Children, since they are polymorphously perverse by nature and, furthermore, do not usually possess property, can be much nicer, wiser, and kinder than culture. In an early essay, Melanie Klein tells about a small boy who, informed how babies are made, is told that he can do it himself when he grows up. ‘“But then I would like to do it to Mama.” “That can’t be, Mama can’t be your wife [sic] for she is the wife of your papa, and then papa would have no wife.” “But we could both do it to her!”’ The heart, or hearts, of many-breasted Cybele would warm to that. (I wonder if Melanie Klein believed women became unhinged in the seventh month of pregnancy.)
I understand perfectly well that Sophocles’ play is about aspects of human relations that transcend the immediate circumstances of its composition. Oedipal conflict pre-dates Sophocles. On the other hand, the play isn’t the pure product of Sophocles’ unconscious either – art is not the dream of culture. But Sophocles and Rhode are both very much concerned with crude biologism vis-à-vis the Oedipal situation. Indeed, Rhode is so interested in paternity that he introduces a woman concerned about her own paternity in the first paragraph of a book that is supposed to be about maternity.
‘He was not your father.’ In the terms of the real world in which we live and where we try to cherish our dear ones, Oedipus does escape his fate. He does not murder the man who saved him from death, nurtured him, gave him a bicycle, had his teeth straightened, paid for driving lessons, etc. Nor does he impregnate the woman who wiped his bum, taught him to sneeze, and catered to all the indignities of childhood that effectively de-eroticise the relationship between mothers and sprogs. Oedipus’s genuine filial feelings are not outraged. His biological parents are perfect strangers. To emphasise the biological aspect of parenthood is to deny culture in a way that makes us less human. That dreadful question – how do we know whose child we are? – has dogged patriarcy since its inception, yet it is a profoundly absurd question. Put it another way: an American friend discovered her son had financed his grand tour of Europe by selling shots of his sperm to an AID agency. ‘My grandchildren!’ she cried and then fell silent, suddenly aware of the absurdity, to even think of them like that.
There never has been a way to know. Not truly know. Until just now, in the late twentieth century, when genetics can help us. And that is somewhat late in the day for the human race, which has been forced to rely for so long on its mother’s word when women are so notoriously duplicitous. But the question has been so pressing it has even resolved itself in metaphysics, in the invention of an omnipotent but happily non-material father to whom everyone can lay claim as a last resort.
‘Father’ is always metaphysics: a social artefact, a learned mode. Rhode is prepared to concede this, using his favourite device of the rhetorical question. ‘Who is my father, my mother, my brother, my sister? In a sense, the answer is simple – in regard to our mother, at least.’ (In regard to all the others, it may be unbearably complex.) ‘There is documentation; and the documentation is unlikely to have been faked.’
Unlikely, but not improbable. Raising the unwanted child of a sister, or a daughter, as one’s own is not uncommon among working-class families, often causing a good deal of existential anxiety. On the other hand, although a mother can fake the documentation of her condition, she cannot fake the physical event of birth.
The fact of maternity has become a good deal more problematic in the late twentieth century than it has been hitherto, however. For example: am I the mother of the fertilised egg I carry when it does not originate in my own ovary? I’d say: yes, of course. But where does the child who eventually comes out of this egg stand in relation to such a mother in terms of incest taboo? What degree of kinship would the Sphinx ascribe? If Jocasta had donated a fertilised egg to Merope, what then?
These are academic, even scholastic points. But they underpin a good deal of the discussion about mechanical intervention in the processes of maternity, where the culture of high-tech surgery manifests itself at its most ‘unnatural’ by taking on, and succeeding at, a job that Mother Nature shirked. And if this train of thought is followed to the end, we must conclude that ‘mother’ is also primarily a conceptual category. Just like ‘father’.
Yes, but. If these basic, physically determined relationships are not ‘natural’, then what is? And why do women, having given birth – the most natural thing in the world, as they constantly tell you at the antenatal clinic – so frequently go mad, as if the violent collision of culture and nature which is the event of childbirth shatters us?
