James Joyce: Commentary (10)

John P. Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse UP 1991), writes of Beckett’s critical appraisal of Joyce: ‘MacGreevy […] is generally accredited with introducing Beckett to Joyce. MacGreevy later repatriated himself and became director of the National Gallery; he wrote a book about the national importance of Jack Yeats that Beckett found difficult to praise, but, out of obligation, tried to do so.’ (p.11.) Harrington quotes J. C. C. Mays’s reading of MacGreevy’s depreciation of Yeats and the Revival, together with O’Faolain’s derogation of the stay-at-home Irish writers, and adds: ‘By the 1980s, the centrality of that position for an Irish writer, that depreciation of Yeats and appreciation of Europeanisation, came around again in a general program of revisionism of local literary and cultural history.’ (p.13.) ‘Far from being solely transition’s offspring, Beckett’s earliest criticism, poetry, and obiter dicta are profoundly entangled in Irish literary issues, including both literary precedence and consequent literary agenda.’ (p.14.) Harrington reads ‘Dante .. Bruno … Vico … Joyce’ as a careful rescuing of Joyce from those contexts: “The danger is in the neatness of identifications … The conception of Philosophy and Philology as a pair of nigger minstrels out of the Teatro dei Piccoli is soothing, like the contemplation of a carefully folded ham-sandwich … This social and historical classification is clearly adapted by Mr. Joyce as a structural convenience - or inconvenience. His position is in no way a philosophical one.”’ (Beckett; here p.16.)

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David G. Wright, Ironies of Ulysses (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1991): ‘The most substantial link between Ulysses and an antecedent text is its relationship to the Odyssey. Joyce stressed to early would-be readers of his novel that they should assimilate Homer’s text before they embarked on Ulysses. [Cites JJ’s letter to Aunt Josephine, 14 Oct. 1921; Letters, 1966, Vol. 1, p.174.] Joyce’s debt to the Odyssey have been extensively catalogued [by] Gilbert, Ellmann […] and Michael Seidel. The question of the centrality and purposes of Joyce’s use of Homeric material in Ulysses nevertheless remains vexed; but this question may have been deliberately devised by Joyce as a problem which no reader of his novel could [106] solve. One reason why Joyce might have encouraged this doubt about his intentions is the degree of flexibility which it permits him in the use of irony. […/] That Joyce’s deployment of Homeric material often becomes ironic in the sense developed in this study can hardly be questioned. The Homeric presence in Ulysses operates as an insistent focus for semantic disjunction, and constantly affects the implications of Joyce’s text. Like irony itself, the Homeric material works on a wide range of scales, from minute to all-embracing, superficial to profound. Stephen’s first spoken words in Ulysses - “Tell me, Mulligan” - recall a common opening phrase in epic but, in particular, precisely echo the opening of the Odyssey as rendered in the Butcher and Lang translation, which Joyce used: “Tell me, Muse”. At the other extreme, Joyce’s Homeric schema provides an underlying structure massive enough to support the considerable weight of Ulysses. / Certain episodes of Ulysses seem particularly saturated in Homeric details. […]. (pp.106-07.)

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John Banville, ‘Survivors of Joyce’, in Augustine Martin, ed., James Joyce: The Artist and the Labyrinth (London: Ryan Publishing 1990): ‘The figure of Joyce towers behind us, a great looming Easter Island effigy of the Father. In the old days it was considered fitting that the children should honour the parent, and I could, indeed, spend the next fifteen or twenty minutes paying tribute to that stone [73] Nobodaddy at my shoulder. But when I think of Joyce I am split in two. To one side there falls the reader, kneeling speechless in filial admiration, and love; to the other side, however, the writer stands, gnawing his knuckles, not a son, but a survivor. […] (pp.73-74.) ‘Do not mistake me; I am not criticising. I believe the trick earthly, is the true mark of his genius. As a reader, I can only applaud. As a writer, I feel, to paraphrase Simon Dedalus, that I have been left where Jesus left the Jews. Nor is this a criticism: it’s no business of Joyce to haul the rest of us on to the raft, nor even to give us a peek inside the pagoda. It’s just that it is cold out here, and, half the time, it feels like drowning.’ (pp.73-74, 80-81.) ‘In Finnegans Wake, is it the element of the crossword puzzle that attracts us? Much has been made of the mephistophelian [76] pact between Joyce’s work and academe, and it is true that without the attentions of the academics, much in Joyce would have gone unexplained. (The corollary of this is that without the surety of an academic posterity, Joyce might have done things differently; but that is another lecture). What the burners of midnight oil glean from the Wake, however are mere facts. They are interesting facts, they are sometimes beautiful facts, but still, they are only facts. Edmund Wilson shrewdly pointed out that, in the case of The Waste Land, the more widely we read in other works, the more references we spot, and the more references we spot, the more The Waste Land diminishes. Something the same is true of Finnegans Wake. The more of it we decipher, the more we “use it up”. Of course, it is not serious diminishment; but anyone who has ever completed a crossword knows that curious, ashen sense of futility, of nausea, almost, that comes along with the “solution”. / I hasten to add that I am not suggesting that understanding of a work of art makes one feel sick; I do believe, however, that what we come to know about a work is simply that: a knowing about, a peripheral knowledge. Knowing a thing, however intimately, however deeply, is not always the same as understanding it. We are back to the boy with the dismantled Swiss watch. / We are asking: what is it fascinates us about Ulysses and Finnegans Wake? - what quality is it in such works that prompts us to set them up as canonical? Wallace Stevens believed, or professed to believe, that in our post-religious age, poetry could be the supreme, sustaining fiction without which Man would perish. Works such as The Waste Land and Ulysses have taken on, or have been conferred with, a biblical quality: they have become the Psalms, they have become the Book. Why? What constitutes the quality of the numinous in them? What is it that speaks to our need for texts, for Holy Writ? / I believe it is a quality of closure.’ (pp.76-77; for further remarks on Joyce’s style, &c., see quotations under Banville, supra.)

