Chapter 5—
Genre Echoes From Early Irish Literature

CECILY: (to Gwendolen) That certainly seems a satisfactory explanation, does it not?

GWENDOLEN: Yes, dear, if you can believe him.

CECILY: I don't. But that does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer.

GWENDOLEN: True. In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Although the mythic method that Joyce pioneered has been productive for the modern novel, his stylistic and formal innovations, particularly those of Ulysses , are primarily responsible for securing his place as a major writer. Joyce himself felt that the formal innovations were the most significant achievement of Ulysses; after Ulysses was published, he said, "The value of the book is its new style" (quoted in JJ 2 557). The ways in which Ulysses is indebted to the mythos of the native literature of Ireland for its architectonics and to Irish literature for the basic framework of its epic mode suggest that other innovative formal characteristics of Ulysses , including its stylistics in the broadest sense, must be reappraised in terms of Irish literature. Stuart Gilbert, presumably at Joyce's suggestion, proposes that the detail of Joyce's narrative ties his work to that of the fili (71–72), but other features of the narrative of Ulysses indicate this relationship as well; such considerations lie at the heart of the investigations in this chapter.

An epic cast in the mold of Irish heroic narrative, Ulysses is at the same

time a copious compendium of virtually the full range of early Irish literary prose genres, a range that can be understood only in light of the nature and function of the early Irish professional classes. After the advent of Christianity to Ireland, the early Irish fili (pl. filid ), 'poet', inherited the varied functions of all the learned classes of the early Celts. At once seer, magician, jurist, historian, storyteller, praise poet, and satirist, the fili at the earliest period was sacred guardian of the traditions of the people. The fili was the source of knowledge of the future through his skill at divination; the repository of knowledge of the past as historian, storyteller, and genealogist; and the guardian of the norms of the present as praise poet, satirist, and keeper of law, precept, and proverb.^[1]

The etymological meaning of the early Irish words for 'poet', fili and éices , is in each case 'seer', the former cognate with Old Irish fil ('there is', originally 'behold') and the latter cognate with Old Irish do-éccai ('sees'). In early Irish culture the fili was the visionary of the tribe, and that role affected all his other functions and his entire literary output. The early Irish poet was a seer and a shaper, able to frame in suitable words his natural vision; as Ifor Williams asserts regarding the Irish poet's Welsh counterpart, the poet had "a good eye": "The poet was the man who saw. Over and over again in our early poetry the bard sings 'gwelais '—'I have seen.' . . .The poet is a seer, and has a good eye; he has the gift of vision: when he looks at a warrior in splendid armour, or gazes upon a landscape, or the life of society, he can frame or shape his vision in fitting words, in metre and assonance, measure and adornment" (7–10). But the poet also had second sight—not only his natural eye, his súil , but his inner eye, his rosc —which permitted his vision to extend through time and space. Many early Irish stories concern poets who are able to recover information about the past (often by summoning a dead witness);^[2] others relate the poet's ability to discern the truth of a situation despite distance or deceptive illusion (e.g., AIT 360ff., 37off.; Meyer, Fianaigecht 38–39). The ability to see afar structures even such seemingly simple genres as nature poetry (Tymoczko, "'Cétamon'"; Cf. Tymoczko, "Knowledge and Vision"). Stories also show poets as able to foretell the future (e.g., AIT 240–41, 131–33),

[1] For a more comprehensive view of the role of the early Irish poet, see Knott and Murphy 1–93; Flower; Dillon and Chadwick chs. 1, 9; Watkins 213–17; I. Williams ch. 1; Robinson; Carney; J. Williams and Ford 21–49; as well as references cited in these sources.

[2] See, for example, Kinsella, Táin 1–2.

and some textual information has survived about the poet's incantations and rituals used to achieve these visions.^[3] As a visionary, therefore, the poet could establish the truth of the past, the existential or normative truth of the present, and the truth to be revealed in future events.

Many, though not all, of these varied functions passed to the senchaid (pl. senchaide ), 'storyteller', of later Irish folk tradition. ^[4] Thus, Irish literature has wider boundaries than those of modern English literature, because Irish literature includes in its domain various types of senchas ('ancient or traditional lore'), such as history and magical charms, as well as imaginative prose and poetry and other literary genres. It follows that the genres of Irish literature have a different mapping from those included in the dominant center of the English literary system and, further, that a writer importing genres from Irish literature into English will be perceived as innovative or erratic when judged by the standards of English literature. These wider boundaries for literature are in fact archaic; Terry Eagleton, for example, has observed that the restriction of literature to imaginative writing is a relatively recent phenomenon even in English literature, dating only to the Romantics (17–22).

Once we permit ourselves to consider Ulysses as reflecting in part the system of Irish literature as well as that of English literature, it is immediately apparent that many of the textual types represented in Ulysses , textual types that disrupt the form of the novel, take their place easily within the field of Irish literature. In this chapter I sample Joyce's use of Irish genres and Ireland's formal repertory. The chapter is not meant to be exhaustive; rather, it indicates lines of future inquiry. Here we will consider Joyce as keeper of lore (senchas ), as historian, and as visionary able to mediate perception of the otherworld.

i. Joyce as Irish Senchaid : Nonhierarchical Narrative, "Catechism," and Lists in Ulysses

Many critics have commented on the encyclopedic character of Ulysses ; for example, Karen Lawrence, in The Odyssey of Style in "Ulysses" (83),

[3] Watkins 216 and T. O'Rahilly 317–40, as well as sources cited by these authors, examine the evidence for the poets' incantations.

[4] For an introduction to the modern oral storyteller, see Delargy. Mac Cana, Learned Tales 3–18, discusses the debt of the Modern Irish storyteller to "his medieval forebears."

has characterized the narrative in "Wandering Rocks" as spewing forth a stream of facts. Streets are named, the characters' courses charted. Throughout the book we get facts about natural science and geography, about history and politics, about literature and language, with the lore transmitted being naturalized to the stream of consciousness; while the inquiring mind of Bloom recollects certain types of facts, Stephen and Molly hold quite different repertories of lore in their minds. As is clear from the etymological connection between senchas , 'lore' (DIL , 'old tales, ancient history, tradition; genealogy; traditional law'), and senchaid —in Old Irish 'a reciter of lore, a historian' and later 'storyteller'—Irish storytellers were responsible both for providing entertainment and for safeguarding the knowledge of the tribe. Literary practitioners in Irish tradition, the senchaide and the filid before them, were not simply storytellers but keepers of traditional lore of all sorts, including at the earliest period history, genealogy, kinglists, law, precepts, proverbs, and natural science; and their tales are filled with all sorts of information of this kind, which sometimes dominates the narrative to a degree frustrating to the modern reader (C. Bowen, "Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas " 115). Even the fragmentary anecdotes remaining about John Stanislaus Joyce indicate that Joyce's father was a storyteller in this tradition; his stories melded placelore, history, and family traditions. Joyce himself assumes the role of senchaid as he stuffs Ulysses with all sorts of information, set partly in the voices of his characters and partly in the voice of the narrator or arranger; and this feature of Joyce's narrative increases geometrically, even if in a fractured manner, in Finnegans Wake .

Since Gilbert's early and ground-breaking study of Ulysses , the detail of Joyce's narrative has been compared to the "detailed and elaborate" prose narratives of the professional Irish poets, and the relation of that detailed narrative tradition to Joyce's blurred margin has already been explored. It is not merely the quantity of detail that forms the link between Ulysses and early Irish narrative, however; the nature of the materials detailed and the narrative techniques of representing the lore in Ulysses are of central importance in establishing the intertextual connections. Joyce emerges most clearly as senchaid in two specific episodes of Ulysses , "Wandering Rocks" and "Ithaca." In these episodes Joyce's senchas becomes the center of the narrative, molding the narrative texture in formal and generic ways as well as informing the content. An inves-

tigation of these two episodes illustrates the intertextuality between Ulysses and the lore-bearing texts of early Irish literature.

In episode ten, "Wandering Rocks," Joyce presents nineteen short episodes about the doings of a great number of characters.^[5] Their stories are presented, as Lawrence has observed (83), with lateral logic: the "paratactic imagination . . . catalogues facts without synthesizing them. It documents the events that occur but fails to give the causal, logical, or even temporal connections between them." This treatment of characters, she continues, violates the standards of novel writing and confounds our expectations of plot because "the kind of conceptualization and logical subordination of events that one would expect in narrative discourse is . . . strangely absent" (84–85); moreover, repetitions impart "a curiously mechanical quality to the narrative" (85). She goes on to say: "The limitations imposed upon novel writing by the exigencies of plot making are ignored, and the reader's expectation of the functional relevance of narrative details is undermined . . . Plot is the novelistic counterpart of history; especially in 'Aeolus,' 'Wandering Rocks,' and 'Ithaca,' Joyce investigates the possibilities that are ousted by conventional novelistic plot" (88).

In assessing Joyce's means of exploring alternate narrative modes, it is important to note that collections of stories such as exist in "Wandering Rocks" are common in many types of early Irish senchas: the episode is similar to the historical anecdotes grouped in the medieval manuscripts, to genealogical information and anecdotes, to certain collections of onomastic lore, and to collections of placelore. The form of these grouped snippets of narrative is related to their function. These collections of tribal lore were preserved in the manuscripts for professional purposes; the preservation per se of senchas was paramount, resulting at times in a kind of paratactic or nonhierarchical arrangement including the recording of alternate or even contradictory variants and the cataloguing of facts without synthesis or subordination. Though causal or temporal connections might at times be recorded, it was sufficient for the senchaid to record the raw data in a "mechanical" or "scholarly" manner, leaving the tasks of logical arrangement, causal or temporal connection, and synthesis for the ex tempore demands of oral presentation.

