Chapter 3—
Irish Nationalism and Ulysses as Epic

JOYCE: I have only one request to make of you—

CARR: And I have only one request to make of you—
why for God's sake cannot you contrive just once to wear the jacket that is suggested by your trousers??
(It is indeed the case that JOYCE is now wearing the other halves of the outfit he wore in Act One.
Tom Stoppard, Travesties

The Irish literary revival was haunted by the desire for a national epic. From Ulysses we see that this was a pressing issue in 1904; in the scene in the National Library literary discussion turns to the very topic, and Mr Best remarks: "Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it" (9.309–10). There had been a number of attempts and experiments with epic form among the revivalists, including refractions of early Irish epics such as Aubrey De Vere's Foray of Queen Maeve, which appeared in 1882. The desire for a national epic had also motivated translators of early Irish literature; this impetus culminated in Mary Hutton's 1907 translation entitled The Táin, a 495-page version of Táin Bó Cúailnge and associated tales in blank verse, complete with Homeric epithets, formulaic phrases, and formal division into "books."^[1] Despite.

[1] The thirst for a Celtic epic is also shown in James Macpherson's interpretations of the extant Scottish ballads as fragments of a lost early epic; his own extended "epic" productions were molded by these genre ideals. On these and related points, see Tymoczko, "Strategies."

these efforts, Sigerson's comment that the Irish national epic had yet to be written implies that all previous attempts had in some way failed to meet the goal, either for formal reasons or for reasons of quality. Sigerson's statement also suggests that a national epic was not to be found in early Irish literature: the medieval heritage was not perceived as including an epic that the nation could compare to the Iliad , the Aeneid, or even Beowulf. Thus the task remained for the modern age.

What would it have meant to write the Irish national epic at the time of the Irish literary revival? For the nationalists—as for ourselves—epic was a value-laden term, a valorizing approbation as much as it was the name of a literary genre. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definition: "Pertaining to that species of poetical composition . . . represented typically by the Iliad and Odyssey, which celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the achievements of one or more heroic personages of history or tradition." This definition presupposes as a standard the classical tradition of long verse narrative, elevated and weighty in tone, heroic in content. Though the definition is based on classical epics, as medieval literature was explored and reabsorbed in the nineteenth century, the canon of celebrated epics was extended to include heroic verse tales such as Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and the Nibelungenlied, which came to be seen as the cornerstones of their respective national literary traditions. The OED continues: "The typical epics, the Homeric poems, the Nibelungenlied, etc., have often been regarded as embodying a nation's conception of its own past history, or of the events in that history which it finds most worthy of remembrance. Hence by some writers the phrase national epic has been applied to any imaginative work (whatever its form) which is considered to fulfill this function." Irish nationalists not surprisingly desired such an epic—either medieval or modern—for the prestige it would confer on their national literature and for the centering of the literary tradition it would provide both at home and abroad.

Early Irish literature was seen as wanting in a national epic in part because of its form. Although the topic is complex, it can be noted briefly that early Irish hero tales are generally short and they are grouped in cycles. Thus most of the Irish tales do not meet the minimal definition of epic as being composed of continuous narrative; where long narrative exists, as in Táin Bó Cúailnge, it is almost always demonstrably pastiche. Irish heroic literature, moreover, is not in narrative verse; the narrative line is carried in prose, with (typically) several varieties of prose textures

within an individual work. Short poetic passages (usually of short-line verse of several formal types) are inset into the prose. The content of Irish hero tale—often scatological or pornographic, grotesque or paltry—was equally problematic for the literary revival. Táin Bó Cúailnge, about a cattle rustlers' raid on an adjacent tribe in Ireland, stands as a notable example: far from recording a noble or dignified enterprise, the story involves grotesque and scatological descriptions of battle, adultery, and pandering. Moreover, since the sympathies in Táin Bó Cúailnge are with Ulster as it is invaded by the other four provinces of Ireland, the enemy is referred to as "the men of Ireland"; the story is therefore virtually worthless as the raw material for an Irish national epic of a conventional sort. Finally, the highly variable tone of Irish heroic literature, mixing the heroic or the exalted with grotesque or macabre humor and hyperbole, presents difficulties.

The problems of adapting the early material were so severe that the process of translating the early texts was inhibited, and the early material was reclaimed in severely circumscribed ways (Tymoczko, "Strategies"; "Translating the Old Irish Epic"; "Translating the Humour"). Many stories were simply suppressed or radically abridged in translation; when sagas were translated, elements of the contents were expurgated or the form assimilated to established genres such as verse epic or folktale. Humorous sagas fared least well; they were either repudiated or eliminated from the translation record altogether. Largely for these reasons, Táin Bó Cúailnge was not translated in its entirety into English until 1976, more than seventy years after a full German translation appeared. Thus, not only was early Irish hero tale difficult to present as a national epic in its own right, but it also offered very poor models for those who would write modern Irish epics because it did not present a native Irish poetics that could be received into the European canon and embraced by the modern age. Revivalists could neither reuse the content nor write "in the style of" the early material without colliding with the dominant poetics and canons of Western literature as a whole and of English literature in particular. Sigerson's call went unanswered because of the problematic nature of writing a modern epic in a tradition where no regulation epics had existed, where there was neither dominant Western epic form nor epic style. Sigerson's challenge presented a double bind: to write to meet the received definition of epic was to give up the game and repudiate the national tradition; to write within the national tradition was to produce a work that

would not meet the criteria of epic or command the respect of international audiences.

Whatever their professed stand on the need for a national literature or on Irish nationalism, the Anglo-Irish writers of the Irish literary revival were in the main committed to an English poetics. English poetics had formed their literary sensibilities as English speakers and as people educated in an English educational system. In their works they employ English genres, English prosody, and English standards of narrative. Anglo-Irish precursors of the Irish revival such as Ferguson write in the style of Tennyson, Yeats begins as a nineteenth-century English romantic, and many of the principal writers of the revival use drama, not a native Irish genre at all, as their main form. English poetics determines both the form of original writings and the form of literary translations. Despite the surface concern with Irish subject matter, formally the Anglo-Irish literary revival is a branch of English literature, and the Anglo-Irish writers show themselves to be West Britons in their poetics.

The interest of the Irish literary revival in a national epic and the question of Anglo-Irish poetics are obviously germane to Joyce's choice of form in Ulysses . Ulysses has often been hailed as a modern epic, a determination invited both by its title and by the Homeric parallels that Joyce judiciously disseminated. Yet I suggest that if one were to have sat down to write the Irish national epic in English at the turn of this century, transposing an Irish poetics and content into English, it would have come out rather like Ulysses . It would have involved a compromise between established European guidelines for the genre and native formal principles for hero tale. The content would have balanced Irish themes, perspectives, plotting, and tone with those sanctioned by classical models. Joyce's Ulysses can be seen as his solution to these problems. In this chapter I sketch out several ways in which Ulysses is an epic reflecting Irish poetics, with the argument concentrating on three principal features of Ulysses : the gaps in the narrative, the stylistic variation, and the comic elements.

i. Moving Down the Cycles: Ulysses and the DiscontinuousNarrative of Irish Oral Tradition

Like canonical epics, Ulysses is long and weighty (two pounds, eight ounces in the Gabler reading edition), but unlike traditional or canonical

epics, it is composed of episodes rather than continuous narrative, each of which claims approximately one hour of June 16, 1904.^[2] Joyce stressed the episodic structure of his narrative in his references to Ulysses, naming the chapters and writing to Carlo Linati, "Each adventure is so to say one person" (Letters 1: 147). Of the names of the episodes Hugh Kenner has written, "Their usefulness points up one of the salient peculiarities of Ulysses : the identity each of its eighteen episodes assumes, by contrast with the relatively anonymous chapters of normal novels. 'Episode,' a word Joyce used consistently, suggests something more bounded than a chapter" ("Ulysses " 23). The episodes are separated by significant gaps in which things vital to an understanding of the day's events are left unspoken. Transitions are not supplied between the episodes; we have the narrative equivalent of the cut rather than the dissolve (Kenner, "Ulysses " 15) as we move from discrete episode to discrete episode.

There are, moreover, other gaps in the narrative as well, and about these hiatuses or skips Kenner comments: "There is much that the Blooms do not say to each other, much also that the book does not offer to say to us. Pondering such instances, we may learn how largely Ulysses is a book of silences despite its din of specifying, and may notice how eloquent is the Blooms' rhetoric of avoidance and also the author's. Some of the most moving things the book has to say are things never said" ("Ulysses " 48). Kenner cites as an example the gap during which Molly and Leopold discuss their plans for the day ("Ulysses " 48–49; cf. Kenner, "Rhetoric of Silence"); during this hiatus Molly tells the time when Boylan will come to visit her and Leopold says he will be out in the evening, seeing Leah at the Gaiety. Later allusions to the conversation tell the reader it has happened, but the event itself is omitted from the narrative. Leopold thinks to himself as the funeral cortege makes its way through Dublin:

Could I go to see Leah tonight, I wonder. I said I. Or the Lily of Killarney ? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big powerful change. Wet bright bills for next

[2] Joyce distributed Homeric schemata to Carlo Linati in 1920 and Valéry Larbaud in 1921, among others, indicating the time occupied by each episode as well as the classical mythic parallels signaled by the titles of the episodes (Ellmann, JJ 2 519–21; Kenner, "Ulysses " 23–25). For a comparison of these schemata, see Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey appendix. Kenner, "Ulysses " 24, describes each episode as a "space-time block of words."

week. Fun on the Bristol. Martin Cunningham could work a pass for the Gaiety. Have to stand a drink or two. As broad as it's long.

He's coming in the afternoon. Her songs. (6.184–90)

The time at which Boylan will come is made clear for the reader in "Sirens," where Bloom thinks to himself, "At four, she said" (11.188). The gap is intentional; Joyce knows what has transpired, taking care to alert the reader as well, and yet omits the material. As Kenner observes, "The text has details to sustain our sense of the probable. Joyce clearly did think out such a scene, and very pointedly did not write it" ("Ulysses " 48).

