Chapter 1—
Incipit

MICHAEL: (to Christy) And where was it, mister honey, that you did the deed?

CHRISTY: (looking at him with suspicion) Oh, a distant place, master of the house, a windy corner of high distant hills.

PHILLY: (nodding with approval) He's a close man and he's right surely

Synge, The Playboy of the Western World

When Stephen Joyce wrote to the New York Times Book Review in 1989 defending his decision to destroy certain letters by his aunt Lucia, he asked explicitly for an end to what he considered snooping in his grandfather's private life and implicitly for an end to the psychoanalytic criticism of James Joyce; instead he recommended as useful to readers critical work on "the Dublin-Irish ties that are pervasive and deeply rooted in all my grandfather's major works." Whereas most studies of the Irish elements in Joyce's fiction have centered on the surface realism—elucidating the geographical or historical context of the works, for example (Hart and Knuth; Garvin)—revisionist critical work on Joyce has made it increasingly clear that in all his writings Joyce also utilized plotting elements, mythopoeic imagery, structural features, formal principles, and linguistic resources taken from his Irish heritage. Thus, for example, an early Irish plot focused on fate, violation of taboo, and death serves as backbone of "The Dead," contributing a tone of inexorable disaster (Kelleher, "Irish History"), while a series of names referring to the Old Irish god of the dead is a thematic link binding Dubliners as a whole (Nilsen).

Medieval Irish otherworld imagery structures the symbolic node of the climax of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Roche, "'Strange Light'"), and the theme of the kiss, associated with the Irish myth of the Sovereignty, is a leitmotif throughout A Portrait (Grayson). It requires a Gaelic lexicon to understand the wordplay of Finnegans Wake (O Hehir), even as Irish myth and folklore are reincarnated and metamorphosed through the substance of the text (Benstock, "Finn"; MacKillop).^[1]

In Ulysses the framework of Irish pseudohistory and Irish Sovereignty imagery sets the relationships of the main characters and provides a second axis of mythic correlatives augmenting the Greek mythos of the book (Tymoczko, "Symbolic Structures"; Tymoczko, "Sovereignty Structures in Ulysses"; cf. B. Scott 179–83). At the same time medieval Irish voyage tales double the plotting of the Odyssey as mythic determinants behind the wanderings of Bloom (Sultan 42–48.; Tristram 221 n. 4). The affinity of the comic elements in Joyce's later narratives to the Irish comic tradition has been discussed (Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition ch. 8), and Joyce himself commented on both the Irishness of the style of Ulysses and its debt to medieval Irish tradition in likening his text to the Book of Kells: "In all the places I have been to, Rome, Zurich, Trieste, I have taken [the Book of Kells] about with me, and have pored over its workmanship for hours. It is the most purely Irish thing we have, and some of the big initial letters which swing right across a page have the essential quality of a chapter of Ulysses. Indeed, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations" (quoted in Ellmann, JJ 2 545).

Although literary studies have turned increasingly to issues of intertextuality during the past decades, with the theoretical dictum being that literary works are as much about literature as about life, Joyce's Irish literary discourse has never been systematically delineated. The purpose of this book is to begin the task: to investigate at length Joyce's debt to Irish literature in Ulysses and to reclaim Joyce as an Irish writer who has much in common with other writers of the Irish literary revival and who is, in fact, in some ways preeminent among them as a writer in the Irish literary tradition.^[2] Although Irish elements are found in his earlier works, it is in

[1] In this study I am using the term myth in the broadest sense of "traditional tale," including religious myth, traditional hero tale, and historical legends.

[2] Tradition in this book refers primarily to Ireland's literary tradition, which has shown a remarkable continuity in the last fifteen hundred years not only in content but in other ways, including its formalism and its sense of the comic. Many aspects of this literary tradition have survived the transition from Irish to English and thus characterize Irish literature in English as well as literature in Old, Middle, and Modern Irish.

Ulysses that Joyce's Irish poetic emerges in a comprehensive and fully articulated fashion; in turn Ulysses sets a pattern for the later extensions of his Irish techniques, styles, and mythic structurings in Finnegans Wake. In this regard, as in many others, Ulysses is the pivotal text in Joyce's oeuvre. In Ulysses Irish mythic correlates and poetics are intertwined with the political dimension of the text; recognition of Joyce's Irish discourse thus requires a reevaluation of his mythic method, the substance of his realism, and the modernist features of his narrative, as well as his involvement with the political questions of his day.^[3]

