James Joyce's "Ulysses" and World War I. Ann Hingle Martin Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1996 James Joyce's "Ulysses" and World War I. Ann Hingle Martin Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Martin, Ann Hingle, "James Joyce's "Ulysses" and World War I." (1996). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 6310. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/6310 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. 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Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. JAMES JOYCE S ULYSSES AND WORLD WAR I A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Ann Hingle Martin B.A., Louisiana State University, 1979 M. A.. Louisiana State University, 1989 December 1996 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9712858 UMI Microform 9712858 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT..................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION............................................................................................1 CHAPTER I: JOYCE AND THE MODERN PERIOD........................5 CHAPTER II: THE HERO: A CLUE TO THE WAR’S EFFECT ON ULYSSES:................................................ 38 CHAPTER III: THE WASTE LAND...................................................... 68 CHAPTER IV: PLOT AND PERSPECTIVE....................................... 115 CHAPTER V: RHETORIC IN TIME OF WAR................................ 139 CHAPTER VI: THE COUNTERPOINT: WHAT “THE AGE DEMANDED” ..................................................... 155 CONCLUSION.............................................................................................174 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................ 177 VITA..............................................................................................................183 i; Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT The final words of Ulysses underline the text’s position on the cusp of the pre- and postwar eras. Joyce was emphatic that Molly’s “Yes” be immediately followed by those crucial coordinates: Trieste — Zurich — Paris 1914-1921 Where does this unsettling epitaph point us? In the direction of history, clearly; we are nudged towoard the text’s and its nail-paring creator’s autobiography. Even the shallowest knowledge of recent history will indicate the centrality of those towns, during those years, to “all those wretched quarrels .. erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag” (526). Even the shallowest knowledge of recent history will make us aware that Ulysses’ initial plotting was done in one world and its final incarnation fixed in another. We reflexively turn those coordinates upon the foregoing text and try to gauge their significance. How might they have affected the narrative? Here I explain how World War I affected Ulvsses in important ways which have yet to be critically explored. And I also explain how Ulvsses reflects back upon that war and the culture it transformed. I first sketch James Joyce's interest and involvement in World War I, an engagement with history that belies his later, self-conscious pose of aesthete. I then demonstrate specifically how the War, though anachronistic to the date of Bloomsday, is yet important to Ulvsses' theme, characters, tone. I explore how the war manifests itself in the book's protagonists', and their creator's, new attitudes to heroism. I probe the war's relation to Joyce's new mechanics of plot and perspective. I examine how the War is evinced too in iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the theme of the Waste Land as it is sited in the book. I explain how the poignant sense of homelessness experienced by many characters within the book is related to the dislocation of space, time and meaning often experienced by participants and civilians during and after the war. Finally, I emphasize how the war manifests itself in Ulvsses' alternate site, the Dublin "[fjabled by daughters of memory" (20). This alternate site is characterized by stabilizing coordinates which provide a new grounding for postwar space and time. Joyce creates for his readers a comforting world within the text thus Ulvsses transcends the crisis of values which it simultaneously reveals. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION Two important events took place in Europe in 1914. Coincidental with the beginning of World War I was the beginning of James Joyce's composition of Ulvsses. Both war and book gathered momentum over the next few years; as they drew to conclusion — the war in late 1918, Ulvsses in early 1922 — it was obvious that both were major forces of change in their respective spheres of influence. World War I's sphere was immeasurably broader, of course: it would be fatuous to compare a book with a tragedy that killed millions and affected hundreds of millions, affected the course of western civilization itself. Yet, I argue, both book and war deserve to be set in the same frame. There are two important points that need to be made about their relation. Firstly, World War I affected Ulvsses in significant ways which have not yet been critically explored. And secondly, Ulvsses reflects back upon that war and the culture it transformed. Eric Leed observes that "[t]he war mobilized all the cultural resources of meaning available to Europeans in the first decades of the twentieth century.'" These cultural resources often fell sadly short, as we have learned from scholars of the postwar generation. Ulvsses exhibits the process firsthand, however: it offers insight into the contemporary situation. Within this wartime and postwar book are recapitulated and revealed important contemporary crises of meaning. Further, the uprooting of values caused by war and war's effects is mirrored by Ulysses' own uprooting of literary values. Ulvsses reflects in its form and content the process of dislocation which affected the whole of Europe. Eric Leed. No Man's Land. (Cambridge. Cambridge Imiversity Press, 1979), x. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 Can we find all this in a book by such a disengaged aesthete as James Joyce? Did he not disavow any interest in politics and war? After all, Joyce is famous for the bored comment that he made in 1919, "Oh, yes, I was told there was a war going on in Europe" (JJ, 472).2 It is true that any response Joyce would have made to World War I would have been indirect; he felt, with that other anachronistic artist, Yeats, that the turmoil of war was not the artist's subject; and he consciously made Ulvsses an antebellum story. Yet, consciously or unconsciously, he has registered all his feelings about the war in important elements within his book. In this study I will argue that behind Ulvsses is the ghoststory