Chapter 8—
Monographs and Scholarly Sources

BOYLE: "Mr. Nugent," says I, "Father Farrell is a man o' the people, an', as far as I know the History o' me country, the priests was always in the van of the fight for Irelan's freedom." . . . "Who are you tellin'?" says he. "Didn't they let down the Fenians, an' didn't they do in Parnell? An' now . . ." "You ought to be ashamed o' yourself," says I, interruptin' him, "not to know the History o' your country." An' I left him gawkin' where he was.

JOXER: Where ignorance's bliss 'tis folly to be wise; I wondher did he ever read the Story o' Irelan'.

BOYLE: Be J. L. Sullivan? Don't you know he didn't.

JOXER: Ah, it's a darlin' buk, a daarlin' buk!

Sean O'Casey, Juno and the Paycock

From popular sources and oral culture Joyce had obtained a general fund of knowledge about early Irish literature. At several periods of his life he apparently added to this fund by reading monographs and more scholarly sources related to Irish literature, particularly when he studied the Irish language in 1901–2 and again, it would seem, when he was writing both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . Such specific readings are often the most difficult of Joyce's sources to determine, as John Kelleher has illustrated with respect to Finnegans Wake:

In the best of circumstances it is difficult to prove that Joyce used a particular book for a particular word or passage in Finnegans Wake or, if obviously it was the source, that he knew it at first-hand and did not merely hear of it from some informant or temporary assistant. With most Irish allusions the difficulty is compounded by the fact that Joyce was born, raised and schooled in Ireland and that his fantastic memory was stored with all kinds of Irish lore, literary and popular. How then are we to say of any apparent reference to an Irish book that Joyce actually looked at the book while working on the Wake, or that he remembered having read it when he was young or that he just knew of it in the way that each of us knows the title or general substance of many books he has not read? ("Identifying the Irish Printed Sources" 161)^[1]

We may see prima facie evidence of familiarity with a book or a story, but in the absence of a request to Aunt Josephine, or a notesheet with quotes, we cannot be certain whether Joyce actually read any particular monograph or whether he might have known of the material at second hand from the type of source considered in the preceding chapter. In this chapter I consider monographs and scholarly sources for the Irish literary and historical material in Ulysses that we have evidence Joyce knew.

i. Joyce's Knowledge of Modern Irish

It is well known that Joyce, like many people in Ireland at the turn of the century, spent time learning Modern Irish. The pressure to learn Irish is thematized in A Portrait of the Artist in Davin's conversation with Stephen Dedalus: "Then be one with us, said Davin. Why don't you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the league class after the first lesson?" (202). In the last decade of the nineteenth century the Gaelic League had made learning Irish a nationalist act—an act that distinguished the "Irish" from "West Britons." This is the point behind the conversation between Miss Ivors and Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead" when she reproaches him for his reviews in the Daily Express and criticizes his vacation plans and his language learning as well:

[1] It is well to remember Clive Hart's warning that Joyce was not often a great reader, particularly later in his life, and that it is wise to be guarded in one's assumptions about the depth of his literary background (Power, Conversations with James Joyce, foreword 5). Garvin (227) notes as well that Joyce got people to summarize or mark books for him.

—And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land?

—Well, said Gabriel, it's partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.

—And haven't you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish? asked Miss Ivors. (D 189)

The language movement was a central feature of Irish cultural nationalism, and study of Irish became a test of an individual's nationalism, as Joyce indicates in these passages.

Not a great deal is known about Joyce's engagement with Modern Irish. In My Brother's Keeper Stanislaus Joyce says: "First among [Joyce's friendships] was George Clancy ('Davin'), who became a teacher of Irish. . . . As a student, Clancy was an Irish language enthusiast. . . . It was under his influence that my brother studied Irish for a year or two" (175). Joyce's instructor was Patrick Pearse, the Irish nationalist and future martyr of the 1916 Easter Rising, so it is reasonable to suppose that Joyce got a good deal of politics along with his language tuition, much of it nauseating to Joyce, as the portrait of Hughes in Stephen Hero indicates. Joyce engaged in these Irish lessons at the time when he was busy acquiring a number of modern European languages, including French, Italian, German, and Dano-Norwegian (cf. JJ 2 59–61, 75–76); his interest in Irish can thus be related as much to his major area of university studies as to an interest in cultural nationalism. Indeed, it would have been strange had a student of modern languages totally ignored the Irish language movement burgeoning around him in view of the intrinsic linguistic interest of Celtic languages in general and Irish in particular. It is probably not irrelevant that in Stephen Hero Daedalus, lured to Irish classes by his attraction to Emma Clery, gives as his acknowledged reason for learning Irish, "I would like to learn it—as a language" (55).

Joyce gives a rather dismal picture of Gaelic League Irish classes in Stephen Hero (59ff.), and the portrait of the teacher Hughes—bad poet, monomaniacal hibernophile, and artistic philistine—is not an attractive view of Pearse (59–63, 82–83, 103–4). Joyce later told Budgen he stopped attending classes because Pearse insisted on denigrating English in favor of Irish (Budgen, Further Recollections of James Joyce 323), and the picture of Hughes as Pearse offers sufficient reason to quit the classes. But Joyce also notes in Stephen Hero that the books used were those of

Father O'Growney, the standard Gaelic League grammars; these are very simple chapbooks whose tuition hardly goes beyond the simple declarative sentence.^[2] Moreover, although most students learned quickly and worked very hard, the progress of the class "was retarded by the stupidity of two of the young men" (SH 60). An able language learner like Joyce would have found such a learning environment stultifying at best and more like maddening. What Joyce's real mastery of the language came to be remains difficult to assess, but it must be remembered that he was gifted at languages: he graduated from University College in modern languages and worked professionally as a language teacher. He lived and worked comfortably in foreign-language environments, switching from English to Italian, German, and French with ease. He taught himself Norwegian so that he could read Ibsen in the original. With this sort of orientation, it would have been extraordinary had Joyce not learned a credible amount of Modern Irish in "a year or two," especially considering the political import of the language movement, even given the obstacles of the depressing classes Joyce portrays.^[3]

Joyce's accomplishments in Modern Irish can be judged by a number of indices largely related to the Irish that he incorporates in Finnegans Wake. Not only is there a large Irish lexical repertory in the Wake, but it is clear from the puns on other Irish words, and also interlingual puns, that Joyce had Irish "in his ears": he had more than a bookish knowledge of the language. His usage of phonetic spellings (O Hehir xi) fits with this hypothesis. There are grammatical constructions in the Irish in Finnegans Wake (including errors that may have been intentional, as similar errors in English are; cf. O Hehir ix) and some idioms as well, indicating that Joyce knew more than just Irish words: he had some facility with the morphology and syntax of the language, including an understanding of the initial mutations.

Many of the Irish expressions in Finnegans Wake are proper names, including place names, tribal names, and personal names. Joyce and his brother had the practice of etymologizing names during their walks in Dublin (O Hehir viii), and that interest in names is reflected in Joyce's naming in his literary work as a whole, his verbal realism in Ulysses and

[2] A line from O'Growney is quoted in Ulysses 9.366; cf. Schutte 38–39.

[3] Cf. O Hehir (vii), who comes to a similar conclusion.

elsewhere, and the punning on Irish names in Finnegans Wake. There are other stray indications of Joyce's facility in Irish in his other works, including the punning on Banba discussed in chapter 4 and, curiously, the triad of things that, Stephen remembers, an Irishman ought to avoid: "Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon" (1.732). Although Joyce may have known an English version from oral sources, the Irish source may be the Irish column in the Freeman's Journal entitled "Le h'aghaidh na nGaedhilgeoiridhe," which appeared during the period Joyce was working on his Irish; on 3 March 1902 the column gives an English translation accompanying the Irish text, and the translation reads, "Shun the smile of the Saxon, the bull's forehead, the snarling of a dog, and the hind-part of a stallion," and goes on to comment, "The Irish cannot avoid the deceitful smile of the Saxon."^[4] Joyce knows enough about Irish senchas to pare the saying down to the traditional form of a triad and to translate it in a way that captures the pithy quality of the original. His translation also introduces alliteration, which is common in many Irish precepts. In Ulysses Stephen is presented as one who knows Irish expressions, who can understand simple Irish when it is spoken, and who has Irish words and phrases come to mind in appropriate circumstances.

Citing the growing number of Irish words in Joyce's texts between Dubliners and Finnegans Wake, Kenneth Nilsen observes, "It might seem reasonable to assume that Joyce's knowledge of Irish was at its high point in the early years of this century but a look at his writings seems to indicate exactly the opposite" (24). After writing Ulysses Joyce continued his interest in Irish, and in 1939 he retained in his possession two dictionaries of Irish, including an abridgment of Patrick Dinneen's standard dictionary of Irish, entitled A Smaller Irish-English Dictionary for the Use of Schools (1923; Connolly #58 and #271; cf. O Hehir vii–viii).^[5] Though the possession of these works indicates a significant interest in

[4] The Irish text reads, "Seachain gáire sacsanach, éadan tairbh, dranntadh madaidh, agus deireadh staile"; cf. O Hehir (337), who also gives the Irish of this tetrad. Cf. Thornton (Allusions in "Ulysses" 26) and Gifford (27) for additional English sources for the expression.

[5] In July 1924 Joyce also wrote to Larbaud some simple observations regarding features of Irish orthography and phonology and indicating that the borrowings from Latin and Norman French are relatively restricted. The content of the letter does not say much for Joyce's Irish, but his willingness to speak with some authority does. See Letters 1: 217–18.

the language, the fact that he added the Irish to Finnegans Wake after the first draft suggests that Irish was not natural to him (O Hehir ix). O Hehir concludes that he had "elementary and common Irish," though the fact that it is the second of the languages listed as contributing to the Wake indicates its importance to Joyce in that work.

Although Modern Irish is very different in its morphology from Old and Middle Irish, the syntax of the three states of the language has much that is continuous; moreover, the lexis of the three periods of Irish overlaps to a great extent. Thus, even the sort of facility in Modern Irish that Joyce seems to have acquired serves to make some elements of an early Irish text accessible to an attentive reader of a facing translation. The accessibility of the early texts was still greater when Joyce was learning Irish than it is today since the spelling reforms had not yet been instituted; thus, the spellings Joyce learned were those inherited from the medieval orthographical conventions, making the early texts more approachable from a lexical point of view than they are to those who currently learn Modern Irish. It follows, therefore, that any scholarly editions of medieval Irish texts that Joyce would have used for their translations would have offered partially transparent texts to him as well. If it is correct, as some scholars have suggested (Kelleher, "Irish History" 419), that Joyce read scholarly editions and facing translations of some early Irish stories at the time he was studying Irish or later in his life, thereby familiarizing himself with certain texts that he later used in the mythic structuring of his own works, he may have been able to make determinations on his own about certain of the more obvious features of the style of early Irish narrative. The argument that he knew the content or poetics of much of the early literature does not turn on this possibility, however. In any case the inclusion of a considerable Gaelic lexicon in Finnegans Wake indicates that Joyce did not forget his Irish once he went to the Continent: to the contrary, he seems to have augmented his knowledge. And where original Irish texts or scholarly sources are indicated for his architectonic structuring, it is not necessary to restrict Joyce's reading of these materials to the time before his departure from Ireland nor to restrict his knowledge of the texts purely to translations. Joyce seems to have renewed his interest in Irish materials whenever he had need of them for his own writing and whenever he had access to suitable collections of books, as he did both in Zurich and Paris.

ii. Monographs

It is quite possible to know the contents of a book sufficiently well to use the material in conversation or in artistic creation without having read the volume: this fact is obvious in daily life, but it is often forgotten in criticism. Reviews, conversation, lectures, classroom instruction—all summarize books in ways that make the contents utilizable to the audience. There are many monographs related to early Irish literature and culture that Joyce could have read either casually in his youth or more deliberately later in his life; the possibilities, indeed, are so large that the task of determining his possible reading almost defies definition. In picking out some few monographs for the following discussion I have focused on specific books as likely to have informed Joyce's thinking for one of the following reasons: the book was part of Joyce's library, particularly at the period when he was writing Ulysses; the book or author is mentioned by Joyce, either in one of his literary texts or in his letters or other papers; internal evidence in Ulysses suggests that the book underlies Ulysses; or the book was widely discussed in popular periodicals, so its contents had passed into the general discourse of Irish culture. Several foci of discussion emerge, not all of which result in commensurate categories. They are bound together by being likely materials known to Joyce, though his depth of knowledge may have been quite shallow in some cases. As with the knowledge gleaned from popular sources discussed in the previous chapter, Joyce's use of early Irish materials from book-length studies is usually general rather than specific, architectonic rather than detailed. Thus, a cursory reading, a conversation about the salient points of a monograph, or even a detailed summary in a review may have sufficed to fire his imagination in the directions we can trace.

