If an artist courts the favour of the multitude he cannot escape the contagion of its fetishism and deliberate self-deception, and if he joins in a popular movement he does so at his own risk.
—James Joyce, “The Day of the Rabblement”
I want to show you that the political tendency of a work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That means that the correct political tendency includes a literary tendency. For, just to clarify things right away, this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency—that, and nothing else constitutes the quality of a work. The correct political tendency of a work includes its literary quality because it includes its literary tendency.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”
The cabin door opened and he saw the Hungarian standing in a shaft of grey light: “Daybreak, gentlemen!”
—James Joyce, “After the Race”
James Joyce stands out among the writers assembled here for being the most likely to divest himself of social ties and the least likely to place his faith in the efficacy of collective projects. In that sense, it is not surprising that he stands as the interface between older paradigms of modernist internationalism and the newer one on offer in the present book. Whereas classic accounts established Joyce’s “European” aesthetic credentials by divorcing him from Ireland, I will be considering how Joyce’s distrust of glorified accounts of European fellowship returned him to the scene of Irish politics.1 Specifically, it provoked a critical dissection of the rhetoric of Irish solidarity with European nations on “the Continent,” a moniker that stood not only for cosmopolitan sophistication but also for a supranational model of solidarity much more desirable than that of imperial Britain.
It is precisely because of Joyce’s suspicion of solidarity that his fiction makes it possible to conceive of internationalism not just as an indefinitely deferred dream of universal cooperation but also as an internally combative and competitive discourse in which the tensions between national interests and cosmopolitan identifications rarely resolve themselves. Joyce, as is well known, was deeply critical of such nationalist projects as the Irish Literary Revival, the Gaelic League, and Sinn Féin; however, the dominant narrative behind his modernist persona is that he rejected them on the grounds of their nativist insularity rather than for their methods of international comparison.2 As I show in this chapter, the infamous cultural insularity of Irish revivalism was not so much a product of willful isolation from other cultural traditions as it was a symptom of a particular kind of engagement with the histories and traditions of other countries, in which international solidarity became a mechanism for asserting both Ireland’s singularity and its parity with the sovereign nations of the world. In other words, revivalist expressions of international solidarity hinged on what Declan Kiberd, drawing on the work of Seán de Fréine, calls “the ingenious device of national parallelism.”3
National parallelism was an epistemological procedure as much as a cultural one, and it worked by exorcising the unevenness of colonial history from the rhetoric of international comparative space. Rather than incorporate the conditions of underdevelopment that would complicate comparison across the Irish colony and European nations, proponents of parallelism pursued comparative equivalences that would participate in liberating Ireland by, at least rhetorically, elevating it from colony to nation. Joyce objected to such inflation and to what he perceived to be the exaggerated national and international solidarities proffered by revivalism in general. Yet he was not immune to revivalism’s implicit claim that cultural production was intrinsic to the liberatory politics of decolonization. He accepted the premise that art had a role to play in achieving collective freedom, but he refused to adopt strategies of historical reclamation and aesthetic representation that would prioritize cultural pride over cultural confrontation.4 Instead, he developed his own techniques of international comparison in his fiction—techniques I gather under the heading “alternating asymmetry.” Some readers will no doubt recognize the phrase as Joyce’s own, taken from his description of “Cyclops” in the Linati schema. I use it more expansively here to encompass literary techniques and affective tendencies that connect his early work in Dubliners to his masterwork, Ulysses.
Joyce developed strategies of uneven and disproportionate comparison in order to explore the psychological and material effects of colonialism on ordinary Irish people and, further, to propose that the reassurances of collective solidarity might not always constitute an adequate solution to the challenges facing downtrodden communities. Eschewing narratives of progress and social acceptance for those of underdeveloped pathways, failed unions, and betrayed friendships, Joyce turns the negative sociability of everyday life—its subtle hierarchies and not-so-subtle power plays—toward an analysis of the aggressions and disparities sustained by the conviviality of peers. The focus on finding formal arrangements that capture the asymmetries of actually existing collectivities leads Joyce’s fiction into oblique and direct criticisms of parallelism as the comparative tool for forging national unity and international standing.
Joyce’s boundary pushing at the level of literary form is of a piece with his overall trajectory of pushing the boundaries of fiction’s social content toward both the ordinary and the indelicate. Joyce prized unsheltered styles of writing—writing unafraid to divulge coarse thoughts and deeds, accumulate unflattering impressions, or memorialize its characters through their sustained subjection to ignobility. In reorienting narration from the ennobling to the bathetic, he created affective predicaments in which the awakening of sympathy and pathos for his characters is rarely isolated from the evocation of disgust and disidentification. Such emotional paradoxes, coupled with the strategies of satire and excess that characterize Ulysses, reflect how the grotesque permeates Joyce’s fiction to become the dominant literary and political tendency of his work. The travestying of previous and concurrent forms of writing, coupled with his relentless mixture of pathos and bathos, suggests a fondness for the lowly as a site of genuinely disturbing feeling and communal questioning.
As a form of social critique, the grotesque worked through involution; it mandated an internal reckoning with oneself in which Dubliners came face-to-face with the very stuff of life—material goods, romantic love, peer recognition—that threatened to destroy their aspirations while also claiming to fulfill them. Joyce’s fiction thus draws out the tragicomedy of what Lauren Berlant has called cruel optimism, an attitude whose cruelty derives from its attachment to objects that cannot sustain the weight of their promises. For Berlant, optimism is a pleasure that can “induce conventionality, that place where appetites find a shape in the predictable comforts of the good-life genres that a person or world has seen fit to formulate.”5 Optimism generates pleasure by reproducing received aesthetic as well as social norms. Further, its cruelty lies in the sense of pleasure that such reproduction creates. Brought into relief by such a counterintuitive affective relation as cruel optimism, Joyce’s pessimism appears newly kind. His grotesquerie emerges as an attempt to intervene in the reproduction of destructive appetites through the creation of newer and odder literary shapes. He subjects ideals of collective attachment and solidarity—the national past but also a supranational European future—to scrutiny within the historical present.
Joyce’s attraction to the degraded and the unpalatable as overlooked sources of regenerative discovery resonates with an older understanding of the grotesque, which Mikhail Bakhtin derived from the poetics of Rabelais: “Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with the earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sew, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something new and better.” For Bakhtin, lowering the spiritual and the cerebral to the realms of the material and bodily did not vitiate the former but revitalized them, so that the energy of “folk humor” in Renaissance literature might combat the aridity of authoritative or official culture.6 For Joyce, the grotesque inflects the modernist literary project of cultural renewal in a distinctly darker way: it brings out the private humiliations informing corporeal humor and the socioeconomic cruelties that yield obscene or embarrassing displays. As I will show, his asymmetrical comparative forms condense degradation and regeneration into simultaneously apprehensible moments of insight—epiphanies that yoke psychic pain to the process of spiritual recovery.
Kind pessimism may seem a strange and even grudging relation for Joyce to assume. Why withhold the kinds of solidarities that would imbue an occupied territory with a sense of cultural pride and political agency? As the first epigraph to this chapter attests, Joyce feared art’s legitimation of self-deception, its indirect ratification of people’s tendencies to adopt narratives, however flawed, that confirm their hopes and dreams. The role of the artist, in his reckoning, was to act as a check against such tendencies, even and especially when those tendencies informed crucial efforts at popular mobilization and political unification. This is why he was so critical of the Irish Literary Theatre for staging plays that capitulated to “the forces that dictate public judgment” rather than those that “calmly confronted” it.7
Joyce’s readiness to confront, startle, and defamiliarize, despite embedding collective ends, demonstrated an autonomy and elitism that placed early critics’ “modernist” versions of Joyce in opposition to “postcolonial” recuperations of Joyce as an Irish writer. Joyce’s avowed distance from the “multitude” has led critics like Joseph Valente to construe him as self-divided—caught between identification with “the conquerors and the conquered.”8 Such self-division, for Emer Nolan, is a property both of Joyce’s individual psychology and of the psychology of his writings: “Their very ambiguities and hesitations testify to the uncertain, divided consciousness of the colonial subject.”9
Although Valente and Nolan are no doubt correct to identify the psychology of the colonial subject as one of the most interesting aspects of Joyce’s work, their identification of that psychology with self-division rather than self-deception limits the sources of his fiction’s psychological complexity to the agon between colonizer and colonized and misrecognizes Joyce’s efforts to register colonial resistances uncaptured by self-conscious collective projects. Self-division also tends to participate in a logic of selfhood in which the unification of one’s loyalties connotes the health of the subject. By focusing on self-deception in this chapter, I might seem equally guilty of instantiating a simplified logic of selfhood in which the realization that one’s “effective motives” differ from one’s “avowed intentions” comes to be equated with liberation itself—the emancipation of the Irish people from myths of colonial inferiority and national aggrandizement.10 Certainly, Joyce advanced a version of this argument himself when he was fighting the censorship of Dubliners.
