by James Joyce
Yet, unlike the other men, Bloom shows a redemptive awareness of his own inarticulacy. He feels a real empathy with all dumb things. Kind to animals, he tries to translate the household cat’s sounds into human words like ‘Mrkgnao’ or ‘Gurrhr’. The machine in the newspaper office is ‘doing its level best so speak’ and so, fraternally, he coins the word ‘sllt’ to render its sound. Like his creator, Bloom too is seeking to extend the limits of language, so that it can encompass signals from a previously inarticulate world. His sympathies with humans flow naturally to those as lonely as himself; and such encounters, as with Gerty MacDowell, are often wordless, conducted in the language of the body. In Barney Kiernan’s pub, on the other hand, the men use words as weapons, distancing Bloom with references to ‘him’. Bloom is thus denied his proper name, which had been changed anyway from the Hungarian ‘Virag’, in order to avoid just the kind of embarrassment which has been created. Later in the day, a similar act of dispossession will leave a newspaper recording one mourner at Paddy Dignam’s funeral as ‘L. Boom’. There are many codes at work in Ulysses, and the least kind are often words, which seem even more treacherous than the relations of men.
The lonely inarticulacy of Bloom is poignantly captured in the scene on Sandymount Strand, after his masturbation, when he writes in the sand I AM A. This unfinished sentence is characteristic of the man’s inability to bring many of his impulses to a satisfactory conclusion. The incomplete sentence had already been used by Joyce to register that sense of anticlimax which hung over many of the scenes in Dubliners and A Portrait, for Joyce was from the very outset concerned with the expiring pangs of a language, the moment of its exhaustion.
The banal clichés which recorded the epiphanies in Dubliners had been comprehensible but scarcely expressive; whereas, by way of contrast, many crucial passages of A Portrait had rendered feelings in an idiom so charged with private intensities as to be virtually undecipherable. Already, in those two books, Joyce had made a central theme of a perennial problem – that those who know how to feel often have no capacity to express themselves, and, by the time they have acquired the expressive capacity, they have all but forgotten how to feel. Only rare, remarkable souls manage to seize a received language and inflect it with the rhythms of individual feeling. Gerty MacDowell’s yearnings may be real enough, but their expression is trite, proving that words are not only shaped by feelings, but come, by a strange kind of dialectic, to shape them in turn. Her mind has become so infected by the conventions of her favourite magazines that it is hard to tell when she is sincere in the expression of feeling and when she is simply impersonating the kind of woman she thinks she ought to be.
Her fate is typical of other characters in the book. Even Bloom’s rich mind is a compendium of shreds garnered from newspaper editorials and advertisements. In a mass culture, those few ideas or feelings unique to a person are easily deformed into conventional clichés: otherwise, everyone would be an artist. So it is no surprise to find that Bloom’s mind is invaded by a phrase which had earlier crossed Gerty MacDowell’s consciousness on Sandymount Strand: ‘that tired feeling’. Joyce here carries his critique of language even further, with the suggestion that not even our interior monologues are our own. Molly Bloom inveighs against portentous words and her husband agrees (‘only big words because of the sound’), but the idea had already been recorded in Stephen’s fear of the big words that made people unhappy. The fear of the leading characters that they are interchangeable is traceable to their helplessness in the face of words, phrases, ideas.
Near the start of the Aeolus chapter, Joyce reorders a single sentence to illustrate just how interchangeable words can be:
Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince’s stores.
That permutation comes significantly under the heading GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS, as if to suggest that for journalists words are simply tokens to be arranged and rearranged indifferently. But for an artist there can be only one ideal order. Frank Budgen illustrated this with an anecdote. One day, he asked Joyce how his book progressed, only to be told that his friend had spent a whole day on two sentences – not on the required words but simply on their order, with which he rendered Bloom’s mingled feelings of awe and lechery as he contemplated female underclothing in the milliner’s window:
Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely he mutely craved to adore.
