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.