Histories

Joyce pays tribute to Irish historians in a passage in Finnegans Wake in which various historical writers are cited as authorities (572.19–573.32).^[6]

[6] In The Books at the Wake James S. Atherton has identified these authors as well as other Irish historians mentioned throughout the text of Finnegans Wake; they include James Ware, Edward Alfred D'Alton, Charles Haliday, John T. Gilbert, Giraldus Cambrensis, Luke Wadding, D. A. Chart, J. M. Flood, John Lannigan, W. E. H. Lecky, Thomas Leland, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, P. S. O'Hegarty (whose work appeared after Ulysses was published), and Walter Harris. To this list should be added John D'Alton and Eoin Mac Neill as well (Kelleher, "Identifying the Irish Printed Sources" 166–67).

Atherton and Kelleher ("Identifying the Irish Printed Sources") have shown that Joyce used various passages from the historians he cites in Finnegans Wake, and Joyce probably did additional reading in the Irish histories after he wrote Ulysses. Although specific instances of textual borrowings may be discovered, it is very unlikely that Joyce had read all of the historians he cites. To have done so would have been tedium in the extreme as the material becomes exceedingly repetitious from volume to volume. The general contours of Irish history can be gleaned from a single study, and its outline would have in any case been familiar to Joyce from his schoolboy studies, as Kelleher indicates ("Identifying the Irish Printed Sources" 164–65).

Although James Atherton believes that in Finnegans Wake Joyce depended largely on the annals appended to Thom's Directory, he concludes that Joyce "probably . . . made use of all the Irish histories that he could find to write his own version of the History of Ireland" (93; cf. 90–93). In Finnegans Wake there are many references to modern historians, but Joyce's most extensive tribute is to Michael O'Clery, Conary O'Clery, Cucogry O'Clery, and Fearfesa O'Mulconry, who, better known as the "Four Masters," merge with the Four Evangelists and are essential elements in the mythic fabric of Finnegans Wake. The Four Masters are at the foundation of written Irish history, for it is their annals, compiled from much older books even as native Irish culture was crumbling in the seventeenth century, that constitute the main extant source for early Irish history. The standard edition of the Four Masters had been published with notes and translation in seven quarto volumes by John O'Donovan between 1848 and 1851, a work justly celebrated by Irish cultural nationalists. Discussions of the Four Masters are found in the periodical literature of the time—for example, in the United Irishman of 18 November 1899—and O'Grady had summarized the account of Irish prehistory to a.d. 432 from the Annals of the Four Masters in his All Ireland Review , as mentioned in chapter 7; there are also references to the Four Masters in the general histories and in school histories. Although, as Atherton believes (89), the Four Masters may not have been cited directly by Joyce in Finnegans Wake, he would have been aware from his youth that the Annals of the Four Masters were the fountainhead of Irish history, and this general knowledge suffices for the iconographic role of the Four Masters in his last work.

If Finnegans Wake is Joyce's history of Ireland, Ulysses is his pseudohistory of Ireland; and because the majority of Irish general histories begin with a brief account of Irish pseudohistory, the historical sources that Joyce invokes in Finnegans Wake overlap to a considerable extent with sources for Irish pseudohistory that Joyce may have used earlier when he was working on Ulysses. The pseudohistory in the general histories is based on three major sources: The Book of Invasions and its attendant kinglist; the pseudohistorical entries in the Annals of the Four Masters, which are themselves dependent in part on The Book of Invasions ; and the general history of Geoffrey Keating entitled Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (The History of Ireland). Keating, like the Four Masters, was a seventeenth-century historian composing from earlier sources; he includes summaries of The Book of Invasions , the major narratives of the Ulster Cycle, and other literary sources; and his work has served as the single major source of Irish tradition since his time.^[7] In Ulysses I have found no specific use of editions of Keating, but it would be surprising if a close scrutiny of the Irish elements in Finnegans Wake failed to turn up significant allusions to Keating.

Certain textual allusions to traditional Irish pseudohistory in Ulysses do suggest that Joyce used some written sources for his pseudohistorical framework from The Book of Invasions. These references—like the title of the book itself, which signals the relationship to Greek myth—are also overt indicators of the mythic structure of the book. The first allusion refers to the intersection of Hebrew and Irish in Irish pseudohistory, an intersection that in turn leads outward to Vallancey's theories of the Phoenician origin of the Irish and to Bérard's theories of the Phoenician origin of the Odyssey :

What points of contact existed between these languages and between the peoples who spoke them?

The presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and servile letters in both languages: their antiquity, both having been taught on the plain of Shinar 242 years after the deluge in the seminary instituted by Fenius

[7] Several early editions of Keating had appeared before Ulysses was published (see Best, Bibliography [1913] 255), but the standard edition by Patrick Dinneen was published in four volumes by the Irish Texts Society between 1902 and 1914, a period during which Joyce was particularly interested in Irish culture. As mentioned above, Dinneen was one of the professors at University College, and later in life Joyce owned his shorter Irish dictionary.

Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Israel, and ascendant of Heber and Heremon, progenitors of Ireland. (17.745–51)^[8]

It is difficult to establish Joyce's particular written source for this passage, as I have been unable to find any edition of either The Book of Invasions or Keating that includes these spellings of the name Fenius Farsaigh and of the location Shinar ; the latter has apparently been normalized by Joyce to the standard spelling in English Bibles, while the former is widespread enough to be indeterminate. Like traditional Irish historians before him Joyce here relies on a genealogy to encapsulate the broader affinities he is working with in Ulysses.

Joyce makes another oblique reference to traditional Irish pseudohistory in Ulysses by giving Bloom an Irish genealogy in episode 12: "Who comes through Michan's land, bedight in sable armour? O'Bloom, the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory's son: he of the prudent soul" (12.215–17). Originally a Hungarian genealogy, "O'Bloom, the son of Rudolph the son of Leopold Peter, son of Peter Rudolph," Joyce changed it to a traditional Irish one (Groden 141), emphasizing Rory by the chiastic order and repetition. Although Rory , Old Irish Rudraige , occurs frequently in the Middle Irish and early Modern Irish period, the name is most famous as the traditional ancestor of the Ulster Cycle heroes in the genealogical tract entitled Senchas Síl Ír. Rudraige, in turn, is traced genealogically to the Milesian invaders of Ireland.^[9] Thus, Joyce styles Bloom both as an Ulster hero and as a Milesian in the episode, humorously evoking the heroic and pseudohistorical literature of Ireland by a typical Irish genealogical connection.

Though Ulysses is primarily a refraction of Irish pseudohistory rather than Irish history, there is internal evidence that Joyce had been dipping

[8] The passage goes on to suggest the "two peoples theme" in invoking "their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival." It is also interesting that Joyce notes the presence of gutturals in both Irish and Hebrew, since in Stephen Hero he writes about the Irish classes, "Stephen found it very troublesome to pronounce the gutturals but he did the best he could" (60).

[9] The traditional genealogies are found in M. O'Brien (270–86), but Rudraige's name and genealogical indicators occur frequently in the Ulster Cycle tales, including Táin Bó Cúailnge, as well as in historical materials including Keating and the Four Masters.

Thornton (Allusions in "Ulysses" 266) identifies Rory in the genealogy with the last high king of Ireland; given Joyce's way of conflating mythic figures, he probably has both figures in mind, with the latter pointing to the Sovereignty themes in Ulysses.

into the Irish histories before 1921, when he was writing "Ithaca," for in that episode there is a synchronism of the ages of Leopold and Stephen that forms a nice parody of the type of synchronism found in some early modern histories of Ireland. The parody begins:

What relation existed between their ages?

16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen's present age Stephen was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom's present age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54 their ages initially in the ration of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13 1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in 1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom, being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah, 969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C. (17.446–61)

This amusing passage plays on the relation of the ages of Stephen and Bloom, Joyce's two masks in this book, picking out key dates in Joyce's own life (since his chronology coincides with that of Stephen). At the same time, by projecting an immense life span for his two characters, Joyce takes them out of the time frame of realistic fiction and places them in the mythic framework of time-before-our-time, the time scale of biblical history and The Book of Invasions .^[10]

We may compare this passage with part of a synchronism from Roderic O'Flaherty's Ogygia, or a Chronological Account of Irish Events , published in Latin in 1685 and translated by James Hely into English in 1793:

From the birth of Phaleg, to the eightieth year of Moses, the space of 695 years has elapsed; of which let us grant that Nuil was 60 years later, or even as they say a hundred and seven; but 588 years, which remain will be made up by multiplying 42, the age of Nuil, a generation, by 14, so many generations as were between them, and each of the four generations, which they only allow, required 147 years for a generation.

[10] For an interesting discussion of the passage and its errors, see McCarthy 608–9.

But let us suppose Nuilus, according to the ideas of these ideots [sic ] who give the longevity of our ancestors, as a pretext to unravel all these difficult and irreconcilable matters, was 500 years old, when sent for by Pharaoh, to the marriage of his daughter, and that he propagated an offspring to the fourth generation in 81 years. Abraham indeed was four hundred years prior to this Mosaic period, and even then, instances of people at an advanced age, having issue, began to be less frequent. (102)

O'Flaherty's text, like Joyce's, seems to be a parody of itself, not only because history is not done this way any more but because belief in biblical chronology has diminished considerably: the Bible has been demythologized. But traditional Irish pseudohistory upon which Joyce relies in Ulysses requires a suspension of positivist belief, a resumption of a mythologized perspective on both time and space. Such a perspective is assumed in many of the general histories of Ireland including some, such as The Story of the Irish Race (1921) by Seumas MacManus, written well into the twentieth century; in this regard the historiography of both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is typical of Irish historiography as a whole.

For a convenient example of the persistence of a mythological perspective on space in the early histories, we may again turn to O'Flaherty. In discussing the names given to Ireland in antiquity, he makes the following argument about the island:

Whether this be Plutarch's Ogygia , which he places to the west of Britain, in his book of the Moon's appearance in her course, as some assert; or whether it be the contrary, as others think, is all the same to me. For I have intitled my book Ogygia , for the following reason given by Camden: "Ireland is justly called Ogygia, i.e. very antient , according to Plutarch, for the Irish date their history from the first aeras of the world; so that in comparison with them, the antiquity of all other countries is modern, and almost in its infancy!" The poets, as Rhodogonus says, call any thing Ogygium , as if you should say, very old, from Ogyges , the most antient. Likewise it appears, that Egypt was called Ogygia for this reason: for the Egyptians are said to be the most antient people in the world; and they have discovered and invented many useful arts and sciences which the Greeks borrowed and introduced into their own country; whererefore [sic ] Egypt has been stiled the parent of the universe , and the mistress of arts and sciences. (34)

Throughout the nineteenth century the identification of Ireland with Ogygia is taken up by historians and lay writers alike, and it is obvious that this aspect of pseudohistory would have been attractive to Joyce in his

own enterprise of coordinating Greek and Irish mythos in Ulysses. When, therefore, Joyce opens the second part of Ulysses with the episode of Calypso, identifying 7 Eccles Street as Ogygia, he is paradoxically opening the book in Ireland. There is a dubletting not only of Molly's role (Calypso/Penelope) but of space (Calypso's island/Ireland); at the same time the home (7 Eccles Street/Ireland) also stands for Ithaca. Thus, the geographical presuppositions of episode 18, where Gibraltar-as-otherworld folds over onto Ireland, are anticipated in episode 4, with its pseudohistorical underpinning in Irish tradition.^[11]

The way in which history per se, including materials from the annals appended to Thom's Directory , impinges upon the contents of Ulysses has been adequately discussed in the critical literature and is beyond the scope of concern here. In general the Irish histories that have left the most significant traces in Ulysses include books, such as O'Flaherty's Ogygia and Vallancey's theories, which have a pseudohistorical quality to them. Despite the realistic surface to the narrative, the logos in Ulysses is mythical and pseudohistorical; history per se in the book has a relatively short temporal span and is relatively local in its focus. Only in Finnegans Wake does Joyce begin to integrate history in a more universal sense. Joyce's mixture of history, pseudohistory, and myth in both books, however, is typically Irish and should be attributed in part to his reading of Irish history, for the way in which history and pseudohistory blend even in the modern histories and annals of Ireland—or, as we might put it, the way in which history and literature blend—exemplifies the archaism of Irish tradition right up to the twentieth century. Elsewhere in Europe this blend is characteristic of medieval thought rather than later historiography, and it is one aspect of Joyce's thought that gives his writing a medieval temper.^[12]

Studies by P. W. Joyce

In 1909 in answer to an inquiry by G.Molyneux Palmer, who was setting some of Joyce's poems to music, James Joyce wrote: "I have never seen Billy Byrne printed: but I am sure my namesake, Dr P. W. Joyce, will be

[11] But Calypso's island could also be identified with Gibraltar (cf. Seidel, esp. 27–28), so the folding over of locations is even more complex.

