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145 9 Old Testaments and New DECL A N K I BE R D When asked why he chose Odysseus rather than Christ as a model for Bloom, Joyce was curt. Living with a woman was one of the most difficult things a man could do—and Jesus was a bachelor who never did (Budgen 1972, 191).1 Yet Joyce was haunted by the mystery he flouted. According to Francini Bruni, his friend in Trieste, “he only completely admires the unchangeable: the mystery of Christ and the mute drama that surrounds it. I can well imagine that his head was full of this mystery when he wrote Ulysses and that therein lies the allegorical point of this story of new martyrdom” (cited in Potts 1979, 35). Bruni noted how Joyce frequented the Catholic churches of Trieste all through Holy Week, “so as not to miss a single syllable ” (ibid.). “As a child he was very religious,” recalled one of his sisters: “I think that all of Jim’s loves were really created in the love of God” (Rodgers 1972, 29). His brother Stanislaus, who became a lifelong atheist, remarked sardonically of James’s temperament that “he who has loved God in youth can never love anything that is less than divine” (S. Joyce 1957, 159). Joyce was someone who snooped around old texts looking for a back door through which to effect an entry. The New Testament was one such text and a major element in the creation of Ulysses. What fascinated him was the audacity with which the gospel authors cannibalized and rewrote the Old Testament, much as he would reconfigure earlier classics, making Ulysses both their fulfilment and itself an open, prophetic book. 1. This essay appears in my book Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (2009). 146 Declan Kiberd As well as the Bible writers, Joyce revered the English mystic William Blake as another bard “who present, past and future sees” (Blake 1927, 53), because all tenses blend in the no-time of God. Blake wrote a prophetic book on this understanding, as did Joyce. Even in the Old Testament, “a saviour is born” because God-time is an eternal now and for Christian readers Jesus always existed. It was not God-the-Father who appeared on Sinai, but Jesus, the preexisting Word. The words of the prophets were shot through with a utopian potential that was not completely realized until it was incarnated in the figure of the New Testament Jesus. Similarly, a previous work like The Odyssey achieved its destined form in Ulysses. But only when Jesus delivered certain lines or performed specific actions did his followers realize that he was the anointed one foretold. Only then did the sentences foretelling him become famous as prophecy, and, for Christians, more significant than the rest of the Old Testament. Joyce, likewise, selects key lines from the classics, even as he submits those texts to a “retrospective arrangement” (U 424). The New Testament , in effect, establishes the utopian, forward thrust of the older texts— Joyce performs a similar service for it, and for them. In one sense, he liquidates all prior works; in another, he shows how much of them can be saved. T. S. Eliot said that Ulysses manipulates a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, and that this technique—he called it “the mythical method”—had “the importance of a scientific discovery” (Eliot 1965, 681). But this method is at least as old as the New Testament. A number of crucial passages culled from the Old Testament helped the first Christians to give shape to the life of Jesus. The Exodus narrative of the people of Israel shows that, despite their occasional mutinies, God kept his promises and gave them hope of better things to come. The mutiny in the wilderness, the manna from heaven, the handing over of the Tables of the Law on Mount Sinai—each has later echoes in, respectively, the temptation in the desert, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, or the Sermon on the Mount. The twelve tribes of Israel find their equivalents in the twelve apostles. The edict of the Pharaoh that all male babies, including Moses, should die prefigures Herod’s killing of children under two years old in his attempt to do away with Jesus. So the Christian life was “fitted” to the Exodus paradigm, with the forty days spent by Jesus in the desert as a reconstruction of the forty years of wandering...

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