Chapter 6—
Ulysses and the Irish Otherworld

FATHER HART: What are you reading?

MARY: How a Princess Edain,
A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard
A voice singing on a May Eve like this,
And followed, half awake and half asleep,
Until she came into the Land of Faery,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave. . .

MAURTEEN: Persuade the colleen to put down the book . . .
W. B. Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN: You have but to pay the price and he is free.

EMER: Do the Sidhe bargain?

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN: When they would free a captive They take in ransom a less valued thing.
W. B. Yeats, The Only Jealousy of Emer

The principal argument of this book is that to be well understood, Ulysses must be considered in an intertextual grid that includes both halves of Ireland's divided literary tradition. Cruxes in the text of Ulysses have here been illuminated by looking to features of Irish myth and literature for Joyce's resonance and embedded significance and by setting the Irish testimony beside material offered by English and Continental literature.

Another such crux is Joyce's portrait of Gibraltar in Molly's interior monologue. Phillip Herring and other scholars including James Card ("Gibraltar Sourcebook") and Robert Adams (233) have demonstrated the limitations of Joyce's historicity in the representation of Gibraltar in Molly's soliloquy. The flaws in the historical surface Herring attributes to the artistic problems Joyce faced in creating a setting beyond that of his own experience. Never before, Herring suggests, had Joyce to depend so heavily on a semblance of truth resting on so thin a veneer of substance ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 501, 518).^[1] Herring sees Gibraltar as "a dash of local color in the drab landscape of Dublin that was never meant to be examined closely"; Molly, Herring concludes, is "unconvincing" as a historical woman from Gibraltar ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 516).

A central aspect of the tension between the social reality of Gibraltar and Molly's portrayal of Gibraltar results from a third structural element in Ulysses taken from Irish myth: the morphology of the Celtic happy otherworld. If indeed Joyce chose to present a "Spanish" Molly in part to fit the architectonic structure from The Book of Invasions and if, in addition, Molly's character owes much to the typologies of Irish earth goddess and Sovereignty goddess, then we should not be surprised to find mythic imperatives determining the delineation of Gibraltar itself in Ulysses. Thus, the artistic task Joyce undertook in Molly's episode was somewhat different from the one that Herring and others have defined: Joyce was not simply creating a realistic setting removed from those he knew firsthand. This chapter explores aspects of Gibraltar that have Irish mythic resonance; as with Joyce's other mythic structures in Ulysses, the Irish dimensions of Gibraltar complement but do not supplant the significance of Gibraltar that has previously been identified in the critical literature.^[2]

The episode in Nighttown presents a set of related problems: while the form, a surrealist play, most disrupts the reader's generic expectations of

[1] Herring's arguments about Molly considered in this chapter can also be found in Joyce's Uncertainty Principle 117–40.

[2] Thus, Gibraltar provides a "Mediterranean axis" to the story, and it offers a link with Dante's Ulysses. At the same time Gibraltar gives biographical resonance to Nora, whom Joyce thought of as "Spanish." See, for example, Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 518, and the references he cites there.

the novel, the events themselves, specifically Bloom's trials and transformations, require critical exegesis in an assessment of Bloom's character. As in Molly's monologue, the departures from realism in this episode can be contextualized by Irish otherworld literature: some of the more sinister aspects of the Irish otherworld provide an Irish subtext for the episode, even as the configuration of Celtic otherworld belief provides a mythic imperative for Joyce's formal structuring of the text and for his manipulation of Bloom's character in the episode. When the Nighttown episode as a whole is seen in the context of Irish otherworld literature, a coherent pattern emerges linking the disparate elements.

i. We've Lived in Two Worlds : The Otherworld Literature of Ireland

At the start of the last chapter, I briefly considered the importance of sight to the professional duties of the Irish poet. The concept of the poet as seer, particularly as possessor of second sight, is related to and reinforced by the early Irish belief in the otherworld, as Thomas O'Rahilly indicates: "In Celtic belief the Otherworld was the source of all wisdom and especially of that occult wisdom to which humanity could not (except in a very limited degree) attain" (318). The wisdom of the otherworld was attainable through contact with various otherworld entities and locations, including the Salmon of Knowledge and the otherworld well associated with the drink that the Sovereignty offers to the sacral king. O'Rahilly continues: "While the boundless knowledge which was a prerogative of the Otherworld was in general hidden from mortals, it was yet not wholly inaccessible to them. A class of men known as 'seers,' filid  . . . claimed to be able, by practising certain rites, to acquire as much of this supernatural knowledge as was required for a particular purpose" (323).^[3] Doc-

[3] The otherworld as source of the poet's knowledge is epitomized in the story of Finn, who acquires his second sight by tasting the Salmon of Knowledge, to which Joyce alludes in Finnegans Wake:

Finn [also called Demne as a boy] bade farewell to Crimall, and went to learn poetry from Finneces, who was on the Boyne. . . . Seven years Finneces had been on the Boyne, watching the salmon of Fec's Pool; for it had been prophesied of him that he would eat the salmon of Fec, after which nothing would remain unknown to him. The salmon was found, and Demne was then ordered to cook it; and the poet told him not to eat anything

        of the salmon. The youth brought him the salmon after cooking it. "Hast thou eaten any of the salmon,
        my lad?" said the poet.

"No," said the youth, "but I burned my thumb, and put it into my mouth afterwards."

"What is thy name, my lad?" said he.

"Demne," said the youth. "Finn is thy name, my lad," said he; "and to thee was the salmon given to be eaten, and indeed thou art the Finn." Thereupon the youth ate the salmon. It is that which gave the knowledge to Finn, so that, whenever he put his thumb into his mouth and sang through teinm laida [an incantation], then whatever he had been ignorant of would be revealed to him. (AIT 365)

umented for two millennia, the belief in the otherworld is one of the most important and most persistent aspects of Celtic thought, and it is therefore, not surprisingly, a dominant theme of the literature of every Celtic country. Otherworld elements are found in Irish literature from the earliest time to the modern period, in both written and oral texts, in folk and aristocratic strata, in both halves of the divided Irish literary tradition. Although the full range of ideas about the otherworld is complex, the otherworld can be characterized as another space-time continuum, separate from and parallel to that of mortals, with its own rules and properties.^[4]

The Irish otherworld is known by a variety of names, including Tír na nÓg and Tír inna mBan, 'the land of youth' and 'the land of women'. Though these names are most common, there are other names such as Tír inna mBéo, 'the land of the living', Mag Mell, 'the plain of delight', and Magh da Chéo, 'the plain of the two mists', all relevant to aspects of the Irish otherworld discussed below. The otherworld in Irish tradition is located in a variety of places: in islands to the west of Ireland; under deep lakes; in "fairy mounds" (such as the Neolithic burial mounds that are plentiful in Ireland, including the great mounds of Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth); in the hollow hills of Ireland and in caves; and in various other locations. Needless to say, the mode of getting to the otherworld varies in Irish tradition depending on the location in question: in some tales a boat is necessary, but for locations in Ireland itself, such as caves and mounds, one can penetrate by foot. At times the otherworld is conceptualized as coterminous with the world of experience, as existing parallel to the Ireland known to mortals, but in another plane; the two

[4] For a fuller discussion of the Irish otherworld, see Patch ch. 2; Nutt, "Happy Otherworld"; Mac Cana, "Sinless Otherworld"; Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology 123–29; and sources cited by these authors.

worlds are permeable at special locations and special times. Although the concept of the otherworld is found in many cultures, the mappable quality of the Irish otherworld, the specificity of its locations, and its accessibility are notable.

The otherworld and the mortal world are, as noted, permeable at special times, particularly at the great Celtic feasts of Samain (November 1) and Beltaine (May 1), which divide the yearly cycle into two halves, winter and summer respectively; Samain marks the beginning of the new year. The temporal relations between the two worlds are, however, highly unpredictable: a mortal may enter the otherworld and pass a considerable time there, only to return to the human world at exactly the same time he or she entered (see AIT 251); conversely, mortals may seek to return to their world after an apparently short lapse of time only to discover that hundreds of years have passed in human time (cf. AIT 454, 595).

The happy otherworld of the Celts is best known in critical literature, but the otherworld is also conceptualized at times as an ominous, hostile, entrapping, or dangerous place. In some tales inhabitants of the otherworld make war on human beings,^[5] and people who find their way into the otherworld may find it difficult to leave (AIT 248–53).^[6] The women of the otherworld are attractive and usually welcoming, but such women may also entrap men despite their will (cf. AIT 595). The otherworld inhabitants at times also take revenge on mortals (AIT 92, 215). In both its beauty and its danger the otherworld is perilous. Thus, the early Irish (and Celtic) conception of the otherworld is clearly multifaceted, and Proinsias Mac Cana has commented on the seeming inconsistencies:

Being, as it is ultimately, an imaginative reflex of human attitudes and aspirations, this other kingdom assumes different forms according to the occasion and circumstance, but these forms are not sharply or consistently distin-

[5] Note also the hostility of the otherworld to Conaire Mor in The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel (AIT 93–126), as well as the colophon to one version of Tochmarc Etaíne (The Wooing of Etain), to the effect that Conaire was destroyed as revenge of the otherworld people (AIT 92).

[6] In The Adventures of Nera, Nera is given the job of hauling wood, very low-status work requiring daily reporting and hence daily surveillance, in part so that he will have difficulty leaving. In the voyage tales some of the companions of the main character are almost invariably lost, and Etain is reclaimed by her husband from the otherworld only with great difficulty. See AIT 248–53, 588–95, and 82–92.

guished. When a mortal visits the otherworld by invitation, it is usually pictured as a land of contentment and joy. But when it is invaded by human heroes—a favourite theme in storytelling and one which is related to Cú Chulainn, Fionn and Arthur among others—then it wears a very different image. It may still be a country of riches and of wonders—and frequently the declared object of such heroic expeditions is to seize its treasures and its magic talismans—but inevitably its status relative to mankind has been transformed: its rulers and its welcoming hosts are now formidable and even monstrous enemies, fit to test the mettle of the greatest hero. (Celtic Mythology 126)^[7]

Modern Irish folk traditions about the fairy world and folk tales about Finn's encounters with the otherworld portray it in much the same way. A principal theme of fairy lore is the fairy taking and the changeling motif: the fairies abduct a child or young adult, substituting a log or other entity that appears to be the body of the abducted person; occasionally such a person can be rescued but only with difficulty, and should the person have eaten in the otherworld it is virtually impossible to return him or her to the human world. Even a person who has been brought to the fairy world to render a service, such as a midwife, may find that the fairies become dangerous or hostile. In otherworld tales about Finn, both in the earlier texts and in modern oral tradition, entrapment takes still other forms: the Fianna are frequently bound or rendered incapable of movement in a variety of ways and must be rescued by a comrade.^[8]

Illusion and transformation are themes found in the otherworld literature of Ireland from the earliest period to the twentieth century. Otherworld figures have the power to transform themselves: for example, the war goddesses can assume the form of crows (e.g., AIT 213), and other figures also assume animal forms at will (AIT 54). Otherworld figures may also have the power to cause others to transform, as the early story of The Wooing of Etain illustrates (Bergin and Best 152–57). In the early tales and particularly in modern fairy lore, the otherworld is at times not all that it seems to be: its splendor, for example, may turn out to be il-

[7] Cf. Sjoestedt 64–65.

