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Title:Print media and the Construction of the Public Sphere in James Joyce’s Ulysses
Author:Camilla Mount
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1
PRINT MEDIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE
PUBLIC SPHERE IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES
Camilla Mount
Thesis submitted for PhD in English
King’s College London
January 2014
2
Abstract
Framed around an investigation into the public sphere in Ireland during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, this thesis explores how the public sphere is constructed and
reflected upon by James Joyce in Ulysses. It recognises that in order to exist in a society that
is increasingly influenced by print media, communication and commodity, the public
sphere must be able to function beyond the limits of a set location or place. I therefore
explore two versions of the public sphere. The first, as set down by Jürgen Habermas in his
study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, began with the Enlightenment and
relies on fixed locations such as reading rooms and coffee houses. In the second, I
introduce a possible alternative to the Habermasian historical understanding of the public
sphere. This argues that networks of communication form reading communities which are
created through the movement of newspapers and other objects of print ephemera, and
that are read out loud in groups or move through the narrative as pieces of paper
paraphernalia.
These communities—created through the communal experience of reading and
discussing news—exist in Ulysses on a virtual level, often recognised solely by the reader,
but they can also be identified in Joyce’s wider context. Here I discuss Benedict Anderson’s
theory of the imagined community and the rise of nationalism, with specific reference to
Ireland. The changing shape of the public sphere is integral to understanding the
relationship between print media and the individual. Its potential has yet to be fully
recognised in the scholarship surrounding Irish Studies and James Joyce. It provides a
framework through which to analyse the connection between the political climate, the rise
of new communication methods, and the role of the individual in Ireland during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. By setting up such a discussion surrounding the
public sphere, I am able to re-evaluate Joyce’s use of print media in Ulysses, and explore the
implications that this brings.
3
Table of Contents
Abstract
2
Table of Contents
3
Table of Figures
4
Acknowledgements
5
‘The Shade of Parnell’: an Introduction to Joyce’s Public Sphere
6
Introducing the public sphere
The public sphere in print, literature and community
Dubliners, Parnell, and private and public spheres
Joyce, Parnell, ‘history’ and the public sphere
Chapter 1: Ulysses and a Different Kind of Public Sphere
Networks and reading communities in Ulysses
Benedict Anderson, nationalism and the imagined community
Hidden Ireland, cultural nationalism and the community
The Revival and the public sphere
Chapter 2: Forms of Media and Community in ‘Aeolus’
Speaking, listening and reading
Newspapers and social responsibility
‘Aeolus’ and the Tram Lockout
Easter 1916 and communication networks
Chapter 3: Space and the Language of Violence in ‘Cyclops’
Space and the Public Sphere
Space and control, newspapers and authority
Space and representation
Space, newspapers, time and the public sphere
Violence and the Public Sphere
Violence, representation and the past
Violence, rhetoric and race
Violence and the crowd
Chapter 4: Ulysses and the Public Sphere on the Street
The flâneur and urban modernity
Dublin, degeneration and the commodity
Women, the street and the public sphere
10
16
21
28
37
43
54
61
66
79
81
90
95
109
121
122
122
129
134
140
140
148
155
159
165
178
190
Conclusion: The Public Sphere and the Archive
203
Bibliography
211
4
Table of Figures
Figure 1: ‘Vulture of Dartry Hall’
103
Figure 2: M.A.P.
185
5
Acknowledgements
A PhD can be an isolating and unnerving experience. I am lucky to have had the support
of many wonderful people, some of whom I would like to thank here. Firstly, Richard
Kirkland has been a fantastic supervisor and mentor since I began at King’s, and I would
like to thank him for his patience, encouragement and guidance. Mark Turner, as second
supervisor has been an invaluable reader of my work and his comments were especially
appreciated during the last few months. Since arriving as an MA student at King’s, the
English department has been a place of welcoming, friendly encouragement, and I would
like to thank in particular Anna Snaith and Jo McDonagh for continuing to show an
interest in my work and progress. Thank you to Fritz Senn and the Zurich James Joyce
Foundation for their generous scholarship which enabled me to spend time in Zurich
researching at the Foundation. I have met a wonderful group of friends at KCL and in the
wider ‘academic community’, these people have been invaluable during the last four years.
