Ulysses

  So it happens that the scene of Bloom’s greatest abjection in Circe – where he voyeuristically imagines himself leading Boylan to the bed of his own wife – dissolves into that strangely redemptive moment when Stephen begins to discern the end of his quest. He and Bloom gaze into a single mirror and see reflected back at them the beardless face of William Shakespeare, that near-perfect androgyne, whose life-story had brought them to the verge of a meeting earlier that day. Now Stephen’s mind recalls the premonitory dream of Bloom holding out watermelons and realizes that the womanly man is indeed the object of his quest. It is for his multiple selfhood that Stephen accepts the new prophet: ‘Christus or Bloom his name is, or, after all, any other …’ – an expression similar to Molly’s own formula of acceptance (‘as well him as another’) at Howth. Molly and Stephen partake unknowingly of the same thought. They recognize that Bloom is both average and special, a man with so many sides that his identity is tenuous and provisional, everything and nothing, the androgynous goal. In the catechism section of Ithaca that human formula is specified:

  What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and nonentity?

  Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.

  No-man and no-woman either, but one who offers Stephen his ‘firm full masculine feminine passive active hand’. Back in Circe, Stephen had been surprised to feel ‘a strange kind of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and all that’. But he goes in the end with the dark stranger.

  Not all lovers of Ulysses have seen Bloom’s androgyny for what it is. Frank Budgen attributed Bloom’s failure to halt the affair between Molly and Boylan to ‘the homosexual wish to share his wife with other men’, since this is the only way in which he can achieve a sense of fellowship with other males. But Bloom bears testimony to the fact that androgyny (which is intrapsychic) is not bisexuality (which is interpersonal). Even in Circe, androgyny was a state more of mind than of body. Male and female elements have become so balanced in Bloom that sexual desire is slowly ebbing away. This is the same process which Bloom has discerned in previous lovers of Molly, a transformation from desire to fatigue ‘with alternating symptoms of epicene comprehension and apprehension’. If it is, in part, the female in such men which is attracted to the male qualities of Molly, then that passion is the source of its own reduction to epicene serenity, as sex itself becomes the source of its own transcendence. Budgen, however, was among those readers who insisted on seeing Bloom as the victim of an ‘ailment’ rather than the prophet of a new sexuality. The serenity of a man who has all but achieved the balance of yin and yang he interpreted as sexual indifference. Apologists for androgyny do not see it thus as a featureless unisex philosophy nor as an obliteration of the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’, but as a fusion of both. June Singer has written:

  The new androgyne is not in confusion about his or her sexual identity. Androgynous men express a natural, unforced and uninhibited male sexuality, while androgynous women can be totally female in their own sexuality. Yet neither tends to extremes: men do not need to exude machismo, or women to pretend to a naive and dependent character.

  Instead, by bringing the anima to conscious recognition, the man ends his unconscious enslavement to her and is paradoxically freed to be more fully masculine even as he admits his female element. That admission requires a courage and daring superior to any machismo exemplified by Boylan.

  ULYSSES AND IRISH WRITING

  In espousing the ideal of androgyny, just one year after the declaration of the Irish Free State, Ulysses proclaimed itself a central text of national liberation. Against the either/or antitheses of British imperial psychology, it demonstrated the superior validity of a both/and philosophy.

  Antithesis had been the master-key to the imperial mind, causing people to make absolute divisions not just between English and Irish, but also between men and women. By this mechanism the British male could attribute to the Irish all those traits of poetry, emotion and hypersensitivity which a stern muscular code had led him to suppress in himself. In like manner, Victorian men insisted that their women epitomize domestic virtues and emotional expressiveness which a harsh mercantile ethic had led them to deny in themselves. In The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde had shown that such an antithesis quite simply does not work; and he had shrewdly anticipated Freud’s findings that manly women are attracted, and attractive, to womanly men. So it was the women in his famous play who read heavy works of German philosophy while the men lounged elegantly on sofas. These men were filled with romantic impetuosity and uncontrollable surges of emotion, while the women cynically anatomized the finer points of the male physique. Lord Bracknell, for his part, accepted that a man’s place was in the home. Wilde’s was an art in which every dichotomy dichotomized as seeming opposites turned into actual doubles – much as Wilde, in his own life, became a very English kind of Irishman. His doctrine of the androgyny of the full person found immortal expression in the wisecrack: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.’ The apparent sexism of the first half of that jibe was brilliantly annulled by the sharp feminist intelligence of the conclusion. Far from being a glib exponent of the witty paradox, Wilde was committed to the moment when an ancient antithesis dissolved to reveal an underlying unity.

