i. The Erigenating Hierarchitectitiptitoploftical Framework of Ulysses : Joyce's Refraction of The Book of Invasions

If Joyce is to be taken seriously as an Irishman, the possibility that his primal symbol systems may be Irish must be considered. In particular, we must examine native Irish literature for correlates to his work when realism breaks down, as it does in the case of the configuration of the main characters in Ulysses. Taken one by one, Joyce's main characters in Ulysses are plausibly explained in terms of the shared symbolism of European literary tradition. As a system, however, Joyce's characters have no parallel in European literature; taken together, the three main characters point to a more unified source than European literature can provide. The interface of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly is Irish because Joyce's constellation of characters in Ulysses —a Greek, an ersatz Jew, and a lady from Spain—is based on the mythic structures of Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), generally known in English as The Book of Invasions.

[4] A discussion of the actual background of Irish Jews is found in Hyman.

The Book of Invasions contains the pseudohistory of Ireland: the traditional history of Ireland before A.D. 432, the usual date for the coming of Patrick and the beginning of written history in Ireland. Its prototype was probably composed in the seventh century to fill in the gap for Ireland in such standard late Roman universal histories as those by Origen and Eusebius. Though the story apparently was originally restricted to the account of the postdiluvian history of the Milesians, supposed ancestors of the Goidelic stock in Ireland, it was opened up at an early period to include bits of cosmogony and old myth. Eventually it came to contain the "history" of Ireland since the Creation, giving accounts of several conquests of Ireland before and after the Flood and culminating in the invasion of the sons of Mil.^[5]

The Book of Invasions and its associated kinglist became the matrix for the rest of Irish history and literature; and as the organizing referent for Irish tradition, it stands in initial position in the great twelfth-century manuscript the Book of Leinster, a compendium of Irish narratives and histories, genealogies, and learned poetry. By the seventeenth century the contents of The Book of Invasions were presupposed or distilled in most native Irish historical materials from the Annals of the Four Masters to Geoffrey Keating's History of Ireland . In 1861 Eugene O'Curry felt obliged to spend little time explaining The Book of Invasions to his English-speaking Irish audience; he notes in his Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History , "The Milesian history is pretty generally known, and has been much canvassed by the writers of the last 150 years" (446). In the nineteenth century the story of the Milesians was promoted by scholars and popularizers alike, from precursors of the Anglo-Irish literary revival like Standish O'Grady to writers of school history books. Elements of The Book of Invasions are still part of popular history among the Irish and Irish-Americans as well.

The relevant features of The Book of Invasions for the symbolism and the architectonics of Ulysses can be summarized as follows.

There are six invasions of Ireland. The first two groups of invaders are wiped out and leave essentially no survivors. The third, fourth, and fifth—those of

[5] The Book of Invasions survives in four recensions, which have been edited in two series: R. A. S. Macalister and John MacNeill, eds., Leabhar Gabhála, The Book of Conquests of Ireland, The Recension of Micheál Ó Cléirigh ; and R. A. S. Macalister, ed., Lebor Gabála Érenn, The Book of the Taking of Ireland, 5 vols.

Nemed, the Fir Bolg, and the Tuatha De Danann, respectively—come from Scythian Greek stock. The Nemedian invasion is eventually abandoned because of opposition and difficulties from the Fomorians, a chaotic and oppressive race of marauders. The Nemedian invasion is succeeded by that of the Fir Bolg, who are in turn overcome by the Tuatha De Danann. Though these three groups are related genealogically, their characters and experiences differ widely. The Fir Bolg are subjugated and become laborers in Greece, while the Tuatha De Danann become skilled in lore, crafts, and hidden knowledge. The Tuatha De Danann become allies of the Athenians before departing for Ireland.

