Seeds of Brightness: Poetic Memory in James Joyce's
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 of age, the long and delayed trip home and the homecoming. The
novel contains some traditional epic features - the invocation, the journey, extended similes, and chapters begun in media res – although many of these are couched in parody.
However, as a prose work, any “epic” designation of Ulysses is made trickier in terms of its treatment of the heroic models before it. It has invariably been termed a “mock-
3 heroic” epic, with its unlikely protagonist, Leopold Bloom, termed an “anti-hero” in the
sense that he is a modern day man of various failings and average stature. Joyce assigns
him the wandering mode of Odysseus but Bloom’s wandering is that of a simple man
who lives in modern day Dublin. In many ways, he is an outlier, adrift socially, and a man who nowhere near possesses the superhuman qualities of epic heroes such as
Odysseus or Aeneas. That Ulysses is an Odyssean text is certain. And some scholars have classified it as a fable. Ulysses borrows generously from Irish folklore, right at the outset, as is witnessed by the visit of the milk delivery woman to the Martello tower in chapter 1 (“Telemachus”). A stand in for the fabled itinerant old woman who haunts
Irish hillsides, she is “A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayor, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning” (Ulysses 1:404-05). Here, her designation as cuckquean foreshadows Leopold
Bloom’s own position as a cuckold, one that will serve as his primary reason for wandering around Dublin throughout the novel.
The aesthetic choices and strategies underlying Ulysses are intricate. A hybrid comprised of Irish folklore, Greek and Roman poetics, and medieval philosophy,
Ulysses’ textual fabric is generous in its range of appropriation. Joyce has often been termed a medievalist or as having a medieval sensibility and his conversations with
Arthur Power indicate a pronounced affection for medievalism. There is a wonderful passage in chapter 12 of Power’s book that describes the two men’s visit to Valery
Larbaud’s flat so that Joyce could retrieve some books and manuscripts. He had taken to writing there in a room “shaped like a cabin of a ship” with a “light in the middle and a long table running down the centre with shelves like small bunks along the wall on either
4 side at arm’s length” (Power 105). Additionally, the room was “soundproof and
draughtproof,” the irony of all of this being that Joyce did not like to work in it as he
equated the snug chamber with a tomb (Power 105). On the heels of the visit, Joyce
extols the virtues of the Notre-Dame’s roof:
at their amazing complication – plane overlapping plane, angle countering
angle, the numerous traversing gutters and runnels, flying buttresses and
erupting gargoyles. In comparison, classical buildings always seem to me
to be over-simple and lacking in mystery. Indeed one of the most
interesting things about present-day thought in my opinion is the return to
medievalism. (Power 106)
The same reasoning behind his love of the church’s architectural features echoes the
reasoning behind his choices in creating the intricacies of Ulysses. The novel possesses
the textual equivalent of these sudden and confrontational angles, bisections, arches, and eruptions.
The Joycean text is keenly aware of its process, of its (as Derek Attridge put it)
“effects,” so much so that it almost seems, at times, to highlight its experimentalism to the point of a kind of creative treatise on style and allusion.1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, in their concept of “minor literature,” render a fitting description. According to
Claire Colebrook,
Minor literature frees language from a speaking subject, and shows the
ways in which subjects are effects of ‘collective’ ways of speaking. . . . If
1 Note Derek Attridge’s claim, in Joyce Effects, at the end of the twentieth century that “Among the negative evaluations of Joyce on an intra-cultural basis, the most tenacious and widespread (particularly in relation to the later works) has been that there is an excess of technique over content, intellect over feeling, and will over spontaneity”(175). 5 we take literature to be the expression of some human spirit then literature
is subordinated to something other than itself and is located within a
historical trajectory of human becoming. But if literature is literary then it
must be a minor literature, not the continuation or expression of an already
existing identity but an event of style. (310)
And there are many styles in Ulysses. The distinction here resides in the narrative voice of the text - a kind of cultural or civic voice disconnected from any discernible character’s voice. “Great texts,” Colebrook writes, continuing Deleuze and Guattari’s assessment, “such as those of Joyce and Kafka, can be described as minor precisely because they are written in such a way that what they say is not located within a speaking subject” (qtd. in Colebrook 310). In her analysis of Joyce’s earlier story, “A Painful
Case,” Colebrook points to the political voice that opens the story, one that embodies the rhetoric of Dublin’s consciousness: “Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious” (qtd. in Colebrook
310). The voice is not contained within quotes and is political she says, not because it
“expresses a political message but because its mode of articulation takes voice away from the speaking subject to an anonymous or pre-personal saying” (310). In other words, the impersonal is more political or universal.
Ulysses contains many moments of such anonymous articulations. For example, chapter 17 (“Ithaca”), takes the form of an impersonal catechism, with a question and answer format in block form; chapter 15 (“Circe”), is structured as a play, with titles of the speakers directly preceding the spoken lines; chapter 13 (“Nausicaa”), while not
6 anonymous, still contributes to the novel’s shifting feeling as the narrative is shared between the two perspectives of Gerty MacDowell and Leopold Bloom. As Colebrook points out, the narratives of Joyce’s earlier work already explore the use of a voice through which a national consciousness can speak. Ulysses could be said to possess
elements of a collective national voice, although these elements are often difficult to
fathom due to the surrounding parody or their subversion as a result of Joyce’s critical
stance on his country’s notions of nationality and mythic grandeur at the time of its
writing.
Ulysses tends to be upheld as a model for theoretical discussions. It is perfect for
discussions such as minor literature and has collected a substantial record of scholarship
owing to its aesthetics but also to its enormous range of content. Its motifs are often
difficult to trace among the magnitude of detail. Various characters and objects emerge,
disappear, and re-emerge throughout its chapters, the manner of which results in a
piecemeal issuance of information. In this sense, motifs only become apparent when read
from the beginning to the end of the novel. One such motif that will be discussed later in
chapter 5, and part of Joyce’s formulation of one version of his epiphanies, is the bat.
Other motifs include the advertisement of Plumtree’s Potted Meat (discussed in chapter
6), which finds its way through multiple chapters, and the ever present, yet deceased,
Patrick Dignam. These motifs surface in the minds of Joyce’s characters and reveal the
potency of memory, consciousness (both personal and national) and internal dialogues, a
quality thoroughly modern and apart from the simpler specific storytelling narratives of
earlier epics.
7 In conjunction with his prose techniques, Joyce engages in allusive practices, utilizing codes existing within the epic tradition. As such, Joyce - and Ulysses - engages in “poetic memory,” the term used by Italian philologist John Biagio Conte to denote allusion, with the added emphasis on a privileging of the moment of intentionality during the poet’s use of allusion (Conte 27). With the assistance of concepts derived from twentieth and twenty-first century philology, Joyce’s allusive processes can be analyzed.
Importantly, Ulysses has an advantage over classical and medieval epic works in that it is not as restricted in its choice and range of styles and allusive material. A diachronic look at the epic predictably casts allusive processes in earlier works as more limited, whereas the later epics, romances and others works of the late medieval and early modern era by writers such as Francois Rabelais, Torquato Tasso, Luís Vaz de Camões, Edmund
Spenser and John Milton are able to employ a wider range of allusive possibilities in terms of content. The allusive practices in their work function in accordance with the epic codes and norms that they engage with, utilize and modify. In order to provide a fuller picture of the historicity involving poetic practices with respect to epic, the next section will discuss early epic authorship.
Early Epic Authorship and Dynamics of Appropriation
Epic texts pre-dating classical works exist as early as 1700 B.C.E. (Gilgamesh) and 1200 B.C.E. in the Babylonian Epic of Creation. In its earliest forms, the defining characteristics of the epic structure are, at least partially, those meant to facilitate its oral nature: the lyrical nature of the verse and the repetitive use of “stock words,” words meant to assist in remembering the details. Those forms appear between 3500 and 4000
8 B.C.E. and, from these fragments, according to Paul Innes, the epic “gives a sense of
emerging literary traditions” and “stories, including the epic, act as templates to be varied
according to local interpretations” (3). What is most remarkable about the emergence of
these early epic prototypes is that they already reveal a process of appropriation and
revision: “Right from the beginning of the history of the epic, then, there is interplay
across culturally defined notions of authority as these narratives migrate and are
reinvented” (Innes 3). This process of appropriation and revision will be conveyed orally
and can be seen by the presence of heroic markers in epics such as Gilgamesh that will subsequently convey to the Homeric model:
The great gods created the structure of Unug, the handiwork of the
gods, and of Eana, the house lowered down from heaven. You
watch over the great rampart, the rampart which An founded. You
are its king and warrior, an exuberant person. (ETCSL)
Already evident in Gilgamesh are identifiers such as heroic attributes, the perilous journey, divine intervention, the superhuman hero and other features such as extended similes and the three-fold repetition of dreams. Thus, thousands of years before the
Roman epic, there are such formulae as the warrior, with his formidable strength, and the handiwork of the gods.
Concerning early pre-Homeric epic models, W. R. Johnson notes the following features: an accompanying lengthy recitation of information pertaining to history, persons of note, places of renown and other facts that the audience grew to expect during the telling of the tale. More specifically, “what the audiences wanted from their epic improvisers was a sort of encyclopedic inevitability cast in narrative form, a record of
9 whatever information they needed to survive and thrive, a collection of such information
stored in and retrievable from professional poets and their poems” (27). Johnson labels
this info-divulging genre as both “informational epic” (consisting of both the
safeguarding and display of the epic as info on request) and “living encyclopedia” (28).
This encyclopedic nature of the oral epic manages to carry on and reinvent itself across
centuries to re-emerge as a tendency in medieval authors to incorporate “lists” in the
medieval era, also a byproduct of the early medieval importance of amplification. Listing
and cataloguing partially comprise such works as Erasmus Desiderius’ The Praise of
Folly, Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and, later, the exorbitant listing found in Ulysses.
The Iliad and Odyssey are the foundational epics that all early Roman and later
European writers will look to in order to model their own work after and both were widely imitated in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Dating to the late 8th or early 7th
century B.C.E., their basic structural features will become widely imitated. Oddly
enough, there is some consensus that the language of the Homeric poems is one that is
“artificial and poetic,” (Knox, The Iliad 11) and a hodgepodge of
archaisms – of vocabulary, syntax and grammar – and of
incongruities: words and forms drawn from different dialects and
different stages of the growth of the language. In fact, the
language of Homer was one nobody, except epic bards, oracular
priests or literary parodists would dream of using. (Knox, The Iliad
11)
10 The possibility exists that early epics were products of earlier ballads sewn together in
order to form one full work. In contrast to later critics’ view of the Homeric verse,
Aristotle praises the poems’ rhetoric. Adopting the idea of mimesis from Plato, a concept
that had already been around in Greek culture for a long time, Aristotle “found imitation
natural to man” (Newman 39). He had definitive ideas about the qualities that gave the
epic its greatness, including mimesis. His Poetics is considered to be foundational, the earliest commentary on literary study that has proved influential in classical times up through the present. In chapter 24’s comparative discussion on simplicity and complexity inherent in epic poetry and tragedy, Aristotle states:
In epic, there is also a necessity for reversals, recognitions, and the
depiction of suffering. Here too, thought and diction must be handled with
skill. Homer used all these elements first and in a proper way. For each
of his poems is well constructed; the Iliad is simple and exhibits suffering,
whereas the Odyssey is complex (for there is recognition throughout) and
shows character. In addition to these matters, Homer outstrips all others in
diction and thought. (Poetics 77)
He also identifies various aspects of the improvisation that sets Homer apart from other poets in his era: “And just as Homer was especially the poet of noble actions (for he not only handled these well but he also made his imitations dramatic), so also he first traced out the form of comedy by dramatically presenting not invective but the ridiculous”
(Poetics 65-66). Finally, Aristotle praises him for his imitative techniques and
“speak[ing] in his own person in the poem as little as possible,” (78) which would defeat his position as an imitator. Despite his laudatory work on the subject of Homer’s epic,
11 and on its traits “unified and grand in style and [its] subject matter” (44), there is
evidence that the epic form has been abandoned and then revived at some points – for
example, at the end of the 5th century (Newman 44).
The poet seen by history as second to Homer in popularity, if not technique, is
Hesiod. In Ion, Socrates proclaims “Now you assert that Homer and the other poets,
among them Hesiod and Archillochus, all treat of the same subjects, yet not all in the
same fashion, but the one speaks well, and the rest of them speak worse” (Plato 40).
Plato subtly explores the notion of Hesiod as “one of the others,” and Longinus, in his
essay on the sublime, sees fit to contrast a descriptive line from Hesiod (one that he finds to be “rather loathsome”) to the elevated diction of Homer’s, one in which “Homer magnifies the higher powers” (101). A large part of this critical consensus is reinforced by Greek culture’s (and the Aristotelian) viewpoint that tragedy is the highest genre to aspire to and, as Richard P. Martin notes, “. . . Homeric poetry is best because it more closely approaches tragic drama” (qtd. in Innes 31).
The Pindar-influenced poet Callimachus, in an attempt to engage with Homer’s work after it became subject to a corrupted appropriation by other poets in the
Alexandrian era, found it necessary to revisit the work of Hesiod due to the fact that it offered a range of new material and a new code (Newman 19 and 516). His interest lay not in narrative or dramatic poetry but in “an arresting, amusing or piquant moment . . . .
[m]odernization, familiarity, brevity, lightness, variety, rapid transition, episodic curtailment, the startling treatment of detail – all of these were part of the new
Callimachean manner” (Otis 5-6). There is some consensus, by Susan Stephens, that, along with Appollonius and Theocritus, Callimachus reworked Greek poetry to write new
12 verse for the court of the Egyptian king, Ptolemy II (c 284 BCE) (Stephens 12-17).
According to Stephens, humor and realism were important to him and the reworking of
Greek mythologies to suit the Ptolemaic court was part of the poet’s aesthetic. She also identifies deliberate “moments of rupture” in his crafting of verse that seems repetitive and, as other critics complain, devoid of substance in favor of rigid formalism.
At the same time, Stephen Hinds, in his exploration of the Alexandrian footnote
(labeled as such by scholar David Ross), has brought attention to the fact that poets in the
Alexandrian era, such as Callimachus, were making pronounced references in their verse through “appeals to tradition and report, such as ‘as the story goes’ (fauna est), ‘they relate’ (ferunt) or ‘it is said’ (dicitur)” (Hinds 2). The point of all of this, according to
Hinds, is in the rote nature of the usage and such usage as a marker – he terms it the
“Catallan dicuntur” - as a simple reflexive citation, a way of a poet denoting oneself a scholar (2). In this respect, we can see that the earliest use of allusion is sometimes a simpler allusive marker, designed to emulate common poetic practice of the time for the simple purpose of invoking the work of another poet but not necessarily to connote any particular work or memory.
An example of use of the dicuntur will be seen in chapter 5 during Stephen’s speech on fertilization and fantastic pregnancies at the Holles Street Maternity Hospital, one that responds to Dante’s Purgatorio 25. Joyce’s use of the dicuntur enables him to engage in a dialogue (through Stephen’s dialogue) with both Dante and Virgil, thereby entering into a negotiation of authority.
Horace, and his 476 line Ars Poetica (10-8 B.C.E.), the longest of his poems, is important to classical literary criticism. As with Roman poetry’s inheritance of Greek
13 models, Ars Poetica counts as its influences technical material from the Greeks as well as
ideas contained in the work of Quintilian and Cicero and it holds that poetry should both
instruct and provide pleasure at the same time (Hadas 182). It deserves a place in any
discussion concerning classical literature and theory’s legacy to twentieth century
modernism. His other works – the Epodes (iambi), Satires (Sermones), and Odes – all afford him a reputation of a great lyric poet, although the Epodes, with their experimental nature, are the work that serve “as the index of the origin and growth of Horace’s lyric style” (Hadas 165). Similar to Joyce’s use of various rhetorical styles and parody, the
Epodes constitute a mix of themes and styles, with some displaying a mock approach to the message. For example, Epode 17 is a “mock recantation of the satire against witchcraft” (Hadas 166). Horace’s suggestions on the craft of poetry contain sentiments that resonate with the modernist aesthetic of recycling material. The below selection is from his letter to the Piso brothers, themselves invested in the study of poetry, and also includes various snippets about the suitability of genre-specific form, tone, and consistency.
In weaving your words, make use of care and good taste:
You’ve done it right, if a clever connection of phrases makes a
good old word look new. If you have to display some recondite
matter in brand new terms, you can forge
Words never heard in the pre-tunic days of Cathegus. (85)
Horace’s message, which is actually quite modernist, points to an evolving aesthetic of appropriation and modification. He emphasizes the nature of poetic art as “a capacity for objective self-criticism” as well as “a practiced mastery of a craft [and] as a systematic
14 knowledge of theory and technique” (Leitch 122). By Horace’s time then, there is
already a marked allusive aesthetic at work in Latin authorship that encompasses epic
poetry and the ancillary dialogues regarding the theory and technique concerning its
creation. Equally as important is “decorum . . . [as well as] copying the techniques and
strategies of one’s accomplished literary predecessors” (Leitch 11).
It is clear that Horace occupies Joyce’s thoughts by adolescence, with his
schoolboy translation of the Horatian ode “O fons Bandusiae” into English (Schork 144).
Plenty of pun-like or otherwise modified quotations from Finnegans Wake and Ulysses derive from Horace. Sometimes, as is the case with other moments in Ulysses, Joyce merges the Horatian phrase with another allusion to create a new, complex meaning. The artistry in Joyce’s use of Horatian allusions operates on two levels: the first is the level of the word, of etymology and language and a choice to interact for the (often playful) sake of authorial experimentation and the second is praxis. As Schork explains, Joyce is creating neologisms or puns – using Horatian words to do so - as a nod to Horace’s dictum to the Pisones to “search for the callida iunctura (clever verbal connections) that would transform diction by placing familiar words in arresting and extraordinary collocation” (153).2 While Horace is not the only one to own the distinction of creating
neologisms or engaging in word play, this early legacy of making clever connections and
creating something new undoubtedly has influenced Joyce’s artistic choices.
2 Elsewhere the term “callida inunctura” is glossed as “skillful combination” and as a doctrine “which is of far-reaching importance in the tradition of European poetry, no least in Virgil” (Newman 56). 15 Primary and Secondary Epic (Oral and Literary)
In Joyce’s adaptation of the Homeric frame, he is using traces of an epic defined
by an oral tradition, but one that also serves as the most popular and original Greek model in western culture. It is partially from this model that Joyce takes the basic image of the wanderer, extended voyage, and homecoming. Against the frame of implied events such as Odysseus’ visits to various islands, his descent to the underworld, and the transformation of Odysseus’ men into animals, Bloom visits taverns, attends a funeral and rescues Stephen – and himself - from the clutches of Bella Cohen.
In his 1967 study, From Virgil to Milton, Cyril Bowra notes the differences in the
Homeric and Virgilian models. Homer’s The Odyssey is built upon narratives laden with repetition and structurally given to a “looseness of construction” that “might be used for piecemeal recitations and [which] must be ready for them,” as it was commonplace to recite only portions of the epic at a time (4). Analyzing the composition of the Homeric and Virgilian models, Bowra notes the following qualities in each:
Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a
whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the singleness of his
effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the
concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed
without irrelevant or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into
bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is
obvious at first sight. (5)
It is this similar fancy, and similar oral classification, that places Homer’s epic in the same league as “Beowulf, the Song of Roland and a large mass of Jugoslav lays” (Bowra
16 5). Even later, in the work of Rabelais, Fischart, and Nashe, “the oral art of the
storyteller remained incalculably strong” (Weiman 3). Both the oral and the written
format transfer their structure features but the following quote reveals that written transfer enables a more facile improvisation:
In oral poetry, the matter of the song and the art of recitation are handed
down from bard to bard, presumably through sustained personal contact.
In literary epic, the new poet signals participation in the epic tradition by
imitating formal, thematic, and stylistic elements of previous epics, so that
an informed reader may readily sense the relation between old and new.
(Gregory 439)
Whereas Homer’s work is defined by the immediacy and pronounced character of his hero, Virgil’s epic is entirely different. His seminal work, The Aeneid, appropriates the Homeric structure: the first six books are modeled on The Odyssey, while the second six of the twelve are modeled on The Iliad. A fable of the events leading up to the founding of Rome, The Aeneid was written as a means to celebrate the rule of Augustus
Caesar, but takes as its subject a distant set of events, discrete and removed from the time space of Virgil’s present day empire. Bowra states:
The truly heroic ideal and standards of conduct did not exist for the writers
of the literary epic. [. . .] When he [Virgil] took the traditional epic form,
he had to adapt it to the changed conditions of his own day. Between him
and his heroic models lay a vast tract of history. He looked to the past for
inspiration but his work was invariably shaped by the present. (10)
17 The intrinsic quality in Virgil’s epic that became just as important to Camões,
Tasso and Milton was an attempt to “write a poem about something much larger than the
destinies of individual heroes, [and] he created a type of epic in which the characters
represent something outside themselves, and the events displayed have other interests
than their immediate excitement in the context” (Bowra 15). The implication we can
derive from the language in this statement is that the epic took on, with Virgil, a quality
more communal (with respect to empire) and universal rather than individual. In addition, there is an emphasis on connecting the past with the present:
He sought to provide a poem on the Roman character by linking his
fabulous hero Aeneas to his living patron, Augustus, to bracket past and
present in a single whole, and to give a metaphysical unity to Rome by
displaying the abilities which had made it great in its own day and had
existed in it from the beginning. His first aim is to the praise the present,
but the present is too actual, too complex and too familiar to provide the
material of his poem. (Bowra 15)
As did the Greek poets preceding him, Virgil works within an allusive frame, finding it necessary to respond to the work of other poets. As Paul Innes notes in Epic,
Virgil inflects his work with a very precise literary posture, a
developmental form of authorial identity that he finds in his immediate
predecessor, Lucretius (c. 100-50 BCE). In Virgil’s formulation, the poet
represents himself as self-consciously elaborating his craft, experimenting
with different devices until he attains the apogee of the epic form. (10)
18 He was so important to Dante that he was cast in the role of constant companion – a witness, guide and mentor throughout The Commedia. The move was also a calculated endeavor for Dante to invest himself with literary credence and authority. There are strains of “sweetness” in Virgil’s poetry that suggest Dante’s dolce stil novo poetry was written after the poet’s close consideration of Virgil’s nature verse in order to formulate a poetics.
Each epic poet appropriates or eschews structural elements, styles, techniques and allusions from his predecessors. The Aeneid’s major revision to the epic’s genre is
Virgil’s appropriation and modification of the Homeric structure in order to focus on
Rome’s past. According to Paul Innes, “Virgil clothes the literary epic tradition he inherits from the Greeks in the garb of Roman Imperialism. Since the poem is produced at the moment of the political shift from republic to empire, The Aeneid reworks the founding myth of the Roman people” (10). Like other epics, his is stocked with classical mythology and makes use of epic formulae.
Impressed by Virgil’s Roman epic, Luiz Vaz de Camões creates a Portuguese epic and takes as his hero Vasco da Gama. Like Torquato Tasso, his Os Lusiadas, published in 1572, is influenced by his readings of Petrarch. Camões’ aesthetic is largely influenced by his travel at sea and “[m]aritime expansion and travel, the historical backdrop of sixteenth century Portugal, exercise an influence on the metaphors and the real and imagined experiences of the Camonian poetic subject” (Blackmore 1089). His frame, per Cyril Bowra, is the First Crusade (15) and he is a keen study of Virgil, taking the similes he reads in Homer and Virgil and reinventing them (Bowra 107). Fanciful elements pervade his work, an inheritance from his readings of Matteo Boiardo and
19 Ludovico Ariosto. From his readings of Ariosto’s “marvelous landscapes and magical
gardens” (Bowra 127), Camões creates a ten stanza paradisiacal scene for his Island of
Loves (Bowra 127). This, despite the fact that the adaption of fanciful themes from the
poets led at times to a conflict with his “grave and heroic subject” (Bowra 127). Ariosto
uses jewels for flowers; Camões fills his island with the real flowers of his native
Portugal (Bowra 127-128). Bowra notes that Camões instead “paints the landscape of his
own country as he saw it with the homesick eyes of exile” (128). Camões, like Dante, is
exiled from his native country for almost twenty years, although Dante was never able to
return to Florence. Similarly, Joyce lives under a self-imposed exile. Able to return to
Ireland but unable to live there. Like Joyce, Camões draws material from his country, preferring to capture its native landscape within his epic. Joyce, of course, will continue to write of Ireland landscape and cityscape, with the assistance of others providing him
with names and other details.
Just as Camões’ imitation of Virgil results in a Christian epic, Tasso takes the
Crusades as a frame for his Gerusalemme Liberate and like Os Lusiadas, his work is a fanciful romance. However, Camões is a seasoned traveler who has experienced warfare and rough times, while Torquato Tasso writes from the shelter of Alfonso II’s (Duke of
Ferrara) court. Tasso’s poetry reflects the difference, despite the fact that he and Camões publish only a few years apart3. Even though both aspire to the Virgilian model, have received excellent classical educations and use the meter ottava rima, their sensibilities in terms of the content of their works differ (Bowra 139). As well, Tasso’s language is
3 Os Lusiadas is published three years prior to Tasso’s epic. 20 somewhat more elevated and learned rather than Camões’ native Portuguese. On Tasso,
Michael André Bernstein notes:
One general principle, formulated by Torquato Tasso in his Discorso
Primo . . . [is that] Tasso insists upon what is basically an affective or
intentional distinction between the epic and tragedy: in his view, the
principal emotion aroused by an epic should be admiration for some
distinguished achievement, or noble character-trait, rather than the pity
and fear (l’orrore e la compassione”) proper to tragedy. (qtd. in
Dasenbrock 258)
This somewhat contradicts the material that is contained in The Aeneid, since there are emotional moments. But where Tasso falters, according to Bowra, is in his naivety in matters of the world and the grounds for the crusade in his epic are unfounded.
Patronage, as well, plays a large influence in Tasso’s writing as he has spent a good portion of his early years (his father had been in residence) at Ferrara’s house. There, chivalrous epic “had become a prerogative and Tasso was both expected and prepared to provide it” (141). Tasso is a product of the Counter-Reformation and Bowra describes
Ferrara’s court as a kind of carefree island of non-acquiescence to French or Spanish interference, with a tendency toward an atmosphere of make believe in their northern
Italian sphere (142). In the next century, epic poems written by women will include
Enrico, or Byzantium Conquered (Lucrezia Marinella), Judith (Marie de Calages) and the creation poem Order and Disorder (Lucy Hutchinson) (Gregory 443).
The presence and awareness of poetic theory and analysis of technique continues through each century. Evidence of the same “make it new” sensibility that emerges in
21 antiquity and dominates twentieth century modernism can also be found in Geoffrey of
Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova (or “New Poetic”), a guide written in the late twelfth to early thirteenth century. At once a poem and treatise on poetry, it models its treatise structure on Horace’s Ars Poetica. Vinsauf uses Horace’s treatise-structured frame to carry his own commentary on poetics, and “just as his ‘new’ poetics reconceives and revises
Horatian poetics, so aspiring poets . . . best imitate tradition when they renew and refresh it” (Leitch 226). Remarking upon Joyce’s formative arts, including the schema and other
“rules” that he has placed upon the construction of Ulysses, Umberto Eco notes:
With the same sovereign disinterest, the genius for formalism, the
irreverent and unfair familiarity with the auctoritas that marks the good
commentators of the schools of medieval theology (always ready to find in
Saint Chrysostom or in Saint Jerome an expression adequate to justify the
philosophical solution that appears to be most reasonable), Joyce asks the
authority of the medieval Order to guarantee the existence of the new
world that he had discovered. (46).
The interesting proposition here is Eco’s assertion that Joyce, in formulating an epic based upon rules and ordering associated with the medieval era, asks the medieval Order to guarantee the existence of his new world. Living in self-imposed exile and a non- practicing Catholic, Joyce has a distaste for authority and no need for it from country nor church. While he would clearly realize the request for and attempts to obtain authority by classical poets in the textual realm (through a dialogue of allusive practices), it is hard to say from his writing how much of a sense of authority he receives from the allusive appropriation and modification of others’ works. Joyce does not live in the dangerous
22 conditions of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation and yet Eco notes that Vinsauf or
Mathieu de Vendôme, “theorists of the poetry of the twelfth century, would have been
happy with the iron-clad rules that support the discourse of Ulysses” (47). In terms of the
order that Joyce instills in Ulysses’ structure, Eco also sees the irony in its resistance to
order, admitting that Ernst Curtius “notes a metaphysical nihilism at the root, where
macrocosm and microcosm are fused in the void” (44). Noting Dante’s undeniable
influence, “Richard Blackmur mentions that unlike Dante, who gives order to things,
Joyce presents a type of nihilism in an irrational order” (44).
Whatever order or disorder Joyce displays in Ulysses, he participates in the
appropriation and modification of epic codes, a subset of which is the allusion
(metaphor). A discussion of epic codes and epic norms can be found in the next section.
Epic Codes and Epic Norms
An important underpinning of my premise is supported by concepts and terms
offered primarily in the work of scholars Giorgio Pasquali and Gian Biagio Conte, or
those other scholars who write alongside of their work. Pasquali contributes ideas
formulated in his studies of allusion in the work of Callimachus’ Questions (Quaestiones
Callimachae, 1913) and Horace’s Odes (Orazio Lirico Studi, 1920). According to
Heather Van Tress, Pasquali’s work is the first to confront allusion as an artistic
phenomenon, in general (11).4 Conte focuses his studies mostly in the late Augustan era
and has published works and articles on Virgil, Lucretius and Ovid. Other critics have since picked up the thread of Pasquali and Conte’s work and their subsequent endeavors
4 Previous works by de Jan (1893), Perrotta (1924-26) and Herter (1929) focus more specifically on singular examples of allusion (Van Tress 11). 23 have informed closer readings of Hellenistic, Neoteric, and Augustan poetries, readings which have discovered more specific aspects of emulation and imitation. These aspects include inconsistencies, allusive processes involving authentication, and, in a parallel movement, text-centered studies that investigate authorship in terms of written choices as a process of peer related dynamics.
Conte defines the “epic code” as the “objective narrative structure” of the epic genre, or the stock features that identify the epic as such (Segal 13). For example,
“heroic combat, divine interventions, extended similes, and so forth” (Segal 13). The “so forth” part of the equation may refer to the lengthy journey, katabasis, the earthly paradise, prophecy, the invocation to the deity, catalogues, games, and forms of digression. Epic norms “refer to the cultural contents with which a poet in a given society will fill that narrative grammar, the ideology that the particular realization of the epic code will convey” (Conte 13). Segal, in his introduction to Conte, describes part of the reason why Virgil was the supreme poet that subsequent epic poets looked to as a model:
Virgil exploits the endlessly rich combinations and choices in the epic
code to broaden the Roman epic norm. The unitary viewpoint of Homeric
epic implies a unitary perspective on the events narrated in the poem and
an absolute standard of heroic values; Virgil introduces a multiplicity of
points of view and thereby relativizes the epic norm. He thus undermines
one of the essential attributes of epic in the classical tradition, its unifying
interpretation and condensation of cultural values in mythic poetry. (14)
24 What Segal refers to as the “absolute standard of heroic values,” is something that Virgil, in his own time, cannot relate to. Instead, “Virgil abandons the scheme of life by which the hero lives and dies for his own glory, and replace a personal by a social ideal” (Bowra
13). Additionally, “[a]bove all, he made it contain almost a philosophy of life and death, a view of the universe which answered many desires in the heart of man and provided an impressive background to the new ideal” (Bowra 13). Virgil wants to create an epic containing a more complex range of involvement and emotions for his characters, such as the dilemma that Dido faces, and which would amount to more than a series of activities centered upon glory and heroic courage.
