The
Comic in Ulysses, Joyce’s Critique of the Irish Nativist Identity
Dr. Fedya Daas
ISLT University
Tunisia
Abstract:
This
article explores the potential of the comic to criticize, revolutionize and
redefine the contours of the Irish identity in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In
a first instance, it explains how laughter becomes a subversive strategy of
traditional heroism. Joyce uses laughter as a counter-monumental technique that
figuratively shakes the invincibility of statues of memorialized heroes.
Second, a conversation between Joyce’s protagonist Bloom and The Citizen, a
prototype of the fanatic nationalists, exposes the contradictions, paradoxes,
trivialities and randomness of the Irish nativist project. Third, Joyce also
discloses the atrocities of patriarchy through comic gender shifts and the
comic exaggerations and role reversals expose the dogmatism of the nativist nationalist
discourse. The article concludes that the comic challenges authoritative
conventions and promises emancipation from “all nets of nationality”.
Keywords:
the comic; laughter; subversive; counter-monumental; emancipation
I-Introduction:
In his early essay “Drama and Life”,
Joyce writes: “The great human comedy in which each has share, gives limitless
scope to the true artist, today as yesterday and as in years gone” (Writing
28). In his “Aesthetics”, judging arts by their capacity to “excite in us the
feeling of joy”, he deduces “that tragedy is the imperfect manner and comedy
the perfect manner, in art…” (Writing 103). In “Fenianism”, Joyce calls
Irish history “this sad comedy” (Writing 139) due to the intolerable
conditions prevailing Ireland ranging from the successive failed risings and
political disappointments and betrayals to a sterile clinging to “a narrow and
hysterical nationality” (Writing 60). In the above-mentioned
pronouncements, an emphasis on the comic as an inseparable aspect from the
Irish life and as an artistic tool to combat the narrow conventions of
nationality is unequivocal.
In another essay, Joyce links the comic
and the witty in the all-encompassing phrase “the silver laughter of wisdom” (Writing
60). Through the laughable, truth is seizable. The joyful mood or mode of
representation enlightens facets of realities, discloses new visions and
exposes faults and dogmas to the critical eye. The oxymoron “sad comedy” in its
turn draws attention to the contradictory nature of the comic itself. The comic
and the serious are never opposites, they complement each other in a witty way
that celebrates contradictions. Through exposing the “incongruity, inversion,
random turns and shifting terms” (21) that define the comic according to Cynthia
D. Wheatley-Lovoy, this article attempts at revealing the political role of the
comic in Ulysses.
II-The
Trope of Laughter as Counter-monumental:
Of all the episodes of Ulysses,
“Hades”’s use of the trope of laughter is the most explicit. Rita Sakr sees
that Mr. Power and Martin Cunningham laughter, when passing the Dublin Castle,
an imperial monument is a countermonumental tactics. She explains that one of
the main Joycean subversive gestures is laughter: “Since monumentalization
essentially perpetuates an illusion of invincibility and immortality, the
laughter that imaginatively shakes it by mocking it can momentarily break this
illusion” (47). Joyce is in fact hostile towards any practice that freezes the
now in statues or old and historical forms. Laughter is a celebration of the
passionate life and the immediacy of experience. “It is a sinful foolishness to
sing back for the good old times, to feed the hunger of us with the cold stones
they afford” (Writing 28), Joyce says.
Mr Power’s collapsing in laughter when
the carriage heading to Dignam’s funeral passed Gray’s statue is another
telling example. Sir John Gray is credited with providing Dublin and its
suburbs with a water supply; however, instead of remembering or praising the
great deeds of the sculptured figure, Bloom and Martin Cunningham are telling
the story of the man who saved Dodd’s son from drowning getting, only a florin
instead of being monumentalized. Joyce insists on the heroism of this everyday
man in his Martin Cunningham’s affirmation “Like a hero. A silver florin” (Ulysses
85). And Sakr asserts:
In
Ulysses, gossip about ordinary life supplants official history. An
anecdote about Dubliner’s everyday lives replaces the memorial of the official
hero, hence, the foregrounding of the banal and the humorous in the narrative
occurs at the expense of both the statue of the moderate nationalist M P, Sir
John Gray, and the imperial monument, Nelson’s Pillar, all of which provides a
critique of the politics of the construction of monuments by the dominant and
emergent powers that competed to define Dublin’s landscape in the nineteenth-
century. (47-8)
Since
the Irish live at a time and in a society in which the essentialist model of
nationalism is deeply ingrained and socially effective, the characters’
laughter at statues of historical heroes aims at the dislodgement of
hard-and-fast ethics of heroism and already-conceptualized forms of identity.