[12] Thus, Joyce would have become familiar with many of the medieval Irish sagas and stories through his study of history as well as through reading literature.

able to tell you where it has been printed. If not you could ask Mr Best of the Feis Ceoil" (Letters 1: 66). Patrick Weston Joyce is here credited as an authority on Irish music, seconded only by R. I. Best of the National Library, a figure discussed in the last chapter. In 1935, when Joyce was advising his son, Giorgio, about Irish songs that the latter might sing, he wrote that he intended to send a collection by P. W. Joyce that was in his possession: "I have an enormous collection of Irish folk music collected by Petrie and another lot by Joyce (P. W.) I shall send this out soon." This collection is evidently Irish Peasant Songs in the English Language , the publication that seemingly led Joyce to recommend his "namesake" to Palmer in 1909; in a postscript to the letter Joyce tells his son that apparently the composer Antheil had made off with Joyce's copy of the book (Letters 3: 343–44).

P. W. Joyce, LL.D., was one of the foremost authorities on Irish history, culture, topography, literature, and music of his day. One of the Commissioners for the Publication of the Ancient Laws of Ireland and president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, P. W. Joyce was the author of many publications that still read today, even to a Celticist, as essentially sound, albeit early, investigations of the varied subject matter they cover.^[13] In addition to his publications on music, P. W. Joyce is known for geographical and topographical works, most notably Irish Local Names Explained (1870) and The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (3 vols.; 1869, 1870, 1913), as well as The Geography of the Counties of Ireland with a General Description of the Country (1883) and The Wonders of Ireland (1911). He was the author of books on the Irish and English languages, including English as We Speak It in Ireland (1910), A Grammar of the Irish Language (1878), and a student's edition of the initial sections of Keating's history (Forus Feasa air Eirinn: Keating's History of Ireland , 1886). His literary adaptations and translations in Old Celtic Romances (1879; rev. ed. 1894) were widely read. P. W. Joyce's major works include his social histories of Ireland, particularly A Social History of Ancient Ireland (2 vols., 1903), A Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland (1906), and The Story of Ancient Irish Civilisation (1907), the latter two of which represent a condensation and a popularization respectively of the larger work. He was perhaps best known for a series

[13] It should go without saying that much in P. W. Joyce's work has been superseded by the scholarship of this century.

of histories of Ireland, primarily A Short History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1608 (1893, 565 pp.), as well as various condensations and adaptations of the longer work, including A Concise History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1837 (1893; the twenty-fourth edition appeared in 1920), and A Child's History of Ireland (1897), which was later reissued as An Illustrated History of Ireland (1919).

P. W. Joyce was widely cited in the popular press; as mentioned in the last chapter, for example, his Social History of Ancient Ireland was discussed and implicitly recommended to readers by the author of the article on "The Everyday Celt" in the Leader, and in one of his discussions of localism cited above, William Rooney had recommended to readers of the United Irishman P. W. Joyce's Irish Names of Places. James Joyce apparently knew the latter well enough to refer appropriately to the book in his satire "Gas from a Burner," attributing to George Roberts of Maunsel and Company, who reneged on publishing Dubliners when it was already in sheets (JJ 2 334ff.), the following words supposedly likening Dubliners to P. W. Joyce's work:

Shite and onions! Do you think I'll print
The name of the Wellington Monument,
Sydney Parade and Sandymount tram,
Downes's cakeshop and Williams's jam?
I'm damned if I do—I'm damned to blazes!
Talk about  Irish Names of Places!
It's a wonder to me, upon my soul,
He forgot to mention Curly's Hole.
 (CW 244)

In 1939 a 1921 edition of the third volume of Irish Names of Places was part of Joyce's working library (Connolly #164 P. W. Joyce's work is a likely source for some of James Joyce's knowledge of the Irish tradition of dindsenchas^[*] . That James Joyce characterizes Dubliners as a kind of modern urban analogue to P. W. Joyce's Irish Names of Places, particularly as the role of topography and localism in Ulysses is even more marked, suggests he was aware of the ways in which his own work fit into this aspect of Irish literary tradition.^[14] The comparison reinforces

[14] Joyce's statement also supports Nilsen's argument about the Irish etymological significance of proper names in Dubliners since P. W. Joyce emphasizes etymological meanings in much of his work.

Joyce's reference to P. W. Joyce as his "namesake" and suggests that James Joyce felt an identification and affinity with this scholar of early Irish material, not unlike the sort of affinity he felt for James Stephens because of the sharing of a name and a birth year. These factors, as well as his ownership of a 1921 edition of P. W. Joyce's Illustrated History in 1939 (Connolly #163), indicate that all of P. W. Joyce's works should be considered as possible sources for James Joyce's conceptualization of Irish history and culture.^[15]

Some of P. W. Joyce's works are most relevant as sources for material in Finnegans Wake; in particular, his history texts are handy compendia of the many periods of Irish history incorporated into James Joyce's later work. It is important to note that certain works of P. W. Joyce, particularly his Social History of Ancient Ireland in two volumes, appeared during the period before Joyce left Ireland but after he had studied Irish and done some initial study of Irish traditions; even if James Joyce did not read the text of P. W. Joyce's Social History, he would have absorbed some of the content since the materials in these volumes were discussed in popular sources and to some extent circulated orally. The Social History and its condensations contain significant discussions of the role of the Irish poet as well as important materials on Irish prosody. In these books P. W. Joyce also discusses such questions as the importance of music to the Irish, the preservation of Irish genealogies, and the workings of dindsenchas^[*] as a combination of legendary history and the etymology of names. He does not try to whitewash the moral tone of early Irish legends, noting, "As to the general moral tone of the ancient Irish tales, it is to be observed that in all early literatures, Irish among the rest, there is much plain speaking of a character that would now be considered coarse" (Smaller Social History 237).

Old Celtic Romances, which Stanley Sultan has suggested is the source of James Joyce's knowledge of The Voyage of Mael Duin, has in its preface a clear, if brief, statement about the mixture of history and fiction in Irish tales, a discussion of the mixture of poetry and prose in early texts, and comments about the tone of early Irish literature; P. W. Joyce notes also that his translations are not literal but instead attempt to capture the simple style and spirit of the original texts. The collection includes intro-

[15] It is probably significant also that P. W. Joyce takes up Vallancey's theory of the Phoenician origin of the Irish in his Irish Names of Places (1: 81).

ductions to both the voyage tales and the bruiden tales, stressing the entrapment of the heroes by enchanters in the latter until "they are released by the bravery or mother-wit of some of their companions" (rev. ed., xiv); as a whole the stories in the volume would have provided James Joyce sufficient models for the motifs from early Irish adventures to the otherworld used in the Nighttown episode, while P. W. Joyce's commentary and introductory matter would have alerted James Joyce to the stylistic qualities of early Irish narratives.

In recommending P. W. Joyce and R. I. Best to Palmer, and in owning the music collections of Petrie and P. W. Joyce, James Joyce shows discrimination in his assessment of scholarly authorities on Irish tradition, for P. W. Joyce, Petrie, and Best were indeed among the most reputable writers on Irish topics. Joyce's discernment in this regard is consistent with the earlier observation that as a regular reader of the United Irishman he was among the more knowledgeable of the general public with respect to early Irish subject matters. Joyce's apparent interest in P. W. Joyce is particularly important, for P. W. Joyce is an author who balances scholarly sobriety with readability; his translations are literary rather than philological, and his works show a concern to communicate serious material about Irish literature and culture to a broad audience. Thus, his "namesake" sets a context for James Joyce's treatments of the same domain.

Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville

Joyce's exposure to Le cycle mythologique irlandais et la mythologie celtique (1884) by Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville (translated by R. I. Best as The Irish Mythological Cycle ) has been documented. Among monographs that may have served to introduce Joyce to early Irish literature and history, other works by d'Arbois de Jubainville are excellent possibilities. D'Arbois de Jubainville was professor at the Sorbonne, lecturing on Celtic literature for many years, including the period that Joyce was in Paris in 1902–3. Although his list of publications is extensive, he was perhaps best known for the twelve-volume set published under his general editorship as Cours de littérature celtique, of which Le cycle mythologique irlandais was volume 2. The other titles in the series include Introduction à l'étude de la littérature celtique (vol. 1, 1883), a French translation of the Mabinogi (by J. Loth, vols. 3–4, 1889), L'épopée cel-

tique en Irlande (vol. 5, 1892), La civilisation des Celtes et celle de l'épopée homérique (vol. 6, 1899), Études sur le droit celtique (vols. 7–8, 1895), La métrique galloise (by J. Loth, vols. 9–11, 1900–1902), and Principaux auteurs de l'antiquité à consulter sur l'histoire des celtes (vol. 12, 1902). Although d'Arbois de Jubainville was not responsible for all the work in the series (as indicated above, J. Loth prepared the Welsh material in vols. 3–4 and 9–11, and other scholars contributed to vol. 5), his contribution to the series was substantial.

In the first volume of the series, Introduction à l'étude de la littérature celtique, Joyce would have found a rather full discussion of the Irish learned classes, including the druids and the poets; thirty-two chapters are devoted to these topics, and the discussion includes comments on the poets' satire as well as their second sight. An introduction to early Irish literature includes information on the genres of tales as well as material about the tale lists of medieval Ireland. In short, this volume contains everything that Joyce would have needed to know about the role of the early Irish fili as well as the poet's narrative output, material that may have influenced the poetics of Ulysses. The fifth volume of the series, L'épopée celtique en Irlande, is also important, since it contains rather close yet accessible translations of many of the most important early Irish tales; these translations are more representative of some of the narrative features of the tradition (such as the inconsistencies, the formal alternation between poetry and prose, and the humor) than are the translations produced in English under the constraints of Irish cultural nationalism. The book contains the major tales of the Ulster Cycle as well as significant stories from the Finn Cycle; in it is also to be found a version of The Voyage of Mael Duin. Brief but useful guides to the tales include important introductory information—for example, the observation that in Irish stories as in Greek tales, love between a mortal and an immortal is not rare (170). Moreover, an introduction to the imrama includes the following: "Les Irlandais ont plusieurs voyages fantastiques sur mer, imm-ram, au pluriel imm-rama. Cette littérature ne leur est pas spéciale. Le voyage des Argonautes, dont l'auteur de l'Odyssée connaissait déjà une rédaction, a été un des plus anciens monuments de ce genre de composition; l'Odyssée en est un second" (449). The importance of La civilisation des Celtes et celle de l'épopée homérique, sixth in the series, is self-evident; it includes a comparison of early Irish hero tale with Greek epic, appro-

priately enough since Irish hero tale is in many ways closer to Greek heroic stories than to other medieval epics.

The Irish Mythological Cycle, however, remains the most important book of the series for Joyce's purposes in Ulysses. Its thrust—like the mythological structuring of Ulysses —is to equate Greek and Irish mythos by comparing or juxtaposing the two. D'Arbois de Jubainville's presentations of The Book of Invasions (on which the book is based; see p. xv) and of Balor, Tailltiu, and metempsychosis have already been discussed. In light of the Sovereignty imagery in Ulysses it is significant that d'Arbois de Jubainville states that the "Celtic race . . . worshipped at one time a female divinity whose name in Great Britain at the time of the Roman domination was Brigantia  . . .while in mediaeval Ireland she was called Brigit"; he derives the names from the root brig, 'superiority, power, authority' (82–83). The book presents the victory of the Milesians over the Tuatha De as a parallel to the story of Prometheus (132–35), suggesting a reading of Ulysses in which the haughty Stephen with his Olympian ideals cedes to the all-too-human Bloom; it suggests the irony, as well, behind Joyce's comment that Bloomsday was the day that made him a man (JJ 2 156). In chapter 10 d'Arbois de Jubainville discusses the Spanish origin of the Irish, citing as well Alcuin's comment to Charlemagne, in which the Irish are called Egyptians (128). The comparative perspective of the book is notable and would appeal to a cultural nationalist: "Celtic mythology is not copied from Greek mythology. It is based upon conceptions originally identical with those from which Greek mythology is derived, but has developed the fundamental elements of the myth in a manner of her own, which is as independent as it is original" (165). And again, "Ireland . . . borrowed nothing from Greece. The characteristics common to Irish and to Greek mythology come from an old foundation of Graeco-Celtic legends anterior to the separation of the two races" (69). These views are not unique to d'Arbois de Jubainville, but he gives a clear formulation of a position that facilitates the correlation of the two mythologies, even as it validates both.^[16]

[16] In d'Arbois de Jubainville's Les Celtes depuis les temps les plus anciens Joyce might have found a detailed account of the Phoenician influence on the Iberian peninsula (chs. 10, 18); in view of theories about the Spanish origin of the Irish, this discussion supports the kinds of views put forth by Vallencey, for example.