[8] For collections of Irish folktales about the otherworld illustrating these aspects and these motifs, see Ó Súilleabháin, Folktales of Ireland 21–37, 169–220; Ó Súilleabháin, Folklore of Ireland 35–53, 94–125; Ó hEochaidh, Mac Neill, and Ó Catháin, Súscéalta ó Thír Chonaill; Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales. See also the stories about Finn and the perils of the otherworld included in P. W. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances, a source Joyce probably knew.

lusory, with the fine hall revealed to be a dank cave, the food shown to be unappetizing, or the fine steed proved to be an illusion. Themes of transformation are one aspect of the general fluidity and ambivalence of this metamorphic realm.

Perhaps by virtue of its association with the timeless order of the gods, the otherworld was the repository of various types of specific knowledge—knowledge of the future or the past, including historical or literary knowledge, as well as knowledge of practical aspects of life or the appropriate social order. In some tales the otherworld is linked to the existential assertion of an absolute hierarchy of values, the delineation of which is revealed by otherworld agency and the observance of which in turn is guaranteed by otherworld powers (see, for example, AIT 98ff.). Contact with the otherworld can result in the possession or retrieval of important truths or knowledge. The motif of gaining information, even abstract allegorical information, is found in modern folklore pertaining to the otherworld as well.^[9] The early tales also contain episodes in which the otherworld reveals future succession in a kingship (AIT 97, 184) or validates a royal line; the otherworld was thus, in some conceptualizations, both kingmaker and kingbreaker. As a result, the otherworld has a special relation to kings as well as to poets, and it is therefore perhaps not surprising that the truthfulness of the king was an essential aspect of his sacred role.^[10]

Early Irish literature about the relations of this world and the otherworld forms a substantial portion of the extant narratives. Several of the early genres are specifically about encounters with the otherworld, of which three shed light on episodes in Ulysses: the imram, the echtra, and the bruiden tale. These genres are not perfectly demarcated, but in general the imram (literally 'a rowing about, a voyage', in particular 'a voyage to the otherworld') is a tale about a voyage over the sea to otherworld

[9] For examples in the early literature of knowledge originating in the otherworld, see AIT 503–7, 548–50; Kinsella, Táin 1–2. Ó Súilleabháin, Folklore of Ireland 43–46, is an analogue in folk tradition involving allegorical knowledge.

[10] The idea of the otherworld as kingmaker and kingbreaker is central to the plot of The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel, which Joyce used in "The Dead." Otherworld connections appear as an alternative to the Sovereignty theme as a mode of designating a sacral king in the early tales, including the tales of Mongan and tales about a number of the Ui Neill kings; examples are found in AIT 491–517. On fír flathemon, or the truthfulness of the king, see Kelly, introduction.

islands; several faces of the otherworld are discovered, each conceptualized as a single island. The genre was Christianized at an early period and was used as a vehicle for the exposition of Christian concepts of heaven and hell. The echtra, 'an adventure, an expedition,' is a more generalized form of encounter with the otherworld; the otherworld may be found underwater or in a mound, or it may be entered in a less precise way, as through a magic mist. Such adventures to the otherworld generally involve an encounter that has some perilous aspect, but if successfully completed, the expedition garners for the adventurer or his people an important boon: knowledge, an otherworld gift, or some other element won from the otherworld (see AIT 503–7, for example). By contrast, the bruiden ('hostel, large banqueting hall, house') tale is specifically an adventure to a fairy mound where the inhabitants are generally hostile to the human invaders; the humans, however, may wrest from these encounters important powers, knowledge, or other good.^[11]

Because of its connection with knowledge, the otherworld is a factor in the literature of inspiration in the early texts; thus, we find a series of medieval Irish genres in which characters have visions, go into trances, prophesy, and so on.^[12] This is the branch of otherworld literature that survives in the early modern aisling tradition discussed in chapter 4, in which the poet has a vision of an otherworldly woman to be identified as the emblem of Ireland, a Sovereignty figure. Clearly, literary genres such as these are closely related to the tradition of the poet as visionary; they reinforce the view that the poet's second sight, including his ability to see into

[11] On the tale types of the echtra and the imram, see Mac Cana, Learned Tales 75–77, who suggests that the imram is later than the echtra as a genre. The bruiden tale is later still, not appearing as a category in the medieval Irish tale lists.

Examples of the motif of the magic mist are found in Kinsella, Táin 1–2, and AIT 504.

The otherworld impinges on early Irish literature in many other ways than in these specific genres about incursions to the otherworld. Early Irish literature is noted, in fact, for the role of the gods in the stories; in Irish hero tales, as in the Homeric epics, the gods play an active role, and this is one of the ways in which early Irish literature is much closer to classical tradition than to its medieval counterparts in other European vernaculars. Otherworld figures meddle in human wars, beget offspring, seek human lovers, ask for human assistance, and so forth. See, for example, AIT 134–36, 176–98, 229, 439–56, 488–90, 546–50. The deities of the early Irish otherworld literature in some cases have lingered on as fairy kings or queens in the living oral tradition. For examples, see Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology 85–86.

[12] Mac Cana, Learned Tales 75–76, discusses the genres baile/buile and fís.

the future and his clear vision of the norms by which humans live, is related to the poet's role as mediator between the human world and the otherworld.^[13]

Joyce's familiarity with the features of the Irish otherworld can be amply demonstrated; indeed, this is perhaps the aspect of Irish mythos that is most overdetermined in the sources Joyce had to hand. The literature of the Anglo-Irish literary revival is full of material about the Irish otherworld, as the epigraphs from Yeats illustrate, and must be counted among Joyce's sources for the mythic patterns related to the otherworld in Joyce's work. Yeats's early narrative poem "The Wanderings of Oisin" (1889) serves as a passable introduction to the concept of the Irish otherworld, including as it does many of the features of the otherworld discussed in this chapter, and Yeats returns to the various faces of the otherworld in work after work; in addition, his folklore collections, on which he collaborated with Augusta Gregory, are filled with fairy lore.^[14] Yeats also uses the concept of the otherworld in his plays, and Joyce owned The Land of Heart's Desire in 1920 (Ellmann, Consciousness of Joyce 134; Gillespie #559). The Irish otherworld is present not only in Yeats's work but in Augusta Gregory's adaptations and translations of early Irish literature; and it is also used thematically by authors such as A.E. and Synge.^[15]

A specific connection between Ulysses and early Irish literature about the otherworld is provided by a series of essays in the United Irishman , "The Old Irish Bardic Tales." In the course of this series, between 18 October and 8 November 1902, R. I. Best discusses Imram Curaig Máele Dáin (The Voyage of Mael Duin), Imram Snedgusa ocus Maic Ríagla (The Voyage of Snedgus and Mac Riagla), The Voyage of Bran, and Imram Curaig hua Corra (The Voyage of the Ui Corra), summarizing the stories in such detail that the features of the early Irish otherworld are readily apparent to readers; he also offers extensive bibliographical information for further reading. Following these summaries, which provide

[13] Some of the various types of early Irish texts related to the otherworld are summarized and discussed briefly in Dillon, Early Irish Literature 101–48.

[14] See Yeats, Celtic Twilight and Fairy and Folk Tales.

[15] For examples of Synge's otherworld imagery, see Roche, "Two Worlds"; A. E.'s Deirdre, which uses otherworld themes extensively, illustrates A. E.'s interest in and promulgation of this facet of the Irish literary tradition. Roche, "'Strange Light,'" indicates that Joyce's otherworld imagery in A Portrait of the Artist echoes that of both Yeats and Synge.

an excellent introduction to the genre of the imram, Best turns to two tales that also have important treatments of the Irish otherworld, The Adventures of Nera (an echtra) and Aided Fergusa maic Léiti (The Death of Fergus mac Leiti ), each of which illustrates some of the more sinister and entrapping features of the Irish otherworld. As a regular reader of this periodical, Joyce would have known these articles, and Joyce had earlier found substantial material on the Celtic otherworld in Best's translation of Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville's Irish Mythological Cycle , which had been serialized in the United Irishman.

Another probable source of Joyce's knowledge of Irish otherworld literature is P. W. Joyce's Old Celtic Romances , a book widely discussed in the popular literature and specifically recommended by Yeats (Sultan 43). James Joyce was familiar with other works of this author and respected his work, and there is reason to believe that he knew this volume in particular (Sultan 43–48). In Old Celtic Romances P. W. Joyce presents a collection of translations of early Irish stories, most of which have otherworld themes; the book includes a number of Fenian bruiden tales; the late "sorrowful" tales Aided Chlainne Lir (The Fate of the Children of Lir) and Aided Chlainne Tuirenn (The Fate of the Children of Tuirenn), which involve transformations and metamorphoses; the story of Oisin in the Land of Youth; the echtra entitled Echtra Conlai (The Adventure of Connla); as well as an imram, The Voyage of Mael Duin.^[16]

Internal evidence in Ulysses suggests that Joyce had also read Kuno Meyer's edition of The Voyage of Bran, along with the accompanying important essays by Alfred Nutt on the Irish otherworld and Irish ideas of rebirth. This volume, which was celebrated at the time, would have been the most substantial contemporary source for knowledge of and ideas about certain features of early Irish myth, including the early Irish otherworld and Irish conceptions of metempsychosis. Nutt provides a thorough discussion of the Irish otherworld, synopsizes all the relevant primary texts, and marshals comparative material showing the relationship of the Irish otherworld to similar materials in other Indo-European traditions. Nutt concludes that the Irish representations of the happy otherworld are closest to those of the Greeks, thus representing another

[16] The second enlarged edition includes The Voyage of the Ui Corra as well. P. W. Joyce's translation of Mael Duin is the source of Tennyson's "Voyage of Maeldune."

point de départ for Joyce's coordination of Irish and Greek mythic elements in Ulysses. Nutt's essays on Celtic mythological literature not only show detailed correspondences to various mythological elements in Ulysses, including the presentation of the otherworld, but are also antecedents to Joyce's later program of mythic syncretism in Finnegans Wake.