  But this moment of modernism was also a moment of revolution, an illustration of Marx’s prophecy that Ireland might indeed become the Achilles’ heel of the British empire. Equipped by an analytic colonial education to pen the most rigorous critiques of their masters, Irish writers were enabled to offer witty deconstructions of British imperial culture. The Irish, being underdogs, necessarily knew more than their rulers. Theirs was the perennial problem of quickwitted subjects under the governance of dull-witted administrators. As Hegel had observed, the losers of history in experiencing loss also learn by implication what it must be like to win: they have no choice but to know their masters better than the masters know themselves. Especially they know them in their faults, for it is from their faults that masters have always derived their way of seeing the colonial subject.

  The psychologist Ashis Nandy recorded a similar set of tendencies in occupied India, whose citizens frequently sought to become more like the British, in friendship or in enmity. Initially, a martial ethos was cultivated, ostensibly to threaten the occupier with an uprising. In reality, of course, this was but a subtler form of collaboration with the imperialist code. The new muscular Indian came, none the less, to view his feminized compatriot as one whose identity was nullified by self-cancelling polarities. Such a figure was derided as a victim of a pathology more degraded than femininity itself. Hesitant European well-wishers, like E. M. Forster, were left to interpret a character such as Dr Aziz in A Passage to India as a demonstration of the nation’s ‘lack of fibre’. These diagnoses seemed, covertly, to will the natives to revolt.

  A more sophisticated ‘liberationism interpretation followed in due course. It rejected the polarities of male/female, England/India, replacing them with a more complex set of antitheses, male or female/androgyny, England or India/international liberation. This deconstruction of his beloved binaries was at once the colonizer’s darkest fear and deepest need: ‘instead of trying to redeem their masculinity by becoming counterplayers of the rulers according to established rules, the colonized will discover an alternative frame of reference within which the oppressed do not seem weak, degraded.’ This leads the subject to see the rulers’ code as ethically inferior, and with this new self-confidence to feed that information back in devious ways to the rulers. It is but a short step from this feedback to a repudiation of sexist and imperial ideas in Britain. Hence the extraordinary feelings of jeopardy and threat evoked for English playgoers and readers by the womanly men of Wilde and Joyce.

  The same androgynous figures are to be found in many masterpieces of the ‘Irish Revival’ – in Shaw’s Bluntschli and Dauphin, two sensitive men brave enough to
admit their fears; in Synge’s Christy Mahon, whose daintiness of speech and patent narcissism appeal to the robust countrywomen who fall in love with him; even in Yeats’s adoption of the female voice as he wrote the ‘Crazy Jane’ poems. While nationalists, addicted to a militarist ideal, sought in emulations of Cúchulainn to purge themselves of the last degrading traces of Celtic femininity, these male writers happily embraced the female dimension, the anima, as one basis for liberation. Ulysses’ celebration of Bloom as the new womanly man is the fullest elaboration of that Utopian moment.

  That elaboration is conducted, as we have seen, against a background of failed national fatherhood. Here, too, Ulysses is a central example of a narrative which was shaped by Yeats and O’Casey, Synge and Shaw, as they followed an example set by Wilde. What was sponsored throughout The Importance of Being Earnest was nothing less than the revolutionary ideal of the self-created man. Even the class-ridden Lady Bracknell had proposed the Nietzschean notion that if a man has been denied a good father, he had better go out and manufacture one: ‘I would strongly advise you, Mr Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible.’ So Jack Worthing had to androgynize himself, becoming his own father and mother, inventing his own tradition. To borrow the terms of the critic Edward Said, he exemplifies affiliation (the radical creation of one’s own world, contexts, versions of tradition) rather than filiation (an inherited, given set of meanings). Lady Bracknell, suddenly awakened, warns that all this will lead to ‘the worst excesses of the French revolution’. Wilde did indeed anticipate Joyce in developing a republican politics in his art; and both men pointed in essays to that ‘hidden’ tradition within English culture from Defoe through Blake to William Morris, which might usefully ally itself with Irish republicanism in the attempt to hold English culture more fully true to itself. Sensing that England might be the last, most deeply occupied, British colony, they sought in saving Ireland to save their former colonial masters from themselves, with parables of affiliation and self-inventing sons.

  Shaw is the most obvious instance. By becoming ‘GBS’ he suppressed all degrading links with his failed, alcoholic father George Carr Shaw, becoming (in Michael Holroyd’s phrase) a child of his own writings. Those writings repeatedly celebrate androgynous figures like St Joan or Major Barbara, but in doing so they ‘ghost’ a Shavian autobiography which tells of a boy so neglected by his parents that ‘all the work of disciplining and educating myself, which should have been done for me as a child, I had to do for myself. In the face of paternal inadequacy, the son appointed his mother’s consort Vandaleur Lee as a surrogate father, along with his uncle Walter. ‘This widened my outlook very considerably,’ he recalled:

  Natural parents should bear in mind that the more supplementaries their children find, at school or elsewhere, the better they will know that it takes all sorts to make a world. Also, that though there is always the risk of being corrupted by bad parents, the natural ones may be – probably ten per cent of them actually are – the worst of the lot.

