Ulysses" $15.00

Suzette A. Henke A Study of "Ulysses" $15.00 JOYCE'S MORACULOUS SINDBOOK A Study of Ulysses By Suzette A. Henke Though most critics have been quick to ac knowledge the innovative nature of James Joyce's stylistic experiments, few have pointed out the radical content of Ulysses or the revo lutionary view of consciousness that is implicit in the novel. Suzette Henke makes use of various Conti nental methods of literary criticism to recon struct Ulysses as a fictional life-world, and draws upon phenomenology, Geneva criticism, psychoanalytic investigation, and linguistic analysis to illumine the progress of the narra tive. Existential philosophy provides the point of departure from which she demonstrates how the principles of Heidegger and Sartre eluci date the humanistic dimensions of Joyce's work. Ulysses, she maintains, is no mere tour de force: it has meaning "from and in life" and is significant to us as moral beings. According to Professor Henke, Joyce's char acters move from a world of solipsistic fear to one of shared experience, and from psycholog ical enclosure to an existential liberation of consciousness. Joyce, she suggests, was far ahead of his contemporaries in his understand ing of social interaction and psychological de velopment. In Ulysses, he questions traditional notions of identity and reality, of conjugal ap propriation and egocentric privilege, and de lights in the capaciousness of the human imagination, implying that every individual can become an "artist of life" through myth, sympathy, and creative fantasy. Dr. Henke offers an original and innovative reading of Ulysses that challenges traditional interpretations and reveals dimensions of the text that have hitherto gone unnoticed or un explained. Joyce himself, in the later, more experimental episodes of the novel, provides the key to this new understanding, when he (Continued on back flap) Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook A Study of Ulysses SUZETTE A. HENKE Ohio State University Press: Columbus All quotations from James Joyce's Ulysses are copyright ' 1914, 1918, by Margaret Caroline Anderson and renewed 1942, 1946, by Nora Joseph Joyce. Reprinted by per mission of Random House, Inc. Copyright "• 1978 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Henke, Suzette A. Joyce's moraculous sindbook. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941. Ulysses. I. Title PR6019.09U6547 82.V.9'12 77-18049 ISBN 0-8142-0275-6 To my mother, Elizabeth Kish Henke, and to all the cherished friends who have offered support and encouragement V over the past decade Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 CHAPTER 1 "Telemachus": Ghosts and Cannibals 15 2 "Nestor": The Nightmare of History 37 3 "Proteus": The Art of Perception "Scylla and Charybdis": The Artist as God 53 4 "Calypso": The World of Sensuous Reality "Lotus-Eaters": The Land of Dream 75 5 "Hades": The Hibernian Underworld "Aelous" and "Wandering Rocks": The World as Machine 95 6 "Lestrygonians" and "Sirens": Food for Men and Gods 123 7 "Cyclops": Giant and Jew 137 8 "Nausicaa": Romantic Fantasy "Oxen of the Sun": Procreative Reality 153 9 "Circe": Ulysses in Nighttown 181 10 "Eumaeus" and "Ithaca": Nostos 207 11 "Penelope": The Flesh Made Word 233 Bibliography 253 Index 261 Acknowledgments The roots of Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook go back at least seven years, to the time when this study began to take shape in the recesses of the intellectual imagination. An entire human age has passed, and those who have contributed inspiration or encouragement are far too numerous to be catalogued. I owe a long-standing debt of gratitude to Professor Paul Ricoeur of the University of Paris for originally introducing me to the principles of phenomenology and existentialism. Profes sors David Halliburton and Albert Guerard of Stanford Univer sity generously read this text in its original form, and I am extremely grateful for their editorial comments and for their unfailing professional assistance. David Riggs and Robert Polhemus of Stanford welcomed me as an auditor in several of their Joyce seminars, where a number of my critical perspec tives on Ulysses were clarified. I wish to thank Richard Ellmann, Goldsmiths' Professor of IX English at Oxford, for greeting me as a "fellow-worker in the Irish bog" at a time when a few words of interest made a difference. I am indebted to Robert Kellogg and Robert Langbaum, colleagues at the University of Virginia, for reading and commenting on this manuscript at several stages of compo sition. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Morris Beja, of the Ohio State University, for reading Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook with meticulous care and for making editorial suggestions that have proved invaluable. I doubt that even he fully understands the effect that his sharp critical eye, combined with earnest enthusiasm, has had on the final devel opment of this study. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf declared that "surely it is time that the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured." And we might say the same thing about encouragement, as well. Certainly, the impact of supportive friendships, both professional and personal, can never fully be counted. I hope that the friends to whom this book is dedicated will recognize my tribute and understand my deep appreciation. For enduring companionship throughout my years in Califor nia, I am grateful to Samuel Tabor, who has contributed more than any other nuclear physicist I know to the study of matters Joycean. For inspiration, criticism, and humor, I thank the students who have participated in my Joyce seminars at the University of Virginia, especially John Sack and James Mac- Queen, fellow-spirits in the existential quest. For long hours of proofreading and much else, I would like to thank Michael Hubbard, whose Joycean wit and abundant good cheer have lightened life in the academical village. For much that is non-Joycean, I am grateful to Bobbie Sanger and Judy Ward, who have always been willing to share their advice and experience. Finally, I can only begin to express my sincere appreciation to my mother, Elizabeth Kish Henke, whose faith, courage, and amor matris have offered me the gift of lifelong love and support. For help with the tasks of typing and bibliographical re search, I wish to thank Janet Mullaney; Karen Tidmarsh and Kathleen Fogarty, my research assistants; and the secretarial staff at the University of Virginia, including Darnell McGhee and Peggy Dorrier. For a financial grant in seedtime, I would like to acknowl edge the Mabelle McCleod Lewis Memorial Fund of Stanford, California, whose award in 1971-72 made it possible for me to begin work on this study. University of Virginia Charlottesville, 1977 XI Joyce's Moraculous Sindbook Introduction In the beginning was the Word.—John 1:1 In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh.—"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" The theme of Saint John's gospel is also the motif of James Joyce's Ulysses, a work that preaches the "good news" of the Logos and offers the promise of a "new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future."1 Like Stephen Dedalus, Joyce was determined to use his artistic talents for the transformation of mankind. Throughout the canon of his work, he utters the "word known to all men" (p. 581)—the Logos that defines being, engenders sympathy, and identifies the symbol-system of the race. From the material of words, the artist creates worlds: with godlike omniscience, he fashions an aesthetic microcosm, a fictional "postcreation" that expands the collec tive horizons of human awareness. Joyce's earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, traces its hero's gradual discovery of the awesome power of the word. Pain is the goad that inspires Stephen Dedalus to construct an imaginary world of poetry and song. While Baby Stephen cowers beneath the kitchen table, a rhyme about eagles and authority consigns the figures of parental justice to a play frame. A later scene of torment with Heron, Boland, and Nash unfolds as a drama of static perception: Stephen is "divested of his suddenwoven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel."2 The torturous experiences of youth and adoles cence are stripped of their anguish and dramatically controlled by the use of elaborate metaphor. Poetry offers aesthetic com pensation for the dawning pangs of frustrated erotic desire: in Stephen's Byronic verses "ToE—C—," "the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both" (P 71). Art "tran substantiates" the bread of everyday life into the sanctified wafer of beauty. It transmutes the disappointments of mundane reality into cathartic experiences of pity, terror, and joy. The structure of Stephen's aesthetic theory in Portrait is based on Aristotle's Poetics, filtered through the writings of Thomas Aquinas. The function of the artist is to perceive the "thing in itself" as it really is, shown forth in wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Claritas gives birth to the notion of epiphany, the revelation of the "whatness" of an object or event. An epiphany connotes' 'a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memor able phase of the mind itself."3 In this "most delicate and evanescent of moments" (5// 211), the "soul of the commonest object . seems to us radiant" (SH 213). Stephen leads us through an Aristotelian maze, but he ultimately discards the categorical nets that bind his artistic vision. His description of epiphany initiates an aesthetic celebration of phenomenal real ity, perceived and sanctified in the present moment.

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