The conversation between Molly and Bloom occurs within an episode, but there is a similar gap between episodes 12 and 13 in which Bloom and some of the other mourners pay their respects to Paddy Dignam's widow, leaving her a monetary gift; again the event itself is omitted from the narrative, but it is both anticipated and recollected by Bloom. It is this errand that sets the meeting place between Bloom, Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, and Crofton at Barney Kiernan's Pub; and it is while waiting for them that Bloom has his confrontation with the Citizen. On the beach afterward, Bloom refers back to the visit lightly as he recollects his day: "Long day I've had. Martha, the bath, funeral, house of Keyes, museum with those goddesses, Dedalus' song. Then that bawler in Barney Kiernan's. Got my own back there . . . But Dignam's put the boots on it. Houses of mourning so depressing because you never know. Anyhow she wants the money" (13.1214–27). Again Kenner points out that the narrative gap is artistically contrived by Joyce and the events deliberately effaced: "By featuring this errand a little more, both before and after it happened, Joyce could have made easier not only the reader's lot but also his own; he wouldn't have had to contrive subsidiary links—Joe Hynes's money, Nannetti's errand to London—to give 'Cyclops' some look of entrainment with the rest of the book" ("Ulysses " 102).^[3]

In some ways it is difficult to approach these features of Ulysses anew because critical analysis of the gaps and the episodic structure of Ulysses

[3] See Kenner's discussion of the psychological undertones of this errand for Bloom ("Ulysses " 102–3). A whole series of gaps is correlated with the characters' use of the Dublin tram system; see the examples in Hart and Knuth 18, 24–38; cf. Kenner, "Ulysses " 14–15.

has shaped contemporary views of narrative itself and much of contemporary narratology. The gaps have resulted in theories about the unspoken elements of a text and certain features of reader reception theory.^[4] The gaps and narrative silences in Ulysses are seen as characteristically Joycean, and critics have demonstrated that they have a variety of functions in the narrative.

The sources to which these features of Ulysses are attributed are varied. Kenner, for example, connects the episodic structure of Ulysses and Joyce's conception of the episodes as "adventures" with the organization of Charles Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses , a refraction of the Odyssey known to Joyce from his boyhood. Lamb's chronological and episodic version is organized around Ulysses's adventures, features that Kenner sees as decisive for Joyce's narrative: "Encountered by Joyce at twelve, this version so impressed itself on his exceptional memory that he seems to have read versions of the Greek text as though they were expansions and rearrangements of Lamb. When he planned Ulysses the 'adventure' was his unit, and the core of the book consists of twelve episodes in chronological order, each based on one adventure, each independently elaborated and bounded" ("Ulysses " 23–24).^[5] Although it may be true that Lamb influenced Joyce's treatment of the Homeric parallels, it is disingenuous to maintain that Lamb is the driving influence on the formal organization of Joyce's narrative. Lamb omits the Telemachia and the descent to Hades (cf. Kenner, "Ulysses " 24), and since Joyce restored those elements of Homer's epic, it is clear that he was not strangled by Lamb's narrative arrangement in his own formal treatment of the myth.^[6]

The gaps and the episodic structure of Ulysses link Joyce's epic more to the episodic composition of the cycles of Irish heroic literature than to the structure of other classical or medieval heroic texts. However much Joyce might have been influenced by Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses, it is inconceivable that he should have failed to appreciate the formal alternatives embodied in Irish heroic literature on the one hand and in classical epic on the other, and that he should have failed to be aware that in choosing an episodic structure with the types of gaps Ulysses presents,

[4] See, for example, Kenner, "Ulysses "; Iser chs. 7 and 8; Schutte and Steinberg 160.

[5] Cf. Litz, Art of James Joyce I.

[6] Gilbert avoids the issue entirely by claiming that "the structure of [Ulysses ] as a whole is, like that of all epic narratives, episodic" (3).

he was choosing to write in the form of Irish hero tale. Though it would be simplistic to look at the episodic structure and the gaps in Ulysses solely from the perspective of influence theory, in order to understand adequately the many levels on which the episodic structure and the narrative gaps function, it is essential to realize that in Ulysses they are an aspect of the intertextuality between Joyce's narrative and Irish hero tale.

Irish hero literature is organized into "cycles" of relatively short, discrete narratives; bridges between the stories generally do not exist, and it is often difficult even to establish chronological relations between many of the tales. Serglige Con Culainn (The Sickbed of CuChulainn ), the source of Yeats's Only Jealousy of Emer , offers an example of the difficulty of integrating stories chronologically with others; in the story CuChulainn lies abed for a year of his life after being wounded by women from the otherworld:

"Wilt thou not be carried to Dun Delgan, thy stronghold, to seek for Emer?" said Loeg.

"Nay," said [CuChulainn], "my word is for Tete Brecc"; and thereon they bore him from that place, and he was in Tete Brecc until the end of one year, and during all that time he had speech with no one. (AIT 179)

Where does this story fit in the narrative of the early Irish Ulster Cycle? During which year of his life was CuChulainn intended to be imagined as in bed silent? Nowhere is there a medieval synchronism telling us how to fit this episode into the progression of CuChulainn's life. It is left to the individual members of the audience—if they are so inclined—to integrate this material with the other narrative episodes of the cycle and to reconcile the events of the various stories into a coherent chronology. ^[7]

[7] The problems of chronology in the early Irish texts apparently did at times trouble some of the medieval readers of the manuscripts, for, though they may be later scribal accretions, in some medieval texts there are synchronisms, attempting to establish the chronology of the different episodes of the heroic cycle. In the case of Loinges Mac nUislenn (The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu ), we are offered a synchronism after Fergus and the Ulstermen go in exile: "To the Ulstermen the exiles showed no love: three thousand stout men went with them; and for sixteen years never did they allow cries of lamentation and of fear among the Ulstermen to cease: each night their vengeful forays caused men to quake and to wail" (AIT 245). This passage is intended to reconcile the fact that Fergus is at once foster father of CuChulainn and yet part of Medb's forces when CuChulainn opposes the Ulster exiles at the age of seventeen: it is an attempt to mesh the action in Compert Con Culainn (The Birth of CuChulainn ) and The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu , an older story that was being integrated to the CuChulainn form of the Ulster Cycle. For an early discussion of the variant texts of The Birth of CuChulainn , see Nutt, Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth 39–47; on the synchronism of The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu with the CuChulainn form of the Ulster Cycle, see Tymoczko, "Animal Imagery" 159–60.

Typically each early Irish story gives a single perspective on the heroes, one that may vary in significant ways from those of other sagas. There is, for example, a difficulty in reconciling the dominant form of the Ulster Cycle in which CuChulainn is chief hero with Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó (The Story of Mac Datho's Pig ), where Conall Cernach is the main champion of Ulster and there is no reference to CuChulainn. At other times there are outright inconsistencies between texts, for example, in the genealogy and birth tale of the Ulster king Conchobor or in the generational level of the sons of Uisliu.^[8] Characters may also be presented with fundamentally different characterizations; thus, Conchobor is generally a noble, just king, but in The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu he is treacherous, lying, jealous, and tyrannical. Examples such as these could be multiplied from every cycle of early Irish literature.

In early Irish literature the variations in perspective, the absence of chronological integration, and the inconsistencies embedded in the texts reflect the fact that the medieval texts derive from an oral literary tradition; they derive from temporal and geographical multiforms of the cycles and of the stories, variations typical of oral literature that have been recorded in the medieval manuscripts. The inconsistencies may have been tolerated by the medieval learned classes because the manuscripts were intended as compendia of lore, perhaps reflecting the range of variants that could be used as the learned classes saw fit in different political or cultural contexts. But thus fixed, the material has survived for posterity as "texts"; as a consequence, modern readers of Irish hero tales must relate, integrate, and in some cases reconcile the various traditions preserved and the various facets of the heroes revealed in individual stories.

In medieval Irish literature, as in oral traditional literatures in general, every creation of a story is a re-creation; every telling of a tale is metonymic of the tradition as a whole.^[9] Oral traditional tales are not self-contained in the way that written stories typically are, and they presuppose that the audience is familiar with the content and form of the literature; this is what

[8] On some aspects of the inconsistent versions of Conchobor's genealogy, see Nutt, Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth 72–74; Tymoczko, "Animal Imagery" 154–55, discusses the generational variation in the presentation of the sons of Uisliu.

[9] On these aspects of oral literature, see, for example, Lord and Foley 193ff.

"traditional literature" is by definition. An oral traditional literature like Irish literature presupposes an audience that understands both the cultural context from which the tale grows and the metonymic nature of any given oral performance. That early Irish literature grows out of such a context is revealed in part by the presence of many unspoken assumptions behind the texts—for example, that the audience understands the relationship between this world and the otherworld, that the audience knows the tribal and genealogical matrix into which characters fit, that the audience will understand the economic basis of the culture and the forms of the honor culture, or that the audience knows the narrative framework of the cycle in which the individual tale takes its place.

The result is another notable feature of early Irish literature: the quantity of material that is introduced but not explained, material that gives the stories a somewhat cryptic quality to the uninitiated modern reader. In Aided Óenfir Aife (The Death of Aife's Only Son ), for example, CuChulainn's son dies and in his honor the Ulstermen keep the calves from their mothers for three days: "Then his cry of lament was raised, his grave made, his stone set up, and to the end of three days no calf was let to their cows by the men of Ulster, to commemorate him" (AIT 175). This ending is metaphorically apt as a conclusion to a story about the failure of a boy to reach his parent and receive nurture from his tribe, but the audience must understand that early Irish culture is a cow culture, that wealth is measured in terms of herds, that the Ulstermen are putting in jeopardy what they hold dearest, and that unmilked cows and hungry calves set up a bawling that will serve as a suitable keening for the dead lad. When in Echtra Nerai (The Adventures of Nera ), Nera enters the otherworld on Samain (Halloween) and returns bearing primrose and garlic and golden fern (AIT 251), the audience is to understand that time in the otherworld is inverted with respect to this world: winter here is summer there. Nera can therefore prove he has been to the otherworld by returning to his people with summer fruits. Every tale has such intrusive elements, elements that are introduced but not explained, because the traditional audience understood the presumptions and explanation would have been superfluous.^[10]

[10] Unfortunately, such presumptions are seldom identified in the notes accompanying modern editions and translations aimed at general audiences who do not understand the presuppositions of the texts.