The very erection of some statues is an aestheticization of politics and a
transformation of an ever-changing history and of a controversial present into
chosen signs of a pre-defined collective identity. The strife for constructing
collective national symbols defines the rhetoric of restorative nostalgia that
preaches monological tropes of Irishness discounting the heterogeneity of the
contemporary moment. Accepting Henri Bergson’s definition of laughter as “a
sort of social gesture” (18), the laughter of Joyce’s characters negotiates the
cultural construction of heroism as well as questions the nationalist
foundational narrative thus contesting dominant models of representation and
therefore it is a form of political participation.
The ridiculing of monumental practices
continues as Bloom for example ponders on one occasion “Poor Dignam! His last
lie on the earth in his box. When you think of them all it does seem a waste of
wood” (Joyce, Ulysses 98). On another occasion, “Mr Bloom walked
unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family
vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands.
More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living” (Joyce, Ulysses
101). Soon afterwards he is critical of “rusty wreaths hung on knobs,
garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still the flowers are
more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expressing
nothing. Immortelles” (Joyce, Ulysses 102). Each of the above-mentioned
instances discloses a similar anxiety, of a desire, however frequently aborted,
to revolt against the tyrannies of old traditions, monuments and practices. The
mockery of Joyce at monumentalism in its widest sense aspires for an escape, a
line of flight from a dying society that nonetheless insists on serving the
dead.
III-Reacting
against the Vulgarity of Heroism:
That the very title of Joyce’s novel Ulysses
promises a reworking of the mythic material to present no Ulysses or Odysseus
in the text calls forth a subversively modern cultural fabric of the Irish
society and reclaims the quotidian as the immediate reality of the Irish
ineluctably ridiculing monumentalism and embracing the primacy of everyday
experience. Joyce’s “textual tactics [of counter-monumentalism] participate in
a form of cultural memory that exposes and subverts the process of forgetting
that regularly affects the numerous nonmemorialized heroes of everyday life”
(Sakr 48). While acknowledging that Ireland is an island of Saints and Sages in
his essay of that title, Joyce recognizes that “another national temperament
grew up” (Writing 114), necessitating different expectations of the
notion of “heroism” itself.
Many critics, like Asseel Addul-Latif Taha,
actually describe Bloom as an “anti-hero” because of “his alienation…caused by
the death in infancy of his son, Rudy, the suicide of his father and his
humiliation as a cuckloded husband. He also suffers from the feeling of being,
by virtue of his Jewishness, an outsider… He is frequently humiliated by the
Irish citizens since he is regarded as a rootless recruit to the race and
religion of Ireland, from which many traditionally national heroes sprang out”
(9). Episode six, “Hades”, of the book asserts in detail this anti-heroic
status of Bloom as it depicts “his relative
isolation within a social group. Bloom is positioned as a latecomer, an
outsider, and an anomaly in the cab with Dedalus, Cunningham, and Power; in the
chapel service; and in the cemetery in relation to Menton and other attendees
of Dignam’s funeral. …It is not clear how much Bloom recognizes his own
exclusion” (“Spark Note on Ulysses”).
In much the
same mode, David Hayman in his “Cyclops” depicts Bloom at a
certain stage in the book as a “puny hero and the pathetic clown” (246).
Joyce’s text asserts this clown framework designed by a stringently
narrow-minded society as is evidenced by the various occasions where Bloom is
derided. Chief among them is the newsboys and Lenehan’s imitation of his clumsy
and awkward walk when he leaves the Telegraph offices in “Aeolus”
episode:
Both
[J.J O’Molloy and Lenehan] smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering
newsboys in Mr Bloom’s wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking
kite, a tail of white bowknots.
— Look at the young
guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said, and you’ll kick. O, my rib
risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the walk. Small nines. Steal upon
larks.
