1
Nell Pach
1 May 2009
Yeats in Ulysses: Weighing The Parental Anchor
James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus leaves Ireland, at the end of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, exalting. Joyce loads his autobiographical protagonist with equal
parts fervent optimism and arrogance, a combination that evokes not the cunning
Daedalus suggested by Stephen’s surname but the former’s unfortunate son. Stephen’s
return to Ireland, occurring just before Joyce resumes his story in Ulysses, is reminiscent
of Icarus as well: called back by his father, Stephen crashes down out of the wide sky, its
“black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations”
(Portrait) instantly gone, to find not his own death but the death of his mother. Her death
is a year past when Ulysses begins, but Stephen remains preoccupied both by her
phantom and by the threat of his still-living father, from whom he has striven to distance
himself. Throughout the novel Stephen is intensely anxious about parental usurpation,
the encroachment of the older generation upon the younger, the demands levied upon
children by society and tradition, the crushing responsibilities of children to parents.
For guidance in eluding this generational tyranny, Stephen turns repeatedly to the
early works of W.B. Yeats; through Yeats, he examines and attempts to defy parental
authority, to reject mandated filial duty. Stephen finds, in Yeats’ work, representations of
escape applicable not only to his literal father and mother but to the metaphorical parents
of the patria and the church – the mother or fatherland and the reverend fathers and
mothers – not to mention the paternalistic presence of colonizing England. However,
Yeats himself, sixteen years older and long-established as a writer by 1904, when the
novel takes place, is a literal and literary elder to Joyce, a sort of half-generation ahead,
2
given to romanticizing the Protestant Ascendancy for whom he, as the scion of a middleclass Anglo-Irish Church of Ireland family in decline, held due reverence. Parental
connection is inescapable; in looking to Yeats’ work for liberation, procrastinating writer
Stephen ultimately cannot avoid linking himself to the personal and national past.
Stephen mirrors the young Joyce in his ambivalence toward Yeats; both show
markeds appreciation and disdain for the older poet. The works that Stephen focuses on
in Ulysses are, perhaps unsurprisingly, earlier writing of Yeats that Joyce himself
admired as a man of Stephen’s age. As a seventeen-year-old University College student,
Joyce “clapped vigorously”1 at the 1899 premier of Yeats’ much-maligned verse drama
The Countess Cathleen, in fierce defiance of most of the other students present, who took
offense at the play’s unflattering representation of Irish peasantry as mercenary and
materialistic, and later circulated a letter in protest, a letter that a disgusted Joyce refused,
with little diplomacy, to sign.2 The incident – or something like it – befalls Stephen too;
near the end of Portrait, he recalls overhearing morally offended theatergoers leaving a
performance in disgust:
The verses crooned in the ear of his memory composed slowly before his
remembering eyes the scene of the hall on the night of the opening of the
national theatre…The catcalls and hisses and mocking cries ran in rude
gusts round the hall from his scattered fellow students.
– A libel on Ireland!
… – Blasphemy!
– We never sold our faith!
– No Irish woman ever did it!
Joyce approved of Yeats’ willingness to risk the misinterpretation and abuse of blind
nationalists, cheered his pursuit of pure art at the expense of politics, his “pure
1
2
Richard Ellman, James Joyce, p. 67
ibid
3
imagination”, in which Joyce believed himself deficient.3 He held as a particular favorite
as well an 1896 short story of Yeats’, even then obscure, called “The Tables of the Law”,
and, upon reading it in his student days, committed the entire text to memory4; Stephen
knows the story and reflects in Ulysses, explicitly and obliquely, on its ideas of spiritual
enlightenment and cyclical change. Not long after their first meeting, Yeats would
arrange for a new edition of “The Tables of the Law” and its companion stories in 1903,
with a wry addition to the preface: “‘I do not think I should have reprinted them had I not
met a young man in Ireland the other day who liked them very much and nothing else at
all that I have written.’”5
That first meeting had been a notoriously uncomfortable, though not openly
acrimonious, one. Joyce was already acquainted with Yeats’ fellow Celtic Twilight poet
George Russell, or AE, and Russell put Yeats in touch with Joyce in 1902, telling Yeats,
“‘The first spectre of the new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have
suffered from him and I would like you to suffer.’”6 In the subsequent tense encounter,
Joyce laughed at Yeats’ references to Algernon Swinburne and Balzac, dismissing them
