Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond The Nation

OVER THE PAST fifteen years, literary critics influenced by postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and the new cosmopolitan theory have sought to emphasize the political aspirations or “political content” of James Joyce’s writing.¹ These critics have aimed to correct or at least to supplement previous studies that focused on Joyce’s reputation as a European writer and aesthetic innovator. The new emphasis on what has been called the “subaltern” or the “semicolonial” Joyce is usually offered as a counterpoint to an old emphasis on Joyce’s modernism, though many scholars now acknowledge that the renovation of Joyce studies has helped to produce in turn a renovation of modernist studies.² What it means to focus on and to analyze Joyce’s modernism has changed: we no longer reduce literary modernism to a collection of literary techniques, nor do we assume that British literary modernism, with or without Joyce, constitutes a homogenous cultural movement or a retreat from political and social action. The emphasis on Joyce’s anticolonialism has led to a new analysis of Joyce’s cosmopolitanism, which includes his “dual identification,” as Joseph Valente puts it, with “the conquerors and the conquered,” with British culture and Irish counterculture, with “imperial agency and native resistance.”³ In order to emphasize these identifications, recent work on Joyce’s cosmopolitanism has tended to privilege narrative themes of hybridity, border crossing, and cultural inauthenticity over narrative forms of perversity, decadence, and artifice.⁴ This work has allowed us to see Joyce as a serious, significant writer of anticolonial, antiracist fiction. Yet Joyce’s principal insight, that colonialism and racism rely for their political efficacy on norms of seriousness and significance, is sometimes lost in the bargain.⁵ In this chapter, I argue that Joyce’s cosmopolitanism, while committed to democratic collectivity and Irish liberation, eschews the heroic pieties both of local and of planetary belonging. He proposes instead that anticolonialism and antiracism require a model of cosmopolitanism that values triviality, promiscuous attention, and what I call “canceled decorum.”

Joyce’s focus on triviality—his emphasis on ordinary objects, everyday experiences, transient pleasures, and the tricks of language—leads him to generate two models of national culture: a fixed culture that can be described through the exhaustive collection of quotidian details and a transient culture for which quotidian details mark a principle of inexhaustible, proliferating characteristics. In the critical history of Joyce studies, the tension between these models is addressed sometimes as the tension between two literary modes, naturalism and symbolism, and sometimes as the tension between two political modes, the Irish Joyce and the international Joyce. In his recent book, Andrew Gibson aspires to “bridge the gap between Bloom-centered and Stephen-centered interpretations,” between the emphasis on a “European and international Joyce” and an emphasis on an “Irish and/or colonial context.”⁶ While I share Gibson’s aspiration, I argue in this chapter that the critical “gap” reflects the double imperative of Joyce’s project: the affirmation of distinctive cultures in the service of Irish liberation and the rejection of cultural distinctiveness in the service of antiracism, democratic individualism, and transnational community.

It is a literary as well as a political truism that national movements need to bypass the disparate, quotidian experiences of living in the same place in order to produce collective, affirmative narratives of identification: common origins, common traditions, and common desires.⁷ That this is a truism does not make it true, but the importance of national unity, especially during times of war or social embattlement, is a familiar claim. A great range of cultural critics, from Ernest Renan and M. M. Bakhtin to Etienne Balibar and Arjun Appadurai, have argued that the traditional premise of the nation requires the subordination, if not the suppression, of individual differences so that, as Balibar writes, “it is the symbolic difference between ‘ourselves’ and ‘foreigners’ which wins out and which is lived as irreducible.”⁸ Historically, this structure of subordination has been important for the political recognition that comes with coherent social visibility: if political recognition is based on cultural distinctiveness and value, then one may need to claim a distinct and valued culture even to speak at all.⁹ However, bypassing disparate experiences can have aesthetic as well as political consequences: literature that repeats familiar generalizations, Theodor W. Adorno has argued in essays on the politics of literary style, helps to maintain fixed conceptions by living up to them, and it generates in its readers habits of inattention and intellectual automatism.¹⁰ Literature that refuses to reproduce the social “façade,” as Adorno puts it, shows readers that there might be something to change, that there is a difference between “living human beings and rigidified conditions.”¹¹

Adorno’s account of novelists who refuse to accommodate rigidified conditions, who resist what this chapter calls “acquiescence” or “cheerful decorum,” begins with James Joyce.¹² I will be using “decorum” to refer not only to conventions of social appropriateness but also and more particularly to conventions of literary judgment and political affect. Readers have long noticed that Joyce was indecorous in his refusal to abide by the moral norms of his day. I will be arguing, on the contrary, that Joyce’s critique of decorum needs to be understood as an effort to revise literary conventions of national belonging and political assertion. From Aristotle and Horace onward, “decorum” has referred to the congruity between subject matter and style and between art and social experiences. The logic of decorum is conservative: it favors consistency rather than discrepancy, continuity rather than change. In this chapter, I aim to shift critical attention from the measure of Joyce’s nationalism to the analysis of Joyce’s “nation,” his effort to revise what a “living” nation is. Joyce’s project is cosmopolitan in two important ways: it is critical of authenticity as a measure of belonging, and it promotes intellectual vagrancy, what I call “triviality,” as a condition of materialist critique and social transformation. Joyce develops a style of triviality to contest the political affects that he associates with British imperialism, Irish anti-Semitism, and Catholic evangelism; to induce comparison among examples of exploitation, such as colonialism in Ireland and religious conversion in Asia and Africa; and to reorient attention to an international politics of the everyday.

While Joyce is considered perhaps the least “trivial,” most influential twentieth-century writer in English, he is best known for the minutiae rather than for the majesty of his style. His work provides the most persuasive, most thorough example of epic triviality: through the obsessive, often repetitive thoughts of unremarkable or unrefined characters, Joyce adds fresh, often outrageous images to the repertoire of fiction in English. Using the materials of everyday life, Joyce forges new strategies of intellectual resistance and cultural improvisation. Joyce’s triviality helps to inaugurate a practice of collage in the twentieth-century novel: the collage of foreign cultures, details from places such as England, Ireland, Palestine, and India, and also the collage of local cultures, high as well as low, details from places, in a different sense, such as street corners, music halls, houses, newspapers, and pubs. Moving from one place to another, Joyce’s work gives texture to an insubordinate cosmopolitanism, embracing intellectual vagrancy as a practice of social critique. Unlike Raymond Williams, who rejects “vagrancy” as observation without judgment, Joyce values, in the process of judgment, more promiscuous styles of attention.¹³