He
began to mazurka in swift caricature cross the floor on sliding feet past the
fireplace to J.J O’Molly who placed the tissues in his receiving hands. (Ulysses
116)
The
passage is self-referentially comic using a cluster of words related to comedy:
“smiled”, “mocking”, “risible” and “caricature”. The caricaturing of Bloom is
achieved through words and the zigzag imagery, then the term “caricature”
itself is employed to emphasize the effect of the comic. This intentional
caricaturing of Bloom reveals the Irish refusal of the different, of the other
and of any possibility of plurality; an attitude that Joyce laments and
counteracts through his most daring gesture of shaping his hero in the image of
the clown.
While confirming that Bloom “becomes a
typical modern anti-hero”, J. Arthur Honeywell explains that this qualification
goes back to the title of the novel Ulysses that “suggests at the
beginning the perspective in which to evaluate Bloom; he is to be judged
against Ulysses, a traditional hero. Seen in this perspective, Bloom is at
first evaluated as a timid, inept, ignorant, vulgar, and overly docile
character, lacking all the virtues of a traditional hero like Ulysses” (34). He
adds that because of new kinds of modern plots, there is “a reversal of perspective
and evaluation” (34) that moves from appearance to reality explaining that
modern protagonists work on two aspects: the public and the private side. “In
terms of the publicly accepted and traditional conventions, Bloom is a nobody;
in terms of his private aspirations and convictions, he is something of a
modern hero” (Honeywell 35). Seen from this perspective, the concept of
anti-heroism challenges any standardized, canonized and conventional definition
of heroism. It is a reaction against the vulgarity of heroics. Declan Kiberd in
“The Vulgarity of Heroics” quotes Joyce’s words in a letter to his brother
Stanislaus in 1905:
Do
you not think the search for heroics damn vulgar?... I am sure however that the
whole structure of heroism is and always was a damned lie that there cannot be
any substitute for the individual passion as the motive power of everything”
and concludes that: “The very humility of Bloom becomes a reproach to the myth
of ancient heroism and… man’s littleness is seen to be the inevitable
precondition of his greatness”. (157)
Joyce’s scathing attack on immutable models of
heroism brings about Kiberd’s conclusion in “The Vulgarity of Heroics”
that Joyce’s “hero was a nobody who had no desire to be a somebody” (159).
IV-Revolting
against the Tenets of Essentialist Identity:
Joyce continues his derision of nativist
constancies of heroism and nationality in a dialogue in a pub between his
protagonist Bloom and a character called the Citizen. The conversation looks
much more like a farce that Joyce sets to mock the contradictions, paradoxes,
trivialities and randomness of the Irish nativist project. The Citizen is
loosely modelled on Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association
in 1884 and thus the Citizen unfolds the nativist identity with its reliance on
purity of race, Catholicism, the Irish tongue, absolute heroism and the
cherishing of folklore as well as the revival of ancient traditions. Before the
conversation takes place, Joyce engages in a lengthy description of the
citizen-hero in the style of a heroic legend:
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round
tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed
redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded
deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero(Ulysses
266-7).
Hayman
remarks that “the arranger introduces humour even when the action is not
intrinsically funny” (qtd. in Wicht 143). The citizen also exalts the memory of
Ireland’s greatness: “And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole
world! ...and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite
convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world!” (Ulysses
294-5). Such a chauvinistic attitude that takes pride in the past is ridiculous
because it serves Ireland nothing. Joyce mocks the clinging to a golden, yet
vanished, history: “If it were valid to appeal to the past in this fashion, the
fellahins of Cairo would have every right in the world proudly to refuse to act
as porters for English tourists (Writing 125)”. And affirms that “[j]ust
as ancient Egypt is dead, so is ancient Ireland. Its dirge has been sung and
the seal set upon its gravestone (Writing 125).”
The negotiation of the meaning of a
nation and nationality in the Bloom/ Citizen conversation allows Joyce to
unleash other than conventional ethics of identity that would move beyond
narrow nationalism to liberation:
-A nation? Says Bloom. A nation is the
same people living in the same place.