[5] Frequently the episode is described as composed of eighteen scenes and a coda and is considered a "small-scale model of Ulysses as a whole" (Gilbert 227).

Though Joyce uses the narrative technique of cataloguing materials and events for his own purposes in shaping and redefining the modern novel, he is one with the Irish senchaid in acting in "Wandering Rocks" as a repository for all these stories, presenting each on a par, rather than acting as the narrator of a novel who narrows his interests, selecting, organizing, and establishing an order of hierarchical importance. Although it can be argued that to some extent such lateral and paratactic narrative is typical of medieval literature as a whole and that Joyce's use of these narrative strategies is therefore consonant with his medievalism in general, his reversion to this narrative mode and to the persona of senchaid at precisely episode ten in Ulysses signals his definitive break with the initial, signature, or establishing style of Ulysses ; the break comes at the beginning of the second half of the book, a point taken up below.

Many collections of early Irish lore seem to be presented in serial fashion with few ordering principles in the body of the collection, but a rough order or organization is frequently suggested by the beginning and ending of the collection, which act as a sort of frame to the material. The collections of placelore, for example, are organized clockwise around Ireland, with Tara as the initial reference point (C. Bowen, "Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas " 124–25). In "Wandering Rocks" an analogous principle of organization is suggested by the opening itinerary of Father Conmee, who traverses Dublin in one way, and the closing itinerary of the Viceroy, who traverses Dublin in another way. These two individuals represent the two dominant forces of Irish life under English rule: they are the two masters whom ordinary Dubliners like Stephen Dedalus serve.

—I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

—Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

—And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

—Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

—The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church. (1.638–44)

The Dubliners whose paths are followed in the center sections of the episode are servants of these two masters, with Haines's puzzlement about "Italian" a reminder that not all of the representatives of the Roman church need be foreign. By framing the series of paratactic stories within

these confines, Joyce links this central episode of Ulysses to the ideology informing both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist , the theme of hemiplegia that ramifies through the short stories and is the dominant factor causing the young artist to go into exile.

Joyce presents lore in an even balder form in "Ithaca," the episode he considered both his "ugly ducking" and his favorite (Budgen, Making of "Ulysses" 258). In most critical studies the style of this episode has been called "catechistic," following Joyce's own description of it as a "mathematical catechism" (Letters 1: 159); however, the model for the episode is far from certain, and the question has engendered lively debate about whether "Ithaca" represents secular or religious catechism. The episode is at once an encyclopedia of knowledge about the fictive world and a parody of the arrangement of knowledge, as Lawrence observes:

Critics have had difficulty in agreeing on the particular system parodied in "Ithaca" (for example, the Christian catechism, nineteenth-century books of knowledge, or nineteenth-century science) because it is the idea of a taxonomic system itself, not any particular system, that is parodied. Science, logic, mathematics, theology, and literary criticism are all implicated in the parody, for they are all systems of ordering and containing knowledge. (195)

One is tempted to deconstruct Joyce's own description of the episode and note that Hans Christian Andersen's Ugly Duckling is ugly only because it is a foster child and does not fit the expectations of its foster family: in the same way, Joyce's form in the seventeenth episode of Ulysses can be seen as a fosterling in English, imported from an Irish literary context and awkward primarily because of its new narrative context. But the argument need not rely solely on the deconstruction of Joyce's own statements; it can be conducted on an evidential basis.

Joyce's many non-Irish sources for his form in this episode converge with Irish models, since senchas and collections of stories of all sorts in the medieval Irish manuscripts regularly begin with a question to which the manuscript record or the story provides the answer. Thus, for example, the tale Aided Con Roi (The Death of Cu Roi) begins, "Why did the men of Ulster slay Cu Roi mac Dairi? Easy to say. Because of Blathnat who was carried off from the siege of the Fir Falgae, because of the three cows of Iuchna and the 'three men of Ochain,' that is, the little birds that used to be on the ears of Iuchna's cows" (AIT 328). Thereafter the narrative is given. The same structure is found in the genre of tecosca , 'in-

structions; where the following examples from Tecosca Chormaic (The Instructions of Cormac) are typical:

"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," said Carbre, "what is best for a king?"
  "Not hard to tell," said Cormac. "Best for him

  Firmness without anger,
  Patience without strife,
  Affability without haughtiness,
  Taking care of ancient lore
  Giving truth for truth . . ."

"O grandson of Conn, O Cormac," said Carbre, "what are the dues of a chief and of an ale-house?"
  "Not hard to tell," said Cormac.

  "Good behaviour around a good chief,
  Lights to lamps,
  Exerting oneself for the company,
  Settling seats,
  Liberality of dispensers,
  A nimble hand at distributing,
  Attentive service,
  To love one's lord,
  Music in moderation,
  Short story-telling
  A joyous countenance,
  Welcome to companies,
  Silence during a recital. . .
  Harmonious choruses—

those are the dues of a chief and of an ale-house," said Cormac to Carbre. (Meyer, Instructions 3, 11–13)

Similar patterns are found in early Irish onomastic lore and placelore, as well as in some genealogical and legal materials; this question-and-answer format became a major formal principle of organization and coherence in certain collections of lore (see, for example, C. Bowen, "Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas " 123). Celtic literature is full of compendia that lack the hierarchical structure, taxonomic arrangements, or abstract conceptual schemata of the types that structure most dominant European forms of knowledge; this is one reason that the Celts have been accused of lacking a scientific mentality. Joyce's catalogue in "Ithaca" reads exactly this way; it represents, in fact, an archaic way of pre-

serving knowledge and for this reason can be read as a parody of all modern systems of ordering. We should observe here again the double consciousness of these early Irish materials, a quality illustrated in the quote from The Instructions of Cormac ; though the answer does set out excellent conditions for drinking and is thus instructive, it is clearly also intended to be witty and entertaining, even to some extent overstated and tongue-in-cheek. In much the same manner Joyce's answers in "Ithaca" provide a good deal of instructive material—mined regularly by critics to explicate the earlier narrative of Ulysses —yet the episode is still light-hearted and even parodic.

Lawrence has called the questions in "Ithaca" "expansible"—that is, they subdivide knowledge into finer and finer gradations: "It is the breakdown of the plot into discrete questions and answers that is the primary model of the infinite divisibility of experience and the expansibility of writing. Ironically, no answer is definitive because it has the potential to generate another, more specific question, which leads to another answer, and so on" (190). Similar structures of query and probing are also common in Irish senchas. The opening paragraph of Cóir Anmann (The Fitness of Names) offers a convenient example:

Mumu 'Munster,' whence was it named? Not hard (to say); a nomine alicuius regis, that is from the name of a king who ruled it, to wit, Eochaid Mumo , son of Nia Febis was he.

Eochaid Mumo , whence is it? Not hard (to say). Eochaid mómó 'greater-greater'; for greater were his strength and might than the strength and might of every one in Erin who lived at the same time as he. From him Mumu 'Munster' is named. (Stokes, Cóir Anmann 289)

This passage moves from the general to the particular (and back again), ranging through the levels of knowledge that a poet should master, for it was part of a poet's honor to be able to answer whatever question a patron might ask in whatever detail demanded.^[6]

The Irish senchas considered here can be viewed as expanded or explicated lists, annotated with anecdote or narrative as the case may be. But listing per se is also a feature of early Irish narrative as a whole, a feature eminently consistent with narrative as a form of learning and lore.

[6] Cf. AIT 548–50; Connellan 9off.

Examples can be multiplied from virtually any Irish story, but a few cases will suffice. The text of Táin Bó Cúailnge includes a list of the members of Conchobor's men when he orders them to be summoned (C. O'Rahilly 11. 4053–4100), and a tract in the Book of Leinster lists the names of the shields of Conchobor's host:

Ochain was there, Conchobor's shield, the Ear of Beauty— it had four gold   borders around it;
Cúchulainn's black shield Dubán;
Lámthapad—the swift to hand—belonging to Conall Cernach;
Ochnech belonging to Flidais;
 Furbaide's red-gold Orderg;
Cúscraid's triumphant sword Coscrach. . .
                                                    (Kinsella, Táin 5)7

A list of CuChulainn's gifts is included in Tochmarc Emire (The Wooing of Emer ): "Many were his gifts. First, his gift of prudence until his warrior's flame appeared, the gift of feats, the gift of buanfach (a game like draughts), the gift of chess-playing, the gift of calculating, the gift of sooth-saying, the gift of discernment, the gift of beauty" (AIT 154). The Story of Mac Datho's Pig has a list of the banquet halls of Ireland and their appurtenances (AIT 199), and an itinerary of the route taken by Medb's forces to Ulster is found in Táin Bó Cúailnge (C. O'Rahilly 11. 280–96). A list of lists in early Irish literature could be extended at some length.

Joyce's fondness for lists and catalogues is therefore another feature linking Ulysses and the Irish narrative tradition.^[8] Although both "Wandering Rocks" and "Ithaca" can be considered as expanded or annotated lists, the catalogue or list per se in its simplest form is found frequently. Perhaps the most striking example is the list of motifs opening episode eleven:

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

[7] For the translation Joyce might have known, see Stokes, "Tidings of Conchobor Mac Nessa" 28–29.

