOTHER': Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton.t Moment before the next Lessing says. Thirsty fox. (He laughs loudly.) Burying his grandmother. Probably he killed her. (666/545) For it is the extent of his own responsibility in his mother's death ('Cancer did it, not I. Destiny' [68r/565]) which is the ground of Stephen's 'remorse of conscience' in Ulysses. Just as the emblemata of the Bloom-plot bring their protagonist to a crisis of integrity over his relationship with his wife, so the Stephen-plot brings him to an eleventh-hour crisis m respect of his identity, past, present and future. • This psalm is also liturgically commemorative of Christ's passion. t In the Portrait, Stephen thinks of the Greek for a word with its accent on the antepenultimate syllable in connection with 'the first words of a woman which pierce the gloom and clamour of the first chanting of the Passion :-Et tu cum Jesu Galild!o eras' (248{288).

137

VI

ULYSSES: PHILOSOPHICAL THEMES

(of hisself) : Domine vopiscus! ... Pariah, cannibal Cain, I who oathily forswore the womb that bore you .. , haunted by a convulsionary sense of not having been or being all that I might have been of you meant to becoming.... -Finnegans Wake (193)

MERCIUS

of Ulysses, then, both assume 'structural' importance. In so far as the former draw further and further away from Stephen and Bloom as presented in the first chapters, they constitute a progressive withdrawal from a determinate judgement on the human action of the novel. In so far as the latter locates the action and problems of the novel in a 'boundary' near the end of a cyclebut before the beginning of any next cycle-it inhibits the elimination of possibilities of meaning and indeed promotes their 'suspense'. The full spectrum of critical opinion is, as is usually true of the hyperbolic literary forms,* a projection of thematic conflicts within the work. Three examples may be taken. ( 1) Critical views of Melville's Moby-Dick tend to embody projections of the attitudes to the whale and the chase entertained by Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, etc. The nine ships which the Pequod meets, as W. H. Auden has pointed out, present spectra of views about the White Whale. 1 THE 'STYLES' AND THE SYMBOLIC TEXTURE

*

Cosmological, encyclopaedic, ontologically and epistomologically dialectical; see Northrop Frye, Anatomy ofCriticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 315-26 and passim.

138

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes This diagrammatic quality is repeated at other points in the novel, in respect of other matters, sometimes-as in the cases of the doubloon which Ahab hammers into the mast, which the crew interpret each according to his own nature (Chapter gg), the picture on the wall of the Spouter Inn (Chapter 3), and the markings on Queequeg's body-suggesting not only an entire range of possible interpretation but an imperilling relativism and cancellation of views. (2) The pursuit of his various 'educations' leads Henry Adams in a similar direction, and the cartoon (possibly) by Raffaello 2 is accorded the same treatment as the picture in the Spouter Inn in Moby-Dick. The tendency to treat the meaning of experience as an unknowable noumenon evidenced-if at all -by indeterminate phenomena pervades both books. Adams presents a neat emblem of the extent to which experience becomes a neutral Rorschach 'blot' when he describes the St Gaudens monument over his wife's grave, suggesting that one ~ees in it only a reflection of one's personal bias. 3 (3) In Forster's A Passage to India the characters again represent the spectrum of possible attitudes to the 'mystery' (or 'muddle') of India. Reuben Brower claims that the logic of the alternatives requires that no single interpretation prevail and that when, at the novel's end, Forster appears to present a particular one as having primacy, he is betraying the integrity of his conception. 4 ·where Melville and Forster use individual characters to represent the spectrum, in the manner of a 'philosophical' novel like Camus' La Peste, Joyce in the first instance does not. In Ulysses, as in the Portrait, the paradoxes and mutually exclusive interpretations exist largely as a function of 'style' or point of view. As a result, each of the major characters, instead of being clear and agreed representations of particular positions, have clustered about them those wider antinomies which are involved in one's perception of the novel's meaning. (See the Diagram, p. 140.) Novels whose 'meaning' seems to embrace paradoxes of a wide nature, especially epistomological and ontological paradoxes, run peculiar dangers. As the alternative interpretations they bring to notice are below the level, as it were, of what novels are often taken to be about, as they imperil the very 139

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes postulates which can be assumed for most novels-proceeding from which ordinary critical statement is made-they are liable to misunderstanding of various kinds. Most prominent is the assumption that the ordinary postulates are still there (as, that Joyce's world is 'fixed'). Passing over objections which are based only on a resistance to these kinds of fiction, there is yet a special risk of over-generalization. An implied ontology or epistomology may possibly be extrapolated from every work of art: it may, however, turn out to be the merest of commonplaces. Only the particular finding can justify the procedure. THE PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL:

(3) (2)

Interpretation (synoptic of characters' responses) Characters (take distinctive response) Action

(1) Event ULYSSES:

(4)

(g)

Interpretation (synoptic of alternative responses) Alternative responses to Character/Events, made by reader (or by chapter-styles)

(r-2)

Action: Character/Event

The alternatives of Stephen's and Bloom's future selves, being simplifying projections of their present states, are reflections of the opposing metaphysical positions from which they can be inspected. The alternatives of stagnation (or repetition) and development are mirrored by the metaphysical terms stasis and kinesis used by Stephen in the Portrait. Stephen had espoused stasis as a condition both of art and life, to the exclusion of any kinetic response. S. L. Goldberg has prepared the best case for the rightness of Stephen's choice, 5 but he does not relate the terms precisely to ideas of actuality and possibility. In some unspecified manner a successfully achieved stasis is supposed to release the best 140

'Ul_ysses' : Philosophical Themes possibilities into a condition of actuality. But Goldberg's conclusion is lame-'The development of the soul is thus the sequence of the epiphanies [=stases] it discovers'-because it must smuggle in the back way the terms ('development', 'sequence'=kinesis) earlier ushered out the front. 6 In construing Stephen's cogitations on time, actuality and possi hili tyHad Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? (30(26)it is well to look to the 'answer' which Stephen himself gives a few moments later, apropos of the paradox ofLycidas, 'Sunk ... beneath the watery floor' (actuality), yet 'not dead' (his drowning has not 'ousted' his alive-ness):* It must be a movement, then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve .... Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form offorms. (30-1/26-7) Goldberg has traced the 'form of forms' to Aristotle's De Anima/ but he ignores the beginning of Stephen's train of thought, which is Aristotle's (and his) explicit 'solution' to the problem of possibility in conflict with actuality: 'It must be a movement, then, an actuality of the possible as possible.' 'Aristotle's phrase' is in the Ph_ysics 8 and the word 'movement' in Stephen's translation stands for Aristotle's kinesis (KtVTJO"lS) which, far from being banished as the disreputable alternative, is thereby elevated to a key role in synthesizing the possible and actual: 201a1o Definition. The fulfilment [Stephen says actuality] of what exists potentially [S: of the possible], in so far as it exists potentially [S: as possible], is motion [kinesis, movement]. ... *Young Talbot, who is reciting the poem, quotes the Christian 'solution' to this paradox, -Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves. Only the 'dear might' of Christ guarantees that one may be 'sunk' yet 'not dead'.

141

'Ulysses': Philosophical Themes 201b .•• clearly it is the fulfilment of what is potential as potential that is motion. 202a Hence we can define motion as the fulfilment of the movable qua movable .... 9

In transferring, as he does, this 'definition' of motion from a physical plane to the metaphysical and ethical, Stephen Dedalus is following the main Aristotlian philosophical tradition. Aristotle repeats his definition of movement in the Metaphysics (I o6 5b I 5- 1066a5) and its place there, as Werner Jaeger has stated, is central: The whole first book of the Metaphysics ... would collapse if the aetiology of the Physics were not behind it in every line .... [I]ts whole philosophical conception presupposes the Physics and develops out of it. Two of the foundations of Aristotle's first philosophy belong to the Physics, and they are the most important of all, namely the distinction between matter and form and the theory of motion ... even that pair of conceptions by means of which motion is linked up with form and matter, namely potency and entelechy, is not foreign to the Physics. 10 Jaeger's exposition of Aristole's metaphysics at one point follows the precise course which underlies Stephen's stream of consciousness, and is worth extended quotation, showing as it does the Aristotelian dialectic which lies behind Stephen's movement from the 'actuality of the possible as possible' to soul as 'the form of forms', from kinesis (Physics) to entelechy

(De Anima): Metaphysics is based on physics according to Aristotle in the first place because it is nothing but the conceptually necessary completion of the experimentally revealed system of moving nature. The prime task of physics is to explain motion .... Aristotle anchors this branch of knowledge still more firmly in physics by means of his analysis of the conception of substance .... [HeJ considered it axiomatic that nothing universal possesses independent existence .... Matter is the remnant, the nonexistent, in itself unknowable and alien to reason, that remains after [the] process of clarifying the thing into a form and a conception .... Hence no matter is just matter ... it is matter for this definite form .... Nothing absolutely formless 'is' at all ... . In this way form comes to explain motion as well .... The aim of Aristotle's theory of motion is to invent a logic of it ... .

142

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes With reference to motion the form is the entelechy ( ev-TEAex\0:), inasmuch as in its form each thing possesses the end of motion realized within itself. For the heavenly bodies this is their eternal circular revolution, but Aristotle carries over the principle to earthly things as well. ... [T]he fundamental principle of change in the organic world is the same as it is in the heavens, namely locomotion, to which all kinds of motion are to be referred. Locomotion here serves the special laws of organic coming-to-be and passing-away, which in their turn depend on the form. The entelechy of beings that come to be and pass away is the height of this organic development. In them form appears as an orderliness and determinateness building from within and unfolding itself from the matter as from a seed .... [But] the meaning of 'entelechy' is not biological; it is logical and ontological. In every kind of motion Aristotle's gaze is fastened on the end ... that something fixed and normative is making its way into existence-the form .... The notions of potency and act [also] ... must be taken from human power or ovval.ll'i, which now remains latent and now becomes active (€pyov), attaining its end (entelechy) only in this activity (evepye!a) .... The higher we ascend in the cosmos, the more purely the motion expresses the form that is its end. As a whole the motion of the world is the effect and expression of a form that is absolute and free of all matter. ... Reality is in its determinateness and in its essence necessarily what it is. It cannot be explained from mere possibility and chance, for then it might as well not be or be otherwise. There must be form at the head of motion, and the highest form must be pure act, through and through determination and thought.* This thought cannot think anything more perfect than itself, for as the end of the motion of the whole world it is necessarily the most perfect thing existing, since everything aims towards it. Nevertheless, the thought that thinks itself is not a merely formal self-consciousness devoid of content .... In Aristotle's teleology substance and end are one, and the highest end is the most determinate reality there is. This substantial thought possesses at one and the same time the highest ideality as conceived by Plato and the rich determinateness of the individual. 11

* This is the essential paradox-that form must not destroy the reality of motion, nor motion the reality of form, but both must coexist. What follows can best be regarded as a postulation of the necessary condition for such a conclusion. 1 43

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes Jaeger is hard-pressed at times to rescue his exposition from determinism (especially in the denial of the 'organic' origin of the terms). 12 His 'argument' is finally less a 'proof' than a series of contingent paradoxes; all the same, it demonstrates the clear Aristotelian line from 'movement' to the 'thought of thought' and 'form of forms', by way of notions of substance and entelechy. The bridge notions are not raised to consciousness in Stephen's classroom musings, but his possession of them is borne out later in the day. 'But I, entelechy, form of forms,' he thinks in the library, 'am I by memory because under everchanging forms' (242/187). * The notion of entelechy is combined with that of substance in a personal comic tableau concerning a pound note which A. E. (George Russell) had lent Stephen: Wait. Five months [have passed since the loan]. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound. Buzz. Buzz. But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms. I that sinned and prayed and fasted. A child Conmee saved from pandies. I, Land I. I. A.E. I.O.U. (242-3/187)

The expression is comic, but the 'applied Aristotle' has its point: Stephen accepts his indebtedness. It is Aristotle who 'proves' that he is now the person he then was, despite physical change.t Moments later, attempting to 'shake [Eglinton's] belief that Shakespeare is Hamlet', Stephen transfers the notion to that of artistic creation: -As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination,

* See also 564{425: 'the first entelechy, the structural rhythm' (a translation of the paradox of 'formal motion'). t Cf. Bloom's more mundane version: 'I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I?' (213/165)· 144

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal[,] that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be. (249/192) The Shakespeare who has lived through 'the hell of time', Stephen assimilates to Pericles, 'shipwrecked in storms dire, tried, like another Ulysses' (ibid.). (This is Stephen's only reference to Ulysses in the course of the novel.)* The version of Stephen's predicament according to Bunyan (in 'Oxen of the Sun') makes it clear that the earlier metaphysical speculations have personal ethical relevance: Heard he then in that clap the voice of the god Bringforth or, what Calmer [Bloom] said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard? Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged up the tube Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he.... (516/389) Here the narrator posits Stephen's problem as precisely that of possibility-or potentiality-(Bringforth') versus actuality ('Phenomenon'),t concluding that Stephen's difficulty lies in a refusal to resign himself to the latter and to mortality. Stephen's own conclusion about Shakespeare had been similarly gloomy: He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: lj Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorsteps. lj Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothersin-love. But always meeting ourselves.~ (273/210)

* The allusion is taken over from Georg Brandes: 'Pericles is a romantic Ulysses, a far-travelled, sorely tried, much-enduring man' (William Shakespeare: a Critical Study [London, r8g8], p. 585). See also Eglinton's 'Ulysses quote[s] Aristotle' (Ulysses, 271/2og). tOr, 'Believe-on-Me' (the New Testament) versus 'the book Law' (the Old) (51 7/38g). t Cf. Bloom, 491-2/370: 'The year returns. History repeats itself. Ye crags and peaks I'm with you once again. Life, love, voyage round your own little world ... . 'The new I want. Nothing new under the sun. Care of P.O. Dolphin's barn ... . 145

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes Stephen is here captured by repetitveness and by the assimilative tendencies of the human animal never to 'encounter reality'-as had been his fond hope at the end of the Portraitbut only to meet self-projections.* Giddily reviewing the problem some hours later in the brothel he thinks, (Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco! (623/494)

'That fellow' is the 'dio boia, hangman god' (274/210) who arranges that we always meet ourselves in a personal history which is always and only a 'hubbub of Phenomenon'. Here he is associated with the 'shout in the street' Stephen had called 'God', identifying for himself God and 'history' as equally tending towards the inertness of mere phenomena: -History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if the nightmare gave you a back kick? -The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God. Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: -That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! -What? Mr Deasy asked. -A shout in the street, Stephen answered.t (42/35)

Thus Stephen's conclusions are that the God of this world is a version of Blake's Nobodaddy-his thunderclap precipitates So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she.' The whole of this passage is rich in texture: It gathers up the notion of 'always meeting yourself' with a handful of prominent themes, including the repetitiveness of history, disappointment, the Ulyssean travel-motif, and Bloom's personal fantasies, memories and anxiety. *EHmann and Mason (Critical Writings, p. 130) note the reappearance in 'Scylla and Charybdis' ofjoyce's 1903 remark that 'Leonardo ... has noted the tendency of the mind to impress its own likeness upon that which it creates'. Cf. '[U(ysses is] a parable of solipsism' (D. S. Savage, The Withered Branch [London, 1950], p. 16g). t See also 238{184: 'God: noise in the street: very peripatetic', and 676{599: 'Hark! Our friend, noise in the street!'

146

'Ulysses': Philosophical Themes the parable of Bringforth and Phenomenon *-and that He insures that 'history' is no more than a phenomenal repetition of 'day[s] after day[s]' in which we 'walk through' only ourselves. '\Vhat went forth ... to traverse not itself', 'to encounter ... the reality of experience'? Neither himself nor any man. 'Ineluctability', inescapability has played through Stephen's mind most of the day, growing to include various aspects of his experience. First it extends to space, the 'modality of the visible', and time, the 'modality of the audible', which he calls the nebeneinander and the nacheinander. t Stephen hates the temporal extension of things, one after another, 'history', 'He hates past time because it would bind him with present duties'. 13 Throughout the Portrait he has courted the nebeneinander, space, the static dimension. Now it is the other dimension which menaces him, the 'back kick' (42/35) of 'history'. There is, however, a significant counterpoint to Stephen's pessimistic view of the 'nightmare of history' in Ulysses. Before Stephen arrives at the Maeterlinckean formulation of experience as a mere mirror, the notion had occurred to him apropos of Lyster's commonplaces on the interpretations of Hamlet: Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of lights in rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts. [Stephen is thinking of his meeting with Synge in Paris.] In words of words for words, palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clam art woods, brandishing a winebottle. C' est vendredi saint! Murthering Irish. His image, wandering, he met. [I.e., his experience was 'Syngian' .] I mine. I met a fool i' the forest. -Mr. Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar. - ... in which everyone can find his own [face]. So Mr Justice Madden in his Diary of Master William Silence has found the hunting terms .... Yes? What is it? -There's a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and offering a card. From the Freeman. (256/197-8)

* Cf. Finnegans Wake, p. 22 I : 'the Pageant of Past History worked up ... by Messrs. Thud and Blunder.' The 'thunderwords', of course, open (and close) historical cycles, and 'Sandhyas' (593) are 'period(s] which precede a Yugareon, the period(s] intervening between the expiration of one Yuga and the commencement of another' (B. P. Misra, 'Sanskrit Translations', A Wake Newslitter, n.s. Vol. I, No. 6 (December, 1964], p. 8). t The terms are in fairly common usage, but the Concordance to Hegel does not list them. In Finnegans Wake it is Shem who is associated with time and Shaun, who can't 'keep time', with space (see 152-g, 'The Mookse and the Gripes'). Joyce prided himself on his 'definitions' of space and time; see Budgen, p. 49· 1 47

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes A moment later, Buck Mulligan pounces on the 'card' and we learn that the 'gentleman' is Bloom. It is the first time in the novel that his path has crossed Stephen's. * The significance of his entry upon the note of 'self-meeting'-'His image, wandering he met. I mine .... in which everyone can find his own'-will shortly become apparent. Leaving the library in the company of Mulligan, Stephen recalls Maeterlinck on Socrates meeting only himself and thinks of parting from his own appointed betrayer: Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his home today, if judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctably. My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between. A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting. (279/214)

There is no reason to part, even if 'where' to go is unknown, if space/time 'lies' (like the Leviathan) ineluctably ahead. The 'Scylla and Charybdis' of the chapter, usually construed as signifying 'the stability of Dogma, of Aristotle and of Shakespeare's Stratford ... contrasted with the whirlpool of Mysticism, Platonism, the London of Elizabethan times', 14 between which Stephen must pass, here becomes 'My will' and 'his will [Mulligan's] that fronts me'. Given 'ineluctability', the choice seems illusory, but precisely at this moment 'a man' does pass between them: it is Bloom. Stephen is standing at the portico of the National Library, the place from which, in the Portrait, he had watched the birds in the sky for an omen of his future-'Then he was to go away? ... Symbol of departure or of lonliness' (230{265). Bloom passes between him and Mulligan, he is again at the portico and he remembers this previous search for an omen: A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting. -Good day again, Buck Mulligan said. The portico. Here I watched the birds for augury. lEngus of the birds. They go, they come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men

* On the way to Dignam's funeral, Bloom had noticed Stephen in the street and pointed him out to Simon Dedalus (wg/87). They miss being in the newspaper office together by minutes. Their 'previous encounters' (two-Stephen aged five and ten) are detailed in 'Ithaca', 795/664. 148

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes wondered. Street of harlots after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see. (279/214-15) Casting about for a present omen, he remembers his dream of the previous night. This dream, which Stephen apparently had before and after Haines had awakened him screaming about the black panther, has prepared us for the significance of a meeting with a stranger: After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Streetofharlots. Remember. Harounal Raschid. * I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. ln. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who. (58-g/47-8) William Empson has been alone among critics in considering Stephen's dream a crucial element in the novel. (He finds the dream confirmed by what he calls 'the Bloom offer' 15 of Molly to Stephen.) In 'Circe' it is when Stephen remembers his dream that Bloom approaches him: STEPHEN: Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon .... (Extending his arms.) It was here. Street of harlots. In Serpentine Avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where's the red carpet spread ? BLOOM: (Approaching Stephen.) Look .... STEPHEN: No, I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World without end. (He cries.) Pater! Free! BLOoM: I say, look... . (674/556-7)

Stephen seems too much within his own world to hear or see that which lies unineluctably outside it. What rises to him is not the 'reality' of Bloom but that other 'Pater', Simon Dedalus, 'on strong ponderous buzzard wings' (67 4/55 7). What Joyce's carefully drawn 'exposition' of the gradual meeting of Bloom and Stephen suggests is that Bloom might be for Stephen an instance of the 'not [him]self', the unineluctable, an opportunity to break the cycle of 'assimilation'. That Bloom is a 'challenge' to Stephen has general credence, even if his

* In 'Circe' 'vOICEs' call Bloom 'Haroun AI Raschid' (652/528) and leaving the brothel, Bloom momentarily metamorphoses into Haroun (685/570). 1 49

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes

success or failure is often prejudged. In the words of R. P. Blackmur, [Stephen's] hope is to make an epiphany of the darkness shining in brightness .... Bloom is that darkness projected .... Stephen has somehow to become Bloom, or see the need of it.16

Stephen may or may not make of his meeting with Bloom a 'charismatic' incident, hringingforth a new attitude in him, and even if he does, Joyce is at pains to point out that his 'success' is not thereby assured. Just prior to Bloom's addressing Stephen, Joyce projects a fantasy in which Stephen and Bloom literally become 'one'. The emblem of their one-ness is the 'face of William Shakespeare', which seems to suggest that a 'synthesis' of Stephen and Bloom would qualify one for artistic triumph, but something is awry: (Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection qf the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.) (67 I/ 553)

S. L. Goldberg feels that this passage represents a kind of immanent success for Stephen, for the face of Shakespeare, though 'rigid in facial paralysis'-that dire word in Joyce's vocabulary-is 'yet triumphant' by virtue of the cuckold's 'crown'. 17 (The mirror 'reflection' is taken as a symbol for 'art'.) But the crucial word 'paralysis' seems a clear indication that the 'face', the hypothetical Stephen-cum-Bloom, is yet locked in the ineluctable world of Phenomenon. Previously Stephen's Shakespeare met himself, 'day after day'. To that image we might apply the phrase Goldberg uses of the mirror-image, 'kinetic bondage', 18 by which we may understand the ceaseless non-developmental change of the karmic cycle. The paralysed face in the mirror is, however, in static bondage, incapable of change. Neither state implies the potentiality of vital, meaningful change, 19 the charismatic interinanimation of subject and object which the Aristotelian notion of kinesis labours so hard to postulate. In Portrait of the Artist, Stephen Dedalus maintained his notion of stasis optimistically in respect of himself-though we have noted the pessimistic implications available to the 150

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes 'symbolist' reading which static postulation projects (art as nebeneinander). In Ulysses, both responses (static and kinetic) are exhibited dramatically. According to Stuart Gilbert, The conflict of deliberate indifference (stasis) with the loathing of disgust (kinesis) is apparent throughout Ulysses. Of this conflict in the mind of Stephen Dedalus the author of Ulysses is fully aware. 20

Disgust as response to present condition resulting in indifference assumed as self-protection; indifference assuring that no response whatever is possible, reacted against as life-killing. Absolute paradox and a vicious circle. Given Stephen's redefined situation, in which both static and kinetic response are brought up short against an existential paradox, is any further development of the subject, in respect of art or of life, either possible or brought to bear in Ulysses? In the Ethics Aristotle, perhaps seeking to circumvent the necessitarian bias which clings to his attempted metaphysical transcendence, makes a single special exemption from ordinary human conditions, not, however, for any human action ('doing') but for Art ('making'): Among things liable to change we count (a) articles manufactured [including techne, art], (b) actions done. Making and doing are different activities .... Consequently the rational faculty exercised in doing is quite distinct from that which is exercised in making. Moreover, they are mutually exclusive, for doing never takes the form of making, nor making of doing . . . . The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself. This condition must be present, because the arts are not concerned with things that exist or come into existence from necessity or according to Nature, such things having their efficient cause in themselves .... We may even say that in a manner art and chance work in the same field. 21

Stephen had, in the Portrait, conceived of art and life in transposable terms. In Ulysses there is a suggestion that he would raise art into freedom, leaving life behind in the ineluctable L

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'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes human condition. This is why Hamlet can be a triumph while Shakespeare, goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. (252/194) Stephen's Shakespeare creates from himselfHe drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender (262j202)but unremittinglyAll in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted upon. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.* (272-3/210) Soured by life, Shakespeare returns to Stratford, 'and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberry-tree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended' (273/210). Aristotle's notion of art, while restoring art to freedom, binds the artist as man to 'Nature' and the laws of necessity. By analogy, the 'maker' of an artifact is the God ofhis creation, being to it what the Unmoved Mover is to the Creation itself. Just as the whole of nature cannot have its cause in itself, so the work of art cannot. Its cause resides in its author. The artist's position is dual, therefore, for he cannot 'sink' himself in his artistry. As a man he is, like Shakespeare, subject to 'ceaselessly willing' his own suffering even in the creation of his art, but by the laws of its coming-to-be that art is free. The romantic artist's possession by the notion of the high cost of a life of art lived that the art-object may be free and the notion of the freedom of the death-in-life status of the artimage have been detailed at length by Frank Kermode in his Romantic Image. Kermode uses Stephen's 'Thomism' in the Portrait to adumbrate his subject, deciding,

* Thus, the facially paralysed 'Shakespeare' who is the mirror reflection of Stephen and Bloom 'crows' 'Iagogo! How my Oldfellow [Othello] chokit his Thursdaymomum [Desdemona]. Iagogogo!' (671/553). 152

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes One such conclusion is that the artist who is vouchsafed this power of apprehending the Image-to experience that 'epiphany' which is theJoycean equivalent of Pater's 'vision'has to pay a heavy price in suffering, to risk his immortal soul, and to be alone. 22 But Stephen's 'Aristotelianism' in Ulysses suggests a considerable realignment. 'The Image' may yet be 'a radiant truth out of space and time' (i.e. the order of nature), but its 'inextricabl[e] associat[ion ]' with 'the necessary isolation or estrangement of men who can perceive it' has been broken. 23 The 'Romantic' artist's 'estrangement' was an inhumanity; the artist, as Stephen presents him in Ulysses and as he is himself presented, is as a man no more and no less isolated and estranged than others. Stephen's kinship with Bloom, while it may or may not come to him as the day wears on or after June r6th, 1904, has ended, is in a manner present all through the day, not least in Stephen's 'Shakespeare theory'. When Shakespeare appears in the brothel's mirror, he shouts 'With paralytic rage', the Player Queen's 'wormwood' sentence, 'Weda seca whokilla farst' (762/554)-'None wed the second but who kill the first'.* Here Stephen's Shakespeare and Bloom intersect in the figure of the cuckold, 'Shakespeare' being present as both Old Hamlet and Othello, 'hornmad'. What Stephen phrases of Shakespeare-and it is equally a self-admonition-'One life is all. One body. Do. But do', Joyce inserted into a section of Bloom's monologue. The relevance exists in the mind of the maker, or more precisely in the 'making' itself. For Aristotle this is exactly what is left to man in the order of nature: Virtue, then, is of two kinds, intellectual and moral. Of these the intellectual is in the main indebted to teaching for its production and growth, and this calls for time and experience. Moral goodness on the other hand, is the child of habit, from which it has got its very name, ethics being derived from ethos, 'habit' .... This is an indication that none of the moral virtues is implanted in us by Nature, since nothing that Nature creates can be taught by habit to change the direction of its development ....

* Stephen had earlier applied this to the accusation brought against Shakespeare's grand-daughter Elizabeth, about which he had read in Sidney Lee (~6of~oo). 1 53

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes [Unlike 'natural' faculties like sight or hearing, which 'we had ... before we used them',] the moral virtues we do acquire by first exercising them. The same is true of the arts and crafts in general. The craftsman has to learn how to make things, but he learns in the process of making them. So men become builders by building .... Men will become good builders as a result of building well, and bad builders as a result of building badly. Otherwise what would be the use of having anyone to teach a trade? Craftsman would all be born either good or bad. Now this holds also of the virtues. It is in the course of our dealings with our fellow-men that we become just or unjust.* Still, the exhortation to virtuous action does not determine whether such action is even possible, and to explore this in relation to Aristotle we must make an excursion into Kierkegaard's analysis of the question. The 'Interlude' ofKierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments is a discussion of the Aristotelian definition of motion on which Stephen meditates, relating it to the moral life. We may abstract his argument largely in his own words: Is the past more necessary than the future? or, When the possible becomes actual, is it thereby made more necessary than it was?

How does that which comes into being change? Or, what is the nature of the change involved in becoming (KiVT)O"tS)? ... [T]he change involved in becoming is the transition from possibility to actuality. Can the necessary come into existence? Becoming is a change; but the necessary cannot undergo any change .... Everything that comes into being proves precisely by coming into being that it is not necessary; for the necessary is the only thing that cannot come into being, because the necessary is.

* The [Nichomachean] Ethics, Book II, Ch. I, trans.J. A. K. Thompson (Harmondsworth, I 953)' pp. ss-6. This passage attempts to apply to ethics the transcendental 'movement' (kinesis) which was required in physics to circumvent the paradox of the possible and the actual, and Aristotle has used the same analogy (of building) to express it. Cf., The actuality of the buildable as buildable is the process of building. For the actuality of the buildable must be either this or the house. But when there is a house, the buildable is no longer buildable. On the other hand, it is the buildable which is being built (Physics, in Works, ed. W. Ross [Oxford, Iggo], Book III, 1 [2o1"15 and 20, 21ob5, 10]). The metaphor of 'building' is Aristotle's vehicle at Met. 1065b15ff. as well. 1

54

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes Is not necessity then a synthesis of possibility and actuality? [the Hegelian position, which Kierkegaard has set himself to refute as leading to a determinism of ineluctable preconditioning]. ... The actual is no more necessary than the possible, for the necessary is absolutely different [in essence] from both [which are determinants of being]. ... [Aristotle's] mistake lies in his beginning with the principle that everything which is necessary is possible ... he helps himself out by creating two species of possibility [making a metaphysical confusion rather than admit his terms are necessitarian]. The change involved in becoming is an actual change; the transition takes place with freedom .... All becoming takes place with freedom, not by necessity. 24 The 'actual change' is Kierkegaard's terminus; notions of actuality, change, possibility, necessity and history which restrict his meaning he opposes. Becoming, transition (kinesis) he will not define as metaphysically necessary, for it would become, in the sphere of individual behaviour, conditioned response. The past does not become necessary by virtue of its having happened, nor is the future any more or less necessary than the past. 25 Becoming 'is a change in actuality brought about by freedom', 26 and any restriction of 'freedom' (by false conceptions of the problem) is metaphysically intolerable. Kierkegaard then proceeds to attack the Hegelian 'Manifestation theory'which bears close relation to the theory of 'epiphany' discussed in the first chapter-because mere knowledge does not confer necessity on the thing known: the certainty of the past is based upon an uncertainty, an uncertainty that exists for the past in precisely the same sense that it exists for the future, being rooted in the possibility (Leibniz and the possible worlds) [Theodicee, par. 42] out of which it could not emerge into necessity. 2 7 Kierkegaard recognizes the disjunction of two 'spheres' of discourse, the logical and the 'sphere of freedom' (of time and human action). He notes that 'Motion ... is a concept which logic cannot abide' but that it is part of the dialectic of time as well, on the analogy of a correspondence between the point 1 55

'Ulysses': Philosophical Themes in space and the instant in time. 28 Walter Lowrie cites Kierkegaard's extended comment from the Papers: transition is a becoming. In the sphere of logic transition is mute, in the sphere of freedom it becomes. So when possibility in logic qualifies itself as actuality it merely disturbs the hushed reticence of the logical process by talking about motion and transition. In the sphere of freedom, on the other hand, there is possibility, and actuality emerges as a transcendency. Therefore when even Aristotle said that the transition from possibility to actuality is a KINESIS he was not talking about logical possibility and actuality but about the possibility and actuality of freedom [my italics], and therefore he quite rightly posits motion. 29 Something of this last interpretation Joyce may be attributing to Stephen when he revises the 'actuality of the possible as possible' into Here he ponders things that were not:* What Caesar would have lived to do had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when he lived among women. (248/Igi) [my italics] The establishment not of possibility but of the possibility of possibility is Kierkegaard's aim and it would equally provide a foothold for the reintroduction of vital change into Stephen's world. 'Repetition' is Kierkegaard's word for the perception of sameness which accompanies the souring of the fruits of the aesthetic mode of existence. Such 'repetition' assumes a quasicategorical status as transitional stage between the aesthetical and ethical, or, in its 'later' reappearance as a disillusionment with the ethical, between the ethical and the religious stages. The perception of the apparently meaningless repetitiousness oflife having come, there is no ignoring it; it must be accepted as a condition of existence: In the sphere of nature repetition exists in its immovable necessity. In the sphere of spirit the problem is not to contrive

* The syntax allows for this being either Stephen's interior monologue or Joyce's own comment on Stephen. 'What name Achilles bore [etc.]' is, of course, from Browne's Hydrotaphia (Urn Burial), Ch. 5, whose unspoken title suggests Stephen's next phrase, 'Coffined thoughts around me' (248/191) (Religio Medici and Other Writings, ed. Halliday Sutherland [London, rgo6], p. 132). Stephen/Joyce has 'bore' for Browne's 'assumed' and 'lived' for 'hid himself'. 156

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes to get change out of repetition and find oneself comfortable under it ... but the problem is to transform repetition into something inward, into the proper task of freedom. 30 The 'transition' by which one comes to 'will' repetition, Kierkegaard calls the 'modern category' which corresponds to

kinesis. 31 Thus it is the soul's task to recognize the necessity of repetition in life, and to incorporate it internally into 'the sphere of freedom'. By doing so one is not thereby immanently freed, but one brings to life the paradox of being. The paradox is otherwise in danger of a kind of petrifaction, as when the aesthetic personality remains fixed in its stasis only. The internalization of repetition recognizes the equal necessity of both stasis and

kinesis. Leopold Bloom's reflections on repetition in life are poignant enough: Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same; day after day: squads of police marching out, back; trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second .... Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs,jerrybuilt, Kerwan's mushroom houses, built ofbreeze. Shelter for the night. No one is anything.* (2o8jr62)

* Bloom's detestation of the 'sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt' should be compared with his supposed 'ultimate ambition' 'to purchase by private treaty in fee simple a thatched bungalowshaped 2 storey dwelling-house' (837/697)-with 'additional attractions' (83g/6g8) and 'improvements' (84o/6gg)-to be called 'Bloom Cottage. Saint Leopold's. Flowerville' (841/6gg). The apparent discrepancy can be resolved when we view 'Bloom Cottage' as the narrator's encyclopaedic extension of a much less articulate fantasy of Bloom's. It forms part of 'Ithaca's' 1

57

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas, then solid, then world, then cold, then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock like that pineapple rock. The moon.* (212/164-5)

Bloom's contemplation of the 'series' of Molly's possible lovers, and his 'abnegation, equanimity' were discussed previously. The latter seems conclusively to represent a kind of acquiescence and detachment, however temporary, in respect of the single personal problem from which Bloom has been fleeing, mentally and even physically (when he sees Boylan) all day long. His resignation may be ethically suspect,t but it precisely enacts the inward transformation of 'repetition' and is Bloom's essential preparation to qualify for the position of the Kierkegaardian religious category, his becoming a 'knight of infinite resignation'. Just after Bloom has passed between Stephen and Mulligan on the library steps, Stephen appears to attain a moment of peace from the tensions of the worlds inside and outside: Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds. Frail from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw of softness softly were blown. Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline, hierophantic: from wide earth an altar.

Laud we the gods And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils From our bless'd altars.t (27g-8oj2r5)

Cymbeline's added words-'Set we forward' (V. v. 480)suggest the dimension offreedom towards which the detachment of ceasing to strive would attain.§ J. Mitchell Morse has given 'Utopian' counterpart to 'Circe's' 'Messianic' section, each version being fitted to its 'technic'. * This provokes a memory of Molly and then Bloom pictures Molly and Boylan together, breaking off with 'Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must' (212/165). t Budgen points up the avoidance of Boylan and Bloom's decision not to 'interfere' and comments on Bloom's reasons (pp. 144-7, 261-2). t The poised cigarettes in the newspaper office, while J. J. O'Molloy recites John F. Taylor's 'noble words', had first reminded Stephen of Cymbeline's words (180/140). §Much depends on one's reading ofCymbeline. To some the play ends in ignoble compromise between Roman and Englishman, to others this ending is 'beyond

158

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes the best description of the tension between this search for detachment in Stephen and its opposite, noting that Stephen's possession by remorse, his 'conviction of sin' is the way in which 'society binds him to itself and commits him to its values'. 'He must, as an artist, overcome that conviction', gain 'liberation from remorse', achieve detachment, and cease the 'violation of his essence' which 'consists in not doing the work he is destined to do'. 3 2 In 'Circe' it is, of course, the apparition of'The Mother' which comprises the crisis of Stephen's 'hallucination'. Stephen is 'Horror-struck' and speaks to her 'Choking with fright, remorse and horror': They said I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny. (68rj565) One after another the nets are flung out by the dead mothermother love ('Years and years I loved you, 0 my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb'), the Church ('Repent! 0, the fire of hell!'),* family ties ('Get Dilly to make you that boiled rice every night after your brain work') (682/566). As she prays for his soul, he resists, calling on 'The intellectual imagination', standing on Brand's ground ('all or not at all') and repeating the devil's 'Non serviam!' (682/567). Calling on them to 'Break my spirit all of you if you can! I'll bring you all to heel!,' (He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. )t (683/567) 0

••

The connection Morse points between the struggle against remorse and the need 'to be one's self', to do one's own appointed work, is equally crucial in both Ibsen and Kierkegaard'vteresig selv': For the purpose of becoming (and it is the task of the selffreely to become itself) possibility and necessity are equally essential. beyond', 'a vision,-of unity certainly, perhaps of the Earthly Paradise, perhaps of the Elysian fields, perhaps, even, the vision of the saints. But whatever else, it is assuredly a vision of perfect tranquillity .. .' (J. M. Nasworthy in the Arden Edition [London, rg6o], p. lxxxv). * Expiring, she identifies herself with Christ: 'Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary' (683/587). t A page later the 'chandelier' is only a 'lamp' and Bloom points to 'a crushed mauve purple shade' (684/569) claiming 'not a sixpenceworth of damage done'. 1

59

'Ulysses': Philosophical Themes ... A self which has no possibility is in despair, and so in turn is a self which has no necessity.*

In psychological terms, the crisis of'identity' requires the eliciting of the 'necessary' self 'freely' from the welter of possible selves without injustice to the integrity ofpersonality.Jung observes, Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncracy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaption to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for selfdetermination. 33

It will be no surprise that as we draw near to 'solutions' to metaphysical and existential antinomies of the order offreedom and necessity, the language of them should become more and more paradoxical. 'Adaption' 'coupled with' 'self-determination' is Jung's paradox: it is not only difficult to specify the precise nature of the 'coupling', it is more so to specify particular cases of success. The logic of these 'solutions' is, however, unimpeded by such existential difficulties, and returns us at last to a literary form. Jung's essay on Ulysses revolves around two major points, that 'hopeless emptiness is the dominant note of the whole book', marked by an 'eternal repetition' which leaves 'no place for value', 34 while on the other hand-and this is a position Jung works himself into, laboriously, as he proceeds-the course of the novel marks a gradual detachment from the impedimenta of existence, not on the part of the characters particularly, nor yet on the part of Joyce, but in 'Ulysses', the sufferer who has often lost his way, [and] toils ever towards his island home, back to himself again, beating his way through the turmoil of eighteen chapters, and, free at last from a fool's world of illusions, 'looking on from afar' is not concerned. Therewith he achieves just that which a Jesus or a Buddha achieved -and that which Faust also strove to attain-the overcoming

* S0ren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie, bound with

and Trembling (New York, n.d.), p. x68. Mrs Stobart's article on Ibsen and Fear and

Kierkegaard ('New Lights', p. 235) stresses the need of 'true tragedy' to embody moments of both 'personal responsibility' and 'personal irresponsibility, a relativity to circumstances beyond personal control'. Kierkegaard's similar reflections on Hamlet are in Stages on Life's Way, trans. W. Lowrie (Oxford Press: London and Toronto, and Princeton, 1940), pp. 409-1 1. 160

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes of a fool's world, a liberation from the opposites .... [T]he groundwork ... of Ulysses ... [is] the detachment of the human consciousness .... Ulysses is the creative god in Joyce, a true demiurge who has succeeded in freeing himself from entanglement in the physical and mental worlds and in contemplating them with a liberated consciousness .... Ulysses is the higher self that returns to its divine home after a period of blind entanglement in the world. In the whole book no Ulysses appears; the book itself is Ulysses, a microcosm embraced by Joyce. 35 * Jung makes clear the extent to which the energy of the novel -or if we prefer, the imagination of Joyce-is a participant in its total action, the one which embraces not only the Dublin 'story' but the modes of its telling as well. If this imagination secures 'a liberation from the opposites' and 'the detachment of ... consciousness', as Jung claims, then that liberation and detachment stand at the vanishing-point of a perspective down which the major 'characters', Bloom and Stephen, are pointed. They, too, are entangled in the opposites, the philosophical antinomies of freedom and necessity, possibility and actuality, and for each paths, each to his own capacity, are laid out. Their situation in Ulysses remains dramatic precisely because 'inelectable preconditioning' to become one thing or another is not definitely posited by the text. The question of their being remains an open one, to the very end, one in which 'ineluctability' and 'fixity' are but one possibility.t In the novel as a whole, the possibility of possibility would remain open.

* For the history of the Nee-Platonic allegorization of epics as 'detachments' from the brute round of existence, see Graham Hough, A Priface to the Faerie Queene (London, Ig62), pp. I I6ff. Not only Odysseus but Aeneas received such treatment. Hough cites the interpretation attributed to the Florentine Platonist Alberti: 'a lengthy argument explaining the travels of Aeneas as an allegory of the soul, forsaking all earthly passions, symbolized by Troy, struggling with the perturbations of the senses and passions, and ultimately arriving in the true heavenly kingdom' (p. I I7). Hough thinks the story 'naturally analogous to the story of Israel, captive, wandering and restored' (p. I I8). Ulysses as detachment finds its way into EHmann's biography when he says the novel is a 'pacifist version' of epic story (p. 370). t '[B]y the adequate exploitation of states of mind and by following up all the paths suggested by the impinging of the past, in its multifarious variety, on the present, the nature of potentiality in character can be indicated even without our being shown the occurrences ofevents that would make these potentialities actual. The most interesting case in point here is the character of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses' (David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World, rev. ed. [Chicago, Ig6o], pp. 23-4). 161

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes Themes like 'detachment', the internal acceptance of external necessity, the conflict of potential and actual, the repetitiveness of life, the preclusion of change or the incessant changefulness which precludes permanence, stasis versus kinesisall concerned with the relationship between the metaphysical and the existential-are thus deeply ingrained in Ulysses. Their sources and analogues may be sought, as has been seen, as well within the history of exoteric philosophy and psychology as in the esoteric or occult tradition. Despite Stuart Gilbert's assertion that 'It is impossible to grasp the meaning of Ulysses, its symbolism and the significance of its leitmotifs without an understanding of the esoteric theories which underlie the work', 36 what he cites as these 'theories' both 'underlie' Ulysses only in so far as they relate to thematic elements-the novel does not 'work by magic'-and have eminent analogies within the major western philosophical tradition. Gilbert's 'authorities' in his exposition of Joyce's supposed occultism, Porphyry, Blavatsky, Traherne, Hermes Trismegistus, Eliphas Levy, 37 are cited at points where their thought could equally be set into the context of Aristotelian debate: indeed it is to take esoteric (or theosophical) polemic at its own word not to see it in such a context.* Gilbert's discussion of Karma may include such remarks as, 'by our personal attitude towards the Karma which we cannot escape, [we may] build up merit for subsequent existences', 38 but when he points to passages in Ulysses as illustration of occult theory, his conclusions are usually wholly domesticated: To find ourselves we must first lose our way .... Thus the growth of the soul, the process of self-realization, may be ultimately due to the 'errors' of the individual, his growing-pains. 39

Joyce used the esoteric to exploit the same paradoxes and tensions he had discovered in the 'garner of slender sentences' from Aristotle. t

* The refusal to acknowledge such contexts, the claim to exclusive, 'secret' wisdom, sets the hermetic philosophers off from the exoteric tradition more than does their actual content. t The priority and exclusiveness which Gilbert claimed for Joyce's esotericaquite possibly prompted (he says, 'endorsed') by Joyce [Preface to 1952 edition, p. vi]-has had a deleterious effect. The claim that the 'deeper' meanings of 162

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes We have already seen Eliot's broaching of the relationship of possibility and time in 'Burnt Norton'. Emblems of 'solution' there are in that poemNeither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline, 40 or in 'The detail ofthe pattern is movement' 41 -but Part V of 'The Dry Salvages' presses the question to a secular 'solution'. There Eliot enumerates the 'usual/Pastimes and drugs' which are the necessarily unsuccessful ways we seek 'the overcoming of a fool's world, liberation from the opposites', ways which are themselves constituents of that fool's world: To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, To report the behaviour of the sea monster, Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry, Observe disease in signatures, evoke Biography from the wrinkles of the palm And tragedy from fingers; release omens By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams Or barbituric acids, or dissect The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrorsTo explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams. 42 Taking up the phrasing of 'Burnt Norton', Eliot notes that Men's curiosity searches past and future And clings to that dimension. 43 But the time-dimension is history, and merely one sphere of existence. To seek the future in the past (or present) is yet to remain bound in 'history'. Against that dimension Eliot sets 'the timeless'. One does not, however, desert 'time' for 'the timeless', for that would be to jump from one horn of a dilemma Ulysses were esoteric in nature has led to a praise of Joyce based on dangerously insecure ground-its roots probably lie in the same objection to 'science' that vivified the occult movements-and a derogation by those only too willing to accept the claims of illuminati.

163

'Ulysses': Philosophical Themes to the other. Instead one attempts 'to apprehend/The point of intersection of the timeless/With time'. 44 Here, Eliot continues, Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled, Where action were otherwise movement Of that which is only movedDriven by daemonic, chthonic Powers. And right action is freedom From past and future also. For most of us, this is the aim Never here to be realized. 45 'Past and future', the world of 'action', time and history are, in their eternal repetition, driven by powers outside themselves. Set against this, as a release from it, in Eliot as in Kierkegaard, is the 'sphere of freedom', a wholly distinct 'sphere of existence', which permits of 'right action'. In this life, the apprehension of freedom-' an occupation for the saint-/No occupation either, but something given/And taken'-can occur 'For most of us' only in 'the unattended/Moment', and the rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. 46 This 'action', which is our daily existence, is to be regarded in terms of process, not of product, as a kinesis: And do not think of the fruit of action. Fare forward. 47 W. B. Yeats wrote in 1914, when Joyce began serious work on Ulysses, that truth was 'the dramatically appropriate utterance of the highest man' and that, if I had been asked to define the 'highest man', I would have said perhaps, 'We can find him as Homer found Odysseus when he was looking for a theme' .48 Nineteen-twenty-two, the year of Ulysses' publication, also saw the fragment of Yeats's autobiography titled The Trembling of the Veil, whose very title proclaimed that modern man had arrived at the end of one historical epoch and was now entered 164

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes into a borderline phase of time-a notion Yeats was soon to systematize in A Vision.* Projecting a supreme fiction for that time he saw the necessity of the boundary-situation confrontation of man with his destiny: Nations, races, and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation; because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity. t 49

Writing from the borderline of time, Yeats extended the human boundary-situation to include not only the 'image' (the work of art), but also the tragic hero and the artist himself, and even the reader, the 'nations, races, and individual men'. Great works and great artists were 'Gates and Gatekeepers, because through their dramatic power they bring our souls to crisis' and they have but one purpose, to bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without despair. ... Such mastersVillon and Dante, let us say-would not, when they speak through their art, change their luck; yet they are mirrored in all the suffering of desire. The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens, being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation's very self.... Had not Dante and Villon understood that their fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they lacked Vision of Evil, had they cherished any species of optimism, they could but have found a false beauty, or some momentary instinctive beauty, and suffered no change at all, or but changed as do the wild creatures, or from Devil well to Devil sick and so round the clock. 50

* The modern age was in Phases 22-3 of the twenty-eight phase historical cycle (A Vision [London, I937], p. 256). Phase 22-june in the annual cycle-is a phase of 'struggle and tragedy', a struggle '[to] lose ... personality' ('will'): 'After Phase 22 ... there is a struggle to accept the fate-imposed unity' (pp. I96, 83). In the I925 edition of A Vision (in pages deleted in I938), Yeats put Ulysses along with 'The Waste Land' and Pirandello's Henry IV in the 23rd Phase, 'where there is hatred of the abstract, where the intellect turns upon itself'. Yeats continues by discussing the separation of 'myth and fact, united until the exhaustion of the Renaissance' (A Vision [London, I 92 5], pp. 2 I I- I 2). Phases 22 and 23 are a transition, or borderline between periods dominated by freedom of will and fate. t See 'the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return' (Ulysses, 622/494). 165

'Ulysses' : Philosophical Themes To have spurned the 'false beauty' which precludes change on the one hand or involves one in the sickening dull round of cyclic existence on the other, in the service of presenting both himself and his 'chosen men' as 'at the same instant predestinate and free' in a fictional world which is 'creation's very self' is perhaps the fittest tribute which could be applied to the achievement of James Joyce as a literary artist. If Ulysses represents his achievement, the play Exiles presents the clearest paradigm. Joyce's notes show that he had much of Exiles thought out by November 1913, 51 and the writing ofitranconcurrentlywith the early stages of Ulysses. Exiles exhibits yet another aspect of 'the tragedy of dedication and betrayal' 52 and is a comprehensive emblem of the problems of human freedom and necessity, heroism and victimage, stasis and kinesis, aesthetic and ethical behaviour. James T. Farrell noted the basic aesthetic analogy: Richard Rowan has 'molded' his wife, 'almost in the spirit and manner of a heroine in a novel or play'. 53 This does not mean, however, that Richard intends to secure thereby total control of Bertha. Instead he is attempting to engineer her freedom-'Decide yourself,' he repeats. 'You are free' ( 78-g). This does not mark an abandonment of the aesthetic analogy, but a redefinition of it: the 'author' is careful not to restrict the freedom of will of his 'creation'. The condition Richard seeks for himself is one of 'doubt': It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. ( 162) Richard's 'failure' is not his 'wound' (ibid.), but Bertha's refusal to accept his condition, to be 'free'. She wants Richard to be convinced of her fidelity. It would, I think, be an oversimplification to believe that Richard is motivated by a desire for her to be unfaithful, though he himself says so to Robert Hand.* In the play's full logic, Richard goes beyond this, which is, after all, meant for Robert's ears. t Finally, though it may involve such a thing as self-willed cuckoldry, it

* '[I]n the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her' (97). t 'The play is three cat and mouse acts' (Joyce's note, 172). 166

'Ul)'sses' : Philosophical Themes is Richard's desire to make Bertha capable of 'now act[ing] on her own, in freedom and in frankness' 54 which has primacy. That Bertha either does not wish it or cannot so act casts an essential ambiguity over the whole play. Following the aesthetic analogy we may say that the artist cannot endow his creation with complete freedom even if he so desires; there is something recalcitrant, something given about it which permits at best an ambivalence. This is not the ambivalence which the artist had at first desired, the 'doubt' into which he would be cast by the assurance of her freedom, but another, in which the creation can attain in the creator's eyes at most a borderline possibility, between the condition of freedom and that of fixity. In Exiles it is Bertha's continuing desire to certify her behaviour to Richard which represents this fixity. Francis Fergusson believes that Richard Rowan is an extrapolation of Stephen Dedalus as he appears in the Portrait, 'a last look at the soul which Stephen Daedalus [sic] had been impiously constructing'. 55 On the contrary, Richard's behaviour seems to allegorize the aesthetic of U(ysses-not the implied aesthetic of Stephen, but the technique whereby the different 'styles', the symbolic texture, the plot-management, all suggest that Joyce was attempting to engineer a similar condition of 'doubt' between himself and his creation. Richard Rowan's spiritual condition in Act III of Exiles is Joyce's penetrating analysis of the human cost of maintaining, with such an untyrannical aesthetic, a dedication to exercise the same responsibility in one's life as towards one's art. In that art Joyce was as careful to preserve his characters' freedom as to attack that freedom, as careful to refrain from final judgement as to construct whole ranges of judgement. This care involved an equal concern to prevent a narrowed basis for his own art, the complementary narrownesses of 'symbolism' and 'realism'. Whether the aesthetic conception molded the human conception, or vice versa, one can only speculate, but equally necessary he found them and equally he maintained them, in the face of the greater temptations to aesthetic simplifications which each of his subjects increasingly presented.

M

167

NOTES NOTES TO PREFACE 1 Charles N. Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953), p. 69.

NOTES TO CHAPTER I Letters, p. 55· 2 Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (London, 1941), p. 150. 3 An earlier version of these definitions is recorded in the 'Paris Notebook', dated February 13th, 1903 (Critical Writings, pp. 143-5). 4 Marvin Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship, The Fiction qf Young James Joyce (London, 1959), p. 75· Magalaner reprints the Irish Homestead version as an appendix (pp. 174-80). 5 See, James R. Baker, 'Ibsen, Joyce, and the Living-Dead', A James Joyce Miscellany-Third Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale, 1962), p. 26; Florence L. Walzl, 'Pattern of Paralysis in Joyce's Dubliners', College English, Vol. XXII (January 1961), pp. 221-8; and Gerhard Freidrich, 'Joyce's Pattern of Paralysis in Dubliners', College English, Vol. XXII (April 1961), pp. 519-20. 6 Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye (Norfolk: New Directions, 1939), pp. 107-34. 7 Oliver StJohn Gogarty, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (London, 1954), P· 299· 8 Ed. 0. A. Silverman (Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Buffalo Lockwood Memorial Library, 1956). 9 Introduction to Stephen Hero, p. 23/17. 1 For a discussion of Joyce's possible reasons for omitting 'epiphany' from A Portrait qfthe Artist see William T. Noon, S.J., Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, 1957), pp. 6sff. 11 For a cogent argument against regarding joyce's fiction in terms of'epiphanic writing' see Noon, pp. 73-4, ending 'the works, with a certain minimum of good will, can be seen to illustrate the theories more successfully than the theories can be used to interpret the works' (p. 74). The use of the works to illustrate the 'theory' continues, however; see Graham Hough, Image and Experience (London, 1960), p. 16, 'Portrait of the Artist is built out of a succession of such instants [epiphanies];' Arnold Kettle, 'The Consistency of James Joyce', The Modern Age, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 306, 'Nothing is achieved in Ulysses but a series of epiphanies.' The most sustained attempt to use the theory to interpret the works is to be found inS. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper, A Study qf James Joyce's Ulysses (London, 1961), pp. 44, 89-90, 265, passim. 1

°

168

Notes 12 13

Critical Writings, p. I 52. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Ps;•choana!ysis, trans. Joan Riviere

(New York, 1960), p. 31. 14 Ibid., p. so. 15 Ibid., p. IO I. 16 This is in fact the interpretation made by Ernest Jones in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 17 Kenner, Dublin's Joyce (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1956), p. 53·

'Habitual' is gratuitous, meant to imply things like 'habitual drunkard'. 18 Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (London, I96I ), p. I69. 19 J. B. Yeats to John Quinn, October 14th, I920, in A James Joyce Miscellany, ed. Marvin Magalaner (New York, I957), pp. 75-6. 2 ° Kenner, p. 53· 21 Julian B. Kaye, 'The Wings of Daedalus: Two Stories in "Dubliners" ', Modern Fiction Studies, 4 : 1 (Spring 1958), pp. 3I, 32, 33· The relevant pages in Magalaner and R. M. Kain Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (New York, 1956) are 75-9. 22 See for example Moody E. Prior's discussion of Dryden's All for Love, in The Language of Tragedy (New York, 1947), p. 194ff. 23 Eugene Waith, 'The Calling of Stephen Dedalus', College English, Vol. XVIII, No. 5 (February I957), p. z6o; see alsop. 257· 24 Magalaner, op. cit., p. 126. NOTES TO CHAPTER II 1 S0ren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson (London and New York, 1936), Ch. III, passim. 2 Reuben Brower, The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1962 [ 195I ]) is a notable exception. 3 The Portable Coleridge, ed. I. A. Richards (New York, 1950), p. 388. 4 Graham Hough, A Priface to the Faerie Queene (London, 1962), pp. 109-10. Insertions from pp. 105 and 107. 5 Ibid., pp. llO, III. 6 Letters, pp. 138-9, I47-8. A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce (London, 1961). 7 Kenner, p. I 14. 8 Ibid., p. 1I7. 9 Yves Bonnefoy, 'Shakespeare and the French Poet', Encounter 105, Vol. XVIII, No.6 (June 1962), p. 41. 10 T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-62 (London, 1963), p. I89. 11 See Kenner, pp. II6-I7. The symbolist apotheosis of this particular incident is to be found in Ruth Von Phul's essay 'Joyce and the Strabismal Apologia', A James Joyce Jo.fiscellany, Second Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale, 1959), pp. I 19-32. 12 Cf. Kathleen Tillotson on Thackeray, Novels of the 184o's (Oxford, 1961), p. 239· 13 Jean Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence (London, I950), pp. 7-8. 14 Cf. ibid., under Assimilation and Accommodation; also Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (London, I95 I), passim. 15 Grant H. Redford, 'The Role of Structure in Joyce's "Portrait"', Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, I958), p. 21. 16 Mark Schorer, 'Technique as Discovery', from James E. Miller, Jr., ed., Myth and Method (University of Nebraska Press, 1960), p. g6.

169

Notes 17 From Discorsi del Porma Eroico, as trans. by E. M. W. Tillyard, in The English Epic and its Background (London, 1954), p. 232.

T. S. Eliot, 'Burnt Norton', 11. 6-8, op. cit. Grover Smith has noted the resemblance of this passage to 'Burnt Norton', T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago, 1956), p. 257· 2 ° Kenner, p. 121. 21 See Robert S. Ryf, A New Approach to Joyce: The Portrait cif the Artist as a Guidebook (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), pp. 33-5· 22 Goldberg, p. 46. 23 Kenneth Clark, The Nude (Harmondsworth, rg6o [1956]), p. 6. See also the note on p. 361. 24 But see Goldberg, Ch. III, who considers it an extension, or development. 25 Kenner, p. 129. 26 S. L. Goldberg, Joyce (Edinburgh and London, 1962), p. 52. 27 Kevin Sullivan, Joyce Among the Jesuits (New York, 1958), p. g. 28 Kenner, p. 119. 29 Richard EHmann, 'The Limits of Joyce's Naturalism', Sewanee Review, Vol. LXIII (1955), p. 572. 30 Eugene M. Waith, 'The Calling of Stephen Dedalus', College English, Vol. XVIII, No. 5 (February 1957), p. 256. Caroline Gordon, 'Some Readings and Misreadings', Sewanee Review, Vol. LXI (Summer 1953), pp. 388-g3. Kenner, pp. 109-57 and 'The Portrait in Perspective', in James Joyce: Two Decades cif Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York, 1948), pp. 109-33. 31 Waith, pp. 257, 260. 18 19

NOTES TO CHAPTER III Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York, 1957), p. I47· 2 Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, pp. 131-3. 3 Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James (London, rg6o), p. rgo. 4 Ibid., p. 228. 5 Ibid., pp. 214, 239· 6 Ibid., pp. 204-5. 7 Ibid., pp. 207, 245, 244· 8 Quoted in Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London, 1927), p. 128. 9 Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait cif the Artist as the Enemy (London, 1957), p. I 7710 Lewis, p. 130. 11 Critical Writings, pp. 73-4. 12 Lewis, p. gg. 13 W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London, 1937), p. 25. 14 Wilson, p. 9· 15 Henry Miller, p. 1 I r. 16 Lewis, pp. 107, I IO. 17 Schorer, op. cit., p. 99· 18 Ibid., pp. 99, roo. 19 Feidelson, p. I35· 20 Ibid., p. I35· 21 See W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London, Igso), pp. 6g-7o. Subsequently titled 'He Remembers Forgotten Beauty', the poem no longer contains any clue that its subject (in The Wind Among the Reeds [I899]) was once Robartes. 22 'Ibsen's New Drama' (1goo), in Critical Writings, pp. 63, 62. 23 G. Wilson Knight, Ibsen (Edinburgh and London 1962), p. I I4· 1 1

qo

Notes Ibid., p. 115. Halvdan Koht, The Life cif Ibsen, trans. R. L. McMahon and H. A. Larsen (London, 1931), I, 169. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., I, 272-7. 28 EHmann, James Joyce (New York, 1959), p. 73· Courtney's reply to Joyce, offering to look at a review of Ibsen's newest play, 'When We Dead Awaken', is dated January 19th, 1900. Joyce used a French translation in preparing the review, in which he notes the play had been published in Copenhagen on December 19th, 1899· 29 M. A. Stobart, 'New Lights on Ibsen's "Brand"', The Fortnightly Review, n.s. 66 (August 1st, 1899), p. 239· Stobart prints 'Kirkegaard' throughout. Brandes's monograph on Kierkegaard was published in Danish in 1877 and had been translated into German but not English. 30 M. A. Stobart, 'The "Either-Or" of Soren Kirkegaard', The Fortnightly Review, n.s. 71 (January 1st, 1902), pp. 53-60. 31 Stobart, 'The "Either-Or" of Soren Kirkegaard', pp. 55 and 56. 32 Koht, II, 27. 33 Stobart, 'New Lights', pp. 228-32. 34 For recent comment see Brian W. Downs, Ibsen, The Intellectual Background (Cambridge, 1946), pp. 83ff; Michael Meyer, in his edition of Brand, mentions Brand's reputed analogy to Either/Or, but says he finds Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling more illuminating. 35 Downs, pp. 81-2. 36 EHmann, James Joyce, p. 79· The source is Constantine Curran. 37 Downs, pp. 88-9. 38 EHmann, James Joyce, pp. 274-5. 3 9 Quoted in Koht, II, 27. 4 ° Critical Writings, pp. 101, 100. 41 EHmann, James Joyce, p. 274. (From Stanislaus's diary for September 8th, 1907.) 42 Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Walter Lowrie (London, 1944), II, 228-9. [my italics] 43 Ibid., Vol. I, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, I, 33· 44 Ibid., I, 29. 45 Ibid., I, 78. 46 Ibid., I, 33-4. The appositeness to Tennyson's 'The Palace of Art' and 'The Lady of Shalott' is apparent. 47 Ibid., I, 20. 48 Ibid., I, 22. Cf. Byron's Manfred, II, i: my days and nights ... Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore, Innumerable atoms; and one desert, Barren and cold .... 24 25

Stobart, 'The "Either-Or" of Soren Kirkegaard', p. 57· Goldberg, The Classical Temper, p. 33· But note that 'with experience and growth' assumes Stephen is capable of change and that 'collapse' is ambiguous. 51 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, II, 226. 49

50

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV William Schutte, Joyce and Shakespeare (New Haven, 1957), pp. 8-16. 2 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York, n.d.), p. 48 (Copyright Princeton University Press). 1

171

Notes Ibid., pp. 4g-51. Ibid., p. I2I. 5 Noon, pp. 8g, go. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton, Ig44), p. 453· 6 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 448; and cf. W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1g57), p. 37g, n. 4· 7 Noon, p. go. 8 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscipt, p. 447, footnote. 9 Brower, p. Ig8. 10 EHmann, James Joyce, p. 367. 11 Cf. 'Eveline', in Dubliners, 4I/47· 12 Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses (New York, rg56), p. I7g. 13 Goldberg, The Classical Temper, p. 35· And cf. 'very specific individuals and a clearly established present', Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, The Representation rif Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York, Ig57), p. 481. 14 Lewis, p. r I4· 15 Schutte, pp. I8I-2. 16 R. M. Adams, Surface and Symbol, The Consistency rif James Joyce's Ulysses (New York, Ig62), p. g8. See my review in Essays in Criticism, Vol. XIII, No. 3 (July I963), pp. 288-9. 17 Letters, p. I 26. 18 Ibid., pp. 127, 128. 19 Ibid., p. I28. 20 Reproduced facing p. 48 of A James Joyce Afiscellan;•, Second Series. 21 Letters, p. I 28. 22 Gilbert, p. 243· 23 Ibid., PP· 254-5· 24 Letters, p. I 29. 25 Gilbert, p. 257· 26 Goldberg, The Classical Temper, pp. 4g, 28I. Goldberg consistently undervalues the 'symbolic' dimension of Ulysses, believing it merely 'technical experimentation' (p. 3I3)· Underrating the possibilities of conflict between 'Naturalistic "matter" and a Symbolist "structure"' in the novel (p. 247), he writes from the standpoint of the necessity of 'fusion', and when he has not discovered it, condemns the 'symbolic'. See my review, Essays in Criticism, Vol. XII, No. 2 (April I962), pp. rg8-2o3. 27 Gilbert, pp. 252-3. 28 Goldberg, The Classical Temper, p. 244· 29 Ibid., p. 26r. 30 Harry Levin, James Joyce, A Critical Introduction (New Directions Books, I g4 I), p. Iog. 31 EHmann, James Joyce, pp. 560-I. 32 Levin, James Joyce, p. Iog. 33 Goldberg, The Classical Temper, p. 185. 34 Litz, pp. 32, 35· 35 Adams, p. r86. 36 Letter of February rg2I, Letters, p. I6o. 37 Ibid., pp. I42-3. 38 Ibid., pp. r5o-6o, passim. See also the letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, August 3oth, 192 I (ibid., p. I 71): 'I have also added a Messianic scene to Circe.' 39 Ibid., p. I58. 4 ° Clive Hart, Structure and A1otijin Finnegans Wake (London, rg62), p. 65. 3 4

172

Notes Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, p. 26I. Goldberg, The Classical Temper, pp. I 88-g. 43 Ibid., pp. I 89-90: 'a sensibility [etc.]', my italics. 44 Ibid., pp. I94, I96. Goldberg's alignment of the mythic and the static, which he considers liberating and potentiating, points to a father paradox when the static is explored as a constriction. 45 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy, trans. Richard Howard (London, I959), pp. 8o-1. 46 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., 'The Substantive Level', in The Verbal Icon (New York, '958), p. 138. 47 Ibid., p. 144· 48 Cf. Auerbach, pp. 471-6. 49 Letters, p. 172. 50 Ibid., p. 160. 51 For Joyce's 'intention' (or interpretation) see ibid., p. 170. 52 EHmann, James Joyce, p. 542. 53 V. S. Pritchett, 'Talented Agrarians', New Statesman, Vol. LXVI, No. r689 (August 2nd, 1963), p. 141. 54 Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings (New York, 1956), p. 20. 55 Goldberg, The Classical Temper, pp. 29 I, 3 I 5· 56 Ibid., p. 291. As usual, Goldberg's locution skirts the real problem: his 'and yet' relieves him of the difficulty of establishing how doing 'the worst' and 'reveal[ing) human validity' are related in the novel. 57 George Bernard Shaw, Immaturity (London, I 931), p. xxxiii. 58 Goldberg, The Classical Temper, p. r85. 'As well as' obscures the difficulty: if the ideal is absent by which Bloom could be human, how can 'the process point to his essential humanity' ? 59 Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, p. 242. 6 ° Cf. Wimsatt and Brooks, pp. 378-80. 61 Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, p. 243· 62 Ibid., p. 242. 63 Don Juan, Canto II, Stanzas xix-xxi. 64 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth, rg63), p. 308 65 Ibid., pp. 306, 307, 308, 307. 41

42

NOTES TO CHAPTER V Cf. Clive Hart, pp. 94-5. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History, The Afyth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1959), pp. 153, 123. 3 Ibid., p. xi. 4 Ibid., p. 153. 5 Ibid., p. I53· 6 Pp. 1 34-5· 7 Eliade, p. 66. 8 Ibid., pp. 62, 68. 9 Cf. Ibid., p. 57· 1 ° Frazer, ed. T. Gaster, New Golden Bough (New York, 1959), p. 562. 11 New Golden Bough, p. 564. 12 Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 258. 13 David Daiches, The Novel and the Afodern World, rev. ed. (Chicago, Ig6o), p. 75· 1

2

173

Notes Eliade, p. 68. EHmann, James Joyce, pp. 258-9. 16 Ibid., p. 262. 17 Ibid., p. 262. 18 Paradise Lost, XI, 376-7. 19 Being one-armed, Nelson's pose resembles the 'onehandled urn', a chamberpot? Cf. 'Gas From a Burner', Critical Writings, p. 245· 2 ° Kenner, Dublin's Joyce, p. 25 r. He also notes Bloom's '[Boylan] gets the plums and I the plumstones' (Ulysses, 491/370). 21 Gilbert, pp. 30o-1. 22 The Haggadah of Passover (New York, 1956), p. 63. 23 Ibid., p. 64. 24 Parnell really did lose his hat, which an unknown person handed back (Kitty O'Shea, Charles Stewart Parnell, His Love Story and Political Life [London, 1914], II, 18o). 25 'Gas From a Burner', Critical Writings, p. 243· The lime-throwing incident took place in late December 1890, as Parnell addressed a political meeting in Dublin. 26 'The Shade of Parnell', Critical Writings, p. 228. 27 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, ed. Richard EHmann (London and New York, 1958), p. 168. 28 Ibid., pp. 103-4. 29 Stephen Hero, 121-2/116-7. 'Dixit enim Dominus' is 'corrected in red crayon to read: "Haec dicit Dominus"', and 'Written in the margin in pencil' by 'the sins of the world' 'is the phrase, "the idea of the scapegoat in the Old Testament and of the Lamb of God in the New (Christ's own words)".' 30 The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual (Leeds, 1954), p. 560. 31 Ibid., p. 561. 32 Critical Writings, p. 225. 14

15

NOTES TO CHAPTER VI W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood (London, 1951), p. 6o. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (London, 1919), pp. 216-19. 3 Ibid., p. 329. 4 Brower, pp. 195-8. ! Goldberg, The Classical Temper, Ch. II and passim. 6 Ibid., pp. 76-7, 74· Doubt may be cast on the extreme rigour with which Goldberg elevates the static at the expense of the kinetic, especially as he writes elsewhere, 'the structure of Joyce's art, far from a static pattern of "symbols" and leitmotifs [etc.]' ('Joyce and the Artist's Fingernails', A Review of English Literature, Vol. II, No. 2 [April 1961], p. 68). Cf. 'The Aquinian contemplatio is as much kinetic as it is static and Stephen might have made a better formulation of pity and terror as the essentially tragic emotions had he realized that when the mind is arrested by the artistic vision of conflict and collision it is very much in action and not static at all' (Noon, p. 37). 7 Aristotle, De Anima, 431 b-432"; Goldberg, The Classical Temper, p. 73· 8 Aristotle, Physica, Book III, I-II (201"10-202"). 9 Aristotle, Physica, in Works, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1930), Vol. II. 10 Werner Jaeger, Aristotle Fundamentals of the History of his Development, Second Edition (Oxford, 1948), p. 296. 11 Ibid., PP· 3so- 5 . 12 Ibid., p. 384. 1 2

174

Notes 13 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Bloomington, In diana, I96o), p. I29· 14 Gilbert, p. 224. 15 W. Empson, 'The Theme of Ulysses', A James Joyce Miscellany, Third Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale, 1962), pp. I34-5· 16 R. P. Blackmur, 'The jew in Search of a Son', Virginia Quarterly &view, Vol. 24, No. I (Winter I948), pp. 109, I I2. 17 Goldberg, The Classical Temper, pp. I 67, I 7 I. 18 Ibid., p. 167. 19 On the equivalence of the two states, see W. B. Yeats, quoted below, p. 165. 20 Gilbert, p. 23. 21 Aristotle, The [Nichomachean] Ethics, Book VI, Ch. 4 ('What is Meant by Art'), trans. J. A. K. Thomson (Harmondsworth, I953), pp. I75-6. [my italics] 22 Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London, I957}, p. 2. 23 Ibid., p. 2. 24 Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson (London and New York, I936), pp. 59-61. 25 Ibid., p. 63. 26 Ibid., p. 65 . 27 Ibid., p. 65 . 28 Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Walter Lowrie (London, I94I ), pp. XXIX-XXX.

Papers, IV B 120, pp. 308ff.; quoted in &petition, pp. xxx-xxxi. The Concept of Dread, quoted in &petition, p. xxxiv. 31 Ibid., pp. 6, 34· 32 J. Mitchell Morse, The Sympathetic Alien (New York, 1959), pp. 23, 19, 34· 33 C. J. Jung, The Development of Personality, Collected Works, Vol. 17, Bollingen Series XX (New York, 1954), p. 171. 34 C. J. Jung, 'Ulysses A Monologue', trans. W. S. Dell, Nimbus, Vol. 2, No. 1 (June-August, 1953), pp. 7, 9· 35 Ibid., pp. 17-18. Cf. p. 19: 'Who, then, is Ulysses? Doubtless he is the symbol of that which makes up the totality, the oneness, of all the single appearances of Ulysses as a whole ... including Mr Joyce'-which, if I understand it, makes Joyce's novel a 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction'. 36 Gilbert, pp. 42-3. 37 Ibid., Ch. 2 ('The Seal of Solomon'), pp. 43-7. 38 Gilbert, p. 46. 39 Ibid., p. 49· 40 T. S. Eliot, p. 191. 41 Ibid., p. I95· 42 Ibid., p. 213. 43 Ibid., p. 2I3. 44 Ibid., p. 2I3. 45 Ibid., p. 213. 46 Ibid., pp. 2I2-13. 47 Ibid., p. 21 I. 48 W. B. Yeats, 'Reveries over Childhood and Youth' (I914), from Autobiographies (London, I956), p. go. 49 The Trembling of the Veil, Autobiographies, pp. 194-5. 50 Ibid., pp. 272-3. 51 EHmann, James Joyce, p. 366. 52 See above, p. 134. 29

30

1

75

Notes 53 James T. Farrell, 'Exiles and Ibsen', in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York, 1948), p. 115. 54 Farrell, loc. cit. For a view that the two notions of freedom and 'necessary victim[age)' form a conflict in which Richard is 'caught', see EHmann, p. 366. If the hero's motivation is rendered 'ambiguous' (EHmann) the two conduce to the same end. 55 Francis Fergusson, 'Joyce's Exiles', in The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York, 1957), p. 72.

176

INDEX

Adams, Henry, I39, I74 Adams, R. M., I02, I72 Alberti, I 6 I Alighieri, Dante, 23, 28, I65 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 7, 4 I Aristotle, viii, 40, I 28, I 4 I-4, I 53-6, I74 Assumption of Moses, I 29 Atherton, J. S., ix, 44 Auden, W. H., I38, I74 Auerbach, Erich, I 72-3 Augustine, St., 51 Baker, James R., 168 Baudelaire, C., 26 Black, M., 129 Blackmur, R. P., 150, I75 Blake, William, 22, I46 Blavatsky, H. P., 8, 162 Bloom, Leopold, 42, 54, 6g, 74-102, I04-7, 110-4, I I7, 119, I25, I27-8, I30-3, I36-8, I40, 144-5, 148-so, I52, I57-g, I6I, I73-4 Bonnefoy, Yves, 26, I6g Brandes, Georg, 6s-6, I45, I7I British Broadcasting Company, I4 Brock, A. Glutton, 88 Brooks, Cleanth, I 72-3 Brower, Reuben, 78, I39, I6g, I72, I74

Browne, Sir Thomas, I s6 Budgen,Frank,25,52,8S,88, 103-6, I I2, I47, I75 Byron, Lord, s6-6o, 67' I Is, I 7 I' I73 Camus, Albert, 109, I 39 Charles, R. H., I 29 Chateaubriand, 71 Christ,Jesus, 52, I Ig, I28, I34-6,

159

Clark, Sir Kenneth, 38-g, 4I, I 70 Coleridge, S. T., 24, I6g Connolly, Cyril, 44 Courtney, W. L., 65, I7I Curran, Constantine, I, 2, I 7 I Curtius, Ernst, go Daiches, David, I 24, I 6 I, I 73 Davitt, Michael, 36 Dedalus (Daedalus), Stephen, 2-3, 6-7, I0-3,2I-2,26,28,30-49, SI-64,66-7,69,7I-s,78-8g,gi, 95-107, 110-4, I I7, I25-30, I34-6, I38, I40-2, I44-s4, 156, I58-g, I61, I69-70, 174 Dennis, Nigel, 29 Dos Passos,John, 87 Downs, Brian W., 68, I 7 I Dryden, John, I 6g

177

Index Eliade, Mircea, 8, I 18-g, I 2 I, I 73-4 Eliot, George, 52 Eliot, T. s.' facing I' 26-7' 35. sg, IIg, I63-5, I69-70, I75 EHmann, Richard, vi, ix, 49-50, 52, 6I,66-8,7s,78, I24-5, I46, I6I, I70-6 Empson, William, 23, I I2, I49, I75 Erikson, Erik H., I I 2 Farrell, James T., 166, 176 Feidelson, Charles N., viii, 6I, I68, 170 Fergusson, Francis, I67, 176 Findlay, J. N., I36 Ford, Ford Madox, I I I Forster, E. M., 78, I39 Fortnightly Review, The, 6s-7' I 7 I Frazer,SirJ.G., I20, I23, I73 Friedrich, Gerhard, 168 Freud, Sigmund, g-I 1, 23, 27, 30, 169 Frye, Northrop, 138 Garborg, Arne, 68 Gilbert, Stuart, 8, 82, 87, go-1, 129, I 48, lSI, I62, I72, 174-5 Glasheen, Adaline, viii Goethe, 47 Gogarty, Oliver St.John, s-6, I68 Goldberg, S. L., viii, 37, 43, 7 I-2, gi-3, g6, gg, I05-7, I I 2-5, I40-I, 150, I68, 170-5 Goldman, A., I72 Gordon, Caroline, so, I 70 Gorman, Herbert, 2, 8g, 97, 168 Gosse, Edmund, 65 Greenhalgh,]. S., 65 Gregory, Lady, 52

llaggadah, I3I-2, I74 Hanley, Miles, vi Hart, Clive, 8, I04, I 72-3 Hegel, I36, I47, ISS Hemingway, Ernest, 20, 109 Hereford, C. H., 64-5,67 Hermes Trismegistus, I 62

Hough, Graham, I r, 24-5, I6I, I68-g Housman, A. E., 125 Ibsen, Henrik, 17, 27, 62-g, 72, I59, I70-I Improperia, I 28-30, I 36 Ionesco, Eugene, I03 Jaeger, Henrik, 65 Jaeger, Werner, viii, I42-4, I74 James, Henry, I3, 53-6, 79 Jansen, 72 Jaspers, Karl, I36 Jones, Ernest, I6g Jonson, Ben, 2 Joyce, James, passim. Critical Writings, vi, 8, 27, 62-3, 67, 6g, I33, I46, I68-7I, I74 Dubliners, vi, viii, I -4, I I-3, I 6, Ig, 3I, 43, I20, I23, I68-g, 172; 'Araby', I6-7; 'Boarding House, The', 4, I23; 'Clay', 4, 120-3; 'Counterparts', 4, I 19; 'Dead, The', 66, I2o-I, 123-5; 'Encounter, An', I6-8; 'Eveline', 4, 16, I8-2I, 43, I25, I72; 'Grace', I 23; 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room', 1 I g-20, 123, I25; 'Little Cloud, A', 4; 'Painful Case, A', 4, I25; 'Sisters, The', I, 3-5, I 2-7, 32, 49. 125 Epiphanies, 6, 168 Exiles, vi, I66-7, 176 Finnegans Wake, vi-vii, 8, 92-3, go, gg-wo, I I8-g, 122, 129, Ig8, I47, I72 Letters, vi, I, 74, 85, 88, I68-g, I72-3 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, vi, viii, 7, I3, I8, 20-2, 24-6, 28,go-62,66,6g,7I-4,8s, 1123, 125, I27, I35. I37. I39-40: I46-8, I5o-2, I68-7o Stephen lleto, vi, viii, 2, 7-8, 3 I, 40, s7-8,63,66,6g,I34-s,I68, I74

178

Index Joyce, James (cont.) Ulysses, vi, viii, I, 4, 7-8, I I, I 6, I8,2I-2,25,35,42,49,5I-2, 6I,66,68,7I,74-5,77-I07, 110-21, 123, 125-33,136, 138-g, 14I, I44-53, I56-68, I72, I74-5 Joyce, Stanislaus, viii, I-2, 67-8, I33-4, I66, I7I, I74 Jung, C.J., I I, 47, 12I, 160-I, I75

Michelangelo, 126 Miller, Arthur, I9-2o Miller, Henry, 5, 6o, I68, 170 Milton,John, 52, I26, 14I, I74 Misra, B. P., I47 Moore, George, 65 Morse,]. M., I58-9, I75 Moses, I 26-9, I 36 Mozart, 70 Murray, Lindley, 102-3

Kain, R. M., 2, 169 Kant, 72 Kaye, Julian B., I 7, 169 Kelleher,]. V., ix, 125 Kenner, Hugh, viii, 12-3, I6-7, 25-6,27-8,35-6,43,49-50,56, 74, I05-7, II4-6, I6g-7o, I73-4 Kermode, Frank, ix, 44, I52-3, I 75 Kettle, Arnold, I 68 Kierkegaard, Soren, vii-viii, 22-3, 63-78, I25, I36, I54-6o, I64, 169, I 7I-2, I 75 Knight, G. Wilson, 63, I 70-I Koht, Halvdan, 63-4,67, 17I

Nabokov, Vladimir, 8I Noon, William T.,s.j., 77, I68, I72, I74 Norris, Frank, I05 Nosworthy,J. M., I 59

Lawrence, D. H., 32-3, I 14 Lee, Sidney, I 53 Leibniz, I 55 Levin, Harry, 47, 54,97-8, I72 Levy, Eliphas, 162 Lewis, Wyndham, 57-60, 84, g6-7, I70, 172 Linati, Carlo, g6 Little Review, The, 82, 85, 8g Litz, A. Walton, 25, 100, I6g, 172 Lowrie, Walter, I56, 17I, I75 Lubbock, Percy, 53, I 70 'Macleod, Fiona', 65 Maeterlinck, M., 145, I47-8 Magalaner, Marvin, I 7, 2 I, I I 2, 168-9, 175 Mann, Thomas, 44, 120 Mason, Ellsworth, vi, 146 Melville, Herman, 138-9 Meyer, Michael, I 71

Ortega y Gasset,Jose, I I2-3, I20, I73 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 36, I I g-20, I23, I32-4, I36, I74 Parnell, Mrs Charles Stewart (Kitty O'Shea), I33, I74 Pascal, I Pedersen, 66 Piaget, Jean, 29, I 69 Pinker,]. B., 98 Pirandello, Luigi, 165 Poirier, Richard, 55-6, I 70 Porphyry, I 62 Pound,Ezra,59,88,g7 Prior, Moody, 169 Pritchett, V. S., III, 173 Quinn,John, I69 Rank, 0., II Redford, Grant H., 169 Richards, Grant, 2 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, viii, Io8-IO, I73 Russell, George (A.E.), I44 Ryf,RobertS., I70 Sartre,J.-P., 27, 53-4, 109 Savage, D. S., I46

179

Index Scholes, Robert E., 2 Schorer,11ark,32-3,60-I,7I, I69-70 Schutte, William, 74, 85, I7I-2 Sewell, Richard, I 36 Shakespeare, William, 42, 84-5, g8, II7, I28, I44-5· 147,150,152, 158-g Shaw, G. B., II3, 173 Shelley, Percy, I45 Sinnett, A. P., 8 Smith, Grover, 170 Spark, Muriel, 34 Spencer, Theodore, 7 Spenser, Edmund, 126 Stobart, M. A. (Mrs St Clair Stobart, later Greenhalgh), 65-8, 71-2, 160, 171 Sullivan, Kevin, 4 7, 170 Swift,Jonathan, 109 Sykes, Claude, I 04 Symons, Arthur, 65 Synge,J. M., 147 Tasso, Torquato, 33, 170 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 171 Thackeray, W. M., I69 Thoreau, H. D., 61

Ticknor, George, 59 Tillich, Paul, 136 Tillotson, Kathleen, 169 Tillyard, E. M. W., 170 Traherne, T., 162 Vergil, 126 Vico, G., I 18 Villon, F., 165 Von Phul, Ruth, 169 Wagner, Geoffrey, 57, 170 Wagner, R., 65 Waith, Eugene, 2I, 50, I69-70 W alzl, Florence L., I 68 Watt, Ian, 1 I 7, 173 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 74, 88-9, 103, I 10, I 72 Wilson, Edmund, I 6, 54, 6o, I 69-70 Wimsatt, W. K., 109, 172-3 Woolf, Virginia, I I o Yeats,J. B., x6, x6g Yeats, W. B., facing 164-5, 170, 175 Zola, Emile, 104

180

I,

52, 59, 62, 65,

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: JAMES JOYCE

Volume 3

JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE

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JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE A Casebook

Edited by JOHN HARTY III

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1991 by Garland Publishing, Inc. This edition first published in 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1991 John Harty, III All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN: ISBN:

978-1-138-63822-8 978-1-315-63790-7 978-1-138-19355-0 978-1-138-19362-8 978-1-315-63926-0

(Set) (Set) (ebk) (Volume 3) (hbk) (Volume 3) (pbk) (Volume 3) (ebk)

Publisher’s Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

JAMES JOYCE'S FINNEGANS WAKE A Casebook edited by John Harty III

GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC. • NEW YORK & LONDON

1991

© 1991 John Harty, III

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data James Joyce's Finnegans wake : a casebook I edited by John Harty, III. p. em. - (Garland reference library of the humanities; vol. 1003) Includes index. ISBN 0-8240-1211-9 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Finnegans wake. I. Harty, John, 1945- . IT. Series. PR6019.09F59354 1991 823'.912-dc20

90-48730

CIP

Printed on acid-free, 250-year-life paper Manufactured in the United States of America

For Adaline Glasheen

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ..................................... xi

Editor's Note ......................................... xv

Introduction John Harty .......................................... xvii

A Working Outline of Finnegans Wake Bernard Benstock ...................................... 3

Part 1: Assessments

Dreaming Up the Wake David Hayman ........................................ 13

An Introduction to Finnegans Wake Colin MacCabe . . . . . . . . . . . ............................ 23

SHEM THE TEXTMAN Hugh Kenner ......................................... 33

The Femasculine Obsubject: A Lacanian Reading of FW 606-607 Sheldon Brivic ........................................ 45

Quinet in the Wake: The Proof or The Pudding? Bernard Benstock ...................................... 57 Vll

Contents

Vlll

Finnegans Wake: All the World's a Stage Vincent Cheng ........................................ 69

The Convertshems of the Tchoose: Judaism and Jewishness in Finnegans Wake John Gordon ......................................... 85

Joyce's "Blue Guitar": Wallace Stevens and Finnegans Wake Albert Montesi ....................................... 99 Part II: Joyce's Textual SelfReferentiality Every Man His Own God: From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake Alan Loxterman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Joyce's Nonce-Symbolic Calculus: A Finnegans Wake Trajectory David Robinson ....................................... 131

The Female Word Kimberly J. Devlin .................................... 141 Part III: Performance "Group drinkards maaks grope thinkards or how reads rotary" (FW 312.31): Finnegans Wake and the Group Reading Experience David Borodin ........................................ 151

Notes for Staging Finnegans Wake David Hayman ....................................... 165

Mary Ellen Bute's Film Adaptation of Finnegans Wake Kit Basquin .......................................... 177

Contents Thoughts on Making Music From the Hundred-Letter Words in Finnegans Wake Margaret Rogers ...................................... 189 Index ............................................... 199

ix

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Acknowledgments To the essayists. To the staff at Garland Publishing, especially my editor Phyllis Korper. To Lisa Gibilisco for excellent assistance. To all librarians at Northern Michigan University and the University of Florida, especially Dolores Jenkins and Pam Pasak. To Patricia Craddock, Chair of the English Department at the University of Florida, and to Leonard Heldreth, Head of the English Department at Northern Michigan University, and to the faculty and staff at both. To my dedicated typists : Lynn Johnson, Danielle Davis, Kim Gosset, Brian Roberts, and to their supervisor Bob Stillwell. To the National Endowment for the Humanities and Professor Michael Seidel for Professor Seidel's 1987 summer seminar on James Joyce. To the Northeast Modern Language Association for a grant to attend Fritz Senn's James Joyce Center in Zurich in 1987. To Adaline Glasheen.

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following: From Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Copyright 1939 by James Joyce, renewed© 1967 by George Joyce and Lucia Joyce. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. From Dubliners by James Joyce. Copyright 1916 by B. W. Huebsch. Definitive text Copyright © 1967 by the Estate of James Joyce. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc., and Jonathan Cape Ltd. as executors of the James Joyce Estate. From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Copyright 1916 by B. W. Huebsch. Copyright renewed 1944 by Nora Joyce. Definitive text copyright © 1964 by the Estate of James Joyce. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc., and Jonathan Cape Ltd. as executors of the James Joyce Estate. From Ulysses by James Joyce. The Corrected Text Edited by Hans Walter Gabler et al. Copyright ® 1986 by Random House Inc. From Annotations to Finnegans Wake by Roland McHugh. Copyright© 1980. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. From The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. From The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens. Copyright© 1952. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. From the film Passages from Finnegans Wake directed by Mary Ellen Bute. A photograph of HCE and ALP. Copyright© 1965. Courtesy of James Nemeth. From Joyce-Again's Wake: An Analysis of Finnegans Wake by Bernard Benstock. Copyright© 1965. Permission to reprint "A Working Outline of Finnegans Wake" granted by the University of Washington Press. From "Dreaming Up the Wake" by David Hayman. Originally published in Linguae Stile, 22, No.3, September 1987, 419-430. Permission to reprint granted by Lingua e Stile. From James Joyce: New Perspectives edited by Colin MacCabe. From "An Introduction to Finnegans Wake" by Colin MacCabe which originally appeared in the British Council Series Notes for Literature. Copyright © 1982. Permission to reprint this essay granted by Indiana University Press. From Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans Wake by Vincent J. Cheng. Copyright© 1984. Parts of "Finnegans Wake: All the World's a Stage" by Vincent J. Cheng are freely adapted from his Shakespeare and Joyce. Permission for use granted by the Pennsylvania State University Press. From A James Joyce Miscellany, Third Series, edited by Marvin Magalaner. Copyright © 1962 by Southern Illinois University Press. Permission to reprint "Notes for the Staging of Finnegans Wake" by David Hayman granted by the publishers. Xlll

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Editor's Note Quotations from Finnegans Wake are designated as follows. Book and chapter numbers are given in roman and arabic numerals-for example, 1.6 for book one, chapter six. Page and line numbers (for example, 293.31) are given in parentheses. The letters L, R, and F indicate left- and rightmargin notes and footnotes in 11.2 (for example, 290.F2 for the second footnote on page 290 . Page references to Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961) are preceded by aU. References to Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et a!. (New York: Random House, 1986) are by chapter and line number. Thus, for example, U 8.258 refers to chapter eight ("Lestrygonians"), line 258. Abbreviations D

FW JJ[ JJ[[ JJA Letters l,ll, Ill

p

SH SL

u u

Joyce, James. Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes in consultation with Richard EHmann. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Joyce, James. "Dubliners": Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1939; London: Faber and Faber, 1939. These two editions have identical pagination. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. The James Joyce Archive, ed. David Hayman, eta!. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1978. Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957; reissued with corrections 1966. Vols. II and III, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The definitive text corrected from Dublin Holograph by Chester G. Anderson and edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Joyce, James. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man": Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking Press, 1968. Joyce, James. Stephen Hero, ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1944, 1963. Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1975. +episode and line number. Joyce, James. Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984, 1986. In paperback by Garland, Random House, Bodley Head, and Penguin. +page number. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1934, reset and corrected 1961.

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Introduction John Harty "MY WARM THANKS TO ALL CONCERNED FOR PATIENCE PROMPTITUDE WHICH I GREATLY APPRECIATE." So read the telegram James Joyce sent to Faber & Faber on January 30, 1939, upon receiving the first copy of Finnegans Wake, a title he had withheld from all including Faber & Faber until publication was imminent.' The first copy had arrived in time to celebrate Joyce's birthday on February 2, a tradition Joyce had set for the publication of his works, with the implication perhaps being that miracles of birth, especially his own, and the production of miraculous art have a certain similarity. One wonders how the printers for Faber & Faber must have felt about Finnegans Wake as they first began their task. What about misprints? Who beyond Joyce and his proofers would notice errors? Richard EHmann describes the details and the drama leading up to the publication of Finnegans Wake. Initially Joyce had hoped to publish the Wake on February 2, 1938. As February 2, 1938, became impossible, Joyce asked Herbert Gorman to withhold publication of Joyce's biography until March 1938. Gorman agreed, stating to his publisher: "I will never write another biography of a living man. It is too difficult and thankless a task." 2 Joyce now hoped to publish Finnegans Wake on another date-July 4, his father's birthday. Faber & Faber objected because of the possibility of weak summer sales. Joyce had been overly optimistic again and July 4, 1938, passed without publication. Finally, what Nora had labelled "chop suey" was published after a series of harrowing proofings by Joyce's devoted team of friends. Paul Leon supplied some last minute drama as he left a section of revised proofs in a taxi. He rushed to Joyce to inform him of the mishap. Joyce, who had to be exhausted at this point, did not reproach Leon but took the ill omen in stride. The taxi driver later returned the proofs. 3 To dismiss Finnegans Wake is an easy but erroneous solution to the problem of what to do with it. The preponderance of available information on its value now makes it unavoidable as a work to contend with. Had someone else written it, it might have languished unread. But James Joyce was the author. Rather than give an annotated bibliography of critical movements here, I refer the reader to Bernard Benstock's James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth which overviews the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium held in Frankfurt, West Germany, in June 1984. 4 That collection of essays surveys the new critical perspectives on Joyce's works and includes essays on the influence of deconstruction, Lacan, feminism, Marxism, and so forth. For the reader just beginning work on Finnegans Wake or in need of a helpful reference, I would suggest Adaline Glasheen's Third Census and Patrick McCarthy's "The Structures and Meanings of Finnegans Wake." 5 Arguably the most important book to have at hand while reading the Wake is Roland McHugh's Annotations to Finnegans

XVJJ

xviii

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Wake, a page by page listing of explications. 6 This book is certainly valuable, but it must be used with caution.

Clive Hart warned Wake enthusiasts in his A Concordance to Finnegans Wake: "The student of Finnegans Wake needs to be a humble person." 7 Problems begin with the title Finnegans Wake, as publishers, editors, and others assume that it should be Finnegan's Wake. Joyce often employs misprints. One of the most significant of these in Ulysses concerns Martha Clifford's mistyping "world" for "word" in a letter to Bloom. 8 Joyce magnifies this process many times in Finnegans Wake and the chance for textual misprints was also thus increased. Perhaps because of his desire "to keep the professors busy for centuries", and his death in 1941, Joyce gave us little help in deciphering Finnegans Wake, misleading the reader as often as not. As with Ulysses, he was very careful about comments on the Wake. It has been suggested that what Joyce was attempting in Finnegans Wake was a work that could be placed third alongside the collected works of Shakespeare and the Bible. Narrowing the focus, Bernard Benstock has stated that the specific Ur-text for the Wake is the Book of Genesis. This idea links up Earwicker's "sin" with Adam's fall (and thus man's) in the Garden of Eden, transformed in the Wake into Dublin's Phoenix Park. 9

This volume contains one outline of the Wake and fifteen essays. The outline plus four of the essays are reprints, but the authors in most cases have made changes to their original work. Many of the other essays were originally "conference papers at various James Joyce symposia including the June 1987 conference in Milwaukee, the Zurich conference in August 1987, the June 1988 conference in Venice, and the February 1989 conference in Miami, Florida. The rest of the essays here were composed especially for this volume. I have divided this casebook up into three sections-Part I: Assessments, Part II: Joyce's Textual Self-Referentiality, and Part III: Performance. The essays have been arranged in an order that might allow them to be read in sequence. Since Joyce made it so difficult for readers to understand where they are at any given page in the Wake, I have included Bernard Benstock's "A Working Outline of Finnegans Wake." Although such an aid cannot be definitive, it does offer needed guidance for a text with no chapter titles, characters who merge into other characters and thus whose identities are ambiguous or unknown, speakers who are not identified, and a host of other problems confusing the reader.

Part I: Assessments In "Dreaming Up the Wake" David Hayman analyses four cryptic dreams recorded in the Wake notebooks between 1923 and 1927, speculating about their possible contributions to the evolution of the book. His essay is designed to show how the enormous mass of genetic materials can illuminate both the life and the work. Colin MacCabe's "An In,roduction to Finnegans Wake" examines book 1.7 (FW 169-195), the portrait of Shem the Penman. MacCabe discusses

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

XIX

Shem's method of writing as described in the well-known passage (FW 185.27186.8) and examines it against earlier versions from Joyce's notebooks. Beginning with the title, Hugh Kenner's "SHEM THE TEXT MAN" examines certain "words," the language of Finnegans Wake, and Joyce's linguistic arrangement of the text. Sheldon Brivic's "The Femasculine Obsubject: A Lacanian Reading of FW 606-607" demonstrates that the cited passage, primarily a description of landscape, becomes an object of desire that looks back to the viewer and elicits his or her being. Bernard Benstock's "Quinet in the Wake: The Proof or the Pudding" notes that Joyce's use of a sentence from Quinet (FW 281.3-13) "stands undistorted in the middle of the Night Lessons chapter." Benstock provides possible reasons for its inclusion and its relationship to the Wake as a whole. Vincent Cheng's "Finnegans Wake: All the World's a Stage" shows how Joyce conceived the Wake essentially as a drama, performed on the "worldstage" by a stock company, and how this theme underlies all the "action" of Finnegans Wake. The members of the HCE family-cast perform countless variations of the all-play, the archetypal family drama. John Gordon's "The Convertshems of the Tchoose: Judaism and Jewishness in Finnegans Wake" concentrates on the antisemitic attacks that Shem undergoes and argues that Shem seeks assimilation, one reason for his overtures to Shaun. Gordon suggests the possibility of a correspondence between the Bible and the Wake, much like the one between the Odyssey and Ulysses. AI Montesi's "Joyce's 'Blue Guitar': Wallace Stevens and Finnegans Wake" discovers that both Joyce and Wallace Stevens were aesthetically attempting similar modern sensibilities. Wallace Stevens, three years older than Joyce, created several poems, including "The Man With The Blue Guitar" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," that can be directly compared to thematic concerns in Finnegans Wake. Part II: Joyce's Textual Self-Referentiality Each of the essays in this section makes connections between Joyce's earlier works and Finnegans Wake. Alan Loxterman's "Every Man His Own God: From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake" argues that the "Wake can provide its readers with a more unified reading experience than Ulysses because the discontinuity between the Wake's characters and plot and its overall argumentative design is more uniform-in fact, more comprehensive-than in any previous work of literature." Its language is more self -referential than that of Ulysses; by comparison, the Wake seems unique in expressing "more about itself than about people or ideas." David Robinson's "Joyce's Nonce-Symbolic Calculus: A Finnegans Wake Trajectory" outlines the HCE saga found in FW 1.4 and traces Joyce's use and distortion of "Grace" and "Hades" within Finnegans Wake. And finally Kimberly Devlin's "The Female Word" compares ALP's language, especially in her letters, with Molly's various musings in Ulysses. The forced coyness of both Martha Clifford and Molly in Ulysses becomes ALP's mysterious letter with its official and repressed text. Joyce's male characters often believe that women have an "other" language, one that is not comprehensible to men. Part III: Performance The essays in Part III discuss the Wake and adaptations of the Wake in such a way that an audience becomes a necessary corollary to the experience. One of the best ways to read and study the Wake is as a group reading experience, much like an academic class, except that there are no grades. There are at present several groups that meet on a regular basis throughout the United States and

XX

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Europe. At the various Joyce symposia each year these groups often attend and share their processes with those at the conventions. David Borodin details the experiences of one such group, The Philadelphia Wake Circle, in '"Group drinkards maaks grope thinkards or how reads rotary' (FW 312.31): Finnegans Wake and the Group Reading Experience." Borodin traces the history of such groups, beginning in the United States with William York Tindall at Columbia University in 1940. He includes the results of a session at Venice in which The Philadelphia Wake Circle discussed the Muta and Juva passage (FW 609-610) before an audience which was allowed to voice readings also. David Hayman's "Notes for the Staging of Finnegans Wake" critiques the early stagings of Finnegans Wake, finding them variously inadequate-including the best one, Mary Manning's Passages from Finnegans Wake-in that each production through 1962 has attempted to encompass the whole of Finnegans Wake. Hayman elaborates a possible stage scenario from II.3 which concentrates on the dramatic situation of HCE in his pub, confronted with his life as projected by the pub clients, through four theatrical sketches. To his early essay Hayman has added a postscript updating his conclusion. Kit Basquin's "Mary Elle!V Bute's Film Adaptation of Finnegans Wake" discusses Bute's adaptation of Mary Manning's Passages from Finnegans Wake. Bute claimed in an interview that her film was not a translation of Finnegans Wake but a reaction to it. This "reaction" departs a great deal from the novel and omits Joyce's explicitly sexual material. Margaret Rogers' "Thoughts on Making Music From the HundredLetter Words in Finnegans Wake" imparts her methods of composing her chorale A Babble of Earwigs or Sinnegan with Finnegan. The work is based on the ten multilingual portmanteau words (the Hundred-Letter Words) spread throughout Finnegans Wake. This chorale has been performed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Arizona.