Joyce's familiarity with the concept of the poet's second sight and the Irish otherworld is patent, and these elements play a significant role in his writings. The theme of sight is a leitmotif of Finnegans Wake, not surprisingly since in Irish literature Finn is a poet and visionary.^[17] In Finnegans Wake there is a reference to the episode in which Finn eats the Salmon of Knowledge caught by Finneces ('Finn the poet'), thereby gaining his second sight: "The finnecies of poetry wed music" (377.16–17). But there are numerous more general references to second sight as well, including vision of the otherworld: "he skuld never ask to see sight or light of this world or the other world or any either world, of Tyre-nan-Og" (91.24–26).^[18] Although Joyce's familiarity with the concept of the poet's second sight can be traced explicitly only in his later work, the Irish conception of the poet as seer, hence as mediator between this world and the otherworld, is related to the notion of poet as priest found in A Portrait of the Artist. There the Irish and Christian meanings fuse in the pervasive imagery of poet as priest, a coalescence that probably has implications for how Joyce saw himself in life as well.^[19]

Joyce had used otherworld themes before Ulysses. "The Dead" is a sort of ghost story (cf. Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce 20); based in part on The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel (Kelleher "Irish History"), it contains some of the same somber and sinister otherworldly atmosphere of Joyce's mythic source.^[20] The otherworld imagery is even more explicit in A Portrait of the Artist, where the theme of "islanding"

[17] For a discussion of Finn as seer, see T. O'Rahilly 318–40; R. Scott, esp. chs. 1, 2, 7; Tymoczko, "'Cétamon'"; Nagy, esp. ch. 1, 129–30, ch. 6; as well as references cited in these sources.

[18] On second sight, see, for example, FW 75.13, 143.26, 157.21, 269.2, 303.10, 364.18.

[19] It is telling that Joyce believed his books were "acts of prophecy" (JJ 2 550).

These Irish traditions coalesce in Joyce with the romantic and symbolist traditions of the poet as seer; on the latter, see Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle 140–60.

[20] Cf. also Nilsen, who traces references to the Irish god of the dead throughout Dubliners.

(173) and the mystical music and voice calling Stephen from "beyond the world" (167) suggest that he undertakes a symbolic imram to the otherworld (Roche, "'Strange Light'"). Here Joyce uses otherworld imagery to symbolize the poet's acquisition of vision in "the strange light of some new world" (172); like Finn's otherworldly Salmon of Knowledge, the bird-girl in Stephen's otherworld vision makes it possible for him to assume the vocation of poet and acts in this regard as his muse.

In A Portrait of the Artist the girl of the otherworld vision is set implicitly against the girls of Stephen's dissolute sexual experiences, and it is no accident that Joyce signals Stephen's entry into the brothel area of Dublin by using language suggesting a transition to the otherworld:

Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns traversed the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed. A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. The yellow gasflames arose before his troubled vision against the vapoury sky, burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and in the lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in another world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries. (PA 100)

The language evokes a number of motifs associated with the Irish otherworld: the "yellow gasflames" and "vapoury sky" suggest the mist that in some early stories permits the transition between worlds; at the same time the women dressed in bright colors, wandering at their leisure, suggests the otherworld as the land of women. There is a suggestion of ritual, and the motif of temporal disjunction is suggested by the last phrase of the quotation—a temporal disjunction not unlike that at the end of The Voyage of Bran. Joyce's phrase "he was in another world" gathers and makes explicit all the otherworld imagery and contrasts with the "strange light of some new world" associated with the later vision of the bird-girl. In A Portrait of the Artist there is in fact a quaternary representation of the otherworld, for these two versions of the early Irish otherworld are in turn contrasted with the two otherworlds of Christian belief: the vision of hell at the centerpiece of the retreat sermon (107ff.) and the vision of heaven held out to the Stephen as a possible reward. The complex interplay of these otherworlds provides the field against which Stephen chooses his vocation as poet.

In Ulysses Joyce returns to otherworld themes, manipulating the material in multiple ways. The imram is reflected in Ulysses as a whole, since

the motif of the voyage from wonder to wonder can be seen as doubling the voyage of Ulysses as well as the voyage of the Milesians in The Book of Invasions.^[21] In Molly's Gibraltar, Joyce recycles the same material, recreating the typical configuration of the happy otherworld of Irish literature and at the same time suggesting with the otherworld themes a vision of Ireland's future after independence. On behalf of the community, Joyce acts as poetic visionary, and he presents his vision in Molly's flowing, continuous, lyrical prose, the closest Joyce gets in Ulysses to the alliterative, cadenced visionary poetry, the roscada, of the early Irish seerpoets. Yet prior to the vision of the happy otherworld in Ulysses, Joyce gives a permutation of the more sinister incursions of Irish heroes into the otherworld found in such genres as the echtra and the bruiden tale. Naturalized as the brothel district of Dublin, in "Circe" the threatening and ominous side of the Irish otherworld becomes a vehicle for representing the workings of the psyche. Though used for rather different purposes, the elements of Irish otherworld imagery that contrast embryonically in A Portrait of the Artist are explored and developed at length in Ulysses.^[22]

ii. Adiaptotously Farseeing the Otherworld: Echtra in Nighttown

A key to seeing the connection between Joyce's "Circe" episode and Irish tale types about incursions to the otherworld is the recognition that, although the adventure in Nighttown has a dreamlike quality to it and although the organizing principles of the narrative are those of the unconscious, the episode takes place in a space-time framework that is physically accessible and yet distinct from that of the ordinary world: the characters in Ulysses geographically enter into and then leave the location in which strange manifestations occur, just as in Irish folklore or early

[21] As early as 1892 d'Arbois de Jubainville had noted that both the Odyssey and the story of the Argonauts could be seen as imrama (L'épopée celtique 449). Stanley Sultan, following this train of thought, has argued that Joyce was influenced in particular by The Voyage of Mael Duin, citing details within Ulysses and references to Mael Duin in Finnegans Wake to bolster his argument, noting in particular the commonality of lack of revenge at the end of both Ulysses and The Voyage of Mael Duin.

[22] There are also scattered references to the otherworld: see, e.g., 9.413; cf. 8.902–03.

Irish otherworld texts characters enter into or depart from the fairy world or the otherworld at specific geographical points in Ireland.^[23] So Bran returns to Ireland from the otherworld at Srub Brain (AIT 595), and Eochaid Airem goes to the mound at Bri Leith when he wishes to reclaim his wife from the otherworld (AIT 92); both Srub Brain and Bri Leith are actual and identifiable places. Similarly, Bloom enters Nighttown at Mabbot Street, and he and Stephen depart from Nighttown at Butt Bridge; their path is mappable and concrete, however distorted and supernatural their experiences in Nighttown may be. The characters in Ulysses are able to return to the normal world after their adventures by leaving the otherworld geographically, as do so many characters in early Irish stories about the otherworld.

In early Irish tales the hero frequently enters the otherworld unintentionally or by accident, sometimes by following another character. An example is found in The Adventures of Nera, where Nera is outdoors on Samain, the Celtic new year festival, when the passage between this world and the other lies open. After seeing a supernatural vision of the otherworld host destroying Cruachan, Nera follows that host, not precisely understanding what he has seen or whom he is following and thereby accidentally entering the otherworld through the cave of Cruachan:^[24]

Thereupon Nera . . . returned to Cruachan. Then he saw something. The stronghold of Cruachan seemed to be burnt before him, and he beheld a heap of heads of his people cut off by the warriors of the fairy-mound. He went after the fairy host into the cave of Cruachan. "There is a man on our track here!" said the last man to Nera. "The heavier is the track," said his comrade to him, and each man said that word to his mate from the last man to the first man. Thereupon they reached the fairy-mound of Cruachan and went into it. (AIT 249)^[25]

[23] As in earlier chapters, the discussion here is intended to supplement earlier critical studies of "Circe." For other parallels to the contents and technique of the episode, see Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey 141; Kenner, "Ulysses" 119; Kain, Fabulous Voyager 31; Hayman, "Forms of Folly in Joyce" 277–78; Herr 96–221; and Seidel 214.

[24] This is an actual location that can be visited today in Connacht, though the way to the otherworld does not presently lie open for everyone.

[25] Similar cases of accidental entry to the otherworld are found in Fenian bruiden tales. See, for example, some of the Fenian tales translated by P. W. Joyce in Celtic Romances.

Leopold Bloom, like the hero of an echtra or bruiden tale, enters Nighttown as it were by accident, following Stephen and the medicals.

A common location for the otherworld in Irish tradition is under the ground in mounds or in a realm under deep water, and Joyce naturalizes this feature of the Irish otherworld by locating the surrealistic adventures in Dublin's brothel district. In his venue Joyce is playing on language, for he is assimilating the Irish otherworld located under earth or water to the underworld of Victorian society, the areas of Victorian cities populated by the poor, the beggars, the thieves, and the whores, those outside the economic and moral structures of bourgeois society. The term underworld was commonly used to denote such segments of society as well as the urban areas inhabited by such people, the brothel districts in particular, during the nineteenth century. The underworld had been brought to the consciousness of polite society though a series of articles written by Henry Mayhew on these segments of London's culture; the series began in 1849 and was later published in book form in 1861–62 as London Labour and the London Poor.^[26] This play on the word underworld, used literally in the case of the Irish otherworld and figuratively for the brothel district, is signaled explicitly in Ulysses when Stephen uses the term underworld in thinking of his attraction to "the sin of Paris" (2.70–73). This is another example of Joyce's use of verbal magic to establish connection or identity, an instance of verbal realism linking Joyce's work to earlier Irish tradition.

Though accessible geographically, the Irish otherworld represents a different order of existence: it has different rules, different properties, and residents with different habits, capacities, and moral strictures.^[27] Like the early Irish otherworld, Nighttown is also a world geographically proximate but morally apart. Gilbert discusses the paradox of a brothel district's being tolerated in Dublin, "the great Catholic city of northern Europe":

The Catholic religion, upholding the inviolable sanctity of marriage, accepts no compromise, and condemns the ostrich morality of those hybrid creeds which, burying their heads in the sands of seemliness, refuse recognition of

[26] Mayhew's discussion of prostitutes is found in 4.35–272. On changes in the patterns of prostitution in the nineteenth century, see Walkowitz.