as long-forgotten.7 Yeats reported later, in a perhaps embellished account, that Joyce
excused his impertinence with the explanation that “after all both you and I will be
forgotten.”8 He read Yeats samples of his prose, which Yeats would call “beautiful
though immature”9, and shrugged off Yeats’ approval, blustering that he didn’t actually
care what Yeats thought of his work, and had no real reason to show it to him. Further,
3
R.F. Foster vol. I, p. 277
Richard Ellman, Eminent Domain, pp. 30-31
5
R.F. Foster vol. I, p. 278
6
Richard Ellman, James Joyce, p. 100
7
Richard Ellman, James Joyce, p. 101
8
ibid
9
Richard Ellman, James Joyce, p. 102
4
4
though he expressed his satisfaction with “The Tables of the Law”, he offered a
devastating assessment of Yeats’ overall career:
…[H]e began to explain his objections to everything I had ever
done. Why had I concerned myself with politics, with folkore, with the
historical setting of events, and so on? Above all why had I written about
ideas, why had I condescended to make generalizations? These things
were all the sign of the cooling of the iron, of the fading out of
inspiration…I had been doing some little plays for our Irish theatre…He
objected to these particularly and told me that I was deteriorating.10
Generalizations, Joyce said witheringly, were made not by poets but by “men of
letters.”11 Yeats was unnerved enough, at the end of the interview, to accidentally give
his age, when Joyce asked, as thirty-six instead of thirty-seven.12 Joyce famously
responded, “‘I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.’”13 The world
of the past was of no interest to the twenty-year-old student; the young had no obligation
to maintain or resurrect it. If too young to be a representative of Joyce’s parents’ age
group, Yeats seemed nonetheless a liaison between the two generations, an apologist for
the patria-bound nationalists if not a champion.
More immediately than political and religious forces, of course, both of Stephen’s
literal parents loom over him. Joyce first addresses Stephen’s mother, May Dedalus,
dead for almost a year when the novel begins. Yeats’ poem “Who Goes With Fergus?” is
the most conspicuous manifestation of the poet’s presence in Ulysses, echoing again and
again in Stephen’s head during the day, from morning till night, often preceding or
following thoughts of May. The poem had been set to music and sung in the 1899
10
ibid
ibid
12
Richard Ellman, Four Dubliners, pp. 39-40
13
Richard Ellman, James Joyce, p. 103
11
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production of Yeats’ play The Countess Cathleen, and Stephen, inheritor of his father’s
fine voice, sang it, as he remembers in the first episode of the novel, “Telemachus”, to his
dying mother: “Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and
pity I went to her bedside.” (U 1.250-253) The memory is clearly not a guiltless one of
solace provided to a sufferer, duty fulfilled: Stephen is, in fact, as his roommate Mulligan
suggests half-seriously, perhaps responsible for some of the suffering. Refusing even to
feign the belief with which she reared him, Stephen would not kneel and pray at his
mother’s deathbed; the performance of “Fergus” served as a substitute for this filial rite.
The poem itself is well-suited to this act of defiance, inviting the listener to abandon the
social and political attachments of the workaday world – “…brood on hopes and fears no
more” – in favor of a life dedicated to the mystic and artistic, efforts to “pierce the deep
wood’s woven shade”, to transcend “love’s bitter mystery” and “dance upon the level
shore”. It is a companion to Yeats’ “Fergus and the Druid”, which features a dialogue
wherein Fergus, king of the northern Irish province of Ulster, gives up his political power
to pursue the spiritual, to “learn the dreaming wisdom”. As Stephen begrudges the
sacrifice he is forced to make for his family in leaving his exhilarating Parisian existence,
Fergus resents the sacrifices necessary on behalf of his people, griping, “A king is but a
foolish labourer/Who wastes his blood to be another’s dream.” Unable though he may be
to avoid being called back to Ireland, to renounce country and kin as legendary Fergus
does, Stephen is determined nonetheless to openly reject his mother’s values, to separate
himself ideologically if he cannot do so physically. The poem seems even to imagine –
to conceive – a new engendering for those who heed it. Its diction hints at selfregenerative sex; listeners are invited to “pierce” the shadows of the forest, to submit to
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Fergus’ rule over “the white breast” of the sea and the stars “dishevelled” like hair.14
Those who dance on the shore can, by implication, gestate and give new birth to
themselves, mothers unneeded.
Defiance, however, despite the content of the poem, proves difficult to sustain.