Individually I would like to acknowledge the encouragement, humour, tolerance and great
company of Will Tattersdill, Mary Henes, Megan Murray-Pepper, Sarah Crofton, and of
course Hannah August who collaborated with me to launch Stet. I would like to thank Will
Viney, Matt Hayward and Cathryn Setz for offering to read parts of this thesis and for their
highly constructive feedback. Anna Peters and Andrew Mickel have been a particularly
wonderful source of South-London fun and distraction. Andy Mee, Kyle and Kelleen
O’Connell-Mock, Lucy Icke, Sarah Downes, Simon Garrard and Sara Strowbridge, have
come to define a particular part of London where I’ve studied and which I love. Without
the encouragement and the intellectual nudge from Tom Morgan-Evans I would never
have begun this project, and I would like to thank him for his continued friendship, which
I truly cherish. The love and support from my family has been unwavering, thank you to
my parents Mark and Rosie, and my brother Sam Mount. Finally, Tom Sanctuary’s energy,
patience, friendship, love and forbearance has cheered me all the way to the finish line.
6
‘The Shade of Parnell’: an Introduction to Joyce’s Public Sphere
At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her
cheeks flushed and quivering with rage:
—Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!
The door slammed behind her.
Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his
hands with a sob of pain.
—Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!
He sobbed loudly and bitterly.
Stephen, raising his terrorstricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of
tears.1
The scene is the Dedalus household on Christmas Day in James Joyce’s A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man. The festive meal has been hijacked by a highly charged political
argument surrounding the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. The subject of Parnell’s death
ignites a bitter quarrel which brings to light disagreements over the public authority of the
Catholic Church and its involvement in Irish politics, and issues of public morality,
defamation and political betrayal. Stephen Dedalus, still a child and today allowed to eat the
Christmas meal with the adults for the first time, watches in confusion and terror, unable
to comprehend the seemingly disproportionate levels of emotion on display. Dante
Riordan’s hostility has been bubbling away from the opening moments of the scene: when
asked whether she had been out for a walk, she ‘frowned and said shortly: / —No’
(Portrait, p. 26–7). The figure of Parnell casts a shadow over the household, dominating and
ultimately warping the inhabitants’ emotional behaviour. It is in this way that the trauma of
recent public events seeps into the private sphere of the Dedalus home. Just as the scandal
1 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1992 [1916]), p. 39. Further references
are given after quotations in the text, using the abbreviated title Portrait.
7
which toppled Parnell was built around the revelation of private affairs in the public
sphere, its legacy was to underscore the constant shifting between public and private,
demonstrating the two spheres’ profound permeability.
In his narrative framing of the announcement of Parnell’s death in Portrait, Joyce
demonstrates the influence of public events on the private seclusion of the individual.
News of the death of Parnell reaches Stephen as he lies in a feverish delirium in the school
sanatorium. Dreamlike imagery of the death of Christ blurs with Stephen’s own sense of
the enormity of Parnell’s fate, highlighting his childish misperception of figures of
authority. Through this religious motif, Joyce mocks the church’s judgement and
vilification of Parnell and pitches him as an alternative, areligious political martyr. In
Stephen’s dream, Brother Michael announces the news to a crowd at the water’s edge:
He saw him lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice of
sorrow over the waters:
—He is dead. We saw him lying upon the catafalque.
A wail of sorrow went up from the people.
—Parnell! Parnell! He is dead!
They fell upon their knees, moaning in sorrow.
