Political economy, tourism, and the future of Ireland in Joyce's Ulysses.
Writing to his brother Stanislaus from Rome in November of 1906, James Joyce expressed his belief that the nascent Sinn Fein party would best advance the cause of Irish independence in the post-Parnell era.You ask me what I Would substitute f r parliamentary agitation in Ireland. I think the Sinn Fein policy would be more effective. Of course I see that its success would be to substitute Irish for English capital but no-one, I suppose, denies that capitalism is a stage of progress. The Irish proletariat has yet to be created. A feudal peasantry exists, scraping the soil but this Would with a national revival or with a definite preponderance of England surely disappear. (Selected Letters 125)
The letter registers an understanding of the centrality of economics to the so-called "Irish Question." As Dominic Manganiello argues, by endorsing Arthur Griffith's Sinn Fein movement, which sought to counter British hegemony in Ireland through the non-violent tactics of economic resistance, Jovice voices his frustration with a parliamentary party that he regarded as compromised by its connection to both Church and State (126-28). Joyce goes on to write that he would call himself a nationalist were it not for the Sinn Fein movement's support of the Irish language revival, and, distancing himself from the nationalist cause, he ironically declares himself "an exile: and prophetically, a repudiated one" (125). Joseph Valente argues that Joyce's identification of the language question as the point of rupture with Griffith's Sinn Hill program registers Joyce's ambivalence about the project of decolonization and suggests "his own place in a Symbolic order embodied in the English tongue" (66).Yet if it suggests his identification with the "Symbolic order" of England at his moment of self-exile from Ireland, Joyce's objection to reviving Irish might also be regarded as evincing a pragmatic understanding of English as the established language of economic exchange both within and beyond the British empire.
Joyce's letter to his brother, then, invites us to read his "exile" within the broader context of Irish cultural and economic conditions at the time of his departure. Indeed, the immediate cause of Joyce's leaving Ireland appears to have been the financial demands of his medical studies. Writing to Lady Gregory in November of 1902, the twenty-two year old Joyce declared his intention to leave Dublin for the Continent, and planned to fund his medical studies at the University of Paris by teaching English after the Royal College authorities refused to provide him with financial aid (Letters 8). After abandoning his medical studies, he wrote to his father hoping to land a position as a foreign correspondent for the Irish Times. Joyce's leaving Ireland thus markedly contrasts with Stephen Dedalus's idealistic view of his exile in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce's own state when leaving Ireland is more aptly expressed in Stephen's ironic mention in his diary of the "new secondhand clothes" (221-22) packed by his mother. New only in the sense that they are unknown, the clothes serve as a metonym for the young Irish artist's impoverished inheritance and figure the tenuousness of his project of artistic self-fashioning.
"On the Rocks" in Ulysses
Joyce's advocacy for Sinn Fein in his letter to his brother calls attention to the absence of an economic base in Edwardian Ireland upon which an independent economy might have been built. Large working-class populations existed in the Ireland of Joyce's day only in the industrialized cities of the North, and, as F. S. Lyons has suggested, cities such as Belfast had more in common with Liverpool or Glasgow in their economic integration with the British economy than with the rest of Ireland (Lyons 7).
In Ulysses the economic hegemony of Northern Ireland is personified by the authoritarian Mr. Deasy, the Ulsterman who tells Stephen that "Money is power" and who brandishes a savings box that organizes coins, including sovereigns that bear the image of Edward VII. These sovereigns represent the colonial power structure that had prevented most of Ireland from reaping the economic benefits of British industrialization. Stephen's thoughts about the antique coins on Deasy's sideboard encode a long history of Irish economic disenfranchisement: "On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins, base treasure of a bog and ever shall be" (2.201-202). Literally "base," minted of interior metal in Ireland under the reign of James II, the coins bore the motto "Christ in victory and in triumph" (Gifford 34), serving as an image of his divine right as Catholic sovereign during his tailed attempt at the English throne. Stephen's interspersing lines from the Gloria Patria as he contemplates Deasy's "treasure" ironically connects the "miraculous" preservation of the rare Stuart coins in an Irish bog and the persistence of the economic subjugation of the native Irish. (1) The presence of these debased coins thus tarnishes the image of the "bright and new" (2.2l7) sovereign Deasy dispenses to Stephen, a "lump" which Stephen regards as a "symbol soiled by greed and misery" (2.227-28).
The literary tropes of Ulysses often function to point to an urban populace lacking in economic opportunity. Stephen's anxiety about the ocean and drowning, for example, suggests not merely his own personal psychic turmoil regarding a "great sweet mother" (1.77-78) (as Mulligan, quoting Swinburne, calls the sea) whom he "could not save" (3.329) from cancer, but the more general economic fate of Dubliners struggling to keep their heads above water. Thus the topos of drowning returns in "Wandering Rocks" as Stephen registers his sister's desperation in trying to keep the Dedalus household afloat: "She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her" (10.875-76). Stephen's imagined inability to "save" Dilly echoes his failure to "save" in the sense used by Mr. Deasy, who accuses Stephen of profligacy: "Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger" (2.236). Internally tallying the large number of his debts, Stephen concludes that the "lump" he has been given by Mr Deasy is "useless" (2.259), suggesting the seemingly hopeless cycle of poverty in which he is trapped. Where Stephen's poverty may authenticate his status as bohemian artist, his chronic debts and inability to save can also be read as allegorizing the economic imbalances between colonial Ireland and England.
Although Leopold Bloom appears to play the role of petit bourgeois in Ulysses, a solid member of the Edwardian middle class with a healthy balance at the Ulster Bank and a [pounds sterling] 90 Canadian Government bond (17.1864), a number of moments in the text reveal that he has suffered significant financial hardship in his past. Recalled by Simon Dedalus as Bloom's time "on the rocks" (11.485) in "Sirens" and later by Bloom himself at the end of "Nausicaa," the half-repressed narrative of Bloom's impoverishment after losing his job at Hely's stationer suggests the difficulties of maintaining financial solvency in colonial Ireland. (2) Much as his past difficulties destabilize our sense of his comfortable financial position, the prospect of future prosperity is undermined by Bloom's "reduction," in "Ithaca," "by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune" (17.1933). This disturbingly detailed account of the successive stages of poverty ends with a dismal portrait of the adman in his dotage: "nadir of misery: the aged impotent disfranchised rate supported moribund lunatic pauper" (17.1946-47). (3) Although this is merely a narrative projection, it nonetheless discounts the earlier fantasies of wealth mapped onto Bloom.
If Ulysses reflects the economic marginalization of the British citizen in Ireland at the turn of the last century, it also represents hopes at the time for the pro-Irish economic agenda adopted by the Sinn Fein party. And yet, as in the previously quoted letter to his brother, Joyce registers an ambivalence about the seemingly inevitable role capitalism will play in twentieth-century Ireland. Joyce's wish for the material betterment of the Irish people is complicated by his sense that life in an industrialized and capitalized independent Ireland might be no better than under English colonial rule. With its reference to the creation of an Irish proletariat and to capitalism as a "stage in progress," the 1.906 letter reveals Joyce's attraction to socialism as a young man. He had, however, become increasingly skeptical of the kind of master narratives of historical "progress" offered by socialism (or Marxism) by the time he began work on Ulysses nearly a decade later, during a period of tumultuous and even cataclysmic historical change. Indeed, Ulysses offers skepticism about reform in both its capitalistic and socialistic guises, as in "Circe"'s comical vision of the "new Bloomsualem," the construction of which necessitates the razing of houses whose inhabitants are "lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with the letters: L. B." (15.1553-54). Recalling the vermillion mailcars emblazoned with the royal initials at the beginning of "Aeolus," the passage both registers Joyce's anti-colonialism and mocks the utopian rhetoric of "modernization" common to both socialist and capitalist ideology.