All of these features of early Irish literature cause difficulties for modern readers, and they were particularly problematic for the Irish cultural nationalists who attempted to reclaim early Irish literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In English translations of the Ulster Cycle and also in Anglo-Irish retellings of the materials, authors and translators struggle with all these generic and textual features. Early adaptations, retellings, and translations attempt to reconcile the inconsistencies, to establish synchronisms, to establish a uniform perspective, to provide transitions, to fill gaps in the narrative of the Ulster Cycle, and to explain (or explain away) the unfamiliar content. Links between stories are supplied, transitions invented, chronological order and consistency established, a uniform perspective imposed, objectionable material suppressed, and canonical epic form imposed, with the result that such refractions are much closer to traditional European epic narratives (and further from Joyce) than are the early Irish originals.^[11]

Despite all these difficulties, the Irish literary revival privileged and romanticized early Irish literature. Joyce reflects the atmosphere of the time and simultaneously treats the attitudes ironically in A Portrait of the Artist , where Davin is described as having learned Irish stories in his youth from oral tradition: "His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood towards this myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty

[11] Standish O'Grady, a seminal figure in the adaptation of Irish literature to English poetics, begins the process of integrating the narrative material of the Ulster Cycle. In the second volume of his History of Ireland , for example, he retells Táin Bó Cúailnge and other early tales in a style that has elements of nineteenth-century retellings of romances: the Ulster heroes are described as knights, supernatural elements (at times with Christian overtones) are added, and the whole is told in a pseudo-archaizing language in the lineage of William Morris's medieval publications. At the same time, a novel-driven aesthetic is apparent: O'Grady adds to his narrative internal states, feelings, and motivations where the Irish texts, like most medieval stories, are eloquently silent; circumstantial detail, rationalization, and sequential ordering suggest nineteenth-century realism; added dialogue gives a nineteenth-century balance between the narrator's voice and other textual elements; and so on. Augusta Gregory also works along these lines in Cuchulain of Muirthemne when she eliminates the episodic structure of the medieval narratives, synchronizes the chronology of the early stories to suggest a consistent cycle, translates the poetry as prose, normalizes the style to folk narrative, and eliminates the senchas. Both authors remove sexual and grotesque elements that would offend late Victorian taste and screen out most of the humor. In their versions of the tales the main characters are presented almost uniformly as seemly and noble, whereas the early texts have a problematic heroic.

and to its unwieldy tales that divided themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dullwitted loyal serf" (181). Kelleher reminds us that this is a romantic account, since by the nineteenth century the medieval tales were known primarily through scholarly publications or through a few popular retellings to which no Irish nurse would have had access ("Irish History" 419–20). What we can glean from the passage is that Joyce knew enough about early Irish narrative to know that it comprised discrete tales organized into cycles and to characterize its narrative texture as unwieldy—an apt description (from the perspective of modern English poetics) for tales that present modern readers with the problems just discussed. Joyce's characterization of early Irish literature in A Portrait suggests that the episodic yet cyclical structure of Ulysses refers back in part to the early Irish narrative tradition and that some of the "unwieldy" features of the narrative of Ulysses likewise have antecedents in the literary tradition of Ireland.

The inconsistencies and the variations in perspective found in early Irish literature are, for example, related to features of Ulysses that have been discussed in the critical literature. Each of Bloom's adventures in the chapters of Ulysses offers a variant perspective on the hero and the action, and these variants have a variety of aspects. At times there is a sort of parallax, the doubling of reference to the same events as perceived by different characters (Kenner, "Ulysses " 75–82); at other times the variation in perspective is a function of the diversity of style (Iser 179–95). Variation also results from the mythic functions assigned to characters; Kenner has observed that characters change their Homeric roles when passing between "playlets" ("Ulysses " 27); accordingly, the perspective on Molly shifts as she changes from Calypso to Penelope. Whatever the reasons for the shifts in perspective, the narrative texture of Ulysses presents in this regard analogues to the oral variants and variation in perspective of the early Irish heroic tales.

Using these means, Joyce invites us to reconsider perspective as a determinant of the definition of reality, a point that Wolfgang Iser makes in his discussion of the emergence of the character of Bloom in "Circe":

The figure of Bloom becomes ever more dominant. And this figure is shown from a variety of quite astonishing angles. . . . What Bloom is seems to depend on the perspective from which he is viewed, and his mirror image depends on his environment at the time. It is not surprising then that in the

course of the night Bloom becomes Lord Mayor of Dublin and, indeed, the illustrious hero of the whole nation. . . . The emergence of Bloom's hidden selves is not to be viewed as a symptom of repression, or as a way around the censorship imposed by the superego, but rather as an attempt to realize the potential of a character which in everyday life can never be anything more than partially realized.

This potential becomes richer and richer with the great variety of forms that the hitherto familiar character of Bloom adopts. And, conversely, if one wished to identify the Bloom of everyday life, one would be obliged more and more to pare down this rich virtual character. The everyday Bloom is merely a collection of individual moments in the course of his life—a collection which is infinitely smaller than that of the unlimited possibilities of the Bloom that might be.

. . . Whatever Bloom reveals of himself is revealed because he is in a particular situation; the forms of his character arise out of changing contexts of life, and so each form is bound to a particular perspective—indeed, this is the only way in which the potential can be realized. (216–17)

These functions of the variation in perspective invite still another comparison with the type of variation exhibited in the oral multiforms of early Irish literature. Iser is suggesting that each realization of Bloom is metonymic of the virtual Bloom, a point not unrelated to John Foley's suggestion that each realization of an oral tale is metonymic of the virtual oral tradition.^[12] The relationship of the part to the whole that we grasp in Joyce's method of characterization is not unlike that of oral tradition.

Related to the gaps, the narrative hiatuses, and the implicit assumptions in early Irish literature is also a feature of Ulysses that Richard Ellmann has termed "the blurred margin": "Joyce's surface naturalism in Ulysses has many intricate supports, and one of the most interesting is the blurred margin. He introduces much material which he does not intend

[12] See, for example, 192–93, where Foley discusses the function of the stock epithet: "The aspect named could be taken as a symbol sufficiently active to evoke not a partial characterization but rather the totality of a character's identity—pars pro toto , as it were. Since we know that a hero achieves his traditional identity . . . by the accumulation of his actions or deeds, so that mention of a single adventure can bring to life the entirety of a hero's accomplishments, why could not a single attribute command as its referent not a single idiosyncrasy but a whole personality complete with its mythical history? . . . This diction is explosively dynamic; . . . the seemingly humble phrase accesses whole worlds of reference. . . . All these and more can be called up into the narrative present merely by plugging into the traditional association of ideas, a network built up over generations."

to explain, so that his book, like life, gives the impression of having many threads that one cannot follow" (JJ 2 377). Richard M. Kain elaborates on the same feature, seeing Ulysses as

an immense structure containing allusive trifles, loose ends, errors intentional and accidental—in short, a magnificent but flawed creation . . . like life itself. . . . Almost every event has its penumbra of details, partially recognized or unknown, whether on the naturalistic or symbolic levels, or . . . on both levels simultaneously. Thus it matters little that the book can never be fully comprehended, for the very infinitude of motifs and allusions creates an atmosphere of significances. ("Motif as Meaning" 75–76)

From the point of reader reception, these unexplained materials in Ulysses are not unlike the implicit presuppositions of early Irish narrative—the assumption of knowledge of the accepted belief system, the historical scaffolding, the economic substratum of the narrative, and so forth—discussed above. The unexplained assumptions in the early texts also create a sort of "blurred margin," evoking a similar response in the modern reader though originating in a vastly different poetics. This aspect of Joyce's narrative is related to his inclusion of lore of all sorts (a point discussed in chapter 5), and it is a feature that Gilbert (probably at Joyce's behest) has connected with the practices of the Irish poets:

It is interesting to note that the Irish sagas came, at an early stage, to be written in prose ; such orally preserved prose sagas were recited by the file or professional minstrels in Ireland as early as the seventh century. . . . These prose narratives were "detailed and elaborate," and the minstrels of the period must have possessed remarkable powers of memory, far exceeding those necessary for the reciters of epic poems. It is significant that Ulysses is both detailed and elaborate in its narration of facts and its numerous historical and literary echoes. Like his predecessors Joyce was gifted with a prodigious memory, and had none of the modern aversion from elaboration and a detailed treatment of narrative. (70–71)

In Ulysses Joyce recapitulates the episodic organization of Irish tales into cycles with his gappy narrative, and he provides a blurred margin in Ulysses parallel to the knowledge assumed of a traditional Irish audience. Though these features in Ulysses grow out of radically different artistic purposes and function in radically different ways from similar features of Irish hero tale, nonetheless the narrative texture of Ulysses is remarkably akin to the early texts, having both analogues and antecedents in early

Irish literature to important Joycean narrative techniques. Joyce exploits these features in his narrative for various purposes, including the restructuring of the novel and expression of the twentieth-century interest in perspective and style. At the same time in his narrative method Joyce looks backward to early Irish narrative tradition.

Iser, writing about gaps in Henry Fielding's narrative, observes, "The gaps, indeed, are those very points at which the reader can enter into the text, forming his own connections and so creating the configurative meaning of what he is reading" (40). To twentieth-century readers of early Irish literature, the gaps, the variation in perspective, the inconsistencies, and the unexplained background knowledge at times are all still troublesome, yet they may also be seen as opportunities and challenges to enter into the texts, to create configurative meaning. These were invitations that most of Joyce's contemporaries shirked. The gappy structure of early Irish narrative cycles and the reader response required to approach this oral literature present similar challenges to the challenges of Ulysses . Because many of the distinctive qualities of early Irish narrative result from the oral base of the tales, it is possible that Joyce was sensitized to such narrative possibilities by his own position in a living, if attenuated, Irish storytelling tradition and his own literary relation with his father. But we may also speculate that some of Joyce's techniques in Ulysses were engendered in part by his own attempts to make configurative meaning of the unfamiliar narrative texture of medieval Irish literature and his own reader response to the early narrative of his native tradition.

ii. Stylistic Variation in Ulysses : Prose Modes and Poetic Structures

Joyce's attachment to the stylistic experimentation and diversity of Ulysses is well known. In 1921 he wrote to Harriet Weaver, "The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone's mental balance" (Letters 1: 167). His stylistic variation met with strong negative reactions from Pound and others as he was writing Ulysses , and Pound wrote after the receipt of "Sirens," "A new style per chapter not required." Joyce nonetheless persevered with his intentions (cf. JJ 2 459–62, 471), and he wrote to Miss Weaver: "I

understand that you may begin to regard the various styles of the episodes with dismay and prefer the initial style much as the wanderer did who longed for the rock of Ithaca. But in the compass of one day to compress all these wanderings and clothe them in the form of this day is for me only possible by such variation which, I beg you to believe, is not capricious" (Letters 1: 129).

