Eliade, Joyce, and the “Nightmare of History”

Abstract

rofessor Mircea Eliade, in 1949, more than a quarter of a century after publication of Ulysses, and eight years after James Joyce's death, published Le Mythe de l'ternal retour: archetypes et repetition. In 1952 book was translated into English as The Myth of Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History. In his book, Eliade notes that the work of two of most significant writers of our day-T. S. Eliot and James Joyce-is saturated with nostalgia for myth of eternal repetition and, in last analysis, for abolition of time (153). Joyce's Finnegans Wake, with its thousand and one repetitions, its Viconian cycles, its mythicizing of such Irish historical figures as Finn MacCool, and its endless form, must have attracted Eliade's attention. So also may Eliade have seen, in fictional lives of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses, a dramatization of his or man of culture, and of his modern man who lacks or has denied Judaeo-Christian faith. Joyce's Leopold Bloom, in many essential ways, is Eliade's primitive man who, lacking religious faith, relies upon myths and archetypes to overcome terror of history. Just as fully, Stephen Dedalus is Eliade's modern man, devoid of course of myths and archetypes but who, having denied his faith, is defeated by this terror. Eliade believes that archaic man refused to accept earthquakes, famines, wars, and personal disasters-to accept terror of history-as a mere succession of events happening in historical, profane, and linear or irreversible time. Archaic man abolished history, for history was meaningless, unexplained and unexplainable. Instead, to make disasters tolerable, not absurd, he employed, with fulness of his imagination, a wealth of archetypes, myths, and paradigms that went back to beginning of things