by James Joyce
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
In laying violent hands on Shakespeare, Irish writers offered the act of re-reading as a rehearsal for revolution, since those re-readings betokened a refusal to accept assigned places and an insistence on experimenting with unfamiliar roles.
The attempt to renovate a national consciousness on the basis of the occupier’s set texts is deeply paradoxical, but it is not the self-defeating enterprise it might seem. For one thing, Joyce and Yeats were reaching back to a premodern, carnivalesque vitality which survived, however obscurely, in Shakespeare’s texts and which seemed to intersect beautifully with the latent energies of Irish speech. For another, the nationalist dream of an absolute return to a mythic Gaelic source was – as we have shown – well-nigh impossible. The nationalism which Joyce lampoons throughout Ulysses is largely a copy of its English parent, albeit a copy minted in occasional Gaelic phrases. Moreover, that nationalism repeated the imperialist equation of ‘rural Ireland’ with ‘real Ireland’ and, as such, was a mere sentimentalization of backwardness. The critic John Eglinton (one of Joyce’s more surprising models for elements of Bloom) asked how a pastoral movement could be in any sense ‘national’ since the interest of the whole nation lay in extirpating the conditions which produced it. That question was a shrewd recognition of the poverty of tradition in Ireland (other than the tradition of subverting all attempts to impose one). For Joyce, far from being a catastrophe, this was an opportunity to improvise, in the vacuum left after a mostly silent nineteenth century, the idea of liberation. The man who wrote of history as a nightmare would have endorsed James Connolly’s warning that a worship of the past might ‘crystallise nationalism into a tradition, glorious and heroic indeed, but still only a tradition’. Such caution was understandable, given that the heroic past worshipped by nationalists was a licensed version of the British imperial present.
The alternative to fetishizing Cúchulainn and his warrior band was the courageous admission that there was no such thing as an Irish identity, ready-made and fixed, to be carried as a passport into eternity. Centuries of colonialism had denied the Irish the knowledge of who they had been or now were. So, in the late nineteenth-century, each time the English claimed to have an answer to the Irish Question, the Irish seemed irritatingly prone to change the question. In a book called Ireland’s English Question Patrick O’Farrell has captured the meaning of that impasse:
… In fact, the two searchings, the British for an answer, the Irish for a meaning to their question, interacted on each other to their mutual frustration. No proposed external solution could ever satisfy the Irish, or calm their troubles, for they as a people neither knew who they were nor what they wanted – these were problems they would have to solve for themselves, themselves alone.
Joyce and his contemporaries had no ready-made insignia for Ireland: they were simply keen to create the conditions in which the pursuit of freedom might begin. They hated the past and those who sentimentalized its many failures as covert triumphs (the Sirens chapter is especially scathing of such rhetoric, songs and tales). Like Stephen Dedalus, they saw Ireland’s conscience as ‘uncreated’, and from this vacuum they hoped to build a vibrant land.
Such a programme for post-colonial liberation was as exacting as any attempt to start from first principles must always be. Moreover, it appeared to slight the past in an orgy of futurology. To secure a fair hearing in a conservative country, the exponents of radical innovation had to present their agenda as a return to ancient traditions; and in the process history took on some of the contours of science fiction. Dreaming of a classless society on anarcho-syndicalist principles, James Connolly found himself contending that this would simply be a restoration of the kinship systems of the Gaelic past. Pedantic historians who protested against this misrepresentation of an historical community failed to realize that, for the activist, a subversive new idea is often best gift-wrapped in the forms of the past. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte–a source for Stephen’s phrase about history as ‘nightmare’ – Karl Marx had noted with amusement the way in which the rebels of 1789 and 1848 nerved themselves for the new society they were creating by pretending to be ‘resurrected Romans’. Sitting for their portraits in ancient togas, they pretended to be Roman democrats when in fact they were revolutionary businessmen. The rebels of Paris in 1789 had put on the masks and costumes of historical actors in order to bring something new into being: they slipped, like an adolescent, into available past roles in hopes of discovering something new about themselves. In such a fashion would Yeats and Joyce slip into the part of Shakespeare. So, too, would Pearse cast himself in the role of Celtic hero, though his actual struggle was to create a welfare state which would cherish all the children of the nation equally. The same attempt to smuggle a revolutionary text into society under a respectably ancient cover may be one aspect in Joyce’s use of The Odyssey as a scaffolding for Ulysses.