However, I will be departing from this line of reasoning to argue for something different: that Joyce’s work remains so enduring, and his sense of vocation so controversial, not because he frees his characters or his readers from their chimeras but because he uses those chimeras willfully and analytically. Chimeras, understood here as both individual and collective forms of self-deception, become gateways into the unexamined foundations of colonial stagnation and social recovery. Joyce probes these foundations to better understand the conditions under which the Irish have been pathologized and have themselves internalized assumptions of colonial inferiority. The literary tendency of his fiction toward affective aloofness and formal techniques of grotesquerie sometimes makes it difficult to separate his criticism of pathology from the reproduction of it. Yet walking that fine line is a crucial part of its perversely correct political tendency to question not just the false promises of imperial development but also the grandiose rhetoric of anticolonialism. By juxtaposing the rousing promises of such rhetoric with the small yet staggering setbacks of everyday life, Joyce melts into air all that is solid about solidarity.
TESTING NATIONAL PARALLELISM
Joyce’s distance from, and even disdain for, the collective projects embraced by his Irish literary contemporaries led him to redirect the national and mythic parallels guiding both popular art and popular sentiment. Perhaps the most obvious mythic parallel was the Moses–Parnell comparison pervasive within the political climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, in Robert Spoo’s words, indicative of the colony’s “sensus communis.”11 The common sense that enshrined Charles Stewart Parnell as the guiding light of the Irish people was reproduced and reinforced by elegiac literature like W. B. Yeats’s “Mourn—and then Onward!” (1891) and Lady Gregory’s play The Deliverer (1911). These overtly patriotic works partook in the project of imagining a specifically Irish identity and national destiny not by turning inward into the treasure trove of Celtic legends but by reaching outward into the origin stories of other peoples. The Moses–Parnell typology also gave birth to more collective comparisons between the Irish and Jewish peoples, such as in John F. Taylor’s speech promoting the Irish language (a speech that Joyce attended). Taylor, a supporter of the Gaelic League, deployed the familiar trope of an independent Ireland as the promised land, and he developed an extended parallel between the “outlaw languages” of Irish and Hebrew under contemporary English and ancient Egyptian rule.12 The analogies organizing his speech, which are recalled and recited by Professor MacHugh in “Aeolus,” point to the larger milieu of international and interracial comparisons in which revivalism operated.13
Indeed, it is important to note that the Irish–Jewish parallel was not the only comparison used to articulate the stakes of Ireland’s present via recourse to another nation’s past. Nor was it the only one to infiltrate the symbolic designs of Joyce’s fiction. The “Hungarian parallel” stands out among national comparisons for its longevity and influence within Irish politics. To those unfamiliar with the history of Irish nationalism, the Irish fascination with Hungary will sound odd, yet the Hungarian parallel was a recurring device of anticolonial discourse from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Thomas Kabdebó offers a history of the parallel, tracing its strategic comparisons back through the writings of such revolutionaries as Thomas Davis, William Smith O’Brien, Michael Doheny, and John Mitchel.14 O’Brien, Doheny, and Mitchel were members of the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, which was inspired in part by the momentum of other revolutions across Europe in the year known as the Spring of Nations. (The twenty-first-century moniker “Arab Spring” plays on this name and the contagion of revolution associated with the events of 1848). Although most of the rebellions (in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, and the Netherlands) failed, some produced lasting changes. France, of course, became a republic, and the Hungarians initially won sovereignty from Austria. However, Austrian rule was restored in 1850, and a compromise was not reached until 1867, when the empire became a dual monarchy known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
This last Hungarian victory, after prolonged constraint, became the basis for the Hungarian parallel in its fullest and most popular articulation by Arthur Griffith, in his political work The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland.15 The work was serialized in the United Irishman from January to July of 1904 before being published in book form. Griffith’s book constructed Hungary not just as a parallel for Ireland but also as a heroic model of an equally marginalized European country whose political trajectory from Austrian colony to corulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire presented an antecedent for Ireland’s own political aspirations. Griffith advocated for a similar British–Irish dual monarchy, in 1904, as part of the platform of his newly founded Sinn Féin party—an option that would seem viable until the Easter Rising of 1916, the aftermath of which saw the consolidation of republicanism.
Griffith’s parallels not only pointed out the similarities structuring Ireland’s and Hungary’s historical marginalization within Europe but also illuminated the comparative history of negative racialization to which both nations were subjected by their respective colonizers:
In the Austrian beer-gardens—the equivalent of the English music halls—vulgar beings clad in grotesque imitation of the Hungarian costume, who sang songs reflecting on the Hungarian character, were popular buffoons. The Austrians called them “Magyar Miska” or “Hungarian Michaels”—Michael being the popular peasant-name in Hungary as the English call their music-hall Irishmen “Irish Micks” or “Irish Paddies.” Nor was there at one time wanting in Hungary the equivalent of the Irish seoinini—debased Hungarians who, anxious to conciliate the strong ones, applauded the libels on their race, affected to despise the customs, traditions, history, and language of their country, to consider everything Hungarian vulgar and all things Austrian polite.16
Griffith’s equivalences in this passage situate Ireland and Hungary as internal colonies within Europe and thus subject to similar forms of cultural oppression and self-alienation. They focus particularly on the forms of minstrelsy that helped create and consolidate racial stereotypes—“Magyar Miskas” and “Irish Micks”—while claiming to document and imitate the fixed racial characteristics of subject peoples. In drawing Irish–Hungarian solidarity out of the shared memory of racial subjection, Griffith employs strategies of comparative racialization that might uplift the Irish people by setting up a cross-colonial field of identification with Hungary.
Diana Fuss has theorized identification as a “detour through the other that defines the self.” Such a “psychical mechanism” enables self-recognition by allowing “self-difference”—that is, the process by which the self comes into consciousness of itself as a self.17 Griffith uses the Hungarian parallel to effect this kind of self-recognition at the national scale, wherein Ireland would solidify its own identity through solidarity with Hungary. Such a lateral connection with a now sovereign nation would, Griffith argued, inspire Irish anticolonialism and exorcise disabling vertical comparisons with the English, whose culture, language, and tradition had already been internalized as superior.
In the process of stoking the passions of positive racial consciousness, however, Griffith leaves unquestioned and thus reproduces colonial comparativism’s own tightly policed racial binaries of Irishness and Englishness, Hungarianness and Austrianness. These binaries in turn yield their own troubling caricatures: “debased Hungarians” become the equivalent of the “Irish seoinini.” Seoinini is the Gaelic word for “shoneen,” or West Briton, meaning an Irishman who imitates English tastes and manners and who might be compared to a babu in the Indian colonial context. The proliferation of such types shows how imperial taxonomies permeated nationalist campaigns, which, as was seen in the previous chapter on Tagore, derived strength and influence from aligning political principles with the policing of cultural preferences and tastes.
Through its own policing of identity, the Hungarian parallel facilitated a mode of collective self-recognition that was also a manner of self-deception. Rather than keeping the example of Hungary embedded within Ireland’s anticolonial cultural imaginary, Griffith allows for its ejection by suggesting that overcoming colonial debasement would best be achieved by turning inward toward an autochthonous past. This move paradoxically disavows the infiltration of Hungarian otherness into Irish self-definition by transforming the unruly field of colonial identification into a stable ground for the comparison of separate-but-equal national cultures.
Griffith’s publication was one of the most influential disseminators of such national parallelism, relying on a set of strategies also deployed by the Gaelic League and other revivalists. Such strategies, according to Kiberd, engineered Irish culture as an “apophatic construct”; that is, it defined Irishness as, first and foremost, a negation of Englishness, and it used cultural invention to devise Irish counterparts (and counterpoints) to English law, activities, and dress. For example, Brehon law paralleled English law, Irish hurling became the analog of English hockey, and the kilt corresponded to trousers, regardless of whether such artifacts of heritage “had a secure place in Irish history.”18
Such modes of revivalist invention surely bordered on the fetishistic, but that is not the sole reason Joyce criticized them. He objected to their internalization of the comparative methods disseminated by the British Empire. By defining Irish culture against English culture, point for point, the revivalists derived cultural specificity even as they assimilated colonial standards of measurement and value. As such, the English standard, even when reviled, remained the unacknowledged gold standard. Opposition to it licensed all sorts of inaccuracies and “deliberate self-deceptions” with respect to the histories and solidarities that revivalism invoked. For example, the nationalist internationalism, of which Griffith’s Resurrection of Hungary was paradigmatic, conveniently ignored the effects of Hungary’s changed status within Europe—from internal colony to colonial power—on its figuration as an oppressed nation.