For all that “Who Goes With Fergus” champions individual pursuit of fulfillment, its
context seems to belie it; The Countess Cathleen, wherein “Fergus” first appeared, is at
last a celebration of the sacrosanct Irish tradition of self-sacrifice. During a medieval
famine, peasants begin to sell their souls to demons for food, driving the Christlike young
noblewoman of the title to offer her own money and supplies to them, and finally her
own soul to the demons in order to buy back the souls of the peasants. She dies shortly
afterward, though her soul is saved by a God “[w]ho sees the motive and the deed regards
not.”15 The story is complicated by the presence of “Fergus”, and also by Cathleen’s
would-be lover, the bard Aleel, who, like the “Fergus” speaker, regularly implores her to
go with him to the free fairy world of the forest and, in monastic isolation, forget the
sufferings of the ungrateful peasants. It is difficult not to hear Yeats’ own voice in that of
the infatuated poet, begging the civic-minded Cathleen – based on the revolutionary
Maud Gonne, to whom the play is dedicated – to forget service to the people and leave
with him, but the play plainly presents Cathleen’s sacrifice as noble, a triumph.
Already thus ambiguous, “Fergus” becomes, within Ulysses, irrevocably tied to
Stephen’s mother and Stephen’s guilt over her death: no longer a fantasy of escape, it is a
reminder of the world from which he could not break away. The memory of his mother
is one connected firmly to sacrifice, to Stephen’s forced relinquishment of France and to
14
15
Lecture, 16 April 2009
W.B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen, 1892 version, l. 829
7
May Dedalus’ almost archetypal martyrdom to childbirth and poverty: Stephen thinks of
the keepsakes of his mother’s youth, indications of a life with few personal pleasures, a
shortlived identity beyond the family. The language of the poem becomes language of
confinement. Atop the Martello tower at the beginning of “Telemachus”, Stephen grimly
surveys the “dim sea” that separates him from Europe. It is “bitter”, darkened by opaque
shadows, shade that cannot be pierced. Stephen is unable to follow the exhortation of the
poem, left with a memory-ridden “brooding brain” (U 1.266) as his mother was left, in
her final days, “crying in her wretched bed…[f]or those words…love’s bitter mystery,”
(U 1.252-253) the mystery, perhaps, of her enduring love for the errant son who will not
pray at her entreaty, and his for her, the two-way amor matris he will reflect upon in the
next episode. Neither can cease to brood, as the poem counsels, upon this cryptic
emotion.
Moreover, it is notable that “Fergus” first issues from the mouth of Stephen’s
tormentor Buck Mulligan, a materialist with no interest whatsoever in the spiritual or the
artistic, a mocker. Stephen, confronting Mulligan about Mulligan’s coarse reference to
the death of Stephen’s mother, is met with flip dismissal. “Give up the moody brooding,”
(U 1.235-236) Mulligan advises, and segues into recitation. What was once an appeal for
freedom from social responsibility and banality becomes an attempt to trivialize the event
that forced Stephen back into the world of parental dominance; Stephen’s sacrifice is
belittled. Stephen’s rebellion, in refusing to pray, is devalued as well, made to seem at
best extraneous, at worst spiteful and childish. Denying Stephen the satisfaction of
openly rejecting his parents, Mulligan advocates empty compromise instead: “Humour
her till it’s over.” (U 1.212) On Mulligan’s tongue, “Fergus” becomes a call to an
8
unexamined life lived, in the interest of convenience, within the bounds of societal and
familial propriety.
The appearance of Fergus in the text is quickly followed by that another maternal
reminder, a personage who suggests another of Yeats’ favorite, much-romanticized
mythological characters: that of Cathleen nih Houlihan, the Poor Old Woman, motherly
personification of dispossessed Ireland, mourning the loss of her “four green fields”, the
colonized provinces of Ireland. In Yeats’ 1902 play, the eponymous Cathleen arrives at
the house of a poor rural family on the verge of Wolfe Tone’s abortive 1798 rebellion to
remind them of her stolen green fields, spurring a young man to give up private happiness
with his fiancée for the draining “hard service”16 for which she unapologetically asks,
matter-of-factly telling him, “[M]any a man has died for love of me.”17 The play is
perhaps Yeats’ most unequivocal approval and glorification of sacrifice; he would later,
in the poem “Man and the Echo”, wonder with guilty conscience if it had influenced any
of Ireland’s latest martyrs, the dead of the 1916 Easter Rising. Old Cathleen sings with
almost unseemly jubilance of those who will fall for the cause:
Do not make a great keening
When the graves have been dug to-morrow…
They shall be remembered for ever,
They shall be alive for ever…18
This Cathleen has no compunction about sending her children to die for her, and though
Yeats, never wholly convinced by the nationalist rhetoric, shows his audience the anguish
of the abandoned fiancée as well, the play’s glorification of those willing to die is
unambiguous.