Many critics have discussed aspects of the narrative complexity that result from the stylistic variation in Ulysses , and some of the functions of this element of Joyce's work have been illuminated. Iser observes of "Oxen of the Sun" that

one has the impression that the different views presented by the different styles exclude rather than supplement one another. With each author [parodied], the theme takes on a different shape, but each treatment seems to assume that it is offering the reality. . . . By parodying the styles, Joyce has exposed their essentially manipulative character. . . . With his historical panoply of individual and period styles, Joyce exposes the characteristic quality of style—namely, that it imposes form on an essentially formless reality. . . .

. . . While the theme of this one chapter is love, the theme of Ulysses itself is everyday human life, and the stylistic presentation of this varies from chapter to chapter, because it can never be grasped as a whole by any one individual style. Only by constantly varying the angle of approach is it possible to convey the potential range of the "real-life" world. (192–93, 194; cf. 200–227)

Joyce's stylistic shifts thus function to convey an essential modernist view, yet at the same time Joyce's tenacious attachment to the stylistic diversity and experimentation in Ulysses is explained partially by the intertextual reference it makes with the stylistic diversity of early Irish heroic narrative prose, which has as one of the most notable features stylistic variation, a variation that was at odds with the canonical form of Western epic. Insofar as Joyce was writing within the generic conventions of Irish epic, however, such stylistic variety was de rigueur, and the mixture of poetic and prose types to be found both in Ulysses and in early Irish texts merits special attention.

At least three types of prose can be identified in early Irish hero tales: an idiomatic and syntactically direct prose used for the narrative and the dialogue, a formulaic prose used for descriptions behind which we see the traces of oral formulaic verse (Slotkin), and an alliterative prose used for certain ornate passages. The syntactically direct prose varies in a number

of parameters, including tone and register, particularly in dialogue that delineates character and establishes hierarchical relationships of the characters. The poetry includes both stanzaic rhymed verse and alliterative cadenced lines seriatim in stanzas of irregular length. Because narrative verse was not part of native Celtic poetics, poetry in the early Irish narratives is all spoken, generally taking the form of dialogue, though it may also be used for spoken prophecy, ceremonial greeting, description, and other "lyrical" purposes.^[13] A celebrated example of spoken verse elements in a prose narrative occurs in the ninth-century Exile of the Sons of Uisliu when the unborn infant Deirdre screams out from her mother's womb at a gathering of the assembled Ulstermen.

Then they brought the woman before them, and thus spoke to her Fedlimid, her husband:

What is that, of all cries far the fiercest,
In thy womb raging loudly?
Through all ears thou piercest with that clamor;
With that scream, from sides swollen and strong:
Of great woe, for that cry, is foreboding to my heart;
That is torn through with terror, and sore with grief.

Then the woman turned, and she approached Cathbad the druid, for he was a man of knowledge, and thus she spoke to him:

Give thou ear to me, Cathbad, thou fair one of face,
Thou great crown of our honor, and royal in family;
Let the man so exalted be set still higher,
Let the druid draw knowledge, that druids can obtain.
For I want words of wisdom, and none can I express;
Nor to Fedlimid a torch of sure knowledge can stretch:
As no wit of a woman knows what she bears,
I know naught of that cry that sounds forth from within me.

And then said Cathbad:

It is a maid who screamed wildly just now,
Fair and curling locks shall flow round her,

[13] It should be understood that in Celtic tradition as a whole verse was also used for lore (Irish senchas )—as a mnemonic for such things as genealogy and law. Though Celtic tradition has no epic verse, the old Indo-European epic-gnomic verse tradition is represented by such forms.

Blue-centred and stately her eyes;
And her cheeks shall grow like the foxglove.
For the tint of her skin, we commend her,
In its whiteness, newly fallen like snow;
And her teeth are faultless in splendor;
And her lips are red like coral:
A fair woman is she, for whom heroes, that fight
In their chariots for Ulster, shall be doomed to death. 
(AIT 240)

The distribution of the poetry in the early prose narratives is generally uneven, with some tales having a great deal of poetry and others having little or none at all; even within a single tale the distribution of poetry may be very uneven. The FerDiad section of Táin Bó Cúailnge , for example, is almost half dialogue poetry, while in other sections of the Táin poetry is not to be found. At times the verse is quoted in extenso , but in some cases only a single line or a couplet of the poem is quoted in the medieval text. Thus, in Aided Con Culainn (The Death of CuChulainn ), when CuChulainn's charioteer Loeg is mortally wounded, the text includes only the initial line of his death poem:^[14]

Then Lugaid flung the spear at Cu Chulainn's chariot, and it reached the charioteer, Loeg mac Riangabra, and all his bowels came forth on the cushion of the chariot.

Then said Loeg,
"Bitterly have I been wounded," etc. [sic ]

(AIT 336)

It is possible to tell when a poem in an early Irish text is quoted in full and when only a fragment of a poem is quoted because poems in Irish tradition end where they begin: they come full circle, either by repeating the entire first line, or by repeating the opening word or syllable, or by repeating the opening phoneme or phonemes. Such a closing is called a dúnad , 'closing, shutting; stoppage'. In the manuscripts the ending of a poem is often further delineated by the repetition in the margin or after

[14] Scholars have assumed that such fragmentary poems were so well known that it was superfluous for the scribe to write them out in extenso, or that for some other reason in the scribe's opinion the material was not worth wasting vellum on.

the poetic text of a phrase, word, or syllable reiterating the dúnad, thus marking the poem as complete.^[15]

A curious feature of the poetry in Irish hero tales is that it often does not fit smoothly in its prose context. It may be redundant with the prose, repeating the action in a different key, as it were, rather than advancing the narrative, or it may even be somewhat inconsistent with respect to the prose. In Imram Brain maic Febail (The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal ), for example, a woman is reported to sing fifty quatrains to Bran, but the text gives only thirty verses (cf. AIT 588–91). Similarly, in The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu Noisi has dark hair in the prose, but in one of the final lyrics spoken by Deirdre he is described as having hair with "yellow beauty" (V. Hull 63, 67). Scholars have debated about these inconsistencies and redundancies, and it is generally agreed that the poetry is exiguous (an assessment backed up by linguistic analysis), reflecting a slightly different oral variant than that recorded in the prose. Thus, the poetry and the prose can be seen as giving two perspectives on the same tale or the same episode.

Frequently there is a sizable poem at the end of a story, sometimes taking the form of a kind of epilogue. A particularly striking example of a verse "epilogue" occurs at the end of the early version of The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu , in which before her death Deirdre speaks two very beautiful love poems that have a great deal of nature imagery in them:

Deirdre lived on for a year in the household of Conchobar; and during all that time she smiled not a smile of laughter, she took not her sufficiency of food or sleep, and she raised not her head from her knee. And if any one brought before her entertainers, she used to speak thus:

Though troops brave and fair to see,
  May return home and ye await them;
When Usnech's sons came home to me in Alba,
  They came more heroically.

With abundant mead my Naisi stood:
  And near our fire his bath I poured;
On Anli's stately back wood;
  On Ardan's an ox or a goodly boar.

[15] For a discussion of the dúnad, see Murphy, Early Irish Metrics 43–45. See examples in Meyer, Bran 2: 285–91.

Though ye think the mead sweet
  That warlike Conchobar drinks,
I oft have known a sweeter drink,
  Often on the edge of a spring.

Our board was spread beneath the tree,
  And Naisi kindled the cooking fire;
Meat, prepared from Naisi's game
  Was more sweet to me than honey.
(AIT 246)^[16]

The fact that Irish hero tale consists of a mixture of several types of poetry and prose instead of the uniform poetry of canonical epics caused a great deal of interference in the perception and reception of the stories as native epic throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth; the record of this interference can be traced extensively in the translations of the Irish revival as well as in critical assessments of the time.^[17] Initially the prose matrix of early Irish narrative was interpreted as an indication of the lateness of Irish tradition; only gradually was it realized that the mixture of prose and verse is more likely archaic, since it appears in early Sanskrit writings as well.^[18] Gilbert, probably taking his cue from Joyce, presents prose as a characteristic feature of Irish narrative at an early period (70).

The intertextual links between Ulysses and the system of prose and poetic types in Irish heroic texts form a complex pattern. Like medieval Irish epic literature, Ulysses is in prose, thereby coinciding with the form of the novel. But like Irish heroic literature and unlike a more conventional form of the novel, the prose of Ulysses varies stylistically. Joyce does not confine himself to imitating the Irish stylistic range; instead, he

[16] In the case of this story, though not in all others, there is a final paragraph of narrative prose following the poetic epilogue; nevertheless, it is the poetry that sets the tone of the end of this tale. For other examples of verse at the ends of tales, see AIT 48, 133, 332.

[17] Various strategies were adopted by translators and critics to assimilate the Irish stylistic variation to other forms more acceptable to English poetics; Irish material was presented in translation, for example, as prosimetrum, folktale, or verse epic (Tymoczko, "Strategies"). Rarely was the form simply transposed into English, though in literal German translations such as Windisch's translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge the form is clear.

[18] See Dillon, "Archaism of Irish Tradition" 9–10, as well as references cited there for a discussion of the archaism of Irish form.

transposes into English the Irish principle of stylistic variation and the incorporation of a variety of prose types, borrowing some prose types from Irish literature (as I argue in the next chapter) but extending this modality in terms of modern English prose possibilities by using newspaper prose, the developmental repertory of English styles, the "Peg's Paper" style of "Nausicaa," and so forth.^[19]

Joyce is faithful to the form of Irish epic narrative not only in his use of various styles and types of prose but also in his insertion of poetic elements into the prose texture of Ulysses , thereby reproducing a number of the features of the verse in early Irish narrative. Page upon page of Joyce's text has snippets of verse—from Mulligan's doggerel,

I hardly hear the purlieu cry
Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by
Before my thoughts begin to run
On F. M'Curdy Atkinson,
The same that had the wooden leg
And that filibustering filibeg
That never dared to slake his drouth,
Magee that had the chinless mouth.
Being afraid to marry on earth
They masturbated for all they were worth.
(9.1143–51)

and nursery rhymes, both straightforward and parodied,

THE CHIMES

Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!
(15.65–64)

to quotations from Yeats,

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery
For Fergus rules the brazen cars.
(1.239–41)

[19] Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition 212; cf. Gilbert 76, who says the chapter is written in the style of Every Girl's Magazine. Joyce does in fact also parody certain Irish prose styles, particularly the alliterative adjectival style that became popular after the twelfth century. To be precise, he parodies the translation style of these passages, as Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition 212, has observed.