Deflating as they were, Joyce’s stories in the Irish Homestead (“The Sisters,” “Eveline,” and “After the Race”), and later Dubliners, corrected for what his Stephen Hero would, in a more didactic vein, call the “political absurdities” of revivalism. His criticism bears quoting at length for the echoes that arise among Joyce’s words, Griffith’s, and Kiberd’s:
He [Stephen] saw that many political absurdities arose from the lack of a just sense of comparison in public men. The orators of this patriotic party were not ashamed to cite the precedents of Switzerland and France. The intelligent centers of the movement were so scantily supplied that the analogies they gave out as exact and potent were really analogies built haphazard upon very inexact knowledge. The cry of a solitary Frenchman (A bas l’Angleterre!) at a Celtic re-union in Paris would be made by these enthusiasts the subject of a leading article in which would be shown the imminence of aid for Ireland from the French Government. A glowing example was to be found for Ireland in the case of Hungary, an example, as these patriots imagined, of a long-suffering minority, entitled by every right of race and justice to a separate freedom, finally emancipating itself. In emulation of that achievement bodies of young Gaels conflicted murderously in the Phoenix Park with whacking hurley-sticks, thrice armed in their just quarrel since their revolution had been blessed for them by the Anointed, and the same bodies were set aflame with indignation [at] by the unwelcome presence of any young sceptic who was aware of the capable aggressions of the Magyars upon the Latin and Slav and Teutonic populations.19
Joyce predicates his indictment of revivalism on the tone and style of its comparisons: rousingly general rather than historically meticulous. He picks up on the rhetoric and semiotics of revivalism in the phrases “a glowing example” and “young Gaels…whacking hurley-sticks.” He also shows how Stephen risks the epithet of seoinini, a self-divided rather than “united” Irishman, for being “a young sceptic” in response to representations of Hungarians as a “long-suffering minority.” Such representations occlude their contemporary status as sovereigns dominating other populations within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
For Joyce, the rhetorical strategies of redress and aggrandizement only go so far before elevating the pride of a subject race detracts from its self-knowledge or, worse, its historical understanding of the present. The specter of self-deception was crucial to his aesthetic and political differences with the Irish Literary Revival and went beyond any simple preference for the high culture of Europe. Idolizing Henrik Ibsen, another searingly truthful artist from the so-called margins of Europe, Joyce was not above making his own parallels as he imagined his artistic trajectory from colony to continent. However, it was the ends those parallels served and the kinds of awakenings they inspired that made all the difference in Joyce’s cultivation of a “just sense of comparison” among his readers.
Joyce subverts the national parallelisms of revivalism by reworking them in “After the Race,” and he achieves a critique of overstated solidarity that is more epiphanic than expository—“exact and potent” in a way that the meandering Stephen Hero is not. Published by the Irish Homestead in December 1904 (several months after the serialization of Griffith’s Resurrection of Hungary), and reprinted in slightly revised form in Dubliners (1914), the short story was the last to be accepted by the periodical because of the large number of reader complaints regarding the bleakness of “The Sisters” and “Eveline.” Comparing “Eveline” and “After the Race” to Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen and “Red Hanrahan,” Richard Ellmann stresses the departure of Joyce’s “Irish” stories from Yeats’s “Celtic” ones. The “Celtic” stories are “melancholy and warm” and draw upon folklore and legend to extol the nationalist virtues of “self-sacrifice.” Joyce’s “Irish” stories, by contrast, are “meticulous” and extol the virtue of “self-realization.”20
Ellmann’s classifications differentiate the ethnolinguistic (Celtic) from the national (Irish), and not so subtly attribute romance and idealism to the former, reality and naturalism to the latter. Although such distinctions rightly reflect Joyce’s artistic differences with Irish Literary Revival writers, their sharpness belies the ways in which the cultural values of “Celtic” nationalism overlapped with the political calls for economic and legal sovereignty associated with “Irish” nationalism. “After the Race,” in particular, picks up on the cultural-political strategies of revivalist rhetoric and responds to the elevating revivalist narratives of racial romance and international solidarity with a debasing one of its own.
The main revivalist strategy that Joyce unsettlingly redeploys in “After the Race” is comparison with Hungary. The short story begins, eponymously enough, as a motor derby is ending. It immediately establishes power differentials among the Irish, Hungarian, and continental characters through well-placed adjectives that judge as much as they describe. The Hungarian Villona is “huge” and implicitly out of place within the “trimly built” French car in which he, along with the protagonist, “the neatly groomed” Jimmy Doyle, is a backseat passenger. Coupled together from the start, and foils throughout the story, the Hungarian and the Irishmen share high spirits that “seemed to be at present well above the level of successful Gallicism.” Outside the car, Joyce continues to establish relations of power between drivers and spectators: “The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry.”21
The cars, which are French and German, evince a casual superiority born of their speed and perfect alignment, while the image of “Inchicore sightseers…gathered in clumps” exacerbates the inertness of watching from the sidelines. By juxtaposing images of Irish lumpenness and Hungarian disproportion with those of continental precision and amplitude, Joyce insinuates strategies of asymmetry into his famed style of scrupulous meanness in Dubliners. These strategies turn the Irish into “sightseers” within their own home and draw out, from the specificities of physical place, the colony’s sociological place within the symbolic landscape of Europe. They also, by exploiting the resources of the grotesque (descriptive distortion; the arousal of both empathy and disgust) subtly undermine Villona and Jimmy’s exuberant “Gallicism.” Joyce’s invocation of gallicism as a linguistic sign of both cosmopolitan sophistication and social pretension signals that Jimmy and Villona’s need for speed may also be a need for borrowed prestige. Their pairing foretells a tale in which ambition and composure, or the lack thereof, become pivotal to exploring the colonial fissures within displays of international camaraderie.
It would be an understatement to suggest that spatial arrangements encode the colonial and continental hierarchies that render solidarity so fragile in “After the Race.” Jimmy contrasts the “profane” world of spectatorship with the sacred world of riding inside the French race car, yet the interior of the car is thick with an uneasily shared insouciance. In the front seats, the driver and de facto leader of the group, Charles Ségouin, and his French-Canadian cousin, André Rivière, “[fling] their laughter and light words over their shoulders” while Jimmy must “strain forward to catch the quick phrase” (Dubliners, 51). Next to him, Villona hums a melody that, coupled with the noise of the car, blurs the Frenchmen’s speech into indecipherable sounds.
Previous readings of “After the Race” have interpreted Jimmy’s fascination with the fast lane—expensive cars, gambling, and carousing—as reflective of a seoinini upbringing, enabled by a father who traded in his nationalist politics for wealth and status in business.22 Jimmy’s adoration of Ségouin’s aristocratic ease would suggest that the young man unwittingly shares the same mind-set as those clumpy Irish the narrative marks as “gratefully oppressed” (Dubliners, 49). Although it is not wrong to treat Jimmy’s ambitions as symptomatic of a colonial subject’s false consciousness, such readings tend to schematize the story’s social relations as indexes of political identity rather than attending to how Jimmy’s affiliations waver and change across dynamic fields of identification. Consequently, these readings represent their own forms of lumping together: the French with the British in the abstract category of “colonizer”; Villona absorbed into the wealthy and cosmopolitan crowd, despite his characterization as hungry and “unfortunately, very poor” (51).23
Rather than create clear factions and alliances, “After the Race” refines our understanding of geopolitical dynamics by exploiting the subtle dynamism of friend groups. A powerful example of this strategy comes when Ségouin welcomes a new addition to the party, an Englishman named Routh, and Jimmy imagines their friendship trumping his own with the Frenchman. Conviviality turns to rivalry, and, “under generous influences,” an intoxicated Jimmy reveals to Routh “the buried zeal of his father.” Ségouin quickly defuses the tension by toasting to “Humanity” (Dubliners, 54–55).