Virgil infuses The Aeneid with a Roman-centric sensibility and history while engaging in the poetic appropriative and revisionist tradition. Virgil is indebted to the intricacies of classical Greek and Roman epic and non-epic poetry for their contribution to epic creation and revisionary poetics. He himself will replace the unitary Homeric viewpoint in The Aeneid as follows:
The unitary viewpoint of Homeric epic implies a unitary perspective on
the events narrated in the poem and an absolute standard of heroic values;
Virgil introduces a multiplicity of points of view and thereby relativizes
the epic norm. He thus undermines one of the essential attributes of epic
in the classical tradition, its unifying interpretation and condensation of
cultural values in mythical poetry. Virgil meets this task by rebuilding the
epic code, widening its flexibility by the intertextual references to the
whole epic tradition, from the Iliad to Ennius’s Annales. The result is a
new ‘polyphonic’ epic that not only incorporates multiple viewpoints but
25 even allows contradiction and incoherence as a fundamental part of its
multilayered texture. (Conte 13-14)
The statement implies that, in Virgil’s writerly process, the incorporation (whether intended or not) of contradiction and incoherence is novel or game changing. However, more recent scholarship suggests that many works preceding those of Virgil are filled with contradiction and inconsistencies, inconsistencies that have often been explained away by scholars who were searching for unity and did not consider that they could be deliberate or reflective of the ignorance in speakers other than the primary narrator.5
Either way, Joyce, after reading Virgil’s epic and various novels, also utilizes a multiplicity of viewpoints, within an even more radically structured frame. Ulysses contains undependable and sometimes unidentified narrators. More significantly, it enables the increased textuality and display of the human mind through the internal monologue, the transition of thoughts and feelings in a linear progression. This style of writing is enabled by the advent of the novel.
In addition to his definition of epic codes and norms above, Conte draws upon
Giorgio Pasquali’s notions of “allusive artistry” or “art of allusion” (24) in order to examine appropriative citation. For example, poets such as Callimachus and Virgil write in response to their predecessors, an elaborate textual dialogue that informs authority and reinforces or modifies mythical elements of the genre. Allusion, according to Conte, acts as a rhetorical trope, basically metaphor:
Allusion, I suggest, functions like the trope of classical rhetoric. A
rhetorical trope is usually defined as the figure created by dislodging of a
5 See Sean Gurd, Literary Revision as Social Process in Ancient Rome, 2011. 26 term from its old sense and its previous usage and by transferring to a
new, improper, or “strange” sense and usage. The gap between the letter
and the sense in figuration is the same as the gap produced between the
immediate, surface meaning of the word or phrase in the text and the
thought evoked by the allusion. The effect could also be described as a
tension between the literal and the figurative meaning, between the
‘verbum proprium’ and the ‘improprium.’ In both allusion and the trope,
the poetic dimension is created by the simultaneous presence of two
different realities whose competition with one another produces a single
more complex reality. Such literary allusion produces the simultaneous
coexistence of both a denotative and connotative semiotic. (23-24)
An allusion (citation), then, acts the same as a metaphor, where a word comes to be known as possessing an additional or replacement value in terms of signification. In areas, the fabric of Ulysses is densely allusive – so much so that it is difficult to determine the number of allusions within one sentence. Joyce often creates single sentences composed of two or more allusive fragments.
Historically there have been two kinds of allusive appropriations: imitative and emulative. Imitative citation (imitatio) is the simpler gesture of copying material from one’s predecessor into the poem or novel. Emulative citation (aemulatio) is best described as a process “more complicated, [requiring] that the writer attempt to surpass his model in some way. He might find fault with a passage and try to improve upon it in his own work, or he might add to it in a way he finds unique, or both” (Van Tress 7-8).
Pasquali’s focus, according to Conte, centers too much on emulative practices in poetry,
27 those instances “where the allusion stands primarily in a relationship of . . . competition
with and improvement over the original” (26). Rather than focus on how poets “best”
one another through citation, Conte is interested in allusive processes as a poetic method.
To Pasquali, the meaning contained in poetry’s citations was key to understanding the text as “he maintained fiercely that no interpretation of an art form was possible unless one recovered and reconstructed its specific cultural identity and exact cultural context in all its historical density” (qtd. in Conte 24). Conte’s sensibility in approaching referential readings is a careful one: “One text may resemble another not because it derives directly from it nor because the poet deliberately seeks to emulate but because both poets have recourse to a common literary codification” (28). The issue of such a potential trap is addressed by Stephen Hinds, who points to scholars Jeffrey Wills6 and K. Morgan7 for
further reading regarding the issue.
Materially inert elements (or static allusions) can, Conte claims, fulfill a purpose,
one of imbuing a passage with authority. However, scholarship concerning the
significance or weight of specific allusions reveals that markers denoting allusion can range from those that appear token to others that create varying layers of meaning in a text. For example, in Conte’s comparative reading of similar passages in book 14 of
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ovid’s Fasti, and Quintus Ennius’ much earlier Annales, below, he finds different motivations in Ovid’s references to his own work and that of Ennius:
“One day at a meeting of the gods – I call it to mind, and have recorded
your devoted words in my remembering heart – you said, ‘There will be
one whom you will lift up into the blue spaces of the sky.’ Fulfill your
6 Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion 7 Ovid’s Art of Imitation: Propertius in the Amores 28 promise now.” With a nod of his head, the all-powerful consented.
([Metamorphoses 14.812-16] qtd. in Conte 37)
The passage above, which contains similar but condensed language in the passage from
Fasti, below, recalls Mars’s reminder to Jupiter of his earlier promise to immortalize
Mars’s human son, Romulus:
“O Jupiter” – he said – “the power of Rome is now strong and safe; it no
longer needs the help of my son. Give him back to his father. Although
one killed the other, the one who is left will be worth both. You told me,
‘There will be one whom you will lift up into the blue spaces of the sky.’
Fulfill your words now, O Jupiter.” With a nod of his head, Jupiter
consented. ([Fasti 2.483-89] qtd. in Conte 38).
Both quotations, while not identical, contain Ennius’ quote, verbatim:
“There will be one whom you will lift up into the blue spaces of the sky”
([Annales 65 Vahlen] qtd. in Conte 38).
The top quote contains the memory of a previous meeting of divine counsel, a meeting which is literally contained in another text. In this sense, Ovid ties together the two citations in order to make the promise that much more powerful. However, the appropriation of the single sentence citation from Ennius seems in no way to contribute to the poetic ambiguity that Conte explains can derive from allusive pairings, nor does it add additional depth of meaning to Ovid’s passages. That, according to Conte, does not matter, as “[t]he aim is not an act of semantic enrichment capable of loading a sign with an extra meaning valid in itself and for itself within the text” (58). Instead, he offers, the quote is effective because “Ennius had already written it, so that it already possessed an
29 independent ‘auctoritas’ (authority). Jupiter had “really” made the promise because
Ennius had said so in his great national epic” (59). The result of the combination of the
three quotes, then, is that Ovid creates a moment in Metamorphoses the complete meaning of which is contingent upon the earlier described moment from Fasti. Ovid further invests the moment with authority by relating back to his own previous text – situating himself as an authority - but also invests the passage with the authority of
Ennius.
There are many variations on the term “allusion” in philological studies. Conte discusses two types of allusion (poetic memory). An understanding of these concepts first requires an introduction to the three basic components of the metaphor/trope: the tenor, vehicle and ground. Adopted from I. A. Richards’ Principles of Literary
Criticism, by Conte and R. Garner8 for use in their own work, the terms “tenor,”
“vehicle,” and “ground,” represent the individual pieces involved in the assembling of a
metaphor (trope) as follows: the tenor represents the pre-existing object (or idea) that
would be the first part of the simile, the vehicle is the substitute for it or the thing that the
tenor is compared to and, finally, the ground represents the possibilities of meaning that
lie between the merger or alignment of the two.
The three terms also extend their properties to citation where one text alludes to
another. These terms, Van Tress writes,
have been applied to allusions as well. The primary text is the tenor, the
text alluded to the vehicle, what the two texts share is the ground, and
some ungrammaticality, some gap in meaning forces the reader to stop and
8 See Garner, From Homer to Tragedy. The Art of Allusion in Greek Poetry. 30 consider the text more carefully, hopefully coming to a deeper
understanding of what has been read. (10)9
For example, in Purgatorio 10, Dante and Virgil must proceed along an upward path
between “cracked rocks”:
Our upward pathway ran between cracked rocks;
They seemed to sway in one, then the other part,
Just like a wave that flees, then doubles back.
Here we shall need some ingenuity,”
My guide warned me, “as both of us draw near
This side or that side where the rock wall veers.”
This made our steps so slow and hesitant
That the declining moon had reached its bed
To sink back into rest, before we had
Made our way through that needle’s eye; (Purgatorio 7-16)
The tenor in the first line can be considered the written description of the pathway between the cracked rocks leading to the first terrace of purgatory. The vehicle for that
particular tenor resides in the last line, “that needle’s eye,” which is actually a fragment
of a biblical text, that of Matthew 19:24. The ground is whatever meaning can be found
in the attachment of “the needle’s eye” to the “pathway. In this case, it can be the visual
nature of that is shared, of the cracked rocks’ opening and the space that is the needle’s
eye. According to Van Tress:
9 Van Tress also notes that Conte’s theory of citation has some basis in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s concept of the “intentional fallacy” (19). 31 The tenor, vehicle, and ground are all static elements of a metaphor, but
there is also a dynamic aspect that must be interpreted; this is called the
“gap,” “tension,” or “ungrammaticality.” This can be defined as the
failure of the statement on a literal level, or the puzzle that a metaphor
presents. The gap or ungrammaticality stops the flow of the narrative
because the reader must pause to make sense of it. (10)
In this particular case, we recognize that the pathway is compared to “the needle’s eye.”
The specific visual – and reference – triggers an awareness in the reader that there is possibly an associated meaning attached to it. Particularly, the specific visual to “the needle’s eye” gives the reader pause. This pause or puzzle is the gap. Those who have biblical knowledge will make the leap that the pathway for the two travelers is difficult not just due to its position but because of the implication of getting into a Heaven. As
Christ states to his disciples, “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”
(Matthew 19:24 qtd. in Mandelbaum Notes 339). Of course, Dante is the one who should be concerned about getting into Heaven as Virgil has already been assigned his place in
Limbo.
The gap, tension or ungrammaticality, then, is a result of the interaction between the three static elements described above. Conte, referring to the recognition of the inherent meanings in allusive texts, states, “Knowledge of the ‘duplicity’ of such discourse, in which the two different realities stretch a single poetic idea between themselves, is knowledge of the gap between the letter and the ‘surplus’ of meaning it shares” (54). While this diagram of the allusion is helpful in terms of conceptualizing the
32 processes involved in the smaller units of metaphor or the larger engagements of textual passages, it does not negate the complexity of the process involved in discerning the gap or surplus of meaning. The section on integrative and reflective allusion, below, provides a further frame for authorship as it relates to allusion; however, that frame is still a binary model. The assessment of allusion is still a complex process, the nuances of which do not necessarily fit into a neat binary frame.
Integrative and Reflective Allusion
As discussed above, the previous terms of tenor, vehicle and ground comprise the three individual parts of a metaphor, as well as passages of text: the primary (tenor), the allusion (vehicle) and the exchanged or shared meanings (ground). The fourth ingredient of that combination is the dynamic aspect of the “gap,” “puzzle,” or “ungrammaticality.”
The terms imitative and emulative stand for the type of allusion used in allusive artistry.
Finally, the terms integrative allusion and reflective allusion, subsets of imitative and
emulative practices, respectively, represent the specific way that the allusion operates in the text. Conte describes them as follows, starting with integrative:
In such cases of emulation, the literary process takes the form of a
superimposition of two poetic structures made possible by the desire for
fusion between them and involves integration.
During such a process, allusion is absorbed by the author, whose words
appear to be directly expressed by the author as individual directly
responsible for the new whole. The only alternative to such amalgamation
33 is the refraction of an earlier word in a later, because they belong to two
different poetic environments. (66)
Van Tress, following Conte, provides an example of integrative allusion from Catallus, as follows:
“multas pergentes et multa per aequora vectus (“carried through many
peoples and many seas”)
Catallus, she writes, “compares the poet’s journey to visit and honor the grave of his brother to that of Homer’s Odysseus,” – below:
[Odysseus] who wandered much after he destroyed the might city of Troy;
and he saw the cities of many people and learned their minds and on the
sea he suffered many sorrows in his heart. (The Odyssey 1.1-4)
She continues her examination by reviewing the following passage in which Virgil
“alludes to both the proem of the Odyssey as well as Catullus’ initial line. Anchises greets his son Aeneas in the underworld:
I receive you carried through what lands and over how many seas”
(Aeneid 6.692-693).
Her interpretation is as follows:
Homer established the pattern of the well-travelled and long-suffering
hero, and Catullus casts himself as a second Odysseus in such a way that
the reader may make other connections between Catullus and the Homeric
hero: the general tragedy of the Trojan War and Odysseus’s nekyia.
Virgil’s Anchises then portrays his son as an Odysseus and a Catullus –
the heroic survivor and the kinsman coming to honor the dead. If we
34 approach these passages from a Pasqualian perspective, we might surmise
that both Catullus and Virgil seek to confront and compete with the
Homeric past. However, it seems that neither Catullus nor Virgil appears
to be attempting to compete with or surpass Homer. Instead, both poets
allude to the opening lines of the Odyssey in order to make the image of
Odysseus well up in the reader’s mind, and to enrich the verses of their
own poetry by infusing it with aspects of another poem. (16-17)
The discussions that Conte and Van Tress present on allusion highlight the
differences of integrative and reflective allusive authorship. Integrative citation involves allusive practices where two texts “integrate” and enrich one another through evocation.
So there is a sharing of meaning, a window of further meaning that is opened. The end result is that the allusion may also heighten one author’s sense (or status) of auctoritas, by using the reference to invest one’s work with the threads of authority (the allusive material). The status granted to the poet whose work is cited conveys to the author of the new text who borrows. Despite the fact that both Conte and Van Tress wish to avoid a solely reflective approach to allusion, it appears that it is the somewhat negative connotation of reflective allusion, the challenge involved, that seems to be malleable in their view.
In his scholarship on allusive practices in Roman poetry, Stephen Hinds has been able to examine the validity of certain hermeneutical practices in philological studies concerning allusion, highlighting in the process the range of citation practices in poetry and the substance of their operative features. The practice of ferreting out the allusive surplus in any citation always runs the risk of resulting in an integrative moment of the
35 barest measure where, as Stephen Hinds notes, one discovers an “accidental confluence,”
or a seeming imitation of, or appropriation of, one artist’s work by another when in
reality, the allusive moment is really a byproduct of authors with recourse to a common
lexicon. The term is similar to a description proposed by D. A. West and A. J. Woodman
in 1979:
Similarities of word or thought or phrase can occur because writers are
indebted to a common source, or because they are describing similar or
conventional situations, or because their works belong to the same generic
type of poem. Only patient scholarship and a thorough familiarity with
the relevant material can reveal whether the similarities cannot be
explained by any of these three reasons. In such cases we may be fairly
certain that direct imitation of one author by another is taking place. (qtd.
in Hinds 19)
The three parts to the beginning of quote, above, constitute the accidental confluence.
Various citations can consist of lightweight duties in terms of their status as a vehicle. In
other words, the allusive fragment may be present for the specific purpose of invoking
the work of another poet (and thus invoking his mystique or authority in the appropriating poet’s passage), and not necessarily serve as a nexus of complexity in terms of meaning.
Allusions can simply be a series of rhetorical flourishes, or stock ingredients that are vacant, empty signifiers in terms of allusion. Stephen Hinds refers to the problem of allusion as a “zone of zero-interpretability,” where the possibilities of reading the allusion
and tracing its path are next to impossible. Still, he invites caution in dismissing the
36 possibility of some connotation as such a zone is fairly impossible, given the fact that there is always some kind of reference usually involved, no matter how minimal (32-34)
Hinds’s examination of “accidental confluence” and instances of “finding meaning where none exists” leads to an analysis of J. C. McKeown’s work on Propertius’ influence in Ovid’s Am. I.I.25-6 because:
me miserum! Ovid uses this exclamation 45 . . . times. It is not found in
Vergil, Horace or Tibullus (heu miserum! at 2.3.78), in Propertius only at
2.33B.35 and 3.23.19. It is fairly common in Comedy and rhetorical
prose; see TLL 8.1105.84ff . . . Ovid favours the idiom because it helps to
produce a lively style . . . Here, he is perhaps echoing and dramatising
Prop. I.I.I Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis. (McKeown qtd. in
Hinds 30)
He cites examples from Ovid and Cicero in order to illustrate the issue:
Here is Cicero on the emotive subject of exile, with one among more than
a dozen instances of exclamatory me miserum and miserum me in his
speeches and letters (Pro Milone 102 qtd. in Hinds 32):
O me miserum, o me infelicem! revocare tu me in patriam, Milo,
potuisti per hos . . .
O wretched me, o unhappy me! You, Milo, were able to call me
back to my country with the aid of these gentlemen . . . . (32)
To the strict student of allusion, an instance of perfect irrelevance to the
nexus centred on Ovid, Am. I.I.25. And yet, like any utterance, this me
miserum comes with a rich freight of cultural resonance; and it may be
37 instructive to resist, just for a moment, the philological sense of
discrimination which hears it as mere noise to be tuned out in order for the
allusive nexus centred on Am. I.I.25 to be tuned in. (Hinds 32)
The “noise” mentioned here by Hinds, the “rich freight of cultural resonance,” is a
distraction that can fool the reader and is urged by Hinds to be put aside. He next finds
the source for the phrase in Quintilian’s commentary on Pro Milone 102. “Ovid,” he
states, “is not of course alluding to the Pro Milone,” but is simply the common pool of
cultural discourses to which Ovid has recourse (Hinds 33).
The information presented thus far on allusion provides a series of definitions
and a very basic approach, derived from the philological studies of Roman poetry, which
can be used as a new way to examine Joyce’s work. There are other ideas presented by such philological studies that may assist in this endeavor. Such allusive processes can
serve as a means to foreground a writer’s dialogue with earlier writers, the
announcement of innovative tendencies and newness (this can be seen in earlier Roman
poetry and undoubtedly influences Dante), and finally, the use of puns and sly exchanges
38 CHAPTER 2: JOYCE’S SYSTEM OF WORKING
In chapter 9 (“Scylla and Charybdis”), in his presentation of his Shakespeare
theory, Stephen Dedalus considers Ireland’s ability to produce an epic:
Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr. Sigerson says. Moore is the
man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a
saffron kilt? O’Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old
tongue. And his Dulceana? James Stephens is doing some clever
sketches. We are becoming important it seems. (Ulysses 9:309-313)
The irony, of course, is that Stephen considers such an idea while he exists as a character
in what will become Ireland’s definitive epic. Sigerson, in “Ireland’s Influence on
European Literature,” according to Don Gifford, “argues not that Ireland has never
produced an epic but that Irish influences have produced (among other works) the
Nibelungenlied and The Lay of Gudrun (“the Ililad and The Odyssey of Germany”),
Tristan and Isolde, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, several of Shakespeare’s plays, etc.” (214)
The statement implies that Irish culture has a potency about it, and the necessary materials to form a national epic, but that these leanings have not come to fruition.
Further, Gifford explains, “Sigerson encourages the champions of the Irish literary revival to produce epics because the epic traditions of Ireland are so rich” (214). Strains of Don Quixote pervade the quote, above, as the “knight of the rueful countenance” and
“Dulceana,” are both references to Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. The presence of Cervantes in Stephen’s thoughts reveals the necessary connection between
39 the anticipation of writing and the consideration of influences that goes with it. This is
just one of many incidences in Ulysses where the character’s thoughts and deliberations
relegate Ulysses to a text that envisions, records and serves as a notebook for authorial
planning.
Ulysses’ contemplative development, its ability to conceive of itself through its
characters’ minds (effectively writing itself in the process), is enabled by the epic
tradition. Joyce’s epic interrogates the necessity of, and possibility of, a “national” epic,
as Sigerson puts it. Scholar Andras Ungar sees Ulysses as a fable. Ungar’s work is
concerned with “the role of the epic fable as a historical argument mediating between present and future” and he states that he is not aware that this idea has received any
critical attention (8). He means, by the term fable, a “formally relatively underspecified
segment of narrative. It includes the basic story materials, corresponding to fabula, to
histoire, and to story in works on narrative by, respectively, Propp, Barthes, and
Chatman” (Ungar 9). In building his case for Ulysses as epic, Ungar points to its
collection of historical data and recording of cultural information of an Ireland situated in
1904, and the late nineteenth century’s trend toward historiography: “At the turn of the
century, discussions of the link between history and literature were commonplace.
Dilthey, Croce, Collingwood, all called explicitly on imaginative vision to serve as a tool
of investigation; Pound and Eliot had ‘investigations of history’ frame the workings of
imagination” (Ungar 2). Ulysses contains the essence and apparent methodology of
historiography but subverts certain elements of the historiography process.
There is some precedent in the image of an epic writer considering the
possibilities of his or her work during its creation. However, Joyce’s written
40 considerations of such possibilities tend to be more discursive and meditative in the moment; they are different than some of his predecessors’ meditations in that they reside within the epic text itself, and not in ancillary texts. Dante, for example, develops an aesthetic dialogue in his Convivio and La Vita Nuova as a way to develop and refine his aesthetics and which is connected to his Commedia. In the canticles of the Commedia, a a set of self-aware texts in its own right, he utilizes allusion as a way of establishing authorial dominance in relation to his predecessors, Statius and Virgil.
As well, as Dante the author, he is able to control the speech and actions of the predecessors he has placed in the Commedia. Certain dialogues between himself and the other poets he discourses with serve to solidify their authority as well as his own. Dante, however, while utilizing Dante the pilgrim in the Commedia to appeal for a clear voice and success in conveying what he witnesses and would like to describe in his poetry, does not ruminate directly as to whether he should be writing a Christian epic for Italy or who would be best-suited to do so. He simply writes one. Dante and Joyce come from vastly different cultures in terms of what constitutes authority and authorship.
Dante’s work is also central to Joyce’s own and his importance has been underscored by scholars, including Mary T. Reynolds, who notes that “Joyce scrutinized closely Dante’s combination of poetic structures in a sublime whole. Dante’s rhetorical management of complexity was Joyce’s most pervading interest” (12). Despite his intentions in emulating his role model, Joyce’s epic is a secular epic, different from the divinely infused cantos of the Florentine poet. And Reynolds agrees with this sentiment, noting that Joyce’s approach to Dante’s work is a literary approach, as has been the centuries of criticism that preceded his own:
41 . . . such a preoccupation with the literary rather than the theological
aspects of the poem, such an interest in craftsmanship rather than in
doctrine, followed a critical tradition of long standing. The tradition
began with the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola, only some fifty years
after Dante’s death, and it has furnished matter for argument and
controversy down to the present day. Whatever we may think of its merits
or defects, this critical stance, which argues that the Commedia can be
understood through a primarily literary interpretation, is an inclusive
critical position that has been validated by time, and it is the approach that
governed Joyce’s perception of Dante. (Reynolds 12)
It is clear that, as inextricable as Dante’s influence is both to Joyce’s authorial aesthetic and as a figure in his works, Joyce considers his engagement with Dante’s work as an ingredient to his own authority as a writer, particularly as a writer of the epic. Dante’s aesthetic and sense of authority is more fully described in chapter 4.
I consider second to Dante’s influence but perhaps just as important to Joyce’s development of Ulysses the work of Francois Rabelais. The French writer’s presence is referenced more explicitly through allusions in Finnegans Wake, but his influence is also felt throughout Ulysses. As a physician (a profession once envisioned by Joyce as his own calling), who has experienced exile to escape his persecutors (similar to Joyce’s self- imposed exile) and who writes highly allusive works that engaged in imitations of rhetorical styles, Rabelais would undoubtedly appeal to Joyce as an influence.
Joyce’s epic is undeniably parodic. Second, Ulysses is informed by the same themes of bodily strata in Gargantua and Pantagruel, and there are remnants of
42 Rabelaisian scenes found in Ulysses. Rabelaisian writing utilizes parodic formulas that, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, were derived from such literary influences as “parodied
Gospels, parodied liturgies [the All-Drunkards’ Mass of the thirteenth century], parodied holy days and rituals” (The Dialogic Imagination 184). This “involved the introduction of religious concepts and symbols into the eating, drunkenness, defecation and sexual- acts series in Rabelais . . .” (184). Bakhtin lists, as well, the “parodic-witchcraft literature, black-magic formulas of a type used by sorcerers . . . and they were widespread and widely known in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance” (184). The same
Rabelaisian eating, drinking, defecation and sexual act series (tropes) can be found in
Joyce’s writing. Chapter 12’s Citizen is a pastiche character, partially contrived of elements from Gargantua. In addition, the same graphic bodily displays and processes typical of Rabelais’ defecation series appear in the micturition scenes of chapter 12,
(“Cyclops”) and chapter 17 (“Ithaca”).
In light of the “rebuilding” of epic codes by Dante and Virgil, we can see evidence in Ulysses that Joyce is also rebuilding epic codes through various experimental and structural choices. As briefly mentioned in chapter 1, Joyce has a medieval sensibility and this is reflected in his structuring of Ulysses’ episodic chapters, its somatic treatments and parody. This chapter will examine a few of the more important aesthetic concepts that Joyce presented in his earlier works – Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man – including, most importantly, his epiphany. In doing so, this chapter will support and emphasize the ability to study Ulysses as a text which operates by epic codes and to treat it as a vehicle for the revision or modification of those codes.
Conte states that the term “epic code,”
43 refers not to features that allow us, through concrete induction, to see each
text as governed by the rules of a specific literary genre but to a much
more general system, whose potential may be implemented in new ways
without causing the reader to doubt that the work is an epic poem even if
this or that rule traditionally imposed by the system has been broken. In
fact, such a code allows a community to consolidate its historical
experiences, conferring sense on them, until they become an exemplary
system that is recognized as the community’s new cultural text or
scripture. (142)
Important here is the statement of negotiability “even if this or that rule traditionally
imposed by the system has been broken.” This definition serves as a means to avoid
perceiving the concept of epic codes in an absolutist fashion, and as a rigid, unmalleable
set of values. The “system” referenced above would be the set of values assigned by
those poets working within the epic genre and their acknowledging readership. The negotiable space that Conte describes is one that enables Dante to write a Christian epic using the frame of hell, purgatory and heaven to develop his aesthetic while imagining the comradeship he envisions with other poets. The same flexibility allows Dante to privilege and modify the vernacular as well.
Epic codes persist by that system in terms of an available matrix, one that changes over time. Codes (in terms of epic poetry) have already been modified well before the
Augustan age. “Such a code,” Conte continues, “is a source and a storehouse of interconnected values, vividly displayed in the actions of heroes, on which the community can draw as an organic arrangement of its own cultural foundations. The
44 code leaves plenty of room for choice” (142). The storehouse of values is a receptacle
that contains the earlier codes of primary and secondary epic. Some are long forgotten while the most predominant ones, for example, the heroic endeavors of the epic’s protagonist, persist. Even so, Bloom, as an unassuming figure in modern Dublin, whose bravest acts may be informing John Henry Menton that his hat is crushed or defending his right to be on Irish soil to the Citizen, is hardly heroic. The most ambitious endeavor he accomplishes is rescuing Stephen from Bella Cohen’s brothel and sobering him up before taking him back to Eccles Street. Long forgotten values, however, can be witnessed if, and when, their fragmented texts and ancillary materials resurface over time. In addition to antiquity’s values, the storehouse accumulates new values with society’s textual accretion.
In The Faerie Queene, there are the usual epic codes of the heroic combat, divine interventions, and extended similes, referenced above in chapter 1’s section on epic codes, epic norms and citation. However, The Faerie Queene draws upon the age of the knight and chivalry. The epic format and its codes - codes including heroic acts, divine interventions, extended similes, games and pastoral elements - persist. However, in The
Faerie Queene there are now the codes of chivalry and loyalty, codes adopted from earlier heroic chivalric poems such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The series of games in Homeric and Virgilian epics have now been transformed into beheading games.
In this sense, the new cultural script of the medieval era gives birth to a different category of epic codes. There are still earlier forms of epic codes present in the work; however, the age in which the Christian epic arises modifies the epic codes according to its chivalric sensibilities.
45 It can be said that Joyce fashions a new cultural text in accordance with Conte’s
statement that “the code leaves plenty of room for choice.” What kind of epic codes does
Joyce develop in his novel? Present are certain longstanding codes such as the invocation
to the muse, beginning chapters in media res, Leopold Bloom’s voyage (in miniature),
and similes. Through his experimentation with these forms, often by merging classical
metaphors with modern assemblages, Joyce is able to produce new codes. Most
importantly, the codes he develops are a product of twentieth century Ireland.
Quidditas, Claritas and Epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Initially, the epiphany is an important facet of Joyce’s (and Stephen’s) prose aesthetic. From 1900 to 1903, Joyce focuses on developing his prose techniques and it is during this time frame that he develops his epiphany, the secularized version of the religious revelation. Not the “manifestation of godhead, the showing forth of Christ to the Magi” but the “sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment in which
‘the soul of the commonest object . . . seems to us radiant’” (Ellmann 83).
For Stephen Dedalus, the process by which an epiphany happens, the praxis of which recurs throughout A Portrait, has its basis in Thomas Aquinas’ aesthetic process of apprehending beauty. As Seamus Deane notes, this is a misreading of Aquinas’ philosophy on Stephen’s part (Deane Notes 319). To the contrary, Deane states, Stephen has essentially cobbled together an aesthetic process from other sources, one of which is
Duns Scotus’ “theory of haeccitus” (‘thinghood’) by Gerard Manley Hopkins (Notes
319). Before his misreading of Aquinas, Stephen correctly paraphrases Aquinas from
46 Summa Theologica: “Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance” (A Portrait 229).
The foundation of Stephen’s theoretical process of apprehension that he wrongly attributes to Aquinas (but still pertinent for the operant aesthetic in Joyce’s own work) is
(1) the esthetic image presented in space or time, which is apprehended as one thing, in its wholeness (integritas); (2) the perception of the thing’s collection of parts, of the harmony in the constitution of its parts (consonantia); and (3) the realization of its thingness as no other, or its quidditas or whatness, and which possesses a kind of radiance (A Portrait 230-231). In explaining the concept of claritas, or the “whatness” of a thing, Stephen Dedalus states:
The connotation of the word is rather vague. . . . I thought he might mean
that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine
purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the
esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But
that is literary talk. I understand it so. (A Portrait 231)
Here, Stephen is ostensibly dismissive of his ideas of something “outshining its proper conditions”; however, even if he verbalizes his own apparent interpretation of claritas, he assumes this interpretation for his own purposes anyway as, moments later, he declares to his sounding board, Lynch, that the radiant whatness of a thing is “apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony” (A Portrait 231). This apprehension by Stephen in turn leads to the mind being “arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony,” which is the “luminous
47 silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state” (A Portrait 231). In sum, the epiphany involves a stasis or a kind of extended moment and/or meditation.