[27] Mac Cana, "Sinless Otherworld," discusses some of the moral freedoms and inversions of the otherworld.

the weakness of the flesh. . . . The man who, passing under the red beacon of ill fame, visits a "regulated" brothel cannot but know that he is committing deadly sin; no compromise with conscience is possible. . . . The Catholic religion, relentlessly logical, sets in sharp contrast virtue on the one side, vice on the other; white light of heaven, red of hell; the Holy Eucharist and the Black Mass. (316)

Not only different moral standing but different mores and even different laws: the night watch in Nighttown condones and even to some extent facilitates the operations of the brothels. Behaviors, modes of dress, and social interactions that would be unthinkable elsewhere in Dublin are the norm in Nighttown. The Dublin red-light district is a world of its own, distorting everyone who enters, presenting everyone and everything in a new light. This separate order of existence attributed to Nighttown is in part an element of naturalism; it was precisely the different order of existence of the Victorian underworld that touched and startled the readers of Mayhew's work. At the same time the difference mirrors a distinction between the world of mortals and the otherworld in Celtic thought.^[28]

While the action is surrealistic and supernatural—note the semantic links between the words—the events in the Nighttown episode of Ulysses are very different from those of a dream. In a dream, whatever the logic of the events, the action is internal to the dreamer; nothing actually happens in the external world. In Nighttown, by contrast, events happen in the physical world itself, and in the episode the narrative line proceeds and develops; although some of the events are internalized to the characters, this is not the sole level of the activity. This tension between, on the one hand, startlingly defamiliarized object and event and, on the other, forward narrative movement is characteristic of stories of the Irish otherworld at every period. Both the early Irish otherworld and the otherworld of Irish fairy lore have manifestations that remind us of those in Joyce's Nighttown episode—absurdities, terror-inspiring visions, metamorphoses, wish fulfillment—ultimately because the Celtic otherworld, like most conceptions of the otherworld worldwide, is a reflection of the human unconscious (cf. Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology 126), much as the

[28] In the early Irish otherworld time is also inverted: winter in the mortal realm is summer in the otherworld (e.g., AIT 251). In Nighttown, too, time is inverted: the underworld is active at night rather than during the day as the respectable world is.

visions in Joyce's Nighttown are manifestations of the characters' psyches. With his fine psychological sense Joyce perceived the psychic basis of otherworld literature and chose Nighttown as the place for otherworld manifestations because the red-light district was a location adapted to his naturalistic framework in which the same sorts of fantasies were expressed: the loosening of sexual proprieties, the indulgence in sexual fantasy and taboo, and the acting out of guilt, fear, and illicit desire. In early Irish literature, dream logic structures some of the adventures to the otherworld as it does Joyce's episode; however, because the otherworld was part of the Irish belief system, events there become structural features of the plot. Events in the Nighttown episode of Ulysses are likewise part of the action of the plot: Leopold searches for Stephen in the brothel district, finds him, has a confrontation with Bella, and rescues Stephen from the soldiers; money is spent, a lamp is broken; and each character has a vision of central importance to him. As for the weird events, Joyce offers rationalization for the reader in need by presenting his characters as under the influence of alcohol, fatigue, and stress: drunken or exhausted, none is fully rational.^[29]

A feature stressed in some early Irish texts about the otherworld is the inconsistency of the perspectives of ordinary humans and the residents of the otherworld. In early Irish stories about the otherworld over the sea, otherworldly horsemen can ride over the waves to actual destinations; the leaping salmon observed by the mortals are to the residents of the otherworld calves and lambs; the dead can move and speak; the bounds of time are broken. Manannan mac Lir speaks of some of these points to Bran in Imram Brain (The Voyage of Bran) :

Bran deems it a marvellous beauty
In his coracle across the clear sea:
While to me in my chariot from afar
It is a flowery plain on which he rows about.

That which is a clear sea
For the prowed skiff in which Bran is,
That is a happy plain with profusion of flowers
To me from the chariot of two wheels.

[29] However, these factors do not explain all the distortions of Nighttown, which begin before either protagonist appears on the scene; see Kimpel 299–300 and French 186–87.

Bran sees
The number of waves beating across the clear sea:
I myself see in Mag Mon
Rosy-colored flowers without fault. . . .

Speckled salmon leap from the womb
Of the white sea, on which thou lookest:
They are calves, they are colored lambs
With friendliness, without mutual slaughter.

Though but one chariot-rider is seen
In Mag Mell of many flowers,
There are many steeds on its surface,
Though them thou seest not. . . .

Along the top of a wood has swum
Thy coracle across ridges,
There is a wood of beautiful fruit
Under the prow of thy little boat.

A wood with blossom and fruit,
On which is the vine's veritable fragrance,
A wood without decay, without defect,
On which are leaves of golden hue.     ( AIT 592)

The "some see it, some don't" quality of Joyce's episode in Nighttown is in this mold. Bloom's fantasy of his rise and fall as Lord-mayor-of-Dublin-Leopold-the-First-and-great-reformer occurs between two of Zoe's sentences as he speaks a few words (15.1353–1958), and she notices nothing. While Stephen sees the vision of his dead mother, the whores remark only that he is white (15.4155ff.). Joyce inverts the capacity of special vision, stripping it from the inhabitants of his underworld and ironically reserving it for his protagonists, who are visitors; this inversion is a function of the psychological focus of the narrative.^[30]

As mentioned in the last section, in many early Celtic stories the otherworld is hostile or forbidding to humans, particularly if they come as invaders, and it may be in part a function of Bloom's "invasion" of Nighttown that he runs into trouble. The hostility of the otherworld is usually associated with the early Irish genres of echtra and bruiden rather than

[30] The special vision is not unlike the vision in early Irish stories of chosen ones to whom members of the otherworld appear; those around the favored mortals may see nothing. See, for example, AIT 488.

the imram tales, and there are specific motifs in the Nighttown episode linking it with the echtra and the bruiden tales in which the protagonist enters the otherworld accidentally or as a result of following others. The hostility of Joyce's underworld is embodied in the hugeness, the "mag-magnificence" of Bella/Bello (15.2846ff.). As her sadism increases, it brings the threat of destruction and consumption:

BELLO: (savagely ) The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. You're in for it this time! I'll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life. (his forehead veins swollen, his face congested ) I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle of Guinness's porter. (he belches ) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette . Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like suckling pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you. (He twists her arm. Bloom squeals, turning turtle. ) (15.2890–2902)

The suggestion of being eaten by the residents of the otherworld is, of course, a motif that goes well beyond Irish literature: it is the oldest threat of wondertales.

One of the early names for the otherworld is Tír inna mBan, 'the land of women', which could be a delicious interlingual description for the brothel district of Dublin and thus suggests another piece of Joyce's verbal realism. In the early Irish tales the women are generally receptive, welcoming, sensual; and such a land—like actual brothel districts—is obviously a manifestation of patriarchal culture serving the wish fulfillment of male desire. Yet the idea of a land of women may also involve projection of other male feelings as well, including male fears of women and male desires to be dominated. Even in the early Irish tales where the otherworld is benevolent to its human visitors, the women are sometimes seen as seductive, entrapping, and hence frightening, as noted earlier.^[31] It is not surprising, therefore, that in some of the bruiden tales the heroes are threatened or held hostage by otherworldly women who at times also have metamorphic powers; the hero escapes with difficulty, and the escape can take the form of breaking some type of enchantment.

[31] See, for example, the actions of the otherworld women in AIT 179, 595.

The term bruiden ('hostel, banqueting hall', later also 'a fairy palace') might be a witticism applied to Mrs Cohen's house, reinforcing the notion that this land of women is an otherworld. If Bella Cohen, doubling as Circe, is keeper of a hostel, then she maintains a hostile hostel; the paronymy here, sound echoing rather than homophony in Irish dialects of English, is another element of the verbal magic underlying the frightening and grotesque aspects of the episode. Bella's bruiden is an abode of women and a guest house providing entertainment, but the environment is sinister. Like Da Derga's bruiden, the site of the demise of Conaire in the early Irish tale which Joyce uses as a subtext in "The Dead," Bella's hostel is also a perilous place: it endangers and entraps the men who visit it and even, through the possibility of a dose of clap, threatens their lives.

One of the most important Irish texts in which the otherworld is a perilous land of women is Brian Merriman's eighteenth-century poem The Midnight Court; Merriman was a contemporary of Jonathan Swift, and much in the work of the two links them, including their use of satire and humor for social commentary. This 1100-line poem, an outgrowth of the aisling tradition, includes a dream vision of the otherworld in which the poet is summoned to the court of Aoibheall, a fairy queen of Munster, by a gigantic, intimidating woman. The Midnight Court is perhaps the best-known work of Modern Irish literature; its satirical tone and lively content make it a perennial favorite, and it would have been known to Joyce, if in no other way, from his period of study of Modern Irish in the years before leaving Ireland. Moreover, the 1905 publication of Merriman's text in Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie was announced in Dana (February 1905) and the text summarized in some detail. This issue of the journal was owned by Joyce in 1920 (Ellmann, Consciousness of James Joyce 105).

Several features of The Midnight Court suggest that Joyce is incorporating a refraction of Merriman's poem as one element of his Nighttown episode. The central element of The Midnight Court is the complaint of Munster's women against men: the women languish for lack of sexual fulfillment; the men fail in their duty to marry; and the old men who do marry are inadequate to the needs and vigor of the young women. The queen, Aiobheall, finds for the women and, noticing the poet, is about to have him bound and flayed for his own offenses when the dream ends. The women's accusations in the poem are overtly sexual, and the tone of the poem is typical of the sexual content of Irish literature as a

whole before the famine.^[32] The poem clearly provides a literary paradigm for the trial scene of Nighttown, in which the women of Bloom's sexual fantasies and misdeeds step forward to accuse him and to bear witness against him (15.774ff.), though their complaints are not those leveled against men at Aoibheall's court. Less obviously perhaps, The Midnight Court is a subtext for Bella/Bello's humiliating accusations of Bloom and the suggestions that Bloom is sexually inadequate:

BELLO: What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (he stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds of Bloom's haunches ) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (loudly ) Can you do a man's job?
(15.3126–32)

Later she taunts Bloom again:

BELLA: (contemptuously ) You're not game, in fact. (her sowcunt barks ) Fbhracht!
(15. 3488–90)

The Merriman poem, like all Joyce's mythic parallels, is freely manipulated here; marriage is certainly not the central issue of the accusations at the trial of Bloom, yet Joyce's work resonates with the tone and the content of the earlier work. In light of the affinities with the situation of the Merriman poem, it is perhaps significant that the Nighttown episode is positioned at twelve o'clock midnight, a correspondence that involved the deliberate omission of an hour in the progress of the day as well as other temporal disruptions.^[33] Midnight strikes just before Bloom enters Bella Cohen's house (15.1362), and though midnight is the traditional "witching hour," the time Joyce sets is also a link to the title of Merriman's poem. The trial scene in the Nighttown episode and Bella's challenge of Bloom are each literally "a midnight court." This "coincidence" is a sign, a portal of discovery, that links Joyce's work with Merriman's important text. Thus, the sexual content of the Nighttown episode and of Ulysses as a whole have important anteced-

[32] Lee (40) discusses the change in morality and the move toward greater prudery in Irish culture after the great famine.