Meanwhile the Goidels—descendants of Noah, of course, and genealogically related to their predecessors in Ireland—are involved in building the Tower of Babel. After that architectural disaster, they establish a language school, becoming language teachers with a specialty in Hebrew and Irish (which is constructed from all the languages that come into existence after Babel). They are invited to Egypt at the time of the pharaohs because of their erudition. Their leader, Nel, is given Scota, the daughter of the pharaoh, as wife. The Goidels become sympathizers of Moses and aid the Israelites in their flight from Egypt. Moses is grateful for their help and offers the Goidels a place in the Promised Land should they care to accompany the Hebrews. However, the Goidels decline Moses's offer. After some years the Goidels are expelled from Egypt in revenge for aiding the Israelites. They undertake various travels (including a second sojourn in Egypt, during which their leader Mil marries the pharaoh's daughter). Eventually they go to Spain, where they make conquests, settle down, and take wives. While in Spain the Goidels see Ireland from a high tower and decide to go there. After various struggles with their predecessors in Ireland (the Tuatha De Danann), the Goidels (or Milesians) defeat the Tuatha De and arrange a settlement with them—the Milesians get the upper half of Ireland, and the Tuatha De get the half below ground.^[6]

The Book of Invasions is in itself a fascinating subject. It depends on the medieval circular map of the world (which explains the somewhat bizarre geographical course of the Milesians and the contiguity of Spain and Ireland), the medieval tradition of the seven wonders of the world (which included the Roman pharos at Corunna from which the Milesians sight Ireland), and much more. It also cheerfully assumes that Ireland is the

[6] Because the story survives in four recensions and countless retellings, details vary from text to text. The summary here is a schematic based on the outline common to most versions.

second Promised Land and that the Irish language is second only to Hebrew in its purity and sacredness.^[7]

There is ample evidence that James Joyce knew the main lines of The Book of Invasions. In the text of Ulysses there are direct references to the Milesians, including a reference to Milesius (12.1310), an allusion to the Milesian facility in Hebrew and a synopsis of the passages in The Book of Invasions related to the language school of Fenius Farsaigh (17.748ff.), and a naming of the Milesians as the Clan Milly (14.371), as well as a reference to Balor (12.197–98). In addition to the internal evidence in Ulysses, there are references to the framework of The Book of Invasions in Joyce's other writings. The Book of Invasions figures explicitly in A Portrait of the Artist, for example, when Stephen sees Davin as a "rude Firbolg" and Thomas Moore, the national poet, is described as "a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian" (180); and Finnegans Wake is larded with allusions to the story (e.g., 15.5ff., 86.15, 130.4, 144.12ff., 219.11, 309.11, 381.03ff., 601.36).^[8]

The Book of Invasions stands as the epitome of an early Irish narrative whose sources were overdetermined for Joyce.^[9] Even had Joyce read nothing about The Book of Invasions, he would have been familiar with the main outlines of the story from oral sources; discourse about Milesians and Tuatha De Danann, Fir Bolgs and Fomorians, was part of daily life.^[10] The popular periodicals of Joyce's youth are full of allusions to The Book of Invasions and summaries of its pseudohistorical scheme. In addition to popular and oral sources, Joyce had several written sources for his material related to The Book of Invasions. In 1920 Joyce's library included William Francis Collier's History of Ireland for Schools (Ellmann, Consciousness of Joyce 105; Gillespie #111), a school history that opens with a summary of The Book of Invasions ; it is likely that Joyce chose to own Collier's school book as he was writing Ulysses precisely because he had

[7] For a discussion of some of these elements, see Kelleher, "Humor in the Ulster Saga" 35–38.

[8] References are found elsewhere in Joyce's critical writing as well; see, for example, CW 166.

[9] John Kelleher writes, "It would be as pointless to try to determine where Joyce got his knowledge of Lebor Gabála , or how much of it he knew or in what detail, as it would be to attempt to ascertain how an American writer learned about the first Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, and George Washington's cherry tree" (quoted in French 281).

