Reading Joyce’s Ulysses

301 Pages·1987·29.02 MB·English

by  Daniel R. Schwarz (auth.)

READING JOYCE'S ULYSSES
Also by Daniel R. Schwarz and published by Macmillan
DISRAELI'S FICTION
CONRAD: 'ALMAY ER'S FOLLY' TO 'UNDER WESTERN EYES'
CONRAD: THE LATER FICTION
THE HUMANISTIC HERITAGE: CRITICAL THEORIES
OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL FROM JAMES TO HILLIS
MILLER
THE CASE FOR A HUMANISTIC POETICS
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL, 1890-1930
Reading Joyce's
Ulysses
Daniel R. Schwarz
Professor of English
Cornell University
First published in Great Britain 1987 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-333-55613-9 ISBN 978-1-349-21414-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21414-3
First published in the United States of America 1987 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-66458-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-312-00086-8 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schwarz, Daniel R.
Reading Joyce's Ulysses
Bibliography : p.
Includes index.
I. Joyce, James 1882-1941. Ulysses. I. Title.
PR6019.09U692 1987 823'.912 86--6680
ISBN 978-0-312-66458-9 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-312-00086-8 (paper)
© Daniel R. Schwarz 1987
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
II 10 9 8 7 6
05 04 03 02 0 I 00 99 98
For Ian Gregor and for my students with whom I have
made the odyssean journey through Ulysses
Contents
Acknowledgements Vlll
Introduction: "0, Rocks .... Tell Us in Plain Words" 1
Joyce as "Lord and Giver" of Language: Form and
Metaphor in Ulysses 7
2 Joyce's Concept of a Hero 37
3 The Odyssey of Reading Ulysses 58
4 The Movement from Lyrical to Epical and Dramatic
Form: the Opening of Ulysses 71
5 Joyce's Irish Jew: Bloom 103
6 The Concept of Artistic Paternity in "Scylla and
Charybdis" 138
7 The Adventure of Reading: the Styles of the Odyssey
and the Odyssey of Styles 153
8 "Circe" as the Climax of Joyce's Humanistic Vision 207
9 Metaphoricity in "Eumaeus" and "Ithaca" 231
10 "Penelope": Molly as Metaphor 258
Appendix 277
Selected Bibliography 281
Index 286
Vll
Acknowl ed gem en ts
Since this book results from my experience not only as a reader,
but as a teacher of Ulysses, my greatest debt is to my students at
Cornell where I have been teaching Ulysses regularly for the past
eighteen years.
My Cornell colleagues, especially Phillip Marcus, have been
generous and helpful in dialogues about Ulysses, but I want also
to acknowledge the ubiquitous influence on my work of M. H.
Abrams, and the friendship and collegiality of Tom Hill and
Michael Colacurcio.
As my student and my graduate assistant in two summer
session courses on Ulysses, Beth Newman has provided stimulat
ing and challenging conversation on Ulysses. I have also learned
from the work of my graduate student William Thickstun. For
more than twenty years, since I was his student at Edinburgh in
1961-2, I have had the benefit of Ian Gregor's advice and
friendship. I am grateful to the participants in my 1985 National
Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for high
school teachers for helping clarify some points in my argument. I
appreciate the splendid and loyal secretarial support of Phillis
Molock, the proofreading assistance of Diane McPherson and
Mary Ann Naples, and the encouragement of my wife and sons.
I would like to thank Random House and The Bodley Head
for permission to quote from James Joyce's Ulysses, and for the
Society of Authors for permission to reprintJoyce's schema as it
appeared in C. H. Peake's james joyce: the Citizen and Artist
(Stanford University Press, 1977).
Cornell Universitv DANIEL R. SCHWARZ
Ithaca, New York
Vlll
Introduction: ''0,
Rocks. . . . Tell Us in Plain
Words"
This study is for readers of Ulysses. It attempts to comment on
the major issues confronting a reader as he tries to make sense of
the novel. In the title of my Introduction, I playfully use Molly's
response to Bloom's explanation of metempsychosis ("0, rocks!
... Tell us in plain words") to indicate that Ulysses is a readable
novel- rather than an elaborate puzzle or a Rosetta Stone or a
hieroglyph. For Ulysses, while presenting unique challenges,
depends upon readers who have a good deal of reading experi
ence in more traditional narratives.
Ulysses is first and foremost a novel about three individuals
Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom - who live
in turn-of-the-century Dublin. But it should also be read as a
social, political, and historical novel. Ulysses is Joyce's inquiry
into the question of what values are viable in the twentieth
century urban world where, according to joyce's view, God does
not exist and traditional notions of heroism are obsolete. Among
other things, Ulysses is an effort to redefine the concept of the
hero. Joyce uses the marginal Jew Bloom to redefine heroism in
secular humanistic terms. As he examines recent Irish history
and culture, Joyce proposes Bloom as an alternative to the
xenophobia and fantasies of the Celtic Renaissance as well as a
successor to Parnell.
There is a danger that the study of Ulysses has become like
ground that has been farmed for so long that it now only
supports exotic crops like persimmons. While we have a vast
array of critical apparatus, we have neglected the questions of
how and what the novel means. In terms of the vast critical
landscape of Ulysses, I shall attempt to provide a bridge between
those who stress Ulysses as a novel that reveals the psyche and
1
2 Reading joyce's "Ulysses"
motives of characters and those who stress Ulysses as an elabor
ate rhetorical experiment. While taking account of essential
arguments of prior critics and acknowledging their contribution
in the appropriate places, I shall try to focus on the novel rather
than on the tradition of commentary produced by the thriving
cottage industry ofJ oyce scholarship. While discussing Ulysses in
terms of the relationships among the three basic units of formal
criticism - author, text, and audience, I shall use contextual
information when necessary.
Joyce transforms the nominalistic events of one day in the lives
of his three characters- events based often on details ofhis own
life- into significant events. We shall explore how Joyce creates
the metaphorical and allusive relationships on which meaning
depends, and we shall examine how Joyce gives significance to
events in the lives of the major figures on one single day, 16June
1904. We shall not only examine how Joyce makes use of his
major sources- The Odyssey, the Old and New Testaments, and
Shakespeare, but how he uses in important ways The Iliad, as
well as the works of Wilde, Yeats, Dante, Milton, Tennyson,
Swift, and Blake.
Ulysses teaches us how to read itself. Put another way, we
should think of our experience of reading it as the reader's
odyssey. We shall stress what the novel does to us as we read it
and how the ventriloquy of its various styles establishes an
unusually complex relationship between text and reader. Unlike
some recent critics who believe that Joyce's interest in style
deflects the reader from his characters, I believe that the focus in
every chapter returns to the subjects of Stephen, Bloom, Molly,
and the Dublin world they inhabit. To be sure, in the chapters
from "Sirens" through "Oxen of the Sun", we are aware of a
tension in Joyce's imagination between interest in style and
interest in character, but in the climax of every chapter his focus
returns to his major figures and their significance. As odyssean
readers turning the pages of the novel and progressing through
the one crystallizing day in the lives of the major figures, we
must overcome the difficulties of style and the opacity of content
-just as the modern Ulysses must resist temptations which
threaten to deflect him from his journey horne.
In my view the principle interest of Joyce's stylistic exper
imentations should be how they shape a reading of the novel. For
the odyssean reader is invited to see that Bloom and Stephen