Only rarely does even a consummate artist achieve such a triumph, making familiar words sound new. Some failures are, of course, less extreme than others. Samuel Beckett – in this respect, at least, a disciple of Joyce – told one of his own Boswells that he was seeking a fitting word ‘so that the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said’. During some of the years spent writing Ulysses, Joyce made money as a teacher of Berlitz English to continental students. The experience must have further convinced him of the foreignness of all language, and of the universality of the unfinished sentence. It would certainly have confirmed his suspicion that languages have a far tighter hold on mankind than mankind ever gains on them.
Even the skilled native speaker may, in the closing hours of a long day, lose control over words. So it is for Leopold Bloom. By the time he meets Stephen, the youth is drunk and the solid citizen exhausted. Having waited so long for this encounter, the reader may find it scarcely as momentous as had been hoped. A fatigued Bloom is hard put to keep up with the intellectually versatile Stephen. He marvels at the melodious voices of nearby Italians only to be curtly informed that they were haggling over money. The two men do not see ‘eye to eye in everything’ and their rapport is less than total. Even less certain is the rapport between the vague, unidentified narrator of this Eumaeus chapter and the reader, who by now knows a great deal more of the protagonists than this ill-disposed purveyor of clichés. The reader may feel cheated at this moment, but this is all that is offered. For this reason, it could be argued that the entire structure of Ulysses might take as its paradigm the unfinished sentence, from the rising curve of hopefulness at the outset to the bleak inconclusiveness of a dot-dot-dot:
The anonymous narrator of Eumaeus tells his story in fits and starts, and with so many interruptions that it scarcely gets going. The reader, denied an adequate climax at this point, is compelled finally to consider not the meeting of the two men, but the language which is failing to describe it.
In fact, after the Wandering Rocks chapter, the style of Ulysses had taken over from the characters as the focus of Joyce’s concern, with even major figures like Stephen and Bloom appearing increasingly as pretexts for a series of meditations on the notions of language and style. Those meditations addressed a central problem of modern writing: the breakdown of the old equation between the structure of a language and the structure of a known world. In simple terms, the zones of scientific and technical knowledge had expanded massively in the modern period, while the resources of language seemed to lag behind. Such developments as the analytic exploration of the conscious and unconscious had been confronted, only belatedly, by the makers of literature; and Joyce was one of the first to face the challenge.
To his earliest readers, the interior monologue seemed a triumphant solution to the problems of describing the workings of the human consciousness. In fact, it was just another literary device, pioneered by Edouard Dujardin and Leo Tolstoy in the general tradition of the soliloquy, but much more detailed and alert to the meandering processes of the mind. Though Lacanian analysts may still contend that the unconscious is structured as a language, it does seem that much of what crosses the mind is non-verbal – images, words, sensations. Yet words were all that Joyce had at his disposal and, even more restrictive, words on a printed page. So there are many things which his interior monologues cannot do. To take a famous example: when Bloom walks out of the porkshop and follows the young w
oman on the pavement, taking pleasure in her ‘moving hams’, it is reasonable to see the latter word as illustrating the continuing impact of the pork-shop on his subconscious; but this, in its way, is a trick of language, and more a matter of word-association than of pre-verbal consciousness. An even more blatant trick, of course, is Joyce’s shamelessly uneven apportioning of interior monologues. Readers may assume that every character in the book is experiencing interior monologues as detailed as Leopold Bloom’s, and that these are implied rather than recorded. However, that is not how things work out in practice. In Thornton’s shop, Blazes Boylan is attributed just four words of interior monologue as he eyes up the female assistant, ‘like a young pullet’; and she, though a much more minor character in the economy of the book, is allocated nine words of recorded thought in revenge on the vulgarian: ‘got up regardless, with his tie a bit crooked’. By giving Boylan only four sexist words, Joyce implicitly endorses the valuation of him as a low-budget rake and lout. It is almost, the critic Richard Ellmann sagely deduced, as if coarseness had no consciousness at all.
Joyce makes daring attempts to find a language adequate to the world of science, but the most sustained attempt (in the Ithaca chapter) seems intended to provoke a painful sense of the costs of such exactitude. Joyce savours the superior effectiveness of the interior monologues by recalling for the reader at the climax of the book the severe constrictions of naturalism. The empirical language of the catechism seems unworthy of the warm reunion in Bloom’s kitchen. This is in keeping with Roland Barthes’ theory that the reader can never plumb the depths of a text, because those depths remain an ‘absence’, hinted but never presented. Once again, the reader is invited to contemplate not so much a feeling as the language which has failed to describe it.
