Whether the results of their labours should be called "novels" is a highly debatable point: it is more likely that they are written in new forms for which there is, as yet, no agreed generic name. There is a strongly parodic element at work in Ulysses, mocking the heroic militarism of epic, the supernatural wonders of folk-tale, the psychological verisimilitude of the novel, but the form which results is in no way confined by these targets. Due homage is paid to those targets: their working conventions are laid bare, in an active exploration of each mode which is also an exercise in literary criticism: however, the parody is no merely temporary transgression, but a gesture which precedes a radical break. Ulysses illustrates the dictum that every great work of literature not only destroys one genre but helps to create another. Radical parody of this kind has the effect of speeding up this natural development of literary form: its ensuing narrative frees itself suffi-ciently from the targeted texts to constitute a fresh and autonomous form,39 a further proof that (in literature, as in politics) the urge to destroy may also be a creative urge.
What is enacted is an energetic protest against those who would convert a once-enabling form into a life-denying formula: and that protest is based on the conviction that all genres – not just the epic basis of Ulysses– are mere scaffoldings, which may permit a new text to be created, but which should be unsentimentally dismantled when the work is well done. On this marvellous mutation, Fredric Jameson has a pertinent comment:
The failure of a generic structure, such as epic, to reproduce itself not only encourages a search for those substitute textual functions that appear in its wake, but more particularly alerts us to the historical ground, now no longer existent, in which the original structure was meaningful.40
Yet even this statement is scarcely enough for, despite all the mockery of those militarist elements of The Odyssey which have been superannuated, there is also in Ulysses a genuine refunctionalization of other, less disposable aspects. If classical epic depicted an individual risking all for the birth of a nation, Ulysses will instead present a hero living as the embodiment of community values. If bodies were pulverized in ancient epic to support its ideals, Ulysses will, chapter by chapter, celebrate each distinctive organ, offering an "epic of the body" as an image of the restored human community.
A part of each earlier form survives in the assemblage that is Ulysses, but it would be foolish to name the book for one or other of these genres. Insofar as it is susceptible of generic analysis, it might dynamically interelate not just with Homer or Rabelais but also with Borges or Rushdie, serving as a rallying-point for the emergence of a new narrative mode. For Joyce, the shattering of older forms permitted the breakthrough of a new content, a post-imperial writing. The danger, as always, is that conventional critics will seek to recolonize that writing, or any other baffling text by an Irish artist or a Latino or an Indian, translating its polyvocal tones back into the too-familiar, too-reassuring terms of the day-before-yesterday.
Another, even greater, danger in interpreting Ulysses would be to treat it as a "Third World" text which is, in all aspects, the very antithesis of a "First World" narrative.41 Yet the Ireland which Joyce chronicled had its share in the making of empire, as well as of its victims. It was, in that respect, a vivid reminder of the relentless reciprocity by which one set of experiences is bound to the other. If Europe scarcely has any meaning without the suffering of the native peoples who contributed to its opulence, and if the "Third World" is but an effect of European desires, then Ireland affords a field of force in which the relation between the two is enacted within the community.
Europe, after all, was the creator of both the dialectics of liberation and the ethic of slave-holding: what characterizes Joycean modernism is its awareness of the need to write both of these narratives simultaneously Each situation has its unique aspects and to construct the "Third World" exclusively as a manageable other of the "First" is, at a certain point, to submit to the very tyranny the phrase was designed to deplore. There is, however, a linked and even greater danger: that of conceiving the encounter as of two distinct worlds facing each other, rather than as social worlds which are part of one another, though differently constituted. Ireland's historical disadvantage, being a European people who were nonetheless colonized, afforded it a remarkable artistic advantage. The country was, and still is, one of those areas where two codes most vividly meet: and, as such, its culture offers itself as an analytical tool at the very twilight of European artistic history. It, too, was asked to remain marginal, so that other peoples could feel themselves central. Now in a position to negotiate between colonizer and colonized, it could be forgiven for strategically seeing itself as a centre. If the "west" turns to the exploited peripheries in the desire for a return of all that it has repressed in itself, the post-colonies turn to the west as to yet another command.42 Ireland, in between, provided Joyce with a more visibly open site of contest, and a reminder that each side in that contest needed the other for a completed account of its own meanings.
