University of Debrecen Doctoral Programme in British and American Studies

University of Debrecen Doctoral Programme in British and American Studies A TALE OF A PUB: READING THE “CYCLOPS” EPISODE OF JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES IN THE CONTEXT OF IRISH CULTURAL NATIONALISM Marianna Gula 1 Introduction The 1990s’ introduction of post-colonial theory into Joyce criticism has brought about a thorough reassessment of Joyce’s relationship to politics and history in general, and British imperialism and Irish nationalism in particular. In contrast to the New Critical vision of his work as the manifestation of an apolitical, cosmopolitan modernist aestheticism, his texts have come increasingly to be seen as complex − most often subversive − sites of ideological involvement. The “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, which most explicitly engages with the issue of Irish nationalism, has been at the forefront in this process. The chapter’s engagement with Irish nationalism, noted by the first commentators, underwent a particularly vigorous reappraisal in the past decade. This process evinced a shift from associating nationalism exclusively with the xenophobic citizen’s nostalgia and violence against Bloom to problematising the issue by contextualised readings accommodating the discourses of imperialism and nationalism. My inquiry aims to further this ongoing critical enterprise by placing the episode in the discursive context of Irish cultural nationalism. Highlighting the text against the backdrop of Irish cultural nationalism in general, not only the 1890s Celtic Revival, which provided the most immediate cultural context for Joyce and which has hitherto been mostly targeted, I explore how the text ironically re-inscribes crucial discursive formations arising out of an organic conception of the nation, and how it subversively enlists the key cultural means of their dissemination. Not denying the validity of analyses emphasising that the chapter stages how extreme nationalist sentiment boils over into physical violence towards a stigmatised other, I focus rather on how the discursive violence of nationalist sentiment – mostly, but not exclusively focused in the citizen’s rhetoric – is subversively counteracted in the episode both thematically − on the levels of plot and characterisation − and, more important, formally, by means of textual praxis. 2 “Nationality, [. .] nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind,” argues Benedict Anderson in his seminal study on the emergence and spread of the modern phenomenon of nationalism (4). Nations came to be imagined in terms of communities with a unique spiritual, cultural identity, as “pristine but continually evolving historical communities” (Hutchinson 38) with the dawn of Romanticism at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The idea − rooted in German idealism and consciously adopted, among others, in Ireland by the Young Irelanders, a group of 1840s intellectuals − was disseminated by cultural, educational projects aspiring to homogenise heterogeneity, to create an authentic homogeneous national identity that belies all apparent gaps and divisions.1 While there was never a unanimous agreement as to the exact nature and location of the unique spirit of the Irish nation, proliferating cultural nationalist projects throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century invariably appealed to the Gaelic past – myths and legends and folklore, their modern day preserver – for authenticity and legitimacy in their endeavour to create the future, emphasising the existence of a basic continuity that connects an ideal origo, the apparently ruptured present and a redemptive future − a sort of teleological safeguard of the nation’s aspirations. I argue that the dense texture of the “Cyclops” episode functions as a heterogeneous site of ironic counterdiscourses challenging discursive formations drawing on the two basic aspirations of diverse cultural nationalist projects − creating a homogeneous communal identity and representing the temporality of the nation in organicist terms as a teleological development. I have found the context of Irish cultural nationalism particularly apt for such a hitherto unattempted extended study of the episode since it 1 Most cultural critics and historians – David Lloyd, Kevin Whelan, Terry Eagleton, Tom Dunne, D. George Boyce – agree that the Romantic concept of the spiritual nation first manifested itself in Ireland in the cultural nation-building campaign of the Young Irelanders in the 1840s. Mary Helen Thuente, however, argues that cultural nationalism appeared in Ireland with the United Irishmen in the 1790s. John Hutchinson, in turn, locates 3 1. can ascribe irony to several puzzling formal – structural and stylistic – games in the episode, major cruces