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Bruce Arnold, The Scandal of Ulysses (London: Sinclair-Stevenson 1991): ‘In 1977 a re-editing of Ulysses was begun. It appeared to conclude in 1984, when the results were published, together with a further copyright claim, reinforced in 1986 by the appearance of a commercial or trade edition of the work, now sold worldwide. Academically, this achievement can be debated, argued over, criticised. But as a legal claim to a new copyright it can only be challenged when the general James Joyce copyright runs out, next January.’ (p.xiv.) ‘It was absurd to imagine that he could deal objectively with the existing third typescript, in terms of making it identical with the earlier two copies, as it is to imagine that Turner could arrive at a varnishing day at the Royal Academy and not bring out his paints and brushes and do more work on his allegedly finished canvasses.’ (p.16.) ‘The fact is that James Joyce was faced with a fair and positive offer from Sylvia Beach in 1921, having seen that his book would not succeed elsewhere, and he had to address the unusual problem for a renowned writer - as he was then becoming - of having a publisher but of not having the book, at least in corrected form and complete.’ (p.17.) ‘[H]e expressed extreme irritation over the printer’s errors and wondered whether these would be perpetuated in future editions. But he never complained about the overall text of the book. […] there is no sense in which he viewed what he was currently doing […] as other than the finalised version of Ulysses which he wanted to see in print. [… a] view greatly reinforced by the changes which he made on the proofs.’ (p.23-24.) ‘In all his correspondence at this time, Joyce referred frequently to the errors in Ulysses and was clearly frustrated by their number. Yet there is never any question of there being deeper textual problems.’ (p.28.) ‘The 1934 copyright claim was therefore made for the unpublished balance of “Oxen of the Sun”, together with the final four episodes. The differences between the parts of Ulysses which were actually copyrighted and the version of Ulysses as printed in 1934 are more substantial than the differences between the accepted, pre-Gabler version of the book and his revised version.’ (p.84.) ‘Gabler claims that the 1922 text comes closest to what Joyce intended, but that it does not offer Ulysses “as he wrote it”, offering no analysis of this statement whatsoever.’ Further ‘“[quoting Gabler]: By common consent, an editor chooses as the copytext for a critical edition a document text of highest overall authority. This eliminates the first edition of 1922 as copytext for a critical edition of Ulysses’ [Gabler].” Arnold asks: ‘How would Gabler deal with Plato?’ (p.139.) Of ‘the word know to all men’ upon which Richard Ellmann touches in his 1986 Preface, Arnold writes: ‘It would be a major alteration indeed if the haunting subtlety of Stephen not knowing the word known to all men and searching for it, not as a word but as a reality in his life, were to be known and expressed by him long before he confronts his mother.’ (p.145.) Further, Ellmann’s preface appraises Gabler’s edition as the search for ‘an ideal text, such as Joyce would have constructed in ideal conditions’ and an attempt to ‘deduce from other versions what the lost documents would have contained.’ (here p.149.) Note: Arnold cites ‘A Crux in the New Edition’, a paper given at the 1986 James Joyce conference in Monaco where Ellmann reports on Gabler’s inclusion of ‘the word known to all men’ in “Scylla & Charybdis” as follows: ‘he thought I would be pleased.’ Arnold remarks that Ellmann was far from pleased and put his doubts to Gabler, ‘but to no avail’. Further recommended him to ‘[p]ut it among the prominent variants at the back.’ [124]. John Kidd’s intervention is discussed at 103ff. Note: In his 1986 “Afterword”, Gebler speaks of a ‘continuous manuscript text’ (here p.136-39.)

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Derek Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge UP 1990), Preface: ‘Joyce is the most international of writers in English. He shares with Shakespeare a global reputation, but unlike Shakespeare, he crossed many national boundaries in his working career, in his outlook, and in his writing - extending his reach further and further until in Finnegans Wake he attempted to embrace the languages and cultures of the entire human community.’ (p.ix; quoted in Daryl Clarke, UG Diss., UU 2006.) Introduction [on Dubliners]: ‘The content (which we are accustomed to thinking of as the raison d’etre of fiction) serves as a vehicle for the manner of telling, the slow release of information, the hints and presuppositions that we are incited to elaborate on, the rhythm of mental deliberation that propels the narrative forward, and our present concern - the controlled language that through its spareness possesses a hair-trigger suggestiveness. This is not to say that Joyce has reversed the relationship between content and form as it exists in every other story, but rather that he has revealed, by going to an extreme, how unstable that relationship is; and if many readers remain convinced that their pleasure comes from being presented with the actual events of the story, for which the particular mode of writing is merely a skillfully contrived channel, this is probably because our activities as readers are usually more complex than the terms in which we represent those activities to ourselves.’ (p.4-5.) [Cont.]

