Bloomsday 100

The Florida James Joyce Series

University Press of Florida

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
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Bloomsday 100
Essays on Ulysses

Edited by Morris Beja and Anne Fogarty

Foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

University Press of Florida

Gainesville / Tallahassee / Tampa / Boca Raton
Pensacola / Orlando / Miami / Jacksonville / Ft. Myers / Sarasota
Copyright 2009 by Morris Beja and Anne Fogarty
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America. This book is printed on Glatfelter
Natures Book, a paper certified under the standards of the Forestry
Stewardship Council (FSC). It is a recycled stock that contains 30 percent post-
consumer waste and is acid-free.

First cloth printing, 2009

First paperback printing, 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bloomsday 100 : essays on Ulysses / edited by Morris Beja and Anne Fogarty;
foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles.
p. cm. — (The Florida James Joyce series)
Papers from the Bloomsday 100 Symposium, held in the National College of
Ireland, Dublin, June 12–19, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8130-3402-7 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8130-4197-1 (pbk.)
1. Joyce, James, 1882–1941. Ulysses. 2. Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Knowledge—
Dublin (Ireland) 3. Dublin (Ireland)—In literature. I. Beja, Morris. II. Fogarty,
Anne, 1958– III. Title: Bloomsday one hundred.
PR6019.O9U6265 2009
823'.912—dc22 2009017135

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the
State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University,
Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida
International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida,
University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North
Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

University Press of Florida

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http://www.upf.com
For
Ellen and Ulf
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 Contents

Foreword ix
List of Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1
Anne Fogarty

Part I. “That Other World”: Material Dimensions of Ulysses

1. Joyce’s Debris 15
David Spurr
2. “Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!”: The Pussens Perplex 31
John Gordon
3. Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 41
Austin Briggs

Part II. “Agenbite”: History in the Text

4. Mixing Memory and Desire: Narrative Strategies and the Past in
Ulysses 65
Richard P. Lynch
5. Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 77
Tracey Teets Schwarze
6. Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 96
Greg Winston

Part III. Mixed Media: Image and Performance

7. “In the Beginning Was the Gest”: Theater, Cinema, and the Language
of Gesture in “Circe” 117
Anthony Paraskeva
 8. Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 135
Katherine O’Callaghan
9. Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama 150
Timothy Martin

Part IV. Counterparts: Intertextualities

10. Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire
Girl” 163
Yu-chen Lin
11. Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 178
Gerald Gillespie
12. Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 190
Robert Weninger

Part V. “Almosting It”: Ulysses and the Reader

13. Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 213
Michael Patrick Gillespie
14. Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature: A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” 228
Margot Norris

List of Contributors 241

Index 245
 Foreword

Somehow Joyce studies has become associated with excess, despite the scrupu-
lous meanness of Dubliners, the asceticism of Portrait, and the general parsimo-
ny of Joyce’s output, the major titles of which can be counted on the fingers of
one hand. The commemoration of Bloomsday bears a great deal of the respon-
sibility for this: what other author is given the luxury of a day to celebrate the
exploits of a fictional character? And perhaps Joyceans themselves, who tend to
be a gregarious lot, have contributed to this perception: the phrase that Gretta
bestows upon her husband—“You are a very generous person, Gabriel”—can
stand as a motto for all the generous spirits in the Joycean world.
So it is with considerable relief that one finds reflected in this volume not the
overabundance of the year-long public extravaganza that was Bloomsday’s cen-
tenary year, but the more lasting benefits of considered meditation on Joycean
themes by some of the most thoughtful and provocative critics working on
Joyce today. We find in these pages a set of fresh and engaged readings with ev-
erything from Schopenhauer to rubbish, all written in the state of heightened
alertness that marks the true Joycean reader. To be brought to a standstill by a
text or an object is the Joycean state par excellence: Bloom, Molly, and Stephen
have all been there before us, staring at the label on a bottle of Bass, listening to
a distant train, or identifying the three masts of a passing ship. John Gordon is
riveted by the additional r’s in the cat’s meow in “Calypso,” reading them not as
evidence of increased hunger on the part of the cat but rather as the result of an
increased awareness on the part of the auditor, who is hearing the sound more
precisely with each cry. David Spurr takes a line as apparently innocuous as the
“archipelago of corks” amid which the throwaway bobs in “Wandering Rocks”
and connects it to everything from the Aegean Sea (the original archipelago)
to the missing corkscrews of “Ivy Day” and “Clay.” It is this strange ability to
make something wonderful out of nothing that has led to Joyceans earning
their richly deserved reputation for plenary abundance.
 x Foreword

At the same time, Bloomsday 100 is a memory piece, from Spurr’s celebra-
tion of the objects in Ulysses to Gordon’s investigation of the working loops of
memory by which the world can be stored and restored, from Richard Lynch’s
study of memory as symbolic narrative to Michael Gillespie’s review of the
best that has been thought and said in Joycean criticism. This again brings us
back to Ulysses, which is nothing if not a study in memory, and to Bloomsday
itself. Bloomsday, in the memorable words of Anne Fogarty in her elegant in-
troduction, is part phantom, part projection, and part post hoc construction:
we could not be more fortunate to have, through the good offices of Beja and
Fogarty, such a testament to one of the very best of the Bloomsday symposia.

Sebastian D. G. Knowles
Series Editor
 Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are among those standard for references to Joyce’s
works and important secondary texts, following the conventions established by
the James Joyce Quarterly. Where contributors have used alternative editions,
the edition used will be noted in the Works Cited.

CW Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth

Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1969.
D Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Robert Scholes
and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking, 1969.
FW Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1939; London:
Faber, 1939 and subsequent reprints. These two editions have
identical pagination. Citation includes page and line number.
JJ Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982.
Letters Joyce, James. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert. New
York: Viking, 1957; reissued with corrections 1966. Vols. II and III,
ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1966.
P Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The definitive
text corrected from Dublin Holograph by Chester G. Anderson and
edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1964.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism,
and Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968.
SH Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. Ed. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum,
and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1963.
SL Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann.
New York: Viking, 1975; London: Faber, 1975.
U Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York
and London: Garland, 1984, 1986. Editions published by Garland,
Random House, Bodley Head, and Penguin. Citations include
episode and line numbers.
 xii Abbreviations

Joyce, James. Ulysses, 1934; reset and corrected 1961 (New York:
Vintage-Random, 1990). Citations include page number.
UA Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for
James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Rev. and expanded ed. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988.
 Introduction
Anne Fogarty

Bloomsday—16 June—has long established itself as the hallowed festival of

lovers of Joyce. It is enjoyed as much because of its populist raffishness and
carnivalesque dimensions as for its lofty literary pretensions. The imaginative
bravado and palpable absurdity of commemorating characters and events in
Ulysses that are to all intents and purposes entirely fictional add to the piquan-
cy of this most celebrated anniversary in the literary calendar. Other writers
are feted in more traditional fashion on their dates of birth, whether putative
or otherwise, such as William Shakespeare on 23 April and Robert Burns on
25 January. Joyce is unique in that he is honored in tandem with his epic novel,
which has managed to acquire a separate curriculum vitae and unfurling his-
tory of its own.
Originally, of course, careful orchestration ensured that Ulysses appeared
on Joyce’s birthday, 2 February 1922, and for several years afterwards celebra-
tions organized by the author or his friends centered on this occasion in winter
rather than on Bloomsday itself. Gradually, however, the June date took over
as the arena of interest in step with the growth in stature and renown of the
novel. The déjeuner Ulysse organized by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monni-
er—to mark the publication of the French translation of Ulysses by Auguste
Morel, Valery Larbaud, and Stuart Gilbert and the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Bloomsday—took place on 27 June 1929 and represented one of the important
milestones demarcating the growing weightiness of this literary work and its
increasing cultural aura. The guests at this event held at the Léopold restaurant
in Les Vaux-de-Cernay, a hamlet near Versailles, included Paul Valéry, Samuel
Beckett, Édouard Dujardin, and Thomas McGreevey (Fitch 291). The surviving
memorabilia, ranging from the menu bearing the autographs of those present
to the overcrowded and alarmingly staid group photo, indicate the degree to
which this was not simply a celebration but a calculated endorsement of, and
 2 Anne Fogarty

investment in, the cult of fame attendant on this work. Bloomsday even at this
early juncture had become a hallmark of the value of Ulysses, while simulta-
neously functioning as a public relations exercise that served to augment the
novel’s reputation. However, the anecdotes about the delayed return journey
of this august group to Paris caused by the frequent stops en route for visits
to pubs by Joyce, Beckett, Philippe Soupault, and others, to the disgust of the
more sober members of the entourage, puncture the portentousness and un-
canny prescience of this cultural celebration and endow it with an altogether
more ramshackle and makeshift quality (Fitch 292).
Through such admixtures of volition, marketing strategy, and happen-
stance, Bloomsday now functions—seemingly ineluctably—as a memorial to
Joyce’s radical literary experiment. On one level, this day of public celebra-
tion punctuated more often than not by solo or group readings of sections of
Ulysses and the consumption of Guinness or other appropriate Irish alcoholic
products nicely acts as a distillation of Joyce’s text with its emphasis on the
diurnal, the communal, and the commercial. On another level, in its aspect
as figment or simulacrum, Bloomsday fittingly captures the quintessence of a
novel that determinedly blurs the boundaries between book and world, plays
with the resources of fictionality, and collapses the categories of truth and fic-
tion. Moreover, even though 16 June 1904 is irrevocably fixed as the temporal
setting for Ulysses, the concept of Bloomsday has proven to be remarkably pli-
ant, portable, and adaptable. It has now become a global occasion as readings,
performances, parties, and theatrical enactments are held in numerous urban
centers around the world, including Szombathely (the birthplace of Rudolph
Virag), Tokyo, Rome, New York, Beijing, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and a host of
other venues. The marketability of Bloomsday as well as of aspects of Irishness
means that Dublin is less a point of convergence for 16 June than a reconfigu-
rable domain that can locate itself anywhere through the potent endorsement
of Joyce’s language, persona, and prestige.
The essays assembled in this collection, however, have tangible links with
the Irish capital because they originated as papers for the Bloomsday 100 Sym-
posium that was held in the National College of Ireland, Dublin, from 12–19
June 2004. This conference was the biggest gathering ever convened under the
auspices of the International James Joyce Foundation: over six hundred papers
were delivered at an event attended by in excess of eight hundred delegates. The
symposium coincided with a year-long civic festival, styled “ReJoyce 2004,”
sponsored by the Irish government, which had the express purpose not only
of marking the centennial of Bloomsday but also of raising public awareness of
 Introduction 3

Joyce and his works. Some of this activity concentrated on diplomatic relations,
the marketing of Ireland abroad, and the mediation of Joyce to a worldwide
community. To this end, a traveling exhibit documenting Joyce’s biography and
his chief works was created and dispatched by the Department of Foreign Af-
fairs through its foreign embassies to numerous destinations around the globe.
The events at home encompassed a richly documented exhibition on Joyce
and Ulysses at the National Library of Ireland, designed by Luca Crispi and
Catherine Fahy, that drew on newly acquired manuscript materials, a short
story writing competition funded by Davy Byrne’s pub, and a display of inter-
national art inspired by Joyce at the Royal Hibernian Art Gallery, curated by
Mia Lerm-Hayes. Inevitably, the most important happenings were scheduled
for mid-June to coincide with Bloomsday. Special license enabled the closure
of O’Connell Street, the main Dublin thoroughfare, to permit the hosting of a
Bloomsday breakfast on Sunday, 13 June, at which ten thousand people enjoyed
a modified Bloomian repast devoid of kidneys, and the staging on Wednesday,
16 June, of “The Parable of the Plums,” a carnivalesque, multiethnic pageant
based on the “Aeolus” episode.
The high-profile nature and impressive quality of these lavish and slickly
orchestrated events funded by the Irish Department of Arts, Sports, and Tour-
ism turned the centennial Bloomsday in Dublin into a public extravaganza.
Nonetheless, the passage of a century since 16 June 1904 must give pause. An
inquiry into the symbolism of Bloomsday seems more rather than less compel-
ling, given that over one hundred years now separate readers from the day on
which Ulysses takes place. By the same token, an attempt to take stock of Joyce’s
talismanic text is warranted as a new century advances and the interpretive
frames that we bring to his work alter, take on a different focus, or demand
readjustment.
For Joyceans 2004 provided the impetus for the creation of necessary retro-
spectives to document the slow and laborious evolution of Joyce Studies pace
the current institution of the supposedly all-enveloping “Joyce Industry.” The
very phenomenon of Bloomsday is instructive in this regard. Although this
symbolic date is now an apparent fixity and fundamental to our understanding
of Joyce and the defining contexts of Ulysses, its precise import remains elusive.
Popular belief would have it that Joyce chose this date as a basis for his epic
text because it was the day on which he first went out with Nora Barnacle. Yet,
a complex reality and textual history underlie this seemingly incontrovertible
and beguiling romantic myth. Eschewing the story of a love tryst, the OED
provides a circumspect definition of the term “Bloomsday.” Having elucidated
 4 Anne Fogarty

its derivation from Bloom’s name and pointed out that it designates the day on
which the action of Ulysses takes place, it confines itself to speculating that it is
punningly named after Doomsday. A plaintive note in Nora’s hand recorded in
one of the Finnegans Wake notebooks also acts as a reminder that the current
status of Bloomsday was less of a preordained development than is often sup-
posed: “to day 16 of June 1924 / twenty years after / Will anybody remember /
this date” (Deane, Ferrer, and Lernout 37).
Genetic criticism and textual scholarship additionally underscore the de-
gree to which the election of the date for Ulysses was neither a given nor an
automatically predisposed component of the scaffolding. Rather, it was arrived
at gradually and after much delay through the painstaking process of revision.
As Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon have argued, drawing on Michael Groden’s
influential account of the incremental phases of composition of Ulysses, the
novel was originally conceived of as a sequel to A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. In this so-called proto-Ulysses, about which Hans Walter Gabler
has also written, Joyce initially intended to mesh the conflicting dates and time
schemes of the two works so that they might be coordinated. Rose, O’Hanlon,
and Gabler, through roundabout computations, arrive at the conclusion that
the original date of the fictional day on which the events of Ulysses take place
was 8 October 1904 and that Joyce altered this crucial aspect of his fictional
apparatus only many years into the process of composition in alighting on 16
June 1904 (Rose and O’Hanlon xix; Gabler, “Joyce’s Text in Progress” 220–21).
This earlier suppositional date was of moment to Joyce because it was the day
on which he departed from Dublin for the Continent with his chosen compan-
ion, Nora Barnacle. It was, in the phrase of Rose and O’Hanlon, “superemi-
nently important” (xv) to the author and was celebrated by him in subsequent
years as an auspicious anniversary that marked the inauguration of his new
life outside Ireland and of his official alliance with Nora. Joyce continued to
honor this date as a form of wedding anniversary even after his marriage in
July 1931. Further, as Gabler speculates, 8 October has an added layer of sym-
bolic associations for Joyce, since he denominates it in A Portrait of the Art-
ist as a Young Man as the day on which Stephen is pushed by Wells into the
square ditch at Clongowes. It is thereby insinuated into an intricate sequence
of events whereby Stephen’s illness and recovery from his life-threatening fever
are counterposed with the death of Parnell on 6 October and the arrival of his
body in Kingstown for burial in Glasnevin on 11 October. Thus this resonant
date forms part of a complex symbolic reckoning by virtue of which Parnell
assumes the role of messianic scapegoat and enables the recovery and resurrec-
 Introduction 5

tion of Stephen. However, it is simultaneously intimated that the cataclysmic

downfall of the father is compulsively reenacted by the son who likewise expe-
riences an overthrow. The discarded as well as the later date of Ulysses hence
encrypt key matrices of the text overall and condense its constitutive anxieties
and desires.
The choice of 16 June 2004 was of course anything but adventitious. Yet, as
Sidney Feshbach has pointed out, Richard Ellmann smooths over many of the
gaps in our knowledge about its private significance for Joyce in producing
his persuasive and authoritative narrative of a foundational love. As in many
other aspects, Joyce’s magisterial biographer is the chief source of the prevail-
ing view of Bloomsday. Ellmann argues that this date is a nodal point in Joyce’s
life because many significant occurrences converge upon it, including the fi-
nalization of his theory about Hamlet. The most momentous occurrence that
falls into this time frame is his meeting and falling in love with Nora Barnacle.
Joyce’s well-known letter from 15 June 1904 expresses his disappointment at
her failure to show up for an appointment they had made and asks for another
to be made in lieu (Letters II 42). Despite the lack of corroborating evidence
about the precise date of their next meeting, Ellmann adamantly ties it to 16
June 1904 and formulates a highly charged account of the redemptive force of
this liaison:
The appointment was made, and for the evening of June 16, when they
went walking at Ringsend, and then arranged to meet again. To set Ul-
ysses on this date was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a
recognition of the determining effect upon his life of his attachment to
her. On June 16, as he would afterwards realize, he entered into relation
with the world around him, and left behind the loneliness he had felt
since his mother’s death. He would tell her later, “You made me a man.”
June 16 was the sacred day that divided Stephen Dedalus, the insurgent
youth, from Leopold Bloom, the complaisant husband. (JJ 156)
Brenda Maddox disputes Ellmann’s rhapsodic view of the dramatic watershed
in Joyce’s life and advances a much more prosaic and skeptical assessment of
this period: “Was the day of their first date, Thursday June 16, 1904? Probably.
That is the best that can be said” (41). Hence, it is uncertain whether Joyce sim-
ply randomly chose a midsummer day in this evidently momentous phase of
his life or deliberately gravitated toward a date that had immense private reso-
nance. As a consequence, Bloomsday is in this regard a traceless originating
moment whose significance remains arcane and irrecoverable. Yet, this is not
 6 Anne Fogarty

to gainsay its import. Rather, the biographical, fictional, and symbolic mean-
ings that have accrued around 16 June 1904 may be seen as the outcome not of
a simple determining chain of cause and effect but of a fluid and always mutat-
ing set of interpretive perspectives. Further, even though Bloomsday may be in
part a phantom, a projection, or a post hoc construction, it also remains last-
ingly rooted in Joyce’s personal history and the Dublin world that he obliquely
mirrors in Ulysses even as he artistically reinvents and reworks it.
The essays collected in this volume are of a piece in that they approach Ul-
ysses in a spirit of inquiry and direct attention to unexamined or insufficiently
explored aspects of the text. They also cohere to the degree that they tend less
to give primacy to theoretical discussion than to interweave it with their own
engagements with the text. Above all, these essays mesh with each other be-
cause they uniformly focus on materialist facets of Ulysses and use their find-
ings about the historical, social, and political, or intermedial dimensions of the
novel to deepen our insight into the intricate workings of Joycean textuality.
Historicist research in this volume serves always as the basis for exacting for-
malist and linguistic investigation of salient passages and episodes of Ulysses.
In “Joyce’s Debris,” David Spurr considers the place of Ulysses in the his-
tory of the novel and reflects on the degree to which objects gradually come
to proliferate and assume a dominant role in nineteenth-century British and
French fiction. Joyce, however, differs from his predecessors such as Dickens
and Balzac, Spurr concludes, because seemingly worthless objects like the
“throwaway” advertisement are given a central part and are not made answer-
able to the exigencies of plot and character. By the same token, Joyce fore-
grounds the material dimensions of language, frees it to some degree from the
laws of narrativity, and exploits the links between litter and letter. However,
even if rubbish or debris is not made to fit into a metaphysical framework as in
the Victorian novel, it is still capable of yielding moments of insight or of con-
veying a transformational vision, as Spurr’s detailed tracking of the symbolic
reverberations of the throwaway illustrates.
John Gordon is likewise concerned with how Joyce renders reality or, more
specifically, how he captures our slow-motion sensory apprehension of the
world. In a reading itself characterized by its fine attunement to the text, he
notes how the onomatopoeic notation of the mewing of Bloom’s cat in “Ca-
lypso,” if carefully deciphered, captures the ways in which sounds gradually
become more audible as we begin to discern and interpret them. He further
contends, in delineating the semantic games enacted with the figure of the Por-
ter in Finnegans Wake, that the process of reading this text spurs readers to re-
 Introduction 7

fine and sharpen their powers of perception. In similar manner, the recurrence
of details and the differing versions of events to which we are often treated in
Ulysses mimic the time-release effect of sense perception while encouraging
readers to hone their observational powers.
In his richly documented essay, Austin Briggs catalogs a persistent vein of
imagery in Ulysses which cross-associates Bloom with stereotypical proper-
ties of Jewishness, particularly those of effeminacy and the peculiar slur of
male menstruation. Moreover, the panoply of racist stigmas, as the essay deft-
ly shows, is inherently contradictory because it simultaneously casts Jews as
vengeful and bloodthirsty and as timorous and emasculated. Ultimately, Joyce
references and counterpoints the lurid denigrations of anti-Semitism and the
discourses of masculinism and athleticism espoused by Irish nationalists such
as Michael Cusack and Patrick Pearse in order to refute them. As Briggs ar-
gues, the unmanliness and pacifism of Stephen and especially of Bloom act as
a pointed counter to political ideologies that aggrandize violence and aggres-
sion.
The problematic operations of memory are the central concern of the essay
by Richard P. Lynch. He differentiates between active and passive memory and
the modes of storytelling that they generate and contends that symbolic nar-
ratives which reorder the past or sidestep facticity may act as a palliative to the
dead weight of history. Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, however, is caught between
two modes of recall: a radical refutation of the past, on the one hand, and a
passive surrender to its enervating effects, on the other. He persistently fights
against forms of memory that induce stagnation but ultimately cannot escape
the traumatic vestiges of his own familial past, especially the enduring psychic
damage caused by the death of his mother.
Tracey Teets Schwarze casts a dramatic new light on the much-aired topic
of Joyce’s Parnellism by purposefully shifting attention from Charles Stewart
Parnell to his consort, Katharine O’Shea. Revealingly, she notes the degree to
which Bloom’s chronicling of the divorce case and the death of Parnell in “Eu-
maeus” is informed by O’Shea’s viewpoint and skewed in favor of the perspec-
tive of the aggrieved but adulterous wife. Moreover, the conflation of Molly
and Katharine O’Shea, which is merely implicit in episode sixteen, is more
fully actualized in the final episode, which casts itself as a kind of confessional
memoir. In secretly replicating some of the tropes and strategies of O’Shea’s
memoir, Molly’s forensic self-accountancy, however, is not simply a rectifica-
tion or squaring of the record. It also adds further fictional layers to the text as
it is qualified by the slipperiness which all such acts of exculpation involve.
 8 Anne Fogarty

In “Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses,” Greg

Winston likewise homes in on a cluster of essential but peripheral female fig-
ures in Joyce’s novel—the streetwalkers. His detailed investigation of the trade
of prostitution in turn-of-the-century Ireland uncovers its peculiar historical
dimensions. As he reveals, imperialism, militarism, and the sex trade were
inextricably connected, a fact that was mirrored in the very geography of Dub-
lin, where barracks and brothels tended to be situated in adjacent districts. In
Joyce’s writings, Winston holds, the figure of the prostitute is deployed not
only to expose the symbiosis of militarism and female sexual labor and the
exploitative effects of imperialism but also to undercut the moral pretensions
of Irish nativist philosophy, which condemned the sexual diseases spread by
prostitution as a foreign import and refused to acknowledge the all-pervasive
importance of sexuality and desire in the human constitution.
The third section of this collection is devoted to the intermediality of Joyce’s
work and demonstrates the degree to which Ulysses does not simply mimic or
borrow from other art forms but reconstitutes and plays with their techniques
and fully ingests and appropriates their varying aesthetic effects. In his densely
argued essay, Anthony Paraskeva expands on Joyce’s interest in cinema and
discloses how the technological developments that enabled the compilation of
discrete shot sequences radically altered the gestural language of early films.
Movies now substituted the histrionic and exaggerated body movements of the
melodramatic stage tradition with complex strings of closely observed small
movements. Paraskeva documents the influence of numerous aspects of the
cinematic medium on Ulysses, such as the use of peephole-style framing tech-
niques. Above all, he convincingly argues that the minutely itemized gestural
language of hand movements that peculiarly dominated the text of Exiles, as
evidenced by its stage directions, was further elaborated on in Ulysses, espe-
cially in the “Circe” episode. The heightened readability of the body in silent
film is turned to account by Joyce, who exploits the radical implications of
the close-up and plays with the semiotics of gesture and the possibility that
physical movements now can become a discrete part of a signifying system that
operates irrespective of human agency or of the integrity of the body.
Katherine O’Callaghan revisits “Sirens” and the interpretive problems it pe-
rennially poses for interpretation. In her revolutionary reading she proposes
that the opening of this episode functions less in the manner of an overture, as
has previously been mooted, than of a score. She further contends that Joyce’s
writing aspires not to the condition of music but to achieving the status of a
radically performative text whose potential can only be unfolded by the read-
 Introduction 9

er and then in a partial manner. Like a musical score, Ulysses is dynamically

brought to life through the interpretive work of its audience, who must become
Joycean impresarios in order to uncover its meanings.
Timothy Martin, by contrast, concentrates on the literary intertexts of Ul-
ysses. His suggestive essay details how Joyce adopts not just the structural ele-
ments but also the ethos and affective characteristics of nineteenth-century
theatrical melodrama. Drawing on the work of Robert Heilman, he observes
that melodrama tends to be monopathic, that is, to insist upon intense but un-
mixed emotion, and also to give precedence to politics and action within the
world. Martin provocatively speculates that Joyce may have gravitated toward
melodrama in the later episodes of Ulysses, especially “Cyclops” and “Circe,” as
a reaction against the now hampering constraints of the modernist aesthetic.
Yu-chen Lin’s focus in “Modernity and Its Discontents” is, by contrast, on
the material world of fashion and the import of the oft-cited music hall song
“My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.” Lin argues that the ironic transformation of the
frugal, self-denying woman in this song into a prostitute in “Circe” provides an
implicit commentary on the vicissitudes of colonialism. Having examined the
attire of many of the characters in Ulysses and their imperfect attempts to fol-
low contemporary fashion, she concludes that Joyce depicts many of his central
figures as both complicit with and resistant to consumerist modernity. More-
over, the economic plight of many of the prostitutes and the monetary worries
of Molly Bloom lay bare the conditions of colonial subjects and highlight their
penuriousness and struggles to survive.
Gerald Gillespie constructs a persuasive and scrupulously argued riposte
to the view that Joyce is a materialist and empiricist. He reveals the tangled
interweave of philosophical references in “Proteus” and tracks the presence
of Schopenhauer’s account of the artist as a creator and mediator of ultimate
truths in particular. In this account, Joyce emerges as an eclectic thinker who
creates an independent aesthetic but nonetheless retains many of the key tenets
of idealism and even of theosophy and cabalism.
Robert Weninger’s fascinating exploration of the one-day novel directs at-
tention to another aspect of Joycean intertextuality, his influence on subse-
quent authors. Weninger contends that Ulysses has become, in Foucault’s term,
a foundational literary text of the twentieth century. However, authors who
imitated some of the crucial innovations of Ulysses, such as Virginia Woolf in
Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts, Graham Swift in The Sweet-Shop Owner,
Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis, and Arno Schmidt in Zettels Traum, felt compelled
also to fight against his legacy or to deny and suppress its effects.
 10 Anne Fogarty

The final two essays in this volume take as their subject even more problem-
atic facets of the reception of Ulysses. Michael Patrick Gillespie’s trenchant and
sardonic metacritique of Joycean scholarship depicts the would-be reader as a
bewildered consumer baffled by the endless array of critical works on offer. His
skeptical commentary points to the need for a more discerning assessment of
the quality and value of Joyce criticism and to the advantage of a therapeutic
disengagement from the compulsive overproduction of academic writing.
Margot Norris’s original and reflective essay likewise advocates a return to
first principles in its endeavor to track the heuristic dilemmas faced by a “vir-
gin” reader of “Calypso.” Adopting Paul Grice’s notion of implicature, the role
of the unspoken and the implied in discourse, her investigation meticulously
charts the path the reader must steer through the false leads, explanatory gaps,
perplexing conjunctions, semiotic lapses, and insinuated points of view of this
episode. Her instructive finding is that all interpretations of Ulysses must nec-
essarily be incomplete and imperfect and that, moreover, Joyce forces us to
collude in the guilty secrets at which the text playfully gestures only often to
reveal as figments.
The centennial of Bloomsday in 2004 was certainly a pinnacle in the global
lionization of Joyce. In Dublin it marked a decisive tidal change in Irish at-
titudes to this author who had for so long been treated with disaffection and
suspicion. Yet, no Bloomsday is ever definitive or final: it merely forms part of a
continuous and ever-evolving process of engagement with Joyce and his work.
As the challenging and engaging essays in this volume attest in their elicitation
of the diffuse material and political dimensions of Ulysses and their diverse and
quarrelsome accounts of its philosophical underpinnings, Bloomsday 2004
furnishes us, above all, with a renewed incentive to deepen our understanding
of Joyce’s radical text, to reinspect those passages and episodes that continue to
puzzle or elude us, to reexamine its primary interpretive cruxes, and to reim-
merse ourselves in its all-engrossing complexity.

Notes
1. A reproduction of the menu and the photo taken at the déjeuner Ulysse may be found in
Fitch 214, 291.
2. For the complex calculation whereby the dates of Stephen’s experiences in Clongowes
might be computed see Gabler, “Joyce’s Text in Progress” 220–21 and “The Christmas Dinner
Scene” 31–34.
 Introduction 11

Works Cited
Deane, Vincent, Daniel Ferrer, and Geert Lernout, eds. The “Finnegans Wake” Notebooks at
Buffalo: Notebooks VI.B.5. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004.
Feshbach, Sidney. “June 16 1904: Joyce’s Date with Nora?” James Joyce Quarterly 21.4 (1984):
369–70.
Fitch, Nora Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twen-
ties and Thirties. New York: Norton, 1983.
Gabler, Hans Walter. “The Christmas Dinner Scene, Parnell’s Death, and the Genesis of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” James Joyce Quarterly 13.1 (1975): 27–38.
———. “Joyce’s Text in Progress.” The Cambridge Companion to Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge. 1st
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 213–36.
Maddox, Brenda. Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce. London: Minerva, 1988.
Rose, Danis, and John O’Hanlon, eds. James Joyce: The Lost Notebook: New Evidence of the
Genesis of “Ulysses.” Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1989.
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I

“That Other World”

Material Dimensions of Ulysses
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 1

Joyce’s Debris
David Spurr

You friable shore with trails of debris,

You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot,
What is yours is mine my father.
Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life”

If a history is ever written on the status of the object in the modern novel,
perhaps it will have room for Harriet Smith’s court plaster. In Jane Austen’s
Emma (1816), the dizzy Harriet is so taken with the fatuous Mr. Elton that she
has preserved, in a box labeled Most precious treasures, two objects that once
had the distinction of being held in his hands: a discarded bit of court plaster
and the end of an old pencil (304–5). The latter is more valuable because it
has been the actual property of Mr. Elton: “This was really his,” she declares
reverently. However, in Austen’s novel these objects figure purely as relics of a
girlish infatuation, and as such they are entirely subordinated to the logic of
character delineation and of narrative, which in this case takes the form of an
ironic hagiography. Austen’s novels are models of economy in this regard, that
every object has its proper use. There are no extra things lying around.
As the nineteenth century progresses, however, the novel begins to accumu-
late more and more things. The first chapter of Balzac’s Le cousin Pons (1847)
is titled “Un glorieux débris de l’Empire,” which refers not just to the novel’s
title character but also, by metonymic extension, to his immense collection
of bric-a-brac: a miscellaneous and helter-skelter assemblage of curiosities, of
obscure pictures and engravings, snuffboxes, picture frames, and so forth. This
being a novel by Balzac, the collection of debris from the brocantes of Paris is
discovered to be of fabulous value, and so becomes the object of deadly in-
trigue among Pons’s neighbors and relations. In terms of the novel’s function
as historical interpretation, Balzac solves the problem posed by the debris of
 16 David Spurr

France’s empire by recirculating it in the form of capital and commodity in the

bourgeois world of the July monarchy.
The spirit of sheer accumulation represented in Pons’s collection is shared
by the less glorious debris of Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). One of the sym-
bolic loci of this novel is Krook’s shop, a dusty repository of rags and bottles,
bones, old iron, wastepaper, and old clothes (61–62)—tottering piles of cast-off
stuff from the Victorian economy of bourgeois consumption and institutional
corruption. As the shop is putatively a commercial concern in secondhand
goods, the things in it are theoretically for sale. But, in fact, it represents the
dark underside of the Court of Chancery, the debris left over from intermi-
nable, ruinous struggles over the rights of inherited property.
Trash is again brought to the foreground in Dickens’s last novel, Our Mu-
tual Friend (1864–65), where a dustman’s rubbish heaps, as tall as hills in the
urban landscape of London, represent a potentially vast fortune to be made
from what they might contain. Rubbish here, however, is simply another form
of capital, and therefore becomes the object of a Balzacian struggle for inheri-
tance. In Theodor Adorno’s analysis, Dickens’s object world, even in the form
of debris, represents the bourgeois sphere of power and property, one that his
characters must master if they are not to be sacrificed to it (Notes 2: 177). If, in
contrast to the novels of Austen, those of Balzac and Dickens have among their
functions that of registering the proliferation of objects in a newly industrial
and urbanized world, they (just) succeed in doing so by containing this pro-
liferation within narrative structures of individual triumph over or sacrifice to
that world.
Joyce is unlike his novelist predecessors in that he abandons the master nar-
ratives to which character relations and the world of objects are conventionally
subordinated. This relinquishment of a totalizing narrative structure appears
to have been necessary to Joyce’s larger purpose of formulating an artistic vi-
sion congruous with the fragmented character of modernity. In the process,
the object world of Joyce’s work tends to take on a life of its own, while at the
same time spilling over into an abundance of debris that seems made to defy
any conventional attempt at authorial control. The problem for Joyce is some-
how to comprehend this increasingly fragmented world of objects in a work of
art. Such a work would need, on the one hand, to resist the kind of narrative
that imposes an illusory order on the world of objects. On the other hand,
it would need a sharper focus and greater discipline than the form in which
Dickens wrote, which Joyce found “diffuse, overloaded with minute and often
irrelevant observation” (Occasional 183).
 Joyce’s Debris 17

Joyce’s solution to this problem is to transform the text itself into a form
of debris: a series of passages or episodes related primarily as fragments, and
fragmentary as well in their absence of hierarchical order. Yet, as an art form,
his work is redeemed from the randomness of debris by its textuality: the man-
ner in which its fragments are interwoven on the level of linguistic texture.
What the forces of modernity have reduced to ruin and debris, Joyce’s work
recuperates on the level of language. In what follows, the first part of this es-
say involves a practical demonstration of this point: that elements of material
and symbolic debris in Ulysses are connected to one another on the level of
language. A second part, in which the debris of Ulysses is compared to that of
Finnegans Wake, considers the theoretical implications deriving from Joyce’s
equation of the letter and litter.

Trash Metonymies
Heaps of wet rubbish, moldering offal, an empty porter bottle, a dead dog: so
many of Joyce’s cast-off objects are just there, not particularly contributing to
the purposes of character study, social satire, or narrative development. To un-
derstand why this is so, it helps to regard Joyce’s fictional technique as primar-
ily linguistic rather than narrative. In Joyce, elements of language are brought
together for their semantic, historical, and phonetic associations rather than
for their function as part of a totalizing and self-enclosed narrative economy.
The proliferation of Joyce’s text is therefore itself a function of an infinity of lin-
guistic units endlessly split and recombined in a process that resembles more
the modern economy of free market exchange and enterprise than a more tra-
ditional economy, with its origins in feudal society, of protection, exclusion,
and centralized control. In Joyce events are not related, as in Balzac or Jane
Austen, because they contribute to a globalized narrative development. Rather,
what happens is that seemingly random incidents create a series of metonymic
juxtapositions between elements of language that Joyce wishes to combine on
the metaphorical, paradigmatic axis.
For example, in “Lotus-Eaters,” Leopold Bloom has bought a copy of a
newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, in order to learn the hour of the funeral of
his friend Patrick Dignam. While walking in Westland Row he is approached
by Bantam Lyons, one of the many underemployed scroungers who people
the streets of Joyce’s Dublin. Lyons wants to consult the newspaper to learn
the odds in the Ascot Gold Cup, a celebrated horse race to be run later that
day in England, where the real money is. Bloom gives him the paper, saying,
 18 David Spurr

“You can keep it, I was just going to throw it away.” By coincidence, “Throw-
away” happens to be the name of one of the horses entered in the race. “I’ll
risk it . . . thanks,” says Lyons to an uncomprehending Bloom (U 5.541). Later,
Throwaway will win the race against odds of twenty to one, causing a great
deal of trouble for Bloom, who will mistakenly be thought to have bet on the
winning horse, a “rank outsider.”
However, the purpose of the exchange with Lyons is primarily linguistic
rather than narrative: it is to generate a play on the word “throwaway” that
will lead to the proliferation of an entire semantic field of things thrown away:
trash, debris, the cast-off remainder, the rank outsider. This semantic field will
acquire importance in the text precisely because it recuperates in the symbolic
economy of the text that which is excluded from the economic and social or-
ders of modern Dublin. Before developing this idea further, it will be useful to
distinguish among certain terms: first, the material economic order, that which
assigns the market or exchange value to the actual objects in our world, objects
among which we find literary texts; and second, the symbolic economy of the
text, or the manner in which the text exists as a field of signifiers, each of which
receives its value from its place in that field and its relation to other signifiers. I
shall also refer to the symbolic order in the Lacanian sense, by which is meant
simply language itself, including the entire realm of human culture conceived
as a symbolic system itself structured on the model of language. The symbolic
economy internal to the text itself has only a tangential relation to the larger
symbolic order.
But let us pursue the linguistic odyssey of the word “throwaway” in Joyce’s
text. Three episodes after the Bantam Lyons incident, “throwaway” refers to a
publicity sheet placed in Bloom’s hand by a young YMCA man. The word itself
does not appear to be the most obvious one to have chosen for this context. It
appears to have been new in Joyce’s time, and less current than its synonyms
“hand-bill,” “fly-sheet,” or the American “flyer.” The OED records its first print-
ed use in 1903, as “a printed sheet or work not intended for preservation after
it has been read.” One might speculate, therefore, that Joyce chose to write
“throwaway” because of its modernity, but above all because of its semantic re-
lation to debris. In any case, the document in question announces the coming
visit of an American evangelist preacher, Dr. John Alexander Dowie, “restorer
of the church in Zion.” Bloom’s reading of the throwaway text is rendered in a
manner that appears to combine elements of the text itself with Bloom’s own
internal commentary: “Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb.
God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a build-
 Joyce’s Debris 19

ing, sacrifice, kidneyburntoffering, druids’ altars. Elijah is coming” (U 8.10–13).

What these lines suggest is a kind of meditation on the universality of sacrifice,
in keeping with the Homeric passage with which Joyce associated this episode.
In book 10 of the Odyssey, Odysseus loses all his companions, except those
belonging to his own ship, to the man-eating giants known as the Lestrygo-
nians. In terms of human lives, it is the greatest sacrifice Odysseus is fated to
make in expiation of his offense to the god Poseidon. Beyond this, however,
the lines devoted to Bloom’s reading of the throwaway constitute a catalog of
pagan, Jewish, and Christian forms of sacrifice in their character as acts of
violence in the name of the sacred. According to popular belief, the druids
sacrificed human victims to their gods. The “foundation of a building” recalls
the construction of the Temple in 1 Kings 6–8, built by the forced labor of tens
of thousands, and dedicated by “sacrificing sheep and oxen that could not be
told nor numbered for multitude” (1 Kings 8:5). The blood of the Lamb (Rev.
7:14) is of course that of Christ himself, martyr to human sin, who sacrifices
his own life for the sake of human spiritual redemption. In the transhistorical
vision that arises from Bloom’s reading, a certain emphasis is placed on the
form of sacrifice the Greeks called enagisma, in which the sacrificial victim is
not shared by the assembled guests at a ceremonial feast, but rather burned so
as to put it beyond human use or enjoyment. Odysseus performs this renuncia-
tory form of sacrifice in book 11 where, in order to gain entrance to Hades, he
must shed the blood of his sheep for the dead souls to drink, and then burn the
carcasses as an offering to the gods.
The point is that for Joyce, sacrifice is the making sacred (Latin sacer, holy,
facere, to make) not just through violence, but also through exclusion and
elimination. Odysseus’s companions, however tragic their deaths at the hands
of the Lestrygonians, are expendable, as were the thousands of slaves who built
the Temple. Christ himself is in excess as a man, not to be assimilated into ei-
ther the Roman or the Jewish order. The sacrificial victim by definition is that
which is expelled from the economy of the living, that which must be put to
death in order for the living to retain their proper relation to the sacred. The
victim, too, is sanctified through its own destruction, thereby signifying the
nullity of the profane as a condition for the presence of the sacred. The distinct
nature of Joyce’s fiction, however, is to render a vision of the world in which
nothing is sacrificed, and where the violent severance which, according to doxa,
erects the sacred on the ashes of the profane, is annulled. This is the sacrifice of
sacrifice, in which nothing and everything is sacred; it is the comic collapse of
a symbolic order based on an ontological difference between the sacred and the
 20 David Spurr

profane, and which can be sustained only at the expense of life and jouissance.
The symbolic economy of Joyce’s text collapses this distinction by investing the
profane with the aura of the sacred without the need for sacrifice; the sacred is
to be found here and now, even in trash.
By putting the demand for sacrifice in the form of a throwaway, Joyce invites
a comparison between the object of sacrifice and the worthless object thrown
away. Both are to be eliminated or put out in the name of a higher principle
(the sacred, cleanliness, economy). In the figure of the throwaway, however, the
traditional sublimation of the sacrificial object from profane to sacred, often
represented as a vertical ascent, is supplanted by the horizontal passage of the
worthless, but no less sacred, object through the world itself, from O’Connell
bridge to the river’s mouth. Bloom tosses the throwaway into the Liffey, where
for a moment it bobs unheeded, like the message it bears, worthless even to the
gulls, before beginning its own voyage downstream and eastward toward the
sea. The throwaway’s voyage will in subsequent episodes constitute an odyssey
of trash contained within the mock odyssey of Ulysses itself. This trash odyssey
brings together the throwaway’s cast-off status, its light nomadic character, and
its announcement of the coming Messiah. In all three respects it figures as a
sign of excess, of the supplemental remainder, sailing beyond the Hesperides of
narrative necessity and economic value. The state of being beyond value is pre-
cisely what trash shares with the sacred: the former bereft of use or exchange
value, the latter transcendent of these, thus creating a kind of symbolic kinship
between the two. In Joyce’s text, this kinship is realized in the form of sacred
trash.
In Rubbish Theory (1979), the social anthropologist Michael Thompson
claims that all of the material objects in our world fall into one of three cat-
egories: those actually in use, those consigned to the rubbish heap, and those
preserved in museums or other repositories of the sacred and priceless. All
objects of the first category are destined, if they don’t disintegrate altogether,
for one of the latter two, both of which stand outside the realm of economic
exchange. Objects in museums are, theoretically, never thrown away, so they
cannot make the passage from there to the rubbish heap. These same objects,
however, have all been rendered useless at some point before entering the mu-
seum. So, although things do not pass from museum to rubbish heap, they can
make the reverse journey, from junk to sacred object. As recently as 2002, a
large number of manuscript pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were discov-
ered gathering dust in the attic of a Paris apartment. They are now preserved
as hallowed objects in the National Library of Ireland.
 Joyce’s Debris 21

Precisely this miraculous synthesis of worthlessness and pricelessness is at

stake in the fate of Bloom’s throwaway flyer. We encounter it again two epi-
sodes and two hours later (in “Wandering Rocks”), where it has become “a
skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming” riding “lightly down the Liffey”
(U 10.294). Further on, it is rocked briefly upstream (“sailing westward”) in
the wake of a passing ferry, just at the moment when, onshore, the commercial
traveler Mr. Kernan is congratulating himself on the skill with which he has
just concluded a business deal with William Crimmins, a tea, wine, and spirit
merchant: “Got round him all right” (U 10.720). The conversation with Crim-
mins has been about the explosion, reported in that day’s news, of a steamer
in New York harbor, a disaster of a thousand casualties. The cause of the ex-
plosion is the same that finished off old Krook in Bleak House: spontaneous
combustion. In this case as in that, the deadly phenomenon is associated with
the intense concentration of rubbish, at least in a figurative sense. “America,”
asks Kernan, “What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own”
(U 10.734–35). Both Krook and the General Slocum (as Kernan perceives it) are
volatile concentrations of human or material debris, and both go up in flames
like a pile of oily rags, spectacular testimonies to the latent energy retained in
even the least valued of objects. Apart from the echo of Dickens, this is the first
expression of a connection between trash and the object of Irish xenophobia
that will be developed later in the “Cyclops” episode. Readers of Dubliners will
recall Kernan’s chronic drunkenness, and his attendance, at the insistence of
his friends, at a somewhat farcical religious retreat for businessmen (Dubliners
164). There is thus an ironic juxtaposition between the combination of intem-
perance, xenophobia, and venality represented by Kernan and the discarded
announcement of the Messiah made by the passing throwaway, itself a product
of the America made of the sweepings of every other country. Meanwhile,
the American evangelist flyer, a sweeping from the streets of Dublin, resumes
its course downstream: “Elijah, skiff, crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by
flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wap-
ping street past Benson’s ferry” (U 10.1097–98).
The location is important, because here we are at the mouth of the Liffey,
a place that figures throughout Joyce’s work as the center of his symbolic uni-
verse, the site of both mythic origin and end. The word archipelago, which oc-
curs here for the first of four times in Joyce, is not chosen innocently, for it has a
bearing on both the origin and the fragmented form of Joyce’s text, while it also
has a history ridden with debris. On a purely thematic level, the archipelago
of bobbing corks serves as a parodic image of the “wandering rocks” that lend
 22 David Spurr

their name to this episode. In book 12 of the Odyssey, Circe warns Odysseus
against passing by the planktas, the wandering or clashing rocks, as the sea
around them is littered with the debris of shipwreck: “the planks of ships and
bodies of men are whirled confusedly by the waves” (1: 437). Odysseus follows
her counsel by taking instead the route by Scylla and Charybdis, but Bloom’s
throwaway goes without such warning, taking in effect the route not taken by
Odysseus, and so charting new territory through the archipelago. Joyce must
have known, however, that the word archipelago is not Greek. It derives from
the Italian arcipelago (Italian arci, high or original, Greek pelagos, sea), a me-
dieval word coined to render the Latin Egeopelagus, the Aegean Sea (Weekley
1: 67). The original archipelago is thus the Aegean, so that the throwaway in
finding its way to the archipelago at the mouth of the Liffey also reascends the
course of history to the Aegean, and thus to the Homeric origins of Joyce’s
text. Joyce’s archipelago, however, does not correspond to the romantic ideal
of the Aegean celebrated in Hölderlin’s great poem of 1800, Der Archipelagus.
It is instead an archipelago of debris, of cast-off fragments, and in this way it
helps to found what will become a characteristically modernist form, such as
the series of poetic fragments that make up René Char’s La parole en archipel
(1962). Blanchot writes in an essay on Char, “Parole en archipel: découpée en
la diversité de ses îles et ainsi faisant surgir la haute mer principale, cette im-
mensité très ancienne et cet inconnu toujours à venir” (Speech as archipelago:
cut up into the diversity of its islands and so giving rise to the great open sea,
that ancient immensity, that unknown always yet to come) (454). In this way
Blanchot defends the fragmentary nature of Char’s poetic text as the authentic
refusal of a false unity, whether belonging to the text itself or to the world it
signifies: Char writes “non pas pour en venir à la totalité où le pour et le contre
se réconcilient ou se fondent: pour nous rendre responsables de l’irréductible
différence” (not in order to achieve a totality in which the for and the against
are reconciled or merged, but to make us answerable to irreducible difference)
(454).
What Blanchot says of Char may also be said of Joyce. Despite the system of
thematic “intrusions,” the nineteen sections of “Wandering Rocks” are, formal-
ly speaking, like so many floating corks, each surrounded by the white space of
the page, which in turn stands for the great openness and the unknown nature
of whatever unity or totality might ultimately join the disparate moments and
spaces that the respective sections of the text denote. As a formal principle
this holds equally for the eighteen episodes of Ulysses, which bear roughly the
same relation to one another as do the sections of this episode. However, the
 Joyce’s Debris 23

meaning of Joyce’s textual fragmentation need not be limited to the modernist

gesture that refuses an inauthentic unity. Joyce’s fragments can also signify a
cyclical return to origins, as on the final page of Finnegans Wake, where, on the
“ultimate ysland of Yreland in the encyclical yrish archipelago” (FW 605.4–5),
the reader is led back to the mouth of the Liffey and its far-calling gulls by a
language that increasingly breaks up as it approaches the engulfing white space
of the page: “Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then.
Finn, again! Take” (FW 628.13–14). That white space is now a quite graphic
representation of the sea, which figures as the site of origin in a number of
senses: geographical, historical, mythic, literary, textual. What Joyce does on a
formal level with the textual fragment is reproduced on the thematic level by
his preoccupation with debris, such as the archipelago of corks.
As for corks, we have seen them before in Joyce. For want of a corkscrew
during the haphazard gathering of political canvassers in “Ivy Day in the
Committee Room,” three bottles of stout are put on the hob. Animated by
the heat, the corks fly, respectively, with apologetic, tardy, and unheard poks
out of their bottles (Dubliners 128–32). In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Stephen, wandering along the quays by the customhouse, wonders at
“the multitude of corks that lay bobbing on the surface of the water in a
thick yellow scum, at the crowds of quay porters and the rumbling carts and
the illdressed bearded policeman.” For Stephen, the corks and the crowds
are equally part of “the new and complex sensation” of Dublin itself (Por-
trait 69). In Ulysses the multitude of corks has gathered further downstream,
“by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks” (U
10.1098–99). We are again at the mouth of the Liffey, where the inflow and
outflow of Dublin’s commercial economy are held in suspension. Awash with
the cast-off corks from a thousand empty bottles, the river also holds, in the
schooner Rosevean, the bricks about to enter the city’s system of exchange
and hence the cycle of building, decay, and ultimate reduction to debris, a
cycle on which Bloom has mused in unconscious parody of the vanitas vani-
tatum mode, concluding with the gloomy thought that “No-one is anything”
(U 8.493). Here, however, the lightness of the little white throwaway skiff is
made to recall the ascent of Elijah in 2 Kings 2, where the prophet is taken
up to heaven in a whirlwind. By the time it reaches the mouth of the Liffey,
the little throwaway has acquired a literary life of its own: a narrative trajec-
tory in its voyage downstream, a figurative representation in its character
as a skiff, and a spiritual dimension in its prophetic function. These values
in terms of the symbolic economy of the text, however, are acquired only as
 24 David Spurr

a consequence of the object’s exclusion from the material economy of the

modern city.
Still two episodes later, in “Cyclops,” the fate of the cast-off object is expe-
rienced on the social level by Bloom himself, a repetition of the act of exclu-
sion marked by the recurrence of the name “Elijah.” We find Bloom at Barney
Kiernan’s pub in Little Britain Street, where news has arrived that the Ascot
Gold Cup has been won by Throwaway, at twenty to one a “rank outsider” (U
12.1219). This information comes in the midst of mounting tension between
Bloom and the Citizen, who considers Bloom, as a Jew, to be just such a rank
outsider, that is, one rank with vermin, “coming over here to Ireland filling the
country with bugs” (U 12.1141–42). The rumor spreads through the pub that
Bloom had money on Throwaway, and that by failing to share his winnings
by offering a round of drinks, he is behaving like a typically avaricious Jew.
“He’s a bloody dark horse himself,” says Joe Hynes, one of the pub loungers (U
12.1558). As suspicion gives way to insult and violence, Bloom retreats from the
pub, pursued by the Citizen’s angry dog and by a tin biscuit box hurled in his
direction.
Bloom, as a Jew, is thus cast out from the society of the pub and, like the
cast-off YMCA throwaway, follows his own lonely path through the city. In
Joyce’s hands, however, Bloom’s narrow escape is figured parodically as both
the ascent of Elijah into heaven (2 Kings 2) and the transfiguration of Christ in
Matthew 17:1–5, where Jesus appears before his disciples alongside Moses and
Elijah as the living fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy. Joyce’s episode
ends thus:
When, lo, there came about them all a brightness and they beheld the
chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the
chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as
of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look
upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah!
And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him
even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory
of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohue’s in Little
Green street like a shot off a shovel. (U 1910–18)
The brightness of the chariot in its ascent to heaven repeats, on the level of the
sublime, the lightness of the little throwaway skiff in its voyage to the sea. The
symbolic triangulation of the three terms—throwaway, Bloom, and Elijah—
may be sketched as follows:
 Joyce’s Debris 25

Elijah

skiff ben

Throwaway Bloom
dark horse

That is, Joyce creates a constellation of three terms, each two of which are
linked by an intermediate term: Throwaway and Elijah are joined as names
for the light paper skiff, Elijah and Bloom combine in the name “ben Bloom
Elijah,” Throwaway and Bloom are both termed “dark horse.” In this way Joyce
establishes a semantic order, specific to his text, connecting a set of terms that
together designate the discarded foreign object. We recall that in 1 Kings 19
Elijah himself is cast out into the wilderness, persecuted by King Ahab and his
wife Jezebel, who are worshippers of Baal. The status of these combined terms
as divine debris may be compared to the debris of history that the young poet
Stephen Dedalus has invoked in an earlier episode by imagining the apocalyp-
tic aftermath of Blake’s wings of excess: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered
glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame” (U 2.9–10).

Letter and Litter

From the perspective of today’s reader, Stephen’s vision of history in ruins reso-
nates not just with Blake but also with the Passagen-Werk, the great unfinished
project of Joyce’s contemporary Walter Benjamin. In this monumental but
fragmentary work, Benjamin attempted a historical reconstruction of nine-
teenth-century Paris that has much in common with Joyce’s imaginative re-
construction of turn-of-the-century Dublin. Benjamin’s technique, like Joyce’s,
involves a certain abdication of narrative authority:
Methode dieser Arbeit: literarische Montage. Ich habe nichts zu sa-
gen. Nur zu zeigen. Ich werde keine geistwollen Formulierungen mir
aneignen, nichts Wertvolles entwenden. Aber die Lumpen, den Abfall:
die will ich nicht beschreiben sondern vorzeigen. (5:1030)
Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to
show. I’ll appropriate no astute phrases, steal nothing of value. But rags,
trash: these I’ll not describe, but show forth.
 26 David Spurr

Benjamin’s resolutely materialist vision of history shares with Joyce the refusal
of master narratives and great ideas in favor of what is left over after the con-
ventional historians have done their work: rags, trash, debris. The work of both
writers, however, manages to transform this debris into a distinctive visionary
mode.
The textual economy of Ulysses, like that of Finnegans Wake, is both all-
consuming and endlessly regenerative, sweeping up the debris of language, of
history, and of the material economic order, and then recombining them in
a constantly proliferating system, one that seems to bypass all of the mecha-
nisms of exclusion and expulsion necessary to the proper functioning of other
systems, whether bodily, social, symbolic, or economic. Although the manu-
scripts of both works are filled with material that Joyce ended by rejecting, they
nonetheless read as if they had nothing left over, no remainder. The solution
to this apparent paradox lies in the distinction between writing and its object.
Even if Joyce is scrupulously selective in his choice of language, his artistic vi-
sion has no a priori principles of exclusion regarding its object: the range of
this vision is both universal and destructive of any existing hierarchy of value:
literally everything is, at least potentially, of equal interest.
It might be instructive in this regard to contrast Joyce with another contem-
porary, the poet Wallace Stevens. In Stevens’s poem “The Man on the Dump”
(1938), “the dump is full of images”; it is the vast universe of human imagina-
tion that the poet must reject in order to get at the truth, which Stevens names
in terms of the definite article: “The the.” In the course of this process, “One
feels the purifying change. One rejects / The trash” (202). This movement ulti-
mately will lead Stevens to the rarefied solitude and the restrained poetic econ-
omy of his later poems. Joyce also arrives at “the” as the final word of Finnegans
Wake, but the difference from Stevens is that for Joyce the definite article is
not definitive; it is not, as in Stevens, followed by a final full stop, but instead
serves to redirect us back into the circular syntax that joins the final page to the
beginning. In Finnegans Wake especially, Joyce is a different kind of poet from
Stevens, one who takes another way. Homeless exile that he is, he sorts through
the trash, putting its pieces together in new and strange ways. He dives into the
dump of language, groping his way through the “chaosmos of alle,” carrying a
“travelling inkhorn” from which he produces “variously inflected, differently
pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns” (118).
This is not exactly to say that Joyce writes trash, but that his writing has in
common with trash its character as being accumulated, variegated, seemingly
random and chaotic, and above all without readily assignable value.
 Joyce’s Debris 27

In the early chapters of the Wake, a letter, unearthed by chance from a

dump, bears all the marks of its partial decomposition: tea stains, terracious
matter, fork punctures, and so forth. To the extent that this document stands
for the Wake itself, it represents the status of the letter as litter. In “Joyce le
symptôme” Lacan writes: “Et pour ce mot littérature, en souligner le poids, je
dirai l’équivoque sur quoi souvent Joyce joue—letter, litter. La lettre est déchet”
(And for this word literature, to emphasize its weight, I’ll say the equivocality
on which Joyce often plays—letter, litter. The letter is litter) (26). Joyce’s letter
is understood here as the leftover litter or remainder from the symbolic order, a
condition that has to be understood as the inevitable consequence of a writing
that fails to observe the limits of that order.
If indeed the textual economy of the Wake represents the leftover remain-
der, the trash left behind in the construction of the larger symbolic order, then
it is tempting to think of Joyce’s writing not as composition but rather as de-
composition, as the strategic disintegration of the symbolic into the realm of
the real. For Lacan, the real is “ce qui pâtit du signifiant,” that which suffers
on account of the signifying order. It is, again, “le domaine qui subsiste hors
de toute symbolisation,” the domain that subsists outside of all symbolization
(Ecrits 388). The analogy with trash produces the following formula:
symbolic value
———— = ————
real trash

The symbolic is to the real as value is to trash: in both cases the latter term
represents that which remains outside of, unintegrated into the system of the
former. The consequences for the latter are not just neglect but a damaging
effect that can also weaken the system of the former. The implications of this
analogy for Joyce’s language are related to his attempt to create a space for
that dimension of language which has been cast out of the reigning symbolic
order. The equation of the letter with litter appears to be authorized by Joyce’s
repeated play on these two words in the Wake, as in Shaun’s indignant descrip-
tion of Shem’s “litterery bed” (FW 422.35). The respective etymologies of the
two words, moreover, tend to support the comparison of Joyce’s language to
Lacan’s notion of the real, a comparison that Lacan himself seems to endorse
in evoking what he calls Joyce’s parlêtre, his speech-as-being.
The English word “litter” is derived not from the Latin littera (letter) but
from lectus, meaning bed, itself derived from the Greek lektron. In early Eng-
lish, “litter” came to mean not just bed but also bedding, commonly made of
 28 David Spurr

straw or strewn rushes, whence a disorderly accumulation of odds and ends.

The word “litter” thus has embedded within it connotations both of disorder
and of the bed or substratum made of various materials: litter is cast off and
beaten down, but it also constitutes a foundation or underlayer, however loose
and variegated. The French expression “faire litière de quelque chose” means
literally to trample something underfoot, but figuratively to scorn or disregard
it. Joyce’s letter as litter is the scorned and trampled remainder that nonetheless
underlies language, just as the real is “ce qui pâtit du signifiant.”
This is one way to account for Joyce’s insistence on the radical materiality of
language, on its status as both vocal utterance and the trace on the page, or, as
he puts it, as both “vocable scriptsign” and “stinksome inkenstink” (183). Let us
recall that the Wake’s archetypal poet-figure, Shem the Penman, himself lives
in a dump of a place, where the rubbish of verbiage is indistinguishable from
bits of food and other litter. This “lair” is

persianly literatured with burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback

snaps, doubtful eggshells . . . rindless raisins, alphybettyformed verbage,
vivlical viasses, ompiter dictas, visus umbique, ahems and ahas, imeffible
tries at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fall-
en lucifers . . . once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage,
unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations . . . (FW 183)

This “speech unasyllabled” is the unassimilated syllable left over from day-
speech; it is speech fit only for the likes of Shem himself, a Lucifer fallen from
the social order, an unredeemed castoff of the same dubious company as Beck-
ett’s Watt and Céline’s Bardamu, both of whom might claim descendance from
Dickens’s Krook.
Joyce’s interest in the materiality of language as well as in the physical sub-
stance of objects themselves may be addressing a basic need for literature, in
an age of capitalist materialism and pure exchange-value, to come into contact
with the more fundamental object world. The presence of debris in the modern
work of art has been put into historical perspective by Adorno. He interprets
this phenomenon as part of the decline of the importance of subject matter
in art since the advent of Kandinsky, Proust, and Joyce, so that a well-painted
gutter is better than a badly painted palace (Aesthetic 149). But there is more to
it than that. This breakdown in the hierarchy of subject matter has been accom-
panied by a more radical critique, in art, of its own possibilities for coherence
and meaning. The modern artwork has undertaken to destroy its own status
 Joyce’s Debris 29

as a “nexus of meaning” (Sinnzusammenhang), so that “for the first time in the

development of art, affixed debris cleaves visible scars in the work’s meaning”
(Aesthetic 155).
How does it happen that, in works like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, de-
bris—both as material object and as linguistic form—rises to the surface
to undermine the work as a system of meaning? In Adorno’s analysis, this
process belongs both to the general nature of the artwork itself, and to its
particular relation to the modern world. In the first instance, the self-critical
nature of art, with its requirement that artistic composition be “drossless”
(schlackenlos), that is, purified of excess baggage, is one that paradoxically
recognizes chaos as “the ever lurking precondition of all art” (Aesthetic 152).
Modern art, in other words, would recall from exile the forces of anarchy
banished long ago, even at the cost of its own coherence. The second rea-
son for art’s mise en cause of its own status as a nexus of meaning has to do
with the impulse to resist the ways in which artistic coherence has conferred
an illusory meaning on the modern world itself. The semblance of meaning
provided by recent movements such as impressionism and Jugendstil “was
to be broken by the work admitting into itself literal, illusionless ruins of
empirical reality, thereby acknowledging the fissure and transforming it for
purposes of aesthetic effect” (Aesthetic 155). According to this way of seeing
it, the presence of trash in the artwork sacrifices the work’s inner coherence
in favor of a subversive negation of late-capitalist totality, a subversive power
it acquires not through the destruction of meaning but through the ceaseless
interrogation of meaning itself.
In my view, Adorno’s analysis of trash in modern art resonates with Lacan’s
observation that for Joyce, “la lettre est déchet,” although Adorno applies to the
historical scene what Lacan regards as a question of the fundamental relation
between the subject and language. If the Lacanian “sinthome” is, apart from
the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, a fourth domain in which the subject
pursues the sources of his or her trauma through the structures of language
itself, then this has something in common with the story told by Adorno in
which modern art, including the work of Joyce, stages its own traumatic rela-
tion to the scene of modernity. In both cases, the space reserved for debris
testifies to an artistic will toward working through the effects of repression by
returning to the loose foundations on which meaning is constructed. In either
case, Joyce’s debris is somehow redeemed, not by being given a meaning other
than that of mere debris, but precisely by being acknowledged as debris, as the
meaning of meaning reduced to debris.
 30 David Spurr

Notes
1. Cf. Derrida’s “Le sacrifice” on the relations between ritual sacrifice, philosophy, and
theater.
2. Translations from French and German are my own except where otherwise noted.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997. Translation of Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften 7. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970.
———. Notes to Literature. 2 vols. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften 5. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1982.
Blanchot, Maurice. L’entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
Derrida, Jacques. “Le sacrifice.” La Metaphore 1 (1993): 51–65.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
———. Our Mutual Friend. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Homer. The Odyssey. 2 vols. Trans. A. T. Murray. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb
Classical Library, 1984.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1992.
———. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1992.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966.
———. “Joyce le symptôme.” Joyce avec Lacan. Ed. Jacques Aubert. Paris: Navarin, 1987. 21–29.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979.
Weekley, Ernest. An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. 2 vols. New York: Dover,
1967.
 2

”Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!”