The authority of d'Arbois de Jubainville would have been recommended to Joyce in several instances. Although publication of The Irish Mythological Cycle by the United Irishman in 1901–2 may have brought this scholar to Joyce's attention initially, announced as it was by a generous tribute to d'Arbois de Jubainville (United Irishman 26 Oct. 1901) and followed by an interview with him as the series was in progress (United Irishman 11 Jan. 1902), when Joyce was in Paris in 1902–3 he would also have heard about d'Arbois de Jubainville's lectures and publications, if not through general intellectual circles, then from J. M. Synge, who had attended some of those lectures. The writings of d'Arbois de Jubainville would have served Joyce as an ideal critical entry to the original Celtic texts in translation and would have provided him with a less narrowly nationalistic perspective on early Irish literature than that promulgated by Irish cultural nationalism. The Continental perspective of such scholars as d'Arbois de Jubainville as well as those trained in such a perspective (like Synge) is reflected in Joyce's use of early Irish literature. What can be seen as a revisionist use of Irish myth in Joyce's writings or a demythologizing of Irish literature may be in the first instance an application of a Continental perspective on Celtic literature. This perspective on Irish literature was reinforced by the philological framework for Celtic studies that Joyce encountered in Zurich (discussed below). Because Joyce had access to the complete run of d'Arbois de Jubainville's Cours de la littérature celtique in Zurich as well as in Paris, any reading in this author's monographs during Joyce's early years could have been followed up at the period he was writing Ulysses.

The Voyage of Bran

One of the most influential publications about early Irish literature at the turn of the century was the edition of Imram Brain by Kuno Meyer. Published in two volumes in 1895 and 1897 by David Nutt under the title The Voyage of Bran, the book includes Meyer's editions and translations of texts with parallels to The Voyage of Bran, as well as two essays by Alfred Nutt, "The Happy Otherworld" in the first volume and The Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth, which constitutes the whole of the second. The prima facie relation of the themes and imagery of Ulysses to Meyer's book have been traced, particularly in the construction of Molly's Gi-

braltar and in the doctrine of metempsychosis that underlies the mythic framework of Joyce's book.

Moreover, the ideas in Nutt's critical essays would have buttressed d'Arbois de Jubainville's views of the happy otherworld and reincarnation and shapeshifting as discussed in The Irish Mythological Cycle. Nutt, like the French scholar, uses a comparative method, focusing in the first essay on the relationship of Greek concepts of the happy otherworld to similar Irish concepts; he concludes that the Irish idea of the happy otherworld is closest to that of the Greeks. In a similar fashion, his essay on the doctrine of rebirth or metempsychosis compares Greek and Celtic ideas of rebirth, stressing their differences but concluding that they derive from common ideas, with the Celtic texts representing a more ancient layer of ideation. Nutt's essays are important not merely for their content related to the themes and motifs of Ulysses but also for the methodology, the enterprise of welding together Irish and Greek myth found also in Ulysses.

Some of the observations Nutt makes about the Irish happy otherworld are particularly interesting in relation to Ulysses. Nutt slyly contends that "quatrain 41 of Bran's Voyage gives a picture of the island Elysium from which one gathers that it must have resembled Hampstead Heath on an Autumn Bank Holiday evening. The trait is not confined to Bran's Voyage. Unlimited love-making is one of the main constituents in all the early Irish accounts of Otherworld happiness" ("Happy Otherworld," 290–91). Nutt continues, "At a later stage of national development the stress laid upon this feature puzzled and shocked" (291). Clearly the sexual component of Joyce's otherworld has antecedents that had been noted in the critical literature of his day. In a discussion of the adventure of Loegaire mac Crimthainn, Nutt also observes that in this story, as in The Sickbed of CuChulainn, there are the motifs of "the wife who mourns the lost lover, but returns, not unwillingly, to the husband who willingly takes her back" (184). With some modification this could be a description of the emotional trajectory of Ulysses.

Concluding that the concept of the Irish happy otherworld is "substantially pre-Christian" (331), Nutt takes the view that it is "untouched by ethical speculation" (cf. 309). He notes, too, that some texts "humanise the Otherworld by minimising as much as possible the differences between its inhabitants and mortal men" (184), thus providing another link

with the naturalized presentation in Ulysses of the otherworld as Gibraltar. Nutt notes also that presentations of the otherworld share a common literary method, not unrelated to the techniques in the final episode of Ulysses: "There is the same fondness for detail, the same richness of colour, the same achievement of effect by accumulation rather than by selection of images" (223). Finally, Nutt contends that "one poem, the Odyssey, . . . supplies parallels to all the salient traits of the Irish conception of the Happy Otherworld" (261). This comment may be seen as an invitation to overlay the Greek tale with an Irish mythological component.

Nutt's essay The Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth is equally provocative. There is important material in the essay related to the motif of metempsychosis in Ulysses; moreover, Nutt makes observations about Irish literature as a whole that are of interest in relation to Joyce's works. For example, he discusses the humorous tone of the stories, regarding "the Rabelaisian, Aristophanesque element" in The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, for example, "not as accidental and secondary, but as primary and essential"; he sees it as Dionysiac (180). Nutt discusses the cyclical and episodic nature of Irish narrative (192) as well as the euhemerization that pervades Irish myth (cf. 196). Equally important is Nutt's emphasis on the mythic nature of Irish literary tradition, a contention that may shed light on Joyce's own purposes for using narrative structured by myth:

We may again find in Greece at once a parallel and a contrast to the development of mythic literature in Ireland. Down to a certain period, alike the substance and the animating spirit of Greek literature are almost wholly drawn from the mythology, and down to that period the literature is national, accessible to, shared in, and understanded [sic ] of all. . . . In Ireland there is nothing corresponding to the great break at the close of the fifth century B.C. between the Greek thinker and artist and the traditional mythology; the Irish man of letters never outgrew his archaic ideal. (202–3)

As even this brief discussion illustrates, The Voyage of Bran represents the nexus of several essential elements in Ulysses: the outlines of the Irish otherworld (including its free sexual mores), the theme of metempsychosis, the juxtaposition of Greek and Irish myth, a delineation of the humor in Irish myth, the humanization of the otherworld and the euhemerization of myth, and the validation of mythos as a vehicle of national unity. It seems likely that Joyce became acquainted with the study before he left Ireland in 1904, but it is difficult to document that Joyce actually read Nutt's essays

and Meyer's translations of the early Irish texts pertaining to the otherworld and metempsychosis. It is probable nonetheless that Joyce had read these volumes and been influenced by them, as the textual parallels with Ulysses are so extensive that they suggest Joyce had a more detailed knowledge of the volumes than the retailing of these texts in conversation and popular culture would have provided. Though The Voyage of Bran was not available in Zurich, it was to be found in Paris, where Joyce wrote the last episode of Ulysses, which shows the closest affinities to Meyer's publication; it is possible that Joyce reviewed the book at that time.

Táin Bó Cúailnge

Close parallels between Táin Bó Cúailnge and Ulysses make it virtually certain that Joyce had read a version of this tale by the time he was writing Ulysses. As one of the longest of the early Irish narratives and the one most often—and most easily—compared to other European epics, it was an important tale for Irish cultural nationalists; thus, even without the textual evidence in Joyce's work, there would be prima facie reason to believe that he was familiar with the story. Although it is easy to identify popular refractions of the tale that Joyce knew, such as the version in Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne, there is reason to believe Joyce had read a version of the story in an extended or scholarly translation.

The elements of the tale that are most important for Ulysses have already been discussed in the earlier chapters. The "Pillow-talk" introduction to the version of Táin Bó Cúailnge in the Book of Leinster offers a perspective on Leopold Bloom's qualities as husband and hero, and his lack of jealousy is appropriately compared with the same quality in Ailill, Medb's spouse, in that story. Medb's imperious actions in Táin Bó Cúailnge and her sexual, dominating nature set a context for evaluating Molly's characteristics, lifting Joyce's portrait out of the realistic and personal realms and giving it a mythic and cultural context. Medb is in many ways the prototype of the Sovereignty figures found in early Irish literature, and her urination in Táin Bó Cúailnge, particularly in the final scenes, is the mythic model for Molly's own release of waters.

This early Irish story is also used extensively in Finnegans Wake: Kelleher has argued that "the single heroic tale that is most extensively employed in the Wake is an episode from the Táin Bó Cúailnge," the fight between CuChulainn and his foster brother FerDiad ("Identifying the

Irish Printed Sources" 170). The tale provides the architectonics for the fight between two brothers that runs through much of Finnegans Wake, the conflict between Shem and Shaun in all their various personae; the medieval story is a paradigm of "the high tragedy of the hero who must, in order to fulfil his duty and save his own people, fight and kill the friend dearest to his heart and who therefore fights reluctantly and wins with sorrow" (Kelleher, "Identifying the Irish Printed Sources" 172). Even in the early Irish tale, the pattern of a fight between brothers appears in a trifold repetition. It is obvious why Joyce picks up this element in his own history of Ireland, for internecine warfare and betrayal are the leitmotifs of Irish history, and these are in fact the very reasons that this central episode of Táin Bó Cúailnge became a lasting part of Irish oral tradition, surviving to the present century. Kelleher details the shapeshifting that Joyce's heroes undergo as they play out their conflict, taking such forms as Buckley and the Russian general, Butt and Taff; and he argues as well that CuChulainn's secret weapon, the gaí bulga, also makes many metamorphic appearances in Joyce's text (172–75).

In settling on a source for Joyce's use of Táin Bó Cúailnge in Finnegans Wake, Kelleher argues that Joyce needed a version of the text that included an episode (the Dolb and Indolb scene) that forms a triplet of battling pairs and that occurs only in two late manuscripts; thus, he indicates that refractions such as that of Gregory are not sufficient, for they do not include the action in question. He suggests that Joyce used Joseph Dunn's 1914 English version, The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Táin Bó Cúalnge, which, though based on the Book of Leinster text, supplements that version with episodes from other manuscripts. The problem with this suggestion is twofold: first, there is no evidence that Joyce had access to this publication on the Continent; second, Dunn's version, like all the English translations of Táin Bó Cúailnge, mutes some of the elements of the early Irish text that have important affinities to Joyce's own works, namely the sexual, scatological, grotesque, and humorous facets of Táin Bó Cúailnge (Tymoczko, "Translating the Old Irish Epic"; "Strategies"; "Translating the Humour").

The presupposition behind Kelleher's suggestion is that Joyce was limited to consulting an English translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge, though in suggesting that Joyce used other German materials for Finnegans Wake (174–75), Kelleher clearly acknowledges that Joyce's German was more than up to the task of using a German version. The question of Joyce's

source for Táin Bó Cúailnge becomes much more interesting when we allow for the possibility that Joyce depended on French and German translations, which were not constrained by the demands of Irish cultural nationalism and hence were much more able to provide Joyce a view of Irish tradition congenial to his tastes, values, and interests. If we look to publications in languages other than English, a more plausible text for Joyce to have depended on than Dunn's translation is Ernst Windisch's 1905 edition of the Book of Leinster version of Táin Bó Cúailnge, published with German translation as a supplementary volume to the series Irische Texte and entitled Die altirische Heldensage Táin Bó Cúalnge nach dem Buch von Leinster, in Text und Uebersetzung mit einer Einleitung.

Windisch's text is based on the Book of Leinster manuscript, which gives the "Pillow-talk" introduction to the story, yet it also includes all the variants from the eighth-century version of the story preserved in the Book of the Dun Cow as well as variants from later manuscript versions of the tale; thus, it contains the fights by three sets of brothers (550–63), which Joyce used in Finnegans Wake, as well as all the humorous and sexual elements of Táin Bó Cúailnge that have left traces in Ulysses. Windisch's edition of Táin Bó Cúailnge was in fact the most complete available in any language at the period, and his translation, like those of P. W. Joyce, reflects adequately the formal qualities of early Irish narrative, including variations in prose and poetry, alternations in register and tone, and the like, as well as the details of the contents, unconstrained by censure from Irish nationalism. Not only does Windisch's text provide the content needed for Joyce's use of Táin Bó Cúailnge in Finnegans Wake, but it also acts as an excellent template for an understanding of early Irish narrative as a whole, providing Joyce the materials excised from most versions circulated in Ireland at the turn of the century. The great advantage of seeing Windisch as Joyce's source for his knowledge of Táin Bó Cúailnge is that there is also clear evidence that Joyce had access to the volume: it was part of the collection in Zurich's Zentralbibliothek, where Joyce worked daily while he was writing the bulk of Ulysses, but Dunn's version of the Táin was not.