I associate Joyce’s triviality with several literary strategies from his early and later writing. Described generically, these strategies correspond to some of the principal characteristics of modernist narrative: the use of interior monologue and unfiltered observation; the unusual range and focus of narrative attention; and the rigorous inclusion of different social, cultural, and aesthetic registers, such as biblical verse and bawdy limerick, popular and philosophical theories of national allegiance, major life events and the color of a face. In this chapter, I will speak of “canceled decorum,” “subtracted consensus,” “unsubordinated attention,” and “tactical discourtesy” to show how Joyce manipulates the conventions of literary description. In his early letters, Joyce argues that conditions of writing, created by publishers as well as by governments, serve to limit the visibility of Irish culture.¹⁴ Extending this visibility, Joyce proposes to transform the consciousness of his readers.¹⁵

Subtracting consensus, Joyce knew that he was promoting discomfort, if not hostility. He suggests this knowledge in his refusal to alter or omit stories from his first book, Dubliners, about which he claimed, “I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.”¹⁶ Joyce’s comment may sound like a lament (“I wish I could write differently”) or even an excuse (“I am unable to write differently”), but the stories imply something more aggressive: Joyce offended his readers on purpose. In some ways, Joyce’s claim is specific to Dubliners, in that Joyce was aiming, at the turn of the twentieth century, to disrupt the social logic of Victorian reading. He knew that his audience, whether Irish or English, would find his topics and strategies either shocking or disconcerting or both. Joyce refuses to censor the less heroic, less salubrious aspects of Dublin life, and he refuses to present these experiences with requisite condemnation or carelessness. This refusal was widely received as Joyce intended it, as a rejection of “standards,” by which one English reviewer, speaking later of Ulysses, meant both specific rules, those that would censor “our most secret and most unsavoury private thoughts,” and historical continuity, the principle that keeps specific rules in place.¹⁷ Joyce’s work thus rejects not only literary custom but also literary tradition; it rejects the edifice of English literature and cultural pride, described by the reviewer as “the noble qualities of balance, rhythm, harmony, and reverence for simple majesty that have been for three centuries the glory of our written tongue.” Making Irish life part of English tradition, Joyce’s work reminds its readers that English “glory” is neither as noble nor as majestic as it once may have been possible to imagine.

That Joyce’s refusal of representational norms functions as a revision of national belonging is first proposed explicitly in two important, early reviews of Ulysses. In these essays, the eminent French writer Valéry Larbaud and the influential English writer John Middleton Murry measure Joyce’s “European” credentials by assessing the decorum of his work.¹⁸ However much they disagree about Joyce’s place in either national or cosmopolitan traditions, Larbaud and Murry concur that his work offends and that its offensiveness is directed at and against the traditions of national writing. In an article that was first presented as a public talk in 1921 and then widely circulated in English and in French, Larbaud praises Joyce by claiming that, with Ulysses, “Ireland is making a sensational re-entrance into high European literature” (253). Ulysses is European rather than merely Irish, Larbaud proposes, because it demonstrates a less celebratory, more descriptive shade of belonging: for Larbaud, the distinction between the national work and the national work that is also European is the author’s refusal to “please” (his term) what Larbaud calls the “nationalistic” audience (253). To be European, one must be willing to offend. Larbaud suggests this most of all in his naming of the other European authors with whom Joyce should be compared: Ibsen, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Gabriel Miró, and Ramón Gomez, all of whom wrote against the social mores of their nation and time.¹⁹

Larbaud invokes the category of “European literature” only once in his essay, but his comment was enough to provoke several critical responses, both from those who sought to associate Joyce with a distinctive and valued Irishness apart from European connections and from those who found Joyce too nonconformist to have any “social” affinity whatsoever.²⁰ Writing in the Nation and Anthanæum, John Middleton Murry argued that Ulysses is part of no tradition, neither European nor Irish, because it demonstrates no respect for “Western” conventions of taste. Murry contends that a work of literature is European only if “the author, consciously or unconsciously, accepts the postulates of Western civilization. He accepts the principle of order, the social law (or convention) that certain things are good and certain other things are evil” (117). Ulysses is not European, Murry continues, because it does not display “obedience” and “submission,” terms of social accommodation that Joyce specifically rejects in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Murry argues that writers cannot be European, or even Irish, if they do not reproduce traditional literary values. The author of European literature, Murry asserts,

Murry is an important early reader of Joyce’s work because he recognizes, if not Joyce’s talent, at least Joyce’s aim: he sees that his writing is meant to reject the established conditions of social collectivity. For this, Murry calls Joyce an anarchist: “He is the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky” (118). Murry is speaking metaphorically, but he is plain in his concern that literary disorder can lead to political disintegration. Murry is unwilling to acknowledge social disobedience as an effective literary or political strategy, in good part because he wants to maintain “the conditions of civilization” more than he wants to change them (118).

While Murry can find no place for social commitment in Joyce’s insubordinate, unsubordinated writing, Larbaud’s account of Joyce oscillates between a familiar story of national affirmation and a less familiar narrative of international critique. Larbaud associates Joyce with two, not quite consistent projects: writing on behalf of the nation (“Ireland”), as it if were a valuable, coherent object; and writing for a community of artists that is broader than the nation and that serves to contest celebratory images of national tradition. For Murry, Joyce’s refusal to adopt a conventional social posture means that he has no social position at all; for Larbaud, Joyce both represents Irish society and also resists the politics of coherent representation. Ultimately, Larbaud and Murry share the assumption that Joyce can meet his political and literary goals only by affirming a distinctive social or national tradition. They are unable to imagine that there is any other kind of tradition to affirm.