The Pussens Perplex

John Gordon

A reviewer, if I remember correctly, once wrote that for me Joyce was literally
a sensational writer. This writer was right. I have always been interested in how
the senses work in Joyce’s writings—in how they register and reverberate, how
they progress from stimulus to sensation, from sensation to perception, from
perception to conviction or hallucination or dream. The process of sensation,
in short, and what follows from it in the embodied brains, or brainy bodies,
of Joyce’s characters. To give one example, which I have cited before: when in
“Proteus” Stephen, walking on the beach, “closed his eyes to hear his boots
crush crackling wrack and shells” (U 3.10–11), the distinctively Joycean note
is not the onomatopoeia of the last five words but rather the fact that it kicks
in at the moment Stephen closes his eyes and starts to listen. We are tracking
here not so much reality as attention to it, not impressions but the dynamics
of impression formation, neither sound nor sense nor sense’s virtual source
but the interplay of all three, the way they work out in the sensorium and the
mind managing the sensorium. You can perhaps find approximations of such
effects in a few other places, among the symbolists, for instance, but for writers
of fiction no one I know of—not Pater or Proust, Chekhov or James, Woolf,
Nabokov, Updike, or anyone later—comes close to the way Joyce threads the
course of his fictions through the glimmerings and awakenings of his charac-
ters, through the percepts, made and in making, of his resident perceptors.
These observations of mine are not original. Over forty years ago Frank
O’Connor remarked of the phrase “The high cold empty gloomy rooms,” from
“Araby,” pretty much what I just said about Stephen’s crackling shells in “Pro-
teus,” that their order follows, as he put it, “almost experimentally,” the young
 32 John Gordon

protagonist’s stages of apprehension: “Because he is so small, the first thing the

boy notices is that the rooms are high; then he perceives the cold and associ-
ates it with the rooms themselves; then he realizes that they are cold because
they are empty, and finally comes the emotive adjective ‘gloomy’ that describes
their total impression” (O’Connor 19–20). Earlier, in The Classical Temper, S. L.
Goldberg had described Joyce’s streams of consciousness as rendering not “pas-
sive registrations of external reality” but “the very process in which meaning
is apprehended in life” (92). More recently, similar comments have been made
by Christy Burns and by Fritz Senn, who in his reading of the “Lestrygonians”
sentence, “Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt
quaywalls, gulls,” observes that the odd syntactic postponing of “gulls” there
may be explained by the fact that, “Empirically, we may well notice something
moving”—flapping and wheeling, for instance—“before the thing moving is
determined—motion before identification” (Senn 102).
What I would like to do is call attention to one critical phase of these percep-
tual dynamics as they are realized in Joyce’s work. It is the phase that Finnegans
Wake describes as passing from the “impression that knits knowledge that
finds the nameform” (FW 18.24–25). It begins with the involuntary operation
colloquially known as “pricking up your ears” or, for sight, “peeling your eyes,”
and its essential unit is what the experimental psychology current in Joyce’s
youth called the “just noticeable difference,” or “j.n.d.” The j.n.d. is the mini-
mal increment necessary to distinguish one phase from another of what Her-
man Helmholtz called the “modality” of a class of sensations—for instance,
the notes of a scale (Boring 10). For a musical neophyte, the interval between
C and C-sharp might, for instance, be such a j.n.d. But as Bloom remarks in
“Sirens,” it would be different for musical “enthusiasts,” the ones who are “all
ears,” who never “lose a demisemiquaver” (U 11.1192–93) and who would surely
be able to distinguish other gradations falling between any two adjacent keys
on the keyboard. As the experimenters of the time were demonstrating, j.n.d.’s
are modifiable (Boring 480–81), and the first step in modifying them is to apply
the kind of attention exemplified by Bloom’s musical enthusiasts, the ones who
are “all ears.” Again, by pricking up your ears. I am walking through a strange
town, say, and I hear a faint “ong” sound. I wonder if it might be a church bell
ringing the time. I prick up my ears. If so, there will probably be another one
coming. There is. But this time around, it is not a faint “ong” sound. It is a
distinct and obvious bell sound, and it seems noticeably louder than the one
before. That is because, prompted by that first liminal stimulus, I was listen-
ing for it, and because, having heard the bell once—and having heard sounds
 “Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!”: The Pussens Perplex 33

like it before—I had in place an expectation of what it might be, what to listen
for. The second sound was qualitatively richer and more distinct because I
had pricked up my ears for it. Were I as musically inclined as most of Joyce’s
Dubliners, I might then be able, like Leopold Bloom at the end of “Calypso,” to
detect the musical “third,” that is (in the words of the OED), “a note three dia-
tonic degrees above or below a given note . . . also . . . the interval between this
and the given note” reverberating in the “overtone following through the air”
(U 4.549–50) after the last (high note—low note) “Heigho!” of St. George’s bells.
Bloom can hear that “third,” as he did not when the bells started ringing, both
because the clanging of “loud dark iron” has subsided into “overtone” and be-
cause he began pricking up his ears to listen from the moment the sound of “A
creak and a dark whirr in the air high up” (U 4.544) announced that the tolling
was about to start. That is why, I suggest, the language just before their ringing
becomes so ding-dongian: “The bells of George’s church. They tolled the hour:
loud dark iron” (U 4.544–45). This, again, is before the bells toll. It registers
Bloom’s anticipatory receptivity to the sound to come, a receptivity established
by all the previous times he has heard the “creak and . . . dark whirr”—what his
contemporary Pavlov would have called a “conditional stimulus”—followed
by the familiar ringing sound. Thus alerted and activated, his auditory appa-
ratus—his ear and mind working together—is ready to pick up that diatonic
interval. Something similar happens later in “Sirens,” when he hears a “jing,
a little sound,” from outside, then identifies it as coming from Boylan’s jaunt-
ing car leaving for Molly, then listens again: “Jingling. He’s gone. Jingle. Hear”
(U 11.457–58). It isn’t that the sound of the car has amplified, from “jing” to
“jingle.” It’s that Bloom has pricked up his ears.
If you want to witness this operation in action, you can do no better than to
observe a cat, and the way its ears swivel, radar-like, in the direction of some
stray sound. The first time around, it was just a stray sound. The second time, it
might be identifiable as, who knows, a bird sound. Hence, cat-brain to cat-ears:
swivel! Think bird! Listen! In “Calypso,” the cat Pussens sees Bloom pouring a
saucer of milk, runs to the saucer of milk, tips the surface three times with her
whiskers, licks the surface, and then, finally, laps (U 4.38–43). She has identi-
fied and certified that it is lappable, in seven graduated stages. In “Sirens,” Miss
Kennedy “sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped, sweet tea” (U
11.140). “Sipping” is her equivalent of Pussens’s tipping. It takes her from brew
to tea to hot tea to sweet tea, also from unpleasant (“distastefully”) to pleasant
(“sweet”). She had to get past one before she could get to the other, by degrees.
It is a kind of progressively self-correcting feedback loop. In “Aeolus,” Professor
 34 John Gordon

MacHugh takes a bite of water biscuit and, “hungered, made ready to nibble
the biscuit in his other hand” (U 7, 259). “Hungered”: when we serve ourselves
what we call appetizers, we perform the gustatory equivalent of pricking up
our ears.
Getting her milk, Pussens is I think also part of another demonstration of
j.n.d. progression, this one working the other way. She communicates with
Bloom, and Bloom, pricking up his ears, homes in, by degrees, on what she
is saying. She doesn’t say “Meow,” because cats don’t. Writing about this pas-
sage in a great footnote, Hugh Kenner remarked that laboratory researchers
of the late twentieth century, armed with the most sophisticated audio equip-
ment, had determined that a cat has at its disposal “9 consonants, 5 vowels, 2
diphthongs an umlaut and an a:ou sound which begins as a while the mouth
is open but ends as ou while the mouth is gradually closed” (Kenner 40), and
that Joyce had obviously been way ahead of them. True enough. But the next
question is not why Bloom’s cat is so expressive—it’s because she’s a cat, and
they are—but why she gets more expressive with each plaint, why her second
cry, “Mrkgnao!,” is identical to the first except with one extra j.n.d., an “r,” and
why her third, “Mrkrgnao!,” is identical to the second, except for, again, yet
another j.n.d., yet another “r.”
Aside from coincidence, there are I think two possible explanations. One is
that Pussens is getting progressively more expressive, stretching out her pho-
nemes. The other is that Bloom, pricking up his ears, achieves with each suc-
cessive stimulus a more refined perception. I think that the latter answer is the
right one. I would suggest it is not accidental that the sound added each time,
“r,” is the one that most likely would be missed by an inattentive, or less atten-
tive, human listener. It is, in phonemic terms, a liquid, prone to blend with
other sounds and at times to be crowded out in the process. And, as Barbara
Walters was put on this earth to remind us, people—but not, I think, cats—can
have trouble with r’s. I think that the Pussens’ first r-less “Mkgnao!” comes out
of Bloom’s, and not her, equivalent of the unconscious elision that produces,
in Boston, Hahvad Yahd, and that in parts of the British Isles anyway can as
Finnegans Wake attests (FW 16.18) turn “horrible” into something like “haudd-
ible.” I would point out as well that of those three cat-cries, the first is at least
relatively unexpected, when Bloom has his back turned—“O, there you are,” he
says in response—whereas the next two are given his full, face-to-face atten-
tion.
Also, this: that “Calypso,” as we all know, parallels the simultaneously oc-
curring action of “Telemachus” in certain ways, and that “Telemachus,” on
 “Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!”: The Pussens Perplex 35

its first page, may itself feature a similar operation. How, to ask an old ques-
tion, does Mulligan there know just when those two whistles he pretends to
summon are going to sound? The best explanation so far is the one offered by
Stephen Whittaker and Francis X. Jordan (29–31), that he has seen the steam
blasts coming from the whistle of the mailboat, knows from experience that
the sound, traveling over a distance of about a mile, will show up about five
seconds later, and times his act accordingly. It is a compelling hypothesis, I
think, but with one problem: that at the time, Mulligan has his back to the
harbor and mailboat. His gold fillings are glinting in the sun, which is in the
southeast. The harbor is to the northwest. He cannot be looking both ways
at once. Which leaves us, if there is an explanation, with the modality of the
audible. Suppose those two whistles were not the first. Suppose they were, for
instance, in response to another whistle, or some other such signal, perhaps
coming from the harbor, and that such an exchange was part of the normal
harbor-leaving routine. Mulligan would then have known when the second
signal was coming, from having his ears pricked up by the first. Then the
question becomes, why didn’t we hear that first signal?, and I would suggest
that the answer might be, because we are processing this sequence through
Stephen, who, being sleepy and distracted, failed to register it, but does pick
up the second signal because, in part, he has been told by Mulligan, in an atti-
tude of “rapt attention,” to prick up his ears: “Shut your eyes, gents. . . . Silence,
all” (U 1.23–25). It is, in other words, a preliminary version of the way that, in
“Proteus,” he, and we, will hear the crackling shells only when he attends to
them. The whistles which seem to come at Mulligan’s call are then described
as “strong” and “shrill” (U 1.26). Maybe they are, but they are also coming
from a mile away. I would suggest that one reason they make such an impres-
sion is that this time around we, through Stephen, are listening for them. Of
the three cat callings in “Calypso,” it is only the third, with Bloom in full-focus
mode, that is described as sounding “loudly.”
One character who understands the principle I am describing is Bloom. He
is, after all, in the profession of advertising, from Latin ad-vert, to turn your
attention toward something, and, as he tries to explain to Joe Hynes, “repeti-
tion” is advertising’s “whole secret” (U 12.1148). (So, in “Aeolus,” where we see
the adman at work, he tells—and, crossing his fingers, shows—Nannetti his
“House of Keyes” idea, thinks “Let him take that in first” [U 7.133], then, repeat-
ing himself [“Like that” (U 7.132) . . . “Like that, see” (U 7.142)], tells and shows
him again, this time around adding more information.) The idea is to get your
attention (with something that “catches the eye” [U 7.151]) in order to make you
 36 John Gordon

take a second look. It is a technique based on a sound grasp of how the mind
and senses work together, as demonstrated throughout Ulysses and the rest of
Joyce’s writings. We see it demonstrated, for instance, in this sequence from
“Hades”:
Oot: a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his
mouth opening: oot.
—Four bootlaces for a penny. (U 6.229–31)
The first sentence registers a stroboscopic moment, the second its gestaltic
completion. The colon indicates that the truncated sight, flashing into view as
the figure appears in the frame of Bloom’s carriage window, occurs at the same
moment as the sound “oot.” The sound is truncated as well because Bloom has
not noticed it, not gone about the operation of separating it from the general
background of street noise, until the visual image has cued him. That is why
he does not pick up on the old man’s cry until mid-syllable. Then, when his
full attention is directed to sight and sound, he takes more in, including the
full duration of “Four bootlaces for a penny.” The second act of apprehension
is what does the trick. “Beauty of music you must hear twice,” he thinks in “Si-
rens” (U 11.1060–61), and from my experience, anyway, he is right about that:
I can almost never tell whether I like a new song until I hear it for the second
time. Songwriters themselves, who almost invariably alternate between verses
one, two, and three on the one hand and, on the other, that species of formal
repetition called the “refrain,” would also understand what Bloom is talking
about. The thought-forming organism needs to be prompted, to be primed,
before the nameform can be knit. Once thus alerted, the ad-verting conscious-
ness can drastically reduce the range of the operative j.n.d. You could “hear
a pin drop,” thinks Bloom, remembering an audience’s hushed expectation,
cued by the familiar sequence of a church service, before Molly began an aria
(U 11.400). Of the distant watch he strains to see in “Lestrygonians,” he thinks,
“If you imagine it’s there, you can almost see it” (U 8.563), as, tracking the bat
in “Nausicaa,” he can “almost see” its “tiny,” “weeny bones” (U 11.1131). In such
adverting, nameform-framing states, he is in the company of the Stephen Ded-
alus of Portrait whose reception of the sound of the director’s swishing soutane
in chapter 4 (P 154) is heightened and conditioned and determined by the im-
pression made by that sound, courtesy of Father Dolan, in chapter 1 (P 50); in
the company, too, of the Gabriel Conroy who, because he has just been told a
romantic story of gravel being thrown against a windowpane, hears or fancies
he can hear the sound of snow tapping on a windowpane (D 221, 223).
 “Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!”: The Pussens Perplex 37

He is also in the company of, really of the same substance as, the reader, who
comes into the book having been informed by the title page that what he or
she is experiencing is a twice-told tale, a second take on a set of cues presum-
ably already absorbed, and who in the course of the book will repeatedly be
given this or that piece of data and then given it again. In yet another anomaly
of the opening scene, for instance, Stephen looks “towards the blunt cape of
Bray Head” (U 1.181). But you cannot see Bray Head from the Martello Tower.
What gives? Well, much later, in “Ithaca,” a shooting star is described as head-
ing “towards” Leo (U 17.1213), a constellation that, being below the horizon at
that hour, you also cannot see. I would suggest that this second occurrence
constitutes a double take on the first, one that resolves its irritating incongruity
by refining out of the word “towards” the unexamined assumption that orien-
tation must imply connection. “Towards” is a dull-as-dishwater word, happily
overlooked, but Ulysses wants you to look at it, first once and then again.
As for Finnegans Wake: this is a book which famously begins as a double
take, whose first line takes us “back,” and whose first complete sentence is a
rearriving encore. Reading it is always a business of trying, with another and
yet another look, to refine and fill out our perception of something that piqued
and perplexed us the last time around. Above all, it is a book of thresholds, in
all senses including the sense I have been discussing without, up to now, nam-
ing—that is, the thresholds of perceptual mechanics, the j.n.d. demarcations
at which a stimulus or change of stimulus first becomes detectable or com-
prehensible, and which determine the difference between the liminal and the
subliminal. The doors of perception. Its central figure is a man named Porter, a
tender of thresholds. I know this is disputed, but aside from his repeated iden-
tification by that name in the book’s waking-up chapter (iii.4), I would respect-
fully point out that before then he is perennially presented as a load-carrying
porter or a bottle of porter or a server of porter whose establishment is a “pint
of porter place” (FW 260.6) or (for instance as “janitor” [FW 27.03, 224.11]) a
Janus-figure porter, that for a while one son is a re-porter and the other a bar-
rel of porter, that his onetime nemesis and double, Hosty, gets his name from
Latin Ostarius, “porter,” that variations of the word are woven into his various
incarnations (the “freipforter” he becomes as city founder [FW 548.12], the
“portrifaction” and “Porterfeud” [FW 78.21, 91.15] of his feuding, falling-apart
household, the “fool porterfull” with which, as “michindaddy,” he is addressed,
at the door—port—of his cave [FW 15.05], the “subporters” supporting his coat
of arms [FW 372.09], the references scattered throughout the book to him,
his family, and his habitation as “porty” [FW 51.24], “pfortner” [FW 531.25],
 38 John Gordon

“Portergill” [FW 104.18], “Sublime Porter” [FW 72.2–3], “porte sublimer” [FW
551.35], “porterhouse” [FW 204.05] and so on), that the last leaf that “clings
still” (FW 628.07) on the book’s last page (i.e., leaf) takes its cue from the story
“The Last Leaf,” by O. Henry, whose real name was (William) Porter, that as the
latter-day “Humphrey” he is a “humping” (FW 62.28) humper of burdens, like
the kind of porter whose traditional “porter’s knot” would account nicely for
the “hump” often attributed to him, that his other nonce-name of “Earwicker,”
given to a figure outfitted with a bunch of keys (the iconographic signature of
another kind of porter), includes (see FW 72.27, 532.18, 589.24) “wicket,” a small
door or portal—and, above all, speaking of doors, that he is forever standing at
them.
He is, for instance, the “dour” Jarl Van Hoother (FW 21.17) who shuts his
door on the Prankquean in the first chapter. The Prankquean episode is all
about thresholds, including the threshold-crossing mental operation of solving
a riddle. The riddle is, in its first version, “Why do I am alook alike a poss of
porterpease?” (FW 21.18–19), and it is among other things a dream-censored
rendition of the question, “Why do I look like a Porter?,” to which the answer
is, “Because you are one. You are my daughter, daughter of a Porter, which is
also why we look as alike as two peas in a pod.” The dream-censoring arises
from the dreamer’s need not to face one of the big-time taboos of Finnegans
Wake, Porter’s desire for his daughter, whose relation to him in this sequence is
accordingly displaced several removes into “only the niece-of-his-in-law” (FW
21.14–15). The result is what the text calls a piece of “porthery”—“porthery”
(FW 23.10)—with the embedded “porter,” again there to remind us that in solv-
ing or trying to solve a riddle we have been not only transgressing inhibitions
but crossing thresholds, from confusion to comprehension, and that as Bloom
the adman pointed out, repetition, in this case of essentially the same “poss of
porterpease” question, three times, is the key.
Finnegans Wake, taking us round and round again over the same field of
incipiently grasped and partially processed cues, is continuously putting us
in the business of pricking up our ears and peeling our eyes, of crossing from
threshold to threshold. In short, ad-verting. The resident advertising man of
Ulysses is a canvasser, making him like Odysseus, the sailor with the canvas
sails. In Finnegans Wake, he’s a “madison man” (FW 25.04)—Madison Avenue
seller of patent medicine, yes, but also a medicine man, a shaman, ushering us
more and more deeply into the arcanum with each repeated spell and spelling
out of spells. Bloom would not have liked Finnegans Wake—he would not,
for that matter, have much liked Ulysses either, except for the dirty bits—but
 “Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!”: The Pussens Perplex 39

the man who took the time to attend, three times, to what Pussens had to say
would, if he had somehow been brought to attend to it, have made a pretty
good reader.

Notes
1. Burns observes how Joyce’s onomatopoeic effects “extend . . . away from phonetic realism
toward an emphasis on how the ear bends a sound toward its relevant message,” for instance
the “Haltyaltyall” of bicycle bells, heard by Bloom as a signal to stop (Burns 32).
2. Sometimes spelled “jnd.” The principle of the j.n.d. was introduced by Ernst Heinrich
Weber and was studied intensively in the laboratory by Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt,
the latter of whom was active and influential during Joyce’s youth.
3. For a more recent treatment, see Hilgard 109–11. My thanks to my colleague Professor
Stuart Vyse, of the Connecticut College Psychology Department, for recommending this book
and for reviewing the manuscript.
4. Kenner’s quotation comes from Muriel Beadle, The Cat.
5. For evidence that Ulysses keeps careful track of the sun’s position at any given hour and
accurately registers the likely effects of glare and shadow, see chapter 10, “Dublin: Sun, Moon,
Stars,” of my Joyce and Reality (122–37). Allowing for the later arrival of Daylight Savings Time
and the disappearance of Dunsink time, the sun’s position for 8:00 on 16 June has been calcu-
lated with the computer program Skymap. It would have had an azimuth of 100.31—ten degrees
south of due east. The mailboat, “clearing the harbourmouth” (U 1.83), should be about twenty
degrees west of due north—in other words about 120 degrees off the line of sunlight. When last
visiting the Martello Tower of Ulysses, I found that when I was facing the doorway in which
Stephen appears—and toward which Mulligan is facing during the events in question—the
“harbourmouth” was behind my back and off to my right.
6. A little later in “Hades,” at U 6.294, Bloom will pick up all of the street cry “Eight plums
a penny! Eight for a penny!”—because, I suggest, he has just heard Simon Dedalus speak the
word “eightpence” (U 6.291). Something similar may be happening at the end of the episode,
when he notices the irregularity in Menton’s hat—also known as a “bowler”—just after remem-
bering the time that, because of the irregularity, the “bias,” of the ball, he antagonized Menton
during a game of bowls (U 6.1010–15).
7. Trying to see it, “His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides” (U 8.562). Compare
Pussens, waiting for Bloom to get her milk, with her “avid shameclosing eyes . . . narrowing
with greed” (U 4.33–35). Both are constricting—“narrowing”—their fields of vision, the better
to concentrate on one point of attention.
8. There is probably another kind of threshold-crossing involved in this scene, the vocaliza-
tion of the j.n.d. that distinguishes one tribe’s pronunciation from another’s, “shibboleth” being
the classic example. Here and elsewhere, Joyce is apparently incorporating the story of the
Sicilian Vespers, the 1282 uprising in which Sicilian natives slaughtered their Angevin occupi-
ers, identifying the victims by their pronunciation of the Italian “ciceri,” for “chickpeas.” (The
Sicilians pronounced it “checheri,” the Angevins “kekeri.”) In the Prankquean exchange, one
party repeatedly poses questions about peas, and the other repeatedly fails to give a satisfac-
tory answer, at least once (“He clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch and he ordurd and his
 40 John Gordon

thick spch spck . . .” [FW 23.3–4]) because of confusion about how to pronounce the letter “c.”
Elsewhere in the book, FW 267.10–21 seems to elide Issy’s “peas” with the disputed “syllable” of
“shibboleth,” FW 54.23–24 and 76.08 give two occasions where the word is invoked, as “sicker,”
to ward off threats from without, FW 425.19 has Shaun brag that unlike his outcast brother he
can “perorate a chickero,” and FW 586.28–30 shows the “patrolman Seekersenn” emerging to
make “siccar” that no God-damned Irish natives are encroaching on the occupier’s settlement.
All in all, “ciceri,” with its permutations into pea, pee, and peas, may be the book’s most im-
portant shibboleth. For Joyce’s—or Stephen’s—earlier derivation of pea-pod from “Cicero,” see
U 16.363. Joyce, incidentally, would probably have learned of the Sicilian uprising from Verdi’s
Les Vêpres Siciliennes, although the opera make no use of the “cicera” tradition.

Works Cited
Boring, Edwin G. Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology. New
York: Appleton-Crofts, 1942.
Burns, Christy. Gestural Politics: Stereotype and Parody in Joyce. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000.
Goldberg, S. L. The Classical Temper. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969.
Gordon, John. Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2004.
Hilgard, Ernest L. Psychology in America: A Historical Survey. New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich, 1987.
Kenner, Hugh. “Ulysses.” London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980.
O’Connor, Frank. “Work in Progress.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Dubliners.” Ed.
Peter K. Garrett. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988. 18–26.
Senn, Fritz. Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995.
Whittaker, Stephen, and Jordan, Francis X. “The Three Whistles and the Aesthetic of Media-
tion: Modern Physics and Platonic Metaphysics in Joyce’s Ulysses.” James Joyce Quarterly
33.1 (1995): 27–47.
 3

Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates

Austin Briggs

Joyce was a great hater of bloodshed. . . . On so many occasions has he prefaced an

observation to me with: “You know, Budgen, I am not a bloodyminded man,” that it
became a kind of refrain.
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses”

“That Bloody Jewman”

Preparatory to anything else, I might state that prudery is not part of my make-
up, or so I like to think; I read Joyce, after all. Nevertheless, I can still recall
the little shiver of male delicacy I felt in 1972 when my 23 March issue of the
New York Review of Books arrived blazoned with a cover headline announcing
Richard Ellmann’s “Why Molly Bloom Menstruates.” Here, with no shivers, I
wish to address a corollary question: why Leopold Bloom menstruates.
The so-called Prefatory Notebook for Ulysses in the National Library of
Ireland, Frances Ilmberger reports, describes Bloom as menstruating. In the
novel itself, Bloom’s menstruation is first suggested by the nameless narrator of
“Cyclops,” who circulates Pisser Burke’s story that Bloom used to lie about in
the City Arms Hotel “once a month with headache like a totty with her courses”
(U 12.1659–60). To be sure, gossip originating in a man nicknamed “Pisser” and
passed on by a barfly who is a scabrous Dublin Thersites scarcely constitutes
reliable testimony. Something very like Pisser’s report is suggested by Bloom
himself, however: musing on the periods of Gerty MacDowell and Molly, he
reflects, “Feel it myself too” (U 13.824). And he seems even more explicit in
“Circe” when, feeling “light in the head” and touched by “[b]rainfogfag,” he
thinks that the cause may be his “[m]onthly” (U 15.209–10). Thus it is appro-
priate that in “Circe” Bloom should wed Selene, goddess of the phases of the
moon (U 15.1507): in addition to his other idiosyncrasies, peculiarities, kinks,
 42 Austin Briggs

perversions, or what have you, “that bloody jewman”—as the Citizen names
Bloom—experiences something he regards as menstrual periods (U 12.1811).
Others have touched on the question of why Bloom menstruates. In “‘Pe-
nelope’ as Period Piece,” Cheryl Herr says that “Bloom’s periodicity strikes me
as . . . appropriating female power, and even Molly’s instances of menstruation
strike me as merely playacting” (72). Although I admire the characteristic brio
of Herr’s essay, it will be clear why I do not agree with it. In “The Source(s) of
Joyce’s Anti-Semitism in Ulysses,” Erwin Steinberg cites the story that Bloom
menstruates as evidence of a pervasive anti-Semitism in Joyce, a view utterly
contrary to mine. Consonant with my reading is Marilyn Reizbaum’s “When
the Saints Come Marching In: Re-Deeming ‘Cyclops.’” Although my focus falls
elsewhere, I agree with Reizbaum’s cogent argument that in evoking the myth
that Jewish men menstruate, Joyce is working with “the way in which the Jew-
ish taboo against menstruation and blood—kashrut law—has been inverted
to become a taboo against Jews who become themselves the pollutants” (173).
I must also recommend Joseph Boone’s “New Approach to Bloom as ‘Wom-
anly Man.’” Boone addresses Bloom’s association with menstruation in only
a paragraph (71–72), but his thoughtful discussion of Bloom as a man whose
“femininity” functions as a critique of “masculinity” is thoroughly in keeping
with my argument here.
For a partial explanation of Bloom’s menstruation, I will look at the myth of
Jewish male menstruation in more detail than Herr, Steinberg, Reizbaum, and
Boone; then I will examine an interrelated explanation: that Bloom’s “monthly”
distinguishes him from an ideal of masculine blood sacrifice repugnant to him
and to Joyce alike.

Blood Curse
Mr. Leopold Bloom is the victim of many myths about the Jewish “race” that
were commonplace in Joyce’s era and some of which persist in some quarters
even to this day. Thinking of Jewish merchants outside the Paris Stock Ex-
change, Stephen recalls that their eyes “knew the dishonours of their flesh” (U
2.372); Stephen cannot know, of course, of the betrayal scheduled for Bloom’s
bed at 4:00 PM, but the dishonors of Jewish flesh that he could have heard of
are numerous. It is not surprising that when Garryowen starts sniffing around
Bloom in “Cyclops,” the nameless narrator says, “I’m told those jewies does
have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs” (U 12.452–53): the “foe-
tor judaicus,” the Jewish stench, was alleged for centuries (Trachtenberg 50).
 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 43

When Lenehan describes a newsboy in “Aeolus” making sport of Bloom by

“[t]aking off his flat spaugs and the walk” (U 7.448), he and the boy may be in-
voking a mythology so vast that Sander Gilman devotes entire chapters of The
Jew’s Body (38–59) and The Case of Sigmund Freud (113–68) to “the Jewish foot.”
And when pleading in Bloom’s defense in “Circe” that his client is not legally
responsible for his actions because of “Mongolian extraction” (U 15.954), J. J.
O’Molloy may refer not only to “Mongolism” (Down syndrome) but to claims
that Jewish features often betray an “admixture of Mongolian blood” (Wein-
inger 303). (At a time when the Irish were often classified as racially inferior,
the Stephen of Stephen Hero thinks the Irish peasant “almost Mongolian” in
appearance [SH 244].)
Although the essay does not mention foetor, feet, or features Mongolian,
Robert Byrnes’s “Bloom’s Sexual Tropes: Stigmata of the ‘Degenerate’ Jew”
summarizes physical markers of Jewish inferiority detailed in Max Nordau’s
1895 Degeneration: “stunted growth, multiple deformities, over-large ears,
squinting eyes, harelips, flat or pointed palates, webbed fingers, and perceptible
asymmetry in the face or cranium” (307). Bloom does not appear to be afflicted
with most of these, but one may see stunted growth in the measurements of
his body reported in “Ithaca” that Byrnes concludes are those of a “ninety-
eight pound degenerate” (320). Furthermore, as Jennifer Ann Savino proposes,
Bloom’s chest measurement of a pitiful twenty-nine and one-half inches may
be based on a newspaper article about the physical condition of Jews (346–47).
Perhaps Bloom’s body is not a finished example of Jewish physical degeneracy,
however. As Hugh Kenner points out, Bloom is tall for the Dublin of 1904 (44),
and the body measurements, Kenner and Robert M. Adams have argued, like
many of the other facts and figures recorded in “Ithaca,” are by no means neces-
sarily to be trusted (Kenner 164–65; Adams 184). Even if his physique were up
to Sandow’s standard, however, Bloom would remain associated with the most
bizarre physical stigma ever dreamed up by anti-Semitism—the myth of Jewish
male menstruation.
Extending to medieval times, the belief that Jewish men suffer a literal stigma
of copious periodic bleeding enjoyed wide credence, particularly in the early
modern era (Horowitz 2). “Stigma,” as Bloom might put it, is from the Greek,
what the ancient Greeks called it. The word originally denoted a prick or punc-
ture with a pointed instrument. Often notably anxious about pins and such,
Bloom still recalls what Molly terms the “cursed day” (U 18.953) on which he
was stung by a bee, oddly, the same day on which her last period—her curse—
began. “If you prick us,” Shylock famously asks, “do we not bleed?” Associated
 44 Austin Briggs

with Shylock when John Wyse Nolan says of him, “there is much kindness in
the jew,” Bloom might well ask the same question himself (U 10.980; Merchant
of Venice 3.1).
In “Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern England,”
David Katz proposes that Shakespeare’s actor would have bought a laugh with
Shylock’s question by gesturing at the word “prick” toward what the audience
would have understood to be his circumcised penis and that the audience
would have heard a reference to the menstruation of Jewish men in “do we
not bleed?” (460–61). One need not agree with Katz’s reading of The Merchant
to accept his extensive documentation of an ancient and widespread belief
that Jewish men menstruated. Equally persuasive is Irven Resnick’s “Medieval
Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” with Katz’s essay the primary source
for my knowledge of the subject.
The myth of Jewish male menstruation was sometimes associated with an-
other myth, the so-called blood libel that Jews murdered Christians for their
blood. In the year in which Ulysses is set, a priest in Limerick preached that if
only they dared, Irish Jews would “kidnap and slay Christian children” (Hy-
man 212), and the blood libel is familiar both to Stephen and Bloom. Stephen
recites “Little Harry Hughes” (U 17.802–28), and Bloom, who is familiar with
the myth behind Stephen’s ballad, muses in “Hades” about “those jews they said
killed the christian boy” (U 6.771–72). The myth, which has been traced back as
far as the twelfth century, affirmed that Jews took the blood of Christians for a
variety of purposes ranging from the making of Passover matzot to serve as an
aphrodisiac, as an analgesic for the pain of childbirth, as a perfume to cover the
foetor judaicus, or as a cure or palliative for a variety of afflictions that Jewish
men suffered from, including a periodic flow of blood (Resnick 243–44). In the
thirteenth century Thomas de Cantimpré postulated that although only the
sanguine Christi of the Eucharist is truly lifesaving, Jews mistakenly believed
that they would be cured of their bleeding by sanguine Cristiano, the blood of
a Christian (Resnick 262).
The blood libel was often traced doctrinally to the “blood curse” that was
said to have been called down when the Jewish mob cried, “His blood be upon
us, and on our children,” after Pilate washed his hands of Jesus’ death (Resnick
249; Matthew 27:25). Having “sinned against the light” (as Garrett Deasy puts
it, U 2.361), Jews are “[c]ursed by God” (as the Citizen puts it, only seven lines
after the recitation of the tale of Bloom lying about “like a totty with her cours-
es,” U 12.1659–67). To some, a dramatic manifestation of the divine judgment
the mob called down was a literal blood punishment on Jewish men, curso
 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 45

menstruo sanguinis—menstruation—a process spoken of to this day as a curse

on all womankind (Shapiro 37).
Menstruation has been associated with hemorrhoids and nosebleeds at least
as far back as Aristotle’s Generation of Animals (1129), and for centuries Jewish
men were widely believed to be subject to periodic bleeding through the anus
and/or the nose (Katz 446–50; Resnick 252–60), and even, it was sometimes
thought, through the urethra (Katz 454–55). Aristotle’s Masterpiece, which is
known to both Bloom and Molly and which connects nose bleeds and men-
struation (45), says that Jewish men are “much subject” to hemorrhoids, be-
cause, like other men who suffer thus, “When their veins are full of melan-
cholic blood, then the conduits of nature are opened, and the blood issues
out once a month, like a woman’s terms” (233). Whether Bloom’s hemorrhoids
bleed is not stated, but he worries about them in “Calypso” and “Nausicaa” (U
4.509–10, 13.1083). He also suffers from nosebleeds. Noting Molly’s reflection
that if Bloom’s “nose bleeds youd think it was O tragic” (U 18.24), Cheryl Herr
speculates that Bloom’s nosebleeds may be a surrogate form of menstruation
(78n7), a Freudian explanation with which Freud himself might have agreed.
In 1897 he wrote of “an occasional bloody nasal secretion” as an expression of
male periodicity in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, who notoriously focused on the
association of the nose and the penis, a folk belief with which Molly is familiar
(U 18.145–46). In another letter to Fliess of the same year, Freud reported a
twenty-eight-day cycle in his own body (Gilman, Case of Freud 96–97).
Even without his “monthlies,” Bloom would be considered by many of his
countrymen and women to be less than a man simply by virtue of being a Jew,
for as has long been recognized, Ulysses plays throughout with the prejudice
that Jewish men are somehow female, are “the other” not only because they
are Jewish but because they are “womanish” or at best sexually indeterminate.
The prejudice was expansively articulated in Otto Weininger’s 1903 Sex and
Character. This widely influential work was known to Joyce, but the everyday
anti-Semitism of Dublin alone would have supplied him abundantly with the
prejudice that Jewish men were less than “manly.” The lads drinking in “Cy-
clops” joke that “every jew is in a tall state of excitement . . . till he knows if he’s
a father or a mother” (U 12.1647–48), and—though “Circe” does not speak of
Bloom lactating after he is delivered of the eight babies that gratify his desire
to be a mother—there were legends that Jewish men were sometimes capable
of breast-feeding (Shapiro 38; Katz 452). The drinkers in Kiernan’s make jokes
about “a bit off the top” (U 12.20), a serious diminution of the circumcised Jew’s
virility according to a prejudice that stretches back centuries and according to
 46 Austin Briggs

a “constant and purposeful confusion throughout the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries of circumcision and castration” (Gilman, Jew’s Body 119).
It is thus not difficult to see why “when he is just only after being semisized”
is one answer suggested for Shaun’s “when is a man not a man?” (FW 170.19,
170.5). In sum, one answer to the question of why Leopold Bloom menstruates
may be simply that Joyce is playing with an ancient myth about the female na-
ture of Jewish men; however, as I will try to show, the significance of Bloom’s
alleged menstruation is more complex.

Blood Sacrifice
Stately (or is that an adverb?) Buck Mulligan may be plump, but he is neverthe-
less an athletic, virile figure. Both he and Blazes, as shall be discussed, stand in
contrast to Stephen and especially to Bloom, for Shaun’s nasty question about
Shem in Finnegans Wake—“when is a man not a man?”—is posed about the
putatively Jewish Bloom again and again in Ulysses (FW 170.5):
—Do you call that a man? says the citizen.
—I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe.
—Well, there were two children born anyhow, says Jack Power.
—And who does he suspect? says the citizen. (U 2.1654–57)
Speaking out in Kiernan’s pub against injustice, Bloom is exhorted, “Stand up
to it then with force like men.” The nameless narrator comments, “That’s an
almanac picture for you. . . . Old lardyface standing up to the business end of
a gun. Gob, he’d adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse’s
apron on him” (U 12.1475–78).
In the midst of all the talk of violence, according to the narrator, Bloom sud-
denly collapses, “as limp as a wet rag” (U 12.1479–80). Real men, of course, are
hard, not limp; they are firm; they “stand up like men.” Indeed, it is difficult to
imagine Bloom facing the muzzle of a gun. His ideal kindergarten would elimi-
nate popguns and catapults (U 17.571–72), and the very thought of children
playing at war prompts him to ask, “How can people aim guns at each other?
Sometimes they go off ” (U 13.1193–94). Bloom’s rejoinder to the advocates of
violence is scarcely limp, however:
—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life
for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s
the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. (U 12.1481–85)
 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 47

In the stereotype, the Jew should endorse unforgiving eye-for-an-eye Hebraic

law in contrast to forgiving Christian love (Justius versus Mercius in the Wake),
but that model is reversed here.
In contrast to Bloom’s “love,” violence is insistently valorized in “Cyclops,”
where the words “blood” and “bloody” occur no fewer than seventy-one times.
The Linati schema charts the sense or meaning of the episode as “The Ego-
cidal Terror” (Il Terrore Egocida), the organs as “Muscles” and “Bones,” and
one of the dominant symbols as “Fanaticism” (Ellmann, “Ulysses” on the Liffey
appendix). A memorable celebration of violence occurs in the description in
“Cyclops” of a festive public execution complete with “the quartering knife,
the various finely tempered disembowelling appliances . . . a terra cotta sauce-
pan for the reception of the duodenum, colon, blind intestine and appendix
etc . . . and two commodious milkjugs destined to receive the most precious
blood of the most precious victim” (U 12.618–24).
As is well known, this comic account is based on the execution of Robert
Emmet. “Emmet Died to Free Ireland,” reads the headline on a 1915 recruiting
poster for the Irish Volunteers. “What are YOU doing towards this glorious
end?” The foot of the poster advised, “Keep this to bait your friends with.”
Certainly Emmet was bait for many Irishmen. Bloom encounters a portrait
of the “gallant pictured hero” (U 11.1274) after leaving the Ormond Hotel, in
whose barroom “brighteyed and gallant” men clink glasses to the accompani-
ment of patriotic ballads and toasts whose siren songs Bloom resists as easily
as he resists the wretched whore of the lane (U 11.1270). Joyce’s text does not
say which portrait of Emmet sits in the window of Lionel Marks’s antique store,
but it is probably pretty much what Michael MacDonagh reported in 1903: “In
the humblest cabins of the land may be seen—with the pictures of the Blessed
Virgin and St. Patrick—rude portraits of Emmet as he would wish perhaps to
be remembered—in his cocked hat and feathers, his green and gold and white
uniform” (qtd. in Elliott 182). Kevin Whelan describes standard nineteenth-
century images of a figure gallant indeed: “the Irish Washington with his tight-
fitting trousers, fine uniform and dashing air. . . . His rounded leg, is deter-
minedly thrust into the foreground; his beautiful, almost sexualized body is
displayed in highly elaborate uniforms.” Thus portrayed, Whelan concludes,
Emmet became “an icon for Irish masculinity” (4).
Such an aggressively masculine ideal seems antithetical to the icon of Jesus,
stripped to his loincloth and limp on the cross, but as Bloom’s association of
Emmet’s last words and the last words of Christ implies, the figures of Emmet
and Christ as sacrificial redeemers merged repeatedly in the rhetoric of repub-
lican politics. Nowhere was that rhetoric more in evidence than in the writing
 48 Austin Briggs

and speeches of Patrick/Pádraic Pearse. It has been suggested that for all their
divergencies Pearse and Joyce were contemporaries who “shared an identical
experience of Ireland and of themselves as Irishmen” (Flood 104). In the course
of his political development, Pearse became haunted by the shade of Emmet, his
model of purifying blood sacrifice; as already noted, Joyce too took Emmet as a
model, in the deeply ironic account of a public execution in “Oxen of the Sun.”
Writing in December 1915 of the Great War, Pearse said that the preceding
sixteen months had been “the most glorious in the history of Europe.” “Hero-
ism,” he exulted, “has come back to the earth.” At this moment, Pearse declared
himself indifferent as to whether the war was being fought for or against Eng-
lish tyranny; what mattered was that “[t]he old heart of the earth needed to be
warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage,” he said,
“was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given
gladly for love of country” (216). Six months later, Pearse would describe the
Easter Rising in similar terms as a “blood sacrifice” to redeem Ireland that was
beyond the issue of success or failure (Moran 1).
Pearse became obsessed by the sacrifice he saw promised in what he called
“red war” (Edwards 159). Declaring that he had been “rebaptized in the Fenian
faith” (qtd. in Kiberd, Inventing Ireland 212), he wrote his own apostolic creed
in “Mionn” (Oath), which invoked “the blood of our ancestors,” “the bloody
wounds of Tone,” and “the noble blood of Emmet” (qtd. in Edwards 161–62).
Fragments of speeches by Pearse are repeated more or less verbatim by an off-
stage orator who rouses the patriotic fervor of the doomed Irish Citizen Army
at the end of act 2 of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. Among O’Casey’s
borrowings is an utterance that has been quoted more often than anything
else Pearse ever said or wrote. Addressing the Gaelic League, Ireland, and the
world, Pearse declared, “[B]loodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and
the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood” (99). For
Pearse, Emmet’s uprising was a glorious and transfiguring moment; for Joyce,
it was “foolish” (“Fenianism,” CW 189). For Pearse, the martyrdom of Emmet
was the beau ideal of manly blood sacrifice; for Joyce, it was the occasion for
the fart that closes “Sirens” while the well-hung “base barreltone” (U 11.1011)
big Ben Dollard and his fellows sing “The Memory of the Dead,” honoring the
“true men” who died in the rising of ninety-eight (U 11.1276).
As the oft-repeated comparison between Pearse and Rupert Brooke sug-
gests, Pearse’s rhetoric was by no means peculiar to himself or the Irish. Declan
Kiberd notes that when Ulysses was begun in 1914, war promised to many in
Europe a heroic antidote to a widespread sense of anomie. As an alterna-
 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 49

tive, Kiberd says, Joyce “wished to reassert the dignity of the quotidian round,
to reclaim the everyday as a primary aspect of experience” (Inventing Ireland
330). Though one can scarcely refer to the female cycle as quotidian (praise the
Lord!), Kiberd’s remark on Ulysses can be applied to that cycle, difficult as it
may be for many to associate “dignity” with “menstruation.”
It was not only Jewish men who were often perceived as unmanly; Celtic
men too were often seen as essentially feminine in contrast to the essentially
masculine Anglo-Saxon male. That view, memorably articulated in Matthew
Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature, was widely shared in a Victorian cul-
ture that saw the deepest binary division between men and “the opposite sex.”
(The opposition is so deep for Weininger that he believes that for transfusions,
surgeons “must take blood not merely from one of the same species, family
and sex, but of a similar degree of masculinity or femininity” [21].) Using a
term coined to describe a response to the way colonialism feminizes its sub-
jects (Sisson 200n17), Kiberd speaks of an Irish nationalist “hypermasculin-
ity” (Inventing Ireland 363), and indeed such nationalists as those who taunt
Bloom in “Cyclops” are enlisted in an effort to reclaim for Ireland masculine
qualities believed to have been lost under English rule. Thus, Seamus Deane
notes, in the clichés of Pearse’s rhetoric, republican Irishmen “are always virile”
(71). Following D. P. Moran, who looked back to a “hypermasculinized Irish-
speaking Gael” in contrast to the modern Celt of twilight and fairies, Elaine
Sisson points out, Pearse designed an educational philosophy aimed at “remas-
culinizing” Ireland (14). He hoped to train boys to redeem an Anglicized Irish
race from what he termed the “eunuchs” (9) of a nation in which so many had
“suffered themselves to be deprived of their manhood” that an Irishman will
sometimes “boast of his unmanliness” (194–95). Looking back in In First Cen-
tury Ireland to “the splendid specimens of manhood” of ancient times, Pearse
heralded a heroic breed of ancient Gael—“big boned and sinewy . . . broad in
the shoulder, thin in the flank . . . as lithe as greyhounds” (qtd. in Sisson 11) that
sounds suspiciously like the description of the Citizen as a “broadshouldered
deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded
widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded
hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero” (U 12.151–55).
In Stephen Hero, Madden is the captain of a hurley club who regularly re-
ports at nationalist gatherings on “the muscular condition of the young irrec-
oncilables under his charge.” Present at the meetings at which Madden reports
on his program “to raise the physique of the country” in preparation for armed
revolt is a separatist who always wears a green muffler and, in “the voice of an
 50 Austin Briggs

ox,” is always “criticizing, denouncing and scoffing.” This “stout black-bearded

citizen” is clearly based on Michael Cusack, who boasted that he was born on
the anniversary of Emmet’s execution and who was the model for the Citizen
in Ulysses (SH 61–62; “Gaelic Athletic Association”). Calling for a “manlier
tone” in Irish athletic endeavor, Cusack founded the Gaelic Athletic Associa-
tion (GAA) in 1884 to promote Irish sports and banish English ones (qtd. in de
Búrca 88). As Kiberd says, the GAA was created to counter “emasculation” and
“degrading femininity by a disciplined programme of physical-contact sports”
(Inventing Ireland 25). Thus, when Eamon de Valera in a 1943 St. Patrick’s Day
radio address broadcast his dream for an Ireland that would be “the home of
a people living the life that God desires men should live,” in addition to such
requisites as “frugal comfort,” “cozy homesteads,” and “the laughter of comely
maidens,” he included “the contests of athletic youths” (466); we can safely as-
sume that the athletic youths envisioned by Dev were all male.
At the turn of the century, when Irishmen were being exhorted to reclaim
their manhood through athletics, “Jewish physical culturists all over Europe”
were echoing Max Nordau’s call in 1898 for Muskeljudentum, “muscular Jewry”
(Hoberman 144). Bloom may have heard such calls, but despite fitful efforts
with Sandow’s exercises, he is scarcely the advocate for or specimen of man-
hood whom Madden or Cusack or Nordau wished to see. In “Cyclops,” Bloom
promotes lawn tennis and speaks against Hynes’s “appeal for the resuscitation
of the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes . . . as calculated to revive the best tra-
ditions of manly strength and prowess handed down to us from ancient ages”
(U 12.909–12). Neither Buck nor Blazes seems engaged in sports or politics,
but they are “hypermasculine,” as their sobriquets imply, nicknames that place
them in sharp contrast to a “Poldy” whose middle name is “Paula” and whose
surname suggests flowers. Appearing markedly “unmanly” next to the stud
who cuckolds him, Bloom is said to collapse “limp as a wet rag” in “Cyclops,”
as has been noted, and his “limp father of thousands” is feminized as a “lan-
guid floating flower” at the close of “Lotus-Eaters” (U 5.571–72). Molly calls
Blazes’s phallus “that tremendous big red brute of a thing . . . I never in all my
life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up” (U 18.144–50);
and Bello contrasts Bloom’s “teapot”—“limp as a boy of six’s doing his pooly
behind a cart”—with Blazes’s “weapon with knobs and warts all over it” (U
15.3131–39).
Stephen appears equally unmanly compared to Blazes. The lost young
poet often seems languid and drooping, even effeminate, in his concern for
aesthetics (after all, he quotes Wilde!) beside the ribald, athletic Buck, who
 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 51

carries a card advertising his “services for the fecundation of any female of
what grade of life soever” (U 14.686–87). “You saved men from drowning,”
Stephen thinks of Buck. “I’m not a hero” (U 1.63). And elsewhere Stephen
contrasts Buck’s courage with his own fear of “a cur’s yelping” (U 3.318). The
hurley sticks with which Madden arms his future soldiers are traditionally
made of ash, but Stephen’s ashplant, though he thinks of it as a sword in “Pro-
teus” and twice again in “Scylla and Charybdis” (U 3.16, 9.296, 9.947), seems
little more than a prop for his body—at least until he strikes at the chandelier
in Bella Cohen’s brothel.
Stephen and Joyce alike are open to a 1903 accusation by Pearse that the emi-
grant was “a traitor to the Irish State” (Moran 113). Emer Nolan points out that
Pearse, who was briefly Joyce’s Irish teacher, is “apparently” the original of Ste-
phen’s Irish teacher Hughes in Stephen Hero (43). After Stephen delivers his
“Drama and Life” paper to the college literary society, Hughes accuses him of
being an immoral aesthete, a purveyor of “foreign filth,” and “a renegade from
the Nationalist ranks”; and, using a word that was often code for “Jewish,” he
attacks Stephen’s “cosmopolitanism.” In an assault on Stephen that anticipates
the charge in “Cyclops” that Bloom is not Irish, Hughes continues, “a man that
was of all countries was of no country” (SH 103).
When Stephen declares that “my country must be important because it be-
longs to me” (U 16.1164–65), he places himself in direct opposition to those
Irishmen eager to give their life’s blood for their country, who ask not what
their country can do for them but what they can do for their country—as
would another son of Ireland, elevated to near sainthood after martyrdom over
a half century later. Hard on the kicking heels of the hanged Croppy Boy in
“Circe,” Old Gummy Granny appears. A caricature of the Poor Old Woman—
Ireland herself—whom Stephen recognizes as the old sow that eats her farrow,
she tries to thrust a dagger into his hand, promising salvation if he stabs Private
Carr: Kill him, she says, and “you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free” (U
15.4738). Stephen, of course, will have none of this; the king he wishes to kill is
in his head. “[T]hose big words . . . which make us so unhappy” that he fears
surely include such darlings of the republican lexicon as “honor” and “martyr-
dom” (U 2.264). When Almidano Artifoni charges that Stephen is sacrificing
himself for his ideals, Stephen’s reply, though offered with a smile, is sincere:
“Sacrifizio incruento” (“Bloodless sacrifice”) (U 10. 348).
The cleansing qualities of blood are not apparent to the Stephen of Stephen
Hero, who affects the expletive “yellow in protest against the sanguine adjec-
tive” (SH 136). Speculating on the Buddhist qualities of Ernest Renan’s Jesus, he
 52 Austin Briggs

concludes that “the fierce eaters and drinkers of the western world would never
worship such a figure.” “Blood will have blood,” he thinks: “There are some
people in this island who sing a hymn called ‘Washed in the blood of the Lamb’
by way of easing the religious impulse. . . . Yeow! what a notion! A blood-bath
to cleanse the spiritual body of all its sinful sweats . . .” (SH 190; final ellipsis in
original).
When Molly says that Bloom has more “spunk” in him than Boylan (U
18.168), the context makes it clear that she means “sperm,” but the word can
also mean “courage,” something seen in the cuckolded husband but never in
the cocky cocksman. The execution of the Croppy Boy in “Circe” provides se-
men aplenty: “A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting
through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelver-
ton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their
handkerchiefs to sop it up” (U 15.4548–52). This blood sacrifice enacts a religio-
sexual drama in which the death of the hero testifies to his manhood and for
which the Wake word “heroticism” is wonderfully apposite (FW 614.35). As
a shower of semen gushes forth, the executioner is brought to a pitch close to
his own orgasm: “I’m near it myself,” he says (U 15.4553). Women identified
as players in Bloom’s masochistic fantasies take relics of the sacrifice as if the
ejaculate were martyr’s blood. Given Jesus’ parable of the sowers and Stephen’s
parable of the plums, however, the cobblestones the seed falls upon do not
promise that the sacrifice of the Croppy Boy will be redemptive.
Heartbreak House, a play as antiwar as The Plough and the Stars (both end
with ironic renderings of Keep the Home Fires Burning sung against the detona-
tions of battle), dramatizes what a section of its preface baldly states: “Those
Who Do Not Know How to Live Must Make a Merit of Dying” (15). In Shaw’s
play, Hesione Hushabye’s husband, Hector, is a man famed for heroism who
has to assure himself that he is not a coward by such stunts as walking on the
outside of third-floor window ledges. More than a decade before Freud’s fa-
mous “Was will das Weib?,” Hesione asks, “What do men want?” She offers her
own answer when she continues, “Why do they envy us the pain with which we
bring them into the world, and make strange dangers and torments for them-
selves to be even with us?” (90). (A similar notion appears in Mussolini’s slo-
gan “War is to men what maternity is to women” [Braudy 449].) Is it possible
that some men envy women for the blood and pain of menstruation as well as
the blood and pain of parturition? Englishwomen picketing the American mis-
sile base at Greenham Common in the 1980s thought so when they protested,
“War is disguised menstruation” (Shuttle, Wise Wound 264). As is always the
 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 53

case where fantasy is artful, Gloria Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate” is
grounded in reality. In a world in which men and not women menstruated,
Steinem imagined that “Military men, right-wing politicians, and religious
fundamentalists would cite menstruation (men-struation) as proof that only
men could serve in the Army (‘you have to give blood to take blood’)” (110).
Invoking the traditional symbol of the rose for Ireland in “The Red Rose
Tree,” Yeats declared in Pearse’s voice, “There’s nothing but our own red blood
/ Can make a right Rose Tree” (183), and in “Three Songs to the One Burden,”
he concluded, “For Patrick Pearse had said / That in every generation / Must
Ireland’s blood be shed” (330). But Ulysses celebrates other blood, not the mas-
culine red wine that rhetoric claimed as the blessing of heroic violence, but the
blood of the “curse”—female, despised, domestic. The blood sacrifice called for
by such as Emmet and Pearse is not a call that summons Bloom or Stephen—
or James Joyce, who once declared his conviction that “the whole structure
of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie” (Letters II 81). Assuming that
Private Carr is ready to die for England, Stephen says, “Let my country die for
me. Up to the present it has done so.” “Damn death,” he cries. “Long live life!”
(U 15.4473–74). Earlier, beset by the specter of death in “Hades,” Bloom is reas-
sured by the thought of Molly’s “warm fullblooded life” (U 6.1005). Handed
a throwaway for an evangelist, Bloom thinks: “Bloo . . . . Me? No. Blood of
the Lamb. His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All
are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen,
martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druids’
altars” (U 8.8–13; ellipsis in original). The humorous inclusion of the burnt
kidney notwithstanding, the catalog that concludes this passage pretty well
describes Stephen’s “dio boia,” the hangman god who is the idol of many in
Ulysses (U 9.1049). In “Oxen of the Sun,” the ordeal that brings Bloom to the
Holles Street Hospital to inquire after Mrs. Purefoy in her third day of labor
provides occasion for coarse humor among the medical students drinking in
the hospital common room; in “Sirens,” the rupture of the hymen is something
to joke about for the men drinking in the Ormond bar, something to play off
against “guy-talk” of bursting the tympanum of the ear (U 11.536); and through-
out Ulysses, religious martyrdom and political sacrifice conflate as they have so
often and so fatally in Irish history—and as they continue to wreak destruction
in an era of suicide bombers.
Blood of the lamb? Repulsed by the “animals”—“Men, men, men”—feeding
in the Burton, Bloom adjourns to Davy Byrne’s (U 8.652–53). Just before he
orders his cheese sandwich there, he recalls the horrors of killing day when
 54 Austin Briggs

he worked for Cuffe the cattle dealer: hooks and poleaxes; “[w]retched” and
“trembling” beasts; “[f]layed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches,
sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust.” “Hot fresh blood
they prescribe for decline,” Bloom reflects. “Blood always needed. Insidious”
(U 8.723–30). The Agnus Dei worshipped by many in Ulysses is “Dublin’s pet
lamb,” Myler Keogh, bleeding “lively claret” as he fights an English sergeant
major in the prize ring (U 11.962–65).
Of course Ulysses does not say that Leopold Bloom actually bleeds during
his “monthly” any more than it says that he was ever pregnant, despite the
eight sons he delivers in “Circe,” an experience that contradicts Stephen’s
assertion that “Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt
himself with child” (U 9.836–37). R. Barry Walkley has proposed that an im-
portant structural device in Ulysses is Bloom’s association with couvade, an
argument that is supported by what I take to be evidence of Joyce’s interest in
couvade in the discourse on the subject by “Kinch”—citing Diodorus—that is
reported in Gogarty’s Tumbling in the Hay (193). As Walkley points out, one
of the ways in which Bloom is linked with couvade is his association with his
own “monthlies” and those of others. Bloom’s participation in the experience
of the female cycle is something that might be termed “menstrual couvade”
or, to use a word coined by Janice Delaney and her coauthors in The Curse,
“saignade” (222). “[T]hat’s why I liked him,” Molly reflects on her courting
days with Bloom, “because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is” (U
18.1578–79).
John Hoberman has pointed out that for Weininger and many of his con-
temporaries extending into the Nazi era, Jews were by nature antichivalric: like
women, they were constitutionally unable to participate in the adventure, the
quest, that gives meaning to the life of the gentile male (Hoberman 145–47). Yet
Joyce’s wandering Jew can be read as a knight errant, or—to use Joyce’s figure—
a modern Odysseus. The Bloomsday saga of odyssey and nostos lends support
to the speculation of Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove that the myth of the
hero-cycle of withdrawal and return traced in Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a
Thousand Faces “very likely originated in the female monthly cycle” (Alchemy
13). As Declan Kiberd has argued in his moving essay “Joyce’s Ulysses: Past Eve
and Adam,” the narrative of Bloom’s adventures offers a revolutionary repre-
sentation of what it might be to be male. At a time when racial myths of Aryan
and Saxon and Gaelic superiority were spreading exponentially, Joyce’s text
offered Bloom; at a time when the “he-man” was becoming the ideal, the term
“masculinity” was beginning to replace “manhood,” and Gerty MacDowell was
 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 55

dreaming of a “manly man” (U 13.210), Joyce offered his “new womanly man”
(U 15.1798–99).
In the imagery of Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” the hearts of political martyrs such
as Pearse become stones that “trouble the living stream” (181). For Joyce, that
stream includes the female “flux,” as menstrual blood used to be termed. Two
great readers of Joyce—Richard Ellmann in “Why Molly Bloom Menstruates”
and Robert Boyle in “Miracle in Black Ink”—have argued that Molly’s flow is
Eucharistic. This is not the life-denying sacrament of the nationalists, how-
ever. Linking the words “menstrual” and “roses” in his notes for Ulysses (Her-
ring 496), Joyce has Bloom refer to Molly’s cycle as her “roses,” a once-com-
mon term—as was “flowers”—for menstruation. Moreover, as Fritz Senn has
pointed out, Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, a work Joyce pored over, connects
“bloom” and “blood” (35). The cycles of Leopold and Molly Bloom present a
life-affirming sacrament as an alternative to the bloodshed of violence. That
Bloom is associated with the female cycle does not diminish him; it signifies
what he himself speaks of at a crucial moment of the novel in the face of violent
men who advocate force and hatred. The association of bloodshed with man-
hood in republican rhetoric is quite in keeping with the talk in “Cyclops” that
celebrates violence and demeans Bloom as less than a man. But Bloom’s answer
stands firm: “Love. . . . I mean the opposite of hatred” (U 12.1485).
Vicki Mahaffey reminds us that Molly is both flower and flow-er. At the
ecstatic close of Ulysses, Molly’s menstrual flow wondrously becomes roses;
that Bloom is associated with those flowers, with Molly’s female flow and abun-
dance, validates his passport to eternity. The female component in Bloom that
makes him “one of those mixed middlings” to the loungers in “Cyclops” who
gossip that he lies abed with menstrual periods contributes crucially to his
polytropic role (U 12.1658–59). His “firm full masculine feminine passive ac-
tive hand,” “Ithaca” says, is “reluctant to shed human blood even when the
end justified the means” (U 17.289–90, 293–94). No conqueror, Leopold Bloom
remains “unconquered hero” to capture and hold our attention and respect (U
11.342).

Notes
1. Ellmann’s essay appeared later under the same title as a section of “Ulysses” on the Liffey
(159–76).
2. On the panel “Joyce and the Menstrual Cycle” that I chaired at the 2004 Dublin Sym-
posium, I explained that some time before the conference I had learned that my co-panelist
 56 Austin Briggs

Frances Ilmberger of the Zurich James Joyce Foundation and I were intellectually ovulating in
synch: we were working on papers with the same title—“Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates”—
and were pursuing the same lines of research. After our panic passed, we agreed that Frances
would continue on course and present on “Blood Curse,” the subject of the second section of
this essay, and that I would develop a paper on “Blood Sacrifice,” which became the third sec-
tion. I learned much from Frances’s excellent presentation and am grateful to her for sharing a
copy of her paper with me.
3. Ilmberger saw this in electronic display at the National Library during the 2004 sympo-
sium, but because of the strict cautions against quoting from the Paul Léon acquisition, she did
not record Joyce’s exact words. She also said in her conference paper that when Joyce wrote in
the “Oxen” notebook, “Menses: breath stinks too LB” (Herring 180), he again indicated plans
to have Bloom menstruate, but I wonder whether this note might simply refer to an opinion
held by Bloom, who thinks about female menstrual odor just before turning to bad breath in
men and women in U 13.1030–36.
4. Perhaps Bloom suffers from what Aristotle’s Masterpiece calls “the False Menses, or
Whites,” one of the signs of which is “loathing of meat” (Aristotle’s Works 55), a revulsion that
he feels in “Lestrygonians.”
5. In James Joyce’s Judaic Other, Marilyn Reizbaum points out that when Punch Costello
says in “Circe” that Bloom’s “fetor judaicus is most perceptible,” the Latin foetur (“stench”) is
replaced by fetura (“offspring”), an exchange combining “both the myth about a Jewish smell
and its source, a combination that technically enables Bloom to give birth” (79).
6. Although Byrnes does not seem aware of the myth that Jewish men menstruate, he does
propose an influence on Joyce’s portrait of Bloom in a Krafft-Ebing case history that tells of a
man of Hungarian extraction who felt himself transformed into a woman and thereafter expe-
rienced monthly periods of menstrual discomfort (315).
7. In U 18.1151, Molly says her last period began on Whitmonday, the day Bloom was stung,
according to U 4.484; we learn in U 17.1449 that he was stung on 23 May.
8. Gilman contends that Freud and Fliess were engaged in an effort to transform the “hid-
den sign,” the menstruation that linked the Jewish male with women, “from being a sign of
difference to being one of universality” (Case of Freud 99).
9. A great deal has been written on Weininger and Joyce. See Steinberg 63–71 as well as the
many titles cited in that essay in 63n2 and 76n35; and see the essays in Harrowitz and Hyams
by John Hoberman (141–53), Marilyn Reizbaum (207–14), Natania Rosenfeld (215–26), and
Elfriede Pöder (227–35).
10. Noting the obvious allusion to circumcision, Gifford and Seidman gloss “a bit off the
top” as slang for “some of the best” and also quote from three verses of a comic music-hall song
“All I Want Is a Little Bit off the Top” (UA 315). Can this number be the “A Little Bit Off the Top”
that Ruth Bauerle does not quote but intriguingly describes as a song of “ritual dismember-
ment” that was “probably part of a rich oral tradition known to Joyce, though it would not have
been considered printable in a world which refused Dubliners in 1912” (257)?
11. Weininger speaks of the slavish disposition of the Jews as demonstrated in their subser-
vience to codes such as the Decalogue (313).
12. The poster is reproduced in Coogan 16.
13. See Elliott, plate 10, following page 84, which the caption identifies as “the classic portrait
 Why Leopold Bloom Menstruates 57

that informed later representations.” For many other portraits of Emmet, see O’Donnell. Em-
met’s memory would be particularly green in the 1904 of Ulysses because of the commemora-
tion the year before of the 1803 Rising and Emmet’s subsequent execution.
14. Flood’s thesis in “James Joyce, Patrick Pearse and the Theme of Execution” is that in
sharply different ways both men “saw the process by which Ireland was to be definitively sepa-
rated from England as so drastic that they could not survive it” (104). Darcy O’Brien attributes
similarities he traces between writings by Pearse and Joyce to the fact that both “were born of
the same ghost-ridden mother, Ireland” (77).
15. Charles Townshend quotes the chilling line on three separate occasions in Political Vio-
lence in Ireland (258, 282, 410). Pearse blithely conceded that “we may make mistakes in the
beginning and shoot the wrong people” (98–99).
16. Leo Braudy’s From Chivalry to Terrorism traces a long tradition of war as a perceived
means of restoring manhood. A recent book encourages hope that the attack on the World
Trade Center may prove a “blessing” that will help the United States “recover the wellsprings
of manly virtue” (Newell xiii).
17. For intelligent discussion of what they term “gender trauma” and “anxious masculinity”
in Joyce’s work see Boheemen-Saaf and Schwarze, respectively.
18. Ironically, but perhaps not completely surprisingly, despite his insistence on “manliness,”
Pearse seems to have felt a powerful homosexual attraction to boys, though he was probably
unaware of just what he was feeling. See Edwards 52–54, 126–28; Moran 120–24 et passim; and
Nugent.
19. A Hungarian participant at the 2004 Joyce symposium told me that although either sex
can bear “Virag” as a family name in Hungary, it is a first name there only for women.
20. Citing a note on the “limp father” in Gifford and Seidman that refers to a plant some-
times known as the “mother of thousands” because of the way it propagates by means of run-
ners that seem to float flowers (UA 100), Byrnes says that Joyce is suggesting that Bloom’s
genitals “are symbolically ambiguous, hermaphroditic” (317). As is so often the case, Joyce’s
symbolism is ambiguous: limp or not, the “mother of thousands” is, after all, a plant more
commonly known as “saxifrage” (Saxifraga stolonifera)—“rock-breaker.”
21. Hughes seems based as well on Louis J. Walsh, who attacked Joyce’s paper on Mangan
before the University College Dublin Literary Society (JJ 96).
22. Observing that the identification of Irish republicanism with the erotic is often embar-
rassingly evident, Seán Moran offers in evidence the full and fulsome text of Joseph Mary
Plunkett’s sonnet “The Little Black Rose Shall Be Red at Last”; as Moran notes, Plunkett equates
his blood with “semen that impregnates the flesh of female Ireland” (105).
23. See “War Metaforms” in Grahn 269–71.
24. In “Sacrifice and Political Legitimation,” Mary Condren takes the history of male po-
litical self-sacrifice in Ireland as her point of departure for a stimulating exploration of “the
gendered nature of such violence” in general (160).
25. In this 1905 letter to Stanislaus, Joyce continued, “and that there cannot be any substitute
for the individual passion as the motive power of everything. . . . For this reason, Hairy Jaysus
[Francis Skeffington] seems the bloodiest impostor of all I have met.” Richard Ellmann’s note
comments, “Skeffington had probably defended the notion that the individual should sacrifice
himself for the sake of the group” (Letters II 81n4).
 58 Austin Briggs

26. Bloom’s Masonic connection may be reflected in “foundation of a building.” A modern

handbook for Masons says that whereas the “primitive mind” required a blood sacrifice for
the laying of a cornerstone, Masonic ritual replaces blood with corn, wine, and oil (“Fellow-
craft”).
27. Gilman speculates that the myth of Jewish male menstruation may well have a patholog-
ical basis in symptoms produced in early adolescence by a parasite that causes urethal bleeding.
He notes that even today “male menstruation” is taken as a marker of sexual maturity in parts
of Africa (Case of Freud 256n114). The West African protagonist of Nuruddin Farah’s Maps un-
dergoes such a rite of passage. For more on male cycles, physical and psychological, see Dela-
ney, Lupton, and Toth 228–35; Shuttle and Redgrove, Alchemy 67–68 and Wise Wound 276–79.
Havelock Ellis, whose work Joyce knew, believed that men carried rudimentary traces of the
menstrual cycle (Kiberd, “Joyce’s Ulysses” 183). For rituals of male menstruation see Delaney,
Lupton, and Toth 221–26; and Froula 269–70n17. For male fantasies of male menstruation see
Faergeman.
28. Although “he-man” entered popular currency around the turn of the century, it was
coined around 1832, “just about the same time,” Leo Braudy engagingly notes, “that machinists
were distinguishing between male and female screws” (396). For “masculinity” versus “man-
hood” see Boheemen-Saaf 255.
29. For more on Eucharistic blood in Ulysses see Dervin and Shanahan.
30. Mahaffey says that Molly’s “view of herself as a flower endows the flow of her thoughts
with a more stable form, verbally bridging the distance between Molly and ALP in Finnegans
Wake, as the ‘-er’ in ‘flower’ metamorphoses into the suffix of the verb ‘flow,’ turning momen-
tary bloom to neverceasing motion” (181).