Summary

It would be easy to continue this survey of publications on early Irish history and literature that contributed either directly or indirectly to

Joyce's treatment of the Irish materials in his narratives. Although in some cases we have as evidence that he read certain books only implicit similarities between his works and the monographs in question, it is also difficult to rule out most literature on the topic; and the range of materials canvassed in oral culture and in popular digests, to which Joyce was therefore exposed at second hand, is very wide indeed. The publications surveyed above, therefore, do not in any way exhaust the scholarly materials that lie behind Joyce's use of Irish myth in Ulysses. It is, for example, probable that at certain points in his life he had read some of the more scholarly publications devoted to early Irish history and literature: journals such as Revue celtique and Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, the early publications of Eugene O'Curry and John O'Donovan, the editions of the indefatigable Whitley Stokes, or the work of such German philologists as Ernst Windisch. Joyce's mythic method makes tracing the particulars of his reading difficult and in fact superfluous: though he might have gone on to read the edition and translation of The Midnight Court published in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie in 1905, his exposure to the outlines of the text in the detailed summary carried by Dana would have sufficed for the subtext from Merriman in the Nighttown episode of Ulysses.

The books surveyed here represent central materials that inform Joyce's work: they do not simply contribute to his knowledge of the particulars of Irish tradition; they shape his understanding of and perspective on the traditional history and literature of his country. I have chosen to focus on materials that bring together text and criticism in order to account not only for the surfacing in Ulysses of motifs from early Irish history and literature but also for Joyce's own vision of those materials, an outlook that distinguishes his work from that of other writers of the Irish literary revival, even as his enterprise of using early Irish history, literature, and myth continues the program of Irish cultural nationalism in the early decades of the twentieth century.

iii. Ideas in General Circulation from Monographs

Many of the ideas in general circulation in the popular press, discussed in the last chapter, are also to be found in books related to early Irish literature that Joyce may have consulted. Indeed, in many cases the dis-

cussions in the popular press are outgrowths of ideas put forward in the first instance in books or in scholarly publications. Thus, for example, the comparisons of Greek and Irish myth, literature, and culture found in the periodicals surveyed in the last chapter have many counterparts in book-length studies, including the works of d'Arbois de Jubainville, which return again and again to the topic, and Meyer's Voyage of Bran, particularly in Nutt's essays on metempsychosis and the happy otherworld. Another early and important discussion of the question is Alfred Nutt's 1900 publication entitled Cuchulainn, the Irish Achilles, which predicates CuChulainn as the Irish parallel to the Greek hero and sets a pattern for the reclamation of early Irish heroism by Irish cultural and military nationalism. Nutt's study of CuChulainn is cited repeatedly by later writers, and his ideas come to be the common coin of the movement. Such examples could be multiplied, but it is clear enough that Joyce's conflation of Irish and Greek myth in Ulysses has a larger context in Irish intellectual history, as indicated by both the popular press and more scholarly discussions.

Monographs are even more detailed about the relation of the Irish to various other cultures than the popular press can be. Thus, for example, the theory of the Spanish origin of Irish culture was discussed by many of the historians, as well as by literary historians such as d'Arbois de Jubainville; as early as 1861 Eugene O'Curry referred to the Milesian conquest of Ireland as a "Spanish colonization" (446). In the same way, the impetus to localism discussed in the last chapter was fueled by material published in book-length studies. Knowledge of Irish sites and localities, as well as of Irish topography, rested upon the Ordnance Survey in the first instance as well as upon P. W. Joyce's many publications related to placelore and toponymy. In the sphere of scholarly publications interest in the topic is reflected also in Edmund Hogan's 1910 publication entitled Onomasticon Goedelicum locorum et tribuum Hiberniae et Scotiae and in the publication of the metrical dindsenchas^[*] by Edward Gwynn in the Todd Lecture Series. In the critical literature the topographical element in Irish literature is discussed in such sources as Eleanor Hull's Text Book of Irish Literature (1: 101ff.).^[17] Though in general there is a great deal of

[17] Although there is no evidence that Joyce knew Hull's Text Book, her work is a very convenient summary of received knowledge at the period she was writing. The book had been reviewed favorably and recommended by Sinn Féin (1 Dec. 1906), and it was brought out by David Nutt as part of his series of Celtic publications; thus, it would have had wide appeal in Ireland. Hull herself follows the work of P. W. Joyce. For all these reasons, then, her work is representative of the sort of material that would have influenced Joyce.

continuity between the ideas discussed in the popular press and the ideas developed in more scholarly publications, some of the intellectual context for Ulysses is best indicated by examples taken from monographs.

The Role of the Irish Fili

In a famous lecture to the Irish Literary Society entitled "Irish Literature: Its Origin, Environment, and Influence," George Sigerson had said, "If our nation is to live, it must live by the energy of intellect. . . . Whilst wealth of thought is a country's treasure, literature is its articulate voice" (114). Published in 1894 along with Douglas Hyde's speech "The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland" and two lectures by Charles Gavan Duffy calling on Irishmen to write books, Sigerson's lecture helped to set the tone and program for the Irish literary revival. The search for a way to write books that would both help the nation live and at the same time de-anglicize Ireland inevitably turned attention to the early Irish fili, the native practitioner of Irish literature. A considerable amount of information was available about the role and nature of the fili, and this information was promulgated in scholarly, literary, and popular contexts. Thus, for example, in Introduction à l'étude de la littérature celtique, the first volume of the Cours de littérature celtique, d'Arbois de Jubainville had included nine chapters on the poets, principally the poets in Ireland. Various roles and functions of the poets in Ireland are discussed, including the functions of creating satire, telling stories, and passing judgment; the role of history, law, and divination in the poet's work is also presented. The grades, privileges, and schools of the poets are discussed, and information about the tale lists and genres of tales is provided. The book also contains five chapters on bards and eighteen chapters on druids.

This is just one of many discussions of the topic available at the time, albeit an early one. In his Social History of Ancient Ireland of 1903, which appeared during the time Joyce was studying Irish and involved in reading books about Irish literature, P. W. Joyce covered much the same ground as d'Arbois de Jubainville had, stressing the existence of lay schools, the long period of study required in bardic schools, and the im-

portance of annals, histories, genealogies, and placelore to the poet's work. The soothsaying and divination of the fili is presented. The book was discussed and recommended in the periodical literature of the time, as mentioned above; the contents would also have been circulated orally, at least in part. The material was summarized for the 1906 publication of P. W. Joyce's Smaller Social History of Ancient Ireland and distilled yet again in the 1907 Story of Ancient Irish Civilisation. Eleanor Hull, who indicates her indebtedness to P. W. Joyce, devotes two chapters to the poets and the druids in her 1904 Pagan Ireland , stressing the knowledge of the future that both classes of learned men were to possess. She also has chapters on the poets and the bards in her Text Book of Irish Literature, where she states that

the file is, in fact, the spiritual leader of the people; at once their Law-giver, Magician, and Man of Wisdom. . . . His poetic gifts. . . were exercised rather in uttering charms and incantations than in composing poetry for amusement; or else in putting into use the terrible faculty for satire. . . . In addition, the laws, genealogies, records of the tribes, and other matters belonging to the kingdom, were guarded and recited by the file. (1: 181–82)

She discusses the topographical, genealogical, and historical content the poets were to master, as well as the ancient esoteric bardic language. In George Sigerson's Bards of the Gael and Gall , which also received wide attention, many of the same points are covered. The list of books presenting information about the filid could be extended, but the essential point is that such information was widespread in Ireland at the turn of the century, and it is alluded to as well in the popular press.

Not only was the fili discussed in scholarly and popularized sources, but the writers of the Irish literary revival had assimilated many of the concepts pertaining to the fili and had made them their own. The mysticism of such figures as Yeats and A. E. was shaped in part by the knowledge of the visionary role of the Irish fili, and to some extent each models his role as poet on that earlier pattern. Yeats spells out his mystic revelations in A Vision; A. E. is an apologist for the poet's being a seer, having visions, and using dreams in The Candle of Vision, and he details one of his own visions in The Avatars. Although these latter works cannot be the source of similar ideas in Ulysses, since they either appear after Ulysses or are too late to have made much impact on its overall structure, the same conceptions can be traced implicitly and explicitly in the earlier

works of Yeats and A. E.; the convergence of their thought illustrates the currency of such ideas in Ireland at this period among the writers using English as their literary language.

Irish Formalism

However much disagreement there was about the nature of a national Irish literature in English, there was widespread understanding at the turn of the century that formalism was characteristic of the early Irish literary tradition. Book after book, article after article stressed this point to the general and scholarly reader alike. It was widely known that Ireland had been one of the seats of learning in Europe during the early Middle Ages, and it was understood that during this period Ireland had cultivated literature to a great degree. Calling Ireland "the Mother of Literatures," Sigerson was a proponent of the position that Ireland's literary interests in turn initiated much of European literary development (Bards of the Gael and Gall 107).

There are many allusions in the popular press to the complexity of Irish meters listed and exemplified in the early Irish metrical tracts, many of which had either been discussed or published by 1912.^[18] These scholarly editions and commentaries had in turn been digested in more general publications; there are, for example, descriptions of the Irish syllabic meters in Eleanor Hull's Text Book (1: 234–37; cf. Sigerson, "Irish Literature" 72ff., and Hyde, Gaelic Literature 173–74, quoted in U 9. 96–99). In his Smaller Social History P. W. Joyce summarized the metrical complexity as follows: "The classification and the laws of Irish versification were probably the most complicated that were ever invented: indicating on the part of the ancient Irish people, both learned and unlearned, a delicate appreciation of harmonious combinations of sounds" (215). Johann Caspar Zeuss and his followers had claimed that rhyme was an invention of the Old Irish poets, and this view was promulgated by Sigerson and other writers, including P.W.Joyce.^[19] It became a topos of nationalist literary history to stress the intricacies of Irish rhyme (e.g., Sigerson, "Irish Literature" 75–78). Moreover, P. W. Joyce claimed that "rhyme

[18] See Best, Bibliography (1913) 52–54.

[19] See Sigerson, "Irish Literature" 77ff., and P. W. Joyce, Smaller Social History 215. Cf. E. Hull, Text Book 1: 219–37.

was brought to far greater perfection in Irish than in any other language" (Smaller Social History 216), and Sigerson generalized that the Irish had sharper sound discrimination than most peoples ("Irish Literature" 77ff.). Sigerson also compared the Irish grace in poetry to the intricacy of the Book of Kells; it was essential to learn Irish, for it was agreed that the metrical complexity of Irish verse could not be reproduced in English translation (Bards of the Gael and Gall 23), a point that Douglas Hyde took up in his Love Songs of Connacht (iv).^[20]

Irish poetry was seen as difficult not only because of its metrical intricacy but also because of its deliberate obscurity. The arcane language of the poets had been discussed in various publications, including Eleanor Hull's Text Book (1: 184). Elsewhere we find descriptions of the most archaic Irish poetry, the passages of obscure poetry called rosc. Sigerson analyzes rosc as rhythmical though unrhymed verse designed to express or to stir up vehement enthusiasm and claims it is the first example of blank verse (Bards of the Gael and Gall 25); Hull characterizes rosc as a declamatory, alliterative blank verse where changes of meter correspond to changes of idea (Text Book 1: 202–4).

The formal intricacy of the early Irish narratives is discussed by many authors. The system of narrative prose interspersed with poetry is delineated, and various authors attempt to give a systematic account of the formal variation. As early as 1894 P. W. Joyce had taken the following position on the mixture of forms:

In many of the prose tales the leading characters are often made to express themselves in verse, or some striking incident of the story is repeated in a poetical form. Not unfrequently the fragments of verse introduced into a prose tale are quotations from an older poetical version of the same tale; and hence it often happens that while the prose may be plain enough, the poetry is often archaic and obscure. (Old Celtic Romances iv–v)

Later Eleanor Hull explained that the poems frequently take "the form of dialogue" and that they are "fitly introduced at points of special pathos or passion" (Text Book 1: 219). These and other discussions of the mixed prose and poetry came to be repeated in popular periodicals as well.

[20] Note that Hyde's book is mentioned in Ulysses in the library episode (9.93–94), and Joyce owned it in 1920 (Ellmann, Consciousness of Joyce 113; Gillespie #226 The impact of Hyde's volume is beyond the scope of this discussion, spawning as it did the Anglo-Irish idiom and having a tremendous influence on most of the major writers of the Irish literary revival.

Irish prose stylistics was also discussed. In lecturing about early Irish literature, Sigerson had cautioned against the assumption that there was one Irish style: "As in other countries, there were not one but many styles, differing with the subject, the writer, and the age" ("Irish Literature" 71). Eleanor Hull analyzed three levels of style in the prose tales: a roughhewn, abrupt style in the archaic tales of the early period; a more elaborated style of the tales from the eighth to tenth centuries; and a tedious alliterative style of the narratives from the eleventh and succeeding centuries (Text Book 1: 94–95). Yet P. W. Joyce could generalize about the earlier prose narratives and pick a translation strategy accordingly: "The originals are in general simple in style; and I have done my best to render them into simple, plain, homely English" (Old Celtic Romances vii).