Through Bloom, Joyce personifies a dilemma confronting the theorists of an independent Ireland, namely the problem of how to enact an economically progressive program that would improve the standard of living in Ireland without seeming to "sell out" an already threatened cultural identity to the pervasive socioeconomic forces of England. Often comically; Bloom comes to embody two contrary positions within the cultural and economic matrixes of colonial Ireland. At times he represents a laudable cosmopolitanism and economic dynamism that allows Ireland to gain a degree of independence from its colonial master; elsewhere he embodies the homogenizing forces of modernity associated with the hegemony of capitalism and England. Bloonm's imaginative plans. such as running a tramline from the park gate to the quays to transport cattle for export, exemplify his entrepreneurial spirit that would displace local traditions and forge greater connections with the imperial center. Thus, for instance, the municipal funeral trans to Glasnevin cemetery Bloom envisions would bypass the traditionally circuitous route taken by funeral carriages through the center of Dublin, allowing all citizens to pay their last respects. About this route, which takes the carriage in "Hades" through Irishtown, Simon Dedalus remarks, "That's a title old custom. ... I am glad to see it has not died out" (6.36), but though he is at first hostile toward Bloom's suggestion about the trail hearse, he does acknowledge its potential value when Bloom asks: "Wouldn't it be more decent than galloping two abreast?" (6.412-14). The discussion registers the tension between ritual that expresses communal values and custom that has hardened into careless routine. Indeed, we alight suspect that Simon's ostensible respect for tradition is merely symptomatic of his sentimentalism; his care for the (lead appears to exceed that for the living, as his treatment of his daughter Dilly in "Wandering Rocks" suggests.
Representing the ritual of the central route taken by a Dublin funeral cortege, the text performs a kind of cultural conservation. Yet Ulysses eschews nostalgia for the half-vanished world it represents. Indeed, Joyce's modes often present Dublin in 1904 as a vital metropolitan center, as in the initial "headline" of "Aeolus": "IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS" (7.1). This mock-exalted style, typographically mimicking the capital importance of a newspaper headline, reflects on the paradoxical status of Dublin as a city at both the imperial center and the colonial periphery. (4) Such modes point to a peculiar kind of Irish modernisin at once hopeful about and skeptical of the forces of modernity.
In dialogical fashion, Ulysses incorporates the conflict between capital and culture in Ireland, one that remained unresolved even in the postcolonial era. As I go on to argue, Joyce recognized the particular significance of the question of Irish tourism to this conflict. The seemingly minor topos of tourism in Ulysses engages the larger themes of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and cultural and economic exchange and desire. Furthermore, aligning this topos with Bloom, the novel reveals how nationalist anxieties about capitalism are imbricated with xenophobic attitudes toward foreigners and in particular Jews. Making the hero of his modern epic not just a Jew but a highly assimilated one, Joyce ironizes the anti-Semitism of most of the novel's Irishmen and suggests that their fear and loathing of "the Jew" constitutes a projection of their own ambivalence about cultural and economic assimilation with Great Britain.
Bloom's vision of a funeral tram may be taken to reflect the capitalistic drive toward efficient systems of exchange that we see elsewhere. In the response to the question about Bloom's habitual "final meditations" (17.1769) posed by the narrator of "Ithaca," we are told:
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life." (17.1770-73)
The "efficient terms" of Bloom's dream ad represent both a loss and a gain for colonial Ireland, which had fallen victim to ostensibly efficient schemes imposed from without since the time of Jonathan Swift, but had also suffered, as Joyce's letter to his brother acknowledges, for not sufficiently modernizing beyond its agrarian economy.
Bloom's dream ad reflects on the modernism of Ulysses itself: The image of a uniquely arresting art congruous with the "velocity of modern life" evokes the symbolic and epiphanic nodes of Joyce's fictional practice, suggesting a correspondence between Bloom's modern vision and his author's. And yet "extraneous accretions" are the very substance of the expansive textual universe of Ulysses, which tends less towards efficiency than entropy, as evidenced by the increasingly drawn-out and digressive questions and answers of the novel's penultimate chapter ("Ithaca"). If the parading of literary styles in Ulysses undermines an understanding of the English literary tradition as a process of organic development, and thus represents a mode of colonial mimicry that mocks the ostensible naturalness of English literary styles, the accelerated liquidation of styles in the latter episodes of Ulysses reproduces at the level of form the "creative destruction" the economist Joseph Shumpeter famously identified as capitalism's core. In particular, the sixteenth episode, "Eumaeus," parodies the effects of capitalism on print culture, the cliched style echoes the anonymous, pseudo-authoritative voice of modern journalism. Thus the newspaper, which earlier appeared as an emblem of the imagined community of the nation--Bloom, for example, admires Arthur Griffith's approval of the masthead of the Freeman's Journal, with its "homerule sun" (4.100) rising over the Bank of Ireland, the building that once housed the Irish Parliament--comes to represent the homogenizing forces of advanced capitalism and the consumer culture it helped to foster at the beginning of the twentieth century. "It's the ads and side features sell a weekly" (7.89) Bloom thinks at the beginning of "Aeolus," the episode set in the offices of the Freeman's Journal, a copy of which Bloom in "Eumaeus" casually and lambastes for its "usual crop of nonsensical howlers and misprints" (16.1267).
"equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island"
In contrast to his fantasies of arresting ads, the expansive public works Bloom envisions seem to align him with the economic nationalism espoused by Griffith's Sinn Fein party, Which believed English colonialism could be undermined by a pacifistic strategy of economic and political resistance (Feeney 33-36). Bloom himself is reputed by John Wyse in "Cyclops" to have given Griffith the idea for Sinn Fein, a claim that the textual evidence cannot finally resolve. (5) However plausible the rumor may be, the cosmopolitan scope of Bloom's plans for Ireland subtly sets him at odds with Sinn Fein nationalists, who, despite their professed interest in expanding Irish trade, maintained an isolationist vision, one that would persist well after Ireland gained its independence from Great Britain. Indeed Griffith's favoring of economic protectionism influenced the policies of Irish governments up to the 1960s (Feeney 35).