[8] Umberto Eco discusses the broader medieval context of this encyclopedic approach to reality reflected in Joyce's work; he considers such features as inventories, lists, catalogues, and enumeratio and notes that coherent wholes are built through bricolage (8–11).

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who's in the . . . peepofgold?             (11.1–10)

The list continues for another fifty-three lines; though it serves primarily to enumerate the themes of the episode and is analogous to the listing of musical motifs in a fugue or other musical piece, it is an extended example of a feature that is characteristic of the narrative of Ulysses as a whole and that recapitulates the lists featured in early Irish narrative.

A more modest list or catalogue in Ulysses is the enumeration of the statues at the National Museum in "Circe":

The keeper of the Kildare street museum appears, dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People. (15.1703–10)

There is a delicious incongruity between the anticipated number of statues ("the new nine muses") and the actual number in the list (twelve); this touch mirrors another feature of some of the lists in the early texts, where there is frequently a discrepancy between the definition of a list as it is introduced and the actual list itself. In The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel , for example, the list of the seven sons of Ailill and Medb contains eight names: "There was . . . a troop of still haughtier heroes, namely, the seven sons of Ailill and Medb of Connacht, each of whom was called 'Mane.' And each Mane had a nickname, to wit, Mane Fatherlike and Mane Motherlike, and Mane Gentle-pious, Mane Very-pious, Mane Unslow, and Mane Honeywords, Mane Grasp-them-all, and Mane the Talkative" (AIT 103). The incongruities in passages such as these prompted medieval parody of the listing form as early as the twelfth century, as Aislinge Meic Conglinne (The Vision of Mac Conglinne) illustrates: "And they entreated him by each of the seven universal things,—sun and moon,

dew and sea, heaven and earth, day and night" (AIT 552).^[9] Medievals no less than twentieth-century readers could appreciate the wit in an author's deliberate inconsistency.

In Ulysses "Ithaca" is a list of lists, so to speak, but even Molly's soliloquy often moves into catalogue mode: "I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly" (18.1582–84). The hyperbolic sections of "Cyclops" carry the listing tendency to extremes:

From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy McCracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley. . . (12.173–81)

This list continues with another sixty-nine names; it is obviously a parody of certain medieval Irish lists since it includes "unknown" heroes and also has, as it were, scribal interpolations of such figures as Benjamin Franklin, Cleopatra, Gautama Buddha, and Lady Godiva, alongside the more predictable S. Brendan and Theobald Wolfe Tone. Yet the parody itself here has antecedents in the early texts.^[10]

Listing became a more prominent feature of Irish narrative after the twelfth century; this development coincides with the popularity of the later alliterative prose style, which is characterized by alliterative runs, including descriptions replete with lists of alliterative adjectives. The alliterative style is a stylistic correlate to the lists per se in the early texts and translates the function of narrative as senchas to the level of lexis.

[9] Although most inconsistencies in the early Irish lists can be traced to scribal interpolations or textual corruption, the medieval parodies suggest that glossators had been busy enough and scribes assiduous enough at copying all marginalia that inconsistency had become a pervasive feature of the medieval manuscripts.

[10] Robert Adams (151–58) analyzes a number of lists in Ulysses , including this list, showing how Joyce has crafted the burlesque in it; similar techniques are found in Irish lists including alliterating and rhyming names, names based on geographical features, and common nouns or adjectives used as personal names. See also Benstock and Benstock, appendix A.

An early example of the alliterative style is found in In Carpat Serda (The Scythed Chariot) , a section of Táin Bó Cúailnge , translated by Thomas Kinsella to reflect some of the alliteration of the Irish text:

When that spasm had run through the high hero Cúchulainn he stepped into his sickle war-chariot that bristled with points of iron and narrow blades, with hooks and hard prongs and heroic frontal spikes, with ripping instruments and tearing nails on its shafts and straps and loops and cords. The body of the chariot was spare and slight and erect, fitted for the feats of a champion, with space for a lordly warrior's eight weapons, speedy as the wind or as a swallow or a deer darting over the level plain. The chariot was settled down on two fast steeds, wild and wicked, neat-headed and narrow-bodied, with slender quarters and roan breast, firm in hoof and harness—a notable sight in the trim chariot-shafts. One horse was lithe and swift-leaping, high-arched and powerful, long-bodied and with great hooves. The other flowing-maned and shining, slight and slender in hoof and heel. (Kinsella, Táin 153)

Joyce adapts and simultaneously parodies the lists of early Irish prose and the adjectival style in some of the hyperbolic sections of "Cyclops":

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus ). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. (12.151–61)

Here Joyce's text reflects the formal qualities of Irish prose quite well; at the same time Joyce's exuberance, generally read as parody, can be seen as transposing the fun-loving qualities of the Irish adjectival style.

Lists in the medieval Irish texts are often outrageous and absurd because of a tendency for Irish schemata to become symmetrical or artificial in other ways, even to the point of inconsistency. This tendency to schematize and to produce symmetrical patterns is characteristic of Ireland's ancient jurist-made law texts as well: "We also find [in early Irish law texts] that unreal schematism and passion for classification which meet

us in the Hindu law books. In other words the jurists, while their work undoubtedly rested on a basis of actual custom, tended to produce a symmetrical pattern, and in the interests of symmetry they sometimes generalized rules and institutions which in real life had a much more restricted ambit" (Binchy 214).

Inclusive schematization thus represents an ancient strand of Irish intellectual life, appearing in the traditional stories as overblown or inconsistent schemata and outrageous and hyperbolic lists that were probably taken as comic even by the original audiences.^[11] Indeed, lore of various sorts is used at times for comic purposes in the early narratives and parodied as early as the twelfth-century Vision of Mac Conglinne , perhaps the best medieval parody in any language, where there is, for example, a parodic genealogy presented in foodstuffs:

     Bless us, O cleric, famous pillar of learning,
   Son of honey-bag, son of juice, son of lard,
     Son of stirabout, son of pottage, son of fair speckled fruit-clusters,
   Son of smooth clustering cream, son of buttermilk, son of curds,
     Son of beer (glory of liquors!), son of pleasant bragget,
   Son of twisted leek, son of bacon, son of butter,
     Son of full-fat sausage, son of pure new milk,
   Son of nut-fruit, son of tree-fruit, son of gravy, son of drippings,
     Son of fat, son of kidney, son of rib, son of shoulder. . . .
                                                                  AIT 561)

The same text also parodies the alliterative style: "Then putting a linen apron about him below, and placing a flat linen cap on the crown of his head, he lighted a fair four-ridged, four-apertured, four-cleft fire of ash-wood, without smoke, without fume, without sparks" (AIT 571). In Ulysses , when listing and lore become absurd or outrageous and when catalogues are amusing for their symmetry or inconsistency, Joyce merely continues a feature implicit and explicit in the medieval texts of Ireland as well as in later Irish literature, a feature that may be another reflex of the mixed tone or double consciousness in Irish tradition that

[11] The heptad of Fergus discussed above is an example. The combination of humor, oversystematization, inclusion of mutually contradictory materials, and manuscript errors results also in many of the catalogue materials in the early texts being fantastic or contrary to fact; thus, they have analogues to some of the unreliable and counterfactual features of "Ithaca" deriving from logic, mathematics, and deliberate factual error, as discussed by McCarthy.

has already been discussed at several points. This double consciousness is nicely captured in Ulysses in the final rhymed list of "Ithaca," which is linguistically systematic within the boundaries of the English phonemic system, hence in the realm of the Word cosmogonic and all-encompassing, mesmerizing with its rhythms, and at the same time amusing and parodic:

He rests. He has travelled.

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer. (17.2320–26)

An exhaustive study of Joyce's use of senchas and his management of lists and catalogues in relation to Irish tradition is needed; it is evident, however, that in general lore functions much the same way in Ulysses as it does in early Irish literature. Lore, or senchas, grounds the narrative in time and space; it historicizes the narrative—a function particularly of genealogical, historical, natural, and geographical lore—thus contributing to the sense of verisimilitude. Lore in the form of catalogues and lists contributes as well to the illusion of density: to the illusion that the incidents foregrounded are part of a dense, though distanced and perhaps blurred, texture of human event and context. Lore, even when it may be absurd or artificial in its particulars, suggests solidity through the concatenation of the individual data, each of which is presented as self-contained, impenetrable, opaque—as a given of the situation. When those data are coterminous with the data of the experiential world, as they are to a large extent both in Ulysses and early Irish literature, lore projects an illusion of reality. These features are notable in Ulysses , and they distinguish early Irish literature as well.^[12]

The sources of Joyce's knowledge of this feature of early Irish literature are difficult to establish, in part because it is such a pervasive feature of the literature and in part because Joyce is borrowing the concept of lore, catalogues, and listings rather than any particular instance of these early Irish elements. By the time Joyce was writing Ulysses , virtually every major

[12] Garvin (77) traces Joyce's use of lists as early as "The Dead" and sees listing as dominating the structure of his major works.

collection of early Irish lore had been published or discussed in the critical literature: The Fitness of Names , a repository of onomastic lore; collections of placelore and other topographical materials; the ancient laws of Ireland; annals and pseudohistory; collections of sententious materials, including proverbs and the triads of Ireland.^[13] Though Joyce would not have known all these materials firsthand, he would have been made aware of this facet of Irish tradition by the popular press as well as by its presence in texts he was familiar with.

