Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars

Chapter 4: Reinventing the Scandal Fragment

117 C h a p t e r 4 Reinventing the Scandal Fragment “Smiling at Wild(e) Irish” Butter, that’s a thing that’s much meddled with. On the first of May before sunrise it’s very apt to be all taken away out of the milk. And if you lend your churn or your dishes to your neighbour, she’ll be able to wish away your butter after that. —Quoted in Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland ’Twas rank and fame that tempted thee, ’Twas empire charmed thy heart. —The Rose of Castile, Act III, quoted in Ulysses Although the figure of Oscar Wilde may not frame all of Ulysses in the same fashion Parnell frames Portrait of the Artist,1 his appearance in the early pages of the novel signals the central role that Wilde, as artist and as symbol, will play in this, Joyce’s most extended critique of scandal. In the opening episode, “Telemachus,” Joyce’s artistic alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is obliged continually to defend himself against 118  s c a n d a l w o r k the simoniacal or, more accurately, pishogueristic encroachments of his housemate, Buck Mulligan. Whereas Joyce’s likening of scandal to simony, taken from Catholicism, evokes scandal’s transformation of the sacred into the profane for profit, his likening of scandal to pishoguery, a cultural practice drawn not just from Irish folklore but specifically from the folklore collections of Revivalist cultural arbiters like Lady Gregory, emphasizes the means by which those sacred fragments are obtained and distributed. In “Telemachus,” Mulligan’s repeated attempts to pick through Stephen’s personal effects and private life in search of shameful fragments that he can sell draw the imagery of scandal as simony, established at the end of “Oscar Wilde,” into the thematics of middle-­ class pishoguery that emerge in Dubliners and Portrait and proliferate throughout Ulysses. This episode dramatizes the dilemma of the Irish artist by linking the efforts of Mulligan and Haines to make Stephen their pishogue through a series of petty misappropriations to scandal through both explicit and stylistic references to Wilde. Within the Irish oral tradition, pishoguery is a sort of malignant magic that is brought about through or enables the movement of private effects outside of their proper sphere. In Irish folk culture, pishoguery covers a wide range of sociosymbolic activities; “pishogue” can designate either pishoguery’s practitioner or its victim, or even the benevolent healer called on to undo its effects. It may also denote the bit of private matter—for instance, hair or fingernails—used for the purpose of malign magic.2 Joyce’s work makes clear that he was quite aware of this tradition. In Ulysses, for instance, he invokes pishoguery by name twice: in the “Cyclops” episode, when the Citizen describes Bloom’s counterpart, Dennis Breen, as a pishogue, and in “Circe,” in which Molly dismisses Bloom using the same term. In one sense, Joyce uses the odd term “pishogue” in his work in much the same way (as Kevin Dettmar observes) that he uses “smugging”: as a flagrantly opaque scandal term that is all the more potent for its indeterminacy. During the Parnell split, Tim Healy had openly gloried in the power of nonsensical name calling, categorically refusing to engage Parnell and his supporters on the more precarious terrain Reinventing the Scandal Fragment  119 of reasoned debate.3 This should alert us to the recurring significance of flagrant opacity in the many quasi-­ scandalous rites of discreditation and exclusion in Joyce’s work, from casual pub gossip to elaborate curses and rituals. But Joyce also uses the concept of pishoguery in his writing, illustrating the sorts of petty, mean pilfering that unleash the wrathful thunderbolts that strike down scandal victims like Oscar Wilde. That Joyce had long pondered his own artistic aspirations in light of Wilde’s fate is elegantly demonstrated by a letter Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus in 1906, three years before the publication of “Oscar Wilde: Poet of Salomé.” Joyce’s reflections on the personal and artistic implications of Wilde’s simultaneous invocation and obscuring of scandalous bonds between men in this letter prefigure the meditation in “Telemachus” on the murky and vacillating line between respectable and deviant male bonds. As in “Telemachus,” in this letter Joyce probes the characteristic scandal-­ induced social and literary question that Eve Sedgwick famously elaborates...