“Dark Men in Mien and Movement”

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

The question of what it means to be a good neighbour runs through Joyce's Ulysses. Its two central characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are often rebuffed by their ostensible neighbours — Stephen by Buck Mulligan and Haines, Bloom by a whole series of Dubliners — and gradually drift toward each other. They meet at the end of 'Oxen of the Sun', interact throughout the apocalyptic 'Circe' episode, and then the parabolic episodes of 'Eumaeus' and 'Ithaca'. Bloom acts truly neighbourly to Stephen in these episodes, and his actions here and earlier in encounters with others in the novel are depicted as re-enactments of the Good Samaritan parable, perhaps Jesus's most famous story of this kind in Scripture. Reading Ulysses anew, I argue, enables not only a fresh apprehension of its parabolic arc over three of its last four episodes, but also allows us to become involved, caring readers of the sort Joyce desired. How does Ulysses draw us to it, generate affection for it and its characters, perhaps even lead us into caring for the Other? In part, it achieves this care by teaching us to read affectively and affectionately through its reinscription of such narratives as the Good Samaritan parable. We might then perceive it anew as a warm and welcoming fiction that invites us into its world of 1904 Dublin, allowing us to linger on the relationship between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, and to understand how they re-enact that parable, so that we might become readers who are hospitable in turn to these characters.

James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus is an insatiable reader of the cultural texts that comprise turn-of-the-century Dublin. Critics such as R. B. Kershner rightly have noted the ways in which the Stephen of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man romantically reenacts Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo and Bulwer-Lytton's Lady of Lyons in order to escape the ever-downward spiral of life in the Dedalus household,(1) but I believe the themes of these works have even broader implications in the political development of the young artist. They also reflect and solidify the sense of betrayal that Stephen comes to recognize as a pivotal motif in Irish colonial politics. Both works depict estranged lovers separated by treachery, but this important theme is also encoded with the signifiers of self betrayal. The protagonists of these stories are deceived not from without, but from within: Edmond Dantes and Claude Melnotte are betrayed by ill-chosen friends, and to a lesser degree, by the women they love. The implications of this self-deception for both Stephen Dedalus and colonial Ireland become clear as we follow Stephen's reading of the Irish political scene and note his inescapable conclusion: It is not England that is Ireland's chief betrayer; it is Ireland itself. Vincent J. Cheng and Enda Duffy recently have argued forcefully for Joyce's position as a subaltern writer concerned with representing the divisive and devastating effects of colonial oppression in Ireland. Both Cheng and Duffy suggest Joyce depicts an Ireland that, in its attempts to throw off the mantle of British imperialism, devises a nationalism that mimics the very structures of racism, ethnocentrism, and violence that Britannia perpetuated in order to subdue indigenous populations across the empire. I, too, view Joyce as a highly politicized, colonial figure writing against canonical and political hegemony. While I agree that Joyce certainly sees British imperialism as a fundamental cause of Irish political chaos in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods (Can the back of a slave forget the rod? Joyce asks [Critical Writings 168]), I would also assert that Joyce's primary, purpose in depicting this discord is not so much to condemn British mistreatment of Ireland as it is to expose and deride Ireland's oppression of its own sons and daughters as it attempts the impossible task of purifying or de-anglicizing Irish culture. Robert Spoo has claimed that Ulysses itself and its protagonists repudiate the totalizing impulse of conventional historiography as simplistic and unsatisfactory; that is, Joyce's novel rejects the depiction of as a teleological, inexorable progression towards one great goal (Ulysses 2.381, my emphasis). Spoo also contends that Joyce attacked Irish nationalism and its doctrine of racial purity for the same reasons (47).(2) I agree with this assessment of Joyce's position, but central to my argument is the contention that late nineteenth-century Irish nationalism - like the problematic notion of Irish - cannot be discussed as a monolithic entity; nationalisms seems to me a more accurate term than the singular form to describe the multiplicity of revolutionary movements in turn-of-the-century Ireland. These nationalisms divided colonial Ireland and presented a threat to Irish nation-ness as dangerously monolithic and oppressive as any imperialistic hegemony.(3) As Stephen Dedalus moves through the politically charged narratives of Portrait and Ulysses, his encounters with the evolving Irish nation - as well as his exclusion from its forms at every turn - reveal Joyce's implicit condemnation of these Irishmen (and women) who have recreated the very political and cultural constructs that they would overthrow. It is a repetitiously bloody and complex colonial heritage that Stephen Dedalus must decode, a national experience characterized by six centuries of British occupation and Irish revolt. Beginning in 1171 with Henry II's arrival on Irish soil and continuing until the 1922 partition of the island into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State, Irish history records the gamut of colonial oppression aimed at expediting the absorption of the foreign culture and reaping the economic harvests of colonization. …

