Seeds of Brightness: Poetic Memory in James Joyce's
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SEEDS OF BRIGHTNESS: POETIC MEMORY IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES by Laura Quinlan DeJong A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL August 2016 Copyright 2016 by Laura Quinlan DeJong ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the encouragement and insightful direction of my dissertation committee of Dr. Mark Scroggins, Dr. Myriam Ruthenberg and Dr. Marcella Munson. As well, I am eternally grateful to Dr. Scroggins for the legacy of the University of Louisville’s Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Dr. Ruthenberg for the magical summer ITA 4930 program held in Orvieto, Italy in 2010, and for the combined efforts of my committee to further my teaching career. In addition to my PhD committee, I would like to thank Dr. Carol McGuirk (Theorizing Science Fiction) and Dr. Jennifer Low (Shakespeare and Company) for providing me with valuable, detailed advice on the revision and formatting of my graduate papers, which assisted me in my writing of this dissertation. iv ABSTRACT Author: Laura DeJong Title: Seeds of Brightness: Poetic Memory in James Joyce’s Ulysses Institution: Florida Atlantic University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Mark Scroggins Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Year 2016 This dissertation examines the process of “poetic memory” in James Joyce’s Ulysses, a term chosen by Italian philologist Gian Biagio Conte to describe allusive processes in the poetry of classical texts, specifically the epic. Conte examines and classifies the epic codes and norms residing within and constituting the classical epic genre. These change with each successive epic according to the author’s culture. The allusive process enables an author’s dialogue with his or her predecessors, which has implications for the establishment of textual authority. By applying Conte’s system of epic codes and norms toward a reading of Ulysses, it is possible to interrogate the novel and assess how it situates itself within the epic tradition. In Ulysses, Joyce responds to and revises the epic tradition through his appropriation and modification of works by classical, medieval and Renaissance authors. He writes from the advantage of doing so in the early twentieth century, at a point in history with a wide range of literary material available to it. Through Ulysses’ Homeric v frame and intricate allusions, Joyce creates a somatic text, one that appropriates the textual somatic components of the Commedia and Gargantua and Pantagruel. In appropriating and revising elements of these somatic sites, as well as classical allusions, Joyce creates a foundational Irish epic, one that ultimately questions and even parodies statements of authority. vi DEDICATION Dit manuscript draag ik op aan Tom DeJong. Bedankt dat je mij door de jaren heen hebt ondersteund in dit project en het voor mij mogelijk hebt gemaakt mijn dromen te verwezenlijken. SEEDS OF BRIGHTNESS: POETIC MEMORY IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES INTRODUCTION: REVISIONIST POETICS IN ULYSSES ........................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: THE EPIC ULYSSES .................................................................................. 3 Early Epic Authorship and Dynamics of Appropriation ................................................. 8 Primary and Secondary Epic (Oral and Literary) .......................................................... 16 Epic Codes and Epic Norms .......................................................................................... 23 Integrative and Reflective Allusion ............................................................................... 33 CHAPTER 2: JOYCE’S SYSTEM OF WORKING ....................................................... 39 Quidditas, Claritas and Epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ........... 46 The Epiphany as Epic Code .......................................................................................... 49 CHAPTER 3: ULYSSES’ ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE AND SOMATIC REPRESENTATIONS ..................................................................................................... 57 Copia and Textual Abundance ...................................................................................... 67 The Citizen: A Parody of Nationalism ......................................................................... 74 CHAPTER 4: DANTE’S AUTHORITY AND POETICS IN CANTOS 25 ................... 88 The Development of Dante’s Poetic Aesthetic in Cantos 25 ........................................ 98 A Poetics of Somatic Re-membering and Embryonic Gestation ................................ 104 CHAPTER 5: “OXEN OF THE SUN” – THE BIRTH OF THE TEXT ....................... 127 The Procreative Text and the Birth of Man ................................................................. 129 Revision of Epic Codes – Incorporation of the Epiphany ........................................... 137 CHAPTER 6: ADVERTISEMENT AS EPIC CODE ................................................... 152 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 171 viii INTRODUCTION: REVISIONIST POETICS IN ULYSSES The title of this dissertation, Seeds of Brightness: Poetic Memory in James Joyce’s Ulysses, contains two allusions. The first, “seeds of brightness,” is Joyce’s reference to a passage in Virgil’s The Georgics, book 3, depicting the impregnation of ferocious mares. The mares experience miraculous conceptions when “they’ll turn, as one, towards the west to face the wind/ and breathe its airs and then – a miracle! – without being/ covered/ by a sire, receive the seed a breeze implants in them” (3:272-75). In another sense, the seeds pertain to the idea that allusion involves the lifting of words as seeds from texts to be deposited into other texts. One name for this process, in addition to “allusion,” is “poetic memory,” a term used by Gian Biagio Conte to denote allusive poetics in classical Greek and Roman poetry. The term emphasizes the intentional aspect behind allusive processes. The appropriation of a story, speech or rhetorical marker in a poem by another signifies not just a response to the poem, its author or the poetic tradition but also indicates the appropriating poet’s intention to situate his or her work within a tradition of authority. Although poetic memory exists in classical Greek and Latin non-epic poetry, it is also a constituent of the epic genre, and joins other rhetorical devices as a means to classify a work as epic. While it is my intention to explore, in a limited fashion, allusive practices in earlier forms of classical and Christian epic, the primary object is to examine how those practices re-emerge in Joyce’s modernist epic novel, Ulysses. The allusive practices in the epic dating from Homer’s time onward are part of a framework of poetic 1 structures and rhetorical ingredients (codes), a subset of culturally inscribed statements known as norms. Joyce participates in this tradition of epic codes and norms revision; however, he does so through interior monologue and parody. Accordingly, he creates new textual possibilities for the epic genre. In post-Homeric poetry, beginning with the Alexandrian school, poets such as Callimachus, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Statius and Lucan engaged in a poetics that involving allusion, revision, signposting and other practices that were commonplace and integral to the writing of the epic and to poetry in general. Classical scholarship shows that their work was highly experimental and involved a vigorous appropriation and modification of others’ scenes, dialogues and stylistic components. Conte, who sees allusion as a metaphor, builds upon the work of Giorgio Pasquali, who published important analyses of Horace’s epigraph technique. In his studies, Conte identifies an ongoing successive engagement in the revision of epic codes and norms. These codes and norms have changed since Homer’s time, as they have been borrowed and modified by medieval, Renaissance and modern writers. Joyce’s establishment of his own epic codes and norms in Ulysses calls for a further exploration of his allusive practices, one that considers Ulysses’ dual position as a novel as well as an Irish epic. 2 O Muses, o high genius, help me now; O memory that set down what I saw, Here shall your excellence reveal itself! Dante Alighieri, Inferno 2 CHAPTER 1: THE EPIC ULYSSES Since its publication, Ulysses has acquired a comprehensive scholarship regarding its epic features. A prose novel, Ulysses does not conform to the classical format of epic verse; however, there is a precedent for mixed verse/prose narratives in early Irish heroic tales and medieval Irish epic literature (Tymoczko 73). Writing an experimental prose novel of highly divergent episodes and epic traces, Joyce signals that Ulysses is an epic through its title, schema, standard epic formulae and various references to its own epic possibilities, all of which categorize it as a response to the epic tradition. However, more specifically, how does Joyce’s participation in an allusive epic tradition inform his own epic? The primary object of this dissertation will be to examine Ulysses’ allusive processes within the parameters of its epic status. The novel’s eighteen chapters, situated within the course of one day, June 16, 1904, were planned and written in accordance with the events in The Odyssey, including Telemachus’ coming