Significantly, before this discussion of claritas, Lynch requests that Stephen explain what he calls beauty, adding sarcastically “please remember, though I did eat a cake of cowdung once, that I admire only beauty” (A Portrait 224). Stephen’s response is one that validates Lynch’s assertion, revealing his thoughts about the artistic merit that can be derived from life, no matter what the material:
“We are right,” he said, “and the others are wrong. To speak of these
things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to
try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from
the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour
which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have
come to understand – that is art.” (A Portrait 224)
The first part of Stephen’s equation starts with a process of action “to express, to press out again,” from material such as “the gross earth or what it brings forth,” revealing that all matter is subject to manipulation, to the writer’s pen. The language which follows that of the “gross earth or what it brings forth,” however, elevates the general idea of the
“gross earth” to the neutral descriptors of “sound and shape and colour.” Essentially, in
Stephen’s view, no matter the conventional beauty or ugliness of the subject matter, all matter acts as “the prison gate of the soul,” or the intangible structure surrounding the senses and perception. The end result is “the image of the beauty we have come to understand,” which implies that beauty is the result of the evolution of one’s perception based upon personal experience and understanding.
48 In Joyce’s “Pola Notebook” of 1904, he affirms this idea in the twofold act of apprehension, which entails perception and recognition (Eco 27). In recognition, “the perceived object is judged satisfactory and therefore beautiful and pleasing . . . insofar as it is perceived as a formal structure” (Eco 27). In embodying these considerations, Joyce is questioning the idea of Being and “whether every object is beautiful insofar as it is a form embodied in a determined matter and perceived through these structural characteristics” (Eco 27). Umberto Eco explains that the concept of beauty based upon structural integrity is in keeping with Thomian ideals and that, due to the emphasis on structural integrity as beauty as opposed to conventional beauty, using Scholastic aesthetics, it was difficult to individuate an aesthetic “based upon the aesthetic quality of each common experience” (Eco 28). In tandem with the formulation of the “whatness” of a thing described above, the epiphany is not subject to conventional definitions of beauty. This results in an epiphany that allows, as part of its equation, subject matter execratory, grotesque, or otherwise unpalatable in terms of societal conventions concerning beauty.
The Epiphany as Epic Code
Joyce kept a working notebook of his epiphanies and examples of their articulation are present in numerous examples throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. The subject matter of these epiphanies is usually religious, aesthetic or political but the material used is often pulled from nature. It is important to look at the epiphany’s possibilities in terms of its structural components and accompanying processes, particularly in Joyce’s development of an epic code. Conte emphasizes that
49 epic codes’ contingency depends upon the era that the epic resides in. Joyce’s creation of
an epiphany from his perspective as a Jesuit educated Irish writer, with all of its
accompanying cultural ingredients, anticipates a rhetorical device that can be considered
a subset of the epic code.
In chapter 5, the epiphany will be examined in terms of its role as a vehicle in a
highly allusive nexus that informs Joyce’s position on authorship in “Oxen.” First,
however, the following passage is the first part of three that comprise an extended
epiphany in the beginning of chapter 3 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the
passage, Stephen meditates on his sinful visits to Dublin’s brothels as he’s sitting in the
schoolroom. As he envisions the women emerging from their houses, he imagines the
street scene as he “prowled in quest . . . would note keenly all that wounded or shamed them; his eyes, a ring of porter froth on a clothless table or a photograph . . .” (A Portrait
109). His watching of the women (now through his memories) transforms itself through the mathematical writing of his school scribbler:
The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening
tail, eyed and starred like a peacock’s; and, when the eyes and stars of its
indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again.
The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing;
the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched.
The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and
inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and
inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words,
the words of Shelley’s fragment upon the moon wandering companionless,
50 pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust
fell through space. (A Portrait 110)
In contemplating his own watchfulness, Stephen envisions his mathematical equation growing eyes. The passage is already pronouncedly metaphorical, with the equation expanding and folding in on itself just as the peacock spreads its feathers and collapses them. The transition of metaphorical ideas in here is rapid and a simile begins the passage. The equation’s features are “like a peacock’s.”
Stephen’s mathematics gives way to scribbling, and numbers and signs give way to feathers. The eyes of the mathematical peacock, opening and closing, represent the sleepiness of his “weary mind.” The extended description of the equation, itself already a metaphor, is the tenor or textual backdrop. In the following sentences, one metaphor follows another: “The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched” (A
Portrait 110). Present in this rich combination are the multiple connotations of watching, sleeping, evaluating and working (indices) and a possible reference to sexuality (the women of the brothels) in the “opening and closing . . . being quenched” (A Portrait
110). Even on its own merits, the passage (epiphany) already works to present a vivid realization of Stephen’s awareness of ideas both on the physical and mental planes.
Joyce’s passage, or tenor, is highly metaphorical and creates a rapidly shifting visual picture. The vehicle in this case (or allusion being appropriated) is the fragment of
Percy Shelley’s poem, “To the Moon.” Stephen, questioning the internal music that accompanies his meditation, thinks “What music?” Then, “The music came nearer and he recalled the words of Shelley’s fragment upon the moon wandering companionless,
51 pale for weariness” (A Portrait 110). The words taken from Shelley’s verse, below, are
from lines 1 and 3, with the full poem represented, below, for context.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth. –
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy? (“To the Moon” 1-6)
Here, the poem is the vehicle part of the allusion, imported into Joyce’s mathematical passage, the tenor. The moon is unnamed and implied, through its positioning and actions. It appears to be carefully chosen, however, as the passage contains language similar to Joyce’s. The ground that the fragment shares with Joyce’s passage is the similar theme of weariness, sight and stars. Shelley’s question “Art thou pale for weariness,” echoes Stephen’s “weary mind,” while the phrases “gazing at the earth,” and
“like a joyless eyes,” align themselves with the visual trope happening in Joyce’s
scribbling. What then, are the gaps or tension between them?
The moon, as metaphor for an eye, factors into Stephen’s imaginary heavenly vista of opening and closing eyes. Eyes turn to stars - the eyes of weariness and of voyeurism. The poem’s fragmentary presence appears to be an integrative, or complimentary, allusion. Its presence does not challenge the epiphany that Joyce presents; instead, it appears to suggest that Stephen’s problem might also be the “eye that finds no object worth its constancy.” In the second part of the unfolding epiphany,
52 Stephen’s thoughts turn to the exponential nature of his sin, by delineating a similar creative process, but this time Joyce portrays Stephen’s soul as a dying star:
The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation
began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was
his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin,
spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon
itself, fading slowly quenching its own lights and fires. They were
quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos. (A Portrait 110)
The “dull light” and “cold darkness filled chaos” fit the theme of sin. Additionally, the music of the first paragraph is missing in this one. The language in both paragraphs is similar. For example, in the first paragraph, the equation is spreading like a “widening
tail.” In this paragraph, his soul is spreading out; however, the “balefire” reference,
combined with the darkness at the end, signifies the threat of hell.
Important to this section is what follows a few passages later. Stephen continues to struggle with the sense of his sin after visiting prostitutes, due to desires of the flesh:
“He had sinned mortally not once but many times” (A Portrait 110). Following his
school room epiphany, he meditates, in the ensuing days, on the Virgin Mary, the glories
of which “held his soul captive: spikenard and myrrh and frankincense, symbolizing the
preciousness of God’s gifts to her soul, rich garments, symbolizing her royal lineage, her
emblems, the lateflowering plant and lateblossoming tree, symbolizing the agelong
gradual growth of her cultus among men” (A Portrait 112). The language here is both
religious and sensual. The women he visits have been replaced by the elevated Madonna.
The earlier trope of eyes and sight introduced two pages earlier continues:
53 Her eyes seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light
glowing faintly upon her frail flesh, did not humiliate the sinner who
approached her. If ever his soul, reentering her dwelling shyly after the
frenzy of his body’s lust had spent itself, was turned toward her whose
emblem is the morning star, bright and musical, telling of heaven and
infusing peace, it was when her names were murmured softly by lips
whereon there still lingered foul and shameful words, the savour itself of a
lewd kiss. (A Portrait 112)
By now, a number of things have happened. The wandering moon and its “joyless eye” have been replaced by the clearness of the morning star. The music here is hopeful, of heaven and peace, as opposed to Shelley’s music of weariness and despair. However, the foul words and lewd kiss of the last line reflects a last minute deviation. Stephen thereupon thinks “that was strange” but is called into the schoolroom and is unable to consider it further (A Portrait 112). The mention of the Virgin Mary in Stephen’s reading of the lesson from Ecclesiastes 24:17-20 in Latin, shortly after the description of
Mary’s “glories,” provides a vivid synesthesia of the visual and olfactory. The translation is as follows:
I was exalted like a cedar of Lebanon and as a cypress tree on Mount Sion.
I was exalted like a palm tree in Gades, and as a rose plant in Jericho. As
a fair olive tree in the plains, and as a plane tree by the water in the streets
I was exalted. I gave a sweet smell like cinnamon and an aromatical
balm! I yielded a sweet odour like the best myrrh. (Deane Notes 297)
54 This passage echoes two features from Dante’s Purgatorio 22, as it is evocative of a similar tree on the sixth terrace of the gluttonous and also interacts with the message from the voice that emerges from it. As Dante follows Virgil and the newly arrived Statius, their “delightful conversation soon/ was interrupted by a tree that blocked/ our path; its fruits were fine, their scent was sweet” (Purgatorio 22.130-132). Shortly thereafter, and as they approach it, the tree cries out that its food is denied to them (Purgatorio 22.141).
It continues with a reference to Mary’s concern for guests at the “marriage-feast” instead of her own nourishment.
The placement of the Ecclesiastes passage in A Portrait does not necessarily mean that Joyce has lifted the phrase from Dante. However, there is a good chance that he has.
The previous depiction of Mary, in her “rich garments,” “emblems” and sensuality, recalls Dante’s vision of Beatrice and her favor in God’s eyes. Now, the alignment of
Dante’s passage with Stephen’s dilemma speaks to Stephen’s gluttony in his visits with women in order to divulge sins of the flesh; however, in terms of the seriousness and love with which Dante portrays Beatrice, if the suggestion here is a lewd one then it can be considered a blasphemy.
It can be seen from the aforementioned discussion that Joyce pairs his own rhetorical device, the epiphany, with allusions from nineteenth century poetry and
Dante’s fourteenth century verse, depending upon the situation. In the first scenario,
Shelley’s poem fragment interacts with the epiphany in a way which creates the “dove- tail” effect discussed by Conte. In other words, the “desire to appropriate another poet’s style” (Conte 66) - in this case Shelley’s - creates a harmony and “denotation becomes loaded with an oriented connotation” (Conte 66). The inclusion of the Ecclesiastes
55 passage can be considered a “face to face” or reflective allusion as the possible three way
antagonistic relationship between the material from Ecclesiastes, Purgatorio 22 and A
Portrait signifies that both the biblical and Dantean material is being confronted by
Stephen’s meditation on his sins and the blasphemy of a “mock” solution. This is
confirmed later on in chapter 5 of A Portrait when Stephen meets Emma, the young woman who he obsesses over, and she questions him about his absence and his writing.
In the last diary format section of the novel, he states that his flippant responses made
him feel “sorry and mean,” so he “turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-
heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri”
(A Portrait 275). The statement recalls Dante’s shunting aside of his physical love for
Beatrice in favor of the divine love that she successively teaches him in the three
canticles of the Commedia, but also, paradoxically, implies the refrigeration of his ardor.
Either way, Joyce takes the reference and turns it into the reductive, a trivial mockery.
Finally, as noted in the above analysis, the presence of Purgatorio 22 factors into
Stephen’s musings on the Virgin Mary shortly after his moment of epiphany. As is
revealed throughout Joyce’s work, the epiphany is associated with Joyce’s (and in this
case Stephen’s) poetic aesthetic and development. As referenced in chapter 5 of this
dissertation, in Ulysses, chapter 3, Stephen – as a failed poet - contemplates the nostalgia
of his epiphanies’ possible success, with “copies to be sent . . . to all the great libraries of
the world” (Ulysses 3:141-42). As a supplement to the meaning contained within the
epiphany, Stephen’s meditations show an awareness of Purgatorio 22’s theme of
temperance, as well as the arrival of the poet, Statius, the latter of which will be more
fully described in chapter 4 of this dissertation.
56 CHAPTER 3: ULYSSES’ ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE AND SOMATIC
REPRESENTATIONS
Somatic imagery is integral to Joyce’s epic code building in Ulysses. As he writes his novel, he writes the human body. There are numerous examples of somatic textual arrangements that serve as loci for Joyce’s appropriation and reconfiguration of allusive material, thereby enable his own revision of previous epic codes in order to create new ones. A few of these somatic examples include his creation of the Citizen, discussed in this chapter, Stephen Dedalus’ embryology speech in chapter 5, and the re-appearance, chapter by chapter, of Patrick Dignam’s body (or shade, rather), according to the style of the particular episode. This chapter will examine the basic frames and rhetorical styles – styles arising from the tropes of abundance and the carnivalesque – that influenced
Joyce’s choice in elevating the body in his works.
In Ulysses, each chapter has been assigned (through the Linati schema), according to Joyce’s identification of Ulysses as “the cycle of the human body,” an organ of the human body. It therefore follows that, chapter by chapter, the details of Dublin’s subject inhabitants unfold under the umbrella of words, implications and processes according to the chapter’s accompanying organ; this process often includes puns and verbal parody of the organ in question.
The novel’s somatic emphasis – as to both bodily parts and its totality - can partly be attributed to the carnivalesque and exploratory literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, carnival influenced texts reach their
57 apogee in terms of cultural popularity. In his discussions with Arthur Power, Joyce
describes Ulysses as being “mediaeval but in a more realistic way” (Power 107). The medieval, Joyce states, “had greater emotional fecundity than classicism” and professes his attempts to express in Ulysses the “multiple variations which make up the social life of a city – its degradations and its exaltations” (Power 110). In the discussions set out
below concerning the somatic building of an early seventeenth century poem, as well as
the consideration of notions of copia and carnival, it is possible to ascertain Joyce’s
authorial pursuit of fashioning a somatic text; in this respect, Ulysses can be conceived of
as possessing a textual corporality and somatics-oriented praxis, where the text itself
attempts to imitate bodily functions.
The Odyssean schema provided by Joyce to his readership establishes a frame for the novel’s reading, and, “when asked why he entitled his book Ulysses, Joyce replied ‘It
is my system of working’” (Ellmann 359). Homer’s hero and his related wanderings
serve as the armature for Joyce’s eighteen chapters. This decision, as Umberto Eco
notes, has its basis in medieval thought:
The medieval thinker cannot conceive, explain, or manage the world
without inserting it into the framework of an Order . . . . The young
Stephen at Clongowes Wood College conceives of himself as a member of
a cosmic whole – ‘Stephen Dedalus – Class of Elements – Clongowes
Wood College – Sallins – County of Kildare – Ireland – Europe – The
World – The Universe.’ Ulysses demonstrates this same concept of order
by the choice of a Homeric framework and Finnegans Wake by the
circular schema, borrowed from Vico’s cyclical vision of history. (7)
58 However, the Homeric trace is not the only ingredient in Joyce’s system of
working. In 1918, Joyce hands the artist Frank Budgen a copy of Phineas Fletcher’s
allegorical poem The Purple Island or The Isle of Man (1633), and suggests that he read
it. A few days later, he holds the following conversation with Budgen, explaining the
impact of The Purple Island as follows:
“Among other things, my book is the epic of the human body. The only
man I know who has attempted the same thing is Phineas Fletcher. But
then his Purple Island is purely descriptive, a kind of coloured anatomical
chart of the human body. In my book the body lives in and moves through
space and is the home of a full human personality. The words I write are
adapted to express first one of its functions then another. In Lestrygonians
the stomach dominates and the rhythm of the episode is that of the
peristaltic movement.”
Budgen begins to respond:
“But the minds, the thoughts of the characters,”
And Joyce continues:
“If they had no body they would have no mind,” said Joyce. “It’s all one.
Walking towards his lunch my hero, Leopold Bloom, thinks of his wife,
and says to himself, ‘Molly’s legs are out of plumb.’ At another time of
day he might have expressed the same thought without any underthought
of food. But I want the reader to understand always through suggestions
rather than direct statement.” (Budgen 21)
59 Fletcher’s epic belongs to the genre of psychomachia, or literary works that are concerned with the vices and virtues of mankind, and he creates a parody of the pastoral frame in which the story (and building) of The Purple Island is narrated. The human body, or Isle, arises from “purple dust . . . from the new made earth” (Fletcher 1:44), in twelve cantos, echoing the biblical story of man’s creation. Fletcher also focuses the reader’s attention to the Isle’s creation as an art form, incorporating the Renaissance topos of indexing and the parts’ relationship to the whole. A detailed examination of the organs and their processes, according to the knowledge of Fletcher’s time, is rendered in delicate, almost ornate verbiage. However, this rendering, according to Thomas Healy,
is not to discover how it is constructed and how its processes work, but
why it functions the way it does. In this respect, Fletcher’s poem is related
to the long-standing conventions of the psychomachia. His demonstration
of bodily functions is a symbolic epic in which the moral condition of
humanity is displayed in a battle between virtues and vices. In The Purple
Island, the body replaces the ancient classic as a text to be interpreted
allegorically, demonstrating its utility in elucidating Christian, and in
Fletcher’s case specifically Protestant, ideas. (341)
It is an aquatic psychomachia, virtually swimming with copious streams, channels, basins, pools and fountains, an inheritance from Spenser’s numerous fountains, streams and pools.
As its title indicates, Fletcher chooses to depict the isle in purple overtones and provides a detailed sketch of the organs of the body with an emphasis on the venous connectivity. The building of the poem – and the allegorical body that is constructed
60 with it, can also be termed a deconstruction of the body in that it is looked at, piece by
piece, broken down in methodical fashion. An omniscient narrator, ostensibly Fletcher,
provides a narrative that encompasses a second narrative “sung” by the shepherd-poet
Thirsil.
Thirsil, who is charged with singing the poem, is dubious as narrator, alternately
evincing airs: “What need I then to seek a patron out;/ Or beg a favour from a mistrels’
eyes/ To fence my song against the vulgar rout;/” (I.21); or begging off due to the heat as
“Our panting flocks retire into the glade;/ They crouch, and close to the’earth their horns
have laid:/ Screen we our scorched heads in that thick beeches shade” (Fletcher 1:60). A
few cantos later, he is relieved that his ornery flock, “which his food refuses” deigns to
eat grass (Fletcher 3.2). Thus, there is a mock quality to his handling of the job that
emphasizes the straightforward part of the poem that delineates the Isle:
Now when the first week’s life was almost spent;
And this world built, and richly furnished;
To store heaven’s courts, HE of each element,
Did cast to frame an Isle, the heart and head
Of all his works, compos’d with curious art;
Which like an index briefly shoul’d impart
The sum of all; the whole, yet of the whole a part. (Fletcher 1:43)
In keeping with medieval and Renaissance ideas of God as the ultimate creator and artificer (for example, in Dante’s Inferno), Fletcher as narrator/creator casts to frame an
Isle, the heart and head of all his works, and composes with curious art. The language is
that of anatomy and creation, creation both linguistic and somatic. The last line’s concept
61 of parts to a whole is Aristotelian, just one part in the parcel of evidence of the
Renaissance’s re-discovery of classical philosophy and which proliferates in its poems and prose.
Finally, the creation itself is likened to an index, or guide to composition. As
Jonathan Sawday notes: “Imitation, a central concept in Renaissance poetic theory, orders the body, the world, and the heavens into a pattern of replication, in which each component of the system finds its precise analogical equivalent in every other component” (23). Through Fletcher’s network of fountains, channels and streams that serve as its venous routes, the human body is reified and inscribed as a new world to be explored. Fletcher writes his somatic poem shortly after the publication of Vesalius’ De
Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), in which “the interior of the body began to take on most of its modern features: Eustachius mapped the ear, Fallopius the female reproductive organs, Realdus Columbus and Fabricius of Aquapendente the venous system, and Michael Servetus the pulmonary transit of the blood” (Sawday 23). Much in the way the anatomy is partitioned and named, Joyce partitions and names the episodic chapters of Ulysses.
The spillover of science’s newfound discoveries of the human body into the realm of writing, particularly via the dissection and anatomization in the spectacle of the anatomy theaters in the sixteenth century, culminates in a body pronouncedly
“textualized,” initially through manuals and charts, and later followed by poetry and prose. In 1543, Claudius Galenus’s (Galen’s) earlier writings on the body are replaced by
Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporus fabrica libri septem, an event which assists in the
62 conceptualization of the interiority of the human body. The heightened focus on space and parts leads to an exploration of the miniature, as noted by Jonathan Sawday:
The period between (roughly) 1540 and 1640, is, therefore, the period of
the discovery of the Vesalian body as opposed to the later invention of the
Harveian or Cartesian body. Guiding the followers of Vesalius was the
belief that the human body expressed in miniature the divine workmanship
of God, and that its form corresponded to the greater form of macrocosm.
(23)
In many ways, The Purple Island reads as a tableside dissection. As noted by other scholars, the language used in the construction emphasizes the organs and their surrounding structures (such as ribs, muscles, sinew) in terms of defense, with their constitution and the spaces they occupy written in terms of vantage point and ability to be defended (Anderson 5). Aside from Joyce’s intrigue with The Purple Island as a model for Ulysses’ somatic epic and its organ per chapter schema, its textual allure resides in its
“cross-pollenating genre” of psychomachia, pastoral frame and battle lexicon (Anderson
5). The defensive aspect of the poem, in its representations of the body as partitioned and fortified, as well as its trope of exploration, are all themes associated with Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
According to Sawday, a burgeoning societal emphasis on individuality is accompanied by an invasive viewpoint:
A phrase such as the ‘culture of dissection’ suggests a network of
practices, social structures, and rituals surrounding this production of
fragmented bodies, which sits uneasily alongside our image (derived from
63 Burckhardt) of the European Renaissance as the age of the construction of
individuality – a unified sense of selfhood. But the ‘scientific revolution’
of the European Renaissance encouraged the seemingly endless
partitioning of the world and all that it contained. It seems an exaggerated
form of medieval ordering. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy
(first published in 1621 and perhaps a little late in this portion of the
paper), with its vast superstructure of divisionary procedures (a text
divided into parts, then subdivided into sections, members, and
subsections), is a late but nevertheless paradigmatic textual example of
this delight in particularization. (2)
Finally, Joyce’s sense of the human body – and its inscription in language – draws upon Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova, written in the eighteenth century (Seidel 41).
About its connection to Ulysses, Seidel writes, “Vico offers Joyce a theory of language and the human imagination, the mind traveling through itself to reveal the bodily forms outside itself” (Seidel 43). Vico likens geographical landscapes to the human body, and in Poetic Cosmography, “he writes of the linguistic progress from one visual form to another, from the geographical contours of the earth to the curves of a woman’s body.
Language accommodates the shapes of nature” (Seidel 41). The depiction of the Anna
Liffey in Finnegans Wake uses a similar model of bodily geography. The first few lines read: “First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils.
Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud, wupper and lauar, from crown to soul” (qtd. in Seidel 42). Here, Joyce imagines the woman’s features in the language of water and river sounds. The image also recalls the
64 winding hair and watery position of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Similarly,
Vico’s influence can be felt in Bloom’s observations of Molly’s body as she lies in her
bed at the end of the novel.
At home at the end of the night, Bloom considers the possible recourse he has concerning Molly’s adultery – “Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witnesses),
not yet” (Ulysses 17:2202-04). His thoughts presage the surveillance techniques of the
future and are ironic in considering the bed’s artificial ability to expose the lovers. In fact, the bed has already exposed their adultery through a natural means. In a preceding paragraph, while climbing into bed, Bloom notes the bed’s “imprint of a human form, male, not his” (Ulysses 17:2124). Despite this, Bloom’s vengeful thoughts turn to
Molly’s body, another Viconian representation:
In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and
reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?
Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial
hemispheres, in all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored (the
land of the midnight sun, the islands of the blessed, the isles of Greece, the
land of promise), of adipose anterior and posterior female hemispheres,
redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and seminal
warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude,
insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties of expression,
expressive of mute immutable mature animality.
Then?
65 He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on
each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mello yellow furrow, with
obscure prolonged provocative mellonsmellonous osculation. (Ulysses
17:2227-2243)
His wife’s physical charms defeat his thoughts of evidence and revenge. The only revenge that he ultimately perpetrates on Molly, and which is actually just a shift in their
respective roles of power, is his directive that she bring him his breakfast in bed.
The language in Bloom’s re-imagining of his wife’s body, viewed through the
lens of exploration and travel as “islands explored or unexplored (the land of the midnight sun)”, conceives of it as exotic. In essence, Bloom’s visions and longing for a
new, accepting homeland in the Agendath Netaim, an aim that he has deferred
indefinitely, are realized in the geography of his wife’s curves, the “smellow melons of
her rump” (Ulysses 17:2241). In addition, the transference of the elaborate somatic
imagery, the language of which is enhanced by Bloom’s sleepy mind, contributes to
Joyce’s epic code revision. How does Joyce accomplish this?
In Odysseus’ homecoming, there is no evidence of adultery to encounter and no
exploratory re-envisioning of his Penelope’s backside. Joyce transfers elements of the
Homeric fable to the scene, both in the reference to the “isles of Greece,” and the
homecoming of Bloom to Molly’s bed. There has been less than a twenty-four hour
separation between the two; however, in mirroring Odysseus’ ten year journey to return
home after the Trojan War, Bloom and Molly share a ten year lapse in sexual relations,
beginning with the death of their son. Bloom’s attention to Molly’s body at this point in
the novel is also one of heightened allusion. The kissing of her backside is the more
66 graphic equivalent of Odysseus kissing “the good green earth” (The Odyssey 13:403).
The “isles of Greece,” is also an allusion to Byron’s Don Juan, thus imbuing the passage with a hint of Bloom’s own internal womanizing. In addition to the Homeric strains, the
“isles of the blessed” are the “Fortunate Islands, somewhere in the unexplored western sea, where mortals favored by the gods went after death” (Gifford 604). Don Gifford glosses the location as comparable to the Tir na n-og or the Irish “Land of Youth,” a
“mythical island to the west of Ireland envisioned as a realm where mortal perfection and timeless but earthly pleasures were the rule” (220).
Bloom’s homecoming scene is a complex ground, the site of a multiplicity of meanings. His wishes for a new homeland, the immediacy of his thoughts through internal monologue, the textual influence of Vico, Homeric allusions and Irish myth all merge to create a new epic code. Ireland’s mythology and scenes of domesticity, as well as Irishman Joyce’s literary knowledge, transform the longstanding epic code of homecoming into a modern day homecoming.
Copia and Textual Abundance
Francois Rabelais and Joyce both employ lists in their works. The pages are filled with minutiae concerning food, clothes, games and titles, to name a fraction of the material they incorporate. It is helpful to consider Terence Cave’s exploration of
Desiderius Erasmus’ De copia to consider their motivation in compiling these lists. The title’s copia stands for abundance and the word derives, according to Cave, from the
Latin copis, which “already embraces the domains of material riches, natural plenty
(personified by the goddess Ops) and figurative abundance” (3).
67 The questions posited in Cave’s chapter on “Imitation,” reveal some of the same concerns with appropriation discussed elsewhere in this dissertation. Cave writes, “[i]n imitation, indeed, the activities of reading and writing become virtually identified. A text is read in view of its transcription as part of another text; conversely, the writer as imitator concedes that he cannot entirely escape the constraints of what he has read” (35).
A concern persists in the mid sixteenth century about imitation attempted subject to the potential trap of simple copying. There is a powerful desire for authenticity, Cave explains, and “[t]he appropriation of authentic discourse – a moment of presence to be discovered amid fragments of the textual past – will be the goal of theories and fictions, poetry and prose, throughout the sixteenth century” (33). Some of this is based upon the writer’s idea of himself or herself as aligned with an authority (53).
The sense of textual abundance and proliferation is encouraged (or enhanced) by
European printing capabilities. In his introduction to The Cornucopian Text, Terence
Cave explains how the advent of the printing press gives rise to an increase in texts, both in terms of production and genre varieties. The three major vernacular writers of France
– Rabelais, Ronsard, and Montaigne – produce writing that reflects these changes in the form of open-ended texts (ix). The writer, according to Erasmus, must find a way to
“both multiply and fragment his models so that he is not trapped by the prestige of a single author” (xi). Curiously, Ulysses is written as though Joyce has produced it alongside of Erasmus’ advice as Joyce’s various authorial influences transect each other in a lattice work effect throughout the text. Part and parcel of this process, Cave explains, is covered in book 2 of Copia, wherein Erasmus discusses the “‘notebook method,’ probably derived via Agricola from the imitation techniques of Italian
68 humanists on the one hand and, on the other, from late medieval sermon rhetoric” (27).
The following explanation of the notebook method can be considered a model of Joyce’s own collective practices. It is necessary to clarify that the “notebook method” referenced below does not pertain simply to the process of jotting down language or lists in a notebook but rather an inexhaustible assimilation of words and phrases, a process which influenced Erasmus’ own writing of De copia (Cave 25-27). Nonetheless, for purposes
of assessing Joyce’s own writing, it is relevant:
The method is expanded so that it draws on the whole corpus of classical
writing, and involves the intermediate ‘processing’ technique of thematic
and dialectical classification which will be exemplified in the index of the
Adages. Here copia takes on the sense of ‘storehouse,’ although store is
always envisaged in terms of release mechanisms which will allow the
processed materials to flow back into the stream of writing. (Cave 27)
The index referred to above belongs to Erasmus’ Adagia, a collection of adages that he
noted from his familiarity with classical texts. The idea of first processing thematic and
dialectical material and then subsequently releasing it back into the “stream of writing,”
is envisioned in the following segment from Ulysses, chapter 15 (“Circe”), where, in the
hallucinatory realm of Bloom’s inebriation, he envisions himself as Lord mayor of
Dublin. In this panorama of festivities and the “Venetian masts, maypoles and festal
arches” that depict a procession of Irish mayors and civil personnel, the narrative gives
way to an itemization of members of the “guilds and trades and trainbands with flying
colours”:
69 . . . coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law
scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimneysweeps, lard refiners,
tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church
decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries,
salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners,
export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse
repository hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters,
riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glover, plumbing
contractors. (Ulysses 15:1427-36)
Joyce’s catalogue, a blend of the modern and medieval, is artful in its drafting as it is both specific and beautiful in its precision. The list bears the same tendency toward copia of such writers as Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), whose work Cave references as an example of listing making, and Rudolph Agricola, a scholar and progenitor of the notebook method referenced above. Agricola’s agency enabled “the aims and methods of
Italian humanists such as Valla – and indeed Piccolomini himself – [to be] transmitted into the cultural climate of northern Europe towards the end of the fifteenth century”
(Cave 12). More specifically, Agricola’s “systematic assimilation and classification of materials of classical literature” (Cave 12) can lead to rhetorical creativity, as is evidenced by his views on schooling:
Characteristically, it is left to the student to devise his own categories and
assemble his own material, while the ‘fruition’ or production of
knowledge by constant practice (exercitatio), and the invention of new
‘things’ on the basis of what is known, are given high priority. Thus
70 Agricola envisages a constant process of absorption and creative re-
production. (Cave 12)
Cave also notes that Erasmus is influenced by Quintilian’s notion of “treasure house of things” (19). In further explanation of this, Cave adds that, where copia and brevitas is
concerned, the balance of the two “enables Erasmus to suggest that true plenitude of
language is to be found not in simple extension, but in inventive and imaginative
richness” (Cave 21).