Henry Flower Writes a Story Horst Breuer (bio) I "Henry Flower" is Leopold Bloom's assumed pen name and literary persona in Ulysses. He adopts it in a clandestine correspondence and carries around a visiting card with the name on it. Hitherto, commentators on the novel believed that no piece of writing by this wonderfully gifted man of letters survived, but they are wrong. They have overlooked a whole episode in Joyce's novel—"Eumaeus." I contend that the episode is narrated by none other than this fabulous author. Henry Flower's contribution to early-twentieth-century journalism, essayism, and belletristic writing is the epitome of a characteristically outmoded, thoughtless, sloppy style of writing, which Joyce, the radical modernist, rightly resented and ridiculed—and occasionally reproduced with ironic relish. "Make it new," Ezra Pound's battle cry for a vigorous, precise, graphic literary style, is the programmatic antidote to Henry Flower's pseudo-elegant, inflated logorrhea.1 Unlike Ernest Hemingway, who did away with all unnecessary adjectives and qualifiers, Joyce takes an entirely different approach to exposing the outworn, pre-modernist literary stance in this episode of Ulysses—not by rejecting but by mimicking it. In many sections of Ulysses, the author delights in irreverently amalgamating bits and pieces of "high" and "low" literature and culture, as is proper for an encyclopedic representation of Dublin's everyday life. "Eumaeus" is the shattering parody of what half-educated characters such as Leopold Bloom might consider a dazzlingly clever literary diction. My hypothesis is that Henry Flower's florid rhetoric is behind the episode in question. II "Eumaeus" is an ingenious compilation of almost every stylistic atrocity the author could imagine, a demonstration piece of bad writing. Its rhetoric is pretentious, long-winded, cliché-ridden, insincere—in every way, the reverse of the young Joyce's artistic ideal of exact observation, radical honesty, and terse expression in "a style of [End Page 87] scrupulous meanness" (LettersII 134).2 Stanislaus Joyce refers to the language of "Eumaeus" as "flabby Dublin journalese, with its weak effort to be witty," admiring the "almost unlimited adaptability" of his brother's writing, though regretting its increasing lack of poetic beauty (LettersIII 58). Most of the earlier critics seem to have disregarded the burlesque aspect of the narrative strategy of the episode and found little of interest in it. For many years, this section was understood as a tiresome piece of imitative writing, meant to match the late hour of the day and the fatigue of the main characters. A. Walton Litz writes of the "failure of the Eumaeus episode," and S. L. Goldberg calls it "one of the weakest sections of the book."3 This conception has undergone a marked revision in more recent years. Joycean commentators seem now to draw considerable enjoyment from the episode and its purposefully wordy and elaborate phrasings. It is found to be "a very funny chapter" by Marilyn French and "a brilliant exercise in comic obfuscation" by Zack Bowen.4 An important step towards recognition of the stylistic profile of the episode is made by Hugh Kenner, who notes the "Bloomian" quality of the narrative and points out the context of Leopold Bloom's literary ambitions and fantasies.5 A number of other critics have followed this approach,6 which is also the basis of the present contribution. The rhetorical hallmark of "Eumaeus" is a dissonant mixture of slang, attempted witticisms, would-be elegant and educated expressions, a vast number of idioms and formulas that have become trite, and sclerotic clichés, as well as countless verbosities, redundancies, linguistic stuffings, and puffed-up phrases. The worn-out quality of the language is indicated by the classification Joyce chose for the episode's "technic," according to his famous schema—"Narrative (old)."7 The overall manner of "Eumaeus" is one of pretended wit, rhetorical boasting, and attempted in-group jargon, conveying the cumulative impression of vulgarity, vacuity, and a general lack of truthfulness, self-knowledge, and identity. This jarring and insincere quality of the text is confirmed by the factual story that can be deduced from the episode. Although Stephen Dedalus (the "noctambulist"—U 17.930) may be bored and tired, Leopold Bloom...