Michael Groden has demonstrated that Joyce's "goal of encyclopedism" determined many of Joyce's late revisions to the manuscript of Ulysses , including the lengthening of many of the lists:

In these elaborate lists (which have been seen as part of the Homeric parallel), Joyce worked toward encyclopedism by taking a specific incident and cataloguing its observers or participants. In most cases his techniques of revision caused him to extend the lists to such comical lengths that they eventually assumed a logic of their own beyond any logic in the events that originally inspired them. . . . By sheer persistence such repeated accumulations ultimately achieved the effect of all-inclusiveness Joyce desired. (195–96)^[14]

Groden's characterization of Joyce's method here indicates its kinship to the methods of the early Irish jurists. Although the encyclopedism of the lists may be read as part of the epic (hence, Homeric) shell of Ulysses , it is equally if not more relevant that this final shaping of the book brought it closer to an Irish poetics. Joyce was pointing up elements in his text that fit Ulysses into the Irish tradition of senchas.

ii. Immaginable Itinerary Through The Particular Universal: Ulysses and the Dindsenchas^[*] Tradition

Celebrated in the annual pilgrimage of Joyceans to Dublin on 16 June, a characteristic of Ulysses affording much delight to Joyce specialists is the meticulous attention given to place in the book. The topographical precision is essential to the texture of realism in Ulysses , and it is well known

[13] For bibliography of the materials published by 1912, see Best, Bibliography (1913) 117–22, 249–66.

[14] Cf. also the principal argument in Litz, Art of James Joyce .

that Joyce exploited the 1904 volume of Thom's Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland so as to be scrupulously precise in Ulysses about the Dublin landscape—even to the fact that 7 Eccles Street was vacant in 1904 and hence available for the Bloom occupation (Kain, Fabulous Voyager 121–23, appendix C; cf. R. Adams 172–73; Hart and Knuth 14). He was fanatic as well about verifying certain geographical minutiae, writing to his Aunt Josephine, for example, to inquire whether "an ordinary person" might climb over the area railing at 7 Eccles Street and safely lower himself down in order to gain entry through the lower level of the house (Letters 1: 175). Though Joyce might manipulate Dublin geography for the sake of artistic order, moving away from strict historicism as he does in "The Dead" when he shifts the Morkan house from Ellis's Quay to Usher's Island (Kelleher, "Irish History" 429–30), the narrative in Ulysses has an overall geographical accuracy that has seldom been paralleled in literature.^[15]

James Joyce may have inherited his interest in Dublin's topography in part from his father and, by extension, from Irish tradition: John Joyce used to enjoy taking his sons for walks, pointing out the places of Dublin and telling stories of Dublin's public and private life. As discussed above, John Joyce also took delight in the fact that he often knew more of the local history and topography than did native Dubliners, despite the fact that he himself was a Cork man. Thus, surviving evidence suggests that placelore is one of the aspects of Irish senchas that John Joyce was most interested in and knew best. In working out his own interest in placelore in Ulysses , however, James Joyce did not rely solely on the knowledge that came to him from his own experience or his father's tales or the traditional oral forms of Irish placelore stories: he supplemented these traditional dispositions with bookish research.

It is essential to a consideration of topography in Ulysses that virtually all Irish literature has a fascination with place. The sense of place dominates contemporary poetry from Kavanagh to Kinsella, Montague to Heaney; and it is preceded by an interest in place among the writers of the Irish literary revival. Yeats's poetry has memorialized for his readers a number of sites—his tower, Coole Park, Innisfree, and, above all, Ben Bulben:

[15] See the studies by Hart and Knuth, Topographical Guide , and Seidel, Epic Geography , for two rather different approaches to the geography of Ulysses .

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
                            ( Poems 327–28)

It has been argued that preservation of topography and toponymy and the nationalistic implications of the material gathered by the Ordnance Survey are at the cornerstone of the Irish literary revival (W. Thompson 11–13), and place is a central focus of early Irish literature as well. The interest in place in Irish literature may have to do with the mentality of the insular Celts, who, as my teacher Máire Mac Neill put it, have been "so long dwelling in one place." It may also be related to the inalienability of land in the Irish legal system or to the association of the land with the earth goddesses of native myth, many of whom continued to play an important role in the culture to the present century in the form of the fairy queens of folklore. The importance of place and placelore is, in short, a central feature of the Irish literary tradition at every period; in putting placelore and geographical structures at the heart of all his narratives, Joyce shows himself to be paradigmatically an Irish writer.

Early Irish stories are frequently mappable and show a persistent interest in place names; the conclusion of The Story of Mac Datho's Pig serves as a convenient example of these traits:

Then Mac Datho came out with the hound in his hand, and let him in amongst them to see which side he would choose; and the hound chose Ulster and set to tearing the men of Connacht greatly. Ailill and Medb went into their chariot, and their charioteer with them, and Mac Datho let the hound after them, and they say it was in the Plain of Ailbe that the hound seized the pole of the chariot that was under Ailill and Medb. Then the charioteer of Ailill and Medb dealt the hound a blow so that he sent its body aside and that the head of the hound remained on the pole of the chariot at Ibar Cinn Chon (the Yew-tree of the Hound's Head), whence Connacht takes its name. And they also say that from that hound Mag Ailbe (the Plain of Ailbe) is called, for Ailbe was the name of the hound.

This now is the road which the men of Connacht went southward, to wit, over Belach Mugna, past Roiriu, past Ath Midbine in Maistiu, past Kildare, past Raith Imgan into Feeguile, to Ath Mic Lugna, past Druim Da Maige over Drochat Cairpri. There at Ath Cinn Chon (Hound's Head Ford) in Fir Bili the head of the hound fell from the chariot. (AIT 207)

The places mentioned in the itinerary are actual places, still of significance today in some cases; thus, the course of this section of the story can be charted. The passage also exemplifies the common conceit that the events of the heroic narrative have actually left their impress on the landscape, giving names to the places noted. Mac Datho's Pig is entirely typical in these respects, and the affinity of such a narrative to aspects of Finnegans Wake should be obvious.

The most improbable stories in early Irish literature have topographical precision. Voyages to or adventures in the otherworld typically begin at actual locations specified in the medieval texts; the otherworld is therefore tied to the known landscape and is considered to be geographically accessible. Despite its seeming improbabilities, The Book of Invasions is also mappable after its fashion, for the geographical peculiarities in the story (the idea, for example, that Ireland can be seen from a high tower in Spain) are naturalistic within the confines of the medieval circular map of the world in which Spain and Ireland are adjacent (Kelleher, "Humor in the Ulster Saga" 36). Placelore is the structural principle of several major early Irish stories, including Táin Bó Cúailnge , in which the characters proceed along a definite route, summarized at points by itineraries.^[16]

Placelore was so central to early Irish literature that a separate genre was devoted to it, the category called dindsenchas^[*] , literally 'placelore'.^[17] There are several extant collections of dindsenchas^[*] , and the genre is found in prose and poetic forms as well as in forms mixing poetry and prose. Most of those collections of dindsenchas^[*] had been published by the time Joyce began studying Irish.^[18] Joyce would have known some of these collections, if only at second hand, particularly since the metrical dindsenchas^[*] was being published by Edward Gwynn during the period 1900–1906, a period when Joyce was actively interested in Irish literature.^[19] Joyce would also have known toponymic episodes from many of the early

[16] See Kinsella, Táin xiii–xxiii; and Haley.

[17] Tarzia discusses the functional aspect of placelore in Irish culture.

[18] C. Bowen, "Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas ," gives a good overview of the dindsenchas^[*] tradition. See Best, Bibliography (1913) 8o–82, 262–63, for the publication history of these materials.

[19] Gwynn published Poems from the Dindshenchas in 1900, a preliminary selection of the metrical dindsenchas^[*.] His systematic series published under the title The Metrical Dindshenchas was published by the Todd Lecture Series in five volumes in 1903, 1906, 1913, 1924, and 1935. The first two volumes would have been most likely to attract Joyce's attention.

tales that he read either in summary or in extenso, and he would have found itineraries widespread also.^[20]

The Irish oral tradition of placelore had also attracted scholarly and critical interest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably in the work of the Ordnance Survey as well as the later publications of such scholars as Eugene O'Curry and John O'Donovan. It was acknowledged that Irish place names frequently had semantic meaning, often referring to historical events, and the significance of Irish toponymy was, accordingly, discussed widely. One of the most important contemporary secondary sources on Irish placelore was the work of P. W. Joyce, particularly his Origin and History of Irish Names of Places , a volume that was widely recognized in Ireland at the time, discussed in the popular press, and known to James Joyce himself. Joyce's attention would also have been drawn to topography and toponymy by discussions in the popular press; in the United Irishman , for example, placelore and toponymy are taken up time and again, and the importance of preserving the knowledge of Irish topography, local legend, and local history are stressed.^[21] The concern for localism in the Irish popular press is of such importance that the topic will be considered at greater length in chapter 7.

Because Joyce writes about urban Ireland rather than the rural Ireland to which most of the early Irish placelore refers, identifying specific sources for Joyce's knowledge of early Irish placelore is less critical than establishing his knowledge of the genre of dindsenchas^[*] , his understanding of the cultural significance of placelore, and his exposure to the role of placelore in early Irish narrative tradition.^[22] Joyce is not merely a raconteur of events and anecdotes about Dublin, following his father's interests and storytelling proclivities; his attention to the topography and traditions of Dublin is an extension of the nationalist validation of local tradition, history, and geography in Ireland at the turn of the century, even if the immediate sources of the particulars are nontraditional materials such as Thom's Directory . Though Joyce rarely has Irish nomenclature

[20] Kelleher ("Irish History," 420–30) has argued that Joyce makes use of the itinerary of The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel in "The Dead."