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Derek Attridge (The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 1990, Preface - cont.: ‘Joyce is engaged in the double task which faces all realistic writers: on the one hand, he is working to produce the convincing effect of a certain kind of mind in a particular emotional state and, on the other, to contrive a narrative progression which gives the reader an active role in piecing together clues and wrestling with uncertainties and puzzles. The demands of naturalism are for a degree of coherence, a completely non-literary style, and a minimum of information (since the character [Eveline] has no need to verbalise to herself things she already knows); the demands of the narrative are for clarity, an original and forceful style, and the gradual provision of judiciously organised nuggets of information that will create an onward drive toward revelation and resolution […] At the same time, however, Joyce heightens our awareness of the techniques he so skilfully deploys by raising questions about our strategies of interpretation. And to be aware of how much is going on in this apparently simple style - this is part of Joyce’s revolution - is not to puncture the illusion of reality but to enjoy the many-sidedness of language and story-telling, and to relish the readerly activity one is called upon to perform.’ (p.8.) [Cont.]

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Derek Attridge (The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, 1990, Preface [cont.]): ‘The Wake will never be mastered, never dominated or exhausted by interpretation, nor will it every offer itself up unproblematically as a single set of meanings; and if a sense of control and singleness of meaning is crucial to a reader’s enjoyment, frustration will be the only result. More than this, however, the Wake teaches us, in a most delightful way, that no text can be mastered, that meaning is not something solid and unchanging beneath the words, attainable once and for all. All reading, the Wake insists, is an endless interchange: the reader is affected by the text at the same time as the text is affected by the reader, and neither retains a secure identity upon which the other can depend. / Another Wakean lesson is that different readers find different things in a text, making it impossible to hypothesise a “typical” reader; and more probably more than any other book in existence Finnegans Wake responds superbly to group readings[…]’ (p.11.) ‘No subtle tone of voice, no imagined human situation, could make all these meanings valid at the same time: Finnegans Wake explodes the belief that language, to be meaningful, must be subservient to a singleness of intention and subjectivity.’ (p.13.)

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Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Methuen 1988): ‘[…] Joyce, perhaps more than any other writer, exploits the uncertain play between the two contradictory guises in which language presents itself to its readers: as a system of forms, in completely arbitrary relation to the meanings that those forms carry, and as impulses of imitation and motivation, constantly moving toward (though never reaching) a solidification of the connections between the sounds or shapes of language and their significances. (The first pulls literature toward the pole of “art”, the second toward the pole of “nature”.) […. F]or Saussure, apparent instances of motivation such as onomatopoeia are marginal phenomena, but for Jakobson they represent, in his phrase, “the essence of language”. Joyce’s texts contradict neither. It is the principle of arbitrariness, allowing infinite combinatory possibilities of form and content, which provides Joyce with his material and scope, while it is the principle of motivation, the never-fading desire on the part of the language-user to find or to make a system of signs in which form [11] and content indissolubly cohere, which produces the energy and pleasure by which Joyce’s texts, and their readings, are propelled.’ (pp.11-12.) [Cont.]

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Derek Attridge (Peculiar Language, 1988) - cont.: ‘ Joyce’s dexterity in handling the sounds and patterns of English is evident on every page of his published work, but one epside of Ulysses is explicitly concerned with music and imitative sound, the chapter known from the Odyssean scheme as “Sirens”. We can expect here not only Joyce’s customary linguistic agility and ingenuity but also some consideration - if only by example - of language’s capacity to imitate directly the world of the senses. [Gives the example of Leopold Bloom’s breaking wind: “Prrprr […] / Must be the bur. / Fff Oo. Rrpr. / Nations of the earth.” (U, 11.1284)]; here p.136.) Notes by comparison that when Molly breaks wind [“Frseeeeeeefronnnng”, 18.595] ‘the context does not allow us to distinguish that trainwhistle from Molly’s own anal release.’ (p.144.) Further, remarks on the tendency in Ulysses (“Calypso”, “Sirens”) for bodily members and sexual organs (notably lips) to operate independently of the subjectivity of their owners at the sentence-level: ‘One way to account for the independence of speech organs in “Sirens” is to appeal to the figure of synecdoche. [..] This synecdochic tendency in colloquial speech is most striking when the entire individual is substituted for the genital organs in euphemistic reference to sexual activity: “You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times” (U15.3788) and it is no feat of interpretative subtlety to translate “yourself”, “I”, and “her” into the appropriate sexual organs. […] One way of regarding the variously busy lips of “Sirens”, therefore, is as a more literal rendering of human volcal activity than is normally [166] promulgated by the linguistic convention of representing all conscious human behaviour as if it were the produce of a single, coherent subjectivity and by the ideologicy that this convention serves and promotes.’ (pp.166-67.) [Cont.]