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II

“Agenbite”
History in the Text
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 4

Mixing Memory and Desire

Narrative Strategies and the Past in Ulysses

Richard P. Lynch

As Stephen Kern has pointed out, in modernist fiction the value attached to the
historical past is often displaced by a belief in the importance of the personal
past (61)—and yet both in their commonly accepted meaning are “historical”
in the sense that they are recollections of past events. Memory, John Rickard
reminds us in Joyce’s Book of Memory, is both a major theme and the primary
method of Ulysses. We have the personal memories of Stephen and Bloom, of
course, but we also have textual memory—the text remembering or echoing
itself—and intertextual memory: both the characters remembering other texts
(often song lyrics) and the text remembering or echoing other texts. And as we
know, Ulysses also contains many instances of proleptic memory, or remem-
bering the future, so to speak, in which figures and events appear in advance
of where they would naturally occur in a traditional linear mimetic narrative.
In effect, the text remembers what it is going to do later.
Memories are always narratives, but there are different kinds of memory, as
there are different kinds of narrative, and as it turns out, the two fall into very
similar categories. Edward Casey defines two kinds of memory: passive and
active. In the passive model, the mind serves as a sort of recorder, “registering
and storing incoming impressions” (15). Here, as Casey puts it, the events of the
past are reduced to “dead weight” (4)—an appropriate metaphor for the past
in Dubliners. Passive memory appears at first to be the kind Bloom uses when
he recalls that magical time with Molly on the Hill of Howth. He is in Davy
Byrne’s for a snack—a glass of burgundy and a cheese sandwich—and chatting
with Nosey Flynn. In a parody of Proust, the memory is triggered by the taste
of the wine: “Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. . . . Seems to [be]
 66 Richard P. Lynch

a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered”

(U 8.897–99). No one who reads the passage, however, can see it as simple rec-
ollection, for Bloom has sanctified that moment on Howth Hill fully as much
as Stephen sanctifies his encounter with the bird-like girl in A Portrait, and he
does it using the same method: language—in this case, Bloom’s own brand of
sensuality in words. Given the proximity of Nosey Flynn (“Hope that dewdrop
doesn’t come down into his glass. No, snuffled it up” [U 8.804–5]), it is an even
greater achievement than Stephen’s, who at least has a nearly deserted beach to
work with. Bloom’s imaginative recollection shades it more toward the activ-
ist view, which sees memory as both a “more unreliable and more powerful
function of the mind.” Here, Casey explains, “memory involves the creative
transformation of experience rather than its internalized reduplication” (15).
Bloom, in fact, is in the habit of using memory this way. Declan Kiberd points
out that Bloom “creatively misinterprets past moments, in keeping with his
current needs” (353), and, like his counterpart in Homer’s Odyssey—also a mas-
ter storyteller and creator of experience—he is more “oral” than Stephen and
therefore more free to invent.
Stephen’s success in Ulysses is that he applies the active model of memory
to Ireland’s past and, as we will see, manages to create a liberating symbolic
narrative in the process. His failure is that, in his attempts to escape a socially
constructed identity and create his own self, he only erases (or tries to erase)
the empirical past, and has no effective substitute for it. And the failure is one
of narrative. Kiberd writes about Joyce’s realization, in Ulysses especially, that
mimetic narrative is the leftover tool of the colonizer, and that postcolonial
writers must move beyond the modes of expression left behind by their former
masters (346). Unlike Bloom, however, Stephen is excessively “literary,” and so
is stuck in “historical” and literary roles, because he doesn’t, or can’t, use active
memory—and that is the real “nightmare” aspect of history from which he is
unlikely to escape. When Stephen attempts to deal with his personal past, he
still thinks in terms of that traditional form of narrative expression.
Passive memory seems to be the type Kern refers to in his statement about
the shift in value from the historical to the personal past, and at first glance it
would seem to be the more reliable of the two. As Casey argues, since the time
of Aristotle, “passivism has been the predominant, and typically the ‘official’
(i.e., the most respected and respectable), view of memory” (15). The ninth-
century Irish philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, however, called stories based
on these recollections “mystery” narratives, since they can never be known
entirely. As Umberto Eco says in The Role of the Reader, total knowledge of the
 Mixing Memory and Desire: Narrative Strategies and the Past in Ulysses 67

world of reference is unattainable; we can only take a perspective on that world

for the sake of interpreting experience, or a text, and we are especially limited
when that world of reference is in the past (228). The other kind of master nar-
rative Eriugena called “symbolic.” These “symbolic” narratives are not stories
based on historical events but, as Stephen G. Nichols explains in his foreword
to Michael Riffaterre’s Fictional Truth, “discourses recounting things that did
not happen as though they had happened for didactic purposes. . . . [S]ymbolic
narrative may invent scenarios at will for the purpose of conveying truths that
transcend specific situations” (x). So “mystery” (or mimetic) narratives cor-
respond to passive memory, just as “symbolic” narratives parallel active (or
“creative”) memory.
If history is a nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus is trying to awake,
then reality in his view must lie elsewhere, and it is necessary that he find that
reality through his own symbolic reality—not in a way that eliminates the past,
but in a way that incorporates it. Symbolic narratives are not based on histori-
cal events in the sense that realistic narrative is, but nor do they attempt to
rise above the level of human experience. Instead, they use those events and
transform them in ways that give them the significance of “truth.” Stephen
manages to accomplish this task with his nation’s past, but not with his own
personal history. In his account of Nietzsche’s attitude toward the individual’s
past, Kern writes: “the personal past constitutes a necessary obstacle in human
consciousness that forces the will to make something of itself in the face of
all the pernicious influences of habit and tradition” (62). And this, as Seamus
Deane points out, is precisely Stephen Dedalus’s aim: to construct himself as an
act of will, rather than allowing himself to be a socially constructed character
(xlii–xliii). But one of those “pernicious influences” Nietzsche worried about
had to be narrative itself, one of the two meanings of “history,” and specifically
the “habit” or “tradition” into which narrative had fallen by the late nineteenth
century. James Fairhall notes that Stephen’s determination to escape the nets of
family, country, and religion in A Portrait of the Artist becomes, in Ulysses, “a
generalized desire to escape the authority of the word and the imprisonment
of narrative” (10). One of the “nets” he must fly past, in a sense, is traditional
mimetic narrative, which threatens him as much as recollections of his own
past, or of his family’s or his country’s past.
We are immediately drawn into Stephen’s consciousness in A Portrait with
the opening words, “Once upon a time”—an appropriate beginning not only
for subject and style but because the fairy tale is Stephen’s ideal narrative mode.
There is no more “symbolic” narrative (in Eriugena’s sense of its insistence on
 68 Richard P. Lynch

“truth”) than a fairy tale. As Jack Zipes points out, a key initial impulse for fairy
tales was to express an essential human desire for a better world, and to express
faith that such a world was possible, was in fact the real world in a moral or
transcendent sense (2). Fairy tales differ from symbolic narratives, however,
in one key way, and the difference is another symptom of Stephen’s problems
with narrative. While they are an expression of how things ought to be, they
also represent escape rather than incorporation, removing the subject from
the dimension of time entirely. Instead of dealing with the past, they replace
it. “Once upon a time” is not about the past. Fairy tales are not located in a
definite time or place. They are more about an indefinite “utopian” future (4).
There are effective symbolic uses for what might be termed utopian narra-
tives, but these do not involve elimination of the past, or of time altogether.
Ned Lukacher uses the term “utopian” in this sense in his book Primal Scenes,
where he writes about Freud’s discovery, specifically in the case of a patient
known as the Wolf Man, of the impossibility of recovering “history” (i.e., the
“forgotten situations” in his patient’s past). As in Eriugena’s “mystery” nar-
ratives, these memories cannot be reproduced effectively or fully as simple
recollection. Instead, Freud had to help the patient construct narratives that
transformed the story of the past and that recognized the “utopian nature” of
the psychoanalytic process. This kind of narrative was, according to Freud, a
“remodelling analogous in every way to the process by which a nation con-
structs legends about its early history” (19).
So A Portrait begins in a narrative mode that was originally an attempt to es-
cape the past (and the present), and ends not with the more empirical view one
might expect a young adult to have grown into but with legend (Daedalus—the
“fabulous artificer”), and with the statement that the past is “consumed in the
present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future” (P 273).
Stephen cannot deny that the past exists, but he insists that it exists only as
memory, not as emotion (P 87)—an idea that is proven to be wishful thinking
in Ulysses.
Stephen’s determination to create himself anew, in defiance of cultural con-
ditioning, explains why, as he thinks of the “prophecy” in his name, he reflects,
“all ages were as one to him” (P 183). In order to escape history’s shaping influ-
ence and design a self, he has to get outside that history. But he does not want
to repeat his own past, either, or his father’s, and so in some respects he does
not want to have a past at all. Unfortunately, his efforts in A Portrait lead him to
embed his identity in what Raymond Williams called a “residual culture,” that
of the aesthete, and a Pre-Raphaelite aesthete at that. Even his classmates at the
 Mixing Memory and Desire: Narrative Strategies and the Past in Ulysses 69

university know what pigeonhole to put him in. Stephen’s 1902 villanelle looks
backward, in spite of his professed fear of the past, and suggests a subjectivity
preserved in amber rather than a living self—but that is after all the meaning
of a past that exists only as memory and not as emotion.
Because he is unable to apply creative memory to his personal past, Stephen
is burdened by the necessity of forgetting, a necessity that Nietzsche insisted
upon in a more general way: “It is possible to live almost without memory,
and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether
impossible to live at all without forgetting” (62). Because of the “dark, invisible
burden” or “chain” of the past that Nietzsche says runs with us through life
(61), humans must engage in “active forgetting,” a practice Stephen Dedalus
attempts with little success, and a practice, moreover, that has its own dangers.
Milan Kundera describes the hazards of such forgetting as what at first appears
to be “splendid lightness”: “The absolute absence of a burden causes man to be
lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly
being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignifi-
cant” (5). What more accurate description of Stephen Dedalus could there be,
not only in the scene in A Portrait where he imagines his soul “soaring in an air
beyond the world” (P 183), but in Ulysses, where what freedom from the past
(memory) he has been able to achieve has rendered his movements precisely
“as free as they are insignificant.” Active forgetting, unlike active memory, is a
way of becoming “half real.”
In Ulysses, Stephen deals more effectively with the historical past than with
his own personal memories. The contrast between passive and active models of
memory is made most clearly in the “Nestor” episode. As Stephen drills his stu-
dents on historical facts, he thinks, “Fabled by the daughters of memory. And
yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then of impatience,
thud of Blake’s wings of excess” (U 2.7–9). That is, the past exists somehow, even
if not as it is recollected in memory, the implication being that passive memory
is unreliable, or inadequate. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake says, “Fable
or Allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded
by the daughters of Inspiration” (544). For Blake, memory was a lesser activity
of the mind, and a danger to the creative imagination.
It was not only the unreliability or inadequacy of memory as recollection
that bothered Blake (and Joyce), but the danger of memory as “habit,” memory
that repeats, for habit in Joyce, as Rickard reminds us, “is the great enemy of
change and the great enforcer of stagnation and paralysis” (60). Or as Blake
puts it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “The man who never alters his
 70 Richard P. Lynch

opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind” (58). If we apply
Stephen’s thought—“it was in some way, if not as memory fabled it”—to nar-
rative, we also have a rejection of traditional mimetic or causal narrative. The
narrative of Ulysses itself, in its most impersonal episodes, suggests the same
view. In the “Aeolus” episode, for instance, we have what Gifford and Seidman
refer to in “Ulysses” Annotated as a “stylistic echo” of Dickens (146). The passage
reads: “I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that
it was that small act, trivial in itself . . . that determined the whole aftercourse
of both our lives” (U 7.763–65). Gifford and Seidman cite a passage from David
Copperfield as an example, but there is one in Great Expectations that exhibits
more than a stylistic parallel: “That was a memorable day to me, for it made
great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day
struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been” (72). This
is Pip’s reflection on the importance of his first visit to Miss Havisham’s and his
first exposure to Estella, and it shows that the echo in Ulysses is thematic as well
as stylistic—specifically, a parody of the faith in linear causation embedded in
the plots of Victorian novels and the firm belief, reflected in the plot of Great
Expectations, that all events can finally be accounted for, all secrets revealed.
It seems more than chance that the echo of Dickens is followed immedi-
ately by a reference to “Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was”
(U 7.882). In theosophy, Akasa is, as Gifford and Seidman define it, the “infi-
nite memory of eternal nature” in which every thought is preserved forever
(118)—in other words, the impossibly perfect historical record. And immedi-
ately after we are reminded of that impossibility, at least on the human plane,
we are treated to Stephen’s Parable of the Plums. Parables are, by their nature,
symbolic narratives. Eriugena also called this kind of narrative historia, and
he used a geographic metaphor to define it. As Stephen G. Nichols explains in
his discussion of Eriugena, historia is like a deep valley, “in which events take
place without the participants being able to see beyond the immediate situ-
ation.” But even though historia is an account of events in that valley, on the
horizontal plane, and not the comprehensive view from a mountain summit
that Eriugena called theologia, it has value because it “provides an occasion
for continuing interpretative dialogue between events in the world and their
symbolic meaning” (Nichols, Romanesque Signs 8). In Stephen’s parable, Anne
Kearns and Florence MacCabe exist entirely on that horizontal plane, and their
exhausting climb to the top of Nelson’s pillar does not lift them from it. They
are afraid of the dark going up, and they are afraid of the height when they
reach the top (they lift their skirts to avoid looking down). Peering up at the
 Mixing Memory and Desire: Narrative Strategies and the Past in Ulysses 71

statue of the “onehandled adulterer,” as Stephen says, “gives them a crick in

their necks . . . and they are too tired to look up or down or to speak,” and so
they eat the plums and spit the stones out between the railings (U 7.1010–27).
The parable is vividly realized, completely grounded in empirical details,
right down to the crubeen and bottle of double X Florence MacCabe has for
supper every Saturday. But historia, as Eriugena said, was not mimesis in the
usual sense—not a simple imitation of phenomenal reality. Instead, it was a
rewriting of that reality. It “did not seek to describe events as they were, but to
transform them into texts” that separated “the imperfect reflections of the sen-
sible world from the Truth.” And it did this by establishing parallels between
historia and sacred history (the scriptures and theology). These two forms of
history—historia and sacred history—combine to reconcile the principles of
change and continuity and demonstrate how the “multiplicity of events in the
world could be shown to be part of divine intentionality” (Nichols, Romanesque
Signs 9).
The application of Eriugena’s concept of historia to Stephen’s parable can
be better understood through comparison with a similar process, “figural in-
terpretation,” as Erich Auerbach describes it in Mimesis. In figural interpreta-
tion, “a connection is established between two events which are linked neither
temporally nor causally—a connection which it is impossible to establish by
reason in the horizontal dimension [or, one might add, in traditional narrative
modes of thinking]. . . . It can be established only if both occurrences are verti-
cally linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of
history and supply the key to its understanding” (73–74). In narrative terms,
Divine Providence or divine intentionality can be translated as what Eco, in
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, calls a “model author,” or an entelechic or
end-directed text (14–15). Stephen makes the intention of his parable evident
when he compares it to Moses’ view of Palestine, which Moses may observe
from the top of Pisgah but may not himself enter and take possession of. The
parable is generally read as a metaphor for the situation of the Irish people,
who can see their country (though only by climbing up a symbol of British
dominance) but will not live to possess it. What Stephen is attempting to do is
to transform the horizontal, so that, as Auerbach says, “the here and now is no
longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events; it is simultaneously something
which has always been, and which will be fulfilled in the future” (73–74). That
is, the situation of the Irish in Stephen’s parable is part of a sort of universal
history, and therefore has meaning (and perhaps hope) beyond its individual
occurrence. But it is, at the same time, the “here and now.” It is still historia, an
 72 Richard P. Lynch

account of events in the valley. One other hopeful sign here is that Stephen is
using symbolic narrative in a less solipsistic way than he has earlier. Instead of
attempting to wish Irish history away, he is trying to place it in a context that
makes it meaningful, but not with the kind of meaning conferred by closure in
a linear narrative.
Again, there are always gaps in history as recollection, whether national his-
tory or personal history. We fill in the national historical gaps with myth and
legend, or what Peter Brooks calls “prehistoric truth.” We do the same with our
personal histories or narratives, and with much the same purpose—as Brooks
puts it, “to show the individual as a significant repetition of a story already en-
dowed with meaning” (280). And at a more general level, this is what Stephen
attempts to do for Ireland with his parable. Stephen’s ability to use symbolic
narrative on a personal level, however, is limited by his idea that the past ex-
ists only as memory, not as emotion. He sees his problem with paternity as an
intellectual one and tries to deal with it on an intellectual or empirical level, in
his Hamlet theory, for instance, and he has attempted to deal with his mother
in the same way—but the real crisis for Stephen is emotional, an element of the
past he is prepared neither to deal with nor even to recognize, and maternity
cannot be reasoned away as a “legal fiction” (U 9.844). In some ways, Stephen is
making the same mistake Freud did initially—assuming that a mimetic narra-
tive will suffice. In the climactic scene of “Circe,” Stephen tries to rationalize his
behavior in a dialogue with his mother’s ghost, to rehearse it as recollected fact:
“They say I killed you, mother. . . . Cancer did it, not I. Destiny” (U 15.4187–88).
But in the reader’s mind, the phrase that follows the word destiny is, “It seems
history is to blame”—a phrase repeated by Stephen, in fact, a few pages later (U
15.4371–72), and a phrase he cannot accept from the lips of Haines in the first
episode.
Stephen’s act of striking the chandelier with his ashplant is accompanied by
a repetition of the image associated with Blake in the “Nestor” episode: “I hear
the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid
final flame” (U 2.9–10). Fairhall reads this image as evidence of Stephen’s view
of world and Irish history as a series of intolerably violent and bloody events,
and perhaps the primary sense in which history is a “nightmare” for him (33).
But why would it occur after a reference to Blake’s impatience with “memory,”
and then later in the chandelier-smashing incident? What is “the ruin of all
space”? In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell it refers to the consumption of the
entire creation by fire, after which, far from nothing, it will appear “infinite
and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt” (38). In Blake the event is
 Mixing Memory and Desire: Narrative Strategies and the Past in Ulysses 73

catastrophic but positive, and his work is devoted to the importance of the
necessary change in vision suggested by those seeming contraries. But at the
end of the reference in “Nestor,” Stephen’s thought is “What’s left us then?” (U
2.10), and it is clear that he does not know. Later, as he strikes the chandelier,
he cries out “Nothung” (U 15.4241), which is the name of Siegfried’s sword,
but also suggests a sort of embracing of the void on Stephen’s part. The result
is anticlimactic, as the sensible Bloom estimates the damage and concludes,
“There’s not sixpenceworth of damage done” (U 15.4290–91). If Stephen’s act
is meant as a rejection of memory (in the form of his mother’s ghost) or an
attempt to destroy it, it fails. Later, he repeats, with a difference, “History to
blame. Fabled by mothers of memory” (U 15.4371–72)—thus associating his
mother with memory, history, and linear narrative, but unable to find anything
beyond them.
Stephen can apply new narrative methods to his country’s past, then, but
not to his personal past, in part at least because he is too busy denying (or
fearing) its emotional impact. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode, one of the
rocks Stephen must beware of is his younger sister, Dilly, who has spent a pre-
cious twopence on a French primer. She gets more sympathy from her brother
than from her father, whom she has run into shortly before the encounter with
Stephen at the bookseller’s cart and who, when she insists he has money to give
her, calls her and her sisters “an insolent pack of little bitches” (U 10.682). From
her father, however, Dilly gets a shilling and two pennies. From Stephen, who
has more money in his pocket than Simon does, she gets nothing. Stephen feels
guilty, but he is determined not to be destroyed: “She is drowning. Agenbite.
Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her” (U 18.875–76).
In the threat the past represents to him, the “old sow that eats her farrow”
has become a much more personal and a more frightening “corpsechewer” (U
15.4214).
Cheryl Herr says the “controlling aim of Stephen’s agonized self-examina-
tion” is to create some kind of “unifying code” that will connect all aspects of
human experience (31), but he cannot do that intellectually or “mimetically,”
through a rational assembling or reassembling of facts. At the personal level,
symbolic narrative must be an emotional rewriting, because it is always about
desire, never merely about memory. Or as Brooks puts it in his account of
Freud’s study of the Wolf Man, “unconscious desire has its own history, its
version of an unsatisfactory past and what would give it satisfaction, a history
unavailable to the conscious subject” (278).
In the “Proteus” episode, Stephen asks himself, “What is that word known
 74 Richard P. Lynch

to all men?” (U 3.435). He wants a key, the secret to a completed subject, one
wholly connected to the natural and human worlds, and in an intellectualizing
episode like “Proteus,” perhaps it is appropriate to speculate on such a key.
But in “Circe,” the very opposite of “Proteus” in terms of conscious control
of the self, it is all Stephen can think to ask his mother about: “Tell me the
word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men” (U 15.4191–92).
His reaction to her emotional/religious appeal to him (the same appeal she
made on her deathbed)—smashing the chandelier with his ashplant—shows
that he hasn’t yet learned what Freud discovered. Again, as Brooks says, “The
past needs to be incorporated as past within the present, mastered through the
play of repetition in order for there to be an escape from repetition: in order
for there to be difference, change, progress” (134). Stephen is so focused on
escaping the past that he does not realize that his salvation lies in the incorpo-
ration of the past into his present—just as Ireland is incorporated into a larger
whole in the Parable of the Plums. He will not resolve his emotional difficulties
until he moves beyond mere remembering and forgetting in his relationship
with the past and understands that traditional closure—the “word known to
all men”—is always a fiction.

Notes
1. Fairhall appears to assume here that all narrative “imprisons,” but I hope to show that this
is not the case in Ulysses.
2. As Seamus Deane has suggested in his edition of A Portrait, Stephen’s wishful daydream-
ing about finding a green rose “somewhere in the world” (P 9) is probably a reflection on what
is possible in words rather than in the world (P 281).
3. Quoted in Lukacher. We can find more general parallels for this kind of transformation in
the work of Lévi-Strauss on myth. As Richard Kearney points out in “Myth and Motherland,”
Lévi-Strauss identified myth as operating “according to a different kind of logic, a logic of un-
conscious symbolism, which is quite as rigorous as scientific logic. In Tristes Tropiques . . . Lévi-
Strauss describes this mythic logic as ‘the fantasy production of a society seeking passionately
to give symbolic expression to the institutions it might have had in reality’” (66n). The “might
have had” refers to the absence of social and political conditions necessary to realize the dream,
in which case, as Kearney says, “myth can serve as an ideological strategy with the purpose
of inventing symbolic ‘solutions’ to problems which remain irresolvable at the socio-political
level” (66n). Kearney is describing the “mythic logic” of the IRA, which turns defeat into vic-
tory, but as both Fairhall and Deane point out, that logic was used widely by the Irish and may
well figure in Stephen’s thinking about history. Deane, speaking of the fall of Parnell and the
failure of Home Rule, explains how the Irish dealt with the disappointments of history: “imagi-
nation figured powerfully as true what fact could not provide. The crowned king of Ireland,
Edward VII, is a sorry figure beside the uncrowned king, Parnell” (qtd. in Fairhall 34). In both
 Mixing Memory and Desire: Narrative Strategies and the Past in Ulysses 75

the society examined by Lévi-Strauss and in Irish society, memory—the intolerable historical
reality—is replaced by desire.
4. Using symbolic narrative on the personal level to rewrite a “historically” incorrect or
inadequate or incomplete self is always dangerous. Such an attempt can easily be channeled
into mere nostalgia for an unrealized subject. Father Conmee, for instance, in the “Wandering
Rocks” episode, inspired by a book called Old Times in the Barony, muses on its account of
intrigues and adultery among the upper classes until we read, “Don John Conmee walked and
moved in times of yore. He was humane and honoured there. He bore in mind secrets con-
fessed and he smiled at smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawing room” (U 10.174–76). This
is no more mature a fantasy than Stephen’s momentary delight in A Portrait at the thought of
knowing the sins and sinful longings of women and girls in the confessional, should he become
a priest (P 172). Or in the “Sirens” episode, Bloom catches Richie Goulding reinventing the past
to supply his need for nostalgia. Richie misremembers Joe Maas singing a tenor air called “Son-
nambula”: “Never would Richie forget that night. As long as he lived: never. . . . And when the
first note. . . . Speech paused on Richie’s lips.” And Bloom thinks, “Coming out with a whopper
now. Rhapsodies about damn all. Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a
good memory” (U 11.623–27).
5. Stephen is engaged in backtracking here. While the Parable of the Plums suggests a more
mature attitude toward his relationship with his country, the Hamlet theory is a return to the
theme of escape. Part of Stephen’s purpose is to deny paternity by demonstrating that Shake-
speare, like Adam, was a father but not a son, and could therefore see himself as “father of all
his race.” In his analysis of Stephen’s theory, Hugh Kenner remarks, “Mere fact is for the artist to
subsume, that he may be free from its claims” (114), and that is indeed Stephen’s method from
the beginning—from the wistful thought of a green rose to the re-creation in verse of the tram
car incident to the linguistic re-creation of the bird-like girl—all the way to the “Oxen of the
Sun” episode, where Stephen says of the “past and its phantoms” that he is “lord and giver of
their life” (U 14.1112–16). But escaping the claims of “mere fact” is a different thing from using
imaginative vision to remedy their inadequacy as expressions of truth.

Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard
R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Blake, William. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Dou-
bleday, 1965.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1984.
Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987.
Deane, Seamus. Introduction. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By James Joyce. New
York: Penguin, 1992. vii–xliii.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1979.
 76 Richard P. Lynch

———. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Fairhall, James. James Joyce and the Question of History. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993.
Herr, Cheryl. “Art and Life, Nature and Culture, Ulysses.” Joyce’s “Ulysses”: The Larger Perspec-
tive. Ed. Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton. Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1987. 19–38.
Kearney, Richard. “Myth and Motherland.” Ireland’s Field Day. Field Day Theatre Company.
South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. 61–80.
Kenner, Hugh. “Ulysses.” Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983.
Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1995.
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York:
HarperCollins, 1984.
Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1986.
Nichols, Stephen G. Foreword. Fictional Truth. By Michael Riffaterre. Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1990. vi–x.
———. Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1983.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Medita-
tions. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 57–124.
Rickard, John S. Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of “Ulysses.” Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1998.
Zipes, Jack. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
 5

Inventing Identity in Ulysses

“Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom

Tracey Teets Schwarze

Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled with stones. That one
day he will come again.
Ulysses 6.923–24

That bitch, that English whore, did for him. . . . She put the first nail in his coffin.
Ulysses 16.1352–53

The fabled image of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary
Party throughout the 1880s, continued to pervade Irish culture after his death
on 16 October 1891. Vilified in both the English and Irish press after being
named co-respondent in the O’Shea divorce trial in November 1890 and sub-
sequently ousted as head of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Parnell, the brilliant
Home Rule strategist, was labeled a “serpent” in the O’Sheas’ Eden of (dubi-
table) domestic bliss, a defamer of morals and hospitality, and an arrogant,
blinded Samson who, in Michael Davitt’s words, had “pulled the pillars from
beneath the temple of a great cause in his own downfall” (642). Yet among
many of his followers, these epithets also morphed into a resurrection mythol-
ogy, with Parnell serving as its Christ figure that would one day return and
deliver Ireland from its subservience to the British Crown.
James Joyce’s Critical Writings mount an unmistakable defense of “the Chief,”
while Joyce’s fiction both details and propagates Parnell’s curious rehabilitation.
In contrast to Davitt’s claim that the Parnell-O’Shea affair was “unredeemed
by a single romantic feature which could offer any excuse for [this] course of
conduct” (637), Joyce admits no blame against the former political leader and
 78 Tracey Teets Schwarze

offers an unmistakably romantic view of his hero’s amorous liaison. In Joyce’s

eyes, Parnell sacrificed all for love and was unfairly punished by both English
and Irish castigators. In his 1912 essay, “Shade of Parnell,” Joyce writes:
[Parnell] fell hopelessly in love with a married woman, and when her
husband, Captain O’Shea, asked for a divorce, the ministers Gladstone
and Morley openly refused to legislate in favour of Ireland if the sinner
remained as head of the Nationalist Party. . . . He was deposed in obedi-
ence to Gladstone’s orders. . . . The Irish press emptied on him and the
woman he loved the vials of their envy. . . . They did not throw him to the
English wolves; they tore him to pieces themselves. (CW 227–28)
Yet if one unpacks the references to Parnell in Joyce’s fiction, it becomes
clear that Joyce veers away from merely defending the Irish leader to explor-
ing the shape of identity discourse itself. Parnell’s reputation—that is, the
popular perception of his character and actions—never fully stabilizes in the
public discourse. The Portrait Christmas dinner scene, set a few months after
Parnell’s death in 1891, dramatically illustrates this schism of perception, as
well as Joyce’s own condemnation of Parnell’s detractors. Dissension appar-
ently remains as late as the anniversary of Parnell’s death in 1902, even though
Mr. O’Connor declares with unintentional irony in “Ivy Day in the Commit-
tee Room,” “We all respect him [Parnell] now that he’s dead and gone—even
the Conservatives” (D 132). For its part, Ulysses continues to reinscribe in
1904 not just the theme of Parnell’s shifting reputation but also rumors of his
un-death and future return: “one morning you would open the paper . . . and
read: Return of Parnell,” predicts the “Eumaeus” cabman. “Dead he wasn’t.
Simply absconded somewhere. . . . He changed his name to De Wet, the Boer
general” (U 16.1297–98, 1304–5). While some of these oscillations in identity
discourse were propelled by Parnell’s real-life predilection for aliases—Mr.
Fox, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Preston—that helped to conceal his rendezvous with
O’Shea as they rented houses along the English seacoast, Joyce’s references
acknowledge more than his hero’s awkward cover-ups and his own Parnellite
sympathies. Joyce’s fiction captures the ways in which selfhood, as illustrated
by these multiple, communal constructions of Parnell, becomes a moving
target.
The author’s fondness for Parnell, of course, is well known to Joyce scholars.
But what has not been considered is the way in which another appropriated,
misconstrued, and divided narrative of identity also enveloped the character
of Parnell’s paramour and later wife, Katharine “Kitty” O’Shea. The discourse
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 79

on “Kitty O’Shea” was as vitriolic as that aimed at Parnell but was subsequently
undefended and unredeemed by any public voice save her own—and, as I will
argue, that of James Joyce.
In 1914, O’Shea broke the public silence she had maintained for more than
thirty years regarding her relationship with Parnell, publishing an intricately
layered, two-volume chronicle of her association with the Irish leader. In
spite of the emphasis of its title, Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and
Political Life answers not just Parnell’s critics but also O’Shea’s, who had cast
her variously as whore, demon temptress, political saboteur, and Destroyer
of a Great Man. In its pages and along its spine, the memoir reasserts a per-
sonal claim to identity construction and attempts to wrest back the repre-
sentation of “Katharine O’Shea (Mrs. Parnell)” from a public discourse that
had usurped and sullied it. In a powerful but finally ambivalent reassertion of
self as speaking subject, the book’s divided female voice professes a series of
self-contradictory claims and revelations that foreshadow the voice of Joyce’s
Molly Bloom.
Joyce’s use of O’Shea, like his treatment of Parnell, fuels his prolific explo-
ration in Ulysses of the ways identity is produced, circulated, and subverted.
Completed in 1921, seven years after the publication of O’Shea’s memoir and in
the year of her death, both the “Eumaeus” and “Penelope” episodes of Ulysses
ironize and deconstruct the public formulations of “Kitty O’Shea.” In “Eu-
maeus,” an episode permeated by the instability of publicly circulated identities
as well as the associated unreliability of newspaper “truth,” Leopold Bloom
considers the courtroom reports of O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell and offers a
perspective that calls the official—and one-sided—narrative of the divorce into
question. Bloom in fact offers a viewpoint never produced in court: Katharine
O’Shea’s. Intriguingly, though not necessarily anachronistically, Bloom pro-
duces arguments and details dovetailing those that appeared in O’Shea’s 1914
memoir and establishes parallels between Katharine and his own wife, Molly.
In “Penelope,” Joyce continues and complicates this indirect defense of O’Shea.
Her ambivalent narrative converges with Molly Bloom’s text to foreground not
just the disruptiveness of female-centered desire but also the profound insta-
bilities of identity discourse as it circulates through both public and private
arenas. In memoir and episode, each woman refutes other-constructed repre-
sentations of her persona and highlights the potent subversiveness of the Self
who speaks.
Joyce owned O’Shea’s memoir and consulted it as he wrote Ulysses, accord-
ing to Michael Gillespie, but when O’Shea is mentioned in Joyce criticism,
 80 Tracey Teets Schwarze

the references tend unwittingly to repeat the accusations of sexual destruc-

tion heaped upon her by her contemporaries: Bonnie Kime Scott remarks
that O’Shea serves as a “modern example of female treachery” inside Garrett
Deasy’s misogynistic rhetoric in “Nestor” (13), a point with which Robert Spoo
concurs, indicating that Deasy’s list features “women who tempted world-his-
torical men to their beds” (22). Stuart Gilbert calls O’Shea “the woman who
wrecked Parnell’s career” (358), and Marilyn Reizbaum locates her in the com-
pany of various “Eves one and all, lost or loose women, who threaten or bring
about the downfall of men and civilizations” (169). Margot Norris’s work on
“A Painful Case” is an important exception to these representations of O’Shea.
Norris astutely argues that the Parnell-O’Shea liaison serves as a probable sub-
text for Joyce’s short story as it examines the devastating impact of unrealized
desire; she also draws some thoughtful biographical parallels between the af-
fairs of Joyce’s protagonists and the real-life lovers: among them, that “these are
mature relationships” initiated in middle age, that “Captain Sinico, like Cap-
tain O’Shea, is frequently absent from home and judged . . . to be indifferent
to his wife,” and that adultery is, in the case of both husbands, either implied
(Captain Sinico’s “gallery of pleasures”) or alleged (Katharine O’Shea coun-
tercharged William O’Shea’s own adultery when he filed for divorce) (Norris
161–62).
But correspondences between Katharine O’Shea and Emily Sinico reso-
nate even beyond those Norris suggests. The story provides an important
jumping-off point for Joyce’s interest in more than the Parnell-O’Shea affair;
it also aligns him with the fate of the silenced woman. Katharine O’Shea, like
Emily Sinico, was for several years distraught and despondent following the
unexpected loss of her lover (now husband) in 1891: after a period of hyste-
ria and nervous collapse, O’Shea spent two years in an asylum (Callaghan
172–74) and may have developed a drinking problem. But more intriguing
than the evident parallels between the post-relationship distresses of Mrs.
O’Shea and Mrs. Sinico is the thirdhand way in which we receive the in-
formation about Emily Sinico’s demise. Much like Katharine O’Shea in the
years following Parnell’s death, Emily Sinico herself is silent, but she is cer-
tainly talked about—by her family, in court, by the press—inside narratives
constructed by others that smack of rumor and innuendo. But unlike Emily
Sinico, Katharine O’Shea will recover her voice, and this emergence from
silence into speech finds a clear analogy in James Joyce’s women. The stifled,
co-opted voice of Emily Sinico will shortly erupt into the insistent locutions
of Molly Bloom.
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 81

Constructing “Kitty” O’Shea: Silence and Resistance

Friends and family called Katharine O’Shea “Katharine,” “Katie,” “Dick,” or

“Queenie” (the last was Parnell’s particular pet name for her, along with “Wi-
fie”). In spite of contemporary representations to the contrary, Katharine Wood
pronounced her married name “O’Shee,” not “O’Shay,” and never, ever used the
pejorative diminutive “Kitty.” Yet such negative, sexually charged epithets cir-
culated freely and derisively in the public discourse during and after the 1890
divorce trial, representing O’Shea as a wantonly transgressive and powerful
woman, a political operator who wielded influence touching both Gladstone
and Parnell, and a seductive hoyden who betrayed Parnell and his beloved
Ireland. As O’Shea recounted later, “The anti-Parnellites were extremely in-
genious in inventing new forms of scurrility in connection with my supposed
name. From one end of chivalrous Ireland to the other . . . the name of ‘Kit-
ty’ O’Shea was sung and screamed, wrapped about with all the filth that foul
minds, vivid imaginations, and black hatred of the aloof, proud Chief could
evolve” (O’Shea 2: 170). But the virulence of the slanders Katharine O’Shea
endured attests to more than hatred of Parnell; it also indicates the profound
disturbance she herself caused inside the political patriarchy. Seen as somehow
having usurped political power herself through the conduit of her sexuality,
O’Shea was maligned by Parnell’s principal Irish Parliamentary Party oppo-
nent, T. M. Healey, as a “proved British prostitute” (“Ireland” 5), denigrated by
illustrations in Punch, and riffed in Vanity Fair: “Some call her ‘The Political
Princess.’ Others, ‘O’Shea who must be obeyed’” (438). Remarkably, O’Shea’s
1921 obituary in The Times, published nearly thirty years after Parnell’s death,
continues to accuse her of sexual and political treachery, while Irish newspa-
pers treated her no better. The Freeman’s Journal distastefully and dismissively
acknowledged her passing, reporting it in terms of “the fall of the great leader”
and “two unsavoury volumes” published in 1914 (qtd. in Callaghan 175).
For her part, O’Shea never attempted while Parnell was alive to counter
or subvert these caustic identity constructs. Parnell ignored the couple’s de-
tractors and even refused to defend the divorce action; O’Shea, however, was
greatly disturbed by both. Although she proclaims, “Never for one moment
have I regretted that I made his point of view my own” (2: 233), the pages of
her memoir, in fact its very existence, register a subconscious rift—a tension
between loyalty to her lover and resistance to the public silence he imposed
upon her. When Katharine complains about the “scurrilities” flung at “Kitty”
O’Shea, for instance, Parnell responds gently, “It would really have hurt, my
 82 Tracey Teets Schwarze

Queen, if those devils had got hold of your real name, my Queenie, or even the
‘Katie’ or ‘Dick’ that your relations and Willie called you.” Immediately—and
somewhat suspiciously, given the withering sarcasm and unmistakable anger
evident against “chivalrous Ireland” at the start of this passage—O’Shea re-
verses her position to submerge it within Parnell’s: “And then I was glad, so
very glad that the gallant company of mud-slingers had with one accord leapt
to the conclusion that those who love me called me ‘Kitty’” (2: 170–71). O’Shea’s
declaration of joy here is forceful but not altogether convincing. This conflict
becomes increasingly evident in the couple’s respective responses to the di-
vorce proceedings.
While Parnell remained stubbornly disengaged from the divorce suit, refus-
ing to appear in court or even to appoint representation (although he did file a
belated denial of the adultery charge), Katharine O’Shea engaged two solicitors
and filed a series of countercharges, including neglect, cruelty, infidelity, and
connivance. Of the divorce action O’Shea writes, “Parnell would not fight the
case, and I could not fight it without him,” but she continued to try to persuade
him until the last possible moment (2: 147). It is clear both in the newspaper
account of the trial and in O’Shea’s memoir that she intended to defend the
suit aggressively, repeatedly filing countercharges and proffering the required
details to support them. That these details are “remarkable” (in the words of
the solicitor-general)—even damning—in their implied confession of her own
adultery suggests that Katharine O’Shea was less interested in winning the suit
than in defending her name and reappropriating it from the degrading com-
munal dialogue. Yet directed by a telegram sent by Parnell the morning of the
trial while O’Shea still slept, her lawyer rose to announce her non-participation
in the proceedings. As a result of this withdrawal, Captain William O’Shea was
the only one of the principals who told his story in court and in the press, a
scenario that so disturbed at least two jurors that they attempted to question
him on their own. His wife would wait in silence for another twenty-three
years before defying the public discourse on “Kitty O’Shea” and reconstructing
her own narrative of self.

History, Herstory: Leopold Bloom, “Kitty O’Shea,” and Identity

Discourse in “Eumaeus”
The scandals provoked by O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell and resurrected by
Katharine O’Shea’s memoir reveal the protean nature of identity as it is molded
and manipulated in public discourse. Certainly identity is constructed within
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 83

language; we each represent ourselves to others—and to ourselves—through

the veil of language, and others characterize us through the same erratic me-
dium. O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell and its aftermath make clear that once
identity begins to circulate publicly, the self loses control of its public represen-
tations, and the other exerts an ever-increasing influence over its transmuta-
tions. As Leopold Bloom so aptly puts it, “The lies a fellow told about himself
couldn’t . . . hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows
coined about him” (U 16.845–47). Bloom’s observation points to several key
facets of identity politics, including the proliferation of selves in the public
discourse—representations sponsored not only by the self (“the lies a fellow
told about himself ”) but also by the other (“the wholesale whoppers other
fellows coined about him”)—and the unreliability and inauthenticity of both.
Problems of multiplicity and authenticity are intensified in the case of public
scandal, especially when the press becomes involved. O’Shea’s memoir, Joyce’s
“Eumaeus,” and Molly Bloom’s “Penelope” narrative all recognize and illustrate
these axioms, making clear not just that the public discourse plays fast and
loose with representations of self but also that individuals themselves promul-
gate contradictory self-constructions.
Preoccupied with issues of inauthenticity, imprecision, and even mispri-
sion in public representations of self, “Eumaeus” offers Joyce’s most detailed
exploration of the mutable phenomenon of identity discourse and the role of
the press in (re)producing a host of both minor and wholesale inaccuracies,
especially as manifested in O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell. Identity as promul-
gated by the self through language is called into question early in this episode
and is shortly followed by unmistakable indictments of the press’s reporting of
the same. As if on cue, once Stephen Dedalus observes that names and other
self-descriptions are “impostures” (U 16.362), we are introduced to a parade
of potential linguistic frauds, among them D. B. Murphy, the mysterious red-
bearded sailor who spins a series of fantastic yarns about himself for public
edification, and “the once famous Skin-the-Goat, Fitzharris,” the man public
rumor has pegged as driver of the getaway car in the Phoenix Park murders—
“assuming he was he” (U 16.323–24, 985). Newspaper reports collude in and ex-
tend this theme of fraudulent representation. As Bloom picks up the “pink edi-
tion extra sporting of the Telegraph” that “lay . . . beside his elbow,” Joyce’s text
immediately and punningly disparages it: “tell a graphic lie” (U 16.1232–33). As
Bloom begins to scrutinize the paper, he notes the “usual crop of nonsensical
howlers of misprints” (U 16.1267), including the wholly inaccurate account of
attendees at Paddy Dignam’s funeral.
 84 Tracey Teets Schwarze

These observations about the press position Bloom in early sympathy with
O’Shea, whose 1914 memoir shares Bloom’s disdain for purportedly “authen-
tic” representations of identity by newspapers. Pursued by paparazzi who had
staked out their home for interviews and images after she and Parnell married
in June 1891, O’Shea recaps an article that appeared in an American paper: “I
must admit that even if not exactly accurate, it was distinctly ‘bright.’ It was an
illustrated ‘interview,’ and Parnell and I appeared seated together on a stout
little sofa, he clad in a fur coat, and I in a dangerously decollete garment, di-
aphanous in the extreme, and apparently attached to me by large diamonds”
(2: 240). The problem of authenticity is exacerbated in this example, as the
reporter who conducted the research for the article never actually spoke with
O’Shea, and her only contact with Parnell occurred as he escorted her out of
the couple’s bedroom into which she had sneaked (2: 240).
Such inauthentic narratives set the stage for Bloom’s divergent meditations
on Parnell’s death and, subsequently, on O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell. Bloom
reveals the shortcomings of both divorce court proceedings and newspaper
reports by presenting a perspective elided by both—Katharine O’Shea’s. Im-
mediately upon the cabby’s prediction of Parnell’s return—the implausibility
of which is signaled by his belief that the event would be heralded first in the
newspapers—Bloom begins to offer the first of his expansive viewpoints on
the Parnell-O’Shea saga. Parnell’s demise was attributed in the press variously
to a severe attack of rheumatism, congestion of the lungs and bronchitis, and
congestion of the liver, brought on by a severe chill incurred during a campaign
stop in Dublin when he stood for three hours in a cold rain. As he considers
Parnell’s death, Bloom fixes on the diagnosis of “acute pneumonia” and then
adds a detail absent from the press accounts—that Parnell’s illness might have
been avoided if he had not “neglected to change his boots and clothes after a
wetting” (U 16.1313–16). This detail is, however, present in O’Shea’s memoir—
O’Shea writes that she always packed a special change for Parnell in case of in-
clement weather, but his host had mistakenly taken the satchel home, and Par-
nell “had had to sit in his wet things for some hours” (2: 249–50). The addition
of this mildly anachronistic point is important here because it signals Joyce’s
willingness, through Bloom, to present a perspective on O’Shea unavailable in
1904 Dublin discourse: the tender, thoughtful lover supplants the calculating,
adulterous woman.
Bloom continues to provide this unusual angle in two additional interpo-
lations as he ponders the details of the divorce trial itself. The first follows
and contrasts an exchange that represents the popular construction of “Kitty
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 85

O’Shea” as the sole scapegoat for Parnell’s fall, his death, and William O’Shea’s
humiliation:
—That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the shebeen proprietor
commented. She put the first nail in his coffin.
—Fine lump of woman all the same, the soi-disant townclerk Henry
Campbell remarked, and plenty of her. She loosened many a man’s thighs.
(U 16.1352–55)
There is Joycean irony evident in the way these statements, intended to demean
O’Shea by representing her as wanton, actually undermine their speakers by
inverting the power relationships they hope to assert. Men here are rendered
unintentionally impotent in this specifically feminine pose, their thighs “loos-
ened” by O’Shea, and their Irish autonomy endangered by her predatory Eng-
lishness. But there is more to see in this passage, which, as it stands, elides
any consideration of O’Shea as a potentially wronged wife. Thus it also reflects
the dynamic of the trial itself, which heard only Captain O’Shea’s version of
events. When one juror, attempting his own cross-examination, asked Captain
O’Shea about the countercharge of neglect filed by his wife, Captain O’Shea
was allowed, incredibly, to assert only the evidence of his own diary. He told
his questioner, “No one has ever made the slightest pretence that there was
a want of attention on my part. In fact, my diaries show clearly that I was a
kind husband and a kind father. The diaries are put in and would be enough
to satisfy anybody” (“O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell,” 18 November 1890, 13). In
contrast to the divorce court and newspaper reports, however, Bloom refuses
to condone this singularly narrow perspective, pointedly refusing to smile or
to laugh at the Kitty-blaming banter. Instead, Bloom recounts to himself the
official facts of the “historic story” (U 1361) and subverts them with several
points sympathetic to O’Shea.
First, he wonders how such a scandal could have ensued when “the thing
was public property all along” (U 16.1368–69), a point O’Shea also makes in her
book, especially in regards to the supposed shock of Parnell’s lieutenants and
Gladstone at the allegation of adultery. She writes, “For ten years Gladstone
had known of the relations between Parnell and myself, and had taken full
advantage of the facility this intimacy offered him in keeping in touch with the
Irish leader” (2: 153). In the second instance, Bloom completely contravenes
the one-sided public account of the trial, which affirmed William O’Shea’s in-
nocence of all countercharges. Rather than accepting William O’Shea’s blame-
lessness, Bloom considers in abstract terms the possibility that the husband
 86 Tracey Teets Schwarze

might have connived in the adultery, and arrives at the following extraordinary
conclusion, given the evidence presented: “It was simply a case of the husband
not being up to scratch, with nothing in common between them beyond the
name, and then a real man arriving on the scene” (U 16.1379–82). In the next
interpolation, in which Bloom recollects returning Parnell’s hat during the fra-
cas that destroyed the offices of United Ireland—the loss of which is specifically
noted in O’Shea’s text (2: 168)—he again thinks kindly of O’Shea, noting that
she “was the first to perceive” that the Irish had placed Parnell on a pedestal
that he ascended only with reluctance (U 16.1509).
Before Bloom ends his public-discourse-subverting reverie, he makes an-
other connection that solidifies his sympathy with O’Shea’s position. He fuses
his wife, Molly, with Katharine O’Shea, supposing that Katharine, like Molly,
was of Spanish descent. Bloom has obviously learned from the papers that the
O’Sheas briefly lived in Spain after their marriage, and he assumes—incor-
rectly, in keeping with the ethos of the episode—that the roots are Katharine’s.
He thinks to himself, “it was just the wellknown case of hot passion, pure and
simple, . . . and just bore out the very thing he was saying as she also was Span-
ish or half so, types that wouldn’t do things by halves, passionate abandon of
the south, casting every shred of decency to the winds” (U 16.1406–10). Just
before pushing Molly’s photograph across the table, Bloom says aloud to Ste-
phen, “Just bears out what I was saying . . . about blood and the sun. And, if
I don’t greatly mistake she was Spanish too” (U 16.1411–13)—then referring to
Molly’s picture: “Do you consider . . . that a Spanish type?” (U 16.1425–26).
Bloom’s mingling of Katharine with Molly here completes his sabotage of the
identity politics that had continued to cast Katharine Parnell as “Kitty O’Shea.”
Bloom steadfastly refuses to blame Katharine for her relationship with Parnell,
acknowledging desire but not culpability. Similarly, Bloom’s position also in-
dicates sympathy with Molly’s fledgling affair and suggests his own complicity
with that event, thus acknowledging its inherent complexity. Most important-
ly, Bloom’s reflections set the stage for Joyce’s emphasis in “Penelope” on the
elided perspective of the maligned, adulterous wife, told in her own words. As
Molly Bloom reappropriates the discourse that has represented her throughout
Joyce’s text, her synchronicity with Katharine O’Shea becomes increasingly ap-
parent.

Identity Discourse, Memoir, and Molly Bloom

In episode 18 of Ulysses, Joyce exploits the opening Leopold Bloom has cre-
ated in “Eumaeus.” Here Molly Bloom, discussed and denigrated throughout
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 87

the day and kept silent by her author for more than five hundred pages since
her initial appearance in episode 4, finally erupts into speech. Just as “Kitty
O’Shea” was bandied about in communal dialogue from Dublin to New York
to London, so also “Molly Bloom” circulates freely in the public discourse of
Ireland’s capital: she is labeled a “gamey mare” by Lenehan (U 10.566–67), an
exhibitionist by Simon Dedalus (“Mrs. Marion Bloom has left off clothes of
all descriptions” [U 11.496–97]), and, as we have seen, a dark siren by her hus-
band (“a Spanish type”) as he tries to interest Stephen Dedalus in her physical
charms. As Molly Bloom reflects on the silence often required of women—the
various ways in which husbands and lovers can shut them up—her narrative
interrogates and undermines these public constructions of her persona. It also
ranges freely through the day’s events, her personal history, and her familial
relationships, presenting an intricately layered and often contradictory self-
accounting, thus establishing a subtly textured bond with Katharine O’Shea’s
memoir. Molly’s text has been referred to as monologue, soliloquy, polylogue,
star turn. I would add “memoir” to the list. If “Eumaeus” can be seen as Leo-
pold Bloom’s oral rehearsal of “My Experiences in a Cabman’s Shelter,” then
“Penelope,” perhaps, can function similarly—as an early, oral draft of Molly
Bloom’s memoir.
Memoir writing is an intricate project, requiring a rhetorical strategy that
allows engagement with various publicly circulated personae as well as the
construction and assertion of more private renditions of self. Memoir pres-
ents its case in a mode that is necessarily self-contradictory, in a quasi-private,
quasi-public venue: it reads like a diary, yet it is written with a specific, exterior
audience in mind. Written at a remove, usually years, even decades, following
the events and relationships it recounts, memoir is also temporally unstable in
terms of its accuracy and reliability. And if it recounts tangled relationships,
such as extramarital affairs, memoir becomes still more complex as it attempts
to navigate the thicket of subterfuge, moral stricture, guilt, self-protection, and
public exposure. For all these reasons, memoir presents identity as a multi-lay-
ered, many-voiced, and often contradictory construction, qualities exhibited
by the narratives of both Katharine O’Shea and Molly Bloom.
Intricate layers of self proliferate inside memoir, including identity con-
structs propagated by others. Both Katharine O’Shea and Molly Bloom refute
other-sponsored usurpations of their identities. For her part, Katharine chal-
lenges the discourse on “Kitty O’Shea” circulated by both the Irish and British
political establishments, countering the “political princess” moniker by prov-
ing that Parnell and not she (as was usually supposed) had refused to defend
the adultery charges, and that she had urged conciliation, not intransigence, in
 88 Tracey Teets Schwarze

Committee Room 15. Every sentence of O’Shea’s book, moreover, is designed

to contest the charges of promiscuity levied against her, and to show her utter
fidelity to Parnell, the man both he and she considered her “true” husband. By
undercutting the ethics of her detractors—for instance, charging Gladstone
and his cronies with hypocrisy for their protestations of shock at the affair—
O’Shea manages to deflect the credibility of their assertions, a tactic that Molly
Bloom will also employ.
Molly, like Katharine, responds vociferously to the identity discourse that
purports to represent her around Dublin. Molly counters other-constructed
visions of herself, answering each of her critics in turn and asserting a diver-
gent and complexly layered version of personal identity. Like O’Shea, Molly
refutes the discourse that presents her as a “loose woman” by undermining the
sources of her disparagement. Lenehan becomes “that sponger he was mak-
ing free with me after the Glencree dinner” (U 18.426–27); Simon Dedalus is
rendered “such a criticiser” (U 18.1088) and observed to be “always turning
up half screwed” (U 18.1290–91); Bloom is mocked as an unwitting pimp: “I
wonder he didn’t make him a present of it [the photograph he shows to Ste-
phen] altogether and me too” (U 18.1304–5). Molly also counters those critics
who would impose upon her their definitions of Irishness. She apparently has
been yanked from the Dublin stage, her incorrectly imperialistic program re-
placed by young Kathleen Kearney’s more nationalist repertoire. Nonetheless,
Molly is unapologetic and utterly disdainful of “Kathleen Kearney and her lot
of squealers” (U 18.878). She considers Home Rule and Land League politics to
be “blather” and, like Katharine O’Shea, holds no high opinion of Irish politi-
cians (U 18.1187). Most significantly, she refuses to let “Irishness” be defined
by the popular nationalist discourse and herself to be positioned outside it.
Instead, Molly offers her own definition of Irishness—her face. “I had the map
of it all” (U 18.378). Such vociferous stances by Molly Bloom and Katharine
O’Shea reappropriate with varying success the right of self-representation over
other-sponsored versions of identity. As they find their voices, both women
begin to exorcise the public discourse that has attempted to define and contain
them.
But this is not to say that they manage to create and promulgate a unified
identity inside their narratives. Instead, Katharine O’Shea and Molly Bloom
offer up multi-layered, many-voiced constructions, rife with contradictions in
their depictions of others and of themselves. Katharine O’Shea, for instance,
affirms her lover’s virility by proclaiming Parnell to be “of immense muscular
strength,” able to lift a downed horse to its feet (with the aid of a few stalwart
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 89

policemen) (2: 71), but she subconsciously impugns his prowess by also report-
ing him to be an oddball hypochondriac who feared that her green carpet was
the cause of his sore throats (1: 138). Molly Bloom’s descriptions of Leopold
Bloom and Blazes Boylan similarly vacillate, although Molly is more overtly
critical of her men than is Katharine. Bloom, too, apparently behaves in a less-
than-manly fashion when he is ill: “if his nose bleeds youd think it was O
tragic” (U 18.24), but he measures up well to another masculine benchmark.
“He . . . looks after his wife and family” rather than spending all his money at
the pub (U 18.1279). Blazes is evidently a well-endowed and vigorous lover—
yet “Poldy has more spunk in him” and is thus more likely to get her pregnant
should she decide she wants another child (U 18.168). In these paradoxical
renditions of identity we begin to intuit just how unstable identity constructs
are, created through the prisms of perspective and observed behavior. Not in-
significantly, these destabilizations all occur before such discourse begins to
circulate in the broader oscillations of the public arena.
Such incongruities also extend to the women’s self-constructions. Katharine
O’Shea’s inconsistencies are evident throughout her text, which at once avows
her desire to defend her reputation and then acquiesces in Parnell’s refusal to
do so, and asserts the openness of her relationship with Parnell then repeatedly
describes their efforts at subterfuge. Most remarkable among the contradic-
tions in O’Shea’s memoir, perhaps, is the way it serves, as her countercharges
in the divorce trial would have, as both self-confession and self-justification
in terms of her adultery. She couples a disingenuous defense of her first hus-
band with an unmistakable indictment of his connivance in the affair, artfully
asserting his innocence of the liaison while at the same time building a case
that makes his ignorance utterly implausible. Although Katharine recounts
several instances of deceiving Willie and denying the affair to him, she also
straightforwardly reports that Parnell took up residence at Eltham in Decem-
ber 1880, and that William O’Shea challenged Parnell to a duel over the is-
sue, having discovered Parnell’s presence at Eltham in January 1881 (1: 176).
But Parnell did not cease stopping there; in fact he ensconced himself there
with increasing permanence, constructing a cricket pitch in 1882, building a
study/workroom in 1885, stabling two horses (President and Dictator) in the
neighborhood, and bringing two dogs to live at the residence. Such narrative
detail, offering physical evidence of another man’s presence at his wife’s abode,
even in the context of her subterfuge and denial, strains the credulity of the
claim—made halfheartedly by Katharine in her memoir and stridently by Wil-
liam O’Shea at the divorce trial—that any further suspicions he may have had
 90 Tracey Teets Schwarze

during this period were allayed. These details point indirectly and subversively
to William O’Shea’s connivance in the adultery, as well as to a neglect of his
wife that borders on abandonment. Thus Katharine O’Shea’s contradictory and
inconsistent text manages handily to affirm and subvert the one-dimensional
rendering of “Kitty O’Shea” born at her divorce trial in 1890, substituting Kath-
arine—adulteress, yes, but also neglected wife, lover, and faithful companion
to Charles Stewart Parnell—in her stead. The divided voice of O’Shea’s memoir
truly—and brilliantly—shatters her own “silence of years.”
Molly Bloom’s divided text also sets before us an inconsistent self-repre-
sentation, a fractured identity discourse, which both indicts and endorses her
affair with Blazes Boylan. Molly’s narrative establishes the irrefutable fact of
her adultery, yet it also suggests a variety of extenuating circumstances for her
actions, among them sexual neglect, loneliness, and desire. Justifying her after-
noon’s activities on the grounds of Leopold’s sexual negligence, Molly wonders,
“what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im
young still can I its a wonder Im not an old shriveled hag before my time living
with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep” (U
18.1397–1401). She appears in places to channel aloud the defiance expressed
in Emily Sinico’s eyes—“I suppose he thinks Im finished out and laid on the
shelf well Im not no nor anything like it” (U 18.1021–23)—and her despair: “as
for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in
the bottom of the ashpit” (U 18.746–47). More directly, Molly also charges con-
nivance against Leopold. She accuses him of already knowing about the affair
begun that afternoon—“he [Bloom] has an idea about him [Boylan] and me
hes not such a fool” (U 18.81)—and even of expediting it, theorizing why Bloom
has sent their daughter, Milly, away for the summer to be a photographer’s
apprentice: “on account of me and Boylan thats why he did it” (U 18.1007–8).
In full voice, Molly appears to reject the indirection exercised by Katharine
O’Shea regarding her husband’s complicity in her affair, first blaming Leopold
entirely and then, perhaps, excusing them both. “Ive a mind to tell him every
scrap . . . serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress . . . if that’s all
the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much” (U 18.1515–
18). These ruptures in Molly Bloom’s narrative reflect the myriad complexities
of her relationships. Why haven’t Leopold and Molly had sex since before their
son Rudy’s death (for ten years, five months, and eighteen days) (U 17.2282)?
Why would Leopold connive in his wife’s affair? Why would he not try to stop
the tryst if he knew of it? Will Molly reinitiate sexual relations with Leopold or
serve him breakfast in the morning as he evidently has requested (U 18.1–2),
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 91

or will she flaunt her lover and continue to see him? To cope with and accom-
modate these multiple instabilities in her life, Molly’s identity discourse splin-
ters, undergoing an elaborate series of negotiations and compensations as she
explores her options and considers how she might have arrived at this place.
What we begin to see in both Katharine’s and Molly’s texts as they recursive-
ly construct, contradict, and reconstruct themselves is that self-authored iden-
tities are not entirely consistent or reliable, either, in their representations. The
layering of identity in memoir extends far past refutations of other-sponsored
selves and into multiple, divided, self-sponsored representations. Katharine
O’Shea represents herself as “a Parnellite” to Willie, yet in other passages her
antagonism to the Irish Parliamentary Party is evident; more tellingly, she at-
tempts to depict a self that is frank and earnest in its utterances, yet she elides
important but inconvenient details about her relationship with Parnell, such
as the two additional daughters he fathered after the birth and death of Sophie
Claude in 1882. Molly Bloom also presents herself as a straight shooter, some-
one who hates “that pretending of all things” (U 18.491), yet she pretends all the
time: she feigns ignorance of the dirty words in the letter Bloom writes her (“of
course I had to say no for form sake dont understand you I said” [U 18.324–
25]); she pretends “not to be excited” when she gives a hand-job to Mulvey on
Gibraltar so many years ago (U 18.810); she may have even faked orgasms early
in her marriage (“no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till he comes and
then finish it off myself anyway” [U 18.98–99]). Most significant among Molly’s
pretenses, perhaps, is the one that has occurred that very afternoon: her inabil-
ity to express herself candidly with Boylan during their lovemaking. “I wanted
to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only . . . who knows
the way hed take it” (U 18.588–90). Devlin has asserted that Molly’s pretending
can signify both subversion of social convention and oppression by the same
force, but the multiple self-constructions of Joyce’s protagonist also suggest
something simpler and just as profound. Molly Bloom’s ubiquitous contradic-
tions evoke the stories, even falsehoods, we each tell ourselves when our ideals
of selfhood—unified, noble, honest—fail to measure up to the person we, or
public discourse, has put forth in the world.
Molly Bloom mentions “Kitty O’Shea” just once in her narrative, admir-
ingly, in the context of complimenting another woman’s hair (“tossing it back
like that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street” [U 18.478–79]). But this is not
the Kitty O’Shea, who did not reside in, or ever visit, Ireland. That Joyce’s Mol-
ly Bloom invents another “Kitty O’Shea,” one to be admired for her physical
beauty, in no way disparaged, and seemingly in no way related to the infamous
 92 Tracey Teets Schwarze

lover of Charles Stewart Parnell, helps to underscore the ultimate mutability of

identity discourse in Joyce’s fiction.
Ultimately, Joyce’s defense of Katharine O’Shea Parnell is subtle and pro-
found. As he presents the public discourse on “Kitty O’Shea,” Joyce also con-
sistently and irrefutably undermines the construct. Joyce’s representation of
O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell is “history repeating itself with a difference” (U
16.1525–26): subversive of the divorce courts, the press, and public-sponsored
renditions of relationships and identities. Allowing Katharine O’Shea to have
her say in his novel, through the agency of both Leopold and Molly Bloom,
Joyce once again insists on the way in which multiple perspectives render elu-
sive or even nonexistent the nature of “truth,” especially as regards identity
politics. O’Shea’s memoir and Joyce’s final episode demonstrate that the pre-
sentation of self in memoir is just one more version of identity, no more or less
authentic than all the other versions, signifier and signified forever shifting.

Notes
1. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph called Parnell “a traitor to his Queen, a traitor to his friend, a
conspirator against the law of the land, a rebel against the canons of the most high, the desola-
tor of the home in which he was a hospitably entertained guest, the serpent which . . . left its
slimy trail upon the domestic Eden into which he had crept” (qtd. in Vanity Fair 438).
2. The messianic myth of Parnell extended far beyond the British Isles, to the farthest reach-
es of the empire: “He could have saved us all, perhaps, as he saved Ireland, or would have saved
her had they let him live,” writes Lucinda Sharpe of Brisbane, Australia, in a letter to United
Ireland in January 1892 (qtd. in D. R. Pearce 250).
3. A brief chronology of the Parnell-O’Shea relationship: in July 1880, Katharine O’Shea
met Charles Stewart Parnell, and based upon the growing intimacy of their letters, it appears
they consummated their relationship by October. By this point, O’Shea and her husband of
thirteen years, Captain William O’Shea, had maintained separate residences for several years,
most recently he in London and she with their three children at Eltham (about eight miles from
central London), visiting one another occasionally and writing frequently. Parnell took up
regular residence at Eltham in December 1880. Between 1882 and 1884, Katharine O’Shea bore
three daughters, all fathered by Parnell, one dying shortly after childbirth. In December 1889,
William O’Shea sued for divorce and won the undefended case, heard after several delays, in
mid-November 1890. Parnell lost the chair of the Irish Parliamentary Party two weeks later. He
and Katharine O’Shea married on 25 June 1891, slightly more than three months before Parnell’s
death. O’Shea published her memoirs in 1914. She died in 1921.
4. Joyce wrote to Carlo Linati on 18 February 1921 that he had finished “Eumaeus” (Let-
ters III 38–39); he finished “Penelope” later in the year. O’Shea died on 5 February 1921. Fritz
Senn notes that Herbert Howarth was the first to wonder if Joyce had been inspired to write
“Eumaeus” after reading O’Shea’s memoir following its May 1914 publication; Senn himself has
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 93

suggested that O’Shea’s cliché-filled, often sensational prose may have inspired the episode’s
style (175).
5. R. F. Foster notes: “A letter from her daughter Norah to Henry Harrison delicately hinted
at a taste for the bottle” (207).
6. O’Shea served as an intermediary between Gladstone and Parnell from 1882 until 1886,
carrying messages from one to the other and helping to facilitate negotiations between the
British prime minister and the Irish delegation leader (O’Shea 1: 256–58).
7. Evidently O’Shea was prompted to publish her memoir, which she had intended to do
posthumously, when one of Parnell’s former colleagues, William O’Brien, alleged in the Cork
Free Press in September 1913 that if Parnell had testified at the divorce trial, he would have
shown himself to be “rather the victim than the destroyer of a happy home” (qtd. in Foster
199).
8. Subordinated in most discussions of style in “Eumaeus” are the implicit connections be-
tween language and identity: Budgen notes the episode’s “tired” language (255), which Gilbert
takes as a symptom of Bloom’s exhaustion (360); by contrast, Kenner continues the associa-
tion of the style with Bloom’s own but claims, “tired it is not” (130). Leckie has produced the
most cohesive reading of the episode’s style and its fascination with adultery; she argues that
it mimics divorce court journalism, and points out that the episode’s “tripartite obsession with
boats, adultery, and questions of identity” mirrors the tripartite English court system, which
arbitrarily linked admiralty court, divorce court, and probate court (the settlement of wills
“often hinged on disputed questions of identity,” she notes) (733–34).
9. For more on the intersections of Irish masculinity and nationalism, see my chapter “‘Do
you call that a man?’ The Discourse of Anxious Masculinity in Ulysses” in Joyce and the Victo-
rians.
10. Certainly, given the hallucinatory evidence in “Circe,” Bloom is also registering un-
conscious parallels here between himself and William O’Shea, and Parnell and Blazes Boylan,
Molly’s lover.
11. Senn also points out this association, and notes with interest that O’Shea’s information
itself is unreliable, produced (as she admits) from another printed source (an appropriately
Eumaean gesture). For his part, however, Joyce creates an actual, if fictional, eyewitness to the
event (174).
12. “Monologue” and “soliloquy” had long been the conventional but unanalyzed descrip-
tors of Molly’s voice, but in 1994, Cheryl Herr, Kimberly Devlin, and Susan Bazargan pointed
out the performative and multivocal nature of Molly’s text. Herr notes that it resembles a theat-
rical performance; Devlin suggests that Molly impersonates conventions of femininity in order
to parody, expose, and flout them; Bazargan recharacterizes Molly’s narrative from monologue
to colonized dialogic, pointing to its extended engagement with competing voices.
13. Such a possibility also helps to explain certain typographic curiosities of the episode,
places in which the conventions of writing, versus those of recitation, seem to take prece-
dence. Consider, for instance, the truncated, abbreviated address Molly supplies for Gardner,
“Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt” (U 18.389) and the strikeouts of a second
“h” in “sympathy” and an extra “w” in “nephew.” “I always make that mistake” says Molly (U
18.730).
14. Daughter of an Irishman who served in the British army, Molly recounts that she sang
 94 Tracey Teets Schwarze

Kipling’s jingoist ballad, “the absentminded beggar,” while “wearing a brooch for Lord Roberts”
at her last outing at St. Teresa’s hall, more than a year ago (U 18.377–79). I assume this is why
her current concert will be held in Belfast, where she might be better received.
15. Her son Gerald O’Shea’s reputed “pugilistic” editing on behalf of his father’s reputation
(Foster 203) might explain the fissure in how Katharine presents William O’Shea’s knowledge
of the affair, but it does not illuminate other rifts in her narrative, especially those that emerge
as she reports her own and then Parnell’s responses to her public denigration.
16. Not insignificantly, Katharine O’Shea gave birth to three daughters, Sophie (1882), Clare
(1883), and Katie (1884), all fathered by Parnell. She mentions only one—Sophie Claude, who
died shortly after birth—in her memoir. William O’Shea likewise omits these difficult-to-ex-
plain daughters in his courtroom testimony.
17. Of Katharine O’Shea’s six children, Gerald (b. 1870), Norah (b. 1873), and Carmen (b.
1874) were William’s.

Works Cited
Bazargan, Susan. “Mapping Gibraltar: Colonialism, Time and Narrative in ‘Penelope.’” R.
Pearce 119–38.
Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses.” London: Oxford University Press,
1972.
Callaghan, Mary Rose. “Kitty O’Shea”: A Life of Katharine Parnell. London: Pandora Press,
1989.
Davitt, Michael. The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland or the Story of the Land League Revolution.
London: Harper and Brothers, 1904.
Devlin, Kimberly J. “Pretending in ‘Penelope’: Masquerade, Mimicry, and Molly Bloom.” R.
Pearce 80–102.
Devlin, Kimberly J., and Marilyn Reizbaum, eds. “Ulysses” Engendered Perspectives: Eighteen
New Essays on the Episodes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
Foster, R. F. “Love, Politics, and Textual Corruption: Mrs. O’Shea’s Parnell.” High and Low
Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889–1939. Ed. Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 197–211.
Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” New York: Vintage-Random, 1955.
Gillespie, Michael Patrick. James Joyce’s Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Austin: Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1986.
Herr, Cheryl. “‘Penelope’ as Period Piece.” R. Pearce 63–79.
“Ireland.” The Times 5 Nov. 1891: 5.
Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Leckie, Barbara. “The Simple Case of Adultery.” James Joyce Quarterly 40.4 (2003): 729–52.
Norris, Margot. Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2003.
O’Shea, Katharine (Mrs. Charles Stewart Parnell). Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and
Political Life. 2 vols. New York: George H. Doran, 1914.
“O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell.” The Times 17 Nov. 1890.
 Inventing Identity in Ulysses: “Kitty” O’Shea, Memoir, and Molly Bloom 95

“O’Shea v. O’Shea and Parnell.” The Times 18 Nov. 1890: 13–14.

Pearce, Donald R. “‘My Dead King!’ The Dinner Quarrel in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.” Mod-
ern Language Notes 66.4 (1951): 249–51.
Pearce, Richard, ed. Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Reizbaum, Marilyn. “When the Saints Come Marching In: Redeeming ‘Cyclops.’” Devlin and
Reizbaum 167–84.
Schwarze, Tracey Teets. Joyce and the Victorians. Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2002.
Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Senn, Fritz. “Trivia Ulysseana IV: ‘The Kitty O’Shea Touch.’” James Joyce Quarterly 19.2 (1982):
173–76.
Spoo, Robert. “Genders of History in ‘Nestor.’” Devlin and Reizbaum 20–29.
Vanity Fair 22 Nov. 1890: 438.
 6

Barracks and Brothels

Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses

Greg Winston

I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to do, you know, and the young
man run up behind me. But I’m faithful to the man that’s treating me though I’m only
a shilling whore.
Ulysses 15.4381–83

The processes of military manpower acquisition are gendered processes. . . . Ignore

gender—the social constructions of “femininity” and “masculinity” and the relations
between them—and it becomes impossible adequately to explain how military forces
have managed to capture and control so much of society’s imagination and resources.
Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives

In her study of culturally and historically diverse militarized settings, feminist

historian Cynthia Enloe examines numerous roles women assume for their
social and economic survival. Prominent among these is the role of prostitute.
Ranging from medieval Europe to late-twentieth-century Thailand, Enloe’s
work constantly underscores the socioeconomic interdependency of soldiers
and prostitutes. Her argument focuses closely on how military authorities fre-
quently manipulate ideologies and economies of sexuality to serve their pur-
poses of troop recruitment and retention. Women who work in the sexual
commerce surrounding bases of military operations are therefore central to
building and maintaining the ranks of volunteer armed forces.
Like Enloe’s historiography, James Joyce’s fiction observes a significant and
essential connection between male warriors and female camp followers. The
visit to a brothel by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
hints briefly at the interrelation of the military and sexual workforces, which ef-
fectively subverts or at least redirects the power arrangements in male-female,
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 97

English-Irish, and soldier-civilian relations. Joyce’s portrayal of a day in the

life of Dublin in June 1904 revisits this connection in still greater depth, often
defining the colonial city as a place in which men as sexual competitors and
women as sexualized commodities are further complicated amid the tangled
nets of social value and territorial controversy that result from a military oc-
cupation. As rival to native men and purchaser of native women, the occupier
represents a dual threat, what Sheldon Brivic describes as “an extension of the
general historical principle that the conqueror has a right to the women of
the conquered, with men’s competition deciding women’s fates” (48). This is
indeed the case for Cissy Caffrey, in her metamorphosis from seaside nanny
to Nighttown whore, and for the unnamed “nightwalker” Bloom and Stephen
encounter during her nocturnal reconnaissance beside the cabman’s shelter.
Both women are conscripted to serve an economy of male sexual desire that
depends upon the militarization of women’s lives.
When reading Ulysses with an eye to its sexual and martial economies, it
helps to consider how June 1904 belonged in its own right to an era whose
social order and economic opportunity were to a great extent shaped by ex-
pectation of, and preparation for, military action. If 1904 did not include major
armed engagement for British imperialism or Irish nationalism, the year still
bore witness to the terms of a dominant, escalating militarism throughout the
United Kingdom and much of Europe. As during the cold war some five de-
cades later, or the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” a century hence, the
sheer anticipation and anxiety over global conflict did much to create its own
enveloping ideology and local conditions, some intended, others incidental.
For both civilian and red-coated residents, life in an occupied city generated a
unique set of socioeconomic circumstances that Joyce records in his fictional
accounts of Dublin. Arguably, those most affected were the soldiers who found
themselves stationed there and the local women left with limited options for
economic survival.