[21] For example, articles on this topic are found in the issues of 9 Dec. 1899, 24 Nov. 1900, and 16 Feb. 1905.

[22] Joyce does, however, use early legends that have topographical connections with the geography of Dublin, including The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel , the story of Isolde, and various legends about Finn. Cf. Nilsen 24–32.

to preserve in his geographical purview, his precise research into the topography of Dublin and his interest in Dublin stories and legends are undertaken with the zeal worthy of the Ordnance Survey in the days of O'Donovan and Petrie. Moreover, despite the fact that Irish nomenclature and etymology per se are not central to Joyce's topography of Dublin, the dindsenchas^[*] tradition in Irish narrative illuminates the singularity of Joyce's topographical interests—the fact that "it is not by way of description that Dublin is created in Ulysses ," but by way of naming: "Streets are named but never described. . . . Bridges over the Liffey are crossed and recrossed, named and that is all" (Budgen, Making of "Ulysses" 68).^[23] Joyce's interest in topographical names links his work to the narratives of the early Irish literary classes, and his practice of naming without describing in Ulysses , while fitting with a stream-of-consciousness technique, also has a mantic quality about it.

In 1905 Joyce wrote about Dubliners, "When you remember that Dublin has been a capital for thousands of years, that it is the 'second' city of the British Empire, that it is nearly three times as big as Venice it seems strange that no artist has given it to the world" (Letters 2: III; cf. 2: 122). It is clear that he aspired to the task both in Dubliners and in A Portrait , that Ulysses is the keystone of the project, and that Finnegans Wake translates the enterprise to a mythic and surrealistic mode. Joyce was explicit about the centrality of place in Ulysses ; speaking of his intentions in Ulysses , Joyce said, "I want . . . . to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book" (Budgen, Making of "Ulysses" 67–68). It is thus difficult to overstate the importance of placelore in Ulysses ; in one sense Ulysses is an extended piece of dindsenchas^[*] .

In this aspiration Joyce acts like a senchaid of Irish tradition: he states directly that he wishes to preserve geographical knowledge and local history from extinction, and in this desire he is acting on behalf of the tribe. It is thus ironic that much of the Dublin Joyce preserves in his narrative did indeed disappear in the troubles from 1916 to 1923 (Kenner, "Ulysses " 93–96, 139). His writing answers the call in the popular nationalist press for the preservation of topography; at the same time, by celebrating urban, English-speaking Ireland, Joyce curiously twists that same pro-

[23] Cf. Kain, Fabulous Voyager 20; Hart and Knuth 19.

gram away from a backward-looking celebration of the countryside and the Gaeltacht. It is typical of Joyce that the Dublin he celebrates is not primarily the Dublin defined by the memorable sites of the Protestant Ascendancy, including Trinity College and the Georgian townhouses; the Dublin of Joyce's narratives is the Dublin of the common people afoot, Catholic as well as Protestant. As it were, Joyce retakes Dublin from the Irish Ascendancy, giving us a memorable Everyman's Dublin, an English-speaking Dublin upon which to build a free state. This attention to Dublin topography is an ironic expression of Joyce's nationalism, an expression not likely to be appreciated by the nativist nationalists who were interested in promoting and preserving a rural Irish Ireland.

iii. Back in the Presurnames: Onomastics in Ulysses

In Joyce's works naming frequently has special import, and Joyce uses names deliberately, often with a discernible subtext. Joyce uses a carefully chosen network of names in Dubliners "to strengthen his theme that the Dubliners of his day were wallowing about in a black pool from which they could not escape" (Nilsen 33). The name "Stephen Dedalus" is "the wedge by which symbolism enters" A Portrait of the Artist (Levin, James Joyce 46), signifying the metamorphic relationship between protagonist and the Greek mythic hero(es) of the Daedalus myth and between protagonist and the first Christian martyr. His special name is also an aspect of the Sovereignty theme as it is developed in A Portrait of the Artist : here 'crown', the Greek meaning of Stephen , is significant (cf. Kain, "Motif as Meaning" 64). In Ulysses Stephen's name cues the reader to the Greek affiliations of the Irish and the Greek element in the mythic substructure from The Book of Invasions as well as continuing the symbolic functions from A Portrait of the Artist . The significance of names in Finnegans Wake was such that Joyce was reluctant to reveal the title of the book, calling it instead "Work in Progress" from 1924 to 1939, revealing the title only when the book was published (JJ 2 563; cf. 543, 597, 708); the magic of naming in the title invokes and reifies the multileveled meanings coded throughout the text. As for Ulysses the title itself—a name—remains as the single exiguous sign of the classical counterpart of the narrative and a sign of Joyce's mythic method itself. Within the text names

also present themselves as meaningful, and naming has several levels of significance, with names forming a web of meaning that shapes the text and helps to integrate the disparate parts.^[24]

Joyce's lifelong interest in naming and his pervasive manipulation of naming in his writing is another part of his heritage, for onomastics plays an essential role in early Irish literature and Gaelic culture. The naming of characters, like the naming of places, is frequently a result of a significant event in the early tales, as the naming of CuChulainn or the boasts in The Story of Mac Datho's Pig illustrate (C. O'Rahilly 161–63; AIT 203–5). Names of characters, like place names, frequently have a semantic meaning, and names bestowed on characters become emblems of the characters' true natures. A name frequently indicates the essence of the one named; it is thus not surprising that misnaming is a significant act and that in medieval Ireland it was a legal offense to confer a derisive "nickname" that stuck to a person (Robinson 105–6). The number of heroes in the tales with amusing names suggests that receiving a nickname was a real peril, even as it indicates the ironic treatment of heroes in the tradition as a whole. As in many cultures worldwide, names in Irish tradition are numinous, hence the widespread use of propitiary names for deities and for the fairies as well. The importance of personal names is seen also in the early collections of names that have survived in the manuscripts, including extensive genealogies and genealogical poetry.^[25] It is possible that merely to recite the names of a chief's ancestors, to rehearse a litany of names, was a significant and evocative act.^[26]

Doris Edel sets this interest in names in a broader epistemological context when she stresses the importance of etymological speculation in the methods of the native Celtic intellectuals:

The so-called bélre n-etarscartha or 'language of separation' had been elevated into a science, to use D.A. Binchy's words. The jurists were among its leading exponents, but it also contributed extensively to other fields of learning, e.g. place-lore. To resolve a word into its 'original' elements, each of them

[24] For a thorough inventory of the names in Ulysses , as well as an analysis of the patterns of naming in the book, see Benstock and Benstock.

[25] M.A. O'Brien's 764-page edition of the medieval Irish genealogies indicates the volume of the surviving materials. The medieval interest in names is also indicated by the etymological tract Cóir Anmann (The Fitness of Names) , which has been edited by Stokes.

[26] Still today in India, to quote the genealogy of a deity is an act of worship.

a separate word—even monosyllables were not safe from this approach—a superficial similarity in sound or meaning was sometimes enough. This method of interpretation seems to have had its roots in the pre-Christian tradition, although in later times it must have gained addition prestige from the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, which had a great impact on insular thought. What we are dealing with here is basically a primitive sort of learning which survived outside the Roman imperium and was dominated by magical beliefs. Within this intellectual horizon, correspondences between words pointed to correspondences between the objects they named, and so language itself was seen as a source of knowledge. For the initiated, this juggling with synonyms and homonyms (or near-synonyms and near-homonyms), punning, even a slip of the tongue, represented indispensable instruments of inspiration. (Z56–57)^[27]

It is not too much to say that one of the chief ways by which the fili determined knowledge was through sound and the magic of language, so that the cultivation of language per se and names in particular was a central feature of the maintenance of senchas. The magic of names and naming permeates early Celtic literature: not only are names etymologized, but they also occur in lists of all sorts, including genealogies; they are preserved as mnemonics, and they are used metonymically to evoke particular stories or even a sense of the whole tradition.^[28] The interest in etymology is typical of much medieval thought, but no other medieval vernacular tradition attends to names and naming so minutely as does that of Ireland.

Though Joyce's naming remains principally within the realm of English phonology and English nominal practice, his manipulation of names has affinities to the linguistic realism and verbal magic permeating early Irish narrative. The importance of the word per se in Joyce's writing is captured by Frank O'Connor: "Style ceases to be a relationship between author and reader and becomes a relationship of a magical kind between author and object. Here le mot juste is no longer juste for the reader, but for the object" (304). O'Connor observed the same quality in Joyce's relationship to the world, a quality illuminated for O'Connor by Joyce's framing a picture of Cork in cork. He concluded that Joyce was suffering

[27] Binchy (210–12) also has an interesting discussion of the bélre n-etarscartha and the etymological impulse of the early period.