Songs also account for a great deal of the verse in Ulysses .^[20] In thinking about his daughter and wife, for example, Leopold muses:

On the Erin's King that day round the Kish. Damned old tub pitching about. Not a bit funky. Her pale blue scarf loose in the wind with her hair.

All dimpled cheeks and curls,
Your head it simply swirls.

Seaside girls. Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers' pockets, jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls , he says. Pier with lamps, summer evening, band.

Those girls, those girls,
Those lovely seaside girls.
(4.434–46)

Generally these poetic elements in Ulysses have been taken as naturalistic reflections of the role of poetry and song in Irish culture, as of course in part they are; but song and poetry have been central elements of Irish narrative for more than a millennium, and these features of Joyce's text are also links to the poetics of early Irish narrative. Because the most common word for 'poem' in early Irish is làid , also translated as 'song' since poetry was recited to musical accompaniment, the early Irish poems inserted into narratives are often referred to as "songs" in translations of the medieval texts; in Ulysses the poetry and verse found in the narrative are also often literally songs.

As mentioned above, songs and poems in the early stories are often quoted only partially or alluded to by their opening lines, and the examples of songs already quoted from Ulysses show that poems and songs are also seldom quoted in full in the Joycean text. Joyce's narrative is realistic in this respect, for rarely does a full poem or song pass through a person's thoughts; more typically a phrase or a few bars go through the mind. Moreover, Joyce does not need to provide his audience with the complete text because the words of popular songs and Yeatsian lyrics alike were familiar to his readers as a whole and to his Irish audience in particular. Joyce's treatment of the poetic elements is therefore analogous to the early Irish scribal practice of quoting only a line or two of many poems alluded to in the narrative, poems like the poetic elements of Ulysses

[20] On the role of songs in Joyce's work, see Hodgart and Worthington, Song ; and Z. Bowen, Musical Allusions .

that were apparently so well known or so trite that the scribe felt it unnecessary to write them out in full.

The poetic elements in Ulysses , like those in early Irish literature, are primarily "spoken," either in conversation or in the narrative representation of performance of songs. But in Ulysses the "speaking" of a poetic element may also be interiorized as part of the stream of consciousness, the inner dialogue. There is no purely narrative verse in native Irish tradition, and the role of poetry in Ulysses mirrors this situation in not carrying the narrative line any more than poetry does in early Irish stories.^[21] The verse in Ulysses, however, does frequently act as a commentary on the narrative line, offering a sort of parallax view of the situation, as in M'Coy's conversation with Bloom:

—My wife too, he said. She's going to sing at a swagger affair in the Ulster Hall, Belfast, on the twentyfifth.

—That so? M'Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who's getting it up? Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and. No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Tom strip of envelope.

Love's.

Old.

Sweet.

Song.

Comes lo-ove's old . . .

—It's a kind of a tour, don't you see, Mr Bloom said thoughtfully. Sweeeet song . There's a committee formed. Part shares and part profits. (5. 151—63)

Here M'Coy's question "Who's getting it up?" reminds Bloom of his wife's plans to meet with Boylan that afternoon and their sexual relations, euphemized in the line "Love's old sweet song." The song comments on the action, adding to the conversation an emotional element that Bloom represses even from himself, providing a doubled perspective that is not unlike the parallax in the doubled prose and poetry in some early Irish tales.

Finally, like many early Irish stories, Ulysses ends with a "lyrical" coda, Molly's soliloquy, the longest poetic element in the book and the final note. Marked off from the rest of the text in the first edition by a

[21] Z. Bowen comments "nothing in the plot or themes depends for its existence on song or musical allusion alone" (Musical Allusions 65).

large black dot at the end of episode 17, Molly's soliloquy was regarded by Joyce as the "clou" that finished the whole (Letters 1: 170) and simultaneously as a kind of epilogue (cf. Letters 1. 172). Like the poems that end some early Irish stories, forming a kind of poetic appendix, Molly's interior monologue sets the final tone of Ulysses ; reminiscent of the Deirdre poems cited above, Molly's monologue celebrates past events in a lyric mode, particularly at the very close of the episode. Neither character's lyric, however, advances the plot of its respective story; instead, these lyric elements determine meaning and mood. Joyce may have structured the ending of Ulysses partly with such Irish analogues as models.

The Irish dúnad, the proper closing to a poem, has been discussed, and it is clear that Joyce uses such a structure to close "Penelope," ending the chapter as he began it:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before . . .
 . . . and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (18.1, 18.1608–9)

Joyce explained to Frank Budgen that this circularity mirrored Molly's identification as earth goddess and eternal woman: "Penelope is the clou of the book. . . . It begins and ends with the female word yes . It turns like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and. . ." (Letters 1: 170). Although this explanation may be accepted as an intention Joyce could talk about, the circularity also gives the most poetic chapter of Ulysses a traditional Irish poetic close. The type of dúnad given to Molly's interior monologue is technically called saigid, 'attainment'; it is the most common form of ending in the Old and Middle Irish period, the linkage of beginning and ending of the poem by the reiteration of a whole word. In oral tradition such a device is mnemonic and, in conjunction with the alliteration that binds the end of one stanza to the beginning of the next, serves to preserve a poem intact and ordered. By marking Molly's soliloquy with a dúnad, Joyce emphasizes that the chapter is a lyric element, and he gives the episode poetic structuring. Joyce's correspondence indicates clearly that he was at some pains to choose the perfect word for the end of the book, and thus we have an indication that the crafting of the dúnad was of some importance to him (Letters 1: 169; cf. JJ 2 712).

Though the final episode of Ulysses ends with the dúnad called 'at-

tainment', a weaker sort of dúnad binds the end of the book to the beginning, forming a "poetic" whole of the entire structure of Ulysses. The book ends as it begins, on the letter and sound of s :

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead . . .
 . . . and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (1. 1, 18. 1609)

Joyce's ending is similar to the weakest dúnad in early Irish poetics, comindsma , 'riveting together'; in this type of dúnad the opening consonant and vowel of the first word are generally the last sounds of the poem, but occasionally only a single phoneme is repeated. Critics have noted this phonological circularity, comparing the entire book to a snake that bites its tail,^[22] but the link with Irish poetics has been missed in the critical literature. By providing a dúnad for Ulysses as a whole, Joyce sets a pointe finale to his entire creation, closing the poetic world, indicating that it is fully bounded with nothing missing. Thus, to attempt to extrapolate beyond the time of the text, to speculate on the future of Molly and Leopold, whether about events of the next morning or the long-term future as some critics have done,^[23] is to violate the poetic wholeness and boundedness of the Joycean world, emphasized here by the dúnad patterned on Irish poetics.^[24]

Joyce's mixture of prose with poems, songs, and lyric elements of all types in Ulysses can be classed as a prosimetrum. As such, the book fits neither the form of the conventional European novel nor the mold of European epic; rather, it stands as a radical challenge to both genres. But the same mixture of formal types that differentiates Ulysses from the dominant European narrative genres links it to the dominant narrative pattern of early Irish hero tales; thus, in his basic generic typology Joyce

[22] See, for example, Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey 162.

[23] As John Henry Raleigh does at length, 244–62, both about the next day and more distant events in time.

[24] The dúnad structures of the final episode of Ulysses and of the book as a whole anticipate the circularity of the prose in Finnegans Wake, but there are significant differences as well. In Finnegans Wake the circularity brings the reader back to the point of departure; nothing definitive has changed, and the book begins again. In the final episode of Ulysses, however, the final yes of the text terminates a development of Molly's thought that leaves her and the reader in a very different place from the point of departure. The same is true of the dúnad of the book as a whole; we have a sort of mystic sameness and difference, a closure and yet a mantic recognition of both similarity and difference.

affiliates his work with the early Irish tradition of heroic literature. These formal intertextual links to Irish hero tale are eloquent. If we can speak of a national spirit reflected in literary creation, then metempsychosis is as much a part of Joyce's form as it is of his content. Though Ulysses is in prose as Irish epics are, the Irish poetic structure of the dúnad makes Ulysses a kind of poem. Thus, Joyce marks Ulysses as the product of an Irish poet and asserts through the formal structures his own identity as a fili, the Irish poet who was equally the storyteller, an identification suggested, probably at Joyce's instigation, in Gilbert's study of Ulysses (70–71). Yet the poetic signals make Ulysses a sort of narrative poem and hence a covert analogue to the Odyssey and to Greek epic as a whole. Joyce conflates the structures of prose and poetry in his narrative, giving us prose with the opening and closing signals of poetry, collapsing the distinction of these two formal types in the creation of his epic, thus riveting together Greek and Irish form as he rivets together Greek and Irish myth.^[25]

iii. Epic and Mock Epic

Though Joyce obviously enjoyed and fostered the view of his book as a modern counterpart to classical epic, he also found it an incomplete reading. He complained that people missed the humor in the work: "The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it" (JJ 2 523–24). It may be doubted that there is nothing serious in Ulysses or that Joyce was a gentleman, but Joyce's words indicate that there is a great deal of humor in Ulysses .^[26]

Relatively early in the critical history of Ulysses , the view was developed that the book was a mock epic. Harry Levin stands as an early advocate of this position: "The relation of the Odyssey to Ulysses is that of parallels that never meet. The Homeric overtones do contribute their note of universality, their range of tradition, to what might well be a triv-

[25] Following a rather different line of argument, Litz, Art of James Joyce 65, comes to a similar conclusion that Joyce destroys the conventional distinctions between poetry and prose.

[26] There have been many studies of the comic elements in Ulysses. L. Thompson, Comic Principle , Z. Bowen, "Ulysses" as a Comic Novel , and Hayman, "Forms of Folly in Joyce," offer perspectives on the comic elements that are in some ways related to the argument I am developing here.

ial and colorless tale. But in so doing, they convert a realistic novel into a mock-epic" (James Joyce 71; cf. 71–73). This view of Ulysses has formed a continuous strand of the critical response ever since. It is con-genial to those who see Joyce's work growing out of the line of nineteenth-century realism and naturalism inherited from Flaubert and Zola, Ibsen and Hardy, and it fits with Joyce's desire to show the hemiplegia of Dublin in Dubliners (Letters 1: 55).^[27] This interpretation, which sees Joyce as struggling with the chaos and tawdriness of modern life, follows T. S. Eliot's analysis of the purpose of Joyce's mythic method:"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" ("Ulysses , Order, and Myth" 201).