-By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s
so I’m a nation for I am living in the same
place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had a laugh at Bloom …
-What
is your nation if I may ask, says the Citizen.
-Ireland,
says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland. (Ulysses 299)
The
laughter of “everyone” at Bloom pictures the proponents of an essentialist
national identity as duplicators of the very colonial ideology they seek to
repudiate, an eliminatory ideology par excellence. A nation according to the
group in the pub is based on the conformity of its individuals. Bloom, a Jew,
becomes irresistibly ridiculous when he thinks of himself as an Irish.
The
parameters of an anti- colonial nationality are, for Joyce, no longer a
feasible medium to define Irishness, namely Catholicism: notions of
“absurdity”, hypocrisy and profanity are associated to religion by Joyce. And
apart from Stephen’s consistent attacks on religion, throughout the book, Joyce
ironically foretells in his essay “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” written
in 1907:
Perhaps
in time there will be a gradual reawakening of the Irish consciousness and,
perhaps, four or five centuries after the Diet of Worms, we shall witness a
monk in Ireland throw off his cowl, run off with a nun, and proclaim aloud the
end of the coherent absurdity that is Catholicism, and the beginning of the
incoherent absurdity that is Protestantism. (Writing 121)
Unless the Irish renounce the equation of Irishness with
religion, there will be no real awakening of the Irish consciousness. Bloom
Joyce’s protagonist in Ulysses thinks of the church as a “[n]ice
discreet place to be next some girl” (Joyce, Ulysses 71), transforming
the church from a sacred place to a space for the voyeuristic as well as
amorous experiences. Exposing the myths of the church to the scrutiny of
analytic reason, Bloom mocks the Latin of the Church: “Makes them feel more
important to be prayed over in Latin” (Joyce, Ulysses 93) and wonders
why the priest uses wine and not any other drink: “Wine. Makes it more
aristocratic than for example if he drank what they are used to Guinness’s
porter or some temperance beverage Wheatley’s Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell
and Cochrane’s ginger ale (aromatic) (Joyce, Ulysses 72).”
These
comic attacks at Catholicism paves the way to highlight the absurdity of
linking religion and nationality together. Bloom vexes the Citizen: “… Your God
was a jew. Christ was a jew like me (Joyce, Ulysses 309)”. Christ was
naturally a Jew, therefore basing Irish nationalism on such a fluid category as
religion seems ridiculous. The Citizen, confronted with such a reality, has no
arguments but violence to defend his fanatic nationalism: “By Jesus, says he,
I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I’ll crucify
him so I will. Give us that biscuit box here (Joyce, Ulysses 309).” He
would rather live in mythology, in his own fantasies of Irishness than open
himself to argumentation. Bloom pushes the irony a bit further by linking Christ
not only to the Jew category but also to himself “Christ was a jew like me”
(Joyce, Ulysses 309) which exacerbates the Citizen even further.
With
his usual wit for irony, Joyce depicts the throwing of the biscuit box by the
Citizen at Bloom in an extended hyperbolic exaggeration that starts as follows:
“The
catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of
Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli's
scale, and there is no record extant of a similarseismic disturbance in our
island since the earthquake of 1534” (Ulysses 311) and ends with the
even more ridiculous inquiry of the Citizen: “Did I kill him, …, or what?” (Ulysses
312). David Hyman in his article “Cyclops” stresses the comedian stance of
Joyce in this particular scene: “In terms of his role, the action is a swelling
and a false release: the unsatisfactory ejaculation of a tired old man. In
relation to this development, the ex-shotputting citizen is a cosmi-comic
figure” (245).While the group in the pub laugh at Bloom and try not to miss any
opportunity to make of him the object of their ridicule, Joyce contrives the
scene particularly to evoke the readers’ laughter at the Citizen and what he
stands for. “Our laughter is always
the laughter of a group” (12), says Bergson. The group of fanatics laugh at
Bloom the outsider, the group of the revolutionary nationalists’ sides with
Joyce and laugh at the narrow-minded Citizen and his proponents. Therefore, as
Bergson theorizes: “However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a
kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or
imaginary” (12).