These ideas resound in James Joyce’s extraction of materials from those around
him, in the form of notes taken from anecdotes and characters from his time in Dublin,
both early and through later visits (Ellmann 365). The open-ended voluminous text is
one that pleases Joyce. He appeals to those around him in efforts to gain material for
Ulysses, including one of his visitors in the thirties, whom he asks to “secure a complete
list of the names and addresses on Mecklenburg Street” (Ellmann 367). In early 1920, he
writes to his Aunt Josephine Murray for material to finish “Nausicaa” and “Oxen of the
Sun”:
I want that information about the Star of the Sea Church, has it ivy on its
seafront, are there trees in Leahy’s terrace at the side or near, if so, what
are these steps leading down to the beach? I also want all the information
you can give, tittletattle, facts etc about Hollis Street maternity hospital.
Two chapters of my book remain unfinished till I have these so I shall feel
very grateful if you will sacrifice a few hours of your time for me and
write me a long letter with details. (Letters 136)
71 The passage shows the extent to which Joyce aims to portray the reality of Ireland, to memorialize it as a snapshot in Ulysses. In his attention to capturing these details, as well as those of numerous songs, poetry, advertisements, news items and other Irish cultural artifacts, his novel becomes a storehouse of history and culture. The only possible downside to this is that such a dense materiality leaves the reader with the feeling of that he or she is just sorting through material.
In the medieval era, enargia becomes attractive to writers interested in imitation theory. Cave defines the word as “the evocation of a visual scene, in all its detail and colors, as if the reader were present as a spectator” (27-28). The concept is different from ekphrasis. To illustrate, Cave cites Quintilian: “But if you open up those things which were included in a single word, there will appear flames pouring through houses and temples . . . [etc.]” (qtd. in Cave 31). In enargia, the emphasis is on a verbal vision, and the transference of its verbal possibilities gives way eventually to copia, which encompasses those possibilities but enables representations both true and false (Cave 30).
The transference of a bright, sharp verbal vision to the extension of description on the verbal plane carries with it an inherent pleasure, with writing as a kind of hedonism. The following quote from Quintilian’s section on enargia, reveals its bearing on authorship:
But when the whole thing concerns pleasure, as is usually the case in
poetry, and in apodeixis, which are treated for the sake of exercising and
displaying one’s talent, it is permissible to indulge more freely in fictions
of this kind. To this category belongs Homer’s descriptions, as when he
arms his gods or heroes, or describes a banquet, a battle, a retreat, a
council. (qtd. in Cave 31)
72 Agricola’s work, Cave explains, examines enargia as “one of the most powerful devices for moving the affections” (32). It appears to carry a sensation-oriented effect with it, in terms of being awe-inspiring and capable of emotional arousal with respect to grandeur and nostalgia evoked from verbal depictions.
Desiderius Erasmus’ ideas are profoundly influential on the work of Francois
Rabelais, as are those of Joachim du Bellay, whose “Deffence argues that French poetry
can only hope to attain perfection by imitating the classics and that, while the true poet is born, only education in the classics will protect his talent from being useless or ill- informed” (Hall, Hardison and Kinney 1163). Rabelais’ imitative practices incorporate the ideas and writings of Lucian, Homer, Erasmus and a host of other writers in his
Gargantua and Pantagruel. He also employs a copia of itemization, listing and
enumeration similar to that listed above and which Joyce will use centuries later. For
example, multiple chapters of Gargantua and Pantagruel contain lists of activities
(Gargantua, chapter 10), games (Gargantua, chapter 20), fowl for a feast (Gargantua, chapter 36), the effects of corn on the body (chapter 2 of The Third Book of Pantagruel),
and the formal listing found in chapter 32 of The Fourth Book of Pantagruel, wherein
physical activities are paired with a corresponding (nonsensical) description, and which
include expressions from Erasmus’ Adages. The following section envisions, in Joyce’s
Citizen, a copia that manifests itself in the form of lists and verbal surfaces that enact certain linguistic possibilities of plenitude.
73 The Citizen: A Parody of Nationalism
In “Cyclops,” the Homeric overlay of Polyphemus and his lair co-exist with
Joyce’s interrogation of Irish nationalism, including the revivals of the Irish language and
the Irish insistence on its self-perception as a mythic race. The chapter’s theme is
“gigantism,” and contains trace images from more than one source, including Odysseus
and his crew’s stay at Polyphemus’ cave. Polyphemus himself is represented by a
character called the Citizen who, according to Richard Ellmann, is modeled after
“Michael Cusack, the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association” (61). Cusack fits the
necessary ingredients of Joyce’s Polyphemus: “Carrying a heavy blackthorn, he would
come into a pub and shout at the waiter, ‘I’m Citizen Cusack from the Parish of Carron in
the Barony of Burren in the County of Clare, you Protestant Dog!” (Gifford 61) Joyce’s
interpretation of the tale of Polyphemus’ wine-induced sleep translates into the chapter’s
setting of Barney Kiernan’s pub.
There are other echoes of The Odyssey, such as the numerous references and
double meanings involving eyes and vision. For example, the Citizen’s “couched spear of acuminated granite” (Ulysses 12:200), is the equivalent of both Cusack’s walking stick and Polyphemus’ club, taken and shaved to a point by Odysseus’ men. The image here is literal but there is mention of the word itself, with the citizen and Bloom “having an argument about the point” (Ulysses 12:488), Bloom telling the citizen that “You don’t
grasp my point” (Ulysses 12:522), and other references to eyes, vision and blindness.
The throwing of a stone into the bay at Odysseus and his crew by Polyphemus translates
into the Citizen’s throwing of the biscuit box as Martin Cunningham and Bloom pull
74 away from the pub10. Other familiar representations transplanted in Ulysses can be found
in the similarities between the cyclops’ hills with their prime farming land and the
mention of Inisfail’s (Ireland’s) “pleasant lands” and streams, fish and produce (Ulysses
12:68-99). As well, the language of “innumerable of bellwhethers and flushed ewes and shearling rams,” recalls Polyphemus’ flocks, the same that Odysseus and his remaining men would strap themselves to in order to escape their captor’s detection – including the
“bellwether ram, the prize of all the flock” that Odysseus lashes himself to (The Odyssey
9:482).
Maria Tymoczko sees a parallel reference of one eyed giants in the Irish
Fomorians, “the most chaotic figures in early Irish literature” (34) as well as in the Irish mythical race, the Fir Bolg. As a source available to Joyce, she continues, The Book of
Invasions or Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), “explains some of the puzzles about Bloom, Stephen, and Molly” (32) in that “in the Irish story we find the unified source for the constellation of main characters in Ulysses, the constellation of
Greek, Jew, and Mediterranean woman” (29). She writes:
The Book of Invasions contains the pseudohistory of Ireland: the
traditional history of Ireland before A.D. 432, the usual date for the
coming of Patrick and the beginning of written history in Ireland. Its
prototype was probably composed in the seventh century to fill in the gap
for Ireland in such standard late Roman universal histories as those by
Origen and Eusebius. (Tymoczko 25)
10 David Hayman refers to it as a small representation of Virag Bloom’s coffin. 75 Joyce, she explains, would have had numerous opportunities to read The Book of
Invasions, indirectly if not directly, since Joyce alludes to Milesians (a race of people it describes) in Ulysses as well as A Portrait of the Artist (27). Joyce’s reading of Irish
mythology and pseudo-history also prefigures his own lists, particularly in “Cyclops” and
“Ithaca”. In Tymoczko’s continued examination of Joyce’s Irish textual influences and
chapter 12’s Citizen, she writes:
Listing became a more prominent feature of Irish narrative after the
twelfth century; this development coincides with the popularity of the later
alliterative prose style, which is characterized by alliterative runs,
including descriptions replete with lists of alliterative adjectives. . . . Lists
in the medieval Irish texts are often outrageous and absurd because of a
tendency for Irish schemata to become symmetrical or artificial in other
ways, even to the point of inconsistency. (Tymoczko 150)
Apparent in the Citizen’s appearance and attire, along with chapter 12’s parody, is
Joyce’s decision to combine Homeric and Irish myth with the gigantism of Rabelais’
Gargantua and Pantagruel. Clothed in deerskin and a garment of “recently flayed
oxhide” representing a kilt, the Citizen also wears a girdle “of plaited straw and rushes,”11 recalling the straw-like haven of the Greek giant’s sheep’s den/cave and his status as a crude shepherd (Ulysses 12:168-69). Hung with seastones carved into crude visage and scenes, it is this ekphrastic and phallic adornment, a semiotic overlay on the already metaphorically inscribed Citizen, that establishes his ironic potency as both a symbol of
Irish nationalism and the conveyor of Ireland’s artistic and symbolic legacy. Violent in
11 Don Gifford glosses the item as a suguan, or Irish rope. “Notes,” p. 320. 76 his thoughts and sensibilities, and antagonistic to Bloom, the Citizen is an anti-Semite, just as Cusack and other characters are.
The seastones represent a diverse and dense textual landscape:
From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every movement
of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art
the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin,
Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, rian of Kincora, the ardri
Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O’Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen
Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott,
Soggarth Eoghan O’Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry
Joy M’Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg
Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott,
Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal
MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the
Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for
Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, the Man in the
Gap, The Woman Who Didn’t, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte,
John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar,
Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes,
Muhammad, the Birds of Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the
Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius,
Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and
Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier
77 Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn,
Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben
Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss
Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva,
The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky
Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Don
Philip O’Sullivan Beare. (Ulysses 12:173-199)
The list contains Irish kings, heroes, revolutionaries, rebels, military personnel and businessmen, as well as saints, martyrs, names from Irish songs and stories.
From this list it is clear that narrator’s “tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity” is not to be trusted, as some of the names are clearly not Irish and, instead, fictional characters. Joyce’s point is that the myth of a united Irish race is a false one. R.
J. Schork’s list of allusions for chapter 12, many of which are not contained in Gifford’s
Notes, identifies the source of the Citizen’s stones as Virgil’s victims of the monster and cattle thief Cacus: “nailed to his high and mighty doors, men’s faces that dangled, sickening, rotting, and bled white . . .” (The Aeneid 8:228-229). On the seastones (with a pun on sea/see), Cacus’ victims are transformed into striking “tribal” images. The implication is that the varied natures of the human personalities are the result of different tribes and, in turn, that Ireland’s tribe is an assemblage of varied ethnicities. While Cacus is the monster in The Aeneid 8, the cyclops are the forgers of Aeneas’ shield. In fact, the ekphrastic nature of the passage suggests the same detail found in the ekphrastic passages that celebrate the shields of Achilles and Aeneas in their respective stories, although this
78 passage is not one of movement but stillness – a written collection of token likenesses, hanging silent in their “rude” appearance.
The seastones’ crude faces, mostly the faces of Irish folkloric, political and revolutionary characters, are clearly designed to be worn by the Citizen as a means of authority. The move is likely a comic jab at Cusack, as Joyce provides a list of identities in what appears to be a mixed bag of names, with identities both Irish and non-Irish alike.
Whether the images are Irish or not, a pseudo Irish nationalism is implied. If we are to read the images as a trace of Homer’s The Odyssey, the passage mimics the “collection” of men that Polyphemus trapped and partially ate in his cave, as the likenesses also hang in close proximity to the Citizen’s stomach. If we are to read the images as a trace of
Virgil’s The Aeneid 8, with an accompanying unauthorized appropriation of the dead, then the Citizen has taken the stones without being entitled to them. The Citizen’s nationalism (and perhaps the nationalism of real Irish citizens) looks to sources fantastic and without merit, and parodies the fabricated nature of Irish history and royal lineage.
Conspicuously present in the seastones’ group is the poet Dante Alighieri, whose presence can be felt throughout Ulysses and in Joyce’s earlier works. His inclusion in this ekphrastic collection signifies his aesthetic influence on Joyce, as well as what appears to be an implicit sanctioning of Joyce’s authority in writing an Irish epic.
However, Joyce’s choice to include him on the Citizen’s girdle is likely mischievous and parodic. In Inferno 25, Dante sees the centaur Cacus in the eighth circle of thieves, adorned with snakes and a dragon (Inferno 25:20-23). Virgil explains to Dante that he has been placed there for stealing cattle (Inferno 25:28-30). Inferno 24 and Inferno 25 contain a series of somatic reordering considered to be an important statement by Dante
79 about his poetics. Because of this, the emergence of Dante on the Citizen’s girdle implies that the Citizen really is intended by Joyce as a modification of Cacus. Alternately, Joyce may be insinuating that where Dante had imprisoned Cacus, now Joyce “owns” Dante,
The complete meaning that Joyce wishes to depict in the Citizen’s accessory is a mystery. Although the images may be Virgilian, they are represented as “seastones,” recalling Stephen’s walk on the “damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats . . . [u]nwholesome sand flats . . . at the land a maze of dark cunning nets . . . Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells (Ulysses 3:148-157). The stones’ placement fall in the space allocated to the stomach and procreative organs, and the word “stones” is slang for the male genitalia. Finally, their location and visibility on the Citizen’s body may refer loosely to the idea of “having someone in one’s pocket,” in terms of approval and support.
Cacus’ simple and bloody trophies have been elaborated into a symbolic plenitude
- one that consists of varying elements of myth, exploration, prestige, invention, empire and authorship. In their proximity to the Citizen’s generative organs, the stones serve as a metaphor for his procreative possibilities. In this respect, the Citizen’s girdle recalls the codpieces – and their accompanying symbolism – in Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the representation, I see Joyce’s appropriation and transformation of Cacus’ heads as deriving from the same plenitude with which Rabelais invests his stories. Joyce is creating a Citizen from equal parts Irish giant, Homeric giant, Virgilian crime, and
Rabelaisian accessory. The following passage describes Gargantua’s codpiece:
The codpiece of the boy child Gargantua can be described as follows:
80 For his codpiece were taken sixteen and a quarter ells of the same cloth.
In shape it was like a flying buttress well and merrily attached to two
beautiful golden buckles and fixed on by two enamel booklets; in each of
them was mounted a large emerald as big as an orange (for as Orpheus
states in his book On Precious Stones and Pliny in his final Book, it has
properties for erecting and invigorating the organ of Nature). (Rabelais
230)
Curiously, the booklets are mounted with emeralds (stones), although Terence Cave
states that the referenced sources of Orpheus and Pliny are erroneous (184). The booklets’ presence on the decoration indicate a textual component, a potential for
reading. In his study of Rabelais (and thus the inherited readings of Erasmus), Cave sees
Gargantua’s braguette as a site of abundance:
[I]n Gargantua 8, the magnificent braguette worn by the child Gargantua
is assimilated to the horn of plenty. The myth here, it would seem,
attached firmly to the theme of sexual performance rather than to that of
writing. Yet one may perceive, by tracing its figurative development, a
fundamental movement inscribed in Rabelais’s text at many levels –
rhetorical, grammatical, and lexical, as well as thematic; it may thus be
taken as a point of departure for a textual exploration which will point
back insistently to the two-faced myths of plenitude in the Prologue to the
Tiers Livre. (183)
In the depiction of the codpiece, Rabelais’ emphasis on abundance is parodic:
81 The opening of the codpiece was about a pole in length; it was slashed like
the hose, with the blue damask cloth puffing out as before. But on seeing
the beautiful embroidery on it, with its threads of gold, as delightful strap-
work garnished with fine diamonds, fine rubies, fine turquoises, fine
emeralds and Persian pearls, you would have likened it to a horn-of-plenty
such as you can see on antiques and such as Rhea bestowed on Adrastea
and Ida (the two nymphs who brought up Jupiter). It was ever vigorous,
succulent, oozing, ever verdant, ever flourishing, ever fructifying, full of
humours, full of flowers, full of fruits, full of all delights, As God is my
witness it was good to see! (Rabelais 230-231)
As has been explained elsewhere, the imagery and language in the continued description
implies a maternal, nourishing fruit-like visual display, hyperbolic and also sly in that one verb – “oozing” – depicts a state incompatible with the remainder of the description, as it possibly indicates a venereal disease. “Full of humours” is also ambiguous. The potential for sexually transmitted diseases is real and the theme is already present through the syphilitic narrator. Especially if, as Cave writes, “The thematic function of this cornucopian codpiece is, apparently, to designate the sexual potency and fertility of what it contains” (184), then its allusive association with the detailed seastones acts as an
amplifier of artifice. In Rabelais’ codpiece, Cave sees the abundance topos emerging
through a careful use of language:
The recurrence of ‘tousjours’ and of ‘plene’ establishes perpetual fullness
as the thematic axis of the figure; and the notations of dampness,
fructification, and the seasonal cycle unambiguously evoke the world of
82 nature. Yet this glimpse of natural plenty is perceived through the lattice
of art: not only is the codpiece an artificial object; the cornucopia itself
appears as an antique cameo, as the representation of a myth.
Furthermore, the precious stones recall the textual domain of lapidaries
(Rabelais cites erroneously, the pseudo-Orpheus and Pliny). (Cave 184)
Cave’s analysis points out that the symbols contained on the codpiece serve as a representation of a myth. In contrast, the descriptions of several of the Citizen’s stones already contain a built in mythological status, through their identities. The qualities depicted by Gargantua’s codpiece fit the qualities proposed by the Citizen’s seastones.
They, too, are crafted through artifice but their connotation is one of death rather than abundance. As Cave notes, however, the Third Book of Pantagruel, chapter 8 (the sister chapter to Gargantua, chapter 8), also discusses codpieces. In it, Rabelais mocks Galen’s theories of human sexuality, particularly the production of semen. The bodily location of its production was debated at the time. The Citizen’s seastones have a war-like, revolutionary aura, similar to the Third Book’s codpiece symbolizing war and the perpetuation of the species. The ekphrastic connection between chapter 12 and Rabelais’ chapters 8 underscores, on the visual and verbal planes, a connection between the potential authority that the Citizen represents (however parodic) and the efforts of Bloom as a true citizen. I also see the Citizen’s seastones as a reminder that Bloom is a mock- hero, since he is not, as Odysseus was, a warrior. The ekphrasis serves as a means for
Joyce to conflate a classical metaphor with Irish mythology, resulting in a revision of epic codes.
83 Toward the end of the chapter, the narrator describes Bloom as having a
fundamental role in the nationalist move of providing support to Arthur Griffith. More specifically, “it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries” (Ulysses
12:1573-76). Here, as in the rest of the claims against Bloom, his involvement is skewed in the eyes of the pub’s denizens toward that of a manipulative interloper on Irish soil.
The role that Joyce assigns Bloom provides him a nationality that is greater than the verbal declarations and venting that transpire in the pub, effectively making the Citizen’s responsive Irish phrases and interest in renewing the Irish language hollow. His inclinations are the product of an investment in pseudo history, a myth and grandeur that is accompanied by a profound racial bias, whereas Bloom’s words amount to a praxis that can affect the Irish political landscape.
Ungar points out, in his writing of The Resurrection of Hungary, that Arthur
Griffith argues for an Ireland that could “free itself from the domination of England by emulating the campaign that the Hungarian leader Feren Deák initiated against Vienna after the national defeat in 1849” (20). Griffith “advocated a boycott of the parliamentary maneuvering at Westminster. . . . Through passive resistance, Griffith wanted Ireland to insist on the recognition of sovereignty that the Irish Volunteers had wrung from Britain in 1783” (Ungar 20). When this initiative failed due to Griffith’s preference for a non- violent abstention from the Irish, Sinn Fein split (Ungar 21).
The actual date assigned to Bloom’s involvement is, of course, fictional, with
Joyce, according to Andras Ungar, writing Ulysses in such a way that it plays a pivotal
84 role in the founding of Sinn Fein. In 1904, Griffith “did not have local prominence, nor did the Sinn Fein connection, not in 1904” (Ungar 21). Further, Ungar writes:
Essentially . . . Joyce took deliberate steps to highlight the connection
[between Griffith, Sinn Fein and Bloom]. For one thing, he backdates the
controversy over Sinn Fein to 1904 in order to involve Bloom. The
Resurrection of Hungary was, indeed, published in 1904, but as James
Fairhall points out “Sinn Fein was founded in 1905, peaked in significance
in 1908, waned almost from notice altogether between 1910-13, only to
rise again thanks to popular anger at the executions following Easter
1916” (qtd. in Ungar 21).
This move, Ungar argues, increases Ulysses status as a fable, one that aligns itself with
Ireland’s rebirth. To that end, the move implies Joyce’s awareness that his epic gains
value in the connection between Bloom, Griffiths and Sinn Fein. Joyce’s writing of
Ulysses as the promise of a free Irish state looms is compatible with Cyril Bowra’s notion
of a prime era in which to write epic. Bowra notes,
Literary epic, if we may judge by its best examples, flourishes not in the
heyday of a nation or of a cause but in its last days or in its aftermath. At
such a time a man surveys the recent past with its record of dazzling
successes and asks if they can last; he analyses its strength, announces its
importance, urges its continuance. Such a detachment does not belong to
poets who write in the middle of a great struggle when the outcome is dim
and the issues are undecided. Periclean Athens, Elizabethan England,
85 France under Louis XIV, had their own superb literatures but no literary
epic. (28)
Ulysses, although written with the hope of home rule on the horizon, was underway by
June 1915, at which time Joyce had begun writing the third episode (Ellmann 383). It
would be published in its entirety in 1922, the same year that Ireland would see the
establishment of the Irish free state. In the sense that there had been a long struggle that
Joyce could look back to, the time accords with Bowra’s notion of a survey of the recent
past, although there were still undecided issues as to the fate of Ireland’s home rule.
In “Cyclops,” Joyce enables a statement on Ireland’s “national-ness” through a
revision of history through Bloom’s actions and his portrait of the Citizen. As Conte
notes, epic codes operate in tandem with epic norms. Ulysses’ epic norms – in this case,
a text involved in the progressive establishment of Ireland as a free nation - are
underscored by its epic codes. As previously mentioned, the metaphor, long established
in epic works and other poetic writings dating back to classical Greece, serves as an epic
code. It also denotes authority. In this case, Joyce establishes his authority as an author,
an authority that is also political, by investing the Citizen with a multiplicity of
connotations. His character is comprised of Homeric and Virgilian elements while his
accessory, the seastones, adopts the generative, textual abundance of Gargantua’s
braguette. In doing so, its curse as “maledictive” stones - referenced as represented
within the ekphrastic facecloth that Joe Hynes passes to the Citizen to clean himself after he spits in response to Bloom’s declaration of citizenship - multiplies. The added
Rabelaisian connotation throws the Citizen into a position of increased nonsense but also danger, in keeping with the violence of the Homeric Polyphemus.
86 As well, the frequent lists – of Irish landmarks, the arboreal wedding attendees of
Jean Wyse de Neaulan and the sacred procession instantly visualized when Martin
Cunningham calls out, during the hostilities in the pub, “God bless all here” (Ulysses
12:1673) – recall the medieval literary experimentation with copia. Inside the bar, the legacy of both Irish folklore and of Rabelaisian writing creates a rich textual allusion that constitutes an epic code.
As an epic code, the Citizen is a multiplicity of texts. Joyce’s writes him through an appropriation of epic and non-epic authorities. As Ungar points out, Joyce utilizes the
Homeric frame to write Ulysses, and this enables Joyce’s “shaping of the epic as historiography” (1). While the Citizen does not help Bloom’s case, he does help Joyce create a space of authority and assists in his revision of the epic genre.
87 CHAPTER 4: DANTE’S AUTHORITY AND POETICS IN CANTOS 25
Dante Alighieri’s aesthetic already figures strongly in Joyce’s earlier work,
Dubliners as it will in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Dante’s sense of authority and poetic development is important to Joyce’s own aesthetic and an examination of Dante’s textual poetics in Purgatorio 25 will be compared to Joyce’s response to those poetics in “Oxen.” There, Joyce continues his process of modifying epic codes through the allusive incorporation and modification of Purgatorio 24’s passage on embryology.
Dante’s poetic aesthetic, and its accompanying authority, is a portrait composed of various lyrics and prose found in Rime (lyric poems), Vita Nuova (New Life), De
Vulgari Eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vernacular), Convivio (The Banquet), Epistles
(Letters), his three books of The Commedia – (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), De monarchia (Monarchy), Eclogues (Pastoral Lyrics), and Quaestio de acqua et terra (A
Question about Water and Earth). The authoritative running commentary in his approach to his ideas – statements of poetic merit, acknowledgement, self-congratulation and the ideas of beauty and art – is a product of his classical influences. His stylistic fashioning of his four major treatises, along with instructive passages in the Commedia, is influenced by the scholasticism in force between 1100 and 1400, an era in which the
Aristotelian prologue became a guide to commentaries on scriptural auctores (Minnis
160). His authorial sensibilities were flavored by the instructional guides and glosses that accompanied those auctores. Through the combined influence of these written models,
88 and his self-aware stylings of Virgil’s commentary in his own poetry, Dante develops a
tendency toward auto-exegesis
Joyce’s works reveal the development of an aesthetic similar to Dante’s.
Throughout Dante’s Commedia and his treatises such as Vita Nuova and Convivio, the
emergence of his writing and his auto-revisionist tendencies coexist alongside of an
evolving authority. This growing sense of authority stems from his belief in the divine sanctioning of his work. The age in which he lived saw a distinction between “God as transcendent Author of authors, and the human authorities which derived from him”
(Ascoli 79). Scripture “is the product not only of several human authors, to whom differing degrees of ‘faith and obedience’ are due, but also, and ultimately, of a single divine Author whose encompassing intentions unite and/or supersede those of the
‘scribes of God’ through whom He speaks” (Ascoli 79).
However, in Dante’s Christian epic, he displays a markedly self-aware vision of himself as author. In Convivio, he actually equates authority as “nothing else than the activity proper to an author” (209), with a second meaning that
the other source from which ‘author’ is derived, Uguccione testifies in the
beginning of his book on Derivations, is a Greek word pronounced
autentin, which is Latin is equivalent to ‘worthy of trust and obedience’.
And thus ‘author’, which is derived from this word, is used for any person
who deserves to be trusted and obeyed. (Convivio 210)
The treatise also reveals a studied, sustained inquiry into imperial authority.
Inferno’s structural layers depend upon the work of the classical auctores as well as that of Dante’s own peers – usually poets or his fellow Florentines. Dante, along with
89 later epic authors, engages in an ongoing dialogue of poetics that spans centuries and
which has evolved through a process of allusion, appropriation, competition,
modification, and imitation. His own place in this textual legacy, as is illustrated through
the Commedia and the works preceding it, is accompanied by his ongoing and
pronounced discourse on the subject of writing that can be related to his status as an
“auctor,” or authority.
Robert Ascoli, in his introduction to Dante and the Making of a Modern Author,
provides a definition of author, distinguishes the differences between author and text: “In
the Middle Ages, an ‘author’ (Latin auctor and autor, Italian autore) was not any old writer of literature, but was instead, and against the modern definition, a person who possessed auctoritas, and who might also have produced texts that were known as auctoritates (Ascoli 6). Further, auctores denote texts, more specifically, auctores
“consisted of a limited number of classical texts that had accrued cultural capital and with it the status of guarantors of truth and models for imitation over the centuries” (Ascoli 7).
In this period, the authority that accompanies authorship is premised upon a divine bestowal of ability, with the author invested with a special ability to conceive of and relate universal truths:
The essential point was that these texts had been proven to have
transcended the limitations of the inevitably fallible men who wrote them
and to bear truths that exceeded the limitations of historical contingency –
being valid in any time and any place. (Ascoli 9)
In keeping with this divine bestowal, Dante writes the Commedia in such a way that autoexegesis and autocitation enable him to reside within a Christian frame where he can
90 envision his poetic status and his poema sacra (sacred poem) as a means to gain Heaven.
Beatrice Portinari, the neighbor that Dante meets at the age of nine, will become the
focus of his writings, first in Vita Nuova and later in the Commedia. Her memorialization
in the works, particularly in the Commedia, as Dante’s divine benefactress and instructor,
identifies her as a significant part of Dante’s meditations on and facilitation of authorship.
As scholars have discussed at length, Dante’s position as an authority differs from
his predecessors in that (1) he chooses to writer in the vulgate (or Italian vernacular)
instead of Latin, a language long considered the superior choice for authoritative texts;
(2) his position as exile and his lack of a public office or other official designation
compromises the accompanying authority that such an endeavor was usually predicated
upon; and (3) there is the challenge of rising to the authority of his predecessors, “Latin
authors long dead,” as Ascoli puts it. The sense of his authority is more apparent in the
various dialogues between himself and others in Commedia, the direct addresses to his reader and his statement about poetics in the cantos. However, he says little about his authority directly in his works. As Ascoli notes, “In his whole oeuvre, he uses words for
“authority” or “author” in relation to himself along in only two isolated cases” (9).
Dante’s more radical contributions to the epic consist of a marked textual awareness of and commentary on his authorial process in order to become poet par excellence. These contributions include the choice to place a wide range of figures literary, historical and known to the author in his work, thereby creating important dialogues; his ability to situate his own auctoritas through the epic tradition; and the text as a means of assessing and interrogating his writing.
91 Dante takes the journey central to all epics and re-envisions it, fitting it into a
Christian frame. Instead of wartime activities, the danger his characters face relate to the
momentary dangers of hell in the Inferno and (for Dante the pilgrim) lapsing into fear, weakness of will, or the inability to finish the journey. In the Christian framework of his
epic, he accomplishes many things that his predecessors had not. He continues, as Virgil has done, to re-define the epic codes and norms of the genre by using the Christian frame, placing and utilizing (for various purposes) a great many real life acquaintances, friends, family and enemies known to him in real life in its cantos. Joyce learns from this technique, using real life models with full or partial pseudonyms, sometimes including details and personas of deceased Dubliners. And like Dante’s ability to write a narrative
that examines his own poetics, Joyce treats Ulysses as a means to develop his literary
aesthetic. In both cases, the inclusion of many characters in the text leads to a fleshly
quality, partially for the important purpose of enabling aesthetic, philosophical and
psychological discourses.
The conversations in the Commedia are a natural extension of Dante’s verse
dialogues with poets in his day. For example, as early as 1283, Dante is already using
poetry to converse with Dante da Maiano, in order to respond to the other poet’s question
about a dream that he had concerning a beautiful woman and which had circulated in
Florence (Ruud 313). His response is an attempt to analyze the dream’s symbolism but,
more importantly, it reveals his need to develop poetic discourse with other writers for
the innovative challenge of fashioning the planes of hell, purgatory and paradise. Dante
considers da Maiano a mentor and will continue to show him his poems in order “to test
92 their worth” (Ruud 314). Da Maiano will not be the only poet he corresponds with by
verse; he does so with Guido Cavalcanti, Meuzzo Tolomei da Siena, and Forese Donati.