16
Yeats, Cathleen nih Houlihan
ibid
18
ibid
17
9
Joyce’s Yeatsian “poor old woman…wandering crone” (U 1.403-404) arrives at
Stephen’s door in the guise of a withered milkmaid moments after his conversation with
Mulligan, completely unfamiliar with Irish, the language Yeats sought to promote as
Ireland’s real tongue, but of which he, too, was embarrassingly ignorant.19 Unable even
to recognize the supposed mother tongue, she is a grotesque travesty of a mother figure,
dry and shriveled herself, yet offering milk. She is parasitic, drawing as she does milk
from the cows and money, coin by coin, from Stephen and Mulligan. The undertones of
vampirism in Yeats’ own old woman are more evident in this light: Yeats’ Cathleen is
reported at the end of the play to have transformed, following the young man Michael’s
decision to fight for her, into “a young girl…[with]the walk of a queen.”20 Through the
sacrifice of her young this mother rejuvenates herself, as if bathing in virginal blood; she
is the cannibal pig who, as Stephen says viciously to his patriotic friend Davin in Portrait,
“eats her farrow”, the “[g]houl” and “[c]hewer of corpses” (U 1.288) into which
Stephen’s own mother transforms when he dreams of her visit from the grave. Still,
despite her ability to bleed her offspring dry, she is without real power of her own; she is
the betrayed wife who cooperates in her own betrayal to imperialist Britain and
indifferent, collaborating Ireland as personified by Haines and Mulligan respectively; far
from the queen of Yeats’ play, she is their “cuckquean”.21
This vision of Cathleen nih Houlihan, wronged Ireland incarnate, is remarkably
close, ironically, to Stephen’s caricature of newly-dead Queen Victoria, symbol of
imperialist England, the “[o]ld hag with the yellow teeth…[v]ieille ogresse with the dents
jaunes” (U 3.232-233), as the expatriate revolutionary Stephen knew in Paris called her.
19
Richard Ellman, Eminent Domain, p. 29
Yeats, Cathleen nih Houlihan
21
Patrick Keane, Terrible Beauty, pp. 56-59
20
10
Both are monstrous, consuming women, and both represent an authority that is in a way
parental; their demands upon their subjects are like the demands of parent upon children.
Victoria and Cathleen are each explicitly linked to Stephen’s personal mother: ravenous
Cathleen is not far from “corpsechewer” May Dedalus, denounced as a “[h]yena”(U
15.4200), a scavenging animal, its name derived from the Greek for “pig”, known to eat
its young as Stephen has accused Ireland itself of doing; Victoria is conceived of as “[a]
crazy queen, old and jealous,” demanding, as Stephen’s mother did of him, “Kneel down
before me.” (U 1.640) In the delirium of the “Circe” episode, the three are called up in
close succession. First comes the disintegrating corpse of Stephen’s mother, who
reminds Stephen of his own inevitable death and shames him with the memory of her
suffering for him, in a speech that seems to conflate her inextricably with Jesus Christ:
“Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount
Cavalry.” (U 15.4239-4240) In response Stephen declares the Luciferian Non serviam!,
invoking the power of “[t]he intellectual imagination,” uncontaminated by sentiment or
filial debt. (U 15.4228) Imagination, however, even an imagination as fine as Yeats’ –
“‘No surrealist poet can equal [Yeats] for imagination,’”22 Joyce repeatedly told friends
who preferred Eliot’s bleak vision23 - is prone to subjugation, as is demonstrated in the
figure of Old Gummy Granny, who appears, after a brief reference to vieille ogresse
Victoria, third, a brutally satirical monster-clown version of Yeats’ Cathleen. She takes
form from three women, just after the graphic execution of the patriot Croppy Boy; the
women who “coalesce” to form her have previously been employed in mopping up the
expelled semen of the hanged man, vampiric absorption of potential offspring. With
22
23
Richard Ellman, Eminent Domain, p. 53
Ibid
11
comical precision she promises Stephen immediate results and a reward for murder done
and death faced in Ireland’s name:
Remove him, acushla. At 8:35 a.m. you will be in heaven and
Ireland will be free. (she prays) O good God, take him!
U 15.4747-4749
The nightmare Cathleen is bloodthirsty not only in regard to her enemies but to her
children as well, thriving on their deaths; she asks God not for Ireland’s liberation but for
Stephen’s martyrdom. The cause of freedom means Stephen’s enslavement, enslavement
of the young. Love for the mother requires sacrifice on the part of the child at least as
drastic as the sort compelled by the mother’s own love for her offspring.
