Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce

6 Teleology without a Telos?: Constitutive Absence in Joyce’s Pilgrimage

6 Teleology without a Telos? Constitutive Absence in Joyce’s Pilgrimage Among numerous commentators about the plight of the displaced self and the Sisyphean quest for meaning is James Joyce, a voluntary exile himself, a wanderer, seeker, a pilgrim of sorts, albeit one who has rejected formalized religion. His Leopold Bloom—an Irishman, a Jew, and a cuckold , a “homeless” and alienated character—attempts to escape the double oppression of colonized, predominantly Catholic Ireland through literal and metaphorical forms of pilgrimage. In the act of walking, in movement through his urban world, he strives to arrive at independent selfidentification . When his telos, however, proves to be empty or false, he redirects his steps and shifts his gaze onto another one. Hence the disappointment upon reaching an unfulfilling goal turns into a new promise of a formative center. The empty center becomes a constitutive absence, a driving force to redirect and move toward a new telos. But why does he pursue it at all? Joyce’s personal pilgrimage through Dublin, Paris, Trieste, Pola, Rome, and Zurich, his disenchantment with Dublin’s factionalism, and the stifling limitations imposed by the Catholic Church, by England, and by his destitute and rowdy father influenced his portrayal of Bloom and Stephen’s restlessness. In the country whose citizens are either Catholic or Protestant , pro-Union or anti-Union, pro-Treaty or anti-Treaty, pro-Parnell or anti-Parnell, there seems to be no niche for those who acknowledge plurality and diversity, who choose to explore their selves rather than blindly follow ideologies, who realize that succumbing to limitations imposed by society, religion, and politics equals spiritual and artistic death. Joyce Teleology without a Telos? Constitutive Absence in Joyce’s Pilgrimage · 119 himself escaped Dublin; instead, he placed Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom within this milieu. His surrogate selves explore the city’s paths and their own identities. Almost all of Joyce’s characters in Ulysses attempt to subvert or evade their fragmented world through literal and metaphorical forms of pilgrimage . They strive to arrive at independent self-identification, but their telos proves to be ultimately unachievable or “empty.” The characters’ dislocated selves, revealing ontological anxiety and frustrated pursuit of the sacred union between the father and the son, display important qualities of the pilgrim as well as certain modalities characteristic of all four categories analyzed by Bauman: the stroller, the vagabond, the tourist, and the player. Each character’s pilgrimage is informed by other methods of seeking an identity or, in some cases, of escaping a fixed identity. This transformation from the identity seekers in archaic culture into the homeless in contemporary society is one of the central themes in Ulysses. Here, as in Conrad’s Secret Agent, wandering through the city is a metaphor for seeking an identity. The characters experience anxiety resulting from the lack of center as well as a ceaseless endeavor to approach it. In “Semus Sumus: Joyce and Pilgrimage,” Julia Bolton Holloway presents a thorough and pertinent survey of the figure of the pilgrim in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. She analyzes influential sources employed by Joyce in his direct and indirect references to pilgrims, but disregards the very nature and purpose of Joyce’s quest motif. In fact, she focuses on the pilgrim and his predecessors rather than on the progress itself. However, her discussion is valuable as an encyclopedic enumeration of references to pilgrim figures in the novels, as well as a detailed analysis of their sources. She mentions James Joyce’s namesake, Saint James of Spain, a pilgrim traditionally depicted with a book, a staff, and a hat. Stephen, Holloway notices, wears a pilgrim’s hat and carries a traveler’s staff (his ashplant). He also bears the key to the Martello tower, “a pilgrim emblem of the Romeville journeying” (215). Not only is he associated with symbols of the Judeo-Christian pilgrim, but his hat and staff are also reminiscent of the Greek xenos, ptochos, paroikos (stranger, beggar, pilgrim) in exile (217). While Stephen “is on the brink of his Daedelian flight, about to set forth on ailithre into exile,” Holloway adds, “Bloom is the exile from Jerusalem . . . who plans a ‘retourney postexilic’ (FW 472)” (216), as well as Moses , who carries “the lighted candle, the Paschal candle which liturgically 120 · Part II. Pilgrimage reflects Mount Sinai’s pillar of fire by night and pillar of cloud by day, beside Stephen’s Aaron’s rod...