Most of the links between Ulysses and Irish literature are elementary—one would say obvious, had they not gone so long unacknowledged. In some ways it is astonishing that the material discussed here has not been part of the critical tradition about Ulysses for decades; indeed, in the case of the Irish architectonic structures in Ulysses, one of the most scrutinized books of world literature, such an oversight is virtually incredible. This blind spot in the history of Joyce criticism and scholarship is worth reflecting upon. A likely explanation for the oversight has to do with the intellectual framework for the critical tradition on Joyce, a framework begun by Joyce himself when he stressed his own indebtedness to Henrik Ibsen, when he credited his stream-of-consciousness technique to Édouard Dujardin, when he disseminated to Carlo Linati and others schemata elucidating the Homeric parallels in Ulysses, when he defined and described Ulysses to Frank Budgen, and when he facilitated Stuart Gilbert's landmark study, James Joyce's "Ulysses." Joyce's works have been read and discussed primarily within dominant traditions of Western literature—Greek literature, French literature, English literature—and related to the literary programs of the giants of Western literature such as Flaubert and Ibsen. The problem with such conceptual frameworks, as M. C. Escher's fascinating graphic works make vivid, is that they determine what is seen. The central critical frameworks for Joyce—even those established by Joyce himself—have not included Irish literature: hence, no Irish elements have been found by scholars working within these frameworks. It has been principally scholars of Irish literature working

[3] The latter aligns the present work with still other revisionist work on Joyce, including, for example, Manganiello, Joyce's Politics.

within an independent tradition of scholarship who have discovered the Irish substratum of his works.

Another reason that such elements as the Irish symbolic values for the main characters in Ulysses and the significance of their configuration have not been recognized long since is the dual isolation of the book. Though there was no Customs exclusion order on Ulysses in Ireland after 1932 and though the book was never banned by the official Censorship Board (M. Adams 31n), it remained isolated from the Irish reading public by less formal blacklisting, including clerical disapproval. Steeped in Irish popular history and exposed to Irish narratives, the Irish reading public is the audience to whom the Irish archetypes and the Irish poetic of Ulysses would speak most immediately and to whom these features of Ulysses would be most apparent. But because of the blacklisting of Ulysses, Irish citizens who have been most inclined to read Ulysses are usually cosmopolitan and have been influenced by the European and American literary establishment; they, like readers of Ulysses in general, come to the book preconditioned to perceive the established Homeric parallels and the way in which the book fits into an international literary history. At the same time the vast majority of the readers and critics of Ulysses, Europeans and Americans alike, remain isolated from Irish literature, which has overall not been incorporated into canons of world literature. This isolation from Joyce's own formative literary traditions has further contributed to the treatment of Joyce as a European writer and to the exclusion of his Irish poetics, themes, symbols, archetypes, and major structural features from critical recognition and discussion.

Theoretical issues about what is meant by world literature, about the formation and function of literary canons, and about the nature of literary criticism are therefore raised by the critical history of Ulysses. This is paradoxical since in many ways Ulysses is at the center of most canons of modern literature and has received an immense amount of critical attention. The case at hand is an example of criticism as refraction, to use the formulation of André Lefevere:

Let us take a classic, any classic, in our own literature or in another. Chances are that we did not first come into contact with it in its unique, untouchable, "sacralized" form. Rather, for most, if not all of us, the classic in question quite simply was to all extents and purposes its refraction, or rather a series of refractions, from the comic strip over the extract in school anthologies and anthologies used in universities, to the film, the TV serial, the plot summary

in literary histories we gallantly tried to commit to memory in those long dark nights of the soul immediately preceding graduation, critical articles telling us how to read the classic in question, what to think about it and, above all, how to apply it to our lives. If and when after all that we finally get around to reading the actual classic, we are often rather surprised by the discrepancy that appears to exist between our perception of the classic, which is a composite of a series of cumulative refractions we have grown to be quite comfortable with, and the actual text itself. (13)

Ulysses offers a clear instance in which criticism, functioning as a story about a story, produces a metatext. It is the metatext of Ulysses —a non-Irish metatext—that we have read for the better part of a century. Although some scholars have recognized and freely discussed parallels between Irish literature and Ulysses, most have not. With the notable exception of writers such as Chester Anderson and Vivian Mercier, even the most distinguished scholars have been hampered by this metatext of Ulysses.

In most instances revisionist studies of Joyce that reclaim him as an Irish author are intended not to replace or set aside established critical views of Ulysses but to supplement them. Joyce characteristically works on several levels simultaneously, particularly in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake —surface naturalism and symbol, mythic correlate and psychological imperative, and so on—with the different levels providing mutual resonance and ironic byplay.^[4] Just as we would consider our understanding of Ulysses inadequate without some account of the Homeric parallels, so a reading of Ulysses without an account of the parallels from Irish myth is a monologic reduction of Joyce's text (cf. Bakhtin). Attention to the Irish literary elements of Ulysses also brings with it a greater appreciation of the intertextual richness behind Joyce's naturalism, which in turn serves to illuminate the relation of Ulysses to the works of writers of the Irish literary revival, including the mythic work of W. B. Yeats. Thus, a study like the present one both reveals elements internal to the text of Ulysses and situates Joyce in a historical context.