In the Company of Men

Near the close of Ulysses’ “Circe” episode, Cissy Caffrey keeps time with Pri-
vates Compton and Carr in a scene that rewrites her minding (in “Nausicaa”) of
her volatile twin brothers, Tommy and Jacky, whose own apparel (“sailor suits
with caps to match and the name H.M.S. Belleisle printed on both” [U 13.13–
14]) and argument about Martello-tower methods of sandcastle construction
prefigure the row of British regulars. As Cissy explains in her alibi during the
 98 Greg Winston

mock-inquest into the assault on Stephen Dedalus, she was “in company” with
the soldiers. From the caregiving role of older sister she resurfaces in Bloom’s
subconscious fantasy to perform domestic service of another sort. Exchanging
private intimacy for private pay, she assumes the new role of prostitute and
with it the camaraderie and jargon of the barracks. As “only a shilling whore,”
even her bargain price echoes the famous king’s shilling earned by nineteenth-
century Royal Army recruits. Such military punning resituates her character
and, in so doing, extends a parallel of sexual and armed services seen across
Joyce’s writing.
The night after Bloomsday is just one more link in a discursive chain that
illustrates the interdependent economies of prostitution and militarism. Mark
Osteen sees in Cissy’s association with Compton and Carr “a grouping that
implies the collaboration of political and economic exploitation: Britain has
prostituted the Irish economy by limiting employment and industry, enforcing
this oppression with military power” (349). I would go even further, recog-
nizing that Cissy, not to mention the entire Dublin economy, exists primar-
ily to serve the soldiers of the “brutish empire” (U 15.4569–70). The hallmark
of militarism is that all areas of social and economic life evolve to serve the
military machinery of the state; the notion of armed service to the country is
replaced by its corrupt inversion: the compelling sense that citizens exist pri-
marily to service the armed forces. Cissy’s metamorphosis into shilling whore
thus shows a troublesome trend.
The connection of the martial and sexual economies in Joyce derives pri-
marily from the heightened sense of militarism that pervaded Dublin life prior
to the Great War. While notable studies by James Fairhall and Robert Spoo
already consider Joyce’s work in the context of World War I, the interest here
is less with actual armed conflict than with Joyce’s depiction of the social and
ideological consequences of constant military preparation and occupation, to
the extent that other activities of society are relegated to serving the military
aims of the state. Militarism in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland was a primary
support of British imperialism. The 1901 British census of Ireland recorded
“21,000 troops and officers, nearly 4,000 militiamen and yeomanry, and over
2,000 members of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines” (qtd. in Fitzpatrick 381).
With such formidable troop numbers, one was hard-pressed not to witness
some display of British force in Ireland on a daily basis. As David Fitzpatrick
explains, “The presence of these forces in more than eighty barracks, with their
parades, drills and ceremonies, provided Ireland with reiterated reminders of
the military presence and power of the state” (381–82). In Dublin that power
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 99

and presence announced themselves in rather systematic spatial terms. Herbert

Gorman describes “swaggering British soldiers” as a constant in the Dublin of
Joyce’s youth (39). These troops had their counterparts in the gathering mili-
tia and numerous volunteer secret armies of the Irish republican movement,
which played a competing role for manpower and political support while they
sought to militarize the population for nationalist purposes. But the social and
economic impacts of the nationalist armies in 1904, though burgeoning, re-
mained slight in comparison to those of colonial forces on Irish soil.
The residential arrangement of the British military in Ireland’s largest city
had a symbolic as well as functional role, with soldiers barracked at strategic
locations so as to encircle and bisect the entire city. On the north side of Dub-
lin, in Phoenix Park, were the Magazine Fort and Marlborough (Royal) Bar-
racks. Closer to the city center were the Aldborough Barracks in Portland Row,
opened in 1853 as the central supply depot for all troops stationed in Dublin.
South of the river, the Richmond, Wellington, Portobello, and Beggars Bush
barracks, from west to east, mirrored the north-side configuration to complete
the engirding pattern. A number of these barracks are given direct mention or
oblique reference in Joyce’s fiction. For example, the Pigeon House, the boys’
failed destination in “An Encounter,” was for most of the nineteenth century
a naval fort and barracks controlling the mouth of the Liffey and gateway to
Dublin harbor; and in “Counterparts” the beleaguered central character Far-
rington finds himself, in one of his darker moments and as precursor to his
own militant patriarchy, near his house on Shelbourne Road “in the shadow of
the wall of the barracks” (Dubliners 93). The somber location gives the reader
cause to consider if the military presence does not have more than a little to do
with the violent domestic scene with which the story concludes.
The abundant dispersion of troops, when combined with high unemploy-
ment rates for young women, solidified the rise of prostitution in the nine-
teenth-century Dublin economy. Unlike Belfast to the north, Dublin had not
developed a strong industrial base; most employment in some way served the
British civil and military administration headquartered there. The vast major-
ity of jobs for women were in the service sector, mainly hotels, restaurants,
and private residences. The large number of female emigrants who poured
into Dublin to escape the Famine in the countryside only added to an employ-
ers’ market, forcing many young women to seek other ways to earn a living.
Prostitution became the chief source of income. Bonnie Kime Scott notes how
“Brothels flourished, as Ulysses testifies, furnishing outlets for men who could
 100 Greg Winston

not satisfy themselves with angels and income for single, ineligible women,
who needed an independent wage for survival” (14).
The high-water mark for Dublin prostitution came in 1845 with 419 brothels
in the city; the number declined in the post-Famine decades but still averaged
around 80 through the turn of the century (Luddy 57). In 1871 the anti-prosti-
tution advocate William Logan was appalled at the vast number of nightwalk-
ers in the city: “In a back-street in a neighborhood of the barracks there were, it
was said, some 200 of those wretched girls” (qtd. in Fagan 11). Not surprisingly,
Logan saw the most solicitation occurring within close proximity of military
installations, whose location by this time corresponded rather predictably with
the red-light districts of Dublin. Though he does not specify the name, there
is every reason to believe Logan was describing the most famous of these, the
neighborhood known as Monto.
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the focal point of the Dub-
lin sex industry was the district bounded by Mecklenburgh Street Lower (re-
named Tyrone Street and later Railroad Street), Lower Gardiner, and Mont-
gomery (now Foley) streets. It came to be called Monto, an abbreviation for
Montgomery Street, but was also known as “The Kips,” “The Digs,” and “The
Village.” Another variant, “Nighttown,” was coined by journalists and came to
be preferred by Joyce, whose characters in Ulysses access the area from Mabbot
Street, near Amiens Street (now Connolly) Station. Readily accessible from all
the north-side barracks, Monto certainly thrived as a nighttime destination
for the rank-and-file soldier. Additional clients included the military officer
class, sailors, merchants, businessmen, and members of the Anglo-Irish gentry.
Police were known to visit, in occasional vice raids, but more often on illegal
monetary shakedowns that were frequently combined with sexual recreation.
An elaborate system of tunnels, some rediscovered during 1980s public works
projects on Gardiner Street, provided quick escape from several brothels in the
event of a police raid. The same subterranean network was used by the rebels
of Easter Week for transporting weapons, personnel, and information to and
from the city center, a fact that suggests the spatial duality of “Nighttown” with
regard to sexual economy and military reconnaissance.
The wide variety of Monto brothels catered to the different social strata of
the clientele. Streetwalkers carried on a brisk outdoor trade in casual sexual
favors, while basic brothels offered modest rooms and beds for those willing
to spend a little more. The best-maintained and priciest establishments, called
“flash houses,” were run by madams of considerable influence. These attracted
the highest class of customer, including King Edward VII during a 1904 royal
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 101

visit, for an evening entertainment that moved from musical lounges to private
boudoirs. Among the top tier of flash houses, Bella Cohen’s on Mecklenburgh
Street Lower became the setting for “Circe.” Joyce would have even found en-
tries for Cohen and several other notable madams in his frequent sourcebook
for Dublin commercial and residential listings, Thom’s Directory. He also likely
experienced some of these establishments firsthand during his own Monto
sojourns between 1898 and 1904.
Lesser red-light districts grew up in close proximity to the Magazine Fort
and Marlborough Barracks, at the southern edge of Phoenix Park along Co-
nyngham Street. Thus in Finnegans Wake Joyce lends the name Lili Coning-
hams to a streetwalker known for turning her tricks and conning the hams
(men) of that neighborhood. South of the Liffey, French Street and its environs
were home to a number of successful houses, all within close range of the
Portobello and Wellington barracks. (It was later renamed Mercer Street in an
unsuccessful bid to confuse and discourage repeat customers.) Indeed, if not
for the sizable population of “garricksons” (FW 55.35), the bordellos of Monto
and these smaller districts could never have thrived in such volume or dura-
tion.
In some parts of the country prostitutes systematically rotated between mil-
itary depots; in others they joined together in semipermanent encampments
quite literally in the shadow of military bases, in a sort of unofficial feminine
parallel to the sanctioned masculine camaraderie just beyond the wall. Testi-
fying before the 1881 Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases Acts, one
witness noted prostitutes “always moving about from Fermoy to Kinsale, and
the garrison towns . . . and sleeping under forts, and behind the barracks”
(qtd. in Luddy 59). One renowned group composed of both prostitutes and
common-law wives was nicknamed the Wrens of the Curragh after establish-
ing their camp outside Ireland’s largest army barracks some thirty miles west
of Dublin (Luddy 60). Such social juxtaposition saw female camp followers in
somewhat contradictory roles—one maternal, family-centered, and financially
dependent, the other sexually unabashed, socially unfettered, and financially
independent. In this regard, the Wrens share something in common with Cissy
Caffrey, who in her two incarnations (in “Nausicaa” [U 13.13–77] and in “Circe”
[U 15.41–72, 4380–4405]) represents both woman’s sanctioned place as care-
giver within the patriarchal family and her morally suspect role as whore, pos-
ing a grave threat to traditional monogamy and economic dependence. If by
today’s standards this might seem a favorable reading of the unenviable posi-
tion of sex worker, Joyce for one saw little to distinguish that occupation from
 102 Greg Winston

the role of wife, observing in Stephen Hero that “A woman’s body is a corporal
asset of the State: if she traffics with it she must sell it either as a harlot or as a
married woman or as a working celibate or as a mistress” (SH 202). For all the
limitations on both aspects of her character, Cissy is still the hand that rocks
the cradle and a minor governess in Bloom’s sexual subconscious.
Once constructed, barracks remained obvious, fixed reminders of the mili-
tary presence; brothels, on the other hand, were often covert and fluctuating
establishments, springing up wherever conditions were optimal, and shrinking
into the background whenever the local economy or municipal policy grew
less hospitable. The return of regiments to Dublin following the Boer War led
to overcrowded conditions in several barracks and the need to billet soldiers in
nearby lodging houses, where they lived in close proximity to women. In many
neighborhoods faced with mounting economic pressures and declining op-
portunities, the slippery transition from lodging house to brothel was neither
long nor complicated (Fagan 10), a point well illustrated by the Dubliners story
“The Boarding House.” The result was a de facto elision of barracks and broth-
els into a kind of dual-purpose urban space intermingling male and female,
soldier and prostitute, colonizer and colonized. In such close quarters, the in-
terpersonal politics of occupation were most immediately felt and intimately
realized. But any conceptual similarities quickly dissolve in a comparison of
the material realities in the lives of the two groups, one tended to by the state,
the other well exploited (but for the most part ignored) by official policy. As
one medical officer observed in the Hardwicke Fever Hospital Report of 1818,
“the pay of the soldier is ample, he is well clothed, well fed, well lodged, and
well looked after, and all his wants in health as well as in sickness are provided
for. Not so the women of the town” (qtd. in Prunty 33).
Examining the continuum from domestic to sexual servitude, and also the
odd symbiosis of soldiers and sex workers, Joyce’s fiction develops its own
inquiry of the complex historical link between barracks and brothels. While
some studies treat the topic of prostitution in Joyce, none concentrates primar-
ily on the relation of soldier to streetwalker. Nor does any trace the constant
thread of this subject that extends backwards and forwards from “Circe.” The
rest of this essay attempts just that, by reconsidering some of the relevant but
overlooked details in Joyce’s early fiction before returning to Ulysses. At the
confluence of the two industries, Bella Cohen’s becomes a meaningful and dy-
namic space for examining issues of gender and sexual identity, politics and
power, occupation and surrender. In the economic and ideological transac-
tions of soldiers and sex workers, the Bloomsday visit to Nighttown depicts the
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 103

combination of forces at work behind a mutually exploitative system of illusory

power.

Photographic Memory
Joyce first explores the link of private and prostitute in A Portrait of the Art-
ist as A Young Man, where it emerges in Stephen’s combined memory and
anticipation of a “gloomy secret night” in the red-light district (Portrait 96).
He pictures the “squalid quarter of the brothels,” where his feet will lead him
with a will of their own back through dark streets of sexual desire (Portrait 96).
He sees the gas lamps being lit and envisions the whores emerging from the
houses in preparation for another night’s trade. At last his senses recall various
minutiae from inside the brothel, concluding with the visual: “his eyes, a ring
of porter froth on a clothless table or a photograph of two soldiers standing to
attention or a gaudy playbill; his ears, the drawling jargon of greeting” (Portrait
96–97).
It is on the second of these details, the soldiers’ photograph, that I will ini-
tially focus. While the function of photography in the semiotics and struc-
ture of Joyce’s writing has received recent attention, the content and context
of this particular picture seem altogether overlooked by analyses of Portrait.
The photograph seems mundane enough, another of Joyce’s realistic brush-
strokes and part of the expected decor of the location. Yet, it also seems to say
more owing to its surroundings and the limited omniscient perspective of the
narrative. “Standing to attention” suggests not simply upright infantry but the
double entendre of phallic readiness, a meaning perhaps only fully realized in
its display on a brothel wall. If in other locales—say, a post-office billboard or
recruiting station door—pictures of soldiers might just be soldiers, here they
are sexualized objects and sexual clientele. Awaiting their turn, the privates
see themselves in the pinup on the wall, reinforcing their regular status and
occupation—of the brothel and the women’s bodies, of the city and the coun-
try.
The other determining context of the soldiers’ photograph is of course Ste-
phen’s own sexuality. His thoughts select and frame the entire remembered
scene as he counts the soldiers’ photograph among a cluster of images that
“wounded or shamed” his senses: the melodramatic word choice not only
speaks to Stephen’s inner conflict about his liaisons with hookers but also
evinces two probable outcomes for the soldier in combat: the glory of return-
ing wounded from battle or the public humiliation of returning unscathed.
 104 Greg Winston

Prior to announcing the photograph, the passage equates other terms of battle-
field engagement with sexual encounter. For example, the pursuit of prostitutes
is conflated with the heightened tensions surrounding military patrol and sur-
prise ambush: Stephen sees himself “waiting for a sudden movement of his
own will or a sudden call to his sinloving soul” (Portrait 96). Like a soldier
poised for combat, he stands aloof from conscious thought, merely awaiting
instinctive reaction from himself or official order from his commander. The
description renders ambiguous the question of whether the greater power re-
sides with the attacker or the target that lures him. Still another phrasing—“As
he prowled in quest of that call” (Portrait 96)—combines the base language of
sexual/military predation (“prowled”) with the high-minded tones of courtly
love and chivalric honor in the field (“in quest of that call”). In this manner,
the textual as well as the spatial surroundings of the photograph alert us to a
host of associations and, in so doing, reinforce a connection between armed
conflict and sexual commerce. In Stephen’s Nighttown and Joyce’s Europe, the
two are inextricably and dangerously linked.
These are some possible readings of the content and context of the photo-
graph, but what might be said of its pretext? Who put the picture there in the
first place, and why? Perhaps the house madam or one of her employees, in a
gesture of genuine admiration or clever advertisement? Or a soldier/customer
in a boastful statement of conquest? Neither confirming nor denying such pos-
sible explanations, the narrative simply makes room for speculation. Thus, the
photograph serves as a dynamic interpretive space, another of Joyce’s reso-
nant lacunae or meaningful “(w)holes” that Richard Pearce describes. The one
thing we do know in most certain narrative terms is that Joyce’s writing (and
Stephen’s perspective) puts up the photo for our interpretation. What emerges
from its placement is a uniform semiotics that couples the British occupying
force with the Dublin skin trade.

Disgraced Irish Capital

In the opening of “Lotus-Eaters,” Bloom, like Stephen, notices a posted mili-
tary image, also in a context of illicit sexual preoccupation. Eagerly antici-
pating a note from typist Martha Clifford, he spies in the Westland Row Post
Office a “recruiting poster with soldiers of all arms on parade” (U 5.56–57).
It moves him to think not along politico-military lines but in personal and
sexual terms: “He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket, reviewing again
the soldiers on parade. Where’s old Tweedy’s regiment? Castoff soldier. There:
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 105

bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he’s a grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is:
royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats. Too showy. That must be why the women go
after them. Uniform. Easier to enlist and drill” (U 5.65–69). In his study of Brit-
ish recruiting posters in Ireland, Mark Wollaeger sees in this passage Bloom’s
“insight into uniforms as a technique of recruitment and social control” (97).
But Bloom’s critical reading of the poster goes even further in that it both
acknowledges and undermines the sexual appeal of the uniform. By trying to
locate his father-in-law among the ranks, he in essence seeks his lost connec-
tion with Molly in her ceaseless infatuation with military men.
Like Stephen’s photograph, the recruiting poster indicates how militarist
ideology can become purposefully and dangerously entangled with male sexu-
al identity. But rather than inspiring him to enlist and become one of its showy
figures, the poster images inspire feelings of inadequacy in the civilian Bloom.
Feeling privately outmanned, he seeks refuge in the rhetoric of the aforemen-
tioned public debate: “Maud Gonne’s letter about taking them off O’Connell
street at night: disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith’s paper is on the same tack
now: an army rotten with venereal disease: overseas or halfseasover empire.
Half baked they look: hypnotised like. Eyes front. Mark time” (U 5.69–73).
He further undercuts the soldiers’ potency by allusion to the syphilis epi-
demic, an ongoing problem in Dublin and other garrison towns. Policies of
regulation and encouragement to the Irish sexual economy were as much a part
of the British army as battle plans and supply lines. Bloom’s thoughts about the
public health risks of the standing army echo a concern expressed by Oliver St.
John Gogarty in “Ugly England,” a series of three articles for “Griffith’s paper”
(the United Irishman) in the fall of 1906. The first of these declaims the hypoc-
risy of Sludge (a nickname for the average Englishman), who “cries out again at
the godlessness of the foreign Governments regarding their treatment of those
women who associate with their soldiers.” In language that suggests a definite
source for Joyce/Bloom, Gogarty asserts the British army to be “rottener and
more immoral than any or all of the armies in Europe put together” (3). For
evidence he highlights the sexual behavior of troops stationed in India, where
women are held captive in a state of sexual slavery worse than a harem and
“debauched at the good pleasure of the Army, a body of men who, as their own
statistics show, are already more than half leprous from venereal excess” (3). It
is difficult to read such accusations of hypocrisy without recalling that Gogarty
himself was a frequent visitor to Nighttown during his medical student days.
Writing as a doctor and married Irishman with an anti-British agenda, “O.G.”
assumes his own safe distance, even if his reinvention as Buck Mulligan—not
 106 Greg Winston

to mention his own memoir, mischievously titled Tumbling in the Hay—would

ensure his eternal association with the flash houses of Monto.
After reading Gogarty’s article, Joyce too seemed intent on making the issue
a matter for further public discussion. It may have already become a pressing
private concern if, as some suggest, Joyce himself contracted syphilis during a
1903 or 1904 visit to Monto. At any rate, he forwarded the editorial to Stanis-
laus on 24 September, followed with a letter saying, “I hope you will appreciate
the full flavour. The part about the chummies is particularly rich” (Letters II
164). The topic apparently remained on Joyce’s mind when he wrote his brother
ten days later, “I wish some unkind person would publish a book about the
venereal condition of the Irish; since they pride themselves so much on their
immunity. It must be rather worse than England, I think. I know very little of
the subject but it seems to me to be a disease like any other disease, caused
by anti-hygienic conditions. I don’t see where the judgement of God comes
into it nor do I see what the word ‘excess’ means in this connection” (Letters
II 170–71). To some extent, in Ulysses, Joyce did go on to write that book. The
theme of sexually transmitted disease, especially syphilis, recurs throughout
the novel, from private thoughts to bawdy jokes. It represents a matter of both
personal humiliation (in the case of Mr. Breen) and national security. Syphilis
becomes an equal threat to British and Irish, soldier and whore, occupier and
occupied. Thus in “Cyclops” when Bloom comes to the defense of the Nelson
policy, certain rights of British colonies, and civilization, there comes the Citi-
zen’s rejoinder: “Their syphilisation, you mean . . . sons of whores’ gets! No
music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. The only civilization
they have they stole from us” (U 12.1197–1200). To ardent Irish nationalists,
syphilis and other maladies of the brothels could prove more effective than
armed uprising at ousting the occupying force. The implication is that prosti-
tution might play an unexpected role in the military liberation of the country:
prostitutes in a sense become soldiers in a silent battle, armed with their own
biological weaponry.
British authorities knew as much and responded to the crisis with the pas-
sage of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864–69, under which all women
suspected of prostitution were subject to medical examination. Any woman
discovered to have a sexually transmitted disease could be held for as long as
nine months in a city Lock Hospital and upon release had to be licensed with
the police as a prostitute. In reference to the nightwalker plying her trade close
to the cabman’s shelter, Bloom comments to Stephen, “It beats me . . . medi-
cally I am speaking, how a wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 107

reeking with disease can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his
sober senses, if he values his health in the least . . .” (U 16.728–31). By the time
of Bloom’s remark the direct regulation of prostitution had ceased following
repeal of the acts under mounting public pressure. Moreover, a calculated
military policy continued to rely on and encourage the Dublin red-light dis-
trict in order to appeal to young, single men and fill regimental ranks.
To this end, in the spring of 1904 British authorities were permitting troops
stationed in Dublin to spend free evening hours away from the barracks. The
policy was part of a wider recruitment effort during the final stages of the
Boer War, when forces had become overextended across the empire. Scores
of young regulars roamed Dublin city center with the dangerous mixture of
money in their pockets and time on their hands. Such a typical roving band
moves through Finnegans Wake: “Tap and pat and tapatagain, (fire firstshot,
Missiers the Refuseleers! Peingpeong! For saxonlootie!) three tommix, sol-
diers free, cockaleak and cappapee, of the Coldstream. Guards were walking,
in (pardonnez-leur, je vous en prie, eh?) Montgomery Street” (FW 58.23–26).
Whatever their regiment, whether Coldstream Guards or Royal Fusiliers, this
raucous band will not “refuse a leer” at any woman as they navigate the Monto.
They are “three tommix”—that is, three Tommies, slang for British infantry—
but also “free to mix” with women of the town, all the more so owing to the ex-
tended curfews and relaxed off-barracks restrictions that, as mentioned, were
now standard operating procedure in the post–Boer War army. Like so many
roving soldiers, they also exhibit some of the sure and fluid signs (“cockaleak
and cappapee”) of sexually transmitted diseases.
What Joyce expresses in the multiplicity of wordplay was voiced more di-
rectly and deliberately in June 1904 through open letters and newspaper edito-
rials that regarded the situation as, in the very least, creating a public nuisance
and, at worst, representing a public health risk that could rival or even surpass
that which had inspired the Contagious Diseases Acts several decades earlier.
A column in the United Irishman of 11 June complains how “in the heart of the
city at night-time conduct has been openly carried on by the British soldiery
and the women who consort with them that could not be witnessed in the
streets of any other city in the world” (“Dublin Corporation” 5). One Dublin
Corporation member rated the “immorality and indecency” along Westmore-
land and O’Connell streets as worse than anything he had seen in Paris, Port
Said, Cairo, or Bombay. Yet, the columnist makes the issue more about national
sovereignty than public decency, noting how, “Under the British flag, in the
 108 Greg Winston

twentieth century, the Corporation of Dublin has not power even to regulate
the traffic in the streets” (“Dublin Corporation” 5).
While free off-base evenings for all recruits might have expanded the econ-
omy of prostitution, opponents like the United Irishman saw British military
authority as pandering Dublin itself (“the streets of the capital”) to men in Brit-
ish uniform, with debauchery and sexual conquest serving as metaphors of the
city’s colonized status. The column concludes with a firmly voiced doubt that
any Tory member of the Corporation who opposed measures to remedy the
situation and has a daughter “would attempt to walk with her along the west
side of O’Connell-street on a Sunday evening” (“Dublin Corporation” 5).
One remarkable feature of the United Irishman editorial is its ability to turn
a blind eye to the issue of prostitution and the condition of those engaged in
it. Control of the streets is of primary political and strategic concern, while
the well-being of the women, physical and moral, goes unmentioned. Young
women are only referred to as daughters to be protected from the danger of
free-roaming soldiers or those who “consort” with such soldiers; the commen-
tator stops short of discussing the economic role in which women find them-
selves catering to the military. By contrast, during the sobering conversation
of “Eumaeus,” the arrival of the streetwalker in the black straw hat elicits a
guilt-ridden sympathy from Bloom: “Unfortunate creature! Of course I sup-
pose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition. Still no matter what
the cause is from . . .” (U 16.731–33). If Bloom is vague about just who “some
man” might be, that is due to the fact that it is he: he was once her customer
(“Yes, it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane” [U 11.1253–54]) and has already
tried to avoid her once earlier in the day outside the Ormond Hotel bar. Mean-
while, the striking metaphor of surveillance used to describe the anonymous
nighttwalker announces another association. She is said to be “palpably recon-
noitering” (U 16.705) beside the cabman’s shelter; much like Cissy Caffrey, she
resembles the actions and assumes the mien of the militarized culture and
military men that constantly occupy her body and her country. In what Kath-
erine Mullin calls “a disquieting gaze of retaliatory female spectatorship” (191),
the streetwalker stares straight into the masculine scene. If only for reasons
of social and economic survival, she has come to imitate and even intimidate
those who buy her services.
In their commercialized sexual roles, both the unnamed streetwalker and
Cissy Caffrey challenge contemporary representations of the Irish female. They
are Dublin women with economic agency and sexual freedom, and as such they
function as antitypes to Cathleen ni Houlihan, the feminine personification of
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 109

Ireland awaiting her male suitor and savior, that was so frequently touted by
the core writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance. (The decrepit milkwoman
of “Telemachus” represents Joyce’s earlier invocation and deflation of this fe-
male archetype.) In reply to Bloom’s rather paranoid and paternalistic call for
invasive state regulation of prostitutes, Stephen offers an alternative view (that
echoes his prior rumination in Stephen Hero) stressing the woman’s fundamen-
tal mercantilism: “In this country people sell much more than she ever had and
do a roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not the power to
buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap” (U 16.737–
38). Within Ulysses, the language harkens back to his earlier retort against Mr.
Deasy’s anti-Semitism, while at the same time undoing the argument Bloom
has proposed for essentially reenacting the Contagious Diseases Acts of three
decades before. Clair Wills regards the prostitute in Joyce’s colonial city as be-
ing “a sign of both imperial domination (in her link with the barracks) and,
through her association with venereal disease, the corruption of that political/
military system” (90). This exchange of Bloom and Stephen illustrates her op-
portunity for exploitation by both adherents and opponents of that system.
To the republican mind-set, women serve as the feminized personification of
Ireland-as-victim, a metaphor Stephen seeks to elude in his characterization
of the nightwalker; to British command, Dublin women potentially represent
either a strategic threat or enabling accomplice to national defense, a power-
ful role that Bloom, distracted and distressed by his own potential exposure,
refuses to comprehend. In such depictions of prostitution and its effects, Joyce
critiques the possibility of pandering Irish womanhood, whether physically or
symbolically, to either militant nationalism or military imperialism.
In Joyce’s Dublin, whether soldiers’ nightly presence on the street amounts
to heightened surveillance or increased solicitation remains unclear, as evi-
denced by Bloom’s appropriation of the ambiguous expression “disgrace to our
Irish capital” (U 5.70) from Arthur Griffith’s newspaper. The phrase points,
on the one hand, to the moral hazards of military or sexual submission (or
both), and on the other, to the physical, political city (i.e., Dublin as capital
of Ireland) or the human capital that nightly walks its streets (or both). Even
if the debate were seemingly about two very different kinds of streetwalking,
Bloom’s distillation invites reading their precise connection within the ironic
vagary of euphemism. Thus, certain potency resides not simply with armed
forces patrolling for sexual opportunity but in the merger of the two effected
through the guise of imprecise language. Much like the architectural elision of
barrack and brothel in Monto and the other red-light districts, this linguistic
 110 Greg Winston

merger establishes in Ulysses a dynamic ideological space in which to examine

the interplay and interdependency of Edwardian Dublin’s sexual and military
economies. It is in that space that Joyce constructs the combative brothel of
“Circe.”

Setting Things Rite

During the altercation with soldiers at Bella Cohen’s, the intercourse of martial
power and sexual commerce undergoes a fascinating re-visioning. This occurs
when the stage directions amplify the moment of Stephen’s assault by Private
Carr into an epic battle scene: “Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past.
Heavy Gatling guns boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artil-
lery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores
screech. Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on cuirasses.
Thieves rob the slain. . . .” (U 15.4661–65). A gathering host of screaming war
birds adds Irish mythic connotations while the darkened midnight sun lends
a biblical dimension (of the battle of Jericho) to the scene. In the warriors
sprouted from dragons’ teeth, the symbolic roots of civil-military strife in an-
cient Thebes are notably present, as they “exchange in amity the pass of knights
of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabers” (U 15.4681–82). All of this co-
incides with a continuous female entourage of diverse backgrounds and identi-
ties, some menacing, others vulnerable. Some become participants in armed
struggle, others its innocent bystanders or potential victims: the screeching
whores are followed by flying witches, half-undressed society ladies, and fan-
cily dressed factory lasses who “toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs” (U 15.4677),
a corrupted revision of the lyric earlier performed in “Wandering Rocks” by
the highland troops of the viceregal cavalcade (U 10.1251–57).
While the initial cause of trouble is Cissy Caffrey’s jostling by Stephen, the
social miscue escalates to more serious internecine strife. Dueling Irish states-
men from several eras establish a dialectic of physical force and constitutional
nationalism: “Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O’Brien against Daniel
O’Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M’Carthy against Parnell,
Arthur Griffith against John Redmond” (U 15.4687–4688). The fundamental
question of whether to use force against the outside invader threatens to undo
society by causing it to unleash its own forces upon itself. These conflicts are
soon displaced by anagrammatic revisions of individual names set hilariously
against themselves—“John O’Leary against Lear O’Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzger-
ald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The O’Donoghue of The Glens against The
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 111

Glens of The O’Donoghue”(U 15.4685–4688)—each suggestive of the eternal di-

visiveness of individual as well as nation.
The psychological chaos and political disarray of the narrative can apparent-
ly only be righted—or rited—by the capable hands of Father Malachi O’Flynn
and Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love, the clerical reincarnations of Mulligan
and Haines. In a reiteration of the mock mass from the book’s opening, the
current ritual seeks a proper realignment of female and male. The poor old
milkwoman is replaced by the fecund Mina Purefoy on the altar of the sacred
feminine; the phallic military stronghold of the Martello tower morphs to an
open umbrella, an image representing the ancient heraldic symbol of the mas-
culine as well as a precise inversion of the feminine/chalice that rests on Mrs.
Purefoy’s pregnant belly. This heraldic semiotics is previously visible in the “gilt
chevrons” of Major Tweedy’s uniform, when he “gives the pilgrim warrior’s
sign of the knights templars” (U 15.4614–16), the first of two references to the
legendary military protectors of the sacred feminine and Grail symbology.
While critics from Stuart Gilbert to Patrick McCarthy refer to the ritual as
a “black mass,” the stage directions refer to a “camp mass” (U 15.4695), thereby
sustaining the battlefield conceit. The inherent paradox of the repeated phrase
“back to the front,” applied to the physical positioning of O’Flynn and Love,
carries a connotation of gender reversal, evidenced by the “lace petticoat and
reversed chasuble” worn by O’Flynn. Moreover, O’Flynn’s “two left feet” point
to the ancient idea of the left (L. sinister) in its association with the female as
sinister to Christianity. Perhaps most significantly, going “back to the front”
suggests returning to the front lines in a military theater of operations, a term
that had come into increasingly common usage during the entrenched combat
of World War I (e.g., the western and eastern fronts). The potential of a return
to warfare, and the ambivalence of the entire scene, seems to suggest the utter
precariousness of history, specifically Ireland and Europe in their periods of
civil and international upheaval. The question of whether to turn back to the
front or have one’s back to the front—and all the destructive masculinities
and marginalized femininities there created—becomes integral to pacifying
the world through love and a return to the sacred feminine. “Circe” thus ex-
tends the alignment of warrior and harlot, the camp mass serving as climactic
antidote to primarily masculine orthodoxies of calculated violence and sexual
oppression.
By purposefully enmeshing questions of political loyalty and physical sac-
rifice within an economy of desire, Joyce’s fiction repeatedly underscores how
the British garrison remained an industry co-dependent with prostitution.
 112 Greg Winston

Mark Osteen observes how “British soldiers in Nighttown claim to ‘protect

Ireland’ but treat her as a whore” (337). To be sure, Joyce’s fictional representa-
tion of sexual commerce in 1900s Dublin describes women in the unsavory
aspects of militaristic domination and economic competition. At the same
time, it asks readers to consider how the existence of armed forces interweaves
questions of political loyalty and social acceptability. Whether from psycho-
sexual causes or for reasons of simple financial survival, many young women
found employment in the sex industry of early-twentieth-century Dublin. In
that realm, their connection to men in military service was virtually inescap-
able. If brothels and brothel workers seemed to exist somewhere beyond the
social, legal, and financial norms, Ulysses shows how the women of Nighttown,
like the soldiers they so often served, were both objects and agents of looming
surveillance and calculating control in a highly militarized society.

Notes
1. The brothers’ names are also slang terms for English soldiers and native Dubliners, known
as Tommies and Jackeens, respectively.
2. Writing to Nora of brother Tom Barnacle’s 15 December 1915, enlistment in the British
army, Mrs. Barnacle complained, “at present he is only getting a shilling a Weeke he sined me
half his pay than I am getting seperation allowance” (qtd. in Maddox 139).
3. The last of the Monto brothels was razed in 1925.
4. In his chapter “Terrorism, Prostitution, and the Abject Woman,” Enda Duffy reads the
episode as a discourse on the “intimate revenge” of terrorism. Margot Norris considers theat-
ricality and performance to be the driving force in “Circe.”
5. Its mere existence as photograph is relevant to numerous other moments in Joyce, a
number of which Brandon Kershner considers in his essay situating Ulysses within the cultural
context of nineteenth-century photography.
6. Though several degrees milder than a brothel visit, his correspondence with the typist
Martha Clifford nevertheless represents a transgression of sexual propriety and marital fidelity,
not to mention postal decency: why else the alias Henry Flower?
7. In her reading of “Penelope,” Suzette Henke observes how Molly Bloom’s long-standing
attraction to soldiers—Lieutenant Harry Mulvey and British officer Gardner—stems from her
“having initially courted the attentions of a detached and distant patriarch” (132), her father,
himself a career officer.
8. I will not attempt here to resolve a long-running debate as to whether for Joyce syphilis
went beyond the literary. Burton Waisbren and Florence Walzl analyze the symbolic role of
the disease in Dubliners; Vernon Hall and Waisbren regard syphilis as a dominant theme and
preoccupation of Ulysses. J. B. Lyons dismisses much of their view in his argument that Joyce
suffered from neither contracted nor congenital syphilis. Martin Bock argues that simply liv-
ing in fear of the disease was enough to influence Joyce. Bock convincingly locates the source
of Joyce’s syphilitic descriptions in contemporary medical dictionaries. More recently, in a
 Barracks and Brothels: Militarism and Prostitution in Ulysses 113

chapter about Joyce in Pox, a study of syphilis in the lives of historical and cultural celebrities,
Deborah Hayden resuscitates the matter by considering Joyce’s consultation on the matter with
medical friend Gogarty.
9. See Luddy 56–62 and Prunty 263–66 for more on the Contagious Diseases Acts.
10. Suffragist and activist Anna Maria Haslam was a leading force in the movement for re-
peal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. See Mary Cullen’s chapter on Haslam in Women, Power
and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (161–96).
11. As a geographic term, the word capital is either inaccurate or wishful thinking, since
Dublin had not technically served as a capital since the Irish parliament was abolished in the
1800 Act of Union. Had it succeeded, the Home Rule movement would have reestablished an
Irish parliament and returned the city to capital status.
12. The chevron (inverted V), ancient representation of masculinity (phallus) and inverted
counterpart to the chalice symbol of femininity, still holds a prominent place on the epaulettes
of European and American military uniforms. In Finnegans Wake the chevron also functions
as the symbol of Shaun (the Post).
13. The OED gives the date 1665 for the first recorded use of the term front to signify a place
of military engagement, in Manley Grotius’s Low Country Warres. It becomes prevalent through-
out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II.

Works Cited
Bock, Martin. “Syphilsation and Its Discontents: Somatic Indications of Psychological Ills in
Joyce and Lowry.” Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Patrick A. McCarthy and Paul
Tiessen. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. 126–44.
Brivic, Sheldon. Joyce’s Waking Women. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
Cullen, Mary. “Anna Maria Haslam.” Women, Power and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century
Ireland. Ed. Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy. Dublin: Attic Press, 1995. 161–96.
“Dublin Corporation.” United Irishman 11 June 1904: 5.
Duffy, Enda. The Subaltern “Ulysses.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Enloe, Cynthia. Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives. London: Pluto,
1983.
Fagan, Terry. Monto: Madams, Murder, and Black Coddle. Dublin: Inner City Folklife Project,
2002.
Fairhall, James. James Joyce and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993.
Fitzpatrick, David. “Militarism in Ireland, 1900–1922.” A Military History of Ireland. Ed. Thom-
as Bartlett and Keith Jeffery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 379–406.
Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” New York: Vintage Books, 1955.
Gogarty, Oliver St. John. “Ugly England.” United Irishman 15 Sept. 1905: 3.
Gorman, Herbert. James Joyce. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1939.
Hall, Vernon, and Burton A. Waisbren. “Syphilis as a Major Theme of James Joyce’s Ulysses.”
Archives of Internal Medicine 140 (1980): 963–65.
Hayden, Deborah. Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. New York: Basic Books,
2003.
 114 Greg Winston

Henke, Suzette. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Terence Brown. New York: Penguin, 1992.
———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. R. B. Kershner. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
1993.
Kershner, R. B. “Framing Rudy and Photography.” Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (1998):
265–92.
Luddy, Maria. “Prostitution and Rescue Work in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.” Women Surviv-
ing: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Ed. Maria Luddy and
Cliona Murphy. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1989. 51–84.
Lyons, J. B. “‘Thrust Syphilis Down to Hell.’” James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium. Ed. Mor-
ris Beja, Philip Herring, Maurice Harmon, and David Norris. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1986. 173–83.
Maddox, Brenda. Nora. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
McCarthy, Patrick. “The Jewel-Eyed Harlots of His Imagination.” Éire-Ireland 17.4 (1982): 91–
109.
Mullin, Katherine. James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003.
Norris, Margot. “Disenchanting Enchantment: The Theatrical Brothel of Circe.” “Ulysses” En-
gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes. Ed. Kimberly Devlin and Mari-
lynn Reizbaum. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 229–41.
Osteen, Mark. The Economy of “Ulysses”: Making Both Ends Meet. Syracuse: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 1995.
Pearce, Richard. “Teaching for the (W)holes.” Approaches to Teaching Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Ed.
Kathleen McCormick and Erwin R. Steinberg. New York: Modern Language Association,
1993. 97–104.
Prunty, Jacinta. Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography. Dublin: Irish Academic
Press, 1998.
Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Spoo, Robert. “‘Nestor’ and Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses.” Twentieth
Century Literature 32.2 (1986): 137–54.
Waisbren, Burton, and Florence Walzl. “Paresis and the Priest: James Joyce’s Symbolic Use of
Syphilis in ‘The Sisters.’” Annals of Internal Medicine 80.6 (1974): 758–62.
Wollaeger, Mark. “Posters, Modernism, Cosmopolitanism: Ulysses and World War I Recruiting
Posters in Ireland.” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.2 (1993): 87–132.
Wills, Clair. “Joyce, Prostitution, and the Colonial City.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95.1 (1996):
79–95.
III

Mixed Media
Image and Performance
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 7

”In the Beginning Was the Gest”

Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe”

Anthony Paraskeva

From 1902, when he stayed at the Grand Hôtel Corneille, two miles from the
Thêatre Robert-Houdin owned by Méliès, until Paris in the 1920s, when ac-
cording to Patricia Hutchins “he went frequently to the movies, usually be-
tween dusk and dinner time when he could no longer work” (Hutchins 11),
Joyce witnessed the development of early film history, from the exhibitionist
“cinema of attractions” circa 1904 to the gradual formation of syntactic con-
ventions, perceptual fields, and the dismemberment of the gesturing body. In
“Circe,” the waltz and twirl between acoustic patterns and iconic performance
style occur under a narrative gaze trained to read gestures in films, from their
earliest inception to the episode’s composition in 1920–21. I wish to extend the
territory of scholarship on Joyce’s film-literate prose by relating the episode’s
“art of gestures”—his own category in his notesheets (Herring 288)—to the
history of performance style in early cinema, in light of his description of the
episode’s figures as “Cinema fakes” (Scribbledehobble 119), and his fraught rela-
tions with the theater.
As David Hayman and Fritz Senn argue, physical routines in “Circe” are
partly an aspect of mimographic evocations which enact movement through
acoustic effects. At the same time, the technical language and proxemic stage
codes, the detailed blocking of the cast, the elaborate physical routines in the
stage directions, according to Katie Wales, foreground the episode’s essential
iconicity. As Derek Attridge observes, the language in Ulysses, in one view,
“draws attention to itself and its configurations independently of its referential
function,” and in the other, it wills its own disappearance “in an enhanced expe-
rience of referentiality” (133). This dialectic in “Circe” is significantly informed
 118 Anthony Paraskeva

by Joyce’s fascination with the perceptual reality of cinema’s “mute world” (U

15.2575). At a showing of the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train at the Grand Café
Lumière in 1895, one spectator was heard to announce “la langue universelle
est trouvée” (Sadoul 288); this is echoed by Stephen in his opening declaration:
“so that gesture . . . would be a universal language” (U 15.105–6). Joyce had
begun to think about representational overlaps between film and writing as
far back as 1906, for instance, in a sixty-miles-an-hour hyperbole to Stanislaus
that ends with the line: “The Italian imagination is like a cinematograph, ob-
serve the style of my letter” (Letters II 202). His remark in 1924 that “the book
[Ulysses] could not be translated into another language, but might be translated
into another medium, that of the film” (JJ 561), testifies to the compositional
energy of these aspect shifts between acts of reading and spectatorship.
Stephen and Bloom spend 16 June distracting their minds from two painful
thoughts, the death of a mother and a wife’s infidelity, until they reach Night-
town’s midnight movie, when those secrets, no longer kept, are projected onto
a screen for Dublin’s assembled throngs to watch aghast. In “Telemachus,”
Stephen’s mother “In a dream, silently . . . had come to him” (U 1.270): the past
perfect tense keeps the apparition, a remembered dream, at a safe distance. The
stage directions in “Circe” place the afflicted dead mother presently before the
horrorstruck eyes of an audience: “emaciated, she rises stark through the floor,
in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her
face worn and noseless, green with gravemould . . . She fixes her bluecircled hol-
low eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word.
A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly” (U 15.4157–62). These shock
tactics gain their iconic impetus by harking back to the origins of cinematic
movement. Joyce re-creates the first spectators’ unfamiliarity, their perceptual
shock at the sheer visibility of mechanically recorded motion. Maxim Gorky’s
1896 commentary on the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train—“it is not life but its
shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre. . . . All this in a strange si-
lence . . . no sound of footsteps or of speech” (qtd. in Leyda 407–9)—also serves
to describe the rising of Stephen’s mother, who “opens her mouth . . . uttering
a silent word,” just as Bloom “calls inaudibly” (U 15.4962) after Rudy, both in-
stances rendered in the style of mute utterance in silent cinema, where the lips
are seen to move but no sound is heard.
Noël Burch pinpoints the predominant quality of the first public screening:
“The first spectators of L’arrivée d’un train, reacting with their whole bodies
to what they fleetingly perceived as an external manifestation, were indeed
in a brief hallucinatory state, their unfamiliarity with the messages received,
 Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” 119

the mode of vision, induced a state of mild sensorial confusion” (244). The
sensorial confusions and hallucinatory states in “Circe,” the tawdry operatics
of the zombie resurrection, allude to the spectacular rising ghosts and ghoul-
ish transformations of early trick films. Austin Briggs and Keith Williams
amply demonstrate the influence between stop-motion effects in trick films
and cartoons, and Joyce’s display of instantaneous transformations in “Circe”
(Briggs 151; Williams, “Ulysses in Toontown”). The predominant nondocumen-
tary film genre up to 1904, the trick film emerged through the coincidence of
magic theater traditions and the earliest film cameras. The origins of cinema
are inextricably bound to the history and practice of magic, conjuring and
legerdemain (Barnouw 45), as is “Circe,” whose symbol in the Linati scheme is
“Magic.” One of the first filmmakers to buy a machine from Lumière, the Ital-
ian magician Leopoldo Fregoli, used primitive cuts and reverses to modify his
signature trick, the transformation of his face into the appearance of famous
characters, a trait mimicked by Bloom when “he contracts his face to resemble
many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of
Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle,
Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe,
Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur” (U 15.1844–49). In the climactic transformation of
Stephen into Rudy, Bloom’s dead son materializes “against the dark wall” (U
15.4956) as though “Stephen’s face and form” (U 15.4948) engender his shadow,
an effect that recalls the silhouette films of Lotte Reiniger and the combina-
tion of legerdemain and shadowgraphy in the work of Felicien Trewey, whom
Lumière introduced to England (Barnes 19).
Katherine Mullin’s analysis of stylistic allegiances between “Nausicaa” and
the Mutoscope takes film history in Ulysses even further back than trick films
(155). This peephole machine, observed through an eyepiece using large pho-
tographs flipped through with a hand crank, was introduced the same year
as the first public screening of the Lumières’ L’arrivée d’un train at the Grand
Café in 1895. The language of peephole pantomime that passes between Gerty
and Bloom is Mutoscopic: it remains a private fantasy seen only by him. The
fantasy is ended mid-thought, or rather mid-flick, as Gerty limps away, just
as Bloom himself goes limp: “She walked with a certain quiet dignity char-
acteristic of her but with care and very slowly because—because Gerty Mac-
Dowell was . . . Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O! Mr Bloom watched her as she
limped away” (U 13.769–72, ellipsis in original). Gerty reappears lasciviously in
“Circe,” pawing Bloom’s sleeve, after which “She slides away crookedly” rather
than limping away: the pun on “slides” alludes to the photos prepared for use
 120 Anthony Paraskeva

in a Mutoscope, and Gerty’s crooked movement suggests the jerkiness and ir-
regularity of those hand-cranked slides. Bloom’s reflections in the past tense—
“he watched her as she limped away”—mutate into Nighttown’s stage direction,
which incarnates its referent by placing the movement in the present tense
and before an audience, exploding private Mutoscopic peepshow into public
cinema projection.
In “Circe,” Bloom is held fast as a subject while being compelled to attend
a public exhibition of versions of himself and his hidden sexual proclivities.
Isolated voyeurisms are screened for an awestruck staring audience as he finds
himself locked in a turn-of-the-century “through the keyhole” film. These
tableau films, which reproduced “the peepshow perspective of kinetoscope or
mutoscope parlors” (Hansen 40) in their transition to public exhibition space,
show characters peeping through a device, such as a telescope or keyhole, be-
fore a cut to what is seen, often an incriminating scene: A Search for Evidence
(1903) displays a series of points of view as the deceived wife accompanied by a
private detective observe a row of hotel rooms through keyholes that frame the
tableaux, eventually finding her unfaithful husband in the last room. “Circe”
harks back to this arrangement when Boylan offers Bloom a view of Molly:
“You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go
through her a few times,” to which Bloom asks if he can “take a snapshot”
(U 15.3788–92). These films offered incipient identifications between the spec-
tator-subject’s orientation and what the audience sees; the relation between
the Mutoscopic drives in “Nausicaa” and the sense of collective spectatorship
in “Circe” is suggested by the historical shift from the Mutoscope to the cin-
ematograph. Bloom’s spectacular embarrassment at having his fantasy recon-
structions exposed is imagined as an act of voyeurism played over the “coughs
and feetshuffling” (U 15.2169) of an audience, in the style of tableau films such as
The Story the Biograph Told (1904), in which an unseen office boy films the pro-
prietor kissing his secretary, then screens the film to an audience that includes
the proprietor and his wife. Bloom’s private guilt is turned into a masochistic
spectacle in which he is not only a member of the audience but also its ideal
reluctant spectator.
The majority of extant films up to 1904 required a mediating agent, for in-
stance a keyhole or lens, to co-represent a person looking and the object looked
at. Aside from the keyhole films, film historians place the identification of the
film’s spectator with the diegetic viewpoint at around 1910–11. Early cinema
is predominantly framed from a centered frontal position that excludes the
spectator’s gaze from the gaze of the figures on screen (Burch 164). This is an
 Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” 121

aspect of a performative style derived from tableau gestures for the stage:
prior to 1910, film actors would gesticulate by standing center stage and facing
front, as though playing to the gallery. Standardized gestures, inherited from
acting manuals and handbooks for the stage (e.g., Boucicault, The Art of Act-
ing) developed from the idea that “the natural size of the human body should
be the unchanging unit of measurement” (Brewster and Jacobs 148). Roberta
Pearson names this convention of gestural performance “the histrionic code”
(21): it recommends actors not to use—according to Dion Boucicault, a lead-
ing Irish American playwright and actor of nineteenth-century melodrama—
“gesticules, or little gestures” (The Art of Acting 33). Joyce was evidently aware
of both this convention and Boucicault himself, who is mentioned in “Lestry-
gonians”: Bloom sees Bob Doran “sloping into the Empire [Theatre]. . . . Where
Pat Kinsella had his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran the Queen’s. Broth of
a boy. Dion business with the harvestmoon face in a poky bonnet” (U 8.599–
602).
Vitagraph’s Francesca de Rimini (1907), shown as part of the Volta program
in 1909, is a salient example of this performance style. The film, in its depiction
of a distinctly anti-Bloomian event, the murder of an adulterous wife and her
lover, contains fifteen tableau shots, acted in the classical mime style. The ac-
tors are shown in full length, and their bodies speak with exaggerated extended
gestures of the arm.
The performances consist of a series of codified gestures and exemplify
Pearson’s “histrionic code”: hands on both sides of the face signify distress,
hands covering the face indicate despair, and resolution is displayed with a “fist
clenched in the air, and then brought down sharply to the side of the body”
(2). Francesca de Rimini was based on a theatrical version written in 1855 and
first staged at the Star Theatre in New York in 1882. Surviving detailed sketches
of this production, which show the iconography of actors’ bodies in speech,
closely parallel the gestures enacted in the film (Uricchio and Pearson 99). Vi-
tagraph’s version is a typical instance of the transferral of a work for the stage
to tableau cinema’s replica proscenium arch. Gerty’s reappearance in “Circe”;
Stephen’s rising mother; Bloom’s guilt-ridden keyhole introspections; Privates
Carr and Compton marching “unsteadily rightaboutface” (U 15.49); the deaf-
mute idiot, “shaken in Saint Vitus’ dance” (U 15.15); and the Hobgoblin “kan-
garoohopping with outstretched clutching arms”(U 15.2157–58) all represent al-
lusions to the stagey demonstrativeness and histrionic style of early cinematic
performance.
Exaggerated gesticulations in cinema were more or less eliminated by 1913
 122 Anthony Paraskeva

once focal points had become dispersed across sequences of body parts (Keil
141). The abandonment of the “histrionic code” in favor of discrete accumu-
lations of small-scale gestures emerged from the twofold advance in camera
technique and editing, and inaugurated the new capacity to write the gestur-
ing body in its extremities, together with a more nuanced acting style. These
innovations are mainly attributed to D. W. Griffith’s Biograph films of 1907–13
(Gunning, D. W. Griffith 114–16). The difference between the two styles of ges-
ture can be observed in two versions of the same narrative by Griffith, After
Many Years (1908) and Enoch Arden (1911). In the first, histrionic coded ges-
tures show the married couple embracing before the departure of the husband,
who points to his chest, and then upward, raises his hand to his forehead, and
clenches his fist in the air. The 1911 version concentrates on their hands rather
than their outspread arms. For the same scene, closer shots show the wife’s
hand cutting a curl from the head of their baby and hanging it round her hus-
band’s head; she then plays with the lock while whispering to her husband.
Bloom’s performance style, as distinct from the ritualized histrionics he is
forced to observe, is given in a downplayed assemblage of discrete shot se-
quences: “Bloom, holding in his hand Stephen’s hat, festooned with shavings,
and ashplant, stands irresolute. Then he bends to him and shakes him by the
shoulder” (U 15.4920–23). “Bloom” and “stands irresolute” name the full shot,
which is interspersed with a detailed close-up of the hat; this is followed with a
medium-close shot as Bloom shakes Stephen’s shoulder. Sequences move in an
instant from the proscenium body to dismemberment of the unified body im-
age: “Bloom trickleaps to the curbstone and halts again. He brushes a mudflake
from his cheek with a parcelled hand” (U 15.196–97). Bloom’s gesturing body
tends toward fragmentation; the audience sees him unfold in a series of focal
points or body parts: a close-up of his “left foot” then cuts to his “impelling fin-
gers” as he “gives the sign of past master,” cuts again as he draws “his right arm
downwards from his left shoulder” (U 15.2723–25). Bloom’s dual status as specta-
tor and subject is partly expressed in the tension between the theatricality of
the cinema of 1904 and the advent of the shot sequence. The dialectic between
these two kinds of spectatorship, and the sense that an audience, including a
shame-faced Bloom, watches versions of Bloom engaged in voyeuristic acts,
frames the composition of his many-angled variousness.
The stage directions evidently transgress the confines of the proscenium
arch, where the spectator would observe the enacted scene as a whole in space,
according to the total measurements of the actors’ bodies: “Bloom walks on a
net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson’s
 Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” 123

Pillar, hangs from the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells in-
cluded), heals several sufferers from king’s evil . . . turns each foot simultaneously
in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his
little finger” (U 15.1841–51). Textual directions conventionally operate across a
dual plane of signification: they are both fictional representation and directives
for performance, commands issued to an actor physically to enact a gesture
before the eyes of an audience (Pavis 89). “Circe” invokes the technical lan-
guage of the proscenium arch stage—“From left upper entrance with two sliding
steps Henry Flower comes forward to left front centre” (U 15.2478–79)—only to
undermine its capacity to prescribe doable acts of the staged body. Joyce merci-
lessly cuts up the proscenium in “Circe,” and this is partly the consequence, I
would argue, of his difficult relations with the theater.
Since university Joyce had planned to write a play, and he regarded his
novels and stories, from 1900 to at least 1909, as preparation. In 1900 he had
already written his first play, A Brilliant Career: no copy of this survives, al-
though it was read by William Archer, who denounced it as “wildly impossible
for the stage” (qtd. in JJ 79). The moment dated 23 April 1900, when Ibsen sent
Joyce a telegram, via William Archer, saluting him for his generous review,
according to Ellmann, “kick starts his career as a writer” (JJ 74). From as early
as 1893, Joyce “went to the theater as regularly as he could afford it” (JJ 54). He
watched plays by Strindberg, Yeats, Synge, and Sudermann, among others, and
through reading and watching Ibsen on the stage he became “convinced of the
importance of drama” (JJ 54). Yet his writing for the stage met largely with dis-
appointment and failure. The rejection by Yeats in 1904, on behalf of the Abbey
Theatre, of his translations of Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise and Michael Kramer
anticipated Yeats’s eventual rejection of Exiles, on behalf of the Abbey Theatre,
in 1915. Exiles sustained years of rejection by theaters. As Joyce approached the
writing of “Circe”—his only text, other than Exiles, to make extensive use of
stage directions—he remained desperate for the play to be performed in Paris,
remarking: “an unperformed play is really a dead deportee” (Letters I 148).
The problem of Exiles in performance is to a large extent related to the in-
tricate patterns of hand gestures in the stage directions. The significance of
these small-scale iconic utterances, as they map out the developing tensions
and crises, passes unnoticed within a proscenium arch. Richard’s struggle to
keep interior deliberation hidden from view circumscribes his hand move-
ments and is barely perceptible from the stage. His most characteristic gesture
involves “Clasping his hands quietly” (Exiles 23); he only ever “Joins his hands
earnestly” (21), and this serves to keep to himself his emotional strategies and
 124 Anthony Paraskeva

bearings. When his blood is up, he halts, “thrusting his hands in his pockets”
(71), or “restrains a sudden gesture” (52). Robert consistently tries to goad him
into disclosing his possible resentment against Bertha, though Richard holds
out with unflagging self-command:
ROBERT: Not only for your sake. Also for the sake of—your present
partner in life.
RICHARD: I see. [He crushes his cigarette softly on the ashtray and then
leans forward, rubbing his hands slowly.] (52)
In situations when his tactile distance from Bertha is breached, when he speaks
with emotional directness, he quickly “lets her hand fall” (Exiles 103) or “releas-
es his hand” (162), and this obstructs a straightforward reading of his intentions
by disavowing gesture’s merely illustrative function. As Robert’s attempted se-
duction of Bertha becomes more apparent, Richard’s facade of self-possession
begins to reveal barely perceptible cracks, in the form of Freudian symptom-
atic gestures, small movements that betray a previously concealed intention.
Joyce’s meticulous attention to the slightest movements of the hand testifies
to an encounter with Freud’s work on symptomatic actions. In Freud’s view,
“states of mind are manifested, almost without exception, in the tensions and
relaxations of facial muscles, in the adaptations of the eyes, in the amount of
blood in the vessels of the skin, in the modification in vocal apparatus and in
the movements of limbs and in particular of the hands” (“The Psychopathol-
ogy of Everyday Life,” Standard Edition 14: 286). These suggestive nonverbal
phenomena, which let slip an unconscious intention, obstruct the attempted
concealment of a mental process. This “concurrent action—or perhaps rather
the mutually opposing action—of two different intentions” (“Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Standard Edition 15: 27) is a conspicuous phe-
nomenon in Exiles. When Richard attempts to speak calmly to Robert—“Your
advances to her, little by little, day after day, looks, whispers. [With a nervous
movement of the hands.] Insomma, wooing” (Exiles 83)—his hand escapes his
control, involuntarily hints at his secret, and a split complex of attitudes toward
his wife. On the one hand, he embraces the hypothetical situation of her in-
fidelity with Robert and takes steps to arrange it: accepting her sexual liberty
means freeing his mind from jealous suspicion. But this distance, the moral
attitude on which he prides himself, is a performed deception, for others and
himself, in order that Bertha and Robert may act unhindered and of their own
volition. His conscious intentions arrange the scene so that his wife and friend
are free to lie together; his unconscious intentions, signalled by his hands, are
 Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” 125

directed toward the prevention of this ever happening. Richard’s striking com-
posure in those rare instances where he confesses his suffering draw attention
to the timing of his confession as insincere. Yet his nervousness when speaking
calmly to Robert reveals his attitude toward his wife as split between jealous
possessiveness and libertarian distance. This nuanced, minute downplaying of
gestures of the hand, signs of nervous apprehension briefly emerging from pa-
ralysis, demands a representation that gives it a valency equal to speech. These
mutually opposed intentions, easily overlooked in a proscenium arch theater,
require an iconic language, beyond the scope of the stage, that can bestow upon
those gestures an emphasis equivalent to speech.
It was not until the fifteenth episode of Ulysses that Joyce again used stage
directions. He writes “Circe” against a background both of his personal failure
in the theater and of a period of crisis for European theater in general, which
was losing its audiences to the cinema. As early as 1914 in France, “the cinema
had largely supplanted the theater and café-concert . . . in the provinces and
had become a strong rival to them in the larger cities” (Dureau 14). In its satire
of Irish Revivalist theater (see Platt), “Circe” takes energetic revenge on the
theatrical institution that refused his playscripts and frustrated his long-held
ambition. The cinematic shot sequence, with its heightened emphasis on small-
scale gestures and its incorporation of spectator-subject identification, articu-
lates Bloom’s distinct style of performative gesture in “Circe” as a counterforce
to the gesticulating screen personas and tableau mock-ceremonies unfolding
before him. His counter-histrionics are an aspect of Joyce’s parody, not only of
theatrical overemphasis in early cinema, but also of the grand gesture in Yeat-
sian Revivalist theater. Tableau gestures combine the ceremonial elements of
Revivalist theater with the historical reconstructions of early cinema, in order
to critique both the histrionic style, which came to signify, for Joyce, the kind
of melodrama that invariably leads to bloodshed, and the false historiography
of Anglo-Irish Revivalism at the Abbey Theatre. The attack on Irish Revival-
ism is Joyce’s affront to the rejection of Exiles by Yeats, who declined to rec-
ommend it “to the Irish Theatre because it . . . is too far from the folk drama”
(JJ 401). “Circe” parodies the gestural conventions that assert Celtic ceremony
as Ireland’s most distinguished “folk drama” by alluding to the performative
overemphasis in early cinema.
For Yeats, the Abbey Theatre was the province in which the ceremonies of
a distinctly Anglo-Irish history could be enacted. The unity of a nation was
“like an audience in a theatre,” and the Abbey should strive to become a con-
temporary theater of Dionysus, a national theater in which the people would
 126 Anthony Paraskeva

watch “the sacred drama of [their] own history” (qtd. in Flannery 65). Pagan
ritual gestures, preserving ancestral relations to Celtic Ireland, hark back to
the patterns of movement, unchanged over centuries, of Ireland’s heroic age.
In On Baile’s Strand, Cuchulain’s oath of fealty to the High King Conchubar is
performed as a grand-scale ritual in which his sword is joined in the fire with
those of the lesser kings, to the inaudible murmur of chanting female voices,
a symbolic rite directly borrowed from the Celtic Mysteries (Yeats 262–63).
These ceremonies at the Abbey embodied a solemn, hieratic acting style, de-
scribed in a review of On Baile’s Strand at the Abbey as “an art of gesture ad-
mirably disciplined and a strange delicacy of enunciation . . . in the method
of . . . ritual” (Flannery 27).
While Revivalist theater played at the Abbey—its inaugural play, Yeats’s The
Countess Cathleen was staged at the Abbey in 1899, and Synge’s In the Shadow
of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World in 1907—Dublin’s Erin The-
atre would screen the tableau historical reconstructions of early cinema. Lu-
mière programs interspersed documentary footage of current affairs of state
with “vues historiques,” presented in a style identical to their documentaries,
as unmediated actuality (Abel 91). Méliès produced tableau reconstructions
of solemn rituals of state, for instance the Coronation of Edward VII (1902),
which displays a procession of gifts, with the king swearing his allegiance, the
presentation of the sword of justice and his adornment with an orb, crown, and
sceptre. The presentation of historical events as contemporary documentary, in
the style of the ostentatious grand gesture, was quickly taken up by Pathé, with
works such as Epopée napoléonienne (1903). These spectacles of national iden-
tity, commonplace in the prewar French Third Republic, particularly after the
success of Film D’Art’s L’assassinat du Duc de Guise (1907), which exemplifies
the histrionic style, had become by 1911 one of French cinema’s most distinctive
genres (Abel 92).
The ceremonies of state and empire in “Circe,” of the trials, executions, and
coronations that Bloom both watches and is made to enact, serve as mock-
ing acknowledgments of Yeatsian Anglicization, in the style of the historical
pseudo-documentary of early cinema. Joyce detected in both a similar false
historiography, particularly in the historical claims made for the grand ges-
ture. Against the ritual style of the historical tableau, with its sweeping ges-
tures, Joyce pitches tentative, small-scale movements. The shift between the
historical tableau, in which the spectator is externalized, and the technique of
perceptual identification available since the evolution of the shot sequence, a
phenomenon that emerged in 1910–12, in the films of Griffith and the system
 Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” 127

of parallel editing and shot/reverse shot (Salt 94), is incorporated into the dia-
lectic of Bloom’s dual status as spectator and subject. His “apologetic toes turned
in,” Bloom “opens his tiny mole’s eyes and looks about him dazedly, passing a
slow hand across his forehead” (U 15.957–59); while he appears onscreen “in a
crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing Saint Edward’s staff, the
orb and sceptre” (U 15.1442–44). Edward the Seventh appears “slowly, solemnly”
singing a song about “coronation day” (U 15.4562), but it is Bloom’s corona-
tion: the Archbishop of Armagh “pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom’s head” (U
15.1487), an aspect of the ceremony whereby an oath is taken and the sover-
eign is anointed with holy oil to indicate the sanctity of his person. Symbolic
ceremonies further invest Bloom with the imperial mantle: “Bloom assumes a
mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He ascends and stands on the
stone of destiny. The representative peers put on at the same time their twen-
tyeight crowns. . . . The peers do homage, one by one, approaching, genuflecting”
(U 15.1490–96).
These symbolic ceremonies of Anglo-Irish history summon Bloom, and by
extension, Ireland, to a role Joyce regards as contrary to their natural tenden-
cies. Once Bloom is made sovereign, he is observed enacting an idealized ver-
sion, not of the grand heroic gesture, but of his own small-scale domestic rou-
tines: “shaking hands with a blind stripling . . . Placing arms round shoulder of an
old couple . . . He wheels twins in a perambulator. . . . He consoles a widow. . . . He
kisses the bedsores of a palsied veteran. . . . He whispers in the ear of a blushing
waitress and laughs kindly. . . . He gives his coat to a beggar” (U 15.1600–1615).
These are Bloom’s versions of the grand gesture. His instinctive distaste for
ritual is an aspect of his independence of mind. When he finds himself in
situations of ritual behavior, his mind slips into its own routines, removing
him from the scene, as it does at Dignam’s funeral. His private commemora-
tions demonstrate a resistance to mechanical templates of imposed physical
behavior, just as his small-scale gestures contrast with the falsely historiciz-
ing folk rituals of theatrical Revivalism and historical pseudo-documentary.
Bloom’s acts of heroism are found in the littleness of the diurnal, rather than
the grandly ceremonial. It is a performance style precisely suited to the mock-
epic.
As counter-Revivalist drama, “Circe” stages the small-scale intimate gesture,
in the language of the shot sequence, against the histrionics of false ceremony.
Bloom’s naturalist gestures subvert the hieratic solemnity of the ritual body
and its capacity to depersonalize the expressive life of the body. Joyce found in
the language of the shot sequence an ideal method to show forth tiny gestures,
 128 Anthony Paraskeva

in particular of the hands, which are given amplified significance throughout

Ulysses. Bloom not only talks with his hands but is seen thinking aloud with
them. Earlier, in “Sirens,” bored Bloom tambourines gently with “I am just
reflecting fingers” (U 11.863), his hands as attentive as those in “Scylla and Cha-
rybdis” which “fingerponder nightly each his variorum edition of The Taming
of the Shrew” (U 9.1062). Hand gestures in Ulysses are forms of self-reflexivity,
symptoms of (dis)engagement of the self with itself. Michel Serres describes
how an internal sense of one’s own body derives from manual self-reflection in
his account of cutting his fingernails: “Where does the subject settle itself? . . . I
take the implement in my left hand, and present the open blades to the end
of my right index fingernail. I position myself in the handles of the scissors,
the I situates itself there, and not at the tip of the right finger. . . . The left hand
participates in the I, suffused with subjectivity, the right hand is of the world”
(qtd. in Connor). Steven Connor remarks of this passage that “the hand is
a principle and agency of this capacity . . . bringing oneself to oneself.” As it
is also for Bloom’s: in “Hades,” when Boylan is sighted by the others, Bloom
instantly “reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand” (U
6.200), after which “he clasped his hands between his knees” (U 6.209). In
“Lestrygonians” his hands search his pockets in a dumbshow of misdirection:
“I am looking for that. Yes, that.” The episode ends after he tries “all pockets”
and locates his potato soap and purse: “Safe!” (U 8.1188). Recurrently through-
out his day, Bloom prevents himself from disintegrating at the thought of his
wife’s infidelity with small gestures that serve both to distract his mind and to
restore his bodily self-integrity. In “Circe” these gestures help ease his sense of
spectatorial shock: “His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself” (U 15.3815).
By the time Joyce had begun to compose “Circe,” the iconic language of
close-ups, with its capacity to show the exact visual form of a hand movement,
the stretch or curl of a finger, the position of the palms, had achieved interna-
tional status. According to theorist and filmmaker Jean Epstein, writing in 1921:
“The amplifying close-up demands underplaying. It’s opposed to theater where
everything is loudly declaimed” (qtd. in Epstein 237). Griffith remarked, in an
interview in 1914: “the close-up enabled us to reach real acting, restraint” (qtd.
in Pratt 110–11). In Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience (1914), the scene with the
protagonist, Walthall, at the police station is constructed from close-ups of
Walthall’s hands as he nervously pleads innocence: his hands pull at his clothes
and stroke his knees, he plays with his thumbs, puts his hands in his pockets.
Cecil B. De Mille’s The Whispering Chorus (1918) constructs an elaborate series
of close-up hand gesture motifs. John Tremble, an accounts clerk, attempts to
 Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” 129

convince himself that stealing money from his office might be justified. The
intertitle, an interior voice, reads: “Clumley has more than he can use: take
what you need.” We see his hands, in medium close-up, interrupt his counting
motion to tap nervously the wad of notes, his hands seeming to make their
mind up for him. After taking some of the money for himself with his right
hand, his left hand grasps the right, as though to conceal its guilt. The right
hand appears to act with an autonomous criminal agency of its own. We next
see it in extreme close-up, falsifying the figures in the account book in order
not to arouse suspicion, and then later, a disembodied extreme close-up of the
hand appears in superimposition. In place of the voice of conscience, or an ac-
cusing face, we see an enlarged double of his right hand in handcuffs, next to a
medium shot of Tremble, whose left hand, anxiously feeling his right, falls into
the same clasping position as when he had stolen the money. The rest of the
film shows Tremble, as an intertitle puts it, “feeling suspicion in every smile he
meets—and handcuffs in every welcome.” In the final extreme close-up of his
right hand, it is strapped to an electric chair, as though the hand were assuming
responsibility for the crime on the man’s behalf.
Bloom often keeps his hands in his pockets, partly because he keeps his
magic potato soap there, but also to conceal himself, to prevent his hands from
speaking about him against his will: when a “male cough and tread are heard
passing through the mist outside,” Bloom immediately adjusts his features, and
then “places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly” (U 15.2727–29). Put on the
spot, he enacts the physical equivalent of an embarrassed change of subject.
Hand gestures in “Circe,” liberated from the contingencies of the stage and its
demands for spectatorial wholeness, are imagined as symptomatic close-ups,
unfolding on a screen. The notesheets for “Circe” on sleights of hand and palm
reading describe these gestures in extreme close-up. The view of film theorist
Hugo Münsterberg, writing in 1916 of “an enlarged play of the hands in which
anger and rage or tender love or jealousy speak an unmistakeable language”
(36), uncannily describes Stephen’s and Bloom’s speaking hands. We learn that
Bloom’s fingers are shorter than Stephen’s, and his fingers have round tips, and
that this indicates his pragmatic materialism (Herring 46). The first and second
bend easily, indicating shyness (Herring 266). Zoe sees Bloom’s secret in his
hands, remarking, “Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That wrong?” (U
15.3706). The notesheets open out the fields of reference from which she reads
Bloom’s palms: the first and second finger, if “far apart,” show the subject is
“self-willed”; the third and fourth finger apart signal impulsiveness; long and
white fingernails signify cruelty (Herring 266).
 130 Anthony Paraskeva

Joyce reverses the terms that allocate coded significance only to “histri-
onic” gestures by magnifying tiny symptomatic actions, as hand gestures
move toward resembling a microlinguistic system in themselves. The effect
is achieved by allowing the terms that ordinarily govern speech and gesture
to become interchangeable. Particular coded movements of the hand make
inanimate objects speak, and often in the give-away voice of the symptomatic
unconscious. Bella’s fan as she moves it toward her face speaks with a voice
of its own: “The Fan: (flirting quickly, then slowly) Married, I see” (U 15.2755).
The speech-gesture complex increases in significance when the tempo in the
movement is referred back to the code for “fan flirt” in the notesheets, where
“quick=engaged,” and “slow=married” (Herring 296). Whereas the notesheets
correlate the placing of the fan on the ear with “forgot me?” the script literally
gives voice to the gesture: “The Fan: (folding together, rests against her left ear-
drop) Have you forgotten me?” (U 15.2764). By cross-breeding coded gestures
with discursive speech, these complex movements approach the condition of a
natural language system. A movement of the parasol toward the shoulder in-
dicates indifference; holding it with “2 hands” means “well?”; “high=darling”;
“shut=dare all.” Swinging an umbrella “over hand=I am a nuisance.” A twirl of
the handkerchief in the right hand means “love another,” whereas a twirl in
the left hand connotes “riddance”; a folded handkerchief signifies a “wish to
speak” (Herring 295–96). These elaborate correspondences between the Freud-
ian symptomatic act and the isolation and analysis of cinema’s “unconscious
optics” anticipate Walter Benjamin’s explicit comparison between Freud’s “Psy-
chopathology of Everyday Life,” in which symptomatic actions receive their
most extensive account, with the “precise statements” given by enlarged fields
of view in filmed behavior and the revelation of “entirely new structural forma-
tions of the subject” (230).
Derek Attridge’s observation that Ulysses “frequently fails to conform to the
syntactic norms of a language which allows little independence to the organs
of the body” (160) finds iconic correlates in the way Bloom’s hands speak as
though independent of his conscious sensation of movement, and the de-
tachment of movement from agency in a filmed close-up. When Mrs. Breen
“surrenders” her “soft moist meaty palm” to Bloom’s “finger and thumb” (U
15.46–47), their hands are observed, split from the dialogue, conducting their
own conversation separately from the dialogue. As “Bella approaches, gently
tapping with the fan,” the fan remarks: “We have met. You are mine. It is fate” (U
15.2775), partially echoing Bloom’s entrance into Nighttown, just after Stephen
demonstrates his view of gesture as a “universal language”: “Stephen thrusts
 Theater, Cinema, and the Language of Gesture in “Circe” 131

his ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands, his head going back till both
hands are a span from his breast, down turned in planes intersecting, the fingers
about to part, the left being higher” (U 15.124–27). The planes of Stephen’s hands
symbolize the intersection of his lines of fate with Bloom’s. Instantaneously
“On the farther side under the railway bridge Bloom appears” (U 15.141–42), as
though summoned by Stephen’s palms. A medium shot of Stephen thrusting
his ashplant is cut with a close-up of his intersecting palms, superimposed
over the appearance of Bloom under the railway bridge. The gesture serves to
instigate the coincidence of Stephen and Bloom. The mutual dreams of elective
paternity and metempsychosis finally intersect and culminate in the transfor-
mation of Stephen into Rudy.
Stephen experiences in this transformation the “cunning dissociation of
consciousness from identity” that Roland Barthes describes in speaking of
the photographic subject, or rather, “neither subject nor object, but a subject
who feels he is becoming an object” (12–14). This is also Bloom’s condition
throughout the episode, as he struggles to keep a zone of himself that is
private, against which various images of himself, in the form of screen per-
sonas, attempt to encroach. Screen representations of his body image—as
Stephen Heath puts it, “the body in its conversion into the luminous sense
of its film presence” (180)—alienate his volitional agency, as for instance in
the doppelgänger projections of Henry Flower and Virag, who resemble the
reproducible demon images of screen personas like Douglas Fairbanks and
Max Linder: “Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a
pocketcomb and gives a cow’s lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to
the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two un-
gainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the wall a pusyel-
low flybill, butting it with his head” (U 15.2627–31). Bloom’s “trickleaps” as he
“darts forward suddenly” (U 15.184) and “blunders stifflegged” (U 15.191), later
transposed into Virag’s “ungainly stilthops” (U 15.2630), resemble the style
and gait of Max Linder. When Joyce showed the film A Conquest (1909) as
part of the Volta program, Linder had already established a reproducible star
persona from his distinctive style of movement. Bloom’s personas, aspects of
an alienated consciousness dissociated from his physical identity, approach
the condition of the film actor, who “feels as if in exile—exile not only from
the stage but also from himself. . . . his body loses corporeality, it evaporates,
it is deprived of reality, life, voice . . . in order to be changed into a mute im-
age” (Benjamin 223).
The range of Bloom’s alter egos in “Circe” make iconic reference to the film
 132 Anthony Paraskeva

actor’s exile from his “mute image,” and more specifically, to the dialectic be-
tween theatricality in tableau cinema, in which the spectator is externalized
and refused perceptual identification, against the technique of spectator-sub-
ject identification available since the historical shift from film tableaux to the
shot sequence. The Joycean alienation effect is situated at this intersection of
the performative gesture in theater and cinema. When Brecht notes that “it is
conceivable that other kinds of writer, such as playwrights or novelists, may
for the moment be able to work in a more cinematic way than the film people”
(Willett 47), it is possible he has Joyce in mind, as he does when he mentions
“the Verfremdungseffekt in Ulysses,” and how Joyce “alienates both the way of
representing (mainly through the frequent and rapid changes) and the events”
(Silberman 10). The time lag between his reflexive intelligence and his body,
inhabited by the imperatives of its role, generates an effect whereby Bloom be-
comes conscious of his own representations. Cinematic dissociation compels
Bloom, as we read his gestures, to become his own spectator.