[33] See Joyce's schemata in Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey appendix; cf. Gilbert 30. Gifford (2–3) discusses the dislocations of time in Ulysses, particularly after midnight.

ents in Irish literature. It is typical that Joyce should have incorporated The Midnight Court in his mythic parallels, a work that his contemporaries in the Irish literary revival found difficult to use because of the conflict it presented with Victorian prudery and Catholic morality.

In a plot sequence that is similar to many stories from fairy lore, as well as to some versions of the early Irish echtra and bruiden tales, Bloom manages to rescue Stephen from "entrapment" and mistreatment in the underworld environment.^[34] Entrapment in Ulysses takes the form of unsavory sexual relations and monetary bilking, as well as more generalized mockery, but these are to be read as the modern expressions of the timeless dangers run by mortals in the underworld. The motif of entrapment in the otherworld can be traced in Irish literature for more than a millennium, and it is connected with the most widespread motifs of fairy lore: the fairy taking and the changeling motifs.^[35] In Nighttown-as-otherworld it is therefore no surprise that the dead appear—from Rudolph Virag and Ellen Bloom to Stephen's mother and Paddy Dignam, who explains that the situation is possible "By metempsychosis. Spooks" (15.1226). The episode is in some ways a ghost story, not entirely divorced from "The Dead," but the otherworldly and fairy aspect has come to the fore, as Joyce clearly indicates in the final scene:

(Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy body of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page. )

BLOOM: (wonderstruck, calls inaudibly ) Rudy!
(15.4956–62)

The changeling motif is accompanied here by the clear suggestion that Rudy is not dead: he has continued to grow and develop and is now eleven, the age he would be had he survived.

A common motif of fairy lore is the rescue from the fairy world of a

[34] For example, in Echtra Chormaic i Tír Tairngiri (The Adventures of Cormac in the Land of Promise) (AIT 503–7), Cormac rescues his daughter, son, and wife from the otherworld.

[35] In Irish folklore untimely death, particularly that of a child or a blooming young adult, is frequently attributed to a fairy taking, in which the dead human is replaced with a wooden branch or other artifact metamorphosed to the human shape; alternatively the human (particularly a baby) is replaced with a fairy, often a wizened, old fairy disguised to appear like the missing human.

person thought to be dead, or at the least conversation with such a person. Though Bloom sees Rudy, he cannot recapture his own child from the otherworld; at the same time, by rescuing Stephen from Nighttown, he is in a sense rescuing a son from the otherworld. In Ulysses no less than in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist, the repetition of key words sets up chains of meaning essential to the significance and metaphorical structure of the book.^[36] Here the identification of Rudy and Stephen is facilitated by a node of meaning represented by Rudy's Eton suit in his apparition in Nighttown: for if Bloom sees Rudy in an Eton suit in his mind's eye (cf. 6.76), it is Stephen that Bloom has seen with his corporeal eye actually dressed this way (17.467–76, 18.1311–13, 14. 1371–78), setting a model for his desired and ideal son. Indeed, it is the sight of the grown Stephen and the memory of the young Stephen throughout Bloomsday that have triggered Bloom's nostalgia for the lost Rudy (e.g., 6.74–84). The conflation of the two is established as well by the word changeling, for Stephen no less than Rudy has been presented to the reader in this role (3.308). Stephen thus doubles for Rudy in the plot sequence of one of the tale types that Joyce uses as backdrop for this episode—the rescue of one taken to the fairy world. It is partly in virtue of this doubling that Joyce is able to establish the father-son linkage between the two characters, at the same time maintaining Stephen's disinclination to be anyone's son. This is an example of the way that Joyce uses the fabula of a traditional tale as his subtext, raising expectations and at the same time undercutting those expectations by his manipulations and countermanipulations of the skeletal outline of the substructures.

In fairy lore in Ireland rescue from the otherworld may become impossible if the person taken has eaten while in the otherworld; the motif is well known from the Greek story of Persephone.^[37] Rudy has grown, and we may thus infer that he has eaten. The question of eating in the otherworld is raised obliquely elsewhere in the Nighttown episode:

(The cigarette slips from Stephen's fingers. Bloom picks it up and throws it in the grate. )

[36] See O'Connor for the full argument; cf. Kain's concept of integrating themes, Fabulous Voyager, esp. 48–71, appendix D.

[37] This is motif C211, which is widespread both worldwide and in Irish literature of all periods; for examples, see S. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, and Cross, Motif-Index.

BLOOM: Don't smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. (to Zoe ) You have nothing?

ZOE: Is he hungry?
(15.3641–3647)

It is perhaps fortunate that Stephen never eats, and it is reasonable to suppose that had Joyce allowed Stephen to eat in the brothel, the subsequent plotting would have been substantially altered: rescue from the otherworld would have become compromised.

Rescue, however, is not the only, or perhaps even the primary, retrieval possible in the otherworld; the otherworld is also the source of truth, revelation, and information, including special poetic knowledge and knowledge of regnal succession. The motif of the otherworld as maker and unmaker of kings resonates behind the amusing sequence of Bloom's ascendancy as Lord Mayor of Dublin and Leopold the First, as well as his summary carbonization (15.1362–1956). Joyce had used this facet of the Irish otherworld before Ulysses, since the otherworld is responsible for making Conaire Mor king of Ireland and for bringing about his downfall in The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel, the early Irish tale that Joyce uses obliquely in the plotting of "The Dead" and in his characterization of Gabriel Conroy.

Within Ulysses the episode in Nighttown reveals more truth than Bloom's sacral status. Truth is revealed on several levels, including Stephen's realization that his comrades have little concern for him and that even Lynch is a Judas in his life (15.4723–30). The primary gain from the adventures in Nighttown is the retrieval of psychic truth on the part of both protagonists. For Stephen, the adventure brings a crisis: his vision of his mother as the devouring maw of death ("All must go through it, Stephen. . . . You too. Time will come." 15. 4182–84), the corpsechewer (15.4214) who calls him to repentance and the bonds of religious duty (15.4212–40), coalesces with the vision of Ireland as Gummy Granny, the devouring incubus who promises heaven for self-sacrifice in nationalist terrorism ("Remove him, acushla. At 8:35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free" [15.4737–38]). Mothers, grandmothers, religion, patriotism—for Stephen, in Ireland, they all mean death; they are all manifestations of Banba, an ancient name for Ireland, homophonous with banb, 'young pig'. Abandoned by his comrades, faced only with varied manifestations of "the old sow that eats her farrow" (15.4582–83; cf. PA

203), Stephen finds that his course is clear: he must leave Ireland. Stephen's vision at the climax of Ulysses leads to the same conclusion as his realizations at the ending of A Portrait of the Artist, but the motivation is less intellectual, less cerebral: his departure and exile are essential for his survival.

Bloom also comes away from his Nighttown adventure having met with his own psychic truths. He has encountered his sexual guilt and his desires, his fears of inadequacy, his sexual ambivalences, his shame about cuckoldry, his longing to be dominated. His megalomania has been played out, as have his desire to be a reformer and his fears of betrayal and rejection. He has met with the shades of parents and child and experienced once more the loss of his son. He has survived it all and returns to the normal world in fuller possession of himself: more individuated, more integrated. He is able to command eggs for breakfast in bed, and a drink from the Sovereignty as well ("tea in the moustachecup" [18.1505]). The "Circe" episode was conflated by some early critics with "Hades" (cf. Gilbert 320), in part no doubt because it is a ghost story. This identification, though wrong structurally with respect to the Homeric parallels, is not altogether off the mark, for the hero's mythic descent to the otherworld is usually a rite of passage: the hero returns to the mortal world having lived through a crisis, having integrated and transcended human development in ways that will enable him to go beyond the common limitations of humanity.^[38] Bloom does not have this experience in the "Hades" episode of Ulysses ; the dead he encounters in the graveyard are as much the hemiplegiacs of Dublin—Simon Dedalus, and John Power, and Martin Cunningham, and all the rest, the dead of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist^[39] —as they are Paddy Dignam, "poor mamma" (6.683), and the notables of Glasnevin. There is no heroic crisis for Bloom in "Hades"; he escapes "back to the world again" (6.995), but he returns relatively unchanged. The personal crisis and integration characteristic of the hero's incursion to the otherworld are reserved for the adventure in Nighttown.

Joyce has bifurcated the hero's descent to the otherworld, representing the primary encounter with the dead in "Hades" and reserving the testing and spiritual crisis of the hero for "Circe." There are some realistic rea-

[38] See, for example, the argument developed in Campbell 90ff., 217ff.

[39] Cf. Letters 1: 55; PA 248; Scholes and Kain 68.

sons for this bifurcation: Joyce used the motif of the ordinary funeral to a variety of good ends, and funerals in Ireland are held in the morning. The hero's crisis and hence the climax of the book could not be placed this early in the course of the day if the unity of time was to be observed. Moreover, in Ulysses the Homeric enchantments of Circe are assimilated to intrapsychic experience: in a post-Freudian world it is the natural conjurings of the psyche, not the enchantments of a sorceress, that make men pigs, just as it is the encounter with the psyche that must occur for a man to emerge a hero—even such a hero as Bloom is. By integrating Celtic otherworld themes with his classical framework in the "Circe" episode, Joyce welds together the heroic encounter with the otherworld and the heroic encounter with the psyche. This is the heart of the test that changes the hero(es) in Ulysses, and it is the Irish mythic underlay that provides the structural justification for their heroic transcendence in the episode that is properly speaking the climax of the story.

iii. The Intertemporal Eye : Molly's Gibraltar and the Morphology of the Irish Happy Otherworld

The Celtic otherworld is bivalent: it can be welcoming to mortals if they are invited, but hostile if it is invaded or if mortals come unbidden. Joyce has represented both faces of the otherworld in Ulysses : the hostile and frightening elements in the adventure in Nighttown and the delightful aspects in Molly's interior monologue. Together these episodes represent the unconscious desires as well as the unconscious fears and guilts that underlie the human construction of any system of otherworld beliefs. Joyce mediates these representations and at the same time disambiguates the bivalent values of the Irish otherworld in adapting the motifs for a modern English-speaking audience.^[40] This disambiguation and the consequent doubling of otherworld genres in Ulysses have been among the factors that obscured Joyce's use of motifs and genres from early Irish literature.