  As in Joyce’s life and art, so in Shaw’s: the revolt of the son is never the cliché-rebellion against a tyrannical parent, but the more complex revolt against the refusal or inability of an ineffectual father to provide any lead at all.

  In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus becomes ‘himself his own father … made not begotten’ on the same principle by which Shakespeare recreated himself in both the doomed father and the avenging son of Hamlet … and by which Joyce reincarnates himself in both the middle-aged Bloom and the youthful Stephen. This modernist protagonist was, again, invented by Wilde, who taught that every man must form a stylized conception of himself, that is, ‘conceive of himself in the literal meaning of that phrase. Whereas nineteenth-century literature had been obsessed with solving questions of origin and paternity, modernism abolished ideas of heritage and sought to usurp (or even murder) the father. Its protagonists were men like Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, whose inherited name was Jimmy Gatz, but who ‘sprang from some extraordinary Platonic conception of himself’; or women like Lawrence’s Ursula Brangwen who ‘had no father, no mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery …’ Such a character is an orphan, either psychic or real, whose aspirations were well described by Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Being nobody’s son, I was my own cause and was filled with both pride and wretchedness … I always preferred to accuse myself rather than the universe, not only out of simple good-heartedness, but in order to derive only from myself.’

  In the colony that was Ireland, the meaning of that moment was even more complex. Synge’s Christy Mahon usurps his father in order to create himself; and The Playboy of the Western World ends with a reversal in which a delighted father defers to the established son, the two men forming the image of a revolutionary society in which age defers to youth. The repudiation of the genetic father in a colonial situation takes on a revolutionary character, since it implies not just a rejection of authority but of all official versions of the past, and a determination to invent the self in conditions of cultural freedom. In the colony, there were two paternal stereotypes – the compromising minor functionary and the broken boozer, but neither had hands on the levers of power. In consequence, the usual revolt of children against parents was a largely meaningless affair, since it could not translate itself (as it would in an independent nation-state) into social progress. To achieve such progress what was needed was not a mere rebellion but a revolution, in the throes of which all forms of authority would be challenged by a generation which became its own father.

  This manoeuvre, as Synge shrewdly hinted at the end of The Playboy, required not so much a killing of the father as a conversion of him into a revised version of the son. (Stephen, in Ulysses, accordingly insists that his father has ‘my voice’.) Of no literary exemplar was this more true than Father Shakespeare, an inadequate parent who might yet be reinvented as a better one. Hidden in his classic plays lay many subversive potentials awaiting their moment like unexploded bombs. So writers of the Irish colony read Shakespeare to explore and explain themselves. For Yeats, the failure of Richard II was due not to his bumbling ineptitude but to a poetic sensitivity far superior in moral or artistic value to the merely administrative efficiency of Bolingbroke. His was a Celtic Shakespeare who loved Richard’s doomed complexity and scorned the usurper’s single-minded hunt for power. This was, with Arnoldian inflections, the story of England invading Ireland; and Yeats rewrote it, in Shakespearean idiom, as the clash in Irish mythology between Cúchulainn and Conchobar. Edward Dowden and the efficiency-minded critics of imperial Britain had worshipped Bolingbroke and belittled Richard, but Yeats now proposed to restore to Shakespeare’s texts an openness which they once had before being simplified by the administrative mind.

  Joyce, too, sought to produce a Celtic Shakespeare and in Ulysses he had Stephen reinterpret the entire works as a developing narrative of exile and loss. He even took time off, in the National Library scene, to set mock-questions for the revised Celtic syllabus:

  Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney’s Arcadia and spatchcocked onto a Celtic legend older than history?

  And he answered them:

  Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother, or all three in one, is to Shakespeare what the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book.

  Friedrich Engels had complained that the object of British policy was to make the Irish feel like strangers in their own land, but he had underestimated their capacity to colonize the culture that was used to colonize them. Against the imperial view of The Tempest as a paean to ‘service’ and a critique of ‘brainless revolution’, Irish writers read the play as an account of imperialism’s failure to master all that it represses. Instead of an ‘isle of the blest
’ and an expansion of personality, the invaders endure stark privation and a drastic self-simplification: for the denial of the natives entails the repression in the imperial personality of those elements with which the natives are identified. Such suffering was hardly to be borne for long. By the time he wrote Ulysses, Joyce’s dealings with Britain’s representatives overseas had convinced him that many went mad from self-imposed strains. So he saw Prospero as finally foretelling that moment when his written knowledge will fail in the face of ‘Patsy Caliban’s otherness, which it can never fathom. His parodic humiliations of the written tradition may be read as rehearsals for that moment when the book surrenders to the recalcitrant fact and the invader has the goodness to leave the islanders free to create themselves:

  … But this rough magic

  I here abjure, and when I have required

  Some heavenly music – which even now I do …

  … I’ll break my staff,

  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,