Scholarship about has, from start, envisioned autobiographical implications in Ulysses. In 1924, Herbert Gorman tells us that in Dedalus of first three episodes of novel, Joyce draws a portrait (obviously autobiographical) that is astonishing in its complexity completeness (124-25). In 1930, Stuart Gilbert, while also claiming that Dedalus is a self-portrait, adds that Stephen Dedalus represents only one side of author of Ulysses, and that in character of Leopold Bloom, the balance is redressed (102). In 1934, Frank Budgen likewise claims that is Joyce's self-portrait, although he interprets Bloom differently, his interpretation still resembles Gilbert's biographic supposition: There is a difference [between Dedalus Leopold Bloom] of dimension substance as well as character. is a self-portrait, therefore one-sided. Bloom is seen from all angles, as no self-portrait can be seen. (James 59) In 1955, Hugh Kenner discusses issue of autobiography too, though he limits his remarks to A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man its even more autobiographical prototype, Hero, works that portray Dedalus but not Leopold Bloom (Dublin's Joyce; see especially 137). Yet spirit that pervades even this shrewd book often betrays a willingness to to notebooks conversations of Joyce, as if to find textual confirmation from master himself. In his exhaustive, authoritative biography of Joyce, first published in 1959, Richard Ellmann was a fastidiously close reader of autobiographical content in Joyce's writings. He stresses importance of Joyce's autobiographical material in introduction: The life of an artist, but particularly that of Joyce, differs from lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command attention. Instead of allowing each day, pushed back by next, to lapse into imprecise memory, he experiences which shaped him. (James 3) More than any other work of scholarship, this biography meticulously reckons instances in Joyce's life that got written into A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man Ulysses. Such autobiographical consideration of Ulysses elicits little surprise, since himself encouraged looking at his work autobiographically. While working on Hero, rather muddlesomely signed some of his correspondence as Stephen Daedalus; [1] while working on Ulysses, he tried to change his life to resemble his fiction. Budgen shows, for example, how would try to make his relationship with Nora resemble that of Leopold with Molly Bloom: Nora became tearful through her tears she told me that Jim wanted her to go with other men so that he would have something to write about. Joyce, pretending to be more drunk than he was, was shuffling up in rear, hoping presumably, to catch some helpful words. (Myselves When Young 188) Again, seems to encourage autobiographical inquiries by his confession to Budgen that Dedalus as he appears in A Portrait of Artist (a significant before artist) is a self-portrait (James 60). Little wonder, then, that Joyceologists set a high importance on convoking instances of life experiences that Joyce, in Ellmann's phrase, shapes again in Ulysses. Here are a few they have found: humorous valentine poem sent to Joyce, a valentine that later uses in Ulysses as one Bloom sends to his daughter Milly (Ellmann, James 31-32); George Russel's snubbing by not including him in an anthology of young Dublin poets that Russel was editing, a snub that Russel administers to Dedalus in library scene (Ellmann, James 174n); Joyce's rescue by a Mr. Hunter--Joyce's model for Leopold Bloom--which appears as Bloom's rescue of in Circe (Beja 68). …

A study of characterization in James Joyce's Ulysses. Alert to form, style and innovation, it offers explanations of why Leopold Bloom, who knows he isn't Jewish, feels Jewish to himself and others, and how Stephen Dedalus' theory of Shakespeare reveals core aspects of his own struggles.

Contemporaries in imagination as in fact, James Joyce and Sigmund Freud pondered the complexities and depths of human consciousness and found distinct ways to represent it—the one as a great novelist, the other as the first psychoanalyst. In this book, Paul Schwaber, both a professor of literature and a psychoanalyst, brings a clinician’s attentiveness and a scholar-critic’s literary commitment to the study of characterization in Ulysses . Alert to form, style, and innovation, and respecting continuities and uniquenesses of character, he offers discerning explanations of why Leopold Bloom, who knows he isn’t Jewish, clearly feels Jewish to himself and others; how Stephen Dedalus’ intricate theory of Shakespeare reveals core aspects of his own inner struggles; and why Molly Bloom’s adulterous aftermath registers with her, at the end of the day, as sleeplessness. Schwaber also offers intriguing commentary on the novel’s narrator. Not imposing formulations but subtly drawing them from the text, Schwaber reads openly—as an analyst listens—and illuminates the extraordinary psychological mimesis of Ulysses . He invites his readers to appreciate the brilliance and fun of Joyce’s book, and in so doing he brings psychoanalysis as a mode of inquiry to the test of great literature.