This conflict is evident in Bloom's vision for Dublin, which includes not only adding to its tram lines and repristinating its waterways, but also promoting the nascent Irish tourism industry. Bloom's "schemes of wider scope" (17.1709) in "Ithaca" include:
A scheme for the development of Irish tourist traffic in and around Dublin by means of petrolpropelled riverboats, plying in the fluvial fairway between Island bridge and Ringsend, charabancs, narrow gauge local railways, and pleasure steamers for coastwise navigation (10/- per person per day, guide (trilingual) included). (17.1720-4)
This elaborate and satirical description of Bloom's utopian tourism scheme vaguely recalls the tourist development plan for the Irish town of Ruscullen envisioned by Tom Broadbent, the English capitalist in George Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, a work Martha Black identifies as having an influence on both character and plot in Ulysses (204, 225-27). In Shaw's colonial satire, "modernization" transforms Ireland without improving the life of the natives, who are forced to abandon their agriculture labor to become golf caddies for. English tourists. The destructive efficiencies of English capitalism are satirized in Broadbent's suggestion that the river of Roscullen is going to waste without a motorboat on it. At the end of the play the syndicate Broadbent represents is exposed as practicing a form of capitalism that reenacts colonial power structures. Bloom may less resemble the hypocritical Broadbent, however, than Broadbent's Irish partner, Larry Doyle, who proclaims: "I want to bring Galway within 3 hours of Colchester and 24 of New York. I want Ireland to be the brains and imagination of a big Commonwealth, not a Robinson Crusoe island" (914). Although Doyle's idealism is eventually undermined in the play, his vision nonetheless throws into relief the selfish provincialism of his fellow Irishmen. (6)
Joyce has on occasion been criticized for fetishizing cosmopolitanism at the expense of national affiliation, and we might suppose that Gaelic is less likely than either English or French to number among the three unnamed languages spoken on the riverboat tours Bloom imagines. Indeed, Esperanto, decreed the "universal language" (15.1691) by Bloom in one of the fantasies of "Circe," would seem more plausible. Nonetheless, the international scope of Bloom's tourism schemes exceeds the colonial dynamics of tourism in Ireland represented in the text. For example, in the "Wandering Rocks" episode, Stephen sees:
Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women sitting fore, gripping the handrests. Palefaces. Men's arms frankly round their stunted forms. They looked from Trinity to the blind columned perch of the bank of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed. (10.340-4)
These English "palefaces" keep well within the English Pale, holding on both to one another and to a colonially circumscribed vision of Dublin; averting their eyes from the Dublin street life, they focus upwards to the institutions of Ascendancy power. Their diminished vision is repeated in the "blind columned perch of the bank of Ireland" (10.342-43, my emphasis), the former home of the Irish Parliament before it voted itself out of existence. Stephen's vision of these "stunted" tourists reflects the nationalist antipathy towards English tourism that Would persist even after Ireland gained political independence from England. (7)
Tourism in early twentieth-century Ireland might have looked like an extension of colonialism, but it could also be seen as countering colonialism by encouraging economic and even political autonomy. Both viewpoints are encoded in the newspaper advertisement for the shop of Alexander Keyes, a "tea, wine and spirit merchant" (7.143) whose commission occupies Bloom's morning. Bloom intends the advertisement to pun graphically on Keyes's name by having two crossed keys above it, which--as two crossed keys are the emblem of the independent Manx Parliament--he believes offers an "Innuendo of home rule" (7.150). Contrasting critical accounts of Bloom's ad read it either as a politically Subversive sign slipped into the pages of the politically moderate Freeman's Journal or as all instance of the power of advertising to exploit political sentiment for its own commercial ends. (8) But such readings are not mutually exclusive: politics sells spirit and spirit, nationalist politics. Readings of this dialectical sign have for the most part. moreover, not accounted for its intended audience within the narrative: namely, tourists from the Isle of Mail planning to attend the horse shoe, a fixture of the Dublin social calendar. A bit of Bloom s interior monologue reveals the ad's seasonal logic: "Rub in August: good idea: horseshoes month. Ballsbridge. Tourists over for the show" (7.193-94). Bloom intends his ad to appeal to the national pride of the Marl: tourists who will go on to patronize Keyes's shop. and perhaps even bringing along their enthusiasm for self-government. Yet we might suspect that the Manx vacationers attending the horseshow would be more likely to consort with English tourists than with Irish natives.
Held at the Royal Dublin Society's Agricultural Premises in the affluent suburb of Ballsbridge, the Dublin Horse Show epitomized the cultural and economic conundrum of tourism ill colonial Ireland. An article contemporary with the period in which Ulysses is set entitled "At the Horse Show," in D. P. Morale's highly popular nationalist weekly The Leath'r, conveys the privileged atmosphere of the event. Impressed by the dress of the attendees, the reporter wonders "Am I in England or Ireland?" (22). Delight, however, quickly turns to disgust:
One feels many a throb of national pride as he strolls through the enclosures of the Dublin Horse Show. When one gets opposite the Vice-Regal stand his national temperature may have a fall. For outside that place you will observe a large sprinkling of the well-dressed mean classes straining their eyes in an endeavor to get a peep at, and identify, the various sprigs of nobility. These classes generally wear a weak, oily leer expressive of a desire that they might be allowed to black the hoots of the accidentally great ones of this earth. (22-23)
This description of the Horse Show might remind us of the excitement engendered by lord lieutenant's cavalcade in the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Ulysses, the procession that occasions the strained and admiring looks of the Ormond hotel's fashion-conscious barmaids ("She darted, bronze, to the backmost corner, flattening her face against the pane in a halo of hurried breath" [11.74-75]). Like the cavalcade, whose destination, the Mirus Bazaar, is also located in Ballsbridge, the Dublin Horse Show constitutes an Ascendancy spectacle enforcing the hierarchical power structures of colonial Ireland. Although, as a tourist "draw," the Horse Show doubtlessly stimulated economic activity in Dublin (and still does), its atmosphere of social snobbery, as in Moran's ironic reference to the "well-dressed mean classes," surely precluded its being regarded by nationalists as an authentic image of Irish culture.
In Ulysses Irish tourism is as much an extension of capitalist innovation as colonial rule, an element of the bourgeoning of the leisure industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although Bloom's imagined fee for the riverboat ride--ten shillings per person per day--might have seemed an extravagant expenditure for much of the populace of Dublin, it would not have been out of reach for members of the British middle class. Bloom's status as a member of the Edwardian bourgeoisie is satirized in "Eumaeus," as are the tourist schemes he envisions. Seeming to expand From the degraded romanticism of Dan Dawson's journalistic prose read out loud in "Aeolus," the description of the touristic delights of Ireland takes as its model the cliches found in English guidebooks:
There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around Dublin and its picturesque environs even, Poulaphouca to which there was a steamtram, but also farther away from the madding crowd in Wicklow, rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighborhood for elderly wheelmen so long as it didn't come down, and in the wilds of Donegal where if report spoke true the coup d'oeil was exceedingly grand though the last named locality was not so easily getable so that the influx of visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the signal benefits to be derived from it while Howth with its historic associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O'Malley, George IV, rhododendrons several hundred feet above sea level was a favourite haunt with all sorts and conditions of men especially in the spring when young men's fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the cliffs by design or accidentally, usually, by the way, on their left leg, it being only about three quarters of an hour's run front the pillar. Because of course uptodate tourist traveling was as yet merely in its infancy, so to speak, and the accommodations left much to be desired. (16.547-65)
The promotion of domestic tourism in this passage might remind us of the question posed by the nationalist Miss Ivors to Gabriel Conroy in "The Dear": "And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land?" (Dubliners 164). But where Miss Ivors's advocacy of vacationing in Ireland is meant to help bring the imagined community of the nation into being, the narrative of local tourism in "Eumaeus" only serves to divide the concepts of nation and land. (9) This parodic description either occludes the violence of Irish history--county Wicklow was the center of the 1798 Rebellion--or renders it mere backdrop and pageant. Reflecting the perspective of the modern tourist who seeks both rustic authenticity and the personal comforts associated with "up-to-date" travel, the passage emphasizes the contradictions inherent in touristic desire. Focusing on the picturesque and the visual delights of the land it reflects on how the English regard the landscape of Ireland as abstracted from the life of its people. Where the archaism of "sylvan spots" evokes a tradition of Anglo-Irish literary pastoralism reaching back to Spenser's Faerie Queen, mention of "reports" and the "benefits to be derived" suggests a more utilitarian sensibility intimating the forms of topographic knowledge central to the colonial enterprise. By noting the distance of Howth from "the pillar"--the towering memorial to Admiral Nelson from which Dublin's trams are shown to depart at the opening of "Aeolus"--the narrative constructs a space still organized by colonial power.