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Derek Attridge (Peculiar Language, 1988 [cont.]): A further effect of this organic liberation is erotic arousal […]’ (pp.167-68.) Attridge speaks of a ‘traffic between vocal and sexual organs [which] occurs throughout the chapter (e.g,. “sure you’d near burst the tympanum of her ear, man” [U11.536]) […] The substitution here is not only of one powerfully penetrative male organ for another, penis for voice, but of vagina for female ear [.; 169]; the vocal and the vaginal also become indistinguishable at times […] One can almost conceive of the chapter as a version of Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets: a conclave of talkative (not to say musical) genitalia.’ (pp.169-70.) Further, ‘Throughout Ulysses there is a questioning of the straightforward blending of a mind and a body in a unity that can be called by a single proper name or pronoun; most obviously, “Circe” and “Ithaca” use deviant language to disturb and dissolve that unity, and the uncertain reference of many ) of Molly’s pronouns in “Penelope” is another well-known instance. “Eumaeus”, too, dethrones the controlling subject, whose language is seen to be a tissue of slightly soiled phrases, all too available to the first-comer. These episodes, by means of their play with organs and with words, and the desires that pass between them, insist that neither language nor the body can be seen as merely secondary and subservient to a nonmaterial, transcendent, systematic, controlling principle, whether we call that principle “meaning” or “the self.” More important, they demonstrate some of the pleasures, sexual and textual, that we owe to this fact.’ (pp.186-87; for longer extracts, see Ricorso Library, “Criticism”, infra.)

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Eamon Grennan, [ Joyce’s Poetry], in The Artist and the Labyrinth, ed. Augustine Martin ([London:] Ryan Publishing 1990): What kept Joyce, in biographical, circumstantial, and aesthetic terms, so conservative as a poet? [122] In his need to express his loving and lustful fervour for Nora he stumbles on a style that will animate in language the brimmingly carious (and rootedly sexual) consciousness of Leopold and Molly Bloom. The rediscovery and validation of the poems lead to a new creative fluency [based on] the remarkable transitions observable in the letters from lyricism .. to pornography .. to the mundane … [123] Joyce found a way to accomodate in language the whole self, an imaginative accomodation that would lead to the expansive wholeness and harmonies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake [ 123] Chamber Music [was] the young Joyce’s act of self-dedication [126] an elaborate act of homage and self-dedication on the part of the young poet [132] this inner emigré who has gone stylistically into exile before ever he left with Nora from the North Wall in 1904. [133] In the poems, the realities of self, sex, and spirit receive an abstract, distilled expression. He wants a much closer approximation to the actual, and this the poems alone cannot deliver. [137] “multiple theft” [130] [On first poem in Chamber Music sequence:] ‘Here all is frozen gesture; language and syntax encase and make conventional the moment, giving it the generality of song. In his contemporary work in prose, however, the elements that verse distils out are left in, accentuated. And it is in his prose poems, in fact, in the epiphanies, that Joyce discovers a management of language that will allow him to pursue his own narrative urge…. Here facts are enacted, rather than souls evoked.’ [q.p.].

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Jennifer Levine, ‘Ulysses’, in D. Attridge., ed., Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (1990): ‘The Homeric parallels are irresistible. Granted, we do not need the Odyssey to tell us that Stephen is a young man troubled by the fact that he is a son, and has a father nor that Bloom is haunted by memories of the son who never really was - his second child, Rudy died only days after his birth. But it sharpens our sense of his potential filial relationship between them and also to see them as Telemachus and Odysseus. (p.264.)

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Margot Norris, The Decentred Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis (John Hopkins UP 1976): ‘The singularity of individual experience - its uniqueness - is undermined by the replication of events and the instability of characters. The causal relationship of events in novelistic narration is replaced in Finnegans Wake by contiguous associations on the order of psychoanalytical free associations.’ (p.11; quoted in Tim Conley, ‘Finnegans Wake: Some Assembly Needed’, in James Joyce, ed. Sean Latham [Visions & Revisions Ser.], Dublin: IAP 2010, p.135.)