His exchanges with Donati in Purgatorio 23 are provocative, with some scholars
assuming that Dante’s reference to his wife, Nella, in an unfavorable light to be an insult
and indicative of an estrangement. Dante will address this scenario later on in Purgatorio
23, casting Nella in a good light during a moment of homage to Donati; however, Dante’s
portrayal in their earlier exchange seems a type of forerunner to the misogynistic blasons
of the late sixteenth century. These exchanges illustrate that Dante is already formulating
a dynamic which will anticipate poetic exchanges with Virgil and other poets in The
Commedia, with the additional plus that he is attempting to make amends in Purgatorio
for his real life actions on earth. Dante’s exchange is a palinode, or recantation - one of
many in his work. Teodolinda Barolini and Robert Ascoli, among others, have researched substantially Dante’s use of the palinode and other recantation oriented
practices in his corpus. One concerns Dante’s allusion to The Aeneid in Inferno, the
result of which points to a conflict concerning Virgil’s influence of Dante and Virgil’s
pagan status.
The scene of Pier della Vigna (in the form of a tree) on the plane of the suicides
recalls Virgil’s spear riddled body of Polydorus in The Aeneid 3. Pier della Vigna was
minister and chief counselor to Frederick II before committing suicide. In Dante’s
transformation of the body of Polydorus for Inferno, it becomes a black gnarled tree in a
mass of trees and brambles. In Aeneid 3, Aeneas comes upon the dead body of
Polydorus, killed by the King of Thrace, initially believing it to be a thicket of dogwood and myrtle spears (The Aeneid 3:28-29). Intrigued, he twice tears a branch from the
93 mass, hoping to use the branches to make a canopy for a sacrificial altar for Venus, his mother. Each time the branches secrete blood (The Aeneid 3:30-39). On the third and last try, Aeneas hears a groan and the following words:
‘Why Aeneas,
why mangle this wretched flesh? Spare the body
buried here – spare your own pure hands, don’t stain them!
I am no stranger to you. I was born in Troy,
and the blood you see is oozing from no tree.
Oh, escape from this savage land, I beg you,
flee these grasping shores! I am Polydorus.
Here they impaled me, an iron planting of lances
covered by body – now they sprout in stabbing spears!’
(The Aeneid 3:47-55)
Dante appropriates the scene for his own purposes because there is an issue with a proper burial after a horrendous death. Dante’s metamorphosis of Polydorus removes the sign of war from della Vigna’s body. The body that is transferred allusively from Polydorus to
Pier della Vigna is no longer a warrior but a writer, who was a “judge, canon lawyer . . .
[and] agent for the foreign affairs of Frederick II” (Petrocchi 180). Falling into disfavor with the court, “he was imprisoned and blinded. The orator’s suffering under torture led him to suicide” (Petrocchi 181). In the forest of brambles, Virgil advises Dante, “If you would tear/ a little twig from any of these plants,/ the thoughts you have will also be cut off” (Inferno 13:28-30). When Dante complies, the following accusations ensue:
. . . its trunk cried out: “Why do you tear me?”
94 And then, when it had grown more dark with blood,
it asked again: “Why do you break me off?
Are you without all sentiment of pity?
We once were men and now are arid stumps:
your hand might well have shown us greater mercy
had we been nothing more than souls of serpents.” (Inferno 13:33-39)
Giorgio Petrocchi attributes Dante’s action to his realization that “[f]oreseeing exile,
Dante expresses its cause, ingratitude, and its effect, the abandonment of all friendships and the unbreakable bond between the personalities of men and political misfortune”
(179). The snapping of the bramble is a metaphor for the severing of political ties and ties with Florence. Nonetheless, Dante provides a further commentary on della Vigna’s situation by allowing him to clear his name:
I was faithful to my splendid office,
So faithful that I lost both sleep and strength
The whore who never turned her harlot’s eyes
away from Caesar’s dwelling, she who is
the death of all and vice to every court,
inflamed the minds of everyone against me;
and those inflamed, then so inflamed Augustus
that my delighted honors turned to sadness (Inferno 13:62-69)
In both cases, the characters - although Polydorus is fictive – are servants of the court and suffer from political violence. Allen Mandelbaum notes the literary connotation in della
Vigna’s manner and its effect on Dante’s verse:
95 The mannered style of Pier’s discourse has been seen as a historical
characterization of Pier’s own chancellery style, of which Pier’s epistles
are masterly examples (Novati); but Spitzer, noting that this style
penetrates Dante’s own style in the canto, sees historical characterization
as “not the sole or even the prime, artist motive behind the use of these
rhetorical devices.” Instead, he sees “a sort of linguistic, or onomatopoetic
rendition of the ideas of torture, schism, estrangement.” But it is also true
that Dante is given to the same exacerbation of rhetoric in very un-suicidal
contexts. (Inferno Notes 365)
Despite the uncertainty of Dante’s textual intentions concerning style, the poetic memory
here is intended nonetheless. Because the allusion involves Virgil, a poet, and della
Vigna, a writer of epistles, the literary atmosphere of the scene results in Dante’s use of a
divergent style. Additionally, the tenor of della Vigna’s brambles in conjunction with the
vehicle of Polydorus’ spear struck body results in a new meaning. On the simplest level, the ground between the two, or similarity, lies in various aspects such as the body/rod or body/branch visual, as Polydorus has become bush-like, the spears signifying the same
danger of pain associated with the brambles.
In both scenes, the souls of the shades are revealed when Aeneas and Dante tear
off a leaf or bramble. Both envision a body, transformed, that can still speak in death.
Polydorus is given a “fresh new burial” (The Aeneid 3:74) by Aeneas and his men, while
della Vigna will remain in the form of a bramble, subject to his suicide. The irony is that
they share a similar fate in being remembered, both in story and in literature. Polydorus
is buried and remembered: “And so we lay his soul in the grave as our voices raise his
96 name” (The Aeneid 3:80-81). Likewise, della Vigna requests of Virgil and Dante: “If one of you returns into the world,/ then let him help my memory, which still/ lies prone beneath the battering of envy” (Inferno 13:76-78).
The scene between della Vigna, Virgil and Dante takes on new meaning as Virgil chastises Dante for not believing the injury to Polydorus in The Aeneid: Virgil apologizes to della Vigna:
Wounded soul, if earlier,
He had been able to believe what he
Had only glimpsed within my poetry,
Then he would not have set his hand against you;
But its incredibility made me
Urge him to do a deed that grieves me deeply. (Inferno 13:46-51)
At this point, Dante’s engagement with poetic memory turns the episode into a mingling of metaphor and a reflection on aesthetic choice. Both contribute to the manipulation of time. Dante snaps della Vigna’s branch because he has read Virgil’s work and cannot believe its incredibility even though he still places such an incredible act of metamorphosis in Inferno 13. The incident represents a palinode, or retraction, and is part of a set of textual modifications noted by Ascoli:
Dante evokes his own earlier texts or those of others in a variety of ways
(verbal or conceptual echo, generic modeling, narrative episode, dramatic
representation), only to define a limit to their value as models, usually in
the form of a critique of the doctrinal substance conveyed by their literary
practice. (278)
97 The defining action mentioned here along with the critique can be seen in the evocation
of Virgil’s text (Polydorus) in Dante’s Inferno (Pier della Vigna), above. Dante orchestrates a critique of Virgil by deliberately ignoring the references in his allusion.
Dante, through Virgil’s chastisement, is essentially representing the text of Aeneid as a warning about the consequences of snapping the branch. However, since Virgil is pagan, and not Christian, Dante cannot treat his text as an authority, so his snap is the critique of the lack of doctrinal substance in Virgil’s work. Ironically, Dante tears the branch to
acknowledge Virgil’s representation and influence on the poet. The next section looks at
the more complex allusive statement on authority present in the connection between
Dante’s cantos 25.
The Development of Dante’s Poetic Aesthetic in Cantos 25
Vita Nuova, with its thirty-one lyric poems and accompanying prose passages, is
an integral part of Dante’s corpus. According to Jay Ruud, the format of poems threaded
with prose commentaries is, for its time, “unusual and Dante probably borrowed it from
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius’s sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy” (349).
The concept of unrequited love, along with the associated humiliation and pain Dante felt
from Beatrice Portinari, is felt throughout. In Vita Nuova 25, a canzone in the midst of a
series of canzoni concerning Beatrice and her father’s death, Dante explains his aesthetic
choice of using personification (allegory) in depicting love as a god. He also explains
that
any metaphor or rhetorical similitude which is permitted unto poets,
should also be counted not unseemly in the rhymers of the vulgar tongue.
98 Thus, if we perceive that the former have caused inanimate things to speak
as though they had sense and reason, and to discourse one with another . . .
it should therefore be permitted to the latter to do the like. (Musa)
In placing the defense of allegory and rhymes of the vulgar tongue in Vita Nuova, Dante continues a privileging of the Italian vernacular, thereby lending it authority for poetic works and also enacting a modification of the Italian language. In terms of Beatrice’s presence, Eric Auerbach notes a few of the intricacies of her role as a poetic force, writing that in addition to becoming “a necessary part of the plan of salvation, decreed by
Divine Providence,” she was a “living synthesis of sensuous and rational perfection”
(62). Her memory persists in Dante’s life and works and her poetic character contains features derived from the Christian-infused strains of love poetry as well as the connotation of secret truth that appears to underline her presence in the Commedia; however, Auerbach considers her as a sophisticated presence, one that is more profoundly
Christian than the “troubadours’ cult of the saints: she is transfigured and transformed while preserving her earthly form” (62).
The Italian language, or vernacular, is important to Dante’s method. In Vita
Nuova 12, there is a conflation of Dante’s concern with Beatrice (she has snubbed him) and a question concerning his use of the vulgate. He is visited by God, who addresses him in Latin:
And he said these words to me: Ego tanquam centrum circuli, cui simili
mo do se habent circumferentie partes; tu autem non sic. (“I am like the
center of a circle, equidistant from all points on the circumference; you,
however, are not.”) Then, as I thought over his words, it seemed to me
99 that he had spoken very obscurely, so that I decided, reluctantly, to speak,
and I said these words to him: “Why is it, my Lord, that you speak so
obscurely?” And this time he spoke in Italian, saying: “Do not ask more
than is useful to you.” (Musa)
Upon hearing Latin, he refers to God’s language as “obscure.” The response he receives
is in Italian. The change from Latin to Italian can be interpreted as God’s divine
sanctioning of Dante’s decision to write his seminal work in Italian. Dante writes such an event in order to affirm that, as an auctor who is divinely inspired, his use of Italian is acceptable and ordained. The power invested in Beatrice by God (and Dante) sets the stage for her presence later on in the Commedia. Dante passes Beatrice on the street and
is mystified as to her snubbing of him:
And so, I began telling him about the greeting that had been denied me,
and when I asked him for the reason why, he answered me in this way:
“Our Beatrice heard certain people who were talking about you that your
attentions to the lady I named to you on the road of sighs were doing her
some harm; this is the reason why the most gracious one, who is the
opposite of anything harmful, did not deign to greet you, fearing your
person might prove harmful to her. Since she has really been more or less
aware of your secret for quite some time, I want you to write a certain
poem, in which you make clear the power I have over you through her,
explaining that ever since you were a boy you have belonged to her; and,
concerning this, call as witness him who knows, and say that you are
begging him to testify on your behalf; and I, who am that witness, will
100 gladly explain it to her, and from this she will understand your true
feelings and, understanding them, she will also set the proper value on the
words of those people who were mistaken. (Vita Nuova 17-18).
Aside from the divine implications of Beatrice’s presence, Dante is already revealing a
tendency to address others, a tendency that will become part of his poetic process. These dialogues become a means to negotiate space and time in order to address perceived misunderstandings (see the Forese Donati reference above) or to envision some response that is not forthcoming. Sometimes the dialogues are proleptic, with shades warning of events that Dante has experienced. In this case, the God’s directive to write a poem binds up the multiple themes at issue: love, inspiration (of Beatrice to Dante), the search for truth and divinely inspired authorship.
Virgil’s influence and presence is particularly important to Dante’s establishment of himself as poet par excellence and he fills many roles: guide, protector, surveyor, tutor, communicator and overall facilitator of Dante’s journey through hell and purgatory. The pairing is one that figuratively places him on the same poetic path and provokes a comparative glance at the two poets’ works. Virgil’s duties stop at purgatory as he is not allowed into heaven. In addition to the verbal exchanges that he shares with Dante through the Commedia, certain features of his poetic style are absorbed by Dante into his own aesthetic. Although Dante crafts a guide/mentor relationship between himself and Virgil, this issue of his auctoritas is eternally present, confronting Virgil’s.
Upon meeting Virgil, in Inferno 1, Dante proclaims his reverence for him:
O light and honor of all other poets,
101 May my long study and the intense love
That made me search your volume serve me now.
You are my master and my author, you –
The only one from whom my writing drew
The noble style for which I have been honored. (Inferno 1:82-87)
The noble style mentioned here refers to Dante’s endeavor of writing verse termed the
“sweet new style” (dolce stil novo). In The Georgics, Virgil writes of his own “wish” concerning poetry:
And as for me, my most ardent wish is that sweet Poetry,
Whose devotee I am, smitten as I’ve been with such commitment,
Would open up to me the courses of the stars in heaven,
The myriad eclipses of the sun and phases of the moon,
Whence come earthquakes, which are the reason deep sees surge
To burst their bounds before receding peacefully,
And are why winter suns dash to dip themselves into the
ocean
And are what causes long nights to last and linger. (The Georgics 2:475-
483)
Virgil’s pronouncement of his devotion and love of “sweet” poetry comes at the end of book 2, after verse that discusses farming, the propagation of trees, and various themes of nature, including the tending of bees and cutting of clover. Occasionally, Virgil will address his love of nature poetry directly: “What ties me to the theme of bigger trees”
(The Georgics 2:435)? This investigation of his authorship will provoke similar ones in
102 Dante. His poetic aspirations extend to the celestial sphere, as he wishes poetry to open
up to him “the courses of the stars in heaven, the myriad eclipses of the sun and phases of
the moon” (The Georgics 2:477-78). Shortly after the first “sweet” reference above, he
evinces the same kind of authorial concern that Dante will imitate. He addresses his
fellow farmers and countrymen on the subject of the husbandry of sheep and goats:
Now you’ve your work cut out for you – stake your hopes of
Fame on it, courageous countrymen.
Don’t think I’m not aware how hard it is to find the words
For such a theme and dignify one that’s so circumscribed.
But love’s sweet force transports me to Parnassian peaks
Where none has ever trod before, where there’s no beaten path
Easing downward to the spring at Castalia.
Now I appeal to you, Pales, inspire me with some authority. (The Georgics
3.287)
Four major themes can be identified in the passage above: fame as a reward following
hard work; the acknowledgment of difficulty in finding language elevated enough to
dignify the theme and write it; the same “sweet” force that can lift the poet to Parnassus;
and attempting, through his poetry, to gain authority. However, the same “love’s sweet
force” that can transport Virgil to Parnassus is tied to the poet’s love of the land. His poetics are intertwined with his experiences in farming, animal husbandry, the routines of bees and other forces of nature, whereas Dante’s “sweet new style,” concerns a poetry that is tied to feelings of romantic love, an inheritance from the troubadour genre. His poetry is less about the sheer appreciation of nature and more about human concerns. He
103 creates a realm of both discipline and favor by assigning his fellow countrymen spots in the Commedia.
As regards appropriation and modification, Dante will lift passages from Virgil’s work as he does with other classical authors such as Lucan, Statius and Ovid, for varying purposes. Sometimes the appropriation serves to establish his poetic prowess. At other times, he wishes to valorize Virgil’s auctoritas in order to heighten his importance and relevance to Dante’s work. Either way, the allusion works as a metaphor and Dante’s appropriation precipitates the same model of multi-nuanced meaning that Joyce employs in his work. For purposes of illuminating Joyce’s intentions for “Oxen,” the next section will examine the connection between the bodily re-membering in Inferno 24-25 and
Statius’ depiction of the embryo in Purgatorio 25. The poetic implications in Statius’ speech will be later be adddressed by Joyce in “Oxen.”
A Poetics of Somatic Re-membering and Embryonic Gestation
Throughout Inferno, Dante is constantly requested by the shades to remember them to others when he returns to Florence. A trope of re-membering the physical body accompanies these requests for verbal reconstitution among the living. What can be metaphorically reproduced by Dante, post-hell, through memory on the plane above, can be torn apart below. Striking poetic examples of transformations of the body take place in Inferno 24-25, striking in their descriptions and the authorial statement that Dante proposes in the verses surrounding the scenes of somatic restructuring. In the gradual journey from Inferno 20 to 25, the pilgrim poet expresses his weariness and the increasing difficulty of continuing.
104 At the beginning of Inferno 20, right before the horrific metamorphoses of thieves
Vanni Fucci, Agnello de’ Bruelleschi, and Puccio Scancato, Dante informs his readers “I
must make verses of new punishment and offer matter now for Canto Twenty of this first
canticle – of the submerged” (Inferno 20:1-3). In this moment of metafiction, the
endeavor of authorship appears almost too difficult, as though Dante needs to reiterate
and thus reaffirm his role as poet. His difficulties are paired with various corporeal restructurings as both poets continue through the eighth circle, beginning with the landscape of contorted and misaligned limbs in Inferno 20. The visual panorama brings
Dante to tears. Included in these figures is Tiresias, the prophet who, “changed his mien/ when from a man he turned into a woman,/ so totally transforming all his limbs/ that then he had to strike once more upon/ the two entwining serpents with his wand/ before he had his manly plumes again” (Inferno 20:40-45). The allusion is to Ovid’s Metamorphoses
and the snakes and transformation are a precursor to a larger physical and allusive
transformation in Inferno 24-25. The contortions witnessed here are static ones, meaning
there has already been a metamorphosis, a reassignment of limbs and twisting of heads
and torsos. The fallen move around - contorted, but frozen. Those static images will be
replaced by more movement in the cantos that follow.
In Inferno 24, just after Virgil and Dante navigate the difficult eighth circle of the
Malebolge (or the level of fraud, where the “hypocrites” are placed), Dante rests, finding
it increasingly difficult to continue. Virgil counsels him, stating, “Now you must cast
aside your laziness,/ for he who rests on down/ or under covers cannot come to fame;/
and he who spends his life without renown/ leaves such a vestige of himself on earth/ as
smoke bequeaths to air or foam to water” (Inferno 24:45-51). Dante carefully places
105 Virgil’s words in this passage as they pertain to the fame that comes with superior
craftsmanship as a poet.
This is not the first time Virgil has had to counsel Dante. In placing Virgil in such a role, Dante prepares the reader for the activities a short time later during the bodily metamorphoses, in which Dante declares his superiority: “Let Lucan now be silent”
(Inferno 25:94); “let Ovid now be silent” (Inferno 25:97). However, the lines that follow also indicate his journey is a spiritual one: “Therefore, get up; defeat your breathlessness/ with spirit that can win all battles if/ the body’s heaviness does not deter it” (Inferno 24:52-54). The irony in this passage is the knowledge that the spirit will eventually leave the body and live on; also, there is a writerly implication that the canto can only continue, in writing, if there is a physical hand to write it.
Inferno 24 and 25 contain numerous statements regarding authorship. Inferno 24 opens with the pastoral: a comparison of a shepherd’s expression to Virgil’s troubled face. The pastoral simile is a nod to that genre’s reputation as the poetic precursor to the writing of the epic. This comparison contains a simile where “hoarfrost mimes the image of his white/ sister upon the ground - but not for long, because the pen he uses is sharp”
(Inferno 24:6-7). The words “mime” and “pen” imply authorship and mimicry, which is relevant owing to Dante’s engagement with and imitation of his precursors in this canto.
Virgil’s unease is soon replaced by and expression Dante terms “that sweet manner I first had seen along the mountain’s base” (Inferno 24:20-21).
The reference to “sweet” in Virgil’s manner again recalls Dante’s own authorial stilnovisti past, one that likely owes some credit to Dante’s readings of Virgil. However, the bridge that the two are about to cross is pointedly referenced as “broken” (Inferno
106 24:19), “ruined” (Inferno 24:42), and the ridge beyond it as having crags “more jagged, narrow difficult and much more steep than we had crossed before” (Inferno 24:61-62).
The landscape is physically taxing to the pilgrim-poet. It is symbolic of the authoritative battle that lies ahead.
Arriving at a moat near the eighth embankment, and discerning a voice from a ditch that “was not suited to form words,” Dante asks Virgil’s permission to descend the wall they are walking along, to the lower belt. Virgil responds by emphasizing action:
“The only answer that I give to you is doing it . . . A just request is to be met in silence, by the act” (Inferno 24:76-78). The two descend to a moat filled with the follow scene:
serpents so extravagant in form –
remembering them still drains my blood from me.
Let Libya boast no more about her sands;
For if she breeds chelydri, jaculi,
cenchres with amphisbaena, pareae,
she never showed – with all of Ethiopia
or all the land that borders the Red Sea –
so many, such malignant, pestilences. (Inferno 83-90)
Lines 86 -87, as Allen Mandelbaum notes, are taken from book 9 of Lucan’s Pharsalia, the one remaining work of his lost corpus. Moses Hadas writes that, while he acknowledges the more hackneyed features of Lucan’s Civil War epic, “Compared to other post-Vergilian writers of epic, [Lucan] wrote almost as if he had never read Vergil”
(263). He considers this a compliment and sees Lucan’s epic as admirable in terms of its freshness and characters who are not so heroic as to be larger than life. Dante, who has
107 placed Lucan in place of pride in Limbo along with Homer, Horace and Ovid, thinks him important enough to name him in the authority themed Inferno 24. Dante’s inclusion of
Lucan’s serpents is most likely due to Lucan’s reputation for extended, detailed descriptions of animals. His presence is one more reminder that Dante is situating his own work against the work of epic masters.
The image of the writhing pit is further made horrifying by the souls who run through it and who are restrained, pierced or otherwise manipulated by the serpents surrounding them, a pool of transformations. The poets notice one of the serpents’ targets, Vanni Fucci:
And – there! – a serpent sprang with force at one
Who stood upon our shore, transfixing him
Just where the neck and shoulders form a knot (Inferno 25:97-100).
Fucci’s transfixion and knotting serves as the first in three metamorphoses that befall three sinners in Inferno 25. At this moment of “undoing,” the passage continues:
No o or i has ever been transcribed
So quickly as that soul caught fire and burned
and, as he fell, completely turned to ashes;
and when he lay, undone, upon the ground,
the dust of him collected by itself
and instantly returned to what it was. (Inferno 25:97-103)
In this brief simile, the process of writing is likened to Fucci’s burning soul, the inverted vowels of o and i representing the Italian first person pronoun of Io (I).
108 Fucci is reconstituted from ash and admits to his stealing of the “sacristy of its fair ornaments and someone else was falsely blamed for that” (Inferno 24:137-139). In terms of the rule of contrapasso in Inferno, he must repeatedly be “robbed” of his constitution.
Dante’s choice to showcase his appropriative writing in the circle of fraud and hypocrites serve as a comment about the “true” nature of writing and authority. Textually, the
“knot” that connects Fucci’s neck and shoulders recalls other knots that proliferate through the Commedia. The knots are a feature of Dante’s poetics and can be found in other locations that involve transformation. For example, the monster Geryon has flanks adorned with “twining knots and circlets” (Inferno 17:15). His language of his construction implies artifice: “No Turks or Tartars ever fashioned fabrics more colorful in background and relief, nor had Arachne ever loomed such webs” (Inferno 17:16-18).
Virgil will appeal to the monster in order to descend to the eighth circle of fraud. The implication is that an artificial representation accompanies fraudulent activities.
Vanni Fucci’s transformation reveal a somatic re-ordering that carries with it semiotic transformation. First, I propose that Dante uses a sign, the combination of the small letters o and i, and its permutations, during the moment of Fucci’s flash burning
(with one letter resembling the navel and the other a snake) as a means to “refigure” an allusion while privileging the Italian vernacular. In this brief analogy, the physical process of writing is compared to the body’s transformation. The o/i combination – reversed – spells io – the Italian first person pronoun. Latin, the language of the high style and classicism, has been replaced by the Italian vernacular. Literally, the self is undoing the self (in the form of rough shapes similar to the o and i and also through the combined forces of the letters – as the Italian personal pronoun io (“I”). This is
109 something that has not been presented in the Metamorphoses of Ovid or in Virgil’s scene
concerning the priest Laocoön in The Aeneid 2.
In Inferno 25, the re-membering of Dante’s sinners continues with the second
sinner, Agnello, as follows:
A serpent with six feet spring out against
One of the three, and clutches him completely.
It gripped his belly with its middle feet,
And with its forefeet grappled his two arms;
And then it sank its teeth in both his cheeks;
It stretched its rear feet out along his thighs
And ran its tail along between the two,
Then straightened it again behind his loins. (Inferno 25:50-57)
The passage contains allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses 4, wherein the deity Salmacis latches onto and tries to restrain the son of Atlas, Hermaphroditus. Dante appropriates the same wrapping, folding and melding properties that can be found in Ovid’s tale, wherein Salmacis “twines around him like a serpent,” (Metamorphoses 4:358-59) and
“wraps her coils around his head and feet and with her tail, entwines his outspread wings”
(Metamorphoses 4:362-63). Finally, after her appeal to the gods to not separate them,
“they merge the twining bodies; and the two become one body with a single face and form” (Metamorphoses 4:375-77). In the process, the new combined body seems neither woman nor man, “it seemed neither and seemed both” (Metamorphoses 4:384).
110 In Dante’s revision of Ovid’s passage, the man/woman merger has been replaced
by Agnello and Cianfa, the serpent. More specifically, the next description of the episode recalls Ovid’s imagery, with Dante adding two similes as the two merge:
Then just as if their substance were warm wax,
they stuck together and they mixed their colors
so neither seemed what he had been before
just as, when paper’s kindled, where it still
has not caught flame in full, its color’s dark
though not yet black, while white is dying off. (Inferno 25:61-66)
The first simile entails Agnello and Cianfa blending as warm wax. The snakes’ comparison to wax is followed by a similar comparison of burning paper. The combination of the two connotes the process of writing, as paper is used for writing and wax is used in seals. Thus, Dante emphasizes the literary aspect of the transformation with an allusion to the writing process. Many of Dante’s epic similes employ the same use of precise, vibrant detail.
The next scene, with its partitioning of the body’s procreative and digestive areas, anticipates the relationship between Inferno 25 and Purgatorio 25, particularly Statius’ statement on embryology. The new entity that was Agnello, now “two heads . . . joined in one” (Inferno 25:70) and with “every former shape . . . canceled there,” (Inferno
25:76) turns its attention to the other two sinners and attacks them, “moving against the bellies of the other two” (Inferno 25:83). Then, “attacking one of them, it pierced right through the part where we first take our nourishment” (Inferno 25:85-86). Again, the ensuing merger of the two leaves “no sign that was discernible” (Inferno 25:108).
111 Therefore, in hell, the possibility of nourishment is eradicated. The scene is the antithesis of embryo’s nourishment in Purgatorio 25. Whereas the sixth terrace of Purgatorio deals with longing and the possibility of satiation, there is no such possibility present in
Inferno.
Between the beginning of this second metamorphosis and its conclusion, Dante champions his own description of events, engaging in a discourse of “outdoing”:
Let Lucan now be silent, where he sings
Of sad Sabellus and Nasidius
And wait to hear what flies off from my bow
Let Ovid now be silent, where he tells
Of Cadmus, Arethusa; if his verse
Has made of one a serpent, one a fountain,
I do not envy him; he never did
Transmute two natures, face to face, so that
Both forms were ready to exchange their matter. (Inferno 25:94-102)
Throughout these exchanges, Dante has incorporated metaphors of writing (both in the language of the io pronoun and in the imagery of wax and paper). The allusion can be classified as reflective. He challenges Ovid by responding to his meticulous poetics. His language subtly recalls the trading of poetic material as in “forms were ready to exchange their matter.” Wax is used to show figurative levels of firmness and constancy in both hell and purgatory. While Agnello and Cianfa stick together as if “their substance were warm wax,” the poet Dante informs Beatrice later in his journey, after she claims his
“intellect . . . [has] grown opaque,” that “Even as the wax the seal’s impressed,/ where
112 there’s no alteration in the form,/ so does my brain now bear what you have stamped”
(Purgatorio 23:78-81). The sinners located within the level of fraud have no constancy, whereas, Dante, in ascending to Paradiso – and in his constancy to her – retains
Beatrice’s word as though solid impressed wax.
There is a third unspoken reference in these passages. The transformations of
Ovid and Dante recall the separate story of Virgil’s Laocoön, wherein the Trojan priest warned Troy of the horse gifted to them by the Greeks. The priest launches an arrow into the horse’s belly, provoking Athena’s anger and his and his sons’ demise, as follows:
Laocoön, the priest of Neptune picked by lot,
Was sacrificing a massive bull at the holy altar
when – I cringe to recall it now – look there!
Over the calm deep straits off Tenedos swim
twin, giant serpents, rearing in coils, breasting
the sea-swell side by side, plunging toward the shore,
their heads, their blood-red crests surging over the waves,
their bodies thrashing, backs rolling in coil on mammoth coil
and the wake behind them churns in a roar of foaming spray,
and now, their eyes glittering, shot with blood and fire,
flickering tongues licking their hissing maws, yes, now
they’re about to land. We blanch at the sight, we scatter.
(The Aeneid 2:259-270)
Virgil’s statement “I cringe to recall it now” echoes Dante’s admission, midway through the Inferno’s metamorphoses, of his own incredulity: “If, reader, you are slow now to
113 believe what I shall tell, that is no cause for wonder, for I who saw it hardly can accept it”
(Inferno 25:46-48). While Dante’s transformation engages poetic memory in utilizing specific depictions of the Ovidian metamorphosis, his statement to the reader is Virgilian.
The passage continues:
Like troops on attack they’re heading straight for Laocoön –
first each serpent seizes one of his small young sons,
constricting, twisting around him, sinks its fangs
in the tortured limbs, and gorges. Next Laocoön
rushing quick to the rescue, clutching his sword –
they trap him, bind him in huge muscular whorls,
their scaly backs lashing around his midriff twice
and twice around his throat – their heads, their flaring necks
mounting over their victim writhing still, his hands
frantic to wrench apart their knotted trunks,
his priestly bands splattered in filth, black venom
and all the while his horrible screaming fills the skies,
bellowing like some wounded bull struggling to shrug
loose from his neck an axe that’s struck awry,
to lumber clear of the altar . . .
Only the twin snakes escape, sliding off and away
to the heights of Troy where the ruthless goddess
holds her shrine, and there at her feet they hide,
vanishing under Minerva’s great round shield. (The Aeneid 2:256-288).