Joyce mocks not only words but those – including himself – who flatter themselves into the belief that they can write them. From the flashy headlines of the journalist, through the letters of Milly Bloom and Martha Clifford, the dialects of Lady Gregory and Synge, Bloom’s abortive two-line poem on the seagull, to Stephen’s completed but precious lyric, he laughs at all writing. Stephen’s is the only literary act of any minor value on the day and even that deed in the Proteus chapter is undercut by two other transformations – by the fact that the poet pees on the sand and picks his nose. It is in the course of this chapter that the narrative turns against itself and its chosen language. In the attempt to find a verb for the lugubrious motions of the midwife on the beach, languages of various kinds are pressed to serve: ‘she schlepps trains drags transcines her load’. Then the question is raised as to who will read these written words, a reference in the immediate context to Stephen’s poem, but more generally applicable to Joyce’s book. The alienation of the artist which to the Romantics could seem heroic is here presented as pathetic. Stephen picks his nose as a daredevil bohemian defiance of social convention, but then he looks nervously over his shoulder in fear that someone may have spied him in this unseemly act. The estranged artist may wish to blame society for his loneliness, but most of all he blames language, failing to recognize (as Joyce does) that the alienation of language merely reflects a prior alienation of man.
This is the explanation for Joyce’s repeated mockery of the urge to write, whether Gerty’s to write poetry or the Blooms’ to record one another’s bon mots. Joyce’s implication is that each attempt is a compensation for a prior failure to communicate with others. This is particularly true of the young poseur Stephen Dedalus, who is somewhat too conscious in his poeticizing and can find nobody to share words with him at his chosen level of intensity. A hater of the ‘bookish’, Joyce loved to twit literary types. When brought by disciples for a long-promised meeting with Marcel Proust, he outraged his followers and delighted Proust by discoursing not on the ache of the modern but on the merits of dark chocolate truffles.
The mockery of bookishness extends in the Oxen of the Sun chapter to the major styles in the evolution of English literature from Anglo-Saxon to the present day. One effect of juxtaposing so many styles is to demonstrate how much is left unsaid by any: in rendering an aspect of the world, it misses out on many others. So Joyce can show that each is as limited as the next. It has often been remarked that, within this play of modes, there is no identifiably Joycean style. Traditionally, ‘style’ was supposed to represent a writer’s unique way of seeing the world, but this never prevented exponents of a tradition from judging one style ‘good’ and another ‘bad’. Joyce was one of the first modern artists to appreciate that style was less the mark of a writer’s personality than a reflection of the approved linguistic practice of a given historic period. What seemed like a personal style in a writer was often no more than the discovery of a new convention, as when Hemingway found that it was more effective to describe actions in telegram-language than in leisurely Victorian circumlocutions.
Ulysses is, therefore, constructed on the understanding that styles, like persons, are interchangeable. The method, though not quite dadaist, intermittently justifies Joyce’s account of himself as ‘a scissors and paste man’. Only Joyce could have written Ulysses; and yet it is a book which asks us to give serious consideration to the possibility that anybody could have written it. If our words are scarcely our own, suggests Joyce, then neither are our plots, which can be borrowed from Homer, who may never have existed. He claimed to base much of his material on borrowings from the talkers of Dublin; and took perverse pride in sharing with Shakespeare the boast of never having created a single plot. If the structure of Ulysses is borrowed, the very language seems sometimes to develop at its own instigation, moving with a will of its own to which the author surrenders. Even the virtuoso set-pieces are less acts of creation than of parody; and parody is the act of a trapped mind which, realizing that it cannot create anew, takes its revenge by defacing the masterpieces of the past. In this respect, also, Ulysses anticipates the techniques of The Waste Land, whose subject is the inability of the modern world to create itself anew. The poem’s condemnation of abortion is not necessarily high-handed, for the poet effectively includes himself in the indictment by virtue of looting so many lines from previous texts. The poem itself is an incomplete birth, and its maker (like Joyce) a mixture of ventriloquist and parodist.