However, while Stephen is skeptical of what even the most devoted mothers have
to offer their children – “weak blood and wheysour milk”. (U 2.166) – he is far more
generous in his evaluation of maternity than he is in regard to the role of the father. Amor
matris is granted, at least in the beginning of the novel, some value; it is, Stephen thinks
as he observes a runty pupil at Deasy’s school, perhaps “[t]he only true thing in life”. (U
2.143) For fathers he seems to have no regard, no deference, and Stephen’s anxiety about
– and distrust of – the father-son relationship is perhaps even more pronounced than his
fear of the consuming mother figure. His own father, of course, is a drunk who
disapproves of Stephen and his artistic aspirations, providing almost nothing for
Stephen’s near-starving sisters. While Stephen seems to fear absorption into and
insuperable connection to the mother – in the “Proteus” episode he imagines the
umbilical cord that extended between him and his mother: “The cords all link back,
12
strandentwining cable of all flesh.” (U 3.37) – he is markedly disdainful of his father and
their far more tenuous tie: “What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.” (9.859)
Of course, as a Telemachus figure, Stephen is in search of a father, judging his
own insufficient. He seems, at times, to consider true worthwhile father-son relationships
impossible, an archetype almost never realized. Fatherhood, Stephen opines in the
National Library to the half-mocking friends and fellow writers who egg him on, is a
quasi-fantastical, theoretical ideal:
Boccaccio’s Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself
with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is
unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession,
from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on
the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob
of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because
founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void.
Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood…Paternity may be a legal
fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him
or he any son?
U 9.837-845
Motherhood is sure and mother’s love, whatever its ill effects, is unquestionable;
fatherhood, even for those who believe in it, is unpleasant for all and potentially
damaging:
The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides
affection, increases care. He is a new male: his growth is his
father’s decline, his youth his father’s envy, his friend his father’s
enemy.
U 9.854-857
Here Stephen sinks, as he does throughout the book, starting from the first episode, into
contemplation of the Holy Trinity, God manifested as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, a
perennially troubling doctrine. Several times during the day Stephen remembers
“Sabellius, the African,subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field” (U 9.862), who
13
theorized that the Father and the Son were one and the same – doubtless a troubling
notion to Stephen, who strives to separate himself from his father.
It is here too that Stephen again turns to Yeats, finding, this time in Yeats’
esoteric short stories, hope for a new manifestation of the father-son relationship, a
dynamic reconceived, or even wholly eliminated, Father and Son swept away to leave
only Holy Ghost. Stephen is, of course, known to have a penchant for the telling of ghost
stories – his students demand one in “Nestor”, and much of the episode in the library,
“Scylla and Charybdis”, consists of Stephen relating his theory about the ghost of the
murdered King Hamlet, the character he believes represents the author of the play himself.
“He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory…he wants to make our flesh creep,” (U
9.141-143) says John Eglinton with condescending good humor. Certainly Stephen
harbors some hostility toward flesh, at least toward the flesh that he and his father share.
In the language of the theologians, they are consubstantial, constructed of the same
material, and Stephen seems to view this overlap as an encroachment on his father’s part;
he was created, he reflects in “Proteus”, by the “ghostwoman” mother with whom he is
no longer consubstantial and a man “with my voice and my eyes” (U 2.46), body parts, it
seems, that Stephen feels are more his than his father’s. A few moments later he
imagines his “consubstantial father’s voice” (U 2.62) complaining to his sisters about
their “artist brother” – his own voice, turned against him. The sense of an encroaching,
usurping father who takes the place of the true spiritual father dogs Stephen. His theories
about Hamlet center around the relations between fathers and sons, and correspondences
between father-son pairs. He maps Shakespeare to the murdered King Hamlet,
Shakespeare’s dead son to the eponymous prince, but it is clear that he sees a more
14
immediately relevant correspondence too: that of himself, black-clad and melancholy, to
young Hamlet. Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father, is an easy Claudius, the uncle who
urges Hamlet to look on him as a father: both Simon and Claudius are offensively
corporeal drinkers, gluttons, loudmouths, fathers made of “too too solid flesh”. King
Hamlet’s ghost – noted for virtue, if not holiness – is the elusive father that Stephen seeks
outside the ordinary parameters, connected to him not by a moment of biological
exchange but by an ongoing intellectual and ideological engagement.