114 This is the passage in Virgil’s earlier work, The Aeneid, which precedes both Dante’s and
Ovid’s transformations; however, Dante pointedly ignores it in the Commedia, most
likely due to its comparative simplicity. It does not perform the kind of intricate metamorphoses that Ovid’s text establishes. However, the passage displays the same reactive statements that Dante uses in his own descriptions, and the same asides to the reader. Dante borrows from Virgil the same dicuntur or statement that “recalls” or
“remembers” something happening in the moment of allusion, and which is a standard feature of classical poetry.
Inferno 24 and 25’s metamorphoses are violent somatic processes, punishments according to the infernal law of contrapasso. In Purgatorio 24 and 25, the concerns are philosophical and the cantos are replete with dialogue rather than brutal action. The
cantos of Purgatorio 21-25 have long been noted by various scholars as a commentary on
Dante’s poetics. Notably, Purgatorio 24 and 25 contain two important poetic devices:
the autocitation in canto 24 (one of three in the Commedia) and the auctoritas of
Aristotelian ideas conveyed through Statius’ speech in canto 25.
Statius appears in Purgatorio 21 after a tremendous shaking of Mount Purgatorio
where he has been held for five hundred years, explaining: “Soul had the will to climb
before, but that/ Will was opposed by longing to do penance/ (as once, to sin), instilled by
divine justice” (Purgatorio 21:64-66). He has been freed, ostensibly to ascend to
paradise, as is witnessed by his realization that he “just now felt/ my free will for a better
threshold; thus you heard the earthquake” (Purgatorio 21:68-70). Not realizing Virgil is
Dante’s guide, he reveals his admiration and love of Virgil when he admits he would gladly spend one more year in purgatory if he had been able to live on earth while Virgil
115 lived (Purgatorio 21:100-102). In response, Dante explains to him that Virgil is guiding him through Purgatory to heaven (Purgatorio 21:124-126).
The discussion quickly turns to poetics. Statius reveals the level of influence that
Virgil’s The Aeneid has had on his own work, Thebaid: “The sparks that warmed me, the
seeds of my ardor, were from the holy fire – the same that gave more than a thousand
poets light and flame. I speak of The Aeneid; when I wrote verse, it was mother to me, it
was nurse; my work, without it, would not weigh an ounce” (Purgatorio 21:94-99).
According to Jennifer Fraser, Edward Moore reveals the nature of the appropriation:
Edward Moore has shown that Dante has taken from Statius’ own poem
the Thebeid the words of praise and devotion that the fictional character
here applies to Virgil. Moore reads Statius’s lines as a kind of valedictory
address to his own poem, vital for my purposes is that his comparison
reveals that Statius’s likening of Virgil to a flame, as well as the
designation of the poet as a mother, belong fully to Dante’s imagination
and the dictates of his poetic project in the Commedia.” (77)
Such a fictional liberty supports Christopher Kleinhenz’s identification of Statius as a
disguised persona of Dante. Kleinhenz states, “The celebration of Virgil . . . yields to the
celebration of Statius, who might be considered, by extension, to be that of Dante
himself, for the figure of Statius is a carefully crafted alter ego of the Florentine poet”
(236). Further, Robert Ascoli sees the Dante’s grouping together of Virgil, Statius and
Dante in terms of the “historicization of authorship”:
The meeting of Virgilio, Stazio and Dante-personaggio is possible, as the
initial encounter with Virgilio and then other classical poets was, because
116 it takes place beyond ‘the land of the living’ and outside of historical time.
Nonetheless, it unfolds so as to generate a multiplicity of histories,
beginning with a history of the relationship between Roman culture and
Christianity (Virgil is pre-Christian; Statius a produce of the period when
pagan and Christian cultures coexisted; Dante lives in a time of Christian
dominance). More directly to the point, the scene generates a history
and/or a historicization of authorship. (324)
Ascoli’s assertion also has implications for the manner in which Dante reconfigures the
epic form. His somatic Commedia is filled with shades. The shade is also feature of
ancient epic. It exists in the pages of The Odyssey as well as The Aeneid. However,
Dante takes the code (to which, arguably, a shade belongs) and makes it integral to his
poetics by providing his shades with voices so that they can discourse about poetics and philosophy in a non-temporal space.
How does this idea fit with Joyce’s presentation of the dead? While there is no possible equivalent of the shade available for Joyce to incorporate in his work, the
deceased that circulate in Ulysses through the memories of others, appear a different
variety of shade; however, they are static. Mrs. Dedalus, Patrick Dignam, Rudy Bloom,
and Rudolph Bloom circulate throughout the text as the static shapes through the
memories of living characters, but are also more active and aggressive creations of
Bloom and Stephen in the hallucinatory chapter 15 (“Circe”). The idea, however,
becomes plausible if we consider that it provokes the internal thoughts of Joyce’s
characters, even if there is a one-sided dialogue.
117 Purgatorio 25 illustrates the correct divine way of bodily creation and proportion
that is not available to the souls in Inferno 24-25. In terms of creation, God instigates and
overseas the creation of the human body and its soul. However, Dante, in re-membering
the sinners of Inferno 24 and 25, becomes the poetic force behind radical physical
transformation – of both bodies and poetry – a very different kind of authority. Through
the navel as a signifier in these bodily/textual transformations, I see Inferno 24 and 25 as maintaining a dialogue with the structure and thematic material of discussion in
Purgatorio 25, particularly concerning digestion and procreation. If the sinners in
Inferno 24 and 25 pay for their sins through repeated phallic/digestive and procreative attacks, Statius’ explanation of the procreative-digestive system in Purgatorio 25 is a
negation of the evil, unnatural aspects of the sinners’ thievery.
Statius’ instruction of Dante begins in response to Dante’s questioning of the creation of the soul. Regarding the lustful shades who hover nearby, he asks: “How can
one grow lean where there is never need for nourishment?” Virgil replies that
appearances can be deceiving, advising Dante to consider a mirror’s capture of his image.
He defers to Statius in the educating of Dante (Purgatorio 25:25-26). Statius then
explains the progression of a soul from conception to the post-life creation of the shade.
He begins, “If son, your mind receives/ and keeps my words, then what I say will serve/
as light upon the how that you have asked/ (Purgatorio 25:34-36). The statement
continues a trope of listening and remembering that persists throughout the Commedia. It
will also remembered by Joyce, who turns the moment into an entire chapter in Ulysses:
The thirsty veins drink up the perfect blood –
But not all of that blood: a portion’s left,
118 Like leavings that are taken from the table.
Within the heart, that part acquires power
To form all of another’s human limbs,
As blood that flows through veins feeds one’s own limbs.
Digested yet again, that part descends
To what is best not named; from there it drips
Into the natural receptacle,
Upon another’s blood; the two bloods mix,
One ready to be passive and one active
Because a perfect place, the heart, prepared them. (Purgatorio 25:37-48)
The ideas contained in the passage derive from Aristotle’s Generation of Animals
(Mandelbaum 378). Allen Mandelbaum notes that, through Statius, Dante is able to opine on a philosophical question that “had been discussed at length by medieval scientists, philosophers, and theologians (Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Siger of Brabant, among others) (Purgatorio Notes 378). Therefore, in addition to his novel appropriation of utilizing the shade to provide discourse, Dante’s epic is revisionary in that it includes medieval theories and holds discussions about them. The simplistic and primitive medical processes outlined above, which completely bypass any idea of procreative apparati, would have amused Joyce, especially as he once had ambitions of becoming a doctor. The antiquated theory outlined above possibly culminates in his decision to create a parodic nexus of folkloric witchcraft and superstition surrounding Stephen’s oratory at Holles Street Hospital. The continued passage, below, anticipates the faunal evolution trope in “Oxen”:
119 The active, having reached the passive, starts
To work: first it coagulates – and then
Quickens – the matter it has made more dense.
Having become a soul (much like a plant,
Though with this difference – a plant’s complete,
Whereas a fetus still is journeying),
The active virtue labors, so the fetus
May move and feel, like a sea-sponge; and then
It starts to organize the powers it’s seeded.
At this point, son, the power that had come
From the begetter’s heart unfolds and spreads,
That nature may see every limb perfected. (Purgatorio 25:49-60)
Here the fetus is not stationary or contained within the uterus but appears to journey throughout the body, migratory. The metaphor of the fetus as sea-sponge undoubtedly triggers both the faunal evolution theme identified in Joyce’s schema on the chapter, as well as the fanciful renderings of Stephen’s speech. The “powers it’s seeded,” also recalls the Virgilian seeds reference in his speech.
Dante continues his argument through Statius, this time introducing the topic of
Averroës’ “possible intellect”:
But how the animal becomes a speaking
being, you’ve not yet seen; this point’s so hard,
it led one wiser than you are to err
in separating from the possible
120 intellect the soul, since he could see
no organ for the mind – so did he teach. (Purgatorio 25:61-66)
Mandelbaum describes Averroës’ philosophy as follows:
The “possible intellect,” man’s capacity to reach the knowledge of
universals, was only present to each man during his lifetime; only during
that lifetime do we share in the universal, unique, and separated mind of
the human species as a whole. That intellect was eternal, but trans-
individual. It was immortal, but the individual soul was not. . . . [Dante],
in his ardent desire to see the intactness of each individual in the
summative soul – where life, sense, and reason are joined by God’s direct
intervention in the wake of the formative power – he would set aside
anything that might threaten the specificity and immortality of the person.
(Purgatorio Notes 379-380)
Averroës has already been placed by Dante in Inferno 4, the canto designated as Limbo, along with scientists, philosophers and poet laureates – including Virgil and Statius themselves. When Dante see him, he refers to him as Averroës of the great Commentary
(Inferno 4:144). Despite his declaration (through Statius) that Averroës has erred in his thinking, Dante still places him in the idyllic Limbo and sees him as important enough to include in his embryology passage. However, the philosopher is dangerously controversial for his time. As Jay Ruud explains, while Averroës is at the court of
Córdoba, he is confronted by “a conservative religious element who saw some of his philosophical arguments as heretical and burned a number of his books upon his exile”
(389). Joyce, quite possibly recalling the situation in chapter 2 (“Nestor”) has Stephen
121 Dedalus consider the plight of Averroës and Moses Maimonides while attempting to assist one of his simpler students in solving a math problem:
Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. . . . Across the page the
symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing
quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner:
so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world, Averroes and
Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their
mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in
brightness which brightness could not comprehend. (Ulysses 2:151-160)
Don Gifford explains that the two philosophers were pronounced “‘guilty’ of scrying, divination by the ‘mirrors of the sorcerers’ (a crystal ball or other shining surface, such as a vessel filled with water)” (33). The mirror reference, oddly enough, is situated in
Virgil’s charge to Dante, in response to his initial question, to consider the fleeing image of himself in a mirror. If Dante intends the mirror as a symbol of Averroës’ philosophy, then structurally, he has created a tension in the text between the words of Virgil and
Statius, with one championing the philosopher and the other critical of him.
Statius continues to describe the shade’s creation and physicality after the death of the body:
There, once the soul is circumscribed by space,
The power that gives form irradiates
As – and as much as – once it formed live limbs. (Purgatorio 25:88-90)
The choice of “irradiates” as a verb is strange given soul’s designation as a “shade.” This
and the following description imply a physicality that is still heavier than air, although
122 lighter than flesh: “where the soul stopped, the nearby air/ takes on the form that soul impressed on it,/ a shape that is, potentially, real body (Purgatorio 25:94-96). After
Statius finishes, Dante hears singing and the refrain “Summae Deus clementiae,” a matin.
Mandelbaum glosses its third stanza as relating to the temptations of the flesh
(Purgatorio Notes 380-381).
Dante’s placement of Statius’ monologue in Purgatorio 25 serves to reinforce the authority behind Dante’s poetics, as Statius also imitates Virgil; however why does Dante choose Statius to deliver the gestational monologue? The choice may be influenced by
Statius’ close attention to, and writing of, maternal themes and the suffering of children that he writes of in Thebaid. For example, in book 4 of Thebaid, the Argives encounter
Hypsipyle, sole resister of the madness-induced frenzy in which the Lemnian women slaughter their males. The madness is retribution from Venus for the Lemnians’ failure to worship her. Hypsipyle manages to save her father, helping him to escape from
Lemnos. Eventually, word reaches Lemnos that Thoas, her father, is still alive. Knowing that Hypsipyle did not partake of the slaughter, and ashamed of their own involvement, the Lemnians turn on her and she leaves, finding refuge with Lycurgas, the Argive king.
Hypsipyle becomes nurse to the royal infant, Opheltes, son of Lycurgas and
Eurydice. Statius writes, “Hypsipylem fair in her/ sadness. Opheltes, not hers but the ill- starred child of/ Inachian Lycurgus, hangs at her breast, her hair is/ disheveled, her clothing poor; yet on her face are marks of/ royalty . . . “ (Thebaid 4:748-750). She leads the thirsty Argives to a river, leaving Opheltes by himself in the woods, and proceeds to tell them her story. Statius describes Opheltes’ dismay at his nurse’s absence in poignant detail:
123 But the boy in the bosom of the vernal earth, the lush
herbage, now buts and levels the pliant grasses with his forward
plunges, now calls for his dear nurse, crying loud
for milk; and again he smiles and essays words that struggle
with his tender lips. He wonders at the forest noises or
plucks at what comes his way or with open mouth draws
in the day. (Thebaid 4:793-98)
The depiction of his death in book 5 is equally vivid, the narrative intensity increased by the delay of Hypsipyle’s intervening story of the Lemnian slaughter. A dragon, described as a Serpent, enraged due to the arid land, arrives shortly after Opheltes “sinks his heavy eyes and drooping head on the lush/ ground and wearied with length of childish doings glides/ into sleep. His hand stays clutching the grass” (Thebaid 5:502-504). Shortly before the child’s death, Statius writes: “What god’s allotting, little one, gave you the burden of/ so great a fate? By this enemy do you lie low scarcely at/ life’s first threshold? Or was it to make you die sacred/ through the ages henceforth to the peoples of Greece,/ worthy of so grand a tomb?” (Thebaid 5:534-39) The direct address to the child by the narrator imbues the passage with a pronounced pathos, ahead of the depiction of his death, wherein “Grazed by the lash of the tail tip/ you perish child, and the snake knows not of it. Sleep/ fled your limbs straightway and your eyes opened only to/ death” (Thebaid 5:538-40). Hypsipyle finds him near “grass stained with bloody dews” (Thebeid 5:591-92). Chapter 6 is devoted to funeral games for the child, a decision of the Argive men, and there are pronounced depictions of mourning by
Lycurgas, Eurydice and Hypsipyle.
124 Elsewhere in Thebaid, the themes of parenthood and children persist, with
Hypsipyle’s own children by Jason, long-separated from her, managing to find her at the beginning of Opheltes’ funeral preparations. Book 9 sees the death of the youth
Crenaeus, whose last word is “Mother” (Thebeid 9:349). Statius’ epic gives ample space to childhood, even early childhood, containing verse in which children witness slaughter,
as well as verse depicting their own slaughter. His depiction of women and children’s
suffering in warfare, despite the brutality in his scenes, indicates to me that he has a
profound sensitivity to life that informs his poetry. The pathos in his work is probably
one of the reasons that he is charged by Dante to deliver the gestational dialogue, as well
as Dante’s depiction of him as fatherly – he references Dante twice as “son.”
Earlier in this chapter, I note that Robert Ascoli’s discussion of the historicity of
Dante’s placement of all three poets – Virgil, Statius and Dante – together and the
implications of each poet representing a different time frame (and accompanying
religion). Joyce’s rewriting of this manipulation of time by Dante takes place in the
realm of narrative style. “Oxen” displays a shifting historicity represented by its display
of styles of the English language. Similarly, the chapter’s focus is conception, gestation,
birth and associated elements scientific and societal. Although Stephen, Bloom,
acquaintances and the hospital’s medical staff belong to the temporality of twentieth
century Dublin, Joyce interprets the atemporality of Dante’s meeting and discourse by
depicting his characters’ meeting in the shifting temporality of his narrative.
In the following chapter on “Oxen”, Joyce responds to various concepts and
events portrayed in the cantos of both Inferno and Purgatorio, with an emphasis on the
embryology discourse by Statius. Joyce’s chapter is largely parodic; however, there are
125 still aesthetic implications in Joyce’s appropriation that reflect on his own authorship.
The chapter’s narrative details and discussions are, at times, fantastic – seeming even ridiculous. However, the entire project is radical in terms of its reinterpretation of
Purgatorio’s poetics.
126 CHAPTER 5: “OXEN OF THE SUN” – THE BIRTH OF THE TEXT
This chapter will examine Joyce’s multi-faceted approach in responding to the poetics set forth in Inferno 24-25 and Purgatorio 25. Stephen Dedalus’ discussion at the
Holles Street Hospital alludes to Purgatorio 25’s dialogue between Statius, pilgrim Dante
and poet Virgil, wherein Statius delineates Aristotle’s theory of the embryo. Joyce
incorporates this moment in the textual design of “Oxen,” a two-fold allusive design
which partially relies on ideas formulated in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The first half of the design pertains to the inscribed reification (or series of re-births) of
Leopold Bloom; the second pertains to Stephen’s speech, one that combines ideas about
procreation, birth and authorship. In total, they illustrate the radical method in which
Joyce can appropriate and revise epic codes in writing Ireland’s epic.
“Embryonic development” is the technique that Joyce assigns to the chapter. As
Stephen, Buck Mulligan, other friends and medical doctors assemble at the Holles Street
Maternity Hospital, Mina Purefoy labors in childbirth. The scene is meant to
recapitulate, in echoes and fragments, Odysseus’s conversations with his crew,
specifically his warnings to stay away from Helios’ cattle. Their fatal dismissal of his
warning brings about their downfall. The chapter is replete with references to cattle and
bulls, including fertility references and mythology. In one of the hospital’s meeting
rooms, roughly depicted by Joyce as an Anglo-Saxon hall, the men engage in an extended
discourse on matters pertaining to birth, sexuality, and women, as though the very
127 phenomenon of Mina Purefoy’s condition provokes the birth of language. In that sense, she is the “everywoman” of the chapter.
In the Commedia, Dante has taken the epic model, with its substrata of epic codes and epic norms, and refashioned it for his own Christian epic. With a parodic backdrop of several textual styles, Joyce continues his own revision of epic codes and epic norms, and their associated allusive processes. In 1920, Joyce delineated his intentions for
“Oxen” to Frank Budgen:
This procession is also linked back at each part subtly with some
foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of
development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general”
and the “double thudding Anglo-Saxon motive . . . to give the sense of
hoofs of oxen (Letters 138-139).
As Don Gifford notes, the primary metaphor in the chapter compares the development of the human embryo (ontogeny) and the evolution of the species (phylogeny) to the embryonic development of language (409). Frank Atherton, who characterizes “Oxen” as “an exercise in imitative form,” with Joyce “trying to make words reproduce objects and processes” (313) further explains its pattern as “an attempt at producing a verbal equivalent for an object, the convoluted sentences enclosing a central core corresponding to the layers within the cell” (313). These layers configure an image of the chapter’s sentences wrapping around each other, adhering to each other and enclosing the “central core” that Atherton refers to. As is standard with all of Ulysses’ episodes, there are allusive connotations from multiple eras and genres of literature. The following section
128 looks at Joyce’s further technique of giving birth to his characters through poetry and
prose.
The Procreative Text and the Birth of Man
Joyce adopts Purgatorio 25’s discourse on the embryo and rewrites it. This
means that Joyce takes Statius’ theme and writes an entire chapter that conflates the
subject of the embryo with traces of book 12 of Homer’s The Odyssey. To that end, he
assigns “Oxen’s” characters embryonic and reproductive parts. For example, Bloom is
spermatozoon, the Holles Maternity Hospital is the womb, the nurses are the ovum and
Stephen is the embryo (Gifford 408). As the discussion progresses, there is a sense that time is being accelerated, similar to the manner in which a human embryo would develop over time. This is due to the progression of rhetorical styles that provide the chapter’s narrative.
The invocation, a primary feature of the epic from the classical period up through the modern era, has been revamped by Joyce, who turns it into a modern Irish equivalent.
Traditionally, it is an appeal to a muse for assistance; for example, as in Homer’s “Sing to me of the man, Muse” (The Odyssey 1:1) or Virgil’s “Tell me, Muse, how it all began”
(The Aeneid 1:9). The first line of Joyce’s invocation reads “Deshil Holles Eamus”
(Ulysses 17:1) (which can be parsed as “to the right, turning clockwise, to Holles street, let us go”); the second, which can be considered the closest thing to the classical invocation in terms of its request for help, is “Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit,” (Ulysses 17:2-4); and the third is the nurse’s cry of Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!” (Ulysses 17:5) These thrice repeated elements do not resemble the
129 traditional appeal to the muse. The first and last seem activity oriented and concern
arrival (to the hospital and then to life itself), with the middle line requesting the help of
the doctor rather than the muse. Joyce’s choice to create an invocation comprised of a combination of directions, chant to the hospital doctor, and a traditional cry to provoke the baby’s breath is characteristic of the bricolage found elsewhere in Ulysses.
A prose style imitating the Latin of Roman historians Sallust and Tacitus begins
the chapter. Thereafter, the language wanders from Old Anglo Saxon to the
contemporary. Paragraphs advance rapidly from the medieval prose of the morality play
to the fifteenth century prose style of Sir Malory and onto the seventeenth century prose
of Jonathan Swift. This continues in a linear fashion up to Joyce’s time. The progression
represents one facet of “Oxen’s” statement on the birth of textuality, alongside of man.
The symbolism of the embryo overriding all of this represents Stephen’s
consciousness and artistic sensibility. Through rapid change, the text supersedes his
artistic struggles and paralysis in order to continue developing. It births itself,
experimenting with language and parody, developing an aesthetic all its own while Mina
Purefoy labors alongside of it. Stephen as artist is, of course, an extension of Joyce as
artist. It can be said that Joyce, in ascribing the designator of embryo to Stephen (and
therefore Stephen’s consciousness), is presenting the “Oxen” chapter as a statement about
the incubation of influences, past readings and information ingested in his own psyche, in
order to establish his own authority as a writer. While the chapter writes itself, Joyce also
becomes a writer. And he does so in the first several pages, by formulating a figurative
technique based on one employed by Virgil, Ovid and Dante.
130 Stephen and company discourse, negotiating a discursive space as language provides early modern and more recent characterizations of themselves. Biblical references to birth, possible paternity of the Purefoy baby, the female reproductive system, abortion, birth control, fertility, geldings, eunuchs and various theories on medicine stream into the hospital meeting room. Bovine descriptions, traces of The
Odyssey, abound in unlikely places, for example, regarding the laboring woman, two days past delivery point, who would soon deliver “a bullyboy from the knocks, they say .
. .” (Ulysses 14:514). After all, the main event is the arrival of the newborn boy. The theme of Odyssean wandering is joined by scenes of wandering in The Exeter Book, the everyman of the Everyman text, The Travels of St. John Mandeville, the Morte D’Arthur, and Saint Ultan of Arbracan.
In all of this, Bloom experiences a metamorphosis of rebirthing as soon as he enters the hospital. The poetic memory contained within “Oxen’s” written gestational style takes place in the following fashion: as new information (content) unfolds, the text imports a particular textual style. Bloom’s arrival at the hospital is depicted through references to wanderers and movement, recalling both Odysseus as wanderer and
Bloom’s meanderings around Dublin. Essentially exiled (even if self-imposed due to his wife Molly’s indiscretions), Bloom wanders. Now, as he arrives at the hospital, he does so through while being textually inscribed. His inscription is a controlled one, however; instead of being described by name he is identified in simple terms: “Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming. Of Israel’s folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house” (Ulysses 14:71-73). We recognize the man Leopold Bloom since he has
131 previously discussed Mrs. Purefoy’s condition with Mrs. Breen in chapter 8
(“Lestrygonians”). Also, being Jewish, he is “of Israel’s folk” (Ulysses 14:72).
Otherwise, the language deliberately obscures the features identifying him, simply referring to him as “Some man that wayfaring was” (Ulysses 14:71). Even though the characterization is vague and almost appears to mark Bloom as insignificant (some man), it is a necessary characterization since Joyce’s allusion marks him as both wanderer and textual reference. The event becomes more complex, tripling in meaning.
The second meaning of Bloom’s entry is Odyssean. Just as Odysseus stole into his house to confront and slay the encroaching suitors that kept fast to Penelope’s hall,
Bloom is also the wayfaring man who stands by the housedoor in the interest of checking on Mina Purefoy. However, the underlying Odyssean narrative is eclipsed by a new, third allusion: the Anglo-Saxon lament “The Wanderer” from the Exeter Book. Lines 70 through 106 echo the elegiac lament, and they connect Bloom’s position with that of the speaker who is “deprived of my homeland, far from dear kinsmen” (Gifford 410). Joyce undoubtedly plays upon Bloom’s exiled status as the cuckhold deprived of his home (due to Molly’s indiscretion with Blazes Boylan). He wanders Dublin most of the day to escape a run in with the two and, as a Jewish man, he is already the proverbial wanderer as his people are in exile. Bloom himself, or his presence, is reconfigured in Joyce’s depiction of him as an assemblage of Odyssean and Anglo-Saxon wanderers.
As he presents to the hospital, an allusive textuality emerges: the arrival of
Bloom means the simultaneous insertion/appearance in both the text at hand, the poem
“The Wanderer,” and The Odyssey. He cannot arrive to the hospital – or the “Oxen”
132 chapter – solo; his person and arrival are circumscribed by multiple texts. To be on the
threshold of the hospital entrance, and entry itself, is to be present on a textual threshold.
Since the epic tradition necessitates the author’s appropriation and revision of his or her predecessor’s material and technique, Joyce improves on the genre by taking the
Odyssean figuration of the wanderer and turning it into a birth of text and man. He does so by pairing richly allusive “knots” of textual allusions with the emergence of some character (or characters) onto the scene at the moment of doing so. The result is the appearance of characters who are shade-like in their allusive, textual composition – as much Dantean in their shade-like existence as they are Joycean.
When Bloom shows up and is depicted as “some man that wayfaring was,” he remains unformed, unnamed, a shadow – or a shade. His unnamed status recalls the opposite theme of the meeting of Dante, Virgil and Statius with Forese Donati in
Purgatorio 24, wherein the subject of the naming of shades is discussed. Dante asks of
Forese, “. . . tell me if, among those staring at me,/ I can see any person I should note
(Purgatorio 24:11-12). The other poet responds “It is not forbidden to name each shade
here,” (Purgatorio 24:17-18). He proceeds to name “many others, one by one, and at
their naming they all seemed content; so that – for this – no face was overcast”
(Purgatorio 24:25-27). In other words, the shades, in being named, are remembered.
The naming here takes place on the level of purgatory known for poetic dialogue. To be
named is to be reified and born through the textual realm. If Joyce is responding to
Purgatorio 24’s topos of naming by doing the opposite with Bloom, he can respond to
Dante’s poetics by creating the textual birth sequence and not name, thereby both
133 modifying Dante’s poetics as a statement on his own poetics and by adding a Dantean connotation to his re-creation of Bloom.
The event provokes ideas concerning ontology, textuality and becoming. Joyce avoids naming Bloom, instead hinting at his presence through features that the reader could identify or allowing the emerging text (through its style and other markers) to do the job. For example, even though Bloom is mentioned invariably as “Bloom,” “sir
Leopold,” “Mr. Canvasser Bloom,” and “Mr. L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.),” at various points in the chapter, his title reverts back to the “stranger” in the narrative (Ulysses 14:1356).
In addition to Bloom’s re-naming, the others at the hospital receive shifting designations, according to the style of the writing. Joyce lists and renames the group at 14:187,
14:408, 14:467, 14:504, and 14:1203.
Dante’s representation of real life Florentines and other figures in his Commedia manifest simply as themselves, and they often confront or otherwise engage in dialogues with Dante as he continues his journey. Joyce follows suit by placing real acquaintances
(some under fictive names and others under real ones) in Ulysses (Adams 93). As R. M.
Adams notes, Patrick Dignam was a fictional character for his real life counterpart.
Matthew Kane, and almost everyone who attended the funeral took a position in “Hades,”
via pseudonyms. The funeral scene is a conflation of Kane’s, Joyce’s mother Mary’s,
and his brother George’s funerals (93-94). The difference is that Joyce is actually pairing
individual emergence with a textual component. This process implies that the very nature
of human birth is a textual birth. Rhetorically, these “knots” are reminiscent of Roland
Barthes’s designation of a text as “a multidimensional space in which a variety of
134 writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” (Richter 876).
There are already textual meditations on the shape and material of man and his soul earlier in Ulysses. For example, in chapter 3, Stephen Dedalus sits on the shoreline, contemplating his “manshape ineluctable”: “I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? (Ulysses
3:412-413) This same preoccupation with form and its continuation anticipates Molly’s
discussion with Bloom about metempsychosis, or, the transmigration of souls. Her
discovery of the term begins a discussion of the ancient Greek belief in the soul’s ability
to take on plant or animal form after death:
There’s a word I want to ask you.
Metempsychosis?
Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?
Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek. From the Greeks. That
means the transmigration of souls.
. . .
Some people believe . . . that we go on living in another body after death,
that we lived before. . . . They [the Greeks] used to believe you could be
changed into an animal or a tree, for instance. What they called nymphs
for example. (Ulysses 4:331-377)
The metempsychosis theme will resurface in Ulysses on multiple occasions. It is part of
the novel’s larger concern with representations of the human body. These representations
include corpses, Bloom’s museum goddesses, displays of eating in the pubs, and, in this
135 chapter, the physicality of the embryo. At the end of the novel, Bloom will find the
indentation of Molly’s and Boylan’s forms in the marital bed sheets, the physical
impression of the body left behind.
No sooner has Bloom been identified as wanderer than he is defined by another
textual reference – to the morality play, Everyman. The reference emerges during
Bloom’s conversation with Nurse Callan about Doctor O’Hare’s death and Bloom’s
inquiry into Mrs. Purefoy’s condition:
Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the
dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he
came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend
him at the last for to go as he came. (Ulysses 14:107-122)
Specifically, the passage is modeled on an instruction directed to the audience by
the play’s messenger:
The story saith: Man, in the beginning/ Look well, and take good
heed to the ending,/ Be you never so gay./ You think sin in the
beginning full sweet,/ Which in the end causeth the soul to weep,/
When the body lieth in clay./ Here shall you see how fellowship
and jollity,/ Both strength, pleasure, and beauty,/ Will fade from
thee as a flower in May./ For ye shall hear how our Heaven-King/
Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning. (qtd. in Gifford 10-20)
On top of the Everyman reference, Joyce includes fragments from two other allusions in
his condensed passage: (1 Job 14:1, “Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble” (Gifford 411) and (2 Job 1:21, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and
136 naked shall I return thither” (Gifford 411). The combination of these references, beginning with “Therefore, everyman,” marks a point in the text where, just as the messenger of the morality play addresses the audience, the Joycean text intervenes to address its audience. Again, this continues the theme of bodily textual inscription.
The subsequent (and immediate) textual appearance coincides with the entry of “a young learningknight yclept Dixon” (Ulysses 14:125), a doctor, and Bloom’s entry into the general hall where Stephen, Mulligan and medical students will hold their conversation. The paragraph begins “And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened” (Ulysses 14:123). The quotation alludes to the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a medieval compilation of fantastic travel stories. The travel genre seems apropos in light of the hospital’s recent arrivals, and a fitting conclusion to the earlier journey to the hospital referenced in the chapter’s opening incantation of “Deshil Holles Eamus”
(Ulysses 14:1-6).
