Authors: Declan Kiberd
Neither in Ireland nor in India were internal minorities much regarded, and so movement was frozen in its nationalist stage. Joyce,
foreseeing what was to come, attempted in
Ulysses
to unleash a plurality of voices which would together sound the notes that moved beyond nationalism to liberation. After Mulrennan, there was no choice but to put oneself in the place of that absent Other that was the peasant, to take as one's own responsibility that emptiness and to fill it with the sound of voices.
Ulysses
would, like Joyce's earlier books, hold a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin in 1904: but, unlike them, it would also be a book of Utopian epiphanies, hinting at a golden future which might be made over in terms of those Utopian moments.
Benedict Anderson has observed that the problem which besets many a partitioned state is of having been "insufficiently imagined".
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That is hardly surprising, for the builders of modern nation-states were expected to dismantle the master's house and replace it with a better one, using only what tools the master cared to leave behind. A similar issue is raised in the opening chapters of
Ulysses,
where Stephen's problem is a version of Joyce's: he wears the second-hand trousers cast off by Mulligan, and yet somehow in them he must learn to cut a dash. The search for a true home is conducted in inappropriate, inherited forms. The first chapter of
Ulysses
is set in the Martello Tower in Sandycove, built by the British authorities to forestall a possible French invasion in support of Irish republicans. A colonial structure, it nonetheless allows the youths to improvise what freedoms they can. If Joyce adopts a somewhat incongruous scaffolding of Homer's
Odyssey
for a subversive narrative, then Stephen and Mulligan attempt a similar transformation of the tower, which they plan to make the centre of a modern Irish culture. All are compelled to reshape past forms in keeping with the needs of the present. Joyce's initial chapter is named for Telemachus, the embittered son in
The Odyssey
who was angry because the land of his father was occupied by foreign warriors: in the story, false suitors of his mother shamelessly waste his patrimony, while the goddess Athene (disguised in
Ulysses
as an old milkwoman) advises him to leave his mother and seek the absent father.
Even at this early stage, Joyce employs the technique of mythical realism, juxtaposing Odyssean marvels against the Irish quotidian. This method has been shown to have been implicit in many texts of the Irish revival, especially the early plays of the Abbey Theatre, whose writers were among the first to grasp that fantasy, untouched by any sense of reality, is only a decadent escapism, while reality, unchallenged by any element of fantasy, is a merely squalid literalism. Joyce's early books, with their unusual blend of symbolism and naturalism, added much to this method: but it was in
Ulysses
that it reached its apogee. Henceforth,
Joyce would equate realism with the imperial/nationalist narrative: it was the favoured mode for chronicling the fate of the European bourgeoisie. The Irish experience, however, was not fully comparable with the European in this respect, because the Irish middle class was not yet fully formed. The split between modernity and undevelopment was obvious to Joyce within Ireland itself in the almost surreal juxtapositions of affluence and dire poverty, of ancient superstition and contemporary
anomie.
No merely realist method could do full justice to that. A form had to be created which would, in the words of Salman Rushdie "allow the miraculous and the mundane to coexist at the same level – as the same order of event".
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That form was adumbrated in
Ulysses.
The modernism
of Joyce
was not only that
of
Mann, Proust or Eliot: even more it anticipated that of Rushdie, Marquez and the post-colonial artists. For them, modernism did not signalize a move from univocal realism to multivocal hyperreality, but from a realism which never seemed real at all to a pluralism which did try to honour the many voices raised after independence.
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European radicals still followed Rousseau in asking how it was that, born originals, people still died as copies. However, the post-colonial artists, born as copies, were determined to die originals. The modernizers from Europe sought to expose the myths of traditional societies to the scrutiny of analytic reason, but they never dismantled the myths which bound them to their own culture. Joyce's canny blend of myth and realism did just that, using each term as a critique of the other, so that neither could achieve its goals. Rather than levelling all differences, however, he produced in
Ulysses
a genuinely multicultural text, which didn't just redraw the boundaries between discourses at some other point. And he provided a model for the
magic realists in the refusal of
Ulysses
to ground itself in a narrating subject or an identifiable author: instead he offered a text without any final authority.
The risks of such a venture are still huge, and must have been all but unimaginable when Joyce wrote. Joyce's answer was to seek a tradition and, in that very act of seeking, to invent it.
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Such a tradition exists more in its absence than in its presence: it is its very lack which constitutes an artist's truest freedom, for nothing could be more deadening than the pull of the past. Yet the very denial of tradition can become the most potent tradition of all, the tradition of inherited dissent, which is all the more powerful for being paradoxical. Borges denounced the conceit of his fellow-Argentinian writers that they were creating
ex nihilo
as reminiscent of that moment in history when the Emperor of
China ordered the Great Wall to be built and all books
written before its commencement to be burnt.
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Joyce was quite open in his admiration for, and rapturous devotion to, the
European classics. "Apart from a few professors of philology, who receive a salary for it", writes
Roberto Retamar, "there is only one type of person who really knows in its entirety the literature of Europe: the colonial".
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These elements are present also in Joyce, but with a difference: he mocked them to perdition in the bookishness of Stephen and, again, in the writerly exchanges of the men in the National Library. In that scene, most of them speak in dead quotations and citations, as they are surrounded by the "coffined thoughts" of a cultural cemetery.
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Joyce, therefore, adopted an attitude of lofty condescension to the European realist novel. He sought a method which could treat of the superstitions of a pre-modern community, which existed alongside and within a society already developed beyond the confining outlines of the nation-state. He did this in the conviction that the religious sensibility can sometimes survive more honestly outside of church structures and official dogma: for him art could be the third principle which, mediating between the material and sacred worlds, offered that new thing, "a secular definition of transcendence".