[28] Names are etymologized in The Fitness of Names , for example, and a collection of names preserved as mnemonics is found in the Welsh triads (Bromwich).

from "associative mania" (301), an apt description by a scientific man of one whose relationship to language—like that of the fili—was governed by an older habit of thought in which language is a source of knowledge and in which a primitive magical relationship obtains between word and object.^[29]

Thus, names are more than arbitrary signs in the world of Ulysses : they can signify the reality. Molly thinks of her mysterious mother and observes, "my mother whoever she was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely one she had Lunita Laredo" (18.846–48). In the narrative Molly's mother's name is her mother, and critics have turned to this name, parsing its meaning to unravel the secrets of her being.^[30] Joyce also mirrors the semantic significance of Irish naming. Within the text both Bloom and Molly see names as important, and Bloom's name in particular is portentous for both of them. Molly muses in her soliloquy both on Bloom's name and on the other names she might have had:

I never thought that would be my name Bloom when I used to write it in print to see how it looked on a visiting card or practising for the butcher and oblige M Bloom youre looking blooming Josie used to say after I married him well its better than Breen or Briggs does brig or those awful names with bottom in them Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of a bottom Mulvey I wouldnt go mad about either or suppose I divorced him Mrs Boylan (18.840–46)

But it is not merely that the name has semantic value. Names are of the essence here, and when Bloom picks a name for a secret correspondence, it is no accident that he chooses the name Flower . Virag , 'flower' in Hungarian, becomes Bloom becomes Flower . The arbitrariness of phonology

[29] In this regard Joyce's double is Bloom with his characteristic mental form, the "bloomism" that Ellmann has defined as "an uneasy but scrupulous recollection of a factual near-miss," involving "similar sounds as well as similar facts," and thus has the whole of Finnegans Wake implicit in it (Ulysses 36). Cf. Eco 80. Joyce's use of Skeat's Etymological Dictionary is well known (cf. SH 26). As a youth Joyce also showed a penchant for etymologizing the names of places where he lived, a practice that makes his choice of all the Irish personal and place names in Finnegans Wake potentially significant (see O Hehir vii–viii).

[30] See, for example, Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 507–16; B. Scott 179.

By virtue of her name, Molly's mother is a Sephardic Jew, and her daughter Molly is at once Spanish, Jewish, and Moorish. The mother's name thus gives Molly yet another position in the substructure from The Book of Invasions.

gives way to semantic stability, pointing to Leopold's essence; the metamorphosis of names mirrors the metempsychosis of characters in the text. It is almost as if Bloom's name/essence brings with it the flowers dominating Molly's memories, and her love of blossoms folds into her love of her husband: "I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature . . . that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is" (18.1558–63). The likeness of Molly's essence to the name/essence of her suitor in a sense destines them to be mates as discussed in the last chapter.

Names also engender things in the world of Ulysses ; the case of the unknown mourner, the man in the brown macintosh who becomes M'Intosh, is the prime example (6.805ff., 6.891ff., 15.1558ff., 16.1261).^[31] But Molly also wonders whether "bloomers" have been named for her husband: "that old Bishop that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans higher functions about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak caps and the new woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money I suppose theyre called after him" (18.837–40).^[32] This possibility seems likely to her given her husband's obsession with women's undergarments:

of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin standing right against the sun so he could see every atom she had on when he saw me from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me however standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new raincoat on him with the muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual what was he doing there where hed no business they can go and get whatever they like from anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but they want to know where were you where are you going I could feel him coming along skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping away from the house he felt it was getting too warm for him so I halfturned

[31] Nilsen (26–27) discusses the possibility that this figure, through verbal realism, should be identified with the Irish god of the dead.

[32] The garment is in fact named after Amelia Bloomer, an American reformer who worked for women's rights.

and stopped then he pestered me to say yes till I took off my glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat pocket (18.289–306)

It is no wonder that Bloom is nettled about the mistake regarding his name in Dignam's obituary:

The obsequies, at which many friends of the deceased were present, were carried out by. . . Messrs H. J. O'Neill and Son. . . The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr, Martin Cunningham, John Power. . . Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus B.A., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius T. Kelleher, Joseph M'C Hynes, L. Boom, CP M'Coy,—M'Intosh and several others. (16. 1253–61)

It is perfectly consistent with the power of names in the text and in Irish culture that the newspaper error should itself engender a new identity for the hero in the narrative: "Nettled not a little by L. Boom (as it incorrectly stated). . . but tickled to death simultaneously by C. P. M'Coy and Stephen Dedalus B.A. who were conspicuous, needless to say, by their total absence (to say nothing of M'Intosh) L. Boom pointed it out to his companion B.A. engaged in stifling another yawn" (16.1262–66). Still another level of the onomastics of Ulysses is indicated by Joyce's choice of names for some of his characters with referents and connotations or associations outside the fictive world. This practice can be traced earlier in his work, as well; thus, in A Portrait of the Artist Joyce named the character based on his friend Cosgrave after Lynch, the mayor of Galway who had hanged his own son, because of Cosgrave's "betrayal" of Joyce with respect to Nora, the significance of which was well observed by Joyce's contemporaries (JJ 2 160, 205, 286). In the tradition of the Irish satirists, Joyce has "put a name" on an enemy, indicating the essence of the person. Similarly, Joyce chose to name the child of Molly and Leopold Milly not merely for the euphony with her mother's name but also for the connection with the "Clan Milly" of The Book of Invasions .

Bloom's name is the most significant of these instances in Ulysses . As mentioned above, Joyce chooses Bloom as the name for his protagonist because it too has an exiguous significance as the English eponym of the mountain in Ireland called Slieve Bloom , in Irish Sliab Bladma , a mountain that was the residence of the consort of Eriu, the territorial goddess

of Ireland itself.^[33] Thus, the name Bloom is an appropriate assimilative name for Rudolph Virag to have picked as a translation of Virag , but it also suggests that the character Bloom is the man of Ireland. Joyce uses names for their symbolic signification as ways of binding his narrative to the major Irish mythic schemata on which Ulysses is based. Here Joyce depends precisely on the magic of language to make things alike—as Edel says, "correspondences between words point to correspondences between the objects they name"—for the naming is made potent not merely by referential correspondence, the result of the metempsychosis that resonates through the book, but also by the manner in which the fortuitous similarity of sounds in English links these characters to their Irish counterparts. The magic of nominal translation makes Bloom the equivalent of Eriu's mate. Thus, the name Bloom is an onomastic node: it is naturalistic, representing a common "Jewish" name; it has semantic significance in reference to flowers (and bloomers); it embodies Leopold's essence, metamorphosing with his changes; and it has a symbolic and mythological reference as well. Joyce's interest in and exploration of these various onomastic levels in Ulysses are part of his heritage from Irish tradition, and they become central features of the verbal play in Finnegans Wake .

Early Irish narrative is notable for its high density of personal names; unlike European folktales, for example, which use descriptors (e.g., "the wicked stepmother") for many characters, early Irish tales have few unnamed characters. Early Irish narrative is also characterized by the frequent use of patronymics and other genealogical specifications for characters (features that increase the density of personal names in the narrative) and by a low rate of nominal redundancy (that is, few characters bear the same name). For these reasons, the repertory of personal names in early Irish tales is complex and highly specific. Not only do the characters have personal names, but they are also usually associated with a location or a tribe and hence with place names.^[34] These features of naming in the early tales give the narratives an illusion of historicity; the naming sets up a social, temporal, and spatial texture that distinguishes early Irish hero tales from folktale, for example, or from most medieval nar-

[33] See the full discussion in chapter 4, above.

[34] These points are treated at greater length in Tymoczko, "Personal Names."

rative, particularly medieval romance. Though specificity of name and historicism of this type is more typical of epic in general than, say, romance, Irish hero tale is even more historicized with respect to names than are most heroic literatures, including English or French epic. The same tendency to use particularized names characterizes later Irish tradition, even permeating Irish wondertales. ^[35] In regard to naming, the narrative technique of early Irish literature coincides to a large extent with the aesthetic of the nineteenth-century novel and realistic narrative. To generalize broadly, early Irish stories are much more like Russian novels than European folktales with respect to the number of names and the individuation of characters by naming. Joyce's narrative is dense in names, including genealogical and kinship specifiers, in much the same way that his antecedent Irish literary tradition is, and he inherits the technique from a variety of sources, including early Irish literature and the oral tradition in Ireland. As with early Irish literature, Joyce's use of names contributes to the historicity and specificity of his fictive world.

In Ulysses Joyce has created a narrative world in which there is verbal realism, and the operation of language in the text is doubled by evidence from the events of Joyce's own life that reveal a belief in the magic of language. We see these beliefs in Joyce's suggestion that James Stephens finish Finnegans Wake in case of Joyce's early death—a belief based largely on their commonality of first name and their supposed identity of birthdate (see JJ 2 591–93). Similar inclinations are revealed by his acceptance of "found language" in the writing of his texts—for example, the incorporation of "come in" into the text of Finnegans Wake as he was dictating to Samuel Beckett, or the changes he tolerated in the meaning of his texts in typesetting or translation (e.g., JJ 2 649, 700).^[36] Thus, the nominal realism in Ulysses, which ties Joyce to his own cultural tradition, opens up a whole strand in Joyce's thought and life that could profitably be explored at greater length.^[37]

[35] Ó Súilleabháin, Handbook of Irish Folklore 607–11, discusses the broad range of names and the high rate of personal names found in Irish folktales; this is notable in comparison with European folk tradition as a whole, particularly in comparison with English folktales.

[36] The use of found elements is, of course, also characteristic of contemporary movements in the visual arts and not unrelated to Dada.