And he saw Dante in a maroon velvet dress and with a green velvet mantle
hanging from her shoulders walking proudly and silently past the people who
knelt by the water’s edge. (Portrait, p. 25)
In this we can see how Joyce combines Parnell the man with the image of him as a
Christlike martyr. The maroon and green of Dante’s dress and mantle remind us of her
past allegiance to both Parnell and Michael Davitt. In the opening moments of the novel
Stephen describes Dante as having ‘two brushes for her press. The brush with the maroon
velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for
Parnell’ (Portrait, p. 4). The motif of the two colours is repeated through the early stages of
the book, and they represent Stephen’s awareness of the political conflict within the public
sphere. We read that ‘he wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon,
8
because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day
with scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man’ (Portrait, p. 13).2
To return to the scene at the water’s edge: there had indeed been a large and
grieving crowd waiting to greet Parnell’s body, including W. B. Yeats, who was there to
meet Maude Gonne. The poet would regularly return to images of Parnell’s death; Seamus
Deane notes that ‘Yeats described the funeral and burial of Parnell as the event that closed
the Irish nineteenth century.’ 3 Yeats’s poem ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, written in the 1930s,
attempts to articulate an all-consuming sense of culpability at the top levels of
contemporary Irish politics, a sense of accountability for the figurative consumption of
Parnell, as well as the consuming quality of a collective guilt that has lasted through
decades of tumultuous national history:
Had de Valera eaten Parnell’s heart […]
Had Cosgrave eaten Parnell’s heart, […]
Had even Duffy—but I name no more— 4
We might note here that it is a devouring or consuming not simply of Parnell, but
specifically of his heart. Yeats’s fixation emphasises his criticism of the Irish elite, especially
the Catholic church and its followers, in what he sees as their consumption not just of
Parnell’s physical body, taken in death, but of his soul. Furthermore, he issues a call to
accuse and blame: ‘Come, fix upon me that accusing eye. / I thirst for accusation. All that
was sung, / All that was said in Ireland is a lie.’5 ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ is a poem written from
the retrospective distance of the 1930s, but with the bitterness of the recent civil war still
fresh in the memories of both the poet and his contemporary readers. Not only is de
Richard Ellmann informs us that Dante Riordan was modeled on a Mrs. ‘Dante’ Hearn Conway, ‘A fat,
clever woman, she was too embittered by a disastrous marriage to fit easily into the tolerant, high-spirited
household.’ Ellmann goes on to narrate that Dante Conway ‘remained the abandoned bride, and her burning
memories of being deserted joined remorse at having left the convent to make her overzealous, in both
religion and nationalism. […] She had as James Joyce wrote, two brushes […] [and] her loyalties clashed
bitterly when Parnell was found to have been an adulterer, but it is not hard to see why she should have at
once abandoned this betrayer of marriage ties and torn off the backing from her second brush.’ Richard
Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1959]), p. 25.
3 Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction and Notes’, Portrait, p. 283.
4 W. B. Yeats, ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, 1934, in The Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. and intro. by Daniel Albright (London:
Everyman, 1990), p. 330.
5 Yeats, p. 330.
2
9
Valera accused of (figuratively) consuming Parnell in the same manner as did other figures
of political and clerical authority at the time, he is also being presented by Yeats as part of a
larger, more abstract group, culpable for the betrayal of the memory of Parnell as well as
that of a list of other dead ‘martyrs’: ‘Emmett, Fitzgerald, Tone’.6 Of course, Yeats’s poem
comes too late for Parnell himself, and we should be wary of putting too much emphasis
on the anger on display in the poem.7 What it does show is the extent to which the shadow
of Parnell falls across the Irish political spectrum, and the need for Parnell to be shown in
the same light as other ‘martyrs’ for Irish independence.
In his 1915 essay ‘Ghosts’, Patrick Pearse argues that Parnell should be included in
a list of the ‘great minds of recent Irish history’, writing that he ‘was less a political thinker
than an embodied conviction; a flame that seared, a sword that stabbed. He deliberately
disclaimed political theories, deliberately confined himself to political action.’8 Pearse uses
an example of Parnell’s rhetoric from two speeches given in 1885 to justify ‘summoning
the pale and angry ghost of Parnell to stand beside the ghosts of Tone and Davis and Lalor
and Mitchell’. 9 Pearse persuades his readers that Parnell sits alongside those other figures
from history who gave themselves to the cause of ‘Separation’: ‘if words mean anything,
these mean that to Parnell the final and inevitable and infinitely desirable goal of Ireland
was Separation […]. Of Parnell it may be said with absolute truth that he never surrendered
the national position.’10 Pearse’s resolute belief that Parnell’s Home Rule strategy was part
of a campaign for total independence, and his description of Parnell as someone who
embodied separatist convictions, demonstrates the fine line between the man and the myth,
Yeats, p. 330.