Many of Joyce’s contemporaries, such as artists of the Irish Revival and the Harlem Renaissance, sought to promote political recognition for specific social groups by affirming the distinctiveness of their cultures. Joyce valued political recognition also, but he had a different image of culture in mind.²¹ For Joyce, it is not because Ireland has a distinct culture that it deserves self-determination; rather, Joyce wants Ireland to have self-determination so that its culture may change and diversify, so that it may become less distinct. Joyce argues in an early essay that freedom of thought is stifled by social and political constraint, which is why the Irish artist has to leave Ireland:

Joyce is committed to Irish independence from British rule and supports political efforts that would bring about this separation, but he does not seek to justify the political struggle by promoting a homogenous, wholly consistent image of Irish culture.²³ When Joyce speaks of politics, he promotes an Irish republic; when Joyce speaks of the Irish National Theatre, he promotes “European masterpieces,” the plays of Yeats but also of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Hauptmann.²⁴ These are not separate campaigns. Joyce contends that international art will bring fresh inspiration to Irish culture, which is paralyzed by economic and political domination; he looks to contemporary writers and dramatists such as Ibsen to bring freedom from “deliberate self-deception” (71). Joyce envisions a cosmopolitan Ireland, which values Irish traditions without seeking to codify or sentimentalize them, which rejects British occupation, and which welcomes the impropriety of art as a strategy of social transformation.²⁵

Joyce’s early works of narrative fiction may not emphasize cultural hybridity and other recognizable themes of cosmopolitanism,²⁶ but they develop models of insubordinate attention that are crucial to the cosmopolitan posture of Joyce’s later writing. Wandering operates not only as an activity of Joyce’s characters, as it is most famously in Ulysses, but also as an activity of Joyce’s texts: the ceaseless movement of perspective allows Joyce to display and appropriate the paralyzing norms of colonial Dublin.²⁷ In “Two Gallants,” the one story in Dubliners that Joyce’s publisher initially rejected outright, the refusal to focus on appropriate and significant topics—a refusal in which both the characters and the narrative participate—is a principal theme, and a provocation.²⁸ The story relies on the effect of what I call “canceled decorum” to display and unsettle the façade of social consensus. In later texts, Joyce produces this effect by representing episodes of broken ritual, such as a ruined dinner or an insincere handshake; in “Two Gallants,” he invokes and withdraws generic expectations of romance, chivalry, and moral concern. “Two Gallants” presents decorum as a scam of British imperialism. While it is sometimes read as an example of Joyce’s naturalist style, as if it offered a “transparent representation of Irish culture,” one should notice that the social and textual environment of the story is constituted by tricks, affectations, and echoes: styles of behavior that are, for the reader, neither transparent nor fixed.²⁹ Even the story’s title is not exclusively Irish: it names two desperate, self-interested Dubliners by invoking the cosmopolitan tradition of courtly love.³⁰ In addition, one Dubliner’s gratuitous and purposeful use of foreign words (“That takes the solitary, unique, and, if I may so call it, recherché biscuit!”) suggests that ordinary Irishmen might be aspirant cosmopolitans, in the sense both of social cultivation and of cultural mixing (44). Joyce does not oppose the story’s French affectations to some true Irishness located elsewhere; rather, he proposes that cosmopolitan posture is a social mannerism that is genuine to Dublin life.

“Two Gallants” is structured by two principal scams, each of which involves a strategy of diverted attention. The narrative seems to be about two unemployed, unappealing young men: Corley, who plans to extract money from a slavey (a domestic servant) by acting the part of a suitor, and his friend Lenehan, who admires Corley’s ruse and hopes to benefit from the con. The first part of the narrative joins an ongoing conversation between Corley and Lenehan, as they discuss Corley’s plan, and the rest follows Lenehan, who meanders through Dublin, buys himself a meager plate of peas for dinner, and waits for Corley, who meets up with the girl in a scene the reader is not shown. At the end of the story, Corley returns triumphant, with a gold sovereign—a British coin—in his hand. “Two Gallants” implies that romance is a scam, an unequal and untransparent exchange, in which the gestures of courtship point only to other, unromantic conquests. Corley’s conquests are economic: he manipulates the slavey’s trust (she gives him the equivalent of several months’ wages), and he manipulates social expectations (he manages to subsist without a job). The story’s most obvious scam is Corley’s manipulation of the slavey through the promise of romance. The story’s secondary scam is Joyce’s manipulation of the reader, who is led to believe by Lenehan’s coarse jokes and ringing insinuations (“Is she game for that?” [46]; “are you sure you can bring it off all right?” [47]; “Did you try her?” [54]) that Corley’s goal is sex rather than money. The first scam, in which the slavey is diverted, in turn diverts the reader: one is surprised to find the banality of money posing as the titillation of sex; the surprise means that the reader, like Lenehan, ends up worrying more about his or her own deception than about the deception of the girl; however, the surprise also allows Joyce to suggest that moral judgments—our assumption, for example, that sex with the young woman, who looks at Corley with a “contented leer” (49), would have to involve a scam—tend to obscure the gravity of economic squalor. “Two Gallants” is a tale of impoverished romance that is also a tale of everyday fiscal poverty.

The primary and secondary scams are a set up for the story’s most shocking acts of reoriented attention: not the replacement of romance with sex, or sex with money, but the replacement of moral judgment with economic conditions. The story makes its reader focus on a gamut of topics that seem trivial, even unethical by comparison to the topics on which the story might otherwise have focused: Lenehan’s evening of meager fantasies instead of Corley’s interaction with the girl; the feelings of Lenehan and Corley instead of the girl’s feelings (she is never given a name); Lenehan’s concern that Corley might trick him, but never his concern that someone else—the girl—is being tricked. Even Joyce’s use of the word “trick” is confusing. Corley tells Lenehan, “I’m up to all their little tricks” (47), which seems to have two, opposite connotations: Corley is able to exploit women because he knows their vulnerabilities (“tricks”); or, Corley is able to imitate the tactics (“tricks”) that women use to manipulate men. Either way, Corley’s ambivalent phrasing diverts attention from his own dubious actions and towards the actions or vulnerabilities—it is he who calls them “tricks”—of the women he cons.

The specific trick that Corley describes to Lenehan is his habit of intentional tardiness—“I always make her wait a bit” (47)—which serves, presumably, to make women anxious about Corley’s affections and thus more eager to please him. This trick is reproduced with a difference at the end of the story when Lenehan, left alone while Corley meets the girl, begins to worry that his friend might not be coming back. Lenehan imagines that Corley might have succeeded in his quest and then “given him [Lenehan] the slip” (53). Here, instead of facing the consciousness of the conman, the reader faces the consciousness of the dupe, except that the dupe is proposed not as the girl who is losing several months’ wages but as the accomplice who wants to help spend those wages. Lenehan asks himself, in the story’s single acknowledgment of ethical judgment, “Would Corley do a thing like that?” (53). Lenehan’s question is striking because he has focused on himself rather than on the girl but also because he seems oblivious to his own engagement in tricks: his involvement in Corley’s scam and his manipulation of Corley, whom he is pleased to handle with “a little tact” (47). Joyce invokes a collective spirit of ethical behavior—“Would Corley do a thing like that?”—but puts this sensibility in self-serving Lenehan’s mouth: the story presents ethical norms, among the gallants and within colonial Ireland, as yet another scam.