Although the narrative does not contain the words nationalism or empire, Ségouin’s ceremonious neutrality bespeaks the political betrayal of an imagined Irish–French alliance. Irish spectators may have rooted for French drivers, but it is a colonial stereotype, a “Gaelicism” that shatters the beautiful illusions of gallicism and elicits hard realities. Jimmy’s unguarded drunkenness and political bluntness close the door on French solidarity but open the window of kinship with Villona. Villona’s hunger and Jimmy’s drunkenness are analogous examples of bodily expression that rub against the sophisticated impressions both characters wish to create. They are signs of the grotesque surfacing through the genteel. Moreover, they signal that, despite Joyce’s critique of the Hungarian parallel in Stephen Hero, he actually reworked rather than rejected it in his published fiction.
Joyce creates his own Hungarian parallel by casting Jimmy and Villona as foils—a comparative relation that is also an asymmetrical one, given the unequal value of “major” and “minor” characters. Jimmy and Villona’s implicit and unequal comparison undoes the equivalencies Griffith draws between the Irish and Hungarian situations. Nonetheless, it still allows for a similitude that prevents these racialized subjects from the internal peripheries of Europe from being absorbed into the homogenizing solidarity of gallicism.24 Villona, a Hungarian with a French surname, may seem fully ensconced within the sophisticated illusion of high Europeanism, and perhaps is even part of a larger deception happening at Jimmy’s expense.25 Such a reading, however, fails to account for Villona’s poverty or for the odd fact that Joyce portrays him through representational conventions reserved for servants. He provides musical entertainment while the others play cards; he affirms other gentlemen’s speech while rarely giving his own opinions.
Andrew Goldstone has argued that servants in aestheticist literature display the attributes of aesthetes, capable and indeed charged with becoming what Oscar Wilde called “a mask with a manner.” The overlap between the servant’s labor of performance and the aesthete’s luxury of performance elicits the contradictions of aesthetic autonomy, whereby its dependence upon material labor and the servant’s suppressed individuality becomes evident.26 Throughout “After the Race,” Villona blurs the boundaries between friend and valet, racial other (a “huge Hungarian”) and cosmopolite (a “brilliant pianist”). Precisely because he is not officially a domestic worker, his racial character subsumes and conveys his subordination as the material difference that cannot be transcended by his elective affinities. As an example of what Griffith might call a “debased Hungarian,” for his French affectations, the sophisticated but impoverished Villona embodies the world of labor, debt, and servitude that Jimmy is trying to escape but that Joyce is aiming to confront as part of his larger literary commitment to combating individual and collective forms of self-deception.
In the final lines of “After the Race,” Joyce consequently returns to the collective language of race to give the story its mythic and political dimension. “The Hungarian,” rather than the particular character Villona, stands in the iconographic “shaft of grey light” as the angelic messenger of absent authority. His announcement “Daybreak, gentlemen!” occasions the story’s epiphany. This epiphany, for Jimmy and readers alike, is not that Jimmy has lost all his money at cards and is now in debt (that, he and we already know) but that the time for avoidance has run out: “He knew that he would regret in the morning but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly” (Dubliners, 57). Adding insult to injury, the speed that once made Jimmy “too excited to be genuinely happy” (50) truncates his period of permissible stupor/stupidity and hence makes the story genuinely sad. Joyce’s ending debases Jimmy but also disabuses him of the false hopes of international solidarity—namely, the promise that having friends in high places can erase the history of belonging to a place and a people lowered by colonialism. Villona’s Hungarianness foils Jimmy’s Irishness and establishes racialization as a process that cannot be wished away. It is through these characters’ lateral friendship that Joyce levels his critique of a hegemonic European internationalism, without altogether giving up on the possibility of international solidarity.
Joyce’s positioning of excitement as the antithesis to genuine happiness in “After the Race” places his indictment of colonial paralysis and provinciality, so associated with Dubliners, in a new light. Far from reinforcing the disparity between Irish stagnancy and European energy, Joyce’s depiction of the motor race and its aftermath suggests that speed is a comparative relation of empire rather than an emanation of racial character. More than a motif of metropolitan splendor, speed becomes the device by which to negate the standardized comparisons of imperial historicism and their concomitant constructions of “belated” or “backward” races failing to develop as rapidly as “civilized” ones.27
Joyce threads racializing markers throughout the social rituals of “After the Race” so that the epiphanic sting of belatedness becomes more than a reflection of Jimmy’s self-deception. It becomes the collective byproduct of imperial rule, rather than the justification for it, and it removes the overeager identification with ruling powers as a solution to the paralysis of underdevelopment. Rather than reclaim or transvalue the racial negativity ascribed to Irishness or Hungarianness, Joyce’s Hungarian parallel confronts asymmetries of power by drawing Villona and Jimmy into humiliating kinship with one other. Villona is the bearer of a debasing truth—the vessel and vassal of racial conscience that renews the gentleman Jimmy’s own buried sense of colonial marginality in a dysphoric way. There is harshness, even cruelty, to this final inverted tableau of international solidarity in which no one stands on equal ground, but Joyce’s epiphanies are not without care or collective purpose. They move to decolonize consciousness by turning characters’ thwarted aspirations into chimeras to be felt and analyzed by readers.
To experience a chimera in Dubliners is to come face-to-face with the most familiar definition of the term as a misguided and hopeless illusion. It is not surprising that Joyce’s early stories drew angry letters from readers of the United Irishman and that his collection Dubliners would later draw the ire of censors. Yet, for Joyce, the desolation of the chimera was always half the story; the rejuvenation to which it would lead was the occulted other half. To be exposed to chimeras in fiction through formal devices such as the epiphany was to take the first step toward liberation from self-deception in life. This, anyway, was the rationale Joyce gave his publisher Grant Richards when he was asked to remove two stories (“An Encounter” and “Two Gallants”) from Dubliners in response to censors’ identification of morally objectionable material:
If I eliminate them what becomes of the chapter of the moral history of my country? I fight to retain them because I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country. Reflect for a moment on the history of the literature of Ireland as it stands at present written in the English language before you condemn this genial illusion of mine which, after all, has at least served me in the office of a candlestick during the writing of the book.28
(Emphasis mine)
For Joyce, writing fiction was a way of contributing to the “spiritual liberation of [his] country,” a solitary artistic project, as he conceived it, but one with undoubtedly social ends. His contribution to Irish liberation was conditioned by his fiction’s quarrel with the concerted production of a national literature that would affirm the self-image of the multitude and hence deny them the painful but necessary encounter with literature as a revelatory form of reflection. Writing about Irish people from outside cultural nationalism (in an affective and not just geographic sense) gave Joyce the “genial illusion” that we are used to calling modernist autonomy but that may be more specifically theorized, via Walter Benjamin as a mediated solidarity. In Joyce’s formulation, autonomy is more than an expression of individualist self-quartering; it is a sustaining principle of asymmetry that reflects upon the special skills of the artist, and the place they afford him within the undeniable hierarchies of society.
As Benjamin wrote in the context of class, the bourgeois artist’s background, education, and technical skill furnish him with the “privilege of culture” and “makes him solidary with it [the bourgeois class].”29 Writing in the context of the nation, Joyce’s declaration of autonomy from Ireland does not deny that he is solidary with it, in the sense of being yoked to it by virtue of his formation. But, like Benjamin’s imagined author, who must betray his class despite being solidary with it, Joyce must betray the guiding institutions of the nation (“the nets of nationality, language, and religion,” as it is stated in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in order to commit himself to spiritually liberating his country from them.30 That his artistic endeavors might induce social transformation was the enabling chimera under which Joyce labored—an illusion that he recognizes and defends as such. There is certainly irony in the fact that Joyce wishes to preserve his own genial illusions while puncturing those of his imagined readership, but at the heart of Joyce’s fiction is the conviction that one must learn to discriminate between enabling and disabling chimeras. The demand for such judgment, and the cultivation of the reader’s faculties of judgment, is at stake when he seeks convergence between Dubliners, which he subjectively calls his own “moral history,” and the actual, presumably objective “moral history of my country,” which he laments is lost beneath censorship.