As R. F. Foster’s extensive biography of Yeats reveals, the poet’s creation of his own ‘Parnell myth’ was
complicated. Foster argues that while the young Yeats, whose family was of Ascendancy descent, tended to
lean ‘towards more radical politics […] not only endorsing Parnell and Home Rule, but admiring the
separatist Fenian tradition’, Yeats’s vociferous support of the pro-Parnellite camp after Parnell’s death was
partly due to his ‘dislike of the combination of the priests and “the Sullivan gang” (a Cork political mafia led
by T. M. Healy)’. This convoluted initial use of the Parnell myth continued into his later political life, when
his evocation of Parnell became as much a celebration of the myth as a tool for political and rhetorical point
scoring. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 1: Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 44, p.
113. See also R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2: The Arch-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.
444–445.
8 Patrick Pearse, ‘Ghosts’ [1915], in Tracts for the Times 10 (Dublin: Whelan & Son, 1916), 1-20 (p. 13).
9 Pearse, p. 13.
10 Pearse, p. 13.
6
7
10
and the flexibility of interpretation when we project our own hopes and beliefs onto
someone else’s memory. Here, I do not mean to disparage Parnell’s campaign for Home
Rule, but suggest the possibility of a more sceptical view of his political character than
Pearse allows in his myth making. Pearse uses the rhetorically created figure of Parnell for
his own political agenda, putting to work the memory of historical figures to justify his own
revolution.
The figure of Parnell, then, is embedded in the narrative of Irish political history,
and illustrates many of the issues surrounding the construction of the public sphere and its
relationship with the print media of the day. Parnell’s relationship with the press during his
political ascent, together with the role of the English and Irish newspapers in the
subsequent defamation of his character, highlights strategies in communication, print
media and politics which are integral to my exploration of the Irish public sphere.
Furthermore, the story of Parnell’s downfall can be used to reveal important ideas of public
authority and the public sphere. The tale of his downfall is also intertwined with Joyce’s
work. I shall look at Joyce’s use of Parnell, and analyse how his response informs his
representation of the public sphere in his work. This will enable me to take a fresh look at
Joyce’s preoccupation with the use of space in Ulysses, the borderland between public and
private realms, and how this changes depending on how the space is being used by the
characters who occupy it. Alongside this, I will analyse the role of newspapers and print
ephemera in the formation of the public sphere in Ulysses, and the manner in which they
form an important context for the events of 16 June 1904.
Introducing the public sphere
This research is indebted to Jürgen Habermas’s foundational work The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere. According to Habermas, the public sphere can be
identified—in the broadest terms—as a collective of people who, under certain conditions,
are able to debate issues that question and determine the political and social status quo of
11
their society, independently of the influence of the state. This definition rests on an original
and seemingly paradoxical characteristic of the public sphere: its dependence on the
location, accessibility and utility of private space. Examples of such space include print and
coffee houses, salons and private drawing rooms, and reading and debating societies. These
locations were often where newspapers and other sources of information were first
delivered, or even produced on site. As a result there was an immediacy in the reading,
dissemination and discussion of the news. Habermas observes the importance of the
proximity of the reading material to the discussion of its content:
By the end of the [eighteenth] century, more than 270 reading societies could be
counted in Germany. They were mostly associations with rooms that provided
both the opportunity for reading newspapers and journals and, just as
importantly, for discussing what had been read.11
Habermas highlights the importance of a private space which allowed men to read, digest
and discuss newspapers and journals, and in doing so, he reconfigures the way in which we
define and separate public and private space.
Habermas demonstrates the popularity as well as the importance not only of
reading the material, but also of being able to discuss it afterwards with other readers. Part
of the appeal was the immediacy between the act of reading and the experience of debating
what you had just read. In his study of the history of Irish print media, Christopher Morash
notes that, compared to the rapid growth of the print press industry in the rest of
seventeenth-century Europe, the development of the press in Ireland was relatively slow, a
failure that indicates Ireland’s lack of a robust communications network at the time. He
argues:
If the cornerstone of a print-mediated public sphere is the newspaper, the long,
slow trudge towards establishing a regular newspaper in Ireland gives us a
measure of the fragility of the culture that was assembled after 1660. […] The first
Irish newspaper from which we can really trace a lineage is probably The News
Letter (January 10 until December 29, 1685), followed by the Dublin Intelligence
11 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT, Polity Press, 1989), p. 72.