Although these encomia to the Irish countryside have a farcical aspect, they nonetheless register the fact that, having been spared some of the blights of industrialization, Ireland's landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century was to some extent indeed distinct from England's. The particular mention of Howth and "young men's fancy" recalls the significantly non-ironical function of the hill of Howth as a locus amoenus within the larger narrative of Ulysses. In "Lestrygonians," Bloom fondly recalls his lovemaking with Molly "hidden under wild ferns" (8.899-900) of Ben Howth and Molly returns to the erotic scene of Bloom's marriage proposal in her mind at the end of "Penelope." Tellingly, Howth is located both within and beyond the pale of the colonial dynamics of Dublin adumbrated in Ulysses, and its "historical associations" contribute to its Irish authenticity without displacing the delights promised by its natural beauty (Howth is almost always paired in the text with "rhododendrons" in the text). As the site of Molly and Bloom's most sexually intimate moment, Howth is aptly cenral to the sort of touristic discourse that presupposes a desiring subject in search of a place where culture and nature are one. The locus amoenus of Classical Romance and what might be called the pornotopia of the touristic imagination meet in the sexually ripe, ahistorical flower-world of Ben Howth, a place where wants are satisfied, desires "accommodated."
Reflecting his national progressivism, his financial self-interest, and his erotic memories and fantasies, Bloom's touristic engagements would not have appealed to the Sinn Fein movement, whose Gaelic name can be translated into English as "we ourselves." Had Bloom, five days before the day on which Ulysses takes place, picked up a copy of the United Irishman, the nationalist newspaper edited by Arthur Griffith, he might have read a brief article praising a speech given by W. J. Pirrie, the Anglo-Irish shipping magnate. As the paper reports:
Mr. Pirrie has withdrawn from the International Exhibition scheme which he was at first trepanned into supporting, and in a speech at the Ulster Association in London last week, he condemned what the United Irishman has stood alone in the Irish Press in condemning, and on the same grounds--the tourist traffic--which, said Mr. Pirrie, instead of benefiting the country and "ennobling the people by inculcating a proper appreciation of the dignity of industry, degrades therm or rather a large proportion of them, into a condition of servants of the traveling public employed during a season of the year and idlers during the remainder." (10) (5)
The Wealthy industrialist continents on tourists, serve as grist for the ideological mill of the flatted Irishman, which goes on to editorialize: "We have again and again pointed out the moral and material evil the tourist traffic must Work in Ireland, or indeed in any country." This position is at odds with the economic perspective that ostensibly guided Sinn Fein policy, since tourism counts as part of a nation's net exports and thus ostensibly contributes to its wealth. Significantly, Sinn Fein's objection to tourism transcends the historically specific context of colonial Ireland, hinting at the wider perception of tourism as an industry that degrades indigenous culture by commodifying it.
Despite being a vocal critic of Arthur Griffith, whose "Hungarian Model" for independence he held in contempt, D. P. Moran also railed against the nascent tourism industry in Ireland. In "The Future of the Irish Nation," an essay that first appeared in the New Ireland Review and was subsequently collected in The Philosophy Irish Ireland, Moran writes about his fear that Irish laborers Will be exploited by English bosses who find they can pay them less than workers m England. Like Shaw's Keegan Missile Boll's Other Island, Moran extends his critique of British economic power to include the tourism industry:
Then there is the tourist traffic, which is already upon us, but yet in nothing like the volume which it is bound to assume. What good can this traffic do to Ireland a Nation? Without speaking of the demoralizing influence of the "tripper" himself, who forms the great bulk of the present-day touring public, there will be the troops of French chefs and Swiss waiters, and English managers and supernumeraries, which the tourist will demand for his money, for the man who pays can call the tune. The English visitor must have a shock-headed Swiss to wait upon hint, and Paddy will be good enough to laugh at. And Paddy has lost so much of his self-respect that he is only too glad to make a buffoon of himself for a few English coppers. In this age, when economic tendencies rule the world, there is no stopping the tourist development. Yet this particular industry breeds some of the meanest type of the human species. It is all fawning on vulgar people with money, tip-taking and cringing. It breeds beggars in rags and beggars in broad-cloth--products which I need scarcely point out, do not tend to the glory or preservation of Ireland a Nation. (19)
Moran's remarks on tourism reveal a tension latent within the discourse of Irish nationalism. Nationalists yearned to free Ireland from the yoke of British rule but were critical of the materialism that informed modernity, which was often synonymous in their minds with "Anglicization," famously denounced by Douglas Hyde, President of the Gaelic League, in his speech given to the Irish National Literary Society in 1892 on "The Necessity of De-Anglicizing Ireland." As R. F. Foster suggests, Hyde's de-Anglicization signified anti-materialism (448).Yet while Griffith and Moran were critics of the expansion of tourism in Ireland, both recognized the centrality of economic development to the advancement of Irish national interests. In particular, Moran would have approved of Bloom's interest in modernizing Dublin's infrastructure. In a passage from The Philosophy of Irish Ireland illuminating a difference between Bloom's economic nationalism and the Citizen's racial nationalism in the "Cyclops" episode, Moran decries how Irish nationalists fail to attend to economic issues:
And the saddest part of it is that though Ireland is in this peculiarly weak economic position, the efforts of the enthusiasts to arouse her people to the vital necessity of strengthening the nation at this weak point are treated with shameful apathy, and are sometimes looked on with suspicion. The prating mock-rebel has no stomach for such prosy things. I do not believe that it was the intrinsic importance of the Financial Relations Questions which caused it to spring so suddenly into popularity, but the grand opportunity which it offered for indulging in the sensuous pleasure of calling England--what, no doubt, she is--a robber and a cheat. A few years ago I was present at a very able lecture on the economic history of Ireland, after which there was a long discussion. During the course of the discussion even the word economy was scarcely uttered, but the hall rang with the rankest rebel clap-trap that one could wish not to hear. (19-20)
The rebels' indulgent "clap-trap" here anticipates the Citizen's anti-English rants. Furthermore, their suspicion of economic debate finds voice in the narrator of the "Cyclops," who regards the pro-Irish political and economic policies of Sinn Fein with disdain:
So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, john Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Swim Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packing juries and swindling the taxes off of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. (12.1573-7)
The narrator here associates Sinn Fein's pro-Irish tactics with the financial conspiracies and frauds he attributes to Bloom as a Jew. These fraudulent schemes include both the "Canada swindle case" later mentioned by Joe and Bloom's own past involvement in the venture to sell tickets for the Royal and Privileged Hungarian Lottery, referred to by the narrator as the "Royal and privileged Hungarian robbery" (12.775-9). Occasioned by financial necessity after losing his job at Heley's, Bloom's selling of these lottery tickets sometime in 1893 or 1894 represents a dubious ethical and financial counterpart to his intervention in the matter of Dignam's mortgaged insurance policy, and the narrator's claim that Bloom was almost jailed for his participation in the lottery scheme is matched by Molly's later worry that Bloom might be "run into prison over his old lottery tickets that was to be all our salvations" (18.1224-5). While the scheme hardly suggests a "robbery," it nonetheless confirms the worst suspicions of the anti-Semitic narrator. Although not so different from the horse race on which the men of "Cyclops" have wagered, the foreign lottery Bloom has promoted during his impoverishment would not have appealed to Sinn Fein nationalists; by channeling Irish money overseas, unlikely to return, the lottery scheme does not encourage the conditions for an economic revival.