This sampling of contemporary views on the formal properties of Irish literature indicates that many of the features of Irish literature that have here been traced in Ulysses were explicitly acknowledged in the cultural milieu that formed Joyce. The awareness of and pride in Irish formalism are a backdrop for the formalism in both Yeats's poetry and Joyce's prose, and their common emphasis of the formal aspects of literature must be seen as in part an outgrowth of the way in which each positioned himself as a writer of Irish literature in English.^[21]

The Tone of Irish Narrative

One of the explosive issues related to the reclamation of early Irish literature for the purposes of cultural nationalism was the dissonance between the content of the literature and the proprieties of late Victorianism. This issue was debated hotly in public lectures, and reflections of the public discussion are found both in the popular press and also in positions taken in the monographs of the time. Because the moral purity of the Irish had become a central tenet of Irish nationalism (cf. W. Thompson 10ff.), the reception of the sexual and moral aspects of early Irish literature and culture was particularly charged. The way in which these issues filtered into general cultural life in Ireland in Joyce's youth is captured in the discussion between Stephen and Madden in Stephen Hero

[21] Later Irish writers such as Austin Clarke and Flann O'Brien go even further in the direction of transposing Irish metrics or formal characteristics into English writing.

about the moral quality of the Irish peasant compared with that of the English city dweller; Madden's final defense of the Irish is that the Irish peasants "are noted for at least one virtue all the world over," to which Stephen retorts that they are chaste only "because they can do it by hand" (55). The irony of elevating the Irish because of their sexual purity is taken up again in A Portrait of the Artist when Davin tells Stephen about his encounter with a peasant woman who, half undressed when he knocks at her cottage door, invites him to stay the night as her husband is away; for Stephen "the figure of the woman in the story stood forth . . . as a type of her race and his own . . . a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed" (182–83). Here Stephen turns the moral platitudes of Irish nationalism on their head: it is natural sexual freedom, not chastity, that epitomizes the race.

Such women are found aplenty in the early literature, and although Joyce was comfortable with these mores, his views were not shared by many. In a public lecture Robert Atkinson had charged early Irish literature with being indecorous and unsavory, a charge that was reported and discussed widely in the press. Many of the popular periodicals followed up on the issues raised by Atkinson, and Kuno Meyer took up the job of defending the literature from Atkinson's charges. Among others, the Irish Catholic covered the controversy, citing at length a lecture by Meyer on 5 April 1902:

The stream of Irish literature ran deep and broad, and if in its course it carried along with it some earthy matter, such slight admixture did not affect the general purity of its waters, from which none need hesitate to drink deeply. The literature of no nation was free from occasional grossness, and considering the great antiquity of Irish literature and the primitive line which it reflected, what would strike an impartial observer was not its license or coarseness, but rather the noble, lofty, and tender spirit which pervaded it.

The article continues, "The testimony of a scholar of Dr. Meyer's attainments far outweighs the allegations of the Atkinsons and their ilk."

The issues were taken up in book-length studies also. Thus, for example, P. W. Joyce summarizes in his Smaller Social History:

As to the general moral tone of the ancient Irish tales, it is to be observed that in all early literatures, Irish among the rest, there is much plain speaking of a character that would now be considered coarse, and would not be tolerated in our present social and domestic life. But on the score of morality

and purity the Irish tales can compare favourably with the corresponding literature of other countries; and they are much freer from objectionable matter than the works of many of those early English and continental authors which are now regarded as classics. (237)

P. W. Joyce's tactic here, like that of Meyer, is a clever one; indeed, he is correct that there is nothing more scandalous in Irish literature than in Chaucer or the French fabliaux, to name examples that immediately come to mind; it is an argumentative strategy that James Joyce would have appreciated. In his even shorter treatment of Irish culture in The Story of Ancient Irish Civilization, P. W. Joyce quotes Whitley Stokes and Kuno Meyer justifying the moral tone of the tales, particularly considering their context and antiquity (80–82). It is not that P. W. Joyce denies the sexual content or the grotesque in the stories, but merely that, like Meyer, he claims this material has a larger context in which the functions of the fili dominate; a not dissimilar argument was made in the 1933 Woolsey decision rejecting the charges of pornography made against Ulysses (JJ 2 666–67).

In her treatment of the same subject Eleanor Hull takes a slightly more anthropological view. After saying that the artificial tone and highly wrought manners and moralities of Arthurian literature are absent from the early Irish tales, she continues:"We see the champions as we can actually conceive them to have lived in an early pre-Christian age. Their barbarities are described without a shade of disgust; their chivalries are the outcome of a natural fairness and fineness of mind, and are not the product of a courtly attention to an exterior code of morals" (Text Book 1: 90). She concludes that the tales are purely and frankly pagan.

In addition to defending the early Irish tales from attacks on their moral character, books on early Irish literature try to define the special characteristics that distinguish the literature. Hull (Text Book 1: 92), for example, characterizes the stories as having a dramatic quality, and in her view the variation in the stylistics is an essential element in their dramatic quality. Hull's assessment of the texts includes a catalogue of their weaknesses: the tales, she says, are often "wandering and wild"; they "abound in repetitions and exaggerations"; their "sense of proportion and balance" is often obscured by minute descriptions (Text Book 1: 96). Finally, critical studies acknowledge the humor of the early literature. Although some writers are at pains to reject the humor—seeing it, for example, as a late addition by Christian scribes (Henderson, introduction), others de-

fend the humor. Hull is one of the latter; she discusses the humor of the Ulster Cycle in general and Táin Bó Cúailnge in particular (Text Book 1: 48–51) and concludes: "Connected with this dramatic quality, and largely contributing to it, is the strong sense of humour observable in the tales. . . . Everywhere [the humour] lightens and relieves the tedium of the recital. This quality is especially Irish; the Arthurian romance is deficient in humour, hence a certain monotony of repetition which is conspicuously absent from the Irish tales" (Text Book 1: 92–93). Nutt's validation of the humor in the stories has already been considered, including his comparison of this facet of Irish literature with Dionysiac aspects of Greek literature.

All of these features of the tone of early Irish literature, an understanding of which became part of the cultural debate in Ireland at the turn of the century, clearly relate to the tone of Ulysses . Some readers—including perhaps James Joyce—might have considered that Irish literature had the virtues of its defects.

The Position of Women in Early Irish Literature

The status of women in pre-Christian and precolonial Ireland was topical at the turn of the century in Ireland, in part because of the wave of feminism in the British Isles associated with the drive for women's suffrage and in part because of the generalized interest in social reform that was ancillary to the mounting desire for national independence in Ireland.^[22] In popular culture the manifestation of this interest was manifold. A series of lectures on early Irish historical and legendary women was sponsored by Inghinidhe na hÉireann, the women's organization associated with Cumann na nGaedhael. The lectures, which covered Saint Brigit, Macha, Medb, Gráinne Ní Mháille, and Emer, were summarized or even given in extenso in the periodical literature, notably the United Irishman .^[23] In these lectures Irish women were represented as having a high estate, being independent and often aggressive, having the choice of a spouse, and being able to divorce. Some of the character of this discourse

[22] See B. Scott, esp. 1—54. Periodicals such as the United Irishman also carried occasional articles discussing the desideratum of freeing women as the nationalist movement freed Ireland.

[23] See accounts of these speeches in the United Irishman 8 Dec. 1900, 5 Jan. 1901, 5 Oct. 1901, 23 Nov. 1901, and 11 Oct. 1902/1 Nov. 1902, respectively.

was probably influenced by Maud Gonne, a liberated woman par excellence for the period. Gonne delivered a lecture on Medb that stressed Medb's warlike nature and sexual liberation, traits that Gonne herself reified and that she generalized to all early Irish women. It is typical of the atmosphere of the time that Gonne played the title role in the first series of performances of Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan.

In more scholarly publications and monographs, the same views are projected about women, and the general belief was that Ireland's women had a strong social position. P. W. Joyce maintained that in most respects women were on a level with men (see, e.g., Smaller Social History 284), and such authors as Eleanor Hull and Alice Stopford Green concurred. Hull devotes an entire chapter of her Pagan Ireland to the position of women, maintaining that women took an active part in warfare, that they were nurses and doctors, that they were proud and formidable in words as well as deeds. Her summary of the position of women in A Text Book of Irish Literature represents views known and shared by nationalists at the time:

The Irish women belong to an heroic type. They are often the counsellors of their husbands and the champions of their cause; occasionally, as in Maeve's case, their masters. They are frequently fierce and vindictive, but they are also strong, forceful, and intelligent. In youth they possess often a charming gaiety; they are full of clever repartee and waywardness and have a delightful and careless self-confidence. (1: 78)

The position of Irish women was a nationalist point of pride; as Alice Stopford Green observed in 1912, "We are often told that the civilization of a people is marked by the place of its women: a rule by which the Irish stand high" (100).^[24] Views such as these underlie Synge's views about women in the Ulster Cycle: "Most of the moods and actions that are met with are more archaic than anything in the Homeric poems, yet a few features, such as the imperiousness and freedom of the women, seem to imply an intellectual advance beyond the period of Ulysses" ("Epic of Ulster" 368–69). One of the most important publications fueling this discourse was Heinrich Zimmer's "Der kulturgeschichtliche Hintergrund in

[24] These elements of Irish nationalism coalesced with views promulgated by Ferrero in which the relations of the sexes are an index to national temperament; cf. Manganiello (ch. 2) for a full discussion of Ferrero's influence on Joyce. The theme is explored both in "Two Gallants" and in Ulysses in rather different ways.

der Erzählungen der alten irischen Heldensage." Zimmer details the independence and assertiveness of the female characters in early Irish narratives, noting that their behavior is uncharacteristic of Aryan culture; he concludes that the Irish culture has sustained non-Aryan influences that have changed basic elements of the culture. These views Joyce would have found congenial with his theories of Ireland's mixed racial heritage and of Semitic affinities or influences; it is significant that Zimmer's treatise was part of the collection in Zurich's Zentralbibliothek.

The social position of women in these scholarly and popular analyses is to a large extent derived from the literary representation of females, including goddesses, and the role of mortal women in literature was connected in turn with the mythology as it was understood at the time.^[25] The importance of the goddesses in early Celtic literature is repeated over and over again, and conclusions are drawn from the myth about social roles. With such views widespread and in a sense normative, it is perhaps not surprising that historical women such as Maud Gonne and Constance Markiewicz were involved in militant action, and the dominant traits in Molly's character are completely in the literary tradition as it was understood at the time in popular and scholarly publications alike. Molly's sexual and personal assertiveness are to be read as positive features within the constructs of Irish nationalist views about women. Eleanor Hull's summary of Irish women could be a description of Molly, explaining many of her characteristics and actions, right down to her advocacy of Bloom to his boss (18. 510).

The Folding Over of Past and Present: The Coming of the Avatars

Hugh Kenner takes the view that "it was surely at the behest of talk in Dawson Chambers about metempsychosis . . . and by analogy with Maud Gonne as Helen returned that [Joyce] conceived Bloom as unwitting Ulysses" (Joyce's Voices 61). Though this may be a factor in the con-

[25] The hypotheses here are obviously questionable; it is not always possible to extrapolate from myth to social circumstance, as myth can act as compensatory gratification for a culture. See Preston, introduction. Early Irish literature is particularly complicated in these regards because most of the supernatural figures have been euhemerized and it is difficult to unravel the mythological from the historical; see Mac Cana, "Aspects of the Theme"; Tymoczko, "Unity and Duality."

struction of the mythic substructure of Ulysses , the matter is more complicated. In chapter 2 I argued that metempsychosis is the central feature from myth in Ulysses, linking, among other things, the major figures with the principal characters of the Odyssey and also with the mythic types of The Book of Invasions. Implicit in the structure of the book is that the Irish characters are avatars returned to earth; these avatars in turn fore-shadow possibilities for the new Irish state. Even this suggestion of Irish avatars returned to earth was in circulation in Ireland at the turn of the century. The idea is most clearly represented in the writings of the mystic A. E., notably in his Candle of Vision, published in 1918. In this book A. E. speaks of his own visions, and he says that only one vision of his has been prophetic, a vision of an avatar, a child of destiny (98–101). Speaking primarily of mantic roles, he says "the powers which were present to the ancestors are establishing again their dominion over the spirit" (151). The essays in this collection, based in part on ideas from Eastern religion, anticipate his 1933 publication The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy, in which the spiritual transfiguration of Ireland is envisioned as coming from the converse of human characters with the avatars of the otherworld.