Wolfgang Iser has claimed that the reality of Ulysses transcends full comprehension by a reader because of its complexity:

The reader is virtually free to choose his own direction, but he will not be able to work his way through every possible perspective, for the number of

[4] Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle, traces this modality as early as Dubliners.

these is far beyond the capacity of any one man's naturally selective perception. If the novel sometimes gives the impression of unreality, this is not because it presents unreality, but simply because it swamps us with aspects of reality that overburden our limited powers of absorption. We are forced to make our own selections from the perspectives offered and, consequently, in accordance with our own personal disposition, to formulate ideas that have their roots in some of the signs and situations confronting us. (231–32)

Iser goes on to say that it is inherent in Joyce's design and mode of meaning making, of illuminating experience, that no single reader should be able to work through every possible perspective on Ulysses; at best one can achieve a partial reading, a partial realization of the signs. By contrast, in Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce's "Ulysses," Robert Adams muses that "it is conceivable that a new way of looking at Ulysses will be found which will reduce to miraculous harmony all the symbols and references to external reality" (191). Are the Irish elements of Ulysses this miraculous thread? Iser has argued, I think rightly, that the hope of any such decoding is illusory (233). Like any reader, in focusing on the Irish intertextuality of Ulysses I am reading only some of the signs Joyce has left for us, the signs that as a medievalist and scholar of early Irish language and literature I am most qualified to read. I offer this reading of Ulysses with the understanding that it is partial, with no false pretensions to an illusory consistency or comprehensiveness. At the same time it is plain that an awareness of the Irish literary dimension of Ulysses does make some of the seeming "errors," discordances, inconsistencies, and departures from realism more transparent: these slippages can be deconstructed to show, among other things, that the Irish discourse in Ulysses is one of the patterning principles Joyce has used in his design. Joyce indicates the importance of such "errors" by naming them "portals of discovery" (U 9.229). At many points in what follows I hinge my arguments on inconsistencies in the text, showing that a recognition of the Irish elements in Ulysses offers a new perspective on long-standing issues in Joyce scholarship, elucidating cultural obscurities even as it enhances an appreciation of the openness in Joyce's construction of the text (cf. Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle 77ff.). The Irish signs are central to Joyce's construction of and signification in Ulysses and are relevant to virtually any reading of the text.

Although parallels between Joyce's texts and early Irish texts can often be clearly discerned, we must ask how Joyce could have known the Irish

literary texts in question. Heretofore, scholars interested in Joyce's use of early Irish material have taken various tacks—showing textual evidence for a literary echo, or asserting that a source is probable, or resting content to delineate a parallel—but a systematic survey of Joyce's knowledge of early Irish literature has remained to be done. The task is undertaken here in chapters 7 and 8. Joyce's multifaceted literary interests, his many literary enthusiasms, and his voluminous reading, particularly in his youth, make it difficult to document his knowledge of early Irish literature. A great range of materials lies open; and since much of his reading Joyce consumed without comment for posterity, it is traced haphazardly, if at all, through the fortunate survival of notesheets or the posthumous reconstruction of his working library at a particular period. Assessments of Joyce's sources for Irish tradition are particularly difficult because Joyce's knowledge of early Irish literature is generally overdetermined: there is usually a plethora of potential sources to be considered, but little evidence to determine which of the many possibilities Joyce depended upon. Materials incorporated into the school curricula, publications of the Irish revival, specialized reading later in life, and informal conversation must all be investigated as possible sources contributing to Joyce's knowledge of Irish literature.

Moreover, though Joyce at various points in his life explored scholarly sources on early Irish literature (probably reading some scholarly journals as well as writers such as P. W. Joyce), his use of literature aimed at the general reader, including periodicals that devoted space to Irish culture and Irish literature, cannot be discounted. Some of Joyce's familiarity with Irish tradition must be attributed to popular culture and generalized knowledge, cultural layers that are always difficult to determine, particularly when they are part of the popular culture and general knowledge of a marginalized culture, as was the case in early twentieth-century Ireland.

To return for a moment to the established critical metatext of Ulysses, one can note another aspect of the failure of Joyce criticism to recognize the relationship of his work to Irish literary tradition. It is finally too simple to suppose that Irish literature has been ignored in investigations of Joyce's work because Irish literature has not been incorporated into the canons of Western literature. Joyce's Irish contexts have been missed in part because critics have also failed to consider the Irish popular cultural context of his writing, a popular culture that included refractions of a

great deal of the early Irish literary repertory. This popular cultural context is omitted only at great cost to an adequate appreciation of Joyce's range of meaning, his artistic achievement, and the mechanisms by which he relocated twentieth-century narrative. In this regard Joyce is a paradigm for many writers currently being incorporated into revised canons—women, racial and ethnic minority writers, writers from varied socioeconomic strata, writers with minority language backgrounds, colonial and postcolonial authors—whose marginalized cultures illuminate and drive their work. The question of Joyce's knowledge of early Irish literature, therefore, is again paradoxical, for the work of this eminently canonical writer presents affinities with those whose discourse has, for whatever reasons, been marginalized.^[5]

The structures from early Irish literature in Ulysses —or Finnegans Wake for that matter—are pervasive and fundamental, but they are rarely elaborated in a detailed manner. As with the elements from Greek mythology or the parallels in Ulysses with Dante and Shakespeare, the correspondences with Irish tradition are most often general, partial, and suggestive rather than exhaustive. As a whole they do not necessitate that Joyce did specialized research on or possessed recondite knowledge of early Irish literature, though recognition of those same structures may require specialized training and research on the part of a modern critic or scholar. The allusive quality of Joyce's mythic method contributes to the difficulty in determining Joyce's sources for this material: although Joyce rarely makes "errors" that rule out knowledge of, say, scholarly publications, he also rarely gives specific details that can be used as telling evidence for the identification of a particular source text. The very generality of Joyce's use of Irish mythos is usually consonant with any number of publications that he could plausibly have known.

