The French Metropolis As a Site of Cultural Archaeology in James Joyce’S Ulysses and F

Dieter Fuchs

Judgements of Paris and Falling Troy – The French Metropolis as a Site of Cultural Archaeology in James Joyce’s Ulysses and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”

James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald first met on June 27, 1928 at a dinner party hosted by Sylvia Beach – the owner of the rive gauche bookshop Shakespeare and Company, which has become famously known as the Paris centre of the high modernist intelligentsia. In her memoir the hostess explains that she arranged this encounter for Fitzgerald, who “worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him” (Beach 116). On subsequent gather- ings Fitzgerald complimented the Irish artist with a book dedication to “James Joyce, from the humblest but most devoted of his admirers”, kissed the hand of his idol, offered “to jump out of a fourth-floor window” and exclaimed “How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep” (Gorman 116).1 To show that these anecdotal encounters must have provided the eccentric framework of a more serious intellectual exchange, this paper will show that the high modernist poetics of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), known as mythical realism – the ironic juxtaposition of archetypal and realistic repre- sentational modes as a structural device to give meaning and order to an increasingly chaotic contemporary world – may be considered as a prototype for Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited” (1931). It will be argued that Fitzgerald imitates the “mythical method” (T.S. Eliot) of Ulysses by rewriting a set of Joycean allusions to ancient mythology which includes two rather unknown sources waiting to be reconstructed in the following pages: Lucian’s ‘Judgement of Paris’ from “Dialogues of the Gods”, and the infer- nal representation of Helen of Troy in “Dialogues of the Dead” written by the same author. Whereas other works by Fitzgerald such as The Great Gatsby

1 The quotations are taken from Thomas 72-76, cf. also Bruccoli 264-265 and Ellmann, James Joyce 581. Joyce, on the other hand, presented Fitzgerald with copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses inscribed: “Dear Mr. Fitzgerald: Here with is the book you gave me signed and I am adding a portrait of the artist as a once younger man with the thanks of your much obliged but most pusillanimous guest. 11.7.928 [sic]’” (Thomas 74). In commemoration of Sylvia Beach’s party Fitzgerald drew a picture (‘Festival of St. James’) of himself kneeling before the haloed Joyce who presides at dinner as a drunken Jesus fig- ure. 22 Dieter Fuchs

(1925)2 refer to myths and archetypes in a comparatively loosely connected manner, the mythopoesis of “Babylon Revisited” acquires a structural coher- ence and density comparable to the Joycean model. Even though Fitzgerald was deeply imbued with the heritage of mythical realism represented by Joyce, scholars have frequently denied that his work was influenced by European modernism3:

The expatriates left America as an expression of their rejection of American culture. Fitzgerald remained immensely American. He was an American writer living abroad, not an expatriate. [...] Although he was on friendly terms with Stein and hailed the genius of Joyce, Fitzgerald was not influenced by [European] modernism because his style and technique were formed before he arrived in France. [...] Nonetheless, Fitzgerald’s residence in Europe provided him with material. (Baughman 177-178)

Such statements need to be reconsidered. Like Schliemann, who read the Homeric epics to rediscover Troy – the mother of all cities – , Joyce and Fitzgerald reconstruct the roots of contemporary civilization from myths and archetypes and consider 20th century Paris – the axis and centre of the high modernist world – as a site of cultural archaeology. Sharing a deeply tradi- tionalist point of view, these artists contribute to the modernist tradition in so far as they create new meaning by welding the triviality of present-day life with forgotten knowledge reconstructed from the dunghill of history which – in the case of Western civilization – subdivides into a twofold pedigree: the Classical and the Biblical tradition, or Hellenism and Hebraism (Arnold ch. 4). As will be shown in detail, Joyce and Fitzgerald combine the intertextual framework alluded to in the titles of their works – Homer’s Odyssey in Ulys- ses and the Biblical Fall of Babylon in “Babylon Revisited” – with an archaeology of the origin of our collective memory recorded in one of the cen- tral foundational myth of Classical Western culture: the unfortunate Judge- ment of Paris – the son of king Priam of Troy – which constitutes the pre-

2 The Great Gatsby refers to Petronius’s Satyricon from the 1st century A.D., which has become famous for its parody of Classical myths and epics such as the Odyssey. An early version of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was entitled Trimalchio and carried the name of Petronius’s nouveau riche character whose famous dinner party – the “Cena Trimalchionis” – constitutes the backbone of what has survived of the Petronian text. With regard to Joyce’s rewriting of Petronius as a possible source of inspiration for Fitzgerald, cf. Murphy and Killeen, concerning Petronius and Fitzgerald, cf. MacKendrick, Endres, etc. 3 With The Great Gatsby – which he considered as “something really NEW in form, idea, structure” and “the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are looking for, that Conrad didn’t find” (Kuehl & Bryer, qtd. in Thomas 70) – Fitzgerald hoped to “become the American [...] Joyce” (Sklar 232, qtd. in Thomas 71). When The Great Gatsby, written in imitation of the European tradition (ancient and modern), failed the American market, Fitzgerald wrote that “I feel that I am going to have more + more a European public” (Bruccoli & Duggan 208, qtd. in Thomas 70).