Several early Irish primary sources delineate the characteristics of the

[40] Teasing apart the ambivalence of Irish mythological motifs as Joyce does in Ulysses has been a long-standing process; it is a way of assimilating Celtic modalities to the dominant norms of Western culture and can be traced in the history of the assimilation of Celtic myth to Christian-Latin norms. See Tymoczko, "Unity and Duality," for more extensive discussion of the issues involved.

Celtic happy Otherworld; most important are the early Irish voyage tales including The Voyage of Bran, but there are also other narratives such as The Sickbed of CuChulainn. The early texts portray the Irish happy otherworld as a land of youth in which people neither die nor wither. There is no sickness. The Otherworld is a land of warmth and light where there are exotic colors and plants; blossoms coexist with fruit. It is a place of beauty, abounding in poetry and music. There is no work; it is a land of feasting and play. There is a limitless supply of food and drink; the otherworld has its caldron of plenty, bithlán, 'ever full'. There can be fighting in the otherworld, but the otherworld is characterized primarily by peace and lack of conflict. The otherworld is a sensual land, where sexuality is sinless and innocent. It is a land of women, and the women are generally sensual and friendly. Though the otherworld may be located in a mound or under a lake or entered through a magical mist, the happy otherworld is most frequently located on islands in the western sea; one form such islands assume is that of a land mounted on an inaccessible pillar. Thus, the otherworld is frequently reached by a sea voyage. Once left behind, it is difficult to regain.

These are some of the features that impinge on the configuration of Molly's Gibraltar, causing perturbations in the historicity that Herring and others have observed. Joyce highlights the natural aspects of Gibraltar—the botany and climate—in ways that emphasize its likeness to the Irish happy otherworld. Gibraltar is a land of warmth; Molly remembers the heat, particularly at night, and the heat is sensual, causing her clothing to stick and cling: "I used to be weltering then in the heat my shift drenched with the sweat stuck in the cheeks of my bottom on the chair when I stood up" (18.662–63). Gibraltar is bright and light: the sun beats down and shimmers, causing mortal cloches to fade: "red sentries here and there the poplars and they all whitehot and the smell of the rainwater in those tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on you faded all that lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from the B Marche paris what a shame" (18.610–13). Molly remembers the beauty and color of Gibraltar, in particular the fruit and flowers, including exotic plants: "O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses" (18.1598–1601).

All the names of the Irish otherworld—from the most common Tír na

nÓg and Tír inna mBan, 'the land of youth' and 'the land of women', to the less common Tír inna mBéo, 'the land of the living', Mag Mell, 'the plain of delight', and Magh da Chéo, 'the plain of the two mists'—are relevant to aspects of the Irish happy otherworld reflected by Joyce in Molly's monologue. Molly's memories of Gibraltar center on young people—her young man Mulvey is central, and she remembers Mulvey's boyishness: "he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth his mouth was sweetlike young" (18.769–71). Even her Mrs Stanhope is youthful: "she didn't look a bit married just like a girl" (18.623–24). The older generation—including her duenna, Mrs Rubio—is active and vigorous. Gibraltar is also "the land of youth," the land of Molly's youth, the land whose very memories make her feel rejuvenated: "Lord its just like yesterday to me" (18.821); "well small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then" (18.1469–71). We should note, too, that though in fact the society of Gibraltar was predominantly male, Molly's memories of Gibraltar give women a dominant place. We see this also in her frequent references to the Spanish or Andalusian girls and women (18.440, 18.632–33, 18.778, 18.1586).

Molly has no memory of death in Gibraltar. Though Captain Rubio is dead (18.858), and Molly has seen an officer's funeral (18.1262), and the consul is in mourning for his son (18.684), none of these deaths is said explicitly to have occurred in Gibraltar. It seems that in Molly's Gibraltar people do not die: as with the Celtic otherworld, they die only when they leave. In 1904 the Stanhopes are lost and presumed dead—"I suppose theyre dead long ago the 2 of them" (18.636)—and Major Tweedy has died in Ireland, but Molly has no memory of death associated with Gibraltar itself. Like Bran's company in The Voyage of Bran, the mortals who come to Molly's Gibraltar become dust only when they land on other shores.^[41]

As with the Celtic otherworld, the passage to Gibraltar is not simple. In Molly's memories the men come and go as a result of sea voyages, connecting the passage to Gibraltar with the Irish genre of the imram, literally 'rowing' or 'voyage': "he went to India he was to write the voyages

[41] Note that Molly wonders whether Mulvey is still alive (18.823) and considers that he may have been drowned or killed on his trip to India (18.855).

those men have to make to the ends of the world and back its the least they might get a squeeze or two at a woman while they can going out to be drowned or blown up somewhere" (18.853–56). As with the early Irish otherworld, it is difficult if not impossible to return to Gibraltar once one goes away, as the previous passage suggests. Moreover, a decision to leave is decisive: "of course they never came back. . .people were always going away and we never" (18.666–68). After people leave Gibraltar, contact with the inhabitants of Gibraltar fails, and neither Mulvey (18.853) nor the Stanhopes (18.667) maintain a correspondence with Molly once they have left: "not a letter from a living soul" (18.698). Molly wonders whether she herself will ever return (18.1338), and at times she seems cut off even from her memories of Gibraltar: "its like all through a mist makes you feel so old" (18.636–37). Joyce's use of the figure of the mist here connects the passage with the motif of the magic mist as an entryway to the Irish otherworld as well as with one of the names for the Irish otherworld, Magh da Chéo, 'the plain of the two mists'.

Herring notes that Molly is portrayed as "growing to maturity in a carefree atmosphere of warm nights, lazy summer days, free of worries or obligations" ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 513). Such an atmosphere is, of course, an otherworldly one, and the activities that Molly associates with Gibraltar underscore its likeness to the Celtic otherworld with its pleasant sounds and music. Molly's Gibraltar is a land of music and poetry: "where softly sighs of love the light guitar where poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa point the guitar that fellow played was so expressive" (18.1335–38; see also 18.441, 18.644, 18.700, 18.1596).^[42]

Molly's memories stress eating and drinking (18.692–98; cf. 18.749, 18.831, 18.973–74, 18.1593–94). Indeed, when the Stanhopes leave Gibraltar, ]it is the teas that they remember: "will always think of the lovely teas we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore" (18.620–21). It is noteworthy that Molly has little memory of work in Gibraltar and only once mentions her father's military duties as he oversees and instructs at drill (18.766–67), remembered because the

[42] Note that in Irish láid is both 'song' and 'poem'. By association Molly seems to credit her own sensitivity to these arts to her place of origin.

occasion may have given her the freedom to contact Mulvey. Her memories of her father's activities center on his relaxation with his friend over drinks (18.690–98), and she remembers other types of amusements, including parades, visits of dignitaries, band concerts, shopping, strolling, bullfights, picnics, and excursions (18.610–885). All these are otherworld themes; in fact, the abundance of food and drink, the absence of work, and the atmosphere of leisure and pleasure are typical paradisiacal motifs worldwide (cf. Patch).

Finally, Joyce's choice of Gibraltar for the location of his happy otherworld is piquant. The very geography of the place is an amusingly realistic correlate to the Celtic otherworld island located on a pillar. Here the unscalable fortress of the Rock of Gibraltar is a correlate to the crystal or metal pillar of the medieval texts.^[43] In Ulysses there is a doubling of the motif of the pillar: Joyce calls our attention both to the unscalable fortress of the Rock and to O'Hara's Tower located on the rock, near which Molly and Mulvey have their sexual encounter. O'Hara's Tower—itself built for the fantastic purpose of spying on far-distant Cadiz (Herring, Joyce's Uncertainty Principle 124)—functions also as the tower from which the Milesians sight Ireland in The Book of Invasions ; in Ulysses the "sighting of Ireland" gets conflated with a glimpse of "natural" sexual relations between Molly and her young man. There is both a doubling of the tower and a doubling of perspective: the tower is at once the object of vision and the location of mythic otherworldly vision.

Several nonhistorical aspects of Molly's Gibraltar have been stressed by Herring, and Irish literary and mythic correlates are relevant to these critical problems. Herring claims that Joyce gives us "a tourist-eye view" of Gibraltar, devoid of information about the misery or daily lives of Gibraltarians, a view largely conditioned by Joyce's sources for Gibraltar ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 505). He notes that in fact military prerogatives predominated in Gibraltar; over a third of its eighteeen thousand inhabitants were in the garrison. Uniforms were everywhere, and he speaks of "six thousand bored soldiers, plus visiting sailors" ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 502, 504). Despite the strong military presence in the English colony of Gibraltar, it is only the ceremonial and curiously peaceful aspects of Gibraltar's military that find a place in Molly's mem-

[43] The motif of the island on a pillar is old and is found in both branches of Celtic literature, as Jarman (14) shows.

ories—the parades, the young men in their uniforms, the visits of royalty. She remembers "the same old bugles for reveille in the morning and drums rolling and the unfortunate poor devils of soldiers walking about with messtins smelling the place more than the old longbearded jews in their jellibees and levites assembly and sound clear and gunfire for the men to cross the lines and the warden marching with his keys to lock the gates and the bagpipes" (18.685–89). The "damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop" signal only ceremonial occasions, "especially the Queens birthday . . . [and] general Ulysses Grant whoever he was or did supposed to be some great fellow landed off the ship" (18.679–83). The transmutation of the military cast of Gibraltar to the peaceful ambience of Molly's memories may reflect Joyce's sources for his information about Gibraltar, as Herring suggests, but the peaceful and ceremonial atmosphere also echoes the Irish happy otherworld, in which there are warriors but seldom war. Indeed, the very name for the otherworld, síd, signifies 'peace' (Ó Cathasaigh).

