ii. That Greekenhearted Yude : Hebrew and Greek in Ulysses

It is well known that Joyce subscribed to Victor Berard's theory of the Phoenician origin of the Odyssey, elaborated in Berard's two-volume

[20] Cf. Hyman 180–82.

[21] Joyce believed that anti-Semitism was a touchstone of bigotry; see the discussion in Manganiello 56.

publication, Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée (1902–3). Bérard maintains that the Odyssey is a Greek account of the wandering of a Phoenician merchant-adventurer, a Hellenized Phoenician tract on the geography of the Mediterranean world and on navigational instruction. Bérard's analysis includes a linguistic component, and he accounts for various names and words in the Odyssey by providing Semitic etymologies or loantransfers. About the Odyssey Bérard concludes: "The poem is obviously the work of a Hellene, while the 'log' is clearly the record of a Semitic traveller. The poet—Homer, if you will—was a Greek; the seafarer—Ulysses, as we know him—was Phoenician" (trans. Gilbert 82). Joyce probably became acquainted with Bérard's theories in Zurich while he was writing Ulysses (JJ 2 408), and they influenced his own manipulation of the Homeric parallels in Ulysses. It is thus Bérard's views on the Odyssey that Gilbert quotes again and again as he draws the parallels between Ulysses and the Homeric poem, for Bérard's metatext of the Odyssey was one of the main refractions of the Greek text that Joyce relied on in constructing Ulysses . In general critics have viewed Joyce's interest in Bérard as idiosyncratic, the sort of eccentricity that is tolerated in a great artist. According to the conventional interpretation of Joyce's mythic substructure in Ulysses , the value of Bérard's theory lies in its ability to provide a link between the Greek plot of Ulysses and Joyce's Semitic hero, for the Phoenicians, as Bérard indicates, were Semites. Bloom can be both Ulysses and a Wandering Jew under this construal of the Odyssey.^[22]

It is not generally recognized in Joyce scholarship that a theory similar to that of Bérard had also been proposed for the settlement of Ireland. ^[23] At the end of the eighteenth century, Charles Vallancey had claimed that the original explorers and settlers of Ireland were Phoenician and that the Irish language itself was to be derived from the Semitic language of the Phoenicians. Vallancey elaborated on these views in a series of publications including An Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language (1772), A Grammar of the Iberno-Celtic or Irish Language (1773), A Vindica-

[22] A summary of Bérard's views is found in Gilbert, esp. 76–84. For the argument that Ulysses is indebted to Bérard in rather thoroughgoing ways, see Seidel. See also Groden 75–94; Rose and O'Hanlon xxix-xxxi.

[23] Seidel (17) is an exception, but he fails to pursue the implications of the similarities between Vallancey's theories and those of Bérard for the construction of Ulysses .

tion of the Ancient History of Ireland (1786), and Prospectus of a Dictionary of the Language of the Aire Coti or Ancient Irish (1802). Though Vallancey's views of Ireland's settlement are extreme, Phoenician contact with Ireland may be historical, for it is generally agreed that Ptolemy's geography of Ireland derives from that of Marinus of Tyre and thus perhaps from Phoenician sources (Dillon and Chadwick 19). Vallancey's linguistic views about Irish are now considered quaint, but at the end of the eighteenth century the family group of the Celtic languages was still in doubt, largely because of the initial mutations in Celtic languages as well as the Irish word order; it was not yet widely agreed that Irish was Indo-European, and many people grouped Irish with the Semito-Hamitic (Afro-Asiatic) family of languages.^[24]

Vallancey's theories were therefore accepted widely in his day in Ireland, and they addressed various timely issues about Irish culture. In his works, particularly in his Vindication, Vallancey depends on material from the The Book of Invasions to construct his thesis about Phoenician exploration, and in the seventh chapter of this work, entitled "Phenian History," he actually attempts to correlate episodes in The Book of Invasions with the various episodes in the Odyssey, giving Irish etymologies or cognates in some cases for the names of the Homeric sites (e.g., Scylla and Charybdis); these arguments are to some extent anticipated by The Book of Invasions itself, where an episode parallels Ulysses's use of wax in the ears of his men as a means of resisting the Sirens (Macalister 2: 20–21, 2: 40–43; Macalister and MacNeill 206ff.). Vallancey's Prospectus opens with a brief argument that the Phenian (leg. Fenian, i.e., Irish) and Phoenician languages are related; the bulk of that work is a lexicon of Irish words, comparing their meanings with the meanings of supposed cognates from Hebrew, "Hindoostanee," Arabic, "Chaldee," and other languages. All of these arguments dovetail to a remarkable extent with those of Bérard. A reader today will dismiss Vallancey as fanciful, but he was a man of his time: a nascent (if wrongheaded) comparative philologist and a traditionalist in holding to the Mediterranean theory of the origin of Western culture. It is worth noting that ideas not unrelated to those of Vallancey and Bérard have recently been revived by Martin Ber-

[24] For a brief history of the controversy about the linguistic affiliations of Irish and the development of the argument that Irish is an Indo-European language, see Dillon, "Archaism of Irish Tradition" 1–2, and Aitchison 27–28, as well as references cited by these authors.

nal in his Black Athena , in which he argues that the intellectual hegemony of the Indo-European proposition has led to the denial and suppression of evidence that points to the debt of Greek culture to the cultures of the Mediterranean world, to the Egyptians and the Phoenicians in particular. The popularity of Vallancey's ideas in Ireland throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth may be attributed to the valorization of Irish culture that results from an antiquity greater than the classical civilization of Greece; the theory was also attractive as a means of euhemerizing and rationalizing the traditional pseudohistory of Ireland.