In all such cases, the ancient analogues – Shakespeare, Cúchulainn, Odysseus – provided the space within which the radicals were free to innovate or improvise. Claiming to be upholders of the past, they were anything but. They knew that they must creatively misinterpret the past if they were to shape a golden future. Such a future would be less a revival than a birth, a project of self-invention. The revolt against provincialism that underlay the Irish revolution was a revolt against fathers who had inured themselves to repeated defeat by declining, like Simon Dedalus, into ‘praisers of their own past’. To the fathers the past was static, a thing frozen and completed, an arena of heroes whom one learned about; to the sons, in contrast, it was a process with an incomplete agenda and unfinished business, something to have a dialogue with and to learn from. The sons feared that the fathers’ looting of the past in search of serviceable Cuchulainoid heroes might be more a confession of impotence than a spur to self-respect: to them, a worship of the past might be a dubious way of refusing to confront the fallen Ireland of the present. Hence Joyce’s severe ironization of all models of ancient heroism, whether Gaelic or Greek. To those who said ‘Unhappy the land that has no heroes’, he might have replied with Brecht’s Galileo: ‘No! Unhappy the land that needs a hero!’ – a land forever dreaming of past models of greatness and seemingly unable to conceive of itself.
The difference between these two versions of Irish Renaissance might best be explained by invoking Lionel Trilling’s brilliant distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, a congruence between avowal and feeling, can be achieved when there is no problem of form: it is based on the Romantic ideal of truth to the self and it presupposes a definite indentity which it becomes the task of a lifetime to be true to. Authenticity is a more excruciatingly modern demand, which begins with the admission that there is a problem of form, and that this makes the congruence between avowal and feeling difficult: it recognizes that the issue is not truth to the self but the finding of the many selves that one might wish to be true to. It makes the liberating concession that a person, or a nation, has a plurality of identities, constantly remaking themselves as a result of perpetual renewals. Joyce’s constant struggles with the question of form, along with his scouting of the limits of language, place him squarely in this latter tradition – as does his insistence on the ‘plurability’ of experience.
The romantic writer says: there is an essential Ireland to be served and a definitive Irish mind to be described. The modernist rejoins: there is no single Ireland, but a field of force subject to constant renegotiations; and no Irish mind, but Irish minds shaped by a predicament which produces some common characteristics in those caught up in it. The former says: ‘this is Rosie O’Grady – love her’; but the latter repeats Stephen Dedalus’s caveat in A Portrait: ‘I want to see Rosie first.’
The sincere nationalist asks writers to hold a mirror up to Cathleen Ni Houlihan’s face; but the authentic liberationist wistfully observes that the cracked looking-glass, which is all h
e has been left with by the colonizer, renders not a single but a multiple self. Such a self Joyce celebrated in the ‘cultured allroundman’ Leopold Bloom, who combined so many past lives in his own. Wilde had said that the only way to intensify personality was to multiply it, implying that this was a liberty more easily taken by the ‘theatricalized’ subject peoples of the empire. Such a theatricality – though sometimes regretted by sober, puritanical nationalists – allowed people to ‘forget their place’ and assume instead the plasticity of inherited conditions. The drab suit worn by the Victorian male was, in Marx’s words, ‘a social hieroglyphic’, a sign of the stable imperial self. Set against that drab-ness, Bloom’s sheer versatility seems like a liberation, his black mourning-suit a joke which he privately mocks as a gross simplification. He represents, indeed, a wholly new kind of male subject in world literature, a man whose womanly multiplicity is intended less to excite derision than to provoke admiration. Woman has, by tradition, been allowed such multiplicity in the manner of all subject groups: but not so man. Because the feeling of masculinity in males is less strong than that of femininity in females, there has been an ancient prejudice in most cultures against the womanly man; and if any being was more diminished than woman by imperial culture, that being was a womanly man. In the writings of Wilde, Shaw and Synge, such a figure was presented for approbation, but in the slightly strained mode of camp comedy: it was Joyce who rendered the womanly man quotidian and changed forever the way in which writers treated sexuality.