In his effort to conceive of a system free from father-son hierarchy and the
attendant pressures of competition and subordination Stephen draws from Yeats’ “The
Tables of the Law”, the middle piece in a sort of literary triptych dealing with the Holy
Trinity. “The Tables of the Law” is set in the Ireland of Yeats’ day, narrated by a
nameless seeker who, guided by the recurring Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne,
explores the dark and compelling mysticism to which Yeats too was drawn. Following
the opening “Rosa Alchemica”, wherein the narrator and Robartes participate in an
ecstatic rite held by the occult Order of the Alchemical Rose, the narrator fleeing the next
morning when the brutish local peasants attack the order, “The Tables of the Law”
describes an evening spent with an agitated Aherne. Aherne is preoccupied with the
ideas of the Italian abbot Joachim of Flora, a twelfth-century visionary. Joachim’s
writings, denounced as heretical, have over time been rooted out and destroyed by the
church, but Aherne reveals that he has secured a copy of the monk’s most vilified text.
The “tables” in question are the tablets upon which the Mosaic commandments are
written, and Joachim’s work – as invented by Yeats – systematically invalidates every
commandment, listing those who have broken the divine laws and flourished, calling
15
attention to the relativity of certain dictums: “how chastity was a virtue and robbery a
little crime in such a land, and robbery a crime and unchastity a little thing in such a
land…”24 Aherne goes on to explain that Joachim avoided persecution during his
lifetime by recognizing the authority of the Catholic church and allowing it to control the
masses, while privately continuing to teach his revealed truth:
He considered that those, whose work was to live and not to reveal,
were children and that the Pope was their father; but he taught in secret
that certain others, and in always increasing numbers, were elected, not to
live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God which is colour and music
and softness and a sweet odour; and that these have no father but the Holy
Spirit.25
Stephen, presumably having read Yeats’ story, has studied Joachim’s
extant manuscripts in a Dublin library. The historical Joachim’s interest in the Holy
Spirit, the most abstract manifestation of the Trinity, was indeed notable. Like Yeats
with his gyres, like Joyce after encountering Vico26, Joachim conceived of history as
cyclical, divided into three ages mapping to the three parts of the Trinity. The first began
with the Biblical patriarchs, and corresponded to God the Father; the second, taking place
during the existence of the state of Judea and including Christ’s lifetime, was the age of
God the Son; the third would be that of the Holy Spirit, “in which the monastic state is
illustrious”.27 This period would be “the age of the fullness of revelation and the triumph
of the viri spirituals, the ‘spiritual men.’”28 Submissive though such members of the
spiritual nobility might be to the church during the second age, the third age would see
major change in the structure of Christian life, “the domination of the spiritual and the
Yeats, “The Tables of the Law” in Watson, W.B. Yeats: Short Fiction, pp. 205-206
Yeats, “The Tables of the Law”, p. 206
26
Richard Ellman, Eminent Domain, pp. 30-31
27
McGinn, p. 33
28
McGinn, p. 34
24
25
16
charismatic over the institutional and rational”.29 After the chaos of the apocalypse, a
handful of cloistered savants would guide and purify the church.30 Believers had, of
course, been predicting the imminent end of the world from the earliest days of
Christianity, but Joachim veered from the usual version of events in inserting
this extra period between the events of Revelations and Christ’s return, “an age of
completion within history and not outside it…the perfection of the divine action…”31
Here Joachim flirted with heresy, suggesting that in the age of the Son the church
remained somehow incomplete, flawed, that the age of the Holy Spirit would see the
rectification of these deficiencies. If the third age meant perfection, the second age, the
age connected to Christ, was by implication imperfect. Christ’s importance in
humanity’s salvation was then reduced, the death on the cross belittled.32 For Stephen,
born in a nation wildly enthusiastic for sacrifices both secular and sacred, the disparaging
of this archetypical sacrifice proves liberating. He will not die for country or creed, a fact
he proudly declares to a belligerent audience in “Circe”, and thinks little of those who do,
though he regrets their needless deaths:
You die for your country. Suppose…But I say: Let my country die
for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn’t want it to die. Damn
death. Long live life!