These two polarities—epic and mock epic—have been perennials of critical debate and pedagogical practice regarding Ulysses . More recent criticism has tried to reconcile the views of Ulysses as both epic and mock epic—in such attempts, for example, as Kenner's analysis of Bloom as a hidden Homeric hero ("Ulysses " ch. 5). John Gross has also attempted to stop the quarrel by insisting that everyone is right: the two views can coexist because the book is big enough to be both epic and mock epic:

As everyone knows, Joyce partly uses the Odyssey to show up the unpoetic and unheroic aspects of modern life; as most readers probably come to recognize, he is equally concerned with the underlying continuities between past and present. The comparison between Bloom and Ulysses is more than a mock-heroic joke, and it cuts both ways, enhancing Bloom's dignity and reminding us that Ulysses , too, had his flesh-and-blood infirmities. (63)

Although this position is essentially sound, it seems to beg some questions about the genre of Ulysses —questions that find at least partial answers in early Irish literature.

Joyce's approach to writing an Irish epic in Ulysses must be understood in light of his view of comedy and his relationship to the Irish comic tradition. Joyce attributed the humor in his epic to his father, and when John Stanislaus Joyce died, the son said, "The humour of Ulysses is his"

[27] See, for example, Wilson 150.

(JJ 2 22.). A deeper investigation of Joyce's relation to Irish tradition, however, indicates that the situation is far from this simple. Joyce never explicitly acknowledged the importance of Irish tradition as a formative element in his thought, but in The Irish Comic Tradition Vivian Mercier has linked Joyce's practice to the Irish tradition of parody, a major comic form fully established in Ireland by the twelfth century. Mercier takes the view that Joyce was not fully conscious of his participation in the Irish literary tradition: "Though [Joyce] was so much more in the true bardic tradition than many minor figures of the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival, I doubt whether he ever became fully aware of this fact" (Irish Comic Tradition 235; cf. 236). But the father in Joyce's statement of debt can also be read as a sign of a larger inheritance: the humor and wit embodied in Ulysses derive from Joyce's patrimony, his birthright; the father is a signum for the cultural tradition that produced the son and that John Stanislaus Joyce epitomized.

Because the Irish comic tradition is complex and can be dealt with only in summary fashion in this context, I rely here on Mercier's excellent study The Irish Comic Tradition . Mercier's study has the virtue of including both halves of Ireland's dual linguistic and literary tradition; he compares Irish material with Anglo-Irish, showing continuities where appropriate. Although Mercier has concentrated on establishing the debt of Joyce's parody to the Irish comic tradition by devoting a chapter to the topic, Mercier's scheme is also useful as an overview of Joyce's entire comic repertory and its relation to Irish tradition, facilitating comparison where appropriate with comic texts in Irish. In fact, Mercier deals with Joyce throughout his book. Comic elements are pervasive in the Irish literary tradition: virtually no piece of secular literature (and little of the ecclesiastical literature) from the early period is devoid of humor, and the literature is characterized by a mixed tone. In Mercier's scheme Irish humor is distinguished by its absurdity and fantasy, and macabre and grotesque humor also play prominent roles.^[28] Wit and wordplay, including riddling and punning, are also important elements of the Irish comic tradition discussed by Mercier, and he stresses that the tradition is known for its invective, satire, and parody as well.

[28] Note that Mercier concentrates on aspects of Irish comic tradition that distinguish it from English literature; his analysis could profitably be expanded with a greater account of absurdity, understatement, and overstatement or hyperbole.

Mercier sees the fantastic humor in Irish literature as reflecting a taste for marvels and magic when these features are pushed to the edge of the ludicrous. Early Irish humor alternates between overstatement and understatement: exaggeration and hyperbole on the one hand, a dry or tongue-in-cheek quality on the other. Both types push the normal bounds of narrative into the realm of fantasy; such fantastic exaggeration can be seen in the "heptad of Fergus":

Three hundred, three score and five persons in Conchobar's household—that is, the number of days in the year is the number of men that were in Conchobar's household. Among them was a partnership—namely, a man to victual them every night, so that the first to feed them on that night, would come again at the end of the year. Not small was the feeding, to wit, a pig and a deer and a vat (of ale) for every man. There were, however, men within whom, as is told, that did not suffice, for instance, Fergus mac Róig. If true it be, noble was his size—i.e., the heptad of Fergus was not often met with any other [sic ], to wit, seven feet between his ear and his lips, and seven fists (=42 inches) between his eyes, and seven fists in his nose, and seven fists in his lips. The full of a bushel-cup was the moisture of his head when being washed. Seven fists in his penis. A bushel-bag in his scrotum. Seven women to curb him unless Flidais should come. Seven pigs and seven vats (of ale) and seven deer to be consumed by him, and the strength of seven hundred in him. It was needful for him then to feed the household for a week (seven days) more than anyone. (Stokes, "Tidings of Conchobar Mac Nessa" 26–27)

The elaborate detail and the perfect symmetry of both the arrangement of Conchobor's house and Fergus's anatomy combine with hyperbole and a dry tone to produce fantastic humor in the passage. As exemplified in this passage, absurdity is an essential element of much Irish literature. Here the passage is highly stylized and there are two symmetrical schemata—the matching of days of the year and the number of Conchobor's men on the one hand, and the sevenfold description of Fergus on the other. But the schemata are incompatible: if Fergus feeds the household for a week, then not all Conchobor's men will be pressed into service during the year. The inconsistency of the two schemata based on the numbers 365 and 7 throws the fantasy of the passage into relief and pushes the humor toward absurdity.^[29]

[29] Absurdity in early Irish literature is pervasive enough to have been parodied by the twelfth-century author of Aislinge Meic Conglinne (The Vision of Mac Conglinne ).

Fantastic humor often results from the exploitation of marvelous characters in early Irish literature, as we see in the case of Fergus. The tendency also extends to comic descriptions of deities (cf. Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition 19ff.). A celebrated passage of this sort in early Irish literature is the description in Cath Maige Tuired (The [Second] Battle of Mag Tuired ) of the Dagda, the 'good god' of Irish mythology, one of the most powerful yet most humorous figures of the early literature:

Then Lug sent the Dagda to spy out the Fomorians and to delay them until the men of Ireland should come to the battle. So the Dagda went to the camp of the Fomorians and asked them for a truce of battle. This was granted to him as he asked. Porridge was then made for him by the Fomorians, and this was done to mock him, for great was his love for porridge. They filled for him the king's cauldron, five fists deep, into which went four-score gallons of new milk and the like quantity of meal and fat. Goats and sheep and swine were put into it, and they were all boiled together with the porridge. They were spilt for him into a hole in the ground, and Indech told him that he would be put to death unless he consumed it all; he should eat his fill so that he might not reproach the Fomorians with inhospitality.

Then the Dagda took his ladle, and it was big enough for a man and woman to lie on the middle of it. These then were the bits that were in it, halves of salted swine and a quarter of lard. "Good food this," said the Dagda. . . .

At the end of the meal he put his curved finger over the bottom of the hole on mold and gravel. Sleep came upon him then after eating his porridge. Bigger than a house-cauldron was his belly, and the Fomorians laughed at it. Then he went away from them to the strand of Eba. Not easy was it for the hero to move along owing to the bigness of his belly. Unseemly was his apparel. A cape to the hollow of his two elbows. A dun tunic around him, as far as the swelling of his rump. It was, moreover, long-breasted, with a hole in the peak. Two brogues on him of horse-hide, with the hair outside. Behind him a wheeled fork to carry which required the effort of eight men, so that its track after him was enough for the boundary-ditch of a province. (AIT 39)^[30]

Immediately following this passage, the Dagda attempts to copulate with the daughter of his enemy—with ensuing difficulty because of the bulge

[30] The humor here turns in part on the reader's knowledge that the puddled dirt floors of Irish cottages often contained holes where animals could be fed; the Dagda is therefore bestialized by the Fomorians in this passage. On the survival of this practice to the modern period, see Evans 62.

Joyce may have known this description from Hyde, Story of Early Gaelic Literature 64–66, a volume that Joyce quotes in Ulysses 9.96–99.

of his belly.^[31] The Dagda is clearly a humorous figure in this text—humorous within the world of the tale as well as humorous to the audience—but the description is not parody: the Dagda's sexual prowess is established earlier in the text by his coupling with the Morrigan, the war goddess (AIT 38), a coupling that portends victory for his side. The text is an example of fantastic humor in which the genial father-god of the otherworld, the possessor of the caldron of plenty and the primeval progenitor, is seen to be akin to paltry human beings both insofar as he is the grateful (over) consumer of the otherworldly plenty and the subject himself of sexual dysfunctions like those of the audience.

That the passage represents an essentially comic view of the fantastic characters of the otherworld rather than parody can also be seen by comparing this description with another of the Dagda in Mesca Ulad (The Intoxication of the Ulstermen ):

"Here in front of them to the east, outside," said Crom Deroil, "I saw a large-eyed, large-thighed, noble-great, immensely-tall man, with a splendid gray garment about him; with seven short, black, equally-smooth cloaklets around him; shorter was each upper one, longer each lower. At either side of him were nine men. In his hand was a terrible iron staff, on which were a rough end and a smooth end. His play and amusement consisted in laying the rough end on the heads of the nine, whom he would kill in the space of a moment. He would then lay the smooth end on them, so that he would reanimate them in the same time."

"Wonderful is the description," said Medb.

"Great is the person whose description it is," said Cu Roi.

"What, then; who is he?" said Ailill.

"Not hard to tell," said Cu Roi. "The great Dagda son of Ethliu, the good god of the Tuatha De Danann. To magnify valor and conflict he wrought confusion upon the host in the morning this day; and no one in the host sees him."(AIT 229)

The Dagda's description here is amusing, but it is also clear that he is a wonderful figure (ingnad , 'strange, wonderful, remarkable, unusual') with the power of death and resurrection in his potent phallic club. These early Irish texts offer a dual vision in which awe and amusement can coexist.