Joyce was exposed to material related to Irish tradition by several types of sources that reinforced each other; it is in this sense that his knowledge is usually overdetermined. At Joyce's disposal were certain facets of early Irish history and literature that had already by the time of his youth been incorporated into the background culture of English-speaking Ireland as part of the school curricula. In this category we must

[5] For other approaches to Joyce as a postcolonial or minority-culture writer, see the studies by Jameson and Deane 92–107. See Herr for a study of other aspects of Joyce's relationship to popular culture, as well as a theoretical discussion of his use of these elements as a reference point.

put Joyce's knowledge of Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of Invasions), which he probably learned about when still in school. The Book of Invasions was, in any case, part of daily contemporary discourse in Ireland; thus, the metaphors of Milesian and Fir Bolg pepper Ulysses as they did the speech of Joyce's contemporaries. He owes much as well to the Irish literary revival. By the time Ulysses was written, most of the major works of the Irish literary revival had been published, reviewed, discussed, assimilated; since as a literary movement the Irish revival is characterized by the use of Irish myth and symbol, the works of these writers served their readers as an introduction to the literary heritage of Ireland. Thus, for example, the otherworld imagery widely used by writers such as A. E. and Yeats would have served Joyce as ample introduction to this aspect of early Irish literature and Irish folklore.

One of the uncertain aspects of determining Joyce's knowledge of early Irish tradition results from the fact that Irish culture was in Joyce's day, and indeed still is, oral to a very great extent. Just as one cannot investigate eighteenth-century French literature without acknowledging that information circulated and was shared orally in coffeehouse and salon, so one cannot ignore the importance of conversation and oral sources in Joyce's Irish circles. The text of Ulysses itself exemplifies how certain ideas about early Irish literature were retailed in conversation, as we see, for example, in the passage where Haines tells Mulligan about the theory that ancient Irish myth had no concept of hell (10.1077–85). A certain familiarity with early Irish history and literature was widespread, perhaps inevitable, even among those who had no textual sources at their disposal, because of oral transfer and circulation of Irish cultural materials; this familiarity must be accounted for in a determination of Joyce's sources. Questions such as these are pursued in chapters 7 and 8. It should be noted that the chapters on Joyce's sources are self-standing and may be read first by the skeptical reader, but for the sake of general readability these technical aspects of the argument have been placed last. The chapters are, however, an important part of the argument: this study is not simply about James Joyce or Ulysses but about an author and his relationship to culture. Thus, the final two chapters are in part a model for a methodology, presenting one paradigm for assessing the impact of popular and oral culture upon an author.

It might be objected that if Irish literature and myth are central to the structure and technique of Ulysses, Joyce would have been more explicit

about this fact: he would, for example, have provided us, albeit indirectly, with an Irish analogue to Gilbert's study of the Homeric elements. This is not altogether an easy objection to answer. One possible response is that Joyce molded his narrative on Irish tales, motifs, images, narrative genres, and styles intuitively rather than deliberately. A similar position has in fact been taken by Vivian Mercier, who concludes that Joyce wrote within the Irish comic tradition without being entirely conscious of the fact (Irish Comic Tradition 236). It is certainly possible for a writer to be in a literary tradition without being familiar with all of its texts; but in Joyce's case there is evidence of his extensive familiarity with the content of the Irish literary tradition. The climate of cultural nationalism, the self-conscious use of Irish traditional materials by members of the Irish literary revival, and the extent to which awareness of Irish stories, genres, and literary techniques had entered popular culture all speak for Joyce's conscious use of Irish elements to be found in his works. Moreover, a preconscious awareness on Joyce's part of literary motive and technique doesn't really fit what is known about Joyce as an artist.

Though Mercier may underestimate Joyce's deliberate cultivation of Irish literary tradition, his major premise that Joyce worked within that tradition should be sustained. Some of the elements of the Irish literary tradition came to James Joyce as a birthright, in part in virtue of being the son of John Stanislaus Joyce. The importance of this lineage was signaled in Joyce's later life when he commissioned his father's portrait, later hanging it in his flat (JJ 2 565n). Whatever his failings, John Stanislaus Joyce was a storyteller; and what can be gleaned of his stories places him in the Irish narrative tradition. His son Stanislaus remembers that the father prided himself on knowing Dublin better than the Dubliners, for all that he was a Cork man (MBK 81). He would take walks with people, telling stories about people, places, and events that the walk called to mind (JJ 2 44–45). This melding of placelore, oral history, and narrative entertainment is typical of Irish literature; it is an example of the senchas, the 'lore' or 'learning', that the Irish poet, the fili, was to preserve and to promulgate in narrative. Specific narrative threads in Joyce's work have also been traced to stories of John Stanislaus Joyce (Garvin 50, 87–90). No doubt some of the traditional Irish imagery, symbolism, and narrative repertory that are reused in James Joyce's literary works must be traced back in their first instance in Joyce's life to his father as well.