The ethical decorum of Lenehan’s question is canceled by the multiplication of referents, the things “like that,” considered and unconsidered, which crowd the reader’s mind: Would Corley pretend to like the girl in order to take money from her? Would Corley break up with her as soon as he gets want he wants? Would Corley take the girl’s money and then keep it from Lenehan? The story is more interested in the comparison of scams than in the judgment of correct attention: there is no longer a necessary “that” in the local universe that Joyce describes. The final image of the gold coin suggests an ultimate scam and asks readers to question the politics of socialized attention: one realizes that the figurative poverty of Irish morals has substituted for the literal impoverishment caused by British sovereignty. Joyce implies that British rule in Ireland is one more example—though really the preeminent example—of economic exploitation posing as a gallant gesture. “Two Gallants” uses a style of insubordinate attention to offer a critical perspective on the scams of British imperialism. In the end, the conmen, who think they have managed their trick, remain dupes of foreign rule.³¹ But this is not the final word: structuring his story as a scam, Joyce suggests that postures and affectations support cosmopolitan opportunities—his own—as well as imperialist manipulation.

In a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, Joyce complained that the same printer who allows newspapers to report sordid divorce cases objects on moral grounds to the economy of scams that Joyce describes in his fictional stories.³² For this, Joyce calls the printer “one-eyed” (82), which is a significant epithet, both because it casts hypocrisy as the failure to make comparisons between one stratum of culture and another and because it associates the conditions of literary production with the conditions of extreme nationalism and planetary cosmopolitanism, later personified in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. In “Two Gallants,” Joyce’s style of promiscuous attention, most visible in the story’s many diversions, serves to analyze rather than reproduce the scam of ethical consistency. Like the slavey and like the gallants, readers are duped. However, unlike the characters, readers learn the scam: the ruses of Irish gallantry and British imperialism are matched and best displayed by the ruse of Joyce’s fiction.

If “Two Gallants” trains readers to be promiscuously attentive, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents triviality as a tactic of heresy and insubordination. It is telling about Joyce’s project that Stephen Dedalus, in an important scene from the novel, chooses intellectual freedom over social conformity by allowing his mind to wander. This freedom, while it ultimately leads to Stephen’s embrace of exile rather than collectivity, prompts him to compare various examples of exploitation and to think historically and politically about the institutions in which he has been asked to participate. In this sense, wandering allows Stephen to generate a social context for creative innovation and a more complex account of the interrelationships among British imperialism, Irish poverty, Catholic duty, and familial obligation. Stephen’s distraction takes place while he is shaking hands with the director of studies at Belvedere College; the director is a Jesuit, and he has been trying to recruit Stephen for the priesthood. For Joyce, the oscillation of Stephen’s mind, as he focuses on the priest’s conversation and on nearby sounds and images, both constitutes intellectual freedom and also produces it: once Stephen diversifies his attention, a life of unimaginative duty repels him. From this moment, Stephen embraces “wandering” rather than “acquiescence” (136–38). The scene of unsubordinated attention dramatizes the principles of Joyce’s art.

As he shakes hands with the priest, Stephen hears a “trivial air,” a passing melody played on a concertina; he prefers the quotidian pleasure of the song to the “mirthless reflection of the sunken day,” which he sees before him in the priest’s face (136). In this preference, Stephen realizes that he will not join the Jesuits. An entire paragraph narrates only this one, ephemeral moment:

He [the priest] held open the heavy hall door and gave his hand as if already to a companion in the spiritual life. Stephen passed out on to the wide platform above the steps and was conscious of the caress of mild evening air. Toward Findlater’s church a quartet of young men were striding along with linked arms, swaying their heads and stepping to the agile melody of their leader’s concertina. The music passed in an instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children. Smiling at the trivial air he raised his eyes to the priest’s face and, seeing in it a mirthless reflection of the sunken day, detached his hand slowly which had acquiesced faintly in that companionship.

The reader knows that this is the moment of Stephen’s decision, what will become his permanent disavowal of religion and social conformity, because the passing of the music takes “an instant,” the same amount of time occupied by the “sinful thought” of disobedience that led to Lucifer’s downfall (98). One should hear in Stephen’s nonacquiescence the sound of Lucifer’s declaration, non serviam (“I will not serve”), which Stephen repeats later in the novel to emphasize his separation from religious, political, and filial obligations (205). The repetition of instantaneous fall is partial rather than exact, however, because Joyce attributes to Stephen’s consciousness nothing so willful and single-minded as disobedience: this moment exemplifies the difference between the style of attention that Joyce admires, which is flexible, in some ways even passive, and Stephen’s embrace of “exile,” which Joyce will present later in the novel as definitive and unyielding.

The freedom of Stephen’s imagination depends on a “trivial” pun (air as breeze and air as music), whose combination of touch and sound creates a diversion: Stephen seems to be “smiling” at the breeze, at the melody, and also at the frivolity of the resonating experience. This style of attention allows Stephen to see the hypocrisy of single-mindedness. The pun is notable not only because it prefigures the importance of wordplay in Joyce’s later writing but also because it aligns Stephen’s choice of intellectual freedom with his refusal to distinguish between significant and insignificant interpretations. Jonathan Culler has observed that puns refuse to “reaffirm a distinction between essence and accident, between meaningful relations and coincidence.”³³ Joyce’s pun serves to create new meaningful relations by changing the way Stephen thinks: the open, resonating experience of evening and music makes the priest seem, by comparison, unseeing and insensitive. Thinking about the person he will not choose to become, “The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S. J.” (Portrait, 137), Stephen pictures “an undefined face or colour of a face … eyeless and sourfavoured and devout” (137). Joyce suggests in Stephen’s image that the priest’s static, devout attention is equivalent to blindness; it makes him incapable of paying attention at all, where paying attention requires distraction as well as sight.