Equally, at the level of artistic form, Joyce’s experiments with the novel can be best understood in terms of the Irish crisis. For most national writers of the time, the mirror epitomized a realist aesthetic which merely reproduced a degraded colonial environment which they felt they should be contesting. Questioning the notion of art as a mirror held to nature, Wilde in Intentions protested that that ‘would reduce genius to the condition of a cracked looking-glass’. That cracked mirror reappears in the opening pages of Ulysses amid implications by Stephen Dedalus of the menial degradation of those nationalist writers who content themselves with describing the surface-effects of colonial life. He probably means to include Synge in his indictment, but in fact the dramatist offered an equally radical reinterpretation of the image of the mirror. In The Playboy of the Western World Christy Mahon toys in the first two acts with cracked and perfect mirrors, the first emblematic of colonized self-hatred, the second of preening nationalist vanity. Finally, in the third act he rejects both and learns to construct himself out of his own desire, having discarded forever all realist mirrors.
For Joyce, as for Wilde and Synge, art was not just surface but symbol, a process whereby the real took on the epiphanic contours of the magical. Realist writers, cleaving to notions of an empirical, singular selfhood, had failed adequately to render the symbolic dimension of experience, but the Irish were among the first post-colonial peoples to restore the ‘magic realism’ of Shakespeare’s later plays to modern writing. Synge claimed to fuse ‘reality’ and ‘joy’; Lady Gregory to build from ‘a base of realism’ to ‘an apex of beauty’; Yeats’s plays were held to reconcile ‘poetry’ with ‘humdrum facts’; but the logical consummation of these ideals was Joyce’s interrogation of the mythical by the matter-of-fact in Ulysses. Those recalcitrant facts which Matthew Arnold had asserted would always elude the Celt were to be assimilated, but with no impoverishment of imaginative possibility. So Bloom, the most rendered and realistic figure, does not completely surprise us when he ascends into heaven, at the end of the Cyclops chapter, ‘like a shot off a shovel’. As a moment, it prefigures a very similar ascension in another post-colonial novel of magic realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In doing all these things, Joyce took immense liberties with the form of the novel, blending it inter-generically with elements of short story, epic, and drama from which, in its hybridity, it had derived. It is generally accepted that the novel began with Cervantes’ domestication of the epic and his parody of the medieval romance, in the production of a male subject more tractable and more comically lovable than was to be found in those earlier forms. Joyce may have exploded the novel, much as Cervantes did the epic and romance, by taking these insights to their logical conclusion. But the urge to destroy is also a creative urge; and it is very likely that Ulysses is cast in a form for which, even yet, there is no name.
Perhaps that is as it should be, for a name is a barbarism, a limitation; and Ulysses is an endlessly open book of Utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin, 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those Utopian moments.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE TEXT
Even before its formal publication as a book on Joyce’s birthday, 2 February 1922, the text of Ulysses was problematic. Five sections had appeared in 1919 in The Egoist, a London magazine edited by Harriet Shaw Weaver, who ran into problems with her printers and a revolt from some subscribers. Between 1918 and 1920, parts of the book appeared in serial form in The Little Review, an avant-garde American magazine edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. By February 1921, the magazine had been found guilty of obscenity and the editors fined. In some desperation, Joyce turned to a young American bookseller in Paris named Sylvia Beach, and asked her shop, Shakespeare and Company, to publish his work. The printer was Maurice Darantière from Dijon.