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Margot Norris, Joyces Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism [Literary Modernism Ser.] ( Texas UP 1992): ‘The danger, for feminism, in politically valorising a writing like Finnegans Wake , is precisely that of producing feminism without women - a feminism of no benefit to historical or material women. / However much Finnegans Wake’s experimentalism may be coded in feminist typologies as “preoedipal”, “semiotic”, jouissance, and the like, the reference of its disruptive powers to family, language, or pleasure nonetheless fails to address its historical moment or demonstrate its social relevance.’ (p.11) Further: ‘One could argue that it was precisely the “feminine” curriculum of modern languages he studied in his Jesuit schools rather than the classical Greek he would have been taught in the more conventional English public schools from which his Irish Catholicism and poverty barred him, that gave Joyce early models of radical modernity - the Nietzschean revision of classical philology, for example, [13] that ultimately forms his use of Homer in Ulysses. His uniquely progressive Continental education dominated Joyce’s intellectual development, and spawned a remarkable cultural activism, during his late teens.’ (p.14.) ‘In Stephen Hero, Stephen argues for a Nietzschean historical use of art (“The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age vital”), and Joyce stresses throughout Ibsen’s status as a living author […] Yet in this Irish cultural climate that refuses to read Ibsen or allow him to be read […; 15] the most unlikely figure in the world - the harrassed mother ironing clothes while questioning the apostasy of her son - becomes one of the first readers of Ibsen. […] Mrs Daedalus needs Ibsen because she does not know why her children die.’ (p.16.) ‘At the very least, Ibsen may help to prevent the hole of Irish woman’s self-understanding frm being glued with Victorian treacle. (p.17; the allusion is to Mrs Daedalus’s appeal to Stephen to tell her the meaning of the flux from “the hole we all have … here’, in Stephen Hero.)

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Galya Diment, ‘Impersonalising the Personal: Joyce’s Ulysses’, in The Autobiographical Novel of Co-consciousness: Goncharov, Woolf, and Joyce (Florida UP 1994): ‘[Joyce] decided to write the continuation of Stephen Dedalus' quest in a very different way. Thus he abandoned the format of a bildungsroman - his new novel, was to concentrate on but one day in Stephen’s life. Within that one day, Stephen, the undisputed solo performer of Portrait, now had to share the stage with another character - Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew and a commercial traveller. While a significant part of the narration was still to be done through interior monologues, as it was in Portrait, Joyce decided against an almost totally suppressed authorial voice. Instead he chose a set of dramatised semiomniscient narrators and an aloof, Ariel-like presence that could ironically observe the humans, mimic their language, and parody their civilisation.’ (p.116.)

Edward Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge UP 1983): ‘[ Joyce’s work is] a recapitulation of those political and racial separations, exclusions, prohibitions instituted ethnocentrically by the ascendant European culture through the nineteenth century.’ ( pp.48-49; quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz ‘James Joyce and the Tradition of Anti-Colonial Revolution’, [Working Papers Series], Washington State Univ., 1999, p.14.)

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus 1993): ‘[ Joyce’s critique of imperialism] focused on rhetoric, ideas and language rather than upon history tout court, preferring to analyse the verbal symptoms of power rather than its brute exercise […] to deconstruct rather than to destroy.’ ( p.307; quoted in Mary C. King, ‘Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Nativism, Nationalism and the Language Question in “Oxen of the Sun”’ [ typescript], 1998).

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John McGahern, ‘Dubliners’ [essay], in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (July 1991), p.31-37: ‘Dubliners has often been compared to The Untilled Field; Moore’s stories are seen to have foreshadowed Joyce’s, and they are linked in trying to establish a tradition for that dubious enterprise, The Irish Short Story. I do not use ‘dubious’ in the pejorative sense, other than the absurdity of trying to tout one race or literary form above any other. Remarkable work in the short story has come continually out of Ireland, but it is likely that its very strength is due to the absence of a strong central tradition. […] Particularly in “The Boarding House,” “Grace,” and “The Dead”, pun, coincidence, and echo are used as a writer of verse would use the formality of rhyme, deepening the sense of the lives of these mortal-immortal Dubliners, drawing together the related instincts of the religious, the poetic, and the superstitious. / The prose never draws attention to itself except at the end of “The Dead,” and by then it has been earned: throughout, it enters our imaginations as stealthily as the evening invading the avenue in “Eveline.” Its classical balance allows no room for self-expression: all the seas of the world may be tumbling in Eveline’s heart, but her eyes give no sign of love or farewell or recognition. / Joyce does not judge. His characters live within the human constraints in space and time and within their own city. The quality of the language is more important than any system of ethics or aesthetics. Material and form are inseparable. So happy is the union of subject and object that they never become statements of any kind, but in their richness and truth are representations of particular lives - and all of life. / I do not see Dubliners as a book of separate stories. The whole work has more the unity and completeness of a novel. Only in the great passages of Ulysses was Joyce able to surpass the art of Dubliners. In many of these, like the Hades episode, his imagination returns again and again to his first characters, his original material.’ (For longer extract, see under McGahern, infra.)