[10] Oliver Gogarty had accused Joyce himself of having Fir Bolg melancholy and needing to be roused to Attic joy (JJ 2 118).

used this book early in life during his schooldays and wished to have it as a reference while he worked.^[11] Joyce had also read at least one scholarly source on the topic, Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville's Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology, R. I. Best's translation of which had been serialized in 1901–2 in the United Irishman, which Joyce read regularly (see below ch. 7); d'Arbois de Jubainville's study includes a close and detailed examination of the materials in The Book of Invasions. Still another likely textual source is P. W. Joyce's Concise History of Ireland, which Gilbert cites (65), presumably at James Joyce's behest; this volume, initially published in 1893, was in its twenty-fourth edition in 1920 and contains material similar to the author's Illustrated History of Ireland, which James Joyce owned in 1939, again presumably because he had known versions of P. W. Joyce's history since his youth.^[12]

The Book of Invasions is used only in a partial way in Ulysses, in the manner that Joyce uses mythic structures in general. In his discussion of early Irish mythological elements in "The Dead," John Kelleher cautions,

Everyone of course knows that Joyce was fond of weaving into his work parallels with myth, saga, and epic. It is, however, a mistake to assume, when such a parallel is identified, that it must be complete. It rarely is. Even Ulysses does not reflect the entirety of the Odyssey. In Finnegans Wake wonders can be done with a mere hint of resemblance. Usually Joyce is content with a few salient indications as, for example, in the well-known sketch-parody of Dante's Divine Comedy in the story "Grace." The same, I think, holds for "The Dead" and "The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel." The shadowy similarity between Gabriel Conroy and Conaire Máar is enough for Joyce's purposes which by their very nature must be suggestive rather than explicit. ("Irish History" 421)

The parallels between Joyce's text and his mythic prototype are general and sketchy rather than complete and detailed in part because of his mythic method itself: though most retellers of mythic stories use the surface content of myth, manipulating the mythic material so as to fore-

[11] I am indebted to John Kelleher for this suggestion. See below, ch. 4, for a specific element Joyce took from Collier.

[12] For Joyce's ownership of a 1921 edition of P. W. Joyce's Illustrated History , see Connolly 21 #163. Kelleher suggests that Joyce probably read P. W. Joyce's Child's History of Ireland during the years between Clongowes and Belvedere (quoted in French 281).

ground thematic material, Joyce uses myth as an architectural substructure to the realistic surface of the story. In the terms developed by Mieke Bal in her Narratology, the myth in Joyce's narratives does not enter the story at all; it enters on the level of the fabula, whereby the sequence of the mythic events can be equated to the sequence of narrative events in Ulysses, or whereby the relation of actors in Joyce's narrative can be equated with a configural grouping in a myth. In this process, the myth itself is condensed and reduced before entering Joyce's creative process; the fabula of the myth intersects with the fabula of Joyce's narrative. Ipso facto, therefore, Joyce's use of myth appears to be minimalist, as Kelleher has observed.^[13] By using a myth as a subtext—by using the fabula of a myth rather than a mythic story—Joyce develops a mythic method with great flexibility. In virtue of his method he is, for example, able to conflate different mythic narratives and different mythic systems; he can also suggest a myth and undermine it simultaneously.^[14] This technique characterizes Joyce's use of The Book of Invasions in Ulysses as it does his use of other myths; he refers to main elements in the early Irish story rather than give point-by-point correspondences. Though the references to The Book of Invasions are incomplete, condensed, and schematized, they are not insignificant: in the Irish story we find the unified source for the constellation of main characters in Ulysses, the constellation of Greek, Jew, and Mediterranean woman. The Book of Invasions provides the scaffold for the relations of the central characters in Joyce's book and supplies typologies for Joyce to work with in developing his cast.

Leopold Bloom can be seen as a counterpart to the Goidels, the Irish invaders who could have been Jews because they are invited by Moses to share in the Promised Land: "'Come with us, with thy whole people,' said Moses, 'if you will, and remain permanently with us, and when we reach the land that God hath promised us, you will get a share in it'" (Macalister and MacNeill 198–99). The Goidels are confederates of Moses but

[13] Bal distinguishes between three levels of a narrative: the "deep structure" (10), or the fabula, in which a series of logically and chronologically related events are caused or experienced by actors (5); the story, which is a certain manner of presenting the fabula (5); and the text, in which a narrative agent tells a story (117).