The "Jew Question" and the Limerick Boycott
Bloom's participation in the Hungarian lottery scheme contributes to his branding as a foreigner, and accords with Martin Cunningham's assertion that Bloom's reputed involvement with Sinn Fein derives from his ethnic identity as a Hungarian Jew. The fixation on Bloom's Hungarian ancestry in "Cyclops"--Cunningham mentions that Bloom's father, Rudolph Vi-rag, has changed his name--reflects the common claim at the beginning of the twentieth century that Jews were incapable of cultural assimilation, and that Jewish immigrants thus inevitably hastened a nation's economic decline. In an article entitled "The Jew Question in Ireland," published in Moran's The Leader twelve days before the date on which Ulysses is set, the author, writing under the pseudonym Imaal, warns against the involvement of Jews in Irish economic development: "To permit, then, a people who remain aliens wherever they go, who never assimilate with the people among whom they settle, to grasp the finances of our country for themselves, would be an irretrievable error" (235).
Such warnings cut across the nationalist and Unionist divide in Ireland. Thus the Ulster Unionist Mr. Deasy's remarks about the stereotyped "jew merchants" who "eat up the nation's vital strength" (2.348-89) and are "already at their work of destruction" (2.350) echo "The Jew Question":
In truth, it will be found that, while the Jew is himself industrious, yet he most abounds in those places where industry is most backward. Even there he becomes a parasite of industry, the peddler and petty usurer of the community. (235)
In the anti-Semitism of Mr. Deasy in "Nestor" and the Citizen in "Cyclops," Ulysses registers the slippage of claims about Jewish "parasitism" from the realm of economics to that of biology, in which Jews are identified with and as "pests": "Those are nice things, says the citizen, coining over here to Ireland filing the country with bugs" (12.1141-2). Money, vermin, and alien culture all become caught up in an unhealthy exchange whose nexus is occupied by the figure of "the Jew."
These anti-Semitic stereotypes originate in the myth of the "wandering Jew," a figure mockingly connected to Bloom by Buck Mulligan in "Scylla and Charybdis" and then more seriously by the Citizen: "Ahasuerus I call him. Cursed by God" (12.1667). A cobbler supposedly cursed with eternal wandering for refusing to let Christ rest in his doorway on his way to the cross, the apocryphal figure of Ahasuerus invoked by the Citizen suggests the religious origin of his anti-Semitism, echoed in Mr. Deasy's claim that the Jews, having "sinned against the light" (2.361) are 'wanderer on the earth to this day (2.362-6.3). (11) Of course, we might see Bloom as less wandering Jew than wondering Jew, a figure of hospitality and even Christian caritas. (12)
Although the Citizen's identification of Bloom with the wandering Jew might seem a relic of medieval Jew-baiting, it actually conforms closely to twentieth-century anti-Semitism. In this discourse Jews represent a rootless and invidious cosmopolitanism connected to global capitalism and even to tourism, as in T. S. Eliot's "Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistcin with a Cigar." Paradoxically, they are scapegoated by Irish nationalists both for economic backwardness and for overdevelopment, as "The Jew Question": "wherever you sec the Jew beginning to multiply you may be sure that the industrial spirit either has not come, or else is far advanced in its decadence" (235). If such contradictions are symptomatic of anti-Semitism more generally, as is in the common stereotyping of Jews as either filthy or effete, they also speak to colonial Ireland's ambivalence about capital development and exchange. Nationalists both desired the creation of an industrial base and feared the perceived "decadence" that such development might bring.
The projection of such economic anxieties onto the figure of the Jewish immigrant suggests the "Anglicization" of Irish nationalism itself. Thus the Citizen's anti-Semitic rants recall the hostility to Jewish immigrants voiced by both Haines and Mr. Deasy at the beginning of the novel. Joyce would surely have recognized the irony that, writing in The Leader, William Moloney defended the Irish Catholic community's treatment of the Jews of Limerick by appealing to the wisdom of the recent English Royal Commission on immigration, which led to the passing of the xenophobic Alien Act of 1905:
It is necessary in England to have a Royal Commission of Inquiry on alien immigration, principally on that of foreign Jews. Thoughtful and provident Englishmen see the injury that is being done to their country by the influx of low-type Jews, a fact that is constantly being shown up in English periodicals. (l49)
Moloney's reliance on English periodicals--he cites the British Baker and Harinsworth's Answers--for information on the dangers of Jewish immigration here reveals the kind of "Anglicization" dreaded by Irish-Ireland nationalists, who criticized the cultural and political power of the English press in Ireland in the pages of the very journal where Moloney defends the Limerick Catholics.
"Cyclops" invites us to read the voice of the anti-Semitic narrator ironically, his prejudice rendering him unable to distinguish Bloom's selfless acts from his selfish ones.Yet the seemingly stable irony encoded in the narrator's absurd analogy between the pro-Irish economic policies of Sinn Fein and financial conspiracies attributed to Jews is destabilized by the anti-Semitism of the Sinn Fein movement itself. In his denunciation of imperialism, Arthur Griffith often resorted to the rhetoric of Jewish world-conspiracies. As Neil Davison has chronicled, Griffith notoriously supported the boycott of Jewish merchants in Limerick instigated by the anti-Semitic sermon of an Irish Redemptorist priest named Father Creagh. The Limerick boycott constitutes a significant context for the conflict between Bloom and the Citizen, and for the larger conflict between capital and culture in Ireland; it may even be encoded in Bloom's mentioning the oppression of his race at "this very instant" (12.1468). (13) As a reader of Griffith's United Irishman--the newspaper that, after being censored by British authorities, was followed by Sinn Fein--the Citizen himself has likely read the columns there supporting Father Creagh and the boycott that began in the Spring of 1904 and lasted for two years. Indeed his connection to the Limerick boycott is suggested by the "tribal image" (12.175) of "Captain Boycott" (12.182) said to adorn the Citizen's girdle in the narrative's mock epic catalogue of Irish heroes and heroines. The last name of an English land agent in Ireland whose eviction of his tenants in 1880 led to his ostracization by the Irish Land League, "boycott" came to signify a powerful weapon of retaliation against English interests in Ireland. In the case of Charles Cunningham Boycott such retaliation included death threats and the sabotaging of the estate he managed (Foster 406). The boycotting of the Limerick Jews thus represented the racist perversion of a powerful means of collective economic resistance to colonial authority. In the first issue of Dana, whose importance is woven into Ulysses, the magazine's co-editor Frederick Ryan objected to the boycott instigated by Father Creagh. (14) Ryan described Creagh as an "ignorant priest" (28) and lambasted the hypocrisy of the Limerick Catholics: "When Catholics are boycotted it is an outrageous injustice; when Catholics boycott others it is all right and proper, being merely a process of recovering their own" (28). Joyce, whose poetry would later be published in Dana, was likely familiar with Ryan's editorial, which was subsequently attacked in Griffith's United Irishman--the Citizen's paper of choice. (15)
Forced to leave the increasingly hostile scene at Barney Kiernan's pub, Bloom suffers something akin to a boycott as all the "ragamuffins and sluts of the nation" (12.1796) gather around the door of the pub to join in mocking him. (16) According to the Unnamed One of "Cyclops," the chief agent of Bloom's ostracism himself faces the kind of violent communal harassment experienced by Captain Boycott during the land wars:
As much as his bloody life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled multitude in Shanagolden where he daren't show his nose the Molly Maguires looking for hint to let the daylight through hint for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant. (12.1312-6)
The revelation that the Citizen has profited front an eviction, perhaps the emblematic "crime" of British colonialism in rural Ireland, reveals the Citizen's hypocrisy.. Furthermore, the anecdote suggests the gulf between the populace or rural Ireland and those metrocolonial subjects at the urban center, a divide which the Citizen's romantic rhetorie--"save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair Inns of Eire, O" (12.1253-4)--cannot bridge. That the post town of Shanagolden is close to the city of Limerick locates the terrorized Citizen in the same literal and figurative space as the harassed Jewish merchant. Similarly, the Citizen's lament for an earlier epoch in which Irish trade thrived invokes Bloom's Homeric avatar: "Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind. with golds and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen?" (12.1248-50). Although it is unlikely that the Citizen knows that Dante's Ulysses perished for having ventured beyond the limits of the known world marked by the pillars of Hercules, he seems familiar with the notion that the Greeks traded with the Irish. In .4 Smaller Social History of Ireland. P. W. Joyce proposed that ancient Greece knew of Ireland through Phoenician traders who had visited Ireland, citing Ptolemy as a source Whose detailed knowledge of Ireland derived from the Phoenicians (494: Gifford 351). The Semitic origins of these seafaring people thus link the Irish, Greeks, and jews. (17) Of course, the Citizen's nostalgia for an ancient Ireland whose prosperity depended on the perilous crossings of other peoples is contravened by his own racist policing of borders.