Rhode does not really attempt to deal with this question. Instead, he manages to invest biological motherhood with an almost occult quality. Discussing Oedipus: ‘That he fails to see the old man he meets at the crossroads (and murders) as his father is not improbable; that he fails to sense that the bereft queen (whom he marries) might be his mother strains credulity.’
Why? Some young men find older women quite attractive, and though Jocasta might be a touch long in the tooth, she is still capable of giving Oedipus four healthy children, so she can’t be that old. Freud says the feeling of déjà vu is always inspired by the memory of the body of the mother – déjà vue. Perhaps Rhode feels that Oedipus, whilst having intercourse with Jocasta, was bound to have recognised his intra-uterine address. Or is he trying to warn young men off older women because if you screw them you will go blind? Because there is always the chance she might be his mother?
Surely it should be the other way around, anyway. Augustus John used to pat the heads of all the children whom he met when he walked down the King’s Road because he wasn’t sure who was or wasn’t his and didn’t like to leave anybody out. Similarly, we should all treat all old men with respect, just in case. Seed is a random thing. There isn’t the same margin for error with mothers, for whom it is a case of one egg, one birth, as a rule.
Meanwhile, Rhode is constructing an edifice of radiant surmise around that extraordinary clash of culture and nature, childbirth. He is in love with the gnomic. He is so pleased with that sentence about our eyes being pregnant with our mother’s babies that he repeats it twice, subtly varying it. He is rich in ideas that are marvellous, in the sense of the word that the surrealists used – magical, breathtaking, spurting from a sumptuous vein of his own unconscious. ‘Adam’s semen, the semina aetemitatis, contains all mankind,’ he says. He has been discussing seventeenth-century philosophers; it has induced a seventeenth-century turn of phrase – or indeed, of mind. And the entire book is self-consciously in the form of a series of meditations of a doctor-philosopher, a sort of Religio Medici for our times. He condenses images into a dense, suggestive mass; he adores infinity.
And then one stumbles over a piece of nonsense. ‘What does a father see when he looks at the beauty of his wife?’ he demands rhetorically. But fathers do not necessarily have wives, nor, if they do, are these wives necessarily beautiful. I think I can see how this sentence has come about; Rhode is so concerned with the rhetoric of it he has not engaged in a little practical criticism. I suspect it ought to read: ‘What does a father see when he looks at the beauty of his child’s mother?’
The sentence remains a grid of patriarchal definitions: the mother is presented solely in terms of the gaze and vanity of the father, to whose credit it redounds to boast a ‘beautiful’ mate, and of her biological relation to both subjects. But at least it is no longer nonsense and the little bit of gratuitous romanticism about beauty suggests Rhode is really a nice man, even if carried away by his own rhetoric when he contemplates the fact of our arrival on this earth in its blood, its banality, its glory.
In fact, its romanticism is one of the most gripping things about the book, which could, perhaps, be subtitled ‘A Psychiatrist in Search of the Soul’. Rhode is fairly sure he can locate that slippery concept even in the womb. ‘Reluctantly I have come to the view that our heritage at infancy is some articulated yet unconscious Platonic idea, a necessary substrate to our capacity for having experiences.’ H’m.
But then we come to the mad women themselves, in their bereft abandonment. He quotes from Etienne-Dominique Esquirol, who wrote down stark descriptions of women in breakdown in the 1830s. ‘A woman feeding her child was startled by a clap of thunder. Her milk dried up. She lost her reason.’ This makes Rhode think of a painting by Giorgione, The Tempest. It makes me think of Munch, The Scream. When he arrives at the voices of the women in the puerperal breakdown unit themselves, it is scarcely tolerable. This is suffering beyond metaphor:
She just screamed and screamed when I tried to feed her. I thought, it’s my own child and she doesn’t want me. In the end, I didn’t want to get up in the morning. I felt so guilty. I didn’t feel capable of looking after her. My neighbour fed her and I sat there and cried.