[14] The technique is unlike that of many other twentieth-century mythic retellings in which the myth appears on the surface, as it does, for example, in Anouilh's Antigone or Giraudoux's La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu.

not Hebrew, sympathetic to Moses but not among the chosen people. The Goidels share Hebrew history but choose deliberately to go in different directions. In the same way Bloom has Jewish sympathies and through his father the potential of being a Jew, but his actual experience and identity are not Jewish. Because under religious law Jewish descent comes through the mother's line and Bloom's mother and maternal grandmother both have Irish names, Bloom appears not to be a Jew. Bloom is not circumcised, he has been twice baptized as a Christian by official clergy, and in the cabman's shelter Bloom tells Stephen explicitly that "in reality" he's not a Jew (16.1085).^[15] Bloom's mixed identity—his Jewish sympathies and ancestry combined with his Irish actuality—mirrors the early history of the Goidels in The Book of Invasions more than it does the actual experience of any Irish Jew at the turn of the century. It is possible, moreover, that Bloom's preoccupation with Egyptian and Turkish things (e.g., 4.192ff., 15.297ff.) is intended to reflect the Goidelic sojourns in Egypt in The Book of Invasions; Bloom's preoccupation with Egypt also brings to mind the pharaoh's daughter who becomes one of Mil's wives.

In the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses we can see a representative of the Irish invaders with a Greek heritage, particularly the Tuatha De Danann. As noted in the summary, in The Book of Invasions the Tuatha De Danann are known for their learning and skill, including their magical skills. The Tuatha De Danann "learned druidry and many various arts in [the northern islands of Greece] . . . till they were knowing, learned and very clever . . . They considered their men of learning to be gods" (Macalister and MacNeill 142–43). Like the Tuatha De, Stephen Dedalus is schooled in ancient knowledge; like them he has the richness of Western culture and its secret mysteries at his disposal; like them he can be arrogant and aloof as a divinity. The attitude of the Tuatha De Danann toward artists, considering "their men of learning [or artists ] to be gods," has an amusing parallel in Stephen's own aesthetic theory; following Flaubert, Stephen believes that in drama "the artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails" (PA 215). The identification of Stephen and the Tuatha De Danann is mediated as well by an

[15] For a full discussion of the question of Bloom's religion and ethnic affiliations, see Steinberg 27–49.

Athenian alliance of the Tuatha De Danann since in some versions of the classical myth Daedalus is an Athenian. The chief hero of the Tuatha De Danann is Lug, the samildánach, the 'many-skilled'; and Stephen, too, is many skilled. Teacher, bard, singer, potential journalist—Stephen has many arts and on Bloomsday is urged to take up the professions of singer and newspaperman even as he is acknowledged as an emerging literary man.

Molly appears to represent the recurrent Spanish connections in Irish pseudohistory. In her is embodied Mediterranean sensuality—but a sensuality that is Ireland's legitimate heritage in the framework from The Book of Invasions. Of the many characters in The Book of Invasions, Molly calls to mind Tailltiu in particular, the daughter of Magmor, king of Spain, who is wife to Eochaid son of Erc, king of the Fir Bolg. When Eochaid son of Erc is defeated, Tailltiu marries Eochaid the Rough, son of Dul of the Tuatha De Danann. Later Tailltiu becomes foster mother of Lug, the young hero of the Tuatha De Danann, and her memory comes to be celebrated with games at the site of her grave.^[16] Tailltiu is also credited with clearing one of Ireland's plains: "Tailltiu [came] after the fighting of [the first] battle of Mag Tuired to Coill Chuan [Cuan's Wood]; and the wood [was] cleared at her command, so that it was a clovery plain before the end of a year, and she inhabited it afterwards" (Macalister and MacNeill 150–51).^[17]