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

xxi Notes

I.

Richard EHmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 714-715. Finnegans Wake was not officially published until4 May 1939. Faber & Faber managed to assemble an unbound copy (really a set of final proofs) from the printer, R. MacLehose and Company, in time for Joyce's birthday (James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce, Richard EHmann, ed. [New York: Viking Press, 1975], 394n).

2.

EHmann, James Joyce, 705-706.

3.

EHmann, James Joyce, 707, 710, 714.

4.

Bernard Benstock, ed. James Joyce: Syracuse University Press, 1988).

5.

Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Patrick McCarthy, "The Structures and Meanings of Finnegans Wake," in Zack R. Bowen and James F. Carens, eds. A Companion to Joyce Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984), 559-632.

6.

Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Hopkins University Press, 1980).

7.

Clive Hart, A Concordance to Finnegans Wake (Mamaroneck, N.Y.: Paul P. Appel, 1973), n.p.

8.

James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. (New York: Random House, 1986), 8.326-328.

9.

Bernard Benstock, James Joyce (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), 158.

The Augmented Ninth (Syracuse:

Johns

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

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A Working Outline of Finnegans Wake** Bernard Benstock CHAPTER 1 (pp. 3-29) 3: 4: 5: 5-6: 6-7: 7-8: 8-10: 10: 10-12: 12-13: 13-15:

15-18: 18-20: 21-23: 23-24: 25: 25-29: 29:

Statement of themes Battle in Heaven and introduction of Finnegan Finnegan's fall and promise of resurrection The City The Wake Landscape foreshadows H.C.E. and A.L.P. Visit to Willingdone Museyroom The Earwicker house Biddy the hen finds the letter in the midden heap Dublin landscape Pre-history of Ireland-the invaders (including the birth of Shem and Shaun, p. 14) Mutt and Jute recount the Battle of Clontarf The development of the Alphabet and Numbers The Tale of Jarl van Hoother and the Prankquean The Fall Finnegan's Wake revisited Restless Finnegan is told about the present age H.C.E. introduced CHAPTER 2 (pp. 30-47)

30-32: 32-33: 33-35: 35-36: 36-38: 38-42: 42-44: 44-47:

The genesis and naming of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker Gaiety Theatre production of A Royal Divorce Rumors about H.C.E.'s indiscretion The Encounter with the Cad The Cad dines and drinks The Cad's story is spread The making of the Ballad by Hosty The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly CHAPTER 3 (pp. 48-74)

48-50: 50-52: 52-55:

**

The balladeer and all involved come to bad ends as Time Passes Earwicker asked to tell the old story Earwicker's "innocent" version is filmed, televised, and aired

This outline originally appeared in Bernard Benstock, Joyce-Again's Wake: An Analysis of Finnegans Wake (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), xv-xxiv. Permission for use granted by the University of Washington Press. 3

4

55-58: 58: 58-61: 61-62: 62-63: 63-64: 64-65: 66-67: 67: 67-68: 69: 69-71: 71-72: 72: 73: 74:

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake A review of Earwicker's Fall H.C.E.'s Wake A reporter's interview with the populace concerning H.C.E.'s crime A report of H.C.E.'s flight A report of H.C.E.'s encounter with a masked assailant The Banging on the Gate Movie digression: Peaches and Daddy Browning Inquiry concerning missing letters and stolen coffin Lolly the Constable testifies on the arrest of drunken Earwicker The demise of the two temptresses The locked gate A Midwesterner at the gate of the closed pub after hours reviles H.C.E. The list of abusive names H.C.E. remains silent The braying ass retreats Finn's resurrection foreshadowed as H.C.E. sleeps CHAPTER 4 (pp. 75-103)

75: 76-79: 79-81: 81-85: 85-90: 90-92: 92-93: 93-94: 94-96: 96-97: 97-100: 101-3:

The besieged Earwicker dreams The burial in Lough Neagh (including the battle interlude, pp. 78-79) Kate Strong recalls old times in the midden heap in Phoenix Park Encounter between attacker and adversary repeats H.C.E.Cad meeting Festy King on trial for Park indiscretion Pegger Festy denies any act of violence, wins Issy's love King freed, reveals his deception and is vilified by the girls The Letter The Four Old Judges rehash the case and argue over the past The Fox Hunt-in pursuit of H.C.E. Rumors rampant regarding H.C.E.'s death or reappearance The women usher in A.L.P. CHAPTER 5 (pp. 104-25)

104-7: 107-25:

Invocation and list of suggested names for A.L.P.'s untitled mamafesta A scrutinization of the Document, including: Cautioning against impatience (108) Regarding the envelope (109) Citing the place where it was found (110) Regarding Biddy the finder ( 110-11) Contents of the letter ( 111) Condition of the letter ( 111-12) Various types of analyses of the letter: historical, textual, Freudian, Marxist, etc. (114-16) The Book of Kells (119-24)

5

A Working Outline

CHAPTER 6 (pp. 126-68) 126: 126-39: 139: 139-40: 140-41: 141: 141-42: 142: 142-43: 143: 143-48: 148-68:

168:

Radio quiz program: Shaun answers Shem's questions First question identifies the epic hero Finn MacCool Second question regards Shaun's mother Third question seeks a motto for the Earwicker establishment Fourth question deals with the four capital cities of Ireland Fifth question regards the Earwicker handyman Sixth question regards Kate, the charwoman Seventh question identifies the twelve citizens Eighth question identifies the Maggies Ninth question concerns the kaleidoscopic dream Tenth question is a "pepette" letter of love Eleventh question asks Shaun if he would aid Shem in saving his soul, includes: Professor Jones on the dime-cash problem (148-52) The Mookse and the Gripes (152-59) Burrus and Caseous (161-68) Twelfth question identifies Shem as the accursed brother CHAPTER 7 (pp. 169-95)

169-70: 170:

170-75: 175: 175-76: 176-77: 177-78: 178-79: 179-80: 180-82: 182-84: 184: 185-86: 186-87: 187-93: 193-95:

A portrait of Shem The first riddle of the universe On Shem's lowness Football match song The Games Shem's cowardice during war and insurrection Shem's boasting about his literary ability while drunk Shem, venturing out after the war, finds himself facing a gun Shem as a tenor His career as a forger in various European capitals, booted out as foul Shem's place of residence Shem cooks eggs in his kitchen Shem makes ink from his excrement in order to write his books Shem arrested by Constable Sackerson in order to save him from the mob Justius {Shaun} berates Shem Mercius {Shem} defends himself CHAPTER 8 (pp. 196-216)

196-201: 201: 201-4: 204-5:

Two washerwomen on the banks of the Liffey gossip about A.L.P. and H.C.E. Anna Livia Plurabelle's message Gossip about the love life of the young Anna Livia Washerwomen interrupt their gossip to wash Lily Kinsella's drawers

6

205-12: 212-16:

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake A.L.P. steals off to distribute presents to all her children Darkness falls as the washerwomen turn into a tree and a rock CHAPTER 9 (Book II, chap. 1, pp. 219-59)

219: 219-21: 221-22: 222-24: 224-25: 226-27: 227-33: 233: 233-39: 239-40: 240-42: 242-43: 244: 244-45: 245-46: 246-47: 247-50: 250: 250-51: 252-55: 255-56: 256-57: 257: 257-59:

Program for the Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies Dramatis Personae of the Mime Credits for the Mime The argument of the Mime Glugg asked the first riddle-about jewels-loses Seven rainbow girls dance and play, ignoring Glugg Regarding Glugg's career as an exile and writer Glugg asked the second riddle-on insects-loses again Rainbow girls sing their paean of praise to their Sun-God, Chuff Glugg feels the tortures of Hell Review of H.C.E.'s resurrection A.L.P. offers to forgive H.C.E. Night falls and the children are called home The Animals enter Noah's ark The Earwicker Tavern Glugg and Chuff fight, Glugg beaten The rainbow girls laud Chuff with erotic praise Glugg asked the third riddle-loses again Defeated Glugg lusts after the Leap Year Girl Father appears as if resurrected Mother also appears and rounds up her children Children at their lessons but Issy unhappy Curtain falls-the Mime is over Prayers before bed-then to sleep CHAPTER 10 (Book II, chap. 2, pp. 260-308)

260-66: 266-70: 270-77: 277-81: 282-87: 287-92: 293-99: 299-304: 304-6: 306-8: 308:

Lessons begin with Shem writing left margin notes, Shaun right margin, and Issy the footnotes Grammar History Letter writing Mathematics Interlude recounting political, religious, and amorous invasions of Ireland Dolph explains to Kev the geometry of A.L.P.'s vagina (marginal notes reversed) Kev finally comprehends the significance of the triangles during a letter-writing session-strikes Dolph Dolph forgives Kev Essay assignments on 52 famous men The children's night-letter to the parents

7

A Working Outline CHAPTER 11 (Book II, chap. 3, pp. 309-82) 309-10: 310-11: 311-32: 332-34: 335-37: 337-55: 355-58: 358-61: 361-66: 366-69: 369-73: 373-80: 380-82:

The radio in Earwicker's pub Earwicker at the beer pull The Tale of Kersse the Tailor and the Norwegian Captain Kate delivers Anna Livia's message that Earwicker should come to bed H.C.E. begins his tale Television skit by comics Butt and Taff of "How Buckley Shot the Russian General" H.C.E. attempts an apology Radio resumes with broadcast of nightingale's song H.C.E. accused, speaks in his own defense The Four Old Men harass H.C.E. Constable Sackerson arrives at closing time while a new ballad is in the making Earwicker, alone in the pub, hears the case against him reviewed during funeral games Earwicker drinks up the dregs and passes out-as the ship passes out to sea CHAPTER 12 (Book II, chap. 4, pp. 383-99)

383-86: 386-88: 388-90: .390-93: 393-95: 395-96: 396-98: 398-99:

Four Old Men spy on the love ship of Tristram and Iseult Johnny MacDougall comments on the sea adventure Marcus Lyons comments Luke Tarpey comments Matt Gregory comments The sexual union of the young lovers The four old men reminisce over the voyage The Hymn of Iseult la Belle CHAPTER 13 (Book III, chap. 1, pp. 403-28)

403: 403-5: 405-7: 407-14: 414-19: 419-21: 421-25: 426-27: 427-28:

H.C.E. and A.L.P. in bed at midnight The dreamer envisions a glorious sight of Shaun the Post Shaun described at his gorgings Shaun being interviewed The Fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper Shaun denounces the Letter Shaun vilifies Shem and claims equal ability as a man of letters Shaun collapses into a barrel and rolls backward down the river Issy bids Shaun a nostalgic farewell CHAPTER 14 (Book III, chap 2, pp. 429-73)

429-31: 431-32:

Jaun rests along the road and meets the 29 girls from St. Bride's Jaun's preamble addressed to his sister

8 432-39: 439-41: 441-44: 444-45: 445-46: 446-48: 448-52: 452-54: 454-57: 457-61: 461-68: 468-69: 469-73:

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Jaun delivers his moralizing sermon Jaun singles out Issy for his sermon on sex Jaun berates Shem the seducer Jaun admonishes Issy with sadistic fury Jaun's tirade turns into a sweet declaration of affection Jaun campaigns for civic improvement Jaun pays court to Issy with assurances of his success in business Jaun ends his sermon Jaun adds a gastronomic postscript lssy replies in an amorous letter The departing Jaun introduces her to his brother Dave Jaun finally takes his leave St. Bride's girls bid farewell to Haun, the ghost of Jaun CHAPTER 15 (Book III, chap. 3, pp. 474-554)

474-77: 477-83: 483-85: 485-91: 491-99: 499-506: 506-10: 510-20: 520-23: 523-26: 526-28: 528-30: 530-31: 532-39: 539-46: 546-54:

The four old men find the exhausted Yawn on a midden heap They interrogate Yawn Yawn angrily reproaches his interrogators Inquiry continues as Yawn explains his relationship to his brother The voice of A.L.P. through Yawn discusses H.C.E.'s indiscretion A ghost voice through Yawn discusses the Fall Regarding Toucher "Thorn" Regarding the Wake The interrogation takes a turn for the worse and tempers flare Treacle Tom gives his version of the encounter in the park Issy talks to her mirror image Matt Gregory takes over the inquiry and recalls the constable Kate is called upon to testify H.C.E. himself is called to the stand and delivers his selfdefense H.C.E. boasts of the great city he has founded and rules H.C.E. recounts the conquest of A.L.P. CHAPTER 16 (Book III, chap. 4, pp. 555-90)

555-59: 559-63: 564-82: 582-90: 590:

Night in the Porter house-parents disturbed by Jerry's cry in his sleep Matt's view of the parents in bed: First Position of Harmony Mark's view: Second Position of Discordance (includes: the court trials, 572-76) Luke's view: Third Position of Concord: unsuccessful union disturbed by the crowing of cock at dawn John's view: Fourth Position of Solution

9

A Working Outline CHAPTER 17 (Book IV, pp. 593-628) 593-601: 601: 601-3: 603-6: 606-9: 609-13: 613-15: 615-19: 619-28:

Dawn of new era awakens the sleeping giant 29 Girls celebrate Kevin Morning newspaper carries the story of H.C.E.'s indiscretion St. Kevin the hermit meditates in his bathtub-altar The park scene of H.C.E.'s indiscretion revisited Muta and Juva watch the encounter of St. Patrick and the Archdruid Morning brings the cycle to its beginning The Letter signed by A.L.P. is in the morning mail Anna Livia's final soliloquy as she goes out to sea

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PART 1: ASSESSMENTS

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Dreaming Up the Wake

**

David Hayman In the beginning was the woid and James Joyce was obliged by his writer's conscience to fill it with expandable language. Ulysses was published by Sylvia Beach over the Shakespeare and Company trademark in 1922, but the actual composition of Joyce's next book, Finnegans Wake did not begin until the spring of 1923. What transpired between those dates is a matter for speculation; clearly, Joyce, who, like Flaubert, never repeated himself, was duty bound to find a fresh and novel approach to the novel itself. The Irish writer never publicly announced any intentions. After all, in an early notebook, he went so far as to list the refusal to give interviews or write letters to the editor among the innovations of which he was particularly proud: "JJ abolished preface, dedication, notes, letters to press, interviews, chapter titles, capitals, inverted commas." 1 It is consequently very important that he conserved just about every scrap of paper connected with his last book, inadvertently giving us an intimate if cloudy record of some 18 years of creative activity. Though still untitled, Finnegans Wake began to take shape in 1922 as a curious by-product of all the preceding works. 2 That is, Joyce began by taking notes under headings like "Exiles I" or "The Sisters," notes that dealt not so much with the topic of these writings as with what was left implicit. Thus, under Exiles, he did not deal with the characters of that failed drama or even with the problems of an Irish writer returning to face possible and half -willed betrayal at the hands of a trusted friend or even with the deeper problem of doubt. Rather, he developed at length a literary analogue, the seduction of Isolde by -King Mark's emissary, Tristan. Under the first of his Dubliners titles, "The Sisters" he treats none of the mysteries of that tale but rather the problem of the oral tale convention. Under "An Encounter" he deals with homosexuality and Oscar Wilde. Joyce was in fact probing the underside of his production for its repressed potential, moving through his own creative consciousness toward a sort of literary subconscious. The procedure resembles in a sense that which he must have followed when he took the materials amassed during the daytime of Ulysses and reassembled them contrary wise to compile the pantomimic nightmare of his Walpurgisnacht, the "Circe" chapter. It seems that in 1922, consciously or not and almost a year before he actually began to write Finnegans Wake, he was already planning the universal dream he was to write. But a study of the early notes suggests that he had yet to fix its structure. As a matter of fact, he did not really establish the book's outline until 1926. His shadowy cast of characters was not fully accounted for untill923. The famous pun-textured prose was only gradually elaborated. And the final passage was not drafted until 1938! What we witness and begin to map in the early notebooks for the Wake, therefore, is the grouping process that

**

This essay was originally published as "Dreaming Up the Wake" in Lingua e Stile, 22, No. 3, September 1987, 419-430. Permission for use granted by Linguae Stile. A version of it will appear in my forthcoming A Wake in Transit (Cornell, 1990). 13

14

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

generated what was to be the most revolutionary book of our century and what may prove to have been the most influential and liberating. It is arguable that every line Joyce wrote was in some sense autobiographical. Like Shem, his Wakean persona, our writer,

the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal}. 3 This rather unfriendly assessment spoken in the Wake by Shem's fraternal opposite and enemy, Shaun the post, could stand as a definition of the operative creative vision of Finnegans Wake. In fact Joyce was using not only Ireland and the Irish history and people as his microcosm but his family and his own person as standins for the universal human condition. That was, after all, "the only foolscap available" to him. Like most artists and throughout his career, he did little more than draw his own portrait, refining it endlessly to produce a deeper and more immediate likeness. The evolution of his lifework took him from a portrait of Dublin behind which he stands to the portrait of a Dublin child's maturation into manhood to the meticulous evocation of a Dublin day and night to the universal history /dream of an average Dubliner. Ultimately, it reflects the essential double spiral of his vision. That is, by going further and further into the individual psychic machine, he was able to go in ever wider circles, learning and exhibiting his increasingly universal self. On the surface of it, Finnegans Wake, the dream universe of HCE, which becomes by osmosis that of the everyman reader, is a monument to Flaubertian depersonalization. In fact, it began as, and in a profound sense remains, that of Joyce himself. It can even be shown that the tightly controlled "traumscript" of the Wake comes remarkably close to automatic writing. After all, and for all his notes and other preparations, this is a text shaped by verbal choices. It is a text which the author, once he got his machine underway, could never fully control or rather from which the artist could never fully extricate himself. Jacques Lacan is right when he speaks of Joyce the symptome.4 Of more immediate interest to us is the existence of hard evidence that, for a period of one or two years, Joyce's last book hung on the fruits of his actual dreamwork, or at least on a small group of 6-8 dreams told to friends or jotted down in his notebooks, dreams that accompanied as well as fueled the creative process. I would maintain that, like Shem, Joyce, who was not above participating in the general enthusiasm for dreams as keys to unlock the psyche, actually used his dream life as he had previously used his epiphanies to help direct his muse. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to see him accepting his dreamwork as part of that process, using it as an extension in much the same way Freud saw dreams as encoding the sources of our anxieties. This can be said despite Joyce's avowed hostility to "jungfraud"s. The author was searching for the universally available archetypes he felt could be dislodged from his own dreamlife.

Dreaming Up the Wake

15

What I am advancing is of course speculative, since my evidence is a handful of frequently obscure notations written in a hand that is often far from clear and, occasionally, in something resembling a personal code. But the mere presence of these carefully isolated sequences, usually labeled "Dream," lends my speculations considerable weight, as does the fact that Joyce continued jotting down epiphany-like sequences (or "epiphanoids") during this same period, sequences that actually helped him develop the personae and action of his new book. The dreams I refer to are different in treatment, kind and function from the two items recorded by Richard Ellmann in his definitive biography. Indeed, I would suggest that the dreams in Ellmann, the one reprinted from Gorman's early biography and the other taken from Helen Nutting's diary, are more like literary constructs. In the first, Joyce describes a comic encounter with an angry Molly Bloom. I have no doubt its source was an actual dream. We even find a cryptic reference to it in a notebook from early 1923: "JJ with MB/must tell someone." 5 In fact, as Ellmann shows us, Joyce told it not once but twice and each time differently. The second dream, an Arabian Night's confection about a criminal at risk, may be in large measure a joke. Both "dreams" are extremely well focussed and coherent. Both present Joyce as observer/participant rather than pure participant. Significantly, the second was told to Myron and Helen Nutting, whose modish enthusiasm for Freud Joyce liked to mock. The dreamer went so far as to analyse his dream's details for his young friends. It is all the more interesting, therefore, that, as it is reconstituted by Helen Nutting, the dream proper does not square with Joyce's reading, that it lacks important details stressed in his mock-Freudian interpretation. While questioning the significance of this frustration dream, we should say that Joyce did in fact turn to the Arabian Nights when he was writing Ulysses and began taking notes for the Wake under the heading "The Sisters." We should add that the tales in the original Persian collection are themselves frequently configured as dreams. I do not mean to dismiss the dream narratives in Ellmann as insignificant since they do show how Joyce's mind worked and could even be classified as belated epiphanies, that is, as shaped artifacts derived from actual experience. Still, we are obliged to question their authenticity as dreams, and we have yet to determine their significance for the development of the Wake. This brings us to a brief consideration of the demonstrably genuine, if unfortunately fragmentary, dreams found in notebooks compiled between 1923 and 1927. But before citing and analyzing a sampling, we had better give some account of aspects of the Wake to which they may have contributed. The basic situation of that book is very simple: a nuclear family composed of father/mother/twin brothers/sister has fallen on hard times. The father, an upright pub-keeping citizen of Dublin, has been accused of moral turpitude. Gossip has it that he watched two servant maids urinating in Dublin's Phoenix Park. He was seen by three ~oldiers who seem to claim that he was defecating in response to the girls' activity. Since the girls are identified as avatars of the great man's daughter, seen looking in her mirror, there are incestuous overtones. The soldiers, identified as the sons separated by their shame ("Shem and Shaun and the shame that sunders em," [FW 526.14]), introduce an oedipal and perhaps a homosexual element. Indeed, if we take into account all the ramifications of

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

16

the alleged crime, we enter the realm of Krafft-Ebing. I would suggest that it is this aspect of the novel that is crucially dream-generated. The male-oriented half of Finnegans Wake appears to have grown from it and another crucial motif: HCE's meeting with a stranger in the park during which our heroic pub-keeper makes the Freudian slip that incriminates him in the eyes of the community. The cast of the Wake is as limited as are its actions (the other two major acts being the writing of a letter in HCE's defense by Shem the pen at the dictation of ALP, HCE's wife, and the delivery of that letter by their son Shaun the post). Like the members of a commedia dell'arte troupe each of them can take on any number of roles that correspond to their central identities. At least two of the dreams are found in notebooks compiled while Joyce was preparing to write the six skits that constitute the armature of the novel, passages that were eventually placed at its beginning, middle and end. That is, these dreams were written between April and September 1923. The earliest account of the crime was written in September 1923, shortly before Joyce began drafting his first chapter to which it was appended. The account Joyce actually wrote at that time is very brief: Nor have his detractors mended their case by insinuating that he was at one time under the imputation of annoying soldiers in the park ... Slander, let it do its worst, has never been able to convict that good and great man of any greater misdemeanor than that of an incautious exposure in the presence of certain nursemaids ...6 And this passage was probably derived from a note taken in August 1923: It is not true that Pop was homosexual [though] he had been

arrested at the request of some nursemaids to whom he had temporarily exposed himself in the Temple gardens. 7

Without exaggeration, we can say that the conception of this brief episode was the necessary amorce for literally one half of the book, the half devoted to a treatment of male behavior. In the completed novel, the crime and its aftermath, the fall and reconstitutions of HCE as father and leader, dominated half the chapters, beginning with chapters 2-4, the earliest to be written. Thus the dreams dreamed prior to the passages' composition may have played an integral part at a crucial moment in the novel's genesis. After all this priming, the actual evidence I present may seem slight, but in fact nothing that relates to the genesis of this mammoth novel which took up half the writer's creative life is negligible. In March or Aprill923, Joyce jotted down the only dream that is not clearly labelled as such. At that time he was working on the first passage actually to be drafted, an account of the aftermath of the last great banquet given by Roderick O'Conor, the "last high king of all Ireland." The dream itself is at once the most questionable and the most tantalizing in my collection, but it does bear witness to a significant cluster of preoccupations. It reads: pull m - y behind door sawdust wh[ores] toss H[usband] off cart, haggle

Dreaming Up the Wake

17

Stop singing! Leave the room! rubber cunt. Sgt! show him album clap! tell story - 'my husband' purge him, shitcan reek, dairy [?], ask leave 3 t[imes) for[?] go we tempt H[usband] H[usband] write to B[lazes] B[oylan] [?] rod is pickle after- inspection mixed grill 8 The uncrossed-through, and hence probably unused, passage is written entirely in an unusually spidery hand and tightly grouped as a single unit. Among the longest of the unified jottings in this very early notebook, it bears witness to hasty transcription, suggesting that Joyce wrote it down under pressure, perhaps fearing to lose some of its details. It appears to follow a narrative line that is subject to irrational shifts. Finally, these lines have been hastily but completely enclosed by a rough circle. 9 If we may judge by its presentation, Joyce was intrigued and disturbed by its contents, which are blatantly masochistic, scatological and genital, to say nothing of absurd. Any reading of this unit must be tentative and conjectural, but we can fix the major setting as a brothel similar to the one in the "Circe" chapter of Ulysses and say that, along with the "Husband" or "H," an early version of the Pop/HCE/Joyce-figure of the Wake, the protagonists are a group of unnamed . whores and perhaps a persona designated by the letters BB (Blazes Boylan?). The action is best seen as a sequence of loosely connected episodes. The first sequence reveals someone, perhaps Joyce himself, doing something (suspect?) behind a door. Joyce's reticence here is remarkable, given the language of the remainder of the dream. The whores go into action in the second line, apparently "tossing" the abusable "H off [the] cart" perhaps onto some "sawdust." What follows may be haggling over their price. The two commands may have been addressed to a man who has regressed to the condition of a child in a nursery or schoolroom. They may also be a part of a pantomime sequence similar to the Bella/Bello segment of "Circe." Perhaps the man is then supplied with or teased with a "rubber cunt," but it seems likely that that house is also raided by a police "sergeant." After a break or scene change, the whores show H an album (of pornographic pictures?) and someone applauds. Then someone, perhaps one of the whores, tells a story about her "husband." The next two lines are once again violently masochistic. The man submits to a purge, filling a can before he asks leave, again like a child, to go to the water closet. This is followed by a scene of unspecified temptation and what appears to be the public composition of a letter to BB. The next two lines may refer to H's genitals, which are perhaps displayed and inspected. The last item refers to a meal. Any assessment of the Wake's first months must take into consideration the fact that even after he had finished Ulysses, Joyce continued to mediate about changes he would like to make. That is, the completed novel continued to occupy his imagination. It is not strange therefore to find that a chapter like "Circe" on which so much psychic energy was spent can shape the writer's

18

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

dreamlife in 1923. I would suggest that the complex sexual guilt motif carried over from "Circe" is central to any understanding of the crime of HCE. Beyond that, perhaps even issuing from the impulse that generated "Circe," there is what we perceive as a triple Krafft-Ebing motif of voyeuristic watching, selfpollution, and defecation in the presence of witnesses. Indeed, one half of HCE's crime is already here a good while before Joyce actually wrote down his early HCE sketch. The remainder is latent in notes concerned with the relation of Pop to his daughter Is[/lssy/lsolde]. Issy, the multiple-personality juvenile heroine of the Wake, was from the start a version of Joyce's teen-aged daughter, Lucia. Even more important, she came into being long before Joyce invented ALP as an avatar for the mature Nora Barnacle. The curious shape taken by Issy's personality can be traced in large measure to Lucia's incipient schizophrenia, symptoms of which must have been available as early as 1923. 10 Joyce's emotional investment in this juvenile figure suggests that his attempts to find cultural analogues for her personality and her deteriorating condition constituted a sort of self-help therapy. But before the therapeutic writing came the equally therapeutic dreaming exhibited in the following dream: Dream Schwindel ... , [I] awake in 4 bedded room, A.S[.] & L[ucia?] & other W[oman]. Soli. N[ora) Collapses. I go to theatre [where I] meet O[liver] G[ogarty) and E[ileen Joyce Schaurek?]. 'She has a few drinks in her.' [We] Cross [the] arena to [the] hosp(ital]. [The] Concierge [comes out to stop us]. Finis. I howl oatenmealymouth[ily?]. 11 This dream probably dates from the period when Joyce was writing and revising his early sketches and thinking through his project. It is crowded into a space left at the bottom of a notebook page, as though Joyce wished to eliminate as well as ventilate it. Though, like most such passages, it is written in a relatively clear hand, one senses a curious impulse to confine the most powerful part of the experience. The visual impact is rather like that of a spring under pressure. After puzzling over the first word, I tentatively concluded that Joyce is using the German word Schwindel in its primary sense of "giddyness." If this is true, it motivates the awakening in a room with four beds, three of which appear to be occupied by women. Whatever is meant by "Soli," with its Italian meaning "solitary" or "alone," Joyce's apparent swoon, together with the presence of the women and Lucia in the bedroom, seems to have motivated Nora Barnacle's collapse. What follows is easier to interpret. Joyce saw Gogarty /Mulligan as a clownish, theatrical, and overpoweringly seductive presence. It is natural that he would dream of encountering him in a theatre and with a woman. Gogarty contributed, along with the Triestine friend Roberto Prezioso, to the portrait of Robert in Joyce's play, Exiles. If the initial E does stand for Eileen, it seems fitting that the seducer of this inebriated young woman is none other than Joyce's opposite-equal. The incestuous nature of the seduction would thus be displaced.

Dreaming Up the Wake

19

The quoted conversation is clearly Gogarty's, probably delivered sotto voce to Joyce. And the movement across the "arena" to the hospital probably places the action in Joyce's student days in Dublin, a time when Gogarty and Joyce would have been apt to haunt hospitals and chase skirts. The reference to the concierge, however, suggests that either Joyce has translated the word for doorkeeper or janitor or that the scene has Parisian elements. It is in Paris that a recalcitrant concierge might cut short a romantic escapade: "Finis." We may interpret Joyce's breakfast food/pap/oatmeal "howl" as a cry of atavistic frustration, but it may also function as a displacement of guilt feelings. The allusions to giddyness, to Nora's collapse, to the profoundly suspicious and doubtless unwelcome presence of an ex-friend, along with the final catastrophe, confirm the impression that this is not only an ominous dream but an absolute nightmare laden with motifs of guilt, frustration and anxiety. There can be no doubt that both halves of the dream are sexual and that Joyce was aware of many of their implications. There is also little doubt that the dream contributed to or reenforced the development of the Wake. If the incest motif is still only latent in the second dream, it is all too overt in one dreamed nine months later in July 1924: Dream [I saw] Kathleen [who was complaining about] rats O[scar] W[ilde was there in the guise of a] pontifex maximus S[tephen] D[edalus appeared as the] 1st Irish bullfighter L[ucia] J[oyce said,] Shame [?] gave me light Algrin the blind Good God [I? exclaimed with a] cry of shame and horror she [is] only 15. 12 Despite occasional elisions, the exceptional clarity of Joyce's hand and the careful ordering of the events underscore the significance of this complex sequence. Joyce apparently recollected the dream after he had jotted down a bit of behavior signifying Lucia/Issy's sexual maturation: "[lssy] gets rainwater in jug for face." When we consider that the underlying theme of this dream is incest and that the worries of HCE were shared by his creator, the sequence seems to have been tailored for adaptation to the Wake, to which it may have contributed several details. One might qualify the opening lines of this "Circe"-like dream as pantomime, since the first three figures mentioned: Kathleen, Wilde, and Stephen are all either outlandish or outlandishly garbed. In Finnegans Wake, Kathleen, a projection of Kathleen ni Houlihan or Ireland, is an avatar of ALP. A late-comer to the Wake community, she functions as the ancient, grumbling charwoman, a harpy /banshee. I would suggest that she resembles nothing more than the traditional pantomime "dame," a role generally played by a man, who would be perfectly capable of answering the question, "What are you scrubbing the floor with?" by snarling something like, "Shite! will you have a plateful?" (FW 142.7). The chapter containing that line (1.6) was written several years after Joyce dreamed his dream, but we find a version of that comic retort in the current notebook. It seems reasonable to assume that Joyce had Kate's role well in hand when he associated rats and Kathleen in his dream.

20

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Oscar Wilde, the very image of the late nineteenth-century decadent, would be a comic chief prelate of the Roman Pontifical College and an even stranger pope. There is evidence of the direct impact of this dream in a note on the bottom of the notebook page, "pawntifox miximost." Joyce was clearly inspired to pun on the term. Though Wilde is identified with Mulligan in Ulysses, in the Wake he is an aspect of HCE, who speaks of "puntofacts massimus" in the very first line of his longest monologue (FW 532.9). Since Joyce was busy writing that passage when he had this dream, we may assume that the Wildean prelate aspect of HCE, of a piece with the citybuilder's sententious hypocrisy, had genuine oneiric roots. HCE can be seen as a projection of the mature Joyce just as Stephen Dedalus was his youthful self. It follows that Stephen in mock-heroic guise complements a ponderous Wilde/HCE. Among those Joyce met during this period was Ernest Hemingway, whose enthusiasm for bullfighting and bullfighters might have stimulated the image of a bullfighting Stephen/Joyce. Stephen could perhaps have been the first Irish bullfighter had he had better sight and more courage. As it is, the image is pure pantomime fun with an ironic edge on it. The real surprise is the reference to L. J., clearly Joyce's daughter. Here Lucia's name is ambiguously linked to that of Shaun the post and much more directly with "Shame." If the link is with Shaun, then Lucia straddles the worlds of literature and dream, being at once Joyce's daughter and his creature Issy in ways that she is not in other dreams and in the book. It is to Shaun/Jaun, the hypocritical priest and shame-merchant of Finnegans Wake chapter 111.2, that she would be referring and specifically to the sermon he delivers to Issy and her classmates. There, Shaun flirtatiously warns the girls away from his brother (Shem/StephenjJoyce) and her father (HCE/Wilde/Joyce). But the dream "light" is more than a moral illumination, since in that section of the book Shaun is identified with the light of the setting sun. If corroboration is needed for this reading, it is available, however ambiguously, in the reference to what appears to be a blind poet (see Joyce's own eye problems) in the next line. Such a figure must be yet another sublimation of the dreamer's identity. The final exclamation, which is spaced gesturally to suggest its impact as an utterance, seems to be Joyce's own, undisguised dream-response to Lucia's announcement. It does not seem unreasonable to say that the allusion to two (if not four) of Joyce's literary self -projections, conjoined as they are to an undisguised evocation of Lucia, has brought the dreamer into painfully close proximity to his daughter and to a naked expression of his own controlled lust. This reading is reenforced by the next note, written in an identical hand and hence taken immediately after Joyce had recorded his dream: "A was rather lecherous/ B (was rather] lustful." It would appear that the writer had already set about rationalizing what he knew to be normal but felt to be dangerous dream impulses, turning them into literary /social matter. Finally, it is worth noting that, not only does Lucia's name mean light, but Joyce, who was at this time being treated for glaucoma, needed reassurance and relief from the anxiety of impending blindness. Another note from this notebook makes the connection even more vividly by linking the abilities of Dr.

Dreaming Up the Wake

21

Borsch, Joyce's specialist, with those of the 16 year old, whose identity is screened by the sigla for Issy: "[Lucia/Issy was] wiser than Borsch [with regard to] face Iotion." 13 Incest-related sexuality, ambiguous sexual impulses (see Wilde), profound guilt and fear, and endangered sight are joined in this dream even more forcefully than they have been in the earlier ones. What I am suggesting is that at least two of these early dreams, all of which seem to have been important to Joyce, contributed to the development of the crime of HCE and perhaps to the liberation of the author from some of his own demons. Unlike Stephen Dedalus, who attempted in the last chapter of Portrait to separate himself from those who would act upon him, the mature Joyce seems to have tried to face down his urges and reenact his conflicts. In doing so, he was of course continuing the project of "Circe," if not of Ulysses in general. It is significant of course that the dreams he recorded, powerful, nightmarish, sexually charged as they are, all feature a Joycean persona, and that, like HCE, Joyce dreams of himself as seen and as acted upon rather than as acting. I suggest that his choice to make use of this oneiric material, however indirectly, was one of the most serious decisions made during his creative life. Through it he achieved some of the emotional intensity to drive the mighty engine that became Finnegans Wake through 18 difficult years and the stimulus for what became an intensely personal portrait of the nocturnal male psyche haunted by actions and urges and submerged in a sea of vibrant language.

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Notes

I.

The James Joyce Archive (Buffalo Notebook VI. B. 14) ed. David Hayman, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), 9.

2.

Scribbledehobble, ed. Thomas Connolly (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961). James Joyce Archive (Buffalo Notebook VI.A) ed. Danis Rose.

3. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 8th printing with the author's corrections incorporated in the text (New York: Viking Press, 1958), 185.34-186.6. 4.

Jacques Lacan in Joyce & Paris, Vol. I, eds. J. Aubert and M. Jolas (Paris: Publications del' Universite de Lille, III/CNRS), 13-17.

5.

The James Joyce Archive (Buffalo Notebook VI.B.6), 560.

6.

David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 63.

7. The James Joyce Archive (Buffalo Notebook VI.B.3), 153. 8.

The James Joyce Archive (Buffalo Notebook VI.B.IO), 46.

9. Such circling is unusual, but we do find a parallel instance on page 98 of this notebook. In the first instance the circle is roughly drawn, composed in fact of five or six lines enclosing rather insecurely a long sequence. In the second, the circle was apparently drawn in a single motion before Joyce began filling in what may have been another dream. It contains, however, only the suggestive words "serve her horse." 10. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 552-53 and passim; and David Hayman, Shadow of His Mind: The Papers of Lucia Joyce, in Joyce at Texas(Austin:TheHumanitiesResearch Center of the University of Texas, 1983), 65-79. See also "I Think Her Pretty: Reflections of the Familiar in Joyce's Notebook VI.B.5" in James Joyce Studies, No. I, 1990. 11. The James Joyce Archive (Buffalo Notebook VI.B.ll), 31. 12. The James Joyce Archive (Buffalo Notebook VLB.5), 107. 13. The James Joyce Archive (Buffalo Notebook IV.B.5), 14. This note is followed by another in the same hand: "obscenity insult of beauty/vulgarity ignore [beauty]." Even more relevant and startling is the close proximity of these notes to the draft of Joyce's oneiric poem "A Prayer."

An Introduction to Finnegans Wake**

Colin MacCabe

Context In 1922, on his fortieth birthday, James Joyce's Ulysses was published. The fruit of seven years' work, Joyce had started the book as an unknown English teacher in Trieste and had completed it an acknowledged major author in Paris. Ezra Pound's efforts on his behalf had ensured that both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's first novel, and the early drafts of Ulysses had been enthusiastically received in London literary circles. The public acclaim that Joyce now enjoyed was accompanied by financial security because Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had published A Portrait, made him a regular allowance. It was in these favorable circumstances that Joyce began to write a book which was to take him 17 years to complete and which, once published, was to be almost universally castigated as the product of charlatanism or insanity (or both). This is the book that we know as Finnegans Wake. Although a huge number of scholarly studies have since been written, explicating the text with reference sometimes to Joyce's life, sometimes to the books he read, sometimes to the languages he spoke, and very frequently with reference to all three and more, Finnegans Wake, nevertheless, remains inaccessible to most readers. In Finnegans Wake Joyce attempted to write a book which would take all history and knowledge for its subject matter and the workings of the dreaming mind for its form. If one takes a page at random from Finnegans Wake, one may find reference to subjects as disparate as chemistry, Irish mythology, philosophy, American history, details from Joyce's life, all woven together in a language which constantly creates new words by fusing and shortening old ones or by borrowing from the many European languages that Joyce knew. The result of this deformation of language is that every word carries more than one meaning and each sentence opens out onto an infinity of interpretations. Joyce explained his method to a friend when he said: "In writing of the night, I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages-conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious." 1 The difficulty of the language is compounded by difficulty of divining what story this extraordinary language is recounting. Figures change name and transform themselves into their opposites, appear and disappear without any obvious rationality. Joyce's claim for his method was that it enabled the articulation of areas of experience which were barred from conventional language and plot. He told Miss Weaver:

**

This essay originally appeared in the British Council Series Notes for Literature and later appeared as "An Introduction to Finnegans Wake" in Colin MacCabe, ed. James Joyce: New Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 29-41. Permission for use granted by the Indiana University Press.

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot." 2 Many critics have complained that Joyce's last book marks a major change from his earlier work and that his interest in language had become a selfindulgent aberration. But such criticism ignores the fact that from his earliest work, Joyce was obsessed with language, with its structure and its effects. Above all his writing focusses on the methods by which identity is produced in language. The opening passage of A Portrait demonstrates this production: Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moo-cow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . .. His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt. 0, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place. He sang that song. That was his song. 0, the green wothe botheth When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell. His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced: Tralala /ala Tralala tralaladdy Tralala /ala Tralala lala.(P 7) In this passage we move from the paternal narrator who tells us a story and fixes an identity (the listening child realises that he is baby tuckoo and that he can locate himself in a definite spatio-temporal identity) to the mother's voice in which stories are dissolved into the sounds, smells and sensations of the body. It is the deformation of language in "0, the green wothe botheth" that signals the transition to a world where the material of language (the sound of Tralala) has dominance over meaning. The identity of the story gets lost in the confused and disparate experiences of the body. While the father fixes with his eye, the mother displaces into the world of the ear. On the one hand we find the self and the father, the authority of meaning and society and, on the other hand, we find the body and the mother, the subversion of sound and desire. This movement from identity to infancy is one that we repeat each night as we enter the timeless world of dreams where words become things and we reverse the process each morning as we wake to the temporal continuity of meaning. Language changes its nature in the passage between these two realms. A normal syntax and morphology (cutanddry grammar) is appropriate to the normality of stories (goahead plot) but as soon as we begin to pay attention to the material constituents of words in either the spoken or written form then we find ourselves slipping into the world of desire. And this eruption of the material of language is not confined to the sleeping life or dreams. Jokes and verbal slips are the most obvious example in our waking life when another order of language interrupts the normal flow of communication. When Joyce claimed that in

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Finnegans Wake he was investigating a "great part of every human existence"

which escaped normal linguistic relations, he was not simply claiming to represent accurately a sleeping mind but rather to be investigating a vital dimension of our being which, although more evident in dreams, insists in our waking life as well. His earlier works and their experiments with narrative and language made the writing of Finnegans Wake possible but both his methods and his topics remain remarkably constant throughout his adult life as we can see in the extract that we looked at from A Portrait. The importance of the opposition between the invisible language of the story and the material language of desire is evident throughout Finnegans Wake but it is towards the end as Anna Livia, both mother and river, flows to her death that it is stated in one of its simplest forms. As Anna thinks back over her past life, she remembers how much her husband (the ubiquitous figure who is indicated by the letters HCE) wanted a daughter, hoping for a female in the family who would believe his stories, who would give to him the respect that he feels is his due. But the father is inevitably disappointed for the mother teaches her daughter that beneath the stories and the identities lies the world of letters and desire. While the father tells the son stories, the mother teaches the daughter the alphabet: "If you spun your yarns to him on the swishbarque waves I was spelling my yearns to her over cottage cake" (FW 620). The father's yarns (stories) are displaced by the mother's yearns (desires); telling gives way to spelling. It is this struggle between meaning and sound, between story and language, between male and female that Finnegans Wake enacts, introducing the reader to a world in which his or her own language can suddenly reveal new desires beneath old meanings as the material of language forms and reforms. If the language attempts to investigate the processes by which we are constructed in the world of sense and syntax, the stories that we piece together from the mosaic of the Wake constantly return us to the place of that construction: the family. As the text throws out references to the world's religions and philosophies, to geography, and astronomy, we come back again and again to the most banal and local of all problems. What is the nature of the obscure sexual offence that the father, HCE, is charged with? And is he guilty? Only the mother Anna Livia Plurabelle, ALP, seems to know the definitive answers to these questions. The mother has written or will write (tenses become interchangeable in the timeless world of the Wake) a letter which will explain all but the letter is difficult to identify and decipher. It was dictated to one of her sons, Shem, a writer of ill repute, who is likely to have altered the contents, and may have been delivered by her other son, Shaun, a nauseating worldly success. The two brothers are engaged in a constant conflict, often occasioned by sexual rivalry. In some obscure way their sister, Issy, might hold the solution to the problems of her father and brothers but she refuses to say anything at all serious as she is quite content to gaze endlessly at herself in the mirror. If language, the family and sexuality provide three of the emphases of Joyce's last work, there is a fourth which is as important: death. Indeed the title of the book, Finnegans Wake, makes clear this concern. The immediate reference is to a song of almost identical title (only an apostrophe differentiates them): Finnegan's Wake. This tells the story of an Irish bricklayer who went to work one morning with a terrible hangover and, as a result, fell off his ladder. His friends presume that he is dead and take him home to "wake" him, that is to spend the night before the funeral drinking beside the dead body. During the

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

wake a fight breaks out and a bottle of whiskey breaks by Tim's head. No sooner has some whiskey trickled into his mouth than he revives and joins in the fun of his own funeral (which thus becomes a "funferal" [FW 120]}. The ambiguity of the "wake" of Joyce's title, which refers both to part of the funeral process (Finnegan's wake) and to the general awakening of all the Finnegans (Finnegans wake without an apostrophe), indicates the inseparability of life and death in the world of language. To come to life, to recognise one's separate existence, is also to allow the possibmty of its termination, its end. Finnegans Wake not only puns on two means of "wake" but the first word contains both an end ("fin" is French for "end") and a new beginning ("egan" tells us that everything will start "again"). And this process will be the negation (negans) of the ordinary processes of language, an attention to the trace ("wake" in its third sense) left by the passage of language. The clarity of communication will be disturbed by the material trace of the letter that any communication leaves in its wake. Death and sexuality, the construction of language within the family drama, Joyce's text is no self-indulgent whim but an engagement with the very matter of our being. In his attempt to break away from the "evidences" of conventional narrative with its fixed causality and temporality, two Italian thinkers, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, were of profound importance in the writing of Finnegans Wake. In understanding the importance of these figures it is not enough to sketch the positive features of their thought, one must also understand what Joyce is avoiding by his use of these theorists, what presuppositions he is denying. Giordano Bruno was a philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. After becoming a Dominican friar he flirted with the varieties of Protestant reformism as well as interesting himself in hermetic philosophy. His unorthodox beliefs and his final death at the stake as a heretic in 1600 had interested Joyce from an early age. Bruno's principle of the "coincidence of contraries" denied the existence of absolute identities in the universe. Bruno argued that oppositions collapsed into unities at their extremes, thus extreme heat and extreme cold were held to be indistinguishable, and all identities were, therefore, provisional. Bruno joined this belief to a belief in an infinite universe composed of an infinity of worlds. There is an obvious level at which such theories offer some explanations of both the constant transformation of characters into their opposites in Finnegans Wake and the infinite worlds opened up by the "dream within a dream" structure of the text. But to understand Joyce as simply providing an artistic gloss to the theories of an obscure philosopher is to minimise crucially the importance of the Wake. Bruno is important insofar as he provides a philosophical trellis on which the philosophical and linguistic presuppositions of identity can be unpicked. At one level of consciousness we claim an identity and stability both for ourselves and our objects of perception. But such identities can only be produced by a process of differentiation in which other identities are rejected. This rejection, however, presupposes that other identities are possible. The paradoxical feature of identity is that its conditions of existence allow the possibility of its very contradiction. It is this play of identity that Joyce investigates in the Wake where language no longer has to presuppose noncontradiction and everybody becomes everybody else in an infinite series of substitutions and juxtapositions which never attain some imaginary finality but constantly break, reform and start again.

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Giambattista Vico is, arguably, even more important to the structure and content of Finnegans Wake. His name occurs (in suitably distorted form) in the opening sentence of the book as does a reference to his cyclical theory of history. A Neapolitan philosopher of the eighteenth century, Vico was one of the first to propose a general theory of historical change. He held that history was a cyclical process in which civilisation proceeded from a theocratic to an aristocratic to a democratic age and that, at the end of the democratic age, civilisation passed through a short period of destruction, the ricorso, which recommenced the cycle. The very plan of Finnegans Wake, with its three long books and a short concluding one, bears witness to Vico's importance. It is not only Vico's historical theories which figure in the Wake, there is also much play with his account of the birth of language and civilisation. According to Vico, primitive man, surprised in the sexual act by a clap of thunder, is stricken with fear and guilt at what he imagines is the angered voice of God. He retires into a cave to conceal his activities and it is this act which inaugurates civilisation. Language arises when man attempts to reproduce the sound of thunder with his own vocal organs. Once again, however, it would be wrong to understand Joyce's use of Vico as the artistic illustration of philosophical theses. What Vico's theory offers is both an initial articulation of language, sexuality and society and, more importantly, a theory to oppose to dominant historicist accounts of history. Historicism understands the historical process to be subordinate to a dominant principle, which can only be understood in terms of the "end" to which it is progressing. When Stephen Dedalus and Mr Deasy discuss history in the second chapter of Ulysses, Mr Deasy claims that "All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God" (U 40). This historicism imposes on the individual a meaning in which he is already defined. Stephen refuses such a meaning and identity when he claims that God is simply a noise in the street, the undifferentiated sound from which we fabricate meaning. It is by plunging into this sound that we can unmake the meanings imposed on us and awake from the nightmare of history into the dream of language. By insisting on the infinite repeatability of any moment, by refusing a progression to history, one can refuse the ready-made identities offered to us in order to investigate the reality of the processes that construct us. By denying an end to history, we can participate in the infinite varieties of the present. Bruno and Vico are used in Finnegans Wake to aid the deconstruction of identity into difference and to replace progress with repetition. But if Joyce used these thinkers it was largely to displace the dominant conceptions of the everyday novel of identity and temporality and not because they hold some intrinsic truth. The text

To attempt a summary of the events of Finnegans Wake is both necessary and misleading. Necessary in that there are strands of narrative that we can follow through the text, misleading in that such narratives are always dispersed into other narratives. In an essay of this length it is only possible to look at one of the seventeen chapters of the Wake, and I have chosen chapter 7 of Book I, the portrait of Shem the Penman, as one of the more immediately accessible sections of the text. The six chapters that lead up to it have taken us through both a synopsis of all the themes of the book (chapter I) and then through a series of accounts of HCE's obscure and unmentionable crime and his trial

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

(chapters 2-4). The letter which is so crucial to an understanding of all the issues at stake is discussed in chapter 5. Chapter 6 is composed of a set of questions and answers about the characters discussed in the letter and ends with a question about Shem. The whole of chapter 7 (the one we shall consider in a little more detail) is devoted to Shem the writer and at the end of this chapter he gives way to his mother, Anna Livia, whose life and activities are discussed in chapter 8. Book 2 transfers the scene from the whole city of Dublin to a particular public house in Chapelizod, one of Dublin's suburbs. In chapter 1 the children play outside the pub and in chapter 2 they have been put to bed in one of the rooms above the bar where they conduct their nightlessons, lessons which intermingle academic subjects with the discovery of sexuality. Chapter 3 takes place in the bar over which the children are sleeping. Customers and publican (HCE) gossip the evening away and when they have all left the innkeeper falls asleep on the floor in a drunken stupor and dreams about the story of Tristram and Iseult, this dream composing the major topic of chapter 4. Book 3 finds the innkeeper asleep in bed and chapters 1-3 deal with Shaun in his various manifestations as man of the world. At the end of chapter 3 Shaun dissolves into the voices of other characters and in chapter 4 the father and mother, woken by the cries of one of the children, make rather unsatisfactory love as dawn breaks. Book 4 sees the coming of dawn and the start of a new cycle. The mother Anna Livia is now old and looks back over her past life before she dissolves into the sea of death which starts the cycle again. The portrait of Shem (FW 169-95) is unflattering in the extreme. He is accused of endless crimes and perversions. The officious tone of the opening sentences suggests that it is the rival brother, Shaun, speaking. Shaun, a pillar of society and an exemplar of moral rectitude, accuses Shem of refusing to be a proper member of society. To this end Shaun employs every kind of racist and anti-semitic slur. Shem is accused of being a sham and a forger, never able to be himself, to assume a definite identity, but constantly imitating others in his writing. His immense pride goes together with an absolute refusal to join in the patriotic struggle which would offer him the chance of achieving true manhood. Instead he prefers to occupy himself with the affairs of women. Shaun describes the particularly obscene process by which Shem's books are composed (we will look in detail at this description) and how Shem was arrested because of his books. After we have read the details of the arrest, we find ourselves at a trial where Shaun, in the person of Justius, tries Shem, in the person of Mercius. Mercius is accused of irreligion, of corrupting women, of squandering money and, most importantly, of being mad. It would seem that Mercius (Shem) is going to be unable to answer the last charge {the quintessential accusation aimed at those who refuse to conform), but, at the last moment, Anna Livia speaks through his mouth and evades Justius' (Shaun's) accusations. The process by which the mother speaks through the son reduplicates the whole effort of writing Finnegans Wake, in which the mother is finally given a voice. Shaun's demand that Shem identify himself, the policeman's request for identification, is avoided by a throwing into doubt of sexual identity. The apparatus by which the police of identity control the progress of history can be undercut by the assertion of an interminable, never complete, bi-sexuality. If this imperfect summary indicates some of the drift of the chapter on Shem, we can now look, in a little more detail, at the description of Shem's method of writing. The lines in question occur after an explanation, in Latin,

An Introduction to Finnegans Wake

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of the alchemical operations by which the body's waste matter is transformed into ink with the aid of a perverted religious prayer: Then, pious Eneas, conformant to the fulminant firman which enjoins on the tremylose terrian that, when the call comes, he shall produce nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United Stars of Ourania or bedeed and bedood and bedang and bedung to him, with this double dye, brought to blood heat, gallic acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery, flashly, faithly, nastily, appropriately, this Esuan Menschavik and the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent common to allflesh, human only, mortal) but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud. (FW 185-86) We can get an initial perspective on how this sentence functions by examining earlier versions which occur in Joyce's notebooks. 3 The first, very short, draft of chapter 7 contains some preliminary suggestions, in Latin, of the equation between writing and excretion which the final text insists on but there is no hint of the English passage we are considering. In the next draft, however, we can read: "With the dye he wrote minutely, appropriately over every part of the only foolscap available, his own body, till integument slowly unfolded universal history & that self which he hid from the world grew darker & darker in outlook." Joyce then started to revise the sentence (all additions are italicised): "With the double dye he wrote minutely, appropriately over every part of the only foolscap available, his own body, till one integument slowly unfolded universal history the reflection from his individual person of life unlivable transaccidentated in the slow fire of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to all flesh, mortal only, & that self which he hid from the world grew darker & darker in its outlook." In the first version of the sentence we are given an account of how the writer produces his work. The sentence is not syntactically difficult or lexically complex with the exception of the word "integument" which means a "covering" or "skin" and which refers here to the parchment, the material, on which the text is written. The text itself is, of course, Finnegans Wake (a universal and atemporal history) but it is also earlier manuscripts. There is no question of understanding writing as an aesthetic production of a disembodied and creative mind; to write is to engage in a transaction between body and language, word and flesh. It is not surprising that this activity may seem to resemble the small infant's play with all the parts and productions of his body for throughout Finnegans Wake adult behavior is never far distant from children's play and phantasy. But if the writer is transforming his body into the text we are reading, his self, hidden from the world, is becoming more and more pessimistic. The first editions emphasise that Joyce is working with a "double

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

dye" (both ink and excrement) which he is transforming into the "one integument" that we are reading. The major addition to the text ("the reflections" to "mortal only") is one of the clearest statements of the process that produces Finnegans Wake. The text starts from the "unlivable" life of the "individual" and "transaccidents" it into a "dividual chaos." The invented word "transaccidentated" refers to the Catholic Mass and to the doctrine of transubstantiation which holds that the consecrated bread has been transformed into the body of Christ. The Church explains this process with reference to the Aristotelian distinction between the essential nature of a thing (its substance) and the inessential features (its accidents). After the consecration in the Mass, the bread is merely an "accident" while the "substance" is Christ's body. Joyce's writing also involves a transformation of the body but there is no question of an appeal to any ultimate "substance." Shem's whole life is a series of accidents, both in the modern sense of "unfortunate and arbitrary events" and in the philosophical sense that Shem is all inessential features {"accidents") without any essential identity ("substance"). Through concentrating on the "accidental," the writing unmakes the "individual" to investigate the "dividual chaos" that constitutes the "unlivable life." The presuppositions of identity are displaced to reveal the divisions from which we are all fabricated into unity. In the text's final version we find that Joyce has added a proper name ("Eneas"), a demonstrative phrase ("this Esuan Menschavik") and a definite description ("the first till last alshemist") to expand the pronoun "he" at the beginning of the sentence. The first proper name is modified by a clause governed by a present participle modelled on the Latin ("conformant .. ."). This clause in turn contains a relative clause ("which enjoins . . .") which contains within it a further subordinate clause ("that ... he shall ... or bedeed .. .") which is itself modified by an adverbial clause of time ("when the call comes"). The effect of this syntactic complexity is that one has a tendency to read each clause or phrase in a variety of relations with surrounding groups of words. Without seriously transgressing the rules of English syntax at any stage, Joyce so confuses the reader that although each grammatical step will be followed, the phrases and words begin to function outside any grammatical relationship, taking on a multitude of meanings. 4 At the same time Joyce repeats, with variations, the main theme of the sentence as well as introducing topics from elsewhere in the book. Vico's thunder God makes an appearance in "fulminant firman" (through the Latin fulmen, a thunderbolt). His command equates the "call of nature" which reminds one of the necessity of excretion with the writer's "call" or vocation. A further term is added to this equation with the introduction of a set of chemical references which link writing to digestion. The first meaning one might attach to "tremylose" would be tremulous, fearful, but the -ose suffix is a biochemical suffix indicating a sugar. Similarly "nichthemerically" suggests some bio-chemical process although the "nicht" refers both to the nocturnal (night) and the negative (through the German nicht, not) features of the writing of Finnegans Wake. The reference to copyright and the United States of America refer to Joyce's own law suits in that country where Ulysses was both condemned as obscene and published without Joyce's permission. It thus provides more details of Shem's life but the presence of "anus" in "Ourania" and "copro" (Greek for dung) in "copriright" insist on the presence of the body in all Shem's activities. The opening phrase of the final version ("Then, pious Eneas") illustrates a common device of the Wake in quoting famous phrases from European literature

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in a context which robs them of their sense. The phrase is used frequently in Virgil's epic, the Aeneid, where it functions in the narrative as an indication that one part of the action is finished and another is about to begin. Within the Wake such a phrase merely emphasises that we are reading a narrative which has no ability to distinguish between ends and beginnings as everything is written in an atemporal present. The other description conferred on Shem ("this Esuan Menschavik") confirms the charge that Shem is a loser in the game of life as it identifies him with Esau (who lost his birthright to Isaac) and the· Mensheviks (who lost to the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution). If we now turn to the end of the sentence and look at the transformation from the first draft to the final version then we find once again that the simple meaning has been multiplied through a series of lexical coinages and literary references. The original version claims that there is a correspondence between the degeneration of the artist's self and the production of the book from the material of his body. The final version states that the words that he is producing will not disappear and that the self which he had tried to hide behind the skirts of women and squirts of ink ("squirtscreened") is becoming sadder and older as it is affected by the book. In the coinage "doriangrayer," there is a reference to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, a story of a beautiful young man whose picture ages although he, himself, remains young. In its confusion of art and life, of body and representation, Wilde's story is also Joyce's. What Finnegans Wake suggests is that it is the story of us all and that if we wish to read this story of ourselves then we must enter into an experience of language more radical than any offered by the literary tradition.

This reading of a sentence from Finnegans Wake is not in any way exhaustive. All I have indicated is some of the processes by which Finnegans Wake involves the reader in a complicated network of signification which is never completed. Finnegans Wake does not ask for an interpretation that will identify it but for another set of elements to continue its work.

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Notes

1. Max Eastman, The Literary Mind (New York: Scribner's, 1931), 101, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 559.

2 • EHmann, 597. 3. David Hayman, A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1963), 112, 118-19.

4 • For a more detailed consideration of the linguistic procedures adopted by Joyce see Colin MacCabe, "Joyce and Chomsky: The Body and Language," James Joyce Broadsheet, Vol. I., No.2, June 1980.

SHEM THE TEXTMAN

Hugh Kenner As early as the titlepage we're in mild perplexity. "Finnegans Wake"-what does that tell us? Perhaps just that the typesetter has been careless, for should the word not be "Finnegan's"? But the author's name, "James Joyce," suggests otherwise, for from that author we've learned to expect odd things. The very first sentence of his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man arrays words of one or two syllables in a syntax of utter naivete, and three of those "words" we will never have seen before: "moocow" and "nicens" and "Tuckoo." (A "word," by the way, is something we've learned to perceive between spaces fore and aft. Thus "moocow" is one word, not two.) So back to that titlepage. "Finnegan's Wake," with the apostrophe, is the title of a song about a wake, for a certain Tim Finnegan imperfectly deceased, perhaps merely besotted, and certainly resurrected by whiskey. (We may learn one day that it is not an Irish song; no, an American song about a stageIrishman, a being who in his American incarnation was understood to be normally drunk. It was in America they coined the name paddy-wagon for the Saturday night drunk-tank express.) Or is "Wake" perhaps a verb, and are we being told that whole constellations of Finnegans are coming awake? If so, then at least the orthography is accurate, though it does seem odd to be reminded too of that song. One more possibility: may "Wake" exemplify that recourse of the dialect novelist, phonetic misspelling? For "wake" is what you hear when a Dublin voice says "weak," and can something be made of that? Well, perhaps. What we have here, in ideal isolation, is the very condition of literacy: a confrontation with silent marks on paper, in utter absence of contexts save such as we ourselves may furnish, sometimes in desperation. Partly, these marks prompt our eyes to recognize familiar sequences (like "Once upon a time," which we've seen too often to reflect how odd is "upon"). Partly they suggest sounds we might make, in imitation of sounds we may imagine ourselves hearing. I've adduced phonetic misspelling to recall ways these promptings may interact, nonstandard spelling connoting non-standard speech, to connote in turn intricacies of region and "class." (Look at Huckleberry Finn. Also, listen to it: though you'll be responsible yourself for whatever sounds you listen to. There's no guiding voice but your own, responsive to those guiding marks.) It's easy to make the whole subject seem to defy analysis, with such non-analytic naturalness have we all learned to be denizens of Text. En route to becoming deconstruction's buzzword, the word "Text" has been sundered from its own history, part of which we should start by recalling. It's a word highly pertinent to the great Irish theme of orality, the story-teller's endless improvisations, since one thing no story-teller will ever produce is a text.

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For a word that hovers back of "text" is "textile," woven stuff, with its cognate "texture," a quality you test with your fingers, not pertinent to anything made from a mouthful of air. Another antecedent is the name the Greeks had for a carpenter; he was a tekton, and appraisal of his skills gave occasion for the word tekhne: as we now say, "technique." So the family tree of "text" includes loom-and-shuttle Latin words like "textile" and "tissue," saw-and-hammer Greek words like "technician," and their kinship though surely real has not been fully traced. Between them though they turn a text, however arrived at, into something made by hand, like a blanket or a boat. It follows that there can be no spoken text. It's only a text when we can get our hands on it. Verba volant, litterae manent, goes the proverb; words vanish as they're uttered, letters stay. Eric Havelock and Marshall McLuhan are not the only writers who have tried to help us imagine what a shock that all was, when writing was invented and speech broke loose from what is within us-breath-to get outered by scribes. The word outside ourselves, not vanishing but staying: that is what "text" connotes. It even connotes, for that matter, the word itself, an entity created by the space, the last alphabetic character to be invented. Before the coming of Text, the only discrete elements employed by speakers were names, which reflect the separateness of physical things. Apart from names, spoken languages have no words: only a flow of modulated sound. As Ernst Mayr put it bluntly in Animal Species and Evolution, "The transfer of the food-uptake function from the snout to the hands further facilitated the specialization of the mouth as an organ of speech." 1 Mouths are speech-factories, notably Irish mouths; and all that they've uttered all these centuries is gone, all gone, all. But the lettered words a text is made of exist in space the way threads and boards do. Unlike Homer himself, who could call no utterance back, the weaver of a text can reconsider words, scratch them out, rearrange them. We even speak of "cutting" a manuscript, something writers will sometimes do with actual scissors, though more likely with a blue pencil. The words can be selected from lists (Joyce's frequent practice), and once firmly in place will even lie still to be counted. Thus II, as every reader knows, is a number that dominates Ulysses. Little Rudy died 11 years ago, aged II days; that year Stephen Dedalus was II, and he's now 22. The names of Marion Bloom and Hugh E. Boylan have 11 letters each; their tryst commences in the book's II th episode. Bloom owns 22 books (the 23rd in the catalogue belongs to a library). "Oxen of the Sun" takes II paragraphs getting Bloom into the hospital; the coda, on the street and in Burke's pub, is II paragraphs too. In between, 40 paragraphs tally with the 40 weeks of gestation. The first sentence of Ulysses has exactly 22 words; the third has exactly II. And Anna Livia's final utterance-hardly to be called a sentence-"A way a lone a last a loved a long the"-yes, that's II words also. None of these facts is new; I rehearse them to illustrate one thing textuality means: the sheer detachment that permits such counting. And is it accidental, by the way, that in "Circe" the elements "black" and "white" occur in nearly perfect equilibrium, 51 whites, 49 blacks? Or that "Circe" 's next most common color, with 35 mentions, is British red, with next in order the 29 manifestations of Irish green? I don't know if the color-census signifies or not, but it's one kind of question Joyce does lead you to ask. You'd not think to undertake a like scrutiny of any chapter by Dickens.

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But the instincts of Dickens were those of a story-teller, a manufacturer by mouth, albeit one who resorted to pen and paper and printing-press as a ready way to get his stories disseminated. Though all those tens of thousands of readers will have been gratifying, still it was a penance never to be near them while they tasted their pleasure. So Dickens drew his deepest satisfaction from the spoken performances (read, to be sure, from his text) by which he drew laughter and tears from countless paying hearers on countless nights. As to why people paid to hear Dickens read what they had themselves already read, one part of the answer is surely that both he and they thought of the text as somehow coming between them. A machine-age expedient, a text, though it couldn't be dispensed with, could still never evade the radical unsatisfactoriness of anything Ersatz. Also, whether you're reading aloud or silently, the voice you hear as you pick your way through a text can only be your own: not the voice of the author, whence authenticity stems. Dickens and his public were agreed about that, agreed therefore that whenever possible it was the voice of Dickens that should be audible, even at the cost of booking theatres and buying tickets. And just such an agreement is one that James Joyce abrogated. The voice you hear as you scan James Joyce's texts remains your own, but in no way is it a stand-in for the voice of James. Auctorial authenticity has been cancelled. Not in this room, and certainly not in a theater, are we to imagine the author speaking to us. He is elsewhere, paring his fingernails, while we cope on our own with his text. And here we encounter an especially acute contradiction, one that lies at the very root of Joyce's art. To get at it we must invoke his Irishness. Joyce, it goes without saying, is the most Irish of Irish writers; but in Ireland, generally speaking, nothing does go without saying, they're all such great sayers. I've written elsewhere about their distrust of print; they associate the production of printable matter with vices practiced in solitude behind a closed door upstairs, the producer suspect of calculating effects, even of scratching out sentences to start them over, unnatural behavior indeed were it taking place in a pub. Yet it is to be a writer that Leopold Bloom aspires- to be, even, a writer as respected as Philip Beaufoy -and his one effort to tell a story that we know of would benefit by writerly recalls and cancellations. He's recounting the disgrace of Reuben J. Dodd Jr. First he plunges, like Homer, in medias res ("There was a girl in the case," a phrase you're far more likely to read than to hear). Soon he's not being understood and has to adjust the reference of a pronoun (not old Reuben in danger of drowning, no, "the son himself'); whereupon Martin Cunningham takes over and finishes the story properly, and Bloom is reduced to saying ("eagerly"): "Isn't it awfully good?" As it is, if you know how to tell it. Viewed in that light, it's a strange aura indeed that attends the first page of Dubliners. "There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke." That's demonstrably a written sentence, since a speaker would have said "that time"; and when the writer does get around to transcribing spoken sentences, what they're remarkable for is how little they say. Speakers hesitate, leave out words, leave gaps; three dots laid by the pen upon the page constitute the most eloquent parts of the transcriptions. "No, I wouldn't say he was exactly ... but there was something queer ... I'll tell you my opinion ..." (though he never does). What's happening here is that Old Cotter is doing something essentially writerly: he's gauging the effect of each word, the way it may fall on the ears

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of an impressionable boy. Or that's one possibility; another is that he hasn't an idea in his head. Either way, the net result is he can find hardly any speakable words at all. "The Sisters" is in many ways not only the first but the pivotal Joyce text. By the time he had done with revising the Irish Homestead version he'd published at 21, he had in hand much of his mature technique, to set the spoken and the written into ceaseless interaction. What came to fascinate him about his garrulous people was all the things they couldn't find ways of saying, or bring themselves to say, so his texts from end to end are peppered with tacit ellipses. Then Fritz Senn has remarked on what at first glance seems un-Irish, the sheer quantity of reading and writing that goes on in Ulysses. Though in "Telemachus" no one reads or writes, it displays much quotation of printed texts, from the Roman Missal to the work-in-progress of W.B. Yeats. Thereafter literacy is omnipresent. In "Nestor" boys read (and one, who's supposed to be reciting, reads illegally); Mr Deasy writes, even typewrites. In "Proteus" Stephen reads signatures of all things, and inscribes a quatrain. In "Calypso" Bloom reads postcard and letter and the Agendath Netaim leaflet and Tit-Bits, and imagines himself writing, for publication, a story based on "some proverb." (It is Bloom, not Stephen, who is the most text-centered human the fiction of James Joyce has ever yet shown us.) Molly has been reading Ruby, and offstage she reads the cards. That's a detail Bloom remembers in "Lotus Eaters," where he also reads Martha's letter, part of the point of which is his disinclination to ever be in Martha's presence: these titillations go better on paper. In "Hades" he's reading gravestone inscriptions. "Aeolus" is wholly occupied with marks being put on paper or interpreted. "Lestrygonians" has Bloom reading about evangelist Dowie, then throwing the document into the Liffey. "Scylla and Charybdis" is all about Stephen's reading of what Shakespeare wrote. Mid-afternoon will revolve around finding Molly a book. In "Sirens," amid all the singing, behold Bloom writing, and the point is made that writing entails deceit. I can't think of another novel that keeps its people so busy reading and writing. In non-literate "Penelope," even, "write" and its inflections get 23 mentions, "read" 10, "letter" 15 (though one time to be sure the "letter" in question is "French," i.e., a condom), and we hear of Molly mailing envelopes stuffed with scraps of paper but addressed to herself, just so there'll be, if not words, at any rate mail. In courtship's great time Bloom would write her two letters a day. Now a mere delivered envelope serves as methadone. For the written word is addictive: its pushers urge schoolchildren, even, to acquire "the reading habit," a habit by the way that's been the ruin of Gerty MacDowell. Give us this day our daily fix. At the time of which Joyce was writing, the strange phrase "reading matter" had already been invented, to denote what had become the single most fervently mass-produced item in any industrial society: print, print, print. That underlay the economic push, in the 1880s, toward mechanized typesetting: anything to get print out faster, never mind what print, and by all means less labor-intensively. It was only authorship that couldn't be mechanized. Philip Beaufoy: true, you might think a machine could supplant him: but that never proved really feasible. People craved print because scanning it uses up time and they had time to kill, which is Molly's problem. (No, sex is not her problem; boredom is her problem.) Though reading for her isn't facile, she's read Ruby, the Pride of the

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Ring clear to the end. That is no mean feat, I can assure you. 2 And Blazes Boylan's steno, Miss Dunne, fills boring hours at the office with The Woman in White ("too much mystery business in it"). And Bloom consumes time at the stool, time otherwise vacant, with Philip Beaufoy's "Matcham's Masterstroke"; it even provokes Aristotelian katharsis. Indeed, as long ago as about 1845, W.H. Smith in England had discerned that the place to sell cheap books was in railway stations, where throngs confronted the prospect, and commuters the daily prospect, of a vacant hour or two, just sitting. The genteel press duly railed at "The Railway Novel," an order of paper trash like Pampers, mass-produced for contingencies. And by about 1900 James Augustine Joyce in Dublin began to wonder how on earth any reader made sense of anything at all. What strange new order of skill was now deployed? "Glancing round hastily to see that he was unobserved, the intrepid fellow mounted the steps, and after wrestling with the window fastenings with his knife, gained admission to the house." That sentence comes from Tit-Bits for I May 1897, where it's ascribed to the authentic Philip Beaufoy, paid a guinea a column, and the closer you look the more it disintegrates. "Gained admission" is queer enough; in Dublin as in London, native speakers of English never think of gaining admission. They just get in. But "wrestling," done "with his knife," is queerer still. For what Text is woven of is no longer language: it's a sequence of shared typographic conventions, akin to the convention, later challenged by Joyce, that cats say what Bloom pronounces as "miaow." And the most mysterious aspect of the readerly skill is the reader's sure knowledge of what sense, just here and there, is not to be entertained, not even to be considered. There's nothing we're quicker at than discarding meanings. How early Joyce commenced playing with this phenomenon is well known; Dubliners has accreted but three paragraphs when word of Old Cotter "talking of faints and worms" suddenly divides all readers into two classes: the unsuspecting, who accept the phrase for its graveyard ring, and the knowledgeable, who assimilate it to a phrase that follows it, "stories about the distillery," aware as they are that "faint" and "worm" are distiller's jargon, hence that it's appropriate to discard the mortuary meanings. Here the unsuspecting reader will not so much as guess that the other possibility exists. Then there's "the black mass" in "Eveline," which pertains not to a rite but to the obdurate bulk of a ship at dusk; or the company the word "grace" is made to keep in "Grace," a cluster that includes "calling" and "gaiters," two more words that might summon ecclesiastical contexts were the present context not mere respectability. And a way to describe the text of Finnegans Wake is that it leaves us forever uncertain what possibilities we can safely discard. "[F]allen lucifers" (FW 183.16), are those Miltonic devils? Given the litter that's being inventoried, it's more likely they're burnt matches, and the phrase has little point unless we are somehow aware of our need to decide. So readers of the Wake find themselves oddly engaged at what one never does while reading anything else, making actual lists of just such possibilities as skill at reading has long since taught us to ignore. It's a process not devoid of peril; Clive Hart in particular has been rightly eloquent about the dangers of over-interpretation. Still, criteria are not easy to formulate, confronted as we are with perpetual uncertainty about the number of people who may be speaking at once, or the language(s) being spoken. In a polyglot city, even a polyglot citizen may be a moment making

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sure in which of several tongues he's being offered the gift of discourse. ("Gift": was that German for poison or English for a benison?) We may want to surmise that many such experiences in Trieste and Zurich may have been what drew Joyce to the project of a whole book that keeps us on the qui vive because any known tongue may be audible somewhere or other. Moreover, how we page-turners so much as pronounce a string of letters can depend very much on which language is governing. We know a French book is in French just by glancing at a page, and can generally tell that much whether we understand a word of French or not. But in the latter case we'll not know how to pronounce what we're looking at: in such a strait can the allegedly "phonetic" alphabet leave us. Still, not knowing French but needing the sense of a French phrase, can we not expect help from a dictionary? Often; but that strategy too has its perils. It takes Brendan 0 Hehir to help us unriddle a sequence of eight words that look as Gaelic as dammit but aren't any of them to be found in an Irish dictionary: "mhuith peisth mhuise as fearra bheura muirre hriosmas" (FW 91.4-5). What we have to do is sound the words out by Irish conventions, whereupon (assuming we've the skill to do that) we find ourselves making noises ("Wit pest wishi as fare vere mwiri hrismos") that resemble "With best wishes for a very merry Christmas": Irish look, English sound. 3 It's evident that by the time he got to Finnegans Wake Joyce's unit of attention had narrowed to the single letter. He had fully absorbed the great lesson of his seven years with Ulysses, that what he was engaged in day after day was not "telling stories," no, but formulating minute instructions for printers, whose habit of attention goes letter-by-letter likewise. Type, in the days before the Linotype, existed in the form of little leaden objects, a letter apiece, for compositors' fingers to handle. (A text, remember, is something made by hand.) The first thing an apprentice compositor learned was how by attending to a guiding notch he could always avoid getting letters upside down (no way you can get speech upside down). After that it was all a matter of learning where to reach for the right ones, then setting them in the right order. (And note the word "set": it means putting something in place, a spatial but not an acoustic concept.) Now it happened that, fully four decades into the era of mechanized typesetting, Ulysses was set by hand in Dijon, every letter of it. For as typesetting got mechanized to a craft a man performed sitting at a keyboard, the handset book became equated with Art, one definition of Art being any formal skill that's no longer of practical use. 4 Following the lead of William Morris's Kelmscott Press, much obsolete equipment saw a new life in all the fancy presses that could charge a high price indeed for the limited press-runs of their handset wares. The Cuala Press in Ireland was one such outfit, and Maurice Darantiere's Dijon operation was another. Nothing could have served Joyce better than did his interaction with Darantiere, to force his attention toward the power of the single letter: even, as happens once or twice in Finnegans Wake, the single letter inserted (at the author's behest) upside down. So (p. 4) "waalworth" (two a's) turns the Woolworth Building (two o's) into something erected in America where, as Tit-Bits readers by the million well understood, people say "waal"; while as for "this man of hod, cement and

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edifices" (FW 4.26-27), three initial letters suffice to turn an Irish-American bricklayer into the polyvalent polysemous HCE. A closer connection exists between these two examples than the mere fact that I fetched the pair of them from the same paragraph. For if the HCE initials are part of the Wake's special code, "waal" is part of a special code too, special in that it ignores much of the human race but is shared by every denizen of English-language demotic textuality. The list of such codes, if we had one, might prove surprisingly long. They are as wholly arbitrary-as wholly disconnected from extra-textual reality-as are the Wake's HCE and ALP. For you'lllisten long and hard in America before you'll hear "waal." It's typographic encoding merely. Another example is the apostrophe in place of an initial "h," as when "'e" and "'er" say (1) Non-standard English; (2) "Cockney." Moreover, story-book Cockney means nothing very specific except non-standard English as spoken by natives of England. Listen to authentic Cockney speech, transcribe it phonetically the way Bernard Shaw did to guide the actors of Major Barbara, and what arrives on your page will look barbarous indeed, Cockney speech being most identifiable in its vowels. English having but five official written vowels, Shaw was forced to contrive diphthongs and elisions ("Aw'm gowin to give era doin that'll teach er to cat awy from me"). Undriven by his practical purpose, fiction writers had recourse to that simple arbitrary code, the dropped "h," in which their readers concurred. I use "code" in a sense quite different from that of Roland Barthes, whose famous interactive codes are very general, just five in number, and only to be discerned by abstract analysis. Mine are highly particular, indefinitely numerous, and visible right on the surface of the page. Thus doors in English text go "bang" {but in German, "bums"), dogs on an English page say "bowwow" (but in China, "Wang wang"), Anglo-Irish cats say "miaow," American ones "meow" (but the cat in Ulysses says things far more intricate). Conan Doyle in A Study in Scarlet, by a single recourse to the verb "reckon," conveyed the American origin of a man who drove a cab in London. True, after forty years of a reasonably attentive exposure to the speech of Connecticut, of California, of Virginia, of Maryland, I cannot recall ever hearing anyone say "I reckon." But that is not the point. We are not dealing with anything that's there to be heard; we are in a domain of purely textual codes, alphabetic arrangements, and they occupy exactly the same plane of existence as the palpably arbitrary codes of the Wake. They tell the reader which stereotype is being evoked. For all the dense interweaving of its alphabetic codes, most of them public though a number of them peculiar to itself, Finnegans Wake is a book of stereotypes, and we'd get nowhere with it at all if it wasn't. A neat instance is the "us" on which the very first sentence turns: "riverrun ... brings us back to Howth Castle and Environs." That's the "us" of tourbooks, which abound in such locutions as "to our left we see ... ". Though behind it lingers the fiction of a loquacious guide shepherding his party, the Baedeker "us" is a purely typographic convention, since a book implies but one reader at a time. Many passages of Finnegans Wake are cued by this Baedeker first-person plural, and at least once (FW 62.26) the "us" makes an arch comment on itself: "We seem to us (the real Us!) ...". And as for the dropped capital on the first word, "riverrun," that's a direct way to encode the fact that this book has somehow managed to start in mid-

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sentence. As everyone knows, for the real start of this sentence we must look to the last page: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the," some slippage of pagination having interfered with the book's attempt to start where the alphabet itself starts, "A." The alphabet too is a continual presence. "[l]t's as semper as oxhousehumper" (FW 107.34) will tell us "It's as simple as ABC," seeing that ox, house, camel-Aleph, Ghimel, Daleth- are the pictograms alleged to underlie the opening of the Hebrew litany of letters. And if "simple" has mutated to "semper," (Latin for "always"), well, whoever has read that far into Finnegans Wake has agreed that what all Western printed books are made of is, when you come down to it, some set or other of alphabetic units; always ABC or something related. And we're back to the thing that fascinated Joyce very early, the intricate web of agreements, sometimes signaled by a modification of but one letter, that readers and writers, whether of Tit-Bits or of the Aeneid, had somehow come to share, and that accounted for people's ability to read at all. To disregard those agreements, or modify them, was one way for a writer to get regarded as "difficult." The short story, as we have already remarked, in Joyce's young days was by no means "Art." It was the most widely practiced of sub-literary genres, the entire alphabetized world's time-killer of choice. Being sub-literary, it kept its repertory of devices right up in the foreground, where the least experienced of readers could not miss them. And it was James Joyce's point of entry into literature, the commencement of his career of wholesale modification. Among the first agreements he called into question was the one about closure: the agreement that an "ending" will be produced. What exactly has been happening in "The Sisters" the narrator himself seems not to know, or to remember not having known, and as for an ending, the story doesn't so much as have a last word: rather, it offers a last ellipsis, " ... " . By the time he had gotten to Ulysses he was nullifying standing arrangements wholesale. A novel ought to open by establishing the narrating voice, the pseudo-person we are to trust clear to the end whatever else may break up. Ulysses doesn't. It ought to tell us where it's opening and when; not so Ulysses, where two generations of readers have depended on commentaries for elementary data, as about the place (Martello Tower, Sandycove), and the year (1904). It ought to have the decency to let, for instance, any ordinary cat make an ordinary meow; not so the utterly ordinary-indeed nameless-Ulysses cat, with its four-word vocabulary, each word unpronounceable except by a cat. And part of the game Ulysses plays with its ideal reader is the presumption that such modifications of contract are empirically based; as for instance that since no real cat says "meow," we'll benefit by an improved transcription. But no sooner is that idea in place than the book is forsaking empiricism, partly because empiricism was after all the convention old-fashioned novelists had always pretended they were observing, and is not observance of a convention itself a convention? Return, then, to the Wake, thinking now of Shem the Penman as Jim the Textman. What he's up to is what he was up to from the first, an intricate play with that old never-specified contract between any reader of "fiction" and any writer of it. It had become, he's reminding us now, an agreement that established whole stereotypical worlds by simply modifying the spelling of

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words, even by a single letter. Homer had not that resource at his disposal, since neither could he spell nor had he even any letters to think of spelling with. But having at our resource the technology of Gutenberg, we can accomplish absolutely anything with spelling. Finnegans Wake is mankind's isolated tour de force of misspelling: that's certainly one claim we can safely make for it. I've remarked elsewhere in connection with the Gabler Ulysses that Joyce's texts have this special quality when they grow corrupt, that the direction in which they degenerate is not away from the normal but toward it. 5 That is something we may see illustrated just as often as the very title of his last book gets cited with an inserted apostrophe, a theme we may end by pondering: the way, in imitation of his circling book, it served us for point of entry.

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Notes

I.

Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 635.

2.

The Yale Library possesses a copy of the unreadable book Joyce has her reading; it is Amy Reade's Ruby: A Novel Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl. But Ruby, the Pride of the Ring is a more Joycean title, for mightn't you guess, in the absence of context, that the phrase pertained to jewelry?

·3.

Brendan 0 Hehir, A Gaelic Lexicon for Finnegans Wake and Glossary for Joyce's Other Works (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 62.

4.

Similarly, "Art" slowly took over the Short Story even as radio and video were usurping its truly profitable usefulness as time-killer. We lose a whole dimension of Dub/iners in forgetting that its author was working with the most commercial of forms.

5.

Hugh Kenner, "Reflections on the Gabler Era," James Joyce Quarterly 26 (Fall 1988): 11-20.

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FW 606.13-607.16

[Lines not equal]

606.13

Bisships, bevel to rock's rite! Sarver buoy, extinguish! Nuotabene. The rare view from the three Benns under the bald heaven is on .15 the other end, askan your blixom on dimmen and blastun, something to right hume about. They were erected in a purvious century, as a hen fine coops and, if you know your Bristol and have trudged the trolly ways and elventurns of that old cobbold city, you will sortofficially scribble a mental Peny-Knox-Gore. Whether they were .20 franklings by name also has not been fully probed. Their design is a whosold word and the charming details of light in dark are freshed from the feminiairity which breathes content. 0 ferax cupla! Ah, fairypair! The first exploder to make his ablations in these parks was indeed that lucky mortal which the monster trial showed on its first day .25 out. What will not arky paper, anticidingly inked with penmark, push, per sample prof, kuvertly falted, when style, stink and stigmataphoron are of one sum in the same person? He comes out of the soil very well after all just where Old Toffler is to come shuffling along-soons Panniquanne starts showing of her peequuliar talonts. A way wrong wandler surking to a rightrare rute for his plain utterrock sukes, .30 appelled to by her fancy claddaghs. You plied that pokar, gamesy, swell as aye did, while there were flickars to the flares. He may be humpy, nay, he may be dumpy but there is always something racey about, say, a sailor on a horse. As soon as we sale him geen we gates a sprise! He brings up tofatufa and that is how we get to Missas 607.01 in Massas. The old Marino tale. We veriters verity notefew demmed lustres priorly magistrite maxi-mollient in ludubility learned. Facst. Teak off that wise head! Great sinner, good sonner, is in effect .05 the motto of the Mac- Cowell family. The gloved fist (skrimmhandsker) was intraduced into their socerdatal tree before the fourth of the twelfth and it is even a little odd all four horolodgeries still gonging restage Jakob van der Bethel, smolking behing his pipe, with Essav of Messagepostumia, lentling out his borrowed chafingdish, before cymbaloosing the apostles at every hours of changeover. The first .I 0 and last rittlerattle of the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! Heroes' Highway where our fleshers leave their bonings and every bob and joan to fill the bumper fair. It is their segnall for old Champelysied to seek the shades of his retirement .15 and for young Chappielassies to tear a round and tease their partners lovesoftfun at Finnegan's Wake.

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The Femasculine Obsubject: A Lacanian Reading of FW 606-607 Sheldon Brivic I. Gender as Signification, or Taking a Stand

Masculine and feminine are modes of language in Finnegans Wake as they are in the theories of Jacques Lacan. After showing how the genders are divided linguistically, I will describe how the subject or self is formed by their interaction. Masculine and feminine language functions contribute to every personality, but the opposite sex is usually projected onto someone or something else in order to separate the subject from an object. This process can be illustrated vividly by close reading of a passage from the Wake that assembles the family complex of the book, showing how masculine and feminine arise as aspects of a single mind that sees itself in other things. Building on Freud, Lacan argues that the infant has a closeness to the mother in which feelings flow freely until the father imposes phallic authority that separates the child from direct pleasure and obliges him to use language as a substitute for it. 1 We recall that in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist, Stephen Dedalus was separated from his mother and struggling to understand words. As the authority that enforces language, the phallus stands for a firm center that controls the unclear shifting of meaning, which Lacan associates with the feminine. These two sides, "woman formed mobile or man made static" (FW 309.2122), are represented in the Wake by ALP and HCE. She is a river who has no definite form and keeps going on, while he is a tower who tries to stand firm and take a definite position. As Colin MacCabe points out, both genders are described as involved in the act of writing, which expresses "the vaulting feminine libido," but is also " sternly controlled" by a "male fist" (FW 123.810}_2 As Joyce's images suggest here, the masculine function can no more exist apart from the feminine than muscles could contract without expanding in the act of writing. It was a basic observation of Freud's that everyone includes both genders, as the dreamer of the Wake seems to include both HCE and ALP. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan suggests that the two lobes of the brain, in their distinct functions, correspond to the two genders. 3 Society, however, is organized to define certain people as masculine and others as feminine. Lacan, emphasizing that the word phallus (as opposed to penis) refers to a symbol rather than an organ, insists that masculine and feminine are social constructs and linguistic codes with no necessary relation to the biological body. The phallus is seen by Lacan as built on emptiness because it is an idea generated in the child by the fear of castration. In the second chapter of Portrait, Stephen's interest in E . C . first appears in a scene that immediately follows one in which he is mistakenfor "Josephine" (68), so that his sexuality seems to spring from castration anxiety. For Lacan, the penis is only a sign used to validate something bigger, the power of significance claimed by men. 4 The elevation of the phallic over the feminine is parallel to the effort to 45

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fix the meanings of words clearly and to deny the shifting uncertainty behind them, which is linked to the womanly. When words are clear it seems as if we can see reality through them, but Lacan emphasizes that the meaning of a sign can only refer to other signs, so that signification keeps sliding away from what it aims at and attaching itself to alternatives. At any point in the Wake, one finds that a variety of meanings are true at once; and the reader, who can only be conscious of one at a time, feels the sliding of other choices (or joyces). This sliding seems to be what Lacan means by Ia jouissance, a word that may be translated as 'joyance' or 'orgasm.' Lacan says that Joyce's main purpose is to express jouissance, the free movement of the meanings of words. Writing in a style like that of the Wake, Lacan plays on the term jouissance so as to equate it with Joyce's name. 5 If the Wake is made up of sliding away, a Wake critic should not hope for a hull's eye, and Margot Norris has revealed that the center of the Wake is empty in The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake. 6 Yet everyone who interprets the Wake has to install some center, some principle around which to arrange things. The attempt to read the Wake coherently is like the erection of a phallus in the face of a flow. By finding a center, this tempting attempt will leave out many alternatives; and, like the phallus, its pride will not last long. The interpretation I make below is perhaps the most detailed treatment of the forty-six lines I examine, but it leaves out most of what is there, and I realize that other views can be taken. The Wake teaches us that our stands are, like HCE's phallic tower, bound to fall. This does not mean, however, that we should not interpret. Christine van Boheemen points out that reality cannot be represented without using the phallic focus. 7 Even when Norris posits an empty center in the text, she is using this emptiness as a Lacanian phallus, a stand that ·exerts significance to draw details around itself.

One valuable feature of Lacan's theory of genders is that if masculine and feminine are linguistic categories used by all people, then men or women can be as masculine or feminine as they want at any time-if they can escape artificial social restrictions. Patrick McGee shows in Paperspace that the sexual excitement people feel in Ulysses usually is situated in an uncertain area between masculine and feminine, especially in the cases of Leopold and Molly Bloom. 8 Joyce's main women all exert strong phallic powers, as Gretta Conroy, Bertha, and Molly do by having (or thinking of) their own men in opposition to their mates, and as ALP does by deciding to leave HCE. Each shows the will to fix on her own identity apart from the role given her by society. On the other hand, all of the men whom Joyce respects have substantial feminine components. On the linguistic level, each of these figures has to use both masculine and feminine modes if (s}he is to generate discourse that has both the firmness to be coherent and the vitality to be expressive.

II. Subobjectifying More than any other figures in literature, the characters in the Wake exist as signs, as is evident from the letters and sigla that represent them. And these

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signs keeps shifting, for names rarely take the same form twice. Whether they be trees, words, or people as gestures, signs always function as objects because they are defined as sharable with others. Lacan argues, however, that the self can only be manifested in signs. Therefore the self can never exist independently, but only as a circuit between its impression of itself and the environment of signs that makes up that impression. To show how the subject exists as an interaction with objects, and masculine as an interaction with feminine, I will analyze a passage of the Wake that describes the formation of the self through reflection by the environment. 9 Richard Beckman, who recommended this passage to me, described it as a microcosm of the Wake. 10 The earliest form of the two paragraphs I consider here (606.13-607.23} was a separate manuscript added to the Wake in 1938 (JJA 63:64-66), so they form a single late compositional unit. This passage appears in Book IV between the story of St. Kevin and the debate between the Archdruid Balkelly and St. Patrick. Directly before the main paragraph I examine (606.13-607.16}, Kevin sinks into his pool in meditation. Directly after it, HCE is seen in bed with ALP, following which dawn begins to appear (607.24). It seems, then, that this paragraph moves from oblivion toward waking, and this movement evidently involves the formation of self consciousness, which is represented through the landscape. Assuming the dreamer is continuous, he passes from Kevin's emptiness to HCE's fullness. The puzzling opening of this paragraph seems to follow from the last word of the previous one, "Yee" (606.12}, which (as "yed") was added in 1938 as the final sentence of a paragraph about Kevin substantially written in 1923. 11 "Yee" may express Kevin's shock from the water he is entering, and this shock may lead to the image of swerving ships that opens the new paragraph: "Bisships, bevel to rock's rite! Sarver buoy, extinguish! Nuotabene" (606.1314}. Perhaps Kevin loses his identity when the buoy (or candle} goes out, for he is like a church server boy. But he seems still to influence "Nuotabene," which is Italian for ('he swims well,'} as McHugh says/2 as well as an injunction to observe the following landscape. It may be because the dreamer found Kevin's meditation unbearably dull (another level of ''Yee") that a new identity is taken on here, so that the water imagery suggests birth. The whole cycle of life is represented in our paragraph, and birth is followed by the development of the self. In Lacan, the self begins by being reflected from others. Moreover, according to Lacan's theory of the gaze, one can only see something by imagining that it is looking at one; for perception has to be motivated by desire, and desire seeks a response. 13 The lines of the Wake that follow emphasize that the landscape returns the viewer's perception: "The rare view from the three Benns under the bald heaven is on the other end, askan your blixom on dimmen and blastun, something to right hume about" (606.1416). Ben is Gaelic for 'peak,' and the rear view of the mountains on the other end of the subject's sight is shown actively soliciting (asking) his glance (German Blick) by means of a pattern of dark and light (dim and blaze, which is cognate with blast). This is not only something to write home about, but it will be news to Hume because the vitality of the outside world refutes his skepticism.

The mountains become constructions with the opening of the next

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sentence: "They were erected in a purvious century, as a hen fine coops ..." "Erected," "hen," and "coops" introduce HCE with the usual order of his letters reversed, perhaps because he is seen from the other end. McHugh points out that Howth has three peaks, so the mountain, which turns into a city in this sentence, seems to be the father; but the image of the father tends to obstruct the image of the mother. In the past, when things were more permeable (or pervious), these structures were built to contain a hen. The word fine is derived from finire, the Latin verb for 'end' or 'terminate.' As the hen is a figure of woman in the Wake, it may be that the outlines of the landscape and of civilization were constructed by patriarchal convention to con-fine the feminine flow of language. In any case, the landscape turns out to be imbued with womanhood. This pattern recurs throughout the book: HCE projects the image of ALP to create the physical attraction of the world and to bring his mind into the "reality" of involvement. The man needs the feminine flow to motivate him, but he cannot contain it because it breaks down his sense of identity and reason, so he projects it on woman as the Other, and then blames her for inconstancy. The pattern is developed as the observer of this paragraph finds the cityscape increasingly attractive: Their design is a whosold word and the charming details of light in dark are freshed from the feminiairity which breathes content. 0 ferax cupla! (606.21-23) There is synesthesia here in that the breathing feminine air that freshes the details of light is a smell that creates a picture. This indicates strong sensuality, which is confirmed by "ferax cupla," which, as McHugh indicates, combines the Latin for 'fruitful' with the Irish for 'pair.' Feeling is expressed by the shifting of language, and (other things being equal) the bigger the shift, the stronger the feeling. The relation to the object has grown lustful, and the fact that the design imaged is a "whosold" word suggests a woman everyone talks about, or one who sold herself. The Fall (felix culpa) appears here because the subject has separated himself from his feelings and derogated them to the level of object. This may be a necessary step in the formation of civilized man as opposed to woman, but it alienates him from part of himself. The voyeuristic aspect of HCE's crime in the park involves his distancing himself from the object that expresses him, but through this crime he gains his public identity. The subject now finds himself in Eden after original sin, and he is now HCE: "The first exploder to make his ablations in these parks was indeed that lucky mortal which the monster trial showed on its first day out" (606.23-25). Werner Heisenberg states that you cannot observe a phenomenon without changing what you observe. 14 The first explorer is an exploder because when he sees things, he destroys what they were. As a version of Adam, he has been a mortal on trial since history began. His crime was making ablations, a play on ablutions and oblations. Ablation means surgical removal, and this fits with what I have said about his cutting himself off from the feminine. He has, however, also taken his identity from the landscape, and the Latin ablative case means "from."

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A passage from the "Gramma's Grammar" section of the lesson chapter (11.2} refers to the to-and-fro nature of relationships: "Take the dative with his ablative for, even if obsolete, it is always of interest, so spake gramma ..." (268.22-24). On the surface, it says, "Take what your date offers, for even if he is old, he has money." "Oblative" refers not only to the date's offering, but to his round belly (compare "this oblate orange," U 15.4427). Since the dative is the Latin case for 'to,' as ablative is, for 'from,' and inter-est means 'between is,' a secondary meaning is "Take the to and from, for even if he is inanimate, there is still interaction." This recognizes that the truth lies between in any relationship rather than in either party. Returning to our exploder, we find that the statement that he goes back to the first trial leads to a questioning of his identity, which is now attached to a document: What will not arky paper, anticidingly inked with penmark, push, per sample prof, kuvertly falted, when style, stink and stigmataphoron are of one sum in the same person? (606.25-28) Paper is "arky" because it lasts through the disasters of history, and this text is written "anticidingly" because it expresses several opposing forces at once. HCE now uses the phallus of interpretation, and "per sample pror• means that if the right professor is found, the text can be made to "push" anything. It can also be "kuvertly falted," secretly folded or faulted by hidden prejudice, so that parts of the text are hidden and recombined. HCE has now become involved in an elaborate effort to prove that he is unified, to deny his dependence on otherness. Yet "one sum in the same person" equates the Latin 'I am' with sumthing added up, and he continues to be created by the feminine. III. Our Her-o 0 being the standard Lacanian abbreviation for object, we can call HCE our her-o. He actually becomes an object at this point (in two stages), but only when ALP displays herself:

He comes out of the soil very well after all just where Old Toffler is to come shuffling alongsoons Panniquanne starts showing of her peequuliar talonts. Awaywrong wandler surking to a rightrare rute for his plain utterrock sukes, appelled to by her fancy claddaghs. (606.28-32) It seems that Old Toffler is the form of the initial "He" that is completed by the display of the Pan-Ann or 'All-Ann,' for the shuffler is apparently the one who searches for a route in the following sentence. The nameless narrator of "Cyclops" makes an offensive remark about a lewd picture: "Get a queer old tailend of corned beef off that one, what?" (U 12.1176); and the "talonts" ALP shows to supplement HCE's identity are primarily obscene. The P/Q split, a shift from P sounds to K sounds in Celtic and other Indo-European languages, is frequently referred to in the Wake. 15 Here it becomes an image of the feminine shifting of language as attractive. What appeals to HCE is ALP's uncertainty: one cannot tell whether she is coming or going, and her genitals

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are both in front ("pee") and in back (le cui). This arrangement follows St. Augustine's famous line "Inter urinas et faeces nascimur. 16 ALP's uncertainty gives HCE phallic certainty, so her fancy clothes (Swedish kliider), or Claddagh skirts (see McHugh) not only appeal to him, but give him a definite name or appellation. She allows his stones (British slang for 'testicles') to speak ("utterrock"}, and he now appears as the phallus, keeping the fire going by poking; "You plied that pokar, gamesy, swell as aye did, while there were flickars to the flores" (606.32-34). F/icka is Swedish for 'girl,' as McHugh notes, so he played (or danced) a polka while there were girls on the floor. But he also plied the phallus of signification while the lights (flickers) on the flowers drew him. On one level, these were flowers of speech, for Lacan's idea that everything occurs in words is the rule for anyone who lives in writing. 17 After all "gamesy" is one of the frequent references to the fact that Joyce is behind HCE and all of the other signifiers in the Wake. Yet the phallic signifier is a linguistic construct that cannot be filled by anyone; and having gained a sense of fulfillment by seducing or masturbating over every available woman (two more meanings of the last sentence cited) and debasing the object through which he exists, HCE is now beginning to decline, as indicated by the past of "while there were flickars." His inability to fit his definition is emphasized here: He may be humpy, nay, he may be dumpy but there is always something racy about, say, a sailor on a horse. As soon as we sale him geen we gates a sprise! (606.34-36) Another reference to the Fall appears by way of Humpty Dumpty as HCE fails to fit into the expected shape because he is humpy and dumpy. As a sailor on horseback, he is out of place, but his incongruity, the surprise with which he greets you "we gates" (German wie geht's? ['how are you?'] as McHugh notes) is what makes him vital (racy). He comes alive whenever he goes beyond the fixed meanings in which he could be enclosed. That may be why, having become a third person on line 24, he now gains an audience in the first person plural. The movement beyond definition that makes HCE attractive is now portrayed as an eruption: "He brings up tofatufa and that is how we get to Missas in Massas" (606.36-607.1). Joyce may have known of tofu, Japanese bean curd, which was eaten in the West by the turn of the century. 18 He certainly refers to tufa, an English word of Italian origin for porous stone, often volcanic (OED), and its repetition suggests redundancy. The excess that streams from our her-o reveals his feminine aspect, the miss (or going amiss) in the master. This sentence also says that he projects another by which he creates himself: by bringing up thou, he creates me. "Tofatufa" and "Missas in Massas" go together to form the last version of a major motif in the Wake for which Clive Hart lists fifty-six occurrences under the name of the first form in which it appears, "mishe mishe to tauftauf' (3.9-1 0). 19 Critics have not developed the idea that me and thou form a circuit that constitutes the subject. "Mishe," as McHugh points out, is Gaelic for '1,' and Joyce may have been influenced by Martin Buber's I and Thou (1923). Buber says that "1-

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51

Thou" forms a single primary word. He argues that I cannot exist except in combination and that when Thou is spoken, I has to be said along with it. 20 Joyce emphasizes the objective form me rather than I to indicate that the self only exists by return from the other. If HCE at this point has generated the fullness of the other, the personality of the environment, to develop himself, this may relate to "The old Marino tale" (607.1), for Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" learns by telling his story to accept his bond to nature. HCE, however, may show the weakness of a subjection to religion in "Missas in Masses." He is moving toward a middleaged accommodation like that of the "womanly man" Leopold Bloom (U 15.1799), for whom, as Bella Cohen points out, "... the missus is master" (15.2759). One reason for this is that the masculine cannot live without expressing itself through the feminine.