12
(September 30, 1690 until May 1695), which in turn was followed by The Flying
Post.12
A look at the early progenitors of the Irish press makes it possible to trace the lineage of
the Irish public sphere as it was operating under colonial rule. Venues such as Dick’s
Coffee House acted as spaces where the crossover from printed information to communal
and collective debate could take place. Morash again notes the interaction between
newspaper content and its readers:
If there is a single characteristic of the media world of Dublin in the eighteenth
century, it is its vibrant intimacy. In coffee houses such as Dick’s, debates took
place not only among readers, but with the editor of the newspaper. […] In their
own messy, personal way, places like Dick’s […] were setting the conditions for
what would become a vigorous public debate carried on through print in
eighteenth-century Ireland.13
Ulysses mimics the culture of reading rooms and coffee houses in episodes such as ‘Scylla
and Charybdis’, ‘Cyclops’, ‘Aeolus’ and ‘Eumaeus’. Each episode relies on an enclosed
location, and Joyce emphasizes the close-knit community of the men who occupy the
space. As we shall learn, their attempts at hermeneutics demonstrate Joyce’s own critique
of the function of the public sphere and its interaction with the printed press as something
that is ultimately flawed. In light of this, it is important to take a closer look at the
definition of—and separation between—public and private, within the context of
Habermas’s own historical interpretation of the transformation of the public sphere.
In what is described in its introduction as a ‘Bildungsroman’, Habermas ‘traces the
interdependent development of the literary and political self-consciousness of [the
emergent bourgeoisie]’.14 In doing so, he weaves together the story of the rise of this new
class, with the growth and consequential transformation of the public sphere. Within this,
it is important to note, as Thomas McCarthy does, that ‘the liberal public sphere took
Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.
30–1.
13 Morash, p. 37.
14 Thomas McCarthy, ‘Introduction’, in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Massachusetts: MIT, Polity Press, 1989), p.
xii.
12
13
shape in the specific historical circumstances of a developing market economy’, where the
rise of the bourgeoisie ‘replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely
represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored
through informed and critical discourse.’15 This empowering move made room for the
critical discourse of the people to not only monitor, but also to inform state authority.
Habermas initially looks at this through the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his
assertion that,
If we attend to the conversations in mixed companies consisting not merely of
scholars and subtle reasoners but also of business people or women, we notice
that besides story telling and jesting they have another entertainment, namely,
arguing.16
Habermas uses this statement to ask: what are the conditions for rational and critical
debate, and how can arguments among mixed company become agents for social and
political change?17 In her study ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Nancy Fraser demonstrates the importance of
Habermas’s influence on social critical thinking:
The idea of ‘the public sphere’ in Habermas’s sense is a conceptual resource […].
It designates a theater in modern societies in which political participation is
enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens deliberate
about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive
interaction. This arena is conceptually distinct from the state; it is a site for the
production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the
state.18
This ‘institutionalized arena of discursive interaction’ in which ‘political participation is
enacted through the medium of talk’ describes precisely the very culture of discourse that is
both celebrated and critiqued by Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce describes interaction and debate
held in semi-public, institutionalized spaces, while, as I shall explore in chapter one,
McCarthy, ‘Introduction’, p. xi.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by L. W. Beck (New York, 1956), pp. 250–51, quoted by
Habermas, p. 106.
17 Habermas, Public Sphere. Craig Calhoun’s analysis of Habermas’s work on the public sphere is also
important here: Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
18 Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy’, Social Text 25/26 (1990), 56–80 (p. 57).
15
16
14
networks of communication offer a virtual space within which there is the potential for
political reasoning and debate to manifest. Joyce demonstrates how political argument
becomes delegitimized when the language used is clouded with prejudice. As will be
demonstrated in chapter three, he reveals how the spaces that become arenas for debate in
Ulysses are vulnerable to exploitation. He shows how spaces of discourse, such as inside
Barney Kiernan’s pub, can become crowded, imbalanced and fractured.