To have been aware of Vallancey's theories in Ireland at the turn of the century, it was no more necessary to have read Vallancey's publications than at present it is necessary for a literary critic to have read Derrida in order to know something about deconstruction. Vallancey's theories had been taken up in various general histories of Ireland in the nineteenth century, and they were still current during Joyce's youth in Ireland, even at times discussed in the popular press (e.g., All Ireland Review 30 Mar. 1901). Joyce cites Vallancey by name in his 1907 Trieste lecture entitled "Ireland, Island of Saints" (CW 156), and he held views deriving from those of Vallancey, for in the same lecture Joyce takes the position that Irish is an outgrowth of Phoenician,^[25] that the Greeks learned about the Irish from the Phoenicians, and that the religion and civilization of Ireland, "later known by the name of Druidism," were Egyptian in origin (CW 156). There are also oblique references to Vallancey and his theory of the Phoenician origin of the Irish in the "gran Phenician rover" of Finnegans Wake (197.31 ). It is possible that Joyce had read some of Vallancey firsthand, even perhaps while he was writing Ulysses, since the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich where Joyce worked almost daily from 1915 to 1919 contains both Vallancey's Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Language and his Grammar of the Iberno-Celtic. Joyce's interest in Bérard during this period may have sent him back to Vallancey as well, though it is clear from the Trieste lecture that his initial exposure to Vallancey had occurred before 1907, most likely before he left Ireland in 1904.

In The Book of Invasions, the foundation of Ireland's traditional history, the connection between the Israelites and the Goidels had been established, including the proposition that the Irish language has affinities

[25] Nonetheless, he also maintains that Irish is Indo-European (CW 155).

to Hebrew. Joyce was therefore predisposed to be attracted to Bérard's theories by his own cultural background, which included both The Book of Invasions and the theories of Vallancey, theories that are themselves derivative in part from The Book of Invasions . It is one of those famous Joycean coincidences that Bérard's theory links Semite and Greek, a linkage found in The Book of Invasions as well, and that both the Odyssey and the settlement of Ireland could be traced to Phoenician travels. That Vallancey had already begun to correlate the adventures in The Book of Invasions and the Odyssey is suggestive, and it is tantalizing to think that Joyce may have known this material firsthand.

The importance of Vallancey's theory of the Phoenician origin of the Irish for the construction of Ulysses is obvious. Not only do Vallancey's theories dovetail very nicely with those of Bérard, thus fitting with Joyce's conceptualization of the Odyssey , but the two theories in tandem become a historico-literary rationale for Joyce's enterprise of merging Irish myth and Greek myth. The similarity between The Book of Invasions and the Odyssey within a framework set by the critical theories of Bérard and Vallancey would in turn have legitimated Joyce's own fusion in Ulysses of mythic elements from both texts. The theories of both Bérard and Vallancey serve to link Joyce's three primary mythic systems: the Greek story, the story of the Wandering Jew, and the architectonics from The Book of Invasions . Paradoxically, in forging a link between the Phoenicians and the Odyssey , Bérard was also forging a link between the Irish and the Odyssey . But a special value to Joyce of Bérard's theory of the Odyssey was that, like the Homeric parallels in Ulysses , it could be talked about in an international context and therefore facilitated the critical reception of Ulysses ; because of their limited circulation outside of Ireland, neither Vallancey's theory nor the mythic matter in The Book of Invasions could serve that function.

Though all these theories and pseudohistories related to the Mediterranean and to Ireland are important for Joyce's imaginative construct behind Ulysses , his choice of typologies from The Book of Invasions , particularly his decision to make the main character in Ulysses "a Jew," was not simply literary, a function of his sources and his mythic method. The question of national traits was of great interest to Joyce. He felt personal affinities to the Jews, and he felt that in general the Irish and the Jews were similar and their destinies alike. In his letter to Carlo Linati accompanying a scheme of classical and anatomical correspondences for the

book, Joyce referred to Ulysses as "an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish)" (Letters I: 146).^[26] These apparently naturalistic observations were perhaps in part a conventional product of the "two peoples" rhetoric of Irish nationalist politics, in which Irish suffering under the English was frequently compared to the Israelites' bondage and captivity.^[27] This political trope is encoded in Bloom's "blooper" regarding the exodus "out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage," and a full example of the discourse is given in the text of Ulysses when professor MacHugh recites John F Taylor's speech supporting the Irish language movement (7.791–870) 870).^[28]