Joyce’s pun introduces play into a passage about duty. It introduces what Adorno calls “art’s lightheartedness”: a “change in the existing mode of consciousness” that acknowledges but does not reproduce “the brute seriousness that reality imposes on human beings.”³⁴ Art is “lighthearted,” not because it represents happy topics or because it shows indifference to reality but because it exceeds “the constraints of self-preservation” by representing more than is necessary or legitimate, or even politically expedient. Like Joyce, Adorno seeks to change social conditions by changing styles of thought. However, Adorno recognizes that writers who challenge standards of judgment or habitual thought will often seem “inconsiderate,” “eccentric,” or “foreign.”³⁵ Joyce’s writing seems cosmopolitan to his early readers because he expresses both erudition and vulgarity; indeed, Joseph Litvak has argued that sophistication, a characteristic often associated with cosmopolitanism, tends to imply not only snobbery but impropriety as well.³⁶ Joyce’s writing seems foreign or cosmopolitan because, as Adorno’s argument suggests, “the perpetuation of existing society is incompatible with consciousness of itself”:³⁷ social immobility is maintained by the inability to sense it, or by the inability to imagine any other possibility. For Adorno, thinking transforms the social world because it is “not the intellectual reproduction of what exists anyway.”³⁸ Culler argues, similarly, that the pun serves to encourage active thought because it involves a “conception of language which one must struggle to imagine” (14).

One should see two related kinds of active thought in the passage from Portrait: the diversion of Stephen’s attention, from obligation to sensation, and the diversion of the reader’s attention, from evening breeze to trivial melody. These diversions are part of single project in Joyce’s novel. The seeds of this project, visible from the very beginning of Portrait, suggest how intellectual triviality comes to resist political acquiescence. By the time Stephen arrives at his meeting with the director of studies, during the fourth of the novel’s five chapters, he has passed through an intellectual childhood punctuated by efforts to generalize and to parse. For example, in the first chapter of the novel, Stephen learns to give a single name to the same experience repeated several times, such as what happens “when you wet the bed” (Portrait, 1), and he also learns that single names can designate different experiences (“That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt” [3]). Joyce establishes in these early pages the gestures of trivial attention that will stimulate social critique later in the novel. One of Stephen’s juvenile memories, from his childhood at school, intimates a more mature politics of imagination: Stephen’s mind travels from the effort of solving a classroom equation to images of red and white roses that he and his rival wear on their lapels to the color of the cards (“pink and cream and lavender”) that the most successful students receive to the thought of “lavender and cream and pink roses” to the thought of a “wild rose” to “the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place” to the impossibility of “a green rose” (6). While Stephen knows that “you could not have a green rose,” the wandering of his mind allows him to imagine, for just a moment, that “perhaps somewhere in the world you could” (6). Stephen has replaced the cold utility of the schoolroom with the pleasures of artifice—a nonexistent rose—and momentary escape; however, it is the momentary escape from habitual knowledge (“what you can have”) that allows Stephen to imagine the glimpse of possibility. Making the rose green, the color of Ireland, Joyce suggests that intellectual freedom, as exemplified by Stephen’s trivial mind, establishes the conditions for political independence.

By the second chapter of the novel, Joyce is more explicit in his contention that political strategies of anticolonialism require thinking that is “heretic and immoral,” thinking like Lord Bryon’s and like Stephen’s in his defense of Byron. The schoolboy Stephen defends Byron, whom he claims as his favorite poet, against his classmates’ assertion that Lord Tennyson, the British poet laureate, is “the greatest poet” (67). The classmates base their claim about Tennyson on the fact that “we have all his poetry at home in a book,” and they refuse to consider Byron because he “was a bad man” (67–68). The preference for Tennyson signals that the other students are unthinking in their intellectual conformity—they like what they already know and what has received the appreciation of others, in the form of awards and in the form of publication—and also that they are capitulating to British imperialism: Tennyson is the poet of Britannia. The students punish Stephen for his refusal of these values and for his refusal to observe the priority of religious judgment: when Stephen says he does not care that Bryon was a heretic, the students respond by beating Stephen with a cabbage stump, shouting “Admit that Bryon was no good” (68). Stephen reproduces heresy by refusing to condemn it; that heretics produce bad poetry, however “bad” is defined, is an article of faith that Stephen is unwilling to accept.³⁹ This is the first episode, chronologically, in which Stephen is asked to put religious judgment before all other perspectives, though it follows, in the novel, a second episode from several years later.

In the later episode, Stephen is asked, this time playfully, to “admit” his interest in an attractive girl (64). Instead of struggling, as he did when he was younger, Stephen pretends to acquiesce, “bowing submissively” and reciting the Confiteor, the prayer that is used in preparation for Confession (65). Stephen resists the teasing of his friends by adopting the rhetoric of religious submission; performing submission in this mocking context, Stephen trumps his friends by shocking them. When Stephen is older, his irreverence brings laughter rather than aggression. In the early scene of impiety, Stephen refuses to “admit” his sin (liking Bryon even though he is a heretic); in the later scene, he admits his sin (sexual interest) but only by sinning more egregiously (mocking the Confession). The two scenes of impious resistance are connected in the novel by the syntax of “while,” which forces the reader to look across situations of time and circumstance, to rethink one circumstance in comparison with another, and to read without subordination of chronology or conventional significance:

This syntax is repeated a few pages later, after Stephen has remembered the earlier episode, by the addition of another thought: “While he was still repeating the Confiteor amid the indulgent laughter of his hearers and while the scenes of that malignant episode were still passing sharply and swiftly before his mind he wondered why he bore no malice now to those who had tormented him” (68). Stephen bears no malice because he is not interested in questions of “honour” (69), particularly his own; he finds silence preferable to revenge because revenge repeats rather than changes the conditions of judgment. The word “while,” which comes once again, points to the structure of thought that Stephen is resisting and introduces an alternative, insubordinate model:

While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollowsounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement towards national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him to be true to his country and help raise up her fallen language and tradition. … And it was the din of all of these hollowsounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms.

The syntax of “while” captures the wandering of Stephen’s mind from his pursuit of thought, to his “irresolution” about that pursuit, and back to a state of unresolved consciousness. One might describe Joyce’s style in these several pages as “stream of consciousness,” but Stephen’s associations are somewhat more purposeful and more critical than they are automatic or accidental. Responding to the noise of too many projects clamoring for exclusive attention, Stephen rejects any one, single voice. Joyce’s sentences, like Stephen’s thoughts, refuse to subordinate; they refuse to put any one perspective “above all things.” This refusal to prioritize is insubordinate because it promotes conflict rather than acquiescence; it is trivial because it ignores “honour” and other standard priorities of social behavior.