The exaggeration in describing the
nativist hero that runs over two pages as well as in depicting the effect of the
throwing of the biscuit tin on Bloom touches upon the comic “[f]or exaggeration
to be comic”, Bergson explains, “it must not appear as an aim but rather as a
means that the artist is using in order to make manifest to our eyes the
distortions which he sees in embryo” (21).
V-Revealing
the Atrocities of Patriarchy:
Joyce also creates a phantasmagorical
space in “Circe” episode which enables Bloom’s comic role-reversal shifting his
gender identity from a man to a woman. In fact, “[t]he whole of history had
been a story of mistaken identity in which the participants could never be
themselves” (Kiberd, Ulysses and Us 38) because “[h]istory becomes weary
with repetition, as the old plot overwhelms the new one. But when a true
revolution began, the people would not mistake themselves for historical
actors” (Kiberd, Ulysses and Us 39). This actually applies to gender
roles as they are historically determined. Bloom again in his revolutionary
fantasy turns Bella, the brothel Keeper into Bello; thus representing women's
marginality and their occupation of the place of the “other” and “acting out
the feminine vulnerability of his epicene nature [that] gives voice to
iterations of female helplessness, subservience, and sexual humiliation” (Henke
61).
In the drama of “Circe”, Joyce insists that it is
“gender role” rather than “biological sex” that interferes in cultural
representation of identities. Bello in his patriarchal role orders: “Feel my
entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your despot's glorious
heels, so glistening in their proud erectness” (Joyce, Ulysses 464) and
Bloom in his female identity “promise[s] never to disobey” (Joyce, Ulysses
464). While Bloom “puts out her timid head”, “Bello grabs her hair violently
and drags her forward”, “twists her arm” (Joyce, Ulysses 465) then
“slaps her face” (Joyce, Ulysses 466). Bello also lists the cultural
roles of a woman taken to be natural: “you will make the beds, get my tub
ready, empty the pisspots in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh’s the
cook’s, a sandy one. Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up
like champagne” (Joyce, Ulysses 470).
A woman is also treated as a sex-object that must
be, in Bello's words, “wigged, singed, perfume sprayed, rice powdered, with
smooth shaven armpits” (Joyce, Ulysses 467). They are also feeble-minded
creatures who need man's guidance. Bello addresses Bloom, the woman: “I only
want to correct you for your own good” (Joyce, Ulysses 465) and on
another occasion “I'll lecture you on your misdeeds” (Joyce, Ulysses 470).
The whole scene is comically mad, confusing and full of incongruities, yet “the comic spirit has a logic of its own,
even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in its madness. It dreams,
I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at once accepted
and understood by the whole of a social group” (Bergson 11). In the
Ireland of 1904, a woman’s “epitaph is written”, they “are down and out” and
they must not “forget it” (Joyce, Ulysses 473).
Enrico Terrinoni in his article “Comedy, or What
Went Unsaid in Ulysses” remarks that “in the history of the genre,
comedy has often been characterized by its topicality” (262) which means that
comedy mirrors the contemporary society revealing in a witty way its pretenses
and faults. Comedy actually provides a caricature of the present society in
order to laugh at it with greater objectivity. The writer of the comedy has the
ability to distance one’s society from its subjects, to transform the
participants of the comedy to its audience, to hold on the scene for a moment
and reflect upon it. Of course, all for the sake of critique and revolution.
Henri Bergson, in fact, affirms “the corrective function” of laughter.
VI-Conclusion:
“[F]rom Aristophanes down to Wilde”, comedy”,
Terrinoni says, “has also had the responsibility to expose smugness and
pomposity, and therefore to function as a device that may help us cope with
society’s many self-deceits” (263). In this, Joyce proves completely successful
deflating the mythic values and cherished notions of a nativist identity such
as the superiority of Catholicism, the purity of the Irish race, the notion of
legendary heroism, the practice of monumentalism and the worthiness of
patriarchy. Laughter, comic exaggerations and role reversals expose the
dogmatism of the nativist nationalist discourse and consequently aims at
redefining the contours of an Irish identity celebrating hybridity, gender
inconsistency, passionate and individual heroism as well as freedom from all
restrictive orthodoxies. If the Irish society is overburdened with dogmas and
prejudices, Joyce’s comic techniques interfere to create a cranny of light in a
system which might otherwise have seemed hopelessly impenetrable.
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