Authors: Declan Kiberd
Bloom is rather wary of literature and of its tendency to soften hard realities. No sooner does he enjoy a vision of an eastern girl playing a dulcimer, as in Coleridge's
"Kubla Khan", than he applies the brakes to that vision. Yet, although he refuses to use books to "read" life, he is quite keen to convert experience into metaphor, likening a poster
on a nearby window to a patch over an eye. He thinks of jotting his wife's sayings onto his shirt cuff, as a prelude to including them in a story: but Joyce's own reservations about written literature beautifully negate all this, when he ends the chapter with Bloom wiping his bottom clean in the toilet with a page from
Titbits.
Writing is deathly, and in this book, the letter kills; while it is speech, especially the silent speech of thought, which seems to issue from the uncensored depths of the unconscious. Bloom's language is as oral as Stephen's writerly: like all adepts of an oral culture, he uses balanced, rhythmic language and cites proverbs and old saws as an aid to memory and adjudication.
Perhaps the most significant oral narrative cited in
Ulysses
is John F.
Taylor's speech on imperialism and dispossession, a speech which described Moses bringing "the tables of the law in the language of the outlaw"
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– and the phrase might be taken to indicate a new dispensation for literature, written, however, in the experimental language of the rebel. Yet the speech is couched in pure Victorianese, scarcely an assured basis for its own separatist argument, and admired more for its style than its content. Joyce may imply that the Celtic love of style for its own sake is masturbatory. He makes equally clear that the fragments of endless quotation ("Lay on Macduff") bespeak a nervous provincialism and the pedantry practised by a repressed people who fear that they may be second-rate. Stephen, of course, is affected by the same virus, but at least his quotations generally occur in internal monologue. Vast
learning in the newspaper office is put in the service of futility, in a world where conversations lack a central set of overarching themes.
In the National Library scene of "Scylla and Charybdis", the narrator manages to mangle the names of the protagonists and to mock the widespread fashion for pseudonyms among men who fear to become themselves. The conversation, accordingly, is smothered by quotations. The Quaker librarian Lyster is treated as a man more concerned to drop names than advance arguments. He talks in essayistic clichés which show how writing can corrupt speech. In his library, as in so many others, little reading but much talking ensues. Joyce presents its "coffined thoughts" in "mummycases"
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as deathly (in keeping with the earlier link made between printed sheets and defecation). Stephen complained in "Proteus" of having to breathe "dead breaths", which might now in the library be seen as the endless quotations from the dead authors that swirl all around him. His own refusal to publish his theory of
Hamlet
is his way of refusing to embalm his idea. The library in this chapter parallels the graveyard in "Hades", with the librarian in the role of the gate-keeper and Stephen's review of the coffined thoughts recalling Blooms musings over the dead.
The librarian echoes Goethe's view of Hamlet: "the beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts"
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; but this is the purest Celticism. Stephen – and, we may assume, Joyce – is not convinced at all, pitting the brute realities of
Shakespeare's actual history ("he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland")
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against all Yeatsian attempts to Celticize a poet, whose most famous creation he sees in a more imperialist light:
Not for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one. Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr. Swinburne.
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In open revolt against that Celticism which was patented by Matthew Arnold out of the pages of Ernest Renan, Stephen sarcastically notes the latter's relish of the later writings of Shakespeare: but he proceeds to reinvent a bard more serviceable to himself, one in whom the "note of banishment" can be heard from start to finish.
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The trouble to which Joyce went in "Wandering Rocks" to invent a vice-regal cavalcade (which did not occur on June 16) suggests his continuing anxiety to emphasize the colonial theme. The other procession
recorded is that of Father Conmee, whose identification with members of the declining aristocracy is as notable as his relationship with the rising nationalists. The atmosphere of toadying and
deference, which surrounds both figures, had dissolved by the end of the Great War and the victory of Sinn Féin in 1918. Joyce must have known that the manners, which he correctly attributed to 1904, were largely historical by the time he published
Ulysses.