Joyce's father was also a witty man; after his father's death, Joyce said

that the humor of Ulysses was his father's. This is no light tribute; insofar as the wit and humor of Ulysses are typical of Irish literature, we may conclude that this element came to Joyce through oral tradition, as it had been preserved and passed down for millennia in Celtic culture as a whole. We may judge from the portrait of Simon Dedalus in Joyce's works, as well as from anecdotes preserved about John Joyce, that his humor was more than a little tinged with satire and irony, aspects of the Irish comic tradition that his son inherited as well. Simon in A Portrait is also named as storyteller (241), and from him the son hears "of Irish politics, of Munster and of the legends of their own family, to all of which Stephen lent an avid ear" (62). In this regard it is certainly not accidental that A Portrait of the Artist begins with the father's voice telling a story to the boy and ends with the young man's invocation of the mythical father: the young writer about to try his wings traces his vocation to the primordial narrative of the father, where the father represents as well the boy's patrimony of art in the largest sense. Stephen's first consciousness is of his father as storyteller; and in a measure the father passes on the profession of storyteller to the son at the end of the book, not unlike the early Irish poet who was responsible for training his successor. These hints of the literary relationship between father and son suggest that Joyce participated in a living tradition linking him to early Irish literature, but it was a tradition that had crossed the linguistic boundary and was carried in English rather than Irish. Insofar as elements of the Irish literary system came to Joyce as a birthright, he had a position in the Irish literary tradition shared by few of his contemporaries writing in English. This position is one of the elements that differentiates him from most other members of the Irish literary revival writing in English, including Yeats.

It must be remembered that although Joyce did not foster a critical introduction to the Irish myth in Ulysses as he did with the Homeric myth, he has in fact left clues embedded internally in the narrative to the Irish mythic structuring of Ulysses as well as to sources of his own knowledge of the myth. In the text there are explicit references to the Sovereignty myth, to Kathleen ni Houlihan, to the historical scheme of The Book of Invasions (including the Milesians and the "Clan Milly"), to Slieve Bloom, and in fact to most of the central literary elements discussed in this book. The references to Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, R. I. Best, and Julius Pokorny are not mere decor; they are in part Joyce's wry mode

of footnoting and acknowledging his debt to these writers. Stephen—a portrait of the artist as a young man—is presented as someone who knows Irish and whose stream of consciousness includes many aspects of Irish literary tradition. The signs of the Irish intertextuality and Irish structuring are there for anyone to read; it is the inability of most readers of Ulysses to read the signs that creates the problem.

There are external signs of the Irish literary dimension of Ulysses as well. I find it significant that Joyce's relatives—his grandson quoted above, his brother Stanislaus elsewhere (Recollections 19)—take for granted the Irish strand of his writing; it suggests that there was a private, familial awareness of Joyce's use of and dependence on Irish myth and Irish poetics. And perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Gilbert's study itself points to the debt of Ulysses to Irish literary tradition: he includes a synopsis of The Book of Invasions, noting explicitly the Greek and Spanish elements in Irish pseudohistory and citing specific references in Joyce's text to Irish pseudohistory (65–68). It was presumably Joyce himself who alerted Gilbert to these materials, as well as to aspects of the art and social position of the fili relevant to Ulysses, all of which Gilbert duly relays to his readers (69–71). These materials have been available in potentia to the critical tradition for decades, but neither Gilbert nor his successors could see the significance of the information Joyce had provided, any more than they knew how to read the signs of the Irish literary echoes internal to Ulysses.

As an indicator of the importance of his Irish upbringing and his Irish culture to Joyce, the aesthetic of literary forms developed in A Portrait of the Artist has in it a timely reminder:

The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. . . . The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The

personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (214–15)^[6]

Joyce's statement about "the dramatic form" is often cited out of context and generalized to represent his attitude toward the relationship of the artist and any literary work. Yet Joyce is explicit that in a narrative—an epic—like Ulysses, the personality of the artist is of vital importance: "The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea"; only in drama does the artist become "refined out of existence" "like the God of the creation." In Joyce's narrative works it is an Irish personality at work, flowing round the narrative like a vital sea, and the works mediate between one formed by Irish culture and Joyce's audience formed by the dominant English and European cultures. Thus, the many currents of Joyce's Irishness must be examined again and again for their ecological impact on his works.