Although The Avatars itself cannot have influenced Ulysses, it seems likely, particularly in view of A. E.'s essays in The Candle of Vision, that the ideas themselves had been in circulation before 1933. In his introduction to The Avatars A. E. writes somewhat apologetically of his book: "The Avatars has not the spiritual gaiety I desired for it. The friends with whom I once spoke of such things are dead or gone far from me. If they were with me, out of dream, vision and intuition shared between us, I might have made the narrative to glow. As it is, I have only been able to light my way with my own flickering lantern" (vii). These friends with whom he once spoke about such ideas would have included Yeats and Augusta Gregory (who by 1933 was dead); but it must be remembered that for years A. E.'s house was the gathering place of the Dublin literati and that "the friends with whom [he] once spoke of such things" formed a large circle. They may even have included Joyce, who by 1933 had gone far from George Russell.

Yeats, too, uses ideas close to these both in A Vision, where the great characters of Irish myth serve as prototypes of the various states of the soul, and also in such poems as "Crazy Jane on the Mountain":

Last night I lay on the mountain
(Said Crazy Jane)
There in a two horsed carriage
That on two wheels ran
Great bladdered Emer sat,
Her violent man
Cuchulain, sat at her side,
Thereupon,
Propped upon my two knees,
I kissed a stone;
I lay stretched out in the dirt
And I cried tears down.
 (Poems  582)

Here the idea is used somewhat bitterly and ironically, for it is the lack of the presence of the avatars on this earth that leads to Jane's lying down and crying, and it is the comparison between the greats of the past and the paltry minds and bodies of the present that Yeats uses to express his disenchantment with the "filthy modern tide."

In Ulysses Joyce's use of the avatars also has considerable irony from the viewpoint of A. E.'s vision, in which contact with the avatar results in mystical experiences and "a spiritual wonder" (Avatars 136). In Ulysses the avatars may result in renewal in Ireland, but the renewal is resolutely human, ordinary, physical, as well as moral and spiritual, though in directions far from the values of A. E. In this irony is encapsulated Joyce's relationship with the Anglo-Irish literary revival, for he has taken one of the ideas of the movement, followed through on it literally, and, because of his own values and perspectives, changed it utterly, giving a result that appears to subvert the original intent of the literary revival.

iv. Zurich

A fundamental question remains about Joyce's use of early Irish literature and history in Ulysses: was Joyce's knowledge of early Irish myth and literature acquired principally before he left Ireland in 1904, or did he deepen his understanding of Irish literature and history in significant ways after 1904? The question has implications for the way in which we perceive the early Irish elements in Ulysses: Joyce's mythic structures will

be interpreted quite differently if it is assumed, on the one hand, that he had access to texts and critical material about early Irish culture for verification of details and other purposes while he was writing Ulysses, or if it is assumed, on the other hand, that he relied almost exclusively on knowledge gained more than a decade earlier. Is the broad but schematized use of Irish myth in Joyce's work attributable primarily to his mythic method itself and thus comparable to his treatment of other mythologies in Ulysses, or is it attributable in a significant degree to Joyce's isolation from Irish myth after 1904, to his working largely from memories of texts, conversations, speeches, and the like, many years after the fact when those memories may themselves have become somewhat vague?

On the whole, evidence suggests that even after leaving Ireland, Joyce continued to deepen his knowledge of early Irish myth and literature. As noted above, he continued to receive the United Irishman and thereafter Sinn Féin for some years, and the educative function of these newspapers would have provided Joyce with materials during the years between 1904 and 1914. Moreover, Joyce would to some extent have been brought au courant with developments in the field of Irish literature during his visits to Ireland in 1909 and 1912. These were years when Kuno Meyer was director of the School of Irish Learning in Dublin and when he and others kept the topics of early Irish literature and myth in the domain of public discourse through lectures and statements in the popular press as well as through their teaching. The prestigious and scholarly Irish journal Ériu was making accessible many texts of early Irish literature.^[26] Anglo-Irish writers, including Yeats, also kept early Irish material in circulation; during the years between 1904 and 1912 Yeats produced two of his CuChulainn plays (On Baile's Strand and The Green Helmet ) as well as his Deirdre.

While Joyce was in Trieste, he used early Irish history and literature in several ways, notably for his Trieste lectures and also for the architectonics of "The Dead." In discussing Joyce's use of The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel in "The Dead," Kelleher takes up the possibility that Joyce called on his memory for his knowledge of Irish myth in that story:

[26] Ériu was begun in 1904; the early volumes were edited principally by Kuno Meyer in association with various other scholars including Carl Marstrander, Osborn Bergin, and R. I. Best, and the first two volumes were reviewed favorably in Dana.

It may rightly be objected that at the time Joyce was working on the story in Trieste his letters indicate that he had very few Irish books or maps with him. Moreover, he complained in a letter of 1906 that Dublin was already growing hazy in his memory. I doubt it ever really grew hazy. I doubt that his memory, particular and capacious as a bard's, ever relinquished anything once learned from books, from observation, or from his father whose knowledge of Dublin was as intimate and curious as his own. ("Irish History" 431)

Budgen also comments on Joyce's prodigious memory of written text (Making of "Ulysses" 176–77; cf. Power, From the Old Waterford House 66–67). If we take the position that Joyce, like the ancient Irish poets, was able to retain copious and detailed memories indefinitely, then his need to consult books to refresh and sharpen his understandings about early Irish matters is moot. This, however, is a large and ultimately unnecessary assumption.

It is clear that once located in Paris, a major center of Celtic studies where d'Arbois de Jubainville had been professor, Joyce would have had access to virtually any text or critical book on early Irish literature that he cared to work with, but by the time he was in Paris the broad mythic structures linking Ulysses to early Irish literature had been set. It is precisely during the period that Ulysses was taking shape in Zurich, therefore, that Joyce would have consulted Irish mythic materials to greatest effect, for he arrived in Zurich in June 1915, just as he was beginning on the third episode, and he left in October 1919 as he was about to begin "Nausicaa" (JJ 2 383, 469, 473).

Though in Trieste, as Kelleher points out, Joyce had access to few Irish books, necessitating requests to his Aunt Josephine for Irish materials, in Zurich Joyce found a different set of resources, extensive materials that make it unnecessary to suppose that Joyce was dependent on either his personal library or his memory of texts read long since for his use of Irish myth in Ulysses. Joyce worked almost daily, as is well known, in the Zentralbibliothek, a library formed when voters of the canton and city determined in 1914 to merge the relatively recent Kantonsbibliothek (founded 1835) with the older Stadtbibliothek (founded 1629). The former, housed in the Predigerchor, served also as the library of the University of Zurich. Though the Zentralbibliothek existed on paper from 1914, it was only in March 1917 that the new construction for the joint facilities was opened; until that date Joyce would have used the several reading rooms of the original foundations.

German philology was at its height during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, and German philologists were at the forefront of Celtic studies, partly in virtue of the fact that Celtic languages and Celtic evidence are central to the enterprises of comparative philology and to the construction of the Indo-European hypothesis. The University of Zurich had an excellent faculty with philological interests. Not surprisingly, then, since it served the research needs of the university and a public interested in philological questions, the Zentralbibliothek in Joyce's day had a small but distinguished Celtic collection to which Joyce as reader had ready access. Examination of the collection of the Zentralbibliothek indicates that even had Joyce known nothing of early Irish literature and culture before he went to Zurich in 1915, he would have found in the Zentralbibliothek all the source texts required to furnish the Irish architectonics in Ulysses discussed above.

The library subscribed to the major scholarly journals of the period, including Revue celtique (1870–1934). The library received as well several series, among them the Todd Lecture Series and the series of texts edited by Whitley Stokes and Ernst Windisch under the title Irische Texte mit Uebersetzungen und Wörterbuch, which had as a supplementary volume Windisch's 1905 edition and translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge. The holdings included the entire run of d'Arbois de Jubainville's Cours de littérature celtique. These series and periodicals form the backbone of the Zurich collection of Celtic publications (as they do of any collection of early Celtic materials, for that matter) and provide most of the materials needed for the study of early Irish literature.^[27]

Joyce found an extensive collection of monographs on early Irish language and literature in the Zentralbibliothek as well. The German scholars are, not surprisingly, best represented. Philological texts included J. K. Zeuss, Grammatica Celtica (2 vols., 1853 and 1871); publications by

[27] Not all the early publications on Irish history and literature currently in the Zentralbibliothek were part of the collection when Joyce was working on Ulysses. Gaps in the holdings were filled in during the 1940s and 1950s at the request of Julius Pokorny, then professor in Zurich. Thus, the library currently holds Ériu (1904–) as well as an incomplete run of Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie (1899–); R. I. Best's Bibliography of Irish Philology and Printed Irish Literature (1913) was apparently added to the collection in 1947–48 when Best's second bibliographical volume was purchased. I am indebted to Georg Bührer for clarifying accession dates here and elsewhere.

Heinrich Zimmer; philological works by Whitley Stokes, including his Three Irish Glossaries (1863); philological studies by d'Arbois de Jubainville, Joseph Vendryes (notably De hibernicis vocabulis quae a Latina lingua originem duxerunt, 1902), and Holger Pedersen, among others;^[28] John O'Donovan's Grammar of the Irish Language (1845); Ernst Windisch's Kurzgefasste Irische Grammatik (1879); early linguistic studies by Rudolf Thurneysen, including his Handbuch des Alt-Irischen (1909), which remains in its English translation (A Grammar of Old Irish, 1946) the standard grammar of Old Irish; and publications by Julius Pokorny. Significantly, the library also owned Charles Vallancey's Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language as well as his Grammar of the Iberno-Celtic or Irish Language .^[29]

In addition to the series of editions and texts listed above, literary publications included editions by Kuno Meyer, such as his publications on early Irish poetry, his Fenian text Cath Finntrága (1885), and his editions brought out by the Todd Lecture Series, which include The Triads of Ireland, The Instructions of Cormac Mac Airt, and the early Fenian texts in the volume Fianaigecht; Whitley Stokes's editions of religious literature, including Saltair na Rann (1883), The Calendar of Oengus (1880), and Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore (1890). The library also owned Thurneysen's Sagen aus dem alten Irland (1901); Carl Marstrander's Fleadh Dúin na nGéadh ocus Cath Muighe Ráth (1910); and Eleanor Hull's Poem-book of the Gael (1913). The library had purchased some Modern Irish materials, among them Edward Walsh's Irish Popular Songs with English Metrical Translations (1847).

Publications owned by the Zentralbibliothek on early Irish history and culture are extensive and too numerous to detail here. They include volumes in d'Arbois de Jubainville's twelve-volume Cours, Alexander Bugge's Contributions to the History of the Norsemen in Ireland (1900), the edition of the laws by John O'Donovan, and Zimmer's important study of the role of women in Irish literature, "Der kulturgeschichtliche

[28] Joyce's comments to Larbaud about the Latin borrowings in Irish may reflect a familiarity with Vendryes's work; see Letters 1: 217–18.

[29] The library currently owns James Midgley Clark's Vocabulary of Anglo-Irish (1917) as well as P. W. Joyce's English as We Speak It in Ireland (1910), both of which contain useful materials for an author representing characters who speak an Anglo-Irish dialect; however, these works were acquired only in the 1930s.

Hintergrund in den Erzählungen der alten irischen Heldensage." Many of the important collections and studies of placelore were represented in the collection when Joyce used the Zentralbibliothek. These works included the volumes of Edward Gwynn's publication of the dindsenchas^[*] in the Todd Lecture Series that appeared before 1919. P. W. Joyce's publications on placelore were also represented, with the first two volumes of his Origin and History of Irish Names of Places and two copies of Irish Local Names Explained as part of the collection.^[30]

The current author/title card catalogue of the Zentralbibliothek was begun in 1898 as a unified catalogue of various libraries in Zurich, principally the Kantonsbibliothek and the Stadtbibliothek; initially cataloguing the new acquisitions of the several libraries, it was funded by the canton but organized by the staff of the Stadtbibliothek. Only gradually did the card catalogue become a comprehensive listing of the holdings. For more than two decades, including the period when Joyce read in the library, it was used in conjunction with catalogues of the several institutions; these catalogues were kept in the form of volumes, like those of the catalogue of the British Library. The subject catalogue (Schlagwortkatalog ), a pioneering effort in Swiss library science, was organized in the first decade of the twentieth century originally for the Stadtbibliothek but soon encompassed the Kantonsbibliothek as well; following American practices, it was a card catalogue based on a system of subject categories developed under the guidance of the library director, Hermann Escher, who was interested in making the library more available to the nonspecialist but serious reader. In advance of its time in European libraries, this efficient system would have made it very easy for a reader like Joyce to identify and call for publications about Irish material owned by the library. During the period 1915–19, when Joyce was working in the library, there were subject entries under "Irische" and "Irland" as well as "Keltische" and "Kelten." These subjects were in turn subdivided; under "Irische," for example, there were such divisions as "Irische Sprache," and the subdivisions of "Irland" included "Flora," "Fauna," "Geschichte," and so forth. Joyce could also, of course, have looked for the publications of specific authors such as d'Arbois de Jubainville in the author/title catalogues.