‘When I’m washing her clothes and squeezing them out, I think I’m wringing her neck.’ A woman describes a recurring dream: ‘I remember closing my eyes – and I could see a knife sticking into a baby. I could see someone swinging the baby in our hall at home, swinging the baby round and round in the hall.’
Language crumbles under the weight of this pain. Mystification of this pain is a lie. This is what it is to be a mother and be mad.
(1988)
Envoi: Bloomsday
Now I will make my own legend and stick to it.
Letter from James Joyce to Lady Gregory, 1904
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual, but – what is Dublin? Has it made up its mind? Yet if the Thames, as is well known, is Old Father, then Dublin’s river is as famous a woman, is Anna Liffey, with her broad curves gracious as those of a fin de siècle bum. On 16 June, the name of the bridge at Chapelizod was officially changed to the Anna Livia Bridge, thus putting the unequivocal sex of Mother Liffey squarely on the map at last, even if in tribute to Dublin’s most protean if least-grateful son, who irreverently changed ‘Liffey’ to ‘Livia’ after a Triestine housewife.
‘. . . riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay . . . ‘Invitation to the swell and ebb of sleeping and waking, to the world inside the book, which is the world, which is the river, which is the book. And so on. But Finnegans Wake is postgraduate stuff, still; as it turns out, Ulysses is for everybody.
Dubliners wished one another: ‘A Happy Bloomsday.’ Florists cashed in on a pardonable pun: ‘Buy a bloom for Bloomsday,’ and many, Anthony Burgess for one, sported Blazes Boylan buttonholes. Some said it should have been a national holiday. The entire inner city was en fête and, no, it did not rain. Thus Dublin ingeniously secularised and took back unto itself the first authentic post-modernist literary festival, a day devoted to the celebration of the fictional texts of James Joyce, in which the author took a back seat to his inventions.
For though 1982 is his centenary year, Joyce was not born nor did he die on 16 June, but chose to moor Ulysses to this point in time and place because, on that day, in 1904, Nora Barnacle consented to walk out with him. You could say that, on that day, Joyce’s real life began for his greatest novels make of the role of Husband the peak and summit of masculine aspiration. Joyce was one of nature’s husbands, incomplete until he found his wife, and none the less so because he did not marry her for a decade or two after; a husband, still, in his unconsummated dreams of cuckoldry.
On Bloomsday, though, it was not Bloom’s imaginary and antlered head that graced the postage stamps, but the Brancusi drawing of Joyce’s own, the gaunt, bespectacled, subtly odd, familiar face of the legend. But I prefer that infinitely moving photograph of young Joyce, every inch a Jim, taken when he was 22 in that very blessed 1904 itself, hands in his pockets, almost a Boy’s Own Paperly heroic stance. Such an undeniably handsome face you see why Nora fell, and his eyes not yet dimmed nor hidden away behind glasses. ‘Asked what he was thinking when C. P. Curran photographed him, Joyce replied: “I was wondering would he lend me five shillings”.’1
Note Joyce’s syntax, here. His English, as he well knew, had been moulded by another tongue, by one not even his mother tongue since her monoglot English, too, had been moulded by the language long lost within it. (The name of Dublin, Baile Atha Cliath, in Irish so dignified and remotely foreign, turns, when Anglicised, into the almost comically accessible Ballyattaclee: the English knew how to make the languages of the ethnic minorities of the British Isles ridiculous.)
This questing young man is already determined on earth-shattering fame: ‘Now I will make my legend and stick to it.’ He stares at us with almost a Jack London look of purpose. He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.
‘Aren’t there words enough for you in English?’ the Bliznakoff sisters asked Joyce. ‘Yes . . . ,’ he replied. ‘But they aren’t the right ones.’