HCE is thoroughly surrounded after this by the social connections he now needs to support his position as patriarch. He is vouched for in legal terms (607.1-3) and his family motto, history, and heraldry are presented to affirm his status {607.4-10). The Four Old Men sit in judgment over him and his sons appear in ceremonial form as Jakob {Shem) and Essav (Shaun, as indicated by "Messagepostumia"). HCE is striving for a propriety that will protect him from his irrational side, and the more he encloses himself with external specifications and extensions, the less he can live by interacting with otherness. His position is summed up near the end of the paragraph through another familiar motif; "The first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch!" (607.10-12). Patrick A. McCarthy points out that HCE is reduced to a mere name here. 21 As "nam," he is a man in reverse because he is seen from the other end. Lacan argues that if identity is based on how others see one, it is inherently reversed and distorted. 22 In Ulysses, when Bloom is in Nighttown, his guilt is evoked and he imagines the voice of society criticizing him in the form of "the watch" {15.676-1223). Kimberly Devlin points out that Joyce shows that shame is always caused by a sense of being watched. 23 HCE is a "Watch" because he consists of what others see. And because a major component of what sees and generates him is feminine, he is between the genders; so he lives in an "anniverse" ruled by ALP, and he takes the neuter pronoun it. The assemblage of social obligations around HCE constricts him by enveloping him in so many definitions. Yet the potential that is being cut down in him is also being dispersed among his dependents. The whole construct that is wearing HCE out is seen as a big clock run by the Four Old Men, and as Michael O'Shea suggested at a reading session, the two sons are carved figures that ring the hour: ... all four horolodgereies still gonging restage Jakob van der Bethel, smolking behing his pipe, with Essav of Messagepostumia, lentling out his borrowed chafingdish, before cymbaloosing the apostles at every hours of changeover. (607.7-10) A cymbal is struck for the hour here; but since McHugh says that cymbal is derived from the Greek for 'cup,' something is also being let out of a cup.

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Apostle is based on the Greek for 'one who is sent forth,' and HCE's spirit is being loosed among his apostles in a process of changeover that takes place at every hour.

HCE now faces old age, which may be a heroic highway in the sense of a place where everyone confronts death: Heroes' Highway where our fleshers leave their bonings and every bob and joan to fill the bumper fair. It is their segnall for old Champelysied to seek the shades of his retirement and for young Chappielassies to tear a round and tease their partners lovesoftfun at Finnegan's Wake. (607.12-16) "Fill the Bumper Fair!" (as McHugh notes) is a song written by Thomas Moore to atune called "Bob and Joan." A book could be written about the hundreds of references to Moore's Irish Melodies in the Wake. The present poem, an advertisement for alcoholism, says that when Prometheus stole fire from the gods, he needed a place to put it, so he put it in Bacchus's cup, where it mixed with wine, and this is why drinking gives such spirit. In our passage, the spirit passes from the old vessel to the new. The appearance of Shem and Shaun suggested a particularly strong version of two figures who cannot exist except by interaction with each other; and the present passage adds another version of reciprocity, this time inverse, for it repeats the idea that the decline of HCE is the growth of the young people around him. Compare Stephen's statement in "Scylla and Charybdis": "... his growth is his father's decline ... "(U 9.856). If HCE declines by linking himself to too many identities, we may say that as "Old Champelysied," the palsied old champ has the sophistication of a boulevardier; but he is also a ghost, for Champs E/ysees means 'fields of Elysium.' The apostrophe in "Finnegan's" makes the end of the paragraph refer primarily to the wake rather than to the book. If the young rejoice while HCE fades, it seems that 'love's oft fun' at the wake because the decline of the parent is stimulating to the children. On the other hand, love is seen here as soft fun in which one teaches by teasing. These images show the mixing of active and passive, subject and object, indicating how men and women both give and take to create each other by exchanging feeling. The successor of Old Champelysied will be like him, "young Chappielassies," figures each of whom combines subject and object, masculine and feminine, in a single signifier. In the next paragraph, which originally completed the compositional unit of 1938, HCE apparently half wakes to find himself so entangled with his wife that he cannot tell which is which: That my dig pressed in your dag si .... Mees is thees knees. Thi is mi. We have caught oneselves, Sveasmeas, in somes incontigruity coumplegs of heoponhurrish marrage from whose I most sublumbunate. (607 .17-21) John Bishop has amply demonstrated in Joyce's Book of the Dark that the

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dreaming of the Wake seems to be influenced by the "external" events of the physical reactions of the sleeper, 24 so the dream passage we have been examining may have been influenced by the feelings of HCE's body touching ALP's. Bishop does add, however, that we cannot be certain of any of the supposedly external events that impinge on the dreamer. Whether or not ALP is actually there, the situation illustrates a psychological truth of marriage; one is often kidding oneself if one tries to distinguish whether a given feeling, thought, or action comes from one mate or another. In such situations it is clear that the source of the impulse is really a field of interplay between the two. Joyce presents marriage as a 'marring' of distinctions between 'he' and 'her' in such elements as the reversal of "is" in the first sentence quoted and the positing in the third of "oneselves." Lacan represents an indeterminate third party at every dialogue by the term the Other.r; The Other can never be known or seen, but it feels like an external, personal agency or consciousness. Its presence here is indicated by the pronoun "whose": "heoponhurrish marrage from whose I most sublumbunate." Since lumbar means 'of the loins' and nates means 'buttocks,' this has the physical meaning of taking one part of the body out from under another. But its main meaning is that he must sublimate out of 'its' entanglement, the entanglement of an indefinite third party. HCE must pretend that he is he and she is she to avoid realizing that the truth of his being lies between them. After this the dawn appears that will end the book, and presumably return to the external world of clear definitions in which man and woman are opposed. The vision of the Wake, however, is a vision in which personality is located in the field between individuals, a field in which subject is object and masculine is feminine.

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I.

Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 55-57. This is the most comprehensive summary of Lacan's theories available.

2. Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1979), 146. 3. Ragland-Sullivan, Philosophy, 291. Ragland-Sullivan points out that the differentiation of the lobes of the brain takes place at the age of five, when sex differences have been learned. She argues that differences between male and female brains may be caused by social conditioning rather than by biology. 4. "The Meaning of the Phallus," in Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, Feminine Sexuality, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), 74-85. The Introductions to this book by Mitchell and Rose are the clearest introduction to Lacan's thought available. 5.

Jacques Aubert, ed., Joyce avec Lacan (Paris: Navarin, 1987), 27, 36. Four of Lacan's writings on Joyce are in this collection. Eight more appeared soon after they were composed (1975-1976) in the undated periodical Ornicar?, numbers 6-11.

· 6. Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 7. Christine van Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender, and Authority from Fielding to Joyce (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 38-42. 8. Patrick McGee, Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's Ulysses (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 117, 128. McGee joins Norris, MacCabe, and van Boheemen as one of the best Lacanian critics of Joyce working in English. 9. The best available analysis of this passage seems to me to be William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 315-316. Another good treatment of it is Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, Understanding Finnegans Wake: A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce's Masterpiece (New York: Garland, 1982), 299-300. 10. I participated in an Ensemble Interpretation of this passage with the Philadelphia Wake Circle at the Milwaukee Joyce Conference on 13 June 1987. I am grateful to Dick Beckman, our leader, and to the other members of the group: Martha Davis, Morton Levitt, Timothy Martin, and Michael O'Shea.

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II. Joyce wrote "Yed" on a typescript "probably early" in 1938, the time listed for our two paragraphs (JJA 63:41,63). ''Yed" is typed in two later typescripts, but becomes "Yee" in a galley proof of November 1938 (63:93,113,301). Among the OED meanings for the Anglo-Saxon yed are 'tell, sing, and dispute.' Compare FW 605.4. 12. Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 606. Because McHugh, who takes many points from earlier scholars, uses the same page numbers as the Wake, I will not have to use notes for my further references to him. There are many fine points on the present Wake passage in McHugh, and in Tindall and others, that I do not mention because they are not relevant to my interpretation. 13. The idea of the self originating in reflection appears in "The mirror stage as formative ... " (1949), in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7. The theory of the gaze is in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 72-83. 14. Werner Heisenberg, "Non-Objective Science and Uncertainty," in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 444-450. 15. The P/K Split is explained in Brendan 0 Hehir, A Gaelic Lexicon for Finnegans Wake and Glossary for Joyce's Other Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 403-405. 16. 'We are born between piss and shit,' cited in Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 187-188. 17. Lacan hears a voice saying, "Everything is language: language when my heart beats faster ..." in "The Freudian thing ..." (1955), in Ecrits, 124. He means that a sensation can only be perceived by comparing it to other sensations, and this puts it into language. 18. L. Patrick Coyle, The World Encyclopedia of Food (New York: Facts on File, 1982), 642. 19. Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 222-223. 20. Will Herberg, ed., The Writings of Martin Buber (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 43-44. According to Michael O'Siadhail, Learning Irish (Reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 12, 40, mise is the first person disjunctive pronoun, a form that is either the object or implies contrast. Thanks for advice on the Gaelic to Mary Ellen Cohane. 21. Patrick A. McCarthy, The Riddles of Finnegans Wake (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1980), 101-102.

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220 This idea is explained well in Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage, 1974), 39-400 230 Kim Devlin, "'See ourselves as others see us': Joyce's Look at the Eye of the Other," PMLA 104 (1989): 8830 I have also learned from her "Self and Other in Finnegans Wake," JJQ 10 (Fall 1983): 31-500 240 John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 278-2860 Bishop observes also that HCE cannot exist independently of his consort, so that the hero of the Wake is "dyadic" (367)0 250 "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire 0 0 0 ," in Ecrits, 3050

Quinet in the Wake: The Proof or the Pudding? Bernard Benstock Several theories have been proposed regarding the narrative structure of Finnegans Wake, and each has had its advocates: that it is a continuous narrative, or that there is a narrative line that is constantly being interrupted, or that multiple narratives are embedded into each other, or that there is a thematic structure containing narrative analogues, or that a series of points of reference operate within oscillating perspectives, or that a narrative coexists with various near-narratives and constant commentaries-none of these theories need be discarded and all may function in conjunction with each other. With no organizing schema available, these approaches may provide structuring possibilities. There has on occasion been the suggestion that some basic concept underlies the shifting narrative(s) of Finnegans Wake, and a certain amount of attention has been paid to a sentence from Edgar Quinet's Introduction a Ia philosophie de l'histoire de l'humanite that has an almost unique existence in Joyce's Finnegans Wake: it is quoted in its entirety and in the original language (FW 281.4-13) as a paragraph unto itself. Except for three slight discrepancies, probably due to Joyce's habit of quoting from memory, the sentence stands undistorted in the middle of the Night Lessons chapter. Its privileged condition as one of the few self -contained references gives it the stature of the highly focused set-pieces, yet its placement within the lessons context, like the placements of its variants in other contexts in the Wake, raises important questions regarding its overall position in Joyce's scheme of things. Does it provide a philosophic grid for the narrative ventures of the text, or is it there because, as Joyce indicated, he appreciated the balance and rhythms of the sentence? Does it provide a context for the events in the particular episodes, or does it derive its potency from the context that contains it? Like the materials from the Dublin Annals, the Quinet sentence has only a handful of echoes in the text and is therefore all the more suitable for an attempt at thorough analysis. What actually constitutes a context? In this case a foreshadowing of the full French sentence exists some ten pages earlier, and numerous glimpses into the gist of the sentence are spotted along the way. These "indicators" are:

puny wars (FW 270.30-31) The O'Brien, The O'Connor, The Mac Loughlin and the Mac Namara (FW 270.31-271.2) duo of druidesses ... and the tryonforit (FW 271.4-5) From the butts of Heber and Heremon ... brood our pansies (FW 271.19-20) As they warred (FW 271.22-23) Dark ages clasp the daisy roots (FW 272.9) Hengegst and Horsesauce, take your heads out of that taletub! (FW 272.17-18) threehandshighs ... twofootlarge (FW 272.22-23) span of peace (FW 273.4-5) 57

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake we keep is peace (FW 276.26-27) With a pansy (FW 278.5) Since ails war that end war (FW 279.5-6) using her flower (FW 280.24-25) a field of faery blithe as this flowing wild (FW 281.3)

These may seem disparate and disconnected elements, especially when applied to the Quinet sentence, but at this juncture almost halfway through the Wake various echoes have already conspired to establish something of a context even before we read the sentence itself: Aujourd'hui comme aux temps de Pline et de Colume/le Ia jacinthe se piaU dans les GauZes, Ia pervenche en 1/lyrie, Ia marguerite sur les ruines de Numance et pendant qu'autour d'elles les villes ont change de maftres et de noms, que plusieurs sont entrees dans le neant, que les civilisations se sont choquees et brisees, leur paisibles generations ont traverse les ages et sont arrivees jusqu'il nous, frafches et riantes comme aux jours des batailles. ( FW 281.4-/3)

Issy's footnotes to the sentence acknowledge the French locale with references to the Gallic chief that fought the Romans and to the Arch of Triumph, and calls for a translation from the obviously foreign language. Shaun's marginal note, "THE PART PLAYED BY BELLETRISTICKS IN THE BELLUM-PAXBELLUM. MUTUOMORPHOMUTA TION" (FW 28I.R) calls attention to the appreciation of the beauty of the sentence, the War-and-Peace context, and the system of change-significantly in Latin. Shem's marginal note spots "Twos Don Johns" in Pliny and Columella and "Threes Totty Askins" in hyacinth, periwinkle and daisy, the two girls and three soldiers with their sexes reversed. These three commentators on the text reflect an awareness of several aspects of the governing context, as does the paragraph of "commentary" that follows the Quinet sentence. Unlike the frequent instances at which "sober" commentary follows "imaginative" narrative (the preceding paragraph is a case in point: Issy's attempt at letterwriting leads into the observations that become the introduction to Quinet), the fanciful and rather wild comments that evolve from the Quinet sentence begin with exclamations regarding the three flowers: "Margaritomancy! Hyacinthinous pervinciveness! Flowers" (FW 281.14-15). Despite floral innocence, and Quinet's "long view" of history, a suggestion of divination has intruded, a hint of Stephen Dedalus's concern about the course of Roman history had Caesar listened to the Soothsayer. And Roman history for Stephen had been suggested by knives, the stabbing of Caesar by his betrayers, so Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, as well as his Othello (betrayal, knifing, jealousy), quickly produce the literary context ·("But Bruto and Cassio are ware only of trifid tongues"; "What if she love Sieger less though she leave Ruhm moan?"-FW 281.15-16, 22-23). The triumph of peace in Quinet's observation fails to materialize in the world of "brothers' broil." There is an implication of a natural belligerency that belies the promises of peace, a masculine compulsion overturning the feminine "heptarched span of peace" (FW 273.4-5). World conquest implied in "That's how our oxyggent has gotten ahold of half their world" (FW 281.24-25) seems hardly the conquest of battlefields by wild flowers; nor can we mistake the instinct for battle in "A flink dab for a freck dive and a stern poise for a swift pounce was frankly at the manual arith sure enough which was the bekase he knowed from his cradle, no bird better, why his

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fingures were giving him whatfor to fife with" (FW 282.7 -12), although the martial arts could be offset if the fife were to replace the fight. The cynical reaction to Quinet apparent in the commentary is relaxed when combat turns into sports, and Issy can add her comment: "Gamester Damester in the road to Rouen he grows more like his deed every die" (FW 283.F2). Quinet's belletristic gambit (Aujourd'hui comme aux jours de Pline et de Columel/e-Joyce replaced jours with temps) provides the text with something that the author was constantly in search of, a traditional narrative beginning; and a narrative beginnings parallel historical beginnings. A false opening that anticipates the Quinet sentence exists ten pages earlier and, introducing Heber and Heremon, the legendary founders of the Irish people, it stresses warfare in contradistinction to Quinet's stress on paisibles generations: From the butts of Heber and Heremon, nolens volens, brood our pansies, brune in brume. There's a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be. As they warred in their big innings ease now we never shall know. (FW 271.19-24) This intrusion of an Irished Quinet belongs to Issy: while the boys are doing their mathematics lessons ("jemmijohns will cudgel about some a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan's divisional tables"-FW 268.7-9), Issy is learning "gramma's grammar" (FW 268.17), apparently from the Latin. She is aware in the diametric oppositions of her two brother (Shem notes "M. 50-50," while Shaun adds "POLAR PRINCIPLES"-FW 269.L, 27l.R), so that she comments, "You may spin on youthlit's bike and multiplease your Mike and Nike with your kickshoes on the algebrars but, volve the virgil page and view, the 0 of woman is long" (FW 270.22-26). (Issy is divining the future by select pages of Virgil, a method commented upon by Shaun at the reference to "Margaritomancy": "SORTES VIRGINIANAE"-FW 28l.R.) As Kev and Dolph move toward the geometry figure that will result in their broil, lssy has read her Irish history and Roman history and anticipates their split in the infinitive. Co-founders of a civilization they are also its dividers, akin to the Horsa and Hengest of Britain, reduced to embroiled school-boys: "Here, Hengegst and Horsesauce, take your heads out of that taletub!" (FW 272.17 -18). Issy's feminine perspective takes her somewhat afield, although her roots are specifically in Ireland and close to home. Ireland's four fields in particular provide the battleground: Shem lists them as "Ulstria. Monastir, Leninstar and Connecticut" (FW 270-27l.L), while lssy names the clans that provide the four corners of the field, "The O'Brien, The O'Connor, The Mac Loughlin and The MacNamara" (FW 270.31-271.2)-which here serve as the Four Master Annalists of Ireland, who have their own contextual relationship to the Quinet sentence. She is reading Livy's History of the Punic Wars ("Hireling's puny wars"-FW 270.30-31 ), so that Roman history once again adds to the context, but it is particularly Julius Caesar and his particular version of the Three Soldiers that she fastens on: "Sire Jeallyous Seizer, that gamely torskmester, with his duo of druidesses in ready money rompers and the tryonforit of Oxthievious, Lapidous and Malthouse Anthemy" (FW 271.3-6). Intimations of the scene in Phoenix Park, involving Earwicker, the two girls and the three soldier, are certainly present in this conjuring up of the field of combat (the letter she writes as prologue to the Quinet sentence is sent from "Auburn chenlemagne," and Shem's marginal note refers to "Ia jambe demarche" -FW 280.27-28, L), the sin in the

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park. That the "park" in question is the Garden of Eden locates Issy's version of the "butts of Heber and Heremon," as she adds: Eat early earthapples. Coax Cobra to chatters. Hail, Heva, we hear! This is the glider that gladdened the girl that list to the wind that lifted the leaves that folded the fruit that hung on the tree that grew in the garden Gough gave. (FW 271.24-29) A statue of Sir Hugh Gough, British general in India, stands in the heart of Phoenix Park. The positioning of the Quinet quotation at mid-point in the Wake does not make it the first allusion to the concept (assuming that we still read Finnegans Wake in sequential progression): a full adumbration appears early in the first chapter and a last echo late in the closing chapter (FW 14.35-15.11; 615.2·11). The process of transmutation is a familiar one: whatever the form of the "original," various changes are wrought upon it, pulling in factors from the immediate context and weaving parodic variations, so that at other instances a mere fragment from the original (or from a variant) synecdochally awakens a recollection of the whole. The most significant change wrought by Joyce is to expand the trinitarian floral structure to a tetratarian one, from a trifoil to a quadrifoil, citing as "authority" the Four Master Annalists of Ireland. The opening Quinetian allusion follows from the four citations from the Annals, and the four alternatives regarding the changes in time since the absconding of the copyist with his scroll. Unable to read the transcription of history, we read the remains of history, the Irish landscape (in preference to the world of history, the Irish landscape (in preference to the world of antiquity posited by Edgar Quinet). The Annalists are named as historical sources (Quinet is not), although the text credited is a Latin one that translates into an image of the color of the cover of the original Ulysses. In this case the "Irish" version of the sentence does not stand alone as a paragraph but is the second sentence of a paragraph that begins with both contextual transition and a Quinet-like sentence of its own, a "false" opening that contains potent elements of the "true" rewriting: Now after all that farfatch'd and peragrine or dingnant or clere lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness, from the tome of Liber Lividus and, (toh!), how paisibly eirenical, all dimmering dunes and gloamering glades, selfstretches afore us our fredeland's plain! Lean neath stone pine the pastor lies with his crook; young pricket by pricket's sister nibbleth on returned viridities; amaid her rocking grasses the herb trinity shams lowliness; skyup is of evergrey. Thus, too, for donkey's years. (FW 14.28-35) Just as the four clan chieftains had been invoked by Issy as a prelude to the "butts of Heber and Heremon," so the Four Master Annalists in the conflation of "farfatch'd and peragrine or dingnant or clere" are present in this prelude; peace in abundance reigns in "paisably eirenical ... fredeland"; the pastoral scene is luxuriant, although it is essentially the shamrock's three leaves that serve as the three Quinetian flowers of antiquity. All is now set and strongly foreshadowed for the world of Edgar Quinet:

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Since the bouts of Hebear and Hairyman the cornflowers have been staying at Ballymun, the duskrose has choosed out Goatstown's hedges, twolips have pressed togatheerthem by sweet Rush, town1and of twinedlights, the whitethorn and the redthorn have fairygeyed the mayvalleys of Knockmaroon, and, though for rings round them, during a chiliad of perihelygangs, the Formoreans have brittled the tooath of the Danes and the Oxman has been pestered by the Firebugs and the Joynts have thrown up jerrybuilding to the Kevanses and Little on the Green is childsfather to the City (Year! Year! And laughtears!), these paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and whiff now whafft to us, fresh and madeof -all-smiles as, on the eve of Killallwho. (FW 14.3515.11) Translated to the four provinces of Ireland, Quinet's world is much reduced, even trivialized, but his triad of flowers and battlefields augmented to the Joycean four, while an implication of a fifth (the domain of the High King of Ireland at the center of the quincunx) is expanded from the whitethorn to a redthorn as well, a battle of thorns to complement the War of the Roses. The waves of invaders that have created the history of Ireland as a series of wars between defenders and invaders persist despite the constant growth of flowers, and return to idyllic nature; while Quinet's }ours des batailles are assumed to reside in the past, the "eve of Killallwho" projects into an Armageddon of the future. Such an ominous projection is soon tempered, however, by the progenitive "war of the sexes." Wave after wave have come and gone, particularly the Danes and the Norse who founded Dublin, so while the "blond has sought of the brune" (FW 15.16), their "fighting is also their "seeking," the attraction of opposites ("the duncledames have countered with the hellish fellows" (FW 15.17-18), as males and females enounter one another, and interaction takes place between the flora and fauna: "all bold floras of the field to their shyfaun lovers" (FW 15.20-21 ). The "bouts of Hebear and Hairyman" at this juncture are bracketted by the sighting of the "Dyoublong" landscape and the confronting of the first inhabitant, the Jute. Written history, whether the "facts" of history as presented by the Annalists or the philosophy of history as recorded by Edgar Quinet, are soon lost: the copyist has departed with his copy, and has probably been murdered by the "scribicide" (FW 14.21). Without a governing text, one reads the landscape, as Quinet suggests, although a great deal depends on how one reads the landscape-and where. At its most Irish the Quinet situation concerns Heber and Heremon, a beginning, yet the mere presence of those progenitors of the Irish populace is not necessarily grist for the Quinetian mill. When Matt the Evangelist takes the floor to narrate the amorous events on the Tristram-Iseult love vessel ("the clipperbuilt and the five fourmasters"-FW 394.17), this Annalist seems intent on applying Quinet to the business at hand, especially as his invocation conjures up "that time of the dynast days of old konning Soteric Sulkinbored and

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Bargomuster Bart" (FW 393.7-8)-both Joyce's temps and Quinet's jours-but except for a nod toward "mother of periwinkle buttons" (FW 393.19-20) and the predictable "Huber and Harman" (FW 394.29), nothing much comes of it. Heber and Heremon fare somewhat better in the last chapter, although again· only as a "teaser" for the final development of Applied Quinet. In the narrative exposition on Saint Kevin, the Irish bog is shown capable of producing flowers ("The bog which puckerooed the posy"-FW 604.3), introducing the dramatis personae of those Irish progenitors and a solid suggestion of a floral landscape. The short sentence proves disappointing, however: "The vinebranch of Heremonheber on Bregia's plane where Teffia lies is leaved invert and fructed proper but the cublic hatches endnot open yet for hourly rincers' mess" (FW 604.3-6), apparently because the pub is not yet open for business, as the reiteration attests: "Malthus is yet lukked in close" (FW 604.7). Quinet will soon have another opportunity, this time in full proportions, although only as the last half of a much longer sentence that first calls upon Giambattista Vico and the Four Old Men: "Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon (the 'Mamma Lujah' known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk)" (FW 614.27-30). Just as the first use of Quinet served as a stepping stone to the interview between Mutt and Jute, so the last one follows the colloquy of Muta and Juva, and just as the intrusive statement in the original French followed Issy's version of the letter, so does the closing echo user in Anna Livia's writing of the final letter, with an acknowledgment of "heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past, type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward": since the days of Plooney and Columcellas when Giacinta, Pervenche and Margaret swayed over the all-too-ghoulish and illyrical and in our mutter nation, all, anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically, in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One, as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it, may be there for you, Cockalooralooraloomenos, when cup, platter and pot come piping hot, as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs. (FW 614.35-615.1 0) Masculine "heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities" notwithstanding (even heroism here is highly suspect), Edgar Quinet's pronouncement suffers a sex change and has been feminized as well as domesticated. Although Quinet's Pliny-Columella pair are present, his flowers have been corporealized as three women, and his battle areas mocked and negativized. The world which might have been assumed patriachically determined, a fatherland, has been mutated in a "mutter nation," and the hero himself, "our Finnius," reduced to a "Cockalooralooraloomenos," a husband eager for his breakfast, prepared by a wife who is writing history. Anna Livia's immediate reaction, once she has effected her salutation to the "Reverend ... majesty," is to acknowledge the gist of the Qui net concept, although somewhat dismissively. "Well," she writes, "we have frankly enjoyed more than anything these secret workings of natures" (FW 615.12-14 ). Her concerns are elsewhere, and she quickly comes to the point: the fields she

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remembers are prelapsarian, and rather than wait for flowers to grow again when the battles are over, she retains her pristine innocence, unlike the guilty male who "woke up in a sweat besidus" (FW 615.22-23). As far as she is concerned, preventative measures must be taken to keep the "Peace!" that she proclaims (FW 616.12), and to do so she warns against the dangerous serpent: "Sneakers in the grass, keep off!" and "Wriggling reptiles, take notice!" (FW 615.28-29; 616.16). Her park is signposted in advance, although the park she returns to in her thoughts is "backed in paladays last" (FW 615.25). Like Issy she is aware of the potential menace and catalogues the personages who comprise the Fall: an "Eirinishmhan, called Ervigsen," "three Sulvans of Dulkey and what a sellpriceget the two Peris of Monacheena," as well as the "cad with the pope's wife, Lily Kinsella, who became the wife of Mr Sneakers for her good name" (FW 616.3, I 0-12; 618.3-5). All the potentials are still operative for the initiation (or the repetition) of Quinet's jours des batailles. The privileging of Pliny and Columella in this instance returns the situation closer to the Quinet source, and only one other case of such privileging is extant in the Wake, although the two Roman historians are more deeply embedded within the construct. At the close of the comic turn of Butt and Taff, the two antagonists merge into "now one and the same person" (FW 354.8) who offers the concluding commentary. The scene has temporarily shifted away from Ireland to an Edenic setting somewhat determined by the Crimean War battlefield, into which Irish elements filter back. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Quinet invades an already existing context, that of the Tale of Jarl van Hoother and the Prankquean, as well as an overlay of the Genesis narrative, "umbraged by the shadow of Old Erssia's" (FW 354.9-10). (The long stage direction that introduces the "BUTT and TAFF" peroration adumbrates the Old Earth, Old Eire, and Old Russia.) The Quinetian sentence breaks up within the confines of the Joycean paragraph: When old the wormd was a gadden and Anthea first unfoiled her limbs wanderloot was the way the wood wagged where opter and apter were samuraised twimbs. They had their mutthering ivies and their murdhering idies and their mouldhering iries in that muskat grove but there'll be bright plinnyflowers in Calomella's cool bowers when the magpyre's babble towers scorching and screeching from the ravenindove. If thees lobed the sex of his head and mees ate the seep of his traublers he's dancing figgies to the spittle side and shoving outs the soord. And he'll be buying buys and go gulling gells with his flossim and jessim of carm, silk and honey while myandthys playing Jancifer Jucifug and what's duff as a bettie for usses makes coy cosyn corollanes' moues weeter to wee. So till butagain budly shoots than rising germinal let bodley chow the fatt of his anger and hadley bide the toil of his tubb. (FW 354.22-36) The constant process of creating narrative openings and closings, usually folded into each other so that a superfetation of narrations result in multidimensional storytelling, characterizes Wakean contextuality. In this instance the once-upon-a-timeness has been bypassed for the secondary gambit: When old the wormd was gadden echoes "when Adam was delvin" (FW 21.6) of

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the Prankquean tale, in which the male protagonist is replaced by the setting itself, and a Grecian "madameen," the Aphroditic Anthea, unfolds herself as progenitor (mutthering ivies), engendering the antagonistic Cain and Abel of the Crimean battlefield (opter and apter). The causes of their wars are relatively simplistic, Mother, Fate, Hatred (the opposite of love), mutthering ivies, murdhering idies, mouldhering iries, but the triad is also a progression, from motherhood to murder to mouldering, with flowers reclaiming the fields of combat. That they are not specifically Quinet's familiar floral arrangement of periwinkle, hyacinth, and daisy attests to the phasing out of one context and its replacement by others, yet synecdochally Quinet's Roman historians are transformed into flowers instead; plinnyflowers in Calomel/a's cool bowers are merely one facet of the muskat grove, among which can be found ivy and irises as well. (Pline and Columelle have on other occasions their own existences in the Wake, quite independent of Quinet, as when "Pliny the Younger writes to Pliny the Elder his calamolumen of contumellas" [FW 255.18-19] and when "plinary indulgence makes collemullas of us all" [FW 319.7-9].) If the "adventures" of Grace O'Malley and the Earl of Howth had been a pre-existing text for the Tale of the Prankquean and the Jarl, then that Tale may serve as pretext for this Crimean-Edenic passage, with the wandering Anthea as protagonist, until her story is preempted by the twimbs, Hilary and Tristopher, interlocked in combat so they are not only interchangeable but two parts of a whole. The Lucifer combatant is a two-part lancifer lucifug played in the Mime by his Other, so that both opponents (myandthys) play each other's role. The rival sons of Adam and Eve soon give way to the tri-united sons of Noah, as one narrative succeeds another, and the field of battle becomes the flooded field (the Battle of Waterloo), and the three sons are co-existent with the two bird-girls (ravenindove), Three Soldiers and Two Maidens in Phoenix Park. Closure is effected by "separating" the antagonists, making tea (weeter to wee), and assuming a temporary peace until the story begins again. Till and let become the operative words for resolution (till butagain budly shoots ... let bod ley chow ... and bad ley bide). Certain words serve as gambits, It was, Once, When, Since, words that interrupt an existing action or commentary, a sort of overall Wakean progression, to begin a framed narrative, an intrusive tale within the developing narrative. Quinet had perfectly "rounded out" his sentence, from aux jours de Pline et de Columelle to comme aux jours des batailles, while the Joycean variants invented for Finnegans Wake are replete with false openings and inconclusive endings, with set-pieces that seem rounded out with beginnings and endings but are in constant apposition to the contextual permutations. In the Mime context the Quinet sentence, with Romulus and Remus for the only time the dominant pair, has very little excuse for being, probably even less than when the original intruded into the Night Lessons, where at least as a piece of belletristics it served a pedagogical purpose. The cavorting Jssy accounts for the dance tunes, and her appetite for sweets gastronomically allows Thyme to stand in for les temps and flavor an indigestible stew. The focus is limited to Dublin and environs, where the only significant warfare is an election between Liberals and Conservatives. At a few instances the allusions weave their way close to Quinet, as when "the races have come and gone" parallels leurs paisibles generations ont traverse les ages, except that the "races" in question may have modulated (as in Ulysses) from generational races to horse races ("some progress has been made on stilts"), so that "lithe and limberfree" may mock jraiches et riantes, rather than echo. Domesticity provides the

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conclusive setting, pa and ma at tea, very much in the spirit of the closing of the Anna Livia version, and perhaps Edgar Quinet is best represented by the dance popular in his own age, the cancan. The Joycean "improvement" is again represented by "whatnot willbe isnor was" (past, present, and future-indefinite), heard elsewhere as "to have to have been to will be" (FW 271.22). This Joycean improvement or variation on Quinet serves as the fulcrum for the only other fairly complete reverberation of the sonorous sentence, and the weakest one of the five. "So hath been, love: tis tis: and will be" (FW 116.36) opens the paragraph that precedes the quasi-Quinet sentence in the Letter chapter, a paragraph that begins with several triads evolving from the past-present-future configuration, but soon forming quadrivials along Vichian lines: "a good clap, a fore marriage, a bad wake, tell hell's well" (FW 117.5-6) is complete enough, yet is followed by a quartet that leaves its ricorso indeterminate: "such is manowife's lot of lose and win again, like he's gruen quhiskers on who's chin again, she plucketed them out but they grown in again. So what are you going to do about it? 0 dear!" (FW 117 .6-9). The "sentence' as such is the only one of the lot that actually acknowledges its source in Edgar Quinet, but not without the usual camouflage, in this case teaming him up with Michelet, Vico and Bruno, to form the fourcornered historical context previously consisting of the Four Master Annalists of Ireland, the heads of the four major tribes, the Four Old Codgers (four posts of the bed, four sails on the ship): "From quiqui quinet to michemiche chelet and a jambebatiste to a brulobrulo!" (FW 117.11-12). Fulsome as it is, the Quinet mock-sentence is weighted at both ends of the paragraph with introductory and concluding commentaries, attesting perhaps to its nebulousness in relation to the tight specifics of its prototype. The two Roman historians have disappeared, replaced neither by the founding pair of "Romans" nor of the Irish race, but a couple of theatrical dancers: Since nozzy Nanette tripped palmyways with Highho Harry there's a spurtfire turf a'kind o'kindling where oft as the souffsouff blows her peaties up and a claypot wet for thee, my Sitys, and talkatalka tell Tibbs has eve: and whathough (revilous life proving aye the death of ronaldses when winpower wine has bucked the kick on poor won man) billiousness has been billiousness during milliums of millenions and our mixed racings have been giving two hoots or three jeers for the grape, vine and brew and Pieter's in Nieuw Amsteldam and Paoli's where the poules go and rum smelt his end for him and he dined off sooth american (it would give one the frier even were one a normal Kettlelicker) this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections has comb led tumbled down to us fersch and made-at-all-hours like an ould cup on tay. (FWI17.16-30) All that is left of Quinet's battlefield is a reference to the death of Roland, while the eternal presence of an old cup of tea is reaffirmed as a kind of domestic and pacific truth. The homely Irish (Old World) scene of tea-

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drinking by a turf fire, and the talk that accompanies it, conjures up scenes of America (the New World), with rum as the contemporary drink. The historic achievement of fermentation provides a continuum (the "billiousness" of "millenions") to parallel the cycles of war and peace, and now has resulted in the "warfare" of American Prohibition, from Amsterdam to Pieter Stuyvesant's Nieuw Amsterdam to the New York of Broadway's No, No, Nanette! As the historian reads the past in the landscape, the Irish peasant reads the future (emigration to America, the American Dream) in the turf fire, and newspapers record the present of rum-running and Broadway musicals. Folded into the analysis of the all-important missive this New World variant of Quinet's Old World view takes on broader, if also comic and trivial, proportions. The "oldworld epistola" is a letter from the new continent, where gangland pistols create new jours des batailles. Finnegans Wake reads both the runes and the ruins, and does so with a certain degree of suspicion, attempting to separate the authorative from the authoratarian, while constantly questioning the authority. The printed text operative in the new Ireland, "our wee free state" (FW 117 .34), is "our Irish daily independence" (FW 118.2-3), and we are (dubiously) instructed that "we must vaunt no idle dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness" (FW 118.3-4). History as a completed process is assumed by this particular authority, "the affair is a thing once for all done and there you are somewhere and finished in a certain time" (FW 118.7-8), the "somewhere" undercutting the certainty. "Anyhow, somehow and somewhere ... somebody" (FW 118.11-12) continues the new ambiguity, so that when the single somebody turns up as a Roman duo, "Coccolanius or Gallotaurus" (FW 118.13), Quinet's Pliny and Columella return to the scene: they "wrote it, wrote it all, wrote it all down, and there you are, full stop" (FW 118.13-14), while the insistence on certainty disintegrates into scepticism once again: "0, undoubtedly yes, and very potably so, but one who deeper thinks will always bear in the baccbuccus of his mind that this downright there you are and there it is is only all in his eye" (FW 118.14-17)-"all my eye" implying persiflage and "his eye" subjective vision.

Despite its tenuous relationship to Quinet's original, the nozzy NanetteHighho Harry version has the distinction of persistent reverberations through the succeeding paragraphs, remaining contextually viable, as distinct from the intrusion of the self-contained French original in the Lessons chapter. The "continually more orless intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators" (FW 118.24-26) impugns Pliny and Columella (if not Quinet), while "the catamite's columitas" (FW 119.11) isolates one of the pair for scrutiny of a sort. Echoes are apparent as attempts are made to read "the hidmost coignings of the earth ... for wars luck ... by the light of philophosy" (FW 118.36-119.4-5), but it all remains "a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs," etc. (FW 118.28-30), "an Irish plot in the Champ de Mors, not?" (FW 119.32). Whatever proof there is in the pudding may rest not in the authority of the document but in the elegance of the statement, not in the conclusions of the author but in the subsuming contemporaneity of the new rewriting. At the end of the first watch of Shaun a conclusive sendoff is framed in a sentence that carries over the belletristics of Quinet without its pontifications. The Four Evangelists are invoked formulaically in "the elders luking and marking the jornies, chalkin up drizzle in drizzle out on the four bare mats" (FW 428.3-4),

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while the four elements are thrown in for good measure: "the mosse ... foggy dews . . . the fireplug . . . the barleywind" (FW 428.10-13 ). The farewell sentence reads: 'Tis well we know you were loth to leave us, winding your hobbledehorn, right royal post, but, aruah sure, pulse of our slumber, dreambookpage, by the grace of Votre Dame, when the natural morning of your nocturne blankmerges into the national morning of golden sunup and Don Leary gets his own back from old grog Georges Quartos as that goodship the Jonnyjoys takes the wind from waterloogged Erin's king, you will shiff across the Moylendsea and round up in you own escapology some canonisator's day or other, sack on back, alack! digging snow, (not so?) like the good man you are, with your picture pockets turned knockside out in the rake of the rain for fresh remittances and from that till this in any case, timus tenant, may the tussocks grow quickly under your trampthickets and the daisies trip lightly over your battercops. (FW 428.14-27) Like many of the chapter endings in the Wake this one veers strongly toward the sentimental, an Irish wish of well-being for the departing emigrant. Only the waterlogged allusion to Waterloo retains anything of the field of combat (it is his name that Dun Leary gets back from King George IV, Kingstown reverting to Dun Laoghaire during the Free State), and no reader could be expected to glean any resemblance of the Quinet sentence until the closing daisies trip lightly by. Joyce is having a go at doing a "sentence" all on his own, making it as melodiously and nostalgically Irish as Quinet's had been sentoriously and concisely Gallic. Quinet had framed his floral images of peace between reminders of battles; Joyce hides his only battlefield in the middle of images of sleep and sunrise, sea voyages and fields of flowers, turning Quinet inside out and privileging the pacifistic. As the kaleidoscope turns the image becomes Jess and less like itself, and yet particles persist in new arrangements. In the Night Lessons, halfway between the tentative "From the butts of Heber and Heremon" and the authorized "Aujourd'hui comme aux temps de Pline et Columelle," the Wakean insistence on the interrelationship of Past, Present, and Future ushers in a short, clinically concise sentence with intimations of the Quinet construction, unlike the elaborative and exaggerated versions developed throughout. Its prologue sets the stage for it: For as Anna was at the beginning lives yet and will return after great deap sleap rerising and a white night high with a cows of Drommhiem as shower as there's a wet enclouded in Westwicklow or a little black rose a truant in a thorntree. We drames our dreams tell Bappy returns. And Sein annews. (FW 277.12-18) The self-renewing feminine principle contains the cycle from past to future in a universe that is temporarily without a father figure-even "as sure as there's a God in heaven" becomes "as shower as there's a wet enclouded in

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Westwicklow." Resuscitation is at the mother's breast ("And Sein annews"), and the maternal version of paisibles generations supplants the paternal legal peace existing under threat, "with hoodie hearsemen carrawain we keep is peace who follow his law, Sunday King" (FW 276.26-277.1). The Joycean definitive statement, in succinct phraseology and uncluttered precision rather than in any attempt to authorize a philosophy of the history of humanity, follows as a renewal from the maternal breast, somewhat shy and hesitant, modest but with a clear assertion, combining the city along with the countryside, aware of military legions as well as legends, and something of a conclusion since it is followed by the traditional closing of Polly Put the Kettle On ("So shuttle the pipers done"-FW 277.22-23): We will not say it shall not be, this passing of order and order's coming, but in the herbest country and in the country around Blath as in that city self of legionds they look for its being ever yet. (FW 277 .18-22)

Finnegans Wake: All the World's a Stage**

Vincent J. Cheng In James Joyce's VISion, an artist is the god and creator of his own worlds-"After God, Shakespeare has created most" (U 212), as John Eglinton asserts (quoting Dumas pere)-while God is but a very major artist, "the playwright who wrote the folio of this world" ("and wrote it badly," Stephen Dedalus adds; U 213). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce confirms and restates this notion, referring to Shakespeare as "Great Shapesphere" (295.4). To Joyce, artist and god were equivalent-the quintessential artist was the greatest bard of all, the lord of language at his Globe.' Since artists-creators-gods are the playwrights who write the folios of their worlds, Joyce similarly conceived of the world in the Wake as staged drama. Like Shakespeare before him, Joyce viewed all the world as a stage, the "worldstage" (33.3) of the Wake. This is the notion I will refer to as the dramatic metaphor. HCE, the archetypal father who "Haveth Childers Everywhere" (535.3435) and who thus also creates and populates a world, is but another version of both poet and god-{)f "Great Shapesphere." Joyce himself, of course, is all of these things: like Stephen Dedalus' Shakespeare, he is "all in all" (U 212). As a god and an artist, a poet triumphs over confining reality by creating worlds through the imagination-and each of his works is an exploration into the possible "history" of such worlds. HISTORY AND INFINITE POSSIBILITIES Myths are cyclical in nature, and Joyce centered Ulysses on an ancient myth. Bloomsday is a modern reenactment of the Odyssey: Homer's Odyssey, however, is not reenacted precisely, nor linearly, but in more modern variations; in the typical terms of everyman Leopold Bloom, it is "history repeating itself with a difference" (U 655). Bloom's comment could easily serve as a subtitle for Finnegans Wake, for Joyce carried the exploration of this general notion of cyclical history furthest-in Finnegans Wake-with the construct of a dream, the perfect vehicle for repeated motifs and variations, for everything happening at once, for all possibilities and all history in the course of a night's dream. He made Finnegans Wake into a Viconian river, "a commodius vicus of recirculation" (3.2).

**

Parts of this essay are freely adapted from Vincent J. Cheng, Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans Wake (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), chapters two and three. Permission for use granted by The Pennsylvania State University Press. 69

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In contrast, for Stephen Dedalus, linear history ("a nightmare from which I am trying to awake"; U 34) is a destroyer, an ouster of possibilities. "Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge" (U 25). "How, sir?" a student asks. A disappointed bridge, perhaps, simply because it is a pier-therefore severely limited in scope, the possibility of its being a bridge having been ousted by its clearly being a pier. Actual, factual history makes it so. Stephen Dedalus is himself remorseful because of the memory of his dead mother and the hurt he gave her. Her death is fact, and history makes it so; thus, his "agenbite of in wit" cannot be absolved-for she is dead, and nothing can change that absolute fact of history. This is why, to the aspiring artist, history is such a nightmare-because of its destructive qualities: Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? (U 25) In these crucial lines, Stephen is referring to Aristotle's theory in the Poetics ("Aristotle's phrase" in U 25) that there is a room of infinite possibilities-if Caesar had not been knifed to death, he might have lived to a ripe old age, might have developed cancer, might even have come to America-but history limits, and chooses from that room one possibility, thus destroying all others. Linear history, then, is seen by Stephen as a usurper and a destroyer of creative potential, a restrictive force which limits other, perhaps more interesting, possibilities. Stephen goes on to quote Milton: Weep no more, woful shepherd, weep no more For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor . ...

It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. (U 25)

To Stephen, the conflict lies between history and poetry: Lycidas's death is a historical fact; other possibilities are ousted by that certainty. The poet Milton, however, asserts that Lycidas is not dead; whereas factual history eliminates possibilities, poetry forges and creates new and other possibilities. Thus the poet, his poetry, and his imagination are placed in the role of revivifiers, recreators, constructive counters to history's destructiveness: "It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible." Through artistic creation, the artist can counter the death-dealing destructiveness of history and fact by bringing to life all the dead chances ousted and destroyed by linear history. It is a great and moving moment in Finnegans Wake, when Shem-Joyce, reviled and ridiculed by his brother Shaun, gets up to defend himself, lifting his only weapon-the life wand, the godlike phallic pen/knife of the artistic imagination: "He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak" (195.5). The dead and the dumb can speak through the power of

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the creative, regenerative act; through the imagination are history and the past conquered. History, no longer just a nightmare, can be a dream vision, a resurrection of dead possibilities, a wake. Its destructive elements are exorcised through an exploration of myriad possibilities in the room of infinite ones. Joyce's notions about the "room of the infinite possibilities" are carried out in the Wake, in which all history and literature are seen as uncertainty and gossip, the exploration of practically every possibility, and in which the study of the past is as uncertain as our knowledge of actual, factual truth. In a sense all of Finnegans Wake could be considered an attempt to answer the question, "What happened to HCE?" Finding the "truth"-if there is one-is a matter of digging (like Biddy the hen) through the countless possibilities, variations, and interpretations accumulated by the middenpile of time and cyclical history. Art and creation are, for the Joyce of the Wake as well as for Stephen Dedalus and Aristotle, a "movement, an actuality of the possible as possible," an exploration of potential actualities from the room of infinite possibilities. The problem is the same with the story of HCE: we try to choose one version. But which one? Unfortunately, "Zot is the Quiztune" (110.14), and Joyce, like Hamlet (also seeking the truth) and Aristotle before him, knew it: ... me ken or no me ken Zot is the Quiztune .... we are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles though possibly nobody after having grubbed up a lock of cwold cworn aboove his subject probably in Harrystotalies [Aristotle] or the vivle [the Bible] will go out of his way to applaud him on the onboiassed back of his remark for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be. (110.13-21) In describing the Wake's explorations as "a sequentiality of improbable possibles," Joyce appeals to the dean of the Department of possibilities and probabilities, Aristotle. Joyce explains in this passage that the book explores a history of resonant uncertainty and indeterminate sequentiality, a sequentiality of improbable possibles that are as possible as anything, or as much so as the sequentiality put out by linear "history": "for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be." What actually "happened" is ultimately determined by the beholder (in the forms of gossip, criticism, history books, and so on), and nothing is ever conclusive: every generation reinterprets history, just as each generation reinterprets Shakespeare. Finnegans Wake studies this effect by exploring all possibilities and all viewpoints which "are probably as like those which may have taken place." Finnegans Wake's world history is thus one about gossip and uncertainty, about incommunicability and the impossibility of learning the truth, about the attempts of literature, scholarship, and history to state truth by fabricating varying accounts and interpretations of every incident. Repeatedly the Wake collects opinions and evidence from a host of characters. Each one espouses his or her own versions of the HCE tale; nothing can be proved, and they are all probably "meer marchant taylor's fablings" (61.28)-mere lies and fables about a sailor and a tailor. All this Irish gossip is erroneous misunderstanding, and,

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Joyce tells us, HCE, "the Man ... [was] subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland. (perorhaps!)"-perhaps, for even that is uncertain (62.2325). We can only listen to (or read) the Wake's compilation of all the gossipy possibilities and speculative misunderstandings of history and the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly. Thus, we are called to "List! List!" (U 188 and Hamlet I.v.22) to a review of human history: "Hirp! Hirp! for their Missed Understandings! chirps the Ballat of Perce-Oreille" (175.27-28). As such a compilation, the Wake is thus an exploration of the "Notpossible!" (175.5). "Learned scholarch[s]" (31.21) also engage in such explorations. Scholarship and artistic creation, connected by the role of language (litterae, letters), are both concerned with finding, if possible, the right interpretation from the litterheap of infinite possibilities. Clearly aware of the similarity between reading the Wake and researching purple patches and problem passages of literature, Joyce, a twentieth-century foliowright, describes his own "problem passion play" (32.32) as "the purchypatch of hamlock" (31.23-24), the "patchpurple of the massacre" (111.2), "[t]heirs porpor patches!" (200.4), "paupers patch" (316.23 ), and so on. Joyce further emphasizes this similarity by his repeated references to holographs, folios, librettos, original manuscripts, and Shakespearean scholars and ghosters. Finnegans Wake is Joyce's attempt to compile these error-possibilities of HCE's comedy of errors-in other words, all history. A problem play has purple passages which engender much critical speculation and scholarly research; in this sense, Finnegans Wake is, like the letter unearthed by Biddy the hen, an attempt to dig into the middenheap and find the "gossiple" truth. Resonant with the pun of litterae, the "letter from litter" (615.1) is broadly symbolic, representing both history and literature, especially Finnegans Wake. The letter contains all the contributions, from all generations, to the dirtmound of books, history and literature: "For that ... is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints" (20.1 0-11 )-all the errors and missed understandings (and misprints) of the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly. Therefore, you hardly need to ask if every story in the bound book of history has a score of versions and possible interpretations: "So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined" (20.13-16). Here Joyce is commenting on the interminable fecundity of the past and of literature, both subject to endless interpretation, by using the Wake as a symbol of both world and word.

The problem play of Finnegans Wake is, like the letter unearthed by Biddy the hen, an attempt to dig the truth out of the middenheap of possibilities. As with history or literature, there are an infinite number of possible meanings for the letter's sequentiality of improbables, and scholarly study results in numerous schools of interpretation. Equated with Joyce's works, the letter is thus similar to great literature, and specifically to Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce concludes about this "dummpshow" (120.7-8-the dumb show on the middendump)-that it is a "prepronominal fun feral [the Wake as a funeral and a fun-for-all], engraved and retouched and edgewiped and pudden-padded, very like a whale's egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" (120.9-14). In other words: this work, like Shakespeare's, has been retouched and worked over; and, like the plays or the Wake, it is meant to be puzzled over for a trillion nights by that ideal dreambook and insomniac reader. Finally, the passage describes the Wake's Protean qualities as

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an exploration of infinite possibilities, which, like the cloud observed by Hamlet and Polonius, takes on many shapes, "very like a whale" (Hamlet, III.ii.367)-this line has been quoted before, by Stephen, in, appropriately, the "Proteus" episode (U 40), Ulysses's exploration of infinite possibilities. Like Shakespearean folios, then, or like littermounds, works of literature and of historical interpretation are comedies of errors, compilations of misunderstandings. The "purchypatch of hamlock" (Hamlet) is like the purplepatched Wake. In Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce's lifewand makes the dumb speak, exploring the infinite possibilities neglected by factual/linear history, those imaginative alternatives that allow a cloud to become a whale. THE WORLD AS STAGE As we have seen, Finnegans Wake explores "a sequentiality of improbable possibles" (I I 0.15)-a history of resonant uncertainty, indeterminate sequentiality, and infinite possibilities: "for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be" (110.19-21). As early as 1962 Clive Hart had noted that "In Finnegans Wake [Joyce] was particularly concerned to reproduce relativity and the uncertainty principle. . .. There is in fact no absolute position whatever in Finnegans Wake . ... [F)rom whichever standpoint we may examine the Joycean phenomena, all other possible frames of reference, no matter how irreconcilable or unpalatable, must be taken into account as valid alternatives." 2 In his recent study of Joyce's Uncertainty Principle, Phillip F. Herring has argued that "Incertitude may be the dominant theme of the Wake . ... "3 After all, what the dream of all-history requires is a dream-like structure that allows for both specificity of detail and the endless flexibility of variable free-play-that is, both the concrete particulars of a specific possibility, and the simultaneous interchangeability of the particular for infinite possibilities. Characters and events must be infinitely flexible and variable. As Barbara DiBernard writes: "Correspondences juxtapose the individual and the universal, show the unity of life, and undercut any traditional notions of identity or reality. There are no characters or events in Finnegans Wake in the usual meanings of those terms"; 4 Patrick McCarthy notes simply that "no character exists in his own right as a stable personality in the book [Finnegans Wake)." 5 The infinite possibilities and cycles of Joyce's "Viconian" history, then, require infinitely flexible structures and forms in Finnegans Wake. Narrative form/structure in Finnegans Wake has been a primary focus of Wake scholarship in recent years, and there have been a number of major contributions to our understandings of the different structures by which the Wake's narrative is held together: Clive Hart's motifs, Michael Begnal's narrative and dream voices, Roland McHugh's sigla, Patrick McCarthy's riddles, John Bishop's sleeper-among others-have helped to elucidate the structural mysteries of Joyce's final work. 6 I would propose still another structuring principle-the dramatic form of Finnegans Wake, the world as stage. This is a particularly illuminating structural principle given the nature of the Wake's basis on history as infinite possibilities, history repeating itself with a difference. After all, the Wake's fiction can hardly be considered a conventional narrative-and the usefulness of such necessary schemes and scaffolds as Adaline Glasheen's

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multitudinous charts titled "Who's Who When Everybody Is Somebody Else" suggests a shifting, kaleidoscopic set of references-like casts of characters in different plays.7 Margot Norris's important deconstructionist formulation argues that in the Wake "[t]he substitutability of parts for one another, the variability and uncertainty of the wor~'s structural and thematic elements, represent a decentered universe, one that lacks the center that defines, gives meaning, designates, and holds the structure together-by holding it in immobility." It is the mobility /variability of setting and character that allows for the Wake's infinite possibilities; as Norris goes on to argue, "It is freeplay that makes characters, times, places, and actions interchangeable in Finnegans Wake, that breaks down the all-important distinction between the self and the other, and that makes uncertainty a governing principle of the work." 8 In this sense, the dramatic stage provides both an appropriate analogy /metaphor and a precise form/vehicle for representing such infinitely varied reality: life/history are, in the Wake, presented as the infinitely varied repertory of plays produced nightly by a theater company, playing out the decentered variations of an archetypal all-play. For, as Herring and many other commentators have long noted, in Finnegans Wake "Character is based on types that are identified in the Wake manuscripts and at FW 299 as sigla." 9 "In one sense," McCarthy writes, "Finnegans Wake has a cast of thousands: the latest edition of Adaline Glasheen's invaluable Census of Finnegans Wake requires more than three hundred, double-column pages to list and identify the characters, real and fictitious, who appear or are mentioned in the Wake.'t!O But Glasheen's charts ("Who's Who When Everybody Is Somebody Else") are also based on only a ·handful of sigla, suggesting archetypal character types playing out an infinite variety of story-possibilities, lik~ casts of stock characters playing different parts ("changing every part of the time") in a multitude of different plays. This is the nature of the both predictably repetitious and infinitely shifting nature of Finnegans Wake: "every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Aile anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time" (I 18.21-23). Thus, Joyce conceived of Finnegans Wake as essentially dramatic, a world-play acted out on the "worldstage" (33.3) by the archetypal family members of a dramatic company. This "dramatic metaphor"-that is, that all the world is a stage and all the figures of history merely players-underlies all the "action" in Finnegans Wake, Joyce's chronicle of Viconian history: an exploration into Aristotle's "room of the infinite possibilities," different variations of basic archetypal structures within the patterns of Viconian cycles. Joyce sets his dream of all-history in the context of the dramatic milieu: the dream as drama. In Finnegans Wake these possibilities take on the forms of various plays, each re-creating a different view of the possibilities of history. There are consequently thousands of allusions to drama and to the stage in Finnegans Wake-from the works of Ibsen to W. G. Wills's Napoleonic drama A Royal Divorce to Dion Boucicault's Arrah-na-Pogue, from Synge to Gilbert and Sullivan. Cheryl Herr has convincingly argued the importance and familiarity of such plays in the life of Dublin, in which "the theater provided an experience available in some form to almost all of Dublin's citizens.''n Elsewhere I have shown how Shakespearean plays are particularly central matrixes, 12 especially

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Hamlet (in defining the family relations between father and son, and between mother and son) and Macbeth and Julius Caesar (in defining the relations between rival brothers and the sister they fight over). Most importantly, though, Joyce had come to think of an artist as a playwright and a creatorgod, and of the artist's works as a stage peopled by his creations, "All the charictures in the drame" (302.31-32).

The metaphor of playwright as god is most insistent in the Wake, Joyce's chronicle of world history. The prime mover behind the force of destiny is a playwright, "the compositor of the farce of dustiny" {162.2-3); 13 this production of the play about Viconian history is presented by "the producer (Mr John Baptister Vickar)"-Joyce as the author of the Wake and God as the author of history, alias Giambattista Vico and John the Baptist {255.27). GodShakespeare-Joyce-HCE is a "worldwright" (14.19) and a "puppetry producer" {219.7-8); like Prospera, he is a "pageantmaster" (237.13) and the "god of all machineries" (253.33). In the Wake, the most recurrent symbol for the creatorfather-god-figure is, however, Michael Gunn, manager of Dublin's Gaiety Theatre, and father of Joyce's friend Selskar Gunn; repeatedly HCE is referred to as, or compared with, Michael Gunn, in the role of manager of his worldstage. In II.i, that most "dramatic" of Wake chapters, HCE is introduced as "HUMP (Mr Makeall Gone)"; as stage managers, Michael Gunn and God can both make all things come or go. At the end of the same chapter, after loud applause, the exiting HCE is described as "Gonn the gawds, Gunnar's gustspells" (257.34); Gunn as god is gone; the play, Gunn's and God's gospels, is over. In 481.19 Joyce describes HCE as a builder of cities, a poptilator and a patriarch: "We speak of Gun, the farther"-HCE as Gunn and God the Father. So also he is described in 434.8-10 as "the big gun," waiting "for Bessy Sudlow" (Michael Gunn's wife, and an actress in his troupe) to serve him his dinner. In keeping with the theme of Viconian ricorso, HCE will also become, in a felicitous coinage, "the cropse of our seedfather" (55.8)-t\l.e corpse will become the earthladen seed and father of future crops and generations. Thus, finally, in the "worldwright" metaphor, HCE is a "gunnfodder" {242.10): at once cannonfodder; a phallic gun; Michael Gunn, a father and a creator, a grandfather, and the fodder for future Gunns, guns, and generations. Even after death, after Makeall Gone has made all gone, himself being but cannonfodder, even then will there be the "Hereweareagain Gaieties of the Afterpiece"-a joyous play (piece) at the Gaiety in our afterlife. This will be supervised by this new Gaiety's manager, Michael Gunn, "the Royal Revolver of these real globoes" (455.25-26), the god and gun who makes this world turn, the stage manager of "these real globoes"-the Globe Theater and the global world. As "Makeall Gone," "Gun, the farther," "gunnfodder," and "the big gun," Joyce is a playwright-god whose real-life phallic gun is the creative pen of Shem the Penman. Joyce, conceiving of the artist-creator as a playwright, necessarily came to think of his own creations as plays. In the "Shem" episode, for example, Joyce describes Ulysses-"his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles" ( 179.2627)-as an S.R.O. hit and a Christmas pantomime at the Gaiety Theatre: "an entire operahouse (there was to be stamping room only in the prompter's box and everthemore his queque kept swelling) ... in their gaiety pantheomime" ( 179.35-180.4 ). More importantly, Joyce thought of the Wake itself as a drama. If Stephen Dedalus saw history as a nightmare, in the Wake Joyce presents history as a dream, the universal story of "Allmen" (419.10)-at once the dream and drama of the world, dreamed and played nightly in countless versions and variations of the basic archetypal family drama about HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun,

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and Issy. This dream unrolls the drama of universal history, a "dromo of todos" (598.2)-a dream and drama of everything (Spanish todos), of today and of everyday. In the book itself, the word "dream" rarely appears unaccompanied by a pun on the word "drama"; this equation between dream and drama is enforced throughout. "In the drema" (69.14) of the Wake, "We drames our dreams" (277.17) of universal history, peopled with the characters and caricatures of the past, "All the charictures in the drame" (302.31-32); in the Wake, dreams are history, and one might say, "Me drames . . . has come through!" (49.32-33)-my dreams have come true! In our own world of modern psychoanalysis, the drama of our dreams reveals our (and the world's) traumas; and so the Wake is (in the words of Shaun as "Professor Jones," alias Freudian/Shakespearean critic Ernest Jones) "a prepossessing drauma" (115.32; also Traum, German for dream). It may at times be depicted as Hamlet, "the drame of Drainophilias" (I 10.11)-a dream and drama of Ophelia's; or as Bottom's eerie dream in a midsummer night's drama, "This eeridreme ... From Topphole to Bottom" (342.30-32); or as Stephen's nightmare of history, "a lane picture for us, in a dreariodreama" (79.27-28), a dreary Shakespearean drama at Drury Lane. However, behind the dream there is always the drama of cause and effect, of history-becoming-fact: "His dream monologue was over, of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be, affact" (474.4-5). "[I]n this drury world of ours" (600.2), the Drury Lane counterpart to this dream-drama of the Wake is Shakespeare's "Miss Somer's nice dream" (502.29). Whatever it is that Miss Somer or HCE or Yawn or mankind (or whoever) dreams, it is equated in the Wake with Bottom's dream in A Midsummer Night's Dream. (There are many references to "bully Bottom" throughout the Wake.) 14 This is the central reason-as Father Boyle, Adaline Glasheen, and I have all discussed in variant ways 15-that Bottom's dream in "Miss Somer's nice dream," along with the language of medieval and Elizabethan dream visions (methinks, meseems, etc.) is ubiquitous in Finnegans Wake: the Ass in Finnegans Wake remembers his dream of all-history on a "lukesummer night" (501.16); and since the Wake is both dream and drama, the Ass's dream vision thus finds a parallel in Bottom's dream from A Midsummer Night's Dream. The dream is at once a midsummer night's dream and all dreams, both "Miss Somer's nice dream" (502.29) and "Mad Winthrop's delugium stramens" (502.29-30). As such, it can be female ("Miss Somer") or male ("Mad Winthrop"), dream ("nice dream") or nightmare (delirium tremens), midsummer or midwinter ("Mad Winthrop"). It is all history. The "prepossessing drauma," then, is both a traumatic dream sequence, the nightmare of history, and the archetypal family drama, The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies. A poet-playwright-by analogy, HCE and all men-dreams the nightmare-"Me drames" (49.32)-of all time, the "drema" (69.14) of the world. The metaphor of the world as stage, the dramatic metaphor, is suggested recurrently in Finnegans Wake and most insistently on pages 30 to 33 and 219 to 221, the two passages in which Dublin's Gaiety Theatre is aptly transformed into the Globe. James S. Atherton has observed that "one of Joyce's favourite images for the world, or the Wake, is as a stage-although the famous quotation is never made." 16 Of course, few direct quotations are made in Finnegans Wake without being refracted through puns and double meanings. Pages 30 to 33, however, contain a cluster of allusions to Shakespeare and to the stage, most conspicuous of which is the description of HCE as "our worldstage's practical jokepiece" (33.2-3). Clearly, this is a direct reference to Jaques' (the "jokepiece"?) famous

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lines, "All the world's a stage, I And all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It II. vii.I 39-140). As a drama on the worldstage, HCE's story is a nightly reenactment, to which the public is invited, of an archetypal story, a "druriodrama" (50.6) in this Drury Lane world of ours. Here we first see HCE, like the "old gardener" Adam in his "prefall paradise," sitting about in his garden, "saving daylight under his redwoodtree" (30.13-15) as the king approaches. These lines again echo As You Like It and "Under the greenwood tree" (Il.v.1), in a context which informs that the world has been a stage from the beginning of time, and that the Green World of the Forest of Arden, the world of dramatic romance, is none other than Eden and all gardens. The story which follows, the drama about human history, is a production to be "staged by Madame Sudlow" (32.10; Bessy Sud1ow, actress and the wife of Michael Gunn) at the "king's treat house" (32.26; the Gaiety Theatre, a.k.a. King Street Theatre, was on King Street, Dublin) in a "command performance ... of the problem passion play of the millentury" (32.30-32). Admission to this "pantalime" (32.11; Christmas pantomimes were a tradition at the Gaiety) is "two pitts paythronosed" (32.11-12; two bits for patrons paying through the nose) to sit in the "pit stalls and early amphitheatre" (33.9-10), or in the "Pit, prommer and parterre, standing room only" (33.12). The habitual theatergoers are all out tonight to see "our worldstage's practical jokepiece," HCE: "Habituels conspicuously emergent" (33.12-13). Like Hamlet, this piece is a "problem passion play"-and there are references in these pages to Ophelia ("Offaly" in 31.18), Hamlet, Polonius with his "metheg in your midness" (32.45), and the purple-patch of Hamlet-"the purchypatch of hamlock" (31.23-24). In any event, the drama of history here is a play or pantomime presented on a worldstage, in its "homedroned and enliventh performance ... of the millentury, running strong since creation" (32.31-33). As with Hamlet or with the plays of the "house of Atreox" (55.3), the pantomime is an archetypal family drama: it is the tragedy of HCE's fall and his falling-out with his wife ("A Royal Divorce" and "Napoleon the Nth" in 32.33 and 33.2) and his daughters ("The Bo Girl" and "The Lily" in 32.35). Brothers ("our red brother" in 31.25) and sisters ("his inseparable sisters, uncontrollable nighttalkers, Skertsiraizde with Donyahzade" in 32.7-8-Scheherazade and Dunyazade, skirt-raised sisters from the Arabian Nights) are also here, as is the Holy Family, the "triptychal religious family symbolising puritas of doctrina, business per usuals and the purchypatch of hamlock" (31.22-23). The drama is a family affair. Joyce pursues this analogy in the Wake by frequently referring to the characters in the drama of the Wake as both family members and actors in a stage company. The drama on this worldstage is "real life"-r history-and the roles are played by a theatre company (whether the Gunns, Porters, B.onapartes, Hamlets, or Holy Family) whose cast members are the archetypal family itself: "Real life behind the floodlights as shown by the best exponents of a royal divorce" (260.F3). The cast members are, as we know by now, the members of HCE-Porter-Gunn's household, and their Gaiety Theatre globe-stage is none other than the publican's inn and residence in Chapelizod; thus, the word "house" is used throughout the Wake in three senses: domestic, tavernal, and theatrical (e.g., "the whole stock company of the old house of the Leaking Barrel" on 510.17-18). The cast is first introduced on page 13 of the Wake:

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake And here now they are. . . . A bulbenboss surmounted upon an alderman .... A shoe on a puir old wobban .... An auburn mayde, o'brine a'bride, to be desarted .... A penn no weightier nor a polepost. And so. And all. (13.23-28)

The family members are an "older man" with a hump ("bulbenboss") and a stutter (Balbus), or Humphrey-HCE; his wife, ALP, a poor old woman; his daughter, Issy, an auburn maiden; and his twin sons, the Pen and the Post, Shem and Shaun. There are five so far in the cast, and yet that is not all. 17 At other times this household troupe inflates to a "howthold of nummer seven" (242.5), having two additional, nonfamily members in the household: a male servant (Sickerson, Sanderson, etc.) and a female servant (Kate). At the start of chapter 1 of Book II, the performance of The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies is prefaced by the proper theatrical introductions of the cast; this reads: "featuring: GLUGG (Mr Seumas McQuillad). . .. IZOD (Miss Butys Pott) . . . . CHUFF (Mr Sean O'Mailey) . . . . ANN (Miss Corrie Corriendo). . .. HUMP (Mr Makeall Gone). . .. SAUNDERSON. . .. KATE" (219.21221.12)-that is, Shem the Penquill, Issy the Beauty Spot, Shaun the Post, Anna Livia (the running-corriendo-waters of the Liffey), HCE-Michael Gunn, Saunderson, and Kate. These are the elements of our domestic drama, of "The family umbroglia" (284.4). In an acting troupe of only seven members, each actor or actress must be able flexibly to assume a number of roles on call, depending on the particular family imbroglio being performed that evening; thus, each member is symbolic of a family "type," able to be recast into almost any old play or version of a royal divorce. "Like the newcasters in their old plyable of A Royenne Devours" (388. 7), they must be ready pliably to take over history's old plays, each actor performing the role assigned to him or her by the "worldwright" and puppetry producer. This concept is important and fundamental. The notion of an archetypal cast performing different plays, or interpretations of an archetypal play, corresponds marvelously with Joyce's concept of history as a resonant exploration of different possibilities. As the Wake is about history, the different variations (and possibilities) of reality and history become the different plays in the repertoire performed by the acting troupe and family, "the whole stock company of the old house" (510.17), where each member is able to act the part for his or her particular "type" in each new play. The Wake is full of references to stock companies and acting troupes, with the same basic "types" playing different roles under each character "type." What better model could there be for Wakean history and Viconian ricorso? HCE can be the same basic actor under the various historical guises of Adam, Tim Finnegan, Finn MacCool, Shakespeare, and so forth; or the filial usurper (Cad, Hosty, Paul Horan, etc.), "Under the name of Orani ... may have been the utility man of the troupe capable of sustaining long parts at short notice" (49.19-21). The family is a house troupe, which performs "with nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing of ghosters" (219.68), an archetypal cast and stock company acting out the different plays and infinitely various cycles of Viconian history. Pages 323 and 324 provide an excellent illustration of how Finnegans Wake is presented as a stage drama played by "the whole stock company of the house":

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tummelumpsk ... that bunch of palers . . . . Toni Lampi .... ghustorily spoeking, gen and gang, dane and dare, like the dud spuk of his first foetotype . . . . And ere he could catch or hook or line to suit their saussyskins, the lumpenpack. . .. Sot! ... change all that whole set. Shut down and shet up. Our set, our set's allohn. (323.28-324.16) Fritz Senn has pointed out that this passage (quoted here in part) refers to a particular stage performance of Hamlet in Dublin at the Crow Street Theatre. Referring to "the versatility of the Dublin stock companies" (and quoting from Samuel Fitzpatrick's Dublin: A Historical and Topographical Account of the City [1907], one of Joyce's source books for the Wake), Senn writes: "At Crow Street Digges ('Digges' in 313.26) was playing 'Hamlet' and ruptured a blood vessel. The play was immediately stopped and She Stoops to Conquer substituted for it. The manager's apologies having been accepted, the performers, who were all in the house, hastily dressed and went on. A gentleman in the pit had left the building immediately before the accident to Digges, for the purposes of buying oranges. He was delayed for some little time, and having left 'Hamlet' in conversation with the 'Ghost,' found on his return the stage occupied by 'Tony Lumpkin' and his companions at the Three Jolly Pigeons. He at first thought he had mistaken the theatre, but an explanation showed him the real state of affairs" (Fitzpatrick, 256-57). In FW, all actors play multiple parts, often simultaneously, and we [readers] all think, again and again, that we have mistaken the theatre. In particular, Joyce used the incident in the paragraph beginning 323.25, where She Stoops and Hamlet are among the things that go on at the same time. 18 With much going on at once, the passage on pages 323 and 324 is a murky one at best; in context, it seems that HCE, in the role of the Norwegian Captain, has momentarily left the tavern for the outhouse (much as the spectator at Crow Street goes out to buy oranges}, and returns to find the set (tavern= theater, of course) completely changed, as happened with She Stoops to Conquer and Hamlet. This historic worldstage seems to be constantly changing sets, exploring new and different variations and possibilities. The drinkers at the tavern have suddenly become "that bunch of palers" (a bunch of players); Tony Lumpkin appears as "tummelumpsk" and "Toni Lampi." The first play concerned Danish ghosts: both the ghost of King Hamlet, King of Denmark, ("ghustorily spoeking. . .. dane and dare") daring his son on (a father spooking and speaking, "like the dud spuk," to his firstborn, "his first foetotype"); and Ibsen's Ghosts (Gengangere in Dana-Norwegian; here, "gen and gang"). However, "ere he could catch or hook or line," the set has changed back to Tony Lumpkin and the Three Jolly Pigeons-back to the "lumpenpack" accompanied by the shout: "Sot! ... change all that whole set. Shut down and shet up. Our

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set, our set's allohn"-our set's all one in the versatile drama of all-history. (The prop men, crying to shut down and set up, seem to be Sinn Feinners: ourselves, ourselves alone.) Change the set, but the show (and history) must go on, "like the newcasters in the old plyable" (388. 7). The archetypal family drama is a tale renewed and reenacted nightly on the worldstage, a daily dubbing of Hamlet (and all family dramas) at the Globe. If all the world's a stage, then all stages are the world. As a result of this "dramatic metaphor," we find the pages of Finnegans Wake repeatedly and ubiquitously peppered and textured with references to theaters and stage history (the Globe, Bankside, Blackfriars, Drury Lane, Phoenix Playhouse, Dublin's Crow Street and Smock Alley Theaters, and so on), with stage directions ("On. Sennet" [219.13]; "Exeunc throw a darras" [388.1]; "Lights, pageboy, lights!" [245.4]; "Act drop. Stand by! Blinders! Curtain up. Juice, please! Foots!" [501.7] and so on). With such parameters, the players in our world-history then are naturally the great stage-actors, and there are repeated references in the Wake to Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Spranger Barry, Henry Mossop, Thomas Sheridan, Peg Woffington, Ellen Terry, and many others. There is much more to say {than I can suggest here) about the ways dramas and stage history structure Finnegans Wake. 19 The more persistent references, of course, are to those actors most familiar to Joyce-the family troupe and stock company of Dublin's Gaiety Theatre on King Street, managed by Michael Gunn and Bessy Sud low-who become the HCE and the ALP in the Wake's "gaiety pantheomime" (180.4) performed nightly by the house troupe. And so Finnegans Wake abounds with references to Gunn, Sudlow, the Gaiety, and other members of their troupe, such as Valentine Vousden and E. W. Royce. Finnegans Wake is most explicitly a play in II.i, on page 219 and following, where The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies is presented. This mime, put on by Michael Gunn's troupe, is a model of the Wake dream-drama. It is a play given by the children before their parents-a family drama of temptation and frustration (in which Izod-Issy is frustrated in her sexual temptations of Glugg-Shem). The story reenacts some of the old themes of the story of the parents, and is thus a "daily dubbing." Like the Wake and like Joyce's Viconian history, this play comes in four acts, and is a microcosm of Finnegans Wake itself.

To Joyce, always punning, a "play" is also a game-and the plot of the children's mime is literally a game, the children at play. The game that the girls ("the Maggies," led by Izod) are playing, Joyce said, is one called "Angels and Devils or colours." 20 Shaun-Chuff is Mick, or Michael the Archangel; ShemGlugg is Nick, common nickname for the Devil; and the Maggies-rainbow girls or flower girls-are the "colours." Their sport is a guessing game in which Shem-Glugg is the victim: Izod poses a riddle to him three separate times, and thrice he is baffled and disgraced; the Maggies meanwhile dance rings around Shaun-Chuff, for the answer to their riddle is "heliotrope,"21 and the heliotropic Floras find their sunshine in Shaun. HCE then returns to commence the fourth act, in which he ends the children's hour of game and sends them upstairs to bed. At this point the play is over, the curtain falls, and the chapter ends. The introduction/playbill to The Mime is particularly important, for it forms a key statement of the Wake's dramatic metaphor, equating the action of Joyce's novel (here, The Mime) with a stage performance. Il.i opens with a playbill announcing the performance of The Mime (pages 219-222):

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Every evening at lighting up o'clock sharp and until further notice in Feenichts Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open, Diddlem Club douncestears.) Entrancings: gads, a scrab; the quality, one large shilling. Newly billed for each wickeday perfumance. Somndoze massinees. By arraignment, childream's hours, expercatered. Jampots, rinsed porters, taken in token. With nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing of ghosters, with the benediction of the Holy Genesius Archimimus and under the distinguished patronage of their Elderships. . .. while the Caesarin-Chief looks. On. Sennet. As played to the Adelphi by the Brothers Bratislavoff (Hyrcan and Haristobulus), after humpteen dumpteen revivals. Before all the King's Hoarsers with all the Queen's Mum. And wordloosed over seven seas crowdblast in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript. In four tubbloids. . . . The Mime of Mick. Nick and the Maggies, adopted from the Ballymooney Bloodriddon Murther by Bluechin Blackdillain (authorways 'Big Storey'), featuring: GLUGG (Mr Seumas McQuillad .... ) THE FLORAS .... IZOD (Miss Butys Pott .... ) CHUFF (Mr Sean O'Mailey.... ) ANN (Miss Corrie Corriendo .... ) HUMP (Mr Makeall Gone .... ) THE CUSTOMERS .... SAUNDERSON .... KATE .... . . . the show must go on. Time: the pressant.

(219.1-221.17) 22

A partial explication for the playbill announcement reads thus: Performed every evening at lighting up time and until further notice in the Phoenix Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open, a club downstairs for "diddling," or passing the time.) Entrance fee: for vagabonds, a crab-apple; for the quality, one large shilling. Newly billed for each weekday performance. 23 And Sunday matinees (for somnolent ones who doze through Sunday mass). By arrangement, there can be special children's hours, expurgated, and expertly catered, with jampots and rinsed porters taken in token. The play will be

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performed by the whole stock company, with nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer (Michael Gunn, stage manager) and daily dubbing of ghosters with the blessing of the Holy Genesius Arch-Mime himself (St. Genesius, patron saint of actors; Greek archimimos, chief actor) and under the patronage of their Elderships ... while the Caesar-in-Chief (God) looks on. Trumpets, please; begin the play. As previously performed at the Adelphi Theatre by the Brothers Bratislavoff (brat is slavic for brother; Greek adelphoi, brothers) after humpteen revivals (and revivals-ricorsos of HCE = HumptyDumpty). Played before all the King's Horses (Chamberlain's Men) and the Queen's Men. Wirelessed and broadcast over the seven seas in Celtic-HellenicTeutonic-Slavic-Zend-Latin-S anskrit soundscript. In four tableaux .... Called The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, adopted from a Senecan tragedy of blood (like Hamlet) by Bluechin Blackdillain (otherwise known as the author of "Big Story") featuring: Glugg (Shem the Penman); The Flower (heliotrope) Girls; Izod (Miss Beauty Spot); Chuff (Sean the Postman); Anna Livia (the running waters of the Liffey); Hump (Michael Gunn); The Customers; Saunderson, the manservant; Kate, the maid .... The show must go on. Time: the present, urgent (French, pressant) and pressing ever onwards. The playbill continues with a list of props used in "the Pageant of Past History" (221.18-19)-masks, lighting, pipes, hats, bags, trees, rocks, venetian blinds, doorposts, gladstone bags, and so on. Credits are given for a musical score ("Accidental music providentially arranged by L'Archet and Laccorde" [222.1-2]-John F. Larchet was the Abbey Theatre's orchestra leader), and singers are mentioned (including "Joan MockComic" [222.7]-John McCormack). Next, "the whole thugogmagog ... to be wound up for an after-enactment by a Magnificent Transformation Scene showing the Radium Wedding of Neid and Moorning and the Dawn of Peace, Pure, Perfect and Perpetual, Waking the Weary of the World" (222.14-20)-the whole thingamajig is then to be wound up for an after-enactment in a Magnificent Transformation Scene showing the Radiant Wedding of Night and Morning, the Dawn of Peace, the Wake, and Ricorso. (Here, too, is found yet another play, Congreve's Way of the World; and, as in the Gaiety pantomimes, there is a "transformation scene." 24 } These lines provide an apt description of Book IV of the Wake, and, thus, the four acts of The Mime appear to be a .microscosm of the Wake itself. Once again we have learned that the Wake family drama is being staged at the Gaiety, with "Makeall Gone" taking the lead role of Hump (HCE). "Every evening at lighting up o'clock sharp and until further notice in Feenichts Playhouse . . . . Newly billed for each wickeday perfumance": the nightly performance reminds us that HCE's story is an archetypal "drema," dreamt, performed, and reenacted during all times; and, like a reborn phoenix ("Feenichts"), Gunn-Hump rises each morning in order to replay a tragic fall in the evening's performance. The stage thus becomes a precise, concrete, and practical application of Joycean-Viconian ricorso. The various dramas in the Wake become the parameters of the dream-stories of cyclical history played out in its infinite possibilities. The Mime is thus a "nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing of ghosters." Our lives are, in this way, literally "played out" every night-in dream and drama.

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Notes I.

Page and line references are to Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1939, 1959). Page references to Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961) are preceded by a U.

2. Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), 65-66. 3.

Phillip F. Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty University Press, 1987), 182.

4.

Barbara DiBernard, "Technique in Finnegans Wake," in eds. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens, A Companion to Joyce Studies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 681.

Principle (Princeton:

Princeton

5. Patrick A. McCarthy, "The Structures and Meanings of Finnegans Wake," in eds. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens, A Companion to Joyce Studies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 564. 6.

Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake; Bernard Benstock, Joyce-Again's Wake (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965); Michael Begnal and Grace Eckley, Narrator and Character in Finnegans Wake (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1975); Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976); Patrick A. McCarthy, The Riddles of Finnegans Wake (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1980); and John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

7.

See Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), lxxii ff.

8. Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 120-121, 123. 9.

Herring, 189.

10. McCarthy, "The Structures and Meanings of Finnegans Wake," 564. 11. Cheryl Herr, Joyce's Anatomy of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 98. 12. See Vincent J. Cheng, Shakespeare and Joyce: A Study of Finnegans Wake (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1984), especially chapters 3 to 6. 13. Operas are one of the forms of drama in the Wake. A recurrent theme in this drama of Viconian history is the force of destiny, or Verdi's La Forza Del Destino. 14. See Cheng, Shakespeare and Joyce, 214-216.

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15. Robert Boyle, S.J. James Joyce's Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), x; Glasheen, 36; Cheng, 35-38.

16. James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959), 149. 17. McCarthy, "The Structures and Meanings of Finnegans Wake," 564: "In one sense, Finnegans Wake has a cast of thousands. . .. In another sense, the book has only one character, Everyman; or two characters, who represent the male and female principles. Somewhere between these extremes, however, it is possible to discern five main characters, who may be regarded as the members of a single family: H.C. Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia, their twin sons Shem and Shaun, and a daughter, Issy or Iseult. Surrounding and associated with these figures are secondary characters who often represent aspects of the family members: the cleaning woman Kate; the manservant; four old men ... ; seven girls who are associated with the colors of the rainbow; and a jury of twelve citizens .... " 18. Fritz Senn, "Notes on Dublin Theatres," A Wake Newslitter, Old Series 2, 6. 19. See Cheng, 43-53 and 230-233. 20. James Joyce, The Letters of James Joyce, Vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Viking, 1957), 295. 21. See Letters, I, 406; William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1969), 153; and McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake, 55-61. 22. McHugh calls these pages "programme notes." He also notes the play's similarities to Christmas pantomimes at the Gaiety (see Sigla, 57-58). So do Margaret Solomon and Cheryl Herr: see Solomon, Eternal Geomater; The Sexual Universe of Finnegans Wake (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 21; and Herr, 120 ff. 23. See Herr's analysis of the religious implications of "wickeday" and "Holy Genesius Archimimus"; Herr, 124-125. 24. The Freeman's Journal of December 24 and 26, 1892, carried an ad for a Christmas pantomime at the Gaiety, including the climactic "THE GRAND TRANSFORMATION I Entitled I WINTER AND SUMMER." Robert M. Adams shows that page 678 of Ulysses is based on this ad; it describes a show "commissioned by Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King Street ... the grand annual Christmas pantomime ... (under the supervision of Mrs Michael Gunn, ballets by Jessie Noir, harlequinade by Thomas Otto) and sung by Nelly Bouverist principal girl." See Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's Ulysses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 76-82; see also McHugh, Sigla, 58.

The Convertshems of the Tchoose: Judaism and Jewishness in Finnegans Wake John Gordon When Edouard Drumont, professional antisemite, charged that Alfred Dreyfus "does business in the manner of the sons of Sem, "1 he was citing tradition stretching back to Genesis 10, according to which Shem, eldest of Noah's sons, founded the Hebrew race. 2 Etymologically, to be antisemitic is to be anti-Shem. That, surely, is why so many of the insults thrown at Shem by his antagonist Shaun come from the Jew-baiting repertoire. For example, the account given (l49.ll-168.12) 3 by Professor Jones, who associates Shem with four famous Jews, Spinoza, Einstein, Bergson, and Lucien Levi-Bruehl (the last the author of "Why am I not born like a Gentileman" published by "Feigenbaumblatt and Father, Judapest" [ 150.26-28]), who is strangely indignant about the word "talis" (Hebrew for "prayer-shawl") as misused by a "passim" or "pessims," (person or persons celebrating Passover and Pessach), and who characterizes Shem as a bad-smelling (163.9) unwashed (159.27) moneygrubbing (149.21-22) arriviste (161.20), variously employed as pawnbroker (164.23) and robber (160.19), in all capacities tricky (154.2, 159.30, 165.6), who despite his earlocks (165.32) wants to be accepted as a "genteel" (161.4). Jones's fable is in the same vein: the Gripes, skulking from his "temple" (155.4), is a "sly" (154.2), greasy (156.17), double-talking seducer/seditionist (156. 7 -18). The fable also repeats the innuendo about Shem's odor and assigns it a cause: like the Shem described in 1.7 (e.g. 177.6-7, cf. 153.13-14), the Gripes soils himself when frightened. In fact much of the Mookse-Gripes exchange falls into focus once we recognize that the Gripes/Shem is a pair of fouled (male or female) pants (alternately handkerchief or handkerchiefs) opposite, in the person of the Mookse/Shaun, a blood-stained (butcher's or bishop's) apron (alternately sheet or shirt), the two separated by the stream where they have both been taken to be washed. 4 Thus in 1.8 one washerwoman scents the "eau de Colo" "oder" of "greasy" pair of drawers (204.30-35) and remarks that they are "flush-caloured" (205.8-9), "flush" in the context suggesting toilet rather than glow, while the other recognizes the tell-tale bridal-night red stain on the "hostel [and, as Shaun-Mookse, hostile] sheets" she is washing (213.24-25). This opposition of insignia, of brown-stained Jew versus his blood-stained tormenter, of the letter's brown tea stain opposite the X or X's identified with a bloody wound, is, I will argue, emblematic of the relationship of Shem to Shaun, Jew to Christian, in ways which bear on the shape of the Wake. Before that, however, it will be useful to review what kind of Jew Shem is. Most obviously, he is pure caricature-a music-hall stage sheeny to vie with Shaun's stage mick. (When, as he sometimes does, Shem doubles with Noah's third son Ham, founder of the black races, he becomes a type from a music-hall coon show.) In fact he is called a sheeny (173.27, 179.6, 626.25), also an ikey (424.3), a jewboy (463.17), a gombeen-man (344.6; cf. Ulysses 10.890), a yid (318.7), and, countlessly, some variant of "jew," "yude," "ju," "jewy," "yu," etc. As the fouled-pants routine illustrates, he is cowardly, with a shambling, insinuating 85

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manner. He is also relentlessly associated with excrement,5 hence with the brown stain on letter and pants, which makes him Shaun's "lowbrown," "old brown freer" (424.36, 588.13). He has the traditional exaggerated Jewish nose: his attacker in I.7 mocks his "shiny [shiny, shemmy, sheeny] shnout" (179.6); the same chapter's account gives him a hell of a nose (169.12); in the Wakean aviary he is associated with the large-beaked raven (contrasting with the petite-billed Shaunian dove); the "probscenium" at which he fantasizes enthusiastic females throwing favors (180.3) is a proboscis as well as a proscenium and phallic probe. (According to 403.13, he shares this feature with his father.) His greasiness (or, at 570.22, oiliness) accounts for the "suet" which falls from him at 86.2, for the oiliness of Napoleon-Lipoleum 6 at Waterloo, above all for the wet and slithery trail that HCE's Shemian attacker invariably leaves after him. The trades ascribed to him include tailor, "Ole Clo" pedlar (453.15), pawnbroker (192.11), "loanshark" (193.5), and pornographer (passim), all stereotypically Jewish. At one time or other he doubles with Fagen (150.27, 593.15), Shylock (165.32), Marlowe's Aaron (204.31-as in the play, he is poisoning the waters), and, especially, the antisemitic apostate Jew Nathan of Mosenthal's Leah the Forsaken. As both Jones and the Shaunian narrator of 1.7 repeatedly tell us, he is a naturally "low"7 individual who keeps trying to get above himself and has to be put in his place-in other words, he is an upstart. In spite of the Yiddish into which he and the narrative accompanying him are prone to slip, 8 he is likely to affect a high-toned English accent, to lie about his background (I 80.34-181.5), to ape various fashions in order to look more like a gentile/gentleman (343.1314) while trumpeting his degrees in the way no true gentleman ever would (I 79.21-24). Most reprehensibly, he leches after what Alexander Portnoy, employing the Yiddish he learned at his mother's knee, calls "shiksas" (cf. 342.7) and the Wake, quite wonderfully I think, dubs "goyls" (182.22). Worse, there are signs that the feeling may be reciprocated: ALP still remembers how, when about Issy's age, she was swept off her feet by her husband's "sheeny stare" (626.25), and Shaun's anxiety that his blonde blue-eyed sister may go the same way often seems justified. Thus throughout the book, and especially in 111.2, Shaun plays the Victorian older brother, warning his sister against the blandishments of the cosmopolitan insinuator. With his pretensions to establishment respectability and his taste for gentile women, Shem, like Leopold Bloom, aspires to assimilation-one reason he is always making overtures to Shaun. And as for Bloom, the price will be conversion to Christianity, a conversion which will probably be insincere and will always be suspect. The story of Shem's conversion-his initial resistance, his capitulation, his intermittent lapses-is one of the narrative strands which runs through the whole of the Wake. In Book I we are told indignantly that Shem would not submit to the church (154.30-32), that he "would not put fire to his cerebrum [experience the Pentecostal descent of faith]; he would not throw himself in Liffey [be baptized]; would not explaud himself with pneumantics [receive the Holy Spirit]; he refused to saffrocake himself with a sod [take communion]" (I 72.18-20), that in short he would not commit intellectual and spiritual suicide by becoming an Irish Catholic. But in the next book, beginning with 11.1, the pressure increases and Shem, hoping to ingratiate himself with Issy, is weakening: the long paragraph at 240.5-242.24 includes his tormented testimony that he has left or will leave the temple and join the church: "No more singing all the dags in his sengaggeng" (240.9-1 O) [No more singing all day

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in the synagogue], and in the next two chapters the conversion is confirmed as a preliminary to his marriage into a "room yo connelic" family (326. 13-14 ): at 317.12, as what on the next page will be called a "yester yidd" (318.7), he orders a (non-kosher) oyster and (leavened) "doroughbread" (317 .1 ), explaining that "my old religion's out of tiempor" (317.2-3). His antagonist "kerrse" doesn't believe him-the gist of his outburst at 320.1-17 is that once a "shinar" always a sheeny sinner, and the "resistance" (316.4) thrown up against Shem's incursion into the family is "aerian" [Aryan] (316.4)-and indeed at 367.2 we learn, after a spate of Hebrew (366.34-36), that as he got older IssyI ALP's husband "grew back into his grossery baseness" (367 .2) [his gross baseness, his grocery business]. Throughout Book III HCE/Shaun's Shemian, Jewish past, always threatening to return, is remembered as a skeleton in the closet, to be repudiated: the David who danced before the ark and chased after women, the "Ole Clo" (453.15), the schoolgirls are urged to avoid, the Nathan-nation whose name and anthem are banned (588.16). In all such outbursts, there is the unmistakable accent of someone protesting too much-as for Mosenthal's Nathan, Shaun's antisemitism comes across as the overreaction of someone with something to hide. The same is true of the HCE whose voice, on page 538, emerges from Shaun's, and who proceeds to tell us all about his "genteelician arms" (546.5)-though, alas, "genteelician" contains the Yiddish "T.L." (pronounced "tea el," abbreviation for "tokheth lecken," ass-licking 9-well-known as the exercise required of parvenus seeking family crests (see Ulysses 9.924-927, 568.16-26), and the king from whom he received it is not only a sovereign and a Sullivan but a Solomon as well (546.2), and the word in the middle of its legend is, alas alas, not "Cross" but "Crass" and the "holocryptogam" it adds up to sounds a lot like "Tetragrammaton," and the-as always with HCE-incriminating commentary on this authenticating emblem which follows makes a point of nervously dismissing any speculations as to whether he, in the "elder disposition," derived from the "essenes"-ancient Jewish sect-and, like the people of Israel, was "carried of cloud [the pillar of cloud] from the land of locust [Egypt, of the plague of locusts]" (546.11-14). In other words, the story of Shaun, and of the elder HCE, is the familiar one of what the Irish of Joyce's day called a shoneen and the Jews a meshumed, someone who for reasons presumed to be less than honorable has gone over to the creed and customs of the ruling faction, and who typically overdoes things, both in aping the manners of the new set and repudiating those of the old. If we try reading Finnegans Wake as the history of one paterfamilias and family, then its progress from Book I dominated by Shem (hectored from above by Shaun) to Book III dominated by Shaun (menaced from below by Shem) reflects the biography of an uneasy convert from Judaism to Christianity, from someone who in his youth was prevailed on by the carrot-and-stick of persecution and opportunism to renounce his ancestral faith and who in later years is guiltily haunted by voices from the former life. In making this change he has gone, as the racialist conventions of the day would have it, 10 from the earthy and avid sensibility of the Semite to the otherworldly, static sensibility of the Aryan. As it happens, this transition corresponds to the growth, as Finnegans Wake represents it, from young-manhood to old-manhood: "For all of these have been thisworlders, time liquescing into state, pitiless age grows angelhood" (251.89). It also corresponds to the progress of the book from which Finnegans Wake draws most, the Bible. One big reason for Shaun's resentment of Shem, for the

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way he spurns Shem's overtures of reconciliation and suggestions of kinship, is that as a Christian, an adherent of the New Testament, he is unsettled by reminders that his creed might be seen as related to, even an outgrowth of, the Judaism of the Old Testament. To an extent, antisemitism in the Wake symptomizes the anxiety of influence. What really infuriated the antisemitic Citizen of Ulysses was being reminded that his god was a Jew, that he himself was a recent guest in the house established by Bloom's people; what really infuriates Shaun are intimations of continuity, even identity between Shem's low earthy-excremental Hebrew/Semite and his own high celestial-crusader Aryan/Christian. That is one reason why he repeatedly describes Shem-the "yester Yidd" whose "old religion's out of tiempor"-as woebegone (104.12}, as old, aged, decrepit if not defunct (e.g., 153.13-19, 169.20-170.3, 422.14, 463.27), and affects to be surprised at his survival or return: the relationship must be one of replacement rather than displacement. It is also why, for instance, when at his most indignant, just before striking Shem, he should taunt him with "Weepon, weeponder, song of sorrowmon!" (344.5)-an epithet which not only casts Shem as a Jewish son of Solomon and seductive singer of erotic songs (like Solomon's), but reveals Shaun's anxious awareness that his god, the man of sorrows, was prophesied (Isaiah 53:3) in Shem's book, and that he was a Jew, a Shem. Old Testament Shem dominating I, New Testament Shaun dominating III: I would be willing to bet that someone more versed in the Bible than I am could demonstrate a sequential point-by-point correlation between it and the Wake, similar to the sequence of correspondences between the Odyssey and Ulysses. Certainly 1.1 is drenched in "Genesis"; certainly IV, with its blowing trumpet, floods of light, resurrecting bodies and souls, and so on, recalls "Revelations," and the four apostles arrive about when they should. More to the point of the Shem-Shaun conflict in particular, however, is what seems to me another, similar pattern governing the Wake as a whole: that as, like the Shemian/Joycean "Jambs," it goes "Dawncing ... round the colander" (513.9-12}, it enacts, more or less chronologically, the major holy days of Judaism and Christianity and the events they commemorate. Specifically, Book I corresponds to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in September, Book II to the Christmas season in December, and Books III and IV to Lent, Holy Week, and Easter in Spring. The last of these equations needs little support. Many commentators have identified Book IV with Easter, and we know from Joyce's letters that the first two chapters of Book III re-trace (in reverse) the stations of the cross. The four apostle/inquisitors of 111.3 are pretty clearly crucifiers as well; at the same time the Shaun who flinches beneath their assault is also descending into hell, hitting bottom, I would suggest, at 500.1-501.5, from which point he begins the ascent that reaches its celestial culmination in IV. Meanwhile, the events of III are typically those of Lent and Holy Week: Shaun's thou-shalt-not sermons, followed by a dark spell of mourning and self -mortification, followed by the vigil of III.4, then Easter. As for Book I, consider this summary of it. In the wake of his gigantic predecessor's fall, a new man arrives on the scene. He achieves eminence but soon becomes weighed down, both in his conscience and in the eyes of others, by the memory and rumors of some great, protean sin. In fact before long he

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is completely incapacitated-closed in a dark room, assailed by a rising chorus of reproach and self-reproach. There follows a prolonged exposure and scrutiny of the sin, carried out as trial and as exegesis of a document (which at one point is reviewed one letter at a time, eventually covering the whole alphabet), then as a systematic examination (in two senses), from which emerges one figure on whom the whole rigmarole is blamed. This figure is driven out, after which a cleansing river carries away afflictions and washes away stains. The book ends at sundown. I have just described, admittedly in somewhat re-shuffled order, many of the salient rituals of the High Holy Days, encompassing Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the intervening days of penitence. The new man is the new year commemorated at Rosh Hashanah. The evocation, review, and confession of sins corresponds to the days of penitence and the Confession of the Yom Kippur evening service, which Confession presents an alphabetical catalogue of sins. Shem is the scapegoat in whose expulsion from temple and town the Yom Kippur ritual originated. ALP's arrival in 1.8 corresponds to Taschlich, the ceremonial visit to a river and casting of crumbs into it, washing away the sins which in the other ceremony are loaded on the scapegoat. ("JUSTIUS" to Shem: "You will need all the elements in the river to clean you ... "[188.5-6].) The moribund HCE of the middle chapters, closed in his room, is observing the Day of Atonement, with its prohibition of all work or distractions. The book ends, like Yom Kippur, at dusk. And possibly-I'm not as confident of this-the hundred-letter thunderwords of Book I may be, among the usual other things, the blowing, at intervals during the service, of the ram's horn shofar, the "Trist/ram" introduced at the outset. In any event, near the end of the next book's first chapter· we are commanded to "Blare no more rams blares" and to put out the "kindalled bushies," the burning bush of the Mosaic law, because "the holy language" is "Soons to come" (256.11-14). Book II is, I think, the site in which the Wake, like Shem, so to speak crosses over from Judaism to Christianity: "Please stop if you're a B.C. minding missy, please do. But should you prefer A.D. stepplease" (272.1214). Which is to say it corresponds to Christmas and Christmastide, commemorating the arrival of a figure who, as the hinge of the epochal change, was both a Jew and the founder of Christianity. One difficulty with this proposed reading is that, aside from the caroling of 236.10-18 and the "youlldied" Nightletter of 308.18-27, there isn't much about Book II that's particularly Christmasy. Or so it seems. I propose that the whole of Book II, and not just the first chapter, be read as relating the annual Christmas Pantomime at the Gaiety. The announced pantomime program of 219.1-222.20 accords with the whole of Book II, and particularly the actions of 11.3, better than it does with the mime of II. I. It is in 11.3 that we encounter the forecast "chuting [of] rudskin gunerally" (220.15), carried out by "The interjection (Buckley!) by the firement in the pit" (221.36-222.1), that the customers and Kate (featured in the program but barely detectable if at all in Il.l) make prominent appearances, that the drinkers, in their "exodus" from the pub (222.5), enact what can with the license of Wakean wordplay be called a "chorale in canon" (a choral rendering of various songs accompanied by-for canon read "cannon"-"Guns"). 11

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This seems to me the main sequence of events. 1.1 is a round of games, interrupted for tea at about midpoint, played by children while waiting for the show to start. Because like all game-playing children (at least in Joyce), they are imitating their parents, acting out the fundamental patterns of human community throughout history, their "mime" adumbrates the main action to follow, which is to say it is, as it is called, an "argument" (222.21), a preliminary synopsis. At 257.8-10 they are called in as the lobby bell rings at (there are eight "nin"s) eight o'clock, the customary curtain time. As it still does in British theaters, the safety curtain drops (257.29-32), to the commotion and applause of the audience, happy that the show is beginning. At 259.10 everyone goes "Mummum." 11.2 is a program of variety-show acts or "turns." The capital letter legends in the right margin are the placards, traditionally situated upstage right, pompously announcing the titles of the turns or the scenes of performances; at 286.3 and 286.18 Shaun is reminded to "turn over" the next in order to signal that the turn is over; licking a plate, he was evidently (as usual) busy eating, with the result that it has been almost four pages since the last right-margin announcement-as 222.15-16 predicted, there has been a gap during which the titles did not appear. The left-margin Shem is, as he is called at 435.20, the prompter (the program specifies "Promptings by Elanio Vitale" [221.22], Shem designated by the elan vitale of the Jewish "Bitchson" [149.20] with whom Shaun/Jones yokes him), whispering cues onto the stage: Joyce's British Museum notes link the first half or so of the left-margin notes to specific phrases in the main text (there are no such links for the right-margin notes), and usually the association is fairly plain: thus "Alima Mathers" and "Old Gavelkind the Gamper" on page 268 prompt, respectively, "gramma's" and "to your grappa." As for the footnotes, they are the sound of the family (the "Doodles" family of 299 F.4) in the audience reacting to the show. They are dominated by the chatty lssy, but as others have remarked different voices can sometimes be heard-271 F.4, for instance, is in the idiom of Shaun's sermon of III.2, and it is probably Shem who answers a reverential reference to the Church of England with an anti-English epithet (264 F.2). The long footnote on 279 occurs during an intermission, when Issy goes to the lady's room and, applying makeup, talks to her reflection in the mirror; the long monologue of 287.17-292.32 occurs when the father nods off in his seat. Perhaps for the benefit of the children in the audience, perhaps simply according to Barnumesque conventions of ersatz uplift, Shaun's announcements make most of the turns sound onerously educational. In fact, there is a good deal of knockabout farce and dialect cross-talk (282.5286.2), giving us a set between an absurdly stodgy "stodge Angleshman" [284 L.1] [stage Englishman, by analogy with stage Irishman] and his barbaric stageAmerican counterpart, "Finnfinnotus of Cincinnati" (285 L.l) culminating, from 286.4 to 306.7, in a razzle-dazzle magic-and- hypnotism show. The main event is the Gaiety "Christmas pantaloonade" later identified as "Oropos Roxy and Pantharhea" (513.21-22). The Oedipus component of the events needs no underscoring, and "Pantharhea," combining "panta rhei," the Heraclitean catchphrase for fluvial flux, with Rhea, Magna Mater, doubtless epitomizes the female being fought over. The show ends at about 11:00, as a rowdy group of customers, realizing that "The playgue will soon be over" (378.20), leaves their seats early to mulct a final round from the barman before heading home. A good deal of 11.4 following is taken up with reviewing the performance and recalling others from the past; the chapter ends with echoes of "auld luke syne" (398.26) as the Christmas season comes to a close.