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Vincent Sherry, Joyce’s Ulysses (Cambridge UP 1994): ‘The social potency of the literary imagination is a force that Joyce ratifies in his first attempt at his autobiographical novel, his 1904 essay “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. [Quotes “To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word [… &c.”]. Here the power he ascribes to the artist’s Word - to incarnate the millenial State and race - breathes through the mythopoeic, ritualistic diction of his own prose.’ (p.13.) On the Stephen-Bloom relationship: ‘This process of dis-closure [viz., ‘the private subject continues to conceal the forbideen truth he seems equally compelled to reveal to public view’: supra, p.50], an opening of private subject onto public ground, occurs centrally in the bonding of Bloom and Stephen in the roles of epic father and son. This process and its attendant values may be discerned especially at the end of the ninth episode, where Stephen first sights Bloom. The event emerges through an intricate and idiosyncratic art, one which reflects the developing interests of Stephen’s own near chapter-length disquisition on Shakespeare. / Centering Stephen’s attention is the paternal-filial imagination of Hamlet. That Shakespeare wrote the play just after his own father died, Stephen argues, makes fatherhood no less urgent a motif than sonship; Shakespeare creates Hamlet, Stephen goes on to maintain, as type and double for his own son, Hamnet, who died as a boy. Thus Stephen rises to his highest poetry in describing Shakespeare’s fashioning of a son out of words; his reconstitution of fatherhood, now that flesh is gone, as literary creation. “The corpse of John Shakespeare”, William’s father, “does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son” (U9.833-836). “That mystical estate” appears as a quasi-divine privilege and power, in the celebratory language of the ensuing lines, when Stephen adapts the formulas of the Apostle’s Creed. Here he implies forcefully that the work of the verbal imagination, Hamlet as created character, is the word-made [sic] flesh; the literary artifact is the only-begotten son: “Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten” (U9.837-839). And the sense of mystery that Stephen attaches to this kind of imaginative procreation certainly attends his own brush with Bloom at the end of the chapter [quotes]: “About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside. / Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house [50] today, if Judas go forth tonight? Why? That lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctably. / My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between. / A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.” (u9.1197-1203) The older man, sensed at first from behind as an unseen presence, almost preternaturally, passes between Stephen and Mulligan as an intimation now realised, as a hint or wish shifting from potentiality into reality; he moves from imagination into presence, from private desire into public demonstration. And so Bloom’s appearance conforms to the rules of artistic creation, to the needs and laws of mystical kinship that Stephen has expostulated in the lecture - and to the direction of values in Joyce’s epic novel. / Bloom also assumes the role of Odysseus- père in this final vignette. “Seas between”: in this space the canvasser is not only sailing between the Scyllan rock and Charybdian whirlpool; he is returning as mythic father to reject the usurper or bogus son Mulligan, for whom Stephen’s growing disaffection has now hardened into a resolve to leave the tower. In this climactic scene, then, Bloom appears to move simultaneously as mystical father and epic hero; as the projection of Stephen’s subjective and artistic vision of paternity and as the public hero Odysseus, returning to cleanse a rotten house and society. Thus the Odyssean Bloom fits the private intensities of Stephen just well enough to pull the young artist in his wake, toward their narrative union in “Circe” and the social grounding Joyce will establish there for their relation. Such public valuation turns on the mythic father’s own social status, which he proceeds to reclaim, in terms all his (and Joyce’s) own, in this next tercet.’ (pp.50-51.)

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Vincent Sherry ( Joyce’s Ulysses, Cambridge UP 1994 [cont.]), on “Lestrygonians”: ‘“This is the very worst hour of the day” (U8.494), Bloom complains at lunch-time; his search for the right place to eat lengthens into a mood of anxious but blank fatigue. His bodily determination for food suspends his thoughts and distracts his mind, letting down his guard and opening him to ever more pressing intimations of the worst event of the day. Not that he addresses his nemesis squarely. When Boylan appears at the end of the chapter (U8.1168ff.), Bloom actually flees, darting into the covert of the National Museum. He is playing his now familiar game of resistance as recognition, and its psychology is acted out with suitable complexity and subtlety in the signal episode of the chapter. / The central scene of “Lestrygonians” represents a recasting of the original Homeric adventure, in Book X, where Odysseus’s men meet the cannibals. Bloom, turning into Burton’s restaurant, enters an equally savage prospect (U8.650ff.), where the forbidden practices of Homer’s tribe are centered in the eating of meat: “pungent meatjuice” is Bloom’s first and lasting impression. Carnivorism is hardly cannibalism, however, and the logic of the Bloomian substitution is given in the litany he chants over this prospect. “Men, men, men” (U8.653): if red-blooded men (used to) eat meat, the supplanting of Bloom’s own virility by Boylan causes him to bestialise this scene of flesh-eaters. The same logic informs his choice of an alternative lunch at Davy Byrne’s “moral pub” (732): “—A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?” (764). If the mythological Gorgon turned her beholders to stone, Bloom’s naming of this food signals a need not only to substitute cheese for meat but to deflect his (verbal) gaze. Notice how the cadence and stress-pattern of Gor-gon-zo-la matches exactly with that of Blaz-es-Boy-lan (that unspeakable name discovers a small thesaurus of sound-alike phrases, to be heard in chapter 3); in fact, he has just been reminded of his rival as the barman asks “—Wife well?” (8.763). Responding to that question, he gives his lunch order: he puts Blazes Boylan’s name in his mouth, in substitute syllables, in his very attempt to substitute cheese for the flesh on which that savage feeds. In line with the underlying logic of repression as involuntary disclosure, then, [49] Bloom summons the awful but unignorable fact by alternate words. Thus the private subject continues to conceal the forbidden truth he seems equally compelled to reveal to public view. / This process of dis-closure, an opening of private subject onto public ground, occurs centrally in the bonding of Bloom and Stephen in the roles of epic father and son. This process and its attendant values may be discerned especially at the end of the ninth episode, when Stephen first sights Bloom. The event emerges thorugh an intricate and idiosyncratic art, one which reflects the developing interests of Stephen’s one near chapter-length disquisition on Shakespeare.’ (pp.49-50.) ‘The older man, sensed at first from behind as an unseen presence, almost preternaturally, passes between Stephen and Mulligan as an intimation now realised, as a hint or wish shifting from potential into reality; he moves from imagination into presence, from private desire into public demonstration. Ans so Bloom’s appearance conforms to the rules of artistic creation, to the needs and laws of mystical kinship that Stephen has expostulated in the lecture - and to the direction of values in Joyce’s epic novel.’ (p.51.) Sherry later examines the sentences, “To me! / Siopold! / Consumed” (11.751-53) and suggests that ‘a high note of imaginative possibility’ regarding Bloom’s substitution for Dedalus père as Stephen’s father‘is raised as the names of Simon Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are compounded (in response to the aria from the finale of Martha).’ (p.53.)