U 15.4478-4479
Joachim’s idea of a spiritual and cultural elite held appeal for Yeats and for young
Joyce, both envisioning a ruling class comprised not of religious mystics but of the poets,
who would usher in a new artistic age,33 and naturally Joyce’s young protagonist, full of
his own vague but visceral literary aspirations and hungry, as he wanders through the
29
ibid
ibid
31
ibid
32
ibid
33
Richard Ellman, Eminent Domain, pp. 30-31
30
17
third episode of Ulysses, for inspiration, longs too for a new era, a refreshed one. The
Holy Ghost, associated as it is with inspiring previously unknown language in the
apostles during its Pentecostal descent, is perhaps the most appropriate symbol for this
epoch of wordsmiths. Thus “The Tables of the Law” directs the course of Stephen’s
reflections for some of the third episode of Ulysses. The narrator and Aherne discuss
Irish satirist Jonathan Swift at the beginning of “The Tables of the Law”, remarking on
his lack of regard for organized religion, his belief that it encouraged hatred and not love,
and Stephen’s thoughts follow their conversation, slipping onto Swift as well here as he
walks the beach in “Proteus”. Both thinkers – Joachim and Swift – are potential
intellectual fathers for him, but he suspects that they cannot be fully understood from the
little he has with which to reconstruct their minds:
House of decay, mine, his and all…Come out of them, Stephen.
Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh’s library where you read
the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom? The hundredheaded rabble
of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind [Swift] ran from them to the wood of
madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm,
horsenostrilled…Abbas father, furious dean [Swift], what offence laid fire to their
brains?
U 3.105-113
The last line evokes the tongues of fire in which the Holy Ghost is said to alight
upon the heads of believers, imbuing them with transcendent knowledge, a surrogate
father that Stephen imagines came to the medieval monk and the eighteenth-century
scholar. Their inspiration, however, is now gone, used, with only a few crumbling pages
to testify to it. Yeats’ work has sent him looking to the past, not the future that Stephen,
stirred by “Tables”, had trusted he would find.
18
The “hundredheaded rabble” is perhaps a bitter memory of what Stephen
interprets as Yeats’ intermittent betrayals of his own principles of artistic elitism, his
attempts to please the masses. Here Joyce no doubt remembered his own self-righteous
fury when he learned that Yeats’ Irish Literary Theatre would pass over his own
translations of the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann in favor of presenting two less
sophisticated but emphatically Irish works – one in Irish, one adapted from Irish epic by
Yeats and Russell – in an effort to atone for the controversy of The Countess Cathleen.
Joyce lashed out in a self-published article that he titled “The Day of the Rabblement”,34
denouncing compromise:
…[T]he artist, though he may employ the crowd, [must be] very careful
to isolate himself…and to-day when the highest form of art has been just
preserved by desperate sacrifices, it is strange to see the artist making terms with
the rabblement…35
Yeats’ collection The Wind Among the Reeds is praised as “poetry of the highest order”,36
but Joyce, with all the authority of nineteen, warns him that “[i]f an artist courts the
favour of the multitude he cannot escape the contagion of its fetichism and deliberate
self-deception, and if he joins in a popular movement he does so at his own risk.”37 Such
an artist makes himself a slave of “the mean influences”38, pursuing approval and flattery:
“[H]is true servitude is that he inherits a will broken by doubt and a soul that yields up all
its hate to a caress; and the most seeming-independent are those who are the first to
reassume their bonds.”39 Stephen cannot think of his past enthusiasm for Yeats’ Joachim
34
Richard Ellman, James Joyce, pp. 88-89
James Joyce, “The Day of the Rabblement”
36
ibid
37
ibid
38
ibid
39
ibid
35
19
and the age of the Holy Ghost without remembering that Yeats writes also for the
narrow-minded nationalist public.
Finally, the Holy Ghost as father receives the same trivialization from Buck
Mulligan that Mulligan gave to “Fergus” and to Stephen’s mother; not long after
Mulligan’s morning declamation of the latter, he launches into “The Ballad of Joking
Jesus”, a chant mocking the impregnation of Mary by the dove-formed Ghost, and the
ensuing strife between the resulting Son and an ersatz corporeal father, ending with the
Son’s early death:
My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree
So here’s to disciples and Calvary.
U 1.585-587
Again Stephen’s rebellion – this time against his father – is negated, made to seem
adolescent, unconsidered.
