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]