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So, to repeat: Book I is dominated by Jewish, Old Testament ritual, Books III and IV by Christian, New Testament ritual. In between, Book II is dominated by the season commencing the transition from one to the other. Often this transition is violent, especially in 11.3, which features a prolonged assault on Shem-types over issues of religion or race. The more his persuasion seems in the ascendant, the more Shaun resembles those Christian inquisitions whose prescription for Judaism and other out-of -date creeds has been the stake and the faggot. In 1.6, identifying Shem with Levi- Bruehl, Shaun (in the person of Professor Jones) ominously spells his name "Levi-Brullo," as if to suggest the French for Jew- burn (151.11 ); in 11.2 the "COP," re-introducing "GUBERNANT," the burning of Jews, restores order and terror to the town (306 R.l); in Book III, in charge, Shaun promises both to burn Shem (426.1-4) and his books (439.34-35). In 11.3, Taff/Shaun's animus against the Russian general in particular fuses with this program of converting and/or annihilating Butt/Shem by burning him at the stake. He supplies a match-a "spurts flash" [a flash of fire, spurting from the struck matchhead] at 342.34-35, a "strafe from the firetrench" (344.9) a little later; after adding fuel to the fire and showing consternation that his victim still survives, he finally observes (349.6-350.9) the transformation through fire into both corpse and good Christian (349.17 -24; cf. Ulysses 15.1926-1939), though the unconverted remnant survives, "miraculising" as Daniel, Hebrew survivor of Nebuchadnezzar's fire (352.27 -28, cf. 354.3). 11.2 is a little trickier. The Jew-Christian story is also registered here by dialogue and narrative, but the main issue is the layout itself, which simultaneously accommodates distinctively Christian and Jewish figural patterns. First (remembering especially the "Tunc" page of the Book of Kells) a crucifixion scene-good thief on right, bad thief on left, Mary, alternately Virgin and Magdalene, along with the occasional supernumerary, at the foot of the cross, HCE the suffering "upright one" (261.23) the vertical column in the center. Second, a page from the Torah, the distinguishing visual feature of which-and I have never come across any book quite like it, in its resemblance to the II.2 layout-is the columns of commentary literally surrounding the column of text in the middle of the page. (In this regard, it's worth noting that 11.2 is the one chapter that can't be read as we are always being urged to read the Wake, out loud.) That is, whereas 11.3 is a conflict between old Jew and new Christian in which the latter wins a qualified victory, 11.2, the crossroads and formal center of Finnegans Wake, is a stereoscopic fusion of the two, a moment in time when "goy and jew" (273.14) are suspended in solution, and the question of which is to prevail is literally the question of how the chapter's bivalent text is to be read, which pattern they and we will foreground to the exclusion of the other. So it is not accidentally that around the center of the center, the geometric figure of page 293, Shem/Dolph should lead Shaun/Kev through a reading (later writing) lesson with the hidden purpose of advancing his own creed, his own reading. Consider the figure's coordinates:

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Four dots, two of them plotting a vertical line, the other two equidistant from the midpoint of that line, one on either side. What does that resemble? For the Catholic inhabitants of Latin America and the missionary-indoctrinated peoples of the South Pacific, the answer was obvious, which is why we call four indifferent stars arranged thus in the sub-equatorial skies the Southern Cross.

Not for Shem. He directs Shaun to connect the dots angularly, ignoring the vertical, and so to produce two triangles connected at the base. Then he urges that the result be read as the hexagonal Solomon's seal (297 .3), a "Sexuagesima" (298.27), with its powers of magic and wisdom-in other words that six-sided star of overlapping triangles also called the Star of David, symbol (by Joyce's day) of Judaism.

Shaun's response is characteristic. He is captivated for awhile, then becomes confused, indignant, and, soon, violent/ 2 reacting with two gestures both of which typify his role throughout the Wake. One, he strikes out against his tutor, leaving him with a "bloody face" (303.32). Two, he punches a hole in the paper (with a "blast through his pergamen" [303.22-23], putting a stop to what had become a handwriting lesson), leaving the "foliated gashes" (124.2) which, as X's, invariably end the Wake's letter, and which are repeatedly identified as the mark of some sharp instrument poked through the manuscript. In doing so, Shaun introduces into the text that red-on-white, blood-onlinen motif, the "paper wounds" (124.3) which, I have earlier suggested, are persistently identified with the Shaunian Christian in distinction to the brown tea stain of Shem's earthy, vilified, brown-stained Jew. Literally into the text,

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in fact-once he has struck his blow the two triangles become (probably doubling with the Bass Ale label) a "red mass" (304.7). In fact throughout the book this red-on-white mark is a sign to be read, often quite literally, as red print on white paper. And where does one encounter printing like that? In the Gospel passages of those Bibles-typically the volumes used in the mass-which print the words of Jesus in red, thus asserting for those words an absolute truth beyond the black-and-white of the Jewish Old Testament. And so in the Wake: the "X ray picture turned out in wealthy red in the sabbath sheets" (530.8-9). Whatever the actual origin of this typographic convention, in Finnegans Wake its significance is clear: Christ's words are red because written in blood, the blood flowing from the gashes inflicted on his body-a connection made explicitly when, in one variant of his jab-to-white-surface gesture, hoisting his "pederect to the allmysty cielung," Shaunian Mookse strikes "blueild" which flows and spatters out, (155.23-24), thus imitating the centurion whose hoisted lance (jabbed into the chest, therefore lung) gave the king of the Jews his fifth wound. That is why Shaun's blow against person and paper produces a "red mass"-it is Shaun's version of the incarnation and transubstantiation, of the act which makes his lord's blood manifest. It is also, more literally, a blow against Shem, against a Jew (once again, that obnoxious fact, that Christ was a Jew) and against a manuscript. In fact to Shaun, and to the book as a whole, the two go together. One meaning of "Shem" which does not seem to have been noted yet is given under "golem" in the 1925 edition of The Jewish Encyclopedia:

In the Middle Ages arose the belief in the possibility of infusing life into a clay or wooden figure of a human being, which figure was termed 'golem' ... and could carry any message or obey mechanically any order of its master. It was supposed to be created by the aid of ... a combination of letters forming a 'Shem' (any one of the names of God). The Shem was written on a piece of paper and inserted either in the mouth or in the forehead of the golem, thus bringing it into life and action. The best-known golem was that of Judah Low b. Bezaleel, or the "hohe Rabbi Low," of Prague ... who used his golem as a servant on week-days, and extracted the Shem from the golem's mouth every Friday afternoon, so as to let it rest on Sabbath. 13 I have earlier noted the "anxiety of influence" suffered by New Testament Shaun at the prospect of Old Testament Shem. Much of that anxiety focuses on writing-a skill which Shaun possesses rudimentarily or not at all. The Shem/Gripes that he encounters (153.9-19) is (as always, among other things) a book that he can't read, with flyleaf and colophon, waterlogged from having been cast on the waters at Wake's end according to the conventions of the envoi, and the "pressing" to which he consigns him (155.18) is both winepress and printing press. Among Shaun's charges (188.8-189.27) is that Shem could have been a popular singer but chose perversely to scribble instead, that for instance

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he "mangled Moore's melodies," flattened them out, as with mangle/steam-iron or printing press, and thus squeezed, as with winepress, the essential juice out of them by turning words into ink-on-paper, in the process adding to the deforestation of Ireland (439.6-14) and to the consternation of an already printswamped public (189.10). In part, the psychology at work is obvious: like Harpo Marx in Duck Soup, Shaun is angered by books because he can't read them. His signatorial X's, always at the letter's bottom, are after all the traditional mark of the illiterate; in the 11.2 passage discussed above, it is during an abortive writing lesson that he delivers the "blast through his pergamen," partly no doubt out of that frustration and envy which we would expect from the character who in 1.6 assigns to himself the part of the fox of sour grapes fame. Shaun's problem-according to the Wake, Christianity's problem-is that for all the talk of the transcendent Word (e.g. at 167.28), that word remains dependent on, derived from, what Derrida has taught us to see as the scandal of writing. Shaun (apparently the "robot" of 219.23) needs that "scribblative" (I 89.1 0) "shem"-who throughout I. 7, perhaps echoing the story of Rabbi Low's golem, he calls a "low" sham-to give meaning to his utterances, articulated differentiations to his blasts of wind; when he temporarily exorcises his brother, as at 426.2-4, he collapses, like a shemless golem, into incoherent blubbering followed by silent somnolence. He is, after all, whatever his scribicidal animus, a letter-carrier, a "Lettrechaun" (419 .17)-alternately letter-carrying bottle, letter-bearing mailbox, and beer-barrel full of the product of Shemian fermentation-and the Wake repeatedly equates that letter with all letters in all senses, with the whole business of writing. So it is that Shaun, in his own . conceit a pioneer of that twentieth-century return, via megaphone and radio, to the post-literate, post-linear communications culture announced by avid Wakean Marshall McLuhan, finds himself again and again reminded of his dependence on the shem-script referred to (462.16) as his "innerman" (a.k.a. "inkerman"-433.9) and "inmate friend" (523.23), the writer and "first liar" whose "indwellingness" is, as the questioning of 487.35-488.3 asserts and the questioning 419.11-424.13 reveals, the real source of his "Ondt and Gracehoper" fable. (And his "Mookse and Gripes" fable is a "translation" [152.12-13 ]). As resident post- or ante- or rudimentarily literate orator, Shaun is the spokesman of that corner in every Wake reader who at some time or other feels like flinging Joyce's farrago of verbal spaghetti across the room and turning on the television to anything at all. His is the logocentric voice we hear when the text turns on itself and demands (292.31-32) that it draw the line somewhere (but drawing a line is the beginning of writing), that we can't stay here for the rest of our existence reading this stuff (187.20-24) and that the writer should just "Stand forth" and reveal himself in his true colors (but even in the middle of his indictment the accuser needs Shem's help to find the right epithet [191.14]). As the text often reminds us (19.20, 124.3-5, 172.9-10, 379.5-6, 424.13), "X" is the sign of ending, of finality-an old traffic signal for stopping, the sign of obituary and salutation, both for illiterate ("his mark") and pious ("yours in X"}, the sign on the map marking the spot where the search ends, the purgings of exile, excommunication, and exorcism, the "axenwise" "Axe on thwacks" (19.20) which end the argument. And of course, for a Christian, it symbolizes the moment when the eternal and unchanging God rent the fabric of history, the sun stood still in the sky, and the old megil/ah of begats and bequests, the

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old cycles of falling-away and wrathful retribution and return to Yaweh, etc., was canceled with a seal of blood in the shape of a cross. And that, finally, is why Shaun keeps smiting, X-ing, punching holes in, scribbling brother and letter and book-because he embodies what in Finnegans Wake is the specifically Christian impulse 14 to so to speak punctuate the "unbrookable script" (123.32-33) of time and scripture and Wake inherited from the dark abysm of the old faith. Time must have a stop, and before that a shape. As in the margins of II.2, his anti-Shemitism marks an impatient temperament given to capital letters, large or bold-faced (or red-lettered-50.31, 456.34) type announcing momentous events changing everything, versus Shem's italic "cursives" {99.18), letter connected to letter, arabesquing endlessly from hidden past to unseeable future. Something perhaps there is in the gentile soul which recoils at, feels itself oppressed by, the Ulyssean patience of a people still waiting for the messiah, meanwhile spinning the infinite web that is Jewish scholarship. That, anyway, was something of my sensation when, awhile ago, I attended a friend's daughter's Bat Mitzvah, opened the book before me of excerpts from the Torah, was immediately reminded of Finnegans Wake, II.2, and was also struck by the visible sign of the Torah's endless braid of commentary: footnotes piled on footnotes about footnotes, exegesis of earlier exegeses. It is all, for someone used to the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, both impressive and dismaying. What it suggests is that Judaism has little of that Neoplatonically Christian anxiety about commentary, the sense that the more of it one does the farther one gets from the source, that from the Jewish point of view it is good that all this go on indefinitely, literally until the end of time. I understood how Shaun feels: Migod, there's no end to it! No red letters in comparison to which everything else is secondary, either prologue or aftermath. On the contrary, there is even a ceremony, the Simchat Torah (245.1 0), in which the last words of the Torah's last scroll are read and the first scroll begun again. (So it may not be coincidental that the Wake's distinctively Hebraic Book I is, uniquely, circular-it ends with a running river and begins with "riverrun.") The "the" to "riverrun" end-beginning of Finnegans Wake, doubling "Revelations" back to "Genesis," is its Simchat Torah, one which at the least runs counter to the book's Shaun-triumphant Jew-to-Christian progress. "A way a lone a last a loved a long ... "-{)ne can imagine a frustrated Shaun, waiting to hear the one syllable, "men," to complete the word of conclusion and end the show, wishing he could coach the mother as earlier he had (Issy: "ah ah ah ah .... I MEN! Juan responded ..." [461.32-33]) the sister. But somehow or other these females and the low scribbler for whom they have a weakness keep drawing out what he had intended to be the last word or final sign, doubling his single X's, as he indignantly says of Shem (534.30), adding extra X's to his "cruciform postscript" and thus turning a symbol of fixity into something else altogether, the basia which are obviously inviting a response (122.20-22), a continuation of correspondence, ending not with "Amen" but "To be continued. Anon" (302.29-30). Book IV, in which, after the Wake-long warfare of "the young gloria's gang voices the old doxologers" (454.29-30), the former has finally triumphed on the day foretold in "Revelations," then lets the victory slip away simply because, like Old Man River (363.1 0-11 ), it "jest keeps rasing. He jumps leaps rizing. Howlong!" (How long, 0 Lord?) And with that unbrookable rolling is canceled what, probably, was Shaun's main idea in his

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campaign to convert the Jews by hook or crook, by lance, fire, or fork: that according to (curses!) scripture, once that is accomplished it is only a (short) matter of (finite) time before the voice of X will be heard again and for good, piercing through those heavens which are to be rolled up like a scroll, and the unsettlingly Wakean book of time will at last reach (not phoenix but finis) its last stop.

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Notes

I.

Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: George Braziller, 1986), 79. A good deal of the following account of antisemitism is drawn from Drumont's La France Juive, an expansive and relatively lucid compendium of antisemitic lore with which Joyce was probably familiar. Much of the description of Shem at FW 169.11-20 seems to me to derive from Drumont's account of the Jewish physical type. See Edouard Drumont, La France Juive: Essai D'Histoire Contemporaine (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1885), I, 34.

2.

See Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 263.

3.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1939, 1958). Unless otherwise indicated, all citations in parentheses are to this edition of Finnegans Wake.

4.

Joyce may have heard the same joke I heard many years ago-about the general who, having been told that Napoleon habitually wore a red shirt in battle so that if he were wounded in the chest the fact could be concealed from his troops, has his orderly provide him with a red shirt and pair of brown pants.

5.

"En tout ce qui touche a /'ordure, le Juif est passe maitre . .. " [the Jew is a past master at anything having to do with excrement]-Drumont, II, 455.

6.

Apparently it was widely speculated among conservative nineteenth century French writers, among them Michelet, whom Joyce read and admired, that Napoleon was of Semitic origin. See Drumont I, 300-301.

7.

"Le Semite est un terrien ne voyant guere rien au-de/a de Ia vie presente; L'Aryen est un fils du ciel sans cesse preoccupe d'aspirations superieures ..." [The Semite is an earthling barely able to see anything beyond the present life; the Aryan is a child of the sky ceaselessly concerned with higher aspirations]-Drumont, I, 9. Compare for instance the "terricious" (114.29) Shem-written letter "unfilthed" (111.32) from a mound of mud and/or dung, and the "celestine" Shaun (I 91.15).

8.

I don't know Yiddish-some Wakean who does should put together a glossary-but I can report that a pleasant afternoon spent with Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish (New York: Pocket Books, 1973) called up all kinds of Finnegans Wake echoes, especially Shemian ones. Here, pretty much randomly, are some examples: "schmalz" (83.35), "shiddach," or arranged marriage-"shitateyar" (319.27); "shemozzl," or donneybrook (I 77 .5); "nudnick" (395.17); "mish-mash" (466.12); "putz" (a Shemian judgment of Shaun-603.5); "dybbuk" (149.7); "gozlen," or swindler (233.12); "kaddish," or mourner's prayer (l 01.21 ); "kvell," to gloat over someone's defeat or destruction (37.16); "landsman," a fellow townsman (577.7); "mazik," a clever, mischievous child (565.21 ); "megillah," a prolix, confused history

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (514.2); "melamed," a luckless incompetent (247.19); "plotz," to burst from extreme emotion, especially anger (231.14); "potchkeh," to fuss around inexpertly and inefficiently (184.18); "schmuch," literally a penis, figuratively a worthless fool (89.9, 337.2); "shamus," which 169.1 identifies as Shem's full name: the caretaker of a synagogue, a menial functionary, a private detective, a sycophant, a stool pigeon, the ninth candle of the menorah, used to light the others; "shnorer," a beggar or bum (37.12); "shnoz," a big nose (I 79.6); "shut," synagogue (149.8); "timtum," an effeminate man (463.1).

9.

Rosten, 405-406.

I 0.

See note 7, above.

II.

The four old men of 397.7-398.30, trying out their voices to "sing a mamalujo," sound like a quartet preparing to sing a chorale, canonical or otherwise, but I can't hear it or any music in the song of 398.31-399.28. On the other hand, the finale of their performance at 140.15-141.7 certainly qualifies.

12. "A l'Aryen ... on peut tout faire; seulement il faut eviter de l'agacer. ll se laissera derober tout ce qu'il possede et tout a coup entrer en fureur pour une rose qu'on voudra lui arracher. Alors soudan reveille, il comprend tout, ressaisit l'epee qui trainait dans un coin, tape comme un sourd et inflige au Semite ... un de ces chtitiment terribles." [You can do anything with an Aryan as long as you don't provoke him. He will let you have the shirt off his back and then suddenly be outraged if someone tries to snatch a rose from him. Then, suddenly aroused, he sees through everything, seizes as of old the sword which had been languishing in the corner, strikes like a sudden blow and inflicts on the Semite . . . a terrible chastisement] Drumont, I, 12. 13. "Golem," The Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1925), 37. 14.

As for instance in the pranquean story: " ... and she punched the curses of cromcruwell with the nail of a top into the jiminy ... and he became a tristian" (22.14-17).

Joyce's "Blue Guitar": Wallace Stevens and Finnegans Wake Albert Montesi

One method of approaching the monstrously difficult and oft-times indecipherable Finnegans Wake is to step into the circumambient ooze that surrounds its maker. Although one would believe from some recent scholarship that James Joyce was a totally original mind, speaking out of the blue skies as some sort of god-figure, he was, in fact, very much a product of his time. 1 Sharing this environment and compelled to respond to it aesthetically was, of course, a whole generation of literary artists. Some of these were of major significance to the age, among them such luminaries as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner--all of whom were in some manner, large or small, influenced by the waves of protest and reaction to the rationalism and realism of bourgeois art. 2 Symbolism, surrealism, dadaism, impressionism, expressionism, the decay of language, the search for new forms (new medias) by which to capture and express the modern sensibility, the breakthroughs created by Marx, Freud, and Einstein-all of these shook the timbers of the old house of European art and learning. A young artist starting out had to somehow respond to all these waves and demands. Among these was another major artist, seldom in any manner connected with James Joyce although confronting the same problems-both aesthetically and culturally-that Joyce had to face, and that was the American poet Wallace Stevens. Surprisingly enough, we find on looking at the record that Wallace Stevens was three years older than Joyce. 3 Seldom are the two related, but it might be helpful to look at some of Stevens's longer poems-not to try to demonstrate how Joyce might have influenced Stevens, but rather to examine how Stevens dealt with the same problems of form and substance that Joyce faced. In this exchange, we hope to illuminate some of the intent and mysterious design of Finnegans Wake. Before attempting this, however, it might be helpful to set off a grid or screen by which we can examine Finnegans Wake with the angles of visions provided by new discoveries made into the areas of sleep and dreams. At the same time, we should retain all our old methods of looking at the bicameral consciousness and the cognitive processes of the mind. Let's draw up a schemata that appears something like Figure I and, in doing so, let us recall that we understand neither the mind nor sleep with even a minuscule of understanding. And we should remember as well that Finnegans Wake is, above all, an attempt to examine both night and day, dream and nightmare, cognition and knowledge in both the light of day and the dark of night. (Refer to Figure 1.) In considering the schemata laid down in Figure I, let us remember that James Joyce is finally a "bookish" writer, an academic baiter, who is more strongly attracted to scholarship and erudition than has been generally conceded. Like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, he has laced his works with baits and leads that attract traditional scholarship. The commentary on Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert is very much like T. S. Eliot's notes appended to The Waste Land or Ezra Pound's parading of his knowledge of medieval, classical, and renaissance literature. Joyce loved academic debate, as we can well see in the Shakespeare

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dispute in Ulysses, for instance. But withal, he is hardly stuffy and pompous about his learning. He balances it out with his love of the nonsensical and erotical of his times. He is, perhaps, the most holistic writer of the European experience, encompassing as he does le homme moyen sensual with homo faber, homo sapiens, and homme d'esprit. Like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence, Joyce was also a "life" writer, writing his works out of "living life" rather than out of books. For my generation at least, he was also a sexual evangelist, setting free those areas of erotic experience that needed so much to be understood rather than hid. He, too, dared to write about totem and taboo subjects that debunked and demythologized some of the sacred cows of the Victorian past. What we are attempting to explore here is how and why Joyce wrote the infinitely puzzling opus Finnegans Wake, and why he leaves ideation, thought, substance, conceptualizing, and preconceptualizing behind. How does Wallace Stevens's search for his own voice illuminate this question? This is what the following discussion will explore. In our attempt to connect Joyce and Stevens, we must remember that Stevens works within certain conventional approaches to substance and form; he on most occasions does not attempt to separate form and content. Joyce, however, does seem to eschew all rational ordering of discursive communication. In Finnegans Wake, moving as he does from realism and symbolism to impressionism and, finally, to expressionism, he means for us to attempt to follow his creation of a new language, a new iconology, a new notation for experience. We must understand why. We must learn his new dream language, his new language of the night, in order to vindicate our great enthusiasm and love for his magisterial work Finnegans Wake. I believe that, in taking a look at Wallace Stevens's search for his own identity and his struggle to understand the relationship between the imagination and the real, between the poet and his world, will be helpful here. Is (as Stevens calls out in some of his aphoristic triumphs) Joyce really the ultimate "Emperor of Ice Cream," his imagination God, and Finnegans Wake the "supreme fiction" of our times? With these comments and schemata before us, let us turn immediately to Wallace Stevens's famous poem on creativity and the artist, "The Man With The Blue Guitar." The poem was modeled, remember, after a Picasso painting during his blue period. We quote the first segment: I The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

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A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are."4 We can easily see similarities and analogues to Finnegans Wake, in particular, and to James Joyce, in general, in these lines. The guitarist is seen as artist, shearsman, entertainer, experimenter, obscurantist, tailor-pioneer, trail blazer, reality-creator, shaman, and visionary. One of the sanest and most balanced voices raised in the Babel of voices surrounding Finnegans Wake is that of Mrs. Adaline Glasheen, who writes in her prefatory notes of the Third Census of Finnegans Wake, "Finnegans Wake is a simulacrum of the machinery of God's creation .... Overthrow of memory is one of the 1001 silent, cunning devices by which Joyce exiles the reader from his rational mind and persuades him that Finnegans Wake contains as many possibilities of design and random effect as God's creation."5 Also, consider the economium rendered Joyce by Samuel Beckett: "I welcome this occasion to bow once again, before I go, deep down, before his heroic work, heroic being.'' 6 Given this praise, what is there in Joyce (shaman, visionary, reality-creator) that he strums out on his "blue guitar"? Is there, in effect, something in Finnegans Wake similar to the "art god" of Richard EHmann, or the post-Kantian belief that the truth relayed by literature is superior to that of rational science-that if we squeeze Finnegans Wake long enough, the godhead will pop out? Looking further into the poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar," we notice that the guitarist is a "shearsman of sorts," a new sort of tailor who, in Carlyle's sense, is creating a new suit of clothes, a new exterior costume of a new age. He is also a tradesman who is shearing away the notions and styles of the past. He, of course, is again Joyce who, in Finnegans Wake, is creating for us a new icon by which we rid ourselves of all the incubala of past writing. For Joyce ultimately came to believe, like Jean-Paul Sartre, that the old-fashioned novel, bred and expanded in the eighteenth century-moving from Richardson's Pamela to Sterne's Tristram Shandy-from realism to surrealism, was exhausted. Built on ancient ideas and on the philosophies of Descartes and Hume, Jean-Paul Sartre, wanted to write a novel patterned after Heidigger rather than these older philosophers and thinkers. 7 Margot Norris in her The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake talks of the "novelistic fallacy" of the approaches to Finnegans Wake. Of the conventional novel, she writes: Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel locates [its] philosophic roots in the subjectivism of eighteenthcentury thought. He cites specifically the belief in the individual's claim to knowledge and truth through the senses, independent from the collective traditions of the past, as the cornerstone of realist epistemology. This view is manifested in the novelist plot, which portrays the individual's experience as the testing ground of reality and thereby justifies the exploration of everyday life in literature. 8 Finnegans Wake, of course, refutes these conditions, and Joyce, in writing to one of his patrons, says quite openly that Finnegans Wake is not involved with a getaway plot or any of the structuring of past narratives. In truth, then,

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Joyce is a "shearsman." What then of Stevens's next quotation: "The day was green"? Surely, we can read here that the time was ripe, or green, to not only the possibilities of the new narrative, a rebirthing of the making of the novel, but (in the Viconian sense) a new turn of the cultural clock. Artists everywhere were shouting the need to annihilate the old and create the new. Pound insisted, "Make it new." In regard to the next line, people are concerned about this newfangled instrument "the blue guitar," for it has twanged out the obscure Ulysses and now the incomprehensible Finnegans Wake. It refuses to play the old game of the eighteenth century. Yet, it does play the old game of the family scenario: What is owed to the father? What is owed to the mother? If life hands one this family scenario and we are condemned to repeat its configurations, the debt to the mother conflicting with the debt to the father, the killing of the father, the Oedipal conflict-surely Joyce repeats his family story over and over again. However, he tells it differently each time. Yet, in Stevens's next line, "They said, 'You have a blue guitar, /You do not play things as they are'," the "they" takes upon a certain subtle persistence, for it appears that "they" cannot stand too much of reality; they find that without art and new expression, life is intolerable. They live with the disbelief that life must have a design, a meaning, and that it can be found in art. They are incurably aesthetic in their religious pursuit of art, so they demand of the writer that he "must play, you must/ A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,/ A tune upon the blue guitar/Of things exactly as they are." Joyce responds to this with his Finnegans Wake, for in this book he presents things "exactly as they are." Whose "truth," you immediately ask, and whose reality? To answer some of these queries and since, for Stevens, the blue guitar does not in this poem twang out the monumental answers, let's proceed further in Wallace Stevens's song bag, to seek our version of Finnegans Wake in it. Some of this might be provided in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The poem reads: II

I

I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.

Among twenty snowy mountains The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime. IV A man and a woman Are one A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

v I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

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VI Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause. VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. X

At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.

XII The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

VII 0 thin men of Haddam Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?

IX When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles.

XI He rode over Connecticut In a glass coach. Once, a fear pierced him, In that he mistook The shadow of his equipage For blackbirds. XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing

And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar limbs. 9

Under examination, we could easily call this, in our parallel fashion, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Finnegans Wake. First off, in this poem about perspective, we might be looking down on the very guts of life itself. As T. E. Lawrence writes about the flogging of his own sexually aroused body: "the core of life seemed to heave slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last indescribable pang" 10 (the cry and being of, the "isness" of the blackbird). Who, then, is our blackbird in Finnegans Wake? Is it, in fact, HCE, Joyce, Anna Livia, or the eternal movement of the bird who, like the eternal flow of events, is never ceasing, always giving way to change, to Viconian "corso and recorso"? But it is simply not only the movement that stirs us here. It is the rhythms of Finnegans Wake, the speech tunes-"the lucid, inescapable rhythms," "the bawds of euphony crying out sharply,"-the three minds of the teller (stories repeated over and over again, such as the Russian general, the meeting of the cad in the park, the sexual life of Earwicker, and so forth). The most revealing parallel, however, lies in the last verse of this scramble to determine what do we see rightly. If change is protean, Anna Livia becomes as

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she does, Mrs. Finnegan, the River Liffey, Mother Eve, and so on, how can we arrest and freeze time to "see" at all? So this oxymoronic closing exactly captures what we have to admit about reality. Its ambiguity, its opaqueness Joyce has neatly captured in his greatest book-a reality about which philosophers, preachers, and poets have sweated to define for eons. We finally arrive at Stevens's major achievement, his masterful Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. A longish poem (657 lines, 20 cantos), it is generally regarded as a capstone in his continual struggle to bring the imagination and reality to something like an alliance, to create, as he calls it, a theory of poetry that is also a theory of life. The poem is written as a series of instructive notes to a generalized pupil (an ephebe, as he calls him) as to how he achieved a means by which he becomes a "total" person, and thereby a "total" poet. In order for us to deal with it in relationship to Finnegans Wake, let us briefly summarize its content. Stevens divides the poem into three major sections as to what the modern poem should strive to be. A modern poem must be: (I) abstract, (2) it must change, and (3) it must give pleasure-all which, incidentally, describe the thrust and flow of Finnegans Wake. In the first panel of discussion, "It must be abstract," Stevens debates (with himself as well as his reader) the manner in which this might be achieved. This debate runs roughly in the following fashion: The apprentice poet must first of all attempt to define "the real," the source of the poem as it, in some way, captures and mirrors the so-called "first idea," the "sun," the external world without the mediation of the intellect. This requires the thinking of the blood, rather than cerebration. It also negates the possibility of any teleological or divine plan in the making of the universe; in the death of one god, all other gods die. Nor should the ignorant apprentice retain any preconceived ideas as to how this otherness can be tagged or defined. In this manner, the beginner must dredge up out of his interiority, out of the inner self, the ability to express figuratively some sort of metaphor or "truth." (Stevens is at sea as to what the source of this materia poetica might be, whether Bergsonian, Freudian, or Emersonian.) The creation of metaphor must be done to provide for man a link with "real," without the intervention of the conceptualizing mind. This instinctual oneness, which we might dub a sort of Taoism, was first experienced by Adam and Eve. It is some primitive sense that they possessed while in Eden; but, before they acquired this kinship, there was the external world, the garden with all its objects. Expelled from the garden, they encounter a division between themselves and the external world. This separateness must be bridged by the poet in some leap so that he recaptures the primeval innocence, the instinctual bonding that animals experience, to become of the earth, earthy, to live in nature, not on it. The neophyte poet, however, is unable to make this leap. Because of his intellectual cocoon, he is unable to define and perform his nature. Nonetheless, the successful poet has developed an imagination which can contain this visible and invisible world (Wordsworth and Yeats, for instance). Through this great poet, men transcend their ordinary means of perception, tear down the veil, and touch a knowledge which transcends the intellect. However, the poet for Stevens is not the new priest of Baudelaire, who is able to find his way in a forest of symbols, nor is it the Wordsworthian romantic who erects his new altar over the ruins of Tintern

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Abbey. He is a creature who, although he is uncommon, must in the last analysis retain his generic oneness with all men, with a large embrasure that takes in both his commonness and his uncommonness. Out of this unification comes the "icleal man" which the reader yearns so desperately to find. What Stevens seems to be attempting here is to reconcile our reptilian brain with our civilized cerebral cortex, or to reconcile that which is animal in us with that which is cultural and spiritual. 11 In his generous way in Finnegans Wake, however, Joyce does realize that man is unfinished and undefined; that he is unable to make such a marriage of soul and body; that, as early as "Portrait of the Artist," man must live in himself as creature as well as idealist. Stephen (the pretentious idealist) becomes Bloom and Bloom, in turn, becomes Earwicker. Joyce knows that this romantic silliness about man without his limitations becomes an abstraction, not a reality. Therefore, in Finnegans Wake, Joyce does away with the intruding intellect and demonstrates man on a surer ground. A generation cliche, you'd say. Yeats said it many times: Man cannot know truth, but he can embody it, and writes lines to fishermen, and cannot tell the dancer from the dance, and selects Crazy Jane over the Bishop. Teilhard de Chardin said it with his omega point, where the flesh and the spirit become one. 12 What is so original about Finnegans Wake? For these answers, we must explore further still. In the second segment of his "Notes," Stevens insists that the poem "must change," contending that the religionist of the past, with his system of atemporality, was dead wrong. There is, Stevens insists, no abstracted value scheme that transcends man and his world. In the sociology of man, nothing permanent obtains; since nothing there is that does not change, politics and art are as ephemeral as the rose and the briar bush. Greek art has all but disappeared; Shelley writes of Ozymandis, Keats of his melancholy. Is there, then, no absolute but change? Joyce is wonderfully positive here. He allows us through the Viconian circle to say that man will endure, that he will always have a second chance in that Anna Livia may become the sea, but later becomes reincarnated in Issy again and again. He does not, like Orwell, insist that man has in his cells an enzyme for self -destruct. He is blissfully Irish still in his capacity to say that man will not only endure-he can endure with humor, wit, and laughter. He has the rare capacity of the Irish, to survive with the pride of the tinker, to turn aside sorrow with a quick sally of wit, to laugh at misfortune. Joyce is saying in Finnegans Wake: If history is a comic joke, why does man take it so seriously? To continue our discussion of Stevens, in his "Notes" on his second commandment, change, for Stevens, becomes the reconciliation of opposites. For man, the mediating force between creativity and hard reality is the imagination. Therefore, for Stevens, imagination is the essential tool for the new poet. He must be able to combine the forces of nature and the forces of his mind to touch not only the wellsprings of the spiritus mundus, but the nota of his world. The imagination somehow can unseat the mighty horse of reason of its old, tired rider and still retain the magnificent horse. Out of this process, the poet creates the ideal man that the ordinary man yearns to be. Although man scrambles and falters throughout history, he will not give up the dream of a utopia, of a city of graceful men; although he loves erotically and carnally, he still yearns to love lyrically and eternally. But this scaling between the dream and the reality must somehow be balanced out. The dream of the romantic-of

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ideality-must be counter-balanced by the awful limitations of his own psychology and his limited perception. Time, with its fluctuations and its alterations, is an otherness, an order that he can neither wholly understand nor freeze. It can only be tentatively bridged by the master-builder, the poet, to provide a synthesis through his magic skills, his imaginative leap. The poet is thus compelled to be a Darwinist, to witness change and to provide for brief moments a resting place from its eternal movement; this, then, is his art. He finds only in language the means to communicate this forever changing vision. Thus, the poem Finnegans Wake in time may well be considered the great epic poem of its age. Even a brief glance at these notes will assure us that Joyce and Stevens are running along the same track here. The "yin and yang-ness" of Joyce, the reconciliation of opposites, the eternal mobility of Finnegans Wake, the constant blending of characters, the twinning of Shem and Shaun (Mrs. Glasheen has even included a long chart of the metamorphosis of each character; it is a long list). As for reality, the debris of history, Anna Livia's letter is finally indecipherable even to those cognoscenti such as Shaun. There is no letter to the world that will unriddle the mystery of man's biological and chronological history. Even the folk mind of Anna Livia cannot help us here. What other similarities of change do we detect in this paralleling? Surely no one in Finnegans Wake is made outsized or heroic. Everyone is mundane-gutsy, vulnerable, and unwashed. Yet, Joyce's tone and his attitude towards them is never harsh. He is, moreover (if in any sense he is a character of voice in this book), never judgmental or condemnatory. Shaun may speak nastily of Shem, but he is, of course, simply speaking in his own voice. The washerwomen at the ford, the four old men, the cad-all are providing their own angle of vision, their own point of view. Turning now to the last segment of Stevens's instruction, "It must give pleasure," we can say by any scaling or measure that this is the main objective of Finnegans Wake. It becomes in the hands of this masterful puppeteer a triumphant peal of multi-sounding laughter-n occasion baritoned and lusty; in others, guffawed and hearty; in still others, silvery and lyrical. In it, we can hear the voices of Tolkien's elves as well as the bawdy notes of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is at moments operatic and highly choreographed and orchestrated; at most times Wagner; at some others Puccini. Full of all sorts of noises, it may well be as highly poetic as any orchestra score, operatic scenario, or ballet book. To continue our look at Stevens, however, since reality and any current expression of it soon deadens into custom-ridden familiarity, and since actuality is constantly taking on new hues and coloration, the poet must be forever inventive and innovative. The perpetual renewal of the earth and the poet's capturing of that renewal is, of course, one of the major motifs in Finnegans Wake. However, for Stevens, the marriage of the intellect and emotion is difficult to achieve, since Descartes's dualism seems to be enforced by our biology and our psychology. One method of mediating between these two disparities is the imaginative limit made by the poet in his leap toward an infinitude that transcends his own nature. This imaginative limit is controlled by man's incapacity to scale the skies, and his whole life is an effort to achieve those moments when he can transcend that limit. Thus, the poem ends with an epilogue addressed to a soldier who is, in effect, the poet and his neophyte, who

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stand in a perpetual war to fight the barriers that exist between the real and the ideal world. At this juncture, Joyce and Stevens seem to part ways. Joyce seems to suggest that life might not have any pat formulas or solutions, that cause does not provoke effect in all instances, that certain human problems are beyond yes and no, that truth and knowledge may be impossible to achieve in any total or even partial fashion. He further suggests that certain matters do not have a one-to-one correlation; that they may better "play" with as/if, rather than neither/nor, or truth or falsity. Further still, he suggests that stimulus need not provide a perpetual response, that our life lines may be what Ibsen calls our life-lies. Art, Joyce insists, by its use of ambiguous counters repeats that our old mythologies need new coats, that our old ways of thinking and feeling may be leading us to moral and cultural entrapments, that we must take new risks and enter new portals of awareness, not stone the new that may be bringing new seeds to our old caves. Thus, Joyce's Finnegans Wake attempts to restructure the world, reinvent religion, and recreate God. Since language as we know it can be manipulated and contrived or utilized by dictators to distort and disorder reality and, in effect, fail us, Joyce attempts to create a new language in his Finnegans Wake, one that is so loaded with suggestion rather than statement, with indirection and ambiguity that it provokes ultimate thievery of our old stock of ideas and emotions. The triumph of Finnegans Wake, however, is in its insistence that we learn its notation to discover the superior reality, the imp of the absolute, that obsesses us, that we are sure must exist in the novel, opera, or poem that Finnegans Wake must be. Joyce does not revert to the nihilism of literature, the glory of nothing, to the blank page, the willful disordering of the senses of the French symbolists, or Freudian symbolism, or the extremes of the surrealists or dadaists. He does not insist that we destroy our fallible language as it now exists, for that language is all that we have, duplicitous and vulnerable as it might be. What he does do is to ask us to plod relentlessly on through the pits, bogs, and traps of his Finnegans Wake so that our labor to find the design will make our tasks eternally young, to fulfill Wallace Stevens's adjuration that we must make art perpetually new. Joyce knows full well that we will never find that design, that pattern, that overarching unity that we think is in the labyrinths of Finnegans Wake, for at this moment and his-in our present state of consciousness and the split of the bicameral mind-it simply does not exist. There is no central design, no central statement, no secret totality of being in Finnegans Wake. Joyce knew full well that our hope that there is some grand design, some overpowering vision, will drive us on for generations to find it in our reading of Finnegans Wake. For Joyce has contrived in the Wake the most audacious cryptogram in the history of art. With each word a little world made cunningly, each a puzzlement, and with thousands of these words to unravel, we will be at the task for eons. He knows, too, that we will be perpetually renewed by our search, that the expense of our greatness is to fail at unraveling this vast puzzle. This is the message that he twangs out on his blue guitar-a message that Stevens comes partially to understand, but which Joyce understood perfectly.

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Areas of Consciousness The Rational (Day)

l.

Philosophy, history 2. 3.

The Irrational (Night)

Cognition and knowledge is treated in Finnegans Wake. a. Myth: history as a nightmare b. Theory: history as a joke. History of mankind/history of Ireland Popular and Formal Culture a. Music -Musical hall and popular song/ballads, Irish folk music b. Sports, boating, etc. c. Technology d. Science and cosmology e. Cinema and still photography

Pre-Sleep World (all the puzzling images that flash through our minds before we fall asleep). Jungian, collective unconscious Left and right sides of the brain Id/ego/superego Anima and Animus

Techniques of Tension: the circle, twinning, yang and yin of reconciliation of opposites, yoking, transmission into other areas of being, intertexuality. Techniques of Style:

Portmanteau words, punning, piling of one image upon the other, montage, doubling, etc.

The Language Trap:

The tyranny of language The betrayal of language Rhetorical traps Decay of language

Figure 1. Grid or screen by which to examine Finnegans Wake.

Wallace Stevens and Finnegans Wake

109 Notes

1.

The canonization of Saint Joyce grows apace year by year. See, for instance, Jackson Cope's Joyce's Cities: Archaeologies of the Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981 ), where his works are "not unlike the unearthing of Troy or the discovery of Tutankhamen's Tomb." Or see the exchange of letters in The New York Review of Books in regard to the Hans Walter Gabler edition of Ulysses. Here Ulysses, once a saucy, scandalous book, is treated as if it were some sacred document that demands a "Biblical exegesis" (The New York Review of Books, March 30, 1989, 43-45). One wonders, with the invasion of Joyce scholarship by the hordes of linguistic and "new semiotic" researchers, whether their work is high scholarship or just plain Alexandrian decadence, or needless nitpicking.

2.

This old scenario has been so well reported, repeated, and rehashed that I hesitate to rehearse it once more. But here goes: That Joyce knew quite well the nature of the period and its drift, confusions, shared ideas, its Weltanschauung, has been tirelessly recorded by generations of scholars. However, one need not have to catalogue the contents of a library to determine what books (read or unread) or whatever onta or movements of popular or serious thought might have influenced the young writer starting out. Most modern folk know Superman and Mickey Mouse, Elvis Presley and the Beatles, without anything to indicate in their letters or writings that these personages really existed. Joyce has tossed in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake such contemporary popular figures as Charlie Chase, Charlie Chaplin, and Peaches and Daddy Browning. Therefore, why do we constantly insist on a direct one-to-one relationship between the writer and his library? Joyce wrote essays on Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken, aped shamelessly from Dujardin's novel Les Lauriers sont Coupes, and listened to the trendy "art talk" and the tirades and protestations against middle-class art in the bistros of Paris, Zurich, and Trieste. Surely he had come first or secondhand to the slogans and the proclamations so much in the air when both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were conceived -all declaring the decay and collapse of bourgeois culture. A more judicious evaluation of Joyce's debt to his times can be found in Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon's Understanding Finnegans Wake (New York and London: Garland, 1982), where Joyce is considered as a great synthesizer, a collector of debris and verbal exchange of any sort, as well as the erudite and serious works of the past and those of his times.

3.

It might be helpful here to look at a biographical sketch of each writer:

Stevens (1879-1955) 1909 Marries 1914 First Publication 1916 1923

Hartford Insurance Harmonium, A.A. Knopf at 44

Joyce {1882-1941) 1902 Leaves Ireland 1904 Union with Nora Barnacle 1905-1915 Trieste 1907 Chamber Music

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake 1931

1914

Dubliners

1935

Second edition of Harmonium Made Vice-President of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company Ideas of Order

1916

1936

Owl's Clover

1922

1937

Man with the Blue Guitar Parts of the World (Notes toward a Supreme Fiction) National Institue of Arts and Letters Transport to Summer Auroras of Autumn Pulitzer Prize Death - August 2.

1939

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Ulysses (Trieste, Zurich, Paris) Finnegans Wake

1941

Death-January 13.

1934

1942 1946 1947 1950 1950 1955 4.

Wallace Stevens, "The Man With The Blue Guitar," in The Man with the Blue Guitar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 3.

5.

Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), xi.

6.

S. B. Bushrui and Bernard Benstock, eds. James Joyce: An International Perspective (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire; Calvin Smythe, Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982), vii.

7.

Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 228.

8.

Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 10.

9.

Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 92-95.

10. Quoted in Joseph W. Bean, "Lawrence of Arabia," The Advocate (11 April 1989), 29. 11. My reading of Stevens's Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction has been influenced by Margaret Peterson, Wallace Stevens and the Idealist Tradition (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983); Helen Vendler, On Extended Wings (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1969); Albert Gelpi, ed. Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Rajeer S. Patke, The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Interpretive Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Wallace Stevens and Finnegans Wake 12.

Ill

See "Truth" in Stephen Maxfield Parrish and James Allan Painter, eds. A Concordance to the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 838.

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PART II: JOYCE'S TEXTUAL SELF-REFERENTIALITY

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Every Man His Own God: From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake

Alan S. Loxterman

After an initial gasp of astonishment over a text that looks like English yet seems to be in a foreign language, readers encountering Finnegans Wake for the first time may be even more daunted by popular handbooks on Joyce to which they turn for encouragement and explanation: Everything in the book ought to be information, but much of it continues to be noise, and perhaps always will be.' We have to remember not only the appearance of images but the appearance of individual words, and, individual though the words unquestionably are, this cannot be done. 2 Any set of standards that will account for the essential greatness of Ulysses must, I feel, find a certain sterility in Finnegans Wake . . . . In Ulysses, parody and satire have direction because they serve a moral vision; but in Finnegans Wake they turn in upon themselves and destroy their own foundations. 3 An assumption which all these commentators share is that with Ulysses Joyce had already stretched his readers' skills to their limits. Therefore Finnegans Wake, despite some worthwhile passages, remains incomprehensible in that it far exceeds the capacities of even its most experienced and sympathetic readers to view it continuously as a whole. Nevertheless readers continue to be fascinated by Finnegans Wake, and scholars keep trying to explain it. I would contend that we gain aesthetic as well as historical perspective by viewing the obstacles to understanding Finnegans Wake as an extension of those stylistic experiments which also make Ulysses problematic. In this way we can better appreciate how Joyce was working toward his ultimate achievement, an anomaly in the history of literature which expands the way we read. Today, and into our foreseeable future, Finnegans Wake survives not as the completed comprehensible entity which previous fiction (including Joyce's own) had conditioned us to expect. Rather it remains what Joyce first called it, a "Work in Progress," an artistic arrangement of words which requires continuous collaboration from its readers to make those words meaningful as a text. Joycean commentators who do not recognize such continuity between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake tend to draw on Ulysses for contrast, as a means by which to measure the deficiencies of Joyce's final work. The most fully developed argument along these lines is that of S. L. Goldberg, who finds Finnegans Wake to be "neither life nor art" because "it cannot realise [its 'argument'] imaginatively," as does Ulysses: "I would invoke the support both of Ulysses and of the insight on which its achievement rests: that we 115

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understand life (or imagine truly) only as individuals, necessarily living in and by means of our particular circumstances."4 Through its plot and characterization Ulysses provides sufficient circumstantial evidence for us to follow its characters to "the limits of their self -understanding." Then the author as arranger provides metaphors like the Homeric parallels to lead us "beyond [the characters], not rejecting their vision but transcending it.''5 Despite its obscurities and stylistic vagaries Ulysses expresses a moral and spiritual vision because its author maintains a classical control over character and plot which grounds us in life's particulars. Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, dissolves such particulars in a romantic flux of" 'formless spiritual essences,' " giving the reader no sense of "a completed action" (Charles Feidelson, quoted in Goldberg, The Classical Temper 196-197). One problem with Goldberg's comparison is that, in emphasizing the contrast with Finnegans Wake, it oversimplifies Ulysses. Goldberg finds an early indication of Joyce's moral/spiritual vision in the ship which Stephen Dedalus sees at the end of "Proteus." But his ship is more than a metaphor assuring us that Stephen too "is silently moving homeward" (The Classical Temper 163). Before he turns and sees the ship Stephen has melodramatically placed a piece of snot on a rock, declaring "For the rest let look who will.'' 6 Thus the narrative intrusion describing Stephen's glance at the ship as "rere regardant" may be phrased in the stiff, even precious, language of striking a heraldic pose to mock the pretentiousness of Stephen's self -dramatization. The ship itself appears to offer the promise of Christian iconography: "Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship" (U 3.503-505). The "threemaster" (three crosses, or Christ as the "master" of the Trinity?) and the echo between "brailed up" and "nailed up" (especially in conjunction with "crosstrees") could suggest a funeral ship of crucifixion "homing" toward resurrection. But the sentimentality of Ireland's spiritual ideals is also questioned when the homing ship's actual cargo turns out to be mere earthy political ballast: bricks coming from England (U 10.1098-1099). At the end of "Proteus" it is impossible to distinguish between the reader's response to the consoling appearance of the spiritual ship which, in his earlier works, Joyce might have regarded as an epiphany and the author/narrator's mockery of such an epiphany as a reminder of Stephen's immature past. In its romanticized view of art as being sacred, the concept of epiphany seems well suited to a young man choosing between art and the priesthood in Portrait. But it is no longer adequate for what Stephen has become in Ulysses, a self-dramatizing apostate haunted by the ghost of his mother. 7 Goldberg's characterization of Joyce's other main protagonist, Leopold Bloom, also becomes problematic when we look for textual support. Goldberg sees "the son-father relationship of Stephen's theory [about Hamlet] established" when Bloom bends to help the fallen Stephen and has a vision of his own dead son at the end of "Circe" (The Classical Temper 187). But the details of Bloom's vision do not foreshadow a future meeting between Bloom and Stephen; they satirize the past, Bloom's muddled aspirations for this son, Rudy. To fulfill what must have been the dream of Leopold's own parents, the ghost of the eleven-year-old dutifully scans a book. It is not identified as the Torah, perhaps because the grandparents' rabbinical aspirations get confused with Leopold's own knowledge of gentile ritual through freemasonry so that the boy reads "from right to left," yet "appears in the attitude of secret master." To fulfill the aspirations of Bloom in Ireland looking toward England for

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intellectual and social status, Rudy also wears an Eton suit. In fact, he has become a modishly decadent British esthete with "delicate mauve face," kissing the page as he reads, as if the book were Swinburne rather than scripture (U 15.4955-4967). The details of Bloom's vision gently mock his mixed aspirations for his son to be Jewish and Christian, Irish and English all at once-a "changeling" (U 15.4957) indeed. The satire implicit in Bloom's vision of possibility is milder than it was in Stephen's, as befits Bloom's greater compassion and ineffectuality. But the cumulative effect of these details does not seem, as Goldberg suggests, to foreshadow some father-son relationship with Stephen. Rather the future which Bloom had dreamed of for his own son is satirically depicted, being comically exaggerated and even contradictory-as parents' plans for their children are apt to become. Goldberg argues that Stephen's sighting of a ship and Bloom's vision of his son constitute evidence for a moral and spiritual argument beyond the actions of characters in Ulysses. But I have shown that a counter-movement toward satire negates, or at least questions, that argument. Both in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake, the satire "turns against itself," undermining the very principles and expectations being generated by plot and character. Therefore Litz's comment which I quoted at the beginning, a contrast between the two works on the basis of "parody and satire [which] serve a moral vision," seems overdrawn. Both works evince a comic skepticism toward even the most indirect moral conclusions, especially where theology and the supernatural are concerned, as in the visions associated with Stephen and Bloom. Contradictory conclusions reached by Joycean commentators on both works demonstrate that drawing moral conclusions or deducing spiritual consolation is as risky in Ulysses as it is in Finnegans Wake. To the extent that the language of Finnegans Wake continually disorients us, rendering all our preconceptions ambivalent, its satire does seem more comprehensive and unrelenting. But in both books "although Joyce claimed to be able to communicate whatever he liked with language, he also recognized that the complexity of life requires that any such idea must be played off against its opposite, the counterpoint serving to indicate the futility of the search for absolute truth in a universe ruled by relativism, randomness, and uncertainty." 8 Another similarity between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seems more fundamental in that it makes them seem more like each other than like any other fictions. Goldberg justly observes that "Joyce's streams-of-consciousness represent not the endless flux of subjective experience or the formless chaos of objective 'reality,' but the creative insight, the informing activity, that is the real subject of [Joyce's] aesthetic theories and the basis of his moral judgments" (The Classical Temper 37). Yet this observation applies only so long as the interior monologue remains grounded in those moral and spiritual values which Goldberg recognizes in terms of character and plot concerns. And I would claim that at least half of Ulysses diverts its readers' attention from plot and character to the activity of the author as arranger. A rapid survey reveals six chapters which clearly and consistently divert readers' attention from character and plot, with their attendant moral concerns, to each chapter's own stylistic pattern of organization : "Aeolus," "Wandering Rocks," "Sirens," "Oxen of the Sun," "Eumaeus" and "Ithaca." In four more chapters story and patterns of arrangement compete almost equally for readers' attention: "Proteus," "Nausicaa," "Circe" and "Penelope." Even when an interior monologue continuously represents a character's reflection, the author as arranger may become intrusive by implication. Long after we understand in "Proteus" that

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Stephen interprets reality through a convoluted association of allusions to literature and philosophy, the details continue to accumulate until we wonder whether this is more the author's own obsession than his character's. The same happens in "Penelope," where we can savor the comedy of Molly's intuitively random associations only to the point where the pattern becomes obsessive in its inclusiveness, seemingly being indulged for its own sake. This I take to be a foreshadowing of the "total inclusiveness" in accretion of detail that Litz finds to be Joyce's method of construction throughout Finnegans Wake. 9 A number of commentators have sought to justify the shift in Ulysses from story to organizational concerns by explaining how the various narrative styles perform the function of character and plot by indirectly developing the book's overall moral and spiritual argument. Nevertheless, the reader of "Scylla and Charybdis" who has been closely following Stephen's convoluted arguments about Shakespeare in order to find out more about Stephen's own temperament and· circumstances is apt to find the fragmentary montage of the next chapter ("Wandering Rocks") to be diverting as a distraction, not as an entertainment. Throughout Ulysses the reader is deflected back and forth, from concern about what a chapter means to a stylistic preoccupation with its expressive arrangement. 10 Of course the narrative style which seems to intrude on an otherwise conventional telling of a story in Ulysses becomes all-encompassing in Finnegans Wake. Here there is no consistent plot being generated by characters and no coherent system of parallels with other literary works, as there was in Ulysses. The structure of Finnegans Wake-which has variously been determined to be myth, metaphysical entity, and historical system---cannot be experienced immediately by the reader as a symbolic dimension of the plot. It can only be arrived at mediately, through critical explication. 11 Finnegans Wake can provide its readers with a more unified reading experience than Ulysses because the discontinuity which readers experience between the Wake's characters and plot and its overall argumentative design is more uniform-in fact, more comprehensive-than in any previous work of literature. Like Ulysses, Finnegans Wake has its multiple narrative voices. But in Ulysses these voices express a style dictated by the conceptual concerns of a particular chapter. The narrative voices of Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, seem more like each other than like the voices dictated by their particular narrative contexts since they are all composed of the same extraordinary language which sets any passage selected at random apart from any other passage ever written. From beginning to end the unique style of Finnegans Wake reminds its readers that this work is more about itself than about people or ideas. That chapter in Ulysses which most clearly anticipates the self-referential style of Finnegans Wake is "Sirens." Here the very syntax of sentences is determined by abstract concepts, various musical techniques like polyphony and tonality, through which sound may be organized artistically. Verbal organization in "Sirens" is at its most abstract since its materials can be treated primarily for their sound values. If, for example, we compare it to "Oxen of the Sun," in that chapter words are still treated as words rather than sound, and must both parody their literary originals as well as proceed stylistically in chronological order.

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Yet even in "Sirens" words are treated less abstractly than they are m Finnegans Wake:

... Bloom. Old Bloom (U 11.49). Big Benaben. Big Benben (U 11.53). Throughout the chapter Bloom's sound value (which he even gaseously generates himself by way of conclusion: U 11.1288; 1293) is the middle letters of his name, a weak and regretful "Oo." This suits him because he is "Blue," depressed and feeling "Old" (U 11.230) from constant fretting over the impending assignation which he feels powerless to prevent between his wife Molly and her lover Blazes Boylan (U 11.639-641 ). Ben Dollard, in contrast, is introduced as "big" not only because of his actual girth but also by virtue of his vigorous and hearty disposition. His sound signature is doubled into two explosive "Bs" (Benben) because he is bursting with sexual energy. At least that is the way Bloom remembers Molly seeing Ben, laughing at tight trousers that put "all his belongings on show" during a concert (U 11.557). The sound of his name puts Ben in the category of that other double "B," Blazes Boylan, who is "Boylan with impatience" to get to Molly (U 11.289). Joyce's primary method for establishing a sound typical for each character in "Sirens" is onomatopoeia, the deliberate shaping of art to echo life in sound. Here Ben's name rebounds energetically (Benaben), like a big man on a bed. His verbal repartee in this chapter is predominantly sexual, and the repeated sound of this name joins all the other up-down, in-out, jiggling sexual rhythms of the chapter: the "Fro. To, fro" of the beerpull, a "baton cool protruding" (U 11.47), the "jumping rose" on the breast of a barmaid (U 11.181 ), the "rebound" of her garter (U 11.413 ), and the jingle of Blaze's jaunting car which anticipates another soon to follow of Molly's own jiggling bed quoits (U 11.304; 18.1130-1132). In itself onomatopoeia is a traditional device, and it poses difficulties for the reader in "Sirens" only because Joyce practices it so extensively with the concept of verbal music behind it. For example, the names just discussed appear in a verbal "overture" which exposes us to sound fragments of the motifs in isolation, before we can make sense of them within the context of the narrative that follows. But whatever tenacity and ingenuity Ulysses requires from its readers, its demands seem reasonable in comparison to those of Finnegans Wake. Here, for the sake of comparison, are some other names cited in that text: not yet, though all's fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. 12 As in the "overture" to "Sirens," the reading experience must be circular rather than linear; we must reread in order to read with any conceptual understanding. But since the plot and characters of Finnegans Wake are sketchy at best, and constantly shifting, the subsequent narrative establishes little of the dramatic context which helped us to interpret the sounds of "Bloom" and "Ben" in "Sirens." If we allow for spelling variations, we can begin by extracting some names from the text: Vanessa, Susie, Esther, Nathan, and Joe. The last four are Biblical, and this encourages us to discover a fifth Biblical name, "Ruth," which we can derive primarily from saying it and finding it to be a pun on "wroth" since the spelling distortion is greater than with the other names. But what about "saucy sisters," with its spelling distorted so that we can see both "Susie" and "Esther" embedded in the words and hear them as puns? By pronouncing "vanessy" with an accent on the first syllable, we can find another pun in it and rewrite the

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

proverb of "all's fair in [vanity)," then see that "sisters" is being used in the feminist sense of women united in conflict between the genders. So, returning to our Biblical connection between the names, we have the meaning that younger women, like Susannah, Esther and Ruth, involved with older men are liable to be particularly temperamental with their lovers or husbands because their female vanity accentuates the generation gap. 13 So far there does not seem to be too much difference between our interpretation of names in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake, except of course that the latter is more complex, requiring many more mental operations. Both depend on sensitivity to sound values in language and the ability to find hidden associations by interrelating words (in this case names) with concepts and feelings derived from our own observations of human behavior. So far, demanding though they are, both texts nevertheless call upon skills which we might be expected to exercise to a lesser extent in reading other works of literature. But Finnegans Wake requires more. We have two men's names to match with three women's; and if we use the Bible to try and associate them with those women in terms of love and war, we reach a dead end. The words "twone nathandjoe" exemplify a sort of orthographic onomatopoeia in that they look like what they are saying: "two" shares its "o" with "one" just as "nathan" shares its "an" with "and." Two-in-oneness. Could this be twins? Not if these are the Biblical Nathan and Joseph. Perhaps Vanessa, the remaining name which does not fit the Biblical context, needs to be connected with these men and the concept of twins in a different way. A literary Vanessa? Jonathan Swift's "twin" young loves, Stella and Vanessa! So "nathandjoe" is being used not primarily for the men's names but as the code word which Stella employed in private correspondence as "an anagram for Jonathan (Dean Jonathan Swift) split in two and turned head over heels by his two young-girl loves." 14 If, in this passage as quoted, we had not caught the arcane allusion to Stella's anagram, two earlier drafts of Finnegans Wake could have provided us with more overt clues: "twin sesthers" and "twone jonathan." 15 Here we have an essential distinction between the interpretation of Ulysses and of Finnegans Wake. So long as "the integrity of the individual word" (Litz, Art 70) is retained, even the abstract concepts of sound and rhythm in "Sirens" The become symbolically meaningful in terms of character and plot. connotations of a word (Ben) in a plot context (Ben Dollard as lover and singer) are reinforced through onomatopoeia in terms of a particular tonality (Benben) to evoke some character or quality (Big). They then become like musical leitmotifs as they are repeated in other contexts, reverberating throughout the chapter. But in Finnegans Wake isolated syllables, both singly and in groups remain the primary source of meaning. Ultimately we can, of course, recognize a vital connection between the Biblical women and their elder loves, Swift and his girl-loves, and the main character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, whose guilt over his desire for his daughter Issy in her multiple guises runs throughout Finnegans Wake. Yet the puns, orthographic symbolism, and allusions are so demanding in themselves, and the plot and character seem so minimal by comparison, that we only experience a remote connection between that part of a sentence which we are decoding by syllables and the chapter which contains the sentence, much less the book as a whole. In this manner Finnegans Wake fulfills the self-referential implications of those chapters in Ulysses where the development of plot is obscured by stylistic and organizational features. Unlike

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Ulysses it has little plot to be interrupted or undercut because it is organized at the smallest unit of discourse, not section or chapter or even sentence but the syllables of each word. All of Finnegans Wake is experienced by the reader as being less about Vico or myth or even relationships between characters than it is about itself, the generation of meaning through language.

Joyce's increasing preoccupation with language as a reflexive medium parallels comparable developments in other disciplines. Borrowing Joyce's own use of musical analogy, we might call Ulysses neo-Romantic because its passages of atonal composition serve to highlight by contrast those tonal harmonic combinations recognizable as melodies (plot and character generating theme). By comparison Finnegans Wake would be more difficult to listen to, sounding atonal and serial throughout because its intricate texture only permits plot and character to surface fragmentarily, directing our attention instead to the succession and blending of sounds, the compositional process itself. 16 Using the visual arts we could make a similar distinction. Ulysses seems visually challenging in itself, alternating between realism and a surrealism so highly organized (levels of narrative being analogous to visual planes) that most commentators call it cubism. 17 Yet Finnegans Wake makes even greater demands on an audience accustomed to mimetic modes of representation by being more abstract (non-representational) throughout. With respect to scientific disciplines, the design of Finnegans Wake anticipates "complementarity," a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics that the observer actively creates meaning through the very act of mental attention rather than passively discovering it from physical stimuli perceived as external data. 18 In its systematic multiplicity of reference Finnegans Wake seems designed for complementarity, "an interpretation that is inevitably unstable, that (like our composite view of the universe) derives its sense of order only from a careful selection of those facts that support the hypothesis we have in mind at any time." 19 So Finnegans Wake exists in "no spatial time" (FW 358.5). The special/spatial pun reminds us that this work lacks the special sense of space and time which enables conventional fiction-including part of Ulysses-to imitate life through plot, that spatial sequencing of events which readers (using their linear sense of time) interpret as cause and effect. Finnegans Wake anticipates another idea associated with complementarity and the subjective nature of our construction of events in space/time, one which is so speculative and to many physicists so unverifiable that it cannot be scientifically dignified as a hypothesis. If "what we experience is not external reality, but our interaction with it," then our very identity is provisional, a series of choices which might have been otherwise, even opposite. This leads to the Many Worlds theory that all of the choices we do not make continue to exist, but at other levels of reality. Of course we cannot verify the existence of these alternate realities because that very sequence of choices by which we exclude ourselves from them is also the way we construct our own reality from one moment to the next. 20

The observer's constitutive role in making meaning which seems so central to the art and science of our own time has long been influential in philosophy. Joyce could have derived a philosopher's version of what some scientists now call the Many Worlds theory from the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno. The idea that "oppositions collapsed into unities at their extremes" led Bruno to conclude that "all identities were, therefore, provisional." 21 From this

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came Bruno's version of Many Worlds: "At one level of consciousness we claim an identity and stability both for ourselves and our objects of perception. But such identities can only be produced by a process of differentiation in which other identities are rejected." 22 We need only add to this the idea that all those rejected identities continue to co-exist in other, mutually exclusive, branches of reality and we arrive at the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In Finnegans Wake it is not merely the shifting identities of the characters that dramatize the provisional nature of identity according to Bruno. The language itself branches into multiple realities whenever syllables of oncefamiliar words (our expressions of observed reality) are distorted through spelling changes and juxtaposed with other syllables in unfamiliar combinations. We can only hold in our minds one interpretation of such syllables at a time. Yet, as in the Many Worlds theory, we are also aware that other, perhaps equally valid, interpretations of that same syllable co-exist with ours, waiting for us to claim them as meaning. Through the satire often implicit in puns, these alternatives also qualify as Bruno's "oppositions collapsed into unities." Like reality itself in the Many Worlds theory, the text exists not merely as possibilities but as multiple realities which only require complementarity, interaction with our consciousness, to actualize them. Since Finnegans Wake is primarily language being re-read in circular succession, cause-effect interpretations of events in linear time no longer apply. Any given event may be interpreted as preceding the next one as well as following it.Z3 With the disappearance of cause and effect, traditional distinctions of tense become inapplicable as well, as if the text could keep its readers in a perpetual present: "if we each could always do all we ever did" (FW 287.F2). But of course each encounter with the text must be sequential, remaining in linear time. Readers regard Finnegans Wake as observers relate to space/time, both being conscious of the fact that they are only able to descry a few letters of a continuously unwinding scroll on which totality has been inscribed. In Finnegans Wake such a totality is represented by the very density of its text which ensures that each reading experience will be more retrogressive than progressive. Inevitably readers follow the injunction to "Forget, remember!" (FW 614.22) by forgetting more than they can remember so that each reading will become, in effect, a new remembering: "all that has been done has yet to be done and done again" (FW 194.10). The quotation above suggests another philosopher whom many commentators identify as having the greatest theoretical influence on Finnegans Wake. Parallels between Giambattista Vico's cyclical view of historical development and the organization of Finnegans Wake are usually cited as evidence for Vico's influence. Like Bruno, Vico also emphasized the role that observers themselves play in determining the nature of whatever they observe. Mario Valdes calls this "relational theory," and he traces its origins to Vico in the eighteenth century: If with Vico we accept the epistemological primacy of the man-made historical world, it follows that there is no absolute to which we can appeal as the basis of the truth. It follows therefore that man is in a unique position as both the subject and the object of history. He is making his historical world as he himself is already in history and subject to historical forces that antedate him and against which he has only the recourse of self -consciousness. Therefore it is in his historymaking that man encounters his own historical reality. 24

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Except for typographical errors, the black letters on white paper which constitute the text of Finnegans Wake obviously remain unchanged. It is we who continually change the text by re-reading it cumulatively. But Vico's relational attitude is that, while we are able to verbalize entities like "text" or "history" as being independent, we cannot conceive of them apart from our own experience. In practice Finnegans Wake is no more static than history itself because each re-reading is a Viconian spiral of variegated attention, either to new details noticed each time around or to recollected details viewed in a different interpretive Gestalt. With Vico, history is a making, man's imposition of concepts upon whatever is and has been happening around him; and with Joyce, literature is making, the reader's imposition of meaning upon a text through language. What Goldberg condemns as the relinquishing of authorial control and a consequent dissolution of meaningfulness, Joyce, as a Viconian, could defend as a deliberate distortion of familiar vocabulary to dramatize how reflexivity (knowing that we are reading while we do it) is an essential part of the creative process. As Valdes concludes, "In his history-making ... man encounters his own historical reality." From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake Joyce increasingly relies on language to enact the process of how meaning is being made before our eyes. The alteration of a single letter in Ulysses alerts us to characters as composites sharing parallel roles. Bloom loves his daughter Milly as "Silly [Milly]" (U 4.284), a diluted version (with its higher vowel) of Molly with her lower, more mature, sex appeal (a feminine parallel to the high and low-pitched Bloom/Dollard contrast already mentioned). A final draft of Finnegans Wake transforms "thouartpatrick" to "thuartpeatrick" (FW 3.1 0) and opposite possibilities emerge. Either this could be a celebration of Irish Catholicism, combining "peat-rick" (Litz, Art 87) with (Saint) Patrick, both puns being embedded in Peter, the Latin pun on which the church was founded as petras, a rock of ages. Or as "peatrick" it could expose the whole Christian enterprise as a shell-game, the sort of sound-and-light show which both Mulligan and Bloom regard it to be in Ulysses.

Finnegans Wake differs from Ulysses, however, in the extent to which its language becomes self-referential. As plot and character recede in Finnegans Wake, referentiality of language more easily becomes self-referentiality, a linguistic transformation with no discernible meaning beyond rearrangement of the letters themselves. In Ulysses the inversion of the letter sequence within a word signals a duality of concepts, dog/God being the paradoxical material/metaphysical nature of the Trinity which confronts Stephen on the beach in "Proteus" (U 3.286-364) and which "dogs" Bloom's footsteps into nighttown in "Circe" (U 15.247; 15.633; 15.559-697). But in Finnegans Wake Tristan is inverted to "natsirt" (FW 388.3), Mark to "Kram" (FW 388.2), and Dublin to "Nil bud" (FW 24.1 ), seemingly to no other end than puzzlement or to create an amusing sound. 25 Ulysses offers us stream-of-consciousness, a representation of our simultaneous processing of internal and external information. But Finnegans Wake carries this interior exploration further, providing us with a matrix ("stream" sounds too linear) of the pre-conscious where mind becomes mind, the play of our identity as we begin to formulate our reality in words even before being aware of them as words. 26

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Being a recognized work of literature, Finnegans Wake has a potentially limitless history simply as text, "a continuity in time as a sequence of words" which invites an infinite succession of readers to respond in various ways. 27 We might regard Finnegans Wake, then, as the first work of literature to dramatize the relational implications of Viconian theory by treating text in terms of itself rather than as a transparent medium for constructing fictional realities or presenting ideas. To Litz, "it is a damning commentary on Joyce's method [of composing Finnegans Wake] that a study of earlier versions often provides important clues to the meaning of a passage in the final text" (Litz, Art 113). But if we look at Finnegans Wake as the first truly Viconian text, then its very lack of finality becomes its primary virtue. All of Joyce's drafts for it, and his comments to others about it, form a text which is itself merely a prototype for collective authorship by an open-ended series of subsequent commentators. The very difficulty of Finnegans Wake makes it continuously collaborative. 28 Joyce requires his readers to create their own words, constructing the meaning syllable by syllable. We are thereby constantly reminded that each word functions as a text in itself, accumulating its own interpretive history. Litz sees Vico merely as a source for historical schema which became part of the design of Finnegans Wake. Using the various drafts of each composition, he demonstrates that Joyce wrote both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake from a "single image in his mind" which he established fairly early so that completing the rest of each work was a predominantly static process of filling in and elaborating details within a predetermined framework (Litz, Art 5; 19; 52; 86; 89; 101}. But is the reader therefore obliged to try to reconstruct the author's intention in order to recover Joyce's original design? (Litz, Art 57). Anthony Burgess might believe so since he concludes that Joyce himself must be the dreamer of Finnegans Wake. 29 But surely this is an oversimplification. Joyce is not present there as a character, and a number of perspectival discontinuities make the representation of any single narrative stance problematic.30 Rather than trying to reconstruct Joyce's intention or recover his design, we can more profitably view Finnegans Wake as it appears today in Viconian terms of collaborative authorship, the proliferating ingenuity of various conflicting theories about what the text means. Post-structuralist critics have emphasized the openness and undecidability of Joyce's texts. But since they see all literature as exhibiting such qualities, they only perfunctorily distinguish between Joyce and other authors, or even among Joyce's own works. 31 But the reader without post-structuralist presuppositions is likely to find that an overview of Joyce's best-known works reveals striking contrasts. In comparison with what follows, Dubliners appears to be Joyce's most realistic work. The narrative is simultaneously so reticent and so selective that, on the whole, Dubliners leaves its readers with a naturalistic response of "pity or grief or outrage at inadequate human beings, largely selfcondemned, who fail to understand the nature of power and oppression."32 The realism of Portrait is more expressionistic in that its language begins to reflect Stephen's maturity, his growing awareness of his world and of his need to break away from those aspects of his environment which had trapped his predecessors in Dubliners. In Ulysses I have already noted how the narratives of Stephen and Bloom are halfway to Finnegans Wake. That is, both within and between chapters some episodes centered in character (either psychologically realistic or, as in "Circe," expressionistic) contrast with others where plot and character are obscured by narrative style and arrangement.

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Once we regard Finnegans Wake as an extreme example of the narrative experimentation which Joyce was already pursuing in Ulysses, we see that this final work represents his ultimate achievement, a new world created through the merging of the microcosm of interior monologue with the macrocosm of exterior reality. Using his own fictional time and space, Joyce invents a language which more closely approximates music than the sound-language of "Sirens" because it has become even more abstract and self -referential. The godlike narrator begins with the logos, exercising both omniscience and omnipotence; and the development of his fiction is the reader's witnessing of a new world which he helps to create, syllable by syllable. 33 In the history of literature Finnegans Wake becomes the first work to make self -referentiality a fundamental characteristic of its overall design, beginning with every syllable of the text. 34 Yet it remains more than a closed circle, a completed imitation of the process of its own creation. To the best of our own more limited abilities as readers. Finnegans Wake requires us to assume Joyce's godlike power of creation ourselves, not through the assimilation of Goldberg's "argument" or "circumstance" but through collaboration with Joyce as creator, whenever we piece together each word for ourselves. Finnegans Wake seems more speechgesture than imitation, a text which requires us not, as Litz implies, to understand it by attempting to replicate the mental processes that produced it, but to participate in making it a text by drawing on our own creativity, the construction of meaning through language. After all, the slip of Martha Clifford's typewriter in Ulysses has already demonstrated how, at any moment, "word"-making can become "world"-making (U 5.245-246). So the most remarkable thing about Finnegans Wake is not Joyce's ego, which drove him to become a godlike author devoting over sixteen years to the creation of a world which no one else could comprehend, even though his labors pronounced it good. More remarkable is Joyce's generosity in conferring on his readers so much of his own godlike responsibility for making his creation meaningful. What is lost in the text's systematic open-endedness is the "sense of 'inevitability' or 'rightness' which is the sign of a controlled narrative structure" (Litz, Art 62). But there is also gain. More of what was previously under control of the author as arranger in Ulysses is transferred to the reader in Finnegans Wake. For Joyce, God is the artist himself, contemplating his own logos even as he questions it in comedy, so that at every point the reader is free to believe and/or not-believe. This contradictory (or at least opposite) view of meaningfulness and satire, together with self -referentiality in the language throughout, so distance the godlike creator of Finnegans Wake from his narrative(s) that readers are granted an unprecedented opportunity to recreate the text in their own ever-widening Viconian spirals of cumulative perspective.

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake Notes

I.

Matthew Hodgart, James Joyce, A Student's Guide (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 132.

2.

Sydney Bolt, A Preface to James Joyce (New York: Longman, 1981), 161.

3.

A. Walton Litz, James Joyce (U.S.A.: Twayne, 1966; rev. ed. Hippocrene paperback, 1972), 118.

4.

Samuel L. Goldberg, James Joyce (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962. Reprint. Grove Press paperback, 1962), 111-112.

5.

·Samuel L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper, A Study of James Joyce's Ulysses (London: Chatto and Windus, [1961] 1963), 152. Hereafter cited in the text.

6.

James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans W. Gabler, et al. (New York: Random House, 1986), 3.501. Hereafter cited in the text.

7.

Post-structuralist critics might regard this as an example of the indeterminacy which they find everywhere in Joyce. But I would call it ambiguity in the service of characterization, a reflection of the ambivalence which Stephen ruefully acknowledges when Haines asks him whether he is "a believer": "you behold in me ... a horrible example of free thought" (U 1.625-626).

8.

Patrick A. McCarthy, "A Warping Process: Reading Finnegans Wake," in Joyce Centenary Essays, eds. Richard F. Peterson, Alan M. Cohn, and Edmund L. Epstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 51.

9.

A. Walton Litz, James Joyce, 99.

10.

Like Goldberg, Litz (James Joyce 99) underestimates this similarity in the experience of reading all of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. When comparing the two he refers to symbolic elaboration in "the last episodes of Ulysses," as if only these were affected since by that time Joyce would also have been working on Finnegans Wake.

11.

Clive Hart notes that "the more one understands of the detail [in Finnegans Wake], thanks to the continuing flow of explication, the more difficult it becomes to sustain a satisfying sense of the whole." As a compromise between overall schema and local textual details, he suggests "interrelationships of image and idea within a short paragraph, reread and pondered with a general if imperfect sense of the whole book in the background" (Clive Hart, "Afterword. Reading Finnegans Wake," in A Starchamber Quiry, A James Joyce Centennial Volume 1882-1982, ed. Edmund L. Epstein [New York: Methuen, 1982], 156-157).

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Viking, 1967), 3.11-12.

12.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Hereafter cited in the text.

13.

Joseph Campbell and Henry M. Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944), 30.

14.

Campbell and Robinson, 30.

15.

A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce, Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Reprint. Oxford University paperback, 1968), 87. Hereafter cited in the text as Litz, Art.

16.

Hodgart makes a broader comparison between Schoenberg's serial works and both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, all of which are distinguished by "an elaborate hidden structure, which no reader[s] however attentive could possibly work out during [their]first reading" (Hodgart, James Joyce, A Student's Guide, 6). But Fritz Senn warns that all such musical analogies are inadequate in that they "cannot be kept up consistently, since in practice we shall hardly be able to ... listen to the voices consecutively, as in a musical performance we could, even allowing for intervals" (Fritz Senn, Joyce's Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. John Paul Riquelme [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1984], 87). Perhaps the most provocative comparison between Schoenberg and Joyce is the implied circularity of Joyce's self -referentiality. Theodore Adorno on Schoenberg: "Twelve-tone rationality approaches superstition per se in that it is a closed system . . . . The legitimacy of the procedure in which the technique fulfils itself is at the same time merely something imposed upon the material, by which the legitimacy is determined. This determination itself does not actually serve a purpose. Accuracy or correctness, as a mathematical hypothesis, takes the place of that element called 'the idea' in traditional art" (Quoted by Jean-Michel Rabate, "Lapsus ex Machina," in Post-structuralist Joyce, Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 80).

17. The most complete analogies between cubism and Joyce's narrative are in Max Halperen, "Neither Fish nor Flesh: Joyce as Picasso," in New Alliances in Joyce Studies, ed. Bonnie K. Scott (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 93-101. 18.

Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, An Overview of the New Physics (New York: 1979; reprint. Bantam paperback, 1984), 93.

19.

McCarthy, 49.

20.

Zukav, 83.

21.

Colin MacCabe, "An Introduction to Finnegans Wake," in James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed. Colin MacCabe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 33. [Editor's note: This essay is reprinted in this volume.)

22.

MacCabe, 34.

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23.

David A. White, The Grand Continuum: Reflections on Joyce and Metaphysics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), 49.

24.

Mario J. Valdes, Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 24.

25.

Fritz Senn, Joyce's Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. John P. Riquelme (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 88.

26.

Sheldon Brivic anticipates further investigation of the dynamics of mind represented through the fluidity of Joycean language, critical "attempts to present Joycean mentality in cybernetic terms" (Sheldon Brivic, "Joycean Psychology," in Joyce Centenary Essays, eds. Richard F. Peterson, Alan M. Cohn, and Edmund L. Epstein. [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983], 107).

27.

Valdes, 38.

28.

Valdes, 15.

29.

Anthony Burgess, ReJoyce (New York: Norton, 1968), 192.

30.

White, 16-20.

31.

To post-structuralists everything is literary that "refuses and resists the scientific model of knowledge ... by being an event and not an argument or truth-claim." Joyce's texts, in particular, are open to being literary in this way because in his comedy "the ruling principles of scientific knowledge can be tested against themselves, can be made to reveal their dependence on the aleatory, the exluded, the counter-rational, and the contingent" (Derek Attridge, "Criticism's Wake," in James Joyce, The Augmented Ninth: Proceedings of the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium, Frankfurt, 1984, ed. Bernard Benstock [Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University, 1988], 85). After Jacques Derrida proclaimed his debt to Joyce ("Two Words for Joyce," in Post-structuralist Joyce, Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer [Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1984], 145-161 ), his followers found Derrida's own most distinctive traits in Joyce so that he could join Homer and the rest of Western civilization, who of course were already there: "Joyce ... preinscribes Derrida" (Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf, "Joyce, Derrida, and the Discourse of 'the other,'" in Augmented Ninth, 88). So perhaps this article could be regarded as an initial attempt to implement the same author's call for an approach to "Joyce's oeuvre as the reflection of one continuous development from a primarily text-external (referential) approach to the nature of fiction to a primarily text-internal semiotics" (Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf, "Deconstruction after Joyce," in New Alliances in Joyce Studies, ed. Bonnie K. Scott [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988], 35).

32.

Phillip F. Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 203.

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33.

Seeing Joyce's art as some sort of substitute for religion is, of course, commonplace. For the most extended application of the analogy through all of Joyce's life and works see Sheldon Brivic, Joyce the Creator (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

34.

With respect to self -referential design, at least, Joyce may have felt that Finnegans Wake did have a literary predecessor in Tristram Shandy (McCarthy 48). Twentieth-century predecessors include Gide, Les FauxMonnayeurs (1925) and Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (1937) (Ihab Hassan, "( ): Finnegans Wake and the Postmodern Imagination," in Light Rays: James Joyce and Modernism, ed. Heyward Ehrlich [New York: Horizon, 1984], 101).

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Joyce's Nonce-Symbolic Calculus: A Finnegans Wake Trajectory by David W. Robinson What exactly does Joyce carry over from a source, or from one of his earlier texts, when he reuses a plot, a character, or an abstract configuration in Finnegans Wake? Critics have long questioned the use of terms like "parallel" or "parody" to describe Joyce's use of Homer and other sources, and I will generalize their point: the meanings we can assign to Joyce's borrowings always remain radically local and ad hoc. They remain what can be called, with an anti-essentialist pun, "nonce symbols," that is, significant structures whose meaning is tied to a particular usage by Joyce and a particular reading by us. The meanings of a putative symbol or motif vary from one use to the next according to new opportunities opened by new contexts; Joyce jettisons previous details or connections when they grow confining for him. Readers, attempting to assemble and reapply these very details elsewhere in a text, are starkly confronted with a dialectic of sense and nonsense that all reading inhabits, but which Joyce's writing specifically exploits. Joyce did not base late texts on what preceded them, so much as he rereads his early texts in light of later ones, crediting what came first with containing seeds of what was to follow. My calculated example of this procedure, a demonstration of the literary potential of the equation 3 + l + l = 5, begins with Finnegans Wake Chapter I.4 and works backwards through a derivation based on the Dubliners story "Grace." FW 1.4 is the final installment of the four-part HCE saga, in which the hero's origins, fall, death, and resurrection are repeatedly and contradictorily narrated. It describes primarily HCE's interment and rumored return, with digressions into the reasons for his fall and the consequences of his absence. The chapter's surface structure appears to follow from the attack on the pub, narrated in the previous chapter beginning at 69.30, where HCE barricades himself inside the pub to avoid his abusive visitor. In I.4, shortly before HCE's situation is transformed into residence within a heavily fortified tomb, the dream-narrator speculates about what the trapped HCE may be thinking: perhaps "the besieged bedreamt him stil and solely of those lililiths undeveiled which had undone him"' or perhaps "he conscious of enemies, a kingbilly whitehorsed in a Finglas miii, prayed, as he sat on anxious seat" (FW 75.1516) -appropriately, since the seat on which he sits is no doubt a toilet seat, and the sin in Phoenix Park may have as easily been scatological as sexual. It shortly becomes apparent, however, that HCE is really dead, at least in the opinion of the narrator ("Let us leave theories there and return to here's here" FW 76.10), and the remainder of the chapter proceeds from this assumption. Focusing principally on a version of HCE's crime or encounter in the park, and a court trial ensuing from it, the major (if confusing) action of the chapter is diagrammed in Figure 1. 2 Thematically, the chapter concentrates on sin (using the mythic examples of Adam, Parnell, and HCE himself); falling (Adam, HCE); false denunciation (Parnell/Piggott, HCE); resurrection (Finn, Christ, Parnell, HCE); and burial/immersion (Finn, Christ, Parnell). It resolves itself in the newly explicit role of ALP as preserver and regenerator, the force behind the 131

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eternal cycles, figured in the waters of babble-on (Egypt and Babylon being equivalent as biblical lands of exile) at either end of the chapter. Among the more puzzling aspects of this chapter are its numerous allusions to the Dubliners story "Grace," Joyce's harshest indictment of Irish Catholicism.3 "Grace" tells of Tom Kernan's fall while drunk down a set of lavatory steps, and of his restoration to spiritual good health through the plottings of four friends, Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, Mr. M'Coy, and Mr. Fogarty, who induce him to attend a religious retreat. The densest set of allusions to "Grace" occurs on pages 83-84, the conclusion of the Cad/Cropatkin's encounter with HCE, a context apparently sharing nothing in common with the events of the short story: the narrative sense appears to be that HCE's adversary turns friendly after receiving a sum of extorted money. The many references, signalled by "grace" (FW 83.23) and "gracies" (FW 95.4), point to Tom Kernan's fall, his injury, the discussion in his bedroom, and the events at the religious retreat. There are specific allusions to Kernan's hat (FW 83.28, 36), which was damaged in the fall down the steps, to his injured tongue (FW 83.10-11, 16), to the motto "Lux upon Lux"4 spuriously ascribed to Pope Leo XIII during the sickbed conversation (FW 83.9, 25}, and to Father Purdon, the retreat preacher (FW 83.11, 17, 28-30). Kernan is surely present in the description of "this poor delaney" (FW 84.8} with "the white ground of his face all covered with diagonally redcrossed nonfatal mammalian blood ... bleeding in self defience ... from the nostrils, lips, pavilion and palate ..." (FW 84.1922). Other "Grace" allusions abound, including, of course, Martin Cunningham's feminized presence as "Minxy Cunningham" at FW 95.9. To show that the chapter contains allusions to "Grace" says little, of course, about why. The "plot" of FW 1.4 (if one can use such a word in reference to Finnegans Wake) has almost nothing in common with the plot of "Grace"-both texts contain a metaphorically suggestive "fall," but the same could be said of every chapter of the Wake. The characters themselves appear to have forgotten their earlier functions, HCE/Kernan receiving his bloody face from a fight rather than a fall, and Martin Cunningham appearing as some body's "dear divorcee darling" (FW 95.10). The principal theme of "Grace," corruption in the Church through a debased, simoniacal, businessman's theology (articulated by Father Purdon) may be echoed in the scene where the Cropatkin extorts money from HCE (it is simony for HCE to buy "pardun" [FW 83.29]} but the details of the original plot are wholly absent, along with the theological and historical discussions which make up the bulk of "Grace." It appears as though the allusions to "Grace" serve no purpose other than to establish the short story's presence. Its significance of which must function, if at all, on a level other than one-for-one correspondence between plots, characters, themes, or even verbal surface. 5 After leaving the confines of Finnegans Wake to search for meaning in "Grace," the reader has no reason not to regress further and consider the sources of "Grace" as well: an angle of vision taking in further texts appears to be the only hope to escape this abyss of unmotivated intertextuality. This is true despite the fact that the most convincingly identifiable sources seem merely to augment the short story's themes and to show little promise for future reworking. Based on internal evidence, these include the Book of Job and Swift's Tale of a Tub. 6 Job, like Kernan, follows a cyclic progress from prosperity, through adversity, to regained prosperity. Kernan's friends

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(Cunningham, Power, M'Coy, and Fogarty) match Job's comforters (Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu} in number and arrangement, with the initial three in both cases being joined by an argumentative latecomer; on atheological level, both sets of comforters believe in "a direct connection between virtue and material prosperity."7 Finally, the voice of God speaking from a whirlwind is parodied in Father Purdon. Swift, whose Tale of a Tub will show up in FW 1.4 dressed in a "padderjagmartin tripiezite suet" (FW 86.2), is directly alluded to in "Grace" by the mention of "yahoos" (D 161}, but more intriguingly in the spectacle of four fools discussing theology: Swift presents the three sons Peter, Martin, and Jack judging at a remove their father's (theological} intentions, with Swift's "Modern" narrator, a latecomer like Joyce's Fogarty and Job's friend Elihu, completing the parallel. 8 Now, in light of these examples, another comes to mind for any reader of Joyce. The four old men in Finnegans Wake, Matt Gregory, Marcus Lyons, Luke Tarpey, and Johnny MacDougall (so named at FW 384.6-14}, also customarily occur in a 3 + 1 configuration, with Johnny trailing behind. This derives in part from the distinction between the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and the final Gospel of John, which lagged behind in date of composition. As the author of John suggests, the common task of all four Evangelists is to elucidate, in a special sense, the Word; this is also the task of Joyce's four old men in their guise as four philologists struggling to make sense of the words of ALP's letter. 9 The common task of all these quadripartite groups is to interpret and judge, sometimes to accuse as well, and it is specifically as "four justicers" (FW 92.35) that the Four preside over the trial of Festy King. Despite all changes in immediate circumstance, and retaining an association with judgment, the numeric configuration of 3 + 1 + 1 = 5 has survived in transit between "Grace" and the Wake. Like the four men in Job and the four in "Grace," the Four in the Wake accuse, admonish, historicize, and interpret with respect to a fifth, central figure. This pattern, which in "Grace" was only an arbitrary, incidental detail of a specific occasion of parody, recurs in Finnegans Wake as an essential structuring principle, a peg on which to hang the guilt that permeates HCE's dream. What matters to Joyce, retrospectively, is the convenient association of a clear human situation with a simple structure, regardless of his own original intent. As nonce symbol, the equation recurs with an accumulating repertoire of possible meanings, only some of which may be relevant at any given point in the text. 10 None of this explains yet why one of the four friends in "Grace," Martin Cunningham, figures so prominently in FW 1.4 (where he is the only one clearly named) and elsewhere in the Wake. Another set of accidents is suggestive: the history of the real person after whom Cunningham was originally modeled, John Joyce's friend Matthew Kane. Kane, like Cunningham, was an employee in Dublin Castle, had a drunkard wife, and died of drowning off Kingstown on July 10, 1904. 11 These biographical details contribute to Martin Cunningham's longest guest appearances in FW Il.4, "Mamalujo," where the Four reminisce about his death: ...[Johnny section] and then there was the drowning of Pharoah and all his pedestrians and they were all completely drowned into the sea, the red sea, and then poor Merkin Cornyngwham, the official out of the castle on pension, when he was completely

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James Joyce's Finnegans Wake drowned off Erin Isles, at that time, suir knows, in the red sea and a lovely mourning paper and thank God, as Saman said, there were no more of him. And that now was how it was. The arzurian deeps o'er his humbodumbones sweeps. And his widdy the giddy is wreathing her murmoirs as her gracest triput to the Grocery (FW 387.25-35) Trader's Manthly.

Marcus. And after that, not forgetting, there was the Flemish armada, all scattered, and all officially drowned, there and then, on a lovely morning, after the universal flood, at about aleven thirty-two was it? off the coast of Cominghome .... (FW 388.1013) Besides the allusions to Kane's life, these passages contain several echoes from "Grace." "Poor Merkin Cornyngwham" recalls "poor Martin Cunningham" (D 157), although the sympathy in the original story concerns Cunningham's marital troubles; "gracest" recalls "Grace"; "widdy the giddy" refers to Cunningham's inebriated wife; and the detail that Mr. Fogarty is a grocer leads to "Grocery Trader's Manthly." In death, Cunningham has become (like Finn) the Irish landscape ("off the coast of Cominghome") and HCE's name is approximated in the first passage by "humbodumbones," which recalls the Humpty Dumpty story, always emblematic in the Wake of the Fall, and a dual symbol of death and The same resurrection motif emerges from the distortions of birth. Cunningham's name, "Cornyngwham" suggesting a fall, "Cominghome" (obviously) a return. "Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man" (U 3.482-483) is the dominant mode of death in FW 1.4, where HCE sinks beneath various bodies of water, and in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus linked it with resurrection. Stephen imagines during his beach walk a perverse resurrection when he envisions the bloated corpse of a drowned man bobbing to the surface, eaten by minnows, an image foreshadowed in "Telemachus," shortly after a similar reverie about "a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am" (U 1.676-677). Martin Cunningham's function in Finnegans Wake thus appears to build on the earlier theme of death (especially drowning) as a "seachange" (U 3.482), as suggested by the distortion of his name in "There you'll fix your eyes darkled on the autocart of the bringfast cable but here till youre martimorphysed please sit still face to face" (FW 434.30-32). Cunningham is allowed to range free as a suggestion of certain themes and relations, but not necessarily one position within those relations. This, however, is still not the end of the matter, because the funeral of Matthew Kane, attended by John and James Joyce, served as the model for Paddy Dignam's funeral in Ulysses. 12 Joyce's attitude toward his raw materials emerges from this proof that Paddy Dignam and Martin Cunningham share a common source-the transformations between characters in Finnegans Wake are nothing new, for as early as the "Hades" chapter of Ulysses, analogous divisions and redistributions of source material were already taking place. Matthew Kane gives rise to two characters, one of them, Martin Cunningham, alive; the other, Paddy Dignam, dead. This division, and its conflation, are among the most dominant themes in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, so it is altogether

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appropriate that Martin Cunningham should serve in the later book as one manifestation of the multiple-natured HCE. Joyce apparently was willing to mine his own earlier work with the same ruthless detachment about original intent, context, details, and so on, that governed his use of other writings. Martin Cunningham takes on value as a paradoxical symbol of life and death because of an earlier artistic decision made for local, specific artistic purposes. Joyce did not plant all these correspondences in the early works; they become correspondences only when we mis-read the earlier works according to Joyce's own example. To proceed with just such a misreading of "Grace" and "Hades" from the anachronistic perspective of Finnegans Wake: What can be made of the fact that Cunningham is again part of a group of four men when depicted on his way to Dignam's funeral? "Hades" opens with first Cunningham, then Mr. Power (whom we also know from "Grace"), and next Simon Dedalus entering a funeral carriage. Once these three are seated, Cunningham urges, "Come along, Bloom" (U 6.8) and Mr. Bloom gets in. As in "Grace," not to mention Finnegans Wake, 3 + 1 = 4, and the fifth figure, the center of attention, the object of commentary, is naturally Paddy Dignam, who out of necessity rides in a different coach. 13 The assemblage seems only superficially to resemble that of "Grace," the greatest coincidence (a weak one) being that both groups are engaged in religious missions; but it very strongly foreshadows Finnegans Wake, where the Four tell stories and jokes, insult each other, gabble about the past, and generally carry on like the occupants of this funeral carriage. (The later book is supposed to be a wake, after all.) It is altogether appropriate that Martin Cunningham should serve there as one particularly fortuitious participant in it, after having already been an accuser in "Grace" and both mourner and mourned in Ulysses. With the help of Figure 2, which represents schematically all of the texts discussed, other correspondences appear. The benevolent project of the four friends in "Grace" was to raise a fallen comrade, one who fell, in fact, because of his devotion to drink, a peculiarly Irish form of drowning. Kernan's fall was a perverse baptism also in that he fell down into a lavatory, a place where one washes dirt off oneself, though usually not sins, and spends certain moments laved in "ooze"; he also gets baptised in his own blood, an unpromising sort of ritual. To lift Kernan out of this mess is, literally and figuratively, what his friends set out to do. Hence it seems significant that in "Hades" the mourners, in the course of "waking" Dignam, relate the story of Reuben J. Dodd's son: -Reuben J and the son were piking it down the quay next the river on their way to the Isle of Man boat and the young chiseller suddenly got loose and over the wall with him into the Liffey. -For God' sake! Mr Dedalus exclaimed in fright. Is he dead? A -Dead! Martin Cunningham cried. Not he! boatman got a pole and fished him out by the slack of the breeches and he was landed up to the father on the quay more dead than alive. (U 6.278-284)

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(For which service the rescuer received the award of a florin.) From a Wakereader's perspective, Reuben J.'s son has been transformed into yet another avatar of HCE: dead, "buried," and resurrected, all within the scope of a story told by a character who springs from a genuine drowned man, and whose own future drowning is retroactively assured by the logic of Finnegans Wake. Opportunistic to the end, Joyce successfully merged all the previously unrelated aspects of a character named "Martin Cunningham," as well as those that were foreseen, such as the familiar 3+1 pattern (though questions of intention like these lead into a hall of mirrors and reversed chronologies which, apparently, pleased Joyce greatly). When HCE is thus revealed as an amalgam of characters present in Joyce's writing from the start, the now-commonplace observation that all the characters in the Wake bear shifting, exchangeable identities takes on new force. It is only slightly more remarkable that the same basic, even schematic relations among characters appear so early and persist so long: for a writer unfazed by inconsistency and constant re-vision, a single structure can accommodate any number of meanings. For the effect to come off properly, however, the reader must be as unconcerned with pre-conceived orderings as Joyce was in his self-reinterpretations. One of the reasons that "Grace" makes it into Chapter 1.4 is doubtless a thematic one, the idea of grace itself, versus perversions of it, as suggested by the contrast between the inquisitorial nightmare acted out by the Four, and the life-giving waters of Anna Liffey that lap on either end of the chapter, circumscribing the narrower views between. But the chapter's structure and the particular turns taken by its narrators owe more to borrowed structural patterns than to any such thematic inferences we may make. The theme of grace, like other clever extrapolations we might wish to make about Joyce's texts, is finally an imposition on the text, not a fact nestled within it from the start. Just as Martin Cunningham takes on significance because of earlier artistic accidents, from decisions made for local purposes, so Joyce's life work takes on structural cogency when read retrospectively, through Finnegans Wake-and we all end up following Joyce's example and reading him in this anachronistic manner. In practice, however, Joyce disregarded the limits on meaning set by his own past uses of characters, plots, or motifs. His symbols are nonce-symbols, filled with meaning (by Joyce, by us) on a provisional basis. The arithmetical pattern I have been discussing is typical not just in its aloof distance from intrinsic meaning, but also in its efficacy as a structuring device because of that aloofness. The reader is tempted by two conflicting approaches to reading these texts-to totalize them individually and as a corpus, or to see them as deformations of various conceivable totalizations. 14 In his ruthless detachment when rereading himself, his dismissing original intent in favor of literary opportunism, Joyce holds out to his readers and critics a vertiginous model of interpretive self-reliance.