Tailltiu—a character mentioned by Joyce in Finnegans Wake (83.23) and most probably familiar from his youth—has a dwelling place that brings to mind Molly's love of flowers and nature, a love of lushness appropriate to both women because of their Mediterranean origins. Note, too, that both Bloom and Molly toy with the idea that Stephen might move into their home—become, as it were, their "foster son." Whatever her erotic fantasies about the situation, we might say that Molly, like Tailltiu, almost becomes "foster mother" of a multitalented youth. Taill-

[16] Tailltiu is the modern Telltown; under the Gaelic Athletic Association the old Telltown games had been revived, and they continue to be observed to the present. The irony of the nationalists' choice to celebrate the memory of a woman who goes from husband to husband cannot have escaped Joyce. Note also that Tailltiu's "sensuality" here is part of her function as a Sovereignty figure (cf. chapter 4 below).

[17] I have silently normalized the spelling of proper nouns in this quotation.

tiu and the Spanish wives obtained by some of the Goidels after their conquest of Spain might have suggested to Joyce that Mediterranean passion enters Irish tradition through the distaff side—a possible explanation for all the women with vigorous sexual appetites who people medieval Irish literature. In terms of the scaffolding of Ulysses, we should also observe that Molly enjoys dalliance on hilltops and heights and places from which she has a large vista. Her final thoughts of the day are memories in which her embraces with Mulvey on the rock of Gibraltar fuse with memories of her lovemaking with Poldy on the hill of Howth. This scene should remind us of the Spanish tower from which the Goidels spot Ireland in The Book of Invasions.

The identification of the central characters in Ulysses as types from The Book of Invasions explains some of the puzzles about Bloom, Stephen, and Molly noted in the critical literature. Phillip Herring ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 507, 521 n. 31), for example, has commented that Molly and Leopold have a curiously parallel heredity and that by religious law she is more Jewish than he. It is obviously the subtext of The Book of Invasions that explains the unlikely case of having both Bloom and Molly be of Jewish ancestry: because Molly is also identified with the Milesians in Joyce's use of the pseudohistorical scheme, her having potential Jewish ancestry is consistent with the Irish mythic underpinnings, even if it is a rather notable statistical anomaly in Joyce's realism. In a similar way, Bloom's famous "blooper," "All that long business about that [sic ] brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia " (7.208–9), takes on a new meaning as an ironic Milesian commentary on Irish pseudohistory rather than as a simple error of a man who is ignorant of Jewish ritual: the Milesians have left the bondage of pharaoh only to end in the house of British imperialism.

In Surface and Symbol Robert Adams has suggested that a departure from or absence of surface realism points to a symbolic purpose in the text; Adams concludes that "Bloom's Jewish character was a symbol into which Joyce tried to project, not only his social reflections about modern man, but some rather intimate and complex psychic responses of his own" (106). However, the absence of surface realism in Bloom's Jewishness not only indicates Joyce's symbolic intent but also reifies Bloom's identity as an ersatz Jew, like that of the Milesians as a whole; he thus signals the Irish mythic system behind the Joycean text. In the same way

the lack of verisimilitude in Molly's portrait is usefully reconsidered in light of the Irish architectonics of Ulysses.^[18]

It has also been observed that when Stephen Dedalus leaves Bloom's garden in episode 17, he walks out of the Joycean world. He vanishes. The point should not escape the reader: it is a radical relocation of Joyce's interests and priorities to replace Stephen Dedalus with Leopold and Molly Bloom, to leave the reader with those two protagonists in possession of the fictive world, inhabitants of the reader's Dublin. This shift, which has in its nature something of a revolution, is an enactment of the progression of The Book of Invasions, a text presenting wave after wave of invasion, wave after wave of possession and dispossession of the land of Ireland. In The Book of Invasions in particular there is a confrontation of the Tuatha De Danann and the Milesians; the result of that confrontation is that the Milesians take possession of Ireland, driving their predecessors underground. The Tuatha De walk out of the world of men and retreat to the hollow hills, an exit as sudden and total as that of Stephen from Ulysses. The feature of replacement here is, particularly in light of its mythic counterpart, part of the meaning in Ulysses .