At the same time Joyce's views on race have a larger cultural context, a context formulated by Matthew Arnold, who believed that the world moves between the two poles of Jew and Greek; these polarities are discussed in several places in his work, particularly the chapter entitled "Hebraism and Hellenism" in Culture and Anarchy , which Joyce owned in 1920 (Ellmann, Consciousness of Joyce 99; Gillespie #17). Joyce himself held this view (cf. JJ 2 395), and Bloom and Dedalus are representations of these two types. By suggesting the affinities, indeed the union, of Hebraic Bloom and Hellenistic Dedalus through the convergence of their thought, as well as through classical parallels and the Irish substructure, Joyce is suggesting that Ireland is heir to the whole range of human experience, valuation, and potential. Elsewhere such temperaments might be opposed, but in Ireland they are fused: "Jewgreek is greekjew" (15.2097–98). The binding structure from The Book of Invasions helps to explain why Joyce believed that in Ireland, at any rate, those two temperaments could be reconciled: Ireland's populace can be seen as heirs to both typologies because of successive waves of invasions and generations of intermarriage.

But this view may be supported also by the history of the Milesians themselves. In summarizing The Book of Invasions , Gilbert stresses that several of the invasions of Ireland have connections with Greece, and he

[26] On these points, see also JJ 2 373, 382, 395, 515, 521.

[27] For a discussion of the "two peoples" theme in Irish politics, see Kenner, "Ulysses" 137–39, and Hyman 162, who gives examples.

[28] It may be, of course, that the political trope is itself based on the Book of Invasions scheme, which Irish audiences would have recognized but which most Joyce scholars do not. John Garvin (66–70) claims that Joyce rewrites the speech to emphasize Egypt and the Jews and hence, we might add, the connection with The Book of Invasions.

notes that "Irish chroniclers had a strongly rooted belief in the Grecian origins of the Irish race" (65). A second reading of Stephen, as related to the poles of Jew and Greek, emerges from the framework established by The Book of Invasions . This second reading is also hinted at in A Portrait of the Artist , where an embryonic manipulation of the mythos of The Book of Invasions suggests an implicit racial contrast between Davin as Fir Bolg (180) and Stephen. Stephen's own race is not named explicitly in A Portrait of the Artist , but Stephen thinks in racial terms, musing about "his race" (e.g., 183, 238, 253; cf. 202, 221). Because the normal second term of contrast with Fir Bolg in Irish nationalist rhetoric is Milesian, in this reading Stephen, like Leopold and Molly in Ulysses , is also a Milesian. The juxtaposition of these two schemes from The Book of Invasions suggests that Joyce is saying that the privileged race in Irish pseudohistory has within its own heritage both Hebraic and Hellenic qualities, an identity that is dubletted by the successive waves of invasions altogether, thus underlining the reconciliation of "jewgreek" and "greekjew" that we find in Ulysses (15.2097–98).^[29]

A doubled rewriting of the The Book of Invasions in Ulysses is not in the least improbable; indeed, Joyce manipulates Greek myth in exactly this manner. In A Portrait of the Artist Stephen can be read not only as Daedalus the artificer but also as Icarus; he is both simultaneously, and the multiple readings add resonance and interest to the mythic subtext. In Ulysses Molly is both Calypso and Penelope; multiple mythic perspectives take Joyce's mythic parallels beyond the technique of simple mythic retelling, deepening the semiotic values of the mythic subtexts and adding ambiguity and openness to the Joycean text. Joyce is able to manipulate myth in this fashion precisely because he uses only the deep structure of the myth, the fabula. It gives him tremendous flexibility: he can, for example, invoke expectations using the mythic subtext (Stephen as Telemachus is searching for his father) and then undercut those same expectations (Stephen is trying to stay clear of all fathers). By working the myth against itself in this fashion, Joyce establishes a productive ironic gap in his text that can be used for any number of purposes: intellectual and aesthetic delight in a new reading of an old myth, political

[29] Kelleher lays out the contrast between Davin, who "is described as a Firbolg—dark, a serf, one who knows the secret ways of Irish life," and Stephen, who is to be understood as "a Milesian—fair, free, bravely open" (quoted in French 281).

or aesthetic signification, humor or parody. The double readings of myth contribute to Joyce's complex tone and facilitate the textual elements of humor that nonetheless do not undercut other more serious readings.

In Finnegans Wake Joyce refers to the "mixed racings" of the Irish (117.12), and his theories about the mixture of Celtic and Viking races in Ireland permeate his last book. But as early as 1907 he held these views, writing in his Trieste lecture "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages" that

our civilization is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are reconciled. In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread. What race, or what language . . . can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland. (CW 165–66; cf. CW 161–62)

This is obviously a political statement, one that radically repudiates the bitter sectarianism and cultural oppositions that have characterized Irish history of the past four centuries. It is also a theme elaborated in Ulysses through the mythic structuring from The Book of Invasions , a structure that resonates with Bérard's theory of the Odyssey , with Arnold's theory of Hellenism and Hebraism, and with Vallancey's theory of the Phoenician origin of the Irish.