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Figure I. Outline of Finnegans Wake 1.4. 76.10 - 78.6

Description of HCE's coffin, grave and funeral.

78.7- 78.14

Interlude on Viconian themes.

78.15- 79.13

Wars ensuing from HCE's departure; speculation on his current hibernation.

79.14 - 79.26

Sexual behavior in ancient times.

79.27 - 80.36

Kate Strong dumps her load in Phoenix Park; Jove's voice interrupts the fighting.

81.1 - 81.11

Recollection of gigantic heroes.

81.12 - 84.27

Attack on HCE by the "cropatkin," and its aftermath.

84.28- 85.19

Crimes committed in Phoenix Park.

85.20 - 93.21

The Trial of Festy King.

93.22 - 94.22

Letter written in response to trial.

94.23 - 96.24

The judges rehash the trial and crime.

96.25 - 97.28

The Fox Hunt.

97.29 - 101.1

HCE's cyclic recurrence; his present existence; his imminent return.

101.2- 103.11

Inquiry shifts from HCE to ALP.

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James Joyce's Finnegans IVake

Figure 2. "... the four justicers laid their wigs together, Untius, Muncius, Punchus and Pylax ..." (FW 92.35-36). 15 a. Book of Job.

b. A Tale of a Tub.

Eliphaz

Jack I

I

Elihu --- JOB --- Zophar

Narrator---FATHER---Peter

I

I

I

I

Bildad

Martin

c. "Grace."

d. "Hades."

Power

Power

I

Fogarty --- KERNAN --- M'Coy

I

Bloom---DIGNAM---Dedalus

I

I

I

I

Cunningham e.

Cunningham

Finnegans Wake. 1

3+1 West Connacht John (Pylax)

North Ulster Matthew (Untius)

I

HCE I

2

I

South Munster Mark (Muncius)

3

East Leinster Luke (Punchus)

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Notes

1. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 75.5-6. Subsequent abbreviated references are to this edition. 2. See Adaline Glasheen's somewhat different synopsis of the chapter (Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and their Roles [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977], xxxiv-xxxvii). 3. These allusions were first pointed out by Virginia Mosely in "The 'Coincidence' of 'Contraries' in 'Grace,"' James Joyce Quarterly 6 (Falll968): 2-21. 4. James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes in consultation with Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 167. Subsequent abbreviated references are to this edition. 5. Mosely argues rather implausibly that Vico underlies not only Finnegans Wake, but "Grace" as well. Attempts to chart a line of development among Joyce's works often stumble unknowingly on anachronisms of which the author was fully aware-Joyce never hesitated to regard his prior accidents as providentially guided. 6. For an early discussion of the Job connection, see F.X. Newman, "The Land of Ooze: Joyce's 'Grace' and the Book of Job," Studies in Short Fiction 2 (1966): 70-79. A similarity between "Grace" and Tale of a Tub is noted by Mosely (12). Stanislaus Joyce describes in detail the real-life models for the events in "Grace," and reports that the story is also a parody of Dante's Divine Comedy (My Brother's Keeper [London: Faber and Faber, 1958], 223-226). However, his brother James clearly misled him if he mentioned only Dante, who is a relatively unconvincing indebtedness. 7. Newman, 74. 8. Swift even supplies the names for two of Joyce's comforters, Mart in Cunningham and Jack Power, and perhaps for M'Coy as well. Like Fogarty, M'Coy possesses only a surname in "Grace," but Joyce later supplies him with initials: "Just C.P. M'Coy will do" (Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. [New York: Random House, 1986], 5.176; subsequent abbreviated references are to this edition). We later learn that the first initial stands for "Charley" (U 6.884). What can the "P" stand for but Peter? 9. Clive Hart stresses the Viconian significance of "3 + I" and discusses Joyce's reasons for superimposing this and other numeric configurations on one another (Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake [Northwestern University Press, 1962], 62-63 ).

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10. Viewed with hindsight, the deployment of the five men as a "quincunx" (D 172) in "Grace" is startlingly irregular; the central figure should be Kernan, yet here it is M'Coy. I interpret this as proof that Joyce realized only later the pattern's full potential. As Sheldon Brivic argues, the quincunx gains significance at the conclusion of an evolution of Joyce's formal experiments (Joyce the Creator [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985], 5). 11. The facts about the Kane/Cunningham biography used here are drawn from Robert M. Adams, Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's Ulysses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 62-63. 12. Adams notes that when Matthew Kane drowned in 1904, he left behind five children, his friends subscribed for a fund to send them to school, and his funeral cortege crossed Dublin from southeast to northwest-all details of Dignam's funeral as well. 13. Taking care of his own, Joyce sees to it that John Power, Thomas Kernan, and C.P. M'Coy are also listed as mourners in Dignam's obituary (U 16.1257, 1259,1260-1261 ). 14. This is true of all Joycean texts, but particularly the last one as John Bishop argues in Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986): "[A]s soon as it [Finnegans Wake] provides a reader with 'meaning' through the letters and words apparent on the line, it takes the meaning away and leaves him with ... puzzles to solve ..." (313).

15. The Finnegans Wake portion of this table is based principally on FW 140.8141.7, FW II.4 ("Mamalujo"), and on Joyce's letters. The arrangement of the Joycean comforters follows as far as possible the pattern finally arrived at in Finnegans Wake. I have followed Glasheen (Third Census 66) in connecting Cunningham with Mark.

The Female Word Kimberly J. Devlin In Joyce's waking worlds, the attempts by men to envision women writing betray unmistakable limitations in the male imagination. Bloom, for instance, thinks of female letter writers as a potentially intriguing sight, as a visual lure that would easily promote the sale of commercial goods. He has recommended to Wisdom Hely, his former employer in the stationery business, an advertising gimmick featuring "a transparent showcart with two smart girls sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. . .. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she's writing" (U 8.131-35). The ad pretends to think female subjectivity ("Everyone dying to know what she's writing"), when in fact it only sees it as a convenient mystery to be commercially exploited; instead of thinking female subjectivity the ad actually negates it, insofar as the women have been reduced to provocative visual objects-they are "smart" only in the sense of being stylishly dressed, not mentally acute. Exactly what they are writing does not matter at all-it is clearly only the image, the simulacrum of female writing, that is needed to make the ad work. When Bloom shares this idea with Stephen in "Ithaca," the young artist transforms it into a sexual drama that perfectly reveals the scotoma frequently afflicting his vision of the female: What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen? Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary. What? In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel. Queen's Ho ... (U 17.611-20) Stephen's constructed scenario here is connected to that moment in "Scylla and Charybdis" when he briefly espies a young woman in the library, logically presumed to be Emma Clery: "Is that ... ? Blueribboned hat ... ? Idly writing ... ? What? .... Looked ... ?" (U 9.1123). The man in Stephen's sexual drama shares its author's curiosity here about the female text, a text that creates in the male psyche an intellectual lacuna, signified through proliferative ellipses and question marks. In "Ithaca" Stephen fills that lacuna with the most facile of sexist cliches: forced to think female subjectivity in the form of a letter, he can imagine only bored and mindless scribblings. The imaginative paucity that plagues male attempts in waking life to think a female text disappears in the Wakean nightworld where the female writer 141

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returns in varying guises. The dreamer envisions ALP chronicling his past in a personal biography ("her murmoirs" [FW 387.34]), a newspaper ("our national rooster's rag" [FW 220.22]), or -most consistently-the ominous nightletter ("Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest" [FW 104.4]}. ALP is linked to the letter in various capacities-as its commissioner, its discoverer, its hider, its interpreter, and as one of its creators. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued that because women in patriarchal societies lack "the pen/penis that would enable them to refute one fiction by another, [they) have been historically reduced to mere properties, to characters and images imprisoned in male texts . . . generated solely by male expectations and designs. . . . As a creation 'penned' by man, moreover, woman has been 'penned up' or 'penned in.'" 1 The Wakean female is similarly confined, figuratively the creation of a male dreamer, literally the creation of a male author; but rather than being "pen-less" as well as "penned in," she is imagined writing from her unique vantage point, always perplexing, often subversive. The opening of the letter chapter (1.5) of Finnegans Wake records a psychic effort to get in to the content of ALP's text, to penetrate to a site of female writing, to go beyond those limited waking visions of mere sights of female writing. The specific and proliferative titles of ALP's "mamafesta" replace those ellipses marking Stephen's response to Emma's writing, that provocative blank at the center of Bloom's eye-catching ad, or those vacuous doodles in Stephen's elaboration of it. The absence in the waking works returns as superfluous presence in dream, when HCE tries to imagine the female testament that may save or ruin him. Reflecting his deepest hopes and fears, some names for the document augur praise ("The Best in the West") or redemption ("The Augusta Angustissimost for Old Seabeastius' Salvation"), while others allude to the threat of filial conspiracy ("How the Buckling Shut at Rush in January") or scandal in the form of a woman's expose of a man's sexual performance ("In My Lord's Bed by One Whore Went Through It"; "He Perssed Me Here with the Ardour of a Tonnoburkes"). Some promise a resolution of the issue of sexual responsibility for the dreamer's fall, albeit with predictably contradictory results: through a reference to Macbeth ("Look to the Lady"), one title suggests a concession of female guilt, pointing to the wife who spurs her husband on to fatal ambitions, though another blames the man himself ("Siegfield Follies and or a Gentlehomme's Faut Pas" [FW 104-106]}. Under the transformative logic of the Wake, ALP's multiple possible letters become her litter of multiple children (her "superflowvius heirs" [FW 526.2526]) or her multiple gifts, catalogued by the washerwomen in 1.8. ALP's seemingly generous distribution of Christmas parcels takes on unsavory overtones when we remember that on a naturalistic level Anna Livia is the anal Liffey of "dear dirty Dublin": her presents may be the trash people have thrown into her which in flood she vengefully returns to them ("like Santa Claus at the cree of the pale and puny . . . with a Christmas box apiece for aisch and iveryone of her childer, the birthday gifts they dreamt they gabe her, the spoiled she fleetly laid at our door! On the matt, by the pourch and inunder the cellar" [FW 209.23-30]}. Like the tidings offered in her letter, her tidal offerings are ambiguously valenced, possibly injurious or rehabilitating: the river's effluvia may be the source of illness ("a cough and a rattle and wildrose cheeks for poor Piccolina Petite MacFarlane"[FW 210.9-10]), but its benigner properties may offer cures ("spas and speranza and symposium's syrup for decayed and blind and gouty Gough" [FW 211.24-25]). The contradictory nature

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of ALP's "gifts," both physical and textual, betray the dreamer's uneasiness about what sorts of medicine-for body and psyche---she has to offer a dying man. The Wake invites us to read this female bearer of gifts and letters as the return of at least two female figures from Joyce's earlier fictions, the first being Maria from "Clay." In her provocative reinterpretation of the short story, Margot Norris has demonstrated how cruelly Maria is treated by those around her, how vulnerable she is in an androcentric culture that marks aged and unmarried women as insignificant and undesirable. 2 In the Wakean dream this devalued female has her revenge when residues of her character resurface in inverted form in the images of ALP as an elderly domestic. In "Clay," for instance, Maria is treated shoddily in the cakeshops she visits; in dream she retaliates as "Hanah Levy, shrewd shroplifter" (FW 273.11 ). The forbearing old woman becomes the plundering outlaw, her yashmak and apron-the visible signs of her sexual oppression-turning into a bandit's mask ("with a naperon for her mask" [FW 11.33-34]). Norris argues that when the children insert the saucer of clay into the Hallow Eve's game, they hope Maria will interpret it as "shit" and recoil with embarrassment, betraying her own dirty mind; 3 in the Wake ALP in the guise of Kate pays back in kind, offering to others "Shite! will you have a plateful?" (FW 142.7)-this is the anthropomorphic version of the river's gift to the city of its own detritus and sewage. In dream the elderly woman returns with a malicious and rebellious spirit, implicitly protesting her mistreatment in the waking world of androcentric Dublin. This female deliverer of suspect litter and letters can also be conceptualized as a dream vision of Molly, who contemplates writing an expose of Bloom's anomalous impulses in a moment of exasperation with her quirky spouse ("he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything ... if I only could remember the l half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master Poldy yes" (U 18.578-80]). In Finnegans Wake the dreamer envisions what Bloom would fear if he had access to some of his wife's schemes and suspicions, as he pictures ALP actually embarking upon such a slanderous enterprise, recording for posterity in a succinct and frank letter his questionable transactions with "apple harlottes" and "Honeys (who] wore camelia paints" (FW 113.16-17): a dream allusion to a wife who knows that her spouse has been visiting the brothel district. The image of the female writer in the nightworld is frequently not so much a provocative eye-catcher, material for an ad campaign, as it is a paranoiac threat, material for a smear campaign. In her most disturbing guise, ALP appears as "Cowtends Kateclean, the woman with the muckrake" (FW 448.10), who in the course of her scavengings in the midden discovers "the fairest sin the sunsaw" (FW 11.26). The vision makes sense as a dream transmogrification of a wife in the role of domestic detective, searching her husband's belongings for signs of transgression-a role Molly sounds thoroughly familiar with ("first Ill look at his shirt to see or Ill see if he has that French letter still in his pocketbook I suppose he thinks I dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies" [U 18.1234-37]). In the consoling dialectical reversal of this vision, the wife is represented burying or erasing any damaging evidence, or-even better---shredding testimony she never even bothered to write: "she, of the jilldaw's nest who tears up lettereens she never apposed a pen upon" (FW 276.6- 7).

144

The Female Word

The compromising version of the letter that appears in 1.5 may be a written testimonial derived from the fragmented artifact gleaned from the dump, as Shari Benstock has suggested: "like a good critic, [Biddy 1ALP] has come up with a 'reading' of the letter (or some bits of it) that bears little-if any-resemblance to the original document. "4 Because the connection between the two texts remains opaque, we are left to wonder if the hen's report records or constructs HCE's "feebles," dutifully transcribes or scandalously exposes them by filling in the gaps of the initial litterish document. Within the dream's dualistic structure, the female letter is at points the by-product of the male fall, the text constructed from his remains, at others the cause, the text that has reduced him to his shattered state. There are hints that the woman in the act of writing subverts patriarchal origins and critiques patriarchal authority, bringing down the father through her story, forcing him to read his own guilty desires-hence we hear "About that original hen" (FW 110.22). In I.5 the dreamer tries to reassure himself that the ominous challenge the female critic/author offers to the father's word, the androcentric logos, is only an unsubstantiated rumor: "No, assuredly, they are not justified, those gloompourers who grouse that letters have never been quite their old selves again since that weird weekday in bleak Janiveer ... when to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked at literature" (FW 112.23-27). But elsewhere associated with the noxious contents of Pandora's box ("All that and more under one crinoline envelope if you dare to break the porkbarre1 seal. No wonder they'd run from her pison plaque" [FW 212.22-24]), the message of ALP's letter threatens the welfare of the dreamer, just as the effluvia of the river's litter threaten the welfare of the city. One of Issy's provocative footnotes tellingly represents female writing as transgression, as a violation of a forbidden textual domain: "Dear and I trust in all frivolity I may be pardoned for trespassing but I think I may add hell" (FW 270.F3). ALP's final long letter in Book IV is highly equivocal, oddly schizophrenic.

It sounds exculpatory in its attestation that the male has not mistreated the

female ("Item, we never were chained to a chair, and, bitem, no widower whother soever followed us about with a fork on Yankskilling Day" [FW 618.2426]) and trusting in its disbelief of HCE's detractors ("What those slimes up the cavern door around you, keenin, (the lies is coming out on them frecklefully) had the shames to suggest can we ever? Never!" [FW 615.34-36]). Yet reference to the father's homosexual buggery is compromising, his potential fate inauspicious, and the description of him highly unflattering: "Meaning: one two four. Finckers. Up the hind hose of hizzars .... Conan Boyles will pudge the daylives out through him .... The big bad old sprowly all uttering foon!" (FW 617 .2-19). The text also contains a sinister announcement of an impending funeral, clearly the father's own ("His fooneral will sneak pleace by creeps o'clock toosday" [FW 617.20-21 ]). Disturbingly duplicitous, the nightletter is often envisioned as not only a distinctly feminine work of art, but also a byproduct of female artfulness: "The letter! The litter! And the soother the bitther! Of eyebrow pencilled, by lipstipple penned. Borrowing a word and begging the question and stealing tinder and slipping like soap" (FW 93.2427). The missive may be evidence of the female's "stealing tinder," of her creation of the document from her foragings, or of her usurpation of the male verbal prerogative, the father's word-evidence, in short, of her stealing his thunder. The form of this female text is protean, elusive ("slipping like soap"), its message often distrustfully censored, elided ("begging the question"). But it frequently also resembles-in part or in total-a letter copied from a writing

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manual: chattily banal, properly formulaic, totally unoriginal ("borrowing a word"}, questionably sincere. The tension in the female letter becomes clearest in the practice letter Issy writes during the homework lesson. Shari Benstock has pointed out that "as Issy learns to write letters (following the model set forth by her mother's letters) she retraces her father's sin, remembers an act in which she was a complicit witness; her writing is the return of represses, it is the 'trace' of desire." 5 The daughter's role as witness and transcriber, I would emphasize, is a threatening uncertainty, a psychic fear rather than a known actuality. But in contrast to the provocative insinuations of Issy's text, both its format and the gestures she makes as she composes it are conventional, contrived, a series of verbal and physical posturings. Joyce received from Nora a well-known letter that a friend suggested was taken from a letter-writing book (see JJ/l 167). Ellmann speculates that "the notion of her pathetically adopting so much artifice in the face of his own attempt at sincerity gave Joyce a hint for the amorality of woman, to be invoked later in force" (JJ/l 168). Although this interpretation of Joyce's response may be true, I suspect he also started to see the cultural pressures on women that drive them to such artifice-the pressures to be "proper," to please men in socially endorsed forms. In "Penelope," after all, Joyce represents Molly recalling how during courtship she had to fake a sort of mental virginity, feeling socially compelled to say the correct things in response to Bloom's queries about the level of her sexual knowledge: "he wrote me that letter with all those words in it ... after when we met asking me have I offended you ... and if I knew what it meant of course I had to say no for form sake dont understand you I said" (U 18.318-25). (This female confession of feigned verbal ignorance may call into question the authencity of Martha Clifford's coy request, "Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word?" [U 5.245-46).} Envisioning the female letter in the dream, HCE often reads the subtext beneath the prescribed formalities-the slurs, the desires, the sinister prophecies, the damaging revelations (one of which has a distinctly Mollyesque ring to it-he "kissists my exits" [FW 280.27]). Alternately conventional and challenging, respectful and irreverent ("Dear. And we go on to Dirtdump. Reverend. May we add majesty? [FW 615.12-13]), the hybrid female nightletter reflects the dreamer's ambivalence towards the writing woman, his uncertainty as to what he would like to hear-polite formalities, potentially duplicitous, or blunt truths, potentially disquieting. In the final monologue of the dream, HCE imagines ALP as the authoress of two letters, one written on his behalf, the other for herself. The first has been crafted with great care and labor and comes from across the sea, "the site of salvocean" (FW 623.29), with a promise of redemption. This letter is a version of the flattering "murmoirs" HCE dreams his wife will write about him after his death: "The arzurian deeps o'er his humbodumbones sweeps. And his widdy the giddy is wreathing her murmoirs as her gracest triput to the Grocery Trader's Manthly. Mind mand gunfree by Gladeys Rayburn!" (FW 387 .32-35). The second more personal document records ALP's own desires and violates androcentric law. She has buried this letter at the sound of the thunder, the signifier of patriarchal interdiction, but thinks that some day the lost transcript of her hopes will return: "When the waves give up yours the soil may for me.

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Sometime then, somewhere there, I wrote me hopes and buried the page when I heard Thy voice, ruddery dunner" (FW 624.3-5). This final bifurcation of ALP's letter along gender lines hints that female writing within androcentric structures is inevitably a double document, containing both an official and repressed text: the former speaks the language of male desire, telling the father what he might like to hear, while the latter tells a different story, one that is at odds with patriarchal imperatives and concerns-or perhaps has nothing to do with them at all. This dualistic letter mentioned within the final monologue is a miniature of the monologue as a whole, for ALP's speech is indeed a double document, uttered in conflicting tongues as it were.6 Joyce's waking fictions often record a male resentment of female discourse, an implicit desire to censor it, a preference for the voiceless female visual object seen most patently in an early portrait of the artist: "Stephen sat down beside one of the daughters and, while admiring the rural comeliness of her features, waited quietly for her first word which, he knew, would destroy his satisfaction" (SH 46). When women are permitted to speak, are actively sought out as participants in ostensible dialogues, males often try to control what they say. Martha Clifford's missive, for instance, can be viewed as the perverse counterpart of the proper copybook letter, insofar as much of her writing sounds prescribed, artificial. Bloom clearly attempts to control the female voice, manipulating his correspondent into uttering the language of his particular masochistic brand of male desire. Bloom's need to be the "dictator" of female psyche and speech resurfaces in his own recollection of an encounter with a prostitute ("Girl in Meath street that night. All the dirty things I made her say. All wrong of course. My arks she called it" [U 13.867-69]} and in Molly's disgruntled account of a sex game he makes her play, during which she is asked to speak the words that will allow her husband to cuckold himself and to turn her into a whore ("who is in your mind now tell me who are you thinking of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the german Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to make a whore of me what he never will" [U 18.94-97]}. In the Wake this urge to control the female word at least partially disappears: in the irrepressible and often subversive footnotes of Issy; in the spontaneous singing, chattering, and laughing of ALP; and in the proliferative and compromising discourse of the ordinarily marginalized washerwomen, who imitate the rhetorical mode of the "gossipaceous" riverwoman (FW 195.4) they describe. But male subjects in Joyce's waking and night worlds alike are plagued by a recurrent sense that women have access to an "other" language, often audibly silent, a language comprehensible only to other females and implicitly threatening to the excluded-and effectively deaf-male listener. Bloom feels that Molly and Milly understand and communicate with each other in elusive and perhaps nonverbal ways-through "a preestablished natural comprehension in incomprehension" (U 17 .2289-90). In the margins of the nightlesson, Issy and her addressee are glossed as "Procne, Philomela" (FW 307L), the sisters who subvert the censoring powers of the male tyrant by inventing an alternative mode of discourse-the visual text of weaving. Even the imagined voice of ALP, the vehicle for one of the clearest speeches in the dream, is occasionally marked as the incomprehensible, as a string of mere fragments of sense ("With lipth she lithpeth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and thow on thow. She he she ho she ha to Ia. Hairfluke, if he could bad twig her!" [FW 23.23-25]). Joyce adumbrates-almost as a present absence, as it were-a linguistic space

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beyond male discourse; in his representations of men who try to listen to this alternative female language but still fail to understand totally what they hear, he inscribes the potential limits to his own auditory forays into that terrain.

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1. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979}, 12-13.

2. Margot Norris, "Narration under a Blindfold: Reading Joyce's 'Clay,'" PMLA 102 (March 1987): 206-215. 3. Norris, "Narration," 212. 4. Shari Benstock, "The Genuine Christine: Psychodynamics of Issy," in Women in Joyce, eds. Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 185. 5. Shari Benstock, "The Letter of the Law: La Carte Postale in Finnegans Wake," Philological Quarterly 63 (1984):176.

6. See my essay "ALP's Final Monologue in Finnegans Wake: The Dialectical Logic of Joyce's Dream Text," in Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, eds. Morris Beja and Shari Benstock (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 232-247.

PART III: PERFORMANCE

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"Group drinkards maaks grope thinkards or how reads rotary" (FW 312.31 ): Finnegans Wake and the Group Reading Experience

David Borodin I am reading [Finnegans Wake] now, and, though I meet many allusions, the book is very high over my head. A friend here (a painter) and I often read it (or try to) together; and I, it is fair to say, am better than he, and lead him into many a laugh and into the midst of wander and wonderland. It is an amazing book; and hardly to be understood in a year, much less in a day. So wrote Sean O'Casey to James Joyce in May of 1939, within only a month of the publication of Finnegans Wake. 1 And here we see in its infancy a tradition of reading Joyce's great last book that was gradually to be embraced the world over: the custom of reading Finnegans Wake communally. The idea of sitting around in a group-be it of two or twenty-to read a work of prose fiction is perhaps an uncommon one, but a book that so stubbornly resists being read from any one perspective is probably one best read from a multitude of perspectives. And a good way of sustaining a plurality of views in the reading of Finnegans Wake is to read the book in a group. One precedent for reading the Wake communally is the practice sometimes accorded to the reading of religious texts, namely group monastic readings of scripture in the Middle Ages. It may be appropriate that the profane work which probably comes closest to continuing this tradition is Finnegans Wake, a work apparently conceived of, modeled on, and developed as a kind of surrogate for the sacred scripture. The Wake is permeated with references to the world's great religious texts, and even identifies itself with a religious manuscript: The Book of Kells. James Atherton, in The Books at the Wake, points to Joyce's romantic conception of himself as artist-God as the very basis of Finnegans Wake: There was a medieval theory that God composed two scriptures: the first was the universe which he created after having conceived the idea of it complete and flawless in his mind; the second was the Holy Bible. What Joyce is attempting in Finnegans Wake is nothing less than to create a third scripture, the sacred book of the night, revealing the microcosm which he had already conceived in his mind. And as the phenomenal universe is built upon certain fundamental laws which it is the task of science and philosophy to discover, so the microcosm of Finnegans Wake is constructed according to certain fundamental axioms for which Joyce is careful to provide clues, but which it is the task of his readers to discover for themselves. 2 Finnegans Wake is bigger than all of our attempts to reduce it. Just when we think we have the key to some secret storeroom of Wake explication, we arrive only to find that it had been open for us all along, and its shelves lined with fresh copies of the Wake. Yet, many long-term readers find that their eyes do eventually adjust (somewhat) to the dark, and that their ears, too, have been 151

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sensitized by the climb up Joyce's tower of babble. Today, half a century after the publication of Finnegans Wake, it is not uncommon to find groups of readers convening on a regular basis in cities throughout the world-groups of academics and amateurs alike with no more of an agenda than to read aloud, ponder, discuss, and enjoy Joyce's great enigma. The Philadelphia Wake Circle is an example of a community of readers that has allowed the demands of reading Joyce to subject us to the ritual of regular meetings. This group was begun by Richard Beckman in the early 1970s and-allowing for a couple of interruptions-has been reading the Wake communally ever since. However, the group has changed gradually through the years. Participants come and go, bringing and taking with them an eclectic range of expertise in the fields of literature, language, philosophy, history, music, and the visual arts. If we were to choose as our agenda the goal of never finishing the book, we would not be selecting a difficult one. All we would have to do is read the Wake from morning till night for the rest of our lives and we would easily not finish it. Even if we were to read rapidly enough to rearrive on page 3 every year or two, we would still find a new book before us each time in light of all that we have lived and learned (and forgotten) in the meanwhile. But at such a fast clip the landscape goes by us in a blur; and there are countless stones there waiting to be turned over. Our group approach, therefore, has been that of a "close" reading, a term now meaning different things to different people, but used here in its more traditional sense to suggest a slow, careful reading that would permit us to stop for what we stumble on. At a maintained cruising speed of about a half a page per three-hour session, we have allowed ourselves the opportunity for a wordby-word scrutiny that can often reveal much about the book's overall design. One often finds the biggest concepts mirrored in the smallest details. Of course, the trouble with the world-in-a-grain-of -sand approach is the relatively small stretch of beach one has time to examine in an afternoon. And since the intricate architecture of the book emerges only gradually through repetition-while informing the reading of the smallest details all along-it might be ventured that anyone not planning on living beyond, say, a century might miss a great deal of the book's special beauty. The practical solution, therefore, appears to be the augmentation of our close-up group reading with that of the wide-angle variety on our own (that is, concurrently reading the book at two different speeds) so that we may ultimately attempt to keep one eye focused on the road while the other surveys the vast landscape before us. I. "the beast of boredom, common sense"3

Before we discuss the problems inherent in group readings of Finnegans Wake it may be helpful to prepare by taking a brief look at some of the problems faced by a single reader of this book. After spending a third of our lives unconsciously exploring the strange terrain of sleep, what do we do now when we wake to find it in our reading material as well? How do we recapture, consciously, the frame of mind that safely steered us, nightly, past the wandering rocks of rational thought? We spent our childhood learning to give up the remnants of this consciousness in favor of a practical taste for facts, and have consequently allowed the banal encumbrances of time, space, movement, gravity, and the belief in progress to blunt our senses.

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Enter James Augustine Joyce, Jesuit-trained apostate, worshipful iconoclast, wordman, wordlover, drawer of words, who devoted his life to the invigoration of the English language before finally putting it to sleep. For, if the dark, metaphoric world of man's unconscious is ever to be surveyed in language, it is evidently not to be done with words of concrete, but with words as fluid and changeable as their subject. Under Joyce's direction, word becomes "woid" (FW 378.29) in an exhilarating assault on our complacent trust in words as factual correlation. No longer can we expect to see words as the sharp-edged blocks of graven images they largely have been for us before. Joyce put them to sleep for their relative resistance to an essential ingredient of the imagination: ambiguity. Michael Patrick Giiiespie addresses Joyce's use of ambiguity quite succintly: To counteract the impulses of Enlightenment empiricism which still influence our response to experience, Joyce urges the acknowledgment and even the pursuit of ambiguity as a means of opening one's consciousness to the mystery inherent in art. Ultimately in Finnegans Wake the problem does not turn upon a resolution of contraries but upon a reconciliation with them. 4 Ambiguity is an essential aspect of the dreaming mind, both in sleep, and in the conscious imagination. We turn to sleep for what is probably our most effective release from the relentless, hard-edged confines of factual certainty. The ambiguity inherent in the condensation and displacement phenomena of the dreamwork provides an escape from the rigid particularity of conscious perception. 5 We have consciously sought daytime entrance to this refuge via myth, art, and imagination; though even here we often find ourselves trapped in the tyrannical clutches of certainty. Consider how we search through notebooks, drafts, sketches, and letters for insights into a work of art, often finding less about the finished work of art there than about the notebooks, drafts, sketches, and letters. Understandably, it is rather disconcerting, after years of trained submission to the despotic authority of fact to read in Finnegans Wake what we have all nightly understood: that 1 + 1 is sometimes 3. To read the Wake, therefore, we probably should learn first to unread a few thousand years of literature. Hugh Kenner aptly described for us our sleep at Joyce's Wake when he declared: "Joyce worked seventeen years to push [Finnegans Wake] away from 'meaning' adrift into language; nothing is to be gained by trying to push it back." 6 We can't say that we weren't warned. We are probably given everything we need to know about the Wake right in the text itself. If the universe of Finnegans Wake operates according to its own principles (as any good universe should), it also comes complete with the owner's manual of operating instructions dispersed throughout its pages: "Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrent our certitude" (FW 51 .16-17); "What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for" (FW 482.34-36). Such suggestions should be expected in a book predicated on the "gossiple" (FW 38.23) truth, where the fine line between the grapevine and the history book is usually blurred or absent. Conversely, however, we are warned against reading sheer nonsense out of this nonsense. Just when we think we're looking at a mere riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles we read, "No, so holp me Petault, it is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and

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bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks as like it as damn it" (FW 118.28-31). Anyone who has followed Joyce through the Ulysses episodes of "Cyclops," "Nausicaa," and "Eumaeus" knows better than to trust implicitly the objectivity and accuracy of the narrational voice. But, in our attempts to see through their prejudices and incompetence, we run the risk of holding out for an ideally knowable ("real") story line behind the language of its presentation, or, in other words, of looking for a different book beneath its pages. 7 This dilemma is compounded ten-fold in the Wake, where we don't even usually know who's doing the talking, or to whom, or about whom (let alone what is being said!). In a book where a five-member suburban Dublin family permutates into endless social configurations encompassing all of mankind, and where the texture appears modeled on the sound (and consequence) of gossip, it might be safe to conclude that Finnegans Wake is the one book that cannot (must not) allow clear traditional distinctions between the roles of the characters, the reader, and the writer. Therefore, the question of how much authority we should invest in these supposed authorial reader-promptings will presumably remain debatable. In light of the infamous reading dangers inherent in Joyce's "worldrenownced" (FW 341.19) "farced epistol to the hibruws" (FW 228.33-34), we may be tempted to ask the obvious question: just how much abuse is a reader expected to endure? The answer to this question is probably to be found in a closer examination of the question. Is there any reason to insist that Joyce would have really envisioned such a book being read by a single reader? Have you ever been the sole participant at a wake? Would not a sole participant at a wake be the corpse itself? 8 In the lookingglass world of Wakean identity we might just as well assume that the reader is the dreamer who dreams of the writer dreaming our wake. A quick look at the history of Finnegans Wake from its evolution as Work in Progress through the publication and critical reception of the finished work might provide a clue as to just how many people constitute a reader of a text like this. Let us begin with the creator himself. Joyce masterminded a group effort to defend Work in Progress with the publication of Our Exagmination round His Factification for /ncamination of Work in Progress. This book of essays was published in May 1929, long before any one reader on his or her own could have been expected to digest the serially published segments of the then unfinished work. Evidently predicated on the belief in the power of numbers, this group of twelve "disciples" was directed by Joyce like a team of specialists attacking a newly discovered scientific phenomenon, and might enjoy a distinction as the primal ancestor of our modern Finnegans Wake reading groups. That he paid them little tribute in the finished work-"lmagine the twelve deaferended dumbbawls of the whowl abovebeugled to be the contonuation through regeneration of the urutteration of the word in pregross" (FW 284.18-22)--should not discourage us from divining Joyce's approval of the group effort method. That was perhaps just his way of saying thank you. Just a couple of months after the publication of Our Exagmination, Joyce gave another hint of a company policy toward the Wake when he suggested that the book might need to be finished by someone else. His eyesight quickly

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diminishing along with the patience of his readers, a dispirited Joyce, still obsessed with the importance of his mission, formally proposed that his countryman James Stephens oversee completion of the book if and when it became necessary. As we know, it didn't, but Joyce even went so far as to contemplate the aesthetic value of their combined initials, JJ and S, under the title of the book. Such a remarkable gesture might suggest a belief in the author as medium rather than creator-where the writer's job is only to make visible a work that was here among us all along. Already by 194Q---1)nly a year after the Wake's publication-there emerged an example of the Finnegans Wake reading group as we know it today when William York Tindall of Columbia University gathered together a small group of graduate students to pursue the Wake. Though Tindall eventually took up reading the book on his own as well as in the group, he believed that the pooled resources of varied learning and languages would go further than any one individual might. And nearly thirty years later, in the introduction to his 1969 A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake, Tindall acknowledged his indebtedness to this group effort for much of what he learned about the book, and eventually published. 9 In 1962 another concentrated, long-term, group effort at surviving the Wake appeared with the publication of A Wake Newslitter. This journal was founded to provide an arena for the quick exchange of ideas throughout the Wakean world, and opened its premier issue of March 1962 with the understatement: "Finnegans Wake needs to be read communally." And like a Wakean motif this battle cry has been heard, in various guises, echoing from the various parts of the known world. The following year Clive Hart wrote these words again (though never too often) in the introduction to that most primary of secondary works on the Wake, A Concordance to Finnegans Wake, adding the modest appraisal: "I doubt whether any one person can ever see enough of Joyce's linguistic panorama." 10 But we could just as easily justify the necessity of group reading using the opposite approach from that above. It could be argued that the only thing more limiting to an individual's grasp of the Wake than the inevitable limits to one's erudition is one's inevitable erudition. In such a book as Finnegans Wake, where world literature, history, philosophy, art, and science constitute the very fabric of the text, it is indeed possible to ride one's hobby horse off into the proverbial sunset, never to be heard from again (excepting, of course, in an occasional James Joyce Quarterly article). Joyce may have used the Encyclopedia Britannica, II th edition, as a source book for the Wake, but he did choose to leave a few things out. We might go so far, then, as to see the communal reading as a sort of group insurance, where the individual readers are protected from their own worst enemies: themselves. The collective conscience of the group usually has the effect of gently curbing excesses, and constraining even the most exuberant imaginations to soar within the Wakean universe. We all come to the Wake with our own agendas, whether we like to admit it or not. Even the least eventful of reading groups are conspicuous by the gentle whir of axes grinding. This is probably nothing so unnatural in the context of a book that warns us to use "The soft side of the axe!" (FW 433.28). Hugh Kenner once described Finnegans Wake as "a multiplicity of voices being misapprehended by a collectivity of ears." 11 In my experience, this would also serve as an excellent description of almost any communal reading of the book.

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The peculiar texture of the writing translates easily into the experience of reading it together. To sit among a circle of intent Wake readers of various backgrounds, pondering the possible significance(s) of an impossible passage is often like attempting to keep your story straight on a telephone party line. Those who have never tasted the pleasures of a group reading may turn to The Finnegans Wake Experience, 12 where Roland McHugh includes a transcribed tape recording of the "European Finnegans Wake Study Group" of 1970/71. However, something of the same experience can be gotten simply by opening up a copy of his Annotations to Finnegans Wake. 13 As a compilation of margin jottings from the pens of various expert readers, the Annotations lives up to its name. It is a bewildering array of "once current puns, quashed quotatoes, [and] messes of mottage" (FW 183.22-23) dragged into daylight, labelled, and keyed to a text which isn't there. These strange, jumbled pages take on the look of a palimpsest of Joyce's book-a fitting commentary on a book that looks in some ways like a palimpsest of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition! Or maybe they resemble more the heaps of unusable, wide-awake language that Joyce discarded-arranged here like the tagged and numbered harvest of an archeological dig. The important factor concerning these collected readings is their inability to coalesce into a focused, privileged reading. Here in the lap of ambiguity we can find something of the real atmosphere of the group reading-allowing, that is, for a conspicuous telegraphic simplicity. You see, to read the Annotations is to witness, not to participate; and it is well known that Finnegans Wake is not a spectator sport. For those used to the luxury of reading with real people, the effect of reading the Annotations can be more like peering over various shoulders than hearing over various views. There can be something disconcerting in forfeiting the opportunity of staring an Annotator in the eyes while weighing his or her contribution, in that the source and context of a comment often helps gauge the grain of salt needed. On the other hand, a danger inherent in group reading is learning to perfect the fine art of tuning out, a survival tactic acquired early in childhood wherein opinions from unauthorized sources are blocked by the static of one's own ideas. Perhaps the way to have the best of both proverbial worlds in this case is simply to enter the group session with the Annotations tucked under your arm. It is not unknown for readers to record their valued findings directly into the pages of the Annotations. This practice saves the trouble of bringing the mountain to Mahomet, and tends to keep the Annotations the fluid, everchanging book that any secondary work to a text like the Wake must be. There are still many blank areas along these closely-printed pages; the inevitable question arises as to "what happens when I fill them?" (i.e. when there is no room for more; not when there is no more to room). One of the primary dangers of using a book like the Annotations is that of inadvertently falling victim, even momentarily, to an unqualified belief in that which is found in print. It is somehow easier to trust the impersonal upper and lower case of the printed page than that which is personally recorded in the "scribblative" (FW 189.10) case. If we don't believe everything we read in Finnegans Wake, why should we be expected to in the Annotations? We will all presumably find curiosities, contradictions, and even outright errors in this book (as we do in that great Ur-book for it-Finnegans Wake). However, this book has been found by many to be a helpful tool, and has been used by our group as a point of departure in our conference presentations so that the audience may be spared the boredom of being present for the unearthing of old findings.

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II. "two or three philadelphians" (FW 572.25) The 1988 Venice Symposium was the Philadelphia Wake Circle's third opportunity to bring an old Philadelphia Wake tradition before the people. 14 The only thing consciously planned about its presentation was the choice of the passage to be read and the avoidance of anything consciously planned. The goal was not a concert piece of polished explication (anyone can do that!), but rather an unrehearsed example of just what goes on at home. Its members came equipped with their own "readings" of the assigned passage and a necessary willingness to sacrifice their great ideas to the omnivorous god of group (mis)interpretation. A straight line of observation often gets bent by our circle into a convolution not unlike the narrative structure of the Wake itself. The book really comes alive at these readings, and we're often left with the strangely satisfying sensation of having fully digested an untouched meal. Due to the peculiarly fluid, elusive nature of this mode of idea-exchange, any attempt at a precise reconstruction of Muta and Juva in Venice would probably end up reading not unlike the Muta and Juva of pages 609-610. Notetaking at a session like this could be safely compared to bailing out a sinking rowboat with a spoon. In the heat of explication I confidently committed cryptic messages to my margins which, next morning, refused to yield their secrets to me. For example: next to "fundementially theosophagusted" on the first line of page 610 I was luckily able to reconstruct the words, "theological stomach problems=Luther/Berkeley-M." Nice, but who's "M?" Martha Davis ... Mike O'Shea? ... Mort Levitt? ... Tim Martin? ... me? ... Muta? ... maybe? ... MERDE! In light of a few minor technical difficulties, therefore, I will concentrate on evoking the spirit of the session at the expense of the whosaidwhatwhenishness of it, and, simply introduce all contributions with an identifying "R" for reader or "A" for audience.

SILENCE Act drop. Stand by! Blinders! Curtain up. Juice, please! Foots! (FW 501.6-7) Shoot (FW 610.33) R.l: Where's Shoot? R.2: What Shoot? R.l: That Shoot ... there, at the end! R.2: That's the beginning ... R.l: What ... ?

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R.2: ... of the next section! R.l: No, that's the last word of this one ... supportable, I believe, on several grounds. First of all I think of Hamlet. In a dialogue between two people pondering the significance of cloud formations, I find it difficult not to think of Hamlet and Polonius', "Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?" "By th' mass and 'tis-like a camel indeed," etc. Well, I'll get to that in a second, but I'd like to point out that Hamlet ends on the word "shoot": Fortin bras', "Go, bid the soldiers shoot." Now, we know how pervasive is the presence of Shakespeare in the Wake, and we can see it behind this very passage; I would like to argue that Shoot belongs here as an ending to our passage ... R.2: But, R.l, "Shoot" sounds very much like a film director's order to a cameraman, and suggests to me the beginning of something, not the end. R.l: Right, the signal to start filming/reporting the confrontation between Patrick and the Archdruid that follows this. I think that's true as well ... but I want to pursue the Hamlet theme a moment more. I find the image of these two watching smoke clouds to be comparable to Hamlet and Polonius except where they seem here to be seeing in them some sort of archetypal contenders ... like the contenders who will soon confront each other in our next passage. R.3: You know, I cannot help listening to Joyce quite literally here when he calls for "puffs" of smoke that "roll out of the lord." Someone, years ago, observed a theme of papal conclave in the Wake, at the same time citing about a dozen references throughout the book to Pope Celestine I. Now, Celestine died in 432, the year of Patrick's rearrival in Ireland. A new pope had to be elected, as happened that year with the election of Sixtus III. So, maybe the smoke that Muta and Juva observe is, on one level at least, the smoke rising in the square from the stove pipe of the Vatican chapel during conclave. The current tradition allows the populace assembled out in the piazza to learn of the success of a majority vote by the burning of the voting papers with dry straw, making a cloud of white smoke (as opposed to the black smoke made by the addition of wet straw, signalling a failure of majority vote). Now, whether or not this tradition goes back very far does not, in my opinion, damage the beauty of the metaphor. And as proof of Joyce's conscious use of the theme, look at line 15 of page I 00 where "the infallible spike of smoke's jutstiff punctual" announces the mysterious resurrection of the disappeared HCE. In my opinion, it looks like the smoke clouds which Muta and Juva see are ultimately a signal of the spiritual future of Ireland. And this reading would enable us to view this entire dialogue as a foretelling of the awakening of the sleeper by way of a metaphor of an Ireland awakening from the drugged sleep of druidic mysticism. R.l: Yes, "infallible spikes of smoke's jutstifP' certainly sounds papal ... R.4: But there is also the sense of smoke rising from the Earwicker house as breakfast is prepared, as has been observed ...

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R.l: I don't see that ... do the rest of you see a breakfast going on here? I've had trouble with that reading. R.4: Well, maybe Muta is reprimanding against smoking before breakfast. R.2: Yes, it used to be that you couldn't have breakfast before going to communion. R.S: We don't know whether these two see steam, clouds or smoke, really. And it seems to me that there are different kinds of smoke. There's smoking as in "may I smoke?"; and then there's smoking as in "you may burn for all I care!" Perhaps the use is ambiguous here. R.l: But in any case, this smoking is used by Joyce throughout the Wake .. . by way of the pipe and the cigar ... as a symbol of arrogance and pride ... as a symbol of authority ... of God. R.4: But this might be any number of gods. "Old Head of Kettle" might just as well be the Buddha ... head in clouds ... R.l: Right ... R.4: But it is followed by language suggesting the Eddas and Scandinavian mythology. Maybe a plurality of gods is intended here to suggest that particular religions come and go, but Ireland remains ... like the phoenix arising from the ashes, or Quinet's flowers surviving the destruction of civilizations. R.5:

Yes, when Laoghaire bets on which god will win out, he doesn't take any chances, and so bets on all of them!

R.l:

As far as I can see, Juva's idea of God-Joyce's for that matter-is almost always expressed anatomically or meteorologically. Here it is the latter, with the suggestion of volcanic eruption.

R.6:

Yes, don't forget that Jove was associated with emanations from the sky.

R.l: Good, yes, I see a lot of Jove or Jupiter here. And, while I'm on the subject, the spirit of Jupiter is conjured up on line 30 with "An I could peecieve ..." when we remember Aristophanes' crack about rain being caused by Jupiter peeing through a sieve. A. I: Yes, that's echoed on page 451, line 36 with Jupiter, the god of rain, given to us as "shoepisser pluvious." R.l:

Nice!

R.3: Before I forget this, I'd like to backtrack, briefly, to the interesting comment before about Juva's meteorological expression of god, and the godlike quality of the volcano image. The Eddie flavor of Muta's "He odda be thorly ..." seems to me to confirm this connection, in that the Voluspa describes the end of the world-the wrath of God-in terms curiously close to contemporary accounts of the eruption of Mt. Hekla.

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R.7: Yes, and in reference to these issues as issues of authority, I'd like to point out the Shem/Shaun correspondence with Muta and Juva: Muta, like Shem, seems to be the one asking the questions, while Juva, like Shaun, remains the authoritarian. It seems that the creative ones are those who ask the questions. But this correlation with Shem and Shaun I find particularly interesting. Line 30 of page 609 has Muta declare, "An I could peecieve . . . ." Now, if we read the "an" as a Shakespearean "if" and the "I" as an "eye," modifying the meaning to, "If an eye could perceive ... ," we get the sense of one possible self ("an 1"), and a description of the process of perception . . . an interaction of two eyes-Muta and Juva/Shem and Shaun-two lobes of the one brain ... R.l: But aren't you actually forcing Muta and Juva to conspire to form one perception like some sort of friendly, cooperative effort? They seem, rather to be continually at each other's throats. I see this rather as a struggle for the paternal inheritance-in this case Laoghaire's-which is an underlying theme in the brother confrontations. R.4: But Laoghaire stands above the two rival halves, observing them as a whole R.3: Rivalry leads to overthrow, which might be relevant to the possibly prophetic aspect of the smoke-so, do you mind if we go back to the smoke? One aspect we haven't touched on yet that I find essential to this passage-as well as to the book-is that of SechseHiuten, the Zurich spring fertility rite that Joyce was so interested in. This ceremony-"the ringing of six o'clock"--n she accuses: "For your own sake you urged me to it. ... To be free yourself" (E 103). In a conversation with Beatrice, she angrily dismisses the masculine logocentric discourse of "ideas and ideas" (E 100). "Do you think I am a stone?" she asks bitterly. "I am very proud of myself, if you want to know. What have they ever

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done for him? I made him a man . What are they all in his life? No more than dirt under his boots! ... He can despise me, too, like the rest of them - now. And you can despise me. But you will never humble me, any of you" (E 100). Reversing the Pygmalion/Galatea relationship earlier envisaged by Robert, Bertha claims with fierce, maternal pride that it is she who made Richard a man. Through love and passionate devotion, she spiritually gives birth to the mature artist who will, in turn, conceive and bring forth poetic ideas. At this point in the drama, Bertha emerges as a newly born woman, autonomous and free. She asserts, in her own right, a creative liberty that transcends the sexual imbroglio earlier engineered by Richard in his attempt to play choreographer and puppet-master in the drama of both their destinies. 21 In the final act of the play, Bertha proudly lays claim to the kind of psychological autonomy that Richard has been trying to foist on her in the guise of purported benevolence. ''You would like to be free now," he challenges. "You have only to say the word" (E 103). When Richard brashly offers Bertha sexual liberty, she seizes the opportunity to assert emotional freedom. She taunts him with a fantasy of nightly trysts with a mysterious lover in acts of unbridled passion: "To meet my lover! Yes! My lover!" (E 104). There is an obvious note of mockery in Bertha's declaration of sexual independence, as she wryly comments: "You are a stranger to me. You do not understand anything in me - not one thing in my heart or soul. A stranger! I am living with a stranger!" (E 104). Bertha has spent an unforgettable evening with Robert , but their veiled colloquy remains shrouded in mystery. The spectator, like Richard, is cast into a mire of metaphysical doubt. Robert and Bertha address each other in the figurative language of lovers, a discourse fraught with epistemological uncertainty. ROBERT: . . . Bertha? What happened last night? What is the

truth that I am to tell? . . . Were you mine in that sacred night of love? Or have I dreamed it? BERTHA [smilesfaint(y]: Remember your dream of me. You dreamed that I was yours last night. ROBERT: And that is the truth - a dream? That is what I am to tell? BERTHA: Yes. ROBERT: . . . Bertha! . In all my life only that dream is real. I forget the rest. (E 106) 100

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When Bertha reminds her suitor of his dream of amorous possession during their "sacred night of love," Robert, swept away on a tide of emotional ecstasy, cannot distinguish reality from dream. If their conversation is intended to reconstruct the highly coded language of courtly love, then Robert's assessment should be interpreted literally: the encounter was enacted according to "sacred" codes of conduct, and whatever intimacy the two lovers shared took sacramental rather than profane expression. The dialogue has a Platonic cast, and one might assume from this ambiguous tete-a-tete that their involvement stopped short of physical consummation. Joyce, despite his popular reputation as a pornographic author, rarely gives us explicit representations of sexual coition. After tantalizing his audience, he invariably transfers erotic climax from the stage of drama to the scene of writing. Copulation is prepared for, imagined, fantasized, or recollected. But the moment of physical climax is always displaced onto a mimetic stage of impassioned fantasy, a stage of subjective and cultural representation. Erotic jouissance in the Joycean canon is played out in the register of ecriture and endlessly supplemented by inflated reveries in the tumescent imaginations of his characters. Robert Hand, like Keats transported by the song of the nightingale, wonders if his experience were a vision or a waking dream. For a clue to the mystery, we might consult another Keatsian lyric, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which suggests that: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter.'' In answer to epistemological queries, the poet would insist: "'Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,' - that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'' The truth of Robert and Bertha's liaison resides in the lyrical recollections they privately share. Like the lovers portrayed on the Grecian urn, they eschew "a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed" by choosing the "happier love" of unconsummated passion, "forever warm and still to be enjoyed.' ' 22 The couple can luxuriate in melodies of erotic expectation inscribed in consciousness by the suspension of physical release. Robert has dreamt of ecstatic union with Bertha, but his ineffable dream is all the more powerful for its lack of sensuous closure. It will take a plethora of forms in his imagination over a thousand and one nights of delectable fantasy, as he bears into voluntary exile the sacred chalice of Platonic devotion to a mistress who will remain "forever panting, and forever young" in her suitor's romantic memory. 101

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Robert and Bertha mutually construct a dream of love, an imaginary encounter on the stage of aroused desire. Tantalized, they apparently defer physical satisfaction for the sweeter pleasures of erotic dissemination. Their affair seems to have been emotionally and linguistically seminal rather than a transaction involving an "ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ" ( U 1 7: 2283- 4). Language inaugurates an irruption of libidinal desire, a diffusion of sensual titillation through the infinitely deferred resonance of a haunting, unsatisfied dream. Bound together in a piquant discourse of amorous longing, the couple has left a gap in experience, creating a phallic wound of ever-living doubt that will, through a reversal (and triangulation) of metaphorical insemination, penetrate and impregnate the womb of Richard's own artistic imagination. Their collusion has freed him, in fantasy if not in fact, from the tedious fears of conjugal possessiveness. Refusing to covet the woman who would be his wife, Richard embraces the restlessness of emotional doubt in lieu of a socially sanctioned bond of law. By ending the play on a note of paradox, Joyce fails to conclude his drama with the kind of traditional climax anticipated by Aristotelian poetics. He remarks in his notes: "The doubt which clouds the end of the play must be conveyed to the audience not only through Richard's questions to both but also from the dialogue between Robert and Bertha" (E 125). In a drama that deals prominently with the issue of libidinal desire, Joyce titillates his spectator but denies him/her the satisfaction of climactic release. The audience may feel a distinct sense of frustration at this teasing game of authorial manipulation. But, as Joyce would remind us, "doubt is the thing. Life is suspended in doubt like the world in the void. You might find this in some sense treated in Exiles (]] 557). 23 In his notes for the play, Joyce declares: "All believe that Bertha is Robert's mistress. This belief rubs against his own knowledge of what has been, but he accepts the belief as a bitter food" (E 123). Although Robert chooses to leave Dublin, he evidently does not flee out of guilt or adulterous shame. He acquires the name of Don Giovanni without the gains of physical possession and accepts the salt bread of Dantesque exile as bitter, but inevitable fare. He has, perhaps, tasted the fruits of Eden without consuming the apple whole. 24 Ultimately, the text of Exiles confounds us with the inevitable confluence of art and life. "You dreamed that I was yours last

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night," Bertha tells Robert (E 106). But what, finally, is the distinction between reality and dream? How much of human experience is real, and how much is a fictional projection of the creative imagination? Love, like art, largely transpires as a waking dream, a fabulation of subjective consciousness. Each individual tends to elevate sexual experience to the status of legend or myth, as the lover invariably weaves the fabric of erotic consummation on the warp and woof of private romantic narrative. In a play filled with enigmas, Robert's confession of the truth to Richard suggests still further ambiguities. "I failed," Robert avers. "She is yours, as she was nine years ago, when you met her first" (E 107). Robert insists that Bertha refused to yield to his entreaties and that he spent an evening of anxious peregrination culminating in a fly-by-night love affair, a "death of the spirit" with an unknown lady in a cab. It is perhaps telling that the stage-directions at this point call for a fishwoman crying "Dublin bay herrings!" (E 107). Joyce, in his usual punning manner, may be mocking Robert by implying something fishy about his alibi. The tale Robert narrates could be meant to function as a red herring in this convoluted maze of love and betrayal. Doubt is piled upon doubt, as Richard protests that he will never know the truth about the liaison - "Never in this world" (E 102). He hears demonic voices counseling him to despair, despite Robert's assurance that Bertha is still as faithful to Richard as she was nine years earlier. His assertion is deliberately ambiguous. Could Bertha have deceived Richard almost a decade ago, when the three first met? Is Archie, perhaps, Robert's son? "If he were mine," Robert sighs, and identifies himself as Archie's "fairy godfather" (E 110). 25 Despite the accumulation of doubt and ambiguity in Exiles, one thing emerges clearly and remains constant throughout the drama - Bertha's powerful and enduring love for Richard. "I have been true to you," she vows. "Last night and always" (E 110). "Surely you believe me. I gave you myself - all. I gave up all for you. You took me - and you left me" (E 111 ). Spiritually abandoned during their exile in Rome, Bertha has cherished a living memory of their youthful courtship and its passionate consummation. Like Molly Bloom, she nightly resurrects a life-sustaining vision of her husband in the guise of ardent suitor: "Not a day passes that I do not see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we met first. Every day of my life I see that. Was I not true to you all that time?'' (E 111).

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Bertha, the bride faithful in exile, appeals to her errant spouse in a gesture of profound tenderness and solicitude. By piercing her lover with the phallic weapon of triangulated desire, she inaugurates an ongoing quest for the elusive psychic gratifications of wholeness and self-presence associated with the Lacanian other. Richard, like Stephen's Shakespeare, has suffered "a deep wound of doubt" which can never be healed. "I do not wish to know or to believe," he insists. "I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness" (E 112). In some sense, Richard is playing Freud's Fort/Da game with his common-law wife. By making her disappear as a conjugal possession, he can call her back, inscribed as an object of desire, in the realm of the symbolic order. Through an ostensibly sacrificial gesture, Richard lays claim to the language and mastery of the Father, while Bertha functions as a mystified (M)Other figure whose possible loss engenders an imaginary fissure perpetually sutured through aesthetic fantasy. 26 The wound itself will nourish the imagination of a writer who takes masochistic pleasure in the luminosity of doubt and proudly internalizes the pain of abjection. "The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding . . . . There is ... some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself" ( U 9: 459-64 ). The certainty of either love or hate would be disastrous for Rowan the artist, who feels that he must nurture a "living, wounding doubt" as a spur to creativity. The gap in Joyce's aesthetic theory is deducible from the symbolic fissure that insinuates itself like a grain of sand into the oyster-shell of poetic vulnerability, or like the seminal influence that must impregnate the "virgin womb of the [artistic] imagination" (P 217). Penetrated by the sudden impact of jealousy, the writer's mind recoils from emotional pain and continually rehearses the traumatic event until trauma has been mastered in the realm of fabulation. Kinesis inaugurates those flights of restless fantasy that impel the insecure artist/lover to conjure alternative fictional worlds. 27 Richard's infamous wound in Exiles metaphorically invaginates his tormented creative consciousness. A perpetual stranger in the home he once knew, he choreographs an uncanny ( unheimlich) project to detach himself from the umbilical cord of amorous need that links 104

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him, like a dependent child or a powerless embryo, to hidden and inaccessible female genital spaces. The cut in his psyche enables him to cut free. Traumatized by the threat of infidelity and conjugal loss, he gives birth in his head to an idealized image of the beloved and continually possesses her anew in the pain of doubt that will undoubtedly hurt him into poetry. Rejecting his inamorata as a sexual possession, he embraces her as a mystical figure of coherence and plenitude always-already denied - and thus sought after and pined for until longing erupts in artistic couvade. The emotional scar inaugurated by Richard's sacrificial renunciation of Bertha will be replicated over and over again in his turbulent imagination, as the disruptions of frustrated libidinal desire spur the insecure artist to compensatory acts of parthenogenetic creation. 28 At the conclusion of Exiles, Bertha, the mother/muse of Joyce's drama, has successfully given birth to the artistic hero who will return to her in the role of primordial lover. Asserting the irrepressible dignity of her nature, she draws her spouse into the fluidity of female desire and into the semiotic rhythms of unconsummated passion that burst forth in explosive discharges of creative energy. 29 As in all his later works, Joyce gives the last word in Exiles to a woman. Bertha offers Richard a tantalizing invitation to resurrection and emotional renewal so that, together, the couple might strive for, but never fully achieve, a prelapsarian (and wholly imaginary) experience of transcendent jouissance. 30 "Forget me, Dick," Bertha pleads. "For get me and love me again as you did the first time. I want my lover. To meet him, to go to him, to give myself to him. You, Dick. 0, my strange wild lover, come back to me again!" (E 112). 31

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4

UNCOUPLING ULYSSES Joyce's New Womanry Man There 1s only desire and the social, and nothing else. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus) The unconscious ceases to be what it is - a factory, a workshop - to become a theater, a scene and its staging. (ibid.)

In Ulysses, Joyce depicts an epic hero who is also a pacifist, a Jew, a petit bourgeois businessman, a commercial traveler, a voyeur, an exhibitionist, and an ostensibly inadequate husband. Because psychological positions are mobile and transferable in the landscape of the novel, Leopold Bloom is alternately powerful and obsequious, feminized and flagellated, politically exalted and socially humiliated. He emerges as a "new womanly man" and unconventional hero who seems, paradoxically, to inhabit those marginal spaces on the edge of social discourse usually reserved for women and for cultural deviants. A connoisseur of the sensuous joys of polymorphous perversity, Bloom proves to be androgynous not only in terms of psychological temperament but in libidinal orientation, as well. He apparently retrieves the primordial erotic impulses rejected by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents those primitive olfactory and tactile responses that the father of psychoanalysis ascribed somewhat speciously to the female of the species, in contrast to the supposedly visual and oculocentric sexual economy associated with the male.' Bloom manifests a curious infantile "cloacal obsession" with excrementa cast off by the body. He smells the pickings of his toenails, relishes the tang of urine in a fried pork kidney, and is obsessively preoccupied with menstrual excrescences. The Lacanian phallus is displaced in his symbolic imagination by a fetishistic concern with breasts and bottoms, feces, menses, urine, and other physical secretions. Throughout Ulysses, "Baby Bloom" finds himself tantalized by purportedly feminine pulsions that replicate infantile attachment to the imaginary body of a beneficent and

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powerful phallic mother: "Be near her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes" (U 4: 238-9). "A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain . . . . Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore" (U 8: 647 -9). Throughout the novel, most of the female characters take shape as vivid projections of Bloom's richly heterogeneous fantasy life. They are inscribed in his imagination as figures of physical need or sadomasochistic impulse, visceral pity or sensuous attraction. Despite the epicene aspects of his sexual proclivities, Bloom tends to assess women in his environment as amorous objects stoking playful vignettes of the dreaming mind. His farraginous interior monologue offers a pentimento portrait of Irish society that includes such diverse sources of titillation as the next-door girl with a strong pair of arms and "crooked skirt swinging, whack by whack ... behind her moving hams" (U 4: 164, 172) and a well-dressed lady, gloved and booted, haughtily mounting a carriage in front of the Grosvenor: "Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!" (U 5: 130). In a moment of voyeuristic fantasy, Bloom speculates: "Women all for caste till you touch the spot. ... Possess her once take the starch out of her" ( U 5: 104- 6). He admires Amazonian females like Lady Mountcashel: "Riding astride. Sit her horse like a man. Weightcarrying huntress . . . . Strong as a brood mare some of those horsey women" ( U 8: 343- 5); and like Mrs Miriam Dandrade "that sold me her old wraps and black underclothes in the Shelbourne hotel. Divorced Spanish American . . . . Want to be a bull for her. Born courtesan" ( U 8: 350- 7). Women excite or repel him, tease or titillate him; but all of their figurations suggest that in the course of Ulysses, Bloom is rewriting the text of turn-of-the-century sex-role enculturation in the discourse of polymorphously perverse desire. In the persona of Henry Flower, Esquire, Bloom conducts a clandestine epistolary affair with Martha Clifford, a lonely and pathetic working-girl who pines for release from the prison of dreary secretarial duties. Martha complains of boredom and headaches, longs to consummate this illicit liaison with her would-be lover, and takes curious pleasure in his obscene communications. But, like the virtuous Edwardian lady she was raised to be, Martha protests, "I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world" ( U 5: 244- 5). Too exhausted and bleary-eyed to correct her typographical error, Martha fails to recognize the contradictions implicit in her quest for the "real meaning of that word" she does 107

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not like. She assures Henry: "I have never felt myself so much drawn to a man as you. . . . 0 how I long to meet you. Henry dear, do not deny my request before my patience are exhausted. Then I will tell you all" (U 5: 249-54). Martha tantalizes her penfriend with promises of forbidden sexual discourse, but her patience and confidence have, indeed, been misplaced in the cautious married man she unwittingly tries to seduce. Bloom, despite a professed interest in social justice, attributes her depression and physical discomfort to menstrual malady rather than situational angst: "Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably" (U 5: 285). In "Lotus-Eaters," a chapter of flowers, the exhausted Martha is too busy earning her bread to be greatly concerned about the roses denied her - though she does, apparently, take some kind of masochistic pleasure from the thorns of Bloom's pornographic letters designed to pique erotic curiosity. In the "Nausicaa" episode, Bloom responds to Gerty MacDowell's sentimental strip-tease with a kind of Zola-esque naturalism. Aroused by her tantalizing display of exhibitionism, he gives the young woman the impression that his strange "dark eyes" are "drinking in her every contour, literally worshipping at her shrine" (U 13: 563-4). With a little help from Maria Susanna Cummins's Lamplighter, Gerty romanticizes this exotic stranger, sanitizes his masturbation, and idealizes his worshipful attentions. As Virgin Mary of Sandymount, she invites the tribute of Bloom's profane ejaculations, reinscribed in adolescent consciousness by that "dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in the world for her for love was the master guide" (U 13: 671-2). 2 This "sterling man, a man of inflexible honour to his fingertips" ( U 13: 694) evaluates the scene with the same phenomenological accuracy one might associate with the comic caricature of Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft in "Cyclops": "Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish . . . . How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she . . . . Anyhow I got the best of that. ... Thankful for small mercies. Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves" (U 13: 777-90). Bloom's matterof-fact interpretation of his onanistic encounter with Gerty is fairly mechanical: "My fireworks. Up like a rocket, down like a stick" (U 13: 894-5). His response may seem self-serving, if not brutal: "Did me good all the same. . .. For this relief much thanks"

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(U 13: 939-40). But his post-orgasmic thoughts about Gerty are also imbued with feelings of pity and tinged with paternal solicitude . Stunned by his recognition of her lameness, Bloom thinks: ''Poor girl! That's why she's left on the shelf and the others did a sprint" ( U 13: 772- 3). He feels grateful to Gerty for reaffirming his sense of manhood and acknowledges that their erotic adventure involved some form of mutuality and communication, ''a kind of language between us" (U 13: 944). Bloom sees in this postpubescent girl a figure of his own developing daughter Milly, whom he tenderly recalls in nostalgic reverie now that she has left home for an apprenticeship in photography down in Mullingar and is about to burgeon into a "wild piece of goods": "0, well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has happened. Of course it might. . . . Ripening now. Vain: very" (U 4: 428-31) . He remembers Milly's childhood fear of being deserted and the terror she experienced at the first bloody sign of womanly/wombly maturation: "Her growing pains at night, calling, wakening me . Frightened she was when her nature came on her first. Poor child! Strange moment for the mother too" ( U 13 : 1201- 3). Just as Molly will later think through Stephen to Bloom , so the husband moves from the incident with Gerty to memories of female fragility and his daughter's growing-pains and finally to that ever-present object of sexual desire dominating his obsessed imagination, the fascinating but elusive figure of Mother- Molly. The majority of Bloom's reveries about sexual difference seem to circ:le around reproductive potential, and both mammary endowments and fleshly opulence are high on his list of sex-linked preoccupations. Hence his fascination with Molly's ponderous female bulk as he stares at ''her large soft bubs , sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder" ( U 4: 304- 5) . Much of Bloom ' s attention is obliquely focused on imaginary projections of an idealized maternity which he associates with the female body/breast/ womb/genitalia. Although he can crassly reduce women to figures of oral, genital, and anal absence ("Three holes, all women" [U 11: 1089]), he is the only male in the novel to empathize with "poor Mrs Purefoy" in the throes of a painful accouchement: " Three days imagine groaning on a bed with a vinegared handkerchief round her forehead, her belly swollen out. Phew! Dreadful simply! ... Kill me that would . . . . Life with hard labour" ( U 8: 373- 8). Bloom can imagine the pain of parturition in a vivid evocation of the obstetrical

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labors of women, and his fantasies later collapse into a dream of masculine couvade. "I so want to be a mother," he declares in "Circe," then metaphorically "bears eight male yellow and white children handsome, with valuable metallic faces" (U 15: 1817-24). Apparently, Bloom tends to fear what he most desires: woman as mother and fertile creator, the figure of matriarchal power that he tacitly worships in Molly and concretizes in his expressionistic encounter with Bella/Bello the Circean circus-master. When sex-roles are tested on the stage of language, as they are in "Circe," gender-linked scripts prove absurdly intransigent. Bloom's deepest and most repressed fears erupt in dramatic fantasies of erotic compulsion and sexual loathing in Bella Cohen's tenshilling whorehouse. Power relations, culturally inscribed m Edwardian consciousness, remain surprisingly stable, as phallocentric authority passes from male to female in a transvestite drama that parodies the psychosexual scripts that dominate 1904 Dublin. Even the "new womanly man" acting out the feminine vulnerability of his epicene nature gives voice to iterations of female helplessness, subservience, and sexual humiliation. 3 It is only within the heterogeneous representation of Bloom's masculine-feminine, active-passive character that gender identity becomes dynamic and reversible. As Shoshana Felman explains: "Masculinity is not a substance, nor is femininity its empty complement, a heimlich womb . . . . Femininity inhabits masculinity, inhabits it as otherness, as its own disruption. Femininity, in other words, is a pure difference, a signifier, and so is masculinity. " 4 In the expressionistic v, orld of ''Circe, '' Joyce explores that specular icon of feminine gender that inhabits the male cultural imagination. Bella/Bello Cohen, as fetishistic embodiment of the phallic mother, serves as a screen image for Bloom's projected fantasy of his own somewhat willful and tyrannical spouse. He himself is transformed into a woman and then into a pig through a ''substitutive signifying chain which subverts . . . the clear-cut polarity, the symmetrical dual opposition, of male and female, masculine and feminine. '' 5 As Daniel Ferrer observes, "Bloom's masochistic phantasy paradoxically takes the form of a kind of breaking-in of Bella/Bello: the masculinization of the dominating woman is quite as important as the pseudo-feminization of the victim. The game is doubleedged. " 6 What is in question in the "Circe" episode is Leopold Bloom's

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culturally constructed manhood and the phallic signifier that affirms or denies his status as male/father/husband in a twentieth-century the "Daddy-Mommy-Me" triangle Oedipal configuration defined by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and replicated in religious trinitarian models. In the course of the chapter, Bloom temporarily adopts a schizoid position characterized, in Deleuzian terms, by libidinal viscosity: "flows ooze, they traverse the triangle, breaking apart its vertices . " 7 Exploring repressed bisexual drives that challenge traditional domestic arrangements, Bloom moves in and out of the restrictive frame of reproductive triangulation dictated by culturally inscribed paradigms of masculine sexuality . The chapter offers a plurality of signs confirming Bloom's psychological androgyny. He is first male, then female; and, finally, at the "Bip" of a trouser button, he regains his precarious sense of Oedipal identity. The primordial sign of Bloom's maleness, his phallus, is first symbolically present, then absent in a game of sexual metamorphosis and phallic veiling that entails both cross-dressing and imaginary genital transformation. Bloom is symbolically castrated by Bello, the imperious sem1t1c circus-master who, as priestess of a Levitican sacrifice mimicking exaggerated circumcision, "debags" her timid victim. 8 In Circean fashion, she porcines the obsequious male who admits to being a secret "adorer of the adulterous rump" (U 15: 2839). A pagan devotee and worshipper of the voluptuous female body, Bloom admires precisely those aspects of physical form that Molly scorns as impersonal features of animal passivity, the "same two lumps of lard'' that fail to confirm personal attractiveness. The phallic icon of Bloom ' s socially sanctioned manhood is present in the mode of absence as he acts out a bizarre trans-sexual metempsychosis. Paradoxically, when the prominent signifiers of Bloom's epicene personality - his sympathy, gentleness, vulnerability, and solicitude - are reinscribed in an ostensibly female register, they are radically transformed in the context of cultural interpretation. With Bloom's metamorphosis into a woman, his compassion and gentleness give way to masochistic subservience. Although this modern-day Odysseus is recognizably androgynous, his most sympathetic and endearing qualities take on absurd dramatic resonance when the ground of gender changes from male to female. What is admirable in the emotionally bisexual male becomes a sign of debilitating weakness on the part of a defenseless,

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quaking "womanly woman" exploited by the "manly man" of Victorian pornography. Bella/Bello has leapt from the pages of Frank Harris, of Huysmans's A Rebours, and of titillating texts like Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs to perpetrate lascivious acts of brutality on Poldy's feminized body. 9 Hence Bloom's ignominious fall from manhood when Bello orders: Down! (he taps her on the shoulder with his Jan) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. . . . On the hands down! BLOOM

(her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing, yaps) Truffles! (With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet: then lies, shamming dead, with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.) BELLO

(with bobbed hair, purple gills, fat moustache rings round his shaven mouth, in mountaineer's puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport skirt and alpine hat with moorcock's feather, his hands stuck deep in his breeches pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in) Footstool! Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their proud erectness. BLOOM

(enthralled, bleats) I promise never to disobey. ( U 15: 284 7- 64)

Joyce seems to be suggesting, like Deleuze and Guattari, that cultural laws of gender are constant insofar as they are manifest in contemporary social representation. The whoremistress acquires all the accoutrements of imperialistic power as soon as she dons male trousers and sprouts a moustache. As ringmaster and tyrannous phallic mother, Bella/Bello demeans, humiliates, and tortures her obsequious victim. A battered Bloom succumbs to ritual degradation and becomes the ham-holocaust to be slaughtered and skewered, then served up as "fat hamrashers" ( U 15: 2896) in a sumptuous, non-kosher cannibalistic feast. Both Amazonian woman and effeminate male, enacting transvestite and trans-sexual roles of Edwardian pantomime, are inscribed in a melodrama of sado-masochistic catharsis. 10

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Bloom has given birth to the figure of Bello in his own tortured imagination, projecting his psychic need for punishment into the powerful imago of a manly woman, a carnivalesque embellishment of his generally supine spouse. Bella/Bello plays on Bloom's guilt and conjugal inadequacy - irrational responses evoked by his paternal failure to engender a viable male heir. "If it's healthy it's from the mother," he thinks. "If not from the man" ( U 6: 329). Crossdressing offers a mode of phallic veiling, a cover for his repressed sense of genital mutilation. If the child Rudy is metaphorically represented as a surrogate penis in Bloom's sexual imagination, then the grieving father must continually be punished for his son's death through psychological enactments of symbolic castration. Freud emphasizes in The Interpretation of Dreams the interchangeability of paternal and filial positions in the language of the unconscious. Having sired a son who was unable to survive, Bloom mentally changes places with the neonate and expresses his horror of filial loss through emotional rejection of phallic power. He internalizes both the guilt elicited by poor papa's suicide and the pain of little Rudy's death. Father, child, and phallus occupy the same psychological position in Bloom's unconscious, and all have become pathological symptoms of loss and bereavement. The impotent Bloom, sonless and fatherless, is defined in terms of phallic lack: having nothing (but a daughter) to show for a lifetime of heterosexual engagement, he reverts to passive, homosexual, or feminized subject-positions that demand a posture of phallic subjugation. Unmanned by a socially defined pathology of male shame and sexual inadequacy, he adopts an ostensibly feminine persona. If "all is lost" in terms of traditional Oedipal triangulation, then the only hope of escape from psychic breakdown resides in the schizoid position of mental flow, process, viscosity, and disruption - a chaotic metamorphosis of shifting sexual identities enacted on the discursive stage of Circean pantomime. 11 At this point in the carnivalesque fantasy, tropes are reified, and signifiers of sex and gender prove absurdly interchangeable. The swinish behavior of lascivious males is mythically hypostasized, first by allusion to the Homeric narrative of Circe the evil temptress, then in a J oycean expressionistic drama that allows Bloom to realize his most shameful, anarchic, and deeply repressed libidinal drives. The text of Joyce's pantomime reinforces those fetishistic signs attributed by the unconscious to the omnipotent phallic mother -

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an imperious female who sporadically offers nurturance but enjoys, at the same time, invidious power to demean, de-sex, and castrate the defenseless male. The phallic sign of masculine identity, once subverted or repressed, releases a flood of male fantasies depicted by the psyche in female guise. Traditional signs of gender-related authority seem indelibly inscribed on twentieth-century cultural consciousness, albeit in atavistic form. In her male incarnation, Bella/Bello becomes authoritarian and violently sadistic, torturing Bloom to the point of absolute alterity. He is other, "l 'autre" - first trembling in shame before his masterful captor, then enslaved to her dictates, and finally derided as a "maid of all work" trained to "fetch and carry" (U 15: 3086-8) in the chaotic bordello of Joyce's fictive imagination. As soon as Bloom's gender changes from male to female, his androgynous attributes are deracinated from their masculine context and conflated with cultural stereotypes of feminine fragility. The new womanly man is reduced to the archaic subject-position of powerless womanly woman, as the female aspects of bisexual desire erupt in comic mockery. Compassion degenerates into impotence, androgyny into transvestite humiliation. The dramatic text is uprooted from realistic mimesis, and expressionistic drama gives rise to jubilant icriture. The narrative explodes in a riot of cathartic comedy, as "Circe" enunciates the polyphonic novel's "underlying unconscious: sexuality and death. Out of the dialogue . . . the structural dyads of carnival appear: high and low, birth and agony, food and excrement, praise and curses, laughter and tears. " 12 The poles of Joyce's dialogic imagination prove to be those of Bakhtin's carnival, as desire, unrestrained, flows through the schizoid gap between binary oppositional constructs: subject/object, male/female, death/birth, excrement/nurture, blood/milk. In his/her female incarnation, Poldy/Paula manifests all the signs of feminine gender dictated by the ritual inscriptions of sex-role stereotypes. S/he colludes in his/her own victimization by meeting the erotic demands of the prostitutes and consenting to sado-masochistic practices. "0, it's hell itself!" (U 15: 2908) screams L. Paula Bloom, who nevertheless allows gestures of physical defilement to be perpetrated on his/her effeminate flesh by Bello, Zoe, Florry, and the bordello cook, Mrs Keogh. Bowing at the feet of Bello, Bloom acknowledges his/her authority as "Master! Mistress! Mantamer!" ( U 15: 3062). Auctioned off to the highest bidder, s/he undergoes 114

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various animal metamorphoses as horse, cow, and chicken: "Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine shis points. Handle hrim. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid gallons a day" (U 15: 3103-5). The defenseless Bloom is forced to give milk and lay eggs in agricultural postures that parody his/her mammary obsession and henpecked connubial role. 13 It is clear from role-reversals in "Circe" that, in terms of cultural representation, female gender confers parodic marginality. Woman seems destined to play the part of !'autre, alienated other in the specular projections of the male libidinal imagination. When Bloom is auctioned by Bello in a satirical rendition of the bourgeois marriage market, his feminized genitalia become literal objects of commercial exchange. Feminine sexuality, represented as a hole or Freudian absence, absorbs a plethora of masculine fantasies that fill the castrated signature envisaged at the heart of female identity. Bello ''bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva,'' exclaiming "There's fine depth for you!" (U 15: 3089- 90) in mock imitation of heterosexual penetration and homosexual fisting. The victim's genitals are visibly mutilated as indelible signs of woman's enslavement to male phallocentric desire. "That give you a hardon?" (U 15: 3090) Bello inquires. Then s/he orders: "Let them all come . . . . Bring all your powers of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices" ( U 15: 3114- 22). Bello savagely violates the vaginal hole denied the wholeness of sexual integrity. Every female orifice, it would appear, is for sale and on display; every hole can be purchased, raped, or penetrated for the purpose of phallic satisfaction. 14 And a good woman, raped, knows, like the disgraced cuckold, what to do: "Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you" ( U 15: 3 204- 5). In this expressionistic battle of the sexes, the power of an imaginary phallic mother manifests itself as monstrous and obscene. As textual icon of matriarchal authority, Bello assumes the right to debase and colonize Bloom's vulnerable, objectified, mock-female body. As woman/jew/victim, the hapless Poldy is reduced to little more than a cipher of racial and sexual oppression. The male/female drama of courtship and conquest unfolds as an age-old atavistic tale:

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Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. (he cries) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman's fat yadgana. (U 15: 2549-55) This primitive tableau of meat and mating, of giddy flirtation and animal friction, pornographically climaxes in sexual violence. Brutality inhabits the underside of romantic courtship, and if the playmate of this behemoth lover dares to arouse his lust, she must suffer the consequences of bestial cupidity. When Bloom is transformed into a woman by Bella/Bello, he loses his dignity along with the accoutrements of masculine pride. The repressed feminine tendencies of this heroic androgyne erupt in a ludic play of erotic madness. The bellicose matriarchal figure, usurping the male role that Poldy is hesitant to enact, becomes a nightmare fantasy of the stereotypical virago - a phallic mother invested with all the privileges of uninhibited patriarchal authority. The semiology of gender remains unchanged, as various dramatis personae appear in transvestite or trans-sexual guises. Even the comedy of language cannot alter the binary codes of gender or the deeply embedded sex-roles inscribed in societal consciousness. The text seems to evoke the pervasive cultural fear that woman, granted phallic authority, would persecute her mate with unbridled ferocity; and that man, bereft of the kind of patriarchal power that buttresses an illusory sense of dominance and mastery, would sink helplessly into sexual degradation. BELLO

What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump . . . . Can you do a man's job? (U15: 3127-32) When sex-roles are again comically reversed, a feminized Bella plays the saccharine part of an ethereal nymph who incarnates the

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Edwardian womanly ideal - an icon of grace and reverence, unsullied by either food or feces. "We immortals," proclaims the nymph, "have not such a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light" (U 15: 3392-3). This self-glorified, asexual image of the female is no more attractive than her opposite narrative number, Bello the sadistic ringmaster. "You have broken the spell," Bloom insists. "The last straw. If there were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy but willing like an ass pissing" (U 15: 3449-51). Because sexual violence contaminates both ethereal and aggressive icons, the mirror image of Bloom's virginal seductress is a demonic succubus intent on castration. The saintly sprite, offended by Bloom's erotic indictment, grabs a poniard and strikes at his loins, then ''flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks" (U 15: 3469-70). Recognizing the antagonistic Bello emerging from angelic disguise, Bloom mimics abusive phallic authority and insults the transvestite (or hermaphroditic) impersonator: "Fool someone else, not me. . .. Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease . . . . Mutton dressed as lamb . . . . I'm not a triple screw propeller. ... Clean your nailless middle finger first, your bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb" (U 15: 3477-93). Joyce's polytropic man soon relinquishes this ill-fitting role of brutal machismo when he witnesses a dramatic enactment of his wife's seduction by that Dublin Don Giovanni, Blazes Boylan. Here the "coronado" [cornuto] husband wears a visible signature of cuckoldry, the antlered hat-rack of conjugal infamy. 15 He serves as eager flunkey to Molly's suitor, whose penile equipment is ostentatiously on show: BOYLAN

(to Bloom, over his shoulder) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times. BLOOM

Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (he holds out an ointment jar) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower ... ? Lukewarm water. .. ? KITTY

(from the sofa) Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What (Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)

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JAMES JOYCE AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE MINA KENNEDY

(her eyes upturned) 0, it must be like the scent of geraniums and

lovely peaches! 0, he simply idolises every bit of her! Stuck together! Covered with kisses! LYDIA DOUCE

(her mouth opening) Yumyum, 0, he's carrying her round the

room doing it! Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream. KITTY

(laughing) Hee hee hee. BOYLAN'S VOICE

(sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach) Ah! Godblazegruk-

brukarchkhrasht! MARION'S VOICE

(hoarsely, sweetly, rising to her throat) 0! Weeshwashtkissinapooisth-

napoohuck? (U 15: 3788-813) Bloom's gaze is transfixed before the scene of ritual conquest, as he yells locker-room cheers through the keyhole and urges his sexual surrogate to prodigious heights of erotic performance: "(his eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!" (U 15: 3815-16). The presence-absence of Boylan's ithyphallic member signifies for the excited onlooker both masochistic humiliation and scopophiliac jouissance. In this outrageous enactment of caricatured cuckoldry, the timorous Bloom relives the pain of conjugal loss in the mode of voyeuristic farce. He mentally panders to the lascivious Boylan, whose virility signifies the kind of erotic potency glaringly absent from Bloom's own sexual relations with his wife. Participating as flunkey at the scene of Molly's infidelity, Bloom self-consciously reinterprets the signs of connubial disruption from the privileged perspective of dramatic choreographer. Acting as technical director of the comedy, he symbolically sutures the wound of cuckoldry by dramatizing marital transgression in the stylized frame of a turn-ofthe-century peepshow. The seriously embattled scenario of Exiles is here replayed as Commedia del'Arte. Like a clownish rendition of Richard Rowan, Bloom revises the text of his wife's adultery in a grotesque fantasy that resembles

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French farce, not to mention the titillating fabulations of Victorian pornography embodied in Sweets of Sin. By imaginatively colluding in the subversion of marital stability, by up-ending traditional expectations and putting his own phallic powers deliberately under erasure, Bloom participates in the carnivalesque comedy not as unwitting victim, but as the author/actor/director of this play of infidelity. Through the dual role of playwright and spectator, he is able, like Sacher-Masoch's fictive Severin, to reduce his ignominious situation to an absurdly masochistic drama. In the course of "Circe," Bloom becomes author and reader of his own domestic narrative, gaining artistic control over emotional trauma by recreating the dread event in exaggerated detail on the stage of a highly charged erotic (and perverse) imagination. 16 A projection of deeply embedded guilt, this preposterous dramatic fantasy offers Bloom the gratifications of both aesthetic mastery and psychological catharsis. In the dreamscape of ''Circe,'' Bloom doffs the culturally inscribed role of irate cuckold to wear the costume of flunkey; but, like a dramatist who plays the Fool in a script of his own making, he asserts authorial primacy as godlike director of the scene. As playwright and participant, Bloom witnesses his wife's afternoon tryst from the standpoint of God, Shakespeare, and scopophiliac voyeur. He imitates that picaresque "playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly, . . . the lord of things as they are," the hangman-god who "is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself" (U 9: 1047- 52). Playing bawd and cuckold onstage, Bloom strives to become in his own imagination a self-sufficient and self-delighting ''wife unto himself'' by framing his spouse and her lover, gazing at them through a keyhole, and satisfying his own libidinous urges in masturbatory acts of playful postcreation. 17 In "Circe," Bloom's polymorphous perversity and his masochistic longing for protection/punishment at the hands of a powerful woman have imploded in rich, hallucinatory, and schizoid images. The expressionistic drama depicts Bloom's repressed terror and obsessive fascination with the imago of a manly female, a fascistic figure of sensual domination. Libidinal desire gives rise to a polymorphous dissemination of sexual signifiers that destroy the univocal, phallocentric drives of masculinity and articulate deep-

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seated trans-sexual fantasies embedded in the psyche of Joyce's womanly man. ''Circe'' evokes what Helene Cixous delineates as "a proliferating, maternal femininity. A phantasmic meld of men, males, gentlemen, monarchs, princes, orphans, flowers, mothers, breasts gravitates about a wonderful 'sun of energy' . . . that bombards and disintegrates these ephemeral amorous anomalies so that they can be recomposed in other bodies for new passions." 18 By the end of the ''Circe'' episode, Bloom has apparently been purged of both guilt and sexual humiliation in an odyssey that resembles Deleuzian schizoanalysis more than Freudian psychoanalysis.19 Ready to reassert the feminine dimensions of his androgynous personality, he pursues the inebriate Stephen and rescues the nascent poet from the grasp of the Dublin watch, those ubiquitous policemen who signify the abuse of patriarchal power and the illegitimate authority of the threatening Father. At the conclusion of the chapter, Stephen lies semi-conscious and battered at the feet of his ersatz spiritual guardian. But the nature of the relationship between the two men is highly ambiguous. Is Bloom symbolically assuming the Homeric role of adoptive paternity, as critics have traditionally suggested? Or is he subverting the name and law of the Father in an act that replicates the movements of maternal nurturance and care? It might be argued that Bloom and Stephen come together not in Homeric filiation, but through a shared masculine bond that hinges on their mutual dread of maternal abjection.20 Bloom's ostensible reward at the end of "Circe" is a somewhat sentimentalized evocation of the lamb-like and erudite Etonian scholar little Rudy might have become: BLOOM

(Communes with the night) Face reminds me of his poor mother . (he murmurs) . . . swear that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or arts . . . (Silent, thoughtful, alert he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.) BLOOM

( wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!

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(gazes, unseeing, into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face . On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.) ( U 15: 4949-67) As Cheryl Herr observes, the "highly artificial and bizarrely cross-coded Rudy needs to be understood by reference to the several discourses constituting him," since "the primary frame of reference is the pantomime: Rudy is both silent harlequin and the hero of the twentieth-century pan to.' ' 21 Although the text embodies that phallic sign of Bloom's procreative powers, the male child he once engendered, the ghost of his dead son can be resuscitated only in the magical, inchoate fairy-world evoked by the pantomime's Grand Transformation scene. Because of the interchangeability of relational positions in the language of the unconscious, the specter evokes an aching reminiscence of paternal desire and filial loss - a final, enigmatic figure of the disappointed father gazing out through the unseeing eyes of a phantasmal, ever-living son . In the concluding tableau of "Circe," Bloom the bereft father is coupled with the memory of a lost son in the presence of an adoptive surrogate whom he guards and protects with tender solicitude. But in some sense, Bloom has become more of a mother to Stephen than a substitute father. He symbolically supplants the terrifying specter of Mary Dedalus, whose withered hand points a finger of guilt as the ghost-mother counsels repentance and refuses to utter the word of love "known to all men. " 22 Turning the Oedipal paradigm inside-out in a gesture of psychic couvade, Bloom enacts his longing for male motherhood through a fantasy that places the (surrogate) father at the origin and center of filial resurrection. Like the poet Mallarme mourning at the ''Tomb of Anatole,'' he plays out the parthenogenetic roles of both father and mother in a posture of male maternity that Helene Cixous identifies with the legendary stance of Pygmalion: the "old dream: to be god the mother. The best mother, the second mother, the one who gives the second birth. '' The ''death of the cherished son'' gives rise in such cases to a "dream of marriage between father and son. - And there's no mother then.'' 23 The conclusion of ''Circe'' stands the Freudian family romance

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on its head by amalgamating and shifting subject-positions m the domestic triangle "Daddy-Mommy-Me." Bloom adopts a maternal position vis-a-vis Stephen, who slips into an inebriate pose of infantile helplessness and resembles a narcissistic child. Substituting Stephen for Rudy, Bloom establishes a temporary homoerotic alliance with the younger man. Oedipal categories are further confused when, at the end of "Eumaeus," the two go off "to be married by Father Maher" (U 16: 1887) in a scene that parodies the kind of resolution dictated by conventional fiction. 24 In a multi-layered, revolutionary narrative, Joyce deliberately subverts the expected codes of Aristotelian denouement. He tantalizes his reader to interpret Bloom's meeting with Stephen through the epic grid of Homer's Odyssey as the triumphant reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus. Such a reading, however, ascribes to momentary affiliation the kind of metaphysical meaning undermined by Joyce's richly experimental text. Although Stephen may relate to Bloom with openness and affection, any attempt to identify the older man as transubstantial, consubstantial, or even sub-substantial father founders on the rock of undecidability, since the father/son opposition is itself an Oedipal construct whose essentialist premisses refuse mimetic replication. 25 The final chapters of Joyce's novel mock what Deleuze and Guattari identify as Oedipal imperialism by proposing an infinite regress of substitutability in the family's sex-stereotyped scripts. If Bloom assumes a maternal subject-position in his friendship with Stephen, he adopts a similar stance in relation to Molly, while simultaneously exacting nurture from his spouse in the role of benevolent phallic mother. The voyage of Bloom/Odysseus leads to Nostos, a nostalgic return to the bed of Mother-Molly and the womb/tomb of both conjugal and filial affection. Bloom goes home in the company of a young man whom he offers as gift to a Penelopean figure who remains for him the symbolic center around which his dreams perpetually circulate. Molly inhabits Bloom's emotional world in the guise of maternal imago and Circean seductress - an archetypal projection of male need and erotic demand elevated to the wholeness and plenitude of imaginary (M)Other. "Ithaca" concludes the man's epic (his)story. Leopold Bloom is last seen in mythic motion, en route to a "square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the roes of Darkinbad the Brightdayler" ( U 17: 2328- 30) in progress toward that

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enigmatic point of female/maternal origin associated with the mysteries of "bridebed, childbed, bed of death" ( U 3: 396). Bloom's polymorphously perverse delight in the comforting, voluptuous presence of Mother-Molly is nostalgic in the root-sense of the Greek word for "return." As Jane Gallop remarks, nostalgia refers to ''a regret for a lost past that occurs as a result of a present view of that past moment.'' The word may connote either the languor of homesickness or the remorse evoked by unsatisfied desire. "Both the principal definitions relate to a return, the first in the wish to return to a place, ... the second in the wish to return to a time. " 26 Bloom obsessively tries to go back to that far-off time of his inaugural love-making with Molly on Howth to reclaim a world and a place of amorous satisfaction, of erotic origins dissociated from the subsequent trauma of filial loss and paternal failure. Warm female flesh signifies a protective matrix of maternal and spousal love that once valorized Baby-Bloom in the position of an integrated subject and sheltered him from the confusions of psychic fragmentation. The magic of Howth becomes for both Leopold and Molly a central axis for erotic nostalgia and impassioned fantasy. Each psychologically portrays the experience to him/herself in terms of emotional valorization by the other, an ecstatic self-mirroring that replicates the delights of pre-Oedipal bonding. The scene re-presents an imaginary fulfillment of the spiral of identity - a prelapsarian moment of Edenic happiness joyously recollected in Bloomian tableau and later embellished on the myth-making looms of Molly's Penelopean tapestries. In a reverie framed by two copulating flies, Bloom celebrates those wondrous moments of tactile pleasure and infantile delight: Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. 0 wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me

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did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, lips, her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me. Me. And me now. Stuck, the flies buzzed. (U 8:897 -918) A glass of burgundy releases a physical memory of the pent-up "secret touch" associated in Bloom's mind with animal heat and bodily moisture, with flowers and defloration, and with an impressionistic riot of sensuous colors swirling around a sundrenched purple bay. In this joyous game of "laugh and lie down," it is Bloom who feels like a vulnerable Adonis ravished by the seductive Venus who lies throbbing and receptive beneath his trembling body. "Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes" (U 8: 910). A younger Bloom-self regresses to a mode of infantile pleasure as he tongues "woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright" (U 8: 914-15). The perfume of flowers and the taste of food are mingled in the seedcake Molly shares with Bloom, like a mother feeding a child with predigested pablum or a bird nourishing its young: "Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed" ( U 8: 907). The "sweetsour" spittle suggests vaginal secretions, and Molly's "soft warm sticky gumjelly lips" offer a foretaste of the vulval "lips full open" that welcome her excited lover. This ritual exchange of eucharistic seedcake anticipates sexual communion with the mother/lover/wife of Bloom's amorous fantasiesY "Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, lips, her stretched neck beating,'' Bloom thinks, with a sense of wonder at the emotional pulsations that bring man and woman together in a timeless, rhapsodic embrace. The rhetoric of love proves metaphoric and oxymoronic: "lay" implies a passivity contradicted by

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the urgency of masculine libidinal drives, which are tempered , in turn, by sentimental feelings of tenderness and care . In this lyrical reminiscence, Bloom is both ravisher and ravished, Molly both lover and beloved . The repressed romantic sensibilities of the novel erupt in a representation of male/female bonding that imitates, for both partners, the pleasures of pre-Oedipal, oceanic union and captures the reciprocity of ecstatic jouissance. The author titillates us with the thrill of sexual arousal, of highly charged emotion and about-to-be-satisfied desire. The actual moment of physical climax , however, is withheld from the scene of writing. Bloom's vivid recollection focuses on the tantalizing joys of forepla y, on anticipatory arousal rather than heterosexual release. In the textual frame before us , two buzzing flies copulate. Molly and Leopold do not (yet) come together - though they are alwaysalready locked in a passionate embrace phantasmatically inscribed in the textual unconscious of Joyce's swirling, circular discursive matrix. As Christine van Boheemen remarks, "the ideas of coniunctio , of communion, of the return to paradise . . . do not just disappear from the consciousness of the text. They are incorporated into the consciousness of the characters as the presence of their absence,' ' so that "the blissful happiness of resolution informs the text as permanent and unattainable desire.' ' 28 Molly embodies, for Bloom, that figure of totalizing self-presence for which he perpetually pines - an unattainable object of romantic fulfillment sealed in the inaccessible world of the imaginary. From the point of view of Joyce ' s modern epic, Molly occupies the nostalgic place of mythic (M)Other, the " eternal feminine" that psychically centers male libidinal fantasy. By the time narrative focalization shifts to the female subjectposition of "Penelope," Molly, portrayed from the standpoint of speaking/desiring subject rather than specular/desirable object, relates an entirely different (her)story of memory and desire.