[37] Related issues to those discussed here are taken up by Senn, "'He Was Too Scrupulous Always'" 67–69, and Palencia-Roth 162ff.

iv. History and Pseudohistory in Ulysses

A principal job of the Irish fili was to be historian and guardian of the knowledge of the past, knowledge that took various traditional forms. Genealogy was primary, and volumes of medieval Irish genealogies are preserved in the manuscripts, often organized for mnemonic purposes as rhymed, stanzaic verses.^[38] Genealogy was a guide to dynasty and dynastic succession, and for questions of succession, kinglists also represented essential knowledge of the past to be preserved by the fili.^[39]

Although maintaining genealogies and kinglists was an essential aspect of the job of poet, history primarily took the form of tale and anecdote. The ancestors celebrated in genealogy were also remembered for their words and their deeds; and their deeds, particularly their interactions with the otherworld, might be a sign of their descendants' right to rule. As a consequence a variety of tale types was the province of the poets: birth and death tales, hero tales, king tales, tales about succession, tales about battles and heroic deeds, tales about adventures to the otherworld, tales about tribal migrations, and so forth.^[40] Like other types of heroic narratives, such tales were comparatively short, and they were in prose with varying amounts of fixed verse insets. Locked into the matrix of ge-

[38] The standard modern edition of the early genealogies is M.A. O'Brien's Corpus Genealogiarum Hiberniae . Many of the early genealogical tracts had been published by the time Joyce was writing Ulysses (see, for example, Best, Bibliography [1913] 261–62, for the publications through 1912), but written sources for this feature of Irish culture are superfluous. The interest in genealogy continues to be notable in Irish oral culture to the present. For the genealogy of Leopold and Molly Bloom embedded in Ulysses , see Raleigh 12.

[39] Perhaps the most famous kinglist is that appended to The Book of Invasions (Macalister 5: 152–581).

Because succession was based on descent within four generations of a king rather than on primogeniture, kinglists are generally associated with genealogies; and genealogies with lateral branches rather than simple pedigrees were requisite historical information for both family and tribe in medieval Ireland. Genealogies were also used at the early period to reify political alliance, with tribes electing a common ancient ancestor as a sign of political union; the filid were therefore often required to maintain very long lineages for political purposes as well for the purposes of succession.

[40] Dillon, Cycles of the Kings , contains a good overview of the tales pertaining to Ireland's traditional kings; Mac Cana, Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland , discusses the early Irish genres or categories of tales, as well as the surviving lists of medieval narratives.

nealogy and located by tribal affiliation, tales were established in a spatiotemporal grid that helped to keep them stable in content as well as memorable. Annal keeping was an outgrowth of all this historical impulse in medieval Ireland, and it may come as no surprise that the early Irish annals are marked by some of the same features that characterize oral history, rather than being a spare and objective recording of events as they occurred. Like oral history, the annals were not exempt from being reshaped when political changes occurred and new interpretations of the past were necessary.^[41]

Pseudohistory is another type of Irish historical literature, a genre going back to the seventh and early eighth century, when the Irish learned classes attempted to reconcile the relatively short time line of traditional oral history with the long time line contained in Christian and classical history. The most important piece of Irish pseudohistory is, of course, The Book of Invasions , which has a significant position in European literary history and historiography. On the model of Irish pseudohistory Welsh pseudohistory was constructed, and Welsh pseudohistory in turn underlies Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae , the principal European source of the history of Arthur and other productive stories, including the story of Lear. As I have noted already, The Book of Invasions is the centerpiece of Irish literature, and some version of it opens most of the later popular general histories of Ireland.

Because maintaining history was a primary duty of the Irish learned classes, virtually all of the extant early Irish literature and much of later Irish literature has a historical cast. This coloring is also partly a result of the fact that The Book of Invasions acted as a magnet for Irish tradition; the mass of floating mythological and historical senchas came to be organized around the pseudohistorical time line of The Book of Invasions . Later, during the period of the penal laws when the native aristocracy was suppressed, when the Irish learned classes were dispossessed of their social position and social function, and when it was illegal to print books in the Irish language, the Irish poets turned to folk audi-

[41] Kelleher, "Táin and the Annals," has an interesting discussion of aspects of the political manipulation of the Irish annals. Most of the Irish annals were edited and translated at an early date and would have been known, at least by repute, at the turn of the century in Ireland. See Best, Bibliography (1913) 249–56, for early publications of the Irish annals that were available to Joyce and his contemporaries.

ences for support; the result was that folk storytellers became the bearers of Irish traditional history, a fact that has permanently colored the character of Modern Irish oral tradition. Even wondertales in Irish folklore are historicized, commonly opening with the line, "There was a king in Ireland."^[42]

Ulysses can be situated within this tradition of historicized narrative. The geographical precision and the ample placelore set a historically accurate spatial stage for the events of Ulysses , and at the same time Joyce provides temporal historicity as well. The book is filled with allusions to antecedent historical events, particularly allusions to Ireland's political and cultural history, that give the narrative temporal depth. Joyce also obsessively outfits his work with topical allusions and historically accurate details regarding the physical and social world of 16 June 1904. It has taken critics decades to plumb the topical historicity of the book, and the process continues.^[43] Even the mythic framework of Ulysses is carefully euhemerized and naturalized; thus, for example, in order to represent Molly as a Spanish woman for the architectonic framework of The Book of Invasions , Joyce makes her a daughter of an Irish officer in the British garrison at Gibraltar. These are some of the levels on which the narrative of Ulysses is given a historical spatiotemporal context and a historicized content.

Although Ulysses can be read as historicized narrative (history, as it were), it can also be read as an example of the genre of pseudohistory. Joyce builds up a dense texture of allusions to events and deeds that antedate the action in the book, thereby creating a fictitious history not merely for the main characters of the book but for scores of minor characters as well. Indeed, it is possible to construct from this set of allusions a detailed pseudohistory of Molly and Leopold Bloom, a task undertaken by John Henry Raleigh in A Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom , a chronicle beginning in the eighteenth century. The pseudohistorical apparatus of Ulysses is facilitated by intertextual allusions to characters

[42] Dillon, There Was a King in Ireland , gives examples; some stories also use a variant of the more common atemporal European formulas (e.g., the English "once upon a time"), and some tellers combine the two (Dillon, There Was a King 19, 39, 55).

[43] A ground-breaking study in this regard is Robert Adams, Surface and Symbol , in which the author attempts to sort out surface realism and symbolic structure.

who appear in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . These allusions reveal a deliberateness on the part of the author, as Kelleher has remarked in his discussion of "The Dead":

It must be noted that in Ulysses Joyce goes to some trouble to indicate that the Conroys are still, in 1904, a well-known jog-trot married couple. Molly Bloom asks what Gretta Conroy had on, and Bloom remembers that Father Conroy, the curate at Star of the Sea Church, Sandymount, is Gabriel's brother. References to the last illness and death of Julia Morkan, Gabriel's aunt and Stephen Dedalus's grandaunt, show that the Christmas party in "The Dead" must be dated to the early 1890's, from which it would seem plain that Gabriel and Gretta have survived the dozen or more years intervening without noticeable catastrophe. At least, I can see no other purpose to this series of references. They are certainly deliberate on Joyce's part. ("Irish History" 417)

Moreover, with respect to the central action of the day, Joyce provides us enough information so that we can write the pseudohistory of Bloomsday, hour by hour, for several literary characters, thereby enabling us to fill the narrative "gaps."

Joyce has also riveted the pseudohistory of Ulysses into the actual events of Ireland's patriotic history, thus writing in Ulysses a pseudohistory for Ireland as well as for the characters.^[44] Joyce presents Bloom as an actor, albeit a shadowy one, on the wider stage of Irish politics, crediting him with providing Griffith the ideas for Sinn Féin: "It was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries" (12.1574–77). Bloom is also represented as responsible for the ideas underlying Sinn Féin's revolutionary mode of passive resistance, a technique actually taken from Hungarian politics; in Ulysses the ideas are ascribed to Bloom because of his Hungarian ancestry: "He's a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system" (12.1635–36). The parallels to Griffith's ideas exemplified in Hungarian politics were presented in issue after issue of the United Irishman in the series "The Resurrection of Hungary" (which ran from 2 January 1904 to 2 July 1904) and were therefore of topical interest on Bloomsday and pan of the current dis-

[44] I am indebted to Dominic Manganiello for suggesting that I discuss this aspect of Ulysses .

course of nationalist Dubliners.^[45] Historically, Griffith's tactics came to fruition in the later events of the Irish nationalist struggle.

Joyce gives Bloom an even earlier pseudohistorical interface with the giants of Irish politics, making him the shadowy figure who returns the headgear to the hatless Parnell:^[46] "He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke up the type in the Insuppressible or was it United Ireland , a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he said Thank you , excited as he undoubtedly was under his frigid exterior notwithstanding" (16.1333–37). Joyce expands on the circumstantial details of the incident at length later in the text (16.1495–1523), ironically underscoring the claim to historicity in his pseudohistorical fabrication: "His hat (Parnell's) a silk one was inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history , Bloom was the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost celerity)" (16.1513–17; my italics).

In these varied ways, then, Joyce fulfills the function of Irish senchaid as historian, writing the history of his city and his nation, creating a pseudohistory where it is needed, writing in a form that integrates the historical and the fictitious.

v. Conclusion

In this chapter I have given a brief overview of the genres from early Irish literature echoed in Ulysses ; each argument has been schematic, and it is clear that the material could be expanded and detailed and that examples could be multiplied. Rather than belabor the point, I prefer to turn from specific correspondences to the larger question of Joyce's use of early Irish literature to challenge and redirect epic and novel, the privileged genres of English and European literature. Joyce's construction of a national epic follows the lines of Irish hero tale with its variation in style, its mixed tone, its episodic structure, its gaps, and its blurred margin. In a similar

[45] The series was later published as an independent pamphlet, which by 1908 had sold thirty thousand copies (Younger 22–27). On this aspect of the pseudohistory in Ulysses , see also R. Adams 99–106 and Manganiello 119–37, 171.