Similar incidences occur, for example, in textual reifications of the characters near the end of the episode when Joyce lists the men by their seating arrangement, and depicts them as caricatures. By lifting Statius’ embryology discussion from Purgatorio
25 and using it to turn “Oxen” into a written embryo, Joyce succeeds in transforming an organic process of growth into a series of textual births.
Revision of Epic Codes – Incorporation of the Epiphany
During the prolonged conversation at the Holles Street Hospital, Stephen participates in a discussion on the dangers of difficult childbirth to both child and mother.
His second statement pertains to miraculous conceptions, while still responding to
137 Purgatorio 25’s embryonic theme, and is both fantastic and parodic. However, these
elements match the fantastic tone of the entire chapter. Thematically, it is also important
to remember, in his treatment of Dante’s Purgatorio 25, that Joyce termed “Oxen” as
“the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition”
(qtd. in Atherton 314). Such a crime would invalidate the complete viability of the text in terms of its treatment of serious subject matter such as the same ideas found in Aristotle’s
On the Generation of Animals and its reproduction in Purgatorio 25. This same “crime” may also refer to the textual crimes of parody, hyperbole, puns, and misreadings. Of note, Dante’s Inferno also contains quite a few misreadings.
The conversation at the Holles Street Hospital is meant to mimic Dante, Virgil and Statius’ walk through purgatory while conversing about Aristotle’s theory of nutrition and the embryo. The conversation includes specific references to Statius’ discussion, not by mentioning the poet but in Joyce’s dispersion of its traces throughout the chapter. These traces refer to the Aristotelian theory in Statius’ oratory and references to Virgilian works. As previously stated in chapter 1 of this dissertation, allusion can create a “poetic dimension is created by the simultaneous presence of two different realities whose competition with one another produce a single more complex reality” (Conte 24). The following allusive passage is key to Joyce’s revision of
Purgatorio 25. Joyce’s engagement in poetic memory responds to Dante’s work, thus tying together Joyce’s process with Dante’s process.
When Stephen speaks for the first time, it is to comment on the subject of the church’s view of an unborn child’s life taking precedence over the mother’s. When he
speaks a second time, it is an odd speech:
138 Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast
him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions, of
bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires
mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the influence of the occident or
by the reek of moonflower or an she lie with a woman which her man has
but lain with, effectu secuto, or peradventure in her bath according to the
opinions of Averroes and Moses Maimonides. He said also how at the end
of the second month a human soul was infused and how in all our holy
mother foldeth ever souls for God’s greater glory whereas that earthly
mother which was but a dam to bear beastly should die by canon for so
saith he that holdeth the fisherman’s seal, even that blessed Peter on which
rock was holy church for all ages founded. (Ulysses 14:241-14:252)
This highly allusive passage blends fantastic ideas concerning procreation. Stephen opens and closes his statement with parody, via the language of “mother Church,” and within those demarcations are a mixed bag of mythology pertaining to impregnation, a reference to his own poem, and Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals. On the subject
of pregnancy, and the human soul, the language is sterile in the sense that it does not
appear to contribute anything to the discussion. In fact, when Stephen is done speaking,
no one responds to him: “All the bachelors then asked of sir Leopold would he in like
case so jeopard her person as risk life to save life” (Ulysses 14:252-53). Bloom, put on
the spot, responds in such a fashion that he dissembles “as his wont was” (Ulysses
14:254) and “scaped their questions” (Ulysses 14:258-59).
139 There are various references to Aristotle’s work in “Oxen” at 14.247-48, 14.387-
89, 14:1231-33, 14.1233-34, 14.1236-39. The first pertains to the reference in the passage above, with Stephen stating, “He said also how at the end of the second month a human soul was infused” (14:247-48). Statius remains unmentioned in the passage, although the embryology traces persist, having been reduced significantly and now floating free in the text. The Aristotelian reference at 14:1236-39 is paired with science, through a reference to German embryologist Oscar Herwig, “who demonstrated that male and female sex cells are equivalent in their importance and that fertilization consists in the conjunction of equivalents” (Gifford 437).
In Purgatorio 25, Statius’ dialogue is primarily for the purposes of looking at the
development of the embryo in conjunction with the development of the shade. Dante’s
original question to Virgil pertains to the leanness of shades when nourishment is
unnecessary (Purgatorio 25:20-21). He is told, “This airy body lets us speak and laugh,/
with it we form the tears and sigh the sighs/ that, perhaps, have heard around this mountain” (Purgatorio 25:103-105). At the end of Statius’ depiction, the poets, who have been discoursing while walking, reach a spot where “from the wall, the mountain hurls its flames,;/ but, from the terrace side, there whirls a wind/ that pushes back the fire and limits it;” (Purgatorio 25:112-114). Shortly after this and upon his hearing of
“Summae Deus clementiae,” Dante sees “spirits walking in the flames” (Purgatorio
25:122-124). The physical, organic growth of the embryo Statius has just described gives way to a fiery body.
In addition to Joyce’s Aristotelian references, there are references to Lilith, legendary first wife of Adam who “metamorphosed into a demon after she was replaced
140 by Eve” (Gifford 413), and two examples of unorthodox impregnation – through the
sharing of sperm with another woman post coitus, and (in the case study of Averroes’
Colliget), the impregnation through semen in shared bath water (Gifford 413). The
overall tenor of this passage is conception and the strain appears to be that of conjecture, mystery and false notions of conception over time. Inferno and Purgatorio also present examples of misuse, palinodes, and the inability to speak, including instances where
Virgil and Dante appear to only be able to signal each other, due to moments where they are horrified or find it otherwise difficult to describe what they witness or feel. This tendency diminishes as the poets move from hell to purgatory.
Stephen’s speech also ends with a parody of religion’s dismissal of the idea of medical intervention when the mother’s life is at stake. Gian Balsamo notes:
Stephen draws an analogy between the reproductive potency of Dante’s
‘wind of seeds of brightness,’ which stands for purgatory’s prolific wind,
capable of making the plants on earth fructify without recourse to seed
(seme palese) [Purgatorio 28:103-17], and the ‘potency of vampires
mouth to mouth.’ (91)
Balsamo references Dante’s Purgatorio 28; however, Dante’s source is likely Virgil’s
Georgics, book 3, and Don Gifford glosses the passage according to the Virgilian reference. The passage in The Georgics pertains to the mares’ miraculous conception 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”
(The Georgics 3:272-75). According to the equally fantastic seeding that takes place in
Dante’s purgatory, Balsamo sees the seeds and the vampires as representing, respectively,
141 “the chaste pollination by an incorporeal, intangible seed of light” (91) and “the unchaste one by a daemonic agent of periodic ovulation” (91). In other words, they share connotations of miraculous fecundity (91) and that “it bespeaks, in Stephen’s vision of postcreation, the extinction of procreation and the eclipse of Eros” (91-92).
What is ironic about Balsamo’s statement is that, while he identifies in the passage the extinction of procreation, he does not address the possible implications of the passage’s various allusive elements. A portion of Stephen’s poem encompasses Virgilian ideas: “of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the influence of the occident” (the Zephyr or west wind). Here, the “potency of vampires mouth to mouth” is part of the larger re- written stanza that Stephen has authored replacing the original final stanza of Douglas
Hyde’s “My Grief on the Sea”. Hyde’s version reads:
And my love came behind me –
He came from the South;
His breast to my bosom,
His mouth to my mouth. (Gifford 62)
While Stephen’s reads:
On swift sail flaming
From storm and south
He comes, pale vampire,
Mouth to my mouth. (Ulysses 7:522-25)
Stephen’s psyche is burdened by a struggle with poetry in A Portrait of the Artist and
Ulysses. His vampire poem above has been scribbled upon paper torn from Garrett
142 Deasy’s letter on the subject of foot and mouth disease in cattle. In a sense, that earlier movement is prophetic in that his philosophies will be shared in a chapter figuratively threaded with the topos of cattle. When he turns the letter over to the editor, who comments on its torn nature, he thinks of the poem’s lines, thereby publishing it (instead of Deasy’s letter) in his mind’s eye.
Stephen Hinds designates, in his work on allusion, the incorporating text as the writer’s primary original written piece (or the text acquiring the allusion), whereas the incorporated text equals the allusive element that is being imported (103). Joyce’s incorporating text is his vampiric poem fragment. Hyde’s poem is the incorporated text.
By encapsulating Stephen’s poetic fragment between Joyce’s reference and the act of speaking (“Virgilius saith”), Joyce creates a complex new allusive device. The single strand of free indirect discourse is a tenor that already has several elements of poetic memory at work. An example of periphrasis, its allusive nature and mixing of metaphors goes beyond catachresis. The metaphors remain independent and operate closely together but do not replace one another.
The phrase “Virgilius saith” is a form of the dicuntur discussed in chapter 1.
More specifically, it is a reflexive annotation, a form of sign-posting that has been
explored in studies of Roman poetry (Hinds 3). Phrases such as “are said to have”
(dicuntur) or “I used to say, I remember” (dicebam, memini) serve as a means in classical
texts to indicate the presence of allusion in the text, a hint to look for additional meaning,
as well signify participation in poetic memory (Hinds 3). Because the dicuntur signifies
that it participates in allusive artistry, it is also a signature of authorship. The dicuntur in
Catallus 64 can be seen in the following example: “Once upon a time pine-trees, born on
143 Pelion’s peak, are said to have swum through Neptune’s clear waters” (qtd. In Hinds 2).
This particular dicuntur is an “added, editorial intervention external to the events of the
immediately surrounding narrative” (Hinds 3).
Joyce acknowledges the tradition by alluding to, and importing as an authority,
Virgil. Virgil possesses auctoritas, and the mention of “Virgilius saith” is Joyce’s imitatio at work. He is engaging in the ages-old process of forming new epic codes when he builds such a densely constructed passage; however his responsive poetics and imitation is also a parody, with mock overtones, as the combination of the elements
(noted above by Balsamo to be “demonic”) subvert standard conventional attributes of authority. I see the combination as posing a dilemma: the signposting of Virgil to invoke authority and to recall a connotation of Purgatorio 25 involves two separate processes.
Virgil’s name and presence in the text invokes Dante’s work and frame of aesthetics.
However, what Virgil saith appears lightweight in terms of allusive importance. The language used in the tenor passage pertains to fantastic, surreal imageries of conception.
However, the allusion succeeds in making a statement about Purgatorio.
Gian Biago Conte has already classified certain rhetoric devices, such as the extended simile – as a staple in the epic - under epic codes. As an extended (prolonged) meditation on a situation or emotion, with metaphoric elements in its unfolding, the epiphany can be considered a subset of epic codes. Joyce has now developed his epiphany as a rhetorical device that interacts with and modifies allusive practice. Dante, previous to Joyce and most likely exceeding Joyce in this respect, inscribes his work with a revisionary praxis.
144 In terms of Stephen’s poetic fragment, Hyde’s less ominous lyrics have been transformed into a new song of horror through the presence of the unnamed author of
Dracula, Bram Stoker. Joyce ties together fragments of the literary production of two of
Ireland’s most conspicuous natives– Douglas Hyde, academician turned President of
Ireland, and Ireland’s noted gothic writer, Stoker. By positioning the vampire reference in Hyde’s verse, Joyce draws attention to both Irish nationality and its literary authorship.
He further draws attention to these subjects by invoking a series of passages from A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that associate Ireland with the bat.
In chapter 5, as Stephen passes Maple’s Hotel, the name of which annoys him, he envisions the metamorphoses of its inhabitants:
He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which
he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland house in calm.
They thought of army commissions and land agents: peasants greeted
them along the roads in the country; they knew the names of certain
French dishes and gave orders to jarvies in highpitched provincial voices
which pierced through their skintight accents. (A Portrait 258-59)
In his anger at the privileged, he visualizes the beginning of a metamorphosis through their “highpitched provincial voices” and “their skintight accents.” They are, most likely, the Protestant, England-enabled transplants that have been front and center at the political unrest of Ireland. In the next passage, the concept of the Irish race is cast into a metaphor of desire and transformation. Just as the vampire is the transformation of a human into a monster with the traits of a bat, Stephen now sees the transformation of his apprehension.
He apprehends the perceived social inequity of “mingling” blood with the oppressor. In
145 meditating upon this, he envisions the cultural collective of Ireland turning to a frenzied
motion, the monster of the troubles.
How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the
imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them, that
they might breed a race less ignoble than their own? And under the
deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he
belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes, under trees by the
edges of streams and near the poolmottled bogs. (A Portrait 258-259)
The race that he despairs over is his own, the Irish. What initially takes on the physical characteristics of the bats (the intruders) now takes on a mental similarity in his own style of thinking.
And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his
anger was also a form of homage. He had left the classroom in disdain
that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her race lay
behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow.
He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the streets that she was a
figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat-like soul waking to the
consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness, tarrying
awhile, loveless and sinless, with her mild lover and leaving him to
whisper of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear of a priest. (A
Portrait 239-240)
Bats, in the two passages above, are associated both with the Irish landscape and
Stephen’s consciousness. More specifically, they are associated with the thoughts,
146 desires, loneliness and secrecy of the individual, thereby associating those subjects with
nature and a national consciousness. Prior to “Oxen,” Joyce employs the motif in chapter
3 (“Proteus”) and chapter 13 (“Nausicaa”).
In chapter 3 (“Proteus”), where Stephen is still considering the symbolism of the bat, bodily images are conflated with the act of writing. As Stephen passes a midwife, his thoughts turn to the same fertility and birth that will take place later in “Oxen:”
One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from
nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord,
hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable
of all flesh. . . . Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve.
She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of
taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from
everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin. (Ulysses 3:35 – 3:44)
The strandentwining cable is a symbol of humanity’s evolution; however, the original
(and first) woman, lacking a navel due to direct creation by god, has for a belly of a
“buckler of taut vellum.” This “buckler,” or shield of vellum, carries connotations of
writing, thereby representing writing as birth. Later, as he witnesses the passing of a
couple at Sandymount, Stephen envisions the bat/vampire trope again and turns to write
his poem on paper. He links the flight of the vampire of his poem with a closing phrase
from Percy Shelley’s Hellas, which has as its subject “Greek liberty and the War of
Independence” (Gifford 61-62). The bat will later re-emerge in the form of bats flying
during Bloom’s visit to Sandymount Strand in chapter 5 (“Nausicaa”). In that episode,
147 Joyce continues to position their presence as a symbol of Ireland and its national consciousness.
Throughout the beginning of “Nausicaa,” Gerty McDowall has been surreptitiously flirting with Leopold Bloom from her position on the rocks at Sandymount
Strand. As the afternoon turns to dusk, the scene is perceived by Gerty to be beautiful in a national sense: “How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither with a tiny lost cry” (Ulysses
13:624). The subsequent fireworks display on the beach and exposure of herself to
Bloom becomes a “secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don’t tell” (Ulysses 13:750-53), The bat, previously belonging only to the Irish landscape, has now transitioned to the internal landscape of voyeuristic intimacy.
The bat motif in “Nausicaa,” aside from enabling the switch from external landscape to a symbol of secrecy and intimacy, also accompanies the change from
Gerty’s perspective to Bloom’s. After she leave the rocks, the narrative shifts to his point of view (one less sentimental and romantic) and reveals his own sexual climax, and his varied thoughts on his wife and his cuckold status. Just as Gerty considers the details of an Irish seaside moment with its nostalgic overtones, Bloom, notices his surroundings in language that destroy nostalgia: “Howth. Bailey ldight. . . . Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast.
My native land, goodnight” (Ulysses 13:1068-1078). Just as Stephen is disdainful of intruders taking up residence in his territory and envisions their transformation into bats
148 in A Portrait, so Bloom notices a bat, as he considers home rule: “Ba. What is that flying about? Swallow? Bat probably. Thinks I’m a tree, so blind. Have birds no smell? Metempsychosis. They believed you could be changed into a tree from grief.
Weeping Willow. Ba.” (Ulysses 13:1117-1120).” Gifford glosses the word “Ba,” as both the “life breath” and the soul, according to ancient Egyptian religion (400). He points out that the weeping willow reference is a confusion on Bloom’s part of “metempsychosis”
(the transmigration of the soul into another human or animal) with Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, specifically, the tale of Daphne’s flight from Apollo and transformation into a laurel tree (Gifford 400).
Joyce, by framing his poetic fragment between Virgil’s words, also foregrounds
Stephen’s failure at poetry. However, this failure is a success in terms of Joyce’s construction of the passage. Underlying the failed writing is a trope that serves as a vehicle for an Stephen’s (and Joyce’s) epiphany, one that has as its source the history of
Ireland. Two of the epiphanies seen in this paper successfully figure into Stephen
Dedalus’ (and Joyce’s) poetics. Earlier, in chapter 3 (“Proteus”), as he is walking on
Sandymount Strand, Stephen contemplates his work:
Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep,
copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world,
including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few
thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very
like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one
feels that one is at one with one who once . . . . (Ulysses 3:141-146)
149 If Stephen’s simple verse is a failure, the epiphany is not. Through the signposting in the
Aristotle/Virgil passage, the tension between Stephen’s stanza and epiphany can be
compared. Thus, the passage performs the same auto-exegesis found in Dante’s work.
Stephen’s poem, a fragment, emerges in multiple chapters, often in the process of
becoming. In “Oxen,” the poem emerges at a key moment during Joyce’s extrapolation
of Purgatorio 25 as a means to connect with Dante’s aesthetic. Traces of it can also be
found toward the end of “Oxen,” when Francis questions Stephen about school friends.
“Why think of them?” he responds, “If I call them into life across the waters of the Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? (Ulysses 14:1112-14). The reference is to
Purgatorio, where Dante must cross the Lethe to be cleansed before moving on to
heaven. Stephen pronounces himself “Lord and giver of their life” (Ulysses 14:1116)
before crowning himself with “a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent” (Ulysses
14:1117). The commentary is suggestive of Dante’s ability as a “giver of life” in the
Commedia, as an author who can give life to the memories of Florentines in his poem.
Vincent responds “That answer and those leaves . . . will adorn you more fitly when
something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father”
(Ulysses 14:1119). His response is Joyce’s way of commenting on his own development
of an aesthetic, a method informed by Dante, but also parodies the same self-
congratulatory moments that can be found in Dante’s Commedia.
This questioning of Stephen’s proposed authority (however lighthearted) is
echoed in Ulysses 14:988, when the subject of plasmic memory arises one possible
reason for various abnormalities of the physical body. In refuting this,
150 an outlandish delegate sustained against both these views, with such heat
as almost carried conviction, the theory of copulation between women and
the males of brutes, his authority being his own avouchment in support of
fables such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin
poet has handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. (Ulysses
14:991-96)
It is clear that through the Dantean references in both Stephen’s embryology statement and his self-crowning, Joyce acknowledges and continues to parody the Florentine poet’s influence. The Ovidian allusion replaces medical authority with literary authority and this accords with the parody, fantastic elements and conjecture that pervade “Oxen.” In terms of the authority Dante cultivates in the Commedia, how are we to approach “Oxen” as a similar statement on Joyce’s poetics?
Joyce writes an epic that maintains a running commentary about Ireland’s fate.
The issue of nationalism is more fully described in chapter 3 of this dissertation. In
“Oxen,” the textual births taking place alongside of the human birth establish an Irish institution (the Holles Street Hospital) as a textual institution, beginning with the midwife’s chant. Its status as a physical place (non-descript in its actual features) is positioned against the text’s shifting temporality. The hospital itself is a modern establishment. In terms of epic precedents, there is no “institution” similar, as it is a product of the modern city and is inscribed by rhetorics located in another time and place.
Finally, it can be said that to be in Ireland in 1904 is to be situated in a place marked by and partaking of atemporality.
151 CHAPTER 6: ADVERTISEMENT AS EPIC CODE
Leopold Bloom, as public canvasser, advertises on multiple levels. His consciousness, the inner monologue that Joyce has assigned to him, is the ultimate public canvasser. His advertisement endeavors are on display internally (to the reader) and externally (to his fellow characters) as he moves throughout Dublin on June 16, 1904.
Bloom cooks his breakfast, visits the Turkish baths, attends Patrick Dignam’s funeral, visits Barney Kiernan’s pub and the Holles Street Maternity Hospital, gets swept along to
Bella Cohen’s brothel and eventually turns toward home, all the while advertising, a process central to his identity. His position as an unheroic twentieth century Irishman
(his only battles are internal and he can claim no great deed) is one that positions him – among other things - as the kind of Odyssean wanderer who canvasses everything.
Throughout much of chapter 8 (“Lestrygonians"), a veritable landscape of ads,
Bloom contemplates how to get ads and also contemplates the layout and implications of ads that he notices. He envisions the luminous crucifix being peddled by the
Birmingham firm – “Wake up in the middle of the night and see him hanging on the wall” (8:124); sees Charles Wisdom Hely’s sandwichmen whose garb of white smocks and scarlet sashes “across their boards” recall the papacy, and are comprised of the red and white of the English flag (and Bloom inwardly criticizes Hely for having “ideas for ads like Plumtree’s potted under the obituaries, cold meat department”) (127); sees a rowboat anchored with an advertisement for Kino’s II/ Trousers (8:90-92); sees an ad for
152 a typist (8:326) and considers “Best paper by long chalks for a small ad” (8:334). He
plans to search for an ad in the national library (8:369). Most notably, he meets Martha
Clifford through an ad: “Wanted, smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work”
(8:326-27). The irony is that Stephen is supposed to be the writer in Ulysses, not Bloom.
Equally as ironic is Joyce’s procurement of material for Ulysses through his non-writing character, Bloom.
Numerous motifs appear, disappear and reappear. Bloom considers material things; for example, the noisy brass springs of the marital bed, the soap that he picks up for Molly, the Agendath Netaim (planter’s colony), Patrick Dignam, liver and kidneys, the bill sticking Blazes Boylan, his deceased son and Martin Cunningham’s kindness.
Some of these ruminations concern enterprise and his ability to make money.
Advertising leakages often emerge as fragments of his psyche. When we read his thoughts, we read advertisements. In “Ulysses in History,” Fredric Jameson writes:
What I want to suggest is that the analogous recurrence of events and
characters throughout Ulysses can equally be understood as a process
whereby the text itself is unsettled and undermined, a process whereby the
universal tendency of its terms, narrative tokens, representations, to
solidify into an achieved and codified symbolic order as well as a massive
narrative surface, is perpetually suspended. I will call this process
‘dereification’ . . . . (151)
This suggestion ably describes the novel, as information is constantly delivered in fragments to the reader in a roundabout fashion. Jameson applies his assessment of the narrative to an analysis of the city and its involvement in the structure of Ulysses, along
153 with the subject of gossip. For my purposes, I will only use his excellent point that the
process of dereification affects narrative structure by sending descriptive elements of
Bloom’s and Stephen’s world repetitively throughout the text as though pieces of paper
on the wind. Jameson further stresses the materiality of the dilemma:
The process is to be sure more tangible and dramatic when we see it at
work on physical things: the statues, the commodities in the shopwindows,
the clanking trolleylines that link Dublin to its suburbs (which dissolve, by
way of Mr. Deasy’s anxieties about foot and mouth disease, into Mr.
Bloom’s fantasy projects for tramlines to move cattle to the docks) . . . or,
to take a final example, that file of sandwichmen whose letters troop
unevenly through the text, seeming to move towards that ultimate visual
reification fantasised by Mr. Bloom virtually in analogue to Mallarme’s
‘Livre’:
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in
wonder, a poster novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded,
reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the
span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern
life. (U 1961:705; U 1986:592; 17-1770) (153)
Jameson clearly has “Lestrygonians” in mind, with Bloom’s lunchtime visit to Davy
Byrnes’ pub as he meanders toward the National Library, thoughts in advertisement mode. He writes, “The visual, the spatially visible, the image, is, as has been observed, the final form of the commodity itself, the ultimate terminus of reification” (154). As
well, the accompanying “increasing sense of the materiality of the medium itself” is, “one
154 of the classic definitions of modernism” (154). In this sense, Joyce and his text anticipate
the multiplication and rapidity inherent in technological development and material
dissemination that will later prompt Marshall McLuhan’s statement “The medium is the message.” In Ulysses’ fragmentary nature of loosely floating signs, epic codes from previous centuries – in the form of imported allusions, arrive to participate in modernity, doing so through the fragmentary and often detrital nature of his characters’ consciousness and thoughts.
The sandwich boards serve, as Jameson notes, both as a textual and visual component in the modern city. They are carried by Charles Wisdom Hely’s sandwichmen, whose garb of white smocks and scarlet sashes “across their boards” vaguely recall the papacy as well as the red and white of the English flag. In addition to the aggressive marketing tactic, and a position that is coveted by its employees, the
presence of the sandwichmen play on the theme of voyeurism and objectification in the
chapter (if not the entire novel). The essence of trade, commodity and purveyance, in
addition to Joyce’s frame of cannibalism according to the Homeric parallel he chooses,
renders the energy of the chapter as an aggressive, all-consuming need to devour and
possess.
There are certain textual and visual components in Ulysses that carry an added
somatic connotation. A good example can be seen in the newspaper ad for Plumtree’s
Potted Meat that Bloom notices, in chapter 5, in his copy of the Freeman: “What is home
without/Plumtree’s Potted Meat?/Incomplete/With it an abode of bliss” as (5:144-147).
While the ad and position in the paper are known to be fictional, a George W. Plumtree
155 sold potted meat in Dublin and the phrase “to pot one’s meat” is a crude reference to
copulation (Gifford 87).
The phrase “with it an abode of bliss,” may allude to book 2 of The Faerie
Queene, wherein the knight Guyon and his squire, Palmer, visit Acrasia’s bower of bliss, a place where “art works by excess, not complementing nature but competing with or merely copying it” (MacLean and Prescott 218). The garden that Guyon steps into is false, full of artifice and multiple temptations. He finds Acrasia there, with a young warrior-like captive, who has been weakened by her, a victim to her manipulation and seduction. The entirety of the garden and bower stands for intemperance. The connection of the bower of bliss/abode of bliss’s with Plumtree’s Potted Meats would amplify the implication of sexual indulgence, the type that Molly and Blazes Boylan partake of. In addition, the bower is associated with falsity (2:44) and the god Genius, ostensibly a god of generation but secretly one who was the “foe of life” (2:48). Joyce may have had this “foe of life” in mind concerning Bloom’s son, Rudy, who lives only a short time after birth. Overall, its presence in the text is significant as it re-emerges in
Bloom’s consciousness to the point where Bloom’s consciousness continues to advertise for Plumtree throughout the remainder of the novel. Even Molly has fond memories of it in her bed by the day’s end.
Joyce is not averse to the commodification of the deceased – in this case, Patrick
Dignam. Bloom’s advertising consciousness has aligned the corpse with a concrete physical ad (Plumtree). The advertisement, persisting in simple forms leading up to the modern era, informs Joyce’s writing of Ulysses. In Joyce’s dereification of the text, it
156 connects itself with various themes, allusive and transient, enabling Joyce to create new epic codes.
Gifford’s Notes reveal glosses on chapter 8’s Dublin landmarks as well as Irish persons of note, including Arthur Griffith and Charles Stewart Parnell. Allusions of butchering and consuming promote the cannibal theme of the chapter. Bloom walks toward the National Library and decides to enter Davy Byrnes’s pub for lunch, where he will contemplate the dry and canned food staples on the shelves behind the bar. Images of rude devouring, mastication and regurgitation fit with the associated parallel of consumerism’s greedy devouring of material both physical and visual. Having seen the
Plumtree ad earlier in the day, Bloom reviews it again when he spies the product in the products on a shelf behind Byrnes’ bar:
Potted meats. What is home without Plumtree’s potted meat? Incomplete.
What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a
plumtree. Dignam’s potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice.
White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork. Expect the chief
consumes the parts of honour. Ought to be tough from exercise. His
wives in a row to watch the effect. . . . With it an abode of bliss. Lord
knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced
up. Puzzle find the meat. (Ulysses 8.742-51)
Patrick Dignam is a presence throughout Ulysses, with his death and memory persisting in unlikely moments. Joyce creates, through Bloom’s consciousness, a particularly aggressive conceptual stance toward the treatment of his body. In chapters 6 (“Hades”) and 15 (“Circe”), his corpse is on display in often graphic and grotesque detail. In
157 chapter 7, having just come from the cemetery, Bloom still considers “that old grey rat
tearing to get in” as an extension of his thoughts during the earlier carriage ride through
the cemetery. While riding with the funeral entourage, and after hearing Martin
Cunningham’s story of a coffin capsizing from a hearse and spilling into the road, Bloom
imagines the same happening to Dignam:
Bom! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy
Dignam shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too
large for him. Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what’s up
now. Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. Then the insides
decompose quickly. Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also.
With wax. The sphincter loose. Seal up all. (Ulysses 6:421-426)
Bloom’s treatment of death and its presentation is not limited to Dignam. While passing
the conveyance of a dead child’s casket, he pictures his son Rudy’s face: “[a] dwarf’s
face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was. Dwarf’s body, weak as putty, in a
whitelined deal box” (Ulysses 6:326-327). Watching the carriage proceed, Bloom thinks
“Rattle his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns” (Ulysses 6:333). He
essentially assigns the moment to music, as the words belong to a song by Thomas Noel,
“The Pauper’s Drive” (Gifford 111). The pauper reference is telling as Dignam’s family
will be jeopardized due to his lack of an adequate insurance plan.
If Bloom’s earlier outrageous thoughts of Patrick Dignam’s upset hearse and
consequent spilling of his corpse in the road is not un-dig-nified enough (Dignam is
anagram of “dig man”), Bloom now associates the potted meat with his corpse,
envisioning his name on the menu. “White missionary too salty” echoes Bloom’s earlier
158 thoughts at the funeral, where he muses on the rats that tenant Prospect Cemetery and how they might communicate the arrival and subsequent feast of Dignam’s corpse amongst themselves: “Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse…” (Ulysses 8:94). The rat is represented in Ulysses almost as frequently, if not more than, the bat - a symbol Joyce aligns with Ireland’s collective consciousness. Later, in chapter 15 (“Circe”), the image of a dog that hounds Bloom and others throughout the episode surfaces again as a beagle that “lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam . . .all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten” (Ulysses 15:1204).
Nationalist changes pervade Bloom’s thoughts, In his earlier sojourn to the pub,
Bloom considers Arthur Griffith as a ruler: “is a squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob” (Ulysses 8:462). Shortly afterward, a cloud blocks the sun and his consciousness sees a pattern and rhythm to the city around him:
Trams passed on another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words.
Things go on same, day after day; squads of police marching out, back:
trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off.
Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out
of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second.
(Ulysses 8:476-481)
The depiction of Dignam’s removal, situated next to the labors of Mina Purefoy while
Bloom contemplates his lunch and witnesses scenes of consumption around him, is deliberate. Joyce engages in a medieval tradition of visualizing and processing the details of the body, of death, procreation, digestion and defecation, all at once and in close
159 proximity. The cannibalism of Dignam’s corpse recalls the same death-consumation series that Rabelais employs in his writing.