Stephen chooses triviality—art rather than religion, critique rather than socialization—and a life “wandering among the snares of the world” (138). He chooses, instead of a “grave and ordered and passionless life” (136), a life “elusive of social and religious orders” (138). As Stephen walks away from the interview with the director of studies, his travels assume the metaphors of a disobedient consciousness: turning “for an instant towards the faded blue shrine of the Blessed Virgin,” Stephen sees only the squalor of Dublin; he leaves the shrine by “bending to the left,” toward “disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house” (138). It is important to notice that Stephen’s wandering mind prepares the way for more literal, physical wandering; his distracted attention makes unconventional travel—through Dublin and from Dublin to Paris—something he is able to imagine. Once Stephen has “[bent] to the left,” once he has embraced a sinister disorder, his social and physical self-restraint falls away: he smiles, “a short laugh broke from his lips,” “a second laugh, taking rise from the first after a pause, broke from him involuntarily” (138). Stephen is pleased to think of the farmhand whom he and his siblings have “nicknamed the man with the hat”: detaching himself from the social institutions of Ireland and from the social decorum of self-discipline and rigid custom, Stephen fashions an experimental, vernacular existence out of informality, made-up language, and the playful appropriation of everyday objects.

For Joyce, as for Salman Rushdie after him, nicknaming creates intimacy, a private world, and it serves in turn to disable official naming, which it reconstitutes as one more point of view. Nicknaming thus becomes the condition, and not the substitution, for proper names. By the end of Portrait, Joyce presents Stephen’s turn away from proper naming as a critique of cultural distinctiveness and intellectual paralysis: Stephen, now at university, famously haggles with his dean, an Englishman, about whether “tundish” is an English or an Irish word (161). The debate between Stephen and the dean implies not only the word’s etymology but also its usage: Is it a word proper to English speech? Is it (only) an Irish idiom? Is an Irish idiom less proper to English speech than an English idiom would be? Speaking pedantically, the dean tells Stephen that the best way to feed oil into a lamp is “not to pour in more than the funnel can hold” (161). Stephen is surprised by the use of the term “funnel” for an object that he calls a “tundish.” The dean, who has never heard of a tundish, assumes that funnel is the correct word for the object and that tundish must be specific to Irish use: he asks, “Is that called a tundish in Ireland?” Because he is an Englishman, the dean believes that his use of English is natural, whereas Stephen’s is secondary and perhaps incorrect. As Stephen exclaims in the final pages of the novel, “tundish” is “good old blunt English,” derived from Anglo-Saxon (216). A further irony, not proposed by Stephen, is the derivation of “funnel” from Old French.⁴⁰ The point here for Joyce is not to replace one etymology with another but to display the characters’ motivations—economic, political, and social—for establishing correctness.

Like the untrained readers of “Two Gallants,” like the Jesuit priest, and like Stephen’s colleagues at school, the dean takes intellectual norms for granted: Joyce suggests that attentiveness, literary evaluation, and even word choice are shaped by economic and political conditions. Representing these norms, making them the subject of his fiction, Joyce aims to subtract consensus from conceptions of national collectivity. The exchange between Stephen and the dean demonstrates the arrogance of British imperialism, the assumption that the Irish know less about British culture than the English do or that Irish usage, if “tundish” were used only in Ireland, is not part of British culture. The exchange also confirms, beyond the dean’s arrogance, his intellectual limitations: he thinks only in generalizations, platitudes, and clichés.⁴¹ To use a distinction that Stephen makes between literal and figurative language, the dean knows words only “according to the tradition of the marketplace,” only in their most familiar usage, and not “according to the literary tradition” and enlivened by thought (161).⁴² The dean uses the word “funnel” because it is the general term for almost any conical shaped object with a hole at the narrow end. Whereas the Englishman knows only one name and only the most banal designation, Stephen knows that objects have several names, that objects of a similar shape have different names and functions, that language, like culture, is diverse, changeable, and without definite origin. The dean is single-minded because he is insensitive to his own false courtesy, because he has no ear for metaphor or irony, and because he assumes that differences in language are a matter of national distinction rather than a matter of national or cultural or even semantic diversity.

The false courtesy that Stephen rejects in Portrait is a principal topic in Ulysses, especially in “The Wandering Rocks,” a chapter at the center of the novel. Joyce begins the chapter in a style of “cheerful decorum,” the social attitude preferred by Father Conmee, whose consciousness Joyce has adopted for the initial narration.⁴³ For Joyce, even cheerfulness can be a kind of acquiescence when social and economic conditions inspire no cheer and when being cheerful takes the place of being mindful, or critical, of those who maintain those conditions. In Portrait, Stephen imagines his classmates “meekly bent as they wrote in their notebooks the points that they had been bidden to note,” while he imagines himself “unbent” and aware, as his “thoughts wandered abroad,” of “cheerless cellardamp and decay” (Portrait, 152). Joyce proposes that imperialist decorum involves accommodation, constant attentiveness, and unerring repetition, whereas cosmopolitan triviality involves distraction and new, sometimes vulgar sensibilities. In Ulysses, to perceive the cheerless world is to refuse optimism, blindness, and obedience. Joyce refuses these conditions in “Wandering Rocks,” as he describes the cheerless families whose suffering he contrasts with the unsympathetic posturing of church and state. To understand the chapter’s analysis of exploitation and hypocrisy, the reader has to focus on trivial details, reorder the presented world, and make insubordinate comparisons.⁴⁴

Unlike Stephen, whose description of a person will move from standard vocational categories to habitual, disreputable characteristics, Father Conmee focuses strictly on official titles, social status, proper names, pompous clichés, and “practical” consequences (180). Stephen’s description of his father’s “attributes” at the end of Portait provides a ready example of indecorous triviality because it does not subordinate or censor different registers of behavior, whether respectable, professional, habitual, occasional, or embarrassing. “What was” Stephen’s father? He was: “A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past” (207). Whereas Stephen cannot remember and does not care whose secretary his father was and what position in the distillery his father held, Father Conmee focuses his attention only on status, which is also all that he remembers. In “Wandering Rocks,” Joyce introduces Conmee in Conmee’s style, describing him, in the words that open the chapter, as “The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J.” (180). Joyce’s diction implies that the title describes as well as names: that anyone called “superior” and “very reverend” as a matter of custom will also turn out to inhabit these virtues as well. This, indeed, is the logic of aesthetic decorum: the assumption that people are what they are called, that every person has one proper name, that there is no difference between social façade and social conditions.