Hugh Kenner has suggested that one reason Joyce described Ulysses in Homeric terms and was explicit about the Greek mythos while the book was in progress was that the Homeric scheme turned the book "into something that could be talked about"; still later the Homeric structure helped critics and readers alike manage the amorphous text with its genre innovations:

"I am now writing a book based on the wanderings of Ulysses," [Joyce] told Frank Budgen at their second meeting (summer 1918). "The Odyssey, that is to say, serves me as a ground plan. Only my time is recent time and all my hero's wanderings take no more than eighteen hours." It is hard to think of three sentences better contrived to turn an unwritten book into something that could be talked about. Later, if you were a critic struggling simultaneously

[6] Cf. Joyce's 6 March 1903 entry in the Paris Notebook: "There are three conditions of art: the lyrical, the epical and the dramatic. That art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself; that art is epical whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to himself and to others; that art is dramatic whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to others" (CW 145).

with the queer book and with the need to describe it for readers who had not seen it, you would find the parallel more manageable than the text. Joyce . . . knew the value of informed articles. ("Ulysses" 22–23)

The Greek myth provided bewildered readers with a point of reference and a point of departure; it universalized a book that was on its surface very localized. If this is the case, then there is, of course, another very good reason Joyce did not foster a vade mecum for the Irish myth in his book. Such a scheme would have helped most of Joyce's international readers—and it is the international audience that Ulysses most appealed to—not at all. In fact, rather than locating the book for them, the revelation of the unfamiliar Irish literary and mythic substratum would have served further to dislocate the book from the international readership. Thus, an insistent revelation of these aspects would have been counter-productive to Joyce's purpose to have Ulysses be accepted as part of world literature; one might even speculate that Joyce had reasons to conceal the Irish literary substructure.

The humor of Ulysses has been touched upon as particularly Irish; a premise in the following argument is the coexistence of the comic and the serious in Irish culture. In Irish literature, conversation, and culture, serious points are made with jokes, often satirical or ironic jokes; and the habit is one of long standing, as we can see from the following ninth-century poem:

Ro-cúala
ní tabair eochu ar dúana;
   do-beir a n-í as dúthaig dó,
   bó.

I have heard
that he gives no steeds for poems;
  he gives what is native to him,
  a cow.

(Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics 90–91)^[7]

This is a political poem criticizing a prince or noble, making the point that the man who should be generous, an aristocratic patron of poetry, is instead stingy and churlish. Rather than make the political point in a tendentious manner, the poet elegantly uses figurative speech: the low-class.

[7] Murphy prints his literal translation as prose; I have lineated it here.

nature of the man is indicated by accusing him of giving an agrarian animal rather than the noble horse as a reward for art. The point is emphasized by rhyme and by the short fourth line of the epigram: it suggests metrically, through the form of the verse itself, the paucity of the poet's reward. The line falls short of the expected metrical requirement (one syllable where eight are normal), just as the poet's gift falls short of what he might expect in a normal transaction between poet and patron. This very short poem thus presupposes a great deal of background about how the culture works and should work, as well as familiarity with how literature works and should work. The poem is funny, elegant, condensed, formal, but it is also political, ideological, serious, even biting. This is the way of Irish tradition: the intertwining of humor and serious discourse within highly compressed and formal literary structures.

Ulysses takes its place naturally in this framework; and Irish tradition, with its double consciousness about humor, can most easily be used to situate Joyce as a political writer.^[8] Joyce came of age as a writer in an environment in which art was highly politicized. After the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell in 1890, many Irishmen turned in disgust from the realm of politics as narrowly conceived to a broader cultural nationalism. It was during the years before Joyce left Ireland that such organizations as the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League captured the imagination of the nation; that the Irish Literary Society and the Irish Literary Theatre began the work of developing and promoting an Irish literature and drama; that popularizations and translations of early Irish literature became widely available; that writers of the Anglo-Irish literary revival such as A. E., Yeats, and Augusta Gregory began to take their material from Irish literature.^[9]

The development of this Irish cultural consciousness and its determined goal of differentiation from English culture affected Joyce profoundly. In the last decade of the nineteenth century the term "West Briton" was coined, and thereafter "West Britonism" became a slogan

[8] In John Bull's Other Island, written for the Irish National Theatre Society in 1904, Shaw has his famous dictum "Every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time" (611). Shaw's humor is also a vehicle for his politics, though in ways quite different from those of Joyce.

Cf. Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition 244–48, on the melding of humor and seriousness in Irish literature.

[9] For a fuller discussion of the issues touched on here, see W. Thompson, Imagination of an Insurrection ch. 2, and Hunt, Abbey esp. 11.

that could be used as a weapon, as we see in the interaction between Miss Ivors and Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead" (D 187ff.). The call to differentiate Irish life and culture from those of England went deep during the period; in the political sphere they led to the rise of the concept of Sinn Féin, 'We Ourselves', and ultimately to the political actions organized by the party of that name. In the literary sphere the concern about West Britonism was strong as well, resulting in a search for an Irish literature, including an Irish formalism. Joyce's own literary innovations, particularly those in Ulysses, are closely related to such concerns for an Irish literature. A major thesis of this book is that Joyce is responding to the political ambience of Ireland even in Ulysses ,^[10] and that much of his ideological discourse uses the Irish literary elements in the book, particularly his manipulations of Irish mythos, Irish formalism, and Irish humor, as the vehicles of its expression.

