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

Chapter 7: (Re)Fusing Sentimentalism and Scandal

181 C h a p t e r 7 (Re)Fusing Sentimentalism and Scandal “Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich” My opinion is that if I put down a bucket into my own soul’s well, sexual department, I draw up Griffith’s and Ibsen’s and Skeffington’s and Bernard Vaughn’s and St. Aloysius’ and Shelley’s and Renan’s water along with my own. I am going to do that in my novel (inter alia) and plank the bucket down before the shades and substances above mentioned to see how they like it. —James Joyce to Stanislaus Joyce, November 13, 1906 He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. . . . Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-­ in-­ love, but always meeting ourselves. —James Joyce, Ulysses In “Scylla and Charybdis” and several of the following episodes of Ulysses, Joyce continues to employ the artistic strategy Stephen has 182  s c a n d a l w o r k just discovered: using ambiguous self-­ exposure to chart his own path through a literary landscape whose borders have been redrawn by the conventions of the New Journalism. In this episode, Stephen must navigate between the ravaging monster of commercial odd jobs and the all-­ consuming whirlpool of Celtic revivalism; his refusal to entertain either of these options is made clear both by his final rejection of the route represented by Mulligan and Haines and by his verbal jousting about Shakespeare with several leading members of the Irish Literary Revival in the National Library. Joyce thereby positions Stephen not only in opposition to the “hard words” of Parnellite obstructionism and scandalmongering but to the sentimental “soft words” through which the divided and traumatized post-­ Parnellite nationalists transformed an earlier tradition of nationalist romantic allegory into a sentimentalized cultural nationalism agreeable to both British and Irish cultural producers. The Immense Debtorship of a Thing Done Sentimentalism figures prominently in this episode, Stephen’s next attempt to sever ties with Mulligan and British print capitalism. In “Scylla and Charybdis,” we learn that Stephen has sent Mulligan a telegram indirectly declining an imposition posed as an opportunity to win Haines’s patronizing patronage. Refusing to buy the “pints apiece” that he has left Mulligan and Haines fruitlessly awaiting (9.561–62), Stephen, quoting a maxim from George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, describes sentimentalism as the emotional equivalent of “barsponging”: “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship of a thing done. Signed: Dedalus” (9.550–51).1 When he declines this chance to subsidize Mulligan’s enjoyment at his own economic expense, Stephen is also declining to sentimentalize their relationship, refusing to softly play on Haines’s sentimental love of things Irish so as to gain approval or financial reward from this colonial representative. This new and more explicit attempt on Stephen’s part to break off relations with Mulligan also identifies sentimentalism itself as serving, like scandal, (Re)Fusing Sentimentalism and Scandal  183 to invisibly credit “the sentimentalist”—in this case, the English imperial audience—at the expense of the sentimentalized Irish. Nor does Stephen seek to conquer Haines through the hard words that he, in his persona as the Aristotelian philosopher Kinch, could wield so as to compel Haines’s respect through a show of intellectual superiority. The figurative conflation of scandal words with physical violence through images of and puns on jousting, parrying, lancets, and mail in Part I of the novel continues in Part II through a complex trajectory of hard words, violent acts, and their afterlife in the soft words of the sentimentalist. Beginning with Stephen’s earlier delivery of Deasy’s letter to the editor (or “English mail”), this trajectory extends to his self-­ mocking role as “bullock befriending bard” first to Myles Crawford in “Aeolus” and then to the influential Celtic Revivalist poet and editor A.E. (George Russell) in “Scylla and Charybdis.”2 As we shall see, in this episode Joyce/Stephen repositions himself relative to the dominant nationalist discourses of sentimentalism and scandal, crafting an alternate discourse that borrows from both scandal discourse and sentimentalism without being subordinated to either. “All or Not at All” The figure of a “middle path” between perilous extremes is, as one would expect, writ large in “Scylla...