The stifling power of father and mother culminates for Stephen in “Circe”,
definitively defeating the impulses toward freedom that Stephen draws from Yeats. The
episode ends with a return to “Who Goes with Fergus?”, which Stephen mumbles from
the ground, where he has fallen after being struck by one of the English soldiers with
whom he has gotten into a drunken argument. Bloom calls to Stephen, who responds
enigmatically, “Black panther. Vampire,” (U 15.4931) before choking out the poem in
fragments. The panther is a reference to the nightmares of Stephen’s English roommate
Haines, who has on more than one occasion woken from sleep in the Martello tower
believing such an animal to be in the room with him. That such a vision should haunt the
history-denying Haines, whose father made a fortune in Africa selling drugs to Zulus, as
Mulligan has it, constitutes a notable “return of the repressed”, as Alistair Cormack
20
points out in his Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and the Reprobate Tradition.40 This
is not lost on Stephen: the black panther is recalled here as another symbol the
imperialistic, distant father; the vampire references the anthropophagic mother. In the
face of this chilling father-mother pair, Stephen attempts to quote Fergus’ manifesto of
freedom, but is unable to properly conjugate the verb “drive”, unable to connect “pierce”
to the “wood’s woven shade”; action is impaired. He cannot be the poet he still believes
he will become; he can only articulate disjointed nouns, murmuring about the “dim sea”
that kept him prisoner in Ireland in the “Telemachus” episode. The crucial word love –
the “word known to all men” that Stephen demands from his mother earlier in “Circe” –
is not among them, even though the apparition of Stephen’s mother gives him the line –
Love’s bitter mystery – when they speak together of her death. Even mother’s love, it
seems – contrary to what Stephen has sentimentally concluded in the “Nestor” episode –
is eclipsed by parental tyranny, and “Who Goes With Fergus?”, intensely linked to
parents for Stephen, cannot overcome that.
Moreover, for Stephen, Yeats himself, though he does not appear in the novel as
does his lesser colleague George Russell, undermines the rebellions suggested in his
work. For all his interest in a literary elite, he is nonetheless accommodating to
traditional authority, deferential to those who are less talented than he but better-born and
powerful. Where Stephen refuses to give a favorable review to a book by Yeats’
supporter Lady Gregory, Yeats flatters the aristocrat shamelessly. In later editions of The
Countess Cathleen, he would remove “Who Goes With Fergus?”, counterpoint to
Cathleen’s self-surrender, from the play altogether, as well as much of the other blank
40
Cormack, 91
21
verse that celebrated the mystical Celtic traditions, for a more straightforwardly Christian
story of redemption. He is willing to compromise to please patron and patria.
Joyce’s own feelings toward Yeats and his work would always remain ambivalent,
split between admiration and contempt. He was, in later life, understandably
embarrassed about some of the by-then-legendary stories of his interactions with Yeats,
and indeed denied that he had made the more egregious remarks that Yeats attributed to
him. He could recite hours’ worth of Yeats’ poetry, and never hid his esteem for the poet,
even within his continental European milieu, members of which were inclined to regard
this predilection with, at best, bemused tolerance.41
Still he had little time for Yeats’
forays into politics, accusing him of a “treacherous instinct of adaptability”42 that
rendered him too easily talked into concessions, too eager to shape his art to the cause of
the Irish nationalist movement and its attendant cultural interest in all things Celtic.
This adaptability was perhaps the result of suspension between conflicting ideals,
between the conflicting pulls of political duty and aesthetic sense. In “The Tables of the
Law”, Yeats does not, ultimately, present Aherne as happier under the Holy Spirit; the
Holy Spirit proves an insufficient father, and Aherne is overwhelmed by the freedom that
comes with breaking the tablets. He tells the narrator that only through human sin, for
which God the Son died, can humans approach God; only through sin can they acquire
the necessary “sense of separation”43 that must exist if there is to be the rapprochement
that comes with repentance. Though the commandments are “arbitrary”44, they serve to
ensure that the process of sin and repentance will occur. Aware of the relativity of moral
41
Richard Ellman, Eminent Domain, pp. 52-53
ibid
43
Yeats, “The Tables of the Law”, p. 209
44
Yeats, “The Tables of the Law”, p. 209
42
22
behavior, Aherne is unable to feel himself a sinner, and thus is stranded far from the God
he sought. Meanwhile, the narrator has taken refuge in Catholicism and devoutly wears
his rosary beads around his neck wherever he goes. In Ulysses, Yeats is, to Stephen,
suspended between these roles, not quite restraining father, but certainly not freedomseeking peer. He seeks an artistic place between the sorry rosary-bedecked protagonist of
“The Tables of the Law” and the wild-eyed, untethered Owen Aherne, between narrow
Catholicism and the rapturous hallucinatory highs of the mystic world – by extension,
between parochial nationalist propaganda and radically experimental art for art’s sake.
However, he does not find it; instead his work is left ambiguous, with elements of both
extremes, in each of which he remains, like his narrator, in some sense only “half
initiated”.45 Stephen must find the extreme and unambiguous in his own unwritten work
if he is to avoid Yeats and all Yeats’ attendant parental influences. Like Daedalus he
dominates the safe moderate zone between the Earth and the sun, forcing Stephen to
disobey, to fly at unapproved altitudes.
45
Yeats, “The Tables of the Law”, p. 210
23
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