Recognition of the framework from The Book of Invasions illuminates more than the relations of the three major characters; it is also a factor in Joyce's portrait of the Citizen in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses . Joyce's treatment of this character has been cited to show his disdain for the Irish cultural revival and for the cruder forms of insular nationalism. The Citizen was modeled on the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association, Michael Cusack (JJ 2 61; cf. Groden 132–39), but The Book of Invasions adds resonance to the character, for the Citizen can be identified as the representative of still another wave of invaders, the Fir Bolg. In Irish typology the Fir Bolg are short, dark, ugly, crude people. They were laborers in Greece, and in Ireland, after the conquests of the Tuatha De

[18] Although these issues will be addressed at length in chapter 6, it is appropriate to comment here on the seeming incongruity of Molly's "Spanish" origin and her lack of a Gibraltar accent. Phillip Herring has observed that Molly speaks with an Irish brogue, thus claiming that her language undercuts the surface realism. This seeming error is again related to the Irish mythos behind Ulysses: with the shearing of realism Joyce here is conveying to his audience that Molly is both Spanish and Irish; her sensuous Mediterranean nature is subsumed within her Irishness. Herring also argues that Molly has "no understanding of her mixed heritage"; but we should understand that Molly's mixed ethnicity is not intended as a surface, but as a symbol of her Milesian identity from The Book of Invasions . See Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 516.

Danann and the Goidels, they become the unfree, subjugated, nonnoble populace. The Fir Bolg typology—current in Joyce's time and still in force today—is one element behind Joyce's construction of the Citizen.

Not only is the Citizen crude in person and thought, but he is chaotic as well. Kenner points out that Joyce could associate the nationalist movement with destruction and chaos, particularly with the 1916 destruction of Dublin: "When the biscuit-tin, by heroic amplification, renders North Central Dublin a mass of ruins we are to remember what patriotic idealism could claim to have accomplished by Easter 1916" ("Ulysses " 139; cf. 92–96). The most chaotic figures in early Irish literature are the Fomorians (or Fomoiri), who are responsible for the failure of the Nemedian invasion and who fight against and for a time oppress the Tuatha De Danann; this battle between the Fomorians and the Tuatha De Danann is a reflex of the Indo-European pattern of the battle of the gods of order with the gods of chaos (Gray 1–10; Sjoestedt 19; Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology 60). The Fomorians are often conflated with the Fir Bolg in the ancient texts; each group opposes the Tuatha De Danann in a battle at a location called Mag Tuired, and each group is defeated by the Tuatha De. This conflation is apparent in Joyce's treatment of the Citizen, who is as unattractive as the Fir Bolg and as chaotic as the Fomorians; the conflation is partly reflected in the Citizen's being simultaneously an ordinary-sized person in the narration and a gigantic figure in the parodies paralleling the action of the episode.

The most chaotic figure of all the Fomorians is Balor, the one-eyed figure who can turn men to stone with his gaze and who is killed in the Second Battle of Mag Tuired by Lug.

An evil eye had Balor the Fomorian. That eye was never opened save only on a battle-field. Four men used to lift up the lid of the eye with a polished handle which passed through its lid. If an army looked at that eye, though they were many thousands in number, they could not resist a few warriors. It had a poisonous power. Once when his father's druids were concocting charms, he came and looked out of the window, and the fume of the concoction came under it, so that the poison of the concoction afterwards penetrated the eye that looked. (AIT 44)

Elsewhere the Fomorians in general have only one eye (cf. Sjoestedt 16). As a group, therefore, the Fomorians can be compared to the race of Cyclopes; and we should remember that it is the narrator as much as the