To call Dubliners “my chapter of moral history” is to assert that modernist autonomy enfolds back into a project of collective self-knowledge—one that is achieved through a heretical kind of spiritual counsel and a mediated form of solidarity that reflect on the process of forging and forgoing bonds. This process is not always a pleasant one in Dubliners, whose epiphanies crystallize social bonds variously as constraints that cannot be overcome (as, for example, in “Eveline” and “A Little Cloud,” where the protagonists cannot abandon family for new prospects) or as support systems that prove insufficient, as in “After the Race.” The dysphoric epiphanies that punctuate Dubliners are rooted in tactics of what David Kurnick calls “social exposure” similar to those in the early sketches that Joyce collected under the title Epiphanies. Starting with these sketches, Kurnick identifies a “shaming impulse” within the arc of Joyce’s oeuvre that acknowledges the frankly negative and even degrading character of the illuminating device.31 Overcoming self-deception through the epiphany required Joyce to be not only the angel of revelation but also an artist of betrayal—one who catches Dubliners out at moments of weakness and failure and makes examples of their chimeras.
The epiphanies in Dubliners, to draw on an idea from Ernst Bloch, disappoint hope, but the chimeras they yield are key to their spiritually secular counsel.32 They sacralize profane material rather than purifying it through aesthetic form. Recent reinterpretations of the Joycean epiphany through the lens of colonial modernity have questioned the materialism–spiritualism dichotomy animating its theorization. Accordingly, they have moved away from treating the epiphany as a device that, in Seamus Deane’s words, transforms “something solid into something spectral.”33 Saikat Majumdar would instead have us see how the epiphany derives radiance from ordinary objects, phrases, or gestures by accentuating rather than erasing their banality. Encoding the epiphany with the resistance of banal materials of the world to the grand form of art, Majumdar identifies in Joyce’s aesthetics a critical refusal to replicate in literature the “epistemological dominance” of imperial historicisms.34
I would add that, for Joyce’s fiction to rise to the status of moral history, it also would have to be epistemologically decolonizing in the sense of refusing to produce a transactional portrait of Ireland—a portrait that could be exchanged with other national portraits as proof of Ireland’s equivalent cultural capital. This is why Joyce’s modernist category of moral history is in so much tension with the revival category of national literature, though both can be regarded as anticolonial. In operating according to the logic of parallelism, revivalism imagined Irish culture as unique, but, in doing so, also made it fungible within the international arena (hurling for hockey; kilts for trousers). Joyce, in dredging up the paralyzing effects of colonialism throughout Dubliners, disconnects from such principles of equivalence by connecting the epiphany with unabstracted materiality. His stories “epiphanize” the material conditions of colonialism not to spiritualize them away but to come as close as possible to turning them into art objects that exude the decomposition of the colony. As Joyce writes to Richards, “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories.”35
David Lloyd has noted how the “odor” of epiphanies in Dubliners contrasts with the “aura” retained by Stephen’s theory of the epiphany in Stephen Hero. That theory, says Lloyd, advanced the symbolic character of the epiphany by treating it as the moment in which the particular event or object undergoes a transubstantiation into “an illumination of the transcendent.” The epiphanies of Dubliners, however, reflect not so much a transubstantiation as an “internal intensification” of the moment, one that becomes so powerfully set off from its surroundings that it forsakes the symbolic terrain of embodiment for the metonymic one of substitution. The metonymic character of such epiphanies prevents quidditas (the essential “whatness” of the thing brought forth) from becoming the auratic symbol of something other than itself and thus make the epiphany inert for what Lloyd calls “a nationalist aesthetics with its emphasis on the representative function of the symbol.”36 Instead, in turning inward (and I would argue downward toward chimeras rather than upward toward transcendence), the epiphany releases quidditas as an odorous metonym more akin to the once essential, still-nourishing waste material of afterbirth than to the radiant promise of an afterlife in heaven or the nation’s memory.
Supplementing Lloyd’s distinction between aura and odor with the distinction between afterbirth and afterlife calls attention to the temporalities at work in Joyce’s epiphanic chimeras. These temporalities compel us to revisit the causes and effects of Dublin’s infamous paralysis. Caused not by the stopping of time in the colony but by the splitting of it into metropolitan speed and colonial slowness, paralysis inheres in the smoothness of imperial wealth extraction and in the consequent steadiness of the colony’s decay. This devastating structural relation manifests itself affectively in the epiphanic chimera when Joyce’s protagonists suddenly realize that they cannot but be too slow.
This is the paralytic experience of Jimmy Doyle, Eveline, Little Chandler, and the other Dubliners who populate Joyce’s collection. It is apparent in the first-person narrative of “Araby,” when the young boy overstays the bazaar’s hours to give the illusion of purchasing power—an illusion that takes shape through “lingering” and ultimately fails; in “Eveline,” where Eveline’s countenance becomes ghostly and stony at once (“her white face…passive…gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition”); and even in “Clay,” where partygoers avoid explaining to Maria the symbolic implications of her blindfolded choice (that is, that clay equals death) but the forgotten verse of her song, “I Dream that I Dwelt,” imparts a latent knowledge of mortality.37 Even if Maria’s conscious realization remains in doubt, her musical repetition of the song’s first verse performs its own realization of paralysis.
Although the memorialization of such failures to progress is not without the shaming impulses of social exposure, it also can be seen as writing the debilitating effects of colonialism on the body. The grotesquerie of Joyce’s characters registers the bodily refusal that precedes political agency and that would become pathologized as the consolidation of national consciousness supplanted less instrumental forms of resistance. To liberate his country spiritually, Joyce needed to preserve that defective material as part of what Stephen Dedalus would call “the uncreated conscience” of his race.38
In turning away from sanctioned forms of oppositional expression such as parallelism, Joyce’s fiction consequently awakens solidarity with those forms of bodily refusal that emerge as waste material in the eyes of an increasingly politicized race. They are the race’s afterbirth, revealed in their literary solidity to have been sources of nourishment all along. More than symptoms of colonial pathology, Joyce’s chimeric epiphanies mobilize immobilization by orienting readers to various kinds of belatedness and slowed time. They take his characters’ inner protests (the quidditas of colonial paralysis) as far they can go without converting them into triumphal energy. Such restraint is an aesthetic choice, but it also is a political one because it stops shorts of guaranteeing the social renewal that revivalism promised and that even Joyce himself labored under as a “genial illusion.”
Lacking such illusions, Dubliners can only solicit us to keep better track of time ourselves, to recognize the role it plays in distinguishing races and pitting nations against one another. Sotto voce, the collection asks us to be privy to how anticolonial resistance begins before national consciousness is tasked with setting the terms of political agency and freedom. Such recognition involves trading proud national parallelisms for painful literary ones that dwell in feelings of inequality, paralysis, and shameful exposure. In opposing his asymmetrical internationalism to revivalist internationalism, Joyce suggests that purveying dreams of a glorious past and buoyant future, however emboldening and politically necessary, is not enough. One also must analyze the quiet chimeras of everyday life—the fantasies that come to nothing (“Araby” and “A Little Cloud”), the cravings that produce profligacy and embarrassment (“After the Race” and “Clay”), the reasonable ambitions upon which no action can be taken (“Eveline”). These unremarkable defeats, in true chiaroscuro, bring out the half-light of day in the colony where spiritual liberation is irreducible to the achievement of national sovereignty and international fellowship, if also unimaginable without them.
IMBALANCING ACTS
The self-deceptions and attenuated solidarities of Dubliners, particularly those of “After the Race,” alert us to several contradictions animating the homosocial and political landscape of Ulysses: how the desire for group acceptance crosses with the suspicion of group solidarity; how displays of gentility are often enabled by conditions of humiliation and hostility; and how individual gestures of camaraderie, animosity, and exclusion become entangled in collective rituals of national definition and international relation. Such contradictions unfold across many episodes. We see them in “Telemachus,” when Haines (the English guest who overstays his welcome) imagines collecting Stephen’s witticisms into a book of sayings and Stephen wonders whether he will profit from it or become another casualty of colonial wealth extraction. In “Hades,” Martin Cunningham excludes Bloom from commiseration about personal debt and moneylending because of Bloom’s Jewish lineage, leading Bloom to tell an anti-Semitic story (“an awfully good one”) to assert his Irish credentials. In “Scylla and Charybdis,” there is even a subtle allusion to Joyce’s disputes with revival writers John Eglinton, who in real life declined to publish Portrait, and George William Russell, who in the novel leaves Stephen out of an anthology of young Irish poets. Upon being so excluded, Stephen is described as “nookshotten,” a vernacular English word describing an object or place of irregular form, full of angles, corners, or projections.39 To be pushed outside the acceptable parameters of Irish literature, the word suggests, is to be pushed into the decomposed zone beyond the nation’s harmoniously imagined form.