The historical anomaly of Molly's unchaperoned freedom and hence her sexual encounters have also been noted: a freedom from "parental guidance or social censure" that places demands on our "credulity" (Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 513). Again, Joyce's presentation of Gibraltar is illuminated by noting that, like many other conceptions of paradise worldwide, the Irish happy otherworld is sensual. The Celtic otherworld is an erotic place with a great deal of sexual license; similarly, in Gibraltar there are graffiti of naked women (18.325–26), men and women expose themselves (18.544ff., 18.919ff.), and the women wear scant clothing ("I dont know what kind of drawers he likes none at all I think didnt he say yes and half the girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made them that Andalusian singing her Manola she didn't make much secret of what she hadnt" [18.439–42]). As in other delineations of paradise, the Celtic otherworld is also sinless: "Sin has not come to us" (AIT 593). Even sexuality in the otherworld is innocent: "Men and gentle women under a bush,/Without sin, without crime" (AIT 592).

These mythic elements are determinants of Molly's open-air lovemaking with Mulvey near O'Hara's Tower, an episode where the surface of Victorian naturalism cracks as Mulvey and Molly dally "under a bush": "she little knows what I did with her beloved husband before he ever dreamt of her in broad daylight too in the sight of the whole world you

might say" (18.827–29). The mythic substratum explains why in the Gibraltar of Ulysses, though not in the historical Gibraltar, Molly could have had such physical and moral freedom. At the same time we can note that Molly's sensuality does include a typical Victorian episode of female-female sensuality, a memory of her having slept with Mrs Stanhope on the slim pretext of a thunderstorm: "I slept in her bed she had her arms round me" (18.641–42). All these sexual activities in Molly's Gibraltar are conducted without conflict about morality, sin, or guilt; they reflect a moral freedom that is typical not only of the Irish otherworld but of conceptions of paradise and holy places worldwide (Mac Cana, "Sinless Otherworld"). In a psychoanalytic analysis of Molly's monologue, Mark Shechner notes that she betrays little evidence of anxiety or guilt but that "her liberated condition is not particularly admirable, for it has not been won. Molly has overcome no psychic or social barriers to gain her freedom. . . . And insofar as she exists in a realm beyond conflict, she is unreal" (205). He therefore concludes that the psychology of the episode is superficial. It is perhaps more to the point to note that Molly's psychology is the morality of the inhabitants of paradise: as such it is a birthright and does not need to be won.

Herring also rightly questions the realism of Molly's ethnic identity, suggesting that the child of a local Jew and a British major would have had no social context in which she could have been accepted: "Molly could well have been rejected by all but the most tolerant in Gibraltar: by Jews as an outcast (though legally Jewish) like her mother; by local society as a daughter of the regiment . . . by the garrison as the product of a scandalous union" ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 514). The paradox is resolved if Molly's mixed identity—Jewish, Moorish, Irish, Spanish—is related to the Book of Invasions theme: her heritage in Ulysses is less realistic than emblematic of the pseudohistorical background of the Milesians that Joyce invokes. At the same time the absence of sectarian and racial conflict in her idealized Gibraltar mirrors the peacefulness of the Irish otherworld, where there is no conflict and strife, rather than a temporal and geographical reality.

It has often been observed that there are problems with time in Molly's monologue and that there is no chronological orderliness. Just as all the men of her life become the indeterminate, archetypal he in her thoughts (Kenner, "Ulysses" 147–49; Shechner 199; Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey 166; cf. Benstock and Benstock 229–33), so all her life experiences

run together and merge without regard for chronology. Hayman observes that she has "a mind which makes no real distinction between past and present" and that for her "time is one continuous erotic present" ("Empirical Molly" 124, 127). Indeed, Molly has been criticized for being psychologically immature and regressive because of these characteristics of her thought, but the temporal anomalies of Molly's thought, like many of the other critical puzzles about Molly, are illuminated by a mythic perspective. We must begin by recognizing that in his scheme for the book Joyce assigns an hour for every episode but the last, which he marks "[¥ ]" That sign for infinity indicates that Molly's episode is to include all time and to be no time, to be both eternal and beyond time. As Richard Ellmann has put it, "The ruins of time and space and the mansions of eternity here coexist" (Ulysses on the Liffey 163). This timelessness of Molly's thought is the time of the gods and constitutes a reversion to primordial time, where past, present, and future are all equally accessible. Such a temporal context—all time, bounded by no time—is appropriate for a deity and is to be expected in the supernatural realm of the gods; thus the movement of time in this episode fits Molly's status as a Sovereignty figure and an earth goddess. It is no wonder that, as Molly herself observes, she has a problem with mortal time: "I never know the time even that watch he gave me never seems to go properly Id want to get it looked after" (18.344–46).^[44] The temporal framework of the otherworld—as well as the closed form created by the dúnad to the episode—enabled Joyce to assert that "Penelope has no beginning, middle or end" (Letters 1: 172).

This infinity of time also mirrors specific temporal characteristics of the Celtic otherworld. The Irish otherworld has a timelessness in the sense that things neither wither nor decay nor die, aspects reflected in Molly's Gibraltar.^[45] But the flow of time in the otherworld is also disengaged from that of the mortal world: one can be in the otherworld for a short time only to discover that centuries have passed in the world of men, or one can spend a long time in the otherworld only to return to one's own world at the moment one left (AIT 250–51, 595). The shifting perspective on time associated with the Irish otherworld explains some

[44] Bloom also has a problem with his watch in the narrative; cf. 13.983–89.

[45] Though inhabitants of the otherworld do not die, in some tales they can be killed (e.g., AIT 191).

of Molly's temporal dislocation. She has the sense of immense gulfs of time ("how long ago it seems centuries" [18.666]), and the sense that time does double duty ("the days like years" [18.698]), as well as the sense that no time has elapsed at all ("I dont feel a day older than then" [18.1471–72]; cf. 18.821: "its just like yesterday").

Some of the otherworldly aspects of Molly's episode have been recognized before. Ellmann, for example, concludes that Molly's monologue "bursts through. . .to 'that other world,'" a world that is "a paradise lost" (172). What has not been recognized is the specifically Irish quality of this paradise lost. The appendix to this chapter summarizes some of the correspondences between Molly's Gibraltar and the presentation of the Irish otherworld in The Voyage of Bran, perhaps the most famous of the Irish otherworld texts.^[46] It can be seen that some of the correspondences are ironically delicious and amusing: "the best of wine" becomes "Bushmills whisky" in Gibraltar, "strange raiment" becomes lack of drawers. Joyce treats the Irish myth of the happy otherworld with the same comic freedom that he does Greek myth; and while using Irish myth to give structural form to his work, he never solemnizes or sentimentalizes the material, as did most other Anglo-Irish writers of the period. Joyce's playful and humorous tone does more justice to Irish tradition, gives a more adequate reading of the early material, and represents a more seamless continuation of the tradition than did the treatment of such materials by any of the members of the Irish revival, including Yeats.

After identifying breaks in the historical surface of Molly's Gibraltar, breaks that to Herring seem infelicitous but that are meaningful in the context of Irish myth, Herring concludes that Joyce also actively and consciously undermines the social reality of Gibraltar to imbue Molly's past with a mysterious dimension ("Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 513). Herring notes in particular that Molly's parents seem to have been designed to challenge our credulity (515). Herring's reading is essentially correct: the structures from Irish myth reflected in Ulysses indicate that Joyce has deliberately broken the surface historicization of Molly and that this presentation is part of Joyce's mythic method. Molly's mysterious origin is related to her status as a Sovereignty figure: she has the uncertain parentage characteristic of many mythological figures. Thus, the

[46] Citations to The Voyage of Bran are taken from AIT, where Meyer's text is reprinted.

breaks in the historical surface of Gibraltar reinforce Molly's mythic stature at the same time that they coincide with the morphology of the Irish otherworld. Indeed, the structures from The Book of Invasions, the delineation of Molly as Irish Sovereignty goddess, and the presentation of Gibraltar as Irish otherworld together make a mythic pattern of great intricacy and texture; the mythic elements from Irish literature complement and amplify each other, even as they shatter the realistic surface.

Without knowing the Irish dimensions of the material, Shechner has concluded that the end of Ulysses, "this most psychological of modern novels," derives from folklore and myth; Shechner sees this ending as a failure on Joyce's part, a retreat (206). A comparative perspective including Irish literature indicates to the contrary that Joyce's methods in Molly's monologue are an epitome and summation of the mythic elements from Irish literature that provide one axis of the framework of Ulysses and that structure the book from its beginning. Rather than beating a narratological retreat from realism, Joyce uses a technique in the final episode of Ulysses that anticipates the postmodernism of Finnegans Wake. The shearing of the historical surface of Gibraltar is deliberate on Joyce's part; instead of caviling at the ahistoricity of Molly's memories or Molly's speech (Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 516), critics should consider the implications of Joyce's craft here: the "errors" are a portal of discovery. It seems clear that the breaks in the historical surface of Gibraltar are neither simply an absurdist abandonment of the "sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp" (Herring, "Toward an Historical Molly Bloom" 501, 518–19) nor an indication of Molly's nostalgic and inadequate psyche. Instead, they are indications that Molly's Gibraltar is less a geographical location than a mythic and a symbolic one. Joyce's purposes for the symbolism must be considered.^[47]

[47] The mythic determinants of Molly's Gibraltar are largely Irish, as I have shown, but as with much of Joyce's mythic material they coincide also with prototypes from classical literature and from Joyce's other sources. Joyce's otherworldly imagery is implicit also in Field's description of sunset at Gibraltar, in which "the straits shine as if they were the very gates of gold that open into a fairer world than ours" (quoted in Card 167); Field was one of Joyce's sources for Gibraltar. That this passage made an impact on Joyce we can see from an allusion to it set in Molly's voice in her interior monologue: "the straits shining I could see over to Morocco almost the bay of Tangier white and the Atlas mountain with snow on it and the straits like a river so clear" (18.859–61). Joyce truncates the passage and makes the otherworldly associations implicit rather than explicit, letting them pervade his whole treatment of Gibraltar. But Joyce's Gibraltar also suggests the happy otherworlds of classical tradition, particularly the Hesperides, both by its location and the universal aspects of his paradisiacal imagery. Thus, Molly's Gibraltar is at once the otherworld of Field's imagination, the happy otherworld of the Greeks, and the otherworldly western isles of the Celts; Joyce's syncretism here, as noted above, follows Nutt's placement of the Irish otherworld in a comparative mythological context.

iv. Joyce's Sovereign Vision of an Irish Other World

To have an autonomous mythos and an autonomous symbology is to have an autonomous worldview. This has been true to a large extent of Irish and Celtic cultures, which have preserved ancient—archaic—ways of thinking and being into the modern world. This may be true of other marginalized cultures as well, as the powerful mythic material mobilized by Isaac Bashevis Singer or Toni Morrison illustrates. In these respects Irish culture is again paradoxically like the remaining well-organized cultures of the Third World that also have brought living mythic systems into the modern world. Though such cultures are at risk when they engage with dominant Western cultures, at risk of crumbling under contact (Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart inevitably comes to mind), the interface can also be dynamic, potent, explosive. Writers who are members of such cultures, steeped in their living traditions as Joyce was steeped in his but writing in the dominant languages of the West, may gain power from the interface, mobilizing the resources of both literary systems in their work. They can use the old autonomous symbols, myths, and poetics to make meaning—new meaning—in the new cultural context. It is in this sense that the identification of Irish elements in Ulysses and elsewhere in Joyce's oeuvre suggests the comparison of Joyce with twentieth-century postcolonial writers. A major aspect of Joyce's status as an innovator in English narrative and, indeed, as one of the founders of modernism resides precisely in his importation of mythic elements, mythic imagery, linguistic richness, and formal resources from Irish tradition. The otherworld subtexts of "Circe" and the happy otherworld morphology of Molly's Gibraltar are but two examples of this process.