Notes
This paper was first published in Bloomsday 100: The 19th International James Joyce Symposium
CD-ROM (Dublin: Hyperfecto and the James Joyce Centre, 2005).
1. Tom Gunning’s term for the emphasis in early cinema (1895–1906) on the sheer “act of
showing and exhibition” in the use of fixed frame “theatrical display over narrative absorption.”
See Gunning, “Cinema of Attractions.”
2. For an illuminating comparative analysis of Joyce and cinema, and for close engagement
with film history and theory, see Spiegel; Briggs; Williams; Burkdall; Danius.
3. Films were shown in Dublin from April 1896, for instance, at the Erin Variety Theater
and Rotunda. There was no cinema until 1909, when Joyce opened the Cinematograph Volta
(Williams, “Joyce and Early Cinema” 1).
4. This reading favors the 1922 edition over Gabler’s, whose update from “slides” to “glides”
(15.386) obscures the Mutoscope reference. See Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson 420.

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 8

Reading Music, Performing Text

Interpreting the Song of the Sirens

Katherine O’Callaghan

What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for.
Finnegans Wake 482.34–36

According to George Borach’s anecdote, Joyce claimed that in writing the “Si-
rens” episode he had “explored the resources and artifices” and “seen through
all the tricks” of music (JJ 459). It is unlikely that he was merely referring to the
use of musical allusions or to descriptions of instruments and recitals. Indeed,
he was not simply hoping to borrow musical forms so as to produce a liter-
ary equivalent. On the contrary, Joyce’s words imply that he was engaging not
merely with those aspects of music that might be closest to literature (lyrics,
phrasing, rhythm), and which have long been considered shared elements of
the two art forms, but rather the more elusive and perhaps intrinsic elements
of music (performance, interpretation, meaning or the lack thereof) which he
felt could be injected into, and drawn from, prose writing.
Joyce reveals the performative qualities of prose writing, most particularly
in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, through an association of language with mu-
sic. He also uses this interplay of the two art forms to alter the manner in which
we approach the interpretation process of prose literature. Music, within his
texts, acts not solely as a cultural reference point or a symbolic or thematic in-
tensifier, but rather as a marker of a text-performance dynamic inherent within
literature and unfolded by the reading process. Thus by drawing on two of the
key elements of the musical art form, interpretation and performance, Joyce
can evoke qualities of simultaneity, multiplicity, and audience interaction nor-
mally considered to be beyond the scope of the prose literary form. This rather
 136 Katherine O’Callaghan

complex engagement with musical aspects pervades his corpus. Within this
dialectic of music and language, the “Sirens” episode therefore is by no means
unique; however, it singularly harnesses many of the multiplicities of interac-
tion between these two art forms, and thus for the purposes of this essay it will
be used to provide a framework and epistemological gateway for engaging with
those very multiplicities.
The sound effects of the episode can be found within the written text: in
onomatopoeic phrases, in soundscape passages, in descriptions of noise, in in-
structions to “Listen!” But they also manifest themselves in the act of reading,
in the reader’s performance of the text. The urge to read the book as a whole
aloud is strong, and the free-flowing temporality of streams of consciousness
encourages an awareness of a non-static oral quality to the work. The book
draws on a legacy of oral literature—that of Homer’s Odyssey and of the Irish
storytelling tradition. The text exists on the page, visually, but it can also be
played out by the reader in a manner that lifts the words from the page and
into the realm of the auditory. Joyce’s frequent use of music in his work can be
read within this context.

Music and Literature: “It’s What’s Behind”

In the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, Stephen contemplates the idea of a bi-
furcation of the art forms using Gotthold Lessing’s terms: nebeneinander, in
reference to the “one next to another” aspect of the spatial arts, such as paint-
ing and sculpture; and nacheinander, in reference to the “one after another”
aspect of the temporal arts, a category that includes both music and litera-
ture (Lessing 77). This division was disputed by Richard Wagner and many
modernists who aspired to the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art work,”
but Lessing strongly believed in the strict separation of the arts: the sense of
space frozen in time that should be captured by a painting or a sculpture, and
the sense of time, of movement, that should be suggested in literature and
music in particular. Why try to evoke time in a painting? Why try to present
a picture in music? It was Lessing’s belief that because painting exists in space
it “must completely renounce time” and also should avoid temporal subject
matters, the description of “progressive acts.” Music and literature should
also desist from evoking or describing a static, spatial world, because they
present themselves temporally.
As Stephen walks along Sandymount strand he mentally follows Lessing’s
theory: both he and the reader are carried through the nacheinander of his
 Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 137

movement, his “progressive act.” Stephen suggests that as he walks in the dark,
the reader following his progression through consecutive sounds “Five, six” (U
3.12), he is “safe,” as Bloom is when he passes through the gates of the National
Museum at the end of the “Lestrygonians” episode—he too has experimented
with temporary blindness (U 8.1193). The difficulty arises when Stephen opens
his eyes, and the reader’s focus, to the nebeneinander, an entity that has the
potential to pull Stephen into it: “Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a
cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably’ (U
3.14–15). He decides that he is “getting on nicely in the dark” (U 3.15). Stephen’s
fear is that opening his eyes, and thus entering the spatial world, might result
“for ever in the black adiaphane” (U 3.26).
There is already within Stephen’s language an understanding of the visual
and auditory interplay inherent within the literary form, a sense of interdepen-
dence between the two rather than complete separation. Stephen does not just
close his eyes and hear; he closes his eyes to hear: “Stephen closed his eyes to
hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells” (U 3.10–11). The audible be-
comes clear only when the more dominant sense, vision, is diminished. When
the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man composes his poetry
he “spoke the verses aloud . . . then copied them . . . to feel them the better by
seeing them” (Portrait 240). As Stephen writes, thus transcribing the sounds
visually, his sense of the words’ meaning is heightened.
Thus in this early stage of the book Joyce presents the artistic dilemma of his
project: to evoke both space and time in the temporal art of literature. It is my
contention that in order to do so he draws on particular qualities of music, a
temporal art that, as I will show, retains the ability to step out of the relentless
progression of time, “[t]he ineluctable modality of the audible,” the seemingly
inevitable process of “walking into eternity” (U 3.18).
The art of music, though naturally within the realm of the auditory, has
nonetheless developed within the Western classical tradition on the basis of a
synthesis between text and sound. The aural is represented on a visual plane
(the score) which is then reproduced in sound once more (the performance).
Music is understood to exist both in a textual (visual and spatial) sense and in
a performative (auditory and temporal) sense. An acceptance of this duality,
of the fluid, indefinable dynamic between these two aspects of music exists,
one that does not transfer easily to the field of literature. Within the realm of
the written word, notions of the work existing externally or parallel to a clas-
sical urtext provoke a deep anxiety. Certainly interpretations are acceptable
but these interpretations are markedly different from those within the musical
 138 Katherine O’Callaghan

world, whereby, as Theodor Adorno has stated, interpretation “is not an ac-
cidental attribute of music, but an integral part of it” (3).
Even within the nacheinander arts, therefore, there is debate regarding the
uniqueness or sovereignty of each form. Daniel Albright has noted that in rela-
tion to music and literature, “it has always been difficult to tell exactly where
one ends and the other begins: both of these artistic media consist of sound
that varies over time, though in one case those sounds are called notes and in
the other case phonemes” (23). There are several reasons why literature is con-
sidered an inhospitable ground for the art of music. While both arts work in a
temporal manner, in that they move through time, music is capable of holding
multiple ideas at once, it can achieve simultaneity, and can do so in a man-
ner overcoming that dilemma which vexed Stephen on the beach, providing a
means of stepping outside a linear singular temporality. This is not generally
thought to be the case for language.
Also, language is considered to be referential; each unit represents some-
thing or some idea. Music, on the other hand, is self-reflexive; it does not mean
something in the same sense. A note does not refer to something in the way
that a word does. Furthermore, and this is specifically in reference to prose,
music is a performed art, while literature is not. Although poetry and drama
contain overt rhythmical and performative qualities that might lend them-
selves to a natural affinity to music, prose literature generally does not.
To say that music is a marker of a text-performance dynamic within Joyce’s
writing is not to suggest that the long-drawn-out debate concerning the inter-
relationship between language and music in his work is somehow invalid. The
core questions remain: can music become language, and can language become
music? Can literature, following the Paterian dictum, aspire to (and attain) the
status of music, and can music speak? The concept of music speaking indicates
that it might have something to say which, given the right translation skills, the
audience could decipher. It might be taken as implying that music is “about”
something, rather than “that something itself.”
When we speak of lyrical poetry or prose there is often a suggestion of a
musical element to the language. Attempts to analyze, however, what makes
a piece of literature musical rather than simply rhythmical can often lead to
an effort to prove whether or not the literature has become music. This is par-
ticularly obvious in critical writing in the area of Joyce and his use of music: a
dominant strain of argument judges the success or failure of his engagement
with music on the basis of whether he has succeeded in writing music rather
than prose. This line of thought can also get caught up in a debate regard-
 Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 139

ing whether the “Sirens” episode, for example, is music becoming literature
or literature becoming music. This argument, for all its heuristic value, has a
self-canceling aspect. “Sirens” is an episode in a book, not a piece of music—
that much is reasonably clear. The real point of interest is whether Joyce has
succeeded in evoking music through language, and whether he has succeeded
in engaging with processes we traditionally associate with music, such as per-
formance and interpretation, in the art form of prose literature.
We can only read a text with our eyes open. Unlike Stephen, we must open
our eyes to hear him speak. In the “Sirens” episode we are ordered to “Listen!”
(U 11.33) and are told of things that are “heard, not seen” (U 11.240), but the no-
tion of “see-hearing” is also explored. In this way the temporal art of literature
is recognized to have a visual aspect in the act of reading, and furthermore
the inclusion of a blind man and a deaf man in the episode, highlighting the
opposite ends of the visual-aural spectrum, underlines the ability of all of the
other characters to “see-hear.” “Sirens” undoubtedly places the ear and listen-
ing above the eye and sight, but the eye is never fully absent, any more than the
musical art exists solely in the aural, temporal domain.
That “Sirens” is full of musical references, allusions, and puns has been well
documented. Some critics have gone further to analyze the sound effects, the
use of what might be considered musical phrasing and form, and the gen-
eral musicality of the episode. What might be explored further is why Joyce
would choose to use these musical ideas—what specific qualities might mu-
sic have with which he wished to engage? In other words, discussions on the
topic have tended to refer to the aspects of music that correspond closest to
literary texts: focusing on the words of referenced songs rather than on their
melodies, selecting terminology that is not unique to music but rather overlaps
with literary terms. Even those attempts to engage beyond the lyrics or libretti,
the attempts to analyze musical form or style within the text, have tended to
disregard essential qualities of music.

The Opening Section

“Sirens” begins with a series of disjointed fragments that we stumble over, will-
ing them to make sense, to fall into place. Anthony Burgess has suggested they
might be the legendary piles of bones of the sailors who fell into the lure of
the Homeric Sirens (83). The opening section is not simply about confusing
us but forcing us to see words in an unfamiliar setting, to defamiliarize them,
so that we become aware that this is what text is made up of. This technique
 140 Katherine O’Callaghan

is not unusual in Ulysses, which regularly employs self-reflexive strategies, de-

liberately acknowledging its status as a piece of writing. In this case, however,
the dislocating effect is taken a step further due to the fact that we have neither
sentences nor, in many cases, recognizable words to work with. There is no
doubt at this point that the reader must play a role. If the first words, “Bronze
by gold” (U 11.1), are visual, the first action heard brings us into the realm of
the ear. “[H]oofirons” that are “steelyringing” (U 11.1) confirm the fact that this
episode requires the reader to listen as well as see.
The most common explanation of the opening is that it forms an overture
of sorts. Zack Bowen, in his essay “The Bronzegold Sirensong,” writes that the
“first two pages of the episode . . . clearly constitute an overture” (Bloom’s Old
Sweet Song 26). Daniel Albright comments that “[i]t is possible to imagine this
passage as a bundle of Leitmotive” (44), employing the notion of the Wagnerian
leitmotif, whereby a theme is used repeatedly to represent a character or situ-
ation. Albright’s interpretation shares with others the notion that the opening
is meaningless in itself and is to be understood only in terms of what follows in
the main body of the episode. Albright contends that the opening forms “a sort
of thematic catalog of sound-intensive phrases, phrases that will appear later
in the chapter in a more intelligible narrative context” (44). The idea that the
opening is proleptic is continued by Udaya Kumar, who comments that “the
justification of repetition seems to be at the level of narrative organization, in
the use of fuga per canonem as the technic of the episode” (19; Kumar adds: “the
only ground for the coherence of the overture is the appearance of the elements
later” [42]).
Comments such as these bring into stark relief how problematic the no-
tion of an overture is. A musical overture is described as “[a] piece of music of
moderate length, either introducing a dramatic work or intended for concert
performance” (New Grove Dictionary of Music). It has its own form, its own
communication of musical ideas. Some overtures can be thought of as “stand-
alone.” We can certainly trace melodies from the coming work within them,
but the melodies are not presented as mere snatches in a manner incompre-
hensible to the audience waiting patiently for a main body of music to explain
the opening. The equivalent of an overture in writing would be more akin to
an abstract than a collection of disjointed phrases from the text.
The word overture may appear to ring true in both a literary and musical
sense. As in an overture to an opera, fragments of the opening section are
recognizably developed through the main body of the work. However, I would
suggest that the idea of the overture limits our understanding of the opening
and its impact on the reader’s experience of the rest of the episode.
 Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 141

Canon
Joyce himself assigned the term fuga per canonem to the episode, causing much
confusion as critics struggle to fit it to the form of the writing. It is not a com-
monly used term in music, although Joyce seemed fairly confident of his ap-
plication of it, writing to Harriet Shaw Weaver: “Perhaps I ought not to say
any more on the subject of the Sirens but the passages you allude to were not
intended by me as recitative, on page 12 in preface to the song. They are all the
eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem: and I did not know in what other
way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels” (SL
242). A fugue is a piece of music based on canonic imitation, one voice chasing
another. The New Grove Dictionary comments that the Latin fuga is related to
both fugere, “to flee,” and fugare, “to chase.” The word canon is used today to
describe the most straightforward form of fugue: several lines or voices, each
repeating essentially the same melody. Heath Lees’s article “The Introduction
to ‘Sirens’ and the Fuga per Canonem” overturns many assumptions regarding
the opening and suggests that the fugal idea referred to in fuga per canonem
can be found in the opening as well as the main body of the text. Furthermore,
Lees suggests that the opening section is canonical in a medieval sense, as in
the Middle Ages “the canon was usually verbal” (52). The canon was a textual
encryption written at the start of a piece of music to explain to the musicians
how the music was to be textured. Because the most commonly used canon
was a description of strict imitation, the name canon became associated with
that formal technique. “When viewed as a canon,” Lees writes, “the introduc-
tion becomes more like an inscription, embodying the ‘secret technic’ of the
chapter, which now begins” (52). He suggests that the opening “embodies the
Canon” and contains the coded message that we are entering the realm of mu-
sic, that “ineluctable modality of the audible” (52). Using Joyce’s term “seehear,”
Lees also points out that the episode “has to be approached with a musical ear
in order that its total resonance can be ‘realized’” (41).

Canon as Score: Performing the Opening

If we think of the term “seehear” in relation to music, we might relate it to two
aspects of a piece: the text and the performance of that text. Put simply, we see
the score and we hear the music. It is not necessary to revert to a medieval tech-
nique to establish the presence of an encoding system in music. The most obvi-
ous form of encryption in music is the musical score. The composer encodes
the music he or she hears; the musician then decodes the score and performs
 142 Katherine O’Callaghan

the music. This encryption and deciphering are such obvious aspects of music
that they are readily overlooked. The mystery of music comes, to some extent,
from the fact that it can be reduced to dots on a graph of lines and spaces and
again reignited through the act of performance.
Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim discuss in Parallels and Paradoxes
whether a pure music exists or whether there is simply a score and multiple
performances, with performance being necessary for the music to come into
itself. Each rendition of a musical piece is different but true in itself. Barenboim
comments: “When Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony, it simply existed as a
figment of his imagination and was subject to physical laws that he imagined
only in his brain. And then, he used the only known system of notation, which
is black spots on white paper. And nobody is going to convince me that these
black spots on white paper are the Fifth Symphony. The Fifth Symphony comes
into being when an orchestra, somewhere in the world, decides to play it” (111).
I believe that this is the phenomenon that Joyce addresses in “Sirens.” Rather
than reading the main body of the episode as a simple development of the ideas
presented in the opening, perhaps it should be read as a performance of that
score. The change that happens in the performance (or reading) of the score
is representative of what happens when musicians present a piece of music,
when they read a score and we then hear it. The main body can then be read
as one interpretation of what happened, but it is also what makes sense of the
metaphorical dots, lines, and spaces of that opening section. They hold ev-
erything, but without the following playing of them we cannot interpret their
meaning.
Yes, there can be fugal forms traceable within the score, or the opening, but
to hear their value a performance must be given. Joyce lays out all the clues
for us by assigning the “Ear” to this episode, telling us to listen, not to see the
score and read out loud a, b, c, c#, and so forth, but instead to listen to it being
played or performed. Bloom’s own musings on the structure of music led him
to conclude: “Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied
by two divided by half is twice one. . . . Do anything you like with figures jug-
gling . . . and you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it
like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s
on account of the sounds it is” (U 11.830–37; emphasis added).
The idea of the main body representing a fugue has been dismissed on the
grounds that we cannot hear the eight voices that Joyce claimed were present.
However, once more there is a strange emphasis on the written form of mu-
sic in this argument. Certainly, when looking at a score someone with musi-
 Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 143

cal knowledge can decipher the different strands or voices that make up the
whole, but when a fugue is performed the different voices are not always so
obvious. The performed music may often sound vertically, for example, the lis-
tener more aware of the chords that the lines are producing than the horizontal
melodies of individual voices. The final fugue may not be always recognizably
itself—so why should Joyce’s final product have its technic fully on display?

Busoni and the Problems of Notation

Indeed, the concept of musical scoring and performance can be taken a step
further by considering the insight that their relationship gives us into the cre-
ative process. Joyce owned a copy of Ferruccio Busoni’s “Sketch for a New
Esthetic of Music” (1907), in which the composer and critic wrote that “Nota-
tion, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for
catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later” (84). Busoni
held the view that the writing down of music was only ever an estimation of
the original moment of inspiration, of the music that the composer heard in
his or her head: “notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living
model” (84). He believed therefore that it was “for the interpreter to resolve the
rigidity of the signs into the primitive emotion” (84, his emphasis). When Joyce
writes “What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere
grieved for” (FW 482.34–36), he suggests that there is that which does not nec-
essarily appear in the traditional “coding” of language but can be “decorded”
from the text through the application of see-hearing.
Viewing through our postmodern (indeed post–Lewis Carroll) lens, we can
see the literary and aesthetic value in the seeming nonsense of the opening
section. Yet it remains the case that we can only appreciate the full pathos and
emotion of Leopold Bloom listening to Simon Dedalus’s rendition of M’Appari
during an hour in which his wife will betray him when we read the full text of
the episode. It cannot be felt by the reader of the opening alone, even if it holds
the essence of notation of what is to come. Without Joyce’s interpretation or
performance of that notation in the main body of the episode, the “primitive
emotion” referred to by Busoni is not accessible to the reader. There is an im-
pression created by those opening fragments that the episode is being sketched
out by Joyce as it comes to his mind, to be developed later. However, we know
from Joyce’s papers that early versions of the episode did not include the open-
ing section. He is thus, in a sense, re-creating retrospectively the impression of
inspiration coming to him and of the creative process at work. However, made
 144 Katherine O’Callaghan

apparent within that process is the inaccuracy or rigidity inherent in the tran-
scription (or writing down) of the artist’s idea. To represent the initial source
as elusive is to acknowledge the transcendental nature of the creative point of
origin. This critical trajectory suggests a broader issue at play (one that cannot
be covered in an article of this length) regarding Joyce’s cultural heritage and
the unsettling process, not unfamiliar to the Irish, involved in the transference
of a literary and musical heritage previously based on oral transmission into a
formalized rigidity (for example, the transcribing of Irish modal melodies into
a standardized tonal format by Edward Bunting).

Interpretation
While reading the opening section of “Sirens” as an overture may seem neat,
an alternative reading may open up far more insights into what this episode’s
aesthetic ambition challenges and, I would argue, successfully re-creates. A
reading of the main body of the episode as a performance of the initial section
opens up the text because it suggests a musical rather than literary idea of the
act of interpretation. As noted above, Adorno has referred to interpretation in
music as not “accidental” but rather as “integral” (3). He notes a demarcation
between interpretation in literature and in music, in the sense that in the field
of literature interpretation involves understanding, and in the field of music it
involves performing (3). However, his reading of literary interpretation may be
too restrictive, and not just from our present position, but from a further criti-
cal appreciation of the aesthetic categories of reading. Susan Sontag’s descrip-
tion of literary interpretation appears to share common ground with Adorno’s
sense of musical interpretation. Although Sontag maintains a critical approach
to the whole idea of interpretation—“to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete
the world” (7)—she is also presenting a model of it that is far more radical
than Adorno’s. For example, she suggests that to interpret a text is to alter
it, and even to revamp it. Whereas Adorno proposes that to interpret is “to
understand,” Sontag suggests that in contemporary times, “[t]o understand
is to interpret” (7). The interpretation she describes is an active one, one that
engages with the text. This is presented as negative in the framework she sets
up, precisely because it is unacknowledged—as she puts it: “the interpreter,
without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit
doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true
meanings” (6). For Sontag, “Interpretation seeks to resolve discrepancies,” but
in the “Sirens” episode, and later in Finnegans Wake, the interpretative process
 Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 145

encourages discrepancies and defers resolutions. In “Sirens” Joyce incorporates

both senses of interpretation into his art, or to put it another way, his text re-
sists choosing between the two.
In music, interpretation is not a resolving force because it is not singular
but multiple. If music is made up of multiple performances of a score, and the
“Sirens” episode is playing with this idea, then the main body of the text is not
only a performance but one of many possible performances of that score or
opening. In other words, “imperthnthn” may not necessarily be “impertinent”
mimicked by a boot boy. We might read, interpret, the words “bronze,” “gold,”
and “irons” in the opening line as three colors, as three metals, or as three
sounds. This, of course, is a process in which we always engage when reading a
text, but usually the interpretations collapse and one is privileged. At the open-
ing of “Sirens” that does not happen. This can be seen on a micro-level by an
examination of the following segment:
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair. (U 11.5–7)
While the word “bloom” seems to grow out of the repeated play on the sound
“blew/blue,” the reader is also alerted to the idea of Bloom’s “blueness” or sad-
ness. In contrast, the next fragment suggests that the word “bloom” refers in-
stead to a flower “on the. / Goldpinnacled hair.” The flower then appears to be
a rose on a blouse: “A jumping rose on the satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile’
(U 11.8). However, the sense of Bloom’s sadness in “blue bloom” returns when
we reach the phrase “I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming” (U 11.32). The two
meanings are entwined toward the end of the opening section in the phrase
“Last rose of Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone” (U 11.54).
This kernel of ambiguity is played on throughout the episode proper, with
Bloom taking on the uncertain names of “Bloowho” (U 11.86), “Bloowhose” (U
11.149), and “Bloohimwhom” (U 11.308). When we reach the unembellished
name of “Bloom” (U 11.102), it is immediately followed by “On her flower
frowning miss Douce said” (U 11.103), thus reintroducing ambiguity as well as
uncertainty from our perspective as readers. The episode revels in the disori-
entation of the reader; while Odysseus’s men may have had their ears blocked
to the song of the Sirens, the reader of this episode is more likely to feel blind-
folded. Clues come to us aurally: we hear the movement of the tapping blind
piano tuner, of the jingling Blazes Boylan moving up O’Connell street toward
Molly Bloom, of the “steelyringing” viceregal cavalcade. The lack of geographi-
 146 Katherine O’Callaghan

cal signposting creates its own layers of ambiguity and misunderstanding. The
reader is uncertain as to whether the musically named barmaids Lydia Douce
and Mina Kennedy are using the term “greaseabloom” (U 11.180) to refer to the
old fogey from Boyd’s or to Bloom, who has yet to arrive at the Ormond hotel,
and yet whose progress we are also aware of.
The playing out of the bloom/flower motif is far more expansive and lay-
ered than in the earlier “Lotus-Eaters” episode. Now the “language of flow”
(U 11.298) constantly interrupts narrative realism: “thick syrupy liquor for his
lips, looked as it flowed (flower in his coat: who gave him?), and syrupped with
her voice” (U 11.365–67). The reader feels on surer ground when the phrase
“Blue bloom is on the rye” (U 11. 230–31) occurs, as it appears to be an obvi-
ous reference to the song “When the Bloom Is on the Rye.” The word rose in
its various meanings is also played on continually: “Bronzedouce communing
with her rose that sank and rose sought Blazes Boylan’s flowers and eyes” (U
11.398–99); “She rose and closed her reading, rose of Castile: fretted, forlorn,
dreamily rose” (U 11.331–32). The rose motif is overtly associated with music:
Lenehan’s riddle on Balfe’s opera The Rose of Castille, the Thomas Moore song
“The Last Rose of Summer” (which is used in Flotow’s opera Martha), and
Bloom’s memory of buying Blumenlied for Milly.
The sense throughout the episode that words are resonating against each
other creates a text that resists singular interpretations and insists on the no-
tion of performance. The essence of the play on the words “Bloom,” “rose,” and
“flower” (as examples) is contained in the opening phrases of the episode but
requires the temporal expansion of the main narrative to create the reader’s
role as the performer, a role that involves suspending the resolution of mean-
ing, resisting singular interpretation, and allowing the interplay of meaning
and resonance to operate outside a strict linearity.
The penultimate word of the opening, “Done” (U 11.62), can be read as the
last of Robert Emmet’s words from the dock—“Let my epitaph be written. I
have done”—as pondered over by Bloom at the end of the episode proper (U
11.1291–92). However, it must also be considered in relation to the last word
of the opening section, “Begin!” (U 11.63). “Begin” is not repeated at the end
of the episode. Its inclusion suggests something new is about to happen with
the body of the episode. Rather than considering the opening to be mean-
ingless without the ensuing episode, “Begin!” suggests that something has
been put in place which then allows the performance to begin. And yet this
opening resists retrospectively assigned singular meanings and the idea that
such fragments are in themselves a starting point in the creative process. The
 Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 147

question remains: what reading process do we engage in as we encounter

those fragments?
Sebastian Knowles writes that “Joyce, by overdetermining his opening
phrase, is ensuring that it cannot be understood. Only then can it be heard,
only then does the line approach the meaning of music” (Bronze by Gold xxvii).
Even the limited analysis of the words “blue” and “rose” above challenges the
notion that the opening section does not contain meaning itself. If anything, as
Knowles suggests, it is rich with meaning. However, the notion that literature
will only approach the meaning of music when it is incomprehensible is not
the sole key to Joyce’s text. On the contrary, it is possible to see the reader’s
interpretation of those multiplicities of meaning over a prolonged passage as a
performative reading, one approaching a musical performance.
If we read “Sirens” as a score followed by a performance of that score, then
what we are being shown is how a text, as much as music, can move out from
the page through an interpretation or performance. This process is not unique
to the “Sirens” episode—throughout the book we encounter a recurrent mo-
tif suggesting a multiplicity of perspectives and the repetition of events. The
morning of 16 June is performed twice (we return to 8 a.m. at episode 4). In
the “Wandering Rocks” episode, also an attempt to depict simultaneity (more
ambitiously attempted in “Sirens”), we have a sense of perspectives, not simply
as different angles on one thing (Bloom’s “parallax”) but as different renditions
of the same event.
While Joyce himself can be seen as both composer and performer in the “Si-
rens” episode, the implication of alternative interpretations hands power over
to the reader. If we accept that multiple interpretations of the opening section
can be performed, then we are truly encountering what Umberto Eco calls
the “opera aperta,” or “open work” (3). An interpretative process thus emerges
more akin to that of musical interpretation, whereby in each individual read-
ing experience the text can be seen as being performed. Thus the activity of
interpretation is not external to the work but rather is the work, much as it
is necessary in order for music to come into itself. Without it, the music can
exist only visually, as dots on lines and spaces on a page: what is required is a
performance of that score, and within each performance it is necessary for an
interpretation to be made.
Joyce’s repositioning of the novel form within an interpretative, performa-
tive context need not be seen as an aspiration toward the status of music. Rath-
er, our commonplace acceptance of these radical properties within the realm
of music assists in our understanding of how Joyce is drawing them from the
 148 Katherine O’Callaghan

world of language, within which they are latent. The “Sirens” episode, then, is
not exclusively the text on the page but also an ongoing interpretative experi-
ence, much as Mozart’s Requiem is not exclusively a score on a page but an on-
going experience reimagined in each performance of it. As Daniel Barenboim
notes, “the score is not the truth. The score is not the piece. The piece is when
you actually bring it into sound” (33); or as Leopold Bloom puts it, “It’s on ac-
count of the sounds it is” (U 11.830–37).

Notes
1. The essences of time and space, sound and object are combined in Stephen’s words on
Sandymount strand: “Sounds solid” (U 3.17). The solid sound produced by his tapping ashplant
also lets him know that solidity sounds.
2. This phrasing draws on Samuel Beckett’s comment about Finnegans Wake: “His writing
is not about something, it is that something itself” (Beckett et al. 4).
3. See, for example, Bowen, Musical Allusions; Hodgart and Worthington; Bauerle; and
Bauerle and Hodgart.
4. See Knowles, Bronze by Gold; Bowen, Bloom’s Old Sweet Song; and Lees.
5. The concept of the Wagnerian leitmotif in Joyce’s writing has been discussed by many.
See Martin.
6. By suggesting that the main body of the text can be read as a performance of the open-
ing score, I do not mean to imply that the opening represents a particular piece of music that
might be deciphered. Sebastian Knowles takes to task those seeking to force the opening to
“act as a cryptogrammatic vehicle for musical notation, no matter how pleasant and plausible
the resulting melodies may be” (“That Form Endearing” 213). It is in terms of the relationship
between the score and the performance that the musical analogy is important.
7. Knowles argues that the opening section can be compared to the keys on a piano: “The
twenty-ninth note on the opening keyboard is ‘I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming’” (“That
Form Endearing” 219).
8. Declan Kiberd has made the astute point, in lectures and private conversation, that all
of Ulysses may well be the oblique narration of an alternative version of 16 June 1904 on which
the young Joyce did not meet Nora Barnacle. In a sense, that day is released through literature
to inhabit “the room of the infinite possibilities” (U 2.50–51).
9. I do not suggest that Joyce himself created the main body of the text out of the opening,
but rather that the final product evokes this effect. In this sense, the opening could even be read
as a slightly inaccurate dictation of the main body of text.
10. Within the field of musicology, a failure to explore music in its performed, rather than
written, aspect has been recognized by critics such as Abbate and Cook. A critical approach
to musical performances as temporal, unique, ephemeral events involves challenges that do
not occur in a critical reading of the spatial, unchanging written document that is the musical
score. Evaluations of performances tend to be left to newspaper reviewers, while academics
focus to a greater extent on written music.
 Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens 149

Works Cited
Abbate, Carolyn, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30.3 (2004): 505–36.
Adorno, Theodor. Quasi una fantasia. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1992.
Albright, Daniel. Modernism and Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Bauerle, Ruth. Picking Up Airs: Hearing the Music in Joyce’s Text. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1993.
Bauerle, Ruth, and Matthew Hodgart, eds. Joyce’s Grand Operoar: Opera in “Finnegans Wake.”
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Beckett, Samuel, et al. Our Exagmination round His Factifaction for Incamination of Work in
Progress. 1929. London: Faber, 1972.
Bowen, Zack. Bloom’s Old Sweet Song. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995.
———. Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through “Ulysses.” Albany:
SUNY Press, 1974.
Burgess, Anthony. Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. London: Deutsch,
1973.
Busoni, Ferruccio. “Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music.” Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music.
1907. New York: Dover, 1962. 73–102.
Cook, Nicholas. “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance.” Music Theory
Online 7.2 (2001) 1 June 2004 <http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/
mto.01.7.2.cook.html>.
Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Trans. Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989.
Hodgart, Matthew J. C., and Mabel Worthington. Songs in the Works of James Joyce. New York:
Columbia University Press for Temple University Press, 1959.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane. London: Penguin,
2000.
Knowles, Sebastian D. G., ed. Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce. New York: Garland, 1999.
———. “That Form Endearing: A Performance of Siren Songs; or, ‘I was only vamping, man.’”
Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays. Ed. Morris Beja and David Norris. Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1996. 213–36.
Kumar, Udaya. The Joycean Labyrinth: Repetition, Time and Tradition in “Ulysses.” Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991.
Lees, Heath. “The Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the Fuga per Canonem.” James Joyce Quarterly
22.1 (1984): 39–54.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön. Trans. Edward Allen McCormick. 1766. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.
Martin, Timothy. Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991.
Said, Edward, and Daniel Barenboim. Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and So-
ciety. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1966.
 9

Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama

Timothy Martin

Both Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom have their moments in Ulysses,
single occasions on which they transcend their surroundings, contradict their
own characters, perhaps even exceed the naturalist ethos of the work in which
they appear. Bloom’s histrionic moment comes at the end of “Cyclops,” when
he forgets the prudence that has made him a byword in Dublin and confronts
his antagonist in deliberately provocative terms: “Your God was a jew,” he
shouts at the Citizen. “Christ was a jew like me” (U 12.1809–10). The weight of
this occasion is increased by recollection of its apparent inspiration in Homer,
the point when, in a similar (and similarly unique) lapse in character, Odysseus
taunts his own Polyphemus: “Kyklops / . . . Odysseus, raider of cities, took your
eye: / Laertes’ son, whose home’s on Ithaka!” (Od. 9.472–76). Stephen’s moment
comes in the climax of “Circe,” arguably the climax of Ulysses as a whole, at a
point when, confronted by what appears to be the risen corpse of his mother,
he shouts a Wagnerian epithet—“Nothung!”—and smashes Bella Cohen’s chan-
delier: “No! No! No! Break my spirit, all of you, if you can! I’ll bring you all to
heel!” (U 15.4235–42). Elsewhere in the work Stephen’s demeanor is anything
but operatic. A “lovely mummer” (U 1.97), he is parsimonious of speech, ac-
tion, and emotion, parrying anti-Semitism with irony and indirection, using
his “best French polish” (U 9.315) on behalf of Garrett Deasy and of Irish cattle,
“chang[ing] the subject” instead of trying to “change the country” (U 16.1171).
On these unique occasions characters defined by self-possession and reserve
forget themselves; they make scenes.
Each of these grandiose moments in Ulysses is inflected by the theater and
its conventions. As Bloom leaves Barney Kiernan’s at the height of the con-
flict, the narrative suddenly transports him to another plane: “When, lo, there
came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He
 Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama 151

stood ascend to heaven. . . . And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Eli-
jah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai!” (U 12.1910–15).
The triumphal death, here inflated to apotheosis, is a staple of opera: nearly
all Wagner’s operas, most notably Tristan and Isolde and The Flying Dutch-
man, conclude with some variation on this theme. And the dramatic rescue
is common in both melodrama and opera: examples may be found in Dion
Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn and Arrah-na-Pogue and in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Ste-
phen’s crisis in “Circe” draws on the motif of the risen dead, a motif foreign to
naturalist fiction but indigenous to melodramas like Boucicault’s immensely
popular Corsican Brothers and Paul Potter’s Trilby; to melodrama more broadly
defined, such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore and Mozart’s Don Giovanni;
and to melodramatic fiction like Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. Joyce has
taken pains to make the drama inherent in these scenes of antagonism and
confrontation theatrical.
Ulysses is among the most open-ended and naturalistic of novels, but it is
striking how frequently Joyce, especially toward the latter half of the book,
resorted to the theater—and to the melodramatic idiom in particular—to cre-
ate moments of intensity and smaller climaxes that offer local and intermittent
drama even if Ulysses as a whole does not. For example, grandiloquent speech
is characteristic of melodrama, and Joyce has long been known to have bor-
rowed Robert Emmet’s famous “speech from the dock” in order to give the
“Sirens” episode the sense of an ending: “When my country takes her place
among . . . [the] Nations of the earth . . . Then and not till then . . . Let my
epitaph be . . . Written. I have . . . Done” (U 11.1284–93). Joyce might have seen
Emmet’s words in a shop window, as Bloom does in “Sirens.” But the melodra-
matic quality of the speech, and Emmet’s own suitability for melodrama, are
suggested by the fact that Joyce’s countryman Dion Boucicault used it—his
wording is nearly identical to Joyce’s—to create an especially weighty moment
in the last act of his 1884 play Robert Emmet (383–84). In “Nausicaa” Bloom
realizes that his watch has stopped, and he makes an inference that Molly’s rec-
ollections in “Penelope” will ultimately bear out: “Funny my watch stopped at
half past four. . . . Was that just when he, she?” (U 13.846–48). In The Corsican
Brothers, a clock stops inexplicably at ten minutes past nine, when one of two
twin brothers feels a sudden spasm of pain in his chest. We later learn that his
twin was killed in a duel, hundreds of miles away, at ten minutes past nine on
the same day. This powerful strain of the numinous reflects the paranoia that is
at the heart of the genre. The avalanches, fires, and floods of the more spectacu-
lar nineteenth-century melodramas have their mundane counterparts in the
 152 Timothy Martin

occult powers of clocks, mirrors, and family portraits. Eric Bentley has written
of the strain of paranoia in melodrama: “we are being persecuted, and we hold
that all things, living and dead, are combining to persecute us. Or rather, [that]
nothing is dead. Even the landscape has come to life if only to assault us” (202).
Other moments in Ulysses, especially the endings of later episodes, are more
generally theatrical. Cheryl Herr has found that the vision of Rudy with which
“Circe” concludes is indebted to the transformation scene that is usual in the
English pantomime (Anatomy 173–79), and Bloom’s fantastic escape from the
Citizen in a heaven-sent chariot is a reminder of the probable origin of the
dramatic rescue in the venerable tradition of deus ex machina. Two episodes,
finally, evoke sentimental endings characteristic of a good deal of popular the-
ater: the reunion of long-lost family members in the case of “Eumaeus,” when
symbolic father and son go off together, arm in arm; and the acceptance of a
proposal of marriage, if only in recollection, as “Penelope” and Ulysses as a
whole achieve their naturalist denouement.
Joyce’s engagement with popular culture must have been apparent to his
earliest readers, and Joyce scholars like R. B. Kershner and Cheryl Herr have
made important strides in charting its range and implications. Among studies
of Joyce and the theater, Herr, in Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture, devotes a good
deal of attention to Joyce’s debt to pantomime and the music hall. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, few scholars have written on Joyce and melodrama. The most
notable exception is Stephen Watt, whose Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular
Stage gives an account of the tradition of melodrama on the Irish stage, espe-
cially at the Queen’s Royal Theater in Dublin, and charts its influence on Joyce
and O’Casey. “If allusions to popular culture in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
were traced to their origins,” Watt writes, “the trek would frequently lead to the
theater . . . from which Joyce, O’Casey, and many of their characters derived
so much pleasure—and in which Shaw and Yeats discovered so much vulgar-
ity” (30). Watt reminds us that Joyce developed names for his divisive twins in
Finnegans Wake from two nineteenth-century melodramas: Shaun from the
character Shaun the Post in the 1884 Arrah-na-Pogue, and Shem from the title
character in Charles Young’s 1886 Jim the Penman (37–38). In this essay my aim
is less to trace the presence of individual works in Ulysses or to show, as Watt
does, how “melodrama taught historical lessons to its audience” (55) than to
describe and assess the book’s exploitation, intermittently, of a melodramatic
ethos.
The origins of melodrama were in late-eighteenth-century France and in
the romantic movement. The term may have been first used by Rousseau with
 Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama 153

reference to his own play Pygmalion, which consisted of dramatic monologues

interspersed with pantomime and musical interludes (the latter, of course, ac-
counting for the presence of melos in the term’s etymology). After melodrama
made its way onto the English stage in 1801, with the production of Thomas
Holcroft’s Tale of Mystery, strict licensing acts assured that it would flourish.
In London, only the so-called patent theaters—Covent Garden, Drury Lane,
and eventually the Haymarket—enjoyed the right to present traditional drama,
including Shakespeare, while the scores of other theaters that grew up in Lon-
don in the early nineteenth century were obliged, until midcentury, to provide
some sort of musical accompaniment for their plays.
These and other circumstances help explain how Victorian melodrama
earned its poor reputation. Lack of copyright for playwrights—there was no
international protection before the 1880s—made originality unprofitable, so
most melodramas were cobbled out of historical material, legends, and es-
pecially novels. In many cases hack writers simply translated and plagiarized
what they saw in Continental theaters. (Holcroft’s Tale of Mystery was based
on a play by Pixerécourt produced in Paris just months before.) The increas-
ing size of Victorian theaters, built to accommodate rising urban populations,
encouraged stilted diction, strident declamation, and exaggerated gestures.
Finally, strict codes of censorship enforced by the Lord Chamberlain created
many barriers to free expression. One critic has described the heyday of melo-
drama as a kind of theatrical Dark Ages, sandwiched between a Golden Age
of Restoration theater and a modern Renaissance represented by Ibsen, Shaw,
Chekhov, Strindberg, and Wilde (Kilgarriff 15). George Steiner has linked the
rise of melodrama to the decline or “death” of tragedy, and Peter Brooks consid-
ers the form to be the expression of a “post-sacred era” “where the traditional
imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet
where the promulgation of truth and ethics . . . is of immediate, daily, political
concern” (15).
Notwithstanding the poor reputation of nineteenth-century melodra-
ma, many critics acknowledge its emotional power and its ubiquity in both
theater and fiction. In Tragedy and Melodrama, Robert Heilman describes
these two forms of drama as both “artistic structures” and “general catego-
ries of human experience” (88–89); that is, both art and life can be, or seem,
tragic and melodramatic. If tragedy deals with the divided human, basically
good but capable of wrongdoing, “melodrama separat[es] good and evil and
treat[s] them as independent wholes,” and personifies them as heroes or vil-
lains (90). Heilman calls the dominant effect of melodrama “monopathic,”
 154 Timothy Martin

where plot, character, and theme channel our responses into intense streams
of unmixed feeling: “the exaltation of victory, indignation at wrongdoing, the
pitiableness of victims . . . the warming participation in courage, the despair
of defeat . . . the sadness of death” (95). Tragedy is by contrast “polypathic,”
requiring the audience to experience ambivalence rather than singleness
of emotion as it focuses on characters caught between conflicting impera-
tives and impulses. Heilman links tragedy with religion, with “action within
the soul,” and melodrama, perhaps unexpectedly, with politics, with “action
within the world” (97). “Melodrama,” he writes, “is concerned with making
right prevail in the world and between persons, or with observing that it does
not prevail; tragedy, with the problem of right in the self ” (97). And it is in
the preoccupation with setting things right that melodrama is monopathic,
for one must shed ambivalence, suppress the contradictory imperative, and
“assume wholeness” if one is to act (97–98). The vigorous tradition of political
melodrama on the Dublin stage, documented by Stephen Watt and by Cheryl
Herr in For the Land They Loved, helps justify Heilman’s claims about the
topical nature of melodrama.
Heilman’s attachment of melodrama to politics, social action, and right and
wrong gives us considerable purchase on the melodramatic qualities of “Cy-
clops.” The episode in Kiernan’s pub is at once the most political and the most
dramatic in the novel. Its art, according to Joyce’s schema, is politics, and its plot
reveals the standard dramatic trajectory of conflict and rising action, culminat-
ing in what may be regarded as the only real “scene,” leaving aside the question
of “Circe,” in Ulysses. The dominant emotion of the episode—indignation—is
the melodramatic emotion par excellence, the monopathic certainty that one
is right and that others are wrong. It runs like a leitmotif throughout the epi-
sode, as the cast of minor characters confronts political questions like lynch-
ings in Georgia, corporal punishment in the British navy, capital punishment
in contemporary Dublin (the prospective hangman an Englishman bearing the
name of a man against whom Joyce held a grudge), and, most promising of all
these subjects for melodrama, a demanding landlord thrown out of court by a
righteous judge: “A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How
many children? Ten, did you say? . . . And the wife with typhoid fever! Scan-
dalous! Leave the court immediately, sir . . . I dismiss the case” (U 12.1104–10).
Though the landlord may be justified in asking that his rents be paid, Sir Fred-
erick Falkiner, the judge with a “[h]eart as big as a lion” (U 12.1097), has put the
law aside and, like the sympathetic audience for melodrama, made his feelings
whole.
 Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama 155

Politics provokes the conflict between Bloom and the Citizen, and indig-
nation provides its fuel. The Citizen lives in a world of black-and-white dis-
tinctions and monopathic certainty about national questions: “The friends we
love are by our side and the foes we hate before us” (U 12.523–24). Bloom an-
tagonizes him not only because of his dubious ethnic identity but also because
he cannot muster undivided emotion on the political issues that so move the
Citizen. “I mean,” Bloom reasons, “wouldn’t it be the same here if you put
force against force?” (U 12.1361–62). The irony, of course, is that, for all his
patriotism, the Citizen is apparently a villain in his own right, wanted by the
Molly Maguires “for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant” in Limerick
(U 12.1314–16). Heilman writes that “[i]n indignation, we eliminate [our own]
complicity and guilt” (96). Or, as Bloom puts it, his own feelings provoked,
“Some people . . . can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam
in their own” (U 12.1237–38). Ambivalence in argument or in political life is
overmatched by unmixed feeling, and it is only when republicanism becomes
xenophobia and anti-Semitism—when Bloom feels personally threatened—
that he rises, uniquely in Ulysses, to the occasion: “And I belong to a race too,
says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. . . . Robbed. . . . Plundered. Insulted.
Persecuted. . . . At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auc-
tion in Morocco like slaves or cattle” (U 12.1467–72). According to Heilman,
“Stress makes the unified hero or coward, the samitaran or the savage. . . .
[O]ccasion may confer on divided man the oneness for a selfless act, for a kill-
ing in the market, or for a murder in the bedroom” (98). It is a commonplace
of Joyce criticism to attribute a narrowness of vision, a monocularism, to the
Polyphemus of this episode. A sense of the melodrama in the episode helps us
to see a similar narrowness of emotion, a monopathy, shared by the two main
characters and creating the episode’s basic conflict. And it is this melodramatic
deployment of indignation that gives this episode much of its rhetorical power,
just as it does the Christmas dinner scene in A Portrait—two scenes where
Joyce’s writing is most old-fashioned and, not coincidentally, most affecting.
It may be possible to see “Cyclops” as the expression of an impulse toward
the histrionic that is latent or repressed in Bloom. Bloom’s flirtation with
Martha Clifford, with its pseudonyms and secret correspondence, partakes
of melodramatic intrigue in some ways. The melodramatic diction in Martha
Clifford’s letter to Henry Flower—“O how I long to meet you. . . . Then I will
tell you all” (U 5.253–54)—is very much in keeping with the confessional tradi-
tion that links melodrama with its Romantic origins, a tradition in which he-
roes and heroines often vow to “tell you all.” (“You shall know all,” says Fabien
 156 Timothy Martin

in The Corsican Brothers. “From my brother’s friend I will have no secrets”

[Boucicault 103]). Bloom’s relationship with Martha has become a surrogate for
a marital one, just as his histrionic behavior in “Cyclops,” following the events
of “Sirens” so closely, may be a substitute for the action traditionally expected
of the outraged husband in opera and in melodrama. But Bloom’s capacity for
self-knowledge and for seeing both sides of a question distinguishes him from
the Citizen; his own sense of complicity in and partial responsibility for Molly’s
adultery balks the indignation that might prompt action; he is unable to muster
the Citizen’s monopathic conviction about “strangers” in either oikos or polis.
In “Ithaca,” Bloom imagines what a husband’s reaction should be. “What
retribution, if any?” he asks himself. “Assassination, never, as two wrongs did
not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by me-
chanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular
witness), not yet. Suit for damages . . . not impossibly. Hushmoney by moral
influence, possibly” (U 17.2200–2206). One of the theatrical possibilities that
Bloom doesn’t quite reject—“exposure by mechanical artifice”—would make
an excellent opera scene, and certainly the “concealed ocular witness” has a dis-
tinguished tradition in the theater. But a melodramatic solution to the problem
of adultery—assassination or duel by combat—is clearly outside the boundar-
ies of the work. Bloom’s temperament, though he exceeds it for his moment in
Kiernan’s pub, is not fundamentally histrionic; Ulysses is more even-tempered
and dispassionate than is Don Giovanni.
In “Telemachus,” the ghost of May Dedalus is a gentle visitant, easy to ex-
plain naturalistically: “In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted
body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood,
her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted
ashes” (U 1.270–72). In “Circe,” however, the guise of dream is absent, and
her appearance is grisly, uncanny, and, to Stephen, inexplicable: “She fixes her
bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth utter-
ing a silent word” (U 15.4160–61). A small detail that emphasizes the theatrical
underpinnings of this moment is found in Joyce’s stage direction: “Stephen’s
mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor . . .” (U 15.4157). Passage through
walls and floors was a standard indication of the presence of a ghost: when
the murdered Louis dei Franchi appears to his twin in The Corsican Brothers,
the stage directions tell us that “he glides across the stage, ascending gradu-
ally through the floor at the same time” (Boucicault 112). In Sweeney Todd, a
variant of this motif occurs when one of the barber’s victims rises through a
trapdoor—the door that is underneath the mechanical barber’s chair—to con-
 Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama 157

front and upbraid his murderer: “His face is deadly pale; his hair is dishevelled,
and his clothes marked with blood” (Kilgarriff 256).
The established parallel for the ghost of May Dedalus in “Circe” is of course
that of Hamlet the king, who confronts his son at the beginning of Shake-
speare’s play (UA 15.4157n). But the appearance of Stephen’s mother at or near
what must be regarded as the climax of Ulysses recalls the standard “sensa-
tion scene” of melodrama, the point during which lurid action, the advancing
technical skill of the nineteenth-century stage, and the natural dramatic climax
combine to provide the play’s most chilling effects. Judith Fisher, writing on
“The ‘Sensation Scene’ in Dickens and Boucicault,” offers the examples of a
ship explosion in Boucicault’s Octaroon, the escape from prison in Arrah-na-
Pogue, and, outside melodrama proper, the scene in Oliver Twist when Bill
Sikes is accidentally hanged. Many sensation scenes in opera and melodrama
involve confrontation between the protagonist, whether hero or villain, and a
figure from the dead who represents an absolute moral claim—this motif an
echo, perhaps, of the pursuit of Orestes by the Furies. In The Corsican Brothers,
for example, the ghost of the dead Louis dei Franchi makes the same demand
of his surviving twin—revenge—as does the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In the
sensation scene of Gilbert and Sullivan’s parody Ruddigore, an entire portrait
gallery of ancestors comes to life to remind the protagonist of his hereditary
responsibility to commit at least one crime every day. A common variant is the
appearance of the assumed-to-be-but-not-actually dead, a motif that provides
for a more completely happy ending: in The Corsican Brothers, the killer of
Louis dei Franchi is terror-struck when he is surprised by the vengeful twin in
the forest of Fontainebleau; in Sweeney Todd the demon barber is confronted
in court by his first murder victim in the play, a victim who has miraculously
survived. The shock forces total submission: “Ha, Ha!” Todd exclaims, “‘tis
useless to deny my guilt; the very dead rise from their cerements to prove
Sweeney Todd a murderer!” (Kilgarriff 262). Often, as in this case, the effect of
the revenant’s appearance is to force a collapse on the part of the miscreant and
a confession of guilt. It is a mark of Don Giovanni’s intransigent villainy that
he struggles against the Commendatore’s vivified monument in the graveyard
and supper scenes of Mozart’s opera and dies unrepentant.
Peter Brooks has written eloquently about the ethical basis of melodrama,
arguing that “the melodramatic mode . . . exists to locate and to articulate
the moral occult,” that is, “the domain of operative spiritual values which is
both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality” (5). The rise of
melodrama in what Brooks calls a “post-sacral age” is a response to the sense
 158 Timothy Martin

that a moral and ethical basis for existence seems absent (15–16). The figure
of the revenant—almost always an innocent victim of violence—may be seen
as attached to this “moral occult” through his or her sacrifice and charged
with asserting its claims and insisting on a restoration of the moral order, a
restoration to be achieved through acts of revenge or repentance. In “Circe,”
Stephen’s confrontation with his mother is unique, and melodramatically so,
qualitatively different from the episode’s other hallucinations in that Stephen
does not enter its ontological realm. Whereas Bloom greets his visions with
tokens of recognition—“Ja, ich weiss, papachi” (U 15.257)—and with a degree
of cooperation—“I so want to be a mother” (U 15.1817)—Stephen is “horror-
struck,” and the image remains starkly outside him: “Lemur, who are you? No.
What bogeyman’s trick is this?” (U 15.4176). The uncanniness of the ghost is of
course crucial to its moral force and to the melodramatic idiom generally: the
task of the unjustly killed (and an image of Buck Mulligan, a witness to this
confrontation in “Circe,” reminds us of the idea that “Kinch dogsbody killed
her bitchbody” [U 15.4178–79]) is to represent the occult realm of moral values
that has been outraged by the miscreant, who is by definition estranged from
it. Throughout this brief but climactic scene Stephen’s mother is relentless and
rigid, refusing—like moral principle itself—to engage in dialogue with Ste-
phen, iterating variants of an insistence that he repent. For his part, Stephen as-
sumes the role of Don Giovanni rather than that of Sweeney Todd, resisting the
ghost’s claims and, at least temporarily, escaping them. If melodrama is latent
in Bloom’s flirtation with Martha Clifford, it may be somewhat more palpable
in Stephen’s vexed relationship with his mother. Stephen, in fact, may be able
to avoid repentance because he believes another antagonist, perhaps a cosmic
one, is responsible for her death: “Someone killed her,” he tells Buck Mulligan
obscurely (U 1.90).
In the 1960s, the great drama critic Eric Bentley wrote that “As modern
persons we are willy-nilly under the spell of Naturalism. However often we tell
ourselves the contrary, we relapse into assuming the normal and right thing to
be a subdued tone, small human beings, a milieu minutely reproduced” (215).
The lowered voice of Naturalism accords well with the early Joyce, including
the opening episodes of Ulysses, which chart the motion of “Woodshadows
float[ing] silently by through the morning peace” (U 1.242), the sound of a door
creaking open and shut, the sight of a street person emptying a stony boot.
The emergence of an element of melodrama represents one of many populist
voices in the book’s polyphony, a voice whose integration in what is initially a
muted, realist sequence of events contributes to a developing sense of carnival
 Joyce, Ulysses, Melodrama 159

and exuberance. Its presence in the emotional climaxes of the novel and in the
climaxes of individual episodes may reflect nostalgia for an old way of writing
and for a more emphatic ordering of values and of experience. The melodra-
matic strain in Joyce’s work speaks to the many ways in which Joyce began to
chafe at the narrowness of the modernist aesthetic, including many of his own
contributions to it: its elitism, naturalism, and formal integrity. As Bentley
has written, “The curious thing is that, while our age generally is dedicated to
Naturalistic principles, the outstanding writers of the age are forever protesting
against them” (210).

Notes
1. The primary allusion here is to the translation of Elijah into heaven, recounted in 2 Kings
(UA 12.1910–12n). The scene of the Crucifixion, especially as described in Matthew 27, when
Jesus seems to ask for Elijah’s intervention, may play a part as well. “By Jesus,” the Citizen has
said, “I’ll crucify him so I will” (U 12.1812).
2. R. B. Kershner drew my attention to the melodrama of the stopped watch.
3. Two paragraphs from my essay “Operatic Joyce” (35) contributed some material to the
foregoing discussion here.
4. Among the plays that Robert Heilman describes as fundamentally melodramatic are
such diverse works as Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, Euripides’ The Trojan Women, J.
M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Christopher
Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (74–87).
5. In claiming that melodrama tends toward the local and topical, Heilman lists “slavery, ‘big
business,’ slums, totalitarianism, the mechanization of life, war, the varieties of segregationism”
among subjects attacked in such plays (94). For background on the history of melodrama, see
Baugh, Kilgarriff, and Smith.
6. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that, among the episodes of Ulysses, Joyce and the American
composer George Antheil chose “Cyclops” as the basis of an opera. According to Paul Martin,
however, Antheil’s “Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops” may not have advanced beyond a few pages
of manuscript.
7. Paradoxically, melodrama both resists and contributes to the book’s Naturalism. Joyce
recognized that the melodramatic imagination is at work in everyday life as well as on the stage:
few of us can resist the lure of the numinous in stopped clocks, and many of us are acquainted
with Garrett Deasys of our own, “surrounded by difficulties, by . . . intrigues by . . . backstairs
influence” (U 2.343–44).