[30] Volume 3 of Origin and History was acquired in 1954 at the instance of Pokorny.

The collection of Irish materials in Zurich is important as much for what it does not contain as what it does contain. Because the holdings were acquired to serve the interest in philology in the German culture area and at the University of Zurich in particular, the collection of Irish materials is strongest in early Irish language, literature, history, and culture rather than in Modern Irish materials or literature in Anglo-Irish, specifically the writings of the Anglo-Irish literary revival. In Ireland cultural nationalism embraced Old and Middle Irish, Modern Irish, and Anglo-Irish writings related to Irish material, but in Zurich the primary interest was in Old and Middle Irish language and literature, which are of greater significance than Modern Irish for the Indo-European hypothesis and comparative historical linguistics. In this regard the bibliographical emphasis in Zurich is very different from library collections of Irish materials that Joyce had used in Ireland. In Zurich Joyce found neither Douglas Hyde's publication of Modern Irish poetry, Love Songs of Connacht (1893), nor books by A. E.; these omissions would have been unlikely in an Irish library of comparable size.^[31]

The Zurich library also made available, not unnaturally, a different set of authors from those generally found in English-language libraries. German and French authors are best represented in the Zurich Irish collection, with the English authors primarily those working within the tradition of German philology. Thus, the library contains important books by such scholars as Zeuss, Zimmer, Windisch, Thurneysen, and d'Arbois de Jubainville; authors writing in English are more restricted, with Stokes and Meyer being notable exceptions that prove the rule. No Sigerson is to be found, and little P. W. Joyce.^[32]

The emphasis in the Zentralbibliothek was on scholarly publications rather than popular ones, in part because it is by statute a research library. The library has very few of the popularizations, retellings, and translations that were part of the program of Irish cultural nationalism. A striking example is the absence of Augusta Gregory's Cuchulain of

[31] The library later purchased A. E.'s Collected Poems (1920) and Douglas Hyde's Beside the Fire, but it contained nothing by either of these authors while Joyce was in Zurich during World War I.

[32] As noted above, some of P. W. Joyce's monographs were part of the Zurich collection, but it would appear that James Joyce knew this author primarily from his Irish days. P. W. Joyce's Social History of Ancient Ireland is part of the collection at present, but the library owns the third edition, issued in 1920; hence the book was not available to Joyce while he was working on Ulysses in Zurich.

Muirthemne, the book Yeats called in his preface "the best that has come out of Ireland in my time"; it is virtually inconceivable that an Irish library interested in the cultural revival would have failed to purchase this text.^[33] Critical texts and commentaries aimed at a more general audience are likewise missing: the library contains neither Eleanor Hull's Text Book nor Douglas Hyde's Literary History of Ireland, a book that likewise had great currency in Ireland. In Zurich, therefore, a more scholarly view of Irish myth, literature, and history was thrust upon Joyce, a view to which he had probably been exposed briefly during his stay in Paris in 1902–3; the philological framework for Irish studies stressed texts and translations rather than retellings and popular refractions. Though even scholarly sources at times omit some of the most sexually explicit passages of Irish literature, by and large the Irish materials available to Joyce in Zurich were the raw texts with very literal translations showing both the texture of the language and the formal properties of the narratives, as well as a relatively candid view of the contents.

An important and for Joyce probably fortunate gap in the Zurich holdings is the lack of any English-language translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge. The library later acquired John Strachan and J. G. O'Keeffe's "Táin Bó Cúailnge" from the Yellow Book of Lecan (1904–12) as a supplementary volume to Ériu, but it does not own the various truncated translations of the text by such people as Winifred Faraday. In particular, the library does not hold Joseph Dunn's 1914 translation. For Táin Bó Cúailnge Joyce would have had to rely on Ernst Windisch's comprehensive 1905 German edition and translation of the text, issued as a supplementary volume to the series Irische Texte and owned by the Zentralbibliothek, as noted earlier. Acquaintance with Windisch's text would have been a happy chance for Joyce, because in English-language translations Táin Bó Cúailnge was severely circumscribed and bowdlerized; since the text was presented as the national epic by nationalists, nothing offending nationalist sensibilities was tolerated in translation. Windisch, by contrast, is motivated by philological interests; his text is complete and the translation transposes the formal properties of the text, the humor,

[33] The Zentralbibliothek now owns the 1926 editions of Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men, acquired when the Anglo-Irish literary revival had become a literary phenomenon worth collecting in its own right.

the sexual and scatological aspects, the redundancies and absurdities. Insofar as Molly is reminiscent of Medb, she is closer to the Medb of Windisch's Táin Bó Cúailnge and translation than to the Medb of any English translation Joyce might have read.

The wealth of materials related to early Irish literature, history, and language in Zurich's Zentralbibliothek illustrates again the overdeterminacy of Joyce's knowledge of these subjects. He had become acquainted with materials related to Irish history and literature used in Ulysses before he left Ireland in 1904; in addition the publications he needed for his treatment of Irish myth in Ulysses —even the flamboyant texts and theories of Vallancey—were at hand in the libraries he used in Zurich.^[34] Moreover, though the Zurich collection of Irish materials is not, strictly speaking, essential as a repository of sources for the Irish myth in Ulysses, the affinities between the configuration of the Zentralbibliothek's Irish holdings and Joyce's treatment of Irish myth, which transcends the constraints of Irish nationalism, suggest that the library's collection influenced Joyce's thinking about his country's traditions. Because of both the composition of the collection of books pertaining to Celtic language and literature and the accessibility of that collection, in part by virtue of a superior catalogue system, few libraries in Europe and the British Isles would have been better than Zurich's Zentralbibliothek for Joyce to have pursued his interests in early Irish literature, history, and language.

v. Oral Sources in Zurich

In the previous chapter I stressed the importance of oral culture for Joyce's knowledge of Irish tradition. From his father's stories and placelore, to the circulation of ideas among students and Irish intellectuals, to his contacts with Synge and other figures of the Anglo-Irish revival, to his interchange with his brother Stanislaus, we can trace a steady flow of conversational information to James Joyce, some of which had central im-

[34] A major gap in the collection in the Zentralbibliothek is Meyer's Voyage of Bran. Joyce must have known this study either directly or through oral sources before he left Ireland in 1904. He would also have been able to consult it when he arrived in Paris in 1919, where the Celtic holdings were more extensive than those of Zurich and where he composed Molly's episode, in which the concept of the happy otherworld is refracted.

portance for his understanding of Irish literature, myth, and history. The influence of oral culture on Joyce did not cease when he went to Zurich.

Fritz Senn has illuminated the curious anachronism in Ulysses in which Haines credits "professor Pokorny of Vienna" with the view that Irish myth has no trace of hell (10.1076–85). As Senn has pointed out, in 1904 Julius Pokorny was seventeen, a student himself rather than professor ("No Trace of Hell"). Yet in fact Pokorny did hold these views, though they were not published until 1923, a year after Ulysses itself appeared in print. Pokorny himself believed that Joyce had either heard lectures Pokorny delivered in Ireland in 1912 or that Joyce had heard about the content of these lectures from a third party.

Yet all of this speculation overlooks the obvious: that Joyce was working on Ulysses for four years in a city which was part of the culture area dominated by German philology and in which ideas of scholars like Pokorny (who was teaching in nearby Vienna) were circulating. In the case of Pokorny's views about Irish myth cited in Ulysses, the conclusion seems inescapable that Joyce had learned of Pokorny's views through oral channels, but it may be more reasonable to suppose that Pokorny's views circulated in Zurich in the intellectual life that Joyce participated in at a critical time in his artistic growth, the very time when he was writing Ulysses, than to imagine that Joyce was dependent on contact with Ireland for those views.

At the very least, in Zurich Joyce would have become aware through oral channels of the difference in approach between German philological methods and the nationalist filter of Irish culture in Ireland. The anachronistic attribution of views about the Irish otherworld to Pokorny in Ulysses suggests that Joyce learned specifics as well as generalities about Pokorny's views on early Irish culture while he was in Zurich, either directly through lectures or written sources or indirectly through third parties. I am suggesting that the reference to Pokorny in Ulysses is Joyce's way of giving tribute to what he had learned of Irish literature and culture in his Zurich days as much as anything else; it is, of course, also a way of making Haines a fool. The details of what Joyce picked up through conversation in Zurich are irretrievable; but it is significant that in Haines's remark Pokorny is credited with views that indicate the early Irish were resolutely non-Christian—views Joyce would have taken up with some satisfaction.

vi. Conclusion

Compared to his contemporaries in Ireland, Joyce emerges as a person with substantial interests in the history and literature of Ireland. His interest in Irish as a language went beyond the rather pallid Gaelic League program, and it is clear from his acquisition of Irish dictionaries later in life that this interest in Irish persisted. His discernment related to Irish culture is indicated in his interest in and valuation of the writings of P. W. Joyce and others whose treatments of Irish literature, history, and culture are distinguished in comparison with the sentimentalized and circumscribed fare of the Irish cultural nationalists. The likelihood that Joyce used Windisch's edition and translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge, his unfavorable review of Augusta Gregory's Poets and Dreamers, his use of d'Arbois de Jubainville, as well as other evidence discussed above, all corroborate this supposition.

Although Joyce owned some key books about Irish history and literature, he did not depend on his personal library for his resources in this area during the time he was composing Ulysses. An analysis of the books he collected before 1920—his so-called Trieste library—indicates that only 4 percent of the books were related to Irish culture and history (Gillespie 17).^[35] Together with the slim evidence for the use of specific books on Irish history and literature, these data support the suggestion that Joyce's Irish architectonics and poetics result from his general knowledge gained in Ireland, from popular sources read in Ireland and abroad, and from library resources that he had at his disposal in Zurich and Paris.

Joyce was exposed to a very broad view of Irish culture during his lifetime. Raised in Ireland, he was introduced early in his life to many aspects of early Irish myth and literature, as well as to Modern Irish as a language and to Irish history. Initially these subjects were presented to him through the veil of cultural nationalism, and he learned of them largely through popularizations of various sorts, though he also undertook study of Irish as a language in a more serious way. As early as 1902, when Joyce went to Paris, he would have met with a different view of Celtic and Irish studies: a more scholarly view, but one influenced as well by French nationalisms and sep-

[35] Note, however, that a similar percentage of the library is in political science (3 percent) and the social sciences (2 percent), yet Manganiello has demonstrated the significant role that politics plays in Joyce's work and thought.

aratisms. This exposure to a different way of regarding early Irish material was probably reinforced for Joyce by his contact with J. M. Synge, who was himself sensible of the limitations of Irish nationalist refractions of the early texts. Later Joyce lived and worked in Zurich, manipulating Irish myth and literary texts as he wrote Ulysses in an environment where the German philological perspective on those same materials was dominant.

For Joyce these alternative perspectives on Irish tradition broke the stranglehold of parochial and proprietary Irish nationalism on Irish literature. Joyce's attitude toward Irish myth and his use of it in Ulysses show influences other than those of the Irish revival and reflect in part Continental views emphasizing a comparative Indo-European perspective. Although a comparative perspective was sometimes adopted by cultural nationalists—the Gael-and-Greek brief discussed above, for example—the method was for nationalists primarily a means of validating Irish culture and literature. The Continental philological tradition was more dispassionate about features of the tradition that violated dominant values, mores, and literary standards, using a comparative framework to situate Irish literature as a whole within the Indo-European tradition. The European context for Irish culture that Joyce met in both Paris and Zurich comes to fruition in Joyce's appreciation and use of Irish material in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, a use that is more extensive and more various than that of most of his contemporaries among the writers of the Anglo-Irish literary revival. Joyce is more able, as argued above, to transpose and reanimate, among other things, the humor, the sexuality, the ironies, the genres, and the formal properties of early Irish literature.

The comparative framework implicit in the program of German philology and historical linguistics, particularly in investigations of Indo-European culture and linguistics, to which Joyce was exposed in Zurich sets an intellectual context for Joyce's coordination of Greek, Irish, and other mythologies in Ulysses. A recognition of the implicit comparatism in Ulysses in turn illuminates ways in which Finnegans Wake is a logical extension of Joyce's earlier work. That Zurich and the Zentralbibliothek played an important role in Joyce's ability to see Irish tradition whole, to use Irish myth in ways that are less tainted and parochial than are those of his nationalist Irish contemporaries (including W. B. Yeats), can hardly be doubted. To these influences we also owe a partial debt for Joyce's brilliant experimentations with form in the second half of Ulysses as well as in Finnegans Wake.