of Joyce criticism, such as the use of a narrator (the only one in the whole of Ulysses), the split structure of the chapter – a stylistically and perspectively disjointed, fractured body of narrative – and the nominal economies of the episode, 2. can reveal and/or create not readily visible subtextual/intertextual dramas subversively re-staging diverse cultural nationalist topoi and subversively enrolling cultural vehicles of inventing the Irish nation – newspapers, ballads, and drama, 3. and most importantly, enables me to tackle the function of one of the most problematic and hitherto scarcely discussed formal features of the chapter: its numerous lengthy lists. Two of the most monstrous lists provide the dynamic foci of two chapters. The context of Irish cultural nationalism can reveal and/or create ironic formal and thematic – heterogeneising and counterteleological – dynamics operating within the lists, which counteract the discursive violence of the nameless narrator’s zone. The method I deploy is that of the archaeologist. Drawing on the work of theoreticians of the modern idea of the nation such as Anderson, Homi K. Bhabha, and John Hutchinson; cultural critics focusing on Ireland such as Kevin Whelan, David Lloyd, Oliver MacDonagh, Luke Gibbons, Richard Kearney, Declan Kiberd, Joep Leerssen, Mary Helen Thuente, C. L. Innes, Mary Trotter, and Seamus Deane; those who critique teleological modes of historical imagination such as Hayden White and Michel Foucault; and applications of their findings to Joyce’s texts by Vincent J. Cheng, Robert Spoo, James Fairhall, Emer Nolan, Marjorie the beginning of Irish cultural nationalism even before this time, in the Protestant antiquarianism of the mid- 4 Howes, Derek Attridge, and so forth; as well as on ample documentary sources – such as revivalist histories of Ireland, popular journalism, music and theatre, and the manuscripts of Ulysses in progress – I contextualise and historicise discursive formations and the vehicles of their dissemination woven into the composite texture of “Cyclops” to better illuminate the ideologically subversive implications of their use. Since “Cyclops” is one of the few episodes of Ulysses in which Joyce totally changed his compositional strategies, scrutinising the genetic development of the episode yields precious insights into the text’s subversive dynamics. Preparatory to anything else, however, to locate my inquiry in the critical discourse, I briefly survey the history of the discussions of nationalism in relation to “Cyclops,” paying special attention to the results of the past decade. Through the Critical Looking Glasses “Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub,” thinks Leopold Bloom in the early morning of 16 June 1904. It would be an equally good puzzle to work one’s way through the amassed criticism on the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses without passing a reference to Irish nationalism. Although the currently predominant concern with the political, ideological implications of Joyce’s texts began to supplant previous depoliticising − de- contextualising, de-historicising, de-culturalising − readings only two decades ago, “Cyclops” deals with political issues so explicitly that this aspect was noted even in the heyday of New Criticism. Joyce himself ascribed “politics” as an art to the episode in his schema popularised later by Stuart Gilbert.2 The politics of the episode, in turn, was for decades primarily − eighteenth century. 2 Pinted in Gilbert’s Ulysses and reprinted in Richard Ellmann’s Ulysses on the Liffey, Appendix. “Cyclops” has been described as “the political chapter of Ulysses” (Manganiello 138), “the most politically committed piece of fiction that Joyce ever produced” (Parrinder 172), and “the episode [. .] most rich in political theme and reference” (Rodstein 146). In 1977 Charles Peake argued that although “[i]t is often suggested that, in his writings, Joyce is apolitical and amoral, [. .] this chapter alone proves to the contrary” (242). 5 almost exclusively − discussed in terms of Joyce’s moral (satirical) repudiation of Irish nationalism.3 As Enda Duffy diagnosed in 1995, “critics invariably characterize ‘Cyclops’as the set-piece in which Joyce, with the heartfelt agreement of his readers, sends up chauvinistic and ignorant Irish nationalism” (109). More particularly, the episode for a long time was unanimously read “as a magisterial deflation of the tradition of physical force republicanism, which is always identified, perhaps anachronistically, as a highly pernicious discourse,” as Susan Sola de Rodstein noted three years later (153).4 To some extent, such a reading relied on Joyce’s own cue. At an early stage of the episode’s composition, in a letter to his Zurich friend, Frank Budgen, he described the citizen, the figure dominating

Load more