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Vincent Sherry ( Joyce’s Ulysses, 1994 [cont.]), ‘Joyce’s differences [from Dora Marsden, Wyndam Lewis and Ezra Pound] reach to social attitudes as well as aesthetic practices, which allow him to create the speaking character of the democratic average, Leopold Bloom, and to show that the individual remains irrespressible, ungeneralisable, an equal partner in transactiosn with generic words. […] This engagement includes a debilitation of the radical individual through the working of words, and the first section of this chapter will follow this process through Joyce’s own experience of writing the novel and the crises of the verbal artist Stephen Dedalus, who serves at least in this respect as Joyce’s counterpart. Instead of straining words to the principles of a visual linguistic like Pound’s or Lewis’s, however, Joyce engages in a process of re-imagining the relation between Self and language. He renews his sense of individuality as a function of a new linguistic understanding, one which works out the reconciliation between private subject and social totality, as discussed in the preceding chapter, in terms special to his apprehension of language. Here Stephen’s romantic subjectivity and its attendant sense of Word will alter and merge into the more generic individuality of Leopold Bloom, whose operative sense of words accommodates a speaking personality at once common and private, historically and culturally conditioned but also’endowed with an individual, indeed idiosyncratic vocabulary. This development from Stephen to Bloom will be followed as a newly discovered line of unity and continuity in Ulysses, to be examined for its depth of linguistic intelligence in the middle section of this chapter. Bloom will then be seen to exercise this linguistic as a poetics of the common man in the third and final part. The starting point for this consideration is the remarkable and conspicuous phenomenon of Joyce’s stylistic carnival in the second half of the novel. Those exercises, no less than the implementation of the Homeric scheme [80; …] take direction and meaning from the inner life of the protagonists, here from the deliberations on language (variously recondite, and unselfconsious) by Stephen and Bloom, whose experience with words will eventually centre consideration.’ (pp.80-81.) Sherry notes that Joyce wrote ‘End of first part of Ulysses, New Year’s Eve, 1918’, after “Scylla and Charybdis” in the Rosenbach MS, and infers a shift in method: ‘The sense of linguistic autonomy in Ulysses does coincide with feelings of authorial autonomy. The waxing powers of style measure the waning force of the self, and Joyce spells out his bitter ratio in his letters, in a vocabulary no less intense than oblique.’ [Quotes “burnt up field” (Letters, I, p.129) and “[…] task I set myself technically […]” (Letters, I, 167). ‘The first image of self-decimation provides a basis in the second for a portrait of the stylising artist as gravitational vacuum, sucking in the disjecta membra of popular culture, or as a tabula rasa […] that exists in his work as a function of his very absence as an articulate individual. / Hyperactive styles may serve, conversely, as compensation for the loss of authorial power, the voiding of the self may be avoided, the silence filled with the burgeoning noise of those mannered parodies.’ (p.83.)