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5

MOLLY BLOOM The Woman 's Story She inscribes what she is saying because she does not deny unconscious drives the unmanageable part they play in speech. (Helene Cixous, "Sorties") what else were we g1ven all those desires for (U 18: 1397 -8) Man's desire and woman's are strangers to each other. (Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One)

SPECULUM OF THE OTHER MOLLY Molly Bloom emerges in the "Penelope" episode of Ulysses like a fragmented image in a cubist painting seen from a number of simultaneous but conflicting perspectives. She has been portrayed in a wide range of paradigmatic feminine roles, from latter-day Emma Bovary to mythic earth-goddess - as a sensuous Irish matron whose emotional resources are rapidly dwindling, and in the metaphorical guise of a serene Gea-Tellus who replicates the maternal and seductive aspects of the archetypal female. If one were to judge from current critical debate, Molly would seem to be either a fictional embodiment of the "eternal feminine" or a middle-aged, cranky, and erotically-minded housewife frightened of losing her tenuous powers of sexual allure. 1 Joyce encouraged an epic interpretation of her figure when he confessed in a letter to Harriet Weaver that he had "tried to depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman" (Letters I, 180). But to Frank Budgen he sketched Molly's more fleshly aspects, describing her as "perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib . lch bin der Fleish tier stets beJaht" (Letters I, 170). By labeling Molly the "flesh that always affirms," Joyce invites his readers to approach the "Penelope" episode voyeuristically, as a textual exhibition of

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feminine sexuality revealed through uncensored and unsublimated stream -of-consciousness monologue. In mapping the enigmatic territory of feminine desire, Joyce tried to simulate the mysterious and polymorphous iterations of a woman's psyche, constructing a female subject that has much in common with the Lacanian "woman-creature" of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. Molly has traditionally been excluded from male discursivity because she "speaks fluid," and her subvocal iterations imitate the amorphous and irrational utterances of hysterical speech . Her unpunctuated soliloquy flows out of Joyce's fictional representation of a rich and capacious stream-ofconsciousness that draws freely on those preverbal, prediscursive dimensions of language described by Julia Kristeva as semiotic a threatening and subversive discourse associated with pre-Oedipal attachment to the body, voice, and pulsions of an imaginary maternal figure. Although Molly's sinuous prose-poetry flows from a phallic pen, it nonetheless offers a linguistic paradigm of ecriture feminine, as jouissance is deferred by the free play of a woman character's imagination over the elusive terrain of sexual difference. 2 Molly Bloom's "feminine writing" has always seemed both perplexing and paradoxical, rooted as it is in the heteroglossia of male and female polyphonic voices inherited from nineteenth-century sexual/textual metadiscursive conventions. In a tantalizing confession of marital infidelity, Molly depicts herself to herself through the language of pornographic fantasy. Her monologue unfolds as psychic masquerade, a curious rehearsal of erotic desire encoded in a frame of sentimental Victorian fiction. Playing the dialogic roles of both analyst and analysand, Molly reads the text of her own adulterous tale with all the style and panache of a proud, unrepentant Emma Bovary. What overflows the margins of her graphic narrative is unsettling sexual desire masked in ostensible libidinous pleasure. As the Penelopean web of Molly's discourse transgresses the boundaries of Edwardian sex-role stereotypes, the voice of a lusty vamp gives way to the complaints of a destabilized ego - fluid and fragile, insecure and vulnerable. Desirous, like Bloom, of the lost satisfactions of pre-Oedipal nurturance, Molly unconsciously displaces infantile need onto an obsessive search for emotional presence. In Joyce's implicit paradigm of psychological development, the female self, detached from the male-biased rhetoric of

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cultural inscription, 1s mentally split and schizophrenically fragmented . It reads its sexual identity marginally, through a masculine Logos needed to valorize the feminine ego . Because Molly sees and judges herself through a fantasmatic grid of male surveillance, she reads her own sexual experiences " against herself" in a monologue that gives startling evidence of emotional alienation from the matrifocal ground of feminine desire. As in much of Joyce's work, the maternal figure is present in the mode of absence , an unattainable and imaginary theological center that focuses the subject's fantasies of self-representation . In the context of more traditional psychoanalytic space, Molly would seem to manifest a concentric narcissistic sexual economy , formulated according to the classical Freudian view of female sexuality in terms of a continual preoccupation with self and body. Most readers have tended to agree that Molly is selfish and egotistical, ''a woman whose love for herself seems an intrinsic part of her character. " 3 Darcy O ' Brien, for instance, dismisses her as a "comic example of a self-loving woman" and complains that her "narcissism is of such proportions that one is hard pressed to discover amid her effusions any kind of love ... except self-love. ' ' 4 Those dimensions of her personality that have long been analyzed in terms of a narcissistic aetiology may, however, be symptoms of a reaction formation - an attempt, on Molly's part, to compensate psychologically for the original trauma of maternal desertion. Joyce, in his notes for the "Penelope" episode , declared that Molly is "jealous of men" and "hates women. " 5 But if she is portrayed as a woman who ''hates women,' ' then she also hates herself - or, at least, struggles to handle the repercussions of diminished self-esteem. It is precisely what has been erased from the text - the figure of the absent mother - that forms in Molly's narrative a psychological gap crucial to her understanding of sexual difference. Although barely cognizant of Lunita Laredo, Molly acknowledges "being jewess looking after my mother" ( U 18: 1184- 5) and exhibits many of the debilitating consequences of longterm mother absence . Deprived of oral gratification, physical warmth, and solicitous presence shortly after birth, Molly was forced at an early age to relinquish her mother as primary love object. Without direct experience of mother-daughter symbiosis, she identified in childhood with a mythic evocation of the beautiful, seductive, and powerful woman who won Daddy's affections only to go 128

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away. If Molly seems to exhibit narcissistic tendencies, it is largely because the trauma of maternal abjection has enunciated the ground of problematic ego-development. 6 Cut off from attachment to her ''moon-mother'' Lunita, Molly constructs a myth of origins that imagines the plenitude of feminine nurture as an always-already absent object of desire. "My mother, whoever she was," muses Molly, "might have given me a nicer name" (U 19: 846-7). She cannot mimetically represent the archetypal female as milk-giver and breast-giver, a beneficent source of female identification through mother-daughter symbiosis. Traumatized by primordial loss, the girl-child compulsively recreates an idealized image of her mother as an unattainable icon, an imaginary figure constructed around the exotic traces of a glamorous, Spanish-sounding name. Molly's own emotional needs tend to reproduce, in turn, Lunita's shadowy history. 7 Unable to reclaim the mother of childhood longing, Molly tries to become the woman who abandoned her by attempting continually to reinscribe in consciousness the wound of parental desertion. "Ive my mothers eyes and figure anyhow" ( U 18: 890- 1), she reassures herself. Transferring the womanly/wombly affections of Lunita to the register of Oedipal approval, she seeks to appropriate the veiled phallus of the father in compensation for those sensuous satisfactions attributed in fantasy to an all-powerful phallic mother. 8 Though an earth-mother in Joyce's imagination and the GeaTellus of Bloom's own psychological projections, Molly more closely resembles the legendary Persephone in search of a long-lost Demeter. Some sin there must have been - an apple tasted (like Eve's), a pomegranate half-devoured (like Persephone's), to deprive the girl-child of her female origin, that heimlich womb that once nurtured and protected. Cast into an unheimlich world of male authority, judgment, and tacit supervision, Molly grew to adolescence under the panoptical eye of an inept and bumbling patriarch who casually prohibited his daughter's emotional needs for preOedipal nurture. Exploring the forbidden mystery of male desire by re-enacting the history of maternal seduction, Molly is trapped in the "discourse-desire-law of man's desire" and loses the ability to imagine a maternal figure of mythic and psychosexual satisfaction. Molly has experienced, in the words of Luce Irigaray, "an exile, an extradition, an exmatriation, from this/her economy of desire. " 9 Her fal)ulated origins have been reduced to primeval simplicity -

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to the archetypal dream of an austere, impenetrable moon-mother, an always-already absent and unattainable love-object. The moon turns its face away from a daughter who is left isolated and psychologically castrated. Without the imaginary presence of a nurturant female parent, the infant cries alone in the Plutonian night, calls for Ceres/Demeter until the cries of longing are transferred to the father/lover who prohibits an incestuous expression of daughterly desire. Molly Bloom's discourse is fluid and feminine, deracinated and polymorphic, uncontained by the limits of logocentric authority. But the contours of her monologue are fearfully phallomorphic, determined by the pervasive presence of a male register of desire. Woman, for Molly, is represented mimetically as an absence that threatens masculine power and phallic domination. By her own defiant rejection of male logic and restraint, Molly replicates the register of female castration, "a hole in men's signifying economy. A nothing that might cause the ultimate destruction, the splintering, the break in their systems of 'presence,' or 're-presentation' and 'representation.' " 10 Spewing forth words in uncontrolled, fluid, voluminous volubility, Molly exudes verbiage in a semi-hysterical outburst of exuberance and anxiety. Post-coital depression reflects and re-presents a deeper, more embedded melancholia, the maternal object-loss that must have been interpreted, both consciously and unconsciously, as an ego-loss inaugurating infantile abjection. Bereft of the mother that everywhere fills the landscape of her unconscious, Molly continues to enact a scenario of perpetual bereavement. The maternal figure, appearing in fantasy as a little moon, beloved but "lunatic" and unstable, represents that bisexual presence hidden, veiled, and ultimately prohibited by the authoritarian law of the Father against incestuous appropriation. Starved of feminine nurture, Molly identifies narcissistically with the bisexual mother of infant yearning who ''becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis." 11 Her narcissism spins around an axis of oral deprivation, a symptom psychologically displaced onto the orally fixated male: ''like some kind of a big infant ... they want everything in their mouth" ( U 18: 582- 3). Longing to suck the breasts of a mother who denies her bodily contact, Molly makes a fetish of her own milk-giving and pleasure-giving breasts. "Amor matris, ... the only true thing in life" (U 9: 842-3) has 130

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engendered a futile object cathexis . Yearning for the metaphysical presence of (M)Other love, Molly transfers intra-psychic desire to the male penis/phallus/progenitor and seeks a '' substitutable signifier" for mammary/umbilical connection. Locked in oral fixation, she wants to ingest and assimilate the phallic presence that substitutes for a maternal breast. But the aetiology of such hysterical, all-consuming desire is melancholic - a regression from object-cathexis to the narcissistic oral phase of the libido. Melancholia, Freud tells us, ' ' behaves like an open wound , drawing to itself cathectic energy from all sides . . .and draining the ego until it is utterly depleted. " 12 Molly has clearly internalized the bisexual/phallic mother, the mythic lunar presence whose inconstancy forever forms an emotional scar sutured by the abandoned daughter's brash pose of vanity and insouciance. She is caught in a Freudian dilemma, since she must "inscribe herself in the masculine, phallic way of relating to origin, that involves repetition, representation, reproduction.'' In giving birth to her daughter Milly, Molly "will be her mother and yet not her mother, nor her daughter as mother, with no closure of the circle or the spiral of identity.'' 13 The idealized maternal figure has been internalized as a harsh super ego, a female imago whose gaze, unseen, will always judge the girl-child unworthy of affection. The fantasized genital insufficiency of the mother, held responsible in a Freudian schema for the "fact of castration,'' is shamefully reproduced in the narcissistic wound of maternal absence. The girl-child feels herself deprived of both penis and idealized phallic parent and, in a gesture of irrational atonement for this double castration, seeks to play the role of genital proxy for the veiled sex of a transcendent, mythic mother. " The girl's only way to redeem her personal value , and value in general , would be to seduce the father, and persuade him to express, if not admit, some interest in her." 14 To valorize her fragile identity as female/child/woman/beloved, Molly must seduce not only Major Brian Cooper Tweedy, but a signifying chain of Tweedy clones who function psychologically as paternal surrogates . Bound to her father in a complex web of Oedipal emotions, Molly aspired to replace the lascivious Lunita in Daddy's adoring eyes . She unconsciously internalized a masculine stereotype of feminine desirability and began to emulate the imaginary (male-constructed) temptress who seduced the ingenuous Tweedy , then left him alone

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with the fruit of their illicit union. Molly, perceiving herself through her father's eyes, came of age in an environment of psychic alienation and, as an Oedipal strategy for mental survival, fashioned a seductive self-image wholly dependent on masculine approval. As Jane Gallop observes, the "father, possessor of the phallus, must desire the daughter in order to give her value"; but the father's veiled emotional seduction of his child takes place through the aegis of patriarchal authority. Paradoxically, the "daughter submits to the father's rule, which prohibits the father's desire, the father's penis, out of the desire to seduce the father by doing his bidding and thus pleasing him." 15 Having initially courted the attentions of a detached and distant patriarch, Molly now feels neurotically compelled to repeat her childhood conquest in the numerous flirtations of adult life. As a young girl in Gibraltar, she managed to attract the interest of Lieutenant Harry Mulvey, a naval officer enthralled by her charms, but willing to substitute manual titillation for the more dangerous pleasures of adult sexuality. Similarly, the British officer Gardner flattered and fawned over Molly after her marriage to Bloom, but the two probably shared the delights of heavy petting rather than consummating an adulterous liaison. If Molly seeks a virile lover to confirm her female identity, why does she choose to marry Leopold Bloom? Her psychological project .is decidedly ambivalent. Just as Bloom obsessively searches for a surrogate to replace, through phallic presence, both his dead father Rudolph and his infant son Rudy, so Molly directs her unconscious energies toward a repressed and futile quest for the imaginary figure of an absent mother. As Freud would remind us, the neurotic personality, unable successfully to analyze traumatic experience, is invariably destined to repeat it. 16 Searching for the patriarchal signifier that will heal the gap of maternal absence, Molly reverts to a pre-Oedipal model of emotional satisfaction in her conjugal relationship with Leopold BloomY Molly's attraction to her husband is clearly a mode of psychological compromise. Forever seeking the lost female parent, Molly finds in Bloom the "new womanly man" who can compensate, in some sense, for earlier maternal desertion. Leopold courts the precocious Molly, the "Oriental prize of Dublin," by exercising the androgynous charms of a "masculine feminine passive active" mate ( U 17: 289- 90). Ethnically semitic, he reminds her of her J ewess132

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looking mother and exhibits a foreign demeanor that proves to be slightly epicene. Molly remarks that "he was very handsome at that time trying to look like lord Byron,'' whom she judges, in turn, "too beautiful for a man" (U 18: 208-10). Demanding a filial relationship with Mother- Molly, Bloom pledges a symbiotic troth of unshakable, non-judgmental devotion, and, in turn, symbolically acts the part of surrogate mother in his relationship to an insecure and vulnerable spouse. In her marriage to Leopold, Molly attempts to reinstate a fantasized emotional paradigm of maternal-infant symbiosis. She seeks sensuous and psychological gratifications that will allow her a "return to the experience of primary love - the possibility of regressing to the infantile stage of a sense of oneness, no reality testing, and a tranquil sense of well-being in which all needs are satisfied." 18 From a psychoanalytic perspective, the Molly-Leopold-Boylan triangle figuratively reinstates, with a difference, the Oedipal relationship at the heart of familial association. Molly unconsciously choreographs a bizarre configuration in which Leopold plays nurturant mother and affective emotional partner; Boylan is cast in the role of distant, idealized, authoritarian father; and Molly herself tries to re-enact both the pre-Oedipal script of infant-mother attachment and the Oedipal drama of paternal seduction. On the morning of 16 June 1904, she reads the cards to predict a fortune that is already predestined: the cards have been stacked by Molly's childhood isolation and infantile psychic needs. 19 In the course of cohabitation with Leopold Bloom, Molly has grown more and more daughterly vis-a-vis her husband. Although she thinks of men in general, and of Bloom in particular, as infants yearning for the amniotic peace of a mother's womb, she herself is deliberately infantilized in relation to an uxorious spouse. While complaining about male helplessness, Molly depends on Bloom to serve her breakfast in bed, purchase salacious reading-material (like Sweets of Sin), and nourish her with precious and expensive cream. Bloom once suggested milking her postpartum "hubs" into the tea, but it is he who now provides mother's milk (or cream) to a bedridden spouse. Like a child making outrageous demands on its parents, Molly orders Poldy to serve her breakfast in bed, buy her gifts of garters and face lotion, and, finally, to leave her alone to play at afternoon games with a virile lover. Although Bloom may be replaced in his partner's erotic affections, he knows he will never be

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ousted from his filial/parental roles of caretaker and nurturer. In Bloom's romantic eyes, the sun shines for Molly and will continue to illumine her features, despite the ''blazing and boiling'' ardor of Blazes Boylan's sexual attentions. Unlike Molly's more macho suitors, Bloom unconsciously craves a fetishistic, polymorphous sexuality. He provides Molly with tender, maternal care and seeks, in turn, the psychological reinforcement of non-aggressive, childish erotic rites. 20 Having regressed, in some sense, to the anal stage of infantile sexuality, Bloom worships at the ''altar of the adulterous rump" and takes sensuous pleasure in the osculation of the "melonsmellonous hemispheres" of his wife's voluptuous bottom. 21 Instinctively, Molly knows that Bloom will offer her the kind of unstinted devotion usually associated with mother-love. "The sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head . . . I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body" (U 18: 1571-7). "I liked the way he made love then he knew the way to take a woman when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th" ( U 18: 328-30). Sharing the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 8 September, Molly remains ever virginal in her husband's enamored imagination. When Bloom proclaims that the "sun shines" for the woman he loves, he poetically attests to what Freud would call "overvaluation of the love object." Whereas Boylan flatters Molly with a pragmatic gift of food and wine (peaches and port), Bloom sends her eight full-blown poppies, lyrical symbols of flaming affection and impressionistic tokens of the female genitalia. If there's "a touch of the artist about old Bloom" (U 10: 582-3), courtship brought both aesthetic and pornographic impulses to the fore. We know that Molly considered his titillating epistles "only natural" and took masturbatory pleasure in such explicit ecriture. On V alentine's Day, 1888, Bloom sent Molly the following acrostic:

Poets oft have sung in rhyme OJ music sweet their praise divine. Let them hymn it nine times nine. Dearer far than song or wine. You are mine. The world is mine. ( U 17: 412 - 16) Two days after Molly's eighteenth birthday and the gift of "8 big poppies," the world, metaphorically, became Bloom's. Molly and Leopold "anticipatorily consummated" their marriage and, nine 134

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months later, Molly gave birth to their daughter Milly. Although Molly thinks that Bloom ''looked more like a man with his beard a bit grown" in the hospital ( U 18: 30) and that he ought to "smoke a pipe like father to get the smell of a man" ( U 18: 508-9), she would clearly feel uncomfortable, even threatened, were she married to a surrogate Tweedy. Molly is fascinated by fatherfigures like Mulvey, Gardner, and Boylan; but she also feels insecure and diminished in their presence, for she knows that these "manly men" will constantly judge her harshly and that she must play the stereotypical role of seductress in order to please such demanding suitors. "I hate that pretending of all things" (U 18: 491 ), Molly thinks to herself. And yet her flirtation with aggressive males requires the perpetual adoption of a false self-system - a set of roles defined by the cliche-ridden rhetoric of Edwardian courtship and pulp yellow novels of the day. Molly's psychosexual quest is obviously problematic: while searching for the lost mother of childhood fantasy, she is simultaneously compelled to re-enact the family romance of Oedipal attraction. She suffers from a proverbial Freudian separation of emotional and erotic satisfactions and wants both maternal solicitude from a womanly spouse and the thrill of aggressively heterosexual coition. Reared without a positive model of conjugal co-operation, she goes outside her home, as did Lunita before her, to verify a volatile and insecure self-image. Thus Boylan, her "organizer," becomes an authority figure she wants to please and placate - not only by song and professional competence, but through erotic expertise as well. Initially, Molly interprets her own sexuality as nai:ve readers have usually interpreted Ulysses - tacitly (and pornographically) assuming a relentless female fascination with phallic potency. She selfconsciously adopts the melodramatic role of seductress, and her tone is smug and self-satisfied until the gradual detumescence of erotic intensity leaves her disenchanted with the few moments of genital friction provided by the self-serving Boylan. Deserted by this careless and uncaring Don Juan, Molly retreats from libidinal engorgement to a sense of disappointment and melancholia. The four, five, or six climaxes she purportedly enjoyed with Boylan have left her feeling bereft and unsatisfied. Female desire flows around the impassioned recollection of sexual contact, but memory is imbued with the vacuous residue of copulation without sentiment, coupling without jouissance. 135

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Certainly, Molly's explicit language, exuberance, and celebration of sensuous delight have all contributed to an impression of sexual freedom and erotic enjoyment. Celebrating Boylan's virility with Rabelaisian enthusiasm, she observes: "he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has . . . I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep" (U 18: 143-51). But her praise for Boylan's agility quickly wanes, as she acknowledges the impersonality and sadism of his sexual attentions: ''whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye" (U 18: 151-3). Molly resents "all the pleasure those men get out of a woman" ( U 18: 583) and suspects her lover of savage satisfaction in the infliction of physical pain. Remembering his rough foreplay, she notices "the mark of his teeth still where he tried to bite the nipple . . . arent they fearful trying to hurt you" ( U 18: 569- 70). The brawny Boylan apparently ignores Molly's own sexual needs and proffers few signs of tenderness or affection. On the afternoon of 16 June 1904, Molly is enacting a psychological drama patterned on unresolved Oedipal fixations. She admires Boylan's potency and yields to his love-making with a kind of masochistic self-abandon, thrilled by his stallion-like frenzy and by "that tremendous big red brute of a thing" which she metaphorically compares to a blunt weapon, "like iron" or a "thick crowbar" (U 18: 147 -8). 22 After all, she must be punished - over and over again - for erotically desiring Tweedy and depriving her father of Lunita's conjugal affections. But her sexual script, dictated by the classical conventions of nineteenth-century pornography, proves to be demeaning rather than catharticY It leaves her feeling victimized and abandoned, contemptuous of Boylan's phallic mastery and angry at his physical crudeness. "One thing I didn't like," she complains, was "his slapping me behind ... though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass" ( U 18: 122- 3) . Boylan has played the stereotypical role of lascivious patriarch, spanking his erotic object and dismissing her as an afternoon amusement. His love-making involves little more than phallic-narcissistic sexploitation, urged on by anal-sadistic tendencies. He treats Molly like a giant breast/body to be voraciously devoured, to be physically enjoyed and casually eliminated. In search of a phallic substitute for

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Lunita's nurturant love, Molly finds in this emotional scenario little more than a psychological replication of the earlier wound of maternal desertion. Is Molly, at least, sexually satisfied by Boylan? She attests to the pleasures of vaginal orgasm and brags of protracted climax. But is the "untrustworthy . . . Weib" a reliable narrator? Or does she exhibit a kind of pornotopic inflation when she recalls how ''he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him. . . 0 Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all" ( U 18: 586- 9)? The invocation of long-censored four-letter words would seem to testify to erotic liberation. But immediately after Molly's exuberant declaration of sexual freedom, her joy is deflated by fears of feminine inferiority. Even at the height of sensuous excitement, she worries about orgasmic strain, wrinkles, and male disapproval. Only in perverse fantasy can she challenge the limits of Victorian discourse or defy traditional sexroles. It is somewhat shocking that at the moment of supposed climax, Molly sees herself as specular object rather than experiencing subject. U nselfconscious pleasure is tainted by a pervasive fear of patriarchal judgment, and her primary concern remains the pursuit of Boylan's tenuous favor. She imagines herself free to "shout . . . anything" ( U 18: 588- 9) were she liberated from the constraints of male censure. But in actual fact, Molly feels sexually insecure and perpetually on trial before the father-figure she so urgently aims to please. She wants to shout that four-letter word known to all men, but does not. Inhibited by the need ''not to look ugly," she is tormented by anxiety about "those lines from the strain" ( U 18: 589) and, conforming to a sexual script that could have been dictated by Sweets of Sin, congratulates herself on remaining seductive and tantalizing, despite the rigors of love-making: "I gave my eyes that look with my hair a bit loose from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage brute" (U 18: 592 -4). It seems telling that every celebration of Boylan's penile prowess immediately gives way to expressions of anger and resentment over a conviction of female inferiority. Like the goddess Juno in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Molly is convinced that men get more pleasure from sex than do women: "nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure" (U 18: 157). And despite her claims 137

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concerning vaginal orgasm, she pre-empts The Hite Report by confessing to occasions of self-induced climax: ''no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway" (U 18: 98-9). If Bloom believes that his wife has been satisfied by their sexual practices, then Molly has apparently been "faking it" with her husband. Only the most suspicious of readers would entertain the possibility that she engages in a similar deception with Blazes Boylan - or even with herself. 24 MOLLY BLOOM AND EDWARDIAN SEXUAL SCRIPTS It is clear from Molly's childhood and education that her sole experience of power in a male-dominated society is contingent on her ability to attract, manipulate, and influence powerful men. Sheldon Brivic complains that Molly's ''version of neurotic compromise is to give up, as a woman, the real world of power for the dream world of love.' ' 25 But in turn-of-the-century Ireland, Molly has few genuine choices. Living in a neurotic social environment and confined to Edwardian sexual scripts, she has become addicted to masculine validation of feminine self-worth. Like Gerty MacDowell in "Nausicaa," Molly is male-identified and chooses to play the role of seductive vamp, a persona that reinforces patterns of earlier childhood experience. Trapped in a debilitating prison of gender-stereotypes, she unconsciously tries to imitate the alluring temptress portrayed in popular pornography. Molly may read a genre of novels different from the romances that Gerty so voraciously devours; but like her younger counterpart in Ulysses, she is doomed to construct a media-controlled self-image. If, as Joyce tells us, Molly is "jealous of men," her sentiments go far beyond the kind of anatomical penis-envy hypothesized by Freud. Like many contemporary feminists, Molly feels dissatisfied with woman's condition of social and cultural powerlessness and, though lacking rhetorical skills to articulate her discontent, decries the violent consequences of male political aggression. 26 The generals of the Boer War, she believes, should have resolved territorial issues in hand-to-hand combat or in a limited military arena: "they could have made their peace in the beginning or old oom Paul and the rest of the other old Krugers go and fight it out between them instead of dragging on for years killing any finelooking men there were" (U 18: 394-6). She disdains war as a waste

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of beautiful young bodies mutilated as cannon-fodder by power-mad politicians but resents the fact that Gardner, who died of enteric fever in the Boer War, was not "even decently shot" (U 18: 397). Like Bloom, Molly takes a non-violent, pacifist stance when she proposes the novel idea that universal matriarchy would make the earth a more utopian community: "itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop" (U 18: 1434-9). If Joyce planned in his notes to portray Molly as a misanthrope arbitrarily hurling invective at members of both sexes, his authorial intentions were clearly modified as "Penelope" evolved into an epic articulation of the repressed female story embedded in a male master-narrative. Molly's monologue exhibits such endearing human qualities of psychological ambivalence and emotional vulnerability that the reader is subtly sedu.ced by the "rhagnolious expansiveness" (Letters I, 173) of her mellifluous discourse. Whereas critics delight in citing Molly's misogynist indictment of women as ''a dreadful lot of bitches,'' they often ignore its protofeminist conclusion: "I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy" (U 18: 1459-60). 27 Like Joyce, Molly diagnoses shrewishness as a symptom of female frustration , and, by acknowledging the debilitating consequences of gender-based tribulations, whether physiological or culturally induced, she expresses a good deal of commiseration for woman's inequitable lot. At a number of points in her soliloquy, narcissistic sentiments of impatience or selfpity expand into broader feelings of communion with her longsuffering sisters, whom she sees as the more enduring, altruistic, and sensitive sex. 28 Molly, we learn, has troubles enough of her own , especially those attendant on her recent foray into adultery. Even when she feds perturbed at Boylan's boorish insensitivity, she continues to worry about the impression she makes on her egotistical lover . ''I wonder was he satisfied with me," she muses. "I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming" (U 18: 121-5). Not only is there little question of love in the liaison , but Molly appears to be in some doubt as to whether Boylan cares for her at all . She would feel far more secure in her plan to soak this wealthy bachelor for money and 139

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gifts if only she "could find out whether he likes me" (U 18: 412-13). Invariably, her thoughts return to an ever-present fear of ageing and ugliness: "I looked a bit washy of course when I looked close in the handglass powdering" (U 18: 413-14). Despite a powerful need to placate this insensitive suitor, Molly strongly resents cultural inscriptions of female submission to weighty and imperious males: "always having to lie down for them ... can you ever be up to men the way it takes them" (U 18: 416-20). Molly takes it for granted that "the woman is beauty of course thats admitted" ( U 18: 559- 60), especially when "compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack" (U 18: 542-4). She scorns male exhibitionist tendencies and disdains men who regard the phallus ''as if it was 1 of the 7 wonders of the world" (U 18: 551- 2). But Molly cannot herself identify with the aesthetic ideal embodied in "those statues in the museum" or with the Photobits nymph immured in the bedroom of 7 Eccles Street. Her self-image is more perverse and pornographic: ''Im a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo he has" ( U 18: 563-4 ). Again, an unconscious denigration of feminine behavior extends even to herself. If Molly believes that women can act like ''a dreadful lot of bitches," she can also be harsher on herself than any of the lot. Her casual identification with the "nude senorita" ( U 17: 1810) depicted in a pornographic postcard reveals a startling residue of contempt for the female body, as well as feelings of sexual abasement unconsciously associated with her exotic Spanish mother. One could, of course, make a similarly strong case for an earlier attitude of adolescent narcissism on Molly's part. As a child, she seems to have been as self-absorbed as Issy Earwicker, the primping daughter and purported temptress of Finnegans Wake. Molly loved, at the age of ten, cavorting before the fire in a ''little bit of a short shift" and felt flattered by the attentions of the "fellow opposite" voyeuristically "watching with the lights out" ( U 18: 919-22). "I used to love myself then stripped at the washstand dabbing and creaming" ( U 18: 922- 3), she confesses, and recalls being fascinated with her budding breasts, "shaking and dancing about in my blouse ... I loved looking down at them" ( U 18: 850-1 ). She still seems to admire the "peachy" thighs that allure Boylan: "I bet he never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are the smoothest place is right there between this

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bit here how soft like a peach" (U 18: 1144-6). It is not clear, however, that the mature Molly retains the kind of delight in her body that she felt as a nubile girl. 29 As a middle-aged matron, Molly is filled with anxiety about the loss of physical attractiveness. She worries that her ''belly is a bit too big," considers giving up stout at dinner, and wonders about the efficacy of antifat. Molly has been conditioned to fear unsightly flab and feels panicky at the thought of her body running to fat. Like Gerty MacDowell, she is duped by advertised panaceas and feels confident that if only she could purchase "one of those kidfitting corsets . . . obviating that unsightly broad appearance across the lower back to reduce flesh" ( U 18: 446- 50), she could hide a protruding abdomen and please the most critical of suitors. When Molly observes that she used to love herself as a girl, she unwittingly implies that the prepubescent self-confidence she once enjoyed has waned with middle age. In a brief narcissistic reverie, she thinks: "God I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman" (U 18: 1146-7). Later, she admits that her breasts "excite myself sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure they get off a womans body were so round and white for them always I wished I was one myself for a change jmt to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it" (U 18: 1379-81). Despite her earlier contempt for male anatomy, Molly indulges in a number of transsexual fantasies that exhibit what seems to be a fairly natural curiosity about sexual difference. Men, she speculates, are "all mad to get in there where they come out of'' because the womb/vagina must provide an embryonic haven: ''yes because theres a wonderful feeling there so tender all the time" ( U 18: 806- 9). Longing for the maternal flesh/sanctuary/nurturance prematurely denied her, Molly understandably envies a univocal phallic presence that can penetrate the body of the mother and engender feelings of security and tenderness associated with pre-Oedipal bonding. Socially conditioned to regard other women as enemies and sexual competitors, Molly tends to dismiss every female of her acquaintance as too old, thin, harsh, idiosyncratic, or demented to pose a threat to her own attractiveness and erotic supremacy. That miserly "old faggot" Mrs Riordan was driven to religious devotion and puritanical prudishness when she lost her husband, because "no man would look at her twice." "I hope Ill never be like her"

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(U 18: 4-12), Molly comments acerbically . She expresses similar contempt for the aged Mrs Rubio, who wore a "switch of false hair" and remained "vain about her appearance ... with all her religion domineering" (U 18: 752-4). It is the terrible fear of being ignored and isolated, like the niggardly Mrs Riordan, or superstitiously pious, like the fatuous Mrs Rubio, that threatens Molly with the specter of an ominously bleak senility. Although she recognizes the inequities of Edwardian sexual scripts, Molly never seriously contemplates the possibility of altering those cultural and political structures responsible for gender discrimination. Her socialized premisses about sexual privilege, along with a repressed horror of ageing and debilitation, lead her pessimistically to conclude: ''as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit'' (U 18: 746-7). Knowing that a metaphorical rubbish heap awaits her long before the grave, she has already begun to enunciate mental panic. If society banishes females who are old, ill, or unattractive, then a woman's only recourse is to cling desperately to whatever scraps of youth and beauty she possesses for as long as she is able. Life for a middle-aged woman in turn-of-the-century Ireland degenerates into a losing battle against the imminent loss of physical attributes. In an open market geared to the demands of a male libidinal economy, women must patiently wait for the Prince Charming of their dreams, then continually labor to retain his favor through assiduous devotion to all the cosmetic strategies suggested in the Gentlewoman and other ladies' magazines of the day. The suitor whose interest Molly most avidly courts is, finally, neither Blazes Boylan nor Stephen Dedalus, but Leopold Paula Bloom . Despite the fact that she has just inaugurated her role as adulteress on the afternoon of 16 June 1904 ("anyhow its done now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it" [U 18: 101-2]), and that she has thereby enjoyed her first complete sexual experience in almost eleven years, Molly is still compulsively preoccupied with the issue of Bloom's continuing affection . Having so recently taken an extramarital lover, she projects her own feelings of guilt onto her spouse by courting suspicions that he might be having a secret love affair: "he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite anyway love its not or hed be off his feed thinking of her so either it was one of those night women

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or else if its not that its some little bitch or other he got in with somewhere or picked up on the sly . . . 1 woman is not enough for them" (U 18: 34-60). Molly's jealousy becomes a leitmotif of the chapter and continues almost to the end of her soliloquy: "I wonder was it her Josie off her head with my castoffs hes such a born liar too no hed never have the courage with a married woman" ( U 18: 1252-4). Unaware of Bloom's sexual dysfunction, Molly concludes that "he couldnt possibly do without it that long" ( U 18: 76), then tries to piece together shreds of evidence to expose the name and nature of his hypothetical infidelity. Vigorously protesting that she doesn't "care two straws now who he does it with" (U 18: 53-4), Molly, as usual, protests too much. She cares so passionately, in fact, that her attention is always focused a little above or beyond her husband's image. If BloomUlysses slaughters Molly's suitors, real or imaginary, in his head, Joyce's modern-day Penelope is engaged in an analogous project to disarm her ostensible competitors. She mentally demolishes, one by one, those women she believes have caught Bloom's attention or have expressed the least sign of interest in his masculine regard. Molly indicts the pathetic Miss Stack, an "old maid" (and emaciated version of Beatrice Justice) who retrieves flowers from the wastebasket and offers them to the bedridden Bloom; that "slut" Mary Driscoll, a domestic servant guilty of "padding out her false bottom to excite him" ( U 18: 56 -7); and Josie Powell Breen, a nondescript woman whom Bloom briefly courted before his marriage. Molly marshals her most powerful rhetoric against this rather insipid catalogue of putative enemies. Having dismissed the brazen Mary Driscoll from her employment on a charge of stealing oysters (though the girl's real crime was the possession of garters that might have been fetishistic favors from Bloom), she justifies her jealousy by proclaiming: "I couldnt even touch him if I thought he was with a dirty barefaced liar and sloven like that one" ( U 18: 73-4). Molly bitterly resents what she perceives to be an inequitable double standard governing male-female relationships: ''they [men] can go and get whatever they like from anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but they want to know where were you where are you going" ( U 18: 297- 300). She accuses Bloom of voyeuristically ''skulking'' after her during their courtship and resents his invasion of her sexual privacy. Proverbially

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contradictory, Molly ascribes to her husband the same kind of envy and suspiciousness that she herself exhibits throughout ''Penelope.'' If Molly had few female friends before her marriage, she seems to have abandoned even those when she assumed her proper status as a respectable married lady. In the early days of her courtship, she took pleasure in snatching Bloom away from the hapless Josie Powell, then tantalizing the rejected wallflower: ''because I used to tell her a good bit of what went on between us not all but just enough to make her mouth water" (U 18: 214-16). Although Molly abdicates responsibility for alienating this female friend, it is clear that she considers her conquest of Bloom a rather smug and enviable victory. Josie "didnt darken the door much after we were married" and eventually wound up with a "dotty husband" who wears his muddy boots to bed "when the maggot takes him" (U 18: 216-23). Molly's own insecurities compel her to drive away competitive female acquaintances, then to complain that women lack the kind of intimate camaraderie and social support apparently enjoyed by males: men "have friends they can talk to weve none" (U 18: 1456-7). Convinced that she could intimidate a matron like Josie and that a younger woman would get wise to Bloom's idiosyncrasies ("if they only knew him as well as I do" [ U 18: 45- 6]), Molly summons to her aid the amusing rationalization of male menopause. Bloom's wandering eye is surely just a passing phase, not to be taken seriously, "because all men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty" ( U 18: 50-1 ). Thinking about "Mrs Maybrick that poisoned her husband," Molly argues that it would be "only natural" for a woman to get rid of an intolerable partner: "of course some men can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad . . . she must have been madly in love with the other fellow to run the chance of being hanged 0 she didnt care if that was her nature what could she do" [U 18: 237-44]). Molly protests: ''Id rather die 20 times over than marry another of their sex" (U 18: 231-2). She, of course, does not want to "marry another'' because she intends to retain (and resuscitate the interest of) her present mate. The knowledge of Bloom's strange habits gives her a kind of security: "hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do . . . hes not natural like the rest of the world" (U 18: 232-3, 268); "nobody understands his cracked ideas but me" (U 18: 1407).

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Molly secretly takes pride in her perplexed but extraordinary relationship with Bloom, characterized by an intriguing mixture of tolerance, affection, jealousy, and exasperation. Her spouse, she complains, is annoyingly "pigheaded" ( U 18: 363), but "hes not proud out of nothing" (U 18: 17), is "not such a fool" (U 18: 81), and has "a few brains" (U 18: 321-2) in his head. He knows, in fact, a lot about a mixed-up number of things, even though, if asked a question, he might pretentiously "say its from the Greek" and "leave us as wise as we were before" (U 18: 241-2). Molly's acquisition of a responsible husband, the possession of a "finelooking daughter,'' and her recent attraction of a wealthy lover offer proof of success in a world where female status is other-directed and contingent on rewards for the satisfaction of male libidinal desire. Women, Molly observes, "try to walk on you" if they "know youve no man" ( U 18: 4 73- 4). She then proceeds to judge her spinster competitors accordingly. Brashly asserting her superiority over the unmarried "Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics . .. Irish homemade beauties" (U 18: 878-81), she challenges: "let them get a husband first thats fit to be looked at and a daughter like mine or see if they can excite a swell with money that can pick and choose whoever he wants like Boylan . . . or the voice either" ( U 18: 892- 6). Molly is perhaps overly defensive in her expression of feminine vanity. The implicit braggadocio of her erotic and (only secondarily) professional accomplishments betrays, once again, a faltering and unstable self-image. Harking back to her youth in Gibraltar, Molly tells a poignant tale of childhood isolation . Hester Stanhope, her one female friend, was "awfully fond" of Molly, her "dearest Doggerina," whom she fawned over and comforted during a terrifying thunderstorm: "the night of the storm I slept in her bed she had her arms round me then we were fighting in the morning with the pillow what fun" ( U 18: 641- 3). Mrs Stanhope is the closest thing to a mothersurrogate, elder sister, or "kissing cousin" that Molly has ever known. Molly notes that "we were like cousins" ( U 18: 641), though she cannot initially recall Hester's first name. There is a subtle suggestion of lesbian attraction in their physical intimacy in bed, as well as in the pillow-fight that follows the next morning. But if Hester is a maternal substitute, the friendship shared by the two women degenerates in classic Oedipal fashion. 145

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"Wogger," Mrs Stanhope's husband , apparently made eyes at the nubile Molly, and Hester quickly removed him to Paris, safe from the scene of incipient temptation. One suspects that Mrs Stanhope may have deliberately obscured her address on the envelope she sent, as well. Molly remembers: "he was watching me whenever he got an opportunity" ( U 18: 643) . Dearest Doggerina, for her part, is also keeping a steady eye on Wogger. And the older man's perceived or imagined desire sparks in her the first stirrings of erotic excitement. Echoing Gerty MacDowell, Molly recalls how "our eyes met I felt something go through me like all needles my eyes were dancing . . . after when I looked at myself in the glass hardly recognised myself the change . . . . I had a splendid skin from the sun and the excitement like a rose . . . it wouldnt have been nice on account of her but I could have stopped it in time" ( U 18: 645- 52). In the first blush of sexual awakening, Molly proves as vain as Issy Earwicker . Enthralled by her mirror image, she imagines her body blossoming "like a rose" into the newly discovered thrill of sensuous desire , apparently inaugurated by the physiological change attributable to menstrual roses and female fecundity. After the Stanhopes' departure for Paris , Molly mourns a lost female friendship and, for the second time, feels deserted by a matriarchal figure. 30 Desperate for companionship, she sends herself letters ''with bits of paper in them so bored sometimes I could fight" ( U 18: 699). Life "got as dull as the devil after they went I was almost planning to run away mad out of it somewhere were never easy where we are . . . waiting always waiting" ( U 18: 676-8). On the desolate Rock of Gibraltar, the beleaguered adolescent dreams of a handsome prince who will rescue her from emotional imprisonment in a remote and inaccessible peninsular ("penisolate" FW 3. 6) fortress . Longing for the love and emotional presence symbolized by a fairy-tale figure able to storm the Rock for her sake , Molly finds her Irish Prince Charming in Lieutenant Harry Mulvey, the "secret admirer" who woos her with a love letter and wins her girlish heart. "Mulveys was the first . .. an admirer he signed it I near jumped out of my skin" (U 18: 748, 762). In medias res, Molly - in the middle of her monologue and at the chronological center of her life - looks back fondly on the early days of virginal flirtation. Mulvey's initial kiss seemed magical and transcendent: "I

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remember shall I wear a white rose . . . he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall . . . it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth" (U 18: 768-71). The thrill of lingual penetration awakened this "sleeping beauty" from an adolescent sexual slumber. As a teenager in Gibraltar, the precocious nymphette could wear the white rose of virginity or the red rose of passion. Poised precariously between innocence and experience, she could choose the role of ingenue or seductress, virgin or vamp. Mulvey, like Odysseus and Sinbad (and like Eveline's Frank), is a sailor "off the sea" whose life suggests exotic travels. The young naval officer has seen a bit of the world, and he would like to see more of Molly Tweedy than Victorian propriety and virginal reticence allow. The fifteen-year-old Molly is curious but sexually ignorant - and perhaps more naive about love-making than her nautical suitor acknowledges. Bereft of a maternal role model, the young girl must rely for sex education on her prurient advisor Mrs Rubio and on the witch-like warnings of the ancient Ines. It is difficult for Molly to heed the pious remonstrations of the former, whom she remembers "near 80 or 100 her face a mass of wrinkles" (U 18: 753). The more practical admonitions of Ines make a stronger impression. With her knowledge of sexuality confined to wives' tales and folklore, Molly refuses to "go all the way" with Mulvey "for fear you never know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all after I tried with the Banana" ( U 18: 801- 3). The curious adolescent, confusing syphilis with consumption, and engaging in masturbatory experiments with a banana, is a source of both comedy and pathos. Fear of pregnancy, a genuine and justifiable concern, is a dominant theme in Molly's youthful flirtation. She feels horrified at the thought that even one drop of semen could make her pregnant and, cognizant of her mother's sexual history, is doubtless aware of the heavy consequences of being left embarazada in the port of Gibraltar. With a pang of regret, Molly recalls her promise to Mulvey that they could consummate their sexual liaison if only she were married and had a legal cover: "he said hed come back ... and if I was married hed do it to me and I promised him yes faithfully'' ( U 18: 820- 2). Haunted by the memory of this frustrated love affair, Molly confesses: "Id let him block me now" (U 18: 822). The adolescent Molly tantalizes Mulvey and exercises all the 147

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allurements she has learned from life as a daughter of the garrison. She has her thin blouse "open for his last day" but refuses direct tactile contact: "he caressed them outside they love doing that its the roundness . . . he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment but I wouldn't let him" ( U 18: 796- 800). In her first Circean scenario, Molly self-consciously plays the role of sexual temptress and gets a certain thrill from arousing, then refusing immediate gratification to her excited suitor: "I tormented the life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel . . .he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning" (U 18: 812 -14) . Syntactically conflating Mulvey with a stray cur, Molly treats him like an animal - to be teased, petted, and finally rewarded . And she takes exultant pride in her mature ability to gain the upper hand in the game of "catch as catch can." Although Mulvey is a lusty sailor who would presumably be "hot on for it" (U 18: 1412), Molly "pulls him off into [her] handkerchief" (U 18: 809-10) and manages to satisfy him with digital stimulation. Mulvey gratefully responds like an animal being trained by little Doggerina, a beast obedient to its mistress ' s piquant commands. 31 Given the facts of Molly's sex education (or lack thereof) and social inhibitions, her amorous response to Mulvey seems surprisingly uninhibited. She murmurs "yum" in sensuous wonder, allows him to caress her breasts, and curiously inspects his phallic anatomy. Aware of her own virginal limits and confident of her ability to curb male libidinous urges, Molly delights in a first-hand experience that proves more instructive than earlier researches with a banana. "I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons men down the middle on the wrong side of them Molly darling he called me" ( U 18: 814-17). She thinks of the penis as a tube or pole, indented with an eye like a needle, and ''button-like'' at the end . And though she refuses to expose breast or belly, Molly examines her lover's genitals, opens her thighs suggestively beneath a protective petticoat, and feels no compunctions about petting her excited partner to orgasm. She even treasures her semen-stained handkerchief for weeks after Mulvey's departure , preferring its smell to the cheap Spanish perfume available in Gibraltar. Molly's adolescent encounter with Mulvey sets the stage for the mythic resonances that will be retrieved in her imagination at the

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end of the "Penelope" episode. The com1c elements of this inaugural experience are absorbed by the larger, more exotic scene of romantic reverie. As Molly and Mulvey lie together on the Rock of Gibraltar, the "highest rock in existence" and the ancient pillar of mediterranean civilization, the setting is vaguely reminiscent of Byron's Don Juan and suggestive of a primordial Garden of Eden: "we lay over the firtree cove a wild place ... the galleries and the casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles . . . hanging down . . . yes the sea and the sky you could do what you liked lie there for ever" ( U 18: 789- 92). Poised on a giant phallic promontory, the lovers enact infertile rites allied with the splendors of a beautiful but barren landscape. The wild sea crashes beneath, and an "awful deepdown torrent" holds them suspended in a rhapsodic moment of insatiable desire. By the time Molly celebrates her rapturous ecstasy with Bloom on Howth Head, she gives to this lyrical scene the cumulative weight of mythic memory. Together, Molly and Leopold will consummate an act left unconsummated in Gibraltar and, through the passion of their lovemaking, experience a romantic epiphany sufficiently powerful to revive, sixteen years later, the smouldering embers of a moribund marnage. MOLLY AND LEOPOLD: CONJUGAL ESTRANGEMENT Throughout the text of Ulysses, Joyce teases and titillates our voyeuristic sensibilities and invites us to construct a male-centered vision of Molly as eternal temptress - the insatiable female, the perpetually receptive vagina/mouth/womb of pornographic fantasy. It is not until the "Penelope" episode that he attempts to disclose the woman's story embedded in a predominantly male epic narrative. Homer left Penelope mute and weaving, a symbolic figure of spousal fidelity. Joyce gives voice to her contemporary counterpart's exuberant iterations, cast in the discourse of sexual volubility. Hence the half-century of critical confusion as to the exact nature of Molly's pre- and post-marital erotic liaisons. It is surely one of the great curiosities of modern literature that readers for almost forty years persisted in a literal interpretation of the list of lovers dictated at the end of "Ithaca. " 32 Assuming Mulvey to be the first term of his [Bloom's] senes,

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Penrose, Bartell d' Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton, Father Bernard Corrigan, a farmer at the Royal Dublin Society's Horse Show, Maggot O'Reilly, Matthew Dillon, Valentine Blake Dillon (Lord Mayor of Dublin), Christopher Callinan, Lenehan, an Italian organgrinder, an unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre, Benjamin Dollard, Simon Dedalus, Andrew (Pisser) Burke, Joseph Cuffe, Wisdom Hely, Alderman John Hooper, Dr Francis Brady, Father Sebastian of Mount Argus, a bootblack at the General Post Office, Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan and so each and so on to no last term. (U 17: 2133-42) In the course of her monologue, Molly expresses scorn or derision for the majority of the twenty-five males on the list; and she seems to have had only a passing social glance from, or professional acquaintance with, almost all the rest. Molly dismisses Menton as "that big babbyface" who "had the impudence to make up to me one time" (U 18: 39-42). And her contact with a farmer at the Dublin Society's Horse Show or with a bootblack at the General Post Office must have been limited to a cursory moment of lascivious interest. She thinks Simon Dedalus a fool and remembers with disgust Lenehan's impudent fondling. As Hugh Kenner observes, the "Penelope" episode exposes the Ithacan catalogue as nothing more than ''a list of past occasions for twinges of Bloomian jealousy.' ' 33 Molly has evidently remained faithful to Bloom in her fashion. And with the possible exception of the enigmatic Gardner, a suitor unknown to the Ithacan consciousness, Molly's "lovers" before Boylan were apparently restricted to the realm of flirtation or fantasy. The suitors named in "Ithaca" are males perceived through Bloom's jealous but boastful imagination. He seems to believe, like many husbands, that his wife's voluptuous figure must be a constant source of sexual temptation for other men, who cannot refrain from ogling her with lust in their hearts. Molly's own perception of these alleged suitors is more realistic and critical. She once exchanged passionate embraces with Bartell D' Arcy "on the choir steps" and plans to use the incident to tantalize Bloom at some later date. Her liaison with Gardner was most probably limited to heavy petting, since Molly spends so little time thinking about this more recent British admirer. But the kind of excitement, guilt, agitation, and confusion that she associates with

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her present affair with Boylan seems to indicate that adultery 1s a novel experience for her. Were this not the first time Molly had consummated the act with a gentleman-suitor, one doubts that either she or her husband would manifest such an obsessive preoccupation with the event throughout the day of 16 June and the early morning hours of 17 June 1904. Molly's love affair with Boylan appears to be her first experience of "complete carnal intercourse, with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ" ( U 17: 2278- 9) in ten and a half years. There is little wonder, then, that she feels aroused by his ardor and exaggerates the magnitude of his prowess. Even as Molly celebrates Boylan's stud performance, however, her seduction of such a "swell" is filled with ulterior motives. Molly's thoughts about Boylan, like her memories of Mulvey, Gardner, Wogger, and the rest, are all suffused with an awareness of Bloom. When Molly expresses the desire for a romantic "kiss long and hot down to your soul," she thinks: "I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms" (U 18: 104-6). The focus of this fantasy is not sensuous pleasure but the excitation of conjugal jealousy: it is important that Bloom be present as voyeuristic witness to the deed. Similarly, Molly feels convinced that Bloom left her alone earlier in the afternoon ' 'because he has an idea about him and me hes not such a fool" ( U 18: 81). Rationalizing her afternoon tryst, Molly implies that the encounter was "plotted and planned" by her husband rather than herself: "its all his own fault if I am an adulteress" (U 18: 1516). "I suppose he thinks Im finished out and laid on the shelf'' (U 18: 1021-2), she speculates. And this pervasive fear - that her husband's sexual indifference is a sign of emotional rejection -dominates her monologue. Worried that Bloom might rekindle his earlier interest in Josie Breen, Molly reassures herself: "I could quite easily get him to make it up any time" by titillating his fetishistic curiosity. "I know plenty of ways ask him to tuck down the collar of my blouse or touch him with my veil and gloves'' (U 18: 186-90). The "plentiful ways" in Molly's treasure-trove of erotic tactics range from subtle seductive gestures to obscene titillations. As she sinks further into post-coital depression, layers of social civility are peeled back to expose torrents of psychological recrimination. Angered by her husband's inept performance of oral sex, Molly

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makes Bello-like plans to punish him: "he does it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do it again if he doesnt mind himself and lock him down to sleep in the coalcellar with the blackbeetles" (U 18: 1249-52). Left physically frustrated, she temporarily plays the role of punitive phallic mother and, in this particular Freudian revenge fantasy, imagines incarcerating her spouse in the cellar - a cold and unheimlich wombtomb indeed. Molly is evidently too inexperienced to instruct Bloom in the art of cunnilingus. Somewhat confused about the nature of her own physical responses ("I dont know what he forgets"), she cannot articulate her desire for clitoral stimulation even to herself, much less to Bloom; and she soon loses patience with the ''perverse'' experiment which contributes, she believes, to her husband's pleasure rather than her own. 34 Molly strongly resents Bloom's neglect of what she considers proper intercourse and his pursuit of polymorphously perverse satisfactions. He kisses his wife's bottom and is willing to try cunnilingus, with little fear of lips, labia, or vulva; but he apparently refuses contact with the mysterious and threatening vaginal interior and either practices coitus interruptus or brings himself off through frictional contact with his wife's melonsmellonous hemispheres. One would assume the latter, since Molly is used to practicing a primitive form of birth-control and, heeding nineteenth-century popular folklore, allows Boylan to ejaculate ''within the natural female organ" only the last of the three, four, or five times they make love. She seems satisfied with external ejaculation and resents Bloom for his refusal even to broach the forbidden cave of Calypso. Oblivious of Bloom's sexual dysfunction, Molly feels confused and angry at his apparent rejection of her genital spaces and still-fertile womb. And though she contemplates the possibility of having another child ("not off him [Boylan] though" [U 18: 166-71), progeny is not the issue. She is worried about being "all washed up" in Bloom's affections and determines to resuscitate his flagging erotic interest. 35 As the soliloquy progresses, Molly gets more in touch with the source of her repressed hostility. Furious at her husband, she entertains sadistic fantasies of sexual confrontation the following morning:

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Ill start dressing myself to go out . . .Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it in front of me serve him right ( U 18: 1508 - 16) There is a manic quality about this colorful erotic scenario that implies a harsh challenge to her reluctant spouse for a decade of conjugal neglect. Defending her adultery as an act of sexual exasperation, Molly exonerates herself of responsibility and lays the guilt entirely on Bloom. She argues that cuckoldry is precisely "what he wanted" - a masochistic penance expiating marital "omissions." If the nature of Molly's pornographic project is not entirely clear, its import is unmistakable. She seems to envisage a scene tantamout to Bloom's earlier fantasies of humiliation in "Circe" when, cast in the role of Boylan's flunkey, he voyeuristically peered through a keyhole in a perverse act of titillation and self-punishment. Similarly, Molly contemplates arousing her husband by flaunting her afternoon adultery , then coercively demanding sexual satisfaction in a scene modeled on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs. The one salient point that emerges from the diatribe is Molly's frustration with Bloom and her desperate desire to win him back. "Ill just give him one more chance" ( U 18: 1497- 8), she resolves - articulating, simultaneously, the resolution to give herself another chance to solicit the sexual attentions of a wandering husband. MATERNAL RELATIONSHIP: MOLLY AND MILLY

If Molly finally reverts to memories of youth and joy at the end of "Penelope," it is largely because she is so dissatisfied with the present that her one sanctuary would seem to be a nostalgic invocation of past experience or future possibility. The satisfactions of family life have been somewhat ambivalent for Molly, who never knew her own mother and who now regards maternity as an

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uncomfortable reminder of physical deterioration. As Milly grows in age and grace, she becomes a sexual rival to a mother who needs constant reassurance of continuing attractiveness. Thus Molly complains of her daughter's stubbornness, "long tongue," brash behavior and sassy conduct. She regrets having slapped Milly for talking back, but her recollection of the incident suggests that it stands out as a rare instance of physical punishment. Although Molly roundly criticizes her daughter, she recognizes in the girl a younger version of herself and tries to comprehend the motives for Milly's obstreperous behavior. "I was just like that myself," she confesses: "they darent order me about the place" ( U 18: 1077- 8). As Bloom observes, Milly is a little Molly - the "same thing watered down." Milly has proved to be "in great demand" with young Dublin males, and her seductive skills have apparently been learned from Mom. In a burst of comically ingenuous rhetoric, Molly laments the fact that her daughter is not yet sufficiently sensitive to understand or fully enjoy the pleasures of female sexuality: "of course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the wrong place always only the usual girls nonsense and giggling" ( U 18: 1050- 2). This middle-aged mother and adolescent daughter experience the kind of conflict that would seem inevitable in a twentieth-century nuclear family. But Molly's cavalier attitude toward Milly may well reflect her own repressed anger at Lunita Laredo's earlier desertion. As Nancy Chodorow observes, a woman's experience of mothering will be highly colored by pre-Oedipal maternal attachment. Especially in the mothering of girl-children, "her identification with her mother and her reexperience of self as child may lead to conflict over those particular issues from a mother's own childhood which remain unresolved." Motherhood "may be a (fantasized) attempt to make reparation to a mother's own mother for the injuries she did (also in fantasy) . . . . Alternatively, it may be a way to get back at her mother for (fantasized) injuries. " 36 Molly, in fact, has few available role models for nurturant maternity. Abandoned in infancy by her moon-mother Lunita, she longs to re-create that "ideal home" denied her in childhood, but has limited resources for implementing such dreams of domestic bliss. Because Molly's notion of female parenting was defined negatively, by detachment and insouciance, she has a great deal of difficulty relating successfully to her own adolescent daughter.

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It is somewhat amusing that the infinitely contradictory Molly nevertheless chastises Milly for contradicting: ''answering me like a fishwoman when I asked to go for a half a stone of potatoes . . . till I gave her 2 damn fine cracks across the ear . . . she had me that exasperated of course contradicting" (U 18: 1067 -73). Unwittingly punning, Molly complains that Milly's "tongue is a bit too long for my taste" (U 18: 1033), in contrast to Bloom's tongue, which she judges literally "too flat" to suit her pleasure during oral sex. Understandably, Molly feels chagrined when her blooming daughter criticizes her for immodest behavior or suggestive attire: ''your blouse is open too low she says to me the pan calling the kettle blackbottom" ( U 18: 1033- 4). If one recalls Molly's opening her blouse to tantalize Mulvey and the role played by her low cleavage the afternoon of Bloom's marriage proposal, it seems a bit comical that Milly should complain about the very tactics that issued in her birth - sexual strategies that the young girl will undoubtedly employ in her budding romance with Bannon. But Molly, like any middle-class mother, is not anxious to see her daughter blossom into a tantalizing sexual morsel or to watch her inaugurate those seductive rites that will lead to the perilous game of "laugh and lie down." And so she corrects Milly's behavior at every opportunity. Although Molly "loved herself" when she was a girl in Gibraltar and delighted in a striptease that nightly amused a voyeuristic neighbor, she reprimands Milly for a similar tendency toward exhibitionism: "I had to tell her not to cock her legs up like that on show on the windowsill before all the people passing they all look at her like me when I was her age" (U 18: 1034-6). Molly has clearly begun to see her daughter as a competitor for male attention and is loath to relinquish her own sexual priority. Molly, of course, criticizes Milly for precisely those faults she acknowledges in herself. By imitating her mother, Milly plays the role of disconcerting emotional looking-glass: she offers a living reflection of the younger Molly in the full flower of adolescence. The mother, feeling the blossom of youth daily withering and aware of the inevitable disappointments of middle age, is understandably hesitant to recognize her daughter's womanly independence. But Milly has reached her menarche and is biologically a mature female, capable of bearing a child. The girl experienced her first menstrual period or "catamenic hemorrhage" on 15 September 1903, "'9 months and 1 day" before the evening of Molly's soliloquy ( U 17:

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2287- 9). Since that time, mother and daughter have shared an intuitive bond of womanly understanding, "a preestablished natural comprehension in incomprehension" ( U 17: 2289- 90) that makes Bloom feel conspicuously marginal. In Bloom's eyes, Molly and Milly appear to be conspiring in an act of surveillance designed to circumscribe his "complete corporal liberty of action" ( U 17: 2291- 2). Whether or not the two women are actually plotting together is questionable, since their ostensible collusion may be nothing more than a paranoid projection of Bloom's guilty conscience. What is salient in this disclosure, however, is that Milly's menarche has produced a strange, inarticulate, and unprecedented link with her mother. As "consummated females," the two sense a physical liaison that precipitates a new-found emotional communion. Despite prolific parental complaints, Mother-Molly is willing to sympathize with her daughter's growing pains and, in so doing, begins to retrieve the maternal sentiments that tie her emotionally both to the estranged adolescent and to a wayward Odyssean spouse. MOLLY AND LEOPOLD: RECONCILIATION AND COMMUNION By presenting Stephen Dedalus in the "Ithaca" episode as a surrogate for Blazes Boylan, Bloom invokes a psychological strategy worthy of Homer's Odysseus. Having spiritually adopted Stephen to replace his lost son Rudy, Bloom finds it "only natural" to attempt to share his beloved wife with the poet/professor who might successfully distract her from the brawny suitor who has recently claimed her attentions. Molly sarcastically comments: "what is he driving at now showing him my photo ... I wonder he didn't make him a present of it altogether and me too" ( U 18: 1302 - 5). If Molly accuses her husband of laying an emotional trap for her with Stephen as bait, she nevertheless springs eagerly into the net. It is Stephen, in fact, whose amorphous image begins to dominate her fantasies and to supersede Boylan as an object of romantic revene. Molly tells herself that "itll be grand if I can only get in with a handsome young poet at my age" (U 18: 1358-9). She immediately proceeds to convince herself that such a May/july liaison would be feasible, since Stephen must be a mature young man in his twenties: "I wonder is he too young hes about wait ... 156

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I suppose hes 20 or more lm not too old for him if hes 23 or 24'' ( U 18: 1326- 8). At Bloom's implicit suggestion, Molly imagines herself in the role of matriarchal muse: "they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont find many like me" (U 18: 1333-4). Characteristically, she thinks of poetry in terms of the "fine young" body of the poet, whose firm flesh might provide "some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought ... theres real beauty and poetry for you" (U 18: 1348- 51). Molly's aesthetic model is, appropriately , a figurine of Narcissus , a sculpture so tantalizing that it makes her want to perform fellatio - on the statue, the body of Stephen Dedalus , or any of "those fine young men . . . down in Margate strand bathingplace" ( U 18: 1345- 6) . Imagining such euphoria, Molly is suddenly alarmed at the thought of Boylan: "0 but then what am I going to do about him though" (U 18: 1366- 7). Compared to these fantasies of erotic delight, Molly's egotistical lover becomes an annoying encumbrance . He cannot compete with inflated dreams of an author who would immortalize her charms: " Ill read and study all I can find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who he likes so he wont think me stupid if he thinks all women are the same and I can teach him the other part Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints under me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous'' ( U 18: 1361-6). The promise of both fame and scandalous publicity provides a fairly compelling lure for the romantic Molly, who envisions a release from conjugal boredom through illicit union with a bohemian writer. By the time she has fabulated a deliciously provocative liaison with Stephen, Molly is ready to judge Boylan a self-centered fool , an "ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a cabbage" ( U 18: 13 70- 1). Although this potent suitor seems to have a gargantuan sexual appetite and a surprisingly short refractory period, Molly expresses growing disenchantment with his rudeness and playful acts of sexual aggression: "one thing I didnt like his slapping me behind" (U 18: 122). Boylan apparently considers their love-making a trivial amusement. "Of course," Molly thinks, "hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke" (U 18: 1375-6). She knows that such an egotistical male will never provide her with the kind of emotional satisfaction she so deeply craves ("sure you might as well

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be in bed with what with a lion" [U 18: 1376-7]) and chooses the lionous Leopold over the lionized, bestial Boylan. It is, finally, Stephen Dedalus who functions as catalyst in the "disintegration of [Molly's amorous] obsession" ( U 17: 939). Despite fantasies of the young poet serving an erotic apprenticeship under her tutelage, Molly is also able to think of him as a surrogate son and to feel pity for this "stray dog" of an author. Her earliest memories of Stephen remind her of Rudy: "I saw him driving down to the Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in mourning thats 11 years ago now yes hed be 11" ( U 18: 1305- 7). Stephen was eleven when Molly last saw him, and she connects the incident with her loss of a son who, she thinks, would now be eleven had he lived. Although Molly may seem callous in her remark about the pointlessness of ritual grief, she is obviously trying to cope with earlier emotional trauma when she wonders: ''what was the good in going into mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other ... of course he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat" ( U 18: 1307 -10). A few moments later, she lets down her guard and recalls the handmade jacket used as a funeral shroud for her innocent lamb/child: ''I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was . . . but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since" (U 18: 1448-50). She has evidently been forced to develop various psychological strategies to sublimate the bereavement over her son's death - surely a life-shattering event for a young woman in the full bloom of procreative potential. Molly is invoking one of the many rationalizations that have allowed her to handle the loss of her baby. By imagining Stephen as ''a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit" ( U 18: 1311-12), she unconsciously entertains the prospect of spiritually adopting this roving Irish bard and placing him in an appropriately filial role. When Molly identifies Stephen as the ''young stranger neither dark nor fair" (U 18: 1316) who appeared on the cards earlier in the day, she assures herself that the poet must be in his midtwenties. But when she feels solicitous and maternal, she describes him as "hardly 20" (U 18: 1462), a boy not much older than her daughter Milly. In a rare moment of explicit resentment at Lunita Laredo's desertion, Molly sees herself as substitute caretaker to the renegade Stephen: "where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats why I 158

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suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books and studies . . . well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none" ( U 18: 1441 - 5). Like Bloom, Molly desperately longs for a surrogate son to replace little Rudy; and, like her husband, she mentally adopts Stephen and imagines him as a full-fledged member of the household - a pampered guest who could study in the room upstairs, sleep in Milly's bed, instruct his hostess in Italian, and enjoy the sumptuous breakfast that she (or Bloom) would prepare. In Molly's mind, Stephen has already been transformed into a figure of the absent child; and, like Telemachus, he is accompanied in her imagination by the father so long absent from Penelope's stillfertile bed. As surrogate son, Stephen binds Molly to the wandering husband who has recently found in her warm female presence an Edenic land of "milk and honey." The association with Stephen proves crucial to the episode, for it distracts Molly from her earlier obsession with Boylan and re-focuses her imaginative energies on Bloom as the cherished Byronic lover of her youth. When Molly considers confessing her adultery to her husband, one begins to suspect that the encounter with Boylan has been part of an unconscious ploy to attract an errant spouse. At the conclusion of her soliloquy, Molly is plotting to rekindle Bloom's interest: "Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words . . . now make him want me thats the only way" (U 18: 1530-40). If the only way to win him back is to appeal to his coprophiliac obsession, Molly will pull out all the stops and make use of whatever tricks or fetishes required. She is determined to wake Bloom from his sexual slumbers and re-ignite the flames of their mutual passion. Molly dismisses, one by one, the competing suitors who have wooed and temporarily won her favor: she rejects Boylan as a fool, Gardner as a ghost, and Stephen as an innocent child. In the end, she comes back to her husband Leopold as the "strange wild lover" of youthful reverie. Molly returns in fantasy to memories of Gibraltar at a time when the ingenue could still wear the white rose of virginity and when the red rose of womanhood was just about to flower. As she sinks into sleep, the sun of her imagination rises and illumines the dreams of this mountain-flower blossoming on the hill of Howth. The Bloom of her youth has given her burgeoning images of poetry. In the conclusion of her monlogue, Molly re-enacts the thrill of unconsummated 159

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passion that holds the two lovers suspended in a prelapsarian world of pulsating desire: "God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches" ( U 18: 1558-63). Like Adam and Eve in the Edenic garden, Leopold and Molly are united in a Rousseau-esque dream of romantic innocence. As flower of the mountain, Molly fashions from sublimated sexual drives a resounding lyrical crescendo celebrating the raptures of erotic jouissance: yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and . . . I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of . . . and 0 that awful deepdown torrent 0 and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens . . . yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used . . . and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes . . . and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (U 18: 1576-609) A flower of Gibraltar and Howth, Molly says "yes" to Leopold and herself becomes a Bloom. 37 She knows that sexual and marital consent are in this case identical, and her feelings about both suggest a strong attraction to Bloom's epicene personality - a fascination that will not only endure but prevail through sixteen storm-tossed years of bourgeois marriage. In the androgynous Leopold Bloom/Henry Flower, Molly finds a sympathetic love-object whose nurturant qualities provide a psychological surrogate for the absent mother of childhood abjection. On an unconscious, latent and symbolic level, the man-womanly Bloom satisfies Molly's repressed longing for pre-Oedipal ( comm)union. His penis metaphorically "flowers" as phallic

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signifier in a substitution and reversal of the lost maternal breast, in accordance with Freud's formulation that "when sucking has come to an end, the penis also becomes heir of the mother's nipple.'' 38 In the mythic guise of Eve/Persephone, Molly, tasting the seed of forbidden fru:[, returns it seasoned with spittle to the mouth of a maternal surrogate, to inseminate the fertile and receptive male with her own mimetically nurturant seed(cake). Molly feeds Bloom with the spittle/seedcake/Ceres-cake that she herself desires, offers nurture as he sucks her breasts, and symbolically re-enacts the mother/child drama of · reciprocal love and psychic valorization denied her in infancy. At the end of "Penelope," she tantalizes her lover with a poetic pablum that resuscitates his manhood and wins, in turn, the seminal gift of sexual/phallic/fetishistic completion. As Joyce's idealized paradigm of the Jewish "family man," Bloom embodies those Oriental qualities associated in Molly's imagination with the lost Lunita. Molly displays a keen perception of and appreciation for her husband's "difference" from the others: he is warm, considerate, caring, sensitive, and "polite to old women." Her real concern, of course, is that he be polite and loving to her, no matter what her age or physical appearance. She desperately longs for that heimlich womb and nurturant presence obliterated from childhood memory by Lunita's untimely desertion. It is Bloom who offers his blossoming mountain flower not only eight full-blown (opiate) poppies, but the unqualified gift of nonjudgmental affection associated with mother-love. Enamored of this dark semitic stranger, a virginal Molly says "yes" to her solicitous suitor and to the "awful deepdown torrent" of heterosexual passion that both replicates and redefines the frustrated pulsiom of infantile desire. The emotional gaps in Molly's past engender, throughout "Penelope," a subversive feminine discourse that defies logocentric boundaries, borders on the margins of hysteria, and, in its melancholic quest for the absent (M)Other, longs to suture the wound of pre-Oedipal separation. In being "not all," Molly evinces a "supplementary jouissance," a jouissance "of the body ... beyond the phallus. " 39 She perpetually seeks to heal the trauma of maternal abjection by re-creating the polyphonous rhythms and lyrical echolalias of semiotic communication. 40 Leopold Bloom serves as a channel, a surrogate, an instrument for the articulation of primordial feminine desire - ruptured in its futile search for an original,

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oceanic union with the imaginary mother, but temporarily healed in fantasized recollections of erotic joy and orgasmic transcendence shared, at the height of youthful exuberance, with an androgynous son/husband/lover. Throughout Ulysses, sexual identities are indeterminate and polymorphous, psychologically mobile and perpetually transferable. Joyce's novel mockingly reproduces the Oedipal triangle of "DaddyMommy-Me" only to shatter and disrupt the dictates of its culturally embedded scenario. Molly and Leopold reciprocally occupy complementary subject-positions of beneficent phallic mother and blissfully dependent injans. Each oscillates, by turn, between a subjective articulation of polymorphously perverse desire and the valorizing role of Lacanian objet a. Although Stephen temporarily plays a surrogate son binding Molly and Leopold together as Oedipal parents, this Freudian family romance quickly gives way to a nostalgic mother-child coupling, with the new womanly man and psychologically bisexual woman at its enigmatic nexus. Poldy plays "Mommy" to a bedsteadfast spouse who takes shape as mythic (M)Other in his own heterogeneous imagination. And Molly, historically in love with an absent female figure, learns to reconstruct the maternal subject-position through, and in relation to, an uxonous spouse. In the Blooms' unusual conjugal configuration, the patriarchal subject-position of authoritarian Daddy remains conspicuously vacant. It is temporarily occupied by such caricatured males as Major Brian Cooper Tweedy and the indomitable Blazes Boylan. But the voice of authority is radically diffused in the carnivalesque atmosphere of 7 Eccles Street and disrupted by the ''thousand break-flows" of pre-Oedipal (and anti-Oedipal) desire that revels in libidinal viscosity: "Flows ooze, they traverse the triangle, breaking apart its vertices.' ' 41 This anarchic menage brings us, in Deleuzian terms, "yet another message and another code: everyone is bisexual, everyone has two sexes'' in a schizoid world of polymorphously perverse ''desiring machines.' ' 42 Lunita Laredo and Major Tweedy, Rudolph, Ellen Higgins, Millicent and Rudy Bloom all lie together in the great conjugal bed of psychological filiation. Both Molly and Leopold handle the Lacanian experience of radical ''lack'' by nostalgically endowing one another with theological wholeness and plenitude. Their reveries of salutary presence belong to an always-already absent world of prelapsarian

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bliss. As Bertha declares in Exiles, romantic epiphany " comes only once in a lifetime. The rest of life is good for nothing except to remember that time" (E 91). And it is precisely this act of poetic remembering, of re-collecting transitory moments of love and (imaginary) communion and recasting them in aesthetic form, that gives joy, delight, and ecstatic jouissance to the psychic horizons of an "all too human," and all too mortal, physicality .

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READING FINNEGANS WAKE The Feminiairity which Breathes Content Voice! . . . the frantic descent deeper deeper to where a voice that doesn't know itself is lost in the sea's churning . . . . Agony - the spoken "word" exploded, blown to bits. (Helene Cixous, "Sorties")

ALP AND HCE In Finnegans Wake, as in Ulysses, Joyce again sets up a repressive Oedipal triangle in order to mock, destroy, and obliterate it. In this most revolutionary and avant-garde of texts, the obsessive, logocentric reality of the male, along with the idle fixe of patriarchal authority ("awethorrorty" [FW 516. 19]), has been ossified into stony impotence . The compulsive desire for mastery has hardened into the rocky sensibility of Finn MacCool , an ancient Irish giant helplessly shaking a "meandering male fist" (FW 123. 10). The masculine persona of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a "patrified" hero or Immensipater (FW 87. 11, 342. 26), is paralyzed in phallocentric rigidity. 1 In contrast, Anna Livia Plurabelle embodies the "woman creature" who speaks fluid and remains free. The traditional hero, dead and outmoded from the beginning of the book, has to be dreamt into waking, into "Array! Surrection ," by Anna's life-giving riverrun . Anna Livia Plurabelle emerges in Finnegans Wake as Joyce's allincluding, most farraginous archetype. She is open, fluid, and forever ''yea-saying'' to the rushing torrent of temporal phenomena associated with the given moment of cosmic experience. Even more than Molly Bloom, Anna captures the semiotic rhythms of the capacious unconscious and the free flow of fertile libidinal desire. As mother and lover of men and women, she leaps into the lap of old Father Ocean, the watery grave of death and resurrection , until, in the persona of ALP, womb merges with tomb to continue the endless process of evaporation and vaporous redistribution that characterizes cosmic regeneration. It is with Finnegans Wake that Joyceans tend to divide into two

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separate camps - those who, like Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson, attempt to extract from the text a recognizable narrative and those who celebrate the Wake as a post-structuralist oeuvre, free of character, story, or identifiable subjects. 2 Although I recognize the need to suspend traditional notions of "go-ahead plot" in the J:1lake, it nonetheless seems fruitful to extrapolate tessellated, fragmented personae from the Wake's labyrinthine prose and to interpret these fabulated subjects in terms of mythic, sexual, psychoanalytic, and cultural productions. I tend to speak of ALP as though this "alphybettyformed" female were rounded and identifiable in the Joycean text while, at the same time, bracketing an ever-present awareness of the impossibility of discussing figures from the Wake apart from their textual/contextual discursive matrix. One appeals to tropes and rhetorical figures, acknowledging the extended metaphorical dimensions of a polysemic linguistic construct that arises from and perpetually reflects the intractable, polymorphously perverse dimensions of an ineffable textual unconscious. The persona of Anna Livia Plurabelle in the Wake is both riverwoman and gadfly, a flowing stream and a "kindly fowl." Scratching and burrowing, searching the litter of all the dungheaps on the planet, she busily roots out the "literature" (French litterature, both litter and letter) that will produce a missive to vindicate her husband. An unquenchable source of movement and curiosity, she is also the busy, pecking hen about to give birth to the primordial egg from which the world of art can be generated. The egg becomes Humpty Dumpty, or HCE in his ovular persona, precipitously balanced on the wall of a male-constructed civilization and dependent on ALP for continuing vitality. Finnegans Wake might, in some sense, be interpreted as a magnificent couvade, a hymn by the male artist to those feminine creative powers that man can only imitate through art or war - through a poetic reshaping of the material world or by aggressive conflict that asserts a phallocentric will to power in grandiose acts of conquest and destruction. "Allalivial, allalluvial!" (FW 213. 32). All alive are part of that divine being Allah, here "done" by Joyce in a feminine mode. Unlike the Judea-Christian God, omnipotent and omniscient, the female mother/goddess is immanent in the world of nature. Her "omni" qualities are less than plenipotentiary and manifest an allencompassing alliance with life and love, rather than with the knowledge and power traditionally ascribed to a patriarchal deity. If

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old Father Ocean reveals himself as a wrathful Poseidon, Mother Anna flows through the land nourishing and rejuvenating her children without the bitter, acerbic sting of her salt-sea father. Wishing us "teems of times and happy returns" (FW 215. 22- 3), Joyce celebrates "Annah the Allmaziful" (FW 104. 1): "Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be" (FW 215. 24) . Playing the "trinity scholard,'' the artist feminizes and Latinizes the eternal Trinity of Catholicism - the three-personed god resurrected in female form. Blending east and west, "sanscreed" with "eryan" (FW 215. 26- 7), he offers Anna Livia, in all her plurabilities , as a multifarious, tripartite mother goddess who embraces the Viconian cycles of history ("Ordovico or viricordo" [FW 215 . 23]) , as well as the muck-laden reality of "Dear Dirty Dumpling" (FW 215. 13-14), both city and husband, "foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills" (FW 215. 14). Joyce's mythic invocation appeals to a trinitarian deity whose emanation is both Catholic and Freudian. In her ancient identity as Annah, ALP embodies the archetypal female - Heva, Eve , and Lilith, mother of the race and progenitrix of all the daughter-sons that presently people the earth. As legendary matriarch, she manifests the inarticulate, atavistic powers worshipped by prehistoric pagan races. She is the Great Mother that preceded Hera and Zeus in the Greek pantheon and later functioned as the Ceres-figure of the Eleusinian cults. But she also plays the role of Cybele, exotic and destructive goddess worshipped and feared as proverbial temptress. In more contemporary terms, Anna bears in her wake the mysterious forces of the id and the buried libido erupting from the subterranean world of a farraginous textual unconscious . HEN VERSUS HUN: THE FIRST BOOK OF GUINNESSES In the introductory chapter of Finnegans Wake, the archetypal Anna appears in different, contradictory guises. On the one hand, she is the "gnarlybird," a diminutive damsel who caricatures the busy, chattering, gadabout female. Her gossip serves as a repository of cultural fragmentation and offers a contemporary analogue to the religious gospel of an earlier age . In another incarnation, ALP becomes the strong-willed Grace O'Malley , the Prankquean-pirate who challenges Jarl van Hoother, steals his sons, and is ultimately reconciled to a life of bourgeois domesticity.

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In a 1905 letter, Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus: "I am sure . . that the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie" (Letters II, 81); and, in the course of the Wake, he boldly reveals the deception behind heroic pretensions to patriarchal authority and military grandeur. 3 In a polymorphous impersonation of the British war hero Willingdone/Wellington that shapeshifts into the French/Corsican Napoleon, HCE embodies the kind of masculine aggression that Joyce perpetually satirizes. Willingdone is a selfstyled imperialist who thinks himself great in all things, in guilt and in glory; but in actual fact, he is simply a pretentious, vulnerable human being subject to irritation and arousal by the taunting, seductive "jinnies": "This is the jinnies with their legahorns feinting to read in their handmade's book of stralegy while making their war undisides the Willingdone. The jinnies is a cooin her hand and the jinnies is a ravin her hair and the Willingdone git the band up" (FW 8. 31- 4; French bander, "to have an erection"). Infuriated, the general sends a scatological message to these female temptresses and their military entourage: "Cherry jinnies. Figtreeyou! Damn fairy ann, Voutre" (FW 9. 13-14). 4 Like God the Father or a petulant child, HCE demands that his ''will be done'' even when military maneuvers prove irrational or the field of battle degenerates into a sordid erotic "skirtmish." Throughout Finnegans Wake, man disposes and disperses; he erects, then destroys the political foundations of a civilization jerrybuilt to resemble the chaosmos of Babel. The male is "Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand" (FW 4. 18), a putative master of both language and law, and an lbsenian Master Builder constantly subject to tragic hubris and a fatal fall precipitated by a "collupsus of his back promises" (FW 5. 27 -8). Significantly, the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park stands as the slumbering giant's ithyphallic member in the mythic topography of the Wake. 5 It is the female, in contrast, who burrows in the dungheap of dissonant experience and rescues the orts, scraps, and fragments of a more tentative and polyvalent bricolage constitutive of "femaline" culture. Anna Livia, as Biddy the Hen and chambermaid of history, serves as guardian of humankind's sacred word-hoard - those "litters from aloft" that dazzle the primitive Mutt and Jute. "What a mnice old mness it all mnakes! A middenhide hoard of objects" (FW 19. 7- 8). In this runic daybook lie "miscegenations on miscegenations" that "lived und laughed ant loved end left" (FW 167

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18. 20- 1). Their fantastic tale will prove intelligible to the "abcedminded" scholar willing to excavate the muck and detritus of this mysterious "allaphbed" (FW 18. 17 -18). Entombed in the cemetery-dungheap are the primordial parents, lying face to face or "fux to fux" (FW 177. 36) in a surrealistic archeological grave. Earwicker, that "gyant Forficules," will some day rise like a phoenix from the garbage dump of history. Fallen in battle, he will nonetheless be resurrected by "Amni the fay," who presently collects a litter of letters to vindicate her spouse . If ALP as gnarlybird seems obsequious and diminished, she projects, in the role of Grace O'Malley, the sixteenth-century Irish pirate, an archetypal image of folkloric witch - a fiercely independent and willful woman who poses a genuine threat to male domination. As Prankquean, Grace challenges the smug Jarl van Hoother, an indigenous aristocrat ensconced in Howth Castle. The earl presides over an all-male fortress whose only female resident is treated as a dummy or doll - an inert sexual plaything bound in incestuous alliance with the prepubescent "jiminis." Into this masculine stronghold bursts Grace O'Malley, brash and sphinx-like , to pose a riddle of sexual/conjugal/creative import : ' 'why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?" (FW 21. 18-19). When the earl, stony and marmoreal, not only refuses to answer but "shuts" (shits and shuts the door) in her face, the Prankquean retaliates by kidnapping the two jiminies in turn. Magically transforming their twin personalities, she bequeaths on each the balanced, androgynous aspect missing from van Hoother's company. Grace changes the melancholic Tristopher into a ''luderman'' and teaches the playful Hilary the tragic seriousness of life. Her rain/reign offers the boon of female fertility to the otherwise parched , constipated, and analobsessive Jarl. On the Prankquean's third visit, van Hoother dons his sevenlayered martial costume and emerges to fight the witch-like warrior. Like Willingdone before him, he engages in a scatological battle with his uppity opponent. "And he clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch and he ordurd and his thick spch spck for her to shut up shop, dappy . And the duppy shot the shutter clup . . . .And they all drank free . For one man in his armour was a fat match always for any girls under shurts" (FW 23. 3-9). In the thundering attack that conflates defecation with military "skirtmish," either van Hoother defeats and sexually conquers the Prankquean, who is 168

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tamed by conjugal affiliation; or, alternatively, he is bested by the mother/daughter team that colludes to outwit him . (In the latter case, the dummy, finally roused to life and allied with the Prankquean in a new "duppy" incarnation, secretly opens the door of the castle for Mummy while Daddy goes forth in proud display.) Is the boastful Jarl defeated by his Amazonian opponent? Or are we to take the Swiftian paraphrase literally and assume that the male figure emerges victorious over the mother/daughter team allied in their "shurts" against him? In either case, male and female are reconciled in a felicitous scene of family peace: "And that was the first peace of illiterative porthery in all the flamend floody flatuous world. . . . The prankquean was to hold her dummyship and the jimminies was to keep the peacewave and van Hoother was to git the wind up. Thus the hearsomeness of the burger felicitates the whole of the polis" (FW 23. 9-15). 6 ALP , as peacefugle or pirate, "a parody's bird, a peri potmother'' (FW 11. 9), emerges as the dominant force of emotional conjunction in the narrative. Taming the military ardor of a patriar~ chal male, she integrates hostile family members in peaceful communion and serves as catalyst for a larger reign of bourgeois felicity through the "whole of the polis . " The family , Joyce implies, reflects the political macrocosm in Viconian microcosm . From the dialectic of warring male/female desires, domestic synthesis is, at least temporarily, possible . "CONTINUARRATION": THE TALE OF ANNA LIVIA 0 tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Well , you know Anna Livia? Yes , of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You 'll die when you hear. (FW 196. 1-6) The tale told of Anna Livia by the ancient Irish washerwomen at the ford is a narrative "Minxing marrage and making loof" (FW 196. 24). And it is, inevitably, the story of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, that "duddurty devil" her husband , who fell from grace when he "thried to two in the Fiendish park" and has to vindicate his " awful old reppe" (or reputation) of lascivious male desire (FW 196. 10-15). The tale/tail of their marriage is a bifurcated narrative, spliced together from gossip and hearsay by the crones who

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make the Adam and Eve story a part of the river's oral history (herstory). 7 Marriage, they imply, is a social mirage demanded by man-made civilization, an institution which captures woman in the double persona of wife and minx, seductress and nurturer. The first question that concerns the washerwomen is one of legitimacy. Were ALP and HCE legally married? Were the banns of matrimony loosened or celebrated? Or were the two merely spliced together in a union of nature? "Was her banns never loosened in Adam and Eve's or were him and her but captain spliced? For mine ether duck I thee drake. And by my wildgaze I thee gander" (FW 197. 11-14). The conjectures suggest that HCE and ALP assumed from the beginning that "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." Anna "can show all her lines, with love, license to play. And if they don't remarry that hook and eye may!" (FW 197. 15 -17). It is not clear whether the washerwomen accuse ALP of libertine behaviour with a number of men after her marriage or with HCE and his personae illegitimately before the wedding. In any case, their speculations about the union become increasingly violent, until they assume that Humphrey used force to win his bride: "he raped her home, Sabrine asthore, in a parakeet's cage" (FW 197. 21-2). The union takes on mythic resonances recalling the rape of the Sabine women, as well as Milton's Sabrina fair, gleaming goddess of the river. Of Daneviking extraction, that "gran Phenician rover" (FW 197. 31) HCE combines Viking arrogance with Phoenician wiliness and an economic heritage as a wandering "marchantman," sailor, seacaptain and whaler (like Mulvey, Odysseus, and Sinbad). As a trader, he "erned his lille [Danish, 'little'] Bunbath hard, our staly bred" by the "wet of his prow" (FW 198. 5-7). Humphrey won Anna by the sweat of his brow and by the semen of his prow thus combining Adam's curse with the machismo characteristics that adhere to his Viking heritage. (In another incarnation, he becomes the Wake's Norwegian sea captain wooing a tailor's daughter.) Anna serves Humphrey a quotidian diet of daily bread that proves both nurturant and stale, life-sustaining and diminishing. The bold Phoenician sailor searches for his mummy in the hindmoist waters of Anna's riverrun: "Don't you know he was kaldt a bairn of the brine, Wasserbourne the waterbaby? Havemmarea, so he was! H.C.E. has a codfisck ee" (FW 198. 7 -9). Humphrey evidently exhibits "cod's eyes" as he greedily glares at Anna, his bride-prize of 170

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war, who embodies both the Blessed Virgin Mary (Ave Maria) and a military trophy of successful conquest. Like Shem and Shaun at their geometry lesson, he seeks a primordial return to the embryonic waters of an "eternal geomater" (FW 296. 31-297. 1) through sexual congress ( Ge meter = Greek, "Mother Earth"). Anna, claim the crones, is "nearly as badher as him herself" (FW 198. 9). A brash temptress, she tantalizes her drooling seducer in much the same way that Molly titillated Mulvey. The ingenuous Anna does not hesitate ''to go in till him, her erring cheef, and tickle the pontiff aisy-oisy ... Letting on she didn't care, sina feza, me absantee, him man in passession, the proxenete!" (FW 198. 12 -17). Serving as her own procuress, she challenges male authority with the tickling fluency of female river-speech, then feigns indifference and lets the proud Humphrey play the male/macho role of ''man in pas session. '' The narrative of Anna Livia is, of course, shaped by the voyeuristic voices of the washerwomen. Both narrator and auditor function as comic dramatis personae, and both display a powerful emotional investment in the tale. "0, tell me all I want to hear," the auditor begs. "Tell us in franca langua. And call a spate a spate" (FW 198. 14-19). As one old woman spits up a spate of accusations and lascivious details, the other excitedly demands frank language and chides the narrator for using exotic jargon. Both women delve into the dirty laundry of Anna's past and spin a tale of female sexuality that affords them the salacious delights of pornography. Part of the fun is casting aspersions on Anna's character: "For coxyt sake and is that what she is? Botlettle I thought she'd act that loa . . . . Sure she can't fiddan a dee, with bow or abandon! ... Well, I never now heard the like of that! Tell me maher. Tell me moatst" (FW 198. 22-8). Unconsciously invoking Freudian strategies, the women go back to Anna's childhood to search for a clue to her sexual behavior. Anna's grandfather, the River Humber, was apparently an authoritarian patriarch, somber and atavistic: "Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus, with the tares at his thor and the buboes for ages, ... with his dander up, and his fringe combed over his eygs" (FW 198. 28-30; 199. S-6). This fierce, primitive authority figure demands obsequious responses from all of his charges, plies them with questions, and examines their estuarial depths with a harsh, judgmental hand/eye.

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The virginal Anna, vulnerable and ingenuous, might have felt herself threatened by grandpa's incestuous gaze. "And there she was, Anna Livia, she darent catch a winkle of sleep, purling around like a chit of a child" (FW 199. 11-12). The demure damsel is pliable and obedient: "she'd cook him up blooms of fisk and lay to his heartsfoot her meddery eygs, yayis, and staynish beacons on toasc and a cupenhave so weeshywashy of Greenland's tay" (FW 199. 15-18). These Danish delicacies from Copenhagen and Greenland suggest a Nordic feast worthy of the great Finn himself. No question here about female duties in the preparation of a sumptuous breakfast, all washed down with the tea that suggests female sexuality in the novel's hermeneutic code. Woman is nurturer to man's alimentary and sexual needs. As in Ulysses, food and love are conflated, and the word ''yes'' serves as an exuberant affirmation of life's fertile possibilities. Like Molly Bloom, the matronly Anna is definitely maleidentified. 8 Grandfather and husband meld together into a single masculine paradigm in the midst of a morning meal. In an effort to please her irascible spouse, ALP works her fingers (and knees) to the bone. For the pleasure/p/aisir of her greedy partner, she labors "for to plaise that man hog .. . till her pyrraknees shrunk to nutmeg graters while her togglejoints shuck with goyt" (FW 199. 20- 2). Such feminine altruism is ill rewarded by a husband who goes on a hunger strike and refuses to be satisfied by any of her life-giving favors: "my hardey Hek he'd kast them frame him, with a stour of scorn" (FW 199. 24-5). Like Maria in "Clay," Anna takes comfort in songs that celebrate "The Heart Bowed Down" to her lord and master and humms a "balfy bit" to elevate her spirits. She tries to please her partner sexually by the titillations of fellatio, but her efforts meet with mixed success: ''What harm if she knew how to cockle her mouth! And not a mag out of Hum no more than out of the mangle weight. Is that a faith? That's the fact" (FW 199. 31-3). As the boundaries of fact and fiction are eradicated, the two washerwomen express faith in the historical truth of their topping tale of tupping and tepping. With her "frostivying tresses dasht with virevlies" (FW 199. 36) and robed in "a period gown of changeable jade" (FW 200. 2), Anna tries to arouse her husband's flagging sexual interest. Piquing his appetite, she serves as procuress for HCE, "throwing all the neiss little whores in the world at him" (FW 200.

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29-30). Anna challenges her spouse's manhood by casting the spoils of war both male and female into "Humpy's apron" (FW 200. 32) to satisfy his languishing homo- and heterosexual desires. Like Molly Bloom planning the seduction of an errant husband, Anna complains of her partner's impotence in a letter she writes to lighten her heart and expresses the desire to recapture his waning attentions. As the washerwomen listen to the epistolary voice of Anna Livia, they recognize in its message of vanity and lamentation some of the typical concerns of any Dublin matron. "By earth and the cloudy but I badly want a brandnew bankside, bedtlmp and I do, and a plumper at that!" (FW 201. 5-6). ALP's first request from her earthbound hubby and from the "old woman in the sky" is for a corset or girdle to contain her overflowing riverrun - a female undergarment similar to the boned corset that caught Molly's eye in the Gentlewoman. Characteristically, Anna has internalized the grief she feels over conjugal estrangement by projecting HCE's lack of interest onto her own fading charms. She complains of being "wore out'' from ''waiting for nry old Dane hodder dodderer, nry life in death companion, my frugal key of our larder, my much-altered camel's hump ... to wake himself out of his winter's doze and bore me down like he used to" (FW 201. 7 -12). With the blood of Danevikings in his veins, HCE the hod-carrier has degenerated into a disappointing sexual partner - a dotty old gentleman who resembles a "doddered" tree, shattered and infirm. Anna's letter, vindicating Humphrey of sexual criminality by protesting his age and erotic infirmity, suggests the senility, illness, and impotence of this "life in death companion." Anna grieves for the loss of her "maymoon 's honey," now reduced to a "Decemberer" fool whose "camel's hump" is "much altered" in this May/December marriage. Yet she expresses the hope that he is merely hibernating and that, like the dead Osiris/ Adonis/ Attis of ancient fertility rites, he will be resurrected "out of his winter's doze'' and resume a manly posture with the full force of sexual renewal. 9 Meanwhile, Anna waits - lovingly, patiently, and devotedly for her sleeping, slumbering giant to wake himself and assumes responsibility for a shrinking domestic economy. As industrious as Molly during the lean years of her marriage to Bloom (Molly sold second-hand clothes and played the piano in a coffee-palace), Anna offers to hire herself out as a washerwoman or seamstress to keep

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the family in "horsebrose and milk" (FW 201. 15- 16). Bound to onerous maternal and spousal duties, she nevertheless dreams, like Molly before her, of liberating herself from her snug domestic nest and leaping away to the careless freedom she once knew as a seaside girl. She clings to fantasies of recapturing her promiscuous adolescence, of escaping "to the slobs della Tolka or the plage au Clontarf to feale the gay aire of my salt troublin bay" (FW 201. 18-19). The washerwomen, meanwhile, are transfixed in voyeuristic expectation of the "hazelhatchery part" of Anna's salacious biography. Like the narrator of "Ithaca" cataloguing Molly's lovers, and like Molly exaggerating the number of times she and Boylan had sex, the crones excitedly forage for every titillating detail. "How many times did she do it?" they wonder, as they try to verify questions of when, how, where, and with whom. As selfproclaimed guardians of female virtue, they are simultaneously fascinated and scandalized by the story of ALP's profligacy. The spinsters delineate her adventures with a kind of Rabelaisian relish - though their voyeuristic investment makes them less than reliable narrators. How many children had she, and who were their fathers, they wonder. "How many aleveens had she in tool?" (FW 201. 27). Popular opinion suggests "a hundred eleven, wan bywan bywan." Having bred this gargantuan brood, Anna "can't remember half of the cradlenames she smacked on them" (FW 201. 29-32). In the face of such prodigious fecundity, the women remark smugly, "They did well to rechristien her Pluhurabelle" (FW 201. 35), the whore of multiple beauties. The one hundred and eleven progeny she has borne imply a long line of fertile progenitors, embraced with wild abandon by Anna in her sensuous, alluring youth. As the prurient crones comment and crow over Anna's erotic experiments, they accuse her of adolescent frivolity: "She must have been a gadabount in her day, so she must, more than most. Shoal she was, gidgad . . . . Tell me, tell me, how cam she camlin through all her fellows" (FW 202. 4-8). Rumor has it that she was a veritable childish devil or '' diveline. '' The virginal Anna threw away her chastity, that pearl of great price, and squandered her virtue with bucks of the town: ''Casting her perils before our swains . . . Linking one and knocking the next, tapting a flank and tipting a jutty'' (FW 202. 8- 11 ). Bursting with curiosity, the washerwomen follow the chronology of Anna's lovers and try to trace her fluid meanderings back to an mitial act of virginal violation, the 174

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original sin that forfeited her chastity. They are ironically oblivious of the fact "that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity" (U 17: 2127-31). "Waiwhou was the first thurever burst?" they ask excitedly, trying to determine the mysterious identity of the male who initially burst the hymen of Anna's seed-bed (FW 202 . 12-13). The first of Anna's multiple lovers is an amorphous deity, not "who" but "Waiwhou," a superhuman power that reigns as Thor/Thur, the omnipotent father/lover/patriarch . Thor, the thunder-bearer and hammer-hurler of ancient Nordic myth, provides a divine model for Daddy, the god in the sky that bursts his raincloud in a shower that fills the river and fertilizes her soil. According to the washerwomen, the paradigm of that primordial defloration was war-like and violent. Either Anna was conquered by planned seduction "in a tactic attack" (FW 202. 13) or she was wooed and won "in single combat" (FW 202. 14). Metaphors of love and war mingle in the narrative, as the female becomes prey to a Daneviking's prowess and yields her virginity , in a moment of weakness, to the enemy who attacks the fortress of her chastity. This allegory of military conquest goes back to the Roman de la Rose, Spenser's Fairie Queene, and numerous medieval and Renaissance texts that envision the soul as virginal victim , stormed and conquered by an alien seducer. To the prurient spinsters, it is inconceivable that the prodigal Anna could have given herself freely in an act of erotic delight, since their model of sexuality is both aggressive and puritanical . They assume that woman is innocent prey to the libidinous desires of the male and that the victimized virgin must be raped or seduced by a phallic predator : "Tinker, tilar, souldrer, salor, Pieman Peace or Polistaman" (FW 202. 14-15). The washerwomen long to discover the name of this mysterious suitor: "That's the thing I'm elwys on edge to esk" (FW 202. 15). But Anna admits to some confusion about her first love affair: ''She sid herself she hardly knows whuon the annals her graveller was, a dynast of Leinster, a wolf of the sea, or what he did or how blyth she played or how, when, why, where and who offon he jumpnad her and how it was gave her away'' (FW 202. 23- 6). That first

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"graveller" proved a grave-dealer, a "deathsman of the soul" who left her gravid with potential life. Topographically, her despoiler contaminated her river-water by gravelling her soil-bed and polluting the purity of her virginal stream. Was that first seducer a king or a sea-wolf, a dynast or a pirate? Anna does not know. She cannot recall "how it was gave her away" because the reason (both causal and rational) is irrelevant. All those logocentric questions of "how, when, why, where and who offon" adhere to the fabric of an artificial social structure irrelevant to sexual union. In the traditional wedding ceremony, Anna would have been given away by her father; but in the trans-social world of Finnegans Wake, the syntactical construction "gave her away" is notably bereft of an identifiable subject. The pronoun "who" has been replaced by "how," and the inviolate daughter/bride implicitly gives herself to the father/lover who claims her virginity. Liberated from traditional family attachments, the ingenuous girl yields to her lover in a moment of consummate ecstasy. Her innocence and fluidity, her lilting form and shimmering movements, sharply contrast with the ponderous gait of her stony, patriarchal suitor. "She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees" (FW 202. 26-30). In the persona of an earth-bound, lumbering farmer, HCE hardly seems worthy of Anna's nubile charms, though she apparently capitulates "with nymphant shame" when he gives her "the tigris eye! 0 happy fault! Me wish it was he!" (FW 202. 33- 4). As Tigris and Euphrates meet, Joyce recalls the cradle of civilization and the Garden of Eden, where sin and culture were born simultaneously. The story is Joyce's version of the fall of Adam and Eve, the "happy fault" of original sin that gave birth to the shame of mortality and the glories of Christianity. Here the fault evokes sheer sensuous delight, rather than the Christ-centered promise of future redemption. Man and woman fall together into erotic pleasure to rise again and be redeemed in their offspring. This is the primordial lesson of the Garden of Eden/Erin, Ireland's little "split pea" of a biblical story of Genesis (Guinnesses). But, one of the washerwomen protests, the tale at this point is "anacheronistic." Anna's first liaison was not with HCE, but with an earlier lover "when nullahs were nowhere, in county Wickenlow,

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garden of Erin, before she ever dreamt she'd lave Kilbride and go foaming under Horsepass bridge, ... to wend her ways byandby, . . . for all her golden lifey in the barleyfields and pennylotts of Humphrey's fordofhurdlestown and lie with a landleaper, wellingtonorseher" (FW 202. 36-203. 1-7). Before she lay with the composite hero Wellington/N orseman/Horsa/Finn, Anna Liffey, in an earlier incarnation, made love in a Wicklow "garden of Erin," a utopian landscape where ''the hand of man has never set foot'' (FW 203. 15-16). Somewhere between the Alaskan tundra (Yokan) and the ovular vale of Avoca (Ovoca), the innocent Anna had her first sexual experience. The place is a fantasy fairyland rather than a geographical locale: "Dell me where, the fairy ferse time!" (FW 203. 16). Anna's very first lover was apparently a "holy man," the "local heremite, Michael Arklow" - an Irish archangel and hermit/priest dwelling in a Celtic dell somewhere in the heart of the Hibernian hinterlands. Arklow is a spiritualized HCE persona portrayed in a sanctified, mock-heroic incarnation. The time of the "natural nuptials" between Anna and Michael is equally equivocal: the union takes place "one venersderg in junojuly" (FW 203. 19- 20), a winter's Venus-day ripe for venereal perambulations, when ALP could play Juno and goddess, the ox-eyed woman in search of her man. Anna emerges as a teasing ingenue with ''kindling curves you simply can't stop feeling" and "singimari saffron strumans of hair" that weave a web of feminine charm around her shy but willing lover. The traditional Irish analogue to the tale is the hagiography of St Kevin of Glendalough, the hermit tempted by a threatening female. In Joyce's mock-heroic version of the narrative, the monk does not cast the temptress Cathleen into the lake; instead, he embraces the lake/river as a holy water/lover. Arklow parts the ''reign beau's heavenarches' ' of Anna's saffron tresses, '' deepdark and ample like this red bog at sundown," and immerses himself in her silt-laden streams. Goaded by her "enamelled eyes," indigo and enticing, the monk is seduced into "vierge violetian" - a virginal violation that baptizes Michael in the amorous waters of the violet Liffey (FW 203. 22 -9). Characteristically, the pious hermit protests his innocence and projects his desire onto the woman he lusts after. The lapsed celibate claims he was seduced by the lascivious Anna: ''He cuddle not help himself, thurso that hot on him, he had to forget the monk in the 177

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man" (FW 203. 32 -4). As he showers the beautiful maiden with kisses, Arklow warns her "never to" succumb to his erotic titillations. With "niver to, niver to, nevar" (FW 203. 36) on his lips, the monk fondles his lover, "rubbing her up and smoothing her down," plying her with "kiss akiss after kisokushk" (FW203. 35), until the "vierge" to be violated is vertiginously aroused. The preamble to this "holy communion" is described in tantalizing, lubricious prose. But the parting and mingling of Anna's hindmoist waters is an act that occurs almost entirely off-stage. The reader can only imagine the mad monk Michael plunging with salacious delight into the "majik wavus" of Anna's "elfun ... meshes." We are told, opaquely, that "Simba the Slayer of his Oga is slewd" (FW 203. 32), as the monk relinquishes his prurient vows of celibacy. 10 Losing male reason and logocentric control, Michael kisses Anna's "freckled forehead" and immerses himself in the life-giving waters of her mortal stream. (The figure of Shaun/Kevin later portrayed in Book IV is far more restrained.) Anna, for her part, "hielt her souff" (held her breath, panted in ecstasy). 11 Yielding her virginity to this bold priest's entreaties, she revels in the sexual initiation that inaugurates her river/womanhood: "she ruz two feet hire in her aisne aestumation. And steppes on stilts ever since" (FW 204. 2- 3). The ecstasy of love-making elevates Anna's ingenuous self-image; she emerges from the erotic moment whole, hearty, and transcendent. The virginal "sacrifice" proved an act of psychic healing that gave her a sense of personal integration. If the rent (or hole) caused by coition was experienced as a physical wound, her monk/priest/lover provided verbal balm and healing kisses: "That was kissuahealing with bantur for balm! 0, wasn't he the bold priest? And wasn't she the naughty Livvy?" (FW 204. 3- 5). No longer a maid, Anna delights in her newly acquired status of womanhood and is filled with the pride of feminine consummation. Her estuaries have risen, and her sense of self is bright and untarnished. She has emerged from the stream of her youth into the full flower of maturity as woman and river, Anna Livia/Anna Liffey. The sobriety of this sacramental rite of passage is immediately undercut by the voyeuristic gossip of the washerwomen, who continue to excoriate the "naughty Livvy" for the imputed sins of her youth. The hermit Arklow, violating a vestal virgin with all the guilt and excitement of sacred sin, believed that he took the flower of Anna's womanhood. Rumor has it, however, that "two lads in scoutsch breeches went through her before that, Barefoot Burn and 178

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Wallowme Wade, ... before she had a hint of a hair at her fanny to hide or a bossom to tempt a birch canoedler'' (FW 204. 5- 9). These lascivious scouts defiled her long before she had pubic hair or the nub of a bosom and snatched the unripe fruit of her budding sexuality. Even before that, in an incident that mimics the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan, the innocent Anna "all unraidy, too faint to buoy the fairiest rider, too frail to flirt with a cygnet's plume, ... was licked by a hound, Chirripa-Chirruta, while poing her pee, pure and simple" (FW 204. 10-13). The young girl was vulne.·able even while urinating. Naive and helpless , she was violated by a dog that caught her with her knickers down during "shearingtime." Thus was the ingenue taken against her will by a rapacious hound in a scene that suggests a conflation of rape and oral sex. (Female micturition is apparently a source of polymorphously perverse arousal for HCE, whose voyeuristic interest in his daughter Issy' s urination and in the titillating tinklings of two girls in Phoenix Park may well be constitutive of his mysterious sin.) Further back in her infantile past, at the dawn of protohistory, "first of all, worst of all, the wiggly livvly , she sideslipped out by a gap in the Devil's glen while Sally her nurse was sound asleep in a sloot and, feefee fiefie, fell over a spillway before she found her stride" (FW 204. 14-17). In her early sexual researches, the wiggly, elusive child experienced a primordial fall: the rivulet lost her innocence to "stagnant black pools" and lay and laughed amid blushing hawthorns. 12 Ultimately, of course, Anna's sexual fall into womanhood is shrouded in ambiguity and mystery. Joyce acknowledges, like Freud before him, the erotic delights of polymorphous perversity that characterize infantile sexual experiments. Anna, it seems, lost her virginity when she escaped the surveillance of her nurse and fell over a spillway, but the exact nature of the event remains obscure. Is the child innocent and free ("innocefree") as her laughter, and Joyce's Yeatsian pun, would suggest? Or is she guilty of a mysterious autoerotic transgression? We do not know, and neither Joyce nor the washerwomen will tell us, since their story appeals to the inarticulate guilt of childhood eroticism . Anna's "virginal violation" at the hands of a godly monk, two boy scouts, a hound, and viscous black pools of rainwater comprises a sexual aporia woven into the tapestry of the Wake. It becomes part of the unfathomable "eternal geomater" that Shem and Shaun will try , unsuccessfully, to penetrate and unravel.