Stephen’s nookshotten state alludes to Joyce’s own insecurity at being distanced from Irish cultural movements and metafictionally names the aesthetic path he took to harnessing that insecurity, especially in the “monster-novel” Ulysses.40 The simmering tensions of these early episodes boil over in “Cyclops,” where matters of racial difference and national belonging, trespassing and territorialism, become focal points of the work. They occasion Joyce’s meditation on linguistic and social patterns of collective self-deception and continue to expose the limits of revivalism’s national parallelism as a strategy for collective awakening.
“Cyclops” revisits The Resurrection of Hungary, but from a different vantage point than that of Stephen Hero. Whereas Stephen Hero, in progress during the publication of Griffith’s pamphlet, laments the influence of its “haphazard” analogies over the public, “Cyclops,” drafted in 1919, treats the pamphlet by Sinn Féin’s founder as a joke dismissed by its target audience, including the citizen, a Sinn Féiner himself. Andrew Gibson suggests that the failed reception of Resurrection of Hungary in “Cyclops” reflects Joyce’s own derision for the work, but it seems equally plausible that Joyce’s later allusion would embed the more strident attitudes of those who, post–Easter Rising and the founding of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, had moved so far beyond the Hungarian parallel as to find it suspicious.41 As Gibson rightly argues, Griffith’s rhetorical techniques in Resurrection of Hungary resembled those of the revivalists in that he oversimplified situations by omitting inconvenient facts; minimized distinctions of class, party, and religion within Ireland; and generally stressed “unity rather than conflict and division.”42
Ironically, in smoothing over the conflicts of Ireland’s internal heterogeneity in the name of political unity, Griffith’s Resurrection created the conditions by which its own invocation of Hungary, a foreign country, connoted a threat to Irish unity and autarkic self-definition. At least, this is how Joyce’s satire shows the pamphlet backfiring when the patrons of Barney Kiernan’s tavern declare it to be the miscegenated brainchild of Griffith and the Hungarian-Jewish Bloom:
—He’s a perverted Jew, says Martin [Cunningham], from a place in Hungary and it was he drew up all the plans [for Sinn Féin] according to the Hungarian system. We know that in the castle.
—Isn’t he a cousin of Bloom the dentist? says Jack Power.
—Not at all, says Martin. Only namesakes. His name was Virag, the father’s name that poisoned himself. He changed it by deedpoll, the father did.43
To assume that someone of Hungarian origin had to be responsible for the Hungarian parallel is to have already imbibed the logic of autochthony Griffith deploys in the pamphlet. Although Griffith drew Irish nationalism into conversation and comparison with other anticolonial movements, his comparative strategies reinforced the link between racial continuity and national revival, couched in terms of resurrection—the renewal of the already latent rather than the introduction of an outside presence. Cunningham reiterates that linkage to discredit the Irishness of Griffith’s pamphlet by attributing it to Bloom, a man who, despite his legally acquired name and Protestant mother, is regarded as having no direct filiation with Ireland.
Joyce’s recontextualization of The Resurrection of Hungary suggests that Griffith’s Hungary provided a revolutionary political model for Ireland only by perpetuating the racially conservative image of discrete peoples achieving their own destinies in isolation from one another—a sentiment on full display at the tavern. In the episode, however, Joyce explodes such racialized unanimity by again turning to the grotesque, specifically to the formally discombobulating “technics” that he calls “gigantism” in the Gilbert schema and “alternating asymmetry” in the Linati schema. Both stylistic principles emphasize incongruity as a way of skewering the self-deceiving discourses informing pub paranoia, foremost among them revivalism’s triumphal reconstruction of Ireland’s past.
In a less-pointedly antirevival manner, though, this episode also divulges the stake all societies have in finding ways to ignore the self-serving nature of their communal narratives—whether through historical simplification or mythic aggrandizement. Gigantism, in particular, reflects Joyce’s stylistic parody of inflated rhetoric, which goes beyond wickedly mimicking specific revivalist writers to addressing the everyday genres of public writing that collectively comprise the “anonymous voice” of “Irish consciousness.”44 Karen Lawrence has read this anonymous voice in terms of Barthesian myths that codify the culture’s received norms. Joyce’s parody reveals rather than perpetuates that codification, and in doing so, clarifies the vast scale and discursive diversity through which such a collective voice operates. His concerted effort to cluster parodies of revivalism (a conscious project of national self-fashioning) with parodies of politically unmotivated discourse (expressions of Dublin’s anonymous voice) contextualizes revival styles within the larger milieu that permitted their flourishing. The effect is a wide-ranging critique of the hypocrisy and evasions of public language culture as it inflects and ironizes the arguments among Bloom, the citizen, and others at the tavern about national belonging and historical injustice.
Alternating asymmetry, the second technique and the eponymous one for the present chapter, calls attention to the overall pattern of the episode, which treats the reader to abrupt and inane discrepancies of style as a way of stymying the cultural streamlining necessary to proceed with national parallelism as a mode of self-defining/deceiving comparison. As mentioned, for such parallelism to work, one must view nations as internally homogeneous and discrete social units whose unique identities, oddly enough, derive from their symmetries with other nations. In other words, cultural distinctiveness derives from a nation’s ability to generate a set of one-to-one correspondences (tit for tat) with the cultural and political spheres of other nations.
In “Cyclops,” alternating asymmetry makes such correspondence impossible by endlessly diversifying the discursive modes available to the writing of culture. Such proliferation works against transforming cultural practices into the countable attributes of a nation, and thus reveals the impoverishment of parallelism’s positivist logic. Similar to the more famous Joycean strategy of parallax, alternating asymmetry draws attention to the role of perception in mediating the external reality of events. But whereas parallax requires a common ground for measuring perception (the prism of character, for example, as we compare Bloom’s, Stephen’s, and Molly’s versions of events), asymmetry withdraws that ground. Instead, it alternates among incompatible orders of storytelling—most identifiably, between the nameless narrator’s first-person account and the discontinuous parodies of public writing—while allowing those orders to signify upon one another in ways that violate the coherence of any single unit of narration. In other words, alternating asymmetry is Joyce’s formal solution to rendering the internal incommensurability of Ireland’s private citizens and public cultures (street, folk, legal, journalistic, to name a few). Rather than resolve such incommensurability into the common ground of a national culture, he altogether undoes the division between figure and ground.
This is why labeling the parodies as interpolations or interruptions, which is common in criticism on the episode, is problematic. It unwittingly instantiates a narrative hierarchy that privileges the anonymous speaker’s narration as the continuous thread of the episode, with the parodies modifying and ornamenting it.45 Such an account mischaracterizes the major stylistic accomplishment of the episode, which is to create a single differential field through which the narrative, like an alternating electrical current, generates energy by reversing directions at short intervals.
Joyce’s retraction of a consistent stylistic or temporal ground in “Cyclops” allows him to compare discursive registers without making them equivalent or discrete. He thus literarily counteracts the overstated alignments and divisions of national parallelism as he saw them performed in revivalist historiography’s overlap with everyday patriotic sentiment. The tendency of parallelism to bring disparate groups or historical situations into excessive modularity is precisely what Joyce condemns through his mockery of certain characters, such as the citizen, who imagine Ireland going head to head with any country in the world: “We’ll put force against force,” he declares, against any nation (most immediately England) that threatens Ireland’s return to its former glory (Ulysses, 270). The citizen notably has a penchant for speaking in symmetries and tautologies, particularly when sidestepping requests for further explanation or clarification. Take the following exchange:
—Pity about her, says the citizen. Or any other woman marries a half and half.
—How half and half? says Bloom. Do you mean he…
—Half and half I mean, says the citizen. A fellow that’s neither fish nor flesh.
—Nor good red herring, says Joe.
—That what’s I mean, says the citizen.
(263)
The citizen’s speech patterns reproduce a binary evenness but obstruct reasonable interrogation. He initially repeats his exact words (“Half and half I mean”) in response to Bloom’s desire for clarification (“How half and half?”). He then repeats the same idea in different words while retaining the grammatical structure of equivalence in his speech (“neither fish nor flesh”). The citizen is suspicious of those who violate categorization, yet he is incapable of explaining why; his repetitions are both acts of self-confirmation (“that what’s I mean”) and gestures of exclusion. Joe, who completes the citizen’s idiom, reinforces their bond through shared linguistic reference, while Bloom, not already in the know, remains perpetually outside the solidarity of the pub.