[31] The sexual passage between the Dagda and the young woman was omitted from Stokes's 1891 edition and translation of the text; it was published without translation by Thurneysen in 1918 ("Zu Irischen Texten" 401–1). A modern edition and translation appears in Gray 46–49.

Mercier identifies as typical of the Irish comic tradition two other types of humor, the macabre and the grotesque, which he characterizes respectively as helping the audience to accept death and to overcome the awe of life and reproduction (Irish Comic Tradition 49). Macabre and grotesque humor, like the fantastic humor discussed above, may be connected with absurdity: "The macabre and grotesque do not become humorous until they have portrayed life as even more cruel and ugly than it is; we laugh at their absurd exaggeration, simultaneously expressing our relief that life is, after all, not quite so unpleasant as it might be" (Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition 1). Medieval Irish literature is full of examples of macabre and grotesque humor. Death, wounds, and sex are all part of the comic scene that shows the immense hero Mac Cecht lying wounded on a gory battlefield in Togail Bruidne Dá Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel ):

Now when Mac Cecht was lying wounded on the battlefield, at the end of the third day, he saw a woman passing by. "Come hither, O woman!" said Mac Cecht.

"I dare not go thus," said the woman, "for horror and fear of thee."

"There was a time, O woman, when people had horror and fear of me; but now thou shouldst fear nothing. I accept thee on the truth of my honor and my safeguard." Then the woman went to him.

"I know not," said he, "whether it is a fly, or a gnat, or an ant that nips me in the wound." It really was a hairy wolf that was there, as far as its two shoulders in the wound! The woman seized it by the tail, dragged it out of the wound, and it took the full of its jaws out of him. "Truly," said the woman, "this is 'an ant of ancient land.'"

Said Mac Cecht, "I swear what my people swears, I deemed it no bigger than a fly, or a gnat, or an ant." And Mac Cechttook the wolf by the throat, and struck it a blow on the forehead, and killed it with a single blow. (AIT 125)

Here fear of death is defused by the woman's fear for her own chastity, Mac Cecht's wounds notwithstanding; Mac Cecht's ability to survive the ravening wolf, which he unceremoniously dispatches with a bop on the head, contributes to the effect.^[32] Macabre humor is common in early Irish literature, where the heroic topics of single combats and battles provide ample material for jokes about blood, wounds, and death. Sexuality is

[32] Joyce probably knew a version of this passage since he uses The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel as a mythic substructure in "The Dead"; cf. Kelleher, "Irish History."

also a ubiquitous source of humor since women figure largely in early Irish literature and the sexual potential of their encounters with heroes is fully realized.

All these types of humor also characterize Ulysses , and the inclusion of such elements is a major reason the book has been viewed as mock epic. The description of Bloom in the bath presents the same type of fantastic humor as that of Fergus quoted above; overstatement and exaggeration mixed with a little ironic blasphemy cause laughter, yet behind the humor Bloom is presented as a cosmic figure in the eternal waters:

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. (5.565–72)

In this comic mystical vision Bloom, like Fergus, has taken on monumental proportions; his body floats like the earth upon the waters in creation myths, a sanctified body cum giant flower—lemon yellow like his soap—while the moving water swirls around his limp penis, "the father of thousands." The beauty of the language reminds the reader of the essential import of the vision, but the hyperbole of the imagery is humor ous.^[33]

Joyce's presentation of his epic character is thus typical of Irish literary tradition. The description of Bloom's culinary delectation, so often seized on in the critical literature on Ulysses , is a good example: "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine" (4.1–5). Hardly heroic fare, one might say, and the food becomes a commentary on Bloom's character, making him seem less than promising as an epic

[33] Cf. Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey 71–73, 110–16, who discusses inflation and deflation (magnification and "parvication") as basic techniques in both "Aeolus" and "Cyclops."

hero.^[34] Yet the tongue-in-cheek presentation of Bloom's appetites closely resembles both the passage on Fergus's prodigious appetites and the passage on the Dagda's love of the humble porridge. Absurdity does not necessarily render heroism impossible or even unlikely in Irish literature.

Ulysses is also full of macabre and grotesque passages; indeed, many of the parts of the book that most outraged moral purists and censors have these qualities. Probably the most infamous is the passage showing Bloom defecating:

He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. . . .

Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize titbit: Matcham's Masterstroke . . . .

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! (4.494–510)

Bloom on the cuckstool shows us mortality, but mortality becomes funny because of Joyce's play on the word column . Reading and defecating fuse as one experience of columns, and when the two fuse literally—"He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it"—the entire episode ends on a comic note, allowing us to reclaim our bodily functions, even those that involve death (consumption/eating) and fertility (production/defecation). In Mercier's terms the passage is both macabre and grotesque. In a similar way sexuality almost always has a comic side in Ulysses , as it does in Irish literature as a whole. When Molly reminisces about Poldy's having insisted upon seeing her drawers on a public street before they were married (18.293–325), we laugh at his impatience, his disregard of consequences, the potential for mishap, his all-too-human foibles when sexually attracted, like the heroes of early Irish literature led astray by their urges and appetites. Here and throughout Ulysses the sexual

[34] We must tread lightly on the question of Bloom's diet insofar as the Homeric heroes eat the innards in ceremonial sacrifices.

passages remove the awe from the coupling of human bodies, even those of the primordial mother and father.

We could continue on through the other levels of Mercier's analysis of the Irish comic tradition, giving examples of Irish wit, wordplay, and riddling, as well as Irish irony, satire, invective, and parody, and marshaling close parallels from Ulysses . Suffice it to say that Joyce exploits all the resources of the Irish comic tradition. The textual examples cited here of early Irish humor are not significant per se, and I do not argue that Joyce knew all the passages in question, though he might well have done. One could substitute or multiply examples from any of the cycles of early Irish literature or indeed from virtually any period of Irish literature and much of the Anglo-Irish literary tradition as well to make the same points. Thus, any exposure to Irish literature—from the material Joyce found in the United Irishman to stories he read when studying Irish—would have reinforced the living tradition of Irish humor carried by his father and would have contributed to the particularly Irish sense of the comic found in Joyce's later work.

Ellmann has argued that Joyce makes unexpected junctures in his work:

One of his unexpected fusings takes place between beauty and its opposite. . . . Dublin is dear and dirty; so are the mind and body. In theory we grant these combinations, but in practice seem to hold the units apart. Joyce never does. What other hero in the novel has, like Stephen Dedalus, lice? Yet the lice are Baudelairean lice, clinging to the soul's as well as the body's integument. What other hero defecates or masturbates like Bloom before our eyes? Joyce will not make it easy for us either to contemn or adore. (JJ 2 5–6)

These juxtapositions hold true of the heroic tradition in Ireland as well, which offers a sophisticated view of heroic culture and heroic values, continually asking that the audience reevaluate heroism by presenting tarnished heroes (Tymoczko, Two Death Tales , introduction). In The Story of Mac Datho's Pig the great Ulster heroes are by turns revealed to be cowardly, stuttering, impotent, limping, or foolish. And in Táin Bó Cúailnge , if not in the realistic novels of Ellmann's acquaintance, Ellmann's rhetorical question about Stephen's lice finds a concrete answer, for in the earliest version of that tale the great CuChulainn begins his day by picking the lice off his clothing:"Cúchulainn was squatting haunchdeep in the snow, stripped and picking his shirt" (Kinsella, Táin 116).

CuChulainn's lice, like those of Stephen, are spiritual as well (PA 174, 234; SH 194; cf. Herring, Uncertainty Principle 157; cf. JJ 2 5–6), for he is the hero who in various tales kills his son, betrays his wife with another woman, lets men go past him on the occasion of the Táin while he has a tryst with a woman, suggests retreat from the territory of his enemies after a drunken incursion, and gets his head rubbed in dung by CuRoi (AIT 172–75, 176–98, 223, 329; Kinsella, Táin 72).

These strange juxtapositions come about because the essence of the comic tradition in Irish literature is to mix humor, wit, and satire with serious material. Medieval Irish literature in particular, but most of the later Irish tradition as well, is characterized by its mixed tone. Rarely is a tale purely comic or purely tragic. There are exceptions, to be sure, but in most early Irish tales tragedy and comedy go hand in hand. The most tragic stories—like The Death of Aife's Only Son or The Death of CuChulainn —have humorous episodes. The most humorous tales—like Fled Bricrend (The Feast of Bricriu), The Intoxication of the Ulstermen, or The Story of Mac Datho's Pig —take heroes and heroism seriously or convey an implicit warning. Jokes can have a serious edge and serious things can be laughed at in early Irish literature, including the gods. Irish tradition is archaic in many respects,^[35] and Mercier (Irish Comic Tradition ch. 9) has detailed the archaism of the Anglo-Irish comic tradition in particular. The mixed tone of Irish narrative is another such archaism, the product of a literature not schooled in classical genres and an Aristotelian aesthetic.

The importance of humor to Irish tradition had been partially obscured for English speakers, particularly members of the Ascendancy, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because of the dominant critical view of Celtic literature promulgated by Matthew Arnold in "On the Study of Celtic Literature." Though Arnold praised Celtic literature and recommended that it be included in university curricula, at the same time he gave it a definition based on a very slender knowledge of Welsh and no knowledge of Irish literature in the original. One of the characteristics he most valued and most recommended was "Celtic melancholy" (361 and passim)—seeing the Celts on the whole as a gentle, if emotional, elegiac folk with a fine attunement to "natural magic." This

[35] See, for example, Dillon, "Archaism of Irish Tradition"; Jackson, Oldest Irish Tradition : and Robinson.

romantic view of Celtic literature in turn influenced how early Irish literature was read and translated in Ireland as well, distorting the reception of the humor in early Irish texts considerably. The notion of "Celtic melancholy," particularly insofar as Irish texts are concerned, is a product of English criticism rather than a quality notable in the early Irish literary texts themselves; but it was a critical view that affected the tone of most Anglo-Irish writers of the Irish literary revival, writers who were themselves often guided by Arnold's critical refraction of Celtic literature as well as by nationalist ideological constraints that privileged melancholy and tragedy.^[36]

More than most other writers of the Irish literary revival, Joyce uses humor and maintains the mixed tone of early Irish narrative. But humor is not the only face of Joyce's writing. Ellmann has written of Ulysses (JJ 2 360), "The many light-hearted cross-references [to the Odyssey ] have lent support to the idea that Ulysses is a great joke on Homer." Though Ulysses includes all facets of the Irish comic tradition, humor is not the whole story, as Ellmann remarks:

Jokes are not necessarily so simple, and these [references to the Odyssey ] have a double aim. The first aim is the mock-heroic, the mighty spear juxtaposed with the two-penny cigar. The second, a more subtle one, is what might be called the ennoblement of the mock-heroic. This demonstrates that the world of cigars is devoid of heroism only to those who don't understand. that Ulysses' spear was merely a sharpened stick, as homely an instrument in its way, and that Bloom can demonstrate the qualities of man by word of mouth as effectively as Ulysses by thrust of spear. (JJ 2 360)^[37]

Joyce's use of jokes as a vehicle for a serious aim is typical of Irish tradition. The converse is also true. Writing about Joyce's correspondence, Ellmann cautions that "his remarks are bitter, but they are also funny. It is easy to forget, in the midst of his descriptions of his troubles in letters, how repugnant to his personality 'Celtic' melancholy remained" (JJ 2

[36] Arnold, who knew Welsh tradition somewhat better than he did Irish, may have based his generalization on the elegiac tone of much of Welsh poetry from the early period, though by no means is this the sole note to be found. This view of the Celtic literature is ironized by Joyce in "A Little Cloud" (cf. Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle 58–62, 153).