In this regard one may ask why Joyce chooses a dramatic form for "Circe," particularly in view of the fact that drama is not a native Irish literary form at all and in view of the fact that dramatic form violates reader expectations in a narrative text purporting to be either (or both)

novel or epic. To be sure, an Irish writer of the generation that saw the birth and flowering of the Irish dramatic movement would have been hard pressed to resist dramatic form, and the theater is the most powerful illusionary art of the twentieth century.^[48] But an equally compelling reason for the form lies in Joyce's incorporation of elements from Irish otherworld narratives into this episode of Ulysses. In Irish culture, belief in the otherworld has been part of the worldview since time immemorial, and this belief has lingered on in folk culture and popular culture to the present day; otherworld narratives, however strange, have therefore been part of the repertory of belief tales in Ireland rather than the repertory of fantasy tales. In adapting Irish tale types and motifs having to do with the otherworld, Joyce was therefore faced with the problem of representing Irish belief in the otherworld. This belief, like many beliefs in Third World cultures, is part of an alternate worldview in the twentieth century, a view at odds with the dominant worldview of Western culture. In certain respects, therefore, traditional Irish culture—no less than, for example, Latin American culture—is at odds with the dominant Western belief system and Western rationality. Like Gabriel García Márquez, Joyce faced the problem of how to represent the interface of two conceptions of reality; and the nature of magic realism, "characterized by the presentation of two different world views,"^[49] illuminates Joyce's methods, particularly in the episodes where the Irish otherworld plays a significant role.

For a writer emerging from a marginalized culture with an autonomous worldview at odds with dominant Western scientific culture, there is an affiliative dilemma: does the writer stand with the tradition or against the tradition? Does the writer assert the tradition or undercut it, trivialize it, ironize it? The affiliative problem, which is essentially an ideological problem, brings with it artistic problems, not the least of which is how to secure a readership in the dominant culture. Like García Márquez working within Latin American worldviews, to be true to his

[48] Just as the fugal form of episode II is an objective correlative of the song of the Sirens, the dramatic form of episode 15 may be viewed as the objective correlative of the enchantments cast by Circe.

[49] See Chanady (18–20) and the sources she cites. Some authors take the view that magic realism is a uniquely Latin American phenomenon, but with Amaryll Chanady, I would see the mode as emerging from a more generalized conflict of worldviews that can theoretically occur at any cultural interface.

Irish tradition Joyce could not suggest that the otherworld was false, but to assert belief in the otherworld to his international audience was to court ridicule and critical rejection. In using otherworld imagery and narrative types, Joyce was presented with an artistic dilemma with ideological implications for himself as an Irish writer: a knife edge of choice, but Joyce of course wants it all—to affiliate with and assert the tradition, but also to ironize it, laugh at it, undercut it.

It is no coincidence that the two episodes in which the otherworld mythos is predominant are the two episodes most structurally different in their techniques from the rest of the narrative of Ulysses ; indeed, properly speaking neither the Nighttown episode nor Molly's epilogue is narrative at all. Joyce chose a dramatic form for the echtra in Nighttown and a dramatic monologue for the final episode as answers to the artistic and ideological problems posed by using otherworld beliefs and narrative structures from Irish tradition. A standard narrative form involves a point of view, a narrative voice, which would have required Joyce to leave the knife edge of ambiguity. A dramatic form, by contrast, allows Joyce to present the materials without comment: a drama is "a direct presentation." The theater is mimetic; it is an art form that presents material as if, and characters act out "an imitation" of life. Dramatic form was the perfect way out of Joyce's problem of how to present the otherworld beliefs of Irish culture, for while narrative is a story told by a storyteller, drama is experience objectified, "a story without a story teller."^[50] Oscar Wilde had called drama "the most objective form known to art" (Letters of Oscar Wilde 466). No storyteller, no narrative point of view, no voice. The dramatic form allowed Joyce to present the otherworld elements—used in part as correlatives of the psychic manifestations of his protagonists—as unproblematic, unmediated, objectified phenomena, as "real" "events"; and at the same time it obviated any necessity for comment on those phenomena.

Through the dramatic forms in "Circe" and "Penelope," Joyce gains the advantages of the narrative stance of writers of magic realism: the quality that Amaryll Beatrice Chanady has called "authorial reticence," in which unusual and supernatural events or beliefs are presented without comment. The mode of magic realism sensitizes the reader to additional dimensions of reality "in order to create a more complete picture of the

[50] See Scholes and Kellogg (4) for some of these distinctions.

world"; it destroys a conventional view of reality, transforms reality. But in order to accomplish this task, the writer must present the unusual events as "objectively real"; the narrator must suspend judgment, neither censure nor even show surprise (Chanady 27–30). It is a stance that fits Joyce's view of the dramatic in Stephen's theory of literary forms:

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood [in lyric] and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak . . . The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (PA 215)

This is the reason that all the events in Nighttown are presented on a par, the reason that nothing distinguishes hallucinations from "real" events (Kenner, "Ulysses" 123; Ferrer 132ff.). Like García Márquez working with the form of magic realism, Joyce shows authorial reticence and retains his ideological loyalty without appearing parochial by choosing a dramatic form in "Circe" and "Penelope."

But "Circe" is not solely drama; it is published drama. As in any dramatic piece intended to be read, "Circe" must include "stage directions," which for the readers of drama carry the information that enactment on the stage carries for a live audience, particularly when drama moves away from a rhetorical tradition. Joyce exploits the stage directions and uses them to carry much of the information that a narrator would present: it is not at all incidental that a very large percentage of the Nighttown episode paradoxically takes the form of stage directions. As a consequence, Joyce both does and does not have a "narrator" in the episode. Joyce's dramatic form in the episode is an interesting one: it is in the tradition of Shaw and Yeats, who were among the innovators in the field of dramatic literature, insisting that anything worth staging was also worthy of being published as written literature and initiating the tradition of extensive stage directions in reading texts in order to enable the reader to visualize the drama in a sort of mental enactment.^[51]

[51] Ferrer makes the important observation that the stage directions are objective; they are neither interpretive nor descriptive but prescriptive (132, 140). A way of unpacking this idea is to say that narration and stage direction are two different speech acts: the former does give a point of view, that of the storyteller, as the story is told; the latter, like the cosmological Word of the deity, brings into being, and the attitude toward that creation is a separate matter. See also Herr 98–99.

In the final episode of Ulysses Joyce chose a different solution to the problem of authorial reticence, the interior monologue, still another dramatic form. Here too there is no narration per se, not even first-person narration; there is only direct presentation. By casting the entire episode as a monologue, Joyce could avoid authorial commentary altogether on the material presented: even the elusive Arranger or Stage Director fades away, and Joyce can remain hidden behind Molly's mask.^[52] It is no accident that this formal structure is used for the second otherworld episode of the book. It is interesting that Molly has absorbed a great deal of negative criticism, and we can speculate that the critics are irritated in part by her aberrant worldview: the folding over of time and space, the cyclical nature of life, the metamorphic quality of persons in her thought, all of which are features of Irish otherworld beliefs. Those who hold such beliefs are not popular with the devotees of Western rationalism, and I am tempted to suggest that the critics have been trying to "persuade the colleen to put down the book"—to put down the book of the otherworld that structures Molly's thought. Joyce has cleverly deflected such criticism from himself onto his character by his formal strategy. He has, as it were, bargained, paid the price, given in ransom "some less valued thing" than himself: he has given Molly.

For Joyce, working with many of the same problems of cultural interface that later postcolonial writers have confronted, formal innovation was a necessity. He invented as he could, choosing to insert into his narrative two dramatic forms, conditioned and encouraged no doubt by the vitality of the theater in his day, and following in the steps of his older Anglo-Irish contemporaries, Shaw and Wilde, Yeats and Synge. Because drama is a form that presents material as if it were the case, it is useful for the presentation of fantasy, interior states, different levels of reality, and also different worldviews. In taking up drama, Joyce was also returning to the form he was first interested in: the form of Ibsen and Strindberg, with their great innovations on the stage, but also the form par excellence of the Irish nationalist literary movement.

It remained for others such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez to find narrative solutions to the problem of cultural interface, to find narrative voices and narrative strategies that would be compatible with authorial reticence. Magic realism as a narrative so-

[52] This is in fact the episode of Ulysses that is most frequently performed.

lution involves finding a voice; García Márquez is in fact explicit about this aspect of his development as a writer, attributing his tone to his grandmother, who used to tell all manner of amazing stories with a straight face (Bell-Villada 43), and to his aunt, who had a knack for convincing others of the truthfulness of her ridiculous explanations, a naturalness "in which the most frightful, the most unusual things are told with [a] deadpan expression" (quoted in R. Williams 78). García Márquez also achieves his effects through the technique of fictionalizing two readers in the text, one a simple and innocent reader, an open-mouthed ingenue who will be impressed by the extraordinary tale to be unfolded, and the second a critical reader able to demythify the text and receive folk legend critically, who will reject a literal reading of the tale.^[53] But these solutions evolved after 1922; they rely on whole literary movements, like theater of the absurd, which postdate Ulysses, and depend on Joyce's own experiments with narrative possibilities in the twentieth century. Still there is a commonality: the search for form in all these cases is not arbitrary: it is necessitated by the dilemma of an author between two cultures and two worldviews. When formal innovation emerges from such cultural depths as Joyce's does, it has an authenticity, a power, an imperative that grips even those outside the author's tradition, outside the dilemma.

[53] See R. Williams (45–46) and the sources he cites. Obviously, the ironic gap opened between these fictionalized readers is related to the humor in the work of García Márquez and suggests a comparison with the means by which Joyce achieves a double consciousness in his own work.

Appendix