Further to this, Habermas notes how the definition of what constitutes public or
private space, within the public sphere, is determined by the market economy, and more
broadly, the changing uses of specific areas of discourse and authority. Habermas discusses
how something can be determined as public or private, but is then subject to change,
dependent on the social and economic situation that surrounds it. In order to consider the
basic concept of how to define ‘public’ when used in the context of the public sphere,
Habermas quotes Hannah Arendt:
Arendt refers to the private sphere of society that has become publicly relevant when she
characterizes the modern (in contrast to the ancient) relationship of the public
sphere to the private in terms of the “social”: “Society is the form in which the
fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public
significance, and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted
to appear in public.”19
From this, Habermas argues that ‘the Bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all
as the sphere of private people come together as a public;’ he tells us that the bourgeoisie
claimed that they were able to regulate public authorities, and ‘to engage them in debate
over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatised but publicly relevant
sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.’20 This key phrase of ‘basically privatised
but publicly relevant’, can be seen to be negotiated and critiqued by Joyce, who inverts its
premise in his representation of the use of space in Ulysses. In Ulysses, these spaces are
viewed initially as public, but are used by groups whose own critical reasoning Joyce depicts
19
20
Habermas, p. 19. Quotes Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 46.
Habermas, p. 27.
15
as risible, and whose attitudes and political allegiances are exclusionary and so, arguably,
‘private’. This will be looked at further in chapter three.
Furthermore, the definition of public and private shapes our understanding of
universal access. This key concept highlights the root problem of whether a public sphere
is representative of all members of society. The notion of universal access is crucial to my
own reading of how Joyce interprets and critiques the public sphere. In Ulysses, access to
the public sphere can be seen in the politics of community and representation; how to
define a community and how certain characters are (and are not) represented within the
public sphere. In studying the philosophy of the public sphere in Georg Foster and
Christoph Martin Wieland, Habermas writes:
Public opinion originated from those who were informed and spread “chiefly
among those classes that, if they are active in large number, are the ones that
matter.” Of course, the “lowest classes of the people,” the sansculottes, did not
belong to them, because under the pressure of need and drudgery, they had
neither the leisure nor the opportunity “to be concerned with things that do not
have an immediate bearing on their physical needs.”21
This split between those privileged with ‘leisure’, ‘opportunity’, and belonging to a
community within which their needs and opinions are represented, and those lower classes
who lack such representation which allows them access to the public sphere, is key in
Joyce’s critique of the public sphere in Ireland, as represented in Ulysses. This will be looked
at in more detail in chapter four, when I shall explore those marginal figures in Ulysses and
their lack of representation in the public sphere.
If we return to Kant’s conversations among ‘mixed companies’, we can note the
conflict arising within his essentially mercantile premise, which, as highlighted by
Habermas ‘depended altogether on the social relationships among freely competing
commodity owners’. Habermas goes on to write: ‘Only the property-owning private people were
admitted to a public engaged in critical political debate, for their autonomy was rooted in
the sphere of commodity exchange and hence was joined to the interest in its preservation
21
Habermas, p. 102.
16
as a private sphere.’22 This preservation of a private sphere is what Marx (and Hegel for
different reasons) criticised as a barrier to universal accessibility. Habermas tells us that
‘Marx treated the political public sphere ironically—the “independence in principle” of a
public opinion of property-owning private people engaged in rational-critical debate who
viewed themselves as nothing but autonomous human beings.’23 This too is queried and
criticised by Joyce, who rather than focussing on the property owning classes, critiques and
makes laughable the idea that the characters in Ulysses are able to engage in an inclusive and
universally accessible public sphere that enables them to take part in a rational-critical—
and informative—debate. This will be further explored in chapter three when I look more
closely at the community within Barney Kiernan’s pub.
There have been many historical and literary studies of the role of the Irish press,
as well as a wealth of research on Joyce, his works, and their relationship with the separate
but related issues of newspapers, commodity culture and advertising. In addition to these
are the overarching narratives of Irish Studies, which explore (among others) Irish identity
and community. However, within this discourse, the idea of the ‘public sphere’ has been
little considered. The historical and social complexity of the public sphere allows me to
further consider the significance of Joyce’s representation of, and his relationship with, a
print-mediated imagined community in Ireland. This thesis is a study of the construction of
the public sphere in Ulysses, and of how it reflects the history of print culture and the
manifestation of community and collective identity in Ireland.