The great absences in the texts of European modernism are those native peoples whose exploitation made the representations of European magnificence possible. Even writers such as Conrad or Forster who showed some awareness of the issue were unable to render with comprehensive conviction the lives of Africans or Indians.
Irish writers of the time gave English readers some inkling of the life behind that blankness: and they could do this because they wrote in the language of the imperialist, about what it was like to grow to maturity in an occupied country. Radical modernism, as practised by a Joyce or a Rushdie, has been a prolonged attempt to render this accounting, to write a narrative of the colonizers and colonized, in which the symbiotic relation between the two becomes manifest. This is usually based on a recognition by the members of a nomadic native intelligentsia of all that has been repressed in the imperial texts and all that has gone uncomprehended in the native fables. The two orders of reality, when taken together onto a third plane, make for a new level of meaning.
Ireland, in Joyce's schema, was one of those liminal zones, between old and new, where all binary thinking was nullified, and where there could be a celebration of manly women and of womanly men. He recognized the extent to which nationalism was a necessary phase to restore to an occupied people a sense of purpose: and he distinguished sharply between the xenophobic nationalism of the imperial powers and the strategic resort to nationalism by the forces of resistance. The men in the pub in "Cyclops" are a case in point. They mimic English Francophobia ("set of dancing masters"), but they are not anti-foreign, evincing a real sympathy for people of colour living under the lash in other corners of empire. Humanist critics like Richard Ellmann who castigate their chauvinism have failed to note that their range of reference is not Eurocentric, but far wider than that of most humanists themselves.43 The law, which seems established to many Anglo-American readers of Ulysses, did not appear as such to Joyce, being merely a tyranny based on official terror.
Nevertheless, Joyce in Ulysses never fell into the trap of equating nationalism with modernization: indeed, his spiritual project was to attempt to imagine a meaningful modernity which was more open to the full range of voices in Ireland than any nationalism which founded itself on the restrictive apparatus of the colonial state. If the patriots cloaked the fundamental conservatism of their movement in a rhetoric of radicalism, Joyce more cannily chose to dress his utterly innovative narrative in the conservative garb of a classical narrative. This led many critics to the mistaken view that he offered his critique of nationalism from the vantage-point of a European humanist. A close reading of Ulysses will, however, throw up far more evidence of its anti-colonial themes.
As one of a subject people, Stephen can empathize fully with the Jews, whose behaviour he recalls from his time in Paris: "Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures".44 Here is another oppressed, landless people, whose gestures, clothing and inherited structures are not their own, but the cast-offs
of overlords. One of these overlords, Mr. Deasy, repeats Haines's view of history as a perpetual search for scapegoats, and he too blames various women (McMurrough's wife, and Kitty O'Shea) for Irish wrongs. The repeated offloading of blame emphasizes the need for one who will incorporate all the despised elements in himself: Leopold Bloom.
Before his advent, however, Stephen takes his walk along Sandy-mount Strand, dragging up ideas and images from his unconscious as he looks out over the sea. Rejecting the ideal of a restored Gaelic culture, he prefers creation ex nihilo. Tramping on the dead shells of the past, he intuits a radically different future, and so he rejects Mr. Deasy's stasis for a world of flux. At present, he seems able to play every part except his own, but the attempt to seize power by the act of writing has begun. Stephen's weighty self-consciousness has often intimidated readers, who may not appreciate that the portraiture is largely satiric. Joyce is dramatizing a consciousness suffering the over-effects of a recent university education, and immobilized accordingly.