However many there were, there would never be the right ones, since Joyce spoke a language that had been translated into English and must always have suffered a teasing feeling that most of the meaning had been lost in the process. Somewhere, perhaps in the European languages, lurked that unimaginably rich original.
What is more, we carry our history on our tongues and the history of the British Empire came to exercise a curious kind of brake upon our expression in the English language, as it became less and less the instrument of feeling and more and more that of propaganda. Something even odder has happened since Joyce’s day, in these last years, when English, in the great world, has become synonymous with the language spoken in America, which, though it uses the same words, is an entirely other communications system. Indeed, American threatens to leave us entirely stranded, now, on a linguistic beach of history with English turning into a quaint dialect, another Old World survival, like Castillian Spanish, stiff outmoded, unapposite.
And what shall we do then? Why, we shall be thrust back on Joyce, who never took English seriously and so he could continue, as we will do.
However, the world-wide provenance of English, its ubiquitous if fading functionability, the reason why there were enough words in it, even if they had to be kicked around a bit and shown their place, is inseparable from the history of the British Empire, when English needed to be in a lot of different places at the same time. Happy for Shakespeare he did not speak Serbo-Croat and his Queen embarked on a policy of expansion. If you speak a language nobody understands, you can babble away as much as you like and nobody will hear you. Even had he wished to use it, the grand but archaic language of Ireland would not have suited a man who wished to straddle the world.
In Ulysses, only an Englishman is fluent in Irish. ‘I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself,’ mutters a crone addressed in her native speech.
On the other hand, the Celtic revivalists were theoretically correct. The only way to get us off their backs was to ensure we could not understand what they were saying. But unfortunately, we needed to hear them and, by the turn of the century, Ireland was already committed to that tongue of the wicked stepmother – fortunately for us. And this is the tongue that Joyce systematically deformed, excavated, imploded, you might say; he made sufficient space within that appropriated language to accommodate the next phase of history.
He sheared away the phoney rhetoric that had been accreting over the centuries. In Ulysses, he transformed English into something intimate, domestic, demotic, a language fit not for heroes but for husbands, then did it over again, stripped it of its linguistic elements, in fact, and put it together in a polyglot babble that, perhaps, begins to approximate something like a symphonic Euro-language, in which English is no more than a dominant theme. He disestablished English.
Although American academia was especially prominent among the massed scholarship arriving in Dublin for Bloomsday Week and the VIII International James Joyce Symposium in order to get their heads down over a susurrating mass of learned papers, this question of the disestablishment of English is, of course, not an American problem. The American language had some
thing exponential built into it from the start, although the chances are that American will harden its arteries somewhat if the United States dons the mantle of world leadership with too much enthusiasm. All the same, there is nothing culturally troubling about Joyce for Americans. There is for me. Troubling and consoling.
I do believe that, had Joyce opted for a career as a singer, as Nora wished, I, for one, as a writer in post-imperialist Britain, would not even have had the possibility of a language, for Joyce it was who showed how one could tell the story of whatever it is that is going to happen next. Not that he would have cared. Whatever it was he thought he was up to, it certainly wasn’t making it easier for the British to explain their past and their future to themselves. He wasn’t doing it for our sakes, he made that clear.
Nevertheless, he carved out a once-and-future language, restoring both the simplicity it had lost and imparting a complexity. The language of the heart and the imagination and the daily round and the dream had been systematically deformed by a couple of centuries of use as the rhetorical top-dressing of crude power. Joyce Irished, he Europeanised, he decolonialised English: he tailored it to fit this century, he drove a giant wedge between English Literature and literature in the English language and, in doing so, he made me (forgive this personal note) free. Free not to do as he did, but free to treat the Word not as if it were holy but in the knowledge that it is always profane. He is in himself the antithesis of the Great Tradition. You could also say, he detached fiction from one particular ideological base, and his work has still not yet begun to bear its true fruit. The centenarian still seems avant-garde.
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