Works Cited
Baugh, Albert C. “The Drama in Decline.” A Literary History of England. 4 vols. New York:
Appleton, 1967. 4: 1264–69.
Bentley, Eric. The Life of the Drama. New York: Antheneum, 1964.
 160 Timothy Martin

Boucicault, Dion. Selected Plays. Irish Drama Selections 4. Washington, DC: Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 1987.
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode
of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Fisher, Judith L. “The ‘Sensation Scene’ in Charles Dickens and Dion Boucicault.” Dramatic
Dickens. Ed. Carol Hanbery MacKay. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. 152–67.
Heilman, Robert Bechtold. Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience. Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1968.
Herr, Cheryl, ed. For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890–1925. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1991.
———. Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1961.
Kershner, R. B., ed. Joyce and Popular Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
———. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Kilgarriff, Michael, ed. The Golden Age of Melodrama: Twelve 19th Century Melodramas. Lon-
don: Wolfe, 1974.
Martin, Paul. “‘Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops’: Joyce and Antheil’s Unfinished ‘Opéra Méca-
nique.’” Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce. Ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles. New York: Gar-
land, 1999. 91–105.
Martin, Timothy. “Operatic Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly 38.1–2 (2000–2001): 25–43.
Smith, James L. Melodrama. The Critical Idiom 28. London: Methuen, 1973.
Watt, Stephen. Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1991.
IV

Counterparts
Intertextualities
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 10

Modernity and Its Discontents

Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl”

Yu-chen Lin

Blazes Boylan stands out among the hundreds of ill-clad characters in Joyce’s
Dublin. With his fine taste in clothes he is no doubt one of the most eye-
catching Dubliners to stroll the city streets on 16 June 1904. Attired this day
in an elegant, mass-produced dark blue suit matched with a sky-blue necktie
(which in turn matches the color of his eyes and socks), Boylan incarnates the
modern ideal of the dandy. The dandy is meticulous in his dress and can easily
charm women while remaining himself immune to their charm (Boucher 363);
Boylan, for his part, is probably Dublin’s most notorious lady-killer, and aspires
to play this playboy role to the full. He advertises himself not only by his ap-
parel but also by carrying between his lips a flower he takes from the shopgirl
at Thornton’s after he has briefly flirted with her. Perhaps not incidentally, his
self-conscious womanizing ways are punctuated and counterpointed in “Wan-
dering Rocks” by “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” a popular song about a desirable
working woman that serves as the “theme” of Boylan’s promenade (as well as
of a sporting event held at Trinity College).
The significance of this song has not escaped the attention of Zack Bowen,
one of the most attentive readers or “auditors” of the music in Ulysses. He sug-
gests that the song forms the center of “an elaborate and delicately interwoven
tapestry of music based on the rivalry and usurpation themes” culminating
in “a political allegory” (95). In this reading, Rose, the Yorkshire girl of the
song, becomes the epitome of female characters who betray the male protago-
nists and, by extension, Ireland. As a woman who manipulates her husband
and her former lovers, Rose anticipates Molly Bloom, who is fought over by
several lovers, including her husband and, by the far the most formidable
 164 Yu-chen Lin

combatant, Blazes Boylan. In “Circe,” Rose provokes Stephen’s oedipal aggres-

sion when this song is played in Bella Cohen’s brothel, accompanied by the
patrons’ wild dancing; the latter becomes a “[d]ance of death” (U 15.4139) trig-
gering Stephen’s confrontation with the ghost of his dead mother and a choir
of confessors singing a hymn to the Virgin. Within the logic of compression
and displacement that rules this episode, Rose becomes a synthesis of May
Dedalus and the Holy Mother Church, whose oppressive presence Stephen
expels by wielding his ashplant at the chandelier. Finally, Rose is also conflated
with Cissy Caffrey, an Irish girl emerging in this context as a prostitute who
privileges Privates Carr and Compton over Stephen, allegorically a suitor of
Ireland (Bowen 92–95).
Sensitive to the song’s figurative bearing on the central themes of Ulysses,
Bowen’s reading nonetheless elides its materialistic particulars, which are so
historically gender-specific and yet self-contradictory that they call atten-
tion to its underlying ideology. In this regard Andrew Gibson’s discussion,
in Joyce’s Revenge, of Joyce’s decolonizing gender politics is inspiring even if
Gibson is silent about this particular lyric. In contrast to current postcolonial
Joyce studies, which largely focus on Joyce’s place within the domain of Irish
nationalism, Gibson takes into consideration English cultural nationalism in
order to explore how Joyce exacts his revenge on the empire in Ulysses. This
often-neglected phase of English culture originated, on the one hand, from the
empire’s anxiety over the loss of its economic supremacy, under the pressure of
international competition, during the period 1880–1920, and on the other hand
from its apprehension about its stability under the threat of a democratic econ-
omy and popular culture. In this crisis the English people looked to cultural
institutions—guardians of national character—for a response to the demand
for renewed leadership. This explains why the question of the “English spirit”
was, in the early twentieth century (Gibson 8–13), a preoccupation of English
cultural institutions, which relentlessly promoted an ethic of “national fitness”
as the cornerstone of “national efficiency.”
Such an ethic, in turn, builds on a domestic ideology that entails the virtues
of “motherhood, domesticity, and self-sacrifice” (Gibson 131), leading to the
appropriation of women’s labor. Pursuing Gibson’s line of argument, I would
suggest that, more than a gendered figure of internecine betrayal, Rose is de-
ployed as an ideal woman in order to celebrate the English spirit as a force of
modernization, an epitome of the empire’s golden age when national efficiency
was the order of the day. This gender ideal takes on an asymmetrical signifi-
cance, however, when it is introduced to Ireland in order to assimilate colonial
 Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” 165

subjects to imperial values, because the colony is not on a par with England
in terms of economic power, a fact all too visible in everyday consumption,
especially of clothing. What begins as an imperial power’s propagandizing
via an innocuous song consequently becomes the ruthless teasing of an Irish
modernity characterized by disempowerment. To unravel the unequal power
relations lying behind this slippage of intention and consequence, I would like
to begin with an inspection of fashion in relation to Irish modernity, and then
proceed to relate this fashion to Rose’s sartorial preference as highlighted in the
song “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.”
Fashion originated from a desire to imitate the aristocracy in order to el-
evate oneself to a social class otherwise unattainable (Slater 19, 156). In other
words, fashion in its origin is a form of what Thorstein Veblen calls “conspicu-
ous consumption” (27), through which one “socializes” with the class model
as well as with one’s fellow aspirants, paradoxically enough, by differentiat-
ing oneself sartorially (Simmel 301). Fashion thus understood flourished in
the nineteenth century, when empires transported from their colonies exotic
material for the making of clothing, and the rise of mass production made
the latest fashions more affordable to the populace. In such a context, fashion
became an indicator of modernization and, by extension, economic supremacy
and military power. This explains why French and English modes dominated
the world of fashion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Boucher 291,
333). What is more, as a commodity fashion was integrated into the daily life
of the common people so that it also became in effect no longer a luxury but a
necessity.
Georg Simmel’s notion of modernization sheds light on this shift. Mod-
ern life, suggests Simmel, is characterized by an exorbitant excess of stimuli
brought about by modernization, including urbanization, new forms of trans-
portation, and new occupations. The urgent task for modern metropolitans
in this regard is to protect the self from the flood of nervous stimulants and
sensory incitements. To address such a need, Simmel proposes two possible
“survival” skills—the adoption of a blasé outlook in order to lift one’s threshold
of response to new stimuli, and “self-fashioning” (326, 331). As a crucial strat-
egy of self-fashioning, fashion thus becomes highly relevant to modernity in
that it protects the self from the turbulence of modern life by weakening one’s
“nervous energy” (302). It is to be noted that as a technology of the self, fashion
calls for a certain expertise, thereby introducing fashion magazines, or “maps
of modernity” (Slater 86), into the market. Modern culture, in other words, is
an “expertise culture” (Bauman 200–205) in which one paradoxically becomes
 166 Yu-chen Lin

both laborer and commodity in order to produce a self that can remain un-
touched by the hassle of modernity.
If fashion involves two seemingly contradictory impulses—individuality
and uniformity—then Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century presents
an even more interesting case, inasmuch as its “fashion” entails anomalous
patterns of differentiation and socialization, conditioned as it is by a colonial
economy. Joyce’s Dublin is not without citizens who are highly conscious of
fashion. Maginni, for instance, is nothing less than an outstanding piece of “self
advertisement” (U 8.98–99) in Bloom’s view. On 16 June 1904 he dresses me-
ticulously in a “silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight
lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots” (U 10.56–58). Ned
Lambert, for his part, arouses Bloom’s admiration for the “[n]ice soft tweed”
of which his purple suit is made (U 6.828). While Bloom pays visual tribute to
Lambert for his distinctive sartorial taste, Tom Kernan is aware of Mr. Grimm’s
silent compliment–”Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Noth-
ing like a dressy appearance” (U 10.738–39)—and does not hesitate to award
himself the title “[k]night of the road” (U 10.748). The list of dressy Dubliners
also includes Gerty MacDowell, who constantly consults fashion pages in girls’
magazines in order to navigate the vast sea of “expertise culture.” She learns
from Princess Novelette about the magic of eyebrowleine (U 13.111) and from
Lady’s Pictorial that “electric blue will be worn” (U 13.151), a piece of knowledge
she methodically puts into practice.
To the extent that Joyce’s Dubliners partake of the general impulse toward
self-fashioning in the wake of modernization and mass production, they do it
so scrupulously that they demonstrate the symptoms of a colonial economy.
Gibson suggests that social relations in colonial Ireland involve “little calcula-
tions of or tussles for advantage, however small, or . . . claims to status, how-
ever trivial” (88), and it is in these Dubliners’ trivial claims to status through
maintaining their own personal appearance that their little calculations most
poignantly reveal their disempowerment within the sphere of colonial moder-
nity. Granted that Gerty is extravagant enough to spend “[t]hree and eleven”
(U 13.499–500) on her silk stockings—a sum roughly translating into four days
of Eveline’s wages—this is just about her limit economically. What she cannot
afford she does by herself. She hand-dyes her shirt a trendy electric blue, puts
her hat on the waterjug overnight to keep it in shape, and spends all Tuesday
afternoon at Clery’s summer sale to hunt for a “slightly shopsoiled” butterfly
bow to match her eggblue chenille hat (U 13.155–56). She readily congratu-
lates herself on the success of her labors, totally unwilling to acknowledge, or
 Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” 167

perhaps unaware of the fact, that her “product” might not measure up to her
expenditure of “labor.” Bloom, for instance, does not seem to appreciate all the
calculating investments she has made in fashioning herself. He knows that the
rose perfume she puts on the cotton cloth, inserted in lieu of a handkerchief in
her shirt pocket, is “[s]weet and cheap: soon sour” (U 13.1009). What is more,
he favors her expensive stockings to the rumpled stockings of the woman he
met earlier (U 13.929–31), but fails to notice the tremendous effort Gerty puts
into embellishing her hat, except to understand that the hat’s wide beam is
intended to “hide her face” (U 13.838).
Dublin males adopt other survival skills to make themselves presentable,
primarily skills not endorsed by the imperial modernizing agenda for main-
taining public health. Tom Kernan, for instance, purchases a secondhand
“[s]tylish coat” at an incredible bargain price, and admires his own shrewd-
ness immensely (U 10.743–45). Bloom, in turn, plans to remodel an old suit
for the second time (U 6.830–31). Even the affluent and dandyish Buck Mul-
ligan is not above possessing a pair of secondhand breeches, which he gives to
Stephen along with other articles of clothing to dress up his Bohemian friend
(U 1.112–19). This representation of Dubliners’ want of adequate clothing was
historically accurate, Gibson suggests, since the use of secondhand clothes was
very common in Joyce’s time, so common that it contributed to the spread of
disease (89), though this particular aspect is totally absent from Joyce’s Dublin.
Indeed, health is not a primary concern in a colony where survival is the order
of things. Bloom and Molly even undertook “the other business” (U 11.487) of
selling secondhand clothes and stage costumes when they were “on the rocks”
(U 11.485) in Holles Street.
Tellingly, Bloom’s plan for renovating his secondhand suit is triggered by the
pathetic sight of threads hanging down from Ned Lambert’s otherwise elegant
suit: “His wife I forgot he’s not married or his landlady ought to have picked out
those threads for him” (U 6.831–32). Here Bloom’s pragmatic and nonchalant
response to Ned Lambert’s degraded elegance suggests the blasé outlook Sim-
mel prescribes for the metropolitan to protect his or her self from the excessive
stimuli characteristic of modern life. Indeed, Bloom does not seem troubled by
the recollection of a younger Ned Lambert, who used to “change three suits in
the day” as a “[d]ressy fellow” (U 6.828–30). In this remembrance he partakes
of the Dubliners’ nonplussed attitude toward their fellow citizens’ sartorial de-
generacy, although he is an outsider in many ways. Barely able to keep body
and soul together in the Iveagh home (U 11.1014–15), a charity lodging house
for the poor working class, Ben Dollard, for one, attempts to impress others
 168 Yu-chen Lin

by sporting a worn-out cheap blue suit (U 10.940–41); this invites Simon Ded-
alus’s derisive comment: “Hold that fellow with the bad trousers. . . . That’s a
pretty garment, isn’t it, for a summer’s day? . . . They were made for a man in his
health, Ben, anyhow” (U 10.905–15). Ben Dollard responds with a stoic protest:
“I threw out more clothes in my time than you ever saw” (U 10.916–17).
By engaging each other in mutual mockery, these two Dubliners recon-
firm their camaraderie in and of (non)fashion, one that builds on a blasé
tolerance of impoverishment and a cooperative commitment to those in dire
need. In other words, they make do with an alternative fashion that, for all
its “individualizing” impulse, calls attention to its opposite impulse toward
a conformity rooted in poverty. Indeed, Ben Dollard comes to meet Father
Cowley with the purpose of steering the clergyman away from immediate
eviction (U 10.885–98). This help seems to be offered in return for Father
Cowley’s timely tip to Ben, several years earlier, that he should borrow a
concert dress suit from Molly, a woman in possession of a large collection
of used stage costumes (U 11.476–97). As in innumerable other cases where
Dubliners resort to secondhand clothing to fashion their desired self, the
result of this contingent arrangement verges on the farcical, since, as Bloom
recalls, the suit does not fit the stout man at all: “Trousers tight as a drum
on him. Musical porkers. Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself
back across the bed, screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show”
(U 11.556–58). Still, Ben Dollard is grateful because the Blooms’ generosity
“save[s] the situation” (U 11.480). This is one of Bloom’s rare moments of be-
ing included in the Dubliners’ “socializing” occasions, thanks to the anoma-
lous state of Irish modernity.
It is not clear whether Ben Dollard seeks help from people he barely knows
because he is too large or too economically hard up, but Bloom is aware of his
addiction to alcohol, which has led to his decline and current status as resi-
dent in a charity home: “Remember: rosiny ropes, ships’ lanterns. Failed to the
tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh home. . . . Number one Bass
did that for him” (U 11.1013–16). In diagnosing alcoholism as the cause of Ben
Dollard’s decline, Bloom might have conflated cause with effect, for Ben is not
an isolated case. In fact, hunger, disability, illness, and poverty seem to be the
norm in the colonial Irish economy, as revealed in the grim scenes Bloom wit-
nesses from the carriage on his way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Alcohol, then,
is for Irish males a ready panacea for frustrations, yet ironically it becomes the
problem rather than the solution as it invariably leads to domestic violence.
Gerty, for instance, is a typical victim of this vicious cycle, a bleak fact not to
 Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” 169

be glossed over by the “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy” style of

“Nausicaa” (Budgen 205):
Had her father only avoided the clutches of the demon drink, by tak-
ing the pledge or those powders the drink habit cured in Pearson’s Week-
ly, she might now be rolling in her carriage, second to none. . . . But that
vile decoction which has ruined so many hearths and homes had cast
its shadow over her childhood days. Nay, she had even witnessed in the
home circle deeds of violence caused by intemperance and had seen her
own father, a prey to the fumes of intoxication, forget himself completely.
(U 13.290–300)
Pathetic as her condition is, Gerty can still afford to fashion herself, in her
own way, into a competitive piece of merchandise on the marriage market. By
contrast, the Dedalus girls are compelled to devote all their energy to mere
survival. As Kimberly Devlin suggests, the mother’s presence accounts for
this difference: May Dedalus may have significantly contributed to the family
economy by taking in laundry, a task taken over by her daughters less success-
fully after her death, even though this fact is systematically suppressed in the
text (82–83). In this view, the Dignam family, with its loss of the father, is the
counterpart of the Dedaluses (78). Yet, granted that Patrick Dignam has to put
up with an ill-fitting mourning suit (“The blooming stud was too small for the
buttonhole of the shirt, blooming end to it”) (U 10.1154–56), his siblings are
relatively well fed, unlike the Dedalus girls, who remain hungry and have to
depend on charity for their food. Ironically enough, woman’s economic contri-
bution is not recognized in Ireland at the turn of the century. Bloom volunteers
to intercede on behalf of Dignam’s widow so that she can make claims on her
husband’s insurance policy, whereas no such effort is made for Simon Dedalus,
presumably because May is not insured at all (Devlin 84).
This perspective sheds new light on Molly, who seems to be idling around
at home on 16 June 1904 except to consummate her liaison with Blazes Boylan
under the pretext of discussing the program for a concert tour to Belfast, while
Bloom fully shoulders all the financial responsibilities. As an advertisement
canvasser Bloom seems relatively well-to-do; at least he can afford occasional
luxuries he fancies, including a silk petticoat for Molly (U 11.189–90). Molly,
however, is much less optimistic about their financial prospects, having expe-
rienced worse days with Bloom; she is even worried that he will soon lose his
job at Freeman’s Journal, just as he lost his jobs with Thom’s, Hely’s, Mr. Cuffe’s,
and Drimmies (U 18.1215–26). In fact, to lift the family out of financial crisis she
 170 Yu-chen Lin

had to work part-time as a pianist at the “coffee palace” and sell secondhand
stage costumes (U 11.485–87). Indeed, so employable was she that Bloom even
speculated on exploiting her full potential as a source of productive labor—
as a nude model (U 18.580), a family music teacher, and the proprietress of a
boardinghouse (U 18.980–82). In other words, Molly is an unacknowledged
laborer like many other Irish women, and her tour to Belfast might be finan-
cially motivated rather than what Bloom suggests it is, in his blasé comment to
Joe Hynes: “Just a holiday” (U 12.992).
This picture of Molly as an invisible female worker brings us back to “My
Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” in which an English working woman’s place in moder-
nity is most palpable. In this song the Yorkshire girl emerges as an idealized
woman, one who contributes her labor to the nation’s collective move toward
modernization without partaking of the rampant “fashion consumerism”:
“she’s a factory lass / And wears no fancy clothes” (U 10.1251–52). While it can
be argued that Rose is too poor to have any use for fancy clothes, her absten-
tion from fashion consumption is still exceptional. For fashion is, as we have
seen, an imperative for modernity and not even Dubliners can resist it, even
though they can ill afford this status marker. This conformity is testified to by
their desperate attempt to distinguish themselves sartorially, and also in Mina
Douce’s and Lydia Kennedy’s all-too-envious admiration of Lady Dudley, a real
lady who heralds a fashion they are to emulate in their own way. The only con-
ceivable reason for Rose’s eschewing of fashionable dresses, then, would be her
unusually long working hours, a condition that makes it impossible for her to
spend time on adorning herself. But this possibility is ruled out by the fact that
she still has time to manage her love affairs before running a family. Indeed,
if Gerty takes great pains to fashion herself into a desirable love object, Rose’s
disdain for fashion is all the more anomalous in that it does not at all diminish
her status as an object of desire, as one of her former suitors confesses: “Yet
I’ve a sort of a / Yorkshire relish for / My little Yorkshire rose” (U 10.1254–56).
In fact, Rose has not just one suitor but multiple lovers, one of whom becomes
her husband.
This anomaly seems to suggest that Rose’s special attraction for men comes
less from her outer appearance than from her character strengths. Seen in this
light she may well be an emancipated woman, one who seeks to differentiate
herself by imitating the “personality and activity of the male sex,” especially
man’s relative indifference to fashion (Simmel 310). This speculation makes
sense, since Rose’s personality coincides with the “Protestant ethic”—“hard
work, sobriety, frugality and personal economic advancement”—which con-
 Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” 171

tributed to the development of capitalism and the definition of masculinity

(Davis 38). Thus, in contributing to the modernization project Rose presents
an unprecedented challenge to the traditional notions of gender and class iden-
tity. By divesting herself of any share in the general ethos of modernity, she be-
comes an autonomous, “masculine” being insofar as she refuses to be a victim
of fashion, choosing rather to generate her own meaning—well ahead of her
times, since the “New Look” constructed by working-class women was not ful-
ly visible until the 1950s (Barnard 75–76)—by opting for “anti-fashion” in order
to articulate her gender and class identity. Paradoxically, Rose’s sobriety and
frugality fit “sensibility,” a primarily male “character ideal” that combines with
fashion to indicate one’s class distinction (Campbell 48–51). In other words, her
working-class ethic is conjoined with a certain aristocratic character ideal to
compensate for her lack (or rejection) of the general impulse toward fashion
consumption.
A difficulty arises, however, when such a character ideal is taken as part of
Rose’s “desirability.” Instead of sustaining the wayward tendencies of lower-class
women—as deplored by English commentators in 1904 (Gibson 146)—which
might account for her love triangle, she behaves like a genteel English lady by
sensibly staying away from the ugly final scene. She leaves her husband to deal
with her two former suitors, who belatedly attempt to claim her after realizing
that they share a common love object. That is to say, her “English-genteel”
womanhood readily negates her autonomous desire, thereby serving conven-
tional gender norms. Given this construct of Rose’s character-ideal, it is not
surprising that, having crossed the gender-class boundary as an autonomous
woman, she nonetheless emerges as neither a speaking agent nor a desiring
subject, even though she promises to be both. Rather, she is configured as
a conventional woman and thus a commodity to be circulated among men.
What begins as a portrait of an independent woman therefore ends up as a
picture of ideal femininity shot through with a Victorian and Edwardian do-
mestic ideology subsumed under English nationalism, thereby betraying the
contradictions inherent in the empire’s nostalgia for its own golden age. If Ger-
ty toils to keep up with the latest fashion, and Mina and Lydia pay their own
way to fabricate themselves in order to achieve the kind of glamor appropriate
to a Lady Dudley, Rose’s modernity is preposterous, both literally and meta-
phorically, inasmuch as she contributes her labor to modernization only to be
alienated from its fruits and stranded in premodern gender-class ideology. In
other words, her individuating potential is appropriated in such a way that it
conforms to the “English spirit.” As a result, Rose is held up as a serviceable
 172 Yu-chen Lin

model to articulate the national desire for modernization while masking the
fact that, as a consumer of modernity, she is a mere surplus.
A fictional construct notwithstanding, Rose’s superfluity reflects woman’s
place in English modernity. As Gibson suggests, drawing on Jane Mackay and
Pat Thane’s “The Englishwoman” (1986), English women were encouraged to
settle in colonies from the 1880s onwards, not only to relieve the nation from
the economic pressure stemming from the surplus of women but also to serve
England’s “civilizing mission,” which was to “ensure the survival of the national
ideal in an alien environment” (qtd. in Gibson 131). In the light of this impe-
rial attempt to appropriate working women to serve the nationalist agenda, at
home and in the colonies, it is not surprising that a seemingly innocuous pop-
ular lyric like “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” is elevated to a semi-official status
on 16 June 1904 to promote, in colonial Ireland, the English cause of physical
fitness and public health, the “corporeal” foundation of the English spirit. The
song is played by the Second Seaforth Highlanders at a sporting event held at
Trinity College and is employed as the theme music for the Mirus bazaar—a
charity fund-raising drive whose goal is to modernize the Mercer Hospital
(Gibson 90)—to be opened by the Lord Lieutenant. Nor is it a coincidence that
this song reemerges in the brothel scene as part of “the sound of Englishness”
(Gibson 187), in the phantasmagoric fashion show (Galef 420) that is “Circe,”
where colonialism and capitalism—one consequence of modernization—con-
verge (Jastrebski 159–60) in a specific Irish context to reveal their implications
in colonial modernity.
The phantasmagoria in “Circe” operates in a peculiar logic, one that con-
denses and displaces Rose into perverse emblems of Englishness, now con-
flated with fashion, but only to puncture its own pretensions. Rose’s workplace
is, first of all, transposed to a Dublin brothel, where the charm of female bod-
ies replaces her character strengths to define woman’s desirability. Then her
name is literalized as the “roses” which adorn the alluring “womancity” (U
15.1327–29) that is Bella Cohen’s brothel, a place that features the “Yorkshire
born” (U 15.1983–84) Zoe, whose lips are smeared with “salve of swinefat and
rosewater” (U 15.1332–33; emphasis added), and who fascinates Bloom with
her English accent (U 15.1336). Indeed, Englishness seems to be a sign of class
distinction—however compromised—within this Irish brothel. Not only does
Zoe reassure Bloom that she is authentically English and therefore “clean” (U
15.1346–47), but Bella Cohen takes pride in the fact that she sends her son to
Oxford (U 15.1288–89) with the money she earns from her “tenshilling house”
(U 15. 4281–82). Even Professor Maginni proudly informs Bella Cohen’s pros-
 Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” 173

titutes that he is to teach them “[t]he Katty Lanner step” (U 15.4044), which
originates in England (UA 515). In step with his sartorial distinction (he wears
“a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a gorget of cream tulle, a green low-
cut waistcost, stock collar with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent
pumps and canary gloves”) (U 15.4034–39), Maginni represents the upper-class
character-ideal by upholding his good name and his distinctive self (Campbell
48–51): he privileges his dance, characterized as “the poetry of motion, art of
calisthenics,” over its lower counterpart at “Madam Leggett Byrne’s or Lev-
enston’s” (U 15.4042–43) in Dublin. In other words, he promises to offer his
students a feel of “prestige” exclusive to the English upper class.
This aristocratic pretension is preempted by his entry, however, which re-
minds one of a routine entrance in a circus performance: “Between the cur-
tains Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins a silk hat.
With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his crown and jauntyhatted skates in”
(U 15.4032–34). Nor are his students English aristocrats, but local prostitutes or
Irish working women led by Zoe the Yorkshire girl. As this overplayed dance
lesson is offered by a circus-actor-turned-dance-master, so is it conducted to
the tune of “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” played in waltz time on a jukebox and
available at the price of two pennies (U 15.4016). As if to lend elegance to itself,
this mechanically reproduced song soon transforms into the live but unlikely
performance of the senile Professor Goodwin, a striking synthesis of Rose and
the mainstream Dubliners in his genteel, feminine grace and fashionable, al-
beit pathetic, apparel:
Professor Goodwin, in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a
stained Inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the
room, his hands fluttering. He sits tinily on the pianostool and lifts and
beats handless sticks of arms on the keyboard, nodding with damsel’s
grace, his bowknot bobbing. (U 15.4017–27; emphasis added)
In this way Rose becomes a working woman who sells her body in a colony
where degenerate fashion consumption replaces her own anti-fashion, and her
inconsequential challenge to the established gender-class categories is turned
inside out. By positing the Yorkshire girl as a surplus English woman who emi-
grates to Ireland, not to advocate the English ideal of modernization by revital-
izing what Lily H. Montague, an early-twentieth-century English commenta-
tor, called “the life of the State” (qtd. in Gibson 146) despite the meaning of her
name (Zoe means “life”) but rather to spread venereal disease as a circulating
and thus secondhand commodity, Joyce exercises his “Celtic revenge” (Gibson
 174 Yu-chen Lin

1) on the empire’s insidious intent to lock the Irish people, and working-class
women, in their proper place within the national cause.
This hilarious act of revenge stems from an awareness of the bleak pros-
pects for Irish women in colonial modernity. If the English popular song
pays an ambivalent tribute to a female worker, this recognition is not avail-
able to her Irish counterparts at all. As invisible workers, their contribution
to the national economy is not acknowledged by any institutions. Even worse,
they seldom work outside the home because job opportunities are so scarce.
In fact, Ireland from 1904 to 1921 was structurally a consumer culture and
economy (Duffy 155); the amount of capital it accumulated could not match
the sum total of its consumption (Leonard 44). In view of this historical fact,
it is not surprising that Joyce’s Dublin is more of an agricultural polis than
an industrial city (Lehan 107). This explains why the Irish factory lass is ab-
sent from Joyce’s Dublin; the closest equivalents are Eveline, the anonymous
slavey in “Two Gallants,” Maria of “Clay”—who works in a Protestant laun-
dry intended for reformed prostitutes—and the aforementioned prostitutes
in Bella Cohen’s brothel.
Like Rose, Eveline is marketable as a love object even though she wears no
fancy clothes. But their similarity is probably less significant than their differ-
ence, because Eveline cannot afford to indulge herself in either self-fashioning
or marriage, burdened as she is by her commitment to her family. Nor does she
even try to challenge the gender role imposed on her. Indeed, she has become
so inured to her assigned role that she stops short just at the moment she is
about to flee domestic misery with Frank. The slavey, in turn, seems to trans-
gress gender norms in a much bolder way than does Rose, since she pursues
her desire rather than forfeits it, but with an ironic twist: she has to purchase
her romance from the jobless Corley out of her modest income, thereby tes-
tifying once more to the petty calculations that constitute the social relations
of colonial modernity. As for Maria, she is barely marketable as an object of
desire even when she is arrayed in her Sunday best, or as a representative of
feminine gentility for that matter. Zoe’s fellow prostitutes, for their part, are
desirable only when they stay in their proper place. Outside the brothel they
are viewed by the middle class as being untouchable, indeed the carriers of dis-
ease, if not as average poverty-stricken Dubliners who count on used clothing,
another secondhand commodity that is also a hazard to public health. In order
to survive, these women are sometimes compelled to moonlight by taking in
laundry, as is the case with the overworked streetwalker who approached the
Blooms to solicit laundry services. Compassionate and egalitarian as Bloom
 Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” 175

has always been, he nonetheless partly internalizes the English ideology of

modernization; thus his feelings toward this “glazed and haggard” (U 16.704)
Irish Yorkshire girl are mixed, varying from compassion (“O, well, she has to
live like the rest” [U 11.1260]) to abhorrence (“Looks a fright in the day. Face
like dip. Damn her” [U 11.1259–60]) to condemnation (“It beats me . . . how a
wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital reeking with disease can be
barefaced enough to solicit” [U 16.728–30]), as he consistently avoids her on
the street (U 11.1260–64; 16.708–10).
If this undesirable streetwalker-cum-laundry maid is a perverse Irish
Yorkshire girl, with a rose on her lapel and a penchant for catching up with
the latest fashions, Mina Douce might be another lesser candidate for the
advocated ideal womanhood. However, Mina is more of a desiring subject
whose desire is unrequited, in terms of both fashion and love, than an ob-
ject of desire. Likewise, even though Gerty MacDowell takes pains to wear
cheap rose perfume to upgrade her value and to conform to the femininity
prescribed by the fashion pages, which internalize an imperial domestic ide-
ology (Gibson 127–49), she has to be “left on the shelf ” (U 13.773) because of
her handicap. We have finally to look to Molly to localize the Yorkshire Rose:
she was born on the same day as the Virgin Mary, whose emblem is the rose;
as a maiden she used to wear a red rose on her head; she plans to navigate
between two lovers by seducing Stephen (probably wearing a white rose)
and dating Boylan, and at the same time make up with Bloom. However, the
Yorkshire Rose does not need to commodify herself in order to become a hot
commodity, whereas the aging Molly cannot afford to forgo fancy clothes.
She dresses up not only to remain attractive but probably also to steer her
family away from financial crisis; thus she “dresses up” when trying to help
her husband keep his job with Mr. Cuffe, but she fails presumably because
of her “old rubbishy dress . . . just like the shop itself rummage sale a lot
of trash” (U 18.514–18). Given the incommensurability between “labor” and
“product values” common to Irish women, there is no telling whether Molly
might prevail over the fashionable Blazes Boylan and the Bohemian Stephen
Dedalus, even if she manages to arm herself with “two other good chemises”
(U 18.438), “one of those kidfitting corsets” (U 18.446), and “a nice pair of
red slippers . . . a nice semitransparent morning gown . . . a peachblossom
dressing jacket” (U 18.1494–97). After all, Molly is only a degraded Yorkshire
Rose, more a consumer than a laborer, and thus constantly awakens to the
cruel reality that she cannot really afford what she wants: “I hate those rich
shops get on your nerves” (U 18.514).
 176 Yu-chen Lin

In consideration of this sameness-in-difference of the Yorkshire Rose and

her Irish version, we must come to terms with the poignant fact that “My Girl’s
a Yorkshire Girl” also serves as the theme song for both the quarter-mile flat
handicap (held at Trinity College) and the Mirus bazaar. If the sporting event is
meant to cultivate healthy, intellectual subjects for the empire, its theme music
inadvertently calls attention to that “handicap” with which most Irish people
are inflicted, be it psychological, physical, or sartorial, at a time when the em-
pire celebrates wholesomeness in material progress. The Mirus bazaar, for its
part, begins as a fund-raising drive for the purpose of modernizing a charity
hospital for poor Irish Catholics, but ends up lending itself to a double display
of imperial modernization—the fireworks show and Lady Dudley’s fashion ex-
hibit; the latter highlights the futility of Gerty MacDowell’s and Mina Douce’s
labor in fashioning themselves into desirable femmes fatales despite their as-
piration to sartorial distinction. Seen in this context, “My Girl’s a Yorkshire
Girl” aptly epitomizes the gap between words and meaning in both of these
“Irish” events, creating an alibi for colonial misrule—much as the Iveagh home
is meant to address Irish debility, but does so only by concealing the impe-
rial indifference to its cause: “Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them
cubicles to end their days in. Hushbaby. Lullaby. Die, dog. Little dog, die” (U
11.1018–19).
Georg Simmel suggests that the most important task confronting human life
in the modern age is to protect one’s inner life against the exorbitant nervous
incitements produced by the drastic changes consequent upon modernization.
However, in addition to this task Dubliners are laden with quite another bur-
den: they often cannot afford those desirable commodities mass-produced by
the empire, including the fancy clothing essential to a weakening or releasing
of one’s nervous energy through self-fashioning. Consumer culture thus be-
comes at once a tantalizing seduction and an incommensurable, impossible
labor, and Irish disempowerment—along with the marginalization of English
women workers—is the central, sad, and cruel fact glossed by the upbeat song
“My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl.”

Note
This essay is part of a research project sponsored by the National Science Council, Taiwan
(NSC 91-2411-H-110-003-BB). I am indebted to the following scholars for their insightful com-
ments on an early draft: Kimberly Devlin, Vincent Cheng, Ellen Carol Jones, Nam Kiheon,
Morris Beja, Anne Fogarty, and Frank Stevenson.
 Modernity and Its Discontents: Fashion and “My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl” 177

Works Cited
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Bauman, Zygmunt. Thinking Sociologically. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Boucher, François. 20,000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment.
Expanded ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987.
Bowen, Zack. Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music. Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 1995.
Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses.” Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1960.
Campbell, Colin. “Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eigh-
teenth-Century England: A Character Approach.” Consumption and the World of Goods.
Ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter. New York: Routledge, 1994. 40–57.
Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Devlin, Kimberly J. “Visible Shades and Shades of Visibility: The En-Gendering of Death in
‘Hades.’” “Ulysses” Engendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes. Ed. Kim-
berly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
67–85.
Duffy, Edna. The Subaltern “Ulysses.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Galef, David. “The Fashion Show in Ulysses.” Twentieth Century Literature 37 (1991): 420–31.
Gibson, Andrew. Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in “Ulysses.” New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Gillespie, Michael Patrick, ed. James Joyce and the Fabrication of an Irish Identity. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2001.
Jastrebski, Joan. “Pig Dialectics: Women’s Bodies as Performed Dialectical Images in the Circe
Episode of Ulysses.” Gillespie 151–75.
Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1998.
Leonard, Garry. “Holding on to the Here and the Now.” Gillespie 39–51.
Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. Ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1971.
Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Malden, MA: Polity, 1997.
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Mentor, 1953.
 11

Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen

as Philosophic Superman
Gerald Gillespie

That Joyce maintained an interest in the famous philosopher of pessimism and

religious atheist, Arthur Schopenhauer, is clear from Schopenhauer’s appear-
ance in Finnegans Wake, in one of the funniest open references amid a string
of allusions to German romantic thinkers. It occurs early on in the fable of
the Ondt and the Gracehoper, when the “apologuis[ing]” Shaun sets out to
“spinooze from the grimm gests of Jacko and Esaup” (FW 414.16–17), that is, to
give an uplifting twist like Spinoza, the favorite Dutch-Jewish philosopher for
many romantics, to the often dark materials cultivated by the Grimm brothers
of fairy-tale fame, whose realm of fiction is conflated with the biblical story
of those archetypal rival brothers, Jacob and Esau (with a nod to the Greek
fabulist Aesop). In an oblique reference to Nietzsche, this twist is slyly an Apol-
lonian act of shaping (“apologuise”). That Joyce would favor the Gracehoper
is clear from the description of him “always jigging, ajog, hoppy on akkant of
his joyicity” and grappling to and with the female “till she was puce for shame
and also fourmish her in Spinner’s housery at the earthsbest schoppinhour so
summery as his cottage” and so forth (FW 414.22–23, 32–34). It seems a high
time (“earthsbest schoppinhour”) for what is exhibited by the Gracehoper, a
frolicking of the life-force or will of which Schopenhauer taught much less
cheerfully.
But the countervailing tendency soon puts in its appearance. Indignant
over the Gracehoper’s ways, the inimical Ondt (Danish for “evil”), “not being
a sommerfool, was thothfully making chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the
icinglass of his windhame, which was cold antitopically Nixnixundnix” (FW
415.27–29). This triune nay-saying embedded in the Ondt’s home name pretty
well establishes once again the complex of oppositions between the Shem and
 Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 179

Shaun polarities. Here is not the place to expand on various underground al-
lusions in the much longer passage in the Wake—for example, the Spinozan
“apologetic” idea of an intellectual love of God’s creation or the way in which
Schopenhauer redefined the “thing-in-itself ” as a will inherent in nature. Of
immediate interest is that Schopenhauer is still hovering as a presence in the
narrating mind or voice, although the protagonist capable of thinking about
these matters, the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses, has faded away as a concretized
intellectual hero and is now dispersed in Shem and some Shaun attributes all
across the later Wake, scattered in traces we can punctiliously pursue in guides
such as Tindall’s. But it is not the same experience as observing and listening
to a character like Stephen who is a kind of creative force in his own right in
Ulysses. In my Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, as its index shows,
I paid attention to the Schopenhauerian presence in the French and German
novelists but neglected his relevance for Joyce.
Yet, even in Ulysses, things no longer are as easy and straightforward for
assessing what’s streaming in a character’s mind as when earlier we had our
first encounter with Stephen in the Portrait. Upon the 100th anniversary of
Bloomsday, students of Joyce hardly need reminding that a particular allusion
or strand of allusions in Ulysses ought to be appreciated, finally, for how it fits
within strata and webs of reference and functions at different levels of authority
in various contexts. This consideration motivates me to supplement my book
and call attention to a particular shadow among the many shadows falling over
Stephen in the “Proteus” episode. When at its close he senses, “Behind. Perhaps
there is someone,” and looks “rere regardant” at the arrival of “a silent ship” (U
3.505), whether it be Odysseus’s, the Flying Dutchman’s, or others’ more men-
acing, Stephen’s looking also serves as an invitation to us readers to apprehend
the looming shadow of all our bodily and spiritual ancestors. Just before that
gesture of regard, we are privy to Stephen’s worrying about himself: “My teeth
are very bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go
to a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the
superman. What is that I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?” (U
3.494–97).
Joyce nudges us awake with this question for contemporary and future
readers. Readers today still correctly hear the Nietzschean pointer in the word
“superman” (e.g., UA 66), and readily see how the “shell” motif relating cur-
rency, language, and pilgrimage gets linked further to “tooth.” Even as rugged
a concretization of the life-force as a tooth seems evanescent and fragile like
the emblematic “shells” on the beach that once contained something living;
 180 Gerald Gillespie

and we are justified in sensing an analogy to what Proust frequently terms an

“envelope” in À la recherche du temps perdu. Because the superman concept
has already surfaced in the “Telemachus” episode with such comments of Buck
Mulligan’s as “I’m hyperborean as much as you” and “Thus spake Zarathustra”
(U 1.92, 727–28), we know that Nietzsche’s hyperbolic rebel from Also sprach
Zarathustra is also and probably more present in Stephen’s thoughts. Buck nee-
dles Stephen by keeping alive the thought of being coupled with him as another
human failure, not a cultural hero: “I’m the Übermensch. Toothless Kinch and
I, the supermen” (U 1.708–9). As Davison has shown (108), Nietzsche helped
Joyce rise above the older dichotomization of Hebrew and Hellene attributes in
nineteenth-century cultural discourse. Unmistakable is also the rankling thorn
of a higher ambition such as Nietzsche had suggested.
But here, in addition, the shadow of Nietzsche’s teacher, Schopenhauer,
lurks in Stephen’s rotten teeth and his anxious question to himself, as it does
in Buck’s jibes. In them resonate all those passages where, as in this illustrative
snippet from The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer explains
that the body is “the phenomenal appearance of the will, its becoming visible,
the objectivity of the will,” and that the body serves “the chief demands and
desires by which the will manifests itself. . . . Teeth, gullet, and intestinal canal
are objectified hunger; the genitals are objectified sexual impulse,” and so forth
(WWR 1: 108). In the virtual eternity of evolution that produced us, even that
latest product, “knowledge remains subordinate to the service of the will” ac-
cording to Schopenhauer; “in fact, it sprang from the will, so to speak, as the
head from the trunk. . . . Even in the higher animals, head and trunk are still
more one than in man, whose head seems freely set on the body, only carried
by the body and not serving it” (WWR 1: 176, 177–78). Facing the biological
groundedness of life, the philosophizing head seems inherently in an awkward
position. Nietzsche’s turning away from Schopenhauer’s disciple Wagner (see
Rather) and his invention of “yea-saying” in response to Schopenhauer’s reli-
gious atheism (most pronounced in book 4 of The World as Will and Represen-
tation) were moments in a high drama that had dominated the European intel-
lectual and artistic scene during the decades when Joyce and Thomas Mann
were growing up. We know that, while in Trieste, though a firm admirer of
Aquinas, Joyce had discussed Nietzsche and the younger Freud, who was yet
another of Joyce’s contemporaries indebted to Schopenhauer (Freud, “Schwi-
erigkeit”); and Joyce already owned Schopenhauer’s principal works (JJ 341–42;
Davison 141, 167–68).
So it was unnecessary for Joyce to lift the Schopenhauerian “tooth” reference
 Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 181

from such well-known literary instances as Huysmans’s À rebours (1884). There,

readers witness a horrific visit to the dentist by the decadent-symbolist hero
Des Esseintes, an experience that triggers Des Esseintes’s musings on Gustave
Moreau’s painting of the presentation of the head of John the Baptist to Salomé.
Besides repeatedly extolling Schopenhauer, À rebours enacts his teaching that
spirituality eventually emerges from the head, itself an evolutionary outgrowth
of the body; and thus Huysmans agrees with Schopenhauer that liberation
from captivity to the life-force or will is an ultimate goal—better to martyr
your head than just lose it by default. At the turn of the century, in the same
spirit, the symbolist painter Odilon Redon is pouring out a profusion of liber-
ated heads, or in another even more concentrated synecdoche, balloon-like
eyes, floating free over our sublunary world on his canvases. Joyce might also
have noticed that, in Mann’s novel of 1901, Thomas Buddenbrooks undergoes
a fatal tooth extraction right after his rediscovery of Schopenhauer’s teachings,
an upsurge that signals a final sapping of his desire to live. The horrid four
roots of Thomas’s failed tooth ironically suggest the title of Schopenhauer’s
treatise On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason (Über die vierfache Wurzel
des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde).
In any event, Joyce places a contrastive tooth reference prominently on page
1 to anticipate Stephen’s fretting. The antagonist figure Buck Mulligan, ever
prone to sarcastic anatomical and physiological observations, not only exudes
a kind of animal strength by virtue of a face “equine in its length” and hair
“hued like pale oak,” but also sports “even white teeth glistening here and there
with gold points” (U 1.15, 16, 25–26). The papal colors in assertive dental form
may appear here, as well as Stephen’s surfacing thought of rhetorical prowess in
Cardinal Newman and St. John Chrysostomos—an instance of what Fritz Senn
terms “metastisis” in Joyce’s Dislocutions (138–44). The dead mother’s “shapely
fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice” and her implied teeth as
“Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!” (U 1.268–69, 278) have something of Schopen-
hauer’s dour descriptions of women, even more so than of men, as animals
equipped with claws and mouths to stuff themselves with life in order to live,
life as circular predation. There is furthermore a danger-boding, metaphoric
extension of “tooth” in the conflicted Stephen’s private refrain, “Agenbite of
inwit” (U 1.481); he is being eaten up by his discovery of the stark facts of life,
that is, by his own spiritual development. But will Stephen become a John the
Baptist in opposition to toothsome life?
There are many things Stephen will yet have to discover. Since his sense
of a presence behind him in “Proteus” clearly anticipates Bloom’s presence in
 182 Gerald Gillespie

the “Library” episode, I will focus for a spell on the legacy of Schopenhauer
latent not only as “Proteus” ends but also as it begins, without disentangling
all the other matters in Stephen’s mind. Senn is credited with the correct at-
tribution of Stephen’s reflections on the ineluctable modalities of the visible
and audible to Lessing’s contrast between sculpture and poetry as spatial and
temporal media in the treatise Laokoon (1766). It is still a rewarding reminder
when we revisit Senn’s compact notes of forty years ago (“Esthetic Theories”)
on this important echo out of the eighteenth century. However, because we
find our artist-elect walking on the edge of the oceanic realm in a classic mode
of meditation—meditation not just on aesthetic principles but on the mys-
teries of being and identity—it is important to acknowledge the intervening
Schopenhauerian echo, too. It is as if, anachronistically, a nineteenth-century
mentality is looking over Lessing’s shoulder while Stephen is engaged in think-
ing with the aid of standard vocabulary of the age. This vocabulary includes
the virtually unavoidable, well-shaped Lessing spatial and temporal categories
to which Schopenhauer himself turned. However, an epochal cleavage sepa-
rates Lessing’s Enlightenment rationalism from the romantic revolution to
which Schopenhauer contributed so enormously. Aside from Nietzsche, no
figure after the Kantian turn in philosophy was more crucial for suggesting the
waning of ego-centered subjectivist individualism in art and the significance
of the unconscious. Schopenhauer was crucial in the second half of the nine-
teenth century as a standard philosopher for symbolism because he affirmed
the primacy of art over life (most notably in book 3 of The World as Will and
Representation). And as Morris Beja has shown (30–32), by its emphasis on
intuition, the Schopenhauerian view exercised an important general influence
on the concept of epiphany in modernism; Beja notes in particular that Scho-
penhauer’s comments on art are strikingly similar to those of young Stephen
Dedalus: he grades works “according to their degree of impersonality” (31).
A thumbnail reminder may be useful here. Kant had argued that the cat-
egories of time and space and the moral imperative inhered in the structure
of the human mind, and his work incited others to draw extreme subjectivist
conclusions. In contrast, Schopenhauer insisted that the phenomenal realm of
time and space was a direct expression or “representation” of the numinous
“thing-in-itself ”; he argued we encounter the “thing-in-itself ” as the unstop-
pable laws of nature which govern the human species like everything else in
the cosmos. Only occasionally might a special mind break through the veil of
illusion, that is, pierce through our experience in the phenomenal time-space
realm, and glimpse something of the operations of the will, its working out of
 Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 183

the destiny of the species through the agency of the unconscious and the body.
As he broods, sardonic Stephen is trying to gain clarity as to the real basis of
life, to cope with painful separation from the mother, to sustain confidence in
his own sense of mission, and to transcend the limits of his own situation and
personality. Thus it is hardly surprising that there should be a strong Schopen-
hauerian flavor in the catchy German terminology of the nebeneinander and
nacheinander which presses to the surface of Stephen’s thoughts. The following
passage from Schopenhauer’s The Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason known to
Joyce can serve to illustrate this echo. I have left untranslated the key words
that recur in the “Proteus” episode:
If time were the sole form of these representations [i.e., phenomena],
then there would be no simultaneity and therefore nothing persistent
and no duration. For time is only perceived insofar as it is fulfilled, and
its advance only through the change in what fulfills it. The persistence of
an object is thus only known through the contrast of the change of others
that are coeval with it. The representation of conjointness is not, how-
ever, possible in mere time; but only, for the other moiety, conditioned
through the representation of space; because in mere time, everything is
nacheinander, but in space nebeneinander: thus this [representation of
simultaneity] only arises through the union of time and space.
On the other hand if space were the sole form of representations of this
class, then there would be no change: for change or alteration is the suc-
cession of states, und succession is only possible in time. Hence one can
also define time as the possibility of opposite modifications in the same
thing. (Sämmtliche Werke 3: 137)
The crucial new element here that makes Schopenhauer’s view distinct from
Lessing’s is the ontological emphasis. Schopenhauer’s attempt to grasp “con-
jointness” offers a key to unlocking the mystery of the intersection between
temporal existence and eternity—and thus his thought is relevant for modern-
ist artists who experiment with ways to arrive at privileged moments, at epiph-
anies. It is apparent why Schopenhauer’s temporal-spatial “veil” of illusion
could have a bearing on Stephen’s aesthetic ideal, but more is involved. In the
opening words of “Proteus,” Stephen is capable of leapfrogging from a theo-
sophical stance, a Boehmean sense of reading the “Signatures of all things” (U
3.2), over Aristotle’s ideas of sensory perception, to a Blakean gnostic concern
over the possibility we are trapped in a fallen creation made by the demiurge.
His conscious testing of the nebeneinander and nacheinander as a venturous
 184 Gerald Gillespie

Siegfried with “ash sword” at his side, as well as his Telemachus-Hamlet search
for a father or creative source, also contains and exhibits a genuine puzzle-
ment. He wonders whether he is truly “walking into eternity,” and whether his
personal identity must therefore disappear or can somehow persist, given that
the world is “There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without
end” (U 3.18, 28–29).
In terms of the narrative action, Stephen’s thoughts seem virtually to pull
something important onto the beach in a parade; it passes before our eyes, too,
a troupe of women, that otherness to which he is misaligned, the “sisterhood”
(U 3.35) most representative of the “will” because women give birth. Through
the “allwombing tomb” (U 3.402) of earthly existence we arrive by birth as
spectators who in our turn are entranced by the veil of Maya, as Schopenhauer
termed the phenomenal realm, and through it we generate our progeny to con-
tinue in that role. Stimulated by these other wanderers through time and space,
“trekking to evening lands” like him, this multifarious, collective “she” that in
his words “trudges, schlepps, trains, drags, trascines her load” (U 3.392–93),
Stephen moves straightway into speculations on the entire ontology of what is
human, and he imagines how the “cords of all link back, strandentwining cable
of all flesh” (U 3.37) to the mystery of Adam and Eve, to Adam who has God
as his mother and father, to Eve who has Adam as her mother and father, and
to these first children of a father-mother, Adam and Eve, who together initiate
bringing forth the human experience in its manifoldness. Stephen ponders
whether Father and Son could be “consubstantial” through the channel of the
feminine, because life as begetting in the flesh is inherently “sin.” Nonetheless,
sitting within his own physical shadow, he feels a shadow as of an earlier in-
carnation of himself, himself as a shadow, and tries to cast “this ended shadow
from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form
of my form?” (U 3.412–14).
Another pointed question thus is addressed also to us readers then, now,
and in the future. Schopenhauerian anxiety is one of several factors spurring
Stephen as a thinker, but an undertow in his meditations on singularity and
endlessness pulls Stephen in a direction that in the longer run more resem-
bles that taken by Rabelais’s and Bruno’s predecessor Nicholas of Cusa in the
fifteenth century. Nicholas’s treatise Visio Dei holds that “Absolute infinity
includes and embraces all things” (Bond 259); and his De Docta Ignorantia
assures, “Nor is the earth’s darkness proof of its inferiority” (Bond 161); and
because “God is the Form of all forms,” accordingly “every creature is, as it
were, a finite infinity or a created god” (Bond 133–34). Stephen must still
 Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 185

learn how to approach that divine potential so that form of his form and
Form converge.
Here is not the place for an excursus on Joyce’s treatment of this great my-
thologem of Christianity, the symbolic relationships between the story of Adam
and Eve and Christ and the Virgin, which he lets Stephen agonize over as clues
to the divine mystery of creation. I only want to illustrate the nuances in the
Schopenhauerian echo, a background that will eventually give way to Joyce’s
own, more complex revision of the entire ensemble Schopenhauer-Wagner-
Nietzsche-Freud. Key, I believe, is that in Schopenhauer Joyce would have no-
ticed one of several great statements of a seemingly paradoxical relationship
which post-symbolist artists confront. This is the necessary conflict between
singularity and plurality, between the artist’s own entrapment as a person be-
cause of incarnation in the time-space continuum and the artist’s special role
as a channel for a reality that transcends any individual identity. The following
passage from The World as Will and Representation in Payne’s translation il-
lustrates how Schopenhauer links the problem of individual identity to time-
space, that is, the phenomenal veil of illusion or principle of sufficient reason:
I shall call time and space the principium individuationis, an expression
borrowed from the old scholasticism. . . . For it is only by means of time
and space that something which is one and the same according to its
nature and the concept appears as different, as a plurality of coexistence
and successive things. Consequently, time and space are the principium
individuationis. . . . It is apparent from what has been said that the will as
thing-in-itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient rea-
son in all its forms, and is consequently completely groundless, although
each of its phenomena in time and space are innumerable. It is itself one,
yet not as an object is one, for the unity of an object is known only in
contrast to possible plurality. Again, the will is one not as a concept is
one, for a concept originates only through abstraction from plurality; but
it is one as that which lies outside time and space, outside the principium
individuationis, that is to say, outside the possibility of plurality. (WWR
1: 112–13)
In Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context (chs. 8 and 14) I have dealt
at some length with what we will eventually overhear in the “Library” epi-
sode: Stephen’s mellower thoughts about how humanity is constantly reweav-
ing its body thanks to the mother goddess and how the artist must go through
a plurality of roles, while transcending his own personal limits, in order to
 186 Gerald Gillespie

apprehend life both in its variety and in its fullness. In a brilliant synthesis,
Stephen draws together the Penelope or weaving function (our involvement in
the phenomenal veil) with the possibility of a privileged moment out of time,
when the artist glimpses, and thus becomes a channel of, the creator principle
at work—in a necessarily diminished state (for reasons which cabalistic teach-
ing, a covert influence here in the hidden or super-narrator, makes clear). The
creator principle shines through the veil as the potential of its own rebirth: “As
we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to
day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave
his image. . . . so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the un-
living son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind,
Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which
in possibility I may come to be” (U 9.376–83).
Stephen’s own “becoming” in the mode of the older Bildungsroman is thus
directly pertinent to the insight he is achieving as a protagonist in the modern-
ist novel Ulysses. Our penetration with him, as readers, behind the phenom-
enal veil is a parallel enactment to that on the highest plane: our participation
in the mind of the supreme narrator. The point of citing the great misogynist
Schopenhauer above, at some length, is to illustrate that Stephen’s meditations
on the nebeneinander and nacheinander have a bearing on more than aesthet-
ics; their relevance is also distinctly and importantly metaphysical. Plurality
manifests the principle of individuation, but according to Schopenhauer the
special individual capable of insight into manifoldness subsumes it in a privi-
leged, timeless moment of art. The following is one of many passages that bear
directly on the artist as the mortal creature whose insights, when as a “pure
subject of knowing” he breaks through the emotional barrier of his own incar-
nation, bring us in touch with absolute reality:
although the individual phenomenon of the will begins and ends in time,
the will itself, as thing-in-itself, is not affected thereby, nor is the correla-
tive of every object, namely the knowing but never known subject, and
that life is always certain to the will-to-live. This is not to be numbered
among those doctrines of immortality. For permanence no more belongs
to the will, considered as thing-in-itself, or to the pure subject of know-
ing, to the eternal eye of the world, than does transitoriness, since passing
away and transitoriness are determinations valid in time alone, whereas
the will and the pure subject of knowing lie outside time. (WWR 1: 282)
Schopenhauer acknowledges art of the highest order as capable of expressing
 Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 187

profound religious insights: “And now art ends by presenting the self-abolition
of the will through the great quieter that dawns on it from the most perfect
knowledge of its own nature” (WWR 1: 233). But he carefully distinguishes the
authentic saint from the artist as a human type: “This purely knowable side of
the world and its repetition in any art is the element of the artist. . . . That pure,
true, and profound knowledge of the inner nature of the world now becomes
for him an end in itself; at it he stops” (WWR 1: 267). Resignation is not the goal
of art, but art transcends by attaining deeper knowledge.
Characteristic of the role of Stephen midway into Ulysses is that it permits
Joyce one more of those amazing syntheses which, after he pulls it off, we ad-
mire and grasp in retrospect. The symbolist idea that the disappearance of the
artist into his work is a new goal beyond romanticism fits congenially with the
Schopenhauerian idea that the greatest artists ultimately rise above the phe-
nomenal scene of human striving and suffering. This level of comprehending
the world is already implicit in moments of Stephen’s thinking, even though
he is still anguished or groping in his approach. We hear the potential for his
understanding that the artist should recede as a person and be totally devoted
to acting behind the world he discovers for us. Attaining a universality beyond
any personal identity surfaces in a passage such as “We walk through our-
selves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows,
brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” (U 9.1044–46). In terms of
generic substructures, Stephen functions like a linchpin that holds together the
tradition of the Bildungsroman inherited from the romantics and the emergent
post-symbolist consciousness that actually already is present in the practice of
the unnamed super-narrator who shows Stephen to us. The ground pattern of
the Bildungsroman will no longer be attached to a post-romantic philosophic
superman in the Wake; rather, it will be spread dialectically over the columns
in the children’s “study” program (book 2, ch. 2), because what’s being narrated
is the whole evolution of the human race on its colossal pilgrimage; our “educa-
tional” material has definitively attained the scope predicted in Goethe’s Faust:
everything in history and reaching back into the archaic, traces from before
history, and qualitatively the “eternity” of the human mind as it has been con-
stituted over eons. Showing us a nay-sayer on the road to yea-saying (and to
a capacity analogous to that of the Schopenauerian pure subject outside time)
is itself implicitly one version of the magical trick of subsuming the nay in the
yea. That is, in yet another great act of synthesis, Joyce lets the Schopenhau-
erian shadow contrast and intermingle with the refulgence of divine light in a
Cusanan-Brunonian coincidentia oppositorum. As in the case of other Joycean
 188 Gerald Gillespie

fusions, here we can readily shift over to a viewpoint far more congenial to
Joyce in the longer run. The Schopenhauerian coloration will prove ultimately
to be a mere tinge in Stephen’s sensibility; it helps lead us further into a caba-
listic understanding of the same relationships (Gillespie, “Nein oder Ja”).
In “Proteus,” and still in “Circe” in a more comic vein, Stephen as Telema-
chus-Hamlet-Siegfried (Gillespie, “Portraits”) still evidences emotional attach-
ment to the role of “nay-sayer,” a role Goethe’s Mephisto defined so aptly in
“The Prolog in Heaven” of the cosmic drama Faust. Right next to the sign of the
father’s power, Stephen thinks fondly of the luminous rebel: “Thunderstorm.
Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect, Lucifer, dico, qui nescit oc-
casum” (U 3.486–88). But everywhere there are hints of a more complex reso-
lution of Stephen’s and art’s disturbed relation to the feminine, genitive, and
dative in the making. For example, Stephen entertains cabalistic notions that
promise a meaningful approach to God through our lowly incarnated state;
chief among these is his awe in thinking of the All-Mother to whom all is con-
nected. There are indeed many veils in Ulysses. I hear not just a Blavatskian or
theosophical, but also especially an echo of Schopenhauer’s veil in “Proteus”
when, ruminating on All Mother Eve and the “darkness . . . in our souls,” Ste-
phen asks himself: “Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the
veil?” (U 3.424–25). This is Schopenhauer’s famous veil of Maya (WWR 1: 8)
borrowed from Hindu scripture.
To hear the aspirant superman muttering to himself is a very refreshing,
human touch. I believe we can read this kind of utterance, underground, as
the hope that an ineffable, ungraspable unity will shine through the multifari-
ous phenomenal veil; we hear in Stephen’s yearning to glimpse the ground of
being for a tremulous instant out of time the promise that our world can be
reconceived by the artist in an artifice of eternity. Comparing Joyce with Kafka,
I have spoken elsewhere of Joyce as a modern mystic who attempts nothing less
than to intimate the coincidence of opposites to reach a meta-junction when
not just the modalities of the audible and visible, but nay-saying and yea-saying
converge (Gillespie, “Nein oder Ja”). Joyce is one of those rare authors in the
train of Rabelais who have a sense for implementing in literature Nicholas of
Cusa’s assurance that “the unknowable God reveals himself knowably to the
world in imagery and symbolism (as, for example, when the Apostle rightly
said that with God there is not both Yes and No but is only Yes)” (Hopkins
159). Therefore it is fitting to close by repeating the question Stephen puts to
himself, but I will extend it to the whole of Ulysses: “does it mean something
perhaps?”
 Schopenhauer’s Shadow, or Stephen as Philosophic Superman 189

Works Cited
Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971.
Bond, H. Lawrence, ed. and trans. Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings. New York: Pau-
list Press, 1997. [Contains On Learned Ignorance, Dialogue on the Hidden God, On Seeking
God, On the Vision of God, On the Summit of Contemplation]
Davison, Neil R. James Joyce, “Ulysses,” and the Construction of Jewish Identity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Freud, Sigmund. “Eine Schwierigkeit in der Psychoanalyse.” Imago 5 (1917): 1–7.
Gillespie, Gerald. “Nein oder Ja: Kabbalistische Züge in den Romanen von Kafka und Joyce.”
Kafka und die Weltliteratur. Ed. Manfred Engel and Dieter Lamping. Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. 263–75.
———. “Portraits of the Artist as a Young Siegfried: Mann’s Felix and Joyce’s Stephen Approach
the Supreme Mysteries.” The Finer Grain: Essays in Honor of Mihály Szegedy-Maszák. Ed.
Péter Nemes and Richard Aczel. Bloomington: Indiana U, Research Institute for Inner
Asian Studies, 2003. 161–68.
———. Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context. Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 2003.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Die Faustdichtungen: “Urfaust”; “Faust, ein Fragment”; “Faust,
eine Tragödie” . . . . Ed. Ernst Beutler. Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1950.
Hopkins, Jasper. A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa. 3rd ed. Min-
neapolis: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1986. [Contains Trialogus de Possest (On Actualized-
possibility)]
Huysmans, Joris-Karl. À rebours. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 7. Geneva: Slatkine, 1972.
Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag,
1901.
Rather, L. J. Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1990.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde. 2nd,
rev. ed. (1847). Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. Paul Deussen. Vol. 3. Munchen: R. Piper, 1912.
———. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. 3rd, rev. ed. (1859). Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. Paul Deus-
sen. Vol. 1. München: R. Piper, 1911.
———. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover,
1969.
Senn, Fritz. “Esthetic Theories.” James Joyce Quarterly 2 (1965): 134–36.
———. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1984.
Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to “Finnegans Wake.” New York: Farrar, Strauss and
Giroux, 1959.
 12

Days of Our Lives

The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce

Robert Weninger

The Expansion of Time through the Reduction of Time

In his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” T. S. Eliot famously argued that
Joyce’s use of myth as a “continuous parallel between contemporaneity and an-
tiquity” (177) would provide a model for many generations of writers to come.
Twentieth-century literary history amply proves him accurate; Joyce’s deploy-
ment of myth as, again in Eliot’s words, “a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history” (177) indeed serves as the blueprint
for numerous writers’ works. But it holds no less true in terms of Joyce’s pro-
totypical interior monologue, the literary device he employed to capture the
scintillating minutiae of the mental households, the streams of consciousness,
of his three main protagonists as well as some of the minor figures in Ulysses.
While Joyce’s employment of interior monologue may not have been novel per
se—as is well known, the French writer Édouard Dujardin and the Austrian
writer Arthur Schnitzler preceded Joyce by some decades—the subtlety and
sophistication of the Irish writer’s usage were so unprecedented, his technique
seemed so mature and compelling, that it was not their works but rather Ul-
ysses that became the universal paradigm of this particular modernist innova-
tion, putting his stamp on any future adaptation. Indeed, the Dublin Odyssey
of Mr. Bloom and the interior monologues of Stephen, Leopold, and Molly
became Joyce’s most celebrated achievements, and rightly so, at least in literary
historical terms.
But Joyce’s novel was innovative in yet another formal respect. Early crit-
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 191

ics were stunned by the fact that a novelist could devote some 730 pages to
depicting just one day in the lives of a mere three main characters. By reduc-
ing his novel’s narrative time span to just one day—give or take a couple of
hours—Joyce had achieved something that had never been attempted in this
way before in the epical genre. In other words, Joyce was no less innovative in
this regard than he was in deploying myth and interior monologue. But where
did the idea originally stem from? What inspired Joyce to write a 700-page
novel that spanned only one day in the lives of its protagonists? The answer
usually given is of course Aristotle’s “On the Art of Poetry,” a work that Joyce
read in Paris in early 1903. At the very outset of their introduction in “Ulysses”
Annotated, Don Gifford and Robert Seidman are quick to point out the close
relationship between Joyce’s Ulysses and Aristotle’s poetics:
The action of Ulysses takes place at the confluence of two orders of liter-
ary time: dramatic and epic time as Aristotle defines them in the Poetics:
“Tragedy [drama] endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single
revolution of the sun; . . . whereas the Epic action has no limits of time.”
A modern translator might be inclined to render this passage as apply-
ing not to the action imitated but to the time of performance: a drama
to be performed in a single day, an epic to be performed over a period
of several days. But earlier translators, such as Butcher (a copy of whose
translation was in Joyce’s Trieste library), assumed Aristotle to mean that
drama was to imitate the events of a single day, as Ulysses does. . . . And
Ulysses enjoys the other unities Aristotle recommended for drama: it has
unity of place (Dublin and environs); unity of action (all action takes
place in a single day); and, as good Sophoclean drama, Ulysses has three
central characters . . . as well as a chorus (of Dubliners) that, as Aristotle
said it should, functions collectively as a fourth character. (UA 1–2)
There are of course many more parallels between Ulysses and Aristotle’s “Po-
etics” than Gifford and Seidman, or I, have space to discuss, not least among
them the fact that a tragedy should have three main parts and that Aristotle’s
main prototype and frame of reference for many of his arguments is Homer,
and in particular Homer’s Odyssey. But, as telling as the correspondences be-
tween Joyce’s Ulysses and Aristotle’s “On the Art of Poetry” may seem, there are
substantive differences that should not go unmentioned. It would be mislead-
ing to create the impression that Joyce conceived Ulysses as the epical putting
into practice of Aristotle’s theory of the tragedy, as Gifford and Seidman’s com-
ments might seem to suggest. Ulysses clearly is an epic, and Joyce is a master of
 192 Robert Weninger

making use of epical or—adjusted to more contemporary models and genres of

literature—prose narrative’s advantages. Take the following example: in chapter
24, on “Epic Poetry,” Aristotle writes:
In tragedy it is not possible to represent several parts of the story as tak-
ing place simultaneously, but only the part that is actually being per-
formed on the stage by the actors; epic poetry, on the other hand, being
narrative, is able to represent many incidents that are being simultane-
ously enacted, and, provided they are relevant, they increase the weight
of the poem, and give it the merits of grandeur, variety of interest, and
diversity in its episodes. (67)
Of course, one can question whether Joyce, or any prose author for that mat-
ter, ever succeeded in representing genuine simultaneity, or what Stephen, fol-
lowing the German writers Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Karl Gutzkow, in
“Proteus” calls the nebeneinander—after all, the first three and second three
episodes of Ulysses are sequential and must be read sequentially in time. There
is no escaping Lessing’s ground rules. In another important respect, too, Joyce’s
Ulysses deviates from one of Aristotle’s central prescriptions for a successful
tragedy; Aristotle claims: “Now in the same way as living creatures and organ-
isms compounded on many parts must be of a reasonable size, so that they can
be easily taken in by the eye, so too plots must be of a reasonable length, so that
they may be easily held in the memory” (42). While one might argue that the
plot of Ulysses is of a reasonable length—as opposed to the book—it is more
than questionable whether it is “easily held in the memory.”
These differences notwithstanding—and let us not forget that they have to
exist for Joyce’s work to be classifiable as a novel and not as a tragedy—it is
genuinely remarkable how closely Joyce’s Ulysses conforms to Aristotle’s most
central prescriptions for tragedy. And the most remarkable correspondence
among them seems to be just how much, and how successfully, Joyce was able
to tighten and reduce, contract, and shrink epic narrative’s traditionally loose
temporal frame of reference with its lengthier temporal parameters—which
would typically have meant an action spanning some weeks or months, if not
years—to a mere day, and that without losing bulk; quite to the contrary. This
reduction in time entails an expansion in time, which is only seemingly a para-
dox: if we reduce a novel’s action and time span to one day, we are—assuming
the same number of pages—simultaneously expanding the narrative space that
can be devoted to any given moment in time. This paradox, the expansion of
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 193

time through the reduction of time, is surely one of the prime characteristics
of the modernist novel.