[37] Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition 213–14, makes a similar point; cf. also Herring, Joyce's "Ulysses" Notesheets 67 n. 10, and Herring, "Bedsteadfastness of Molly Bloom" 49–61.

218).^[38] Joyce is closer to the spirit of native Irish literature in his mixed tone both in his letters and in Ulysses than virtually any other Anglo-Irish writer of the period.^[39]

Joyce shows his appreciation of the comic in his literary theory as well as his practice, defending comedy as superior to tragedy:

All art which excites in us the feeling of joy is so far comic and according as this feeling of joy is excited by whatever is substantial or accidental in human fortunes the art is to be judged more or less excellent: and even tragic art may be said to participate in the nature of comic art so far as the possession of a work of tragic art (a tragedy) excites in us the feeling of joy. From this it may be seen that tragedy is the imperfect manner and comedy the perfect manner in an. (CW 144)

Thus, in Ulysses the comic elements are not intended merely to be funny but to raise joy. Ulysses is also comic in the medieval sense of having a happy ending; like Dante's Commedia, Ulysses is designed to bring hope as much as to amuse.^[40]

To summarize, then, Joyce shows the full range of Irish comic devices: fantastic, grotesque, macabre humor; wit, wordplay, and punning; satire and parody. His mixed tone—comic and serious, bitter and funny—his refusal to limit himself to either a heroic or a mock-heroic vision, his ability to embrace both views: all these qualities mark Joyce's writing, particularly in Ulysses , as part of the Irish literary tradition and show that in Ulysses he produced an epic with the tone of early Irish heroic literature. Moreover, Joyce developed an aesthetic theory that formalized the importance of comedy and hence justified important aspects of his nation's literary heritage.

iv. Conclusion

Among his Irish contemporaries, Joyce is one of the few to have chosen The Book of Invasions as the basis for a literary refraction of Irish mythic literature. On the face of it the story holds little promise: a rather dry succession of invasions, it is also among the least plausible of medieval

[38] Cf. S. Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce 14–15, 26.

[39] Since Joyce, of course, this has become a familiar mode in Irish writing, as the work of Flann O'Brien or Austin Clarke illustrates.

[40] See Dante's "Epistle to Can Grande," quoted in B. Clark 47.

Irish narratives. Yet in retrospect it is clear why Joyce turned to this tale in writing his version of the national epic. As the organizing principle for the chronology of Irish history and Irish myth, The Book of Invasions stands at the center of Irish tradition; it gives a relatively simple framework for the national history of Ireland, providing typologies for the population. Unlike the Ulster Cycle or the Cycles of the Kings, its referent is universal, all of Ireland, for it primarily purports to tell the history of the invasion that furnished the ancestors of all the leading clans of Ireland. Because of its containment and clear outline, The Book of Invasions was more useful for an epic than was the Finn Cycle. Though the Fenian material held much potential for Joyce, it was not right for his attempt at a modern epic because of its amorphousness, its greater regionalization, and its multifariousness, the very features put to good use in Finnegans 'Wake. Although The Book of Invasions includes wars and conflicts, it is not principally a celebration of the heroic deeds and ethos of the warrior class, as so much of early Irish literature is; the story is thus a framework for an epic that is potentially other than a glorification of war. In telling the story of Ireland's past, The Book of Invasions also connects Ireland with Europe and the Mediterranean world, thus contributing to Joyce's coordination of multiple mythic patterns. Moreover, The Book of Invasions was known by virtually all the Irish of Joyce's time. For all these reasons, it becomes clear why Joyce based his attempt at a national epic on this material.

Ulysses has been problematic for readers and critics alike since the book appeared, in large part because it violates formal expectations for all the standard European genres. These violations of generic expectations made it hard for the initial readers of Ulysses to construe the book, hard to configure its meaning. The gaps in the narrative structure, the blurred margin, the variations in style and form, and the hyperbolic or humorous elements have also fueled critical debate about such polarities as novel or epic, epic or mock epic, modern or postmodern. As early as 1923, Eliot, in his discussion of Joyce's mythic method, encapsulated aspects of the problem: "I am not begging the question in calling Ulysses a 'novel'; and if you call it an epic it will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age, which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of some-

thing stricter" ("Ulysses , Order, and Myth" 201). Some seventy years and countless novels later, Eliot's zeitgeist solution will not serve, and it is necessary to turn to other quarters for a solution to the puzzle. ^[41] Although there is danger in falling into a post hoc, propter hoc argument in a study of this sort, simplicity is always a desideratum in a theory, so long as the theory accounts for the phenomena in question. In this case the generic configuration of Irish heroic literature provides an elegant template for Joyce's generic experiments in Ulysses , a template that does not undermine most other investigations of Joyce's form but rather provides a pattern that integrates what has often been scattered critical response. The sheer number of points of contact between the narrative form of Ulysses and the form of early Irish narrative is telling.

Joyce elevated comedy above tragedy in his literary theory. This theoretical view suits Irish literature, but it does not facilitate the writing of epics, which in Western literature are more often associated with serious matter than with comedy. The comic tone, or even a mixed tone, is minimal in our canon of epics. Among the earliest epics the Odyssey is one of the few to be comic in the sense of having a happy ending, though even at that precious few of its characters come out well, and it is not primarily amusing or humorous in its tone. In terms of possible models for writing an Irish epic at the turn of the century, the discussion of epic in the library scene of Ulysses provides some illumination: "Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important, it seems" (9.309–13). Considering the importance of the comic in Irish tradition, it is no wonder that an Irish Don Quixote comes to mind when the Irish national epic is imagined. Joyce here may be signaling that just as the Irish have a Spanish origin in The Book of Invasions, so too their national epic would have a Spanish flavor: like Don Quixote it would be full of humor and burlesque, mixing the comic and a serious worldview. We could look at Ulysses as a modern Irish analogue to the Spanish epic, a comparison Joyce may have had in mind given his structural and the-

[41] For other, more recent approaches to the problem of Joyce's genre, see Litz, "Genre of Ulysses "; Kenner, "Ulysses " 2–4; Gifford 1–3.

matic use of The Book of Invasions as well as his commitment to the view that the Irish were a Spanish race. A full exploration of this possibility, however, lies beyond the scope of the present study.^[42]

Joyce attempted to disguise and make palatable his attempt at an Irish epic by constructing it like a series of Chinese boxes: remaining faithful to contemporary Ireland through surface realism, gaining justification as a canonical epic through accessible classical parallels and his title, building on the Irish heroic narrative tradition through the subtext of The Book of Invasions, Irish narrative techniques, and Irish tone, and passing the whole off as a novel. The man who felt that "an Irish safety pin is more important than an English epic" [JJ 2 423) could be counted on to continue the Irish narrative tradition in his version of a modern Irish epic. Joyce's juncture of the Irish and classical epic traditions at their points of greatest similarity was decisive in his ability to make the enterprise succeed.

The problems posed by the form of Ulysses are precisely those of Irish epic. When Ulysses appeared, it was anomalous both as a modern novel and as a modern epic for many of the same reasons that Irish hero tale is anomalous as epic: for its odd characters, its scatology and sexuality, for

[42] In a 1911 essay entitled "Irish Books," John Eglinton (W. K. Magee) had speculated about the idea of a modern Irish epic in the mold of Cervantes's work: "If a masterpiece should still come of this literary movement . . . we have a fancy that appearances in modern Ireland point to a writer of the type of Cervantes rather than to an idealising poet or romance writer. A hero as loveable as the great Knight of the Rueful Countenance might be conceived, who in some back street of Dublin had addled his brains with brooding over Ireland's wrongs, and that extensive but not always quite sincere literature which expresses the resentment of her sons towards the stranger. His library would be described, the books which had 'addled the poor gentleman's brain.' . . . We can conceive him issuing forth, fresh-hearted as a child at the age of fifty, with glib and saffron-coloured kilt, to realise and incidentally to expose the ideals of present-day Ireland. What scenes might not be devised at village inns arising out of his refusal to parley with landlords in any but his own few words of Gaelic speech. . . . His Dulcinea would be—who but Kathleen ni Houlihan herself, who really is no more like what she is taken for than the maiden of Toboso, . . . an old woman, . . . not a friendly and buxom wench, whose partiality for strapping young foreigners, whether Danish, Saxon or Scotch, has had a great deal to do in bringing about the present, by no means desperate, situation of modern Ireland" (87–88; see also Gifford 214; Thornton, Allusions in "Ulysses" 171–72). It is possible that Joyce knew about Eglinton's idea from a conversation prior to the publication of the essay, as represented in Ulysses .

For a comparison of Ulysses and Don Quixote, see Z. Bowen, "Ulysses" as a Comic Novel, esp. 83–102.

its mixture of the heroic and the comic, for its anomalous form, its variation in styles, its mixture of prose and poetic structures, its gaps, its blurred margin. The question of "epic or mock epic?" is one that only someone outside Irish tradition would think to ask about either early Irish hero tale or Ulysses . One is tempted to say "neither" or "both," but the real answer is that Ulysses is an Irish epic. The irony of Ulysses is that as a national epic this most Irish of modern narratives was no more acceptable to the Irish literary revival or to cultural nationalists than the early Irish hero tales had been.