Citizen whose (single) eye is mentioned: "I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at the comer of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye" (12. 1–3). While he represents two groups in The Book of Invasions at one and the same time—crude Fir Bolg and chaotic, one-eyed Fomorian—the Citizen also owes something to the specific characterization of Balor; and the one-eyed quality of the Fomorians, best elaborated in the descriptions of Balor, provides the surface linkage between the Irish mythic prototypes and the Homeric Cyclopes.^[19]

Given this mythic background for the Citizen, we should expect Stephen Dedalus rather than Bloom to oppose the character, since Dedalus seems to represent Lug in particular and the Tuatha De Danann in general. It is the Tuatha De who fight both the Fir Bolg and the Fomorians at the two battles at Mag Tuired, and Lug slays Balor. Thus, it is suggestive that Joyce originally intended Stephen to be part of the "Cyclops" episode (Groden 133–37; cf. 149). Because Bloom was apparently intended as the Citizen's victim from the very start (Groden 132), the mythological structure of The Book of Invasions may offer some clue to Joyce's original plans for the chapter. As it stands, Joyce has bent the early Irish myth by having Bloom rather than Stephen oppose the Citizen, but The Book of Invasions explains in part why there is a typological as well as a personal contrast between Bloom and the Citizen: they represent the opposition of their races within Ireland.

In sum, The Book of Invasions helps to explain why the central characters in Ulysses are all outsiders though they stand as universalized representations of Dubliners, for the invasion theory of Irish history in Lebor Gabála is predicated on the notion that there are no aboriginal inhabitants of the island. In this scheme, everyone is an outsider, descended as it were from immigrants. From the perspective of Irish pseudohistory, the cultural alienation of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly mirrors the heritage of all the island's inhabitants as descendants of invaders: to be Irish is to be an immigrant. Thus, within an Irish mythic framework, if not an Irish

[19] Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, Irish Mythological Cycle 123, takes the view that in Irish literature there is no counterpart to the Cyclops, but Rees and Rees (66) note that the theme of the one-eyed enemy pervades Irish literature. Ingcel in The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel is an example both of a one-eyed enemy and a chaotic figure (AIT 104ff.).

naturalistic context, the main characters of Ulysses are typical of their country. Irish myth, therefore, underscores the modernist alienation that pervades the book.

In this light we see the ultimate irony of Deasy's joke about Ireland's having no Jews as well as the irony of the Citizen's xenophobia and his virulence against the Jews in particular (12.1140ff., 12.1666). The Book of Invasions provides a framework in which the Goidels of Ireland and their descendants should have a natural sympathy and affinity for the Jews, for the Goidels might well have joined Moses's band and shared in Jewish history after aiding the Israelites in Egypt. Indeed, from this mythic perspective the Goidels might well be called an "Israelitish" race, a term Joyce applied to the Irish;^[20] and the views of the tolerant characters in Ulysses are all sentiments that Joyce himself espoused, believing that the Irish least of all have a claim to purity of race (discussed at greater length below). Against the mythic framework of The Book of Invasions, the Citizen betrays his non-Goidelic and base ancestry through his anti-Semitic views.^[21]

Bloom and the Goidels, Stephen and the Tuatha De Danann, Molly and Tailltiu, the Citizen and the Fomorians/Fir Bolg—taken one by one, each correspondence between Ulysses and The Book of Invasions is of little moment. Taken together they carry weight. Ireland's pseudohistory, which had shaped Irish concepts of time and identity for over a thousand years, found its way into Ulysses and informs the relations of Joyce's main characters. Ulysses is a roman à clef, though no one key fits it exactly. To the Odyssey and Hamlet and the Divina Commedia, the books that are most widely acknowledged to have contributed to the architectonic structure of Ulysses, we should now add a fourth: The Book of Invasions. One of the keys to Ulysses is Irish, a key unlocking many of its textual puzzles, its mode of signification, its meaning.