Stephens style of interior monologue is "writerly", developing at the instigation of words, unlike that of Bloom which will respond to the pressure of actual experience. Stephens rejection of the quotidian ("Houses of decay. . .")45 is most unJoycean, and will not be ratified by Bloom. A painfully provincial intellectual, Stephen strikes aesthetic poses in hopes of investing himself with an innate authority, but he has been slighted even by a serving-woman. He is shrewd enough in his impersonations, however, to sense an echoing falseness in the bravado of his English rulers, all mimicking the ideal type (which they are not) in a "paradise of pretenders".46 Mulligan, a degraded instance, has seized the key to the tower, whose rent Stephen nevertheless pays, while the Englishman goes free of charge. This overlord and his Irish toady strike Stephen as a neo-colonial act, "the panthersahib and his pointer".47
At this stage, after just three chapters, Stephen disappears into the book, which becomes thereafter an account of why his consciousness cannot be further elaborated in that society. The consciousness of Stephen certainly exceeds all available literary styles, which it wears with a richly ironic sense of their formal inappropriateness. Where a youth in an English novel would probably quantify and test the solidity of the landscape, Stephen sees it as a mere theatre for the improvisation of a free consciousness, a summons to reverie. He is the first instance in Ulysses of a succession of characters – Bloom, Gerty MacDowell, various unnamed narrators, Molly – all of whom will be doomed to express real enough feeling in inauthentic form.
Finding himself nowhere, Stephen attempts to fabricate an environment: "signatures of all things I am here to read".48 But the problem is that his learning is more dense than his setting. He is a dire example of the provincial intellectual weighed down by the learning of the European literary tradition. His world, like that of his colleagues later in the National Library, is a parade of second-hand quotations, of gestures copied from books, of life usurped by art. Joyce may have used English with a lethal precision impossible to most of his English rivals, but he was well aware of the humiliation felt by the assimilé who speaks the language with a degrading, learned correctness: and he had a corresponding sense of the ways in which such persons softened raw realities by the euphemisms of an. Here he mocks the manner in which Stephens consciousness is at the mercy of literature. Joyce was himself often accused of developing his narrative at the instigation of words rather than felt experience, but this is true strictly and only of Stephen. Joyce's own texts are profoundly dissatisfied with available forms and words, and they refuse any final homage to art, celebrating instead those aspects of life which generally elude literature.
Far from being an autistic surrealist, as early detractors complained, Joyce felt that he struggled under far too many controls. Like Stephen, he tried in his art to reconstruct a world out of barbarism, to begin again with Finn again. His problem in handling Stephen was that faced before him by Synge with Christy Mahon, by Shaw with Keegan, by Yeats with his personae. to return a figure of such renovated consciousness back into an unredeemed community would be tantamount to humiliating that figure and destroying that consciousness. Previous writers had solved that problem by refusing the return: the sensibility of their heroes became an end in itself rather than a way of reshaping a world, and their final glamour resided in the audience's awareness that no form could be found commensurate with their own capacity for wonder, that no words could represent their heightened inner state. Joyce, however, came to this point relatively early in Ulysses, and so, in the fourth chapter, with the onset of Bloom, he shifted his investigation from the mind of Stephen Dedalus to the setting which thwarts its articulation.
Yet what he finds, almost at once, is that there is no "society" to report, even within Bloom's own household in Eccles Street. A few pages of interior monologue are sufficient to make clear that the Blooms can never know one another as the reader will come to know each of them. Indeed, the tragedy of the interior monologue will be revealed to lie in the counterpoint between the richness of a person's thoughts and the slender opportunities for sharing those thoughts with others in conversation. What is depicted in the ensuing chapters could hardly be called a society in the conventional sense, being rather a gathering of fugitives, of submerged groups, of clamorous competing voices and of speakers who do not often listen to one another. If the traditional European novel has a plot which hinges on a number of crucial dialogues, then this is not such a narrative at all, being constructed more around monologues, soliloquies and reveries.
