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.