The Same and Not the Same

Examples abound in which novelists have chosen to depict just one day, or
less, in the life of a character or, more usually, a set of characters. A recent ex-
ample in English literature is Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday, published in 2005,
describing a day in the life of the London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. In
the first and, if I am not mistaken, only article to date on the topic of one-day
novels, published in Finnish in 1982, Dietrich Assmann lists some forty texts
within this subgenre, many of which were composed in the wake of Ulysses.
Indeed, Joyce might have savored the fact that many of them are written in one
of the four Scandinavian languages. The earliest, predating Ulysses, is Hjalmar
Bergman’s Markurells i Wadköping (1919), which plays on a June day in 1913;
among the others are Joel Lehtonen’s Putkinotko (1920), Reino Rauanheimo’s
Aamusta iltaan (1930), Sigurd Hoel’s En dag i oktober (1931), Volter Kilpi’s Alast-
alon salissa (1933), Arvid Brenner’s En dag som andra (1939), and Franz Emil
Sillanpäa’s Elokuu (1941), all written and published during Joyce’s lifetime. And
Assmann’s list is by no means complete. But rather than survey this field once
more (Assmann has done this competently and engagingly, and I am grateful
to him for supplying me with a German translation) I would like to focus our
attention on a limited subset of one-day novels, namely those that not simply
take up and rework the one-day structure but simultaneously reference and
acknowledge their precursor, James Joyce, by metanarratively paying homage
to their prototype, Ulysses, either through direct quotation, intertextual allu-
sion, or metapoetical commentary, or a combination thereof.
There may be no better place to start than Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dallo-
way, her counterweight to Joyce’s one-day novel. Written very much under
the spell of Joyce’s Ulysses, but quite distinct from it in narrative tone, timbre,
and flow, Mrs. Dalloway—set on a June (!) day in the London of 1923—was
published three years after Ulysses, in 1925. As is well known, Woolf was read-
ing Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Joyce’s Ulysses more or less
simultaneously while conceiving her own novel; equally well known is that her
attitude toward Joyce was at best ambivalent. But even if she used Proust’s À la
recherche du temps perdu as the preferred model for her own style of writing
rather than Joyce’s Ulysses, the figure of Mrs. Dalloway is clearly configured on
one level as Woolf ’s well-bred, upper-class counter-image to Joyce’s “under-
 194 Robert Weninger

bred” Molly Bloom. While Molly is cast as an immobile, bed-bound symbol

of the earth, representing female desire and womanly sensuality, a peculiarly
desexualized Mrs. Dalloway navigates her way through London’s inner city,
walking past Piccadilly, up Bond Street, along Oxford Street, a flaneur no less
than the more pedestrian Leopold Bloom, possibly seeing the queen ride by in
her car, gravitating in the end toward her home and that evening’s party with
the British prime minister. Preoccupied no less than Molly with her domestic
circumstances and memories of adolescence, no thought of marital infidelity
(for example with Peter Walsh, freshly returned from India) crosses her mind.
As close as London and Dublin get in geographical terms, the two novels, and
their two female protagonists, seem to be located at opposite ends of the em-
pire, the empire of politics as much as the empire of lust.
And yet, besides the obvious parallel that it is set on a June day in a capi-
tal city, Woolf ’s novel contains a number of passages that can be interpreted
as echoes of, maybe even tributes to, Joyce’s “masterpiece” (Common Reader
191—as she calls Ulysses in her 1919 essay “Modern Fiction”—despite its also
being a “memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster,” as
Woolf later says in her essay “How It Strikes a Contemporary” [Common Read-
er 297]). One of these passages, seemingly fusing the cloud of Ulysses (1.248
and 4.218) with the snow of “The Dead,” runs: “As a cloud crosses the sun,
silence falls on London; and falls on the mind” (Mrs. Dalloway 49). In another,
while saluting Joyce in acknowledgment, Woolf seems to be reproaching him
for his lack of proportion: “Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing,”
we read in Mrs. Dalloway, “the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day,
counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the su-
preme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far
diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street,
announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby
and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one” (102).
Surely the “commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street,” is
meant to remind the reader who knows Ulysses of the clock at the Ballast Office
in Dublin which is on Bloom’s mind shortly after 1 p.m. on June 16, 1904: “Mr
Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that.
After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time. . . . Parallax. I
never exactly understood” (U 8.108–11). With her allusion to Ulysses, Woolf is
creating her own version of a parallax, namely an intertextual one. Similarly,
a motorcar in Mrs. Dalloway—“the Queen’s, the Prince of Wales’s, the Prime
Minister’s?,” no one knows for sure (14 and 16)—circulates through London’s
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 195

inner city, the center of empire, much as the vice-regal cavalcade proceeds
through the heart of the Hibernian metropolis in “Wandering Rocks,” “shred-
ding and slicing, dividing and subdividing” the city.
Using a very different kind of tripartite structure than Joyce in Ulysses, a
structure she will emulate in To the Lighthouse, Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway maps
out three geographical and spiritual strata of life in London: first, the city of
London with its streets and shops, its hustle and bustle, its comings and go-
ings: “Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans,
the eager advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the domes
and spires of offices and hospitals” (128); second, the house which the Dal-
loways inhabit in Westminster, a house that is currently being prepared for a
party that evening that even the prime minister will attend; and finally, Clarissa
Dalloway’s private drawing room. Correspondingly, these three strata or layers
of public and private life are subtly reflected in Mrs. Dalloway’s three names:
first she is Mrs. Richard Dalloway, the wife of a senior government official;
second, she is Clarissa Dalloway, her public self; and finally, she is Clarissa,
her private self. Her triadic identity is spelled out early in the text when we
read: “up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more;
this being Mrs Richard Dalloway” (11). Moreover, as in Ulysses, three figures,
or more precisely, three minds, two male and one female, dominate the novel:
Clarissa Dalloway herself, who is for much of the day perambulating the streets
of London in preparation for the party that evening; Septimus Warren Smith,
the volunteer soldier returned from World War I, who is plagued by memories
and no longer able to cope with life, and who is going to commit suicide that
very afternoon; and, finally, Peter Walsh, recently returned from India after
thirty years of service, who is looking forward to seeing Clarissa again, whom
he had once hoped to marry.
In many respects, Woolf, in Mrs. Dalloway no less than in her later works,
aspires precisely to what she claims in “Modern Fiction” Joyce accomplishes
in Ulysses: “Let us record,” she says, “the atoms as they fall upon the mind in
the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected
and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what
is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small” (Common
Reader 190). This poetics of the trivial, of what is small and insignificant, is
borne out by another one-day novel by Woolf, her last work, Between the Acts,
which was conceived in 1938 and completed in February 1941, but published
only posthumously four months after her death in July 1941. Woolf herself
 196 Robert Weninger

calls the novel “too silly and trivial” to merit publication (Woolf, Letters 6:
486). While Between the Acts contains only a few indirect echoes of Joyce’s
Ulysses, some of the themes Woolf touches upon—in particular the focus on
time, change, and history (“Memories; possessions. This is the burden that
the past laid on me” [155]; “Time went on and on like the hands of the kitchen
clock” [174]; “Change had to come, unless things were perfect; in which case
she supposed they resisted Time” [174]; “‘You don’t believe in history,’ said Wil-
liam” [175])—make this novel the perfect intermediary between Joyce’s Ulysses
and our next one-day novel, Graham Swift’s The Sweet-Shop Owner of 1980.
Although its narrative mood resembles that of Woolf much more than that
of Joyce’s Ulysses, Swift’s The Sweet-Shop Owner contains more references to
its Joycean pre-text than does any other English-language one-day novel. Like
Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and Between the Acts, all three of which may well have
served as sources for Swift’s novel, it too is set on a June day. It is the last day in
the life of its central protagonist, the sweet-shop owner Mr. Chapman, whose
wife, Irene, died in 1970 and who, on this “hot June day” (Sweet-Shop 10) in
1974, senses that it is his turn to die of the angina pectoris—“that little pain,
with its name like a rare butterfly’s” (182)—that has plagued him for far too
long. While written in an impersonal voice (third-person singular), the novel
is dominated by Mr. Chapman’s thoughts, given mostly in free indirect speech;
his mind revolves around memories of his and his wife’s wedding in June 1937,
their very different social backgrounds, the purchase of the sweet shop in No-
vember 1937, the birth of their daughter in 1949, their numerous holidays in
Teignmouth and Dorset in the 1950s and early 1960s, their daughter’s educa-
tion, and his wife’s death. As in Woolf ’s last novel, there is a distinct tone of
melancholy about Mr. Chapman’s meditations as he goes about arranging his
affairs.
As much as Swift may be indebted to his precursors, he does not parade
his obligations. Most correspondences between Swift’s and Joyce’s novels will
not be apparent to any untrained reader of The Sweet-Shop Owner, so hidden
and even arcane are the allusions. But to any Joycean the similarities should be
obvious, and they are fun to detect: first, Chapman’s daughter, Dorry, reminds
us of Milly, not just because their names have a similar ring; on this very June
day it is Dorry’s twentieth birthday, as it was Milly Bloom’s fifteenth on June 15,
and both fathers have their daughters on their minds. “There was always the
sunshine. It had shone then—June 1949—through the windows of the nurs-
ing home,” Mr. Chapman muses, thinking back to the day Dorry was born.
“Trees brushed outside and bees had buzzed in and out of the open windows.
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 197

Should they have allowed that, with all those babies? . . . And today, Dorry,
is your birthday. He could almost smile at the neatness of it” (10–11). While
Bloom muses, thinking back to Milly’s childhood: “Silly Milly’s birthday gift.
Only five she was then. No, wait: four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she
broke. Putting pieces of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled,
pouring” (U 4.284–86). Similarly, when Mrs. Chapman met and married her
husband, it was not a grand love affair: “He would do” (Sweet-Shop 27), she
admits to herself at the time, echoing Molly Bloom’s “I thought well as well
him as another” in the final passages of “Penelope.” And the relationship be-
tween mother and daughter is not unlike that of Molly and Milly, as illustrated
by the following excerpt from Mr. Chapman’s interior monologue: “And after
that, letters once a month, which said little. Irene never read them, though she
recognized them from the envelope. She left them to me as if they weren’t hers
to touch” (182). It is the father who from that point on communicates with
the daughter. And in one of her letters Dorry informs her parents that she is
giving up her university studies to be with a man, something that preoccupies
the father’s thoughts no less than Bloom’s mind is preoccupied with Milly’s
suitors. Like Bloom, Mr. Chapman would go down every morning to make
breakfast (136). He always has “two eggs, soft-boiled” (11), a roguish allusion
to Bloom’s demand for a “couple of eggs,” as Molly gripes at the opening of her
monologue. Mr. Chapman is a rather undistinguished, nondescript man who
is known largely because of his wife, “the Harrison girl” (40), the daughter of
the “laundry Harrisons,” not unlike Bloom, who too is known around Dublin
primarily for his wife. And like Bloom, Mr. Chapman nearly forgets his keys
on this last morning of his life: “Sunshine gleamed in the hall. He picked up
his hat and briefcase. Only then did he remember. The keys. The keys to the
house, to Briar Street, to the till, to the safe in the stock room, to Pond Street.
They were on the bedside table, by Dorry’s letter. He went to fetch them. He
paused by the sheet of notepaper, breathed heavily, then folded it into his breast
pocket. She’s come” (13). Thematically, too, the novels revolve around similar
patterns, and the upsetting of patterns. If history is a nightmare from which
Stephen is trying to awake (U 2.377) and if it is “history [that] is to blame” (U
2.246–47), in Swift’s novel Mr. Chapman’s daughter is writing, of all things, a
thesis about the “sense of history”: “What was the name of that thesis you were
writing, Dorry? ‘Romantic Poetry and the Sense of History’? And now you are
living with a historian. What do you learn from history, Dorry?” (Sweet-Shop
216). Indeed, the underlying moral of both novels seems the same, history and
its repetition, but invariably repetition with a difference: “Nothing new under
 198 Robert Weninger

the sun” (U 13.1105), “See, things remain” (Sweet-Shop 218) on the one hand,
“history repeating itself with a difference” (U 16.1525), “The same and not the
same” (Sweet-Shop 88, 117, 187, and 189), on the other. These and many other
references to Joyce in Swift’s novel are intentionally submerged; they are woven
as seamlessly into the fabric of Swift’s text as the references to the Odyssey are
woven into Joyce’s Ulysses. In both cases, one needs to be alerted to the rela-
tionship in order to detect the parallels.
My fourth and final English-language example is Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis,
a novel published in 2003 but situated—“upsetting the pattern,” as Swift’s nar-
rator would put it (Sweet-Shop 159)—on an April day of the year 2000. Eric
Packer, the multibillionaire protagonist, is shown navigating around Manhat-
tan in his chauffeur-driven stretch limousine; around him, New York City has
come to a near standstill because the president is visiting. We recall how, on
June 16, 1904, Dublin is twice cut in half by processions of one sort or another—
Paddy Dignam’s funeral procession moving northwest from Dignam’s house in
Ballsbridge to Prospect Cemetery, and the vice-regal cavalcade moving in the
opposite direction from Phoenix Park to the Mirus Bazaar near Sandymount—
making people stop and eyes turn, to watch, reflect, and occasionally greet.
Like Joyce’s Hibernian metropolis, DeLillo’s American Cosmopolis too finds
itself cut in halves, causing not just havoc but a state of paralysis, a word well
known to Joyceans: “State of chaos. This. The question of the president and his
whereabouts. He is fluid. He is moving. And wherever he goes, our satellite
receiver reports a ripple effect in the traffic that causes mass paralysis. This also.
There is a funeral proceeding slowly downtown and now deflecting westward.
Many vehicles, numerous mourners on foot” (Cosmopolis 65). Mostly from
the safety of his car, this polar opposite of the man of the street, the kind that
Leopold Bloom and Mr. Chapman represent, fills his day with oftentimes hol-
low, at other times profound-sounding conversations with his chief of security,
his chief of technology, his currency analyst, his chief of finance, his doctor,
his wife, his lover. But even in this high-tech world of financial markets, sky-
scrapers, elevator banks, heliports, limos, cell phones, “voice-activated fire-
arms” (18), and “surveillance cameras” (15), a “videostreamed” (15) world that
revolves in “ritualistic cycles” (16) around nothing but money and sex—much
like Ulysses itself!—Bloom’s mind never seems far removed:
“We want to think about the art of money-making,” Vija Kinski [his chief
of theory] said.
She was sitting in the rear seat, his seat, the club chair, and he looked at
her and waited.
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 199

“The Greeks have a word for it.”

He waited.
“Chrimatistikós,” she said. “But we have to give the word a little leeway.
Adapt it to the current situation.” (77)
As we know, Leopold Bloom has his own rather caustic take on this kind of
vocabulary: “Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound” (U
8.115), he comments laconically. Like Woolf, DeLillo subtly generates a kind
of parallax—or is it metempsychosis, another big Greek word that might be
“adapted to the current situation”?—between his and Joyce’s pre-text, a time
loop joining early-twentieth-century Dublin to early-twenty-first century New
York City.
In an interview with DeLillo reported in the German daily Die Welt shortly
after the publication of Cosmopolis, interviewer Thomas David cuts right to the
chase when he addresses the obvious link with Joyce. He asks (my translation):
“In interviews you have occasionally mentioned the fact that reading Joyce’s Ul-
ysses was one of your most formative reading experiences during adolescence
[Jugend]. With Cosmopolis you have now published a novel that takes place
on one day. Is this your way of paying your respect?” DeLillo responds: “One
of my first readers told me that Cosmopolis is a Ulysses at the speed of light. I
consciously worked not to make my novel a copy [Neufassung] of Joyce’s book.
Until quite recently there was a pub on 47th Street called Molly Bloom’s. My
protagonist is driving down 47th Street, but even if it still existed I would never
have mentioned it. But there are a number of mythological allusions, among
them to Icarus” (“Jede Art” 27). Despite DeLillo’s disclaimer, his novel cannot
conceal its ancestry; beyond what I have already detailed, many twists of the
plot and turns of expression are reminiscent of Bloom’s wanderings and Joyce’s
language. There are numerous sentences with a distinctly Joycean ring, such as:
“It seemed, the food, to make her draw back. Green tea and toast untouched
before her” (18). Like Bloom, Eric Packer observes “a hundred gulls trail a
wobbling scow downriver” (7). And even the “old Times Tower,” projecting
ominously and incessantly from above the passerby’s head, seems to provide
the quintessential postmodern gloss on Dublin’s Ballast Office timepiece of
yore: “These were three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a
hundred feet above the street. Financial news, stock prices, currency markets.
The action was unflagging. The hellbent sprint of numbers and symbols, the
fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words, of
multinational news, all too fleet to be absorbed” (80).
 200 Robert Weninger

“You Can’t Copy a Genius”

My second group of examples is taken from German literary history. One of
the earliest German-language writers whose work was to be transformed by
the encounter with Joyce’s Ulysses was the Austrian novelist and critic Her-
mann Broch. His most famous novel is arguably Der Tod des Vergil (The Death
of Virgil), published during the immediate aftermath of World War II in 1945.
Broch is best known among Joyceans for his seminal essay “James Joyce und
die Gegenwart: Rede zu Joyces 50. Geburtstag” (“Joyce and the Present Age:
Speech on His 50th Birthday”), delivered as a lecture in 1932 and first published
in 1936. Here Broch comments extensively on Joyce’s “everyday world of the
epoch” (“Welt-Alltag der Epoche” [64, also 67 and 69]) and the “word and sen-
tence polyphony” (“Wort- und Satzpolyphonie” [67]) and “allegorical cosmog-
ony” (“allegorische Kosmogonie” [73]) of Joyce’s “Gesamtkunstwerk” (71). The
Death of Virgil, Broch’s most demanding novel, is an impressive 450-page tour
de force of mostly interior monologue, couched predominantly in free indirect
speech, interspersed with occasional lyrical outbursts and dialogues between
the dying Virgil, the emperor Augustus, and some of Virgil’s closest friends
and acquaintances. The Death of Virgil is considerably more philosophical and
lyrical than Joyce’s Ulysses and more symphonic in its linguistic texture; except
that it is written in “normal” German, the flow of language resembles Finnegans
Wake more than it does Ulysses, not to mention the fact that, like the Wake, The
Death of Virgil contains four chapters or sections, the last of which in its brevity
and lyrical ebb and flow comes surprisingly close to ALP’s final monologue.
Coming close in tone also to the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, Broch’s stream-
of-consciousness sentences frequently extend to more than a page in length.
His language is deep in resonances, swirling from thought to thought, shifting
from present to past and past to present. For obvious reasons, time and tempo-
ralness play a crucial role in Broch’s novel: we are experiencing the last hours of
Virgil’s life, living with him through his last minutes and seconds, all while the
Roman poet laureate is trying to recapture in his meandering train of thought
his past life’s full expanse. Each breath contains a plenitude of memories:
of that which stored in its breath all starry spaces and would itself be
preserved in even the tiniest point of the spheres, breathing itself in and
out, streaming in and out, the reflection of a symbolization sheerly un-
utterable, sheerly unrememberable, sheerly unpredictable, the salvation
of knowledge that by its effulgence outreached every lapse of time and
transformed each split-second to timelessness. (72)
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 201

In his death throes Virgil is seeking a language, “a speech which would help the
[inner] eyes to perceive, heartbreakingly and quick as a heart-beat, the unity of
all existence” (72). This profound relationship between time and language is
ultimately reduced to the formula, recorded in Broch’s self-commentary on the
novel: “One sentence—one thought—one second.” Broch here suggests that
each sentence, each sequence of words encompassed by two periods, however
long or short, corresponds to the brief space of just one second.
The novel was originally conceived around 1936, but by the time of its publi-
cation in 1945 Broch had undertaken at least five revisions. Hölderlin and Rilke
are major influences on theme, style, and tone, but Broch openly acknowledges
that Joyce was his major source of inspiration in particular for his extensive
use of interior monologue. But the Austrian author is also quick to point out
the differences in their treatments of stream of consciousness: “in this respect
my Virgil-narrative is nothing less than a lyrical poem that like any poetry
is meant to express a single moment of life, here of course encapsulating the
moment of dying,” he wrote to Benno Huebsch at Viking Press in New York.
In another self-commentary, he says: “By necessity, the representation of such
circumstances led to the interior monologue, but one in the third person since
the process of dying cannot be expressed in the first person. This peculiar form
also allowed me to move beyond the realm of the psychological and to gain
entry into realms of the metaphysical.” “The method that I use in my novel,”
he continues elsewhere, “is therefore a lyrical one; the interior monologue pro-
ceeds as lyrical prose but switches to verse when it climaxes. This was all the
more permissible as we are dealing with none less than Virgil. The result was
an unbroken chain of lyrical images that come to overlap and illuminate one
another so that, in the end, one could speak of a ‘lyrical commentary’ that elu-
cidates what is unreal from the perspective of the real but that also dissolves the
real into what is unreal.” “I did not follow Joyce in his footsteps,” he concludes,
“you can’t copy a genius . . . Joyce responded to the antinomial structure of the
human spirit with an associative impressionism of language, and with that he
has accomplished a creative and intellectual feat that will, in all probability,
be trend-setting for generations to come and may not even be understood for
some generations yet.”
Interestingly, Broch nowhere explicitly acknowledges the fact that Joyce also
provided the blueprint for the one-day novel. As I see it, the difference between
the one-day structure and the interior monologue is one of linguistic shape: the
one-day structure is an idea, a mold, and as idea or mold it can be filled with
any kind of linguistic form or arrangement; the interior monologue, by con-
 202 Robert Weninger

trast, insofar as it is a prose technique used to encapsulate a person’s stream of

consciousness, already possesses a fairly defined and concrete linguistic shape.
Since Joyce through Ulysses had defined this shape for his generation, any writ-
er using interior monologue after him was forced either to copy the modernist
maestro or swerve away—in any variation of the Harold Bloomian trope of
anxiety of influence. An influence in terms of interior monologue was in most
instances much more palpable than a writer’s adapting the idea of the one-day
structure. Consequently, critics were much quicker to reproach writers (Alfred
Döblin in German literature, for example, or Arno Schmidt) for being imita-
tors and duplicators of Joyce, thereby implicitly alluding to their unoriginality,
when it came to the interior monologue than with the more loosely defined
one-day structure. As a result, authors who followed in Joyce’s footsteps in de-
picting their characters’ streams of consciousness felt a much greater urgency
to diverge from Joyce’s practice or, if they found it difficult to diverge from his
example, to acknowledge the similarities and stress the differences of treat-
ment, as we saw with Broch.
Another famous instance of this in German literature is Arno Schmidt.
When he wrote his one-day novel, Zettels Traum (Zettel’s Dream, 1970), be-
tween July 1965 and March 1969, he knew, and openly admitted as much both
in Zettels Traum itself and in a number of accompanying critical essays on
Joyce’s works, that he was competing with his Irish counterpart. Anyone who
has ever studied Arno Schmidt knows how severe a crisis his preoccupation
with Joyce brought about; reading Ulysses and Finnegans Wake marked a turn-
ing point in Schmidt’s career as a writer. Zettels Traum, the book with which he
seems at last to have exorcized Joyce’s stifling influence, is a gigantic attempt at
one-upmanship—it contains over thirteen hundred typescript pages measur-
ing thirteen by eighteen inches (A3 format). Three columns of text meander
their way through eight books (originally bound in one heavyweight volume)
covering the time span of only one day in June or July in an unspecified year,
but most probably 1968. According to Schmidt himself, the action spans pre-
cisely twenty-four hours from about half past three in the morning to half past
three in the morning of the following summer’s day (Vorläufiges 4). It should
come as no surprise to see Schmidt, on page 273 of Zettels Traum, nodding his
head in the direction of his precursor when his main male protagonist, the
writer Daniel Pagenstecher, declares: “We’re not that far away from ‘Blooms-
day’” (“Wir sind ja gar nich so entfernt vom ‘Bloomsday’” [273]). Later, on page
988, he reiterates that it is not quite the sixteenth of June (“nicht ganz-genau
der 16.6.”).
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 203

Most academic (and even many non-academic) German readers at this

time probably would have quickly identified Joyce’s Ulysses as the prototype
for Schmidt’s one-day novel. Hence Schmidt himself makes no secret of this
relationship, both in the novel and in his statements about it. For example, in
an interview taped shortly after completion of the manuscript of Zettels Traum,
the interviewer, Christian Gneuss, immediately addresses the obvious kinship:
“The action takes place as you said within 24 hours of one July day,” he notes,
only to ask: “Does this not remind us of Bloomsday?” Schmidt’s response is
typical, conceding the influence at first, but then—as any “strong” or strong-
willed author (in Harold Bloom’s sense) would—stressing the differences be-
tween their approaches rather than the similarities: “Indeed that could be the
case,” he says, adding:
But I don’t think so—I am a Joyce-aficionado—and I have done some
work on Joyce—but his concern was different from mine. Joyce was—
hmm—an asphalt-walker [Asphalttreter] down to the core, quite con-
trary to me. That is, his setting is the city, and he of course had the op-
portunity just based on the number of people he would have encountered
in the city the many shops in the labyrinth of streets—he simply had
other kinds of opportunities to fill his book; with many many details. By
locating my story [literally: reality] in the [Lüneburg] heath I rob myself
of, well, I can’t really call it the opportunity simply because I don’t like
city life. One could object that my foundation is rather slim for such a
gigantic edifice.
If Joyce covered one day in the life of a city, Schmidt claims to cover a day in
the life of the countryside where much less happens, and yet he is going to use
three times more text than Joyce to describe the events, or rather non-events,
of this most singular day. How then does Schmidt resolve the dilemma of fill-
ing over thirteen hundred elephantine pages with rural non-content? He sub-
sumes within his deceptively simple story line a hypercomplex and protracted
psychoanalytical discussion—disputation might be a more fitting term—about
the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, even outdoing Marie Bonaparte’s exten-
sive 1930s psychobiographical analysis. It is here, as well as in a number of criti-
cal essays written during the same period, especially those on Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake, that Schmidt advances his agonistic Etymtheorie (“etym” theory) and
the concept of a Vierte Instanz (fourth instance). Indeed, the concept of “etym”
itself is derived from the Wake, where Schmidt found the term in Joyce’s phrase
“the abnihilisation of the etym” (FW 353.20); Joyce himself is later in Zettels
 204 Robert Weninger

Traum identified as “the (to date) best representative of the ‘4th INSTANCE.’”
Although Schmidt’s depiction of Joyce as the twentieth century’s supreme mas-
ter of “etymistical” language—in particular, of course, in Finnegans Wake—is
a fascinating subject and worthy of study in its own right, it has little bearing
on our subject, the one-day novel. Suffice it to say that in Zettels Traum Joyce
figures as the only modern writer—besides Arno Schmidt himself, naturally—
who is able to recognize and consciously deploy the unconscious psychosexual
carnivalism of etyms raging behind the surface of our everyday language.
The author of my third and last German example likewise pays homage to
Joyce and his Ulysses within the framework of his own one-day novel, a book
that is structured like an amalgam of “Wandering Rocks” and John Dos Pas-
sos’s Manhattan Transfer, a novel that itself is heavily indebted to Joyce’s Ulysses
without adopting its one-day structure. The 230 pages of Wolfgang Koeppen’s
Tauben im Gras (Pigeons on the Grass), published in 1951 during the early post-
war period, consist of some 220 narrative subsections, some of which span a
mere couple of lines, others a page or two, with the longest extending to some
thirteen pages. Within its mosaic-like texture, the novel relates the occasionally
interconnecting but mostly unconnected lives of roughly twenty characters
and a dog. The action spans one day from early morning until midnight, but
neither the precise date nor the location is recorded; however, a number of sig-
nals suggest that the novel’s action most likely takes place in Munich in 1948.
The concept of time plays an important role in Koeppen’s somber tale of
postwar German depression; it provides a symbolic grounding for the author’s
portrayal of his novel’s characters as transient and ephemeral beings. “Philipp
had problems with time,” it is said of one of the many protagonists. “The mo-
ment was like a living image, the droll object of a solidification, life cast into
plaster.” Dasein, human existence, has frozen, solidified into an immobile
presence, and people, too, seem hardened and frozen in time. At the novel’s
conclusion, time is likened to a “meagre span, . . . a second to catch one’s breath,
a breather on a damned battlefield.” And yet, “at the same time, while time
was speeding it was stationary, too, representing the Here and Now, a moment
of eternal duration.”
Koeppen pays tribute to Joyce in this novel in particular through the nam-
ing of one of his male protagonists: Odysseus (!) Cotton is an African Ameri-
can soldier doing duty in Munich, where the local America House, ironically
lodged in a National Socialist Führer-building (“Führerbau des Nationalsoz-
ialismus”), is compared to a storehouse of “the spirit, the myths and the Gods”
of antiquity (“der Geist, die Heldensagen, die Götter” [231]), on the one hand,
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 205

while simultaneously representing a “colossal tomb of antiquity” (“kolossales

Grabmal der Antike” [231]), on the other. Unlike Joyce’s handling of myth in
Ulysses, Koeppen does not attempt to conceal his allusions to classical mythol-
ogy. What follows are two exemplary descriptions of Odysseus and his German
girlfriend Susanne, separated by some seventy pages, which illustrate how far
removed Koeppen’s style and technique are from Joyce’s, and how close he is
to Dos Passos and Alfred Döblin: “Susan was Circe and the Sirens,” the narra-
tor announces, “and maybe she was Nausicaa, too. No one in the pub noticed
that others lived under her skin, age-old beings; Susan did not know who all
she was; Circe, the Sirens and maybe Nausicaa; the simple-minded person she
was, she thought she was Susan, and Odysseus had no idea which mistresses
he was encountering with this girl.” The second passage runs: “They lay to-
gether, white skin, black skin, Odysseus Susan Circe the Sirens and maybe
Nausicaa, they meshed, black skin white skin, in a chamber that was supported
by a couple of beams and hung suspended, almost like a small balcony, above
the depths, because the foundation walls of the house had been cut away by
a bomb, and never would they be rebuilt.” If Joyce keeps his mythological
substrata submerged, Koeppen lets them surface openly, bringing into focus
the evocative parallelism between antiquity and modernity. It took quite some
unraveling—and considerable guidance: Joyce’s schemata did much to help
us along—to recognize Bloom as a reincarnation of Odysseus and Stephen as
Telemachus; in Koeppen’s novel, the correlation is laid bare for everyone to see:
the Americans are the victorious Greeks and Odysseus Cotton is Odysseus, the
conquered Germans are the Trojans and Munich/Germany is their Troy, while
his German girlfriend is the seductress, keeping him from returning home.

The Primum Mobile of the One-Day Novel

Three English-language authors (Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift, Don DeLillo)
and three German-language authors (Hermann Broch, Arno Schmidt, and
Wolfgang Koeppen), all of whom pay homage, some of them reluctantly for
sure, to their precursor James Joyce, each in his or her respective text or its
commentary refers metapoetically or intertextually to their pre-text, Ulysses. In
the words of the German modernist writer Hans Henny Jahnn, who was writ-
ing his novel Perrudja (published in 1929) when he first encountered Ulysses,
Joyce’s book “represents a turning point of literary technique and an explosion
in our means of expression.” Around the same time, in 1928 and just one
year after the publication of the first German translation of Ulysses, Bertolt
 206 Robert Weninger

Brecht, one of the great luminaries of twentieth-century German literature,

wrote, responding to a questionnaire about the best books of the year: “The
novel Ulysses by James Joyce, because—according to Döblin—it has changed
the whole status of the novel and represents, as a collection of various ap-
proaches to representation (introduction of the interior monologue and so
forth), an indispensable reference work for writers.” An “explosion in our
means of expression” indeed, a “reference work” to be sure, that too; but Ulysses
was also a (psychological) barrier, an inhibition and constraint, a (literary)
obstacle and disincentive for authors working in his shadow. In a study of the
impact of Ulysses on Italian literature, Serenella Zanotti relates how, “in 1930,
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa considered writing a novel based on a day in
the life of a Sicilian aristocrat, which he provisionally entitled La giornata di
un siciliano (The Day of a Sicilian). . . . He only started writing it in 1954, but
had to abandon the idea of a one-day action and finally admitted: ‘I don’t know
how to write Ulysses’ [Non so fare l’Ulysses]” (338). In a similar vein, Hermann
Broch once admitted to his English translator Willa Muir: “The most radical
consequence that one could draw from this beyond Joyce is to stop writing
altogether, even philosophy, and to retreat into the esotericism of mathematics
instead. As a matter of fact, this is precisely what I should do.” But he did not.
Fortunately for us, he forced himself instead to find other means of continuing
to write in the wake of Joyce.
What all this suggests is that Joyce’s Ulysses, from the moment of its publi-
cation in 1922 (if not earlier), became the twentieth century’s prime example
of what I have elsewhere called a “foundational” literary text, a notion derived
from Michel Foucault’s seminal essay “What Is an Author?” If “Joyce”—as
persona rather than person—perfectly embodies what Foucault described as
an “author-function,” someone who performs a “classificatory function [that]
permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differ-
entiate them from and contrast them to others” (147), Ulysses correspondingly
emerges as the prime example of the analogous “text-function” (a concept,
incidentally and rather surprisingly, that Foucault does not introduce in his
essay). Viewed from this vantage point, Joyce becomes—again in Foucault’s
terms—a veritable “founder of discursivity” (154), with Ulysses representing the
“foundational” text par excellence of twentieth-century literature. It served as
the discursive node of numerous programmatic literary and literary theoreti-
cal discussions, even about the characteristics and features of socialist realism,
and was, as I mentioned at the outset, the mainspring of at least three different
literary traditions, or trajectories, for one of which—the one-day novel—I have
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 207

here provided a partial and selective outline. The one-day aspect of Ulysses
functions precisely as Foucault specifies, namely as a “classificatory function
[that] permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them,
differentiate them from and contrast them to others” (147). Or, to put it another
way: Stephen Dedalus’s and Leopold and Molly Bloom’s Dublin day is the one-
day novel’s primum mobile, a term that is maybe doubly appropriate not just
because it means the prime mover; in Ptolemaic cosmology it also relates to
the tenth and outermost of all concentric spheres of the universe, causing all
the other spheres to repeat their own revolution around the earth once every
twenty-four hours. In this sense, Ulysses is the quintessential text and pivot that
gets the one-day novel spinning.

Notes
1. As Dietrich Assmann (1982) points out, a number of attempts to reduce narrative time
to one day or less had preceded the publication of Ulysses, but none handled the task as suc-
cessfully as Joyce. As main contenders he mentions Maria Jotuni’s story “Arkielämää,” Hjalmar
Bergman’s Markurells i Wadköping, Joel Lehtonen’s Putkinotko, Carl Spitteler’s novella “Con-
rad der Leutnant,” Arthur Schnitzler’s story “Leutnant Gustl,” and Richard Beer-Hofmann’s
Der Tod Georgs, many of which, however, were not full-fledged novels, nor did they have the
prominence or circulation to ever make them formative.
2. Early essays on this topic by Joseph Frank (1963) and Erich von Kahler (1970) belong
among the most illuminating that I know.
3. It is surely also no coincidence that a Mr. Joyce appears as a character in Swift’s novel; the
estate agent company that Mr. Chapman and his wife dealt with when they bought the shop in
Briar Street is called “Hancock, Joyce and Jones.”
4. “das in seinem Atem jeglichen Sphärenraum aufbewahrt und dabei von jedem noch
so kleinen Sphärenpunkt aufbewahrt wird, sich selbst ein- und ausatmend, sich selbst ein-
und ausstrahlend, Widerschein eines vor Sinnbildhaftigkeit schier unaussprechbaren, schier
unerinnerbaren, schier unverkündbaren Erkenntnisheils, das mit seinen Strahlen jeglichen
Zeitenablauf überholt und jeden Sekundenbruchteil zur Zeitlosigkeit verwandelt” (Der Tod
des Vergil 85)
5. “die es dem Auge gestattete, herzschlagend und herzschlagrasch, die Erkenntniseinheit
des Seins zu erfassen” (Der Tod des Vergil 86).
6. “Ein Satz—ein Gedanke—eine Sekunde” (Der Tod des Vergil 492); this passage is from
Broch’s commentary on his novel, which was not included in the English edition (the transla-
tions of Broch’s commentary in the text are my own).
7. “in diesem Sinne ist meine Vergil-Erzählung nichts anderes als ein einziges lyrisches Ge-
dicht, das wie jede Lyrik als Ausdruck eines einzigen Lebensmomentes zu gelten hat, eines ein-
zigen Lebensaugenblickes, der hier allerdings der des Sterbens ist” (Der Tod des Vergil 458).
8. “Die Darstellung dieser Sachverhalte hat notwendigerweise zum innern Monolog gefüh-
rt, allerdings zu einem in der dritten Person, da ein Sterbensprozeß nicht in der ersten aus-
 208 Robert Weninger

gedrückt zu werden vermag. Diese eigentümliche Form erlaubte auch, den Bereich des rein
Psychologischen . . . zu verlassen und in metaphysische Bereiche vorzudringen” (Der Tod des
Vergil 461–62).
9. “Die Methode, welche ich im Vergil verwende, ist demnach eine lyrische; der innere
Monolog läuft in einer lyrischen Prosa ab, die in letzten Höhepunkten zum Vers übergeht,
und dies war umsomehr gestattet, als es der Monolog des Dichters Vergil ist. Es ergab sich
solcherart eine ununterbrochene Kette lyrischer Bilder, welche sich übereinander schieben
und gegenseitig erklären, so daß man gewissermaßen von einem »Lyrischen Kommentar«
sprechen dürfte, der das Irreale vom Realen her begreift und hinwiederum das Reale ins Irreale
auflöst” (Der Tod des Vergil 462).
10. “Ich bin nicht den Joyceschen Weg gegangen, das Genie läßt sich nicht nachah-
men . . . Joyce ist [der antinomischen Struktur des Menschengeistes] mit einem assoziativen
Sprach-Impressionismus begegnet, und er hat damit eine künstlerische und geistige Tat voll-
bracht, die wahrscheinlich für Generationen richtunggebend sein wird, ja, wahrscheinlich erst
von künftigen Generationen voll erfaßt werden kann” (Der Tod des Vergil 462).
11. “Die Handlung spielt Sie sagten es—an einem Juli Tag—innerhalb von 24 Stunden.
Drängt sich da nicht die Erinnerung an den Bloomsday auf, also nicht nur Poe sondern auch
Joyce?” (Vorläufiges 12; my translation in the text).
12. “Zweifellos könnte man das meinen. Ich glaube es aber nicht ich bin nun Joyce-Ken-
ner—und habe auch über Joyce mehrfach gearbeitet; aber sein Anliegen war ein gänzlich
anderes. Joyce—war—hm—ein Vollblut Asphaltreter, ganz im Gegensatz zu mir. Also sein
Schauplatz ist die Stadt, und—da hatte er nun natürlich die Möglichkeit—lediglich aufgrund
der Anzahl der ihm begegnenden Personen bei einem Gang durch die Stadt der Vielzahl von
Geschäften des Straßenlabyrinths—er hatte ganz andere Möglichkeiten, sein Buch zu füllen;
mit vielen, vielen Details. Ich—beraube mich praktisch dadurch daß ich die Wirklichkeit hier
in die—Heide verlege—dieser—ja ich mag es nicht Möglichkeit nennen, ganz einfach weil ich
das Stadtleben nicht mag. Man kann einwenden die Basis sei nun etwas schmal für ein solches
Riesengebäude” (Vorläufiges 12; my translation in the text).
13. “der (bis jetzt) beste Repräsentant der ‘4. INSTANZ’” (Zettels Traum 1247; translation in
the text is my own).
14. “Philipp kam mit der Zeit nicht zurecht. Der Augenblick war wie ein lebendes Bild, der
possierliche Gegenstand einer Erstarrung, das Dasein in Gips gegossen” (Tauben im Gras 22;
translations in the text are my own).
15. “karge Spanne, . . . eine Sekunde zum Atemholen, Atempause auf einem verdammten
Schlachtfeld” (Tauben im Gras 238).
16. “Zugleich aber raste dieselbe Zeit, die doch wiederum stillstand und das Jetzt war, dieser
Augenblick von schier ewiger Dauer” (Tauben im Gras 23).
17. “Susanne war Kirke und die Sirenen, und vielleicht war sie auch noch Nausikaa. Ni-
emand im Lokal merkte, daß andere in Susannes Haut steckten, uralte Wesen; Susanne wußte
nicht, wer alles sie war; Kirke, die Sirenen und vielleicht Nausikaa; die Törichte hielt sich für
Susanne, und Odysseus ahnte nicht, welche Damen ihm in dem Mädchen begegneten” (Tau-
ben im Gras 164).
18. “Sie lagen zusammen, weiße Haut, schwarze Haut, Odysseus Susanne Kirke die Sirenen
und vielleicht Nausikaa, sie schlängelten sich, schwarze Haut weiße Haut, in einer Kammer, die
 Days of Our Lives: The One-Day Novel as Homage à Joyce 209

sich windig auf ein paar Balken stützte und fast wie ein kleiner Balkon über der Tiefe schwebte,
denn die Grundmauern des Hauses waren an diese Seite fortgerissen, eine Bombe hatte sie zur
Seite gerissen, und nie würden sie wieder errichtet werden” (Tauben im Gras 232).
19. “ein Wendepunkt des Schreibstils, eine Steigerung der Ausdrucksmöglichkeit jetziger
Sprachen” (quoted in Füger 235–36).
20. “Der Roman Ulysses von James Joyce, weil er nach Ansicht Döblins die Situation des Ro-
mans verändert hat und als Sammlung verschiedener Methoden der Betrachtung (Einführung
des inneren Monologs und so weiter) ein unentbehrliches Nachschlagewerk für Schriftsteller
darstellt” (82).
21. “Die radikalste Konsequenz, die daraus zu ziehen wäre, über Joyce hinaus: überhaupt
nicht mehr schreiben, auch keine Philosophie mehr schreiben, sondern sich auf die Esoterik
der Mathematik zurückzuziehen. Und im Grunde habe ich die größte Lust dies zu tun” (Briefe
I 182).
22. See also my essay “‘Ulysses’ in Quotation Marks.”

Works Cited
Aristotle. “On the Art of Poetry.” Classical Literary Criticism. Trans. with an introduction by T.
S. Dorsch. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. 29–75.
Assmann, Dietrich. “Yhdenpäivänromaani: Mietteitä erään tutkimuksen perustaksi.” “Siivilöi-
ty Aika” Ja Muita Kirjallisuustutkielmia. Ed. Toimittanut Eino Maironiemi. Publications of
the University of Joensuu, Series A, No. 25. Joensuu, 1982. 5–22.
Brecht, Bertolt. Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst 1. 1920–1932. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967.
Broch, Hermann. Briefe I (1913–1938). Vol. 13.1 of Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Ed. Paul Michael
Lützeler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981.
———. The Death of Virgil. Trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983.
———. “James Joyce und die Gegenwart: Rede zu Joyces 50. Geburtstag.” Schriften zur Litera-
tur 1: Kritik. Vol. 9.1 of Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Ed. Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1975. 63–94.
———. Der Tod des Vergil. Roman. Vol. 4 of Kommentierte Werkausgabe. Ed. Paul Michael
Lützeler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976.
DeLillo, Don. Cosmospolis. New York: Picador (Pan Macmillan), 2003.
———. “Jede Art von Macht verlangt auch nach ihrer Ausübung. Das Wichtigste ist ihm die
Sprache: Ein Interview mit dem Schriftsteller Don DeLillo über seinen neuen Roman Cos-
mopolis.” Die Welt 22 Sept. 2003: 27–28.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-
vanovich, 1975.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
Criticism. Ed. Josué V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 141–60.
Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in
Modern Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963. 3–62.
Füger, Wilhelm. Kritisches Erbe. Dokumente zur Rezeption von James Joyce im deutschen Sprach-
bereich zu Lebzeiten des Autors. Ein Lesebuch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.
 210 Robert Weninger

Kahler, Erich von. “Untergang und Übergang der epischen Kunstform.” Untergang und Über-
gang: Essays. Munich: DTV, 1970. 7–51.
Koeppen, Wolfgang. Tauben im Gras. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994.
McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.
Schmidt, Arno. Vorläufiges zu “Zettels Traum.” Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1977.
———. Zettels Traum. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1977.
Swift, Graham. The Sweet-Shop Owner. New York: Vintage (Random House), 1993.
Weninger, Robert. “‘Ulysses’ in Quotation Marks—Toward a Theory of the Foundational Text.”
Comparative Critical Studies 1 (2004): 71–83.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co. (Harvest Edition), 1970.
———. The Common Reader. First Series. London: Hogarth, 1968.
———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 6, 1936–1941. Ed. Nigel Nicholson. London: Hogarth,
1980.
———. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Co. (Harvest Edition), 1990.
Zanotti, Serenella. “James Joyce among the Italian Writers.” The Reception of James Joyce in Eu-
rope. Vol. 2. Ed. Geert Lernout and Wim van Mierlo. London: Continuum, 2004. 329–61.
V

“Almosting It”
Ulysses and the Reader
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 13

Past Its Sell-by Date

When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism

Michael Patrick Gillespie

What Is to Be Done?
Insecurity functions as a driving force throughout the academic world and
at every stage of an individual’s professional life. Insecurity causes a graduate
student to assume that his or her admission to a particular school was a clerical
error that might be discovered and corrected at any moment. Insecurity leads
an assistant professor to spend hours dissecting the implications of a tenured
colleague not saying (or, sometimes worse, saying) hello when passing in the
corridor. And insecurity compels a senior faculty member to complain to the
department chair that the size of his wastebasket is incommensurate with the
length of his publication record.
Sadly, no matter what position an individual occupies on the academic great
chain of being, nearly everyone falls victim to the most common of scholastic
anxieties: the fear of being exposed as a person who does not know as much
as everyone else. This phobia generally centers on what one has read, or more
accurately what one has yet to read. (In his novel Changing Places, David Lodge
brilliantly satirizes the sadomasochistic feelings this fear inspires.)
In a field like Joyce studies, this apprehension can become especially intense
for anyone attempting to engage the range of critical commentaries now in
print. Diverse methodologies jockey for pride of place in scholarly journals.
Specialization makes overviews of critical resources increasingly difficult to
articulate. Even common assumptions about the texts with which one works
have all but disappeared.
Although the problem appears to be particularly acute at this time, schol-
 214 Michael Patrick Gillespie

ars have obsessed about dealing with the mass of criticism of Joyce’s works
for decades. Fifty years ago writers began using the term “the Joyce industry”
to describe the onslaught of interpretations largely emanating from America
(Magalaner and Kain 209). However, despite the work of Hugh Kenner, Fa-
ther William Noon, Chester Anderson, J. Mitchell Morse, Maurice Beebe, S. L.
Goldberg, David Hayman, A. Walton Litz, and Mackie Jarrell, to name only a
few of the more prolific writers of that period, the total output remained rela-
tively modest. In the 1950s only fifty books and articles on Joyce and his work
appeared, and the James Joyce Review, begun in 1957 by Edward Epstein, only
lasted for three issues. The same was true of Magalaner’s A James Joyce Miscel-
lany, which published three sets of essays in 1957, 1959, and 1962.
By the mid-1960s the pace began to pick up. Bernard Benstock, Thomas Sta-
ley, and Fritz Senn had launched the James Joyce Foundation (later the Inter-
national James Joyce Foundation), Staley had begun the James Joyce Quarterly,
and a number of energetic scholars were laboring mightily to bring not just
American but international Joyce criticism to widespread notice and respect-
ability. By the late 1960s these efforts began to produce impressive results. A
strong and continuous output of first-rate Joyce scholarship appeared, so that
in the last three years of the decade alone 375 books and articles were pub-
lished.
The volume of production has remained strong; the number of publications
that have appeared since the turn of the millennium illustrates the scope of the
problem (with apologies to those who assert that the millennium did not begin
until 2001). From January 2000 to the fall of 2004, 695 books and articles relat-
ing to Joyce’s works were published. Over that same period, 60 dissertations
were completed, all written in the hope of joining the deluge of interpretations
pouring out of university presses. (All of the figures cited in these two para-
graphs come from the MLA online bibliography.) Today the Joyce industry
finds itself well established as a formidable, multinational conglomerate that,
on an annual basis, produces an inundation of books and articles relating to
Joyce and his works. This condition has led to an ongoing reconfiguration of
the critical landscape.
One now finds a vast number of elaborately delineated, and what can seem
to some mutually exclusionary, fields of study operating sometimes uncom-
fortably side by side within what remains the broadly delineated field of Joyce
studies. Genetic critics appear to converse in a language very different from
those interested in postcolonialism. Topics like Joyce and gender can encom-
pass such a range of possibilities that even critics who find themselves drawn
 Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 215

to this area of study may have little interest in the writings of others ostensi-
bly working on the same subject. And anyone with the temerity to attempt to
determine the proper principles to follow when editing one of Joyce’s works
quickly finds that he or she must sift through a wide range of often conflicting
claims in an effort to discern the best critical methodology.
All this is a long way around saying that the amount of Joyce criticism that
currently exists is more than anyone could possibly keep track of—much less
read, assimilate, and then critique. Furthermore, the problem continually
worsens as scholars keep adding to the list every day. As a result, having admit-
ted this fact, one nonetheless feels an obligation to be more or less aware of the
critical heritage, and sanity cries for a reasonable plan for selected perusal.
Of course, I am aware of the irony of decrying the sheer volume of Joyce
studies in a collection of yet more essays on Joyce and his work. However,
my point is not that all criticism of Joyce’s work should cease. Although that
would produce the benefit of forestalling some very bad writing, it would also
preclude the expression of some very useful insights. Rather, I am saying that
critical approaches have become so diverse, and in some cases so mutually ex-
clusive, that even all good Joyce criticism (assuming it were possible to identify
that group) cannot appeal to everyone interested in Joyce. One needs therefore
an economical method for choosing the most satisfying criticism.
Being the perennial bad student, I have no idea of what methodologies
might already exist to address this difficulty, and further I am far too lazy to
take the trouble to discover and then master them. Searching for an easier way
to make somewhat informed choices, I fell back on an approach that buoyed
me up when I was a penurious graduate student, comforted me as an assistant
professor of limited means, and now delights me as a miserly senior faculty
member with too much time on my hands: shopping on a tight budget. Once
I settled on using the marketplace as the arbiter for allocating my intellectual
capital, it seemed an obvious choice to turn to the most mundane element of
consumer activity, a trip to the grocery store, to provide the framework for my
investigations.
At this point, I really must ask the indulgence of Brandy Kershner, Cheryl
Herr, Mark Osteen, Garry Leonard, and all of the other Joyceans who have
a much stronger grasp of materialist criticism than I do for the metaphoric
flights of fancy that follow. I am not attempting to emulate the work of any
of these scholars. Rather I am trying to assuage my own intellectual obses-
sions and professional insecurities by drawing upon comforting images from
American commodity culture to find the same reassurance in dealing with the
 216 Michael Patrick Gillespie

consumption of literary criticism that as a child I found in a bag of groceries

after a quick trip to the local market with Mom. Admittedly, nostalgia and se-
lective memory play equal parts in shaping the images I evoke here. However,
no matter how subjective these perceptions may be, my representations still
benefit from the model I have chosen: the clearly defined parameters that one
associates with confident choices that address visceral appetites.
Before commercial establishments around the world began to emulate Har-
rods by trying to make possible the purchase of every imaginable domestic
necessity in a single building, shopping for food was a very specialized task.
Economies of space and finance made shopkeepers keenly aware of the need
to lay out their stores in a fashion that balanced customer desire against the
limitations of inventory. Such constraints challenged consumers to develop
highly refined skills yet offered the promise of immediate gratification. (This
was, and still is, at least true for shoppers like me who invariably arrive at the
cashier with a handful of empty candy wrappers, the remnants of items that I
could not wait to purchase before consuming.) To that end, I have attempted
to apply the same self-indulgent approach that can make grocery shopping
so pleasurable to gleaning from the vast amount of works on Joyce the most
satisfying amount of criticism with the least possible effort.
I seek to enter fully into this process, and I ask your indulgence if I refer to
products from my childhood that lack currency in today’s commercial empori-
ums. I will try to guide you through the aisles with a minimum of jargon, but a
certain number of colloquialisms are bound to accrue. However, before begin-
ning to fill our shopping carts (or trolleys if you prefer), we need to confront
the conflicting attitudes that inform the process.

Truth in Advertising
Just as extratextual forces always influence our reading, concerns that fall well
outside the realm of practical needs can have a powerful impact on our most
mundane purchases. More often than not, this motivation comes from the aura
created by the merchandizing promoting the product. Before entering the gro-
cery store, the wary shopper seeks to disentangle misleading assertions from
useful information. Likewise, when approaching criticism, we need to consider
the claims and promises that drew us into this excursion.
Some criticism attracts our attention by offering wide-ranging commen-
taries about a work or an author. These studies provide generalizations that
can serve as the foundation for more specific readings, often starting trends
 Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 217

in critical thinking that go on to far more elaborate conclusions. One often

finds this approach in the earlier works on Joyce’s canon from authors like
Harry Levin in James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. Because these books ap-
peared decades ago, some contemporary readers may be tempted to dismiss
them as rudimentary and dated, and thereby sidestep the commitment re-
quired actually to read and understand them. However, that generalization
often proves reductive and surely unfairly ignores the difficulties that initial
respondents to complex artistic efforts face. For those like myself, always
looking to cut corners, actually reading all those studies has all the appeal of
a trip to the all-night dentist. Instead, I recommend looking at Re-viewing
Classics of Joyce Criticism, edited by Janet Dunleavy. Despite the portentous
reverberations of its title and the self-important tone of its introduction, the
book is full of essays that provide concise summaries and useful critiques of
the critics studied there.
Other critical works claim to offer specific interpretive ideas for readers to
build upon. These studies often act as goads for developing new perspectives of
a work or for extending readings that have already proved insightful. For well
over three decades Jacques Derrida did this sort of thing very dramatically,
though I frankly confess that his approach has produced mixed results for
me. (When Derrida spoke in French about the “Penelope” episode at the 1984
Frankfurt Joyce symposium, I thought for the first five minutes of the talk that
he was concerning himself with Molly’s “yes.” Only when I glanced down at
the conference program did I see that what I heard as “oui” was really “huit,” an
allusion to the eight sentences in the episode. That convinced me that leaving
to have a coffee at a café across the street made far more sense that straining
my inadequate sense of the French language with additional misprisions of
the lecture.) Again, it is often better to ingest this material in condensed form.
Geert Lernout’s The French Joyce offers a digested version that helps one avoid
the acid reflux of ponderous Gallic prose.
Finally, whether intentionally or not, some Joyce criticism gives one a viv-
id sense of what does not work. More often than not in these cases, the line
between a courageous failure and unintentional self-parody proves to be ex-
tremely narrow. Kathleen Ferris’s James Joyce and the Burden of Disease falls
into this category for me. Ferris simply bases too many of her interpretive
efforts on dubious assumptions relating to syphilis and Joyce’s medical his-
tory. (This is all the more egregious, because Ellmann’s revised Joyce biography,
published thirteen years earlier, reprints the autopsy report on Joyce’s death,
pp. 741–42, confirming that no sign of syphilis existed.) Although it can be dif-
 218 Michael Patrick Gillespie

ficult to predict before one begins to read which category will fit a particular
book, one should never hesitate to abandon the effort once it becomes clear
that an author’s ideas are simply too much to swallow.

The Lure of the Marketplace

Whatever one thinks of individual works noted above, each work presumes
that one will read it in order to form an opinion. Most academics take a more
pragmatic, and frankly less idealistic, approach to analytic studies. Both in
reading and writing, appearance often trumps substance.
Further, the primary impulse governing critical writing and critical reading
is avoidance. Authors generally wish to say as little that is concrete as possible,
so that the inaccuracies, misjudgments, and simple errors for which they can
be held accountable is kept to a minimum. The rest of us wish to read as little as
possible, because we become tired moving our lips as our eyes scan the printed
page.
Consequently, we like sound-bite criticism, works that offer easily excerpted
passages that give the reader an aura of intelligence or at the very least the sense
of being. It also helps if we can achieve this sense with a minimal engagement
with the text. I realize that in some cases this goal proves to be challenging.
Nonetheless, most books adhere to a structure that can be adapted to this ap-
proach. They summarize their chapters in the introduction. They tell us what
their analyses prove, so that we need not figure that out on our own. And
they invariably invoke a critical approach utterly new to us, ambiguous if not
outright contradictory, and yet with a name that is easy to remember. (The
late, lamented Deconstruction was possibly the finest instance of this.) This
process is best accomplished with the incorporation of polysyllabic words that
are difficult to pronounce, mean absolutely nothing, and yet intimidate anyone
hearing them for the first time.
I do not mean that the only acceptable form is one that is incomprehensible.
As readers we are irresistibly drawn to authors who say the nasty things we do
not wish to articulate in print. Hugh Kenner’s delicately understated deflation
of Richard Ellmann’s revised version of his Joyce biography provides a model
of this sort of writing. Given the timorous nature of most academics, instances
of this sort of criticism prove extremely difficult to find. Thus, because of the
rareness and venom that often color these assessments, such pieces have a par-
ticular attraction.
Of course, pious bromides assert that the best criticism comes from diligent
 Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 219

research, thorough scholarship, and lucidly argued interpretations. That may

well be true. However, the concentration demanded in reading such criticism,
much less writing it, far exceeds the capabilities of most academics.

The Pitfalls That the Canny Consumer Avoids

Given the conflicting appeals and contradictory demands of various critical
works, how then does one proceed? The conventional views summarized in the
“Truth in Advertising” section of this essay offer no clear guide for addressing
the mind-numbing amount of material anyone adhering to them would have
to wade through. The cynical, and frankly gratifying, attitudes expressed in the
“Lure of the Marketplace” passage cut down the volume of reading in terms
of specific works, but they still provide no organized way of winnowing down
the stacks of books one must at least peruse. The supermarket approach to
Joyce criticism supplies an answer to these difficulties, but even following this
method requires a clear grasp of certain caveats.
Whether shopping or reading, the most appealing approach, because it re-
quires the least effort, is to ignore it all. Unfortunately, that compels one to
attempt to survive by eating the rancid mayonnaise found in a jar at the back
of the refrigerator. In critical terms this means recycling, usually with dys-
peptic results, the same few authors that one read in graduate school to get
past comprehensive exams. If one following this practice has the temerity to
attempt to publish, readers for scholarly journals, taking full advantage of their
anonymity, will alternate heaping scorn on the writer’s parochialism with cit-
ing tedious lists of critics who should have been mentioned. In the classroom,
a bright-eyed, industrious individual who actually reads beyond the syllabus
will inevitably appear. I need not elaborate on the consequences.
The situation comes down to a confrontation between the preference for
inertia and the abhorrence of humiliation. Bitter experience proves that one
cannot ignore Joyce criticism. What, then, for slothful scholars is the course
demanding the least exertion?
Often, academics find themselves struggling with the same impulse that be-
devils shoppers: grab whatever catches the eye. However, wandering through
the library stacks and picking up the books with the most arresting bindings
has at least two obvious drawbacks. It leaves one with a chaotic, idiosyncratic
impression of Joyce criticism, and it still compels one to read or, at the very
least, check out the pile of books pulled off the shelves. A less demanding plan
of action is required.
 220 Michael Patrick Gillespie

A clear sense of specific need will limit the number of works that must be
sampled. Like the last-minute shoppers who wait until they are in the middle
of preparing their meals to rush to the store to get the ingredients that the
recipe calls for, some academics follow the plan of first writing an interpreta-
tion and then reading the available criticism on the topic to see what they
must include in their Works Cited pages. This approach will generally result
in one of two equally unpleasant revelations. Last-minute bibliographers will
find that the ideas which they thought so brilliant as they committed them to
paper have been published already (occasionally multiple times), or they will
be confronted with the unpleasant fact that their ideas are so banal that no one
would ever dream of printing anything relating to them.
Finally, readers must eschew the equivalent of purchasing only frozen pizza
and prepared dinners. One finds this practice exemplified in those who try
to develop a superficial knowledge of a body of Joyce criticism by using book
reviews as if they were Cliff ’s Notes. This tactic stands as perhaps the greatest
gamble of all, for its success, however modest, relies upon the assumption that
the various reviewers consulted actually read the work or works under consid-
eration. Given that the reviewer is probably another academic, this supposition
is at best a dubious proposition, leaving one with little more than a synopsis of
the reviewer’s speculations on the author’s suppositions.

The Proper Approach: W.W.M.D.

Fortunately, a straightforward option for getting a sense of the available criti-
cism without making the commitment to reading it all does exist. It grows out
of a wealth of good sense to which we were exposed in our formative years.
Before going off to the critical marketplace for perusal of Joycean goods, one
should simply ask the following questions: what would Mother do?
The first thing she would inevitably tell us is to make a shopping list. This
is the equivalent of having a plan before beginning to read. While this seems a
painfully obvious point, one must remember that we are academics, and grasp-
ing the obvious is not always our strong suit. Simply showing the discipline to
decide what one needs to know or wishes to extract from Joyce criticism may
dissuade many of us because it seems like a great deal of work, and in fact it
requires more effort than many of us are accustomed to expending. Nonethe-
less, that is a small price to pay to avoid looking vacuous.
Once we have drawn up our lists, Mother would alert us to stick to them,
but she would also advise us to keep an eye out for values. Again, knowing
 Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 221

one’s area of interest while remaining flexible about modifying one’s approach
has the distasteful side effect of requiring some thought. However, having the
option of straying outside these parameters does provide a degree of self-in-
dulgence that shopping lists generally militate against.
Mother also would tell us never to shop when hungry. This translates into a
caution against bibliographic engorgement. Being desperate for sources should
not lead one to pick up the first thing that comes to hand. Quite simply, don’t
let your need for citations overwhelm your sense of the absurd.
Even without Mother to guide us, we should by now realize the wisdom
of reading the label. Abstracts, tables of contents, even subtitles can give us
a clear idea of what we are going to get, although titles can often violate the
truth-in-advertising code alluded to above. More to the point, these adjuncts
can help us avoid that painful feeling, akin to heartburn, that one gets by re-
alizing one is halfway through an utterly worthless piece of criticism. It is one
thing to kill brain cells with alcohol and quite another to do so with turgid
prose.
Since few of us aspire to be ascetics, complete self-denial is both impracti-
cal and distasteful. Some gratification is essential for one’s sanity, so, when
self-indulgence occurs, simply accept what you have done. When you make an
impulse purchase, don’t pretend that it’s anything but that. If you simply can-
not resist a title or an abstract, go ahead and pick it up, but do not then force
references to it into the argument you have constructed based on more relevant
works.
The final bit of wisdom that Mom might bestow would be an exhortation
to remember that this is one of many trips to the store. Do not try to buy ev-
erything at once, and do not be discouraged if you cannot get all you want the
first time you venture out. This is a crucial insight, for it not only guards against
discouragement but also curbs any dangerous inclination actually to try to read
all of the material available.

Wandering through the Aisles

Now that we have addressed the dos and don’ts of supermarket shopping,
how do we begin to fill our carts? Begin by looking for staples. Not tiny wire
fasteners, but the food that your mother told you was good for you. This
means looking for solid interpretive works that provide the nourishment
for building strong bodies of criticism. Unfortunately, these works are often
fairly boring and generally rather bland. Nonetheless, they appear time and
 222 Michael Patrick Gillespie

again in the footnotes of critics who specialize in writing for the New York
Review of Books (and who always refer to that publication as the New York
Review). Richard Kain’s Fabulous Voyager is an early, although alas not an
isolated, version of this type of criticism. You may never read a work like
this from beginning to end (and indeed I adamantly urge you not to do so),
but its index will help you find the quotations necessary to make it seem that
you have.
While in among the staples, take care not to pick up something that seems
essential but which will only bring gastric distress. Books in this category are
akin to sour milk, losing its flavor faster than you realize. Unfortunately, they
do not carry sell-by dates to alert us to the danger, but there are a few general
principles that can help us avoid the discomfort of indigestible reading.
Avoid anything with garish packaging; that is, books with titles promising
sensational revelations. They are the academic equivalent of the teasers one
sees as commercials for the Entertainment Network, and like their electronic
counterparts they rarely deliver. Bruce Arnold’s The Scandal of “Ulysses” has
that effect on me. Most obviously, never consume anything written by someone
who has given a bad review to your own work. This seems patently obvious, but
those with a false sense of noblesse oblige might insist on giving everyone a fair
chance (a most ephemeral condition in a postmodern world). In response I ask
how you can respect a mind who has so badly misjudged your own brilliance.
(In this regard, I find myself blessed with never having to look at John Nash’s
writings.)
Despite all of these guidelines, inevitably, as a test of resolve, one encoun-
ters shelves of junk food near the staples, and the most deceptive of these is
the Twinkie—that sponge cake shaped like a hot dog and with a filling that
seems to be spun lard laced with cheap confectioners’ sugar. It lasts forever, yet
provides little real nourishment. This is the sort of work on Joyce that is, more
often than not, very well written. In consequence, it enjoys a broad popularity,
particularly among people who find it much more accessible than Joyce’s own
work, but has few solid insights into the actual canon. Richard Ellmann’s Joyce
biography exemplifies this category. While the world according to Stanislaus
gives us a clear rendering of the jaundiced views of the dissatisfied younger
sibling, the effects of imbibing this bile on efforts to understand Joyce’s writ-
ing are minimal. Since everyone partakes, you can sample something like this
without real guilt. Just don’t expect genuine sustenance.
Of course, while junk food has its obvious drawbacks, not all impulse pur-
 Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 223

chases produce such deleterious effects. A very different response comes from
an item generally found in the featured display section. It may be going through
a special publisher’s clearance. It may be the beneficiary of extra advertising.
Or it may simply enjoy pride of place on a bookseller’s table. For whatever rea-
son, it catches my eye even though its approach does not interest me. It’s simply
too tempting to pass up.
Despite my ingrained sloth and cynicism, a book that shows a keen sense
of its topic, even if the subject matter has little relevance to my own methods
of reading, and an enthusiastic approach to the critical problem it takes on
invariably engages my interest. When Sheldon Brivic writes about Joyce and
Lacan or Joseph Valente applies queer theory to Joyce’s canon, I know I am
encountering in the first instance a methodology in which I have no faith and
in the second a topic that I see as far less important than a great many other
issues in Joyce studies. Nonetheless, the sheer joy that each brings to the task
more than makes up for my lack of interest in the subject matter. These are the
sort of books to have on hand when I want to convince myself that I really do
have broad critical interests.
Exotic treats and guilty pleasures bear some striking similarities to the pre-
ceding group, although at times the legitimacy of works in the category comes
under question. These categories identify writing that I feel I should not like
but in fact do. This type of criticism generally presents insightful or provoca-
tive commentaries on issues or subjects that seem to fall outside conventional
Joyce criticism. Nonetheless, a wit, an energy, and an engaging quirkiness
characterize each, and they more than repay the energy expended in reading
them. Michael O’Shea’s Joyce and Heraldry is devoted to a topic that seems,
at first glance, worth little more than a footnote, yet, in talking about coats of
arms and iconic representation, O’Shea holds my attention more easily than
many writers who attempt to expound upon headier topics. Paul Van Caspel’s
Bloomers on the Liffey is a very different kind of book. It delights in pointing
out the mistakes that others have made in writing about Ulysses. Reading it is
like watching the meanest teacher in high school make a fool of someone else
in class. One knows it is a terrible thing to enjoy, and that makes it irresistible.
And finally, Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon’s Understanding “Finnegans Wake”
is wonderful for its determinedly idiosyncratic reading and obvious delight
in sarcasm, lets us fantasize about how that seeming dolt from the previous
example would sound if he were in fact bright enough and sufficiently self-
confident to ignore received wisdom and follow individual inclinations.
 224 Michael Patrick Gillespie

The Best Buys

Although much of what I have already written concentrates on avoidance and
self-indulgence, there are a good many worthwhile books of criticism on Joyce.
I would be remiss to conclude this study without at least identifying them.
However, in keeping with the tone of this essay, I also feel the need to offer
strategies for getting the most from them with the least effort.
One of the most dependable areas of Joyce criticism is the category of non-
perishable goods. These are works, generally of the reference variety, that
remain impervious to time. They present information that is as useful now
as when it first appeared, and, like a jar of peanut butter in the back of the
cupboard, they provide immediate sustenance whenever they are consulted.
Also like peanut butter, one would not want to consume them exclusively or
even at great length, but, when sampled, they never disappoint. These books
should always be close at hand, although one would probably never read any
of them cover to cover. Weldon Thornton’s Allusions in “Ulysses,” Don Gifford’s
“Ulysses” Annotated (even if it seems to repeat many of Thornton’s entries), A.
Nicholas Fargnoli’s James Joyce: A Literary Reference, and Roland McHugh’s
Annotations for “Finnegans Wake” offer just the sort of information that one
will find useful today or twenty years from now. (I must confess that I do not
know if peanut butter has a shelf life of that duration, but I would be surprised
if it did not.)
Interpretive works written in the same voice that a good teacher uses to
present ideas clearly and without condescension are also worth noting. A
book in this category has an approach that is so level-headed that age can-
not wither nor custom stale its infinite variety. Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce
combines an engagingly quirky style, a tremendous facility for sensitive close
readings, and a delight in esoteric digressions. At the same time, it is never
opaque, never self-congratulatory, and never mean-spirited. It is the sort of
book that reminds us of a time in graduate school when we thought all criti-
cism would be this good. A. Walton Litz’s The Art of James Joyce remains the
most lucid discussion to date of the composition of Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake. David Hayman’s The Mechanics of Meaning is a deceptive treasure. It
seems little more than a basic introduction to Ulysses. However, it is charged
with an excitement for the work that is bound to reinvigorate our own jaded
palates, and it has a delightful willingness to take risks often absent in con-
temporary studies. (Whether or not, for example, one embraces the idea of
“The Arranger” as a valid narrative device, the clarity of its explanation and
the directness of its challenge to received thinking are a welcome change
 Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 225

from the obfuscations of most interpretive studies.) Margot Norris’s The De-
centered Universe of “Finnegans Wake” is a wonderful example of how easily
one can miss a top-notch work because it unabashedly features an idea or a
methodology no longer in fashion. The book’s subtitle—A Structuralist Anal-
ysis—tempts the glib and the facile (I am guilty on both counts) to reject it as
terribly dated, quaint at best, horribly old-fashioned at worst. In fact, Norris’s
examination of the Wake stands as a wonderful guide to careful reading and
informed critical thinking. It is a model of logical analysis and artful connec-
tions. With the other works named above, its date of publication stands as the
common feature that would allow a hasty reader to pass each of them by. In
fact, these views have matured and become more robust as they have aged,
and they provide insights into Joyce’s canon that one can find in few books
being brought into print today.

The Final Hurdle

Before proceeding to the checkout counter, be sure that you have not picked
up more items than you can carry. Once you have learned the tricks offered
here, it is easy to let hubris influence how much you wish to take on. Further,
there is always the temptation to look at one more piece of criticism because
it forestalls the obligation to begin the task of writing. These responses in fact
undermine the very purpose of this instruction—cutting corners. The point
is to read as little as you can and still get away with it. To ensure that you stay
within the limits laid out here, follow this easy rule of thumb. When it looks as
if you will have a greater number of footnotes than pages of your own prose,
stop looking for citations.
The final bit of advice with which I leave you is to remember the store’s
exchange policy. In most instances, after you take the item out the door, the
purchase is final. Likewise, every act of reading involves time and effort that
you can never reclaim. What seems like an indispensable piece of writing now
may soon become expendable. Even the most judicious shopper can end up
with a shelf full of goods that have already become indigestible in the time it
takes to get them home. Some books, like cans of creamed corn, will never
provide you with the slightest satisfaction. Just as every food drive becomes
an outlet for grocery purchases that you still cannot explain, opportunities for
relieving yourself of unwanted books do come along. When they arrive, do
not hesitate to donate these albatrosses to whatever charitable organization is
gullible enough to accept them, and don’t forget to write off their full monetary
value on your taxes.
 226 Michael Patrick Gillespie

Works Cited
Anderson, Chester G. “James Joyce’s ‘Tilly.’” PMLA 73.3 (1958): 285–98.
Arnold, Bruce. The Scandal of “Ulysses.” London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991.
———. The Scandal of “Ulysses”: The Life and Afterlife of a Twentieth Century Masterpiece. Ex-
panded and updated ed. Dublin: Liffey, 2004.
Beebe, Maurice. “James Joyce: Barnacle Goose and Lapwing.” PMLA 71.3 (1956): 302–20.
Brivic, Sheldon. Joyce the Creator. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
———. The Veil of Signs : Joyce, Lacan, and Perception. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1991.
Derrida, Jacques. Ulysses gramophone; Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987.
Dunleavy, Janet Egleson, ed. Re-viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1991.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New and rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Fargnoli, A. Nicholas. James Joyce: A Literary Reference. Detroit: Gale, 2000.
Ferris, Kathleen. James Joyce and the Burden of Disease. Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 1995.
Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Rev. and
expand ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Goldberg, S. L. “Art and Freedom: The Aesthetic of Ulysses.” ELH 24.1 (1957): 44–64.
Hayman, David. “From Finnegans Wake: A Sentence in Progress.” PMLA 73.1 (1958): 136–54.
———. “Ulysses”: The Mechanics of Meaning. Rev. and expand ed. Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1982.
Herr, Cheryl. Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Jarrell, Mackie L. “Joyce’s Use of Swift’s Polite Conversation in the ‘Circe’ Episode of Ulysses.”
PMLA 72.3 (1957): 545–54.
———. “Swiftiana in Finnegans Wake.” ELH 26.2 (1959): 271–94.
Kain, Richard. Fabulous Voyager: James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1947.
Kenner, Hugh. Dublin’s Joyce. London: Chatto & Windus, 1955.
———. Rev. of Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce. Times Literary Supplement 17 Dec. 1982.
Kershner, R. B., ed. Joyce and Popular Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
———. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Leonard, Garry Martin. Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 1998.
Lernout, Geert. The French Joyce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941.
Litz, A. Walton. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake.”
New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
———. “Early Vestiges of Joyce’s Ulysses.” PMLA 71.1 (1956): 51–60.
Lodge, David. Changing Places. New York: Penguin, 1975.
Magalaner, Marvin, and Richard Kain, Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation. New York:
New York University Press, 1956.
 Past Its Sell-by Date: When to Stop Reading Joyce Criticism 227

McHugh, Roland, and James Joyce. Annotations to “Finnegans Wake.” Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Morse, J. Mitchell. “Augustine’s Theodicy and Joyce’s Aesthetics.” ELH 24.1 (1957): 30–43.
———. “The Disobedient Artist: Joyce and Loyola.” PMLA 72.5 (1957): 1018–35.
Noon, William, S. J. Joyce and Aquinas. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
Norris, Margot. The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake”: A Structuralist Analysis. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
O’Shea, Michael J. James Joyce and Heraldry. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986.
Osteen, Mark. The Economy of “Ulysses”: Making Both Ends Meet. Syracuse: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 1995.
Rose, Danis, and John O’Hanlon. Understanding “Finnegans Wake”: A Guide to the Narrative
of James Joyce’s Masterpiece. New York: Garland, 1982.
Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in “Ulysses”: An Annotated List. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1968.
Valente, Joseph. Quare Joyce. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Van Caspel, Paul. Bloomers on the Liffey: Eisegetical Readings of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
 14

Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature

A Virgin Reading of “Calypso”

Margot Norris

Fritz Senn, one of the most incisive readers ever to tackle Ulysses, calls “Ca-
lypso” “probably the easiest chapter in the novel” (189). This is certainly true for
veteran readers of the novel, who can bring the knowledge of the whole work
to bear on figuring out nearly everything that goes on in this episode. But how
would “Calypso” strike a first-time or virgin reader, as we might call such a
hypothetical figure? Attempts to posit an “actual” first-time or virgin reader of
Ulysses are quickly subject to challenge on a number of fronts. Can we imagine
anyone reading Ulysses without first having heard about it? What would one
hear about the novel that would impel one to read it? If one heard even the
simplest elements of the plot (for example, “Ulysses is about a man whose wife
has an affair . . .”) the first-time reading is no longer “virgin” in the sense of
an absolute innocence of knowledge of what will transpire in the novel. The
novice, first-time, or virgin reader to whom I refer is therefore an artificial or
hypothetical construct. Yet positing such a hypothetical figure, and reading
even such an accessible episode as “Calypso” through its eyes, proves to be
an extremely revealing exercise. “Calypso” is titled after the goddess whose
name means “the Concealer” (UA 70), and the device or construct of the virgin
reader allows us to see not only that the characters in the episode are conceal-
ers but that the narration itself functions as a “Calypso” or Concealer. In the
exercise of novice reading that follows, it is important to remember that the
virgin reader is a heuristic device, designed to explore the workings of nar-
rative, rather than a re-creation of a literal first-time reading experience of
Ulysses. With this caveat, let us assume a hypothetical literate reader, already
familiar with Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
 Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature: A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” 229

who began to read Ulysses for the first time in 1922. Leaving aside the problems
created by the still novel stream-of-consciousness technique in the first three
episodes, such a reader would at least be familiar with Stephen Dedalus and his
religious conflicts with his mother from the end of Portrait. But “Calypso” in-
troduces Leopold Bloom, his wife, Molly, and their daughter, Milly, to readers
for the very first time. The virgin reader consequently approaches them with a
tabula rasa, a clean informational slate untainted by either past knowledge or
foreknowledge of what is to come in the ensuing episodes.
How do we get to know the Blooms in these circumstances, when con-
fronted with a narration that largely eschews exposition in favor of focused
description continually sliding into the interior monologue of Leopold Bloom?
Hugh Kenner contrasts Bloom with Buck Mulligan, who “is all outside,” and
Stephen Dedalus, who “by the end of ‘Proteus’ has become virtually all in-
side,” by noting that the Bloom of “Calypso” is a balance between the two: “we
move in and out, in and out, the ‘out,’ however, closely in touch with the ‘in,’
prompting, controlling” (45). Yet Kenner’s elaboration of the episode’s narra-
tion suggests that while “Calypso” may seem easy to read, its narration is actu-
ally surprisingly complex. He finds, for example, all sorts of narrative “skips,”
as he calls them, that lead him to note: “‘Calypso,’ the first Bloom episode,
abounds in little skips of that sort, hiatuses, narrative silences. There is much
that the Blooms do not say to each other, much also that the book does not of-
fer to say to us. Pondering such instances, we may learn how largely Ulysses is
a book of silences despite its din of specifying, and may notice how eloquent is
the Blooms’ rhetoric of avoidance and also the author’s” (48). I would go much
further and argue that “Calypso” is full of secrets, secretiveness, and innuendo
largely invisible to a veteran reader but designed to create suspense and curi-
osity about the Blooms for the novice reader. The reader who knows nothing
about the Blooms and has no idea how the day will proceed or what will be its
outcome, will be confronted with suspicious behavior, enigmas, and possible
scandals that create a worrisome first impression of the Blooms. How does
the narration create, keep, and betray secrets—the secrets of the characters,
secrets kept from the characters, and secrets kept from the readers? And more
importantly, why would Joyce write his introduction of the Blooms in such an
enigmatic and potentially misleading way?
A discussion of how narrative strategies operate to create secrets and sus-
pense is greatly abetted by contemporary narratology, and I will appeal par-
ticularly to the theories of Paul Grice for help in illuminating a number of
Joycean strategies in this episode. Grice is a philosopher of language whose
 230 Margot Norris

special focus is the logic of ordinary language—conversations, for example.