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The washerwomen who tell us the tale of Anna Livia perceive themselves moral guardians of Dear Dirty Dublin. In charge of the town's dirty linen, they simultaneously clean the undergarments and scour the secrets of a sinful populace, interpreting the history of ALP through a palimpsest of gossip and popular cliche. They see the world through Gerty MacDowell eyes and impose a soap-opera vision of experience onto their sudsy, soporific story. But like the river itself, the narrative of ALP must "never stop" and demands "continuarration." "You're not there yet. I amstel waiting. Garonne, garonne!" (FW 205. 14-15). In this makeshift, "Wakeschrift" tale of HCE's resurrection, the old women cite ample proof of Humphrey's impotence. "Her Chuff Exsquire," with white mane and hoary (whory) locks, has suffered the extinction of both chivalric heroism and courtly love. Without the "role of a royss in his turgos the turrible" (FW 205. 29), he must forgo regal stature and, like Turko the Terrible, become invisible - a deposed king reduced to vapid pantomime. The resourceful Anna, however, determines to "frame a plan" to resuscitate her spouse. She borrows a mailsack from her "swapson" Shaun the Post, then makes herself "tidal to join in the mascarete" (FW 206. 13-14). Transforming herself into a magical shapechanger, Anna moves from stream to river to tidal estuary and, at each turn, assumes a new cosmetic persona in the masquerade of life. In ritual fashion, she arrays herself for a seductive bridal union with HCE. She mingles nature with civilized beauty, the decorative landscape of Ireland with trivial social charms. "Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to sole" (FW 206. 30-2). She washes in a sacred bath of holy water and mud and lets her hair fall in winding coils to the seashore. She bathes in the flowers and mud of existence, cleansing her body with the silt of society and making soap from the effluvia of daily life. "Dirty cleans" ( U 4: 481 ), Bloom notes in Ulysses. And here the muck of Anna's silty soil mingles with her river-water as she washes ''allover her little mary'' with leafmould, "turfentide and serpenthyme" (FW 206. 34-6). Joyce's prose imitates the rhapsodies of the biblical Song of Songs in evoking a shimmering fantasy of feminine splendor: "Peeld gold of waxwork her jellybelly and her grains of incense anguille bronze'' (FW 206. 36-207. 1). Like any mediterranean bride in spring, Anna weaves garlands 180

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for her hair "of meadow grass and riverflags," "bulrush and waterweed,'' and the surrealistic ''fallen griefs of weeping willow'' (FW 207. 2-4). Covering herself in "shellmarble bangles," she resembles an eastern bride ornamented with bracelets, anklets, armlets, amulets, and necklaces of every description. Sending for her ''boudeloire maids,'' this Baudelaire of the cosmetic paint-box creates herself anew in feminine finery to impress "His Affluence" HCE. Begging only for a "minnikin" of his precious time, she escapes from her distracted mate and flees ''with her mealiebag slang over her shulder" (FW 207. 18-19). HCE's "cock striking mine" makes a "bridely sign" of conjugal possession. But the clever bride/matron beautifies herself to attract, then distract, her partner and escape his cloying protectorate. Once a "pearl of great price," ALP has now become an "oysterface" matron equipped with a peasant mealiebag that evokes resonances of both womb and wordsack - a catch-all, carry-all that protects the word of female gossip and the sacred Logos of future incarnations. This embryonic sac(k) recalls the ''virgin womb of the imagination'' essential to the delivery of mail/ art/word/life. In another guise, Anna Livia is ''no electress at all'' - no regal or electrifying seductress - but "old Moppa Necessity" (FW 207. 29), the reality principle that manifests itself as mother to ingenuity and invention. More atavistic than electrifying, ALP resembles a "bushman woman, the dearest little moma ever you saw" (FW 207. 34-5). Not a beautyqueen, she is, instead, a "judyqueen," caught between youth and senility and bound to maternal duties that make her a "punch and judy" puppet of domestic frustration. The fluid river-woman is a female Proteus, and we are warned to "saise her quirk for the bicker she lives the slicker she grows. Save us and tagus!" (FW 208. 1- 2). As she matures, Anna becomes all the more elusive and incomprehensible. Losing the narcissistic focus of adolescent self-centeredness, she slips into and out of the thousand protean shapes demanded by nurturance and sympathetic projection. As the boundaries of her ego gradually dissolve, this mother/woman begins to assume the multiple personalities of those in the realm of her care. ALP's environmental garb, described in gargantuan proportions, evokes the Rabelaisian atmosphere of the earlier comic catalogues in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses. Her clogs are "a pair of ploughfields"; Anna wears "owlglassy bicycles" for eyeglasses and

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protects her pudenda ("hydeaspects") with a "fishnetzeveil" (FW 208. 4-11 ). She takes Sugarloaf Mountain as a hat, ''with a gaudyquiviry peak and a band of gorse for an arnoment and a hundred streamers dancing off it" (FW 208. 7 -9). Her "blackstripe tan joseph was sequansewn and teddybearlined, with wavy rushgreen epaulettes" (FW 208. 16-18). In fact, "everyone that saw her said the dowce little delia looked a bit queer" (FW 208. 29- 30). Anna takes such pride in her appearance that they say ''the darling murrayed her mirror" (FW 208. 35) in a narcissistic nuptial that both consummates and murders the adolescent ego. As fertile mother and womb of the world, Anna hides in her "nabsack" (womb, wordsack, female genitalia) all the "plurabilities" that she bestows on her progeny. 13 "Anna high life" impartially distributes a hoard of presents, both good and evil, to "her furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters, a thousand and one of them, and wickerpotluck for each of them" (FW210. 4-6). In the riotous catalogue that follows, Joyce introduces his own authorial signature in the person of Sunny Twimjim, the boy from Clongowes Wood College - an institution now demoted to a kind of savage outpost of Christianity. Through Anna's beneficence, the author receives "a Congoswood cross on the back" (FW 211. 5) to be borne on the new Via Dolorosa of aesthetic martyrdom. Shem/Seumas, Sunny's shade or fictional alter ego, sports the traditional poetic crown of laurel that gives the illusion of feeling big - though, in fact, the poetic crown of momentary glory is interchangeable with the artistic crown of thorns decorating the exiled Twimjim. After a catalogue of Anna's maternal gifts to her children, the Dublin washerwomen reassert the central paradigm of Finnegans Wake: "every telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it" (FW 213. 12). Every tale is both history and herstory, reflecting the binomial bifurcation of male/female conflict polarized around kinetic patterns of amorous desire. Man and woman clash, fall, and sexually collide to give birth to a new breed/brood of daughter/sons that will re-enact age-old sagas of marital/martial conquest. The male rises to phallic grandeur only to fall into the womb of his hindmoist mother/wife, and his seed is cast on the waters of humanity to be brought to fruition in endless cycles of racial renewal. Every story has a ''taling'' - a tell-tale narrative base rooted in irrational forces of conflict and creativity. More often than not, public myth and legend are constructed around a private

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hermeneutic code obscuring a seminal story of unresolved sexual conflict. Impelled by erotic desire, man and woman love, clash, fight, and do "the coupler's will" (U 3: 47). The thrill of Eros drives them to pursue, resist, and eventually capitulate to the consummation of natural law. From sexual congress come children who must learn both the laws of nature and the secrets of the universe, from grandaddy's martial arts to the more anarchic elements of grandma's grammar. All taling has a tail or end in an eschatology that climaxes in the dissolution of that final distinction between self and other, between subjective personality and objective impotence. The subject loses its will and reason and is re-absorbed into larger, impersonal cycles that "begin again" the endless drama of human existence. "It saon is late. 'Tis endless now . . . . Wharnow are aile her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial!" (FW 213. 15-32). Out of universal suffering, we turn as a tribe to that patriarchal potentate, "the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist" (FW 214. 11 - 12). The author Giacomo Joyce writes himself into this Mobius strip of a narrative when he puts the Finnleader "in his joakimono" and makes a lexical joke of authority and patriarchal pretension. The "lmmensipater" (FW 342. 26) is little more than an anachronistic clown sprung, fully blown, from the head of a facetious Giacomo. Though riding a high horse, this stupefied "awethorrorty" (FW 516. 19) figure is paralyzed and frozen, confined to a stone pedestal that immobilizes him in haughty but impotent pride. The Dublin washerwomen, inadvertently skeptical, implicitly reject an omnipotent Lord and patriarchal divinity by directing their prayers to a more earthly and compassionate goddess, the holy "Maria, full of grease" (FW 214. 18). This new proletarian protector is both divine intercessor and female drudge, bearing the "load" of earthly toil in her spiritual dealings with the deity. The crones call on female saints to mitigate the wrath of an angry god and, in a more atavistic invocation, importune "leis," the Egyptian Isis who resurrected Osiris by restoring his castrated manhood. In a burst of Catholic devotion, the women pray to "marthared mary allacook" (Margaret Mary Alacoque from "Eveline"), the selfmartyred saint who now appears as both cook and "kook" m a new proletarian dispensation. 14 183

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Uttering semi-religious orisons, the washerwomen remind us that the promise of paradise comes each evening with sunset and urge us to: "Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die!" (FW 215. 3-4). As the "little eve" reminiscent of our first mother fades into sunset, a new life of moonlight, dream, romance, and fantasy will be born again. "Anna Livia, trinkettoes" emerges as boon companion and twinkling star, drinking and twinkling at eventide, "the queer old skeowsha anyhow." She embraces and revitalizes her "quare old" mate, "Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills" (FW 215. 12 -14). In the incarnation of Finn MacCool, HCE is father to an atavistic race of preternatural progeny - son/daughters with fins and gills who comprise an androgynous species. The hermaphroditic Humphrey inaugurates a primordial polis of social organization: "Hireus Civis Eblanensis! '' Celebrated as the legendary ''goat'' founder of Dublin, he functions as mythic progenitor of the Irish race: "He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us!" (FW 215. 27 -9). Nurturing twin antagonists in his bosom, he fosters the sons who will eventually defy, castrate, and supersede their impotent father. Like Beckettian dramatis personae, the washerwomen feel convinced that talk can "save us" (FW 215. 34). So long as they continue to narrate a story, to articulate the stirrings of consciousness in fabulated oral history and myth, they remain part of a ''tale told of Shaun or Shem" (FW 215. 35) - a tale of waking and resurrection, of "teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew" (FW 215. 22- 3). And so the women celebrate all "Livia's daughter-sons" in a song of life and renewal that transcends their earlier social concerns of legitimacy and sexual sin, of gossip and puritanical judgment. Out of Anna's fall comes a proliferation of progeny, each with a different personal cry that makes it unique in time and space. The moral and ethical questions raised with salacious interest at the beginning of the chapter now dissolve into universal, cosmic cycles of racial continuity as the women themselves, with the coming of evening, fade into a dark, atavistic landscape to become part of the rocks and trees and stones that unite them with great Mother Earth. Enveloped by night, the crones sink into the heaviness of slumber: "My foos won't moos. I feel as old as yonder elm" (FW215. 34-5). They fall into the quotidian death of sleep and darkness, that obscure region of dream and dissolution that absorbs

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the waking mind and makes consciousness part of an alien, inanimate world. As the two women fuse with the cosmos surrounding them, the distinction between self and other, between conscious identity and inanimate matter, is gradually effaced. The chattering voices of the crones are lost in the distance, and the episode ends with a murmuring music echoing Anna's evensong: ''Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!" (FW 216. 4-5). As the women fade into a darkening landscape, the voice of the river arises from the book's textual unconscious and floods the night world of Finnegans Wake. MAMAFESTA A "commodius vicus of recirculation" (FW 3. 2) brings us back to ALP's letter in Book I, Chapter 5, and forward to its fuller, more embellished form in Book IV. Joyce originally wrote the latter version for the "mamafesta" chapter but put it aside and incorporated it into Book IV fourteen years later. 15 Each of the multiple versions of the letter serves as a textual paradigm for the Wake itself, acting as a semiotic microcosm of the linguistic macrocosm in which it has, like a puzzle or rebus, been playfully embedded. 16 The letter is one of the central aporias of the book, an enigmatic document whose gaps and fragmented utterances reflect, in miniature, the polysemic discourse of its fabulative matrix. Dictated by Anna to Shem her scribe, the epistle "writ by one and rede by two and trouved by a poule in the parco" (FW 201. 1- 2) was reportedly '' rede'' (both read and understood) by the twin sons Shem and Shaun. Posted and lost, it was finally "trouved" (French, trouver, "found, verified, and proved true") by a "poule" or French hen in the Phoenix Park, the alleged site of HCE's sin . The hen is, in turn, an androgynous ALP-ish fowl who serves the function of a twentieth-century Paul, a purveyor of the Joycean gospel through scatterings of gossipy good news to the modern world. Beginning with a tripartite invocation to ''Annab the Allmaziful [rather than Allah the Allmerciful], the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities," Joyce offers a feminized version of the Lord's Prayer: "haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!" (FW 104. 1-3). We are told that her "untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names" (FW 104. 4-5) collected in a riotous Rabelaisian catalogue

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of over one hundred titles (FW 104. 5-107. 7). The missive, identified as a "proteiform graph" and a "polyhedron of scripture" (FW 107. 8), definitely signifies a writing whose weird, cuneiform (or cunniform) letters prove indecipherable to those "naif alphabetters" who would interpret the text as the scribbling of "a purely deliquescent recidivist [an unreformed criminal], possibly ambidextrous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbowl in his (or her) occiput" (FW 107. 9-12). To both the "eternal chimerahunter" and the lust-loving scholar, the text "has shown a very sexmosaic of nymphosis" (FW 107. 13-14). Or, to put it another way, "Honi soit qui mal y pense." The letter is a perplexing text whose polysemic utterances are shot through with the kind of gaps, slippages, holes, and protuberances that allow its reader to project his/her unconscious preoccupations (rooted metaphorically in the "occiput," or back part of the skull) onto the amorphous content of this tabula semi-rasa, "tabularasing his [HCE's] obliteration" (FW 50. 12). Curiosity has invaginated the folds or plis in a document once buried, then picked (or pecked) up - sent, lost, found, and finally resurrected from the dungheap of history by Biddy the hen. The letter has been reduced to a puzzle of graphemes that implicitly graph a sexual history buried in the tissue of the epistle's integument. We are promised the pornographic titillations of "nymphosis" (Greek nympheusis, "wedding") and a collage of dirty pictures. Joyce uses the word "ambidextrous" here, as in "Circe," to suggest the elusive, bisexual identity of its author, "snubnosed" like a woman or a castrated male and exhibiting a "profound rainbowl" of fertile indentation. The rainbow promise of biblical history (male to male, Yahweh to Noah) is transmuted into a vaginal hole/bowl to catch the fecundating rain/ejaculate/tea squidsquirted onto the receptive (female) page/tissue. The text calls our attention to its margins or "bordereau" (French, "inventory") to reveal "a multiplicity of personalities intlicted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes" (FW 107. 24-6). So fragmented is the letter that we do not know if it constitutes a single text or many, whether it "previews" one crime or multiple transgressions. We "must grope on till Zerogh hour" (FW 107. 21-2), in search of that female "zeroine" who complements Ain Soph, the ineffable One of Kabbalistic mystery. The text of this holy epistle (sacred and shot full of holes) is about 186

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marriage and copulation, a titillating "sexmosaic" of bodily parts melded together in the institutional union of one flesh promised in a wedding ceremony that gives the impression (''under the closed eyes of the inspectors" [FW 107. 28-9], at least), that two are made one and "coalesce, their contrarieties eliminated, in one stable somebody similarly as by the providential warring of heartshaker with housebreaker and of dramdrinker against freethinker" (FW 107. 29- 32). The female temptress (heartshaker) rouses masculine desire and violent need until the semi-inebriate (dramdrinking) male is moved to acts of possessivenes and destruction. But the promises of institutional marriage prove little more than a tantalizing illusion perpetrated for the sake of birthing ''more generations and still more generations,'' despite the ''jolting series of prearranged disappointments" (FW 107. 33- 5) that characterizes conjugal life. This bull of a male begins to resemble a castrated ox, perpetually humping to fend off the disillusionments of bourgeois life: "it's as semper as oxhousehumper!" (FW 107. 34)Y The letter from "Boston (Mass.)" (FW 111. 9--10) is described as a "radiooscillating epiepistle" (FW 108. 24), and the Shaun-like professor who explicates the text urges us, first, to examine its envelope: "to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is . . . hurtful to sound sense" (FW 109. 12 -15). 18 Here, as so often happens in the Wake, the literal text is (en )gendered as an eroticized sexual/textual object open to the specular gaze of a lascivious-minded male. The letter's scriptural polyhedron takes the form of Anna's sexual delta, as letter and writer are fused in fantasy, and ALP's hindmoist hemispheres, suggestively draped in "evolutionary clothing ... full of local colour and personal perfume," are lovingly fondled "by the deft hand of an [impotent] expert" (FW 109. 23- 30). Beneath the "feminine clothiering" of Anna's embroidered female writing is inscribed the imprint of that "feminine fiction, stranger than the facts" (FW 109. 31-2), the deltoid site of copulation and conception, whose life-giving potential transforms egg and ejaculate into a unique human being, and whose genitalia "a little to the rere" (FW 109. 33) are the bodily source of that life-writing indigenous to every "femaline" author. A tale potentially resides in ALP's tail, an evolutionary "hystry" (FW 535. 18) or womb-story that "parently" looks backward to "the ginnandgo gap between

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antediluvious and annadominant" (FW 14. 16-17) and a "lost histereve" (FW 214. 1) of biblical origins; and forward to the fruitful "Wooming" (FW 603. 1) of "one fledge, one brood" (FW 378. 4), the "child we all love to place our hope in for ever" (FW 621. 31-7). Just as the chaotic "allaphbed" of literal letters gestates in a mysterious "proteiform" writing to inscribe meaning into signifiers that bear arbitrary, socially imposed significance; so, too, Anna's "cunniform" scripture generates those embryonic forms which, as mature subjects, will produce ''the grandest gynecollege histories" (FW 389. 9). 19 It is clear from the body of this epistolary teaser that sex and text are one: ALP has inscribed a feminine fiction into the fragmented rhetoric of her letter, and it is only by examining the text's deltoid holes that one begins to penetrate the mystery of female sexual/ textual desire. As Shari Benstock notes, the "letter/dream of desire starts and ends in the woman's body - in the River Liffey - the keys to which are given by Anna Livia through her 'Lps.' located at the mouth of the river, in the labia of the vaginal canal. Riding the river's wave, the letter rests in the 'Gyre 0' of the vagina." According to Benstock, Anna Livia insures that Earwicker' s secret is safe by hiding the letter in the one place he would not think to look, a place he knows too well, and one he assumes can only be filled by him . . . .In order to read the letter's message, the reader must first strip the woman and next penetrate her body; the envelope must be torn and the letter removed . . . . Such a process violates the hymeneal covering of the vagina where the letter is lodged, ruptures its protective layers, an infringement that . . .opens the letter to ambiguity, destroying the inviolate nature of its authority. 20 The text warns that ''we are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles" (FW 110. 15). One might as well forget Aristotle's Poetics ("Harrystotalies" [FW 110. 17]) with its "patrilinear plop" (FW 279. 4), along with those logocentric categories bound to be violated by the hen-woman's semiotic discourse. Aristotle's seminal theories about logic, poetics, and epistemology are blatantly challenged by the ovular ecriture of ALP as "original hen," "an illegible downfumbed by an unelgible" (FW 482. 21). 21 "That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many

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counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for" (FW 482. 33- 6). As in the "Nestor" episode of Ulysses, the investigative scholar hypothesizes about the Aristotelian concept of "the possible as possible" and links it to those "souls impossibilised" through acts of onanism or contraception. The events recounted in ALP's narrative "are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person" (FW 110. 19 - 21). In the voice of Shaun, Joyce obliquely contemplates the central mystery of ontology: why should anything be rather than not? Is birth merely an accident of nature or can one conceive of (and by virtue of) a lex eterna originating in divine providence, a "coupler's will" choreographing human generation? (In Ulysses, Stephen chooses the latter theory, Bloom the former.) In more colloquial terms, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Joyce opts for the "coerogenal" hen/hun (FW 616. 20), 22 Biddy Doran, scratching up a fragmented epistle from the dungheap of human history: The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans, a more than quinquegintarian (Terziis prize with Semi medal, Cheepalizzy's Hane Exposition) and what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston (Mass.) of the last of the first to Dear whom it proceded to mention Maggy well & allathome's health well only the hate turned the mild on the van Houtens and the general's elections with a lovely face of some born gentleman with a beautiful present of wedding cakes for dear thankyou Chriesty and with grand funferall of poor Father Michael don't forget unto life's & Muggy well how are you Maggy & hopes soon to hear well & must now close it with fondest to the twoinns with four crosskisses for holy paul holey corner holipoli whollyisland pee ess from (locust may eat all but this sign shall they never) affectionate largelooking tache of tch. (FW 111. 5- 20) The mamafesta purportedly contains everything from ''A'' to "0" (FW 94. 21 - 2), Alpha to Omega, first to Greek-alphabetic last. It is written "scotographically" (FW 412. 3), m a night/nought/not-writing, so that a photographic "negative" inversion of Aristotelian logic evinces a feminine semiotic discourse. 23 It replicates the sacramental hole of Anna's sexual delta, the zero of a 189

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yonic aperture whose darkness masks the life-giving faculty that proves both mysterious and holy. In terms of Joyce's post-Freudian pornosophical philotheology, the "hole" of the female conjoins with the penile "whole" of the male to create a "holipoli" (or holy city/family) based on the Viconian emergence of a gens or (hoi-poloi) gentile class. The whole island of Ireland is washed by the Gulfstream and by the seminal tea-stain that transmits vitality to future descendants of the Porter couple. The letter directs the love-play of feminine desire toward solicitude for "allathome's health" and toward the magical weddingcake that signifies a sacramental or Eucharistic communion between male and female, "dear thankyou Chriesty. " 24 Here Anna Livia defends her husband largely by way of diversionary tactics: he is portrayed as a "Real Absence," the text's embedded theological subject and "Reverend ... majesty" (FW 615. 13), reflected in the diminutive form of an Irish "Maggy" (the dark persona of his daughter Issy, but also a pedestrian Muggy/mugger/muggee, victimized by relentless verbal mugging on the part of his accusers). The letter's night/not-writing gives a laundered account of ALP's angry retort to the Dubliners who calumniate her spouse and get their "comeuppance" in the epistle of Book IV. Ostensibly talking about the weather and complaining of the summer heat, Anna offers a blessing of domestic health intended to palliate differences and reduce this hostile band to milky-mild placidity. She defuses gossip by appealing to HCE's domestic rights (assured by the "general's elections" of Ireland's republic), his military success in the guise of Willingdone/Wellington, his beneficent reign as Jarl van Hoother, and his aristocratic lineage as "some born gentleman" bearing the bounty of a troth and wedding-cakes. HCE, she implies, is an honorable man true to his matrimonial vows. He has recently laid to rest his competitor Father Michael (an amalgamation of Anna's first lover, Michael Arklow, with the adulterous Father Michael [of the Honuphrius and Anita scandal] with whom Anita/ALP "has formerly committed double sacrilege" [FW 573. 31) in a great "funferall" that celebrates the lmmensipater's own victory and resurrection. Anna "hopes soon to hear well," as opposed to ill, about her persecuted husband, and she closes her mamafesta with fond maternal greetings to the twins, who have doubled their parents' hopes by replicating the images of their forebears. Children and parents

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double-cross one another "with four crosskisses," as they exchange an affectionate embrace that prophesies future cross-purposes when the Oedipal youngsters mature into potentially parricidal progeny. The cross of parenthood bears its own particular brand of martyrdom, and the gospel of this universal domestic drama will, in turn, be spread by "holy paul" to the gentiles of a modern Dublin/ Heliotropolis. The "masterbilker's" ejaculatory tea-stain inscribes the text with a male cross-signature that proves invulnerable to the gnawings of rapacious insec(s)ts and the jawings of loquacious gossipers . 25 In this incarnation, the mamafesta is a "culious" example of pleasant/peasant Irish poetry, an epistolary exercise in restraint and diplomacy that recalls the original Greek association between the word for "poet" and that for "maker." Using subtle feminine wiles, ALP adopts a "stralegy" /strategy of effusive solicitude, killing her husband's enemies with kindness. The letter reincarnated in Book IV will be less conciliatory, as Anna's dammed-up riverrun finally explodes in torrents of logorrhea against HCE's accusers, "Mucksrats" (FW 615. 16) and "Wriggling reptiles " (FW 616 . 16). This version of the missive is as ladylike as the journalistic outpourings of a languishing Lydia sipping tea; the final epistle, in contrast, will take fire and bristle with the spousal fury of a veritable virago. "Sneakers in the grass, keep off!" (FW 615. 28-9). "Stringstly is it forbidden by the honorary tenth commendmant to shall not bare full sweetness against a nighboor's wiles. What those slimes up the cavern door around you, keenin, (the lies is coming out on them frecklefully) had the shames to suggest can we ever? Never! So may the low forget him their trespasses" (FW 615. 32- 6). In her fowlish incarnation as Biddy Doran, the kindly ALP proves a model of love and renewal : "she just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species)" (FW 112. 13 -14). A "good lay" and a devoted wife, ALP is passionately committed to the public exposure of the truth about her somewhat schizophrenic spouse (or triphrenic, in keeping with his '' trilithon sign" [FW 119. 17]), who dallies and dances with "apple harlots" and projects himself into the role of the three soldiers who suspiciously survey his actions in the park. As Patrick McCarthy notes, ''Anna Livia apparently wants to vindicate her husband but somehow makes matters worse by saying that he had three personalities and his weakness was dancing with young girls. " 26 "All 191

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shwants ( schwrites) ischt tell the cock ' s trootabout him . . . Yet is it but an old story, the tale of a Treestone [Tristan] with one Y sold [Iseult]" (FW 113. 11 -19). The world, apparently, is filled with stories of older men (like King Mark in the Tristan tale) lusting "erogenously" (FW 115. 14) after young female flesh, "grisly old Sykos" who do their "unsmiling bit on 'alices, ... yung and easily freudened" (FW 115. 21-3). Here the letter's narrative seems to fuse with still another pornographic tale of ''prostituta in herba,'' a young woman who "deliberatively" somersaults off her "bisexcycle, at the main entrance of curate's perpetual soutane suit with her one to see and awoh!" (FW 115. 15 -17) - a digression proposed by the exegete to satisfy his own lascivious obsessions and to transfer sexual culpability onto the female/temptress/victim. "Est modest in verbos. Let a prostitute be whoso stands before a door and winks or parks herself in the fornix near a makeussin wall (sinsin! sinsin!)" (FW 116. 16 - 18). Recalling Earwicker' s crime by the Magazine Wall, the narrator excitedly peers (with a "pudendascope") at the fantasized figure of a '' neurasthene nympholept . . . under her lubricitous meiosis" (FW 115. 30-4), the eternal temptress as nymphomanic adolescent. Psychoanalytic interpretation quickly gives way to socialist rhetoric on the part of this arrogant lecturer whose "steady monologuy of the interiors" (FW 119. 32-3) usurps the signifying space of "this oldworld epistola of their weatherings and their marryings and their buryings and their natural selections'' (FW 117 . 27- 8). Protesting to the contrary, he has nevertheless allowed masculine egotism and pedantic scholarship to deform ALP's feminine writing, now reduced to ''a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed" (FW 118. 28-30). Or is the text's obscurity due, in part, to the "quadrifoil jab" of another professorial fork/pen/penis (that of Brotfressor Prenderguest [FW 124. 15]) expressing hostility toward female "wholeness" by recurrently poking the feminine body/text with a penetrating instrument that fragments the narrative tissue of Anna's epistle and blindly reduces it to an artifact in Braille? Shari Benstock, assessing the psychoanalytic subject-positions of Anna and her daughter in the Wake's night-writing, concludes: The writing of Finnegans Wake both inhabits and is inhabited by

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woman, by ALP and Issy, who are present in the transparent space of the hymeneal folds, in the silences of the historically interweaved, overlapped, and spiralling story, who constitute the absent center of the Wake universe, who are to be found inside the mirror, in the bar between the conscious and the unconscious, between dreaming and waking, between signifier and signified - both inside and outside the fabric they weave. These two - who are one in desire - are capable of providing the origin of the text that exists outside the text, the frame for the dreamstory that is both outside and within itself: they are the letter (of desire) that violates and is violated. 27

ALP AND HCE: THEIR BED OF TRIAL When Joyce finally portrays HCE and ALP attempting to satisfy connubial desire, the parodic scene travesties traditional notions of romantic love. In their incarnation as the pub-keeping Porters, the couple lie upon their bed of trial and awkwardly attempt to make love - despite the interruptions of crying children, the threat of impotence, and the inconvenience of mechanical contraception. Joyce's graphic stage-directions would send chills down the spine of a Lawrentian sentimentalist. 28 "Man with nightcap, in bed, fore. Woman, with curlpins, hind. Discovered. Side point of view. First position of harmony. . . . Man looking round, beastly expression, fishy eyes, paralleliped homoplatts, ghazometron pondus, exhibits rage. . .. Woman, sitting, looks at ceiling, haggish expression, peaky nose, trekant mouth, fithery wight, exhibits fear. Closeup. Play!" (FW 559. 20-9). Such "culious" cinematography of an "allnights newseryreel" (FW 489. 35) attempts to capture a fairly typical moment in the life of a middle-aged couple. Gone are the days of uninhibited passion and unselfconscious love-making. Sexual congress is dominated by Anna's frazzled "hesitency" skeptically manifest in a "haggish expression. '' Her husband is hardly a passionate Don Juan, as he screws up his fishy eyes and, with a bestial expression, exhibits rage at libidinal frustration. Just as he dons "man's gummy article, pink" in preparation for the amorous event, a child's cry off-stage interrupts Humphrey's work in progress . "Airwaked" by Jerry's howl, Anna leaps out of bed and rushes

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to the child's side. She comforts her restive son by exorcising the phantom father from the boy's childish imagination. Rehearsing the "hystorical leavesdroppings" of Humphrey's sin in the Phoenix park, she insists that the threatening father/god/patriarch is nothing but a Freudian nightmare: You were dreamend, dear. The pawdrag? The fawthrig? Shoe! Hear are no phanthares in the room at all, avikkeen. No bad bold faathern, dear one . . . . Gothgorod father godown followay tomollow the lucky load to Lublin for make his thoroughbass grossman's bigness . . . . Sonly all in your imagination, dim. Poor little brittle magic nation, dim of mind! (FW 565. 18-32) Porter, a bourgeois pub-keeper and urban grocer, "our hugest commercial emporialist" (FW 589. 9-10), is lost in the Babbitt-like ritual of mercantile labor. Enslaved to the materialistic demands of running a business and earning a living for his family, he is sapped of both energy and power. All his phallic potency is channeled into the business of selling Bass ale and keeping afloat on the river of twentieth-century commerce. In a moment of lustful exhibitionism, HCE deigns to "present wappon, blade drawn to the full" before the "infant Isabella" (FW 566. 21-3). But this incestuous indiscretion (or dream thereof) is sharply reprimanded by Anna, who chides her husband in good bog latin: - Vidu, porkego! Ili vi rigardas. Returnu, porkego! Maldelikato! [Look, pig! They're watching us! Return, pig. Indelicate!] (FW 566. 26-7)

As HCE's erect phallus is transformed in his masculine imagination into a gigantic monument, "a stark pointing pole" and "dunleary obelisk" of amazing "lungitube" comparable to the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park, Anna warns him to shield his weapon with a condom: "I must see a buntingcap of so a pinky on the point" (FW 567. 7). Here feminine prudence induces Humphrey to control the fertility of his regal monolith. A Humpty Dumpty fallen from his wall, the deposed patriarch must bequeath his paternal authority to the twin sons who, even now, are ''trowelling a gravetrench for their fourinhand forebears" (FW 572. 5-6), "two very blizky little portereens after their bredscrums, Jerkoff and

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Eatsup" (FW 563 . 23-4). 29 Humphrey, clearly threatened by the fractious children who usurp Anna's scattered emotional energies, explodes in lascivious fury. Abandoning all trappings of romance, he asserts a legal right to his wife's body, the "access to one's partner" guaranteed by Church law . "Legalentitled," he screams. "Accesstopartnuzz. NotwildeHaveandholdpp" Twainbeonerflsh . Byrightofoaptz . beestsch. (FW 571. 28-9). The sacred vows of wedlock are mangled by HCE's urgent libidinal need, apparently exacerbated by Issy's lubricious tinklings: "Listen, listen! . . . Annshee lis pes privily '' (FW 571. 24-6). Claiming conjugal privilege , he warns his wife to yield to his desires, as both "provideforsacrifice" (FW 5 71. 32 - 3). 30 In the Roman guise of Honophrius and Anita, HCE and ALP proceed to enact a salacious parody of ecclesiastical rulings on Roman Catholic marriage - a J oycean satire of Church interference in the bedroom , "perhaps the commonest of all cases arising out of umbrella history" (FW 573. 35- 6). Along with various consorts, man and wife engage in a comic catalogue of lascivious, perverse, and incestuous practices . The question is one of conjugal right : " Has he hegemony and shall she submit?" (FW 573 . 32). Is payment of the "marriage debt" valid if "tendered to creditor under cover of a crossed cheque" (FW 574. 14)? Surprisingly, this murky litigation ends in a court judgment favoring the couple ' s right (and the woman's endorsement) to limit fertility by means of a "good washable pink" (FW 574. 25) rubber cheque that checks conception. 31 The never-born soul "impossibilised" by contraceptive practice has no legal rights, since "no property in law can exist in a corpse" (FW 576 . 5). HCE and ALP are free to "keep to their rights and be ware of duty frees" (FW 576. 35-6). Courtship, Joyce suggests , is a "mirrorminded curiositease" (FW 576. 24), a titillating "collideorscape" (FW 143. 28) of narcissistic gratification. But it ends abruptly when male and female agree to mortgage sexual pleasure for the onerous responsibilities of parenthood: "prick this man and tittup this woman, our forced payrents" (FW 576. 26-7) . In institutional coupling, man and woman seek another self, a c om forting alter ego to stave off isolation: " guide them through the labyrinth of their samilikes and the alteregoases of their pseudoselves , .. . from loss of bearings deliver them " (FW 576. 32-5) . "Commit no miracles .. . . Let earwigger's wivable teach you the dance! ' ' (FW 579 13-25). 195

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Anna and Humphrey, ''basilisk glorious with his weeniequeenie'' (FW 577. 2), impelled by resurgent faith in erotic pleasure, take up, once again, the dance of wedded love, though "woman's the prey" (582. 31-2). "At half past quick in the morning" (FW 583. 30), the couple "photoflash" their love-making in a windowshade silhouette observed by "patrolman Seekersenn" (FW 586. 28) and forthwith reported to a Dublin crowd. The coupling is described as a metaphorical horse-race ("old pairamere goes it a gallop, a gallop" [FW 583. 12]) and in terms of a spirited cricket match ("she had to kicker, too thick of the wick of her pixy's loomph" [FW 583. 32- 3]). After Anna warns her husband not to break the condom, "for fear he'd tyre and burst his dunlops and waken her bornybarnies making his boobybabies" (FW 584. 13-14), HCE manages triumphantly to shoot his bolt into this "auricular of Malthus." He deliberately refrains from ''wetting the tea.'' Both have paid the marriage-debt and become one: "0 I you 0 you me!" (FW 584. 34). "Humperfeldt and Anunska" are "wedded now evermore in annastomoses" (FW 585. 22- 3) and settle down in the "fourth position of solution" to await the coming of dawn (FW 590. 22-3). 32 CYCLICAL RETURN In the "wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer" of Joyce's Wake, we witness a "tetradomational gazebocroticon ... autokinatonetically" rehearsing the cycles of Viconian history, those "homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can" (FW 614. 27- 33). Male and female are united in that bisexual, "coerogenal hun" (FW 616. 20) that celebrates the coming of the dawn and calls us to resunection. The voice that proffers benediction is strangely polymorphous and disembodied: ''Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!" it proclaims (FW 593. 1), fusing the Catholic Sanctus with the Sanskrit word for peace, Samdhi. Joyce parodies the Indian borrowings of Eliot's Waste Land and chants a blessing as ambiguous as that of his poet-predecessor. Convinced that Eliot had plagiarized parts of Ulysses, he wreaks vengeance by peppering the Wake with Eliotic parodies. HCE's love-making on his bed of trial climaxes with the rooster-cry Cocorico!, even though Humphrey is ''long past conquering cock of the morgans'' (FW 584. 24- 5) and his procreative potential has been deliberately

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circumscribed. Lightning flashes and the rain comes; but the act is self-consciously sterile, and no seed will fertilize Anna's ageing delta. It is Anna Livia, however, who rouses Humphrey from the reveries of his night-long slumber and calls him to "Array! Surrection!" (FW 593. 2- 3) in the new Egyptian city of Heliotropolis. Like the immortal Phoenix, he will rise from the ashes of sleep and death, from the "hundering blundering dunderfunder of plundersundered manhood" to return triumphant, "renascenent; fincarnate ... awike in wave risurging into chrest" (FW 596. 2- 6). The "supernoctural" event climaxes on a note of "joyance" - of Joycean joy and sexualjouissance. Resurrection transpires in a single, eternal moment, as the sun rises and the Hindu great year, "madamanvantora" (FW 598. 33) renews its cycles. "Father Times and Mother Spacies," the "old man of the sea and the old woman in the sky," oversee this cosmic pantomime (FW 599. 34-5; 600. 2-3). The lyrical voice of Anna, rejuvenating her husband and celebrating the dawn, gradually begins to emerge from the chaosmos of Joyce's ricorso. ALP remembers the "polycarp pool" where she was spawned of "Deltas Piscium and Sagittariastrion" and concludes that "once we lave 'tis alve and vale" (FW 600. 5-7). Although she prepares to say "hail and farewell" to spouse and family, she nonetheless proclaims, triumphantly, "let it be!" (FW 600. 12): "Be! Verb umprincipiant through the trancitive spaces" (FW 594. 2- 3). The injunction inaugurates a jubilant hymn to the "given" world of quotidian experience, the keys to which are bequeathed to the race by the dying river-goddess. The holy Saint Kevin "Hydrophilos" may come to terms with "the feminiairity which breathes content" (FW 606. 22- 3) by taking refuge in a human chalice, "a priest's postcreated portable a/tare cum balneo" (FW 605. 7- 8) or "tubbathaltar" (FW 606. 2). 33 But in so doing, he exorcizes the feminine principle and chooses baptismal celibacy, the spiritual "regeneration of all man by affusian of,'' rather than immersion in, the holy sister/water of female creation (FW 606. 11 ). He will never understand "the first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam" (FW 607. 10- 12), that is, when he is dead or impotent (deprived of manhood), or when man (generic) is female (specific). According to this paradoxical tautology, a man is not a man when he is a god,

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a corpse, or a woman. In the last case, the feminine genital center is symbolized as a "nought" or hollow space. Then "pubably it resymbles a pelvic or some kvind [Danish, 'woman'] . . . a wenchyoumaycuddler" (FW 608. 23- 5). Gradually, the polymorphous, bisexual discourse of Book IV gives way to the lyrical voice of Anna Livia, murmuring her final monologue as she flows out to sea. "Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am ieafy speafing" (FW 619. 20). Her lisping narrative is filled with fluid "1" and "f" sounds and with open vowels that suggest the yonic spaces of female interiority: "I am leafy, your goolden, so you called me, may me life, yea your goolden" (FW 619. 29-30). But her dying message, recalling the golden days of courtship, is one of resurrection, as she exhorts her spouse to arise with the dawn and attempts, simultaneously, to arouse his flagging sexual interest. "Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long! ... Rise up now and arose!" (FW 619. 25-9). She offers him a clean shirt, double brogues, and a "brandnew big green belt" (FW 620. 2) symbolic of Erin/Eireen/Eire. Always, she assures him, "your wish was mewill" (FW 620. 27). And it continues to be so, as Anna proffers the girl/child Isabel to take her place in Humphrey's bed. "It's Phoenix, dear. And the flame is, hear!" (FW 621. 1-2). The couple's joy in passionate communion may be finished, but the flame of youthful attraction can still be sparked, phoenix-like, by memories of amorous delight. HCE is apparently old and impotent. 34 Anna, however, has only to close her eyes to remember her husband, along with each of the male progeny he has engendered, as "a youth in his florizel, a boy in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed'' (FW 621. 30-1). She likes to envisage Humphrey in terms of "the child we all love to place our hope in for ever'' - the offspring who reflects the virile energies of its father before he assumed the martial role of a blustering Willingdone on his "big white harse." Casting off "the weight of old fletch," and "laving" (loving, leaving, washing) her husband's flaccid penis, ALP tries to arouse this aged consort with strategies of prepubescent titillation. "Reach down. A lil mo. So. Draw back your glave. Hot and hairy, hugon, is your hand! Here's where the falskin begins. Smoos as an infams. One time you told you'd been burnt in ice. And one time it was chemicalled after you taking a lifeness" (FW 621. 24-33). Anna suggests that Humphrey's "hot and hairy" member has been

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metaphorically scarred by love-wounds - by the "icy fire" of passion and by numerous erotic deaths . The uncircumcised phallus reminds her of a child's, and she tries to arouse the polymorphous potential associated with infantile (and senile) stimulation. As man and wife stroll together through the waking metropolis of Dublin, their perambulations suggest matitudinal love-play. Anna complains of Humphrey's "big strides" and demands "a gentle motion all around." "You'll crush me antilopes I saved so long for. They're Penisole's. And the two goodiest shoeshoes" (FW 622. 8-12). Sex in the morning, she implies, should be salubrious for the health. And "it seems so long since, ages since," she and "possumbotts" have shared this kind of innocent pleasure. Their early-morning promenade becomes a mimetic journey through Finnegans Wake. 35 ALP recalls her husband in his incarnation as Jarl van Hoother, the chastened lord who is now "a fine sport ... and a proper old promnentory. His door always open" (FW 623. 5-7). She cites her own role as Biddy the Hen, burrowing in the litter of culture to unearth the "traumscrapt from Maston, Boss" (FW 623. 36). "Scratching it and patching at with a prompt from a primer. And what scrips of nutsnolleges I pecked up me meself. Every letter is a hard but yours sure is the hardest crux ever'' (FW623. 31-3). "Sometime then, somewhere there, I wrote me hopes and buried the page when I heard Thy voice, ruddery dunner, so loud that none but, and left it to lie till a kissmiss coming. So content me now" (FW 624. 3- 6). The romantic hopes of girlhood were apparently repressed when Anna felt herself responding to the thundering voice of HCE, the paternal surrogate who wooed and won her affections . But respectable cohabitation with Bygmister Humphrey has meant perpetual accommodation to a shrinking economy and diminishing expectations. Like Leopold Bloom, and like Ibsen's Solness, Earwicker is notorious for ingenious building schemes that meet with little success: ''All your graundplotting and the little it brought! Humps, when you hised us and dumps, when you doused us! ... On limpidy marge I've made me boom. Park and a pub for me . . . . One of these fine days, lewdy culler , you must redo form again" (FW 624. 12- 20). Anna benevolently assures this "grand owld marauder" (FW 624 . 27) that , despite his failures and his fading potency, "you done me fine!" (FW 624. 35). "How glad you'll be I waked you!" she proclaims . "How well

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you'll feel! For ever after" (FW 625. 33 -4). Though faltering and breathless, Anna tries to resuscitate her husband with tender recollections of adolescent courtship. "Remember! Why there that moment and us two only? I was but a teen, a tiler's dot" (FW 626. 8- 9). Diminutive and ingenuous, the impressionable teen lost her heart to the "swaggering swell" who boasted a resemblance to her father: "The swankysuits was boosting always, sure him, he was like to me fad" (FW 626. 9-10). Frail and haggard, the dying Anna still remembers the gentle moments of courtship when, light-hearted and laughing, her oak of a lover would stand against her "in your bark and tan billows of branches for to fan me coolly'' (FW 626. 22- 3). Despite the military echoes of Irish political strife in HCE's black-and-tan garb, the scene is filled with tenderness and solicitude. Anna, gently yielding her bank-side's parting, would "lie as quiet as a moss" (FW 626. 23) and freely submit to love-making. One time you'd stand fornenst me, fairly laughing . . . . And one time you'd rush upon me, darkly roaring, like a great black shadow with a sheeny stare to perce me rawly. And I'd frozen up and pray for thawe . . . . My lips went livid for from the joy of fear. . . . How you said how you'd give me the keys of me heart. And we'd be married till delth to uspart . . . . And can it be it's nnow fforvell? Illas! (FW 626. 21- 34) With fearful joy, Anna experienced wild extremes in HCE's passion - from a gentle, solicitous coupling to fierce, aggressive penetration. Like Thor "darkly roaring," or like Zeus raping Leda, HCE would rush upon his beloved as "a great black shadow" in a storm of libidinous desire. With a "sheeny" (shiny and semitic) visage, this semi-divine lover took his partner so violently that her heart was frozen by the wintry gusts of impersonal frenzy. Like a wind whipping the cheeks of Anna's face and buttocks, the powerful father/lover came upon her with a tempestuous force that seemed both epiphanic and apocalyptic: "Wrhps, that wind as if out of norewere! As on the night of the Apophanypes. Jumpst shootst throbbst into me mouth like a bogue and arrohs! Ludegude of the Lashlanns, how he whips me cheeks! Sea, sea! . . . Remember!'' (FW 626. 4-8). 36 Viking and Visigoth ("Vulking Corsergoth"), playing Vulcan to Anna's Venus, the staunch HCE stormed this "princeable girl," the

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"pet of everyone ," with little regard for aristocratic lineage . His conquest of Anna was tantamout to the invasion of Ireland by the Vikings or to the colonization of India by imperial powers : "the invision of lndelond . And, by Thorror, you looked it!" (FW 626. 26- 9). Penetrated and colonized by the "horrible" Thor/Zeus/ Humphrey, Anna was raped, occupied, and conquered by promises of lawful wedlock: "And we'd be married till delth to uspart. And though dev do espart. 0 mine!" (FW 626. 31- 2). Suddenly roused from reveries of youthful submission , Anna proclaims: " Only, no, now it's me who's got to give . . . . And can it be it's nnow fforvell?" (FW 626. 32- 3). As the light and her eyesight fail simultaneously, all that she loves begins to fade. With some confusion, she wonders if her family is receding, or if it is she who is being transformed by the shadow of death. "But you're changing, acoolsha, you're changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I'm getting mixed. Brightening up and tightening down. Yes, you're changing, sonhusband, and you're turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again . Imlamaya" (FW 626 . 35-6; 627. 1-3). The resurrected Humphrey has rejected Anna in favor of his daughter/wife Isabel, a nubile stream flowing from the Himalayas in mimetic imitation of ALP . A rivulet following the course of her mother, Issy is "coming. Swimming in my hindmoist. Diveltaking on me tail" (FW 627. 3-4). Like a fish or a duckling pursuing its parent, the playful sprite is born of the moist foam of Anna's riverrun. "Just a whisk brisk sly spry spink spank sprint of a thing theresomere, saultering. Saltarella come to her own" (FW 627 . 4-6). Anna blesses the couple that will conjugate in her absence the son/husband of her waking, aroused to seek a younger woman to satisfy his rejuvenated manhood . "I pity your oldself I was used to . Now a younger ' s there" (FW 627. 6). Although Anna predicts the sundering of this incestuous union, she bequeaths on the couple a sacramental benediction : "Try not to part! Be happy, dear ones! May I be wrong! For she'll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother" (FW 627. 7 -9). The sweetness and innocence of her daughter Issy reminds Anna of her own traumatic separation from the magna mater that once protected her in the ''great blue bedroom ' ' of the sky. Why did she ever abandon the peace and silence of that ethereal sanctuary , ' 'the air so quiet, scarce a cloud"? "I could have stayed up there for

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always only. It's something fails us . First we feel. Then we fall" (FW 627. 9-11). In true Plotinian fashion, Joyce describes the initial stirrings of sexual desire that lead the individual toward change and maturation - the need, absence, or gap in experience that draws us forward into sexual union. Feeling the impetus of both desire and sympathy, the self abandons the splendid isolation of prepubescent wholeness and falls into the painful perturbations of Eros. The calm torpor of sexual latency gives way to a turbulent dialectic of emotional conflict and amorous gratification . Knowing that "something fails us, " we fall into sin and into language. We yield to a restless desire for personal communication that leaves us forever unsatisfied by the lack - the astonishing gap and failure of articulation - that always separates signifier from signified, and each individual from an/Other's subjectivity. 37 The self is isolated in a hostile universe, where communication is faulty and understanding rare. "A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?" (FW 627. 14-16). As Anna flows into the sea of death, she confesses to years of "soffran" from the loss of children and lovers. And though she will be replaced by a younger beauty, falling from the hills in the fertile spring rains, she expresses stoic indifference to the cycles that will go on after her death: ''And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come'' (FW 627. 11-13). Anna has, at least, the solace of knowing that she cared for those who needed her: "I done me best when I was let" (FW 627. 13). She takes comfort, too, from "Tobecontinued's tale," a story of perpetual cosmic reincarnation, and from the knowledge that "there'll still be sealskers" (Danish, elske, "to love") - both self-lovers and romantic lovers, long after her departure (FW 626. 18-19). But as she realizes that Father Time, in the guise of an angry Poseidon, has come to claim her, Anna casts off the altruistic roles of wife and mother that have so long defined her position in the universe. She divests herself of spousal and maternal duties and regards her domestic affiliations from the selfish perspective of pre-marital freedom. Sacrosanct family ties appear utterly diminished: ''All me life I have been lived among them but now they are becoming lothed to me . And I am lothing their little warm tricks. And lothing their mean cosy turns. And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their

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brash bodies . How small it's all!" (FW627. 16-20). Anna acknowledges that as a young child/bride , lilting m her loyalty and oblivious of faults, she romantically exaggerated her husband's mythic stature: "I thought you were all glittering with the noblest of carriage . You're only a bumpkin. I thought you the great in all things, in guilt and in glory. You ' re but a puny" (FW627. 21-4). And so she turns home to her wild, primitive ancestors, a Celtic race of lesbian sea-hags that celebrate life through wild dances and ecstatic din . I can seen meself among them , allaniuvia pulchrabelled . How she was handsome, the wild Amazia, when she would seize to my other breast! And what is she weird, haughty Niluna, that she will snatch from my ownest hair! For 'tis they are the stormies. Ho hang! Hang ho! And the clash of our cries till we spring to be free. (FW 627 . 27- 32) Already , she envisions herself transformed, singing hymns of freedom with her sister-waters the " stormies." Although Anna has served as an archetypal figure of the altruistic, nurturant mother, her thoughts before death cast off the emotional ties, as well as the stereotypical female roles, that have shackled her for so long. She retains a female identity that is ever elusive and that dares, in the end, to question a lifetime of dedication and self-sacrifice. At the close of her life, love and loathing are fused, and both are lost in the "bitter ending" of mortality. Wearied now, and "moananoaning" with anguish, Anna rushes to embrace her "cold mad feary father" in the ultimate bond of an Oedipal union that proves both terrible and annihilating. This " therrble" sea-god " bearing down on me now under whitespread wings" is a composite of Thor, Poseidon , Zeus, the Holy Spirit, and Anna's first seducer, Michael "from Arkangels" (FW 628. 2-5, 9 -10). At the climactic moment of personal extinction, Anna heroically leaps into the waiting arms of her immortal father/lover. Engulfed by old Father Ocean, the river Anna Liffey will nonetheless rise as cloud-vapor and begin again the endless cycles of biological renewal. At the conclusion of Finnegans Wake, womb flows into tomb, bearing on her tumultuous river-waters a solitary leaf ' ' a way a lone a last a loved a long the" (FW 628 . 15-16) riverrun of cosmic life. 38 Joyce gives the last (and the first) word in Finnegans Wake, "the"

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(French, "tea"), to a woman. At the final sounding (or scripting) of this single syllable, the book turns back upon itself and, like a resurrected Finnegan, refuses closure and begins again - but with a difference. It is with the fading utterance of ALP's definite article that we realize the endless, indefinite semiosis of Finnegans Wake. In a moment of epiphany that brings us back to the book's beginning, tracing, as it were, the infinite structure of a Mobius strip, we are implicitly commissioned to re-read the entire text as an explosive extension of Anna's lyrical riverrun. Having taken for granted the socially sanctioned assurance of a male narrative voice, we must climb aboard the "bisexcycle" of reader-response and circle through the book once more, with a paradoxically belated foreknowledge of a work ubiquitously inscribed with the provocative iterations of feminine writing.

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RICORSO Anna Livia Plurabelle and Ecriture Feminine

How does one decode the complex structures of Eros and sexuality within Joyce's farraginous textual production? What, precisely, is the nature of the verbal coup that Joyce perpetrates in Finnegans Wake, and what is its relationship to ecriture feminine? The elusive concept of ''feminine writing'' has been recently instantiated in literary theory by such diverse critics as Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Alice Jardine, and Toril Moi. The common denominator among these various, if sometimes contradictory thinkers, is the shared assumption that ecriture feminine is an attempt to "write the body" and to incorporate into discourse those subversive, semiotic rhythms that Kristeva has allied with the body, voice, and pulsions of pre-Oedipal contact between infant and mother - those polysemic and polyglottic iterations that challenge the name and the law of the Father by poetically subverting the univocal discourse associated with phallocentric master narratives. At the 1975 James Joyce Symposium in Paris, Philippe Sollers, waving a bright red copy of Finnegans Wake, exclaimed triumphantly: "Je vous montre une revolution!" 1 He explained in "Joyce and Co.": "Joyce represents the same ambition as Freud: to analyze two thousand years of manwomankind. . .. He writes not in langwidge (language as the edge of the wedge with which id is wed - Joyce's translation for Lacan's lalangue) but in bursting flows of language (Joyce's l'elangues): jumps, cuts - singular plural." 2 Like Sollers, Margot Norris in The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake" finds encoded in the obvious linguistic subversiveness of the Wake an implicit challenge to the patriarchal culture which it parodically replicates and defies. Colin MacCabe takes a similar stance in James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word by marshaling forceful evidence from psycholinguistics to suggest the Wake's radical development of 205

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a non-phallocentric feminine discourse: "If the 'masculine monosyllables' (190. 35) serve as the fixed point around which the rhythm flows, it is the feminine stream which provides the movement. Language is a constant struggle between a 'feminine libido' which threatens to break all boundaries and a 'male fist' which threatens to fix everything in place. " 3 In opposition to Sollers and Co., a number of contemporary feminist critics argue that Joyce's "masterwork" ultimately glorifies the "sameold gamebold adomic structure" (FW 615. 6) of androcentric language and history - an atomic/ Adamic game of linguistic punning that reduces to mockery Anna Livia's continuous, run-on language and makes women little more than marginal figures in a male-dominated society. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in No Man's Land that "Joyce is taking upon himself the Holy Office of pronouncing that woman, both linguistically and biologically, is wholly orifice." 4 Joyce's puns, they contend, offer more consistently assertive instances of the ways in which male writers can transform the materna lingua into a patrius sermo. For, containing the powerful charm of etymological commentary within themselves, such multiple usages suggest not a linguistic jouissance rebelliously disrupting the decorum of the text, but a linguistic puissance fortifying the writer's sentences with "densest condensation hard." As we do in the presence of all puns, we (laughingly) groan at the author's authoritative neologisms because he has defeated us, even charmed us, by demonstrating his mastery of the mystery of multiple etymologies. 5 A deconstructive reader, on the one hand, would be tempted to join Sollers, Norris, MacCabe, and the Tel Que! school in celebrating the Wake as a linguistic subversion of the name and the law of the Father, a revolution of the word that disrupts the traditional symbolic order and challenges bourgeois practices allied with the repressed desires of a male libidinal economy. Thus Kristeva can cite Joyce's final opus as exemplary of those bisexual, polyphonic rhythms associated with the poetic resonance of maternal utterance; whereas a more resistant reader might identify the lexical disseminations of Wakean language in the context described by the French collective Psych et Po as "the discourse of the narcissistic son (the female son)" which "only acts as writing in order to deny, repress, censure but in order to exploit it, the mortgaged place, 206

RICORSO 6 henceforth an unavoidable obstacle, of the mother's body . " In the latter case, the archetypal womb of Anna Livia Plurabelle , the eternal geomater whose sexual delta both centers the son and exiles him from embryonic bliss, becomes unheimlich, a maternal haven that expels its inhabitants and inaugurates the perplexing aporia of male sexuality. In Joyce's writing, the name of the Father proves to be a primary patriarchal signifier continually rendered impotent by the act of verbal castration performed by a rebellious son who defies the authoritarian progenitor. Wielding pen over penis, word over the ineptly stuttered iterations of his castrated predecessor, the impudent son forges the name and authority of the Father in letters that litter a world of his own androgynous making. Julia Kristeva has revealed in the poetic language of Finnegans Wake a carnivalesque discourse contingent on the notion of heterogeneity. The semiotic disposition of Joyce's experimental text is "anterior to naming, to the One, to the father, and consequently, maternally connoted." Like all poetic language, Joyce's Wakespeak is "from a synchronic point of view, a mark of the workings of drives (appropriation/rejection, orality/anality, love/hate , life/death) and, from a diachronic point of view, [it] stems from the archaisms of the semiotic body." Through poetic discourse, the "subject-inprocess appropriates to itself this archaic, instinctual, and maternal territory. " 7 The Wake would seem to posit the lyrical "pleasure of merging with a rediscovered, hypostasized maternal body," identified by Kristeva as the lost "phallic Mother who gathers us all into orality and anality, into the pleasure of fusion and rejection. " 8 In Anna Livia Plurabelle's lilting, lyrical utterances, Joyce taps what Kristeva delineates as the "pre-thetic" semiotic chora of ''articulations heterogeneous to signification and to the sign. '' ''As the addressee of every demand, the mother occupies the place of alterity. Her replete body, the receptacle and guarantor of demands, takes the place of all narcissistic, hence imaginary, effects and gratifications.' ' 9 In psychoanalytic terms, the fantasized phallic mother melds with a de-identifying oceanic whole that assimilates both male and female authority and offers a mirror of that illusory plenitude ascribed by the subject to the inscrutable Other. In this "drury" world of anxiety and narcissism, the maternal figure provides a symbol of fetishistic displacement for the individual searching for embryonic bliss and seeking a return to infant omnipotence. But the trauma of ananke, the introduction of a reality

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principle that bursts the illusion of infantile grace, haunts the underside of prelapsarian happiness. In pre-Oedipal bonding, the child is wholly dependent on a beneficent mother who both valorizes its existence and satisfies its physical needs. This amorphous maternal figure can titillate but refuse sensory satisfaction: arousing desire, she may, at will, either grant or withhold the vital pleasures of mammary nurturance. The phallic matriarch offers stimulation and exoneration, a promise of pain and pleasure that fills in the gaps of disrupted patriarchal authority and suggests a fetishistic supplement to the lost potency of the castrated Father. In Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle adopts a ''femaline'' river-speech that writes itself against the stony language of male symbolic discourse. Naming herself in the language of maternal connotation, she challenges the authority of the male as Logos and law-giver through utterances that combine symbolic and semiotic linguistic practices in a letter whose literal meaning can never fully be decoded. Anna flows through the Wake into an inundating phallic motherhood. As the River Liffey, she ingests and assimilates the male ground of existence - the paternal mountain (HCE/Finnegan) gradually eroded by the sinuous course of a female fleuve embracing its banks. Her phallic potential is metaphorically manifested in the one hundred and eleven (or thousand and one) children who project the creative power of the mother into the male-dominated world of patriarchal privilege: "her furzeborn sons and dribblederry daughters" (FW 210. 4- 5) In opposition to the phallocentric discourse of the Father, Anna "speaks fluid" and, through the subversive parole of "gramma's grammar," restructures the Lacanian letter of the unconscious in a revolutionary ''femaline mamafesta. '' She reinscribes a rhythmic, maternal, semiotic voice into the primordial hill of creative chaos, the litter of letters that suggests the scriptural elements of the Logos, the compositional units of the Kabbalah whose mystic import was initially formulated through sacred books that articulate the androgynous voice of Adam Kaedmon. At the beginning of the Wake, Joyce depicts a metaphorical mound of preconscious signifiers, a lexical word-heap in which both HCE and ALP are buried "fux to fux" (FW 177. 36). The lightning explosion of a Viconian Father-God, a transcendental signifier of authority and mastery, erupts in a thunderburst of seminal potential - obscure, incomprehensible, and definitely threatening to 208

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awestruck inhabitants of the planet. It is the task of Anna Livia to reinvent the symbol-system of Thor the hammer-hurler, old Father Ocean into whose stormy waters she ultimately flows. ALP is mistress of a fluid, feminine discourse that assimilates patriarchal language and reiterates its ominous warnings in sympathetic, creative form. If the paternal voice is imperious and sonorous, the "mother tongue" of ALP is reduced, finally, to a whisper of polyphonic labial "Lps" in the last lyrical passages of the Wake. Anna's provocative river-speech constantly subverts phallocentric discourse and chants lisping libidinal iterations that arise out of the unconscious and appeal to a collective, Jungian racial memory. In Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia is the source of an explosive, hysterical bisexual discourse. She spews forth words in flagrant violation of the symbolic law of the Father, re-playing the scenes of psychological life in the world of the imaginary. Her fluidity is fluvial, and the effluvia of quotidian experience - of desire and guilt, fear and sexual fascination - are carried off into the oceanic tides of a Father/God/transcendental signifier. Her origins are mythically associated with the vaporous ether that produces rainclouds and thunderstorms, fertility and flood. Just as in hysterical discourse vagina and mouth are one, so Anna's womb/delta is rife with words and with children, menstural iterations and periodic rhapsodies. The two poles of the body are conflated, and hysteria prevails. Through perpetual verbal gymnastics, Anna Livia is outmaneuvering the symbolic order in linguistic utterances that flood the text with a semiotic flow that proves unconstrained and untranscribable. According to HeU~ne Cixous, woman "doesn't create a monarchy of her body or her desire. . . . Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide. . . . She alone . . . has never ceased to hear what-comes-before-language reverberating. . . . Her rising: IS not erection. But diffusion. Not the shaft. The vessel. " 10 Unleashed and raging, she belongs to the race of waves. She arises, she approaches, she lifts up, she reaches, covers over, washes a shore, flows embracing the cliff's least undulation, already she is another, arising again, throwing the fringed vastness of her body up high, follows herself, and covers over, uncovers, polishes, makes the stone body shine with the gentle

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undeserting ebbs, which return to the shoreless nonorigin, as if she recalled herself in order to come again as never before. 11 The name of the Father in Finnegans Wake, like the unutterable Tetragrammaton of Yahweh, cannot be spoken. It floats, detached from its paternal signifier, in the shadow of the text, constantly present in the mode of absence. Inaccessible to human articulation, the progenitor's presence erupts in those explosions of patriarchal authority that signify a transcendent law, a power of judgment so ominous as to inaugurate the Viconian fear-words of human speech. The discourse of the Father suggests paternal power projected through imaginary tropes onto a world of nature that invites appropriation but eludes human mastery. The archetypal patriarch, "the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist" (FW 214. 11- 12), longs to inscribe his phallocratic signature onto the resistant body of a resilient Mother Earth. Obsessed with a will to power and domination, he seeks to subjugate Gea-Tellus, the goddess of nature and world, who always escapes his aggressive attempts at conquest. "The pawdrag? The fawthrig? Shoe! Hear are no phanthares in the room at all, avikkeen. No bad bold faathern" (FW 565. 18-20). HCE's "dunleary obelisk," of amazing "lungitube," has "phoenishly" fallen, along with Finnegan from his ladder and Humpty Dumpty from his wall. "First we feel. Then we fall" ( FW 62 7. 11). The powerful figure of Gea-Tellus gives way in Finnegans Wake to an archetypal image of female fluidity evinced through an endless riverrun of maternal/pre-Oedipal pulsions. If the world is a text that inscribes the symbol-system of phallocratric law onto the consciousness of every individual, then the object of the creative artist is to subvert the law and language of the Father by adopting the feminine langue of maternal desire. Exuding excrescences of hysterical speech, female discourse revels in a fluid, metamorphic mode. Its polysemic dissemination of verbal meaning suggests a scattering of male seed (or semes) in fields of maternal mud, the boue that gives birth to those brain-children created by artist and imaginary muse in an act of radical, subversive copulation. Finnegans Wake writes itself in the wake of Anna's riverrun by scattering seeds of male logic in babbling, carnivalesque play. The meaning of the text resides in slippage - in those symbolic gaps that deracinate language from logical formulations and create a

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world of words that indefinitely defers both meaning and closure. Anna's letter is not merely part of the larger text, but a microcosmic mamafesta that forms a nexus in the Wake's linguistic unconscious. The whole of the Wake flows from the eggburst of ALP's henmissive, a litter of letters that subverts the gospel of grandpa's repressive Oedipal codes. In the text of the Wake, speech has given way to polyphonic discourse, and the voice that dominates Joyce's metaphorical muttering is the voice of a female creator reintegrating the fragments of a murdered godhead, breathing life into the limbs of a sexually moribund spouse, and calling the male husband/father/ divinity to arise from the ashes of sleep and death, from the "hundering blundering dunderfunder of plundersundered manhood," to awake "renascenent; fincarnate" (F~'V 596. 4) in a "supernoctural" moment of "Array! Surrection!" (FW 593. 2-3). Anna, the mater (Die Mutter) that mutters her river-speech throughout the text, reinscribes a maternal message into a world potentially embryonic in the middenheap of history. The mud of creation blends earth and feces, silt and sludge, to give birth to a universe of meaning. The significance of grandma's grammar finally resists logocentric interpretation and remains insistently fluid, fragmented, enigmatic, and incomprehensible. It subverts and eludes the male symbolic register that forever attempts to master the jouissance of female (and bisexual) desire. How, finally, should a feminist reader approach Joyce? If this were an lthacan catechetical question, the response would be obvious, though polymorphous: with care, certainly; with a sense of delight and appreciation; with skepticism and circumspection; and with a carnivalesque spirit of fun, play, amusement, and curiosity. From certain parallactic perspectives, Joyce's postmodern oeuvre can be envisaged as contiguous with the projects of feminist fabulation. Like ecriture feminine, his writing annuls classical notions of identity and origin, of metaphysical authority and textual closure. Exploring those schizoid gaps between socially constructed binary oppositions, it plays with an endless dissemination of sexual difference that eludes the Oedipal configurations of patriarchal power. Although Joyce depicts, in the world of Dubliners, a misogynist society dominated by archaic sexual stereotypes, he mocks and challenges at every point the stultifying sex-role attributions that prove ubiquitous in turn-of-the-century Ireland. His canon evolves

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from a seeringly realistic portrait of Edwardian sexual politics, Irish puritanism, and Celtic sentimentality to the subversive textual exposition of Molly Bloom's climactic utterances and Anna Livia Plurabelle's river-speech - a polyglottic discourse arising from the linguistic unconscious of the text itself. Joyce's writing flows sinuously, like ALP's riverrun, from the dramatization of repression in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist to the exuberant affirmation of an unrepressed language of desire in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. A female story dialogically emerges from Joyce's master narrative, appropriates its textual authority, and gradually deconstructs the linguistic codes essential to the logocentric and phallocentric discourse not only of "dear dirty Dublin" but of western patriarchal culture. Joyce, imagining himself in the role of "femaline" creator, adopts a female subject-position and incorporates into the symbolic register of his writing the semiotic pulsions of a pre-referential (M)Other tongue that continually subverts the patrius sermo of his literary forebears. Unlike a modernist such as D. H. Lawrence, he never attempts to speak for all women or to compose literary guidebooks to successful heterosexuality. By playing a multiplicity of parts in the Circean drama of fictional fabulation and imaginatively oscillating between gender polarities, he releases from the textual unconscious of Finnegans Wake revolutionary iterations of a culturally repressed language of bisexual desire. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! ... End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the (FW 628. 6-7, 13 -16) The last word of Finnegans Wake is uttered by Anna Livia Plurabelle, but it is the weakest word in the language - the definite article which, by definition, seeks a substantive as its complement. The Wake ends on a note of insatiable desire: the word "the" reaches out, futilely, for a compatible term to introduce. The Logos, sought, eludes the desiring speaker eager to sustain the salutary metaphysical presence of verbal affirmation . Linguistic longing remains unsatisfied, and the text refuses closure in a way that a scholarly study, or an individual life, cannot.

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INTRODUCTION: DEFUSING THE PATRIARCHAL CAN(N)ON 1 Jacques Lacan, .Feminine Sexuality, p. 87. Lacan notes that "Freud revealed this imaginary function of the phallus . . . to be the pivot of the symbolic process that completes in both sexes the questioning of the sex by the castration complex" (Ecrits: A Selection, p. 198). 2 Arthur Power, Conversations, p. 35. See Carolyn Heilbrun's "Afterword" to Women in Joyce for a description of Joyce as a "man who hated women" (pp. 215-16). Bonnie Scott's Joyce and Feminism and Richard Brown's James Joyce and Sexuality offer excellent accounts of Joyce's feminist backgrounds. 3 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, pp. 50, 116. Jacques Lacan also describes "how everything gets ascribed to the woman in so far as she represents, in the phallocentric dialectic, the absolute Other'' (Feminine Sexuality, p. 95). 4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 239-40. 5 Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology, pp. 134-5. 6 Cheri Register, "American Feminist Literary Criticism." 7 An Oedipal theme pervades Joyce's writing, and many of his heroes find themselves in psychic conflict with a maternal figure. Stephen Dedalus is haunted by Mother Ireland and Mother Church, institutions sustained by the matronage of Mary Dedalus, who returns in Ulysses as an engulfing specter, a ghost that threatens to devour her son and destroy his artistic potential. Sheldon Brivic offers an extensive discussion of the Oedipal complexities of A Portrait in the first section of Joyce Between Freud and Jung, "Stephen Oedipus" (pp. 15- 83). In "The Song of the Wandering Aengus," Mark Shechner argues that the whole of Joyce's work rests on a "psychic base of oral need and oral insufficiency" and that Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake all embody an unconscious quest for the lost and nurturant mother. According to Shechner, Joyce's central fantasy, prefigured in his narrative essay ''A Portrait of the Artist," "is one of ecstatic oral merger with an omnibus whore/Virgin/saint/muse/temptress whose very ambiguity is emblematic

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of the m1ssmg mother" (pp. 84, 78). 8 See Ruth Bauerle, "Bertha's Role in Exiles." 9 Jacqueline Rose explains that for Lacan, "men and women are only ever in language. . .. All speaking beings must line themselves up on one side or the other of this division, but anyone can cross over and inscribe themselves on the opposite side from that to which they are anatomically destined" (Sexuality, p. 73). Rose notes that Lacanian psychoanalysis "shifts the concept of bisexuality - not an undifferentiated sexual nature prior to symbolic difference (Freud's earlier sense), but the availability to all subjects of both positions in relation to that difference itself" (ibid., p. 73n). 10 Philip Toynbee, "A Study of James Joyce's Ulysses," p. 282; Marilyn French, The Book as World, p. 259. 11 For realistic exposures of Molly, see David Hayman, ''The Empirical Molly," and Elaine Unkeless, "The Conventional Molly Bloom." 12 See Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake"; Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word; and Stephen Heath, "Joyce in Language," "Ambiviolences," and "Trames de lecture.'' 13 Julia Kristeva, Polylogue, p. 16. Translation mine. 14 ibid. 15 Jacques Lacan's Seminaire XX: Encore celebrates woman as "not-all," the anti-universal par excellence, the "pure space" of supplementary jouissance that partakes of the infinite. Lacan writes: "There is no such thing as The woman, where the definite article stands for the universal. There is no such thing as The woman since of her essence, ... she is not all. . . . It none the less remains that if she is excluded by the nature of things, it is precisely that in being not all, she has, in relation to what the phallic function designates of jouissance, a supplementary jouissance" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 144). The French term ''jouissance" cannot, in effect, be translated into English, since it conflates notions of sexual orgasm, intellectual enjoyment, sensuous pleasure, and emotional ecstasy. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p. x. As Betsy Wing explains in the glossary accompanying her translation of Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, ''total sexual ecstasy" is the most common connotation of jouissance, "but in contemporary French philosophical, psychoanalytic, and political usage, it does not stop there, and to equate it with orgasm would be an oversimplication." Jouissance is "a word with simultaneously sexual, political, and economic overtones. Total access, total participation, as well as total ecstasy are implied. At the simplest level of meaning - metaphorical - woman's capacity for multiple orgasm indicates that she has the potential to attain something more than Total, something extra abundance and waste, . . . Real and unrepresentable'' (Cixous and Clement, The Newly Born Woman, p. 165). 16 In Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, Brenda Maddox offers a fascinating biographical portrait of Nora Barnacle Joyce, the Galway

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girl who fled to the continent with an egotistical genius who demanded a lifetime of nurturance and support. 17 Although Joyce makes wvert reference to Freudian theory as "the new Viennese school Mr. Magee spoke of" (U 9: 780) in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter of Ulysses, he always daimed to distrust the notions of Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud, he felt, was far too reductive and mechanical in his interpretation of symbols, "a house being a womb, a fire a phallus" (JJ 382). Nevertheless, critics like Frank Budgen, Richard EHmann, and Elliott Gose all suspect .Joyce of fairly heavy, if unacknowledged, reliance on the popular theories of Freudian psychology "in the air" among the intelligentsia of Europe in the first two decades of this century . In The Consciousness of Joyce, Richard EHmann includes among the holdings of Joyce's 1920 library Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life ( 191 7 German edition) ; A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci (1910 German edition); and Ernest Jones's study The Problem of Hamlet and the Oedipus Conflict ( 1911 German edition). EHmann hypothesizes, furthermore, that Joyce made conscious use of Freudian theory in his composition of Ulysses while scrupulously avoiding "Freud's classical model of family relations as Joyce had sampled it." The relevance of Joyce's early acquaintaince with Freud's writing "can hardly be overstressed. The three essays 'burst in upon his porcelain revery' with their transformations, combinations, and divisions of self, their picture of its abasements and suppressed appetites and ambivalences, which were as yet largely untapped for conscious literature" (pp. 54-6 and Appendix). For further discussion of Joyce's use of Freudian sources, see Elliott B. Gose, Jr, Transformation, pp. 95-101; and John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, pp. 15-18 and passim. 18 For an excellent glossary of Lacanian terminology, see Alan Sheridan's "Translator's Note," in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, pp. vii- xii. In describing Lacanian desire, Sheridan explains that the "human individual sets out with a particular organism, with certain biological needs, which are satisfied by certain objects . . . . All speech is demand; it presupposes the Other to whom it is addressed, whose very signifiers it takes over in its formulation . .. there is no adequation between the need and the demand that conveys it; indeed, it is the gap between them that constitutes desire . ... Desire ... is not an appetite: it is essentially excentric and insatiable'' (p. viii). Noting the function of radical lack (manque) in the construction of the Lacanian subject, Jacqueline Rose observes: "The mirror image is central to Lacan's account of subjectivity, because its apparent smoothness and totality is a myth. The image in which we first recognise ourselves is a misrecognition. . . . For Lacan the subject is constituted through language - the mirror image represents the moment when the subject is located in an order outside itself to which it will henceforth refer. Language can only operate by designating an object in its absence. Symbolisation starts, therefore, when the child gets its first sense that

215

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19 20

21

22

something could be m1ssmg; words stand for objects . . . . For Lacan, the subject can only operate within language by constantly repeating that moment of fundamental and irreducible division. The subject is therefore constituted in language as this division or splitting" (Sexuality, pp. 53-4). Lacan writes that "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference resulting from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their splitting" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 81 ). Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 8. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa"; Julia Kristeva, Revolution, p. 17. (I refer to the name of the Lacanian Father in the upper case, and to the biological or Freudian father in the lower case.) For Kristeva, as for Deleuze and Guattari, the pre-thetic "schizophrenic flow" exists "only through language, appropriating and displacing the signifier to practice within it the heterogeneous generating of the 'desiring machine' '' (ibid.). Kristeva insists that just as ''the feminine is defined as marginal under patriarchy, so the semiotic is marginal to language," and that one must "view this repression of the feminine in terms of positionality rather than of essences" (Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 166). She takes the controversial stance that "men can also be constructed as marginal by the symbolic order, as her analyses of male avant-garde artists (Joyce, Celine, Artaud, Mallarme, Lautreamont) have shown" (ibid.). Throughout the following study, I have assumed, like Kristeva, that a male author can successfully adopt and speak from a feminine subject-position in a work of fiction. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett alludes to Joyce as a modernist anomaly, but objects to his ostensibly derogatory portraits of woman as "nature," "unspoiled primeval understanding," and the "eternal feminine" (p. 285). More recently, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in No Man's Land, have launched a frontal attack on Joyce for his inauguration of "a new patrilinguistic epoch." They indict both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as male-biased projects of linguistic mastery perpetrating a "feat of legerdemain in which the materna lingua dissolved and resolved itself into a newly empowered patrius sermo" (p. 260). See Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader.

1: THROUGH A CRACKED LOOKING-GLASS

1

Engaged in controversy with Grant Richards over the publication of Dubliners, Joyce declared: "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous

216

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2

3

4

5

6

7

meanness" (Letters II, 134). "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass" (Letters I, 63-4). Jacqueline Rose observes: "Sexuality belongs in this area of instability played out in the register of demand and desire, each sex coming to stand, mythically and exclusively, for that which could satisfy and complete the other" (Sexuality, p. 56). In "Dubliners: Women in Irish Society," Florence W alzl examines Joyce's female characters within the context of Dublin culture and analyzes gender attributions operative in late nineteenth-century Ireland. She concludes that "when Joyce pits men against women in his tales, it can be proved that drastic economic and social pressures actually forced Dubliners into such situations of frustration, deprivation, and hostility. He spares neither sex" (p. 53). Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, pp. 173-4. "The demand for love," writes Lacan, "can only suffer from a desire whose signifier is alien to it. If the desire of the mother is the phallus, then the child wishes to be the phallus so as to satisfy this desire" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 83). Phillip Herring, inJoyce's Uncertainty Principle, successfully anatomizes the "gnomonic nature" of language in "The Sisters" - a language filled with ellipses, hiatuses, silences, malapropisms, and empty, ritualistic dialogue (pp. 11-18). According to Jean-Michel Rabate in "Silence in Dubliners,'' the incomplete figure of the dead or absent father is inscribed in the text of Dubliners "until finally everything will appear hinged on the silent name of the capitalised Father" (p. 48). See Waisbren and Walzl, "Paresis and the Priest"; J. B. Lyons, James Joyce and Medicine, pp. 84-91; and Zack Bowen, "Joyce's Prophylactic Paralysis: Exposure in Dubliners." Hugh Kenner, in "Signs on a White Field," comments on the ironic contrast between Joyce's tale of two sisters mourning a deceased sibling and the biblical narrative detailing Christ's resurrection of Lazarus at the behest of Mary and Martha in StJohn's gospel. "This brother lies in his coffin unresurrected . . . . We may guess at what went wrong with Father Flynn. He grasped that God did not choose him - perhaps out of nonexistence? And, prompted by the enigma of the title, we may even divine the story's scriptural model" (p. 210). In tracing "Joyce's Revision of 'The Sisters': From Epicleti to Modern Fiction,'' L. J. Morrissey focuses on the progressive inconclusiveness of Joyce's text and its metamorphosis from a "readerly" narrative in the first-published Homestead version to a "writerly" offering in Dubliners. "As our desire to create an enclosed, single, readerly text is increasingly frustrated, our sensitivity to the 'word' of the writerly text is sharply increased" (p. 48). Juliet Mitchell notes: "The identity that seems to be that of the subject is in fact a mirage arising when the subject forms an image of itself by

217

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identifying with others' perception of it . . . . Lacan's human subject is . . . a being that can only conceptualise itself when it is mirrored back to itself from the position of another's desire" (in Mitchell and Rose, Feminine Sexuality, p. 5). In "Joyce: The (R)use of Writing," Helene Cixous offers a paradigmatic Freudian reading of "The Sisters" that concludes: "Desire (a homosexuality which is only admitted in the dark folds of a confessional) is eclipsed here, so swiftly, almost unnoticed, by the desire to kill" (p. 24). 8 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, in Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, sees as the fundamental premiss of Lacanian theory the "contention that the human psyche is composed of two different 'subjects': an objectlike narcissistic subject of being, and a speaking subject." The "first of the Lacanian subjects (the moi) gives rise to and remains perpetually entwined with the second (the je) for the duration of all conscious life . . . . The Lacanian ego (moi) ... is an ideal ego whose elemental form is irretrievable in conscious life, but it is reflected in its chosen identificatory objects (alter egos or ego ideals). The subject of speech (S or je) is distinct from the subject of identifications (ego or moi ), but they interact all the same. The conscious subject, thus viewed, is made up of 'inmixed' symbolic chains" (pp. 1-4). 9 Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, p. 64. In A Scrupulous Meanness, Edward Brandabur interprets the charge of "pederasty" literally and concludes that the boy in "An Encounter," like his predecessor in "The Sisters," "is lured by the mystery of initiation into a sadomasochistic system with a degenerate old man'' (p. 49). Donald Torchiana, in Backgrounds for Joyce's "Dubliners," provides a more historical interpretation of the encouter, suggesting that "Joyce presents us with a recrudescence of the sinister puritanism recalling Cromwell and his sadistic cruelties in Ireland" '(p. 45). 10 A number of readers have questioned Frank's sincerity and wondered if his intentions toward Eveline are, in fact, honorable. David Wright reminds us in Characters ofJoyce that "the word 'frank' appears elsewhere in Dubliners" in a "generally ironical" context and that "'going to Buenos Aires' was once a common euphemism for 'becoming a prostitute'" (pp. 24-5). In The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner emphasizes the implausibility of Frank's marriage proposal and suggests that this randy sailor "may have been less than Frank." Eveline simply "has a fiction in her head which arranges for her the very little she knows of a man named Frank." Her "daydream of escape" is founded on a fictional construct tinged with the rhetoric of "shopgirls' romances printed in magazines.'' Reflecting the illusions of popular culture at the turn of the century, Eveline feeds on sentimental fantasies, imagining ''a home waiting for her'' in a foreign land and a beautiful future with her handsome lover. In this ironic evocation of a "real Dublin ... and a fictitious Buenos Aires," Joyce deliberately maximizes Eveline's "ignorance and her pathos, and emphasizes his earliest and most constant insight, that people live in stories that structure their worlds"

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(pp. 34-9). See also Bonnie Scott's biographical discussion of Margaret/Eveline in Joyce and Feminism, pp. 60-1. 11 Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, p. 113. On "Derevaun Seraun," William Tindall cites Patrick Henchy of Dublin's National Library to suggest that the words are "corrupt Gaelic for 'the end of pleasure is pain' " (A Reader's Guide to James Joyce, p. 22). On the basis of information given him by John Garvin, Donald Torchiana translates the phrase as "Worms are the only end" (Backgrounds for Joyce's "Dubliners," p. 75). In "Some Notes on Language and Atmosphere in Dubliners," Johannes Hedberg offers a similar reading of this demotic Galwegian Irish to mean "only end: maggots" (p. 117). Joyce's own assessment of the Irish domestic worship of hearth and home was recorded in a letter to Nora during their courtship - a communication which details a maternal death similar to that described in "Eveline": "My home was simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited. My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father's ill-treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin - a face gray and wasted with cancer - I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim'' (Letters II, 48). 12 In response to the printer's objection to "Two Gallants," Joyce asked in a letter to Grant Richards: "Is it the small gold coin ... or the code of honour which the two gallants live by which shocks him? . . I would strongly recommend to him the chapters wherein Ferrero examines the moral code of the soldier and (incidentally) of the gallant" (Letters II, 132- 3). In Joyce's Politics, Dominic Manganiello explains that in Guglielmo Ferrero's book L 'Europa giovane "the moral code of the soldier consists in arousing men's 'inert brutality.' Ferrero associates this militaristic activity, which he considered typical of the Germanic races, with the art of gallantry" (p. 50). See also Robert Spoo, "'Una Piccola Nuvoletta': Ferrero's Young Europe and Joyce's Mature Dubliners Stories.'' There is some disagreement as to whether the young woman filched the coin from her employer or saved what would have been a considerable amount of money from her hardearned slavey's wages. 13 As Florence Walzl observes, "the frustration of Dublin's women - a consequence of their dull, empty rounds of existence - results in a circular plot in which the evils of the first generation are visited upon the second." In both "Eveline" and "The Boarding House," "each girl makes a life choice that insures her a repetition of her mother's life." Walzl concludes: "As mothers, so daughters. It is clear in these stories that the situation of the first generation becomes the condition of the second and that mothers tend to transform their daughters into replicas of themselves" ("Dubliners: Women in Irish Society," pp. 47-9). For a summary of the Dorans' future domestic troubles, see Fritz Senn, " 'The Boarding House' Seen as a Tale of Misdirection," p. 412.

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NOTES

14 Helene Cixous remarks that ''Chandler is one of those men who lived curled up in a foetal position, not daring to move lest they be flung out into the outside world. He secretes his own protective cocoon, with childlike, womanlike care. He is still gently nestling within his illusions, preparing his secret self to be born to the glorious destiny of a poet" (The Exile of James joyce, p. 91). According to Bonnie Scott, the "Chandlers have different fantasies of a happy life - Chandler's centering upon modest artistic acclaim; Annie's, upon the popular media's concept of house beautiful. Both are delusions in which one spouse fails to participate" (joyce and Feminism, p. 63). Scott also culls from Joyce's letters evidence that he, like Chandler, felt "typical paternal jealousy" at the birth of his son Giorgio and was troubled by a "sense of rivalry" for Nora's divided attentions (p. 69). On 4 December 1905, Joyce wrote to his Aunt Josephine: "I imagine the present relations between Nora and myself are about to suffer some alteration . . . . It is possible that I am partly to blame . . . . I daresay I am a difficult person for any woman to put up with but on the other hand I have no intention of changing. Nora does not seem to make much difference between me and the rest of the men she has known . . . . I am not a very domestic animal - after all, I suppose I am an artist - and sometimes when I think of the free and happy life which I have (or had) every talent to live I am in a fit of despair'' (Letters II, 128-9). 15 Sigmund Freud, "Femininity," in New Introductory Lectures, pp. 133-4. 16 Chandler, says Donald Torchiana, "is the prisoner of love, and his prison is what has passed for love in his altogether loveless life" (Backgrounds for joyce's "Dubliners," p. 133). It is ironic that "Little Chandler admires Byron, though for the wrong poem" (p. 131). Torchiana believes that Joyce chose as the prototype for Chandler's character one of the lesser lights of the Irish Renaissance, George Roberts, whose sentimental, "snivelling" poetry Joyce complained about in a January 1905 letter to Stanislaus. 17 As Philip Slater points out in The Glory of Hera, in a household that is mother-dominant and father-avoidant, the woman tends to treat her son as a substitute husband. At times, she may relate to him as an idealized spouse; but such maternal devotion is often characterized by a "deeply narcissistic ambivalence." The mother "does not respond to the child as a separate person, but as both an expression of and cure for her narcissistic wounds. Her need for self-expansion and vindication requires her both to exalt and to belittle her son, to feed on and to destroy him" (p. 33). Such a pattern of socialization results in a vicious cycle: ''A society which derogates women produces envious mothers who produce narcissistic males who are prone to derogate women" (p. 45). Reacting against a formidable matriarchal figure, boys develop an unstable self-image that demands continual validation in the outer world. (Consider Jimmy Doyle, Ignatius Gallaher, Little Chandler, and Farrington.) In Dubliners, men tend to flee the prison of

220

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a matrifocal household for the sanctuary of the Irish pub, Guinness ale , and a bantering relationship of easy good-fellowship with male cronies who are also in flight from domestic entrapment. 18 Florence Walzl, analyzing Maria as a typal paradigm, remarks that "the narrative modulates between Maria as a Virgin Mary figure ... and the figure of a Celtic witch in her physical appearance and troublemaking" ("A Book of Signs and Symbols," p. 120). Mary Reynolds believes that "the witchlike appearance of Maria ... clearly owes something to the presence of another virgin in lriferno 20, the prophetess Manto" ("The Dantean Design," p. 125). Richard Brown sees George Moore's story "Mildred Lawson" as an influence on Joyce's portrait of Maria (JaTTII!s Joyce and Sexuality, pp. 127-8). 19 Maria omits the following verse from Balfe's Bohemian Girl: I dream'd that suitors besought my hand, That knights upon bended knee, And with vows no maiden heart could withstand That they pledged their faith to me. And I dream' d that one of this noble host Came forth my hand to claim; Yet I also dream'd, which charmed me most, That you loved me still the same . For an excellent discussion of Joyce's use of The Bohemian Girl, see R.B. Kershner, Joyce, Balchtin, and Popular Literature, pp. 63-8. 20 In " 'A Painful Case' : The Movement of a Story through a Shift in Voice," Suzanne Katz Hyman offers a revealing analysis of the way in which Duffy uses language as a mode of logocentric control. A ''walking embodiment of the Cartesian split," Duffy has recourse to aphorism, cliche, and self-irony for purposes of intellectual detachment. He manipulates language ''to color and control experience so as to make it manageable." At the end of the story, when "language gives way to silence,'' the tale culminates in two non-verbal images: one of venal lovers, and the other a sinister, worm-like train (pp . 111, 115, 117 -18). Donald Torchiana reminds us that Duffy is a failed and ironic Tristan, whose "residence in Chapelizod suggests the relevance of the Tristan and Isolde legend" from Richard Wagner's opera (Backgrounds for Joyce's "Duhliners," p. 165 ). 21 Unlike Richard EHmann and Bjorn Tysdael, Bonnie Scott is convinced that Joyce's essays "Drama and Life" and "Ibsen's New Drama" manifest a "distinct interest in women's experience" and illustrate a keen "admiration for Ibsen's feminism" (Joyce and Feminism, p. 47). In "What is a Woman . .. a Symbol of?: A Lacanian Reading of Joyce's 'The Dead'," Garry Leonard observes: "Gabriel desires to be the desire of woman - of Gretta - because she can then provide what he lacks, or rather protect him from realizing that he lacks anything. Gretta is Gabriel's symptom; something which, if he could only have it, would complete him . The symptom emits something of infinite

221

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value, yet indecipherable - like distant music." See also Jacques Lacan, "Joyce le symptome." 22 In Notes for Joyce, Don Gifford summarizes the poignant narrative of the western Irish ballad, "The Lass of Aughrim": "The lass, relatively low born, is seduced and abandoned by a Lord. With her child in her arms she seeks the Lord in his castle or tower and is deceived and turned away by the Lord's mother, who apparently imitates her son's voice through the closed door. The quoted lines are a variant of the Lass's complaint as she stands in the rain at that point. Rejected, as she thinks, the Lass puts to sea, and she and her child are drowned. . .. The ballad closes with the Lord's lament and with the curse he calls down on his mother" (p. 83). According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce was quite fond of the ballad, which he urged Nora Barnacle's mother to sing for him on a visit to Galway. He found the song's final verses especially moving: If you'll be the lass of Aughrim As I am taking you mean to be Tell me the first token That passed between you and me. 0 don't you remember That night on yon lean hill When we both met together Which I am sorry now to tell. The rain falls on my yellow locks And the dew it wets my skin; My babe lies cold within my arms Lord Gregory let me in. (JJ 286) 23 Without question, Furey has been elevated in Gretta's fantasy life to the status of romantic hero and mystified courtly lover. Lacan asks: "Indeed, why not acknowledge that if there is no virility which castration does not consecrate, then for the woman it is a castrated lover or a dead man (or even both at the same time) who hides behind the veil where he calls on her adoration" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 95). See also Ruth Bauerle, "Date Rape, Mate Rape." 24 Mark Osteen, in "Gabriel's Sarcasm: A Lost Line in 'The Dead,'" argues for the textual restoration of "a sentence, present in those latestage Maunsel proofs but absent from all published versions" of "The Dead" and here inserted in brackets from the James Joyce Archive. Vincent Pecora makes a convincing case in '' 'The Dead' and the Generosity of the Word" for Gabriel's unconscious duplicity in his sentimental self-laceration and construction of a ''myth of generous selfsacrifice" geared to appropriate Gretta's melodramatic narrative. 25 In the passion-vanity dialectic described by Rene Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Michael Furey exemplifies the "passionate person ... distinguished by his emotional autonomy, by the spontaneity of his

222

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26

27

28

29

desires, by his absolute indifference to the opinion of Others" (p. 19). Gabriel, in contrast, acts as a vaniteux whose desire is contingent on both external and internal mediation. Such mediated passion, Girard tells us, "defines desire according to Another" (p. 4), and it is only the other's desire, ''real or presumed, which makes this object infinitely desirable in the eyes of the subject'' (p. 7). Michael Furey proves, for Gabriel, to be ''both the instigator of desire and a relentless guardian forbidding its fulfillment" (p. 35). According to Brenda Maddox, the fictional Michael Furey is a composite character based on the object of Nora Barnacle's "first serious crush," Michael Feeney, who died at the age of sixteen of typhoid and pneumonia in February, 1897; and on her "later admirer, Michael Bodkin," who died at twenty of tuberculosis in February, 1900 (Nora, pp. 15-17). According to Lacan, "woman is a symptom" for masculine desire (Feminine Sexuality, p. 168). "For the soul to come into being, she, the woman, is differentiated from it, and this has always been the case" (p. 156). At the "level of fiction which is commonly labelled sexual commerce," the speaking subject has "recourse to the imaginary register" and "sexual difference gets transposed into the question with which the Other, from the place of its lack, interrogates the subject on jouissance'' (pp. 120-1 ). Jacqueline Rose explains: ''As negative to the man, woman becomes a total object of fantasy (or an object of total fantasy), elevated into the place of the Other and made to stand for its truth. Since the place of the Other is also the place of God, this is the ultimate form of mystification" (Sexuality, p. 74). See also Jacques Derrida, "Fors. '' Joseph Buttigieg interprets the scene as the sudden eruption of "involuntary memory" into Gabriel's firmly defended consciousness: "What Gabriel experiences in this scene is a loss of control. The paralyzed world of habit to which he is accustomed collapses as realities he has long been blind to arise like Lazarus from the dead. Gabriel suffers a defeat or a fall, but he also obtains, for a brief moment, a new vision . . . . His egocentrism surrenders to generosity and sympathy'' (A Portrait of the Artist, p. 38). Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, p. 141. Vincent Pecora charges that in "the name of Michael Furey, his legendary hero and personal saint, Gabriel sacrifices himself to the past, and to the dead, more profoundly than any of his compatriots does. Moreover, he appears completely assured of the sincerity of his gesture . . . . Gabriel has reproduced in himself ... the story of Christ." In Pecora's view, "Gabriel in no way overcomes or transcends the conditions of his existence. Rather, he merely recapitulates them unconsciously" "'The Dead' and the Generosity of the Word," (p. 243). Like Richard Ellmann, Florence Walzl sees the story as a journey of development "from insularity and egotism to humanitarianism and love" ("Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of 'The Dead'"). Donald Torchiana interprets the ending as a symbolic evocation of the

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resurrection of the Irish imagination: "The grace of snow ... has indeed about it something of the harbinger of the Easter Lily. Moreover, a wise man from the East of Ireland has experienced an epiphany, just as the feast, service, and ending of the book demand. . . . 'The Dead' in the long run is a story of growth and life and spring" (Backgrounds for Joyce's "Dubliners," p. 253). Edward Brandabur, in contrast, diagnoses Gabriel as a neurotic victim of "compulsive sadomasochism" whose hostility towards his wife finds ''an effective mythic and psychological structure in the story of Michael Furey" (A Scrupulous Meanness, p. 122). Charles Peake, in less vehement terms, interprets the book's culminating paragraph as a "critical evocation of resignation to spiritual death" (james Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist, p. 53). Mary Reynolds shares this assessment when she compares the "vision of a frozen Ireland" at the end of "The Dead" to Dante's description of a frozen world in the final canto of the Inferno. "The closing sentence of 'The Dead' recalls frozen Cocytus, Dante's last image of despair" ("The Dantean Design," p. 124). And finally, Vincent Pecora offers a powerful post-structuralist argument for the story's seering criticism of "institutionalized codes" and "the ideologically supported transformation of one set of illusions into another'' ('' 'The Dead' and the Generosity of the Word," p. 237). Gabriel, says Pecora, "mythologizes his existence in a literary emancipation that can in fact only repeat the contradictions and anxieties he longs to overcome" (p. 234).