Sinn Fein, Trade, and an Irish "Resurgence"
The tension between the retrograde racial and progressive economic components of Sinn Fein encoded in "Cyclops" suggests Joyce's deep ambivalence about the movement. While the Citizen's adherence to Sinn Fein alerts us to its negative aspects, the narrator's hostility to Sinn Fein, which, by the time Joyce came to write "Cyclops," had become associated with the Easter Rising (Duffy 124-25), alerts us to the movement's positive ones.
Griffith's United Irishman and later Sinn Fein called for the establishment of both an Irish Export Association and an Irish Consular Service to help expand Irish export trade beyond England, ideas that Joyce himself took very much to heart, as is evidenced by his service, living in Trieste, as an agent for Foxford tweeds.' In "Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages," Joyce echoed Griffith's calls for a consular service and an Irish merchant marine, imagining a "resurgence" of the Irish spurred by the establishment of its own commercial fleet and its own ambassadors in port cities around the globe (Occasional 125). Joyce elaborated on the Sinn Fein platform in "Fenianism: The Last Fenian," a journalistic piece he wrote in 1907 for II Piccolo della Sera:
The new Fenians have regrouped in a party called "ourselves alone." They aim to make Ireland a bi-lingual republic, and to this end, they have established a direct ferry link between Ireland and France. They boycott English goods, they refuse to become soldiers or swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown. They are attempting to develop the industry of the whole country and, rather than fork out a one and a quarter million each year to maintain the eighty deputies in the English Parliament, they want to institute a consular service in the principal world ports with the aim of merchandising industrial produce, without the intervention of England. (Occasional 140)
Joyce here emphasizes Sinn Fein's attempt to reverse colonial economic policies. In criticizing the cost of maintaining eighty members of Parliament, Joyce echoes the end of an article published the year before Sinn Fein
Half the money spent on keeping 80 camp-followers
of British Liberalism in the British House of Commons
would maintain an Irish Consular Service in the chief
ports of Europe and America, and open up an Irish
export trade which would provide employment for tens
of thousands of our people in their own land.
("Ireland and Foreign Trade")
For Sinn Fein, the access to international markets gained by establishing consulates and a merchant marine appeared more likely to increase Irish autonomy than parliamentary advocacy for Home Rule. As a Sinn Fein article from 1906 concluded:
We have had an Irish Parliamentary service for nearly
forty years, and it has been unable in that period
to make Ireland a factor in the politics and commerce
of the world. An Irish consular service could in a
tithe of that time make Ireland a force to be reckoned
with in international commerce and international affairs
("An Irish Consular Service")
Sinn Fein's ambitious vision of an Ireland that is a "force to be reckoned with" is parodied in the unbridled nationalism of the Citizen, for whom successful commerce is tied to military power. In response to a parody in the I 'niter' Irishman about Alaki of Abeakuta's visit to the cotton magnates of Manchester, the Citizen declares: "That's how its worked [...], Trade follows the Hag" (12.1541). Although Sinn Fein regarded as mutually exclusive the Irish nationalism and English imperialism that are here intertwined, (19) we might hear an echo of Sinn Fein's desire for Ireland as a "force to be reckoned with" in the Citizen's dream of securing trade treaties with Europe when "the first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to the fore" (12.1.307). For James Fairhall, the Citizen exemplifies here Sinn Fein's racist belief that non-Europeans do not deserve the kind of self-determination deserved by the Irish (179-80). But like his acerbic meditations on the effect the non-aggression pact between Britain and France (the entente cordiale) will have on French support for Irish independence, the Citizen's conflation of military might and economic enfranchisement may be seen as a rcalpolitik grasp of international relations at the time. (20)
The Citizen's comments about the French reflect colonial Ireland's isolation from the rest of Europe, a separation that a direct ferry link between Ireland and France attempted to address. More particularly, they reflect Sinn Fein's understanding of the shift in political alignments following the entente cordiale: along with divvying up disputed colonial territories in Africa, it created a de facto alliance between England and France against Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy. (21) In "Over the Frontier," the first of a series of articles that appeared in Sinn Fein on the prospect of direct Irish trade with the Continent, the paper reported on the announcement in Le Petit Parisienne of the formation of a new steamship company, planning to operate its boats from Dunkirk to Dublin and Belfast. The article is careful to recognize the purely economic nature of the French interest in Ireland:
Very naturally the tone of the article is entirely in favor of pushing French trade in a new market; but little reference is made to the effect that may be produced on Irish trade by this further re-opening of communication with an island whose very existence has been blotted out of the memory of most Frenchmen. The writer indulges in one slight touch of sentiment. He says the French Consulate is a business-like house whence proceeds an excellent propaganda on behalf of French produce and manufactures; and they know there admirably how to profit by the traditional Franco-Irish friendship. That a French writer should make such a statement is very cheering, as it presumes his countrymen would understand to what he was alluding, and so perhaps we are not so completely forgotten, as we had thought. Unfortunately the effect is somewhat spoilt for Irish ears by the addition of a saving phrase in the same sentence. It is to the effect that the wily M. Lefeuve-Meaulle knows also how to profit by the "Entente Cordiale." (Carrignavar)
The French are savvy enough to leverage the sentimental attachment of the Irish, the article suggests, even while benefiting economically from the treaty they have made with Ireland's colonial master. Alluding to the larger political forces at play in European issues, the article identifies German competition with the French for Irish trade, and suggests that the Irish capitalize on these national divisions: "It is for Ireland to make her profit out of this national rivalry between France and Germany, and by so doing she will be acting on strictly business lines." (22) Such thinking reflects an understanding of the power dynamics of international trade at the beginning of the twentieth century, when even colonies might economically exploit rivalries between the great European powers.
These rivalries ultimately had disastrous consequences and if the Citizen's militant nationalist rhetoric seems to anticipate the revolutionary action of the Easter Rising, it also recalls the imperial jingoism that occasioned the Great War. the Citizen's fantasy of an Irish battleship contrasts with Bloom's pacific vision of Irish "pleasure steamers"; but While both are occasioned by an Ireland Wanting in economic opportunities, neither necessarily creates the transformatwe conditions for a truly post-colonial Ireland. Bloom's schemes may merely remap the colonialist-subaltern relationship onto the tourist-native dichotomy, one again casting the Irish as the subordinated object of ethnographic interest; the Citizen's policies may merely reappropriate the imperialist ideology of the colonizer in order to enslave a less technologically empowered people.