Through this period of gestation, Joyce had sold or given draft versions of earlier sections of Ulysses to well-wishers. It had been his habit to procure three copies of each of his chapters from typists. He made revisions to two versions, one to be sent to The Egoist, the other to The Little Review. To Darantière, he could supply only the third copy, which now he revised and corrected as best he could, working from a wayward memory, available copies of magazines, and, in all likelihood, further artistic inspiration. By the time he received galley-proofs from Darantière, the thin line between editorial correcting and creative rewriting had all but disappeared: invention was piled upon correction, addition upon emendation, with the result that Ulysses expanded massively in proof. This was particularly true of later chapters such as Ithaca, which were being typed and effectively rewritten at the same time. According to scholar Richard Madtes, ‘Joyce added 9380 words, or 42% of the episode, after making a fair copy of the basic manuscript. He changed only 348. He deleted entirely an almost negligible 79’.
Darantière’s printers committed many predictable errors of which Joyce complained, but the first edition was ready for the set date, arriving on the Dijon-Paris train in the nick of time. One thousand copies were printed. A second edition of two thousand was brought out in October by the Egoist Press in London, with Darantière again serving as printer, but copies were seized and confiscated at entry to both the United States and Britain. An errata page listed some emendations and Darantière even included some corrections in the typeset, but Joyce’s skills as a proofreader were impaired by bad eyesight and many errors persisted (though, as will soon be seen, scholars continue to argue whether the word ‘error’ should be used of phrases actually passed by the author).
In January 1924 Shakespeare and Company published an unlimited edition, which was reset in 1926. This resetting was done without benefit of the usual reviews which allow eagle-eyed critics to point up howlers in a first edition for subsequent rectification. That same month, a manuscript of Ulysses which Joyce had sold bit by bit to the New York lawyer John Quinn, was auctioned to a Dr A. Rosenbach. He thereupon tried to purchase from Joyce the corrected proofs, but was testily turned away.
In 1932 an Odyssey Press edition appeared in Hamburg, having been seen through the press by Joyce’s friend and confidant, Stuart Gilbert. Three years later, Gilbert wrote an introduction for a Limited Editions Club version, with illustrations by Matisse and ‘corrections suggested to Mr Gilbert by James Joyce himself. By then the unbanning of Ulysses in the United States had freed Random Hous
e to publish a first American edition in 1934; and in 1936 the Bodley Head brought out its famous thousand-copy British edition, proofed by Joyce in the previous summer. These became the standard versions for decades, the Bodley Head reappearing in 1941, 1947 and 1949. The Random House version was often criticized in the US, and so a new version was produced in 1940 with corrections of the 1934 edition. In 1961, just a year after the resetting of the Bodley Head version in London, the Random House edition was also reset.
This was regarded as a reasonably respectable text, whose flaws could be established and remedied over subsequent years. Indeed, a scholar named Jack Dalton prepared a critique of that text at such a level of rigour that Random House made a contract with him, but he eventually withdrew the proposed new edition on learning that the publishers would not promise to include all his corrections.
A number of his suggestions did, however, find favour with Hans Walter Gabler, who headed the editorial team which prepared a ‘corrected text’, published in a critical and synoptic three-volume scholarly edition in 1984. His claims were startling. He argued that he was enabled to offer about five thousand improvements on the 1922 and 1961 editions, both of which were by then regarded by textualists as the appropriate bases for further scholarly refinement. And Gabler’s methods were quite revolutionary: he favoured no particular copy-text, but redefined as a ‘continuous manuscript text’ all of the drafts, notebooks, manuscripts, typescripts, corrected and uncorrected proofs and various editions overseen by Joyce, who was to be imagined as a writer of ‘continuous copy’. With the help of a sophisticated computer, an ideal Ulysses might be reconstructed from this evolving archive. To previous editors, the plethora of materials left over from the gestation of Ulysses was a source of bafflement, since they could never be sure whether ‘errors’ were the printers’ or Joyce’s, and, if Joyce’s, whether they were in fact intended. To Gabler and his team, the sheer proliferation of versions was a godsend, enabling the reconstruction of Ulysses. Gabler was confident of his ability to distinguish the proof-reading Joyce from the creative artist, and to restore the primacy of the latter over the former. Certainly, his own ‘genetic’ text helped scholars to track many errors which had insinuated themselves into early editions; but to move from a critique of these deficiencies to a perfected text in its own right was a tall order. There were many who warned that, given the conditions of its disorderly gestation, there never could be a definitive Ulysses.