The opening of “Wandering Rocks” is worth close consideration because Joyce has embedded in Father Conmee’s style an entire repertoire of subordinating thought. The priest’s stingy attention, which poses as sympathy and good will, points to the model of national consciousness that Joyce has been resisting in his previous works and that he comes to criticize most explicitly here and two chapters later, in “Cyclops.” Father Conmee reproduces social conditions by imposing ready aphorisms, which he justifies by their sound of familiarity and by their conservation of effort. Joyce uses literal stinginess (Conmee’s decision that he will bless a wounded sailor rather than give him the single “silver crown” in his purse) to signal stinginess of mind and to suggest that the exchange of moral rhetoric for material goods is motivated by selfishness rather than piety. As he does in “Two Gallants,” Joyce asks us to notice that decorum participates in a system of exploitation by substituting moral problems for economic ones. Decorum seems to offer what is fitting, when in fact it constitutes a ruse or a distraction that Joyce’s more explicit strategies of distraction—his tricks—seek to criticize. As Father Conmee passes the one-legged sailor on the street, Joyce reports: “He thought, but not for long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward” (180). Conmee thinks of this image briefly because, as a rule, he protects his cheerfulness from the experience of distress and from unwelcome thoughts about social or institutional responsibility. Conmee is not sympathetic about what happens to soldiers and sailors, and he is not interested in the political decisions that cause cannonballs to fly. His observations are opportunistic: the encounter with the one-legged sailor burnishes the priest’s self-regard by reminding him of a well-worn saying by Cardinal Wolsey (according to Conmee, “If I had served my God as I have served my king He would not have abandoned me in my old days”), which he repeats to himself pompously and which he uses to imply that the sailor alone is responsible for his impoverished, damaged condition (180; emphasis in original). Aphoristic decorum allows Father Conmee to substitute pious clichés for sympathy and social causality, and it allows him to mask complacency (thinking “not for long,” displacing guilt from king to sailor) as intellectual grace.

Father Conmee expresses both appreciation and disdain only in formulaic terms: his attempts at bons mots always end in clichés; a woman who reminds him of Mary, queen of Scots, is said to have “such a queenly mien,” and a Protestant minister is superficially pitied for his “invincible ignorance,” the standard Roman Catholic evaluation of Protestantism (181). Joyce presents decorum as the perfect style for a man of limited imagination: he need only invoke the right statement for the right occasion. Of course, it is decorum’s perfection that demonstrates its savage indifference. Decorous characters are so busy being just, in the most unimaginative fashion, that they have no time or no inclination to contemplate justice. Father Conmee uses gestures of worldly knowledge to reinforce what he already knows. His cosmopolitanism is provincial: when he thinks about “a dreadful catastrophe in New York,” he thinks not of suffering or death or the grief of survivors but only of “unprepared” souls going to hell (182); when he thinks of “black and brown and yellow men” around the world, he worries not about colonialism or starvation or racism or genocide but only about damnation, “a waste, if one might say” (183). Whereas sympathy initiates social encounters among the other characters in the chapter, it is for Conmee only a manner of speaking and a way to avoid encounters of any kind.⁴⁵ Joyce proposes that Conmee’s evangelism is congruous to the false courtesy of British imperialism and the polite anti-Semitism of Anglo-Irish nationalism. Conmee’s concerns pose no risk to his cheerful demeanor because he is able to reduce foreign circumstances to familiar, universalizing terms. This strategy of generalization keeps him cheerful because it allows him to interpret all circumstances, no matter how disparate or unexplained, as comprehensible and unavoidable conditions. Not “lighthearted” in Adorno’s sense, Conmee’s cheerfulness is committed only to practiced thought.

In the “Cyclops” episode, Joyce treats decorum by representing hostility. The chapter is full of explicit references to anticolonialism, nationalism, imperialism, nativism, and anti-Semitism, and for this reason it has been a mainstay of postcolonial, semicolonial, and cosmopolitan scholarship.⁴⁶ My own interest is in the triviality of a single, well-known exchange between Leopold Bloom and a group of Dubliners about the meaning of the word “nation.” I say that this exchange is trivial not because it is unimportant or devoid of political significance but rather because it emphasizes vernacular, personal, and economic details, which Joyce uses to disrupt philosophical abstractions both of nationalism and of cosmopolitanism. In this emphasis, the chapter resists not only the single-minded nativism of the anti-Semitic narrator and the citizen but also the generalizing humanism of the antiracist Bloom. Andrew Gibson and Enda Duffy have asked us to notice that the chapter does not restrict its satire of exaggerated, one-eyed perspectives only to the citizen, a Sinn Feiner, or to the Cyclopean narrator.⁴⁷ I argue, in addition, that Joyce uses the vernacular anecdotes of the other Dubliners—their ceaseless interruptions—to refine the politics of reason, measure, and universal cosmopolitanism articulated by Bloom. In this refinement, Joyce articulates a vernacular cosmopolitanism based on what Lauren Berlant has termed “quotidian citizenship”: the “banal and erratic logic … of intimate relations, political personhood, and national life.”⁴⁸

Joyce’s chapter chronicles an impromptu conversation among Bloom and several men whom Bloom knows from his life in Dublin. The men are drinking friends, they are gathered in Barney Kiernan’s pub, and their tolerance of Bloom’s company is fragile and ungenerous. The narrator, one of the drinkers, is recounting a scene that took place in the near past. There are several, recurring words in “Cyclops”: among the most important are “house” (265), “nation” (271–72), “same” (271), “living” (272), and “place” (272). The repetition of these words serves to emphasize the materiality of language (that language has a varied history and context of use) and to unmoor customary meanings from unthinking social usage. Neil Levi has argued that the logic of Ulysses, which favors repetition and the instability of language, is directly opposed in “Cyclops” to the logic of the narrator, who complains of Bloom—as one might complain of Joyce—that he cannot simply recognize an object or a fact but must provide endless explanations that undermine the certainty of naming.⁴⁹ Levi argues that the narrator’s critique of Bloom’s rhetorical detachment is motivated by anti-Semitism: the narrator treats the desire to explain what others accept as fact as a symptom of Bloom’s Jewish cosmopolitanism (“‘See that Straw?’” 383–85). I see this also—that Bloom’s dialogic pedantry functions for the narrator as one more example of perverse doubleness, along with Bloom’s Irish Jewishness, his multiple religious conversions, his literariness, and the doubleness that anti-Semites associate with Jewish sexuality. Yet I do not see a perfect symmetry between Joyce’s style and Bloom’s, as Levi does: whereas Joyce values the materialist analysis and critical discrimination that characterize Bloom’s consciousness in earlier chapters, he presents more ambivalently the detached idealism and universalist cosmopolitanism that characterize Bloom’s speech in “Cyclops.”