Bloomsday: Post-Colonial Carnival or Capitalist Re-creation?
The thriving Dublin tourist industry imagined by Bloom in Ulysses has at least one origin in the text itself: the annual celebration of Bloomsday. First observed in 1954 by a group of Joyce devotees, included among them Patrick Kavanaugh, the original Bloomsday celebration had a counter-cultural aspect; while not legally censored in Ireland, Ulysses was nearly impossible to obtain, given the unwillingness of booksellers to offer it for sale. Notably, the first Bloomsday celebration took place less than two years after the founding of the Irish Tourist Board (Board Eailte) in July of 1952. Bringing scholars and tourists from all over the globe to Dublin on June 16, Bloomsday has more recently become an international phenomenon. The official website for the Bloomsday centenary in 2004 could be viewed in eight languages, including Japanese (far fewer, however, than the twenty-four languages into which Ulysses itself has been translated). Although Bloomsday has become an event of national significance in Ireland, it limits itself to the borders of the city bounded within Joyce's text. It can thus the visitor's sense of Irish regional diversity, narrowing it to the boundaries once legally and culturally circumscribed by the English Pale. (23) Indeed, as a potentially sentimental exercise, the Bloomsday tourist's experience of the city may well harmonize with the kitsch "album of illuminated views of Dublin" (13.465) that Gerty McDowell thinks of giving Father Conroy.
While Joyce's boast that, should Dublin ever be destroyed, Ulysses would allow for its brick by brick reconstruction remains hyberbole, the novel can literally be credited with helping to preserve buildings mentioned in its pages. (24) As the first "unofficial guide" to Dublin, Ulysses has also in a very real sense turned the city it represents into a museum of the originally supplemental text: set into the streets of Dublin are fourteen brass pavement plaques with quotations drawn from topographically relevant passages of Ulysses. Perhaps fittingly, a book partially constructed out of the textuality of the modern city (from newspapers to advertisements) has literally become a landmark dispersed throughout the metropolis, its typography coincident with the city's topography.
Much as the text of Ulysses and the touristic desire it has engendered might be said to have colonized the streets of Dublin, Joyce himself has been appropriated by the Irish tourist industry. Tourists flock to his statue at the corner of O'Connell and North End Street, unveiled at the 1990 Bloomsday festival, oblivious to Joyce's mocking scorn for the plethora of statuary in Dublin. Commissioned by local businesses, the statue is associated with the economic future of Ireland as much as with its literary heritage; the rise of the large-scale Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin during the 1990s coincided with the economic transformation of Ireland and its emergence as the so-called "Celtic Tiger." This late twentieth-century transformation, a product of the technology revolution and of improvements in infrastructure made possible by the economic support of the European Union, curiously recalls the technological utopianism of Leopold Bloom.Yet if such "advancements" have seemed to transform Dublin into a cosmopolitan capital, they have also increased Ireland's exposure to the economic vicissitudes of the global financial system, including the bursting of the dot-coin bubble in 2000 and the more recent financial Crisis, which, having raised questions about the solvency of Irish banks and of the state itself, has led to "austerity measures" that have forestalled an economic recovery. Where colonial protectionism once restricted its economic expansion, Ireland now finds itself at the mercy of the international bond market and the ratings agencies, which have lowered Ireland's debt ratings in the wake of large government deficits and bad loans made by Irish banks.
At once carnivalesque and corny, Bloomsday both disrupts and reinscribes the capitalistic structures of Irish modernity. It may encourage naive sentimentalism about the colonial past, but it also connects the past to the present, celebrating Ulysses as the news that stays news. During the centenary celebration of Bloomsday the Dublin City Council provided breakfast for ten thousand people, including the city's numerous visitors and itinerants. This Leopold Bloomlike gesture of hospitality might remind us of Joyce's own habit of handing out free copies of Ulysses to porters and doormen. Lawrence Rainey has argued that the initial publication of Ulysses as a deluxe edition placed it in the nexus of capital investment and speculation, the anonymous spectacle of the mass marketplace that degrades the bond linking Writer and reader, against which modernism supposedly positioned itself (42-76), but Joyce's gifting of copies gestures toward the reestablishment of that bond. Of course, these free handouts operate within an economy comprehensible enough to the proverbial "man in the street" (16.540). In a manner that even Bloom might have envied, Joyce's promotional gifting created valuable publicity for himself and for I Tlysses--a book which, beyond engendering the "Joyce industry" within the academy, has likely contributed to the Irish economy beyond the most ambitious entrepreneurial and touristic schemes of its central protagonist.
Notes
(1.) Marian Eide regards Stephen's interspersing of the Gloria Patria in his meditation on the coins as an ironic paying of tribute, a return of the "coin" of Christian ritual that follows the Biblical precedent of jesus's returning of Caesars coin, which Stephen thinks of earlier in the episode (76).
(2.) Among the few glimpses we get of his past poverty, we learn that Bloom got "ten bob" (13.840) for selling Molly's combings, and that Molly was selling clothes and performing in a temperance coffee house to make money. Molly herself recalls that during this time Bloom had suggested she "pose for a picture naked to some rich fellow'' (18.560-61), a suggestion that speaks not only to Bloom's sexual voyeurism but to his financial hardship.
(3.) Bloom's possible future as a "moribund lunatic pauper" also recalls the "terrible comedown" (6.235) of the once crown solicitor for Waterford seen from the carriage of "Hades." Although we are given only the briefest of portraits of this destitute figure, Blooni's internal monologue presents a striking image of the disbarred solicitor's decline: "Has that silk hat ever since. Relics of old decency. Mourning too. Terrible comedown, poor wretch! Kicked about like snuff at wake" (6.234-35), As the cameo suggests, the bankrupt, whose attire uncomfortably mirrors Bloom's, has become a mourner at his own funeral.
(4.) Joyce's description of Dublin in a 1905 letter to Grant Richards suggests both pride and anxiety regarding the historical status of the city: "It has been a capital of Europe for thousands of years, it is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire and it is nearly three times as big as Venice" (Selected Letters 78).
(5.) Although Robert Adams discounts the rumor (100), Dominic Manganiello finds it conceivable that Joyce "wants at least a possibility that Bloom gives a tip to Griffith" (121). Bloom's rumored role in Griffith's "Hungarian Policy" might be dismissed along with the rest of the scandalous gossip and hearsay in this episode, but Molly's soliloquy does suggest that Bloom is on familiar terms with Griffith: "he was going about with some of them Sinner Fein lately or whatever they call themselves talking his usual trash and nonsense he says the little man he showed me without the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffiths is he well he doesn't look it" (18.383-7).Whether the rumor is true, it is clearly unpalatable to the Irish-Ireland nationalists of "Cyclops." Andrew Gibson suggests that Bloom, as a Hungarian Jew ostensibly behind Sinn Fein, mocks the anti-Semitic Griffith's purely symbolic image of a Moses who, like the Hungarian heroes Szechenyi or Deak, could lead the Irish to the "promise land" (120-21).
(6.) Following Shaw's Doyle, Joyce's Bloom puts his faith in internationalism and the promise of technology. Bloom's orientation toward technological innovation might also remind us of Oscar Wilde's belief, expressed in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, that machines could ultimately take on touch of much of the drudgery of physical labor: "Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing" (33). Significantly, Bloom's imagined riverboats, which presumably would contribute to the "cultivated leisure" Wilde imagined mankind enjoying, are powered by petrol rather than steam and thereby obviate the need for stokers by employing a recent technological innovation, the gasoline engine. (Coincidently, Frederick William Lancaster built the first motor boat in 1904, the same year in which Ulysses is set.)
