The librarian echoes Goethe's view of Hamlet: "the beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts"51; 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")52 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.53
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.54
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.55 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?"56 (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".57 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"58 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"59 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.60
The mockery of the willingness of a Protestant clergy to legitimize British imperialism is put to double-edged use by Joyce, given his caustic trea
tment 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.61
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.
Accordingly, later chapters like "Oxen of the Sun" find in the rise and fall of the Irish nation echoes of a more general decline of European civilization. In a voice parodic of Haines, an Englander confesses his imperial crimes. Joyce plays with the notion that the self-discipline needed to run an empire finally drove many of its rulers mad, or into drug-dependency:
– My hell, and Ireland's, is in this life. It is what I tried to obliterate my crime. Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse language (he recited some), laudanum (he raised the phial to his lips), camping out. In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope... Ah! Destruction! The black panther!62
Within the chapter is enacted the rise and decline of English literary tradition also.
The shipwreck in Homer's Book Twelve is re-enacted in the disintegration of all major literary styles of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon to the present. But the mockery of the Holy Family myth of Christendom extends the attack to western civilization as a whole: everything is negated. Early critics, in their terror at this, devoted themselves to the analytical pleasures of hidden symmetry in order to absolve themselves of the search for meaning, perhaps because they suspected in their hearts that there might be no meaning at all. Ulysses, therefore, offers a challenge more difficult than that held out by any sacred text, yet it refuses to become a sacred text itself.
To confront the void within the self is the awesome task addressed in the final chapters. Their schematizing of experience is intentionally excessive on Joyce's part – for example, the catechism form of "Ithaca" parodies the attempt by the Catholic Church to ravish the ineffable and to submit the mystery of life to a form imposed from without. Society is increasingly experienced by Bloom and Stephen as an autonomous, external force; and though both men meet, they feel less in direct relation to one another than they feel towards the force which oppresses them and prevents them from becoming themselves. Joyce concludes that there can be no freedom for his characters within that society: they exist in their interior monologues with a kind of spacious amplitude which proves impossible in the community itself. So his refusal to provide a "satisfactory" climax in their final meeting is his rejection of the obligation felt by realists to present a coherent, stable, socialized self.
In the macrocosm of Joyce's world is a "principle of uncertainty" which leads him and his characters to attempt an almost manic precision in the microcosm. The attempt at rigid control of the empty space which mocks all human life is a colonization by the masculine principle which loves to order, to tabulate, to map and to judge – the tradition represented by the written book. "Oxen of the Sun" had thrown that tradition into deep question: now the large full-stop at the close of "Ithaca" may signalize the cessation of the written word, the better to make way for the oral, feminine narrative of Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabelle.
What Yeats wrote in another context in 1906 might be apposite here: "In Ireland today, the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonism is always present under some name or another in Irish imagination and intellect . . . The world soon tires of its toys, and our exaggerated love of print and paper seems to me to come out of passing conditions".63 Joyce concurred: his own texts increasingly substituted a sentient ear for an imperial eye, and, like his disciple Beckett, he trained himself to process the voices which came, as if unbidden, from his unconscious. Ulysses, judged in retrospect, is a prolonged farewell to written literature and a rejection of its attempts to colonize speech and thought. Its mockery of the hyper-literary Stephen, of the writerly talk of librarians, of the excremental nature of printed magazines, is a preparation for its restoration of the human voice of Molly Bloom; and, in a book where each chapter is named for a bodily organ, the restoration of her voice becomes a synecdoche for the recovery into art of the whole human body, that body which always in epic underwrites the given word. A restored body becomes an image of the recovered community, since the protection of a body from outside contact has often been the mark of a repressive society.
Like Yeats, Joyce presented himself as a modern Homer, a type of the epic narrator even in his reluctance to begin ("Who ever anywhere will read these written words?").64 He knew that his national culture, in which a centuries-old oral tradition was challenged by the onset of print, must take due account of both processes. Ulysses paid a proper homage to its own bookishness, but, caught on the cusp between the world that spoke and the world that read, Joyce tilted finally towards the older tradition. Like all epics, his would only be given its full expression in the act of being read aloud.
SEXUAL POLITICS
SEXUAL POLITICS
In the 1920s James Joyce liked to joke that his country was entering "the devil's era"; and historians now tend to agree that the next three decades were indeed "the age of de Valera". More had died in the Civil War than in the War of Independence, but once again out of the ashes of defeat the republican phoenix arose.
The new government was conservative in social policy, impartial in its handling of the civil service (most of those servants who had been trained under the British scheme happily worked on in unchanged structures), and had a proper arm's-length relationship with the army and police. The country was slowly recovering from the devastation of war and poverty was still widespread, made worse by the international economic recession of the late twenties and thirties. In 1926 de Valera and his followers left Sinn Féin and founded Fianna Fáil, which its members liked to call "a slightly constitutional party".1 They
took their seats in the Dáil as the largest opposition party (it was rumoured that some of them carried small firearms in their pockets, should any difficulty arise). As the economy worsened and the government cut old-age pensions, it became clear that Fianna Fáil would win the election of 1932. Mr. Cosgrave's government quietly and smoothly passed the seals of state office to men who just a decade earlier had denied the state's right to exist and sought to kill its representatives. A crucial test of the stability of a young democracy had been passed.2
De Valera was something of a world figure, well known to Irish Americans and also to the leaders of decolonizing movements overseas. He was made president of the council of the League of Nations in the year of his election. At home he announced a programme of industrialization and further deanglicization (he would remove the oath of allegiance to the British Crown from the 1922 Constitution). He also refused to pay land annuities of £5 million per year to the British, in defrayment of a loan advanced years earlier to farmers wishing to buy out landlords. Britain retaliated by taxing Irish cattle on point of entry, and the Irish duly riposted with a surcharge on British imports. A so-called Economic War lasted until 1938, further depressing the economy.
De Valera's main achievement in this decade was the legitimation of state institutions: those IRA veterans who protected his early election rallies from enemy attack in 1932 soon found themselves at odds with the disciplined new regime, but there were fewer and fewer dissidents as erstwhile republicans were drawn into the mechanisms and lured by the rewards of government. De Valera himself soon began to appear at ceremonial occasions sporting a top hat. A neo-fascist organization called the Blueshirts (after their Continental counterparts the Brownshirts) had formed itself as a private army to meet the threat of "Dev's Bolsheviks", but (despite having some marching songs written for it by W. B. Yeats)3 enthusiasm and membership soon evaporated. After decades of high theory and violent practice, Ireland was in no mood for ideological fanaticism: a pragmatic government which could knock down some Dublin slums and build housing estates in their stead seemed a preferable option.
Inventing Ireland Page 44