What is evoked in "Calypso" is the world of the outsider Bloom, who registers his distance from the social consensus by use of the word "they" to describe his fellow humans. His Jewishness, like his Irishness and his femininity, resides in the experience of being perpetually defined and described by others, as whatever at any given moment they wish him to be. In part, this is because he remains an enigmatic open space. There is no initial physical description of him and, over the hundreds of pages to follow, scant details are let slip, beyond the fact that he has a gentle voice, sad eyes, and is of medium height and weight. If acquaintances are more readily classifiable than intimates, he retains some of the mystery and indescribability of a close friend.
Something similar might also be said of the Dublin through which he moves: its settings are only shadowily evoked, and a knowledge of them is assumed. This was a recognized feature of epic narrative, whose environments were well-known to auditors in no need of predictable descriptions. The assumed intimacy of oral narration is even more blatantly a feature of a printed text like Ulysses. To address anyone, a person must presume to be already inside another mind even before conversation begins, and so Joyce must fictionalize his reader. Yet, though he knows the traditional protocols which permit entry, his whole enterprise is to subvert them: for he wants not only to enter his reader's consciousness, but to alter it.
Bloom is rather wary of literature and of its tendency to soften hard realities. No sooner does he enjoy a vision of an eastern girl playing a dulcimer, as in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", than he applies the brakes to that vision. Yet, although he refuses to use books to "read" life, he is quite keen to convert experience into metaphor, likening a poster on a nearby window to a patch over an eye. He thinks of jotting his wife's sayings onto his shirt cuff, as a prelude to including them in a story: but Joyce's own reservations about written literature beautifully negate all this, when he ends the chapter with Bloom wiping his bottom clean in the toilet with a page from Titbits. Writing is deathly, and in this book, the letter kills; while it is speech, especially the silent speech of thought, which seems to issue from the uncensored depths of the unconscious. Bloom's language is as oral as Stephen's writerly: like all adepts of an oral culture, he uses balanced, rhythmic language and cites proverbs and old saws as an aid to memory and adjudication.
Perhaps the most significant oral narrative cited in Ulysses is John F. Taylor's speech on imperialism and dispossession, a speech which described Moses brin
ging "the tables of the law in the language of the outlaw"49 – and the phrase might be taken to indicate a new dispensation for literature, written, however, in the experimental language of the rebel. Yet the speech is couched in pure Victorianese, scarcely an assured basis for its own separatist argument, and admired more for its style than its content. Joyce may imply that the Celtic love of style for its own sake is masturbatory. He makes equally clear that the fragments of endless quotation ("Lay on Macduff") bespeak a nervous provincialism and the pedantry practised by a repressed people who fear that they may be second-rate. Stephen, of course, is affected by the same virus, but at least his quotations generally occur in internal monologue. Vast learning in the newspaper office is put in the service of futility, in a world where conversations lack a central set of overarching themes.
In the National Library scene of "Scylla and Charybdis", the narrator manages to mangle the names of the protagonists and to mock the widespread fashion for pseudonyms among men who fear to become themselves. The conversation, accordingly, is smothered by quotations. The Quaker librarian Lyster is treated as a man more concerned to drop names than advance arguments. He talks in essayistic clichés which show how writing can corrupt speech. In his library, as in so many others, little reading but much talking ensues. Joyce presents its "coffined thoughts" in "mummycases"50 as deathly (in keeping with the earlier link made between printed sheets and defecation). Stephen complained in "Proteus" of having to breathe "dead breaths", which might now in the library be seen as the endless quotations from the dead authors that swirl all around him. His own refusal to publish his theory of Hamlet is his way of refusing to embalm his idea. The library in this chapter parallels the graveyard in "Hades", with the librarian in the role of the gate-keeper and Stephen's review of the coffined thoughts recalling Blooms musings over the dead.
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