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The respective paths of church and state do not cross at any point in the chapter, as if to suggest the tacit truce which has permitted them to carve up Ireland between them; but Joyce is also at pains to suggest that neither Stephen nor Bloom pays homage to the colonial power. Whereas others "smiled with unseen coldness", or provocatively stroked a nose, the two men are neither insolent nor craven (the usual polarity of reactions as reported, for instance, by Forster in
A Passage to India,
1924). Already acting with an unconscious affinity, they have embarked on the mission set down by Stephen: to kill, not in bloody battle but in the depths of the mind, the twin tyrannies of priest and king.
Half-way through
Ulysses,
in a chapter of fragments, each of which represents
in parvo
a chapter of the book, Joyce adopts a god's eye view of Dublin, from which distance both men appear (like everyone else) as mere specks on the landscape. This serves to remind us that thousands of other lives and monologues had been proceeding as we read the earlier chapters; and that any might have been centralized in the book. Joyces assumption of intimacy with the streetlife of Dublin now grows a mite treacherous, as the reader is fed a series of false leads. For example, the Viceroy who passes in cavalcade is given many tides, but never the correct one: Gerty MacDowell thinks him the Lord Lieutenant, two old ladies fancy he is Lord Mayor, and Mr. Kernan is convinced that he has just seen Long John Fanning. Though the king's man scrupulously acknowledges the salutes (which come, absurdly, even from the singers of rebel ballads), he remains as unknown to any of his subjects as they to him.
The "Cyclops" chapter, set in a pub rather symbolically sited in Little Britain Street, is Joyce's most trenchant exposure of the psychology of narrow-gauge nationalism, though it would be foolish to ignore its equal critique of imperialism. The patriotic Citizen (loosely modelled on
Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association in 1884) possesses a one-track mind, which leaves him intolerant of all foreigners among whom, of course, he includes the Jews. Bloom, as an internationalist, profoundly tests the Citizen's tolerance, enabling Joyce to do two things with their scenes – to distinguish Bloom's liberationism
from the Citizens nationalism, and to show how closely the latter's ideas were based on English models which he claimed to contest. Against that backdrop, Bloom emerges as much "more Irish" than the Citizen.
The Citizen denounces British violence, but re-enacts it in his own brutality towards Bloom. He was once a Fenian, until he violated those principles by grabbing the land of an evicted tenant. His cronies, though scornful
of
the British parliamentary system, mimic its procedures, preferring not to call one another by name and often referring to Bloom as "him". The boxing-match between Myler and Percy is a comment on the vicarious taste for violence among Dubliners, who can nonetheless appear genuinely appalled by British military cruelty. Bloom alone is upset by these tastes, and upset in a way which links him back to Stephen, who saw the school playing-field as the source of history's nightmare. Bloom (though he rather inconsistently favours capital punishment for certain crimes) can see nothing superior in employing Irish violence against its colonial counterpart: "Isn't discipline the same everywhere? I
mean,
wouldn't it be the same
here
if you put force against force?"
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(These views, which link him to the
anarchists, will be fleshed out by later revelations that he went even further than Michael Davitt, favouring the expropriation of private property.) It is at this point that he asserts that love is the very opposite of "force, hatred, history, ail that".
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The price of uttering such a truism is eviction, as Bloom hurriedly adds: "I must go now", in the manner of a departing Christ. Later, the Citizen will threaten to "crucify him"
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and Bloom will indeed ascend into the skies, like Christ from Mount Olivet. This man, who will finally be embraced at their meeting by Stephen as "Christus, or Bloom his name is, or after all any other" has many analogies with Jesus, a figure born in a colony to a marginal family and destined to be a scapegoat for communal violence.
