Irish Divorce/Joyce’s “Ulysses,” by Peter Kuch (review)

Peter Kuch’s Irish Divorce/Joyce’s “Ulysses” is one of several recent publications focusing on Joyce’s interest in marriage and adultery as well as on reading Joyce’s work through the law. Like James Alexander Fraser’s Joyce & Betrayal and Jonathan Goldman’s collection Joyce and the Law, Kuch’s study demonstrates that closer attention to Joyce’s understanding of and reading in the law, the realities of marriage, adultery, and divorce during Joyce’s time, and the text of Joyce’s work as situated in cultural discourses around adultery and divorce reveals hitherto unrecognized possibilities for interpreting the story of the Blooms.¹ Kuch’s book is surprising, enlightening, and essential reading for anyone seeking to work through the complexities of Ulysses and its depiction of lived relationships.

Kuch draws on narrative theory to show that Bloom and Molly, as characters, function as textual enactments of cultural discourse and knowledge related to divorce as it was understood in Edwardian Dublin. He engages thoroughly and with critical acumen the existing scholarship on Ulysses, particularly investigations into the Bloom’s marriage and Joycean sexualities. Building on the work of Barbara Leckie, Tony Tanner, Richard Brown, and Luca Crispi, among others, Kuch shows incontrovertibly that stories about adultery and divorce filled the air in 1904; that the logic of the divorce case informs Bloom’s thought processes; and that the Blooms’ marriage teeters closer to the brink of dissolution than many readers have previously thought.² One cannot help but think differently about the aftermath of 16 June 1904 after reading Kuch’s work.³

The argument of Irish Divorce/Joyce’s “Ulysses” is that “Joyce’s fictional world mirrors the popular culture of 1904 Edwardian Dublin and that one of Bloom’s reactions on discovering what he believes is convincing proof of Molly’s adultery is to consider divorce” (245). Given Bloom’s own extracurricular erotic activities, his possible neglect of Molly, and his conceivable complicity in her adultery, however, this becomes a less-than-straightforward case. Like Fraser’s study of Joyce and betrayal, Kuch’s work takes as a starting point the claims that Joyce scholars make about the author’s concern with divorce and sexual betrayal that, upon closer examination, are not entirely substantiated, assertions that continue to reverberate throughout our readings until the evidence is marshalled sufficiently to make us see how wrong we have been. Where Fraser suggests that betrayal serves a number of important narrative purposes beyond the representation of sex, for Kuch, the sex act and whether it has actually occurred is of paramount importance. Without evidence of a sexual act, and without knowing precisely what kind of act we are talking about, we cannot know whether divorce is possible—and this is the dilemma that confronts the Blooms as they work through any evidence they have regarding each other’s suspected infidelity.

Because it is indeed the case that divorce is possible in the world of Ulysses, Kuch begins by dismantling the widely held misconception that it was impossible to obtain in Ireland in 1904. The book begins with an eight-page list of court cases, many of which were reported in the papers that Joyce was himself reading (including Bloom’s Freeman’s Journal—U 7.44) and all of which provide a rich body of examples of the different ways couples could go about dissolving their unions (and the different, occasionally riotous, ways they end up there). These included separation orders and divorce, as well as emigration. In addition, separation and divorce were the results of different processes depending on domicile; petitioners could take up residence in Scotland, England, or even France in order to pursue legal action. Finally, legal recourse was not as costly as many readers of Joyce have come to believe. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that divorce would not have been out of the realm of possibility for the Blooms; and...