The citizen prefers the stability of balanced phrases to the instabilities that questioning categories of collective identity might produce. An aversion to such reflection and analysis is a recurring theme in the symbolically named “Cyclops” and is expressed through motifs of blindness, such as the anonymous narrator’s near eye-gouging at the start of the chapter, and his inability to find the pub’s exit later. The pub-goers repeatedly express impatience with Bloom’s interest in causalities and complexities, especially when they threaten the pride to be gained from circulating the patriotic mythos of resistance martyr Joe Brady’s defiant erection. Bloom’s pedantry, additionally, constitutes its own form of social blindness, as does his refusal to drink or treat others to drinks. His erudite but moralistic citation of the biblical phrase “Some people can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own” is directed at J. J. Molloy and the citizen, yet it could reasonably be said to include himself.46 The biblical allusion’s growing applicability throughout the episode suggests that self-deception is a collective attribute of the pub and that any hope of overcoming it lies not in taking sides but in developing new arrangements.
This is what Joyce does in “Cyclops” when he manipulates literary forms of balance and imbalance to analyze solidarity rather than profess it. He understands solidarity’s political potential to be double-edged, especially when imagining a national community means misguiding individuals within it. He thus assumes the role of the artist in mediated solidarity with a people by actually mediating solidarity—putting the trade-offs of politicians and partisans on display and deriving truths that would otherwise go unobserved. His parodies skewer a host of self-serving, shallow, and even inadvertently cruel assertions of friendship and cooperation across different occasions. He mocks revivalism’s revisionist internationalism when he claims a variety of world figures (for example, Dante, Shakespeare, Herodotus, and the Buddha) as part of a catalog of Irish heroes (Ulysses, 244). He redirects the citizen’s proportionate rallying cry of “Sinn Fein amhain! The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us” (251) toward a disproportionate scene of thousands gathered to watch the execution of a single man.
Joyce also lampoons the simultaneously pompous and fawning style in which newspapers covered public events, such as the official visit of a “picturesque foreign delegation” by the name of Friends of the Emerald Isle, aka F.O.T.E.I. Joyce deflates the affair by encrypting bawdy puns into delegation members’ names and depicting them acting like buffoons at ceremonial occasions. Such obvious bathos embeds more subtle jabs at the cursory nature of official sympathy: “All the delegates without exception expressed themselves in the strongest possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless barbarity which they had been called upon to witness” (252). Here, Joyce portrays international solidarity as little more than an empty rhetorical gesture in which “nameless” barbarities are habitually decried but rarely interrogated. Bearing witness to such hollow professions of solidarity becomes Joyce’s way of evidencing the need for more acute forms of transnational understanding. His debasing parodies capture the abuse of demonstrative emotion in expressions of sympathy and moral outrage, and he shows these to be a woefully insufficient substitute for historical scrutiny and thoughtful dissent.
Instead of smoothing over serious differences in the name of political unity, Joyce uses the acrimonious atmosphere and asymmetrical form of “Cyclops” to air them. This is nowhere more evident than in the escalating conflict between the citizen and Bloom, who, as Enda Duffy has argued, are structurally figured as the episode’s dual and dueling antagonists.47 However, whereas Duffy’s argument restricts the relationship between the citizen and Bloom to an Irish context in which both embody colonial subjectivities—the resistant ire of Caliban and the respectable civility of Ariel, respectively—my argument treats their head-to-head matchup as bringing Irish colonial subjectivity into relief through comparison with other sites of racial oppression not entirely explained by the representational regime of the British Empire. This comparison does not arise from the opposition of the citizen’s and Bloom’s own positions on the subject of Irish nationhood, but rather from their apposition or mutual modification of one another’s positions.
David Kazanjian, building on the work of Fred Moten, has theorized apposition from its grammatical roots in equivalence to its rhetorical effect as a modulating device that insinuates tension into comparisons that insinuate equivalence. Grammatically, apposition refers to noun phrases that accrete information but share the same referent and syntactical relationship to the words around them. For example, in the sentence, “My friend James Joyce the writer loves puns,” the noun phrases “friend,” “James Joyce,” and “the writer” are all in apposition because they modify one another and are syntactically parallel. Yet Kazanjian suggests that, rhetorically, the substitution of apposition for stabilizing connectors such as linking verbs or relative pronouns (in other words, “My friend James Joyce is the writer who loves puns”) creates “a potential break or rupture between the linked terms, an uncoordinated gap” by which ambiguities of emphasis and contingencies of meaning can emerge.48 In other words, the convergences of apposition do not lock terms down but open them up to paths of divergence.
When Joyce brings the citizen and Bloom into dialogue, he not only is staging a disputatious argument but also is creating opportunities for both characters to appose one another—to parallel, interrupt, and recontextualize one another’s claims. The effect might seem cacophonous, but an important echo ripples through the latter half of the episode. It serves to link the Irish and Jewish diasporas without claiming a neat parallel or equivalence between them, thus rearticulating the Irish–Jewish parallel of anticolonial Irish discourse, but in a less complimentary register. The first articulation of diasporic mourning is that of the citizen, who laments, “Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes?” (Ulysses, 267). Although the citizen professes no kinship with the Jews, his language suggests that he cannot help but make sense of the Irish experience of forced emigration by appealing to the narrative of Jewish forced emigration from ancient Israel after the Assyrian conquest. Joyce’s sentence structure, which syntactically dislocates the Jewish allusion “our lost tribes” from “our missing twenty millions of Irish,” captures both the conscious severance of which the citizen speaks and the unconscious similarity that Irish and Jewish self-definitions assume, once displacement becomes central to both their histories. The citizen’s unwitting imbrications of the Irish and the Israelites continue when he declares that “those who came to the land of the free remember the land of bondage” (270). Here, “the land of bondage” blends the British Empire with Egypt, as again the language through which the citizen conveys his sentiments ripples beyond them.49
The citizen’s xenophobic nationalism lays the groundwork for Bloom’s equally problematic universalism, in which he flattens out disparate histories of persecution into a kind of universal law of civilization (“Perpetuating national hatred among nations”). While their opposing philosophies take center stage in a pub debate, the adulterations and redundancies of their apposing speech arguably adds some substance to Bloom’s infamously vacuous definition of a nation as “the same people living in the same place…. Or also living in different places” (Ulysses, 271–272). Although Bloom manages to say very little with this definition, in the context of the conversation, the repetition and oscillation over place further crosshatch the diasporic scattering of the Jews and the Irish begun by the citizen’s speech patterns. In other words, Joyce’s rhetorical flourishes, by undermining his characters, also prevent them from just recapitulating the logic of national parallels and universal histories. Rather, their speech reminds us how specific histories intersect and how that might lead actual people to intersect, in a very concrete sense, in a fight over politics at Kiernan’s tavern:
—And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant.
Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.
—Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction off in Morocco like slaves or cattle.
—Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.
—I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.
(273)
Given the progression of this passage, it is easy to think that Bloom’s anger is intense, but primarily vicarious, as he bears witness to the distant suffering of his fellows. However, Bloom’s insistence on the presentness of the persecution hints at a more immediate context—the pub itself, in which he has been repeatedly subjected to anti-Semitic barbs and in which his expression of Jewish solidarity is itself an agitated displacement of his previously uncountenanced Irish solidarity. The redundancy of “This very moment. This very instant…this very moment” ties near and far sites of Jewish persecution together to establish a diasporic meanwhile that traverses the diasporic meanwhile of the citizen’s “greater Ireland beyond the sea” (270).
Although the patrons refuse to entertain the possibility that the Irish and the Jews are overlapping peoples, it is the unexpected resonance between the citizen’s and Bloom’s mourning of their missing tribes that allows Joyce to reveal the pub as much more than a place of convivial solidarity or bullying consensus, depending on your cast of mind. It is a place of circulating claims, where feelings might be shared and yet certain kinds of shared feeling go unacknowledged because they do not reproduce the polarities of distinct national and racial identities. The airing of these feelings through apposition furnishes the uneven ground upon which an inchoate Irish–Jewish solidarity might be founded, though Joyce forecloses such hope with the chapter’s escalating violence and juvenile race-baiting (evidenced through citizen’s anti-Semitic epithets and Bloom’s pro-Semitic taunts).