Linked to this in Joyce's mind was the masochistic element in the Irish character, whether reliving the legend of the Croppy Boy (betrayed by a soldier dressed in the garb of a bogus priest) or of Robert Emmet's execution. At the climax of the hanging of the rebel, a "handsome young Oxford graduate"
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offers his hand to the condemned man's lover: clearly, he is a version of Haines, and the epitome of the English forces now taking over the Irish Revival on their own terms. In the figure of the woman who willingly hands herself over to the Oxonian, Joyce indicates a sell-out of national interests in a moment of apparent patriotism, to the English scheme of things. He seems
to have been troubled by the frequent assertion that Ireland was subdued only because the Irish were inherently subduable.
This might, by extension, be a way of suggesting that the Jews were used as a scapegoat for Ireland's problems, just as they were used by Haines and Deasy to account for England's economic woes. In this, too, Irish nationalism could be a depressing image of its English parent. Joyce might, therefore, be implying that the real problem is the failure of timid men (like the Citizen or the singers in the Ormond bar) to tackle the British, and that they have failed in this because they are secretly in awe of them. It thus becomes easier to create a knock-on Jewish victim from within their own ranks than to face the full implications of their own victimage. So the Citizen ends up persecuting the man who gave the idea for Sinn Féin to its founder.
This is not as paradoxical as it seems, for the nationalists appear to Joyce as analogous to the leaders of African tribes who manage, in the end, to co-operate with the
imperial mission. The passage read out from a newspaper by the Citizen reflects – though this would never strike him – very badly on himself:
– The delegation partook of luncheon at the conclusion of which the dusky potentate, in the course of a happy speech, freely translated by the British chaplain, the reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones, tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and emphasized the cordial relations existing between Abeakuta and the British Empire, stating that he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated bible, the volume of the word of God and the secret of England's greatness, graciously presented to him by the white chief woman, the great squaw Victoria, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the Royal Donor.
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The mockery of the willingness of a Protestant clergy to legitimize British imperialism is put to double-edged use by Joyce, given his caustic treatment earlier in the chapter of the Catholic clergy's endorsement of the Gaelic League: the priests listed at its meeting were, variously, academics, leaders of religious orders, parish controllers and so on. In this, as in much else, one tyranny is seen to duplicate another, though the fellow-feeling of the drinkers in the pub with the victims of imperialism in the Belgian Congo seems real enough:
Did you read that report by a man what's this his name is?
– Casement, says the citizen. He's an Irishman.
– Yes, that's the man, says J.J. Raping the women and girls and flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of them.
However, the drinkers bring an equal moral outrage to bear on the holders of petty official jobs, always a source of resentment in a city of high unemployment:
Sure enough the castle car drove up with Martin on it and Jack Power with him and a fellow named Crofter or Crofton, pensioner out of the collector general's, an orangman Blackburn does have on the registration and he drawing his pay or Crawford gallivanting around the country at the king's expense.
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Though the Homeric parallel is manipulated with great deftness in every chapter, Bloom remains quite unaware of it. Joyce, committed to the ordinary, finds him admirable in his refusal to mythologize either himself or others. In a book where both Stephen and Gerty try unsuccessfully to emulate approved patterns, Bloom unknowingly achieves their desire. Refusing to conform to the prescriptions of a text, he reserves his small measure of freedom, and through his unconscious deviations, he establishes the lineaments of an individual personality. He creatively misinterprets past moments, in keeping with his current needs. Moreover, his is a "repetition with difference" and out of those differences he constructs a system of resistance to literature. This becomes the basis for a new kind of hope in an Ireland too rich in examples of characters who make themselves willing martyrs to ancient texts. Though repetition is a crucial theme throughout the book, what saves Bloom is his conviction that things can be different, while somehow remaining the same. In a somewhat similar way, what animates Joyce is his conviction that Homer can be rewritten. It would not be excessive to read
Ulysses
as a deliberate attack on
The Odyssey,
which it divests of its ancient authority by converting it into a botched-up version of
Ulysses.
The audacious assumption is that
The Odyssey
will henceforth be read mostly by those who have first learned of its importance through a reading of Joyce's book.