(7.) For example, the influx of English tourists occasioned by food rationing in the aftermath of the Second World War put unwelcome stress upon the entire infrastructure of the country. The post-colonial ambivalence about tourism in Ireland is registered by the fair that the Irish Tourist Board was not established until 1939, supplanting the chronically under-funded Irish Tourist Association. Such governmental neglect can be traced to the isolationism of Sinn Fein before Ireland independence (Deegan and Dineen 11-14).
(8.) Cheryl Herr links Bloom's advertisement for Keyes's shop to Ignatius Gallaher's ingenious use of graphic advertisement to transmit censored information about the Phoenix Park murders to the New York World. She sees both ads as examples of the possibility for subversive resistance from within the medium of the "ascendant ideology" (71) represented by the Freeman's Journal. Alternatively, Jennifer Wicke emphasizes the economic and aesthetic character of the ad, and regards the political anger leveraged by the ad as vanishing "as if into a black hole" (146).
(9.) Terrence Brown suggest, that Miss Ivors was modeled on Hannah Sheehy (later Sheehy-Skeffington), who would go on to become a member of the Irish Tourists Association in 1927 (3111). Sheehy-Skittington may have influenced the promotion of internal tourism by organizing the "See Ireland First" campaign, promoted in the pages of the Association's magazine, Irish liwycl (Thompson 275).
(10.) Pirrie may have had less interest in preventing the degradation of the Irish than in keeping their idle hands busy; two years later he would conceive or the idea of die Titanic, Which was subsequently built in Belfast.
(11.) An origin for the wandering Jew story can be found in the thirteenth-century Pores Historiarom by Roger of Wendover, Where he was a Roman gate-keeper who spurred Christ on towards the Cross. The later, Germanic version naming Ahasuerus, "the shoemaker of Jerusalem," as the wandering Jew became commonplace in the seventeenth century (Anderson, Chapter 3).This version of the story is repeated in Shelley's "Queen Mab," where Ahasuerus tells kindles spirit how a vengeful god sentenced him to eternal wandering.
(12.) Bloom's "wanderings" associate him less with Ahasuerus than with the cuckolded ghost of Hamlet senior--"Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth" (8.68) in Bloom's slight misquote--and thus to Shakespeare himself as he figures in Stephen's biographical reading of the play.
(13.) The Citizen's labeling of Bloom as a "wolf M sheep's clothing" (12.1667) echoes Father Creigh's claim that the Jews, no longer daring openly to kidnap and slay Christian children as they once did, "expose thorn to a longer and even more cruel martyrdom Inc taking the clothes off their back and the bit out of their mouths" (qtd in Keogh and McCarthy 35).
(14.) In the library episode Stephen recalls that Synge has promised him a space in Dana for an article (9.322).When tallying his mental debts in "Nestor," Stephen recalls that he owes Fred Ryan "two shillings" (2.25).
(15.) Joyce may well have read an editorial in the United Irishman rebutting Ryan's "Political and Intellectual Freedom." Possibly written by Griffith, the piece suggests how the anti-Semitic stereotypes of Sinn Fein paralleled those of the Citizen and the "Unnamed One" in "Cyclops":
We cannot, nor can Mr. Ryan, view without apprehension
the power wielded in Europe by the Jewish financiers.
A world ruled by the Jewish capitalist would eventually
invite the destruction which an oppressed and brutalized
proletariat wreaks upon a debauched civilization. So far
as Ireland is concerned, she sees the Jews swarming in
which her children are going out. The fault likes in the
fact that we are ruled not by ourselves but by
foreigners, to whom our interests are diametrically
opposed. But when an attempt is made to alleviate the
situation--when a priest is courageous enough to sound
a note of alarm, and in consequence assailed by all the
ramifications of the Jewish bond--it is, we firmly hold,
the duty of Irishmen to stand by him, and we only regret
that in other cities in Ireland, suffering front the
Jewish usurer, priests as courageous as Father Creagh
have not warned the unthinking people on whom the
harpies prey. ("All Ireland")
(16.) We might compare Bloom's social ostracism with Moloney's account of the Catholic community's treatment of the Limerick Jews:
The facts of the case are as follows:--Since Father Creagh's lecture on the Jews, in the beginning of January, a few women and boys hooted the Jews in one of the streets of Limerick. As a consequence of this, a blind old woman was compelled to appear in court charged with assault. The case was, of course, dismissed. On another occasion, a drunken man in a drunken brawl, assaulted a Jew, and was heavily fined (149)
Molony also mentions that a fifteen year old was sent to jail for throwing a rock at a Jew. Although Moloney's description suggests the slightly farcical quality to the public outburst of anti-Semitism--an element captured by Joyce in the mocking of Bloom by a one-eyed "loafer" who sings "If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew" (12.1801)--it also callously reveals the hostility and even violence to which the Limerick Jews were subjected.
(17.) A series of connections between these ancient "races" is made throughout Ulysses, as when "The Cap" in "Circe" proclaims "Jewgreek is greekjew" (15.2097-98) Or when, after Stephen and Bloom make a "glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols" (17.731) of Hebrew and ancient Irish, the narrator of "Ithaca" answers the question, "What points of contact existed between these languages and between the peoples who spoke them?" (17.74546).
(18.) In a letter to his brother praising Griffith's attempt to "inaugurate some commercial life for Ireland," Joyce remarks that he "actually 'took some steps' to Secure an agency for Foxford tweeds there [in Trieste]" (Letters 111). Notably, the Citizen mentions "our Foxford tweeds" (12.1246) in his catalogue of items of Irish manufacture once traded with Europe.
(19.) As a 1906 article in Sinn Fein expressed it "But it is the opposition of Imperialism to Nationality and Nationalism that Forms its most interesting feature at present. In fact the recrudescence of Imperialism would seem to arise from its expected help in crushing the spirit of Nationality" ("Empire").
(20.) hi Joyce's draft notebook of "Cyclops," the Citizen sees even deeper into the shifting political alliances of Europe by the entente cordiale. With more prophetic power than Mr. Deasy, he foresees "a War coming for the English and Germans will give them a hell of a gate of going" Herring 169).
(21.) Although Lord Lansdowne, the original architect of the entente, regarded it primarily as a means of settling disputes in the colonial sphere, his predecessor, the Liberal Imperialist Edward Grey, recognized its contribution to the balance of power in Europe, seeing it as a means of checking German power (McDonough 11-35,39).
(22.) The article subsequently reports on a rumor that Germany may be considering running a direct hne from Hamburg to Dublin, leading it to declare that, "the awakening of the Continent to the fact that profitable business is to be done with Ireland is the greatest and most sincere tribute that has yet been paid to the policy of Sinn Fein."
(23.) Victor Luftig remarks: "The money and prestige that Joyce scholars have inevitably devoted to Dublin at the expense of the rest of Ireland have at the very least helped confirm a Version of national identity that is absorbed in the capital and the past" (151).
(24.) The Irish Independent reported in 2005 that the Dublin City Council was concerned about preserving Lincoln Place, the location of Sweny's chemist, where Bloom buys a bar of lemon soap ("The Battle"). Though dating back to the 1700s, 13 Ushers Island, the house featured in "The Dead," was rebuilt to approximate its architectural configuration in 1904, a fact that suggests how the attempt to recover one history may efface another.
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| Author: | Nohrnberg, Peter C.L. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Twentieth Century Literature |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUE |
| Date: | Jun 22, 2011 |
| Words: | 12155 |
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