[46] Cf. Kenner, "Ulysses" 131–33, who discusses these political pseudohistorical incidents in a somewhat different vein.

fashion, Ulysses violates dominant expectations of the novel through its variation in style and mode, including the field of literary types included in the text. Joyce himself saw the style as the most significant aspect of the book, and it was this aspect of writing Ulysses that was most taxing to him.

Lawrence, in her treatment of the form of Ulysses, observes that the changing styles are the key to the violation of the reader's expectations of the genre of the novel:

The segmented quality of Ulysses —the discontinuity of the narrative as it dons various stylistic "masks"—can be treated as successive breaks in "narrative contracts" and successive rhetorical experiments rather than segments in a spatial whole. The reader of Ulysses comes to each chapter with expectations that are contingent upon what he has experienced not only in other novels but also in the preceding chapters of this one. These expectations are frustrated and altered as the book progresses. The narrative contract we form at the beginning of the book—the implicit agreement between the writer and the reader about the way the book is to be read—is broken. (6)

Lawrence continues, "The book becomes an encyclopedia of possibilities of plot as well as style, deliberately breaking the conventions of selectivity and relevance upon which most novels are based" (10).^[47] At the same time, as she argues in the second chapter of her book, before Joyce can set up this dynamic with the reader, it is essential that he establish a set of narrative expectations through the "initial style" of the first six chapters, the style Lawrence calls Joyce's "signature style."^[48]

Lawrence suggests that a way of characterizing Joyce's innovations in Ulysses is to see in them the injection of subliterary genres into the framework of the novel—genres such as catechism, journalism, magazine fiction, and so forth (10–11). This insertion of subliterary genres, she contends, is a major way in which Joyce breaks the conventions of the novel; the opening up of the novel results in a greater sense of possibilities, for it sensitizes the reader to the range of experience that overflows the conventional boundaries of the structured and causally linked rational novel (201–2). Lawrence's analysis is acute, but in light of what has been presented in the argument at hand, it may be more to the point to speak of

[47] Cf. French, esp. 54.

[48] Lawrence ch. 2. Joyce uses the phrase "initial style" in a letter to Harriet Weaver in 1919 (Letters 1: 129).

generic convention rather than style as the prime mover of the variation in Ulysses . Stylistic variation is a function of genre in the cases considered in this chapter; thus, generic multiplicity is a factor that drives much, though not all, of the stylistic change in Ulysses . As is consonant with Joyce's techniques and methods in general, Irish literature is only partially responsible for Joyce's stylistic and generic variation in Ulysses , and the Irish models converge with those from other sources. The styles in "Oxen" are clearly and ostensibly parodies of English prose styles; contemporary culture provided the journalistic signals of "Aeolus" and the prose of "Nausicaa." The form of "Nighttown" is that of drama—a genre not part of the Irish repertory at all. Nonetheless, it seems that Joyce's idea of using multiple styles, genres, forms, and modes in Ulysses can be traced to the Irish literary tradition.

A key point to consider is Joyce's complaint 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). Joyce's statement that his "styles" were "unknown or undiscovered by [his] fellow tradesmen" is noteworthy. The implication is clear that Joyce's "styles" were not invented or created by him but rather known and discovered by him: known because of his familiarity with the Irish literary tradition that was at the root of his own popular culture but was marginalized elsewhere in the English-speaking world and in Europe; discovered because it was Joyce who found ways to use these "styles" effectively in modern narrative. Joyce emphasizes this implication by speaking of himself not as an artist but a "tradesman"—one who retails wares purchased elsewhere. Irish literature was not only instrumental but essential in Joyce's discovery of stylistic and generic variation and in his strategy for the reformulation of the novel.

Early Irish tales are characterized by a great deal of variation, as suggested briefly in chapter 3. There is formal variation: not only are the stories generally composed of a combination of poetry and prose, but there are two types of poetry and at least three types of prose. There is in addition an extraordinary variation in language variety and register; in any piece of early Irish literature there may be archaic language, technical language, informal or affective language, crude language or slang, and formal or ritual language, besides the unmarked narrative prose. The tex-

ture of the stories is also uneven, with, for example, radical variations in the amount of dialogue: at times narratives will suddenly open up into extended passages of dialogue, whereas elsewhere the narrative voice may predominate. Although the passages of extensive dialogue are not drama per se, they border on script and probably reflect the performance capabilities of what is basically an oral literature. Joyce exploits all these types of variation in his own narratives of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake .

In addition, a major characteristic of Irish tradition is that it includes genres that the modern definition of English literature considers "subliterary"—genres such as catalogues, placelore, genealogy, rhymed historical and genealogical verse, onomastics, precepts, history, and pseudohistory. Such genres are part of the field of early Irish literature and are integrated into much of Irish narrative per se, and Irish "subliterary" genres impinge on Ulysses over and over again as well. Thus, Joyce's narrative field in Ulysses can be seen as a modern analogue in English to the field of what is accepted as literature in Irish tradition, and this aspect of Joyce's restructuring of the novel, like the treatment of epic material considered earlier, fits comfortably in Irish tradition. Joyce's challenges to the novel in fact recapitulate many of the principles of Irish literature: he includes many styles; he embraces a wide scope of genres, narrative types, and formal structures; he has a double consciousness in his tone; and so on.

Joyce is best known for his stylistic and formal innovations; his formalism is rich and complex, and he himself was the first to acknowledge that "with me the thought is always simple" (JJ 2 476). The material presented here demonstrates that the ways in which Joyce experiments with style, genre, and form in Ulysses cannot be divorced from Irish literary tradition. It is ironic that Joyce should have challenged the privileged center of narrative—the genres of both novel and epic—in English poetics and in the dominant Western poetics using the rhetorical resources of Irish tradition, because behind his seemingly radical innovations we can see his atavistic use of an archaic literature. The placement of these stylistic innovations is significant. Though the headlines in "Aeolus" (which Joyce added late in the manuscript history) violate our stylistic expectations for the novel, the most radical departures begin with "Wandering Rocks" and the episodes that follow.^[49] "Wandering Rocks," the tenth ep-

[49] Groden (105) notes that the headlines in "Aeolus" were added in August 1921, when the book was in press. Cf. Kenner, "Ulysses " 71 n. 1.

isode of eighteen, marks the beginning of what Joyce identified as the second half of the book (Letters 1: 145, 1: 149). It is thus in the second half of the book that Joyce's formal debt to Irish literature becomes apparent, and it seems more than accidental and more than the result of Joyce's development as an artist that the book falls into two halves. Indeed, Joyce was playing with the idea of demarcating the two halves rather radically as he was finishing Ulysses , thinking of adding an "Entr'acte" (Letters 1: 149). The first half of the book fits adequately into English formal structures and with minor dislocations confirms most generic expectations of English literature; the second half incarnates the generic range and many of the narrative structures of Irish poetics. In a sense, these two halves stand for the divided literary tradition of Ireland since the Tudor conquest, as well as the divided literary tradition of an Irish author writing in English after the nationalist revival had sharpened the awareness of the importance of Irish culture in distinguishing the Irish from West Britons.^[50]

Joyce both exemplifies and reconciles his divided literary tradition in Ulysses , merging the two and in the process transcending both. Joyce's fierce attachment to English as a language as well as his disdain for certain features of the Irish literary revival are well known. But it is part of Joyce's genius to have recognized the potential of Irish form and Irish rhetoric for enriching modern narrative; to have seen the twentieth-century possibilities inherent in the genres of Irish literature, the multiplicity of styles, the comic-heroic mix, the gaps in narrative structure of the episodic heroic cycles; and to have transposed these features into English and the English literary tradition. These formal aspects of Ulysses , which have at times been read (incorrectly) as Joyce's aestheticism, also have political and nationalist dimensions: in choosing to renew Irish narrative form and myth in Ulysses , Joyce both asserts his Irishness and rejects the formal participation in English poetics chosen by most members of the Irish literary revival writing in English.

Ezra Pound proposes that technique is a test of a writer's sincerity ("Ulysses" 9). Though the writers of the Anglo-Irish literary revival use Irish content as Yeats and Synge do, or mirror Irish speech as Synge and

[50] In the Linati scheme, the division between episodes 9 and 10 is marked "Punto Centrale—Ombelico" (cf. Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey 88, appendix). The suggestion is perhaps that the two traditions descend equally from the primordial Word:"The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh" (3.37).

Gregory do, they are as a group committed to English poetics and English rhetorical resources. They employ English genres, English prosody, and English standards of narrative. While committed to the use of the resources of English as a language, Joyce breaks with English poetics in Ulysses , particularly in the second half, and thus with the poetics of his Anglo-Irish counterparts. If technique is a test of sincerity, then Joyce shows his loyalties. He writes with Irish techniques, refusing to rest content to be a West Briton in his poetics.

The Irish experience has been a colonial experience, and the colonizers of Ireland treated Irish national traditions and culture with as little regard as those of any other English colony; it has been claimed that Ireland is the only "Third World" nation of Europe. Whatever stand one takes on these questions, identification of the Irish formal and mythic elements in Ulysses suggests comparison of Joyce with twentieth-century postcolonial writers. Joyce, like such writers, was able to transform the language and poetics of English literature in part through the use of rhetorical resources, genres, formal structures, and the very conception of the role of literary practitioners derived from a literary tradition that came under the political and cultural domination of England but that continued to maintain its integrity and vitality to the twentieth century. Like many another postcolonial author, Joyce's importations from the colonized literary system are frequently misread primarily as personal invention rather than as a brilliant synthesis of two literary realms.