Nonetheless, as with the chimeras of Dubliners, the impossibility of a détente between Bloom and the citizen does not invalidate the possibility that Joyce’s unsparing displays of fractiousness might function as an antidote to the characters’ self-deception or to the parodies’ spurious displays of gentility and grandeur. By setting Bloom and the citizen up as antagonists, Joyce makes members of different racial groups palpably a part of the same time and the same place—they share a historically specific present, which revival-style parallels previously had denied to those peoples whose narratives were appropriated to illustrate the Irish plight. Joyce trades a state-centered view of international solidarity, with all its inflated pageantry, for a street-centered view of the local animosities that were, at best, unaddressed and, at worst, fomented by the impulse to claim likeness too quickly. Such a strategy of debasement exposes the hostilities that solidarity conceals, not in order to humiliate a fledgling Irish nation but to regenerate it through a sharp portrait of what it has concealed from itself.
George Bernard Shaw recognized unflinching portraiture and bitter revelation as defining features of Ulysses. Though he was not exactly an admirer of the Joycean aesthetic project, he understood its strategies of social reckoning and did not mince words in describing them. In a letter to Sylvia Beach, he wrote:
I have read several fragments of Ulysses in its serial form. It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity. To you possibly Ulysses may appeal as art; you are probably (you see I don’t know you) a young barbarian beglamoured by the excitements and enthusiasms that art stirs up in passionate material; but to me it is all hideously real: I have walked those streets and known those shops and have heard and taken part in those conversations…. It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful.50
For Shaw, there is a stark line between appealing art and the “revolting record” of Dublin that Ulysses provides. Indeed, it seems as though Shaw refuses to see art in the “hideously real,” despite acknowledging the “literary genius” required to evoke it. Shaw is right about Joyce’s penchant for confrontation, but he is wrong to characterize him as a joyless disciplinarian of “the human subject.” Joycean obscenity and derision lampoon social pieties more than they enforce them. Unable to look fondly upon the “foul mouthed foul minded,” Shaw sees only rebuke in Ulysses, but Joyce clearly derives humor, sensitivity, and pathos from the cruelty of his characters’ many failed social interactions.
This is evident in the conclusion to “Cyclops,” when Bloom, fleeing from the escalating threat of physical violence, ascends to “the glory of the brightness…like a shot off a shovel” (Ulysses, 282). The prospect that “even Him, ben Bloom Elijah” could rise above the melee beneath is emotionally as well as literally uplifting. Readers experience Bloom’s escape, however silly, as a triumph, and yet, in sharing Bloom’s triumph, we cannot quite make peace with its terms. This is not only because Bloom transcends conflict in ridiculous fashion; it is because the conflict at the heart of the episode remains unreconciled. Suspicion and misunderstanding among individuals devolves into explicit hatred between groups. To think that Bloom’s ascension could solve the problems that “Cyclops” raises is wishful thinking at best.
The chimeric ending to “Cyclops” is both comic and tragic; it pursues transcendence while poking fun at it and leaves unanswered the violence in its wake. Such irresolution, though, is not entirely obscure. The incongruities of “Cyclops” resurface in subsequent episodes and cast light upon the major failed friendship of the book—between Bloom and Stephen. “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” join Bloom and Stephen in symbolic, even cosmic, filiation; however, they mar that long-awaited filiation with scenes of social awkwardness and antagonism. Miscommunication, condescension, boredom, and anti-Semitic insult punctuate Bloom and Stephen’s encounter. Their relationship (though not nearly as hostile as that of Bloom and the citizen) thus reprises some of the social and moral blindness of “Cyclops.”
“Eumaeus” features Bloom at his most pedantic and socially obtuse as he continually makes overtures to a demonstrably recalcitrant Stephen. The episode revisits the violence at Barney Kiernan’s pub as Bloom remembers his fight with the citizen and his declaration, in response to the anti-Semitic remarks hurled against him, that Christ was a Jew. Bloom tells Stephen this story to advertise his own cool forbearance, but the episode’s description of him reveals an aching vulnerability: “He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride…with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to glean in a kind of way that it wasn’t all exactly” (Ulysses, 525).
What the infelicitous narrative voice tropes here is “the meaningful glance,” the look that expresses Bloom’s need for Stephen’s friendship. Unfortunately, Stephen remains “noncommittal,” withholding the recognition and consensus for which Bloom yearns. As Margot Norris has argued, Bloom chooses Stephen as his only confidante, recounting the story of his persecution to him in “Eumaeus” while omitting it in his nighttime conversation with Molly in “Ithaca.” Nonetheless, as Norris rightly points out, the much-anticipated encounter of “Eumaeus” culminates in the failure of reciprocity between the two men: the conversation between Stephen and Bloom “has clearly been asymmetrical with Stephen barely listening and consequently unresponsive.”51 The memory of the altercation in “Cyclops” serves to deflate readers’ hopes that the climactic meeting of Bloom and Stephen will be a communion of souls. Instead of showing us the mutuality of friendship, Joyce gives us the asymmetry of Bloom’s overeagerness and Stephen’s aloofness.
As “Eumaeus” gives way to “Ithaca,” Bloom’s longing for mutuality permeates the episode’s literary form and seems to become the driving wish of the episode itself. The opening to “Ithaca” presents Bloom and Stephen as a duumvirate, an alliance of two people sharing power and authority equally. The balance of this relation is compounded by the catechistic form of the episode, with its neat pairings of questions and answers. “Ithaca,” in contradistinction to “Cyclops,” emphasizes symmetry over asymmetry, correspondence over deviation, consummation over irresolution. The Linati schema lists its technics as “dialogue, pacified style, fusion,” but the pacified style of “Ithaca” tries to engineer a friendship where a foundation for it does not really exist. Bloom’s and Stephen’s pas de deux is summarily halted by Stephen’s singing of the anti-Semitic ballad “Little Harry Hughes.” Not only is the song, in which a Jewish girl beheads a Christian boy, an abuse of Bloom’s hospitality, but also its singing interrupts the generous exchange of Irish and Hebrew lessons that leads up to it. Just as visions of Irish and Jewish diaspora come together only to drive individuals apart in “Cyclops,” the brief linguistic accord of “Ithaca” conjures a Hebraic–Hibernian bond only to dismiss it. When Stephen’s chant of “Little Harry Hughes” meets Bloom’s chant of the Hebrew anthem “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”), the catechistic structure of “Ithaca” becomes catechrestic. Stephen responds to Bloom’s call improperly. In place of a song of solidarity, he substitutes one of unexpected and disturbing cruelty. This turn of events is profoundly unsentimental and illustrates Joyce’s refusal of filial unification despite the symbolic design of Ulysses.
Homosocial hostilities, broken bonds, and derailed friendships lie at the core of Ulysses. They tie personal wounds to collective ones and are the primary motifs through which Joyce expresses his distrust of solidarity’s healing powers. “Cyclops” is well known as the episode in which Joyce criticizes the exclusivist construction of national bonds, but it is also the episode in which he rejects the overweening pretensions of the “European family” and “universal love” (Ulysses, 267, 273). Such anticommunitarianism, seemingly as politically inert as the barely articulated protests punctuating Dubliners, nonetheless has a role to play in the cultivation of modernist internationalism—if not always as a mode of cooperation, then as a mode of inquiry into the available vocabularies of political agency and self-assertion.
As Joyce sought to achieve a “just sense of comparison” in his fiction, he arrived at alternating strategies of asymmetry that splintered and reaggregated the kinds of conflict in which Irish people were implicated. He also diversified the language of opposition available to them. His formal satire diminishes the uplifting claims of national parallelism, but the force of his dark comedy and light tragedy is far from nihilistic. It stems from the serious conviction that supplying the social coherence one claims to rediscover bypasses the difficult confrontations necessary for mediating as well as professing solidarity with others.
Joyce’s scrutiny of nationalist and internationalist myths and his exacting attention to the forms of self-deception and self-knowledge they produce are of enduring value to the work of dissecting narratives of political unification. Such narratives prioritize the development of common ground, either through the invention of tradition, civilizational principles, or racialized continuity, in order to unite disparate peoples in a common cause. Nonetheless, a common cause does not always entail common sacrifice or common profit, nor does it guarantee similar rates of advancement to those who pledge themselves to it. The odd angles of Joyce’s “nookshotten” fiction—the unequal foils, chimeric epiphanies, tropes of disproportion, and appositional arrangements—lend comparative perspective to the residual inequalities and exclusions haunting nationalist and transnationalist projects of unification, from postcolonial Ireland to the new Europe. Their mix of insurgent emotion and meticulous questioning anticipates the work of later writers, such as Michael Ondaatje and Zadie Smith, whose own chimeras of form will distinguish the ambivalent ties that bind specific collectivities from the facile connectivity that marks a triumphal globalism.