The father-figure motif in the worlds of<i>Pedro Páramo</i>and<i>Páscoa Feliz</i>

ABSTRACT: This essay brings two under-discussed aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, including his reflections on "cultural paralysis" and what he calls the "suprahistorical approach," into a productive philosophical dialogue with a comparably under-discussed aspect of Ulysses , that is, the significance of the role performed by Leopold Bloom's alter ego, Henry Flower. I argue that Bloom creates this alter ego using a process that is reminiscent of Nietzsche's suprahistorical approach, which proposes that an individual, or a body politic, might benefit from selective historical remembrance, with a view to overcoming the paralyzing trauma triggered by the death of his infant son, Rudy. Mindful of the temporal vantage point from which Joyce reflects upon the fictionalized events of 16 June 1904, this essay further demonstrates that the creation of Henry Flower completes the kaleidoscopic mode of narration through which Joyce refracts the stifling legacy of Irish history: first through Stephen Dedalus, then through Leopold Bloom, and ultimately through Henry Flower. When viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that the creation of Henry Flower allows Bloom to recognize the restorative potential of a surrogate father-son relationship with Stephen. In this way, Henry Flower performs a conciliatory function that establishes a philosophical blueprint for postcolonial nation-building, thereby underscoring the productive potential that resides in even the most disconcerting depths of Nietzsche's philosophical vision.

Ungar argues that Joyce's Ulysses is Irish national - a new national written at moment a new nation, Irish Free State, was being founded, and one that evades potential constraints of tradition in order to draw attention instead to what Ungar calls the change required in Ireland's too formulaic self-definition. This is first full-length study of how Ireland's accession to political sovereignty figures in compositional design of Ulysses. Ungar explores parallel between program of Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith and meeting of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, with their dreams of self-expression and continuity. He reads work as a fable of new kinds of remembering, relations among ancestors, and epic rhyming that are required to imagine a new national entity, and he delineates features of this fable by carefully wrought close readings of key moments in novel. In process he succeeds in uniting an older, eminently distinguished brand of Joyce criticism with insights of younger generation of critics. Ungar adds a wealth of valuable new detail to relation of Joyce's Ireland and Leopold Bloom's Hungary, which is central to his argument, and ingeniously links Molly Bloom to Stephen Dedalus's focus on issue of national identity.

Reviewed by: The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form by Stuti Khanna David Spurr (bio) The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-Conceiving National and Narrative Form, by Stuti Khanna. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. viii + 229 pp. $95.00. The title of this monograph is slightly misleading, as it consists primarily of a comparative study of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. The comparison is instructive, however, insofar as the works of these two writers represent fictional interpretations of the city in its modern and postmodern forms, respectively. According to Stuti Khanna, “[m]odernist” cities like “Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and London” were the cosmopolitan “metropolises” at the beginning of the twentieth century that favored the development of modernist art (3). Dublin figures among them at least marginally, because of the modern elements of its infrastructure and the presence of the Irish Revival. “Postmodern” cities include those beyond Europe and North America, like Bombay, Shanghai, and São Paulo, which are marked by the effects of late capitalism, globalization, migration, and postmodern culture (3). Khanna’s contention is that the radical literary forms adopted by Joyce and Rushdie are the direct effects of urban experience in the cities about which they write. Her study also has the implicit purpose of evaluating both writers according to the degree in which they accurately represent the “multiple, many-layered” aspects of the city, its variety of classes and ethnicities, its “crowded realities,” and its status as a place for “the articulation of untotalizable differences that open up new ways of thinking and being” (69, 144, 66). With respect to Joyce, this argument is hardly new, but in support of it Khanna offers some interesting readings of certain episodes in Ulysses. What takes places in “Cyclops,” for example, is not the simple confrontation of tolerance and intolerance or of reason and passion conventionally seen there. If we take into account everything [End Page 535] said by all those present in Barney Kiernan’s pub, there is, in fact, a spirited debate about the categories of nation and race that is more than two-sided. Not everything the Citizen says is unreasonable, such as his environmentalist plea against deforestation: “Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O” (U 12.1263–64). The episode explores a variety of ways of being Irish, making it difficult to reach definite conclusions about the nature of Irish nationalism. As a further example of the “heterogeneities and contradictions” found in a “postcolonial metropolis” (83), Khanna points to ways in which the official status of such civic institutions as the museum and public library is transformed in Joyce’s narrative. Bloom’s curiosity concerning the nether parts of the Venus Callipyge at the National Museum is offered as an alternate but legitimate form of aesthetic appreciation resulting from Joyce’s refusal to “hierarchize different kinds of knowledges” (108). In the library, the traditional “injunction to silence” is “flouted with impunity as even the librarians [themselves] participate with gusto” in the literary discussion (110). Since this is presented as an example of lively disregard for institutional decorum, it should perhaps be pointed out that the discussion in question takes place in Thomas Lyster’s office, sealed by closed doors from the reading room and adjacent hallway. Khanna’s most interesting chapter explores the way both Joyce and Rushdie put forward figures of the artist as a means of exploring the city. This is a key question insofar as both modernism and postmodernism are commonly held to be artistic movements for which the urban environment has been essential both as a space of collaboration and as a source of new material for artists. In these two writers, however, the figure of the artist is far from being a triumphant product of the city. Khanna points out that, for Stephen Dedalus, the city is not “confronted head on but sublimated and epiphanized into timeless essences” (125). Stephen, in other words, will not serve as a reliable interpreter of the city. That task falls, rather, on Leopold Bloom, whose “mind works by association, opening up unending series of observations” and reflections on...

