Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic The Florida James Joyce Series Copyright 2002 by Andras Ungar. This work is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. You are free to electronically copy, distribute, and transmit this work if you attribute authorship. However, all printing rights are reserved by the University Press of Florida (http://www.upf.com). Please contact UPF for information about how to obtain copies of the work for print distribution. You must attribute the work in the manner speci- fied by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the University Press of Florida. Nothing in this license im- pairs or restricts the author’s moral rights. Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola This page intentionally left blank Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic Epic Mimesis and the Political History of the Nation State Andras Ungar University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers Copyright 2002 by Andras Ungar Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, TCF (totally chlorine-free) paper All rights reserved 07 06 05 04 03 02 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ungar, Andras, 1947– Joyce’s Ulysses as national epic : epic mimesis and the political history of the nation state / Andras Ungar. p. c.m. (The Florida James Joyce series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8130-2445-5 (acid-free paper) 1. Joyce, James, 1882–1941. Ulysses. 2. Nationalism and literature— Ireland—History—20th century. 3. Politics and literature—Ireland— History—20th century. 4. National characteristics, Irish, in literature. 5. Epic literature—History and criticism. 6. Fables—History and criticism. 7. Ireland—in literature. 8. Mimesis in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR6019.O9 U753 2002 823'.912—dc 21 2001054025 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611–2079 http://www.upf.com Contents Foreword by Zack Bowen vii Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction. The Epic Fable: A Negotiation with History and Nationhood 1 1. The Argument of the Fable: An Overview 24 2. The Ascent of Stephen Dedalus from Messianic Ambition to Epic Discourse 35 3. Joyce and the Fate of Arthur Griffith’s Resurrection of Hungary in Ulysses 49 4. Closure and Millicent Bloom 67 5. Epic Mimesis and the Syntax of Ulysses 80 6. Other Alternatives: Nationhood and Forgetfulness 94 Notes 109 Bibliography 129 Index 147 This page intentionally left blank Foreword Andras Ungar’s Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic embodies some of the most original and plausible ideas behind the methodology, structure, and sources of Ulysses to come along in more than a decade. Ungar stresses the importance of epic parallels in the novel in translating them into a familial fable of Irish sovereignty in keeping with the epic’s traditional interpreta- tion as an allegory of nationhood. Manifest in his book is the exceptional idea of Ulysses as a real Irish nationalistic epic in its most ancient and politically figurative form, ultimately drawing on Arthur Griffith’s ver- sion of Sinn Fein for a promise of Ireland’s future emergence as a sover- eign country. Ungar begins by redefining/clarifying the intent and purposes of the epic in regard to the various nationalistic epics of antiquity: the Aeneid’s relationship to the foundation of the Roman Empire and its future destiny and the celebration of Portugal and its empire in The Lusiads, both turning the epic into a fable of national consciousness. “By making its own fable the essential frame of the articulation of this horizon, for the conjunction between the quest for an appropriate epic voice and national self-aware- ness, Ulysses connects its Dublin scenes and conversations to the grand lexicon of legitimacy in the West. The result is a celebration of the epic as a formative power in everyday life.” Joyceans have been struggling for a long time to provide a sufficient answer to the problem of Joyce’s intent beyond the mere comic value of parody in connecting his novel to Homer’s great ur-epic. Ungar’s solution is that Joyce is going far beyond his stated goals for Dubliners in exposing Ireland’s hemophilia/GPI, when in Ulysses he pursues a path toward even- tual salvation laid out in Griffith’s Resurrection of Hungary. While we have already made a good deal of the political implications of Griffith’s pamphlet in Joyce’s work, no one I know of until Ungar traced its connec- tion to the events following the turn of the century and the evolution/ viii Foreword decline of the Hapsburg Empire in terms of Joyce’s presence in Trieste in the middle of the historical upheaval in which the politics of Hungary’s “resurrection” were taking place. Applied to the idea of Joyce’s celebration of the epic fable as a formative power in everyday life and creation, Joyce’s scene of 1904 Ireland, at a crossroads of its own nationalistic destiny, ex- propriates the significance of Sinn Fein for its own political fable of na- tional destiny, weaving the whole into the domestic drama of the Blooms’ extended household. While the history of the Sinn Fein party and the politics of the 1922 treaty are generally well known to Joyceans, the details of the relationships of the crowns of St. Leopold and St. Stephen in the Hapsburg/Hungarian context of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe, particu- larly disputed territories like Trieste, may come as news, as they are linked to the Joycean vision of the Nova Hibernia of the future. Throughout, Ungar’s close reading of segments of Ulysses produces new interpreta- tions founded in nearly every case not on speculation but on solid his- torical grounds and common sense. Zack Bowen Series Editor Bibliography ix Acknowledgments Many people have contributed to the shaping of this text. I’d like to thank my readers at the University Press of Florida: Zack Bowen for his pa- tience and suggestions; Dominic Manganiello for his encouragement; Enda Duffy for his careful survey of the whole argument and detailed commentary. I remain grateful to Joseph Ronsley, then of McGill University, for pa- tience in his encounters with several ur-versions of the argument. I prof- ited from conversations with Marika Finlay, Bob Myles, Richard Cooper, Robert Holton, and Robert Bennet, at the time all at McGill, for strands of this composition. At Concordia University, where I completed several de- grees and have now taught for many more years than I was a student, I have learned a great deal from G. David Sheps’ interest in modern litera- ture, Eyvind Ronquist’s work on Dante, Laszlo Gefin’s analysis of Pound, and Fred Krantz’s studies in menschheit. I’d like to thank Ramesh Ram- baran at the Webster Library for his help and consideration and my stu- dents both in the English Department and at the Liberal Arts College for helping to keep alive the ideas that went into this work. I can’t begin to detail my debt to my family. This book owes a great deal to my late father, who never heard of Joyce. A refugee from Stalinist Hun- gary, fatally ill soon after his arrival in Canada, he was determined to un- derstand the politics and historical events that had destroyed his first fam- ily and had forced him to emigrate with the very young children of his second family. I owe my interest in history and language to the daily duty of having to translate for him at an age when I could hardly manage En- glish or the news. My father had a terrific appreciation of how practical things worked. In Joyce, I was attracted to the intellectual horizon of an émigré, a poet with infinitely complicated talents who was committed to elaborate conversations with acquaintances, poets, historians, and politi- x Acknowledgments cians, living and dead, and who thrived on the practical difficulties of pro- viding a coherent historical account. Bela Ungar would have wanted to know how Joyce’s story worked. I’d like to thank Viola Schwartz-Ungar, Suzanne Ungar, Giselle Foti, and especially Kathryn Gill for just being around and for forbearance, hu- mor, and support throughout the long composition of this book. Some of the material here has appeared in print previously as “Among the Hapsburgs: Arthur Griffith, Stephen Dedalus and the Myth of Bloom,” Twentieth Century Literature 35.4 (winter 1989): 480–501; “Joyce’s Hungarian in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly, 27 (1990): 648–50; and “Ulysses in Ulysses: What the Nolan Said,” in A Small Nation’s Con- tribution to the World: Essays on Anglo-Irish Literature and Language, ed.