2: STEPHEN DEDALUS AND WOMEN Stephen is clearly being inaugurated into the Lacanian symbolic register of male phallogocentrism. "As the first signifier of the social or Symbolic order," writes Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, "the Phallus commands exchange and communication. But it also symbolizes the nonclosure and disunity that it introduces permanently into the human subject by replacing the simultaneity of perception with the deferred nature of language and consciousness" (jacques Lacan, p. 281). See also Christine van Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance, pp. 14-16. 2 As Anika Lemaire explains, according to Lacanian theory, the childish "infans does not yet have language at his disposal. In the circuit of exchange between the parents, permutations of the 'I' and 'thou,' the subject is designated by a 'he' '' (Jacques Lacan, p. 69). At the moment of Spa/tung, the child "recuperates himself as a distinct entity as opposed to the primary merging of himself with his mother" (p. 57). Parallel to the Oedipus, he ''acquires full use of language through the appropriation of the grammatical category of the 'I'. The young child, who at first designates himself by his forename followed by the third person singular of the verb, realizes in a second stage the full assumption of his personality" (p. 8). The iteration of the irifans as subject of

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3

4

5 6

utterance hinges on a pre-Oedipal movement from lack to desire, then from desire to demand, a process whereby the subject "alienates himself in language, creates himself and fashions himself at will" (p. 161). In order to construct the ego, the individual "constitutes himself in discourse by splitting into two parts: subject of utterance and unconscious subject" (p. 161). Quoting Jung on "The Significance of the Father" (an essay found in Joyce's library), Jean Kimball observes that enuresis or bed-wetting may be seen, in Freudian terms, as "an infantile sexual substitute" ("Freud, Leonardo, and Joyce," p . 170). Hence the importance of maternal ministrations after Stephen has wet the bed . If the horn is interpreted as a "phallic synonym," then the sailor's hornpipe suggests repressed erotic interest in the mother. Stephen unconsciously identifies his female parent as a phallic mother whom he sexually desires but simultaneously fears. Kimball points out that "as early as 1911 or 1912 Joyce owned Freud's essay on Leonardo, which highlights the artist's relationship with his mother," and that he probably read Freud's 1905 publication of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, "which focused on the crucial effect of infant sexuality on the psychological destiny of the adult" (p. 165). For a list of the psychology books in Joyce's library and a discussion of their possible influence, see Richard EHmann, The Consciousness of joyce, pp. 53-9, and Appendix, pp . 109 and 114-115. Chester Anderson argues in "Baby Tuckoo : Joyce's 'Features of Infancy'" that in this scene Stephen "is threatened with 'castration' in the most classic way: by having his eyes pulled out, as Oedipus himself pulled out his with Jocasta's brooch." Anderson identifies Dante as the "terrible mother" or castrator and feels "it is important that the threat comes from Dante, the 'bad' mother split from the ' nice'" (p. 149). Anderson's distinction, however, obscures the revelation of Mary Dedalus as a female authority-figure. According to Freud, as the reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle, the ego must '' achieve a progressive conquest of the id." The ego "seeks to bring the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavors to substitute the reality principle for the pleasure principle which reigns unrestrictedly in the id" (Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 19, pp. 56, 25). Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, p. 28. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 122. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva suggests the hypothesis that "maternal authority is experienced first and above all, after the first essentially oral frustration, as sphincteral training. It is as if, while having been forever immersed in the symbolics of language, the human being experienced, in addition, an authority that was a ... repetition of the laws of language . Through frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is

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7

8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15

impressed and exerted. It is a 'binary logic,' a primal mapping of the body . . . . Maternal authority is the trustee of that mapping of the self's clean and proper body; it is distinguished from paternal laws within which, with the phallic phase and acquisition of language, the destiny of man will take shape" (pp. 71 - 2). In her essay on "The Dread of Woman," Karen Horney postulates that at the juncture between pre-Oedipal attachment and Oedipal separation, the young boy "feels or instinctively judges that his penis is much too small for his mother's genital and reacts with the dread of his own inadequacy, of being rejected and derided." The male child's frustration arouses a "twofold fury in him: first through the thrusting back of his libido upon itself, and secondly, through the wounding of his masculine self-regard." The boy's "reaction to that wound and to the dread of his mother that follows from it is obviously to withdraw his libido from her and to concentrate it on himself and his genital . . . . The female genital no longer exists for him" (Feminine Psychology, pp. 142-4). Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 136. ibid., p. 129. ibid., p. 135. Nancy Chodorow tells us that a child's dread of the mother is necessarily ambivalent: "Although a boy fears her, he also finds her seductive and attractive. He cannot dismiss and ignore her. Boys and men develop psychological and cultural/ideological mechanisms to cope with their fears without giving up women altogether. They create folk legends, beliefs, and poems that ward off the dread by externalizing and objectifying women. . . . On the one hand, they glorify and adore . . . . On the other, they disparage" (The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 183). Chodorow explains: "Denial of sense of connectedness and isolation of affect may be more characteristic of masculine development and may produce a more rigid and punitive superego. . .. Boys come to define themselves as more separate and distinct, with a greater sense of more rigid ego boundaries and differentiation. . . . Men's endopsychic object-world tends to be more fixed and simpler, and the masculine heritage of the Oedipus complex is that relational issues tend to be more repressed. Masculine personality, then, comes to be defined more in terms of denial of relation and connection" (ibid., p. 169). See Michel Foucault's discussion of the similarities among educational, penal, and military institutions in Discipline and Punish. Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera, pp. 416, 439. In Charles Rossman's view, Stephen perceives Emma "in a blend of falsifying images: tl.rst, as a vaguely religious figure, a nunlike innocent with a 'cowled head'; then, on the tram step below him, as a temptress trying to coax him out of his protective isolation, down from his height." The poem that he writes in her honor "substitutes for lived experience, refining the human actors out of existence. Here art, like

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religious grace in chapter three, signifies experiential death" ("Stephen Dedalus," pp. 118- 20). Helene Cixous offers an incisive critique of Stephen's narcissistic exercise: "The motto of the Jesuits, nailed down by its four full-stops, is opposed to the vague, floating, mysterious evocation of the woman's name. In the act of writing, both the real woman and the dream woman fade away; only the trace of a kiss remains. The poet embraces himself. . . . He longs to be metamorphosed; ... the artist gives himself poetry and writing in the place of the beloved" (The Exile of James Joyce, pp. 404-6). For a comprehensive discussion of Stephen's imitation of Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo, seeR. B. Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature, pp. 195-212. For an excellent analysis of Joyce's development of the character of Emma Clery from its inception in Stephen Hero, see Bonnie Scott, Joyce and Feminism, pp. 133-55. 16 Jacques Derrida, via Mallarme, insists that the noun spur is related "to the verb to spurn, that is, to disdain, to rebuff, to reject scornfully.'' The artistic spur (tperon) of creativity must be spurned as a physical presence in order to be re-created aesthetically as an object of desire (Spurs!Eperons, p. 41). Stephen's behavior, at this point, conforms to Jacques Lacan's analysis of courtly love: "It is an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it. ... For the man, whose lady was entirely, in the most servile sense of the term, his female subject, courtly love is the only way of coming off elegantly from the absence of sexual relation" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 141 ). 17 Jane Gallop comments: "Written language is a further mediation over oral, and it is in the written, mediated, more symbolic dimension that we find the mark of the father" (Feminism and Psychoanalysis, p. 130). Jacques Derrida declares in Spurs!Eperons that aesthetic style "also uses its spur (eperon) as a means of protection against the terrifying, blinding, mortal threat (of that) which presents itself, which obstinately thrusts itself into view. And style thereby protects the presence, the content, the thing itself . . . on the condition that it should not already . . . be that gaping chasm which has been deflowered in the unveiling of the difference" (p. 39). See also Maud EHmann, "Disremembering Dedalus.'' 18 As Julia Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror, abjection is a "precondition of narcissism" evoked by a "prohibition placed on the maternal body" (pp. 13-14). "We are no longer within the sphere of the unconscious but at the limit of primal repression that, nevertheless, has discovered an intrinsically corporeal and already signifying brand, symptom, and sign: repugnance, disgust, abjection. There is an effervescence of object and sign - not of desire but of intolerable significance" (p. 11). "The body's inside, in that case, shows up in order to compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside . . . . The abjection of those flows from within suddenly become the sole 'object' of sexual desire - a true 'ab-ject' where man,

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frightened, crosses over the horror of maternal bowels and, in an immersion that enables him to avoid coming face to face with an other, spares himself the risk of castration" (p. 53). 19 Julia Kristeva asks in Powers of Horror: "Why does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement, or everything that is assimilated to them, from nail-parings to decay, represent - like a metaphor that would have become incarnate - the objective frailty of symbolic order? ... Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death" (p. 71). 20 The language of this description is based on the murkier prose of a Nietzschean reverie that Joyce recorded as an "Epiphany" in 1903: ''What moves upon me from the darkness subtle and murmurous as a flood, passionate and fierce with an indecent movement of the loins? What leaps, crying in answer, out of me, as eagle to eagle in mid air, crying to overcome, crying for an iniquitous abandonment?" (Scholes and Kain, Workshop, p. 41). 21 Jeanne McKnight tells us that "Joyce's manuscript notes for Stephen Hero suggest that he had once intended Stephen's sexual initiation to have been oral. The plan was for Stephen to participate in Soixanteneuf" ("Unlocking the Word-Hoard," p. 427). See also Scholes and Kain, Workshop, p. 71. 22 Helene Cixous believes that until Anna Livia, Joyce's "portraits of women are far from appealing or charming: he sees woman as a mixture of two simplified aspects, the one attracting and the other repelling, her arms held out in welcome but also to grasp and hold, her flesh welcoming in order to bury and absorb. She is the contradiction to the artist's decision to fly away . . . . By her animal or mineral nature, woman can stand for pure beauty, and by her difference, by vagueness and aloofness, she may become partially divine, so that her distant image becomes the icon before which Joyce likes to prostrate himself" (The Exile of James Joyce, pp. 485-6). 23 Cixous notes that the hell of Father Arnall's sermon "is a model of organisation for physical and mental torture, a model of order and elegance in sadism, and thus could not fail to captivate Stephen's still rebellious mind. . .. Stephen indeed denies his sins, but cannot avoid hearing their language, which is a travesty of his own. . . . It is the artist in him that has been put to the torture. . . . Nietzsche used to say that 'I fear that we cannot rid ourselves of the notion of God, because we still believe in grammar'; it is this belief in grammar that is slowly dying in these convulsions of language and of Stephen's mind" (ibid., pp. 327- 30). 24 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 150-1. Sheldon Brivic feels that "sexual desire is linked in Stephen's mind to dread of being reduced to a woman" ("Joyce in Progress," p. 315). 25 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 166-7.

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26 Anthony Roche, in an article on "Stephen's Vision," suggests an analogy between this passage and the Gaelic aisling or vision-poem, with its "open declaration of sensual delight." "Magic and metamorphosis are invoked at the very outset of the description of the girl; they work with the bird similes (the images of a seabird, a crane, swan's down, and dove) to suggest the world of Celtic legend where the children of Lir were magically transformed into swans, the souls of those who died young took flight for the Otherworld in the shape of birds" (p. 328). See also F. L. Radford, "Daedalus and the Bird-Girl." 27 In The Ordeal of Stephen Dedalus, Edmund Epstein identifies this woman as a prostitute; the text, however, seems to counterpoint her image with the Nighttown setting. For Epstein, the bird-girl "is the earth itself, the 'vegetable chaos' of earthly life" (p. 99). Charles Rossman feels that the wading girl "is the mirror of Stephen's emotional state, the selfserving projection of a doomed yearning. She is the natural descendant of the imagined 'harlots with gleaming jewel eyes,' who had previously stimulated Stephen's orgies of auto-eroticism" ("Stephen Dedalus," p. 121). 28 Florence Howe, in a feminist critique of the scene's realistic context, sees the delicate, crane-like figure as "land-bound." She feels that Stephen's "ambivalence towards the young girl is at once a combination of his earlier idealistic view of women and his experience with a prostitute as well as his way of moving past that to declaim himself a man and an artist . . . . The artist can fly and create, even in motion. We women are of the earth . . . . The male artist, whether he is Stephen or Joyce or someone else, must conceive his power, or his difference from women, must take his measure against them, must finally define the two sexes as different species" ("Feminism and Literature," pp. 263-4). In A Portrait of the Artist, Joseph Buttigieg offers a scathing indictment of Stephen's aesthetic posture in response to the vision of the bird-girl. In order to sustain his "angelic flight," Stephen "must become hardened in his haughtiness, confirmed in his cold remoteness, and ossified in his dehumanized aesthetics" (p. 7.5). "Through the imagination he expects to shed his temporality .... Stephen is as human as those around him; what makes him different is the illusory feeling of disembodiment" (p. 72). 29 Stephen's epiphany is "sacramental" insofar as it proves to be the "outward sign of an inward grace." Compare the fervid invocation in the narrative essay "A Portrait of the Artist": "Thou wert sacramental imprinting thine indelible mark, of very visible grace. A litany must honour thee: Lady of Apple Trees, Kind Wisdom, Sweet Flower of Dusk" (P 264). The protagonist of Joyce's 1904 essay turns away from "waders, into whose childish or girlish hair, girlish or childish dresses, the very wilfulness of the sea had entered" (P 262). The woman he praises seems to combine characteristics later ascribed to Emma, the bird-girl, and the eternal temptress. His prayer climaxes in a flood of romantic ecstasy: "A kiss: and they leap together, indivisible, upwards,

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30

31

32

33

radiant lips and eyes, their bodies sounding with the triumph of harps!" (P 264). Toril Moi, in Sexual/Textual Politics, observes that "Freud's own texts, particularly 'The Uncanny,' theorize the gaze as a phallic activity linked to the anal desire for sadistic mastery of the object. The specularizing philosopher is the potent master of his insight. . . . As long as the master's scopophilia (i.e. 'love of looking') remains satisfied, his domination is secure" (p. 134). Alan Sheridan explains in Jacques Lacan's Ecn"ts: A Selection that the Lacanian "objet petit a" connotes "'autre' (other), the concept having been developed out of the Freudian 'object' and Lacan's own exploitation of 'otherness'. The 'petit a' (small 'a') differentiates the object from (while relating it to) the 'Autre' or 'grand Autre' (the capitalized 'Other') . . . . Lacan insists that 'objet petit a' should remain untranslated, thus acquiring, as it were, the status of an algebraic sign" (p. xi). According to Lacan, "What was seen, but only from the side of the man, was that what he relates to is the objet a, and that the whole of his realisation in the sexual relation comes down to fantasy" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 157). In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Jacqueline Rose describes the of?jet a as "Lacan's formula for the lost object which underpins symbolisation, cause of and 'stand in' for desire. What the man relates to is this object. . .. As the place onto which lack is projected, and through which it is simultaneously disavowed, woman is a 'symptom,' for the man" (p. 72). As Bonnie Scott points out, Stephen's romantic swooning mimics the euphoria of post-orgasmic release. He "reclines on a nurturing mother earth, then falls into a sleep that is also a fall into a flushed womb through rose-like labia" (James Joyce, p. 88). For an illumination of Joyce's use of "symbolism strongly reminiscent of the Paradiso,'' see Barbara Seward, "The Artist and the Rose,'' p. 58. For further discussion of Joyce's art as couvade, seeR. Barrie Walkley, "The Bloom of Motherhood,'' and Jeanne Perreault, "Male Maternity in Ulysses. " Mary Reynolds convincingly argues that Gabriele d 'Annunzio' s first novel, The Child of Pleasure, "furnished the model for the villanelle section of Chapter Five" (Joyce and Dante, p. 181). Hence the intrusion of an angelic Gabriel into Stephen's bedchamber. Reynolds also believes that the villanelle episode is intended to reflect the design of Dante's Vita Nuova through "the relation of the writing of love poetry to the artistic development of the poet," and that this particular example of intertextuality was inspired by still another Dante/Gabriel: "The copy of the Vita Nuova that Joyce bought in Trieste was a deluxe illustrated version of the first pre-Raphaelite edition of 1902,'' with illustrations by Dante Gabriel Rosetti (ibid., p. 178). Reynolds's textual parallels between Vita Nuova and Portrait are striking (ibid., Appendix, pp. 256-64). For further discussion of Joyce's belated addition of the villanelle section to Chapter Five of Portrait, see Hans Walter Gabler, "The Seven Lost Years of A Portrait."

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34 Whether or not Stephen has experienced nocturnal emission has long been a matter of debate among Joyceans. Hugh Kenner seems to have inaugurated the "wet dream school" in Dublin 's Joyce (p . 123). According to Bernard Benstock, an ''examination of Joyce ' s technique reveals that the origins of the poem are not in spiritual dream surfacing near dawn to quasi-consciousness, but in the slow awakening to the realisation of a nocturnal emission. It is not just Stephen's soul that is 'all dewy wet' " (The Undiscover 'd Country, p. 153). But Benstock also suggests that Stephen's "involuntary ejaculation" is followed, towards the end of his poetic composition, by "voluntary masturbation," as "sexual fantasy envelops the naked body of a compliant Emma" (p. 154). In a recent article on "The Villanelle Perplex," Robert Day insists that Stephen has not had a wet dream, but that he does masturbate in this "scene of onanistic composition," or "remote-control sex" (p. 79). 35 Helene Cixous observes that in Stephen's romantic rhetoric, the word "heart" is usually "equated with 'flesh,' and the 'heart's cry' with the cry of desire. 'Soul' is associated with 'nakedness,' meaning the real body of woman." In this instance, "his heart's cry is but the sublimation of a more elementary appeal which uses poetry as dissimulation, rhythm as replacement, and music to disguise its frustration" (The Exile of James joyce, p . 498). These purplish passages, says Bernard Benstock, "should be enough indication that the final poem is not intended to be read as evidence of poetic maturity: the mood is pre-Raphaelite with a vengeance" (The Undiscover'd Country, p. 150). 36 See Elaine Unkeless, "Bats and Sanguivorous Bugaboos." 37 In "The Villanelle Perplex,'' Robert Day reminds us that "the letters to Nora of 1909, which seem to have been involved in the imagery of the prose sections of this passage, abound in references to masturbation ( 184- 86, 190- 91)." while writing or reading the words of love . . . SL Day believes that Joyce gives us "as clear a description of self-induced orgasm and liquids pouring forth as Stephen's fancy language and the 1914 obscenity laws will permit; he is now violating his own precious thing with profane hands" (p . 79) . 38 In Joseph Buttigieg's judgment, Stephen simply "transforms his lust into a villanelle. He escapes and avoids the potential embarrassment of human sexual encounter by wallowing self-indulgently in the unreal beauty of words. He totally abandons the tangible universe in order to derive his pleasure safely from the solitary savoring of his own verbal contrivances" (A Portrait of the Artist, p. 67). In contrast , Robert Scholes defends the villanelle as a "muse-poem," the celebration of a "great poetical archetype." He argues that "joyce intended the poem to be the product of genuine inspiration. . .. It is at this point that Stephen ceases to be an esthete and becomes a poet" ("Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Esthete?" pp. 478-80). Robert Day, assessing the poem "from the point of view of a seeker after wholeness, harmony and radiance," finds it "a hodgepodge of cliche and a farrago of nonsense" ("The

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39

40

41

42

Villanelle Perplex," p. 82). "Talent IS there, but Cupid gets in the way" (p. 83). Compare the young Joyce's own misogynist remarks, recorded on 2 February 1904 by his brother Stanislaus: "Woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month, and parturates once a year" (Dublin Diary, p. 11 n). In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva argues that menstrual blood connotes physiological abjection and threatens the symbolic order because it ''stands for the danger issuing from within the identity (social or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference" (p. 71 ). The notion of defilement that menstrual excrescences evince "is the translinguistic spoor of the most archaic boundaries of the self's clean and proper body" (p. 73). As Bernard Benstock explains, the "surface implication of this magniloquent phrase is that Dante is somehow responsible for a platonically antiseptic attitude for men to hide behind when dealing with unresponsive women." Stephen's "infatuation with Emma is a matter of bestowing upon her Beatrice qualities ... and then, heroically adjusting to his vast disappointment, citing Dante as his predecessor'' (The Undiscover'd Country, p. 97). In her study of morals and gender, In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan postulates that Stephen Dedalus provides an excellent example of a young man acting out a masculine "adolescent ideal" embodied in a narcissistic "concept of the separate self and of moral principles uncompromised by the constraints of reality" (p. 98). "In Stephen's simpler construction, separation seemed the empowering condition of free and full self-expression, while attachment appeared a paralyzing entrapment and caring an inevitable prelude to compromise .... For Stephen, leaving childhood means renouncing relationships in order to protect his freedom of self-expression" (p. 157). For Joseph Buttigieg, Stephen's narcissism and intellectual isolation invoke a spiritual simony that sacrifices the values of love and care for the dubious prize of aesthetic detachment. ''One cannot help noticing the total absence of love in Stephen, and the close connection between his coldness and his unswervingly ironic stance" (A Portrait of the Artist, p. 90). Stephen's "flight from suffering amounts to a flight from love . . . . Stephen's existence becomes a work of art and ceases to be a 'life,' that is, a history" (p. 93).

3: INTERPRETING EXILES 1 One of the reasons that Exiles is such a perplexing dramatic experiment is the very indeterminacy of its genre. Searching for an appropriate form, Joyce vertiginously mixes conventions and swerves from one dramatic genre to another. What begins as a comedy of manners quickly

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moves in the direction of romantic parody, melodrama, moral parable, and farce. Some of the play's idiosyncrasies might be attributable to what Robert Adams identifies as the "buried piling on which Joyce's play seems to have been constructed, ... Scribe's libretto for Meyerbeer's opera, Robert le Diable. As a piece of stagecraft, Scribe's piece is a juvenile shocker in the lowest traditions of Victorian melodrama" ("Light on Joyce's Exiles," p. 98). In the opinion of Mary Reynolds, the origins of Exiles are decidedly Dantesque. The play, she tells us, "reproduces in part the closing episode of Dante's Purgatorio," when "Dante is reunited with Beatrice and receives from her the assurance that his poetic mission has divine validation .... Richard Rowan, the artist-hero of Exiles, defines a conception of love in a dialectic of moral freedom, and Joyce here deliberately constructs a modern and relativist interpretation of Dante's sequence" (joyce and Dante, p. 165). According to Reynolds, Richard Rowan "is clearly a Joycean interpretation of the artist-pilgrim of the Divine Comedy. But whereas "Dante's exploration of the 'struggle of the soul' is theologicallydirected, Joyce's comes near to being psychoanalytically directed" (ibid., p. 172). 2 Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, p. 48. In his essay on "The Meaning of the Phallus," Jacques Lacan explains the critical distinction between sexual need and erotic desire: "What is thus alienated in needs . . . reappears in a residue which then presents itself in man as desire .... The phenomenology which emerges from analytic experience is certainly such as to demonstrate the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric and even scandalous character by which desire is distinguished from need .... Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions which it calls for" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 80). 3 Joyce's emulation of Ben Jonson probably influenced the fact that he gave his dramatis personae in Exiles a set of comic, almost parodic verbal handles. Richard Rowan is associated with the "rowan tree," a Eurasian tree of the apple family with red, berry-like pomes. His surname recalls Hamilton Rowan, although he denies lineal descent from the Irish patriot. The word "Rowan" further suggests a sense of firmness and mastery subliminally associated with a "rower" or captain. Robert Hand, in turn, is identified as an aspiring "manipulator" (from the Latin manus). He wants a hand in everything and tries to intrude in Richard's domestic situation by forcefully laying hands on Bertha. Robert proves to be a phallic imposter whose hands are everywhere, grasping for Bertha as lover, then reaching for Richard as leader and master. Rowan comes to the cottage to demand that Robert unhand Bertha; but instead, like Pilate, he washes his hands of the situation and goes off to pare his fingernails as the would-be lovers sort out their moral dilemma. A surprising number of references to hands are scattered in stage-directions throughout the play. 4 Rowan has refused to "mark the product of copulation with his own name" or reduce his partner to an "anonymous worker, the machine in

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the service of a master proprietor who will put his trademark upon the finished product" (Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 23). Calling himself a "socialist artist," Joyce wrote to Stanislaus in May 1905: "I cannot tell you how strange I feel sometimes in my attempt to live a more civilised life than my contemporaries. But why should I have brought Nora to a priest or a lawyer to make her swear away her life to me? And why should I superimpose on my child the very troublesome burden of belief which my father and mother superimposed on me?" (Letters II, 89). 5 This riddle, in turn, raises still another question. Has Richard indeed relinquished the phallus as "emblem of man's appropriative relation to the virgin" (Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 42)? Or has he, instead, appropriated the womb, the original signifier of absence and mystery, by making himself the origin of aesthetic and imaginary creations that erase woman's sexual/reproductive authority? 6 It is interesting that Joyce intended to give Bertha a youthful history of love and loss, of amorous grief similar to that of Nora Barnacle and Michael "Sonny" Bodkin in actual life and of Gretta Conroy and Michael Furey in the Dubliners story "The Dead." In his notes for the play, Joyce imagines Bertha weeping over Rahoon, over "him whom her love has killed, the dark boy whom, as the earth, she embraces in death and disintegration. He is her buried life, her past. . . . His symbols are music and the sea, liquid formless earth. . . . She is the Magdalen who weeps remembering the loves she could not return'' (E 118). Bertha remains friendless and alone, protesting in an unpublished fragment of dialogue: "I was too simple and uneducated" (Robert Adams, "Light on Joyce's Exiles?", p. 91). Although Beatrice Justice could be a potential friend to Bertha, she is cast by Joyce in the role of antagonist and foil. Beatrice is described as "a slender dark woman of 27 years" (E 16), dressed like a spinster and appearing like a shade. Joyce notes that "her mind is an abandoned cold temple in which hymns have risen heavenward in a distant past but where now a doddering priest offers alone and hopelessly prayers to the Most High" (E 119). Beatrice has served as Richard's editor and ostensible inspiration, a virgin offered a novena of letters over the nine years of Rowan's exile. Richard implies, moreover, that his flight from Ireland was meant as a judgment against this unfaithful Mercedes who, in a moment of weakness, sinned in a garden by pledging her troth to Robert with a kiss and a garter. 7 Until recently, few critics have acknowledged the centrality of Bertha's role in Exiles. Hugh Kenner claims that Bertha is a "neurotic woman" and a "parody of the exiled Eve" (Dublin's Joyce, p. 89). His view is shared by Carole Brown and Leo Knuth, who see the play's female protagonist as "little more than a psychological satellite," "annoyingly imperceptive," and "neither empathic nor discerning" ("Joyce's Exiles," p. 16). William Tindall indicts Bertha as Richard's "stooge," a woman who gullibly colludes in her own sado-masochistic victimization

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(A Reader's Guide to James Joyce, p. 111 ). And Theo Dombrowski, romanticizing Richard's ideal love, concludes that Bertha "does not want freedom" but "desires love as a kind of bondage" ("The Problem of Love," p. 123). One of Bertha's few critical defenders is Darcy O'Brien, who celebrates Joyce's heroine as a symbol of innocence and a "secular Madonna ... who bestows her soul's virginity in love, that unnatural phenomenon which occurs but once" (Conscience, pp. 64-5). Ruth Bauerle, in her essay on "Bertha's Role in Exiles," offers convincing evidence that Bertha might be considered the "dominating figure of the drama." See also Celeste Loughman's essay "Bertha, Victress, in Joyce's Exiles" and Bernard Benstock's discussion of Exiles in A Companion to Joyce Studies. 8 According to Richard EHmann, Joyce fashioned the character of Robert Hand through a conflation of Oliver St John Gogarty, Vincent Cosgrave, Thomas Kettle, and Roberto Prezioso. "From his experiences with them Joyce drew the picture of friendship which appears in the play: a friend is someone who wants to possess your mind ... and your wife's body, and longs to prove himself your disciple by betraying you" (JJ 356). Joyce evidently took much of his inspiration for Exiles from Prezioso's dalliance with Nora - an interest which Joyce himself at first encouraged. Prezioso was a Venetian journalist who befriended Joyce in Trieste and "had a reputation of success with women." He began making regular calls on Nora, and Joyce followed the flirtation as though it were a scientific experiment. When Prezioso, however, ''endeavored to become Nora's lover rather than her admirer" in 1911 or 1912, Joyce sought him out and "expostulated with him in the name of friendship and broken confidence." In a semi-public spectacle, Prezioso was left weeping and humiliated in the Piazza Dante. EHmann notes that "Joyce was half-responsible for Prezioso's conduct, in an experiment at being author of his own life as well as of his work. No doubt he was taking too much upon himself, but he did not do so for pleasure, except perhaps the pleasure of self-laceration" (JJ 316-17). See also Helene Cixous, The Exile ofJames Joyce, p. 534. Cixous claims that Joyce slapped Prezioso, but I can find no biographical evidence of such uncharacteristic physical violence on Joyce's part. 9 In James Joyce and Sexuality, Richard Brown notes Joyce's satire of the sexual undercurrents of the Catholic confession and identifies this scene as a parody of the sacrament of penance. "Much of the tension of the play,'' he tells us, ''arises from the sexual inquisition to which Richard subjects Bertha" (p. 128). According to Michel Foucault, it was the Catholic pastoral of the seventeenth century which gave rise to the construction of a sexual discourse modeled on a rigorous and detailed confessional investigation, "an entire painstaking review of the sexual act in its very unfolding.'' The priest was to examine a penitent in confession with the understanding that "everything had to be told. A twofold evolution tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to

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the strirrings - so difficult to perceive and formulate - of desire . . . . Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings. . . . The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech" (History of Sexuality, pp. 19-21). 10 A maternal ghost overshadows Rowan's consciousness, spurred to rebellion against Mother Ireland by a matriarchal judge that ''turned aside from me and from mine'' (E 23). Still fighting the haunting specter, Richard protests that it was, finally, his mother who drove him away. "On account of her I lived years in exile and poverty too" (E 23). She rejected her grandson as "a child of sin and shame," nameless and godless. On behalf of himself and his son, Richard raises an angry cry of rebellion against the parent who bore him, then thrust him from her heart and affections. Yet it is her aspect - hard, cold, that he purportedly seeks to emulate, detached, and pitiless proclaiming: "It is her spirit I need" (E 25). 11 Joyce remarks that "Bertha's state when abandoned spiritually by Richard ... is like that of Jesus in the garden of olives. It is the soul of woman left naked and alone that it may come to an understanding of its own nature. . .. Through these experiences she will suffuse her own reborn temperament with the wonder of her soul at its own solitude and at her beauty, formed and dissolving itself eternally amid the clouds of mortality" (E 115). If Bertha, as Joyce suggests, is to be perceived as a Christ-figure, Richard becomes God the Father, an allseeing patriarch testing Bertha's faith through abandonment and suffering. Bertha resembles the scapegoat about to be sacrificed for the sins of humankind - in this case, male sins of jealousy and emotional avarice. In a symbolic drama that borders on allegory, Joyce has given us two Christ-figures - Bertha the victim and Richard the narcissistic man/god. Joyce admits in his notes for Exiles that Richard initiates this existential trial largely out of self-interest: "He is in fact fighting for his own hand, for his own emotional dignity and liberation in which Bertha, no less and no more than Beatrice or any other woman is coinvolved. He does not use the language of adoration and his character must seem a little unloving. But it is a fact that for nearly two thousand years the women of Christendom have prayed to and kissed the naked image of one who had neither wife nor mistress nor sister" (E 120). 12 It is not surprising that readers have, for the most part, found Joyce's "semi-autobiographical" protagonist arrogant and annoying, if not insufferable. Darcy O'Brien sees Rowan as "a man driven by an unpleasant alliance of principle, perversity, and lust," not to mention voyeurism, masochism, and homosexual urges (Conscience, pp. 60-1). Hugh Kenner describes him as a "lonely deity" obsessed with a need for mastery over all the characters in the drama ("Joyce's Exiles, " p. 395). And Clive Hart judges Richard "consistently pompous, overmeticulous, and masochistic,'' especially in his interaction with

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Bertha, " the only person in the play who is at all sympathetic " (james Joyce's "Ulysses ,'' pp . 26- 7). Perhaps the strongest indictment comes from Edward Brandabur, who believes that Rowan suffers from a sadomasochistic pathology in which "the neurotic both directs and plays conflicting roles" of torturer and victim. Controlled, in actuality, by a ''spiritual allegiance to his dead mother,'' Richard proves a moral and aesthetic failure in the enactment of his narcissistic project (A Scrupulous Meanness, pp. 138, 131). John MacNicholas, in an excellent survey of "The Stage History of Exiles," points out that literary critics have often had difficulty liking the play because Richard is himself so unlikeable . '' Apparently, only Harold Pinter has staged Exiles with unqualified success, " perhaps because "Joyce was struggling toward a new kind of theater. Ambiguity and stylized silences are at the center of this theatrical technique" (pp. 11, 23). Bernard Benstock believes that in Joyce's drama of "three cat and mouse acts" (E 123), Rowan "is the major cat, a role that he tries to monopolize throughout but may have to relinquish before the end" ("Exiles," p. 368) . Benstock disagrees with those critics who see ''Rowan as the dominant force in Exiles, the introspective and philosophical hero modeled by his creator on himself and therefore sacrosanct" (p. 377). Richard Brown , however, defends Rowan as a man whose " situation is not one of ignorance , compromise, comedy and victimization but one where high principles and a degree of heroism may be attained " (james joyce and Sexuality , p. 18). 13 A number of critics have defined the homoerotic attachment between Richard and Robert as an implicitly homosexual affiliation. According to Helene Cixous, the "real couple" in the play "is formed by the two men, their relationship defined by analogy with that of Jesus and Judas." Robert, she observes, "is the reflection of Richard in a distorting mirror," and Richard " denounces his own Judas in order to assume the crown of thorns " (The Exile of James joyce, pp. 539-41). Bertha is reduced to a figurative sexual mediator, " the nebulous matter in which the two men wander, ... the vas naturale, ... the means of sexual communication" (ibid . , p . 538). It is interesting, however, that Bertha and Beatrice are brought together in a similar homoerotic configuration later in the play, when Bertha is moved spontaneously to befriend Beatrice and to acknowledge her as an alter ego . She admires the other woman's "lovely long eyelashes" and sad , myopic eyes. The two are united in their shared rejection by Richard . When Bertha boldly accuses her husband of egotistically manipulating them both, she offers an impassioned defense of Beatrice, whom Richard "made unhappy as you have made me and as you made your dead mother unhappy and killed her" (E 103). Beatrice , she ingenuously declares, "is a fine and high character. I like her . She is everything I am not - in birth and education" (E 103). 14 The idea of molding a woman in his own artistic image evidently appealed to Joyce , who saw a precedent for his relationship with Nora

237

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15

16 17

18

in William Blake's choice of a marriage partner. Joyce declared in his 1912 essay on William Blake: "Like many other men of great genius, Blake was not attracted to cultured and refined women. Either he preferred to drawingroom graces ... the simple woman, of hazy and sensual mentality, or, in his unlimited egoism, he wanted the soul of his beloved to be entirely a slow and painful creation of his own" (CW 217). Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, p . 168. Most critics have identified Richard as a Joyce figure and Robert as his alter ego and mirror image Stanislaus/Shaun/Bodkin/Gogarty/Kettle/Preziosi. Joyce's 1909 letters to Nora, however, reveal that the playwright has projected into the lascivious Robert many of his own complex and ambivalent attitudes towards sexuality. On 2 December 1909, Joyce wrote to Nora that "inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odour and act of it" (SL 181). The next day he was "still in a fever-fit of animal desire" and assured Nora of her Circean powers to "turn me into a beast" (SL 181-2). Addressing her as "my dirty little fuckbird," he praised her iteration of that "one lovely word" (SL 185). This four-letter monosyllable known to all men evidently refers to love as it dares not speak its name in Exiles. Quoted in Robert Adams, "Light on Joyce's Exiles," p . 86. "I carried her away into exile, " says Richard. "And now, after years, I carry her back again, remade in my own image" (ibid.). Joyce's own notorious jealousy is documented in his letters of accusation to Nora at the time of the malicious hoax perpetrated in 1909 by Vincent Cosgrave. Fearing that Nora had "stepped out" with Cosgrave during their own 1904 courtship, Joyce wrote: "My eyes are full of tears, tears of sorrow and mortification. My heart is full of bitterness and despair. I can see nothing but your face as it was then raised to meet another's . 0, Nora, pity me for what I suffer now . I shall cry for days. My faith in that face I loved is broken . ... I cannot call you any dear name because tonight I have learnt that the only being I believed in was not loyal to me" (SL 158). In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Rene Girard describes, in a different literary context, the kind of triangulated desire characteristic of Richard's self-deceptive strategy: "The hero seems to offer the beloved wife freely to the mediator, as a believer would offer a sacrifice to his god. But the believer offers the object in order that the god might enjoy it, whereas the hero of internal mediation offers his sacrifice to the god in order that he might not enjoy it. He pushes the loved woman into the mediator's arms in order to arouse his desire and then triumph over the rival desire" (p. 50). In an unpublished fragment, Richard insists that he "remade" Bertha in his own image for the sake of Robert, who " risked nothing and lived prudently" (Robert Adams, " Light on Joyce's Exiles," p. 87). Robert retorts: "It is a queer kind of present, Richard, like the giver. You see of course that I have no intention of

238

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19

20

21

22

accepting it. No, you have made her new and strange. She is yours. Keep her" (ibid.). Joyce observes in his notes for Exiles that since "the publication of the lost pages of Madame Bovary the centre of sympathy appears to have been esthetically shifted from the lover or fancyman to the husband or cuckold . . . . This change is utilized in Exiles although the union of Richard and Bertha is irregular to the extent that the spiritual revolt of Richard ... can enter into combat with Robert's decrepit prudence" (E 115 -16). As Richard Brown points out, Rowan's own definition of "love" is elevated and highly mystical: "Love, for all Joyce's desire to replace romantic mystifications with biological certainties, is not solely represented as sexual passion. Indeed Robert is the apologist for nature's law of passion and Richard (and by implication Joyce too) condemns such a law as mere possessiveness, ... saying that love is 'To wish her well' " (James Joyce and Sexuality, p. 34). Richard Ellmann tells us that ''some of the wording and all the ambiguity" of Robert Hand's article can be traced back to Thomas Kettle's review of Joyce's Chamber Music in the Freeman's Journal 1 June 1907. Although Kettle describes Joyce as "a lover of elfin paradoxes" and the "very embodiment of the literary spirit," he also complains that he can find "no traces of the folklore, folk dialect, or even the national feeling'' of Ireland in Joyce's collection of verses, whose melodies he compares "with harps, with wood birds, with Paul Verlaine" (JJ 261). According to Robert Adams, original fragments of the Exiles manuscript suggest that "Bertha's innocence and girlishness, associated with the naivete of Irish political life and the naturalness of Irish rural existence, were to appear within the play as memories of childhood scenes. Bertha was evidently to be a character deeply rooted in the Irish soil" ("Light on Joyce's Exiles," p. 98). As Ruth Bauerle points out, Bertha exhibits in this scene "a fundamental integrity of character which brings fulfillment. She manifests not only honesty and truthfulness, but also a profound personal wholeness of being . . . . Bertha, exiled, lonely, and manipulated, shows the greatest faith of all, that of the mistress in the lover who has betrayed her and may do so again" ("Bertha's Role in Exiles," pp. 125-4). This scene represents one of the few examples in Joyce's canon of one woman befriending another. Bernard Benstock observes that Bertha's ''moment of defiance is capped with an offer of friendship with her presumed rival, an allegiance that transcends their rivalry for Richard . . . . The gesture of feminine solidarity consolidates Bertha's position as she returns her focus to the men who have viewed her as their domesticated mouse" ("Exiles," p. 3 74). See John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," l. 79; and "Ode on a Grecian Urn," ll. 17-20, 25-30, 49-50: Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal - yet do not gneve;

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She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou live, and she be fair! More happy love! More happy, happy love! Forever warm and still to be enjoyed, Forever panting, and forever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Sheldon Brivic, in Joyce Between Freud and jung, makes a connection between Keats's theory of "negative capability" and Richard Rowan's obsessional desire for a creative, ''wounding doubt.'' Brivic cites Keats's famous letter of 21 December 1817 defining "negative capability'' as a state of mind in which ''a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (p. 122). 23 Joyce offered this description of doubt in answer to a question which he posed, rhetorically, to Arthur Laubenstein: "Which would you say was the greater power in holding people together, complete faith or doubt?"(}} 557). When Laubenstein guessed "faith," Joyce corrected him: "No, doubt is the thing" (}} 557). As Simon Evans explains, Exiles "is deliberate in its withholding, for its audience as well as for its characters, the conditions of faith, knowledge, certainty, and belief'' (The Penetration of Exiles, p. 36). John MacNicholas concludes that the final effect of Exiles "is anti-cathartic, which is to say that it is complex, impossible to categorize comfortably, vexing, arresting in the impenetrability of its doubt" ("Joyce's Exiles: The Argument for Doubt," p. 39). 24 Still another explanation of the ambiguous ending might be found in Joyce's rather clinical analysis of sexual possibilities in the play: "Bertha is reluctant to give the hospitality of her womb to Robert's seed ... and for her the supreme concession is what the fathers of the church call emissio seminis inter vas naturale. As for the accomplishment of the act otherwise externally, by friction, or in the mouth, the question needs to be scrutinized still more. Would she allow her lust to carry her so far as to receive his emission of seed in any other opening of the body where it could not be acted upon, when once emitted, by the forces of her secret flesh?" (E 124). Richard Brown points out that here "the investigation of Bertha's feelings also involves a kind of inversion of the Catholic hierarchy of sins since, for her, in the modern situation of an adulteress, a 'lustful', 'perverse', 'onanistic' or non-reproductive sexual act is less of a 'concession' than a more conventionally legitimate one." In Exiles, Joyce "achieved his most striking dramatic

240

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25

26

27

28

29

effects precisely by leaving unstated and mysterious the nature of Robert's and Bertha's desires and acts" (james Joyce and Sexuality, p. 57). Compare Joyce's somewhat paranoid query to Nora in his letter dated 7 August 1909: "Is Georgie my son? The first night I slept with you in Zurich was October 11th and he was born July 27th. That is nine months and 16 days. I remember that there was very little blood that night. Were you fucked by anyone before you came to me?" (SL 158). "I have been a fool. . . . In Dublin here the rumor here is circulated that I have taken the leavings of others. Perhaps they laugh when they see me parading ·~' son in the streets" (SL 159). The "demonic voices," according to Robert Adams, might well be another vestigial remnant of Robert le Diable ("Light on Joyce's Exiles," p. 101). As Anika Lemaire explains, every desire "is a desire to have oneself recognized by the other . . . and a desire to impose oneself in some way upon the other" (jacques Lacan, p. 174). "Like the Forbidden, the Sacrifice manifests the rupture through which the symbolic establishes itself as an order distinct from the natural or profane material given" (ibid., p. 62). "Subjects in language," writes Jacqueline Rose, "persist in their belief that somewhere there is a point of certainty, of knowledge and of truth. When the subject addresses its demand outside itself to another, this other becomes the fantasied place of just such a knowledge or certainty. Lacan calls this the Other - the side of language to which the speaking subject necessarily refers. The Other appears to hold the 'truth' of the subject and the power to make good its loss. But this is the ultimate fantasy" (Sexuality, pp. 55- 6). Lacan insists that the "gap in this enigma betrays what determines it, conveyed at its simplest in this formula: that for each partner in the relation, the subject and the Other, it is not enough to be the subjects of need, nor the objects of love, but they must stand as the cause of desire . . . and to disguise this gap by relying on the virtue of the 'genital' to resolve it through the maturation of tenderness (that is by a recourse to the Other solely as reality), however piously intended, is none the less a fraud" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 81). In The Penetration of Exiles, Simon Evans offers a fascinating discussion of Richard's wound by exploring the etymology of the verb "to exile," which he translates as "to wound," from the Latin ex-ilia, "out of entrails"; or, alternatively, "to leap out," from the Latin ex-sa/ire. "Exiles," he observes, "is contained within the space vacated by those two derivations, between the resonances of a symbolic wound that may refer either to a fatality or to the triumph of a resurrection" (p. 41). Compare Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic theory in "Scylla and Charybdis" and my own analysis in Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook, pp. 65-73. Ruth Bauerle concludes in "Bertha's Role in Exiles" that Bertha has emerged triumphant, "revealing to Hand courage and honor; to Beatrice, friendship; and to Rowan, compassion and the knowledge

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that he cannot, finally, know. Having once made Rowan a man, she now makes him human. It has been Bertha's night" (p. 128). Celeste Loughman, in a note on "Bertha, Victress," suggests that Bertha proves to be "feminist in the best sense. She knows what she is and what she wants" and "seeks energetically to recapture an ideal relationship" (p. 72). 30 I use the term "imaginary" in the Lacanian sense, defined by Alan Sheridan as "the world, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined. In this respect, 'imaginary' is not simply the opposite of 'real' " (Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, p. ix). Jacqueline Rose explains: "Lacan termed the order of language the symbolic, that of the ego and its identifications the imaginary (the stress, therefore, is quite deliberately on symbol and image, the idea of something which 'stands in'). The real was then his term for the moment of impossibility onto which both are grafted, the point of that moment's endless return" (Sexuality, p. 54). 31 Although Hugh Kenner was the first to point out Bertha's prelapsarian yearnings (Dublin's Joyce, p. 89), Simon Evans offers a corrective: "It is not simply the first Adam that she misses. The meaning of her 'again' is that she sues for the second greater man as well" (The Penetration of Exiles, p. 38). Simon Evans and John MacNicholas have both pointed out the similarity between the erotic discourse of Exiles and the "reverential concupiscence" of Joyce's earlier manuscript, Giacomo Joyce. Compare, for instance, the textual notes in Exiles with the following description: ''Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fineboned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder" (GJ 3). See John MacNicholas, A Textual Companion, p. 13; and Simon Evans, The Penetration of Exiles, p . 22. According to Robert Adams, prudence and justice give way, in the ·final benediction of Exiles, to "a darker, more passionate relation, that between the artist and his creation.'' Bertha, having made Richard a man, "must now cherish him as a child; having created his work of art, the artist must now suffer it to create him" ("Light on Joyce's Exiles," pp. 103-4).

4: UNCOUPLING ULYSSES

1

See Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, p. 27. Gallop cites Michele Montrelay's Freudian critique that the "unbearably intense immediacy of the 'odor di femina' produces anxiety, a state totally threatening to the stability of the psychic economy . . . because it threatens to undo the achievements of repression and sublimation, threatens to return the subject to the powerlessness, intensity and anxiety of an immediate, unmediated connection with the body of the mother'' (ibid.)

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2 As Wendy Steiner notes, "Bloom watches Gerty seated on the beach; Gerty watches Bloom watching her. . . .Each creates the other by creating the other's response, inducing him or her to display and to desire. Thus, Gerty, totally engrossed in her role as Bloom's voyeuristic object, imagines herself in the third person and composes Bloom's response to that objectified self. . . . Each character projects a fantasy of the other in the course of this subject-object interplay - Gerty through the fallen romance cliches of ladies' journals, Bloom through the primordial symbolism of femininity and the homely wisdom of his own experience .. . . Gerty and Bloom here demonstrate the problem of intersubjectivity through the model of vision common to painting and romance - the temporary appropriation of another solely by looking' ' ("There Was Meaning in His Look," p. 98) . I have discussed Gerty more extensively in "Gerty MacDowell: Joyce's Sentimental Heroine." 3 In Joyce's Anatomy of Culture, Cheryl Herr offers a convincing interpretation of "Circe" as a "Joycean pantomime which plays out the confusing implications of how culture not only determines gender traits but also shapes concepts of selfhood," so that "sexual identity is largely a cultural or even a theatrical phenomenon" (pp. 152- 3). "In Ulysses, there is ... no 'fully human' androgyny; there is only a perpetual rising to textual consciousness of gender traits that became rigidly entrapping labels, packages, and norms reflecting the culture's characteristic mechanism of binary encoding (male vs . female)" (p. 154). Although Herr and I both start from similar premisses concerning the cultural construction of gender, we arrive at somewhat different conclusions about Joyce's trans-sexual play in "Circe." 4 Shoshana Felman, "Rereading Femininity," p. 42 . 5 ibid., p. 31. It is not surprising that Joyce chose a brothel as the setting for the "Circe" episode of Ulysses, since, as Michel Foucault points out, the brothel and the mental hospital were two places which escaped the nineteenth-century injunction to silence that surrounded sexual discourse beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family. "If it was truly necessary to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of production, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental hospital would be those places of tolerance . . . . Words and gestures, quietly authorized, could be exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would untrammeled sex have a right to (safely insularized) forms of reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of discourse" (The History of Sexuality, p. 4). 6 Daniel Ferrer, "Circe, Regret and Regression," p. 136. In an interview with Frank Budgen, Joyce acknowledged "an undercurrent of homosexuality in Bloom as well as his loneliness as a Jew" (Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses," p . 315). 7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 51, 67. In his persona as Henry Flower, Bloom illustrates what Deleuze and Guattari

243

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8

9

10

11

celebrate as a Proustian "vegetal theme," the "innocence of flowers," which ''brings us yet another message and another code: everyone is bisexual, everyone has two sexes, but partitioned, noncommunicating; the man is merely the one in whom the male part, and the woman the one in whom the female part, dominates statistically . . . . Here all guilt ceases, for it cannot cling to such flowers as these" (p. 69). For an informative discussion of Bloom's role as Levitican holocaust, see Beryl Schlossman, Joyce's Catholic Comedy of Language, Chapter 2, "Love's Bitter Mystery: Blumenlied." "The concept of the phallus and the castration complex," writes Jacqueline Rose, "testify above all to the problematic nature of the subject's insertion into his or her sexual identity" (Sexuality, p. 64). "The subject has to recognise that there is a desire, or lack in the place of the Other, that there is no ultimate certainty or truth, and that the status of the phallus is a fraud" (ibid.). Richard EHmann points out a number of similarities between the "Circe" episode and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, which "tells of a young man named Severin who so abases himself before his mistress, a wealthy woman named Wanda, ... that she becomes increasingly tyrannical, makes him a servile go-between, and ... turns him over to her most recent lover for a whipping'' (]] 369). "Bloom's daymares of self-reproach," observes Stanley Sultan, "draw again and again upon Sacher-Masoch's book .... Bloom ... conforms to the pattern of the hero of Venus in Furs, the desire to be made to suffer by a woman to whose service he is dedicated . . . because of his sense of guilt for failing to be that woman's true husband" (The Argument of "Ulysses," pp. 315-16). Sultan notes, furthermore, that KrafftEbing, in Psychopathia Sexualis, "delineates a classic development of male perversion from passivity to masochism to feminization" (p. 317). For a provocative discussion of Circean masochism from a Deleuzian perspective, see Frances L. Restuccia, "Molly in Furs." For fin-de-siecle sources of the Bella-Bloom encounter, see my earlier articles on "James Joyce and Joris-Karl Huysmans" and "James Joyce and KrafftEbing." As Catherine Clement suggests in "The Guilty One," the scenario of the circus depends on the "institutionalization of hysteria. . . . The history of the sorceress and the hysteric rejoins the history of spectacles: the fusion of public child's play with private sexual scenes" (Cixous and Clement, The Newly Born Woman, p. 13). According to Cheryl Herr, "Ulysses argues that sexuality is sheer theater, at least on the social stage on which we dramatically construct the selves we play . . . . 'Circe' provides evidence that to change Bloom we would have to change his culture and to alter the structure of terms in which individuality is positioned" (Joyce's Anatomy of Culture, pp. 154-5). In the Oedipal schema attacked by Deleuze and Guattari in AntiOedipus, "the libido as energy of selection and detachment is converted into the phallus as detached object, the latter existing only in the transcendent form of stock and lack" (p. 73). "Lack (manque) is,"

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12

13 14

15 16

17

furthermore, "created, planned, and organized in and through social production" (p. 28). "Castration as a practical operation on the unconscious is achieved when the thousand break-flows of desiring machines ... are projected into the same mythical space, the unitary stroke of the signifier" (p. 61). Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, pp. 78-9. For a discussion of Joyce and the carnivalesque, see Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce; and Elliott B. Gose, Jr, The Transformation Process in Joyce's "Ulysses," Chapter 9, "Comedy in 'Circe."' For an analysis of Bloom's purgings and bestial transmogrifications, see Gose, The Transformation Process, Chapter 10, "The Grotesque in 'Circe.'" As Luce lrigaray declares in This Sex Which Is Not One, "femininity" is itself "a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity . . . . In our social order, women are 'products' used and exchanged by men. Their status is that of merchandise, 'commodities."' (pp. 84-5). In James Joyce and Sexuality, Richard Brown explains why Molly Bloom's malapropism "coronado" should actually read "cornuto" (p. 19). Sigmund Freud notes in Beyond the Pleasure Pn.nciple that such "punishment dreams" tend to "replace the forbidden wish-fulfillment by the appropriate punishment for it; that is to say, they fulfill the wish of the sense of guilt which is the reaction to the repudiated impulse" (p. 61). The first German edition of this work was published in 1920; the first English translation, by C. J. M. Hubback, in 1922. Either could have been known to Joyce. The strategies of Bloom's unconscious are similar to those employed by the child initiating the Fort/Da game analyzed by Freud as a paradigm for the compensations offered the psyche at play. Children tend to repeat in play anything that makes a strong impression on them in real life, and "in doing so they abreact the strength of the impression and ... make themselves master of the situation" (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 36). Thus the child who symbolically casts away a spool at the end of a string, only to draw it back with exclamations of delight, enacts a pantomime of "instinctual renunciation," compensating for his mother's absence "by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach . . . . At the outset he was in a passive situation - he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not" (pp. 34-5). "Finally, a reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults . . . do not spare the spectators . . . the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enJoyable" (p. 37). For a discussion of ''scopophilia,'' see Chapter 2, note 30.

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18 Helene Cixous, "Sorties," m Cixous and Clement, The Newly Born Woman, p. 84. 19 Most psychoanalytic readings of "Circe" agree that Stephen and Bloom are, to some extent, cognizant of the dramatic events enacted on Joyce's textual stage and are psychologically transformed by their confrontation with specters from the past. In Joyce in Nighttown, Mark Shechner analyzes the drama by drawing on Joyce's own biographical obsessions and interprets "Circe" as an extensive desublimation of Bloom's (and Joyce's) fantasy life. "The comedy," he tells us, "will be most hilarious wherever the fantasy is most revealing" (p. 151). Sheldon Brivic, in Joyce Between Freud and Jung, is somewhat pessimistic about the cathartic effects of Joyce's comedy and sees little hope for spiritual deliverance. In contrast, Elliott B. Gose, Jr, in The Transformation Process of Joyce's Ulysses, describes "Circe" as a "dialectic of purging. Both Bloom and Stephen have projected their deepest fears and desires into hallucinations which we share with them,'' and both are "cured" of neuroses by the end of the episode. Bloom "emerges as a more integrated and authoritative person after experiencing his worst transformation" (pp. 128, 162). See also my own discussion of "Circe" as psychoanalytic transformation in Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook, Chapter 9. Contemporary post-structuralist critics tend to assess "Circe" as static rather than kinetic - either a mock pantomime or a carnivalesque play of linguistic di.fferance. In The Book as World, Marilyn French tells us that "Bloom and Stephen are not hallucinating. The hallucinations are hypostatizations of their hidden feelings . . . production numbers staged by the author for the audience. . . . Circe is a nightmare sent by god-Joyce to the reader" (p. 187). According to Hugh Kenner, the chapter contains a "plethora of episodes that resemble hallucinations, . . . but are, in fact, either dramatized metaphors, ... or else expressionistic equivalents of states of feeling" ("Circe," p. 352). Nonetheless, Kenner describes "Circe" as "a nearly accidental psychoanalysis, wholly lacking an analyst'' and believes that both Stephen and Bloom are "at least temporarily" changed (ibid., pp. 359-60). Cheryl Herr observes that the chapter "shows us that we cannot burrow under a character's clothes to any essential nature, to any undiluted and potent identity, sexual or otherwise" (Joyce's Anatorrry of Culture, p. 153). "Bloom's playing Bloom in 'Circe' describes his continuous adoption of one role or another, to the extent that we cannot distinguish character from role" (ibid., p. 155). My analysis of the episode in this chapter attempts to incorporate elements from both psychoanalytic and post-structuralist camps and, in so doing, swerves from the earlier psychoanalytic standpoint of Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook. 20 I use the term "abjection" both in the sense suggested by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror to connote the physical excrescences of the female body that tend to incite horror in the male imagination and in the psychoanalytic sense of an imaginative projection of the self/ego as an "abjected," cast off, and rejected product of the maternal body that

246

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21 22

23 24

25

26

serves, in fantasy, as an imaginary matrix of wholeness and cohesion. In "A Clown's Inquest into Paternity," Jean- Michel Rabate suggests that in "Lacanian terms, Stephen is the phallus for Bloom even more than for Molly, the phallus as a signifier of absence; this representation triggers the movement of ellipse back to mother" (p. 91). Immediately before this book went to press, I discovered that Kristeva's theory of abjection had led Patrick McGee to some similar (and dissimilar) conclusions about "Circe" in Chapter 4 of his recent study Paperspace (pp. 115-49). Herr, Joyce's Anatomy of Culture, p. 176. For a discussion of Rudy's appearance in terms of the "Grand Transformation" scene of theatrical pantomine, see ibid., pp. 173-9. In the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode, Stephen thinks: "Love, yes. Word known to all men" (U 9: 429-30). These crucial lines were restored to the text in Hans Walter Gabler's 1984 edition of Ulysses and are discussed by Richard EHmann in his introduction to the 1986 Random House publication of the Gabler text ( U p. xii). See also my own commentary "Reconstructing Ulysses in a Deconstructive Mode." For "love" as a four-letter word known to all men, see SL 185. The dead mother has become for Stephen what little Rudy has long been for Bloom - an always-already absent object of desire, forever cast in a mold of paralyzed bereavement. As in Freudian dreamscapes, the child psychologically changes places with the dead or absent or spiritually defeated parent; psychic energies are constantly mobile because prpetually transferable. Identifying with the "lost one," the subject confuses guilt with grieving, consequence with cause. Stephen cannot forgive himself for a filial rebellion he associates with his mother's death, just as Bloom mourns for Rudolph the elder, for a dead son he could not succeed magically in keeping alive, and for his own diminished generative powers. For further discussion of the encrypted imago of the lost one, see Jacques Derrida, "Fors." Helene Cixous, ''Sorties,'' in Cixous and Clement, The Newly Born Woman, pp. 65-6. According to Christine van Boheemen, ''Ulysses is a deconstruction of the family romance, a decreation that seems to suggest that epigenetic models are based on preconceptions of patriarchal presence" (The Novel as Family Romance, p. 171). As Boheemen observes, Joyce self-consciously "refused to follow the tradition of clear-cut resolution, of recovery of origin, identity, or title. Leopold Bloom's return to the bed of his wife Molly is not a climactic coniunctio; the meeting of Bloom and Stephen is unconvincing as an emblem of permanent bonding . . . . With the characters in the fiction, the reader is denied the catharsis of a totalizing perspective. There is no closure, no resolution of contradictions" (ibid., p. 133). "Whatever Ulysses presents, creates, or constructs is immediately deprived of full self-presence and put 'under erasure' " (ibid., p. 146). Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan, pp. 147, 150.

247

NOTES

27 According to Sheldon Brivic, Bloom has placed Molly in " the role of nursing mother . ... The situation of nursing is evoked by the infantile orality of this scene .. .. In making a God of woman, Bloom is really putting her in the place of the father. He continually plays a submissive, filial role with Molly" (Joyce Between Freud and jung, pp. 137 -8). In contrast, Richard Ellmann describes this memory as "an epithalamium; love is its cause of motion. The spirit is liberated from its bonds through a eucharistic occasion. . . . Though such occasions are as rare as miracles, they are permanently sustaining" (jj 379). 28 Christine van Boheemen, The Novel as Family Romance, p. 158. Although her book was published after the completion of this chapter, I have tried to acknowledge the similarity of our enterprises (triangulated by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus) by both incorporating and responding to Boheemen's analysis.

5: MOLLY BLOOM

1 As Bonnie Scott points out, readers have faced ' ' the dilemma of

whether to assign Molly to a realistic or a symbolic category, and then the decision of whether to exalt or denigrate her'' (joyce and Feminism, p. 157). Mark Shechner notes that "most of her interpreters have staked out positions in either of two opposed camps: the 'earth-mother' camp and the more modern and ever-more-popular 'satanic mistress ' or 'thirty-shilling whore camp' " (Joyce in Nighttown , p . 197). Leading the cast of harsh Penelopean critics is Joyce's friend Mary Colum, who declared in "The Confessions of James Joyce" that Molly exhibits "the mind of a female gorilla who has been corrupted by contact with humans" (The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, p. 233). "She is a dirty joke," writes J. Mitchell Morse in "Molly Bloom Revisited." "No one regards her as anything but a whore" (p. 140). Robert Adams is equally severe in his indictment of Molly as " a slut, a sloven, and a voracious sexual animal" (Common Sense and Beyond, p . 166). Hugh Kenner calls her a "Satanic mistress" (Dublin 's joyce, p . 262). And Darcy O'Brien conceives of Molly as a vagina dentata who "would devour any man" : "for all her fleshly charms and engaging bravado, she is at heart a thirty-shilling whore" (Conscience , p. 211). On the opposite side of this debate, S. L. Goldberg portrays Molly as the "mystery of Animate Flesh" whose vital potentiality remains couched in a "simple, shrewd, elemental" form (Classical Temper , pp. 293-5); and Marilyn French defines her as the "mythic, the archetypal other" (The Book as World, p. 259) . As David Hayman reminds us in "The Empirical Molly ," Joyce's Penelope tends to reflect the various "attitudes we accumulate toward her" (p. 111). 2 In "Molly in Furs," Frances L. Restuccia observes that "Joyce positions himself to write bisexually, to oscillate constantly throughout Ulysses between the (phallic) referential and (feminine) non-referential,

248

NOTES

3 4

5

6

7

and ultimately to disseminate linguistic play" (p. 115). Daniel Schwarz believes that "Molly's obsessive sexuality is an expression of Joyce's conception of Nora .... As artistic 'father' of her uninhibited sexual energy - in the sense of creator - Joyce thus has a kind of control over the physiological life of Molly-Nora that, we know from his letters, he feared he might lose in life" (Reading Joyce's "Ulysses," p. 268). Elaine Unkeless, "The Conventional Molly Bloom," p. 159. Darcy O'Brien, Conscic~ce, pp. 204, 202. In his introductory lecture "On Narcissism," Sigmund Freud uses the term "to denote the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way as otherwise the body of a sexual object is treated; that is to say, he experiences sexual pleasure in gazing at, caressing, and fondling his body, till complete gratification ensues upon these activities. Developed to this degree, narcissism has the significance of a perversion, which has absorbed the whole sexual life of the subject" (A General Selection, p. 104). In his essay on "Femininity," Freud arbitrarily attributes "a larger amount of narcissism to femininity, which also affects women's choice of object, so that to be loved is a stronger need for them than to love" (New Introductory Lectures, p. 132). Joyce's "Ulysses" Notesheets, ed. Phillip F. Herring, p. 498. In his Zurich notebook VIII.A.5, Joyce asked: "What kind of child can much fucked whore have?" - a question evidently intended for the mind of Leopold Bloom (Joyce's Notes and Early Drafts for "Ulysses," ed. Phillip F. Herring, p. 17). Julia Kristeva declares in Powers of Horror: "It is with Joyce that we shall discover that the feminine body, the maternal body, in its most unsignifiable, un-symbolizable aspect, shores up, in the individual, the fantasy of the loss in which he is engulfed or becomes inebriated, for want of the ability to name an object of desire" (p. 20). "Far from preserving us from the abject, Joyce causes it to break out in what he sees as a prototype of literary utterance: Molly's monologue. If that monologue spreads out the abject, it is not because there is a woman speaking. But because, from afar, the writer approaches the hysterical body so that it might speak, so that he might speak, using it as a springboard, of what eludes speech and turns out to be the hand to hand struggle of one woman with another, her mother of course, the absolute because primeval seat of the impossible - of the excluded, the outsideof-meaning, the abject" (ibid., p. 22). Kristeva and I both arrived independently at a similar assessment of Molly's response to mother-loss, though Kristeva mentions her hypothesis only as a critical aside. For further discussion of the term "abjection," see above, Chapter 2, note 18, and Chapter 4, note 20. See Ruth von Phul's speculative re-creation of the military career of Major Brian Cooper Tweedy and his romance with Lunita Laredo in "'Major' Tweedy and His Daughter." Von Phul points out that Molly, as the daughter of a Jewish mother, "was technically Jewish herself, but her maternal relatives seem to have repudiated her." Molly apparently "remembers nothing about her mother, ... so we can assume that she

249

NOTES

died or decamped very early, and Molly's belittling remark reveals the resentment of a child who has lost a parent whether by death or desertion" (p. 345). In Joyce's Uncertainty Principle, Phillip Herring offers a fascinating reconstruction of the historical Molly Bloom and her maternal lineage. "There are both Christian and Jewish Laredos," he explains, "but those in Morocco and Gibraltar are Jewish" (p. 129). Are we to assume that Joyce knew this? Did he expect his reader to have access to such sociological information? Both Herring and von Phul believe that Lunita was Jewish, as she might well have been. But the question remains moot. Joyce piques our curiosity by having Molly describe Lunita as ''jewess looking'' in an ambivalent attribution which suggests either that Lunita looked like a Jew because she was one, or that her dark Spanish features gave her a mysteriously exotic, Oriental and Sephardic appearance. Similarly, Herring observes that "Molly's circumstances and actions strongly hint that she is illegitimate" (ibid., p. 134) and that Lunita was, or became, a courtesan. Although Joyce refers to Lunita in his notes as a "much fucked whore," all we know about her from the text is that she "simply disappeared after giving birth to Molly" (ibid., p. 136). The one other critic to have emphasized the profound impact of maternal loss on Molly's psychological development is Jan Good in "Behind Taittering Lips: Molly Bloom's Losses and Sexual Guilt." "Molly's psyche," Good tells us, "must protest that the mother, Lunita Laredo, was driven away not by Molly's powerful longing for closeness and affection with the father, but rather by Major Tweedy's own great love for his daughter" (p. 3). 8 How, one might wonder, does Molly know that she has Lunita's "eyes and figure"? Does she remember her mother as a physical presence? Has she seen a photograph? Has Tweedy compared her to Lunita in moments of nostalgic reminiscence? This is one of the titillating gaps in Joyce's text. In The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow speculates that women who experience an infantile "disruption in mother-child empathy" may, as adults, suffer from severe "ego and body-ego" distortions and find that their relation to reality is, "like an infant's, mediated by their mother as external ego." According to Chodorow, the ''mother remains a primary internal object to the girl, so that heterosexual relationships are on the model of a nonexclusive, second relationship for her" (pp. 100-1, 198). Molly Bloom's complex, often contradictory, intra-psychic life seems to hinge on infantile emotional needs frustrated by the truncated drama of pre-Oedipal attachment - a developmental stage that largely determines the female child's "subsequent oedipal attachment to her father and her later relationship to men in general'' (ibid., p. 96). 9 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 43. Irigaray does not apply this theory directly to Joyce, but I have found her psychoanalytic description of female desire highly provocative and useful in my own interpretation of Molly Bloom's psychological subject-position. According to classical myth, Persephone was raped by Hades/Pluto and

250

NOTES

10

11

12 13 14 15

abducted to the underworld against her will. A legendary vtctlm of male lust and innocent of primordial transgression, she (like Molly) was not responsible for mother/daughter separation, though her tasting of the pomegranate had dire and wintry consequences in terms of the seasonal absence of Demeter/Ceres. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 50. Jacques Lacan writes: "I would 8ay that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of the one to whom she addresses her demand for love" (Feminine Sexuality, p. 84 ). Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 69. In his essay on ''Anxiety and Instinctual Life,'' Freud posits the theory that an obsessive fear of loss of love in adult life may be ''a later prolongation of the infant's anxiety if it finds its mother absent. ... If a mother is absent or has withdrawn her love from her child, it is no longer sure of the satisfaction of its needs and is perhaps exposed to the most distressing feelings of tension" (New Introductory Lectures, p. 87). "The reproach against the mother which goes back furthest is that she gave the child too little milk - which is construed against her as lack of love . . . . It seems ... that the child's avidity for its earliest nourishment is altogether insatiable, that it never gets over the pain of losing its mother's breast" (ibid., p. 122). Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," in A General Selection, p. 134. Luce lrigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 78, 76. ibid., p. 87. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, pp. 70-1. It is interesting that Leopold and Molly both share similar histories in terms of mother-loss. Ellen Higgins Bloom, the Protestant spouse of Rudolph Virag Bloom, died at some unspecified point in Bloom's youth, and her husband, isolated and debt-ridden, committed suicide because he was unable to overcome feelings of bereavement after his wife's death. Ellen Bloom occupies surprisingly little space in Bloom's interior monologue. She appears in the "Circe" episode in a pantomimic guise that suggests cross-dressing and theatrical transvestism: she wears "pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow Twankey 's crinoline and bustle, blouse with mutton leg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net" (U 15: 283-5). In Joyce's Anatorrry of Culture, Cheryl Herr characterizes Ellen as Aladdin's "slapstick, widowed mother" in a popular Dublin pantomime and explains that the role was usually played by a male dame in drag: "Ellen's wearing of a male version of female apparel" subtly suggests that the reader's "notion of Bloom's character has to include a sense that his maternal image shows some gender confusion" (p. 145).

251

NOTES

16 Freud notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the subject of a repetition compulsion is "obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past. These reproductions . . . always have as their subject some portion of infantile sexual life - of the Oedipus complex, that is, and its derivatives; and they are invariably acted out in ... transference'' (p. 39). 17 In Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, Brenda Maddox draws a correlation between Molly Bloom's childhood in Gibraltar and Nora Barnacle's in Galway. As a young girl, "Nora was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, Catherine Mortimer Healy. This was Nora's first exile and the one that most shaped her personality . . . . Nora never forgave her mother for shutting her out. . . . Being sent to be fostered, common as that practice was, broke Nora's bond with her mother" (p. 12). Maddox concludes that for both Nora Barnacle and Molly Bloom, "maternal deprivation led to coquettish ways. . .. The maternal qualities that Nora saw in Joyce are the same that Molly saw in Bloom. By making Molly a motherless girl who had been reared by a man and who turned early to pleasing the opposite sex in search of affection, Joyce shows that he understood why Nora was the way she was, even though it drove him to frenzies of jealousy'' (p. 203). 18 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 194. 19 In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce lrigaray calls attention to Jeanne Lampl de Groot's hypothesis concerning a "girl's negative Oedipus. Before arriving at a 'positive' desire for the father, which implies the advent of receptive 'passivity,' the girl wishes to possess the mother and supplant the father, and this wish operates in the 'active' and/or 'phallic' mode" (p. 58). This kind of "negative Oedipus" seems operative in Molly's adult sexual economy. 20 For further discussion of this aspect of Bloom's sexuality, see my essay entitled "Joyce's Bloom: Beyond Sexual Possessiveness." 21 According to Robert Boyle, "Bloom, who worships woman particularly in her life-giving and generative role, is here ritually approaching the source of human life.'' Boyle reminds us that the figure eight lying on its side (lemniscate) can be interpreted as a symbol of infinity ("Penelope,'' p. 412). 22 In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce lrigaray observes about the representation of feminine desire in the dominant discourse of contemporary culture: "Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies. That she may find pleasure there in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man" (p. 25). 23 During the composition of "Penelope,'' Joyce asked Frank Budgen to send him "Fanny Hill Memoirs (unexpurgated)" (Letters I, 171). Molly's apparent fascination with penile size may derive intertextually from

252

NOTES

24

25 26 27

28

29

30 31

32

Cleland's Fanny Hill, where the proportions of a man's "machine" are always obsessively detailed by the heroine/protagonist. Such concerns, however, are a staple of pornography (both classical and contemporary) and tend to reflect masculine fantasies about female pleasure rather than woman's own polymorphous desire. J. Mitchell Morse has proposed the curious theory that Molly "can achieve orgasm only by masturbation or by the friction of her partner's finger" ("Molly Bloom Revisited," p. 142). In Joyce and Feminism, Bonnie Scott offers a feminist rejoinder: "Molly's description of vaginal orgasm . . . and her admiration of Boylan's organ for making her feel 'full up' ... are questionable as female perceptions of coitus, though they reflect male and Freudian fallacies, uncorrected m an era preceding Masters and Johnson" (p. 172). Sheldon Brivic, Joyce Between Freud and Jung, p. 194. For an excellent discussion of Molly as a "counterprinciple" to male social and cultural values in Ulysses, see Bonnie Scott, Joyce and Feminism, Chapter 8. Bonnie Scott relates Molly's "troubles" to Irish political history and offers a provocative assessment of her feminist propensities (Joyce and Feminism, pp. 174-6). Charles Peake makes a strong case for an interpretation of Molly's attitudes as those of a 1904 protofeminist: "Women, she thinks, besides being more sensible and prudent than men, are also more sensitive ... and more beautiful, . . . but they are the oppressed and underprivileged sex, burdened by nature and deprived in their social and personal relationships. Molly is no more consistent about this than about any other subject . . . but, in general, she asserts the physical and moral superiority of women, and, even in her most outspoken attack on the behavior of her own sex, explains it as due to all that women have to put up with" (james Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist, pp. 303-4). Jane Gallop observes in Feminism and Psychoanalysis that in '' Lacan' s mirror-stage the infant is fixed, constrained in a representation which the infant believes to be the Other's, the mother's, image of her. The representation freezes the nameless flow . . . . Yet without representation there is only infantile passivity, powerlessness, and anxiety" (p. 121). See Jan Good, "Behind Taittering Lips." According to Brenda Maddox, Joyce and Nora had a similar experience when they first "stepped out" on 16 June 1904. Joyce took Nora to Ringsend where, with few preliminaries, this semi-experienced young woman "unbuttoned his trousers, slipped in her hand, pushed his shirt aside and, acting with some skill (according to his later account), made him a man" (Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, p. 27). Whether or not Molly has committed adultery with any of the suitors before Boylan has long been a heated issue of Joycean critical debate. Whereas early readers of Ulysses tended to interpret the Ithacan list of

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NOTES

Molly's "lovers" literally, cnt1cs since the early 1960s, perusing "Penelope" somewhat more judiciously, have concluded that few of the males in the catalogue could have actually enjoyed physical coition. Richard EHmann announced in his biography of Joyce that the "two lovers Molly has had since her marriage are Bartell D' Arcy and Boylan, and only Boylan has fully consummated the sexual act" (JJ 377). Robert Adams, Stanley Sultan, and David Hayman all defend Molly's sexual fidelity to Bloom before the liaison with Boylan and support the "single lover" theory. See Robert Adams, Surface and Symbol, pp. 35-43; Stanley Sultan, The Argument of "Ulysses," pp. 431- 44; and David Hayman, "The Empirical Molly." As Hugh Kenner notes, "by post-1959 consensus the number of Molly's lovers other than Boylan swings between 0 and 1'' - hardly the record of a hardened adulteress (Ulysses, p. 145 n). 33 Hugh Kenner, Ulysses, p. 143. 34 Although Joyce refers to the clitoris in the "Circe" episode of Ulysses as the "bachelor's button discovered by Rualdus Columbus" ( U 15: 2341- 2), he seems, like most men and women of his generation, to have sustained an entrenched Freudian faith in myths about vaginal orgasm. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Pygmalion authors have traditionally castrated the Galateas they create by excising the clitoris from their textual/sexual productions. And Molly Bloom, as a creation of male authorial fantasy, seems to be no exception, despite her popular reputation for sexual voracity. For further discussion of the issue of fictional "clitoridectomy," see Robert Scholes, "Uncoding Mama," in Semiotics and Interpretation and my own article on ''Sexuality and Silence in Women's Literature." 35 David Hayman was the first critic to point out that the Ithacan allusion to a "period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ" ( U 17: 2282- 4) does not preclude the possibility that Molly and Leopold practice "coitus interruptus, cunnilingus, or manual stimulation" ("The Empirical Molly," p. 115). In James Joyce and Sexuality, Richard Brown proposes the hypothesis that the Blooms' "estrangement" may simply refer to their reliance on birth control - either coitus interruptus or the use of condoms. He concludes that the Ithacan citation of a Catholic formulaic code for nonreproductive sexuality may be a ''way of describing a contraceptive sexual relationship rather than sexual abstinence. Used with all the rigour, though none of the moral outrage, of the Jesuit theologians, it hardly entitles us to assume, as most critics of Ulysses do, that their marriage is an especially unhappy one'' (p. 67). As I have suggested elsewhere, Bloom apparently suffers from what psychologists term "secondary impotence," the inability to complete sexual intercourse for reasons of anxiety or trauma - evidently, in this case, the trauma precipitated by the death of his infant son Rudy. I have used the term "impotence" to refer to the syndrome of secondary impotence, though

254

NOTES

36 37

38

39

40

41 42

Bloom clearly retains the ability to experience both erection and ejaculation. Bloom's usual practice seems to be to kiss Molly's bottom, then to bring himself to orgasm on her backside. Whether or not this polymorphously perverse ritual changes on 17 June 1904 is beyond the scope of critical inquiry, though many readers have wished it so and have insisted that the Blooms do resume "normal" heterosexual practice at the conclusion (or, more precisely, beyond the ending) of the novel. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, p. 90. For a discussion of Molly Bloom's monologue as paschal canticle, sec Beryl Schlossman, joyce's Catholic Comedy of Language. According to Schlossman, "Molly's monologue is the word that Joyce brings into the world through a feminine mouth . . . . In the dis-graceful enunciation attributed to Molly (orality, narcissism, desire, betrayal), the vampirelike figure of femininity seems to shrink and disappear. Joyce overturns the prayer for the dying, replacing it with the joyous canticle of the quasi-virginal Molly remembering her first time with Bloom among the roses (rhododendrons or, etymologically, rose-trees) of Howth" (p. 63). Sigmund Freud, "Anxiety and the Instinctual Life," in New Introductory Lectures, p. 10 1. Jacques Lacan, "God and the Jouissance of The Woman," in Feminine Sexuality, pp. 144-5. For Joyce, as for Lacan, woman embodies the pas· tout, the "not everything" or "not-all" that refuses summation and defies the boundaries of logocentric discourse. Joyce, however, ts describing a psychological gap; Lacan, an essentialist fallacy. '' Lacan used the word lalangue to describe elemental language and to imply its thing- or objectlike quality. This is a language with particular ambiguities and special patterns of internal resonance and multiple meanings" (Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, p. 206). Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 67. ibid., p. 69.

6: READING FINNEGANS WAKE

1 In joyce's Book of the Dark, John

Bishop explains this phenomenon as the mimetically morbid state of an unconscious sleeper inhabiting a mysterious, surrealistic night-world of darkness and dream. For a lucid discussion of the "clearobscure" dimensions of the Wake's unique approach to night and sleep, see Bishop's introduction and Chapter One, "Reading the Evening World" (pp. 3-41). 2 Characters in the Wake, says Margot Norris, "are fluid and interchangeable, melting easily into their landscapes to become river and land, tree and stone, Howth Castle and Environs, or HCE. We find in the Wake not characters as such but ciphers, in formal relationship to each other" (The Decentered Universe, p. 4). In "Finnegans Wake":

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NOTES

A Plot Summary, John Gordon seeks "to extract a coherent narrative from this least reducible of masterpieces" (p. 8). Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon undertake a similar project in Understanding "Finnegans Wake," as do Joseph Campbell and Henry Robinson in A Skeleton Key to "Finnegans Wake." In contrast, post-structuralist critics like Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida have celebrated Joyce's deconstructive "free play'' with language for its unique qualities of indeterminacy and unlimited semiosis. In an essay entitled "Two Words for Joyce," Derrida compares the Wake to a "1000th generation computer" and confesses that "every time I write, and even in the most academic pieces of work, Joyce's ghost is always coming on board" (pp. 147 -9). He cites, for example, Joyce's influence on Dissemination, La Pharmacie de Platon, Scribble, La Carte postale, and Envois. 3 In his study of Joyce's Politics, Dominic Manganiello repeatedly emphasizes Joyce's lifelong commitment to pacifism. The artist apparently took as his political models "Tolstoy, Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker" (p. 72). As early as 1898, Joyce somberly declared in an essay on "Force" that "all subjugation by force, if carried out and prosecuted by force is only so far successful in breaking men's spirits and aspirations" (CW 17). As a neutral Citizen harbored in Switzerland during World War One, he gave parodic expression to his pacifist sentiments in the verse pastiche "Dooleysprudence" (CW 246-8). Mr Dooley, the "gentleman who won't salute the State" is an anarchist who remains contemptuous of both British and German military authorities. He observes that "Poor Europe ambies/Like sheep to shambles," goaded on by a Church that worships a Jingo Jesus and by ministers who sadistically "taught their flocks the only way to save all human souls/Was piercing human bodies through with dumdum bulletholes" (CW 247 -8). Dooley notes skeptically that both sides are "out to collar/The dime and dollar,'' as they sacrifice citizens to martial slaughter. Refusing to collaborate with either faction, the defiant Dooley reserves the right "To paddle down the stream of life his personal canoe" (CW 246-8). 4 According to Campbell and Robinson, the jinnies may be seen both as "a couple of young mares on the battlefield" and "a pair of Napoleonic filles du regiment. These polymorphous beings correspond to the two temptresses of the Park episode" (A Skeleton Key to "Finnegans Wake," p. 41, n. 7). Patrick Parrinder, in James Joyce, identifies the jinnies as those two nightingales, "Florence Nightingale of Crimean War fame and Jenny Lind." He sees the female figures as ironic reminders of the "infantile sexual content" in Joyce's wordplay with "Waterloo" as a "place for urinating" and for the titillating thrill of voyeuristically observing female micturition in a "game of textual hide-and-seek" (pp. 224-5). John Gordon reminds us that HCE in his mimetic Dublin incarnation is the pub-keeping Porter and ingeniously traces the Waterloo battle-scene to a calendar in the jakes of the Porter establishment in Chapelizod (A Plot Summary, p. 16).

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5 For an excellent cartography of "Novo Nilbud by Swamplight" (FW 24.1), see John Bishop's illustration injoyce's Book of the Dark, pp. 34-5. HCE's guilt remains perpetually mysterious and amorphous: "It was in Phoenix Park . . . that he committed an indecorous impropriety which now dogs him to the end of his life-nightmare. Briefly, he was caught peeping at or exhibiting himself to a couple of girls in Phoenix Park. The indiscretion was witnessed by three drunken soldiers, who could never be quite certain of what they had seen . . . . Earwicker himself is troubled by a passion, compounded of illicit and aspirational desires, for his own daughter, Isabel, whom he identifies with Tristram's lseult, and who is the sweet little reincarnation of his wife" (Campbell and Robinson, A Skeleton Key to "Finnegans Wake," pp. 7- 8). 6 Cf. Dublin's motto, Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas. The story of the Prankquean has always remained a controversial riddle. William Tindall believes that the Prankquean is victorious: "Mother and daughter, ganging up - as composite 'duppy' - on father, defeat him. He falls to the sound of thunder, and from what remains of him a city arises" (A Reader's Guide to "Finnegans Wake," p. 48). Margaret Solomon, in contrast, concludes that "the Prankquean's wetting was, in repetitious effect, the reine bringing the reign to the Jarl, thereby giving him the royal rein" (Eternal Geomater, p. 15). In "A Clown's Inquest into Paternity," Jean-Michel Rabate offers still another perspective when he declares that the "incestuous position of the Emancipator/Immense pater is blatant: he emancipates his doubled daughter (or his wife plus his daughter) just to abuse them, and he conversely castrates the sons who are mere 'geldings' . . . . Women, spurned or raped, are the only fixed or stable points of reference in this reversible universe: but they are merely exchanged, taken as a pretext of the perverse male struggle for power" (pp. 103, 105). For an extensive analysis of the Prankquean's riddle, see Patrick A. McCarthy, The Riddles of "Finnegans Wake," pp. 104-35. McCarthy concludes that the narrative of van Hoother and the Prankquean ''stands as an emblem for the eternal male-female struggle that characterizes human life" and offers a temporary "synthesis of opposing principles" that merely "begins a new cycle of conflict and reconciliation" (pp. 106, 116). 7 Patrick Parrinder notes that the washerwomen's "interest in the act of conception, prurient though it may sometimes seem, is an interest in origins and thus an example of the fundamental historical impulse; and it is the root of all literature, being the basis of our quickened attention when we hear the basis of a tale" (james joyce, p. 235). John Gordon proposes that the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter, "always taken as the dialogue of two washerwomen," is actually the murmurings of Kate the Slop, ''the dream-mediated record of her talking to herself while going about her chores" (A Plot Summary, pp. 71-2). John Bishop believes that the fluid language of this river-chapter simulates the sleeping hero's unconscious awareness of the torrential sensation evoked by the circulation of his own blood, ''arteries and vessels of running water'' that

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reflect "the vitality of [the body ' s) own bloodstream" (joyce 's Book of

the Dark, p. 342).

8 John Gordon claims that HCE has literally "branded" ALP as his conjugal possession. "There is a weird kind of Wakean logic to the idea that a man who has begotten three children should be envisioned as having three penises, and to the idea that from this oddity should derive . . . the three horizontal lines of the capital E which is his siglum. That brand (it is, after all, a fire-iron) is what he used to mark ALP as his own" (A Plot Summary, p. 23). 9 For further discussion of the Wake's Egyptian sources, see John Bishop, joyce's &ok of the Dark, Chapter 4; Danis Rose, Chapters of Coming Forth by Day; Mark L. Troy, Mummeries of Resurrection; and my own article "James Joyce East and Middle East." 10 Roland McHugh tells us that "Simba" in Kiswahili is "lion" and that "oga" means "to bathe." "Siva the Slayer," furthermore, is a Hindu god of destruction, and "oga" is the Old English word for "fear" (Annotations, p. 203). Joyce's syntax in this passage suggests a double negative - perhaps implying that the lion slayer of Michael's fear is both "lewd" and slain" and that, as a result, his erotic passions undergo a phoenix-like resurrection. 11 The French verb souffler means "to blow, breathe, utter, or pant." The noun sicheresse implies drought, dryness, harshness, or a lack of feeling. A possible exegesis of this passage, then, would suggest that "while you would parch your dryness" (slake your thirst?), she "held her breath"; or, alternatively, "held herself panting." John Gordon ingeniously suggests that "alongside the obvious water-passage is a backwards account of a fire-making . . . . As remembered on other occasions, the Liffey is being set afire" (A Plot Summary, pp. 166- 7). 12 Roland McHugh reminds us that the word "Dublin" originally meant "black pool" (Annotations, p. 204). 13 See Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of "Finnegans Wake," pp. xlv-xlvi. I disagree with Glasheen's analogy of ALP's gift-giving with the release of evils from Pandora's box, since Anna's presents appear to be either beneficent or punitive, according to the "potluck" of their recipients. John Gordon summarizes the contents of the sack as "the raw material of all story-telling. Each of ALP's gifts is an individual destiny, a novel in miniature, some of them familiar to Wake readers" (A Plot Summary, p. 167). 14 Roland McHugh confirms the idiosyncratic nature of this saint's hagiography when he notes that St Margaret Mary Alacoque distinguished herself as a "visionary who preferred drinking water in which laundry had been washed" (Annotations, p. 214). She seems, then, an appropriate saint to be invoked by washerwomen. Her vision was of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in whose honor she inaugurated the Eucharistic celebration of the nine first Fridays. As a saint associated with self-sacrifice and protracted martyrdom, she reminds us of Eveline's emotional sacrifice in Dubliners, as well as of ALP's

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responsibilities as all-giving wife, mother, and family cook. 15 Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon point out that there are, in addition to the mamafesta version, "six principal forms of the Boston Letter cited in the Wake," beginning 11. 22, 116. 19, 280. 09, 301. 05, 369. 30, and 617. 20 (Understanding "Finnegans Wake," pp. 86- 7). 16 As Patrick McCarthy observes, the letter, modeled on such texts as "The Book of Kells, Swift's Drapier's Letters, Parnell's letters (both his love letters to Kitty O'Shea and the phony letters forged by Richard Piggott), the forged bordereau used to convict Dreyfus, and Documents No. 1 and 2 (the 1922 treaty of Irish partition and Eamon de Valera's proposed alternative)," tends to appropriate "all documents, and its subject matter is human life on all its levels" ("The Structures and Meanings of Finnegans Wake," p. 576). In Structure and Motif in "Finnegans Wake," Clive Hart adds Frances Sheehy-Skeffington's 1908 Michael Davitt to the list of sources (in a pen/revolver/letter connection) and observes that Anna Livia Plurabelle "is physically identified with the Letter, and hence with the whole 'riverrun' of Finnegans Wake" (pp. 201-2). 17 Roland McHugh glosses the phrase as "simple as ABC," since the Hebrew letter Aleph means "ox," Beth means "house," and Gimel means "camel" (Annotations, p. 107). 18 The Shaun-like professor who subjects the letter to scholarly exegesis is an insufferable pedant, later identified as the infamous Professor Jones (FW 149), a parody of that "mucksrat" literary enemy, Wyndham Lewis, who condemned Joyce for his time-minded propensities in Time and Western Man. (Hence the time/space, dime/cash problem that besets those twin antagonists, Shem and Shaun.) "The lecturer's manner varies from the formidably abstract to the breezily colloquial. . . . By turns he employs the methods of textual critics, contextual critics, biographers, paleographers, political and psychoanalytic critics. He examines the handwriting, the state of the paper, the punctuation (if any), each letter, sign, and word. In short, he is exhaustive; but what his exhausting analysis amounts to is an unintended criticism of criticism by an intending master of burlesque" (Tindall, A Reader's Guide to "Finnegans Wake," p. 100). 19 Anna's "cunniform letters," says John Bishop, "take the 'form' of the 'cunny,' purveying sense subsemantically, in the same way that the sound of arteries of water and 'meusic' do: hence the many 'warbly sangs' (200. 11-12) that Anna sings throughout 'Anna Livia' " (joyce's Book of the Dark, p. 362). The language of the Wake is Anna's: "it argues the power not of phallogocentric structures but of uteroillogico-eccentric ones (like children and dreams)" (ibid., p. 383). 20 Shari Benstock, "Nightletters: Woman's Writing in the Wake," pp. 229-30. 21 John Bishop reminds us that "the Greek to hen signifies, in philosophy, 'that One' out of which the phenomenal world splinters, 'above' (154. 35 [L. ab ova, 'from the egg'])" (joyce's Book of the Dark, p. 376).

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22 The "aggressive 'hun' who is the incubating subject of this construction becomes everywhere linked with a feminine 'hen' and 'her (Da. hun) with whom, bonded in 'original sin,' ... he is latently 'coerogenous' " (Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark, p. 379). 23 John Bishop gives an excellent description of Joyce's process of "scotography" or night/not/nat-writing, an elaborate "not language" which he "devised in order to represent the nat (Da. 'night')." This "'nat language' now generates as a totality a kind of portraiture opposite in every particular from that afforded by the photograph and related forms of representation: antonymically inverting the sense of 'photography' (Gr. phiitographia, 'light-writing'), Joyce's sleepdescriptive 'scotography' (Gr. skotos, 'darkness') makes for a kind of 'darkness-writing' whose developed product, the inversion of a wellarticulated positive print, is a 'partly obliterated negative' that captures the 'Real Absence' of an extremely 'Black Prince'. . . . Where the photograph, taken through the open-eyed lens of the camera Iucida (171. 32), seeks to freeze the plenitude of the present in all its fleeting detail, the Wakean 'scotograph,' taken through 'blackeye lenses' (183. 17) kept as firmly 'SHUT' beneath 'a blind of black sailcloth' (182. 32-3) as those of the eyes in sleep, seeks to capture only the absent" (Joyce's Book of the Dark, pp. 51-2). 24 Patrick McCarthy explains that the letter ends with the traditional Irish ejaculation Slainte or "Health," usually associated with a drinking salute. "The slain/slainte pun, suggesting the death and resurrection of the hero-god, encapsulates not only the subject matter of the book, but also its circular structure" ("The Structures and Meaning of Finnegans Wake," p. 577). 25 There has been a great deal of argument about the symbolic import of the tea-stain at the end of the letter, which Clive Hart associates with Joyce's scatological/urinary obsession. The Wake, Hart tells us, "identifies urine with another symbol of fertility - strong Irish tea - and even with the communion wine itself.'' The letter, in its various incarnations, "usually ends with an act of micturition, a 'pee ess' (111. 18)," and the "post-script is a flow of urine: 'amber too' " (Structure and Motif, p. 206). Tindall euphemistically identifies the letter's teastain as "family tea" associated with marriage, the Prankquean's tea, and the Boston tea-party (A Reader's Guide to "Finnegans Wake,'' p. 103). It seems evident, however, that the stain carries pornographic, as well as scatological associations, and that the stain suggests genital excrescences, ambiguously male or female. (In a long-censored letter, Joyce implored Nora to send him a note inscribed with her own sweet vaginal fluids.) 26 Patrick McCarthy, "The Structures and Meanings of Finnegans Wake," p. 597. 27 Shari Benstock, "Nightletters," p. 231. Because of the parameters of my argument, I have chosen to talk almost exclusively about Anna Livia and to treat her daughter Issy as a rivulet-extension of the

260

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28

29

30

31

mother/mater/river, "dadad's lottiest daughterpearl and brooder's cissiest auntybride" (FW 561. 15-16). For excellent discussions of Issy, see Bonnie Scott, Joyce and Feminism, pp. 184-200; and Shari Benstock, "The Genuine Christine: Psychodynamics of Issy." John Gordon believes that "Issy is the Wake's occasion, theme, reason for existence, prime mover - the one for whom and because of whom the dream is dreamed" (A Plot Summary, p. 76). "The Original Sin of Finnegans Wake is the act of intercourse which produced Lucia Joyce . . . . Specifically, it is the marital copulation at which Issy was conceived, as witnessed by the boys" (ibid., pp. 81- 2). In A Reader's Guide to "Finnegans Wake," William Tindall also contrasts Joyce's satirical portrait of wedlock with Lawrence's romantic notions of mystical marriage. For Joyce, sexual love is spirited and ludic, a laughable game that "Lawrence, despite his gamekeeper, would have abhorred" (ibid., p. 285). Tindall believes that Book III, Chapter Four, may be Joyce's "realistic rejoinder" to Lady Chatterley's Lover. For an ingenious description of the Porter pub and lodgings in the Wake, see John Gordon, A Plot Summary, pp. 9-36. One of the interesting aspects of Joyce's satirical portrait of married love is that its narrative presentation in Book III is both dramatic and voyeuristic. The Porters' deflated coupling is reported by Mamalujo, the four gospelers who double as the four bedposts of the Porter matrimonial bed and salaciously relish "every single ingle" of the couple's connubial activity in much the same way that the prurient nymph in Ulysses witnessed the conjugal couplings of the Blooms. As Rose and O'Hanlon observe, the bedroom is "treated as a stage set and the occupants as actors" (Understanding "Finnegans Wake," p. 266). Moreover, HCE and ALP "are portrayed as two chess pieces, the king and queen, that are moving across a board (the floor of the bedroom)" (ibid., p. 286). According to Lacan, Freud stresses the thematic affinity of the father and death and links "the appearance of the signifier of the Father, as author of the Law, with death, even to the murder of the Father thus showing that if this murder is the fruitful moment of debt through which the subject binds himself for life to the Law, the symbolic Father is, in so far as he signifies this Law, the dead Father" (Ecrits, A Selection, p. 199). As to the "legal entitlement" of the Catholic husband to access to his partner's body, see Ruth Bauerle's speculations about the likelihood of "mate rape" in the unhappy but prolific marriage of James Joyce's parents ("Date Rape, Mate Rape"). In James Joyce and Sexuality, Richard Brown offers a fascinating discussion of the way in which Joyce gives us, in the trial of Honuphrius and Anita, a comic parody of the kind of matrimonial casuistry that preoccupied nineteenth-century Catholic theologians. He cites, in particular, M. M. Matharan's book Casus de Matrimonio Fere Quingenti, published in 1892: "For Matharan the sexual act is understood as a rendering of the conjugal debt incurred in the marriage contract and the

261

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validity of specific acts is established or challenged in such terms . The Wake's English is no easier to unravel than Matharan's clerical Latin, but basically the case discusses the rights of Honuphrius (HCE) to exact the conjugal debt from Anita (ALP)" (pp. 45-6) . William Tindall observes: ' 'This mishmash of incest, buggery, incestuous buggery, and, if possible, worse, is as intricate as a Restoration play and nastier than anything by a declining, or even a falling, Roman. The characters, who take their names from the Imperial City, are all the people of the Wake, and the scene of this Roman shocker is Chapelizod. Honophrius is H .C .E . , Anita is A.L.P., Eugenius and Jeremias are the twins, and Felicia is Isabel" (A Reader's Guide to "Finnegans Wake, " p . 292). Rose and O'Hanlon set forth, as laconically as possible, the plot of this bizarre melodrama of sexual intrigue: " Honuphrius (H .C .E.), it goes, is imputed with the commission of incest with his virgin daughter, Felicia (lssy); with the seduction of his sons Eugenius (Shaun) and Jeremias (Shem); with voluntary self-chastisement (flagellism); and with the attempted prostitution of his spouse, Anita (A.L.P.) . Anita, who has herself been guilty of adultery with Father Michael (a curate who wishes to seduce Eugenius), wishes to save the virginity of Felicia for Magravius (Magrath), who is urged by Mauritius (Sigurdsen) acting on the instructions of Honuphrius his master, to solicit the chastity of Anita after the death of his schismatical wife Gillia. . . . Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla, the leader of a band of thugs called the Sullivani (the Twelve) who (Sulla) wishes to procure Felicia for Gregorius, Leo, Vitellius, and Macdugalius (the Four) if she (Anita) will not submit to him and render Honuphrius conjugal duty " (Understanding " Finnegans Wake," pp. 277 -8). 32 John Gordon and Patrick Parrinder both interpret this chapter as a fairy-tale narrative of the Freudian primal scene, with the child(ren) witnessing the parents' copulation. (A Plot Summary, p. 254.; James Joyce, pp. 214-15). Gordon, in fact, hypothesizes that the "date of Finnegans Wake is Monday, the twenty-first of March, 1938, and the early morning of Tuesday the twenty-second " (A Plot Summary, p. 37). III. 4, he believes, recounts a scene of marital love-making that transpires once a year and provides the occasion for the conception of Issy-Lucia, born ''at or around the time of a festival of light in the dark dead of winter, nine months later" (p. 38). He notes that "Nora Joyce became fifty-four on 21 March 1938," and that ALP' s agnomen is LIV, the Roman numeral for fifty-four (p. 40). The "'allpurgers' night" (FW 556. 28) recounted in III. 4 unfolds as "the final occurrence of the primal scene, of young self spying on old self" (p. 259). But the chapter also celebrates the fulflllment, however temporary, of sexual desire and marital affection, the joys of that sexual/textual game of love played with farraginous gusto throughout the Joycean canon. As Robert Wilson observes, "we habitually play not only with words but also with toys, fantasies, ideas, possibilities, signs, signification, other people and playmates. . .. Any activity or thing can be playful, and

262

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33

34

35

36

37

anything, even a game, can be converted into a plaything . . . . Play is making and it is teasing: it is a constructive activity and a deconstructive activity, pointed in opposite ways yet interbound" ("In Palamedes' Shadow," p. 196). Joyce often used to compare his aesthetic project with child's play, observing that children might just as well play as not, since the ogre of death will come in any case. "I am highly sheshe sherious," claims the narrator of the Wake (FW 570. 25). Patrick Parrinder identifies "Saint Kevin, Hydrophilos" (FW 606. 4-5) as a Shaun figure based on Stanislaus Joyce. "He is connected with the rite of baptism and . . . is a politician aspiring to be the new broom to sweep up now that HCE is gone. Shem Qames Joyce) is a portrait of the artist as polluter and pornographer" (james Joyce, p. 226). In "Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Dream Woman," Margot Norris judges HCE "an elderly invalid, a convalescent, probably a stroke victim." Anna's paradoxical portrait, she feels, is "filtered through the imagination of a dying old man who dreams of virile conquests and senile passions, domestic life, humiliating dependencies, and of the river and woman he has known in beauty, ugliness, youth, and age" (pp. 199-200). John Gordon describes this section as a "deathbed-like sequence of flashbacks from their past lives, real or imagined" (A Plot Summary, p. 275). For Rose and O'Hanlon, this peripatetic monologue is a ''walk down memory lane,'' a ''sentimental journey.'' ''But her memory is weakening. She senses death and knows her riverwater is mixing with the sea. . . . Coldly now she looks on life as she looks on death" (Understanding "Finnegans Wake," p. 319). For Tindall, ALP the river-woman, "taking a mazy course from Chapelizod to Dublin Bay, flows through memories of her family to acceptance of age and death'' (A Reader's Guide to "Finnegans Wake," p. 324). Clive Hart observes that whereas "anal-eroticism is unmistakeably present in all of Joyce's works," it is particularly obvious in Joyce's delineation of the fluid river-woman, ''where head and buttocks are once more united in a 'crosscomplimentary' group" (Structure and Motif, p. 206). Thus Anna's metaphoric mouth or delta suggests at least three physiological orifices - oral, genital, and anal. Margot Norris interprets this particular scene in the Wake as a violent, even sadistic, rape and concludes that "old ALP, in her farewell speech to HCE, seems able to forgive violent fellatio and beatings as though they were only a cruel wind whipping over the river" ("Anna Livia Plurabelle: The Dream Woman," p. 204). "It is sorrowful, Lacan has said, that the loved person onto whom one projects Desire and narcissism serves to give proof of the image and pathos of existence. The other reveals the gap of human Desire, but cannot permanently close it. . . . In love relations this imbalance prevents a perfect coincidence between Desire and the object supposed to provide sexual and psychic closure. The idealized harmony of

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Romantic love belongs to the myth of the androgyn" (RaglandSullivan, jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, p. 81). 38 Joyce explained to Louis Gillet: "In Ulysses, ... I had sought to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I had found the word 'yes', which is barely pronounced, which denotes acquiescence, selfabandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance. In Work in Progress I've tried to do better if I could. This time, I found the word which is the most slippery, the least accented, the weakest word in English, a word which is not even a word, which is scarcely sounded between the teeth, a breath, a nothing, the article the" (Louis Gillet, Claybook, p. 111).

RICORSO: ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE AND ECRITURE FEMININE 1 Philippe Sollers, "Political Perspectives," p. 107. 2 Philippe Sollers, "Joyce and Co." pp. 108, 114. 3 Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe, pp. 54-61 and passim; Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, p. 146. 4 Gilbert and Gubar, No Man's Land, p. 232. "Whether like Joyce's fluidly fluent Anna Livia Plurabelle, woman ceaselessly burbles and babbles on her way to her 'cold mad feary father,' or whether like his fluently fluid Molly Bloom, she dribbles and drivels as she dreams of male jinglings, her artless jingles are secondary and asyntactic'' (ibid.). 5 ibid., pp. 260-1. 6 Marks and Courtivron, New French Feminisms, p. 32. 7 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, pp. 133- 6. "This heterogeneousness, detected genetically in the first ccholalias of infants as rhythms and intonations anterior to the first phonemes, morphemes, lexemes and sentences; this heterogeneousness, which is later reactivated as rhythms, intonations, glossalalias in psychotic discourse, ... this heterogeneousness to signification operates through, despite, and in excess of it and produces in poetic language 'musical' but also nonsense effects that destroy not only accepted beliefs and significations, but, in radical experiments, syntax itself, that guarantee of thetic consciousness" (p. 133). 8 ibid., pp. 174, 191. 9 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 36, 47. 10 Helene Cixous, "Sorties," pp. 87-8. 11 ibid.' pp. 90 -1.

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