Bloom announces, speaking to one of his companions about “persecution”:

In Bloom’s first two answers, he offers a general case that would apply to him but does not force him to speak directly about himself; in the last answer, because the citizen has personalized the matter, Bloom does not propose a general case (for example, “a nation is the same people born in the same place”) but speaks only of himself (“I was born here. Ireland.”). The citizen’s racism is not to be admired, but his question has, for the reader, provocative effects: it negates the false courtesy by which racism had previously passed. Against the epic reconciliation of the chapter’s genteel announcements, which project a continuous and heroic national past, against the narrator’s preference for ideas that require no thought and no elaborate conversation, and against Bloom’s utopian platitudes, the exchange about “nations” introduces a living, contested present.

Bloom invokes a view of national community that accommodates both philosophical and anthropological models of cosmopolitanism: he asks his companions to think of relationships among nations as well as those within them; he asks them to imagine a nation as a community of like values that need not be situated in the same geographic place. Bloom proposes that people living in the same community constitute a nation, whatever differences of culture, ancestry, and origin they may have; that a nation should be measured by its present (“people living”) rather than by its past or by its future. Bloom is asserting that collective identity (“the same people”) should depend on location (“the same place”) or on self-determined association (despite “different places”) rather than on ancestry or on genetic continuity (race). Ned, Joe, and the citizen offer two counterdefinitions, both of which contest the mutability, contingency, and unconstrained voluntarism that they associate with Bloom’s account. The first counterdefinition is based on a philosophical difference about how communities are organized. Ned Lambert and Joe Hynes make fun of Bloom for speaking of place, as in mapped geography or legal territory, because they find it too vague, transient, and inclusive as a test of national belonging: people can change countries as easily as some people change houses, and, as patriots, they want national identity to be less easily acquired and less easily lost than, for example, property. The citizen’s mute response at the end of the scene displays, through verbal silence and physical gesture, his conviction that living in a place, even from birth, is not sufficient proof of belonging: the citizen believes that the Irish nation includes only people of Celtic origin whose parents and parents’ parents spoke Gaelic and who have participated in ancient Gaelic traditions for many centuries; for him, the nation is defined as people who participate, and whose ancestors participated, in an unchanging, homogeneous culture rooted in the ancient past.

The second counterdefinition is based on the quotidian experience of everyday life in Ireland: Ned and Joe, who offer details of this experience, do not mean to be defining all nations or even the Irish nation in their comments, but Joyce allows their jokes to introduce a trivial register of description. Critics have recognized Bloom’s unwillingness to privilege a community based on race or immutable characteristics, but they have tended to ignore the Dubliners’ retorts.⁵⁰ The retorts are significant because they allow a crude and promiscuous vocabulary of location to disrupt Bloom’s decorous philosophy of national belonging. The punning responses focus on the difference between “place” as house and “place” as territory and on the serious fact that many impoverished Dubliners do not have a house to call their own: Ireland is a place made up of many people sharing small, rented houses (“the same people living in the same place,” like Ned Lambert) and of many people whose poverty causes them to move houses frequently (“people living in different places,” like Joe Hynes). However much the men are making fun in this passage, they are also telling the truth about what the Irish nation is like. Joyce’s triviality—the punning definition of place and the assertion of vulgar definitions—introduces an indelicate, anticolonial, and unheroic image of Ireland in particular and of nations in general. Moreover, it is an image that emphasizes specific instances of living as well as international conditions of economic and colonial domination.

Bloom’s comments replace one platitude with another, but the puns inserted by the others produce the effect of a changeable “nation.” Joyce’s nation now includes people who live sometimes within one territory and sometimes within another; people who were born within one territory but may or may not reside there; people who also define themselves by association with smaller groups within one territory or with other territories and cultural traditions. The “same” in Bloom’s “the same people” is heterogeneous: a people may be similar by reasons of continual or occasional proximity, voluntary association, birth, or ancestry. Moreover, “living” has several different registers as well, as Ned Lambert and Joe Hynes suggest: it conveys a transnational community of people residing or traveling or both, and it also conveys a vernacular, localized experience of minimal self-maintenance—“living” in the slums of Dublin. While Ned and Joe emphasize the economic suffering of their national community, in a subsequent exchange Bloom will urge them to think ever more expansively, insisting that he, too, “[belongs] to a race … that is hated and persecuted,” as the Irish are (273). Bloom’s cosmopolitan comparison, between Irish and Jewish persecution, further annoys his interlocutors, who want to think of Ireland alone and before all other situations. They are aggravated by Bloom’s use of abstract language: his talk of “injustice,” “Force, hatred, history, all that.” Bloom moves quickly from description to comparison and from comparison to generalization. He asserts that force and hatred are “the very opposite of that that is really life,” which he calls “Love.” The citizen makes fun of Bloom’s rhetoric (he calls Bloom “a new apostle to the gentiles”), but so does Joyce, who inserts a childish parody—“Love loves to love love”—immediately after this conversation. The citizen’s comment is motivated by racism and by the refusal to compare, but Bloom’s generalizations seem obtuse and ossified in contrast with the specific and animate thought to which we have been introduced in previous chapters. Joyce wants to affirm the politics of transnational sympathy and yet to insist as well on the politics of vernacular difference. Joyce’s triviality, his proliferation of many “nations,” has the effect of provincializing Bloom’s cosmopolitanism.

Within the “changing same” of the “Cyclops” episode, to invoke Paul Gilroy’s image of cosmopolitan tradition, Joyce rejects the all-inclusive rhetoric of universal community while rejecting the too-exclusive rhetoric of anti-Semitic racism and Irish anti-imperialism.⁵¹ More than any other episode, “Cyclops” suggests that styles of decorum not only support racism (by allowing it to function) but also inform it (by naturalizing what is fitting and right). The chapter resists decorum by making racism explicit and by refusing to install a traditional cosmopolitanism in its place. This is not the first time in the novel that Bloom has been mocked and insulted by his companions—it is a recurring, almost blanketing circumstance of the text—but this is the first encounter in which someone directly challenges Bloom instead of whispering in his absence or snubbing him indirectly. Joyce makes the reader notice that the novel’s impersonal banter among Bloom and the other Dubliners has involved a muted, tactful racism, which this scene vocalizes by shifting from the general (what is a nation?) to the particular (what is your nation?) case. The citizen’s question makes Bloom acknowledge that the indirect statements of anti-Semitism and xenophobia spoken casually and regularly in his presence have had a specific target: him. Joyce shows what is implied in the social exclusion and mocking treatment of Bloom in previous pages: to wit, a fixed conception of the Irish nation, which Bloom’s social presence and style of wandering consciousness, though not always his speech, serve to challenge.