Joyce and the Two Irelands

Chapter Six: Ulysses

chapter six 0 9 Ulysses Richard and Robert’s youthful attempt to create a new life in Ireland resembles the moments in Irish history that Joyce cites in his ‘‘Saints and Sages’’ lecture when Protestants and Catholics joined forces in a national cause. Their alliance also exemplifies the popular Revival vision of the two cultures working together to reshape the country. The implication of Exiles, however, is that, whatever their relationship may have been in the past, the two cultures have become so divided that cooperation between them no longer is possible. In Ulysses Joyce lays greater stress than ever before on that division. Nowhere in the book are there signs of the kinship between Irish Catholic and Protestant that Joyce celebrated in his ‘‘Saints and Sages’’ lecture and that had been an article of faith for many Revivalists, Moran being one notable exception. Neither are there signs of any serious hope for an altered Ireland, not even the faint hope expressed by Richard at the end of Exiles. The Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses seems to have abandoned the plan he had at the end of A Portrait of the Artist for creating a conscience in his race. The similar plan that had lingered in Joyce’s mind since Dubliners also appear to have vanished. The idea of a new Ireland is mocked in ‘‘Cyclops,’’ where the Narrator tells of the blowhard Citizen going on and on about ‘‘a new Ireland and new this, that and the other’’ and adds, ‘‘Talking about new Ireland he ought to go and get a new dog so he ought’’ (U 12.483–484). Other ideas for a reformed Ireland, from Buck Mulligan’s Hellenized version to Bloom’s vision of ‘‘the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future’’ (U 15.1544–1545), are treated as jokes. 144 Tseng 2000.8.26 13:25 OCV:0 6052 Potts / JOYCE AND THE TWO IRELANDS / sheet 156 of 232 ulysses The novel is equally devoid of the narrowly circumscribed, but once apparently strong, sympathy toward Revival ideas that Joyce expressed in Exiles, A Portrait of the Artist, and ‘‘The Dead.’’ Throughout Ulysses, he treats the movement with the same relentless satire found in his early attacks on it in ‘‘The Holy Office,’’ ‘‘A Mother,’’ and Stephen Hero. The main difference is that Joyce has enlarged his target. Whereas he aimed his early attacks primarily at the literary Revival and cultural nationalism, in Ulysses, he satirizes all versions of Irish nationalism, from the literary Revival back to the old separatist politics of Wolfe Tone, Edward Fitzgerald, and Robert Emmet. More importantly, rather than limiting himself to exposing the hypocrisy of people involved in nationalist movements as he had in the past, he now also examines problems with nationalism itself. As was mentioned earlier, Joyce objected to Griffith for ‘‘educating the people of Ireland on the old pap of racial hatred’’ (SL 111). Moran, too, taught this ‘‘old pap.’’ Though he targeted Irish Protestants, and Griffith the English, the common thread of racial hatred united them in the antiSemitism that becomes a major theme of Ulysses. In his ‘‘Saints and Sages’’ lecture, Joyce made a special issue of the racist tenor in Revival rhetoric, but Ulysses is his first work of fiction to show racism in action. While examples of racial hatred appear throughout the novel, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism, they culminate in Joyce’s archetypal Irish nationalist , the Citizen.1 In the Citizen’s attack on Bloom, Joyce takes the further step of linking racial hatred with violence. A conclusion that Irish nationalism inevitably was flawed by racism and violence perhaps explains Joyce’s attack on Irish nationalists in Ulysses. His attack may also have been motivated by the Easter Rising of 1916, which was an obvious culmination of nationalist fervor aroused by the Revival and which occurred at an early stage in the book’s composition.2 In his poem ‘‘Easter 1916,’’ Yeats dwelt on the transformative effect this event had on his own views. Whereas he had once thought of the people in the Rising as worth only ‘‘a mocking tale or a gibe,’’ he now saw them as transformed into heroic martyrs, who would be recalled ‘‘Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn . . .’’3 It is highly unlikely that Joyce shared Yeats’ view of the Rising. He attacks the whole notion of patriot heroes in ‘‘Cyclops,’’ where his fiercely satirical...