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Chapter 5: The Protracted Labor of the New Journalist Sex Scandal
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139 C h a p t e r 5 The Protracted Labor of the New Journalist Sex Scandal “Lodged in the Room of Infinite Possibilities” How a poet is to earn an honest living is a problem to which there is no entirely satisfactory solution. —W. H. Auden, obituary for Louis MacNeice In the episodes that follow “Telemachus,” Stephen labors to create an artistic path that neither hides his own dissenting, deviant private life behind a wall of placating, conformist writing nor lays it open to the scandal machinery that was tearing apart so many others who sought to do battle with middle- class morality. Though Joyce opens Ulysses by identifying Stephen, and thus his own younger self, with Oscar Wilde, in the “Nestor” episode Stephen explicitly resolves against following in Wilde’s professional footsteps. Joyce develops his critique of scandal as a treacherous cultural weapon throughout “Nestor,” with particular emphasis on its use within the imperial system to control, debase, and corrupt colonized 140 s c a n d a l w o r k artists. Here Stephen is charged with the delivery of a ridiculously pompous letter by his employer, the headmaster Garrett Deasy, to the editors of the Evening Telegraph and the Irish Homestead, thereby initiating between Stephen and Deasy a race to capture an Irish audience that is so thoroughly rigged as to virtually guarantee Stephen’s defeat. Later, in “Aeolus,” Stephen is given a different charge by those directly implicated in Irish scandal journalism, one that he will eventually embrace in a way quite unanticipated by the members of the Irish “pressgang” who offer it. As we shall see, in both this episode and in “Aeolus,” Stephen finds himself being swept back into the role of “imperial jester” that he firmly abjures, caught in a cultural riptide against which he will continue to struggle over the course of the narrative. As “Nestor” opens, Stephen finds himself once again unable to reach an Irish audience, in this case a classroom of privileged and indifferent students. In this context, Stephen is, like the witticism he makes regarding the Kingston pier, “a disappointed bridge,” unable to span an imperial breach (2.39). His students are the sons of Irish burghers , men who, like Mulligan and Deasy, admire and court English lords while despising the likes of Stephen, whose shabbiness reflects Ireland’s political, economic, and representational dispossession. Stephen , like Ireland, is discredited in the eyes of this Irish middle- class audience by his “lack of rule” and economic dependency on “the fees their papas pay” (2.29). Stephen’s mind, wandering from his hapless efforts to engage his students’ interest, revisits Mulligan’s suggestion that he cultivate Haines and court an English audience instead, and he envisions himself “tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk . . . pierce[ing] the polished mail of [Haines’s] mind” (2.42–43). With this imagery, which recalls Joyce’s association of knives and assassination with Tim Healy in “Et Tu, Healy” and in the later “Eumaeus ” with “the O’Brienite scribes” (16.1503), Joyce figures an adept Irish writer’s encounter with British print capitalism as a medieval parlay between an Irish warrior and an English knight or lord in terms that subtly recall the methods of both Parnell and Wilde and the limits of their effectiveness: [3.89.116.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:20 GMT) The Protracted Labor of the New Journalist Sex Scandal 141 Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master , indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop. Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. (2.42–51) Having briefly envisioned a triumph over Haines, Stephen quickly recognizes that his prize would likely be only to become “a jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise” (2.44–45). Already he seems aware that such a Pyrrhic victory is all but inevitable within an imperial status quo in which Irish artistic or...