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By setting the past and present into dialectical tension, the mythic method undermined the European enlightenment's notions of time and linear progress. Instead, it evoked a world of cycles and spirals, which mocked the view of history as a straight line and they set in its place another, very different model. Separate chapters of
Ulysses
overlap in chronology, and even separate sections of the "Wandering Rocks" chapter narrate the same events in time as seen from different perspectives, rendering by this means a most varied set of voices and experiences. The linear time of the realist novel denied all this and sought to dispose of time in neat parcels, but Joyce, in restoring a sense of an Eternal Now, also restored time's mystery.
One explanation of this return to the mythical is the conviction that the enlightenment project in its merely European form was incomplete. Yeats, complaining that nineteenth-century meliorists lacked the vision of evil, prayed for delivery from a mechanistic rationalism. The darker forces thus excluded were bound to reassert themselves on the peripheries: Ireland – like Africa, India or Latin America – was bound to become a sort of fantasy-land, as a result of psychological self-repression at the imperial centre, a repression crucial to the imperial enterprise. In Yeats and Joyce, and in many writers of the developing world, certain themes and images seem to recur, as if inevitably: the self as labyrinth, the notion of the environment as a place calibrated to
solitude, the sense that all texts are psychological rather than social explanations.
The critique of imperial educational methods in the chapter known as "Proteus" perfectly accords with Yeats's attack on rote memory-work and on that compilation of facts which excluded all feeling and emotion. In later sections of
Ulysses,
especially "Circe", Joyce would explore the forbidden night-world of the dreamer whose censors have been freed. In a more general way, his book deliberately utilized all the discredited materials and despised potentials banished from the European mind-set, in a manner similar to the .Abbey playwright's adoption of the superstitions and folk beliefs of a derided native culture. Clearly, a realist text, with its narrative stability and its depiction of intense personal relations in an ordered society, would have been inadequate to Joyce's needs: what he faced was an under-developed country under the yoke of empire and a people's culture which was oral rather than written in its predominant forms.
To understand the evolution of mythical realism, it must be seen as the outcome of a desperate refusal by native artists of the recommended European novel. In eighteenth-century Ireland, for instance, the tellers of romantic tales responded to the challenge in predictable ways. The anti-hero made his first appearance in Gaelic Ireland in
Stair Éamuinn Uí Chléire
(The Story of Eamonn O'Clery, 1710), a parodic reworking by
Seán Ó Neachtain of medieval texts. The author, dissatisfied with the two-dimensional characters of the romances, seemed caught between the desire to mock them in a hilarious send-up and the wish to supply a more realistic motivation for the virtues and weaknesses of the central character.
Modern Gaelic scholars tend to see in the emergence of such an anti-hero "a noteworthy phenomenon which suggests a decline in cultural standards",
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but it really represents the attempt by artists in
the
Irish language to marry their oral narratives to the forms of
Cervantes and Fielding. The attempt failed mainly because there were few Gaelic printing-presses in eighteenth-century Ireland. England was undergoing an industrial revolution and a massive growth in towns, as Fielding produced his masterpieces for the expanding middle class. In Ireland, speakers of
the
native language still told the old romantic tales, which were filled with supernatural wonders and were recited in public to a credulous audience. The European novel, on the other hand, was a realistic account of everyday life, to be read in silence and in private by the sceptical, solitary reader. It dealt in private emotions and psychological analyses which were lacking in the world of most storytellers.
Ó Neachtain and his contemporaries did their best to conflate the two modes, but without a printing-press could go no further;
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and nineteenth-century Irish novelists in English simply repeated the prevailing English methods, in a tradition which stretched from Edge-worth to
Griffin, from Carleton to Moore. Only Joyce in
Ulysses
managed to take the form out of that rational, middle-class world and to restore some of the magical elements of the romances – as when Mr. Bloom ascends into heaven, at the close of "Cyclops", "like a shot off a shovel", thereby escaping his pursuers.
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The deadpan narration of the attendant factual details ("at an angle of forty five degrees over Dono-hoes' in Little Green street") anticipate by some decades the somewhat similar ascension of Remedios the Beauty in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In both cases, the writers achieve their characteristic effect by a subversive
combination
of the mythical and the real.
Whether the results of their labours should be called "novels" is a highly debatable point: it is more likely that they are written in new forms for which there is, as yet, no agreed generic name. There is a strongly parodic element at work in
Ulysses,
mocking the heroic militarism of
epic, the supernatural wonders of folk-tale, the psychological verisimilitude of the novel, but the form which results is in no way confined by these targets. Due homage is paid to those targets: their working conventions are laid bare, in an active exploration of each mode which is also an exercise in literary criticism: however, the
parody is no merely temporary transgression, but a gesture which precedes a radical break.
Ulysses
illustrates the dictum that every great work of literature not only destroys one genre but helps to create another. Radical parody of this kind has the effect of speeding up this natural development of literary form: its ensuing narrative frees itself suffi-ciently from the targeted texts to constitute a fresh and autonomous form,
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a further proof that (in literature, as in politics) the urge to destroy may also be a creative urge.
What is enacted is an energetic protest against those who would convert a once-enabling form into a life-denying formula: and that protest is based on the conviction that all genres – not just the epic basis of
Ulysses–
are mere scaffoldings, which may permit a new text to be created, but which should be unsentimentally dismantled when the work is well done. On this marvellous mutation,
Fredric Jameson has a pertinent comment:
The failure of a generic structure, such as epic, to reproduce itself not only encourages a search for those substitute textual functions that appear in its
wake, but more particularly alerts us to the historical ground, now no longer existent, in which the original structure was meaningful.
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