To claim that Joyce is serious and political in Ulysses is not to say that he is polemical or solemn, any more than the early Irish epigram quoted above is polemical or solemn. At the turn of the century, particularly the years between 1900 and 1907, there was a raging controversy in Ireland about the role of art, with many people, including Arthur Griffith and Maud Gonne, taking the position that art should be used primarily for political purposes and that such political art should be overtly polemical. It is well documented that this view of art disgusted Joyce, and he takes the Irish Literary Theatre and many of the central cultural figures to task over the point in his 1901 broadside "The Day of the Rabblement" (see JJ 2 88–90; CW 68–72). The controversy was particularly heated just before Joyce departed from Ireland in 1904, and hindsight alone allows a clear assessment of the direction that literature in Ireland was taking in 1904. Many of Joyce's most vitriolic statements about the role of politics in art reflect the situation of the Irish literary revival in the years immediately before his 1904 departure, when the writers made their closest rapprochement to the political movement. This was the period when Yeats collaborated with Augusta Gregory on Cathleen ni Houlihan —

[10] I am, of course, not the only person to make this argument. See, for example, Ellmann, Consciousness of Joyce ch. 3, and Manganiello, Joyce's Politics. Manganiello's work also has excellent brief summaries of the political developments in Ireland that are the background of Joyce's work. These concerns can be traced to the present through the works of Austin Clarke, Flann O'Brien, Thomas Kinsella, and Seamus Heaney, among others.

"political claptrap" Joyce thought it (MBK 187)—and it is the period when the Irish theatrical movement moved away from Ibsenism, indeed from internationalism as a whole, to specialize in a drama that was Irish in the most narrow sense: Irish peasant dramas and mythic revivals. But in October 1903 the Irish National Theatre Society staged J. M. Synge's Shadow of the Glen, the play that brought the split in the dramatic movement between "Art for Art's Sake or Art for Propaganda," to use Maud Gonne's words (MacBride 332). Yeats's position in that controversy, his appeal from the stage to the disgruntled audience for "life" in its unpredictability against the principles and assertions that political parties substitute for life, led to Annie Horniman's decision to give Yeats a theater (Hone 194). The controversy over Synge's play is thus the event that marks not only the founding of the Abbey Theatre but also the beginning of Yeats's move away from nationalist politics and from art for politics' sake. But these developments would not yet have been clear at the time Joyce left Ireland in October 1904 looking for a more congenial place to do his art: the Abbey itself did not open until December of the same year, and in any case it took a while for the new drift to express itself. One could argue, in fact, that only the riots over Synge's Playboy of the Western World in 1907 made the rupture quite clear.^[11]

Most of Joyce's statements about politics and art must be given their proper historical context, a context in which literature in Ireland was under extreme pressure to be a tool of political revolution. Most of his dicta are a response to the inflexible demands to subordinate art to politics that he experienced during his coming of age as an artist in Ireland, and they reflect an ambience in which others besides Joyce projected difficulties in an artist's being able to work in Ireland.^[12] To conclude from these statements by Joyce that his work has no meaning, particularly ideological or political meaning in the broadest sense, is to misrepresent the situation. In this regard Joyce's 1902 essay on James Clarence Mangan offers clarification: "Finally, it must be asked concerning every artist how he is in relation to the highest knowledge and to those laws which do not take holiday because men and time forget them. This is not to look for a message but to approach the temper which has made the work . . . and to

[11] On the development of the Abbey, see Hunt, Abbey; Ellis-Fermor, Irish Dramatic Movement; and the recent reappraisal by Frazier, Behind the Scenes.

[12] See, for example, "Can a Literary Man Exist in Ireland," Leader, 30 Apr. 1904; "The Future Irish Novelist," Leader, 28 May 1904.

see what is there well done and how much it signifies" (CW 75). The Irish literary dimension of Ulysses, like the elements from Greek myth, is a major vehicle for the way Joyce signifies in his work, the way he encodes and communicates meaning. It is a vehicle by which he, like an early Irish poet/seer, comments on the values and standards of life.