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Weldon Thornton, The Antimodernism of Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (Syracuse UP 1994): ‘[…] The modernist idea of “discrete individualism” - i.e., the idea that the individual is self-contained and self-determining - is undoubtedly a central theme of that novel [Portrait of the Artist]. But in my view, Joyce’s purpose in the novel is not to celebrate such individualism; on the contrary, it is to show how superficial and insufficient this understanding of the individual psyche is. Demonstration of that claim about Joyce’s handling of individualism in the novel, however, would have deflected me from my discussion of sources and expressions of atomic individualism in Western intellectual history and would require a book to itself. This is that book. [2] / My argument here is that Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist is, in some meaningful senses of the term, antimodernist. In Stephen Dedalus, Joyce depicts an intelligent, sensitive young man who is strongly influenced by various ideas and assumptions of the Modernist Syndrome - ideas that Joyce himself weighed and found wanting. Though Joyce treats Stephen sympathetically, he reveals in a number of ways the insufficiencies of Stephen’s implicit view of reality and of the self. Furthermore, Portrait reflects this distance between Joyce and Stephen, not simply in its tone or in certain differences of aesthetic opinion between author and character, but in its very structure and verbal texture, because the structure itself embodies Stephen’s implicit view of reality, and the verbal presentation of his consciousness persistently involves a deeper individual and cultural psyche than Stephen himself can comprehend. / From early in his career, Joyce saw the need to dramatise within his work the conflicting perspectives the twentieth century inherited in the subject-object, mind-nature dichotomy - a dichotomy expressing itself in literary terms mainly in symbolism vs. naturalism. Joyce saw the essential falseness and pernicious effects of this dichotomisation and prepared himself to effect a synthesis of the two perspectives. In Portrait the need for this synthesis is fully dramatised through Stephen Dedalus, who is enamoured of such a dichotomy, while Joyce reveals the incompleteness of Stephen’s view. / Thus I see Joyce as “taking the measure” of Stephen, but I add two things to this long-established perspective on the novel. [Note]. First, I set my about Joyce’s “antimodernist” aims in Portrait within the context of certain deep-running currents of Western thought […] Second, I show how profoundly Joyce takes the measure of Stephen’s individualism, even of his implicit view of the nature of reality and of the psyche. […; 4] Moreover, my analysis differs from poststructuralist analyses by showing that although Portrait does involve a profound criticism of the modernist view of the self, Joyce does not claim the self is non-existent or merely a cultural construct (as the poststructuralists would have it) but rather shows the self’s coherence and entelechy are more deeply rooted in the psyche than any analysis can comprehend.’ (pp.2-4.) [For longer extracts, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism / Major Authors”, James Joyce, infra]

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Suman Gupta, ‘What colour’s Jew Joyce …: Race in the Context of Joyce’s Irishness and Bloom’s Jewishness’, in Bullán, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994), pp.59-82: ‘This is where the recent introductions for the Penguin edition of Ulysses written by Declan Kiberd (1992), and for the section on Joyce in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing written by Seamus Deane (1991), come in. These are both attempts at asserting the Irishness of James Joyce. Their reasons for doing so are substantially the same as the ones cited for Herbert Gorman’s and [Charles] Duff s effort. These reasons were and are, as we have seen, largely political. However, whereas Gorman and Duff asserted Joyce’s Irishness on national-racial grounds which were not ostensibly political, Deane’s and Kiberd’s assertion is clearly based on an understanding of Irishness as political consciousness. Their task is to demonstrate that though Joyce did not share the views of the Irish nationalist forums of his time and though his creative works were often critical of the Ireland he knew, his political attitudes were attuned to those of the Catholic Irish on the eve of the formation of the southern Irish republic and the civil war. This, in turn, means that they demonstrate that Joyce had his own nationalistic agenda which he followed in his creative writings, parallel to the more popular revivalistic nationalist movements of his time. Both Deane and Kiberd demonstrate that in his unorthodox use of language, in his practice of creating complex symbols, and in his general portrayal of the colonial Irish ethos, Joyce had in fact carefully questioned, subverted, and annihilated most aspects of the colonial discourse (particularly British, but to a certain extent also Irish) prevalent in his time. With these arguments Deane and Kiberd hope to settle the debate on Joyce’s Irishness - and they may well have done so.’ (p.65.)

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Jeri Johnson, Introduction to Ulysses [World Classics] (OUP 1993): ‘[...] Now this was a novel with a differe. Larbaud might stress that “the plan, which cannot be detached from the book, because it is the very web of it” was actually subordinate to “man, the creature of flesh, living out his day” [Larbaud, trans. in Robert Deming, Critical Heritage, Vol. I, p.261], but the extraordinarily intricate and elaborate symbolic systems carry it away from the domain of more conventional ficiton and toward something which, for lack of a better name, we might call “hyperliterary”. For this literature which draws attention to itself as literature, as artefact constructed out of words and symbols and correspondences and systems which we take pleasure in precisely because of (rather than despite) their craftedness, precisely because they draw our attention to words as word, symbol as symbol, system as system, rather than simply urging us to see through this artifice toward some meaning residing within. [...] What possible “moral” can be drawn from the proliferation of flower names in the “Lotus Eaters” episode? or from the fact that “Calypso”’s colour is orange? or that “Ithaca”’s symbol is “Comets”? Ulysses in this mode will not play that game. [xvi] / It is probably time to attempt the formulation of a rule about Ulysses, a rule which emerges as the logical conclusion of Joyce’s having drawn Larbaud’s attention simultaneously to two different (both independently verifiable) aspects of the book. The rule: a salient, if not the quintessential, characteristic of Ulysses is that it is allotropic [vide n.: carbon exists within nature as graphite or diamond]. That is, it is capable of existing, and indeed does exist, in at least two distinct, and distinctively different, forms at one and the same time: it this case, “distilled essence of novel” and “extravagant, symbolically supersaturated anti-novel”. / The two strains had been alive in Joyce’s mind at least since 1912 when he delivered two lectures at the Universita Populare in Trieste under the series title “Verismo ed idealismo nella letterature inglese (Daniele De Foe-William Blake)”. To any reader of Ulysses, the combination of Defoe and Blake comes as no surprise. [...]. Verismo and idealismo became the two competing yet co-ordinated strains we have already identified.’ (xvi-vii.)

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