One of Grice’s most provocative concepts, introduced in the essay “Logic and
Conversation,” is a practice he calls implicature. The imaginary conversation
Grice uses to illustrate implicature begins with A asking B how C is getting on
with his new job in a bank, and receiving the answer, “Oh quite well, I think;
he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet” (24). Grice writes, “At
this point, A might well inquire what B was implying, what he was suggesting,
or even what he meant by saying that C had not yet been to prison” (24). This
example of implicature draws our attention to the ability of some utterances
to say something in a way that suggests meanings beyond what is actually said
in the words. The unspoken but implied meaning becomes available to the in-
terlocutor by way of a shared context that gives a sense to the implied matter,
or implicatum, as Grice calls it. But what happens if the context is not, in fact,
shared and is kept from one party in the conversation? I hope to show that
this happens repeatedly to the virgin reader of “Calypso,” who is confronted
with implicature in the narration whose context is withheld or deferred. Grice
embeds his notion of implicature in a model of conversation as rule-governed
by what he calls the cooperative principle. The first category of maxims under
this principle concerns “quantity” and directs that speakers should make their
contribution to conversation as informative as required by the present pur-
poses of the exchange, but no more (26). If we construe the reading experience
on the model of a conversation, Kenner’s narrative skips, hiatuses, and silences
could then be seen as Joyce’s violation of the quantity maxim. But Joyce supple-
ments a dearth of information with occasional excess in “Calypso,” producing
a situation that provokes the reader to try to remedy the text’s implicatures
by using the excess material to draw risky and occasionally faulty inferences.
In “Calypso,” Joyce uses implicature not only to create suspense but also to
demonstrate that the relationship between narration and the deployment of
knowledge can be used to implicate and even incriminate the reader in the
suspicious behaviors, secrets, and possible scandals of the characters.
Such a situation is established early in “Calypso” when the narration tells
us, “He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White slip of paper. Quite
safe” (U 4.70–71). What is the narration of Bloom’s thoughts implying? We
are not allowed to see what is on the white slip of paper and therefore cannot
know why Bloom peeps quickly inside his hat to make sure it is there. Why
must the slip of paper be kept safe, and from whom? The novice reader here
encounters both a mystery and a secret, and as long as it remains unsolved we
risk connecting it to another, more alarming mystery that confronts us very
 Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature: A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” 231

soon thereafter. As Bloom pays for his kidney in the butcher shop, a curi-
ous ocular exchange takes place between the butcher and Bloom: “A speck of
eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze after an instant.
No: better not: another time” (U 4.186–87). Again, what are Bloom’s thoughts
implying? What is better done at another time? The narrator doesn’t tell us,
and a novice reader might not unreasonably connect this mystery to the white
card surreptitiously hidden in the hatband and wonder if Bloom is looking
for an assignation—possibly a homosexual assignation. It is important here to
remember that nothing in “Calypso” tells us that Bloom is Jewish. As a result,
we are missing a critical context for the scene in the butcher shop, where we
might also be excused for being misled by Dlugacz’s non-kosher operation. But
even if we register the implication of the advertisement for Agendath Netaim,
Bloom’s inference, “Moses Montefiore. I thought he was” (U 4.156), could as
easily imply anti-Semitism as identification. Nor does Bloom’s crude desire to
follow the next-door girl allay possible suspicions about his sexuality, since his
thoughts of her “Sodachapped hands. Crusted toenails too” (U 4.175–76) are
unromantic and unerotic. It is true that when Bloom returns to his home and
we learn that the woman in bed is his wife, and that they have a daughter, the
suspicion that Bloom may be on the lookout for a homosexual assignation ap-
pears ridiculously flimsy and threatens to embarrass the virgin reader. Bloom’s
smile at his wife’s mocking eyes—“The same young eyes. The first night after
the charades” (U 4.344–45)—so clearly implies his attraction and affection that
we would feel foolish about our hypothetical suspicions. And yet the disturb-
ing implication from before seems momentarily reinforced at the end of “Ca-
lypso,” when Bloom, on his way to the outhouse, wonders where he put the hat
with the secret card inside. He then thinks:
Picking up the letters. Drago’s shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking
that moment. Brown brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and
brushup. Wonder have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap
in the paybox there got away James Stephens, they say. O’Brien.
Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. (U 4.487–492)
Why will Bloom be picking up the letters when letters have already been de-
livered to the house that morning? What was Bloom thinking when he heard
the shopbell? Of whom was he thinking when he saw a recently barbered man
emerging from Drago’s hairdressing salon—and why does the memory make
him wonder “have I time for a bath this morning” and subsequently recall to
him Dlugacz’s deep voice? The suspicion that the card and the Dlugacz inci-
 232 Margot Norris

dent are somehow related is reinforced even more at the beginning of “Lotus-
Eaters,” when we finally learn that the card will be used to retrieve a letter for
a “Henry Flower.” To whom does the effeminate name refer? Is Bloom car-
rying on a homosexual correspondence? Not until we are actually given the
text of Martha Clifford’s letter is the mystery of the card resolved and shown
to have been unrelated to the meaningful ocular exchange between Bloom
and the butcher. When we later learn that Bloom is Jewish—information held
back in “Calypso”—it becomes retrospectively clear that the meaningful glance
did indeed signify desire for an “outing” between the two men, but of a racial
rather than a sexual character: the mutual acknowledgment of their common
Jewishness.
What precisely is the source of the implicatures consequent to the mystery
of the paper in the hatband and Bloom’s ocular exchange with Dlugacz? In both
cases, they appear to be produced by Bloom’s thoughts: “White slip of paper.
Quite safe” (U 4.70–71) and “No: better not: another time” (U 4.187). But can
interior monologue—which is, after all, a conversation with the self—produce
implicature at all, given that the tacit context it requires is by definition fun-
damentally shared in such a case? One possible exception to the communality
of knowledge in interior monologue could be created by repression—when
consciousness conceals the subject’s own thoughts and feelings from itself. We
find such a situation in a later episode of Ulysses, “Lestrygonians,” when we are
given the following interior monologue:
If he . . . .?
O!
Eh?
No . . . . . . No.
No, no. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t surely?
No, no. (U 8.102–7)
We may well ask, what are Bloom’s thoughts implying here? And the answer
made available to us by the context in which they occur—Bloom’s memory of
public toilet advertisements for quack clap medicine—is that they are imply-
ing the possibility that Boylan could infect Molly with a venereal disease. In
this case, Bloom’s thoughts may actually produce the implicature, since we
can as readily assume that he has such difficulty verbalizing this threatening
thought even to himself that its expression remains inchoate and unformed in
his mind. This would hardly be the case with the two earlier examples from
“Calypso,” which suggest an alternative explanation. The narrator in those cas-
 Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature: A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” 233

es seemed to produce the implicature with a telegraphic rendition of Bloom’s

thoughts in order to create an impression of Bloom as secretive and as hiding
unsavory thoughts from the narrator. This impression is reinforced by another
trait exposed by the interior monologue of Bloom’s thoughts in “Calypso”—
namely, his inclination to suspicion and cynicism. When Bloom thinks of Ma-
jor Tweedy’s purchase of the brass bed in Gibraltar—“Bought it at the gover-
nor’s auction. Got a short knock” (U 4.62)—he seems to be implying that “the
auctioneer cut the bidding short in favor of Tweedy” (UA 71). A few lines later,
Bloom generalizes his suspicions when he thinks, “Daresay lots of officers are
in the swim too” (U 4.68), implying a more general corruption in the military.
Bloom has similar suspicions about the corruption of publicans—“Where do
they get the money? . . . Doing a double shuffle with the town travellers. Square
it you with the boss and we’ll split the job, see?” (U 4.126–33).
Bloom’s suspicious and cynical perspective on the public world carries im-
portant implications into what we see of his relationship to his family. For
Bloom is, of course, not the only figure with a secret in “Calypso”; his wife,
too, is a Calypso or Concealer. In a self-reflexive gesture that comments on
the ability of writing to be secretive, Joyce has the Blooms conceal pieces of
paper with writing on them from each other and from the reader in this epi-
sode. “Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered
them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs
Marion” (U 4.243–45). Neither Bloom nor the reader will ever see the content
of this letter, yet the narrator’s observation of Bloom’s somatic response and
piqued attention to the handwriting and address transform the letter into an
implicatum. Bloom is obliged to ask, “Who was the letter from?” and receives
a surprisingly straightforward answer that instantly dissolves its enigma. “O,
Boylan, she said. He’s bringing the programme” (U 4.310). Bloom’s subsequent
question—“What are you singing?” (U 4.313)—permits the novice reader to
infer that Molly Bloom is a singer who will be visited by her impresario Boylan
with the concert program later in the day. We need to remember here that a
hypothetical virgin reader would have no idea of the progress and outcome of
the novel and therefore have no way of knowing that adultery will, in fact, take
place in the Bloom home that afternoon. What we learn of the letter at this
point should arouse no suspicions about Molly Bloom. Instead, the evidence
of Bloom’s suspicious nature on his walk to the butcher shop—introduced be-
fore he sees the mysterious letter on the hall floor on his return—primes us
to suspect that the husband’s arousal by the letter may be an overreaction.
This suspicion is hardly allayed when we catch Bloom surreptitiously spying
 234 Margot Norris

on Molly’s reaction to the letter—“Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway

his backward eye saw her glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow” (U
4.256–57). It is not until Bloom returns from the kitchen with the breakfast tray
that the narrator (rather than Bloom) turns the letter into an implicatum: “A
strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow” (U 4.308). This
moment of narratorial implicature is produced not only by the facts—that the
letter has been opened, read, and seemingly concealed—but also by the nar-
rative language with its implications of peeping and dimpling coyness. This
moment in turn retrospectively transforms the innocent urgency of Molly’s
request for tea (“Hurry up with that tea, she said. I’m parched” [U 4.263]) into
an implicatum. Presumably she sends Bloom out of the room and prolongs his
absence by reminding him to scald the teapot in order to give herself ample
time and privacy to read the letter from her impresario. Many episodes later
we learn from Molly herself that Boylan’s letter wasn’t much of a love letter—“I
wish somebody would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him he
could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan” (U 18.734–36). But by then
we also know that Bloom’s suspicions were not unfounded. Molly’s adultery
with Boylan will actually turn out to be the only significant scandal in the
Bloom family by the end of the novel. Yet the narration of “Calypso,” delib-
erately or not, allows the novice reader’s suspicions about the characters and
their secrets to proliferate. The question of Boylan’s relationship to the family
becomes complicated as soon as we are given the text of the letter Bloom re-
ceives from his daughter, Milly. She mentions a student who “sings Boylan’s (I
was on the pop of writing Blazes Boylan’s) song about those seaside girls. Tell
him silly Milly sends my best respects” (U 4.408–9). There is something dis-
concertingly familiar about the way the fifteen-year-old girl writes about her
mother’s impresario. She refers to him as “Boylan” without the formal “Mister,”
she alludes to his proscribed “Blazes” nickname, and she signs her greeting to
Boylan with her father’s affectionate nickname for her, “Tell him silly Milly
sends my best respects.” The first-time reader is left to wonder what the ado-
lescent girl is implying about her relationship to her mother’s impresario, even
though her father also registers several times her mention of a “young student”
and has to reassure himself that “she knows how to mind herself ” (U 4.428).
However, Bloom’s thoughts of her as a “wild piece of goods” (U 4.429) leaves
open several sexual possibilities for Milly and consequently opens paternal
anxiety about her on several fronts. Bloom’s recollection of Boylan’s song (“All
dimpled cheeks and curls, / Your head it simply swirls” [U 4.437–38]) triggers a
train of thought ambiguous with respect to whether its referent is the young
 Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature: A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” 235

student of Milly’s letter or Boylan: “Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers’
pockets, jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls, he says.
Pier with lamps, summer evening, band” (U 4.439–41). Since both young Ban-
non and Boylan sing the song about the seaside girls, Bloom may conflate them
in his mind—although the reference to the “jarvey off for the day” remains a
mystery in either case. And Bloom confuses the matter further when he sub-
sequently thinks of Milly, Boylan’s song, the torn envelope, Milly’s maturation,
and Mrs. Marion, in a sequence that could be read as linking his anxieties
about daughter and wife to the mysterious Boylan: “Will happen, yes. Prevent.
Useless: can’t move. Girl’s sweet light lips. Will happen too. He felt the flow-
ing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now. Lips kissed, kissing, kissed.
Full gluey woman’s lips” (U 4.447–50). The free indirect discourse implies that
Bloom may fear that Boylan—“Friend of the family” (U 4.440)—will seduce
both daughter and wife.
Both maxims of quantity appear to be simultaneously violated in what the
“Calypso” narration does and does not tell us about Milly. Even before we see
her letter, Bloom’s thoughts introduce her with a strange little verse:
O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.
You are my lookingglass from night to morning.
I’d rather have you without a farthing
Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden. (U 4.286–90)
The “ass” in the last line gives the verse a potentially vulgar turn, until we real-
ize that it may merely refer to the domestic animal. Irish readers of Joyce’s day
would have recognized the corruption of the rhyme by Samuel Lover, though
Lover’s last line, “Than Brian Gallagher wid house and garden” (UA 77), is less
suggestive than the ambiguous “ass.” Who composed this little poem, and was it
actually presented to Milly? The reader is here obliged to speculate on the basis
of some odd juxtapositions. Just before the text cites the verse, Bloom thinks,
“Putting pieces of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pour-
ing” (U 4.285–86). If we interpret this to mean that silly Milly liked to get play
letters in a toy letterbox, then we might construe the little poem as a Valentine
or other sweet note that her Papli wrote for her as part of the game. But the
verse is followed immediately by “Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old
case. Still he was a courteous old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly
off the platform” (U 4.291–93). These thoughts introduce Professor Goodwin as
an earlier impresario of Bloom’s wife and imply that he might have composed
the little verse. Conversely, it may have been the “lookingglass” in the rhyme
 236 Margot Norris

that triggered Bloom’s memory of Professor Goodwin, who, we learn, carried a

“little mirror in his silk hat” (U 4.293). Why? We are not told, which puts us at
a loss to understand the anecdote about little Milly finding the small mirror in
Goodwin’s hat and bringing it into the parlor: “O, look what I found in profes-
sor Goodwin’s hat! All we laughed. Sex breaking out even then” (U 4.293–94).
What are Bloom’s thoughts implying when he translates Milly’s announcement
about the little mirror into “Sex breaking out even then”? We are not given the
context of the joke, although our sense, that even as a small girl Milly was quite
pert with another of her mother’s impresarios, reinforces the troublesome im-
plicature with respect to Boylan in her letter.
If we put these enigmas and secrets signaled by Bloom’s hidden card, Molly’s
hidden letter, and the ambiguities in Milly’s letter together for the first time, we
could get the idea that the Bloom family is embroiled in goodness knows what
sorts of sexual ambiguities and entanglements. We are prepared for the possi-
bility of a married man on the lookout for other men, with a wife and daughter
on the verge of sexual seduction of or by the same man. The novice reader is
thus set up to experience a sensation we rarely associate with Ulysses—namely
suspense. Narratologist Mieke Bal’s definition of suspense as the product of
procedures by which “the reader or the character is made to ask questions
which are only answered later” (160) clarifies its relationship to the violation of
implicature when the conversational context is deferred. Of the various scan-
dals that threaten to proliferate in “Calypso,” only one—Molly’s adultery—will
actually materialize. Yet a perceptive first reader alive to the nuances of impli-
cation and innuendo could be titillated into expecting a novel with the plot,
if not the style, of the quasi-pornographic Sweets of Sin—the genre of racy,
sensational writing that Molly Bloom enjoys for her recreational reading. Why
would Joyce begin his story of the Blooms in this way? The strategy certainly
arouses our curiosity and creates suspense about the nature and outcome of the
family secrets. But we are given a more serious possible motive in “Calypso”
itself, where Molly has been reading an ostensibly sadomasochistic novel called
Ruby: the Pride of the Ring. Bloom infers this genre from the illustrations and
captions: “Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby
pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted
and flung his victim from him with an oath” (U 4.346–49). But this implica-
tum suggests an erroneous context, as Molly herself certifies when she notes,
“There’s nothing smutty in it” (U 4.355). As Mary Power discovered some years
ago, the actual novel that is glossed in the episode is a reform novel aimed at
the cruelties of circus life—Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl,
 Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature: A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” 237

by Amye Reade. Joyce must have seen the possibilities of using a titillating
come-on to lure readers (like Molly Bloom) into delving inadvertently into a
work with a serious intention. The novice reader, confused and excited by the
possible sensational directions Ulysses may take, may be tricked into engaging
with a work of mounting narrative difficulty only to discover that the novel,
like Ruby, has a serious intention and that “There’s nothing smutty in it.”
Is this bit of misleading merely a little joke, or does it have a larger purpose?
The repeated violations of implicature—by deferring the context that would
clarify the implications made by the narration and the interior monologues—
oblige the reader repeatedly to speculate in order to invent possible contexts
that might make the implicatum intelligible. “Calypso” consequently makes its
narrations highly interactive in ways that incriminate the reader in the pro-
liferation of further implicatures. Like the Freudian infant who is deprived of
an original innocence and is posited as always already sexualized and uncon-
sciously sexually aware, the virgin reader of “Calypso” is likewise stripped of
innocence. Forced to dredge up latent suspicions of lurid sexual possibilities in
order to make sense of the narrative innuendos, the novice reader is prodded
to conjure up indecent future scenarios that never materialize in the text. But
while this entrapment of the reader into unsavory speculation may sound like
a sadistic stratagem on Joyce’s part, its purpose may actually be heuristic and
didactic. If we remember the protracted censorship problems Joyce endured
in wrangles with George Roberts over the publication of Dubliners, we realize
that he could not have helped but anticipate far greater censure of the sexual
frankness of Ulysses. Joyce’s 2 April 1932 letter to Bennett Cerf confirms that
his Dubliners wrangles did indeed make publication of Ulysses seem a difficult
prospect to him. We may reasonably speculate that even as Joyce was writing
his novel, he had to posit a potential readership that included a hypocritical
bourgeois establishment eager to indict his sexual realism for obscenity while
perfectly knowledgeable about his writing’s difference from the stuff of tabloids
and pornography. Such expectations were confirmed when even before Ul-
ysses was published in France in 1922, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were
“prosecuted at the instance of some society” in the United States for printing
the eleventh episode in their Little Review (Ulysses 1961 xiv). When Ulysses
was finally exonerated on the charge of obscenity by Judge John M. Woolsey
in 1933, his decision reminded everyone that legal obscenity was defined as a
response of the reader to text. “The meaning of the word ‘obscene’ as legally
defined by the Courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually
impure and lustful thoughts” (xi). Joyce’s incrimination of the reader in the
 238 Margot Norris

practices of implicature in Ulysses served as a demonstration that virgin read-

ers might indeed bring their own impure thoughts to a novel that would, in
fact, frustrate their expectations.

Notes
1. Since the reader is obliged to speculate whenever a context is withheld by the narration,
one is prompted to try to puzzle out enigmas by connecting various dots, as it were. Not long
after Bloom leaves the butcher shop, he sees a man whose name he fails to recollect. “There’s
whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn’t see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore.
His back is like that Norwegian captain’s. Wonder if I’ll meet him today” (U 4.213–16). Whom
does he see? Bloom clearly doesn’t know the Norwegian captain by name, yet he has noticed his
back sufficiently to use it as a point of comparison. What was the context of this observation?
Why might he expect to meet the Norwegian captain again on this day? It is not unreasonable
for the novice reader to try to link these questions to the question in Dlugacz’s foxeyes. Other
possibilities might later occur to us, for example, that the Norwegian captain’s back might be
conspicuous because he is hunchbacked. This different context does not present itself in “Ca-
lypso,” however.
2. Bloom’s implicature is repeated in “Lestrygonians” when the narration tells us “Mr
Bloom’s eye followed its line and saw again the dyeworks’ van drawn up before Drago’s. Where
I saw his brillantined hair just when I was.” (8.1083–85). When Bloom was what? We are still
not told, though by now the reader has enough information about Bloom’s suspicions to infer
that the brillantined hair belonged to Boylan.
3. We might be tempted to extol this passage in Ulysses as an example of what Dorrit Cohn
calls “psycho-narration,” the narrative representation of subverbal states. This technique can
not only “explain a character’s conscious thoughts better than the character himself, it can
also effectively articulate a psychic life that remains unverbalized, penumbral, or obscure”
(46). However, psycho-narration in Cohn’s sense is still produced by a narrative voice. Bloom’s
inarticulate interior monologue, in contrast, is more a psycho-dramatization than a psycho-
narration.
4. This characterization seems oddly contradicted by Bloom’s simultaneous observation
that Milly’s letter shows her “[c]oming out of her shell” (U 4.422).
5. Joyce produces a narrative account of just such parodic jumbles of scandals in the
Honophrius section of Finnegans Wake: “Honophrius is a concupiscent exservicemajor who
makes dishonest propositions to all. He is considered to have committed, invoking droit
d’oreiller, simple infidelities with Felicia, a virgin, and to be practising for unnatural coits with
Eugenius and Jeremias, two or three philadelphians. Honophrius, Felicia, Eugenius and Jer-
emias are consanguineous to the lowest degree” (FW 572.21–26). However, it is important to
note the total absence of implicature in this unequivocal narrative assertion. In the Wake, the
scandals are produced by narration; in “Calypso” they are hinted at, or suggested, by an im-
paired implicature and therefore produced by the reader.
6. This letter to Bennett Cerf was reprinted in the 1934 Modern Library edition and many
subsequent Random House editions. My allusions to this letter, and to Judge Woolsey’s deci-
 Secrets, Narratology, and Implicature: A Virgin Reading of “Calypso” 239

sion, refer to Ulysses, New Edition, Corrected and Reset (New York: The Modern Library, 1961).
The Cerf letter is also reprinted in Letters III 241.

Works Cited
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 2nd ed. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1997.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Kenner, Hugh. “Ulysses.” Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
Power, Mary. “The Discovery of Ruby.” James Joyce Quarterly 18.2 (1981): 115–21.
Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. Ed. John Paul Riquelme.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984.
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 Contributors

Morris Beja is Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University. His books in-
clude Epiphany in the Modern Novel, Film and Literature, and James Joyce: A
Literary Life. With Anne Fogarty he was co-coordinator of the academic pro-
gram for Bloomsday 100, the International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin,
June 2004.

Austin Briggs retired in 2008 as Tompkins Professor of English from Hamilton

College, where he taught for fifty years. The author of The Novels of Harold
Frederic, he has published many articles on Joyce in a variety of venues.

Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin

(UCD) and president of the International James Joyce Foundation. She is direc-
tor of the UCD James Joyce Research Center and editor of the Irish University
Review, a premier Irish studies journal. She is coeditor with Timothy Martin of
Joyce on the Threshold and with Fran O’Rourke of James Joyce: Multidisciplinary
Approaches. With Luca Crispi she is editor of the newly founded Dublin James
Joyce Journal, a co-publication with the National Library of Ireland. She has
co-directed two international Joyce symposia and has been Academic Director
of the Dublin James Joyce Summer School since 1997. She is the recipient of the
2008 Charles Fanning Prize in Irish studies.

Gerald Gillespie is Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and a former

president of the International Comparative Literature Association. His more
recent publications include Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context; By
Way of Comparison: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Comparative Lit-
erature; Echoland: Readings from Humanism to Postmodernism; and the edited
volume Romantic Prose Fiction.
 242 Contributors

Michael Patrick Gillespie is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at

Marquette University. His most recent book is The Myth of an Irish Cinema.

John Gordon is professor of English at Connecticut College. He is author of

James Joyce’s Metamorphoses; “Finnegans Wake”: A Plot Summary; Physiology
and the Literary Imagination; Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back;
Notes on Issy; and Almosting It; and of many articles on modern literature.

Richard P. Lynch is chair of the English Department at Misericordia University,

where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish litera-
ture. He has published essays on John Fowles, Evelyn Waugh, and Nathanael
West.

Timothy Martin is author of Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence; coeditor,

with Vincent Cheng, of Joyce in Context; and coeditor, with Anne Fogarty,
of Joyce on the Threshold. He was guest editor of a special double issue of the
James Joyce Quarterly on Joyce and opera. He teaches at Rutgers University,
Camden.

Margot Norris is Chancellor’s Professor of English and comparative literature

at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of six books, including
four on Joyce: The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake”; Joyce’s Web: The
Social Unraveling of Modernism; Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s “Dubliners”; and
an Ireland into Film series monograph on the 1967 Joseph Strick film of Ul-
ysses. She also edited A Companion to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” for Bedford Books
and the Norton Critical Edition of Dubliners.

Katherine O’Callaghan has taught courses on Joyce, on Anglo-Irish literature,

and on the role of music in Irish literature. She currently holds a postdoc-
toral research position in Paris 3–Sorbonne Nouvelle and is in the process of
completing a monograph titled The Space Between: Music and Language in
the Writings of James Joyce. She is also coediting two collections: James Joyce
and Cultural Memory (with Oona Frawley) and Musical Modernism: Essays on
Language and Music in Modernist Literature (with Katie Brown).

Anthony Paraskeva is a lecturer in film and literature at the University of

Dundee. He is currently completing a monograph titled The Speech-Gesture
Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema.
 Contributors 243

Tracey Teets Schwarze is associate professor of English and vice provost at

Christopher Newport University. She is the author of Joyce and the Victorians
and several articles on Joyce and Victorian culture.

David Spurr is professor of English at the University of Geneva. His books

include Conflicts in Consciousness: T. S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism; The Rheto-
ric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial
Administration; Joyce and the Scene of Modernity; and an edited volume, The
Space of English.

Robert Weninger is professor of German at King’s College London and editor

of Comparative Critical Studies. He has published six books and edited or co-
edited six further volumes, including Arno Schmidts Joyce-Rezeption 1957–1970;
The Mookse and the Gripes: Ein Kommentar zu James Joyces “Finnegans Wake”;
Literarische Konventionen: Theoretische Modelle/Historische Anwendung; Fram-
ing a Novelist: Arno Schmidt Criticism, 1970–1994; Arno Schmidt Bibliographie;
and Streitbare Literaten: Kontroversen und Eklats in der deutschen Literatur von
Adorno bis Walser.

Greg Winston is associate professor of English at Husson University. His re-

search interests are in twentieth-century Irish and British literatures, especially
their intersections with postcolonial history and geography. His writing has
appeared in Colby Quarterly, Études Irlandaises, and James Joyce Quarterly,
among other publications.

Yu-chen Lin is professor of foreign languages and literature at National Sun

Yat-sen University, Taiwan. She is the author of Justice, History, and Language
in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and the Chinese translator of James Joyce:
The Years of Growth, 1882–1915, by Peter Costello. She has also published ar-
ticles on Sean O’Faolain, Joyce Cary, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Irish studies
in Taiwan, and the Chinese Ulysses.
This page intentionally left blank
 Index
Aamusta iltaan (Rauanheimo), 193
Abbate, Carolyn, 148n10
Abbey Theatre, 123; Anglo-Irish Revivalism in,
125–26
Acting, histrionic style of, 121–22, 125, 126
Adams, Robert M., 43
Adorno, Theodor, 16, 28–29, 138, 144
After Many Years (dir. D. W. Griffith), 122
À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 180, 193;
parodied, 65–66
Alastalon salissa (Kilpi), 193
Albright, Daniel, 138, 140
Alcohol consumption in Ireland, 168–69
Allusions in “Ulysses” (Thornton), 224
Also sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 180
Anderson, Chester, 214
Anderson, Margaret, 237
Anglo-Irish Revivalism, 125–26, 127
Annotations for “Finnegans Wake” (McHugh), 224
Antheil, George, 159n6
Anti-Semitism: myths of, 43–46; in Ulysses, 42,
109, 150, 231
Archer, William, 123
À rebours (Huysmans), 181
Aristotle: “On the Art of Poetry,” 191–92; Works,
56n4
Aristotle’s Masterpiece, 45, 56n4
“Arkielämää” (Jotuni), 207n1
Army, British: presence in Dublin, 97–100, 101–3;
prostitution, relationship with, 111; recruiting
posters, 104–5; sexually transmitted diseases,
105–8
Arnold, Bruce, The Scandal of “Ulysses,” 222
Arnold, Matthew, The Study of Celtic Literature, 49
Arrah-na-Pogue (Boucicault), 151, 152, 157
Arrivée d’un train, L’ (dir. Lumière brothers), 118–19
Art of James Joyce, The (Litz), 224
Arts, Sports, and Tourism, Department of, 3
Assassinat du Duc de Guise, L’ (prod. Film D’Art),
126
Assmann, Dietrich, 193, 207n1
Attridge, Derek, 117, 130
Austen, Jane, Emma, 15
Avenging Conscience, The (dir. D. W. Griffith), 128
Bal, Mieke, 236
Balfe, M. W., The Rose of Castille, 146
Balzac, Honoré de, Le cousin Pons, 15–16
Barenboim, Daniel, Parallels and Paradoxes, 142, 148
Barnacle, Mrs., 112n2
Barnacle, Nora, 3–5, 112n2, 148n8
Barnacle, Tom, 112n2
Barracks, military, in Dublin, 99, 102
Barthes, Roland, 131
Bazargan, Susan, 93n12
Beach, Sylvia, 1
Beckett, Samuel, 1–2, 28, 148n2
Beebe, Maurice, 214
Beer-Hofmann, Richard, Der Tod Georgs, 207n1
Beethoven, Ludwig van: Fidelio, 151; Fifth Sym-
phony, 141
Before Sunrise (Hauptmann), 123
Beja, Morris, 176, 182, 241
Benjamin, Walter, 130; Passagen-Werk, 25–26
Benstock, Bernard, 214
Bentley, Eric, 152, 158–59
Bergman, Hjalmar, Markurells i Wadköping, 193,
207n1
Between the Acts (Woolf), 9, 195–96
Blake, William, 25; The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, 69–70, 72–73; A Vision of the Last Judg-
ment, 69
 246 Index
Blanchot, Maurice, 22
Bleak House (Dickens), 16, 21
Blood: libel, 44–45; sacrifice, 46–49, 51–55
Bloom, Leopold: hand gestures in “Circe,” 127–28,
129; and implicature in “Calypso,” 230–6; and
melodrama, 150–51; menstruation of, 41–58; and
passive memory, 65–66; receptivity to sounds,
32, 35–36; sympathy for Katharine O’Shea, 79,
84–86; and throwaways, 17–19, 25; voyeurism
of, 120, 122
Bloom, Milly, 90, 196–97, 229; paternal anxiety
about, 234–36
Bloom, Molly: economic circumstances of, 169–70;
monologue, 86–92, 93n12; and secrecy in “Ca-
lypso,” 233–37
Bloom, Rudy, 90, 118, 119, 131, 152
Bloomers on the Liffey (Van Caspel), 223
Bloomsday: 100 Symposium, 2–3; centennial, 3, 10;
origins, 1–2; significance of date, 4–6
“Bloom’s Sexual Tropes: Stigmata of the ‘Degener-
ate’ Jew” (Byrnes), 43, 56n6, 57n20
“Boarding House, The” (Joyce), 102
Bock, Martin, 112n8
Bonaparte, Maria, 203
Boone, Joseph, “New Approach to Bloom as
‘Womanly Man,’” 42
Borach, George, 135
Boucicault, Dion, 121; Arrah-na-Pogue, 151, 152,
157; The Colleen Bawn, 151, 152; The Corsican
Brothers, 151, 155–56, 157; Octaroon, 157; Robert
Emmet, 151
Bowen, Zack, 163–64; “The Bronzegold Sirensong,”
140
Boylan, Hugh “Blazes,” 89, 90, 91, 163–64, 169, 175,
233–36
Boyle, Robert, “Miracle in Black Ink,” 55
Braudy, Leo, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 57n16
Brecht, Bertolt, 132, 205–6
Brenner, Arvid, En dag som andra, 193
Briggs, Austin, 7, 41–61, 119, 241
Brilliant Career, A (Joyce), 123
Britain/British: militarism, 97–112. See also Army,
British; British Empire
British Empire, 97, 98–99, 104, 164–65, 176; and
“Celtic revenge,” 174; and colonial economy,
166; women encouraged to settle in colonies,
172
Brivic, Sheldon, 97, 223
Broch, Hermann, 205, 206; Der Tod des Vergil,
200–201
Bronze by Gold (Knowles), 147, 148n6
“Bronzegold Sirensong, The” (Bowen), 140
Brooke, Rupert, 48
Brooks, Peter, 73, 74; melodrama, 153, 157–58;
prehistoric truth, 72
Brothels: Bella Cohen’s, 110–11, 172; frequented
by soldiers, 107; Joyce visits, 106; in Monto
area, 100–101; proximity to barracks, 109,
112n3
Budgen, Frank, 93n8
Bunting, Edward, 144
Burch, Noël, 118
Burgess, Anthony, 139
Burns, Christy, 32
Bush administration, 97
Busoni, Ferruccio, “Sketch for a New Esthetic of
Music,” 143
Byrnes, Robert, “Bloom’s Sexual Tropes: Stigmata
of the ‘Degenerate’ Jew,” 43, 56n6, 57n20
Caffrey, Cissy, 97–98, 101, 108, 110, 164
“Calypso”: cat sounds in, 33–34, 35; detecting musi-
cal “third” in, 33; parallels “Telemachus,” 34–35;
secrecy and implicature in, 228–38; “virgin”
reading of, 10, 228–38
Campbell, Joseph, Hero with a Thousand Faces, 54
Cantimpré, Thomas de, 44
Case of Sigmund Freud, The (Gilman), 43
Casey, Edward, 65–66
Céline, Louis Ferdinand, 28
Celtic masculinity, 49
Censorship, 153; and Dubliners, 237
Cerf, Bennett, 237, 238n6
Changing Places (Lodge), 213
Chapman, Mr., 196–97, 198, 207n3
Char, René, La parole en archipel, 22
Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love Story and Politi-
cal Life (O’Shea), 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87–91, 93n7
Cheng, Vincent, 176
Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 151
“Ciceri,” 39n8
Cinema: close-ups, 128–29; Joyce influenced by, 8,
117–32
Cinematograph Volta, 121, 131, 132n3
“Circe,” 8, 9; cinematic influences in, 117–32; hand
gestures, 127–28, 129–31; Irish Revivalist theater
satirized in, 125–27; physical routines in, 117
Circumcision, 44, 45–46, 56n10
Classical Temper, The (Goldberg), 32
Close-ups, cinematic, 128–29
 Index 247

Cohen, Bella, 101, 102–3, 130, 164, 172, 174; alterca-
tion at brothel, 110–11, 150
Cohn, Dorrit, 238n3
Colleen Bawn, The (Boucicault), 151, 152
Colonialism. See British Empire
Condren, Mary, 57n24
Connor, Steven, 128
Conquest, A, 131
“Conrad der Leutnant” (Spitteler), 207n1
Consumer culture, 176
Consumption, conspicuous, 165
Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864–69, 106–7, 109,
113n9, 113n10
Cook, Nicholas, 148n10
Cork Free Press, 93n7
Coronation of Edward VII (prod. Méliès), 126
Corsican Brothers, The (Boucicault), 151, 155–56,
157
Cosmopolis (DeLillo), 9, 198–99
Countess Cathleen, The (Yeats), 126
Cousin Pons, Le (Balzac), 15–16
Couvade, 54
Covent Garden Theatre, 153
Creator principle, 186
Crispi, Luca, 3, 241
Critical Writings of James Joyce, The (Joyce), 77
Criticism, guide to works of Joycean, 213–25
Cullen, Mary, 113n10
Culture, consumer, 176
Curse, The (Delaney), 54
Cusack, Michael, 7, 50
“Cyclops,” 9; and trash, 21, 24
David, Thomas, 199
David Copperfield (Dickens), 70
Davison, Neil R., 180
Davitt, Michael, 77
Deane, Seamus, 49, 67, 74n2, 74n3
Death of Virgil, The (Broch), 200–201
Debris: in modern art, 28–29; in the modern novel,
16; in Ulysses, 15–25, 29
Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake,” The
(Norris), 225
Dedalus, Dilly, 73
Dedalus, May, 118, 156–57, 158, 164, 169
Dedalus, Stephen: contemplates art forms, 136–37;
narrative mode of, 67–74; Parable of the Plums,
70–72; and passive memory, 66; sees mother’s
ghost, 118, 150, 156–57, 158, 164; and soldiers’
photograph, 103–4, 105; walks on shells, 31
De Docta Ignorantia (Nicholas of Cusa), 184
Degeneration (Nordau), 43
Delaney, Janice, The Curse, 54
DeLillo, Don, 205; Cosmopolis, 9, 198–99
De Mille, Cecil B., The Whispering Chorus, 128–29
Der Archipelagus (Hölderlin), 22
Derrida, Jacques, 217
De Valera, Eamon, 50
Devlin, Kimberly, 91, 93n12, 169, 176
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House, 16, 21; A Christmas
Carol, 151; David Copperfield, 70; Great Expecta-
tions, 70; Oliver Twist, 151, 157; Our Mutual
Friend, 16
Disempowerment, Irish, 163–76
Dlugacz, 231–32
Döblin, Alfred, 202, 205
Don Giovanni (Mozart), 151, 156, 157, 158
Dos Passos, John, 205; Manhattan Transfer, 204
Drury Lane Theatre, 153
Dublin: interdependence of sexual and military
economies, 110; lack of employment oppor-
tunities, 99, 174; military barracks, 99; rise of
prostitution, 99–100. See also Brothels
Dublin Corporation, 107–8
Dubliners (Joyce), 21, 23, 65, 102, 237
Dublin’s Joyce (Kenner), 224
Duffy, Enda, 112n4
Dujardin, Édouard, 1, 190
Dunleavy, Janet, Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criti-
cism, 217
“Easter 1916” (Yeats), 55
Easter Week, 100
Eco, Umberto, 147; The Role of the Reader, 66–67;
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 71
Ecrits (Lacan), 27, 29
Edward VII, King, 100–101
Elijah, 23–25, 159n1
Eliot, T. S., 190
Ellmann, Richard: James Joyce, 5, 123, 217, 218, 222;
“Why Molly Bloom Menstruates,” 41, 55
Elokuu (Sillanpäa), 193
Eltham, 89, 92n3
Emma (Austen), 15
Emmet, Robert, 53; execution, 47–48, 50; portrait,
56n13; speech from the dock, 146, 151. See also
Robert Emmet (Boucicault)
Employment, women’s. See Women, and employ-
ment
En dag i oktober (Hoel), 193
 248 Index
En dag som andra (Brenner), 193
English nationalism, 164
“Englishwoman, The” (Mackay), 172
Enloe, Cynthia, 96
Enoch Arden (dir. D. W. Griffith), 122
Epopée napoléonienne (prod. Pathé), 126
Epstein, Edward, 214
Epstein, Jean, 128
Erin Theatre, 126, 132n3
Eriugena, John Scottus, 66–67, 68, 70, 71
Etymological Dictionary, Skeat’s, 55
“Etym” theory, 203–4
“Eumaeus,” identity discourse in, 82–86
Euripides, The Trojan Women, 159n4
Europe: escalating militarism, 97; militarism and
prostitution, 104
Exiles (Joyce), 8, 123–25
Fabulous Voyager (Kain), 222
Fahy, Catherine, 3
Fairbanks, Douglas, 131
Fairhall, James, 67, 72, 74n1, 74n3, 98
Fargnoli, A. Nicholas, James Joyce: A Literary Refer-
ence, 224
Fashion in Ulysses, 163–76
Faust (Goethe), 187, 188
Ferris, Kathleen, James Joyce and the Burden of
Disease, 217
Feshbach, Sidney, 5
Fictional Truth (Riffaterre), 67
Fidelio (Beethoven), 151
Fifth Symphony (Beethoven), 141
Film D’Art, L’assassinat du Duc de Guise, 126
Films. See Cinema
Finnegans Wake, 152; appearance of Schopenhauer,
178; and “etymistical” language, 203–4; litter cf.
letter, 17, 27–29; manuscript pages discovered,
20; prostitution in, 101; River Liffey in, 23; tex-
tual economy, 26–27; thresholds of perceptual
mechanics, 37–39
Fisher, Judith, “The ‘Sensation Scene’ in Dickens
and Boucicault,” 157
Fitzpatrick, David, 98
Fliess, Wilhelm, 45, 56n8
Flood, Jeanne A., 57n14
Flying Dutchman, The (Wagner), 151
Fogarty, Anne, 1–11, 176, 241, 242
Foreign Affairs, Department of, 3
For the Land They Loved (Herr), 154
Foster, R. F., 93n5
Foucault, Michel, “What is an Author?” 206–7
Francesca de Rimini, 121
Frank, Joseph, 207n2
Freeman’s Journal, 81
Freemasonry, 58n26
Fregoli, Leopoldo, 119
French Joyce, The (Lernout), 217
Freud, Sigmund, 185; indebtedness to Schopen-
hauer, 180; and menstrual cycles, 45, 56n8;
Wolf Man study, 68, 73; work on symptomatic
actions, 124, 130
From Chivalry to Terrorism (Braudy), 57n16
Fuga per canonem and “Sirens,” 141
Gabler, Hans Walter, 4, 132n4
Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), 50
Gender: and class identity, 171, 173; and Joyce stud-
ies, 214–15; politics, 164–65; roles, 174
Gestures, hand. See Hand gestures
Gibson, Andrew, Joyce’s Revenge, 164, 166–67, 172
Gifford, Don, “Ulysses” Annotated, 70, 191, 224
Gilbert, Stuart, 1, 80, 93n8, 111
Gilbert, W. S., Ruddigore, 151, 157
Gillespie, Gerald, 9, 178–89, 241; Proust, Mann,
Joyce in the Modernist Context, 179, 185–86
Gillespie, Michael Patrick, 10, 79, 213–27, 242
Gilman, Sander, 58n27; The Case of Sigmund Freud,
43; The Jew’s Body, 43
Gladstone, William Ewart, 81, 85, 88, 93n6
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 187, 188
Gogarty, Oliver St. Jean, 113n8; Tumbling in the
Hay, 54, 106; “Ugly England” articles, 105–6
Goldberg, S. L., 214; The Classical Temper, 32
Goodwin, Professor, 173, 235–36
Gordon, John, 6–7, 31–40, 242
Gorky, Maxim, 118
Gorman, Herbert, 99
Great Expectations (Dickens), 70
Greenham Common protest, 52
Grice, Paul, 10, 229–30
Griffith, Arthur, 105, 109
Griffith, D. W., 126; After Many Years, 122; The
Avenging Conscience, 128; Enoch Arden, 122
Grimm brothers, 178
Grocery shopping guide to Joyce studies, 216–25
Groden, Michael, 4
Gunning, Tom, 132n1
Gutzkow, Karl, 192

Hand gestures: in cinematic close-ups, 128–29; in
“Circe,” 127–28, 129–31; in Exiles, 124–25
Hardwicke Fever Hospital Report, 102
Haslam, Anna Maria, 113n10
Hauptmann, Gerhart: Before Sunrise, 123; Michael
Kramer, 123
Hayden, Deborah, 113n8
Hayman, David, 117, 214; The Mechanics of Mean-
ing, 224–5
Haymarket Theatre, 153
Healey, T. M., 81
Heap, Jane, 237
Heartbreak House (Shaw), 52
Heath, Stephen, 131
Heilman, Robert, Tragedy and Melodrama, 9,
153–55, 159n4
Hellman, Lillian, Watch on the Rhine, 159n4
Helmholtz, Herman, 32
Henke, Suzette, 112n7
Henry, O., “The Last Leaf,” 38
Heroism, 46–49
Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell), 54
Herr, Cheryl, 73, 93n12, 215; For the Land They
Loved, 154; Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture, 152;
“‘Penelope’ as Period Piece,” 42, 45
History in Ulysses, 65–74
Histrionic style of acting, 121–22, 125, 126
Hoberman, John, 54
Hoel, Sigurd, En dag i oktober, 193
Holcroft, Thomas, Tale of Mystery, 153
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 201; Der Archipelagus, 22
Homer, The Odyssey, 19, 22, 66, 136, 150, 191
Homosexuality, 231–32
Houlihan, Cathleen ni, 108–9
Huebsch, Benno, 201
Hutchins, Patricia, 117
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, À rebours, 181
Ibsen, Henrik, 123
Identity: and discourse, 82–83, 86–92; in Ulysses,
77–92
“If Men Could Menstruate” (Steinem), 53
Ilmberger, Frances, 41, 56n2, 56n3
Imperialism, British. See British Empire
Implicature in “Calypso,” 228–38
In First Century Ireland (Pearse), 49
Interior monologues. See Monologues, interior
International James Joyce Foundation, 2, 214
In the Shadow of the Glen (Synge), 126
Index 249
“Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the Fuga per
Canonem, The” (Lees), 141
Inventing Ireland (Kiberd), 48–49, 50, 66
Irish: alcohol consumption, 168–69; disempower-
ment, 163–76; Literary Renaissance, 109; repub-
licanism, 97, 99; Revivalist theater satirized in
“Circe,” 125–27; storytelling tradition, 136
Irish Parliamentary Party, 77, 81, 91, 92n3
“Ithaca,” measurements in, 43
“Ivy Day in the Committee Room” (Joyce), 23, 78
Jahnn, Hans Henny, Perrudja, 205
James Joyce (Ellmann), 5, 123, 217, 218, 222
James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Levin), 217
James Joyce: A Literary Reference (Fargnoli), 224
James Joyce and the Burden of Disease (Ferris), 217
James Joyce Miscellany, A (Magalaner), 214
James Joyce Quarterly, 214
James Joyce Review, 214
James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Reizbaum), 56n5
Jarrell, Mackie, 214
Jesus Christ, 19, 24, 47
Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 159n4
Jews, myths about, 42–46
Jew’s Body, The (Gilman), 43
Jim the Penman (Young), 152
j.n.d. (just noticeable difference), 32, 34, 36, 37,
39n2, 39n8
John Chrysostomos, Saint, 181
Jones, Ellen Carol, 176
Jordan, Francis X., 35
Jotuni, Maria, “Arkielämää,” 207n1
Joyce, James: 2004 exhibition, 3; Bloomsday 1929,
2; connection between militarism and prostitu-
tion, 96–112; defense of Katharine O’Shea, 92;
explores role of press, 83–84; guide to studies
of, 213–25; homage paid by one-day novels,
190–207; influence of early cinema on, 8, 117–32;
and male blood sacrifice, 41–58; parodies Irish
Revivalist theater, 125–27; plays, 123–25; sensa-
tions in writings, 31–39; sympathy for Parnell,
77–79; and syphilis, 106, 112n8, 217. See also
individual works
Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theater
(Watt), 152, 154
Joyce and Heraldry (O’Shea), 223
Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Herr), 152
Joyce’s Book of Memory (Rickard), 65
Joyce’s Dislocutions (Senn), 181
 250 Index
Joyce’s Revenge (Gibson), 164, 166-67, 172
“Joyce’s Ulysses: Past Eve and Adam” (Kiberd), 54
Just noticeable difference (j.n.d.). See j.n.d.
Kafka, Franz, 188
Kahler, Erich von, 207n2
Kain, Richard, Fabulous Voyager, 222
Kandinsky, Wassily, 28
Kant, Immanuel, 182
Katz, David, “Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Men-
struation in Early Modern England,” 44
Kearney, Richard, “Myth and Motherland,” 74n3
Kenner, Hugh, 75n5, 93n8, 214, 229, 230; Dublin’s
Joyce, 224; measurements in “Ithaca,” 43; range of
cat sounds, 34; review of Ellman biography, 218
Kern, Stephen, 65, 66, 67
Kernan, Tom, 21, 166, 167
Kershner, R. B., 112n5, 152, 215
Kiberd, Declan, 148n8; Inventing Ireland, 48–49,
50, 66; “Joyce’s Ulysses: Past Eve and Adam,” 54
Kiheon, Nam, 176
Kilpi, Volter, Alastalon salissa, 193
Knowles, Sebastian, ix–x, 148n7; Bronze by Gold,
147, 148n6
Koeppen, Wolfgang, Tauben im Gras, 204–5
Kumar, Udaya, 140
Kundera, Milan, 69
Lacan, Jacques, 223; Ecrits, 27, 29
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, 206
Laokoon, 182
Larbaud, Valery, 1
“Last Leaf, The” (Henry), 38
“Last Rose of Summer, The” (Moore), 146
Leckie, Barbara, 93n8
Lees, Heath, “The Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the
Fuga per Canonem,” 141
Lehtonen, Joel, Putkinotko, 193, 207n1
Leonard, Garry, 215
Lerm-Hayes, Mia, 3
Lernout, Geert, The French Joyce, 217
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 136–37, 182–83, 192
“Leutnant Gustl” (Schnitzler), 207n1
Levin, Harry, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction,
217
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 74n3
Liffey, River, 21–22, 23
Linati, Carlo, 92n4
Linder, Max, 131
Little Review, 237
Litz, A. Walton, 214; The Art of James Joyce, 224
Lodge, David, Changing Places, 213
Lodging houses, 102
Logan, William, 100
Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill), 159n4
“Lotus-Eaters” and throwaways, 17–18
Lover, Samuel, 235
Lukacher, Ned, Primal Scenes, 68, 74n3
Lumière brothers, 126; L’arrivée d’un train, 118–19
Lynch, Richard P., 7, 65–76, 242
Lyons, J. B., 112n8
MacDowell, Gerty, 119–20; and fashion, 166–67,
168, 169, 170–71, 175
Mackay, Jane, “The Englishwoman,” 172
Maddox, Brenda, 5
Magalaner, Marvin, A James Joyce Miscellany, 214
Mahaffey, Vicki, 55
Male menstruation. See Menstruation
Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos), 204
Manliness, 46–49
Mann, Thomas, 180, 181
“Man on the Dump, The” (Stevens), 26
Manuscript pages discovered, 20
Markurells i Wadköping (Bergman), 193, 207n1
Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta, 159n4
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake), 69–70,
72–73
Martin, Paul, 159n6
Martin, Timothy, 9, 150–60, 241, 242
Masculinity, 46–49
McCarthy, Patrick, 111
McEwan, Ian, Saturday, 193
McGreevey, Thomas, 1
McHugh, Roland, Annotations for “Finnegans
Wake,” 224
Mechanics of Meaning, The (Hayman), 224–5
Méliès, Georges, Coronation of Edward VII, 126
Melodrama in Ulysses, 150–59
Memoirs: Katharine O’Shea’s, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85,
87–91, 93n7; Molly Bloom’s, 86–92, 93n12
Memory in Ulysses, 65–74
Menstruation: Leopold Bloom’s, 41–58; myth of
Jewish male, 42, 43–46, 56n6, 58n27
Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 44
Michael Kramer (Hauptmann), 123
Militarism and connection with prostitution, 8,
96–112

“Miracle in Black Ink” (Boyle), 55
“Modern Fiction” (Woolf), 194, 195
Modernism, 163–76. See also Novels, modern
Monnier, Adrienne, 1
Monologues: in Death of Virgil, 200–201; and
implicature, 232–33, 237; interior, 190–91, 197;
Molly Bloom’s, 86–92, 93n12; and one-day
novels, 201–2
Montague, Lily H., 173
Monto. See Brothels
Moore, Thomas, “The Last Rose of Summer,” 146
Moran, D. P., 49
Moran, Seán, 57n22
Morel, Auguste, 1
Morse, J. Mitchell, 214
Moses, 24, 71
Movies. See Cinema
Mozart, W. A., Don Giovanni, 151, 156, 157, 158
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 9, 193–96
Muir, Willa, 206
Mulligan, Buck, 35, 46, 167, 181; contrasted with
Leopold Bloom, 229
Mullin, Katherine, 108, 119
Münsterberg, Hugo, 129
Music in Ulysses, 9, 135–48, 163–76
Muskeljudentum, 50
Mutoscope, 119–20, 132n4
“My Girl’s a Yorkshire Girl,” 9, 163–76
“Myth and Motherland” (Kearney), 74n3
Myths about Jews, 42–46
Narratology in “Calypso,” 228–38
Nash, John, 222
National College of Ireland, 2
Nationalism: English, 164; Irish, 97, 99
National Library of Ireland, 3, 20, 41
Naturalism in Ulysses, 151, 158–59, 159n7
“Nausicaa” and the Mutoscope, 119–20
“New Approach to Bloom as ‘Womanly Man’”
(Boone), 42
Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 181
New York Review of Books, 222
Nicholas of Cusa, 188; De Docta Ignorantia, 184;
Visio Dei, 184
Nichols, Stephen G., 67, 70
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 67, 69, 178, 179, 182,
185; Also sprach Zarathustra, 180
Nighttown: Bloomsday visit, 102–3; link between
militarism and prostitution, 104, 112; spatial du-
Index 251
ality of, 100; visited by Oliver St. John Gogarty,
105–6
Nolan, Emer, 51
Noon, Father William, 214
Nordau, Max, 50; Degeneration, 43
Norris, Margot, 10, 80, 112n4, 228–39, 242; The
Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake,” 225
Novels: modern, 16, 193, 194, 195; one-day,
190–207
O’Brien, Darcy, 57n14
O’Brien, William, 93n7
Obscenity, 237
O’Callaghan, Katherine, 8, 135–49, 242
O’Casey, Sean, The Plough and the Stars, 48, 52
O’Connor, Frank, 31–32
Octaroon (Boucicault), 157
Odyssey, The (Homer), 19, 22, 66, 136, 150; proto-
type for Aristotle, 191
O’Hanlon, John, 4; Understanding “Finnegans
Wake,” 223
Oliver Twist (Dickens), 151, 157
O’Molloy, J. J., 43
On Baile’s Strand (Yeats), 126
One-day novels, 190–207
O’Neill, Eugene, Long Day’s Journey into Night,
159n4
“On the Art of Poetry” (Aristotle), 191–92
On the Fourfold Root of Sufficient Reason (Scho-
penhauer), 181, 183
O’Rourke, Fran, 241
O’Shea, Carmen, 94n17
O’Shea, Clare, 94n16
O’Shea, Gerald, 94n15, 94n17
O’Shea, Katharine “Kitty”, 7; affair with Parnell,
77–92, 92n3; Charles Stewart Parnell: His Love
Story and Political Life, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87–91,
93n7; compared with Molly Bloom, 87–94;
Gladstone–Parnell intermediary, 93n6
O’Shea, Katie, 94n16
O’Shea, Michael, Joyce and Heraldry, 223
O’Shea, Norah, 93n5, 94n17
O’Shea, Sophie Claude, 91, 94n16
O’Shea, Captain William, 77, 92n3; adultery of, 80;
court appearance of, 82, 85; knowledge of wife’s
affair, 89–90
Osteen, Mark, 98, 112, 215
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 16
Overture and opening of “Sirens,” 140, 144
 252 Index
Parable of the Plums, 70–72, 74, 75n5
Parallels and Paradoxes (Said and Barenboim), 142
Paraskeva, Anthony, 8, 117–34, 242
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 4–5, 7; affair with Katha-
rine O’Shea, 77–92, 92n3; fall of, 74n3; myth of,
92n2; negotiations with Gladstone, 93n6
Parnell, Mrs. See O’Shea, Katharine “Kitty”
Parole en archipel, La (Char), 22
Passagen-Werk (Benjamin), 25–26
Pathé, Epopée napoléonienne, 126
Pearce, Richard, 104
Pearse, Patrick/Pádraic, 7; In First Century Ireland,
49; and notion of blood sacrifice, 47–49, 53;
sexuality of, 57n18
Pearson, Roberta, 121
“‘Penelope’ as Period Piece” (Herr), 42, 45
Performance reading of “Sirens,” 144–48
Perrudja (Jahnn), 205
Photography: in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, 103–4, 105, 112n5; in Ulysses, 112n5
Pigeons on the Grass (Koeppen), 204–5
Pixerécourt, René Charles Guilbert de, 153
Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge), 126
Plays by Joyce, 123–25
Plough and the Stars, The (O’Casey), 48, 52
Poe, Edgar Allan, 203
Political Violence in Ireland (Townshend), 57n15
Porter, William (pseud. O. Henry), 38
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce):
debris in, 23; narrative structure, 67–69; pros-
titution in, 96–97, 103; soldiers’ photograph in,
103–4, 105, 112n5; sounds in, 36
Postcolonialism, 66, 164, 214
Posters, recruiting, 104–5
Potter, Paul, Trilby, 151
Power, Mary, 236
Primal Scenes (Lukacher), 68, 74n3
Prostitution: and British army, 111–12; connection
with militarism, 96–112; in Finnegans Wake,
101; opposed by United Irishman, 107–8; in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 96–97; in
Ulysses, 8, 9, 96–112, 164, 173, 174–75
“Proteus,” 9; and bifurcation of art forms, 136;
sounds in, 35, 137
Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context
(Gillespie, G.), 179, 185–86
Proust, Marcel, 28, 31; À la recherche du temps
perdu, 180, 193; parodied, 65–66
Punch, 81
Putkinotko (Lehtonen), 193, 207n1
Pygmalion (Rousseau), 152–53
Queen’s Royal Theatre, 152
Rauanheimo, Reino, Aamusta iltaan, 193
Reade, Amye, Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of
a Circus Girl, 236–37
Recruiting posters, 104–5
Redgrove, Peter, 54
Red-light districts. See Brothels
Redon, Odilon, 181
“Red Rose Tree, The” (Yeats), 126
Reiniger, Lotte, 119
Reizbaum, Marilyn, 80; James Joyce’s Judaic Other,
56n5; “When the Saints Come Marching In:
Re-Deeming ‘Cyclops,’” 42
ReJoyce 2004, 2–3
Republicanism, Irish, 97, 99
Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism (Dunleavy),
217
Revivalism, Anglo-Irish, 125–26, 127
Rickard, John, Joyce’s Book of Memory, 65
Riders to the Sea (Synge), 159n4
Riffaterre, Michael, Fictional Truth, 67
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 201
Robert Emmet (Boucicault), 151
Roberts, George, 237
Role of the Reader, The (Eco), 66–67
Rose, Danis, 4; Understanding “Finnegans Wake,”
223
Rose of Castille, The (Balfe), 146
Rotunda, 132n3
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Pygmalion, 152–53
Royal Hibernian Art Gallery, 3
Rubbish. See Debris
Rubbish Theory (Thompson), 20
Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl
(Reade), 236–37
Ruby: The Pride of the Ring, 236
Ruddigore, 151, 157
Sacrifice in Ulysses, 19–20
Said, Edward, Parallels and Paradoxes, 142
Saturday (McEwan), 193
Savino, Jennifer Ann, 43
Scandal of “Ulysses,” The (Arnold, B.), 222
Schmidt, Arno, 9; Zettels Traum, 202–4, 205
Schnitzler, Arthur, 190; “Leutnant Gustl,” 207n1

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 178–88; On the Fourfold
Root of Sufficient Reason, 181, 183; The World as
Will and Representation, 180, 182, 185
Schwarze, Tracey Teets, 7, 77–95, 243
Scott, Bonnie Kime, 80, 99–100
Search for Evidence, A, 120
Secrecy in “Calypso,” 228–38
Seidman, Robert J., “Ulysses” Annotated, 70, 191,
224
Select Committee on the Contagious Diseases
Acts, 101
Senn, Fritz, 92n4, 93n11; “bloom”-“blood” connec-
tion, 55; on “Calypso,” 228; Joyce’s Dislocutions,
181; launches James Joyce Foundation, 214;
metastisis, 181–2; motion before identification,
32; physical routines in “Circe,” 117
“‘Sensation Scene’ in Dickens and Boucicault, The”
(Fisher), 157
Sensations in Joyce’s writings, 31–39
Serres, Michel, 128
Sex and Character (Weininger), 45, 49
Sexually transmitted diseases, 106, 107. See also
Syphilis
Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, 44
Shaun the Post, 27, 46, 152, 178–79
Shaw, George Bernard, Heartbreak House, 52
Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 92n1
Shem the Penman, 27–28, 46, 152, 178–79
Shuttle, Penelope, 54
“Shylock’s Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in
Early Modern England” (Katz), 44
Sicilian Vespers, 39n8
Sillanpäa, Franz Emil, Elokuu, 193
Simmel, Georg, 165, 176
Sinico, Captain, 80
Sinico, Emily, 80
“Sirens,” 8; and fuga per canonem, 141; music-lan-
guage associations in, 135–48; opening section,
140; performance reading of, 144–48; sound in,
32–33
Sisson, Elaine, 49
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Eco), 71
Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, 55
Skeffington, Francis Sheehy, 57n25
“Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music” (Busoni), 143
Soliloquy, Molly Bloom’s, 86–92, 93n12
Sontag, Susan, 144–45
Soupault, Philippe, 2
Spinoza, Baruch, 178, 179
Index 253
Spitteler, Carl, “Conrad der Leutnant,” 207n1
Spoo, Robert, 80, 98
Spurr, David, 6, 15–30, 243
Stage directions: in “Circe,” 118, 122–23, 125–27; in
Exiles, 123–24
Staley, Thomas, 214
Steinberg, Erwin, 42
Steinem, Gloria, “If Men Could Menstruate,” 53
Steiner, George, 153
Stephen Hero (Joyce), 43, 49–50, 51–52, 102, 109
Stevens, Wallace, “The Man on the Dump,” 26
Stevenson, Frank, 176
Storytelling tradition, Irish, 136
Story the Biograph Told, The, 120
Study of Celtic Literature, The (Arnold, M.), 49
Sullivan, Arthur, Ruddigore, 151, 157
Superman concept, 178–88
Suspense in Ulysses, 236
Sweeney Todd, 156–57, 158
Sweet-Shop Owner, The (Swift), 9, 196–98
Sweets of Sin, The, 236
Swift, Graham, 205; The Sweet-Shop Owner, 9,
196–98
Synge, J. M.: In the Shadow of the Glen, 126; The
Playboy of the Western World, 126; Riders to the
Sea, 159n4
Syphilis: epidemic, 105; and Joyce, 106, 112n8, 217;
theme in Ulysses, 106
Tale of Mystery (Holcroft), 153
Tauben im Gras (Koeppen), 204–5
“Telemachus” as parallel of “Calypso,” 34–35
Thane, Pat, “The Englishwoman,” 172
Theater: Joyce plays, 123–25; melodrama in Ulysses,
150–59. See also Acting, histrionic style of
“The Boarding House” (Joyce), 102
Thompson, Michael, Rubbish Theory, 20
Thom’s Directory, 101
Thornton, Weldon, Allusions in “Ulysses,” 224
“Three Songs to One Burden” (Yeats), 53
Throwaways in Ulysses, 18–21, 23, 24–25
Times, The, 81
Tod des Vergil, Der (Broch), 200–201
Tod Georgs, Der (Beer-Hofmann), 207n1
To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 195
Townshend, Charles, Political Violence in Ireland,
57n15
Tragedy and Melodrama (Heilman), 9, 153–55,
159n4
 254 Index

Trash. See Debris Waisbren, Burton, 112n8

Trewey, Felicien, 119 Wales, Katie, 117
Trilby (Potter), 151 Walkley, R. Barry, 54
Tristan and Isolde (Wagner), 151 Walsh, Louis J., 57n21
Trojan Women, The (Euripides), 159n4 Walzl, Florence, 112n8
Tumbling in the Hay (Gogarty), 54, 106 “Wandering Rocks,” 73, 147, 163, 195; and debris,
Tweedy, Major, 104, 111, 233 21–22
“War on Terror,” 97
Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zure- Waste. See Debris
ichenden Grunde (Schopenhauer), 181 Watch on the Rhine (Hellman), 159n4
Ulysses (Joyce): anti-Semitism in, 42, 109, 150, Watt, Stephen, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular
231; Bloomsday, 1–6; cinematic influences, Theater, 152, 154
117–32; debris theme in, 15–25, 29; fashion in, Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 141
163–76; history and memory in, 65–74; identity Weininger, Otto, 54, 56n9, 56n11; Sex and Charac-
in, 77–92; manuscript pages discovered, 20; ter, 45, 49
melodrama in, 150–59; menstruation themes Welt, Die (Berlin), 199
in, 41–58; militarism in, 8, 96–112; music in, 9, Weninger, Robert, 9, 190–210, 243
135–48, 163–76; Naturalism in, 151, 158–59, 159n7; “What is an Author?” (Foucault), 206–7
obscenity charges, 237; photography in, 112n5; Whelan, Kevin, 47
position of sun in, 39n5; Prefatory Notebook, “When the Saints Come Marching In: Re-Deeming
41; processes of sensation in, 31–39; prostitution ‘Cyclops’” (Reizbaum), 42
in, 8, 9, 96–112, 164, 173, 174–75; referenced by Whispering Chorus, The (dir. De Mille), 128–29
one-day novels, 190–207; sacrifice in, 19–20; Whittaker, Stephen, 35
significance of hand gestures in, 127–28, 129–31; “Why Molly Bloom Menstruates” (Ellmann), 41, 55
suspense in, 236; syphilis in, 106; textual econo- Williams, Keith, 119
my of, 26; throwaways in, 18–21, 23, 24–25 Williams, Raymond, 68
“Ulysses” Annotated (Gifford and Seidman), 70, Wills, Clair, 109
191, 224 Winston, Greg, 8, 96–114, 243
Understanding “Finnegans Wake” (Rose and Women: economic contribution, 169–70; and
O’Hanlon), 223 employment, 99, 172, 174; encouraged to settle
United Ireland: myth of Parnell, 92n2; offices in colonies, 172
destroyed, 86 Woolf, Virginia, 205; Between the Acts, 9, 195–96;
United Irishman, 109; opposition to prostitution, “Modern Fiction,” 194, 195; Mrs. Dalloway, 9,
107–8; “Ugly England” articles, 105 193–96; To the Lighthouse, 195
United Kingdom. See Britain/British Woolsey, Judge John M., 237, 238n6
World as Will and Representation, The (Schopen-
Valente, Joseph, 223 hauer), 180, 182, 185
Valéry, Paul, 1 Wrens of the Curragh, 101
Van Caspel, Paul, Bloomers on the Liffey, 223
Vanity Fair, 81 Yeats, W. B.: The Countess Cathleen, 126; “Easter
Veblen, Thorstein, 165 1916,” 55; On Baile’s Strand, 126; “The Red Rose
Virility, 46–49 Tree,” 126; rejects Joyce’s work, 123, 125; “Three
Visio Dei (Nicholas of Cusa), 184 Songs to One Burden,” 53. See also Anglo-Irish
Vision of the Last Judgment, A (Blake), 69 Revivalism
Vitagraph, 121 Young, Charles, Jim the Penman, 152
Volta, Cinematograph, 121, 131, 132n3 Yu-chen Lin, 9, 163–77, 243
voyeurism, 120, 122
Zanotti, Serenella, 206
Wagner, Richard, 136, 180, 185; The Flying Dutch- Zettels Traum (Schmidt), 9, 202–4
man, 151; Tristan and Isolde, 151 Zipes, Jack, 68
The Florida James Joyce Series
Edited by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

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