Joyce made his parodies the basis of a serious case against literature itself. Cancelling one another out, the styles of Ulysses were – for all their technical flair – a chastening reminder to readers of the sense in which even the finest literature remains a parodic imitation of the real experience of life. What makes Joyce a radical writer is his willingness to question not just the expressive powers of language but also the institution of literature itself. This is the ultimate in sophistication: for, in raising doubts about the literary medium, Joyce is calling into question the very medium through which those doubts are expressed. The parodies in Oxen of the Sun join forces with the parodies of newspaper journalism, patriotic ballads, Yeats and Synge, adding up to a sustained meditation on the limits of communicability. That theme had been broached in Dubliners, many of whose citizens were unable to finish stories, songs or even sentences; and, again, in A Portrait where Stephen Dedalus mastered language only to find that he was talking to himself in the loneliness of a diary. By the time he had completed Ulysses, Joyce was ready to include his own book in the indictment; and so he reached a terminus point of modernism, at which a culture, having flowered, immediately annuls its own agenda. At the heart of modernist culture is a distrust of the very idea of culture itself.
THE CHARACTERS
If communication seemed difficult to the younger Joyce, then that difficulty was dramatized most fully in botched attempts at male camaraderie, whether the aimless freewheeling of provincial Lotharios in ‘Two Gallants’ or the crisis-ridden fellowship of Stephen Dedalus and Cranly in A Portrait. Such men were seen to come together not as genuine comrades but as victims of the new sexuality, sharing only a sense of maltreatment at the hands of women. The man-to-man relationsh
ip was no longer sufficient unto itself, but seemed doomed to define itself largely in terms of the heterosexual relationship which it flouted. This is one reason why Joyce portrayed Irish males in groups less as guilds of freemen than as battalions of the walking wounded. Male friendship was destined to fail, as it did in Joyce’s youth. He was left to conclude that at the root of many men’s inability to live in serenity with a woman was a prior inability to harmonize male and female elements in themselves. In Ulysses, the mature artist set forth Leopold Bloom as the androgynous man of the future.
But not before he had defined the needs of the modern male in the figure of Stephen Dedalus, a youth in flight from the overweening machismo of his father’s Dublin world. Underlying Joyce’s art is the belief, voiced by Stephen, that paternity – like authorship – is a legal fiction, and that children are compelled sooner or later to rebel. ‘Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?’ asks Stephen, desperately concluding that a father is ‘a necessary evil’.
Stephen only learns to see his father in this way after he has repented his refusal to fulfil his dying mother’s wish that he pray at her bedside. As he teaches school in Dalkey on the morning of 16 June, he ponders his dead mother’s love: ‘Was that then real? The only true thing in life?’ So the basic groundwork of Ulysses is laid when the truth of maternity is shown to discredit the myth of paternity. The inadequate fathers in Joyce’s world are exponents of a boozy bravado and a false masculinity, which Stephen shuns for the more womanly strategy of silence and cunning. He is haunted by the tasselled dance-cards and feathered fans of his dead mother, who bends over him in dreams mouthing secret words. The same guilt which assails Stephen also lacerated Joyce, who was retrospectively fired by an almost feminist sense of outrage on behalf of his dead mother against ‘the system which had made her a victim’. Though Stephen’s mother is gone, ‘scarcely having been’, her son is convinced that her words contain a liberating message. ‘What is that word known to all men?’ he asks. He still has hours to wait for the answer from another man, Bloom, who will perch on the same rock at which Stephen ponders the question and who will tilt his hat similarly over his eye. All day, of course, the answer will be within Stephen’s grasp, but again and again he will fail to recognize it as such. In the story of how a Fenian rebel escaped British enemies ‘got up as a young bride, man’, he has a premonitory glimpse of the sort of androgyne who will be his liberator. However, many hours must yet elapse before he learns the correct reply to Mulligan’s opening invocation, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei’, and alters the gender of the almighty God, ‘Ad deam qui laetificat juven-tutem meum’. Only then will he begin to divine the truth of the Qabbalah, that the supreme creator is female as well as male, the perfect androgyne.
