Inventing Ireland (48 page)

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.