A word on terminology: What is meant by Irish in this book? This is a question that might be asked about any book about Irish literature, and it is rarely easy to answer. In Ireland in the past twelve hundred years, literature has been spoken and written in many languages: Irish, of course; Latin; Old Norse; Old French; Middle Welsh; and English. Although a language may bring with it some aspects of a literary system—generic convention, for example, and meter—these are not the sole determinants of whether a literary piece is part of a national literature. When we use the term Irish, are we speaking of nationality or of language? How are these distinctions to be made? Irish culture (in the national sense) is a divided culture—divided by language, sectarian concerns, politics. Irish literature (again in the national sense) is also a divided literature—divided as any literature is by ideological and sectarian loyalties, but, more important, divided linguistically. In modern times the linguistic divide has been primarily between literature in Irish and literature in English. Joyce was conscious of Ireland's having a divided tradition; he writes, for example, in his essays on Mangan, "[Mangan] inherits the latest and worst part of a tradition upon which no divine hand has ever traced a boundary, a tradition which is loosened and divided against itself as it moves down the cycles" (CW 185; cf. CW 81–82). Joyce's awareness of Ireland's divided tradition and Ireland's linguistic dispossession is made clear in A Portrait of the Artist in the scene between Stephen and the English dean of studies at the university:

[Stephen] felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (189)

Still later Stephen acknowledges to Davin (203), "My ancestors threw off their language and took another. . . . They allowed a handful of foreigners

to subject them." In A Portrait of the Artist Stephen's consciousness of personal and familial dispossession (e.g., 87) recapitulates the national dispossession; ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Throughout the following discussions I assume an awareness of Ireland's divided literary tradition that involves making the distinction between an Irish literature (in the national sense) that originated in and was recorded in Irish (in the linguistic sense), and an Irish literature (in the national sense) that originated in and was recorded in English. Irish (in the national sense) literature in the Irish language naturally grows out of the Irish (in the linguistic sense) literary system, just as Irish (in the national sense) literature in English grows out of the English (in the linguistic sense) literary system. The former (Irish literature in the Irish language) is frequently referred to as "Gaelic" in the critical literature; but as I am dealing with early Irish literature as well as Modern Irish literature, and referring primarily to texts in Old Irish and Middle Irish, Gaelic will not do, since that is a term for Modern Irish (not to mention Scottish Gaelic). Thus, of necessity, here I am using the term Irish as the linguistic referent for literature in the various stages of the Irish language, and Anglo-Irish is used to denote Irish (in the national sense) literary texts and traditions in the English language. The term Anglo-Irish is not to be construed here as in any way pejorative or as carrying with it invidious ideological or sectarian connotations.^[13] Some linguistic overlapping remains (between Irish in a linguistic sense and Irish in a national sense), but context should make the meaning clear.

Mercier, in discussing Anglo-Irish literature (using Anglo-Irish as I am here), has speculated on the vigor of this literature and traced it to the archaism of Irish literature in both languages.

For all the limitations which it imposes, archaism must be acknowledged as chiefly responsible for the vigour not only of Anglo-Irish comic literature but of Anglo-Irish literature as a whole. Whereas the writers of other Western countries have lately striven to re-establish contact with primitive modes of thought and feeling through the study of mythology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, the Anglo-Irish writer has the past always at his elbow—in cold storage, so to speak—preserved in the Gaelic language and literature, in bi-

[13] See the discussion by Richard Wall of the same terminological problem. In opting for the use of "Anglo-Irish," Wall notes that this was also the term used by Joyce (9).

lingual folklore, in Gaelic modes of thought and feeling and speech which have become part of the rural Anglo-Irish dialects. (Irish Comic Tradition 241)

Mercier continues with a discussion of the strengths of Anglo-Irish literature, deriving them from the contact with Irish tradition:

Colleagues and students frequently ask me, in jest or in earnest, why the greatest figures in twentieth-century "English" literature are Irishmen, meaning usually Joyce and Yeats. I can suggest at least four reasons to those who are in earnest. Their Irish background gave (or at any rate offered) Joyce and Yeats these four priceless gifts: contact with a living folklore and thus with myth; contact with a living folk speech; a traditional sense of the professional, almost sacred prestige of poetry and learning; a traditional sense of the supreme importance of technique to a writer, coupled with the realization that technique must be learnt, by imitation, study, and practice. (Irish Comic Tradition 241–42)

These strengths of Anglo-Irish literature are a leitmotif in this book, and parts of this discussion are in ways an expansion of Mercier's generalized observations as they apply specifically to Ulysses.

The appearance of a study of this sort in which are unveiled Irish literary parallels to and sources of some of Joyce's architectonics, generic conventions, and styles in Ulysses should not really be surprising. In Victor Bérard's view the poet of the Odyssey invented nothing: "The Hellene is, first and foremost, a skillful arranger" (trans. Gilbert and qtd. in Gilbert 81–82).^[14] Joyce is kin to Bérard's Homer. Within Ulysses Joyce has left many clues about the Irish literary elements that he has arranged and rewritten; at the same time he has mainly left a deceptive silence about the Irish intertextuality external to the text. Deception is a theme threaded through all of Joyce's work, as Kenner has noted:

Deceiving the reader becomes . . . a way of establishing something about this book, about books, about life. For we are deceived, rather frequently, and there have even been canonical deceptions the righting of which constitutes much of the history of Ulysses criticism. (Joyce's Voices 87)

The present study is another such righting, and a long overdue one it is.

[14] Cf. Kenner: "Joyce writes nothing that is not already written. Like the Homer of Samuel Butler's imagination he does not like inventing, chiefly because he thinks human beings seldom invent" ("Ulysses" 50).