As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, “The death series – with a few exceptions – appears in
Rabelais on a grotesque and clownish plane; it intersects with the eating and drinking series. On the same plane there are disquisitions on the question of a world beyond the grave” (194). The parallel in terms of Joyce’s and Rabelais’ treatment of death is pronounced. In his analysis of Gargantua’s traversing, with his companions, a “stream made of urine, across the piled-up corpses of drowned men,” Bakhtin writes,
Everyone gets across successfully (book 1, chapter 36),
With the exception of Eudemon, whose horse had plunged its right
leg knee-deep into the belly of a blubbery fat good-for-nothing
who had drowned on his back, and the horse could not pull its leg
out and, therefore, stayed stuck there until Gargantua shoved the
rest of the scoundrel’s giblets into the water with his staff, and then
the horse pulled out her leg and (by what miracle of veterinary
science!) was cured of a tumor on that leg, through contact with
that fat oaf’s guts.
What is characteristic here is not only the image of death-in-urine, or the
tone and style of the description of the corpse (“belly,” “guts,” “giblets,”
“blubbery fat good-for-nothing,” “scoundrel,” “fat oaf”), but also the
healing of the leg through contact with the innards of a corpse. Analogous
cases are very widespread in folklore; they are based on one of the general
folkloric assumptions concerning the generative power of death and of the
160 fresh corpse (a wound is a womb) and the idea of healing the death of one
by the death of another. (195)
The example above contains the same physical invasiveness and dark humor present in
Bloom’s observations of Dignam’s cadaver. The difference is that Joyce does not invest
Bloom’s conceptualizations with the same intensity of parodic humor that Rabelais uses.
Joyce’s explicit renderings, as well as those of his predecessors, are clearly the expected
product of the human imagination and he presents them as such. The human mind’s
tendency to envision beauty and filth, equally, is a feature of the realism present
alongside of parody throughout the novel and part of the aesthetic Joyce maintains in his
writing of A Portrait. The presentation of graphic detail, the idea that no thought, visual
or possibility is left unturned, is a feature of both Joyce’s and Rabelais’ writing.
At lunch, Bloom continues his voyeuristic appreciation of the female body,
deciding to examine the naked goddesses at the library museum, which symbolize to him
“Aids to digestion” (Ulysses 8:922). On contemplating Juno’s loveliness, Bloom’s
thoughts quickly turn to defecation and the graphic nature of the body:
Lovely forms of women sculpted Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we
stuffing food in one hole and out behind; food, chyle, blood, dung, earth,
food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked.
I’ll look today. Keeper won’t see. Bend down let something drop. See if
she. (Ulysses 8: 928-932)
As in other areas of the text, Bloom’s predisposition to voyeurism sends him into a secret
planning. With the other objects of his voyeurism usually flesh and blood, the inclination
here is comic and desperate, with Bloom resorting to a stone replica, a replacement of his
161 wife. The statues also recall those near the cemetery, thus importing an added connotation of death in his musings.
In continuing his process of epic code building through the passage above, and his tendency to tie multiple allusive elements together in one condensed space, Joyce merges the reference to Kalypso’s serving of food to Odysseus and his men with an allusion to
Giordano Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity.
In discussing “the dynamics of the ‘soul of the world’ and its endless
proliferation of material forms Bruno writes: “Don’t you see what was
seed becomes stalk, and what was stalk becomes corn and what was corn
becomes bread – that out of blood the seed, out of the seed the embryo,
and then man, corpse, earth, stone, or something else in succession – on
and on, involving all natural forms?” (Gifford 183)
The passage resurrects the same embryo that Joyce frames “Oxen,” although here it is microcosmic. Its elements are natural, with the seeds, stalks, corn and embryo representing nature’s work as opposed to the artifice created by man (which includes advertisements). This artifice is emphasized by Joyce’s placement of the stone statues in close proximity of the Bruno allusion. Joyce draws parallels between nature’s mundane, rote processing of materials and Bloom’s earlier experiencing of the sensations of
Dublin’s energy and activities: “Trams passed on another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging.
Useless words. Things go on same, day after day; squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out” (Ulysses 8:476-478).
I agree with Jennifer Wicke’s assessment that Ulysses can be seen as “a species of advertisement in its own right, an advertisement of the very modernity of under-
162 modernized colonial Ireland as it moves to a post-colonial status” (240). The lens she uses to consider Ulysses as advertisement stems from Joyce’s creation of Bloom in the form of a man who, like Joyce, also thinks in symbols and signs:
Joyce draws a comparison between the literary procedures of Bloom as ad
man and Joyce’s political procedures as literary man. Ads are
constellations of desire; prise them apart recirculate them, translate them,
and they signal a transubstantiation devoutly to be wished. Wishing is
part of the game – decolonizing the mind has to do with the articulation of
wishes, and their creative enactments. Joyce’s entire book works – on
only one of its many levels, as if it were the Keyes ad. (240)
Wicke refers to ads as “constellations of desire” but they can also instill dread. Later, in chapter 17 (“Ithaca”), Bloom returns to the marital (and adulterous) home to find the physical manifestation of the Plumtree ad:
What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the
kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?
On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal breakfast
saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a moustachecup . . . [and]
an empty pot of Plumtree’s potted meat . . . . (Ulysses 17:552)
Additionally, when Bloom later considers his own inventive nature concerning games, arguably Joyce’s conception of the modern remnants of epic games, the question arises,
“What also stimulated him in his cogitations?” The games he considers are “obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard, catapults’ (Ulysses 17: 571). In response to the question, the text asserts: “The financial success achieved by Aphraim Marks and
163 Charles A. James” (Ulysses 17:577) and “the infinite possibilities hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement” (Ulysses 17:581). It is in this same chapter that the narrative focus, which moves through the contents of Bloom’s house and his consciousness, reveals his feelings of personal success based upon his career as a canvasser:
What were habitually his final meditations?
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder,
a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its
simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision
and congruous with the velocity of modern life. (Ulysses 17:1770-73)
This thought is one that competes with Hely’s sandwichmen. By envisioning an
advertisement that “is congruous with the velocity of modern life,” Bloom recalls the
earlier midday modern conveyances and processes of Dublin’s streets.
Later, the Plumtree ad, which has haunted him all day, is present in his thoughts at
home as he converses with Stephen. This time, however, there is blame assigned for the
positioning of the ad under the obituary notices (by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti), along
with a caveat: “Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat. Plamtroo”
(Ulysses 17:600-605). The warning about imitations recalls, once again, the artifice (at
the expense of nature). The next four words in succession represent two anagrams - “pot
meat,” and “Plumtree,” – followed by anagrams of more obscure origin. The
inaccessibility of meaning in the latter two words points to the idea that the product is a
mix of questionable elements on the figurative level but also emphasizes the artifice in
164 language (and advertisements). The product emerges once again when Bloom returns to
the marital bed:
What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?
New clean bed linen, additional odours, the presence of a human form,
female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs,
some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed. (Ulysses
17:601)
Here, the emblem of artifice and intemperance has figuratively and literally found its way
into the marital bed, the result of which reduces the previous occupants to mere forms –
female and male – and Bloom is charged with removing the trace of “leftover
copulation.” The experience provokes a series of thoughts in Bloom, including Molly’s
previous suitors, his emotions concerning her adultery, the possibility of divorce, and
Rudy’s death.
How does Joyce configure the advertisement as an epic code? The answer is
partly its status as an emblem of Irish culture. George W. Plumtree “was listed as a
potted-meat manufacturer at 23 Merchant’s Quay in Dublin” (Gifford 87). As part of
Bloom’s consciousness and an emblem that connects him with Dublin, it connects the
Irishman with the modern city. Through Bloom’s consciousness, Joyce creates a running
advertisement for an Irish ad, one that employs a graphic sensibility in its use of the same lower bodily stratum that Francois Rabelais found in his experiences of the marketplace.
Mikhail Bakhtin describes the major influence of the marketplace, along with its various feasts, fairs and other public spectacles that Rabelais attended, and the resulting presence of its advertising in his writings.
165 As a separate and distinct venue from the Church and its authority, the fair is a
site of subversive possibility, with a separate authority that enabled and authorized
festivity, gaiety, humor, parody and folklore. Rabelais attended many of these fairs
(Bakhtin Rabelais 154-157). The fair and marketplace language (including that of
advertising, invective and comedy) and the language of the Church emerge in his writing
and he situates the activities of Pantagruel and Gargantua within a parodic framework that depends upon the tension between the two authorities (one official and the other unofficial). The textual nature of the fairs, and by this I mean the rhetoric, dialogues, and performances that arise from their activities, is further heightened by its association with publishing. Bakhtin notes that, in Rabelais’ time, the Lyon fairs “represented one of the most important markets of publishing and bookselling, second only to Frankfurt. Both these cities were the center of book distribution and literary advertising. Books were published with an eye to the fairs” (156). The importance of Lyon and its fairs would increase in their importance to Rabelais, who “had first published three scholarly works, later became the provider of mass literature and therefore entered into a closer relationship with the fairs. He not only had to calculate their dates but also their demands, tastes, and fashions” (157).
About Rabelais’ writing of the marketplace dynamic, and its billingsgate, humor and merger of authentic medicine with theater, Bakhtin notes the early cross-over of marketplace advertising techniques into realm of publication:
The cris de Paris were composed in verse and were sung in a peremptory
tone. The style of the barker inviting customers to his booth did not differ
from that of the hawker of chapbooks, and even the long titles of these
166 books were usually composed in the form of popular advertisements. The
marketplace of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was a world in itself,
a world which was one; all “performances” in this area, from loud cursing
to the organized show, had something in common and were imbued with
the same atmosphere of freedom, frankness, and familiarity.’ (Rabelais
and His World 153)
Similarly, titles formed in the shape of advertisements can be found in Joyce’s work, with
the difference in that the titles can reflect the thoughts of the characters.
In chapter 7 (“Aeolus”), Bloom visits the offices of the Freeman’s Journal to
place an ad for Alexander Keyes and also instruct the editor on changes. At the same
time, Stephen Dedalus arrives, delivering Garrett Deasy’s letter on foot and mouth disease. The chapter is ostensibly patterned after Odysseus’ visit to Aeolia, “warden of
the winds” (Gifford 128), with the connotation of the news office being subject to
changeability and windiness (due to its chit chat and conjecture). Present also is the
Odyssean theme of getting blown off course. Hype and hyperbole do not equate with
staying the course. The chapter consists of narrative divided by headlines, similar to that
of a newspaper; however, the headlines are designed by Joyce according to the moment
by moment situations that the various characters encounter, and are inconsistent with
respect to tone. For example, under one headline - “K.M.R.I. A.” - editor Myles
Crawford responds to Alexander Keyes’s requirements for renewal of his wine merchant
advertisement, by telling Bloom that Keyes can “kiss my royal Irish arse” (Ulysses 7:
990).
167 Again, the use of headlines in “Aeolus” recalls the prologues in Rabelais’
Gargantua and Pantagruel, and their French marketplace invective of the sixteenth century. Providing an in depth analysis of the intertwined themes of billingsgate, marketplace advertisement, and praise in the prologue to Pantagruel, book 2, Mikhail
Bakhtin notes the prologue’s range of tone and subject matter, beginning with its praise addressed to the reader:
O most illustrious and most valorous champions, gentlemen and all others
who delight in honest entertainment and wit. I address this book to you.
You have read and digested the Mighty and Inestimable Chronicles of the
Huge Giant Gargantua. Like true believers you have taken them upon
faith as you do the texts of the Holy Gospel. Indeed, having run out of
gallant speeches, you have often spent hours at a time relating lengthy
stories culled from these Chronicles to a rapt audience of noble dames and
matrons of high degree. On this count, then, you deserve vast praise and
sempiternal memory. (Rabelais qtd. in Rabelais 159-160)
The reader is addressed as though he or she is a participant in the audience of the marketplace or fair (also the site of various mysteries and other performances). This elevated style (however parodic) is fleeting. After a defense of his book, the author’s speech quickly degrades into an invective-laden ending:
However, before I conclude this prologue, I hereby deliver myself up body
and soul, belly and bowels, to a hundred thousand basketfuls of raving
demons, if I have lied so much as once throughout this book. By the same
token, may St. Anthony scar you with his erysipelatous fire . . . may
168 Mahomet’s disease whirl you in epileptic jitters . . . may the festers, ulcers
and chancres of every purulent pox infect, scathe, mangle and rend you . .
. . (Rabelais qtd. in Rabelais 164)
“Soul, body and bowels” recalls Joyce writing of death in close proximity to food and
“aids in digestion,” (a different kind of consumption). As Bakhtin points out, the combined pieces of the prologue draw upon a range of social cues, performances and languages existing within the realm of the marketplace:
Such is the structure of Pantagruel’s prologue. It is written from
beginning to end in the style and tone of the marketplace. We hear the cry
of the barker, the quack, the hawker of miracle drugs, and the bookseller;
we hear the curses that alternate with ironic advertisements and ambiguous
praise. The prologue is organized according to the popular verbal genres
of hawkers. The words are actually a cry, that is, a loud interjection in the
midst of a crowd, coming out of the crowd and addressed to it . . . At the
same time, however, this entire prologue is a parody and travesty of the
ecclesiastical method of persuasion. Behind the “Chronicles” stands the
Gospel . . . . (167)
This passage designates the prologue as an imprint of societal consciousness. The bookseller and hawker are precursors to modern advertising. Joyce’s internal monologue episodes enable the thoughts of Stephen and Bloom (but especially the emotional landscape of the latter) to act as the advertisements of consciousness.
This chapter examines Joyce’s unique advertising structure – one that includes commodity, graphic conceptions of the dead, parody, digestion and other corporeal
169 concerns and finds in these ingredients the assembly of an epic code. More importantly, what does it mean to have a consciousness that recycles these elements? This assembly draws from classical mythology, the medieval and the early 20th century.
170 CONCLUSION
The impetus behind this dissertation is to determine Joyce’s purpose and methodology in creating Ulysses’ highly allusive structure. I have been intrigued with its intricacy since 2004 after discovering, in a graduate course, Dante’s presence in Joyce’s work. Since epic poetry is allusive by nature, and Joyce employs an Odyssean frame, I decided to study allusion, both in Greek and Latin poetry and in the Commedia. Gian
Biagio Conte’s concept of epic codes and norms, developed in his readings of Virgil and
Lucan, offers a valuable hermeneutical tool in which to investigate Joyce’s work.
Through his close readings, Conte notices a negotiation of authority contained in classical imitative and emulative allusion. The allusive contents of Ulysses reveal that Joyce engages in the same allusive practices. I argue that, in writing his Irish epic, Joyce modifies epic codes and norms, even creating a few. Such a modification results in a preeminent Irish epic.
Conte finds a revisionary poetics in the work of Virgil and Propertius. In addition to Virgil’s modification of epic codes to create a Roman epic, The Aeneid, he also writes in response and against to the popular derivative style that follows Homer. Conte describes the poets’ efforts to break free of the influence of Ennius:
In literature, it is traditional to fight tradition. An instructive instance from
classical literature is the artistic self-consciousness that the ‘neoteroi,’ and
more especially the bucolic Virgil and the elegiacal Propertius, evolved in
opposing the pompous affectation of the Ennian tradition. They turned to
171 Callimachus and others of the Alexandrian “revolt” to see what choices
they had made when opposing the poetic conventions of the Homeric
tradition. Since refutation had already been codified within the literary
system, it was there to be reused. (92)
His statement reaffirms the literary system as a culturally constituted zone of authorial
modification as well as the existing “artistic self-consciousness,” that anticipates Dante’s poetics of auto-exegesis. How does Joyce revise the epic tradition?
Chapter 1, “The Epic Ulysses,” briefly examines Ulysses’ epic and medieval
constitution followed by a history of early epic authorship and appropriation. Classical
poetry, through appropriation and modification, enables dialogues between poets. A
dialogue increases the aesthetic value of the text and invests it with an authoritative
praxis. A discussion of treatises from Horace and Socrates illustrates a longstanding
poetic process that evolves alongside of poetry. As well, the chapter explores the
differences between primary (oral) and secondary (literary) epic. Virgil’s revision of the epic is important in the traditional shift from oral epic to literary epic. The Aeneid is considered the foundational literary model that will influence later poets. Also discussed is the distinction between imitative and emulative allusive practices, including integrative and reflective appropriation of poetic material. In responding to other poets’ models and words, successors can increase the authoritative value in their work. The primary frame I chose in investigating Joyce’s allusive practices is found in the philological studies of
Gian Biagio Conte.
Conte’s approach, notes Charles Segal,
172 offers a more systematic via media between the newer Structuralist
directions of recent French criticism and the emphasis on sources, models,
and imitation that has been a dominant interest of classical literary studies.
His work is less a radical departure from traditional scholarship than a
reorientation of its goals. His concern is with the synchronic rather than
the diachronic aspects of literary influence, with literature as a system
rather than as historical evolution. (8-9)
The conciseness of his findings lends itself to a straightforward means of studying
Joyce’s asethetic. Ulysses responds to and builds upon previous epic forms, including the
Commedia. Joyce states that Ulysses is his “system of working.” Therefore, the very title of his work brings attention to the novel’s ordering. The challenge is to see how far this system of working extends. As discussed earlier, epic norms “refer to the cultural contents with which a poet in a given society will fill that narrative grammar, the ideology that the particular realization of the epic code will convey” (Conte 13). Joyce, self-exiled from Ireland until his death, could have provided his epic protagonist with a different nationality; however, his version of the cultural contents that epic norm-building is predicated upon could only be found in Dublin.
Chapter 2, “Joyce’s System of Working,” briefly examines Ulysses’ Dantean and
Rabelaisian underpinnings, as well as Andras Ungar’s concept of Ulysses as a historiographic fable. The historicity of Ireland’s politics and Dublin’s streets, shops, conveyances and language is extracted from daily life and situated alongside of – or within - Homeric traces. Together, this historicity and frame assist in forming a unique narrative; however, the apparent fact that neither could stand alone supports Ungar’s
173 claim that the Homeric framework is the ideal receptacle for the historiography of
Dublin. Historiography, aside from referring to the history of a place, may also pertain to
the construction of its cultural ideologies and mythology. Undeniably, there is a
commentary running through Ulysses on the subject of Ireland’s paralysis, antagonism to
the British Empire, and history with Roman Catholicism. As early as the writing of
Dubliners, Joyce was concerned with writing Dublin. Seamus Deane notes that:
Joyce tried to persuade the publisher, Grant Richards, that his collection of
stories, Dubliners, was about a city that still had not been presented, or
represented, to the world. He insists, on many occasions, on the emptiness
that preceded his own writings about that city. It is an historical but not
yet an imaginative reality. Although Dublin has been a capital for
‘thousands of years’ and is said to be the second city of the British
Empire, Joyce claims that no writer has yet ‘presented Dublin to the
world’. (36)
A city can be presented in multiple ways. One of these ways includes mapping. The
mapping of Dublin, illustrated both in Don Gifford’s Notes and in Ulysses’ migratory
narrative, is a natural outcome of Ulysses’ episodes. The novel’s two main characters,
Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, wander. The other manner in which the city can
be depicted, is in its gritty realism. Joyce’s representations are not just gritty but
exorbitant, with a wealth of detail about city life. Deane continues:
By insisting that Dublin had not been represented before in literature,
Joyce was intensifying the problem of representation for himself. He
abjured the possibility of being influenced by any other Irish writer,
174 because there was, in effect, none who belonged to his specific and
peculiar version of his civilization. He was bound, therefore, to find a
mode of representation that was, as far as Irish literature was concerned,
unique (37).
The key point implied here is in Joyce’s divergent technique. His combinatory aesthetics
- of a non-heroic stand in for Odysseus, the internal monologue and the unusual move of using medieval, Homeric and other frames - leads to an ordering that is non-paralleled.
As well, he is the recipient of a solid education through the Jesuits, one with a rigorous study of the classics. Joyce’s system of working includes, early on, the development of the epiphany. The earlier investigations of Thomas Aquinas in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man assist him in their development. I argue that these epiphanies can be considered one form of Joyce’s epic code and the chapter details an example of the epiphany in A Portrait. The epiphany analysis in chapter 2 also makes clear Dante’s influence in Joyce’s formulation of his aesthetic.
Chapter 3, “Ulysses’ Organizing Principle and Somatic Representations,” looks at
Joyce’s Linati schema and his medieval mindset as an author. It explores the influence of early modern texts, texts influenced by somatic imagery found in the medieval era, such as Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island or The Island of Man, and Francois Rabelais’
Gargantua and Pantagruel. To further emphasize the corporeality of Ulysses, I discuss the somatic textual philosophies that influence Joyce, such as the somatic geographical landscapes typical of Giambattista Vico’s Poetic Cosmography, and the imitative theories of writing and concept of copia (or abundance) found in the writings Desiderius Erasmus.
175 The last half of the chapter contains an analysis of the Citizen in “Cyclops,” who
Joyce’s cobbles together from Homer’s Polyphemus and Virgil’s Cacus. A parodic
symbol of Irish nationalism, his image enables Joyce to explore and hyperbolize the
mythical fabric of Irish culture. In Inferno 25, Dante spies the centaur, Cacus, as he
journeys through hell. As explained by Virgil, he has been assigned to the eighth circle
of thieves for stealing cattle (Inferno 25:28-29). In “Cyclops,” Dante’s likeness is
portrayed as one of many seastones that hang from the Citizen’s ekphrastic girdle. The
stones and their likenesses of various persons are an allusion to the heads of Cacus’
victims in The Aeneid. Repugnant in character and an Irish nationalist, the stones identify
the Citizen as a stand in for Cacus. Among other things, this suggests that Joyce may be
parodying allusive practices and the tradition of imitation and emulation in the epic and
poetry in general. As Joyce is aware, highly allusive textual sites can serve as sites of
authority. Dante’s likeness hangs in silence. The implication is that his authoritative
word is no longer necessary, his face is enough; however, another interpretation would be that the primitive nationalism of the Citizen has trivialized art. Art is to be “collected” and displayed, even boasted about, but its meaning is irrelevant.
Chapter 4, “Dante’s Authority and Poetics in Cantos 25,” provides a glimpse of the Florentine poet’s authorial process, emphasizing the auto-exegesis in his work. The
primary focus of the chapter is to prepare for chapter 5’s discussion of Joyce’s “Oxen”
chapter, which responds to Dante’s poetics. The medieval terms of autore (author),
auctoritas (authority) and auctoritates (texts) are defined and there is a brief examination
of his poetic authority due to his public position. Dante’s authority is not pronounced in
his time due to various reasons: his intention to write the Commedia in the vernacular
176 rather than Latin, his later exile and his lack of a public office. Despite this, he writes an
epic that is visionary in its Christian framework and he takes the innovative step of
holding dialogues in the three canticles as well as assigning punishments and positions to
within the Commedia to those he knew in life. The chapter also defines the palinode
(recantation), a part of Dante’s poetics, as well as Virgil’s influence.
A study of the somatic re-membering that takes place in Inferno 24-25 is
compared to Purgatorio’s arrival of Statius and his oratory on the embryo. The shades of
hell constantly request the human pilgrim Dante to remember them to others. The
remembering of some personages through memory is often juxtaposed with a somatic re-
membering of others. In most cases, hell has somehow modified or otherwise disfigured
its inhabitants and Dante must speak with the shades in order to determine who they are.
One thing is clear: in the twenty-fifth level of each canticle there are statements being made about poetics. Those discussions taking place in Inferno happen alongside of physical metamorphoses and violence. Those in Purgatorio and Paradiso (of which only
Purgatorio will be discussed) take place within the realm of discourse.
Inferno 24-25 presents a highly visual and allusive physical restructuring of Vanni
Fuccci and Agnello in the thieves circle. Throughout Inferno, Dante’s sinners serve to prophesize events that will take place in Florence, situating them in such a way that they have not already happened. The appearance of Statius and his relationship to Dante reveals a possible alter-ego for Dante. Robert Ascoli’s sees the meeting of Virgil, Statius and Dante in Purgatorio as a “historicization of authorship” (324). Part of this chapter also examines the pathos in Statius’ poetry as a possible reason he is chosen to provide the theory of the shade’s soul.
177 Chapter 5, “Oxen of the Sun” – The Birth of the Text,” is a comparative view of
Dante’s Purgatorio 25 and Joyce’s “Oxen.” Extrapolating elements of Statius’ speech and threading them through “Oxen,” Joyce also takes the theme of the embryology passage and creates a micro-version in Stephen Dedalus’ speech. In addition to the microcosm, Joyce is a master of the macrocosm. He takes the embryo trope and applies it to the narrative style in “Oxen.” The evolution of language, in this respect, accompanies the gestation of the embryo. The first part of Joyce’s modification of
Purgatorio 25 takes place through a motif of textual births that are used to define
Leopold Bloom’s arrival and movements at the Holles Street Hospital.
In Stephen’s speech, Joyce writes a cryptic response to Dante’s Purgatorio 25,
through an allusive nexus that incorporates the theme of the embryo, Homeric traces, and
references to both Virgil’s The Georgics and Stephen’s failed poetry (containing Irish
literary symbolism). While the theme of Stephen’s speech is fantastic, the underlying
issue – his poetry – designates the passage as an auto-exegetical moment similar to those
in Dante’s Commedia.
Chapter 6, “Advertisement as Epic Code,” explores the advertising consciousness
of Leopold Bloom. Fredric Jameson’s concept of dereification pinpoints Ulysses’ inability to “solidify into an achieved and codified symbolic order” (151). Also, the image is “the final form of the commodity itself, the ultimate terminus of reification”
(154). Elements of voyeurism and consumption are the focus of this chapter.
Advertising acts as a means of processing, similar to the body’s processes of nourishment, digestion, sexuality and death. The museum goddesses that Bloom
obsesses over are viewed as “aids to digestion” (Ulysses 8:922). Bloom is fascinated
178 with orifices, including those of the goddesses: “They have no. Never looked. I’ll look
today” (Ulysses 8:930-931). The same drive to verify that the goddesses are able to imitate bodily functions and to examine the human body in detail leads to a similar consideration of Patrick Dignam’s corpse: “Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also. With wax. The sphincter loose. Seal up all (Ulysses 6:425-426). While the goddesses are to be examined for openness, the deceased are to be examined for closure.
If Bloom does not have control over Molly’s body – due to her affair with Blazes Boylan
– then he will have control over those of the museum goddesses and Dignam.
The argument in this chapter is that the modern advertisement has been turned into an epic code. Plumtree’s potted meat (the surname of which is belongs to the real life Irishman, George W. Plumtree) is referenced in various ways throughout the book and becomes a symbol that invariably denotes death, marital bliss, nostalgia and sexuality. Bloom is ever conscious of the ad. Language is part of the thinking and the internal vocalizations of the mind can equate with the oral cries of the marketplace.
Space is provided in the chapter to early modern advertising in the marketplace and its placement in the works of Rabelais.
Finally, this dissertation’s premise is that a further reading of Ulysses’ allusive
frame can reveal Joyce’s modification of the epic tradition. As discussed in chapter 1,
Gian Biagio Conte defines the epic code as the “objective narrative structure” of the epic
genre, or the stock features that identify the epic as such (Segal 13). In Ulysses, Joyce’s
epic code modifications result in the replacement of the traditional invocation of the muse
with the mock rite of Buck Mulligan in chapter 1 (“Telemachus”); a modest bargeman on
a raft towed by a haulage rope on the royal canal replaces a ferryman on the River Styx; a
179 brothel replaces Circe’s island; and scenes of battle and epic games are replaced with
discussions of literary and medical theories. In chapter 14 (“Oxen), the invocation to the muse is a chant to an obstetrician; the theatrical send up of Rudolph Virag Bloom, Patrick
Dignam and Stephen’s mother in chapter 15 (“Circle”) becomes a parodic form of
katabasis; and, finally, a catalogue of weapons may end up replaced by the catalogue of
the contents of a drawer in Bloom’s house.
Leopold Bloom is Odysseus recast as a Semitic Irishman, and Joyce infuses
Bloom’s comparatively humble wandering throughout Dublin with the promise of a
return to an idyllic homeland, Israel, with its Agendath Netaim. This promise is initially
introduced to the reader through an advertisement in chapter 4 (“Calypso”), the first
chapter in which Bloom and his internal monologue make an appearance. At the butcher
shop, he spies a pile of cut sheets of various advertisements. The first is of “the model
farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias,” a cattle farm that he envisions becoming
a winter sanatorium (Ulysses 4:154-56). The second is the paradisiacal Zionist colony:
Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eighty
marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges,
almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation.
Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered for life as
owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the balance in
yearly instalments. (Ulysses 4:194-197)
The possibility appeals so much to Bloom, who repeatedly envisions a return to the
Jewish homeland, that at Patrick Dignam’s funeral he thinks “Lay me in my native earth.
Bit of clay from the holy land” (Ulysses 6:819). In comparison, moments later he thinks
180 “The Irishman’s house is his coffin” (Ulysses 6:822). Through the advertisements, he considers land as a commodity and financial security but the description of Agendath, above, also implies a sense of belonging. If he cannot find acceptance as both an
Irishman and a Jewish man, he can find acceptance where one can be an “owner in the book of the union.” Bloom does not voyage as Odysseus does. His own delayed homecoming is the result of Molly’s affair, and he only journeys around Dublin in avoidance of her paramour. Instead, Joyce takes him through a voyage of the imagination. For example, in addition to his imagining of Kinnereth and Agendath, a move which places him in the far east, in chapter 5 (“The Lotus-Eaters”), as he stops in front of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company. His reading serves as his Odyssean journey as he regards the “legends of leadpapered packets” (Ulysses 5:18):
Choice blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely
spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on,
cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like
that. . . . Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in
Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. (Ulysses 5:29-35).
However, just as he turns away from that possibility of Agendath, he wonders at his
ability to tolerate the hothouse climate of the far east. Odysseus visits Circe’s island for a
year; Bloom envisions the far east only for a minute.
Bloom’s journeys exist through his reading of newspapers, sheets, packets, postcards and ads. He also reads books, as we find out from the catalogue of his personal library in chapter 17 (“Ithaca”), and he reads letters from Martha The fact that he reads
sets him apart from the typical epic protagonist, as the heroes of Homer, Virgil and
181 Statius are concerned with the journey and warfare. In his investigation of Virgil’s epic
poetics, Gian Biagio Conte writes:
A work that had only original elements would be doomed to
incomprehensibility. For this reason individual experience must emerge
from the private sphere, must become imbued with a systematic formal
design, or “ratio,” and must submit to the process of conventionalization.
The conventional forms are not added as an afterthought to the
spontaneous nucleus that is their original substance; they are not a form of
pressure from without. Rather, poetic experience moves along
conventional tracks and is revealed within an already codified morphology
of content and expression. (91)
Joyce’s individual experience emerges and has multiple formal designs. The emergence
of individual experience from the private sphere and the subsequent application of a systematic formal design find compatibility in Andras Ungar’s statement, in chapter 3, that Joyce uses the Homeric frame to enable Joyce’s “shaping of the epic as historiography” (1). However, the shaping of the epic traditionally involves a
modification of its codes and norms. Ulysses illustrates that Joyce creates an Irish epic thorough the ambitious practice of this modification.
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