A line across the page divides, nine and nine, the first extant list of Ulysses episodes, the one Joyce sent John Quinn in September 1920 (Letters I, 145). Correspondingly, the words “End of First Part of Ulysses” appear on the last page of the Rosenbach fair copy of episode 9, “Scylla and Charybdis.” If we append to this half its coda, “Wandering Rocks,” we have a ten-episode block, homogeneous in its style1 and reasonably self-contained in its themes and actions. It is instructive to linger on this fragment. What should we make of Ulysses if it had ended with “Wandering Rocks”? We should have, by contrast with the book we know, a moderately orthodox novel of under 100,000 words, its ten chapters each of fairly normal length. The interior monologue, tactfully introduced, would be its striking technical feature: that and a certain penchant for abrupt scene shifting (and both have precedents in Meredith). It would follow, contrapuntally, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom from 8 a.m. till midafternoon, when the ostensible business of each is done for the day.

Following an extended theoretical examination of the continuing relevance of the concepts of influence and rapport de fait for comparative criticism today, this chapter provides a contrapuntal “parallactic” reading of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The focus is placed on the role of irony and “parallax” in the depiction of the main characters of these “Bildungsromane,” Wilhelm Meister and Stephen Dedalus (and, to a lesser degree, Leopold Bloom), the role and relevance of chance and coincidence in these novels, and the symbolic significance of the Icarus-motif for an interpretation of the protagonists’ development.

Time and Identity in “Ulysses” and the “Odyssey” offers a unique in-depth comparative study of two classic literary works, examining essential themes including change, the self, and humans’ dependence on and isolation from others. Stephanie Nelson shows that in these texts, both Joyce and Homer address identity by looking at the paradox of time—that people are constantly changing yet remain the same across the years. In Nelson’s analysis, both Ulysses and the Odyssey explore dichotomies such as the permanence of names and shifting of stories, independence and connection, and linear and cyclical narrative. Nelson discusses Homer’s contrast of ordinary to mythic time alongside Joyce’s contrast of “clocktime” to experienced time. She analyzes the characters Odysseus and Leopold Bloom, alienated from their previous selves; Telemachus and Stephen Dedalus, trapped by the past; and Penelope and Molly Bloom, able to recast time through weaving, storytelling, and memory. These concepts are also explored through Joyce’s radically different narrative styles and Homer’s timeless world of the gods. Nelson’s thorough knowledge of ancient Greece, Joyce, narratology, oral tradition, and translation results in a volume that speaks across literary specializations. This book makes the case that Ulysses and the Odyssey should be read together and that each work highlights and clarifies aspects of the other. As Joyce’s characters are portrayed as both flux and fixity, readers will see Homer’s hero fight his way out of myth and back into the constant changes of human existence.

The words of its writers are part of the texture of Dublin, an invisible counterpart to the bricks and pavement we see around us. Beyond the ever-present footsteps of James Joyce's characters, Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus, around the city centre, an ordinary-looking residential street overlooking Dublin Bay, for instance, presents the house where Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney lived for many years; a few blocks away is the house where another Nobel Laureate, W. B. Yeats, was born. Just down the coast is the pier linked to yet another, Samuel Beckett, from which we can see the Martello Tower that is the setting for the opening chapter of Ulysses. But these are only a few. Step-by-step, Dublin: A Writer's City unfolds a book-lover's map of this unique city, inviting us to experience what it means to live in a great city of literature. The book is heavily illustrated, and features custom maps.