The public sphere in print, literature and community
Declan Kiberd has described Ulysses as ‘a slow-motion alternative to a daily newspaper of
Dublin for 16 June 1904, […] a re-appropriation of newspaper methods by an exponent of
the threatened novel form’.24 This thesis is not the first time the novel and the newspaper
Habermas, p. 110.
Habermas, p. 123.
24 Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000), p. 463.
22
23
17
have been compared, and I wish to briefly introduce two very different studies which have
influenced my analysis of these issues. In his 1983 study Imagined Communities: Reflection on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson argues that ‘the newspaper is merely an
“extreme form” of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity.
Might we say: one-day best-sellers.’25 Anderson’s treatise on the spread of nationalism
argues that the proliferation of print culture created the possibility for communities to exist
on an imagined level. He describes how the growth in the production of print news meant
that a mass readership was able to take part in the synchronized activity of reading the
newspaper. This, Anderson argues, created a form of simultaneity which Walter Benjamin
terms ‘Messianic time’ or ‘a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present’.26
The collapse of linear time, facilitated by the mass readership of newspapers, brought
about ‘the birth of the imagined community of the nation’.27
I shall analyse Anderson’s notion of the imagined community in more detail in my
first chapter, but it is interesting to note here that the form of the novel is used as an
important point of comparison in his argument. He discusses how the novel ‘provided the
technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation’,
and he demonstrates that in the novel, ‘we see the “national imagination” at work in the
movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the
world inside the novel with the world outside.’28 The structure of Ulysses in many ways
typifies the imagined community described by Anderson, and it is easy to understand why,
just as Anderson likens newspapers to novels, Kiberd is able to compare the structure of
Ulysses to that of a newspaper. This initial comparison was a trigger for my own interest in
and analysis of the role of print media in the construction of what I term networks of
communication. It has lead me to explore in chapter one how a public sphere is able to
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London:
Verso, 2006 [1983]), p. 34.
26 Anderson, p. 24.
27 Anderson, p. 25.
28 Anderson, p. 25, p. 30.
25
18
operate through the manifestation of a virtual community of readers, and whether this
exists in Ulysses.
The second study I wish to acknowledge here is Brandon Kershner’s The Culture of
Joyce’s Ulysses, which claims to offer ‘the fullest discussion to date of Joyce’s use of
newspapers in his novel’. 29 Like Kiberd, Kershner argues that it is important to consider
newspapers’ ‘formal structure as a genre’ in order to ‘clarify their social function, both in
1904 Dublin and in Ulysses’; this leads him to the conclusion that ‘newspapers are an
important model for the structure and content of Joyce’s novel.’30 Kershner emphasizes the
significance of the history of Irish newspapers, and argues that the newspapers are in a
‘dialogical relationship with one another and with their readership, as well as with Joyce’s
novel itself’, describing them as part of ‘a mixed chorus of contending voices’.31 Kershner’s
astute analysis speaks to much of my own thesis on the role of newspapers and the
construction of the public sphere in Ulysses. He recognizes how Joyce’s writing of the novel
from the distance of self-imposed exile, using newspapers and other such sources of print
media to connect himself to Ireland, relates to Anderson’s concept of the imagined
community. Kershner argues: ‘thanks to the unique commodity status of words, Joyce
could live anywhere, without abandoning Ireland’s imagined community.’32 In many ways
Kershner’s observation is absolutely right: through the letters, articles, newspapers, books
and journals sent to him (predominantly by his Aunt Josephine and his brother Stanislaus),
Joyce remained networked into an imagined community of readers. Similarly, he is correct to
acknowledge the significance of words as commodities (which will be discussed in my
chapter four) in the creation of the imagined community.33 However, as I will demonstrate
in chapter one, Anderson’s theory of the imagined community breaks down when applied
to Ireland. Furthermore, the range of reading taken on by Joyce meant that, while he
R. Brandon Kershner, The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 24.
Kershner, p. 79.
31 Kershner, p. 96.
32 Kershner, p. 83.
33 Kershner, p. 79.
29
30
19
certainly was connected to a virtual network of print commodities, it was not necessarily an
Irish one. Much of my work looks to build on Kershner’s study of newspapers in Ulysses,
and through my emphasis on the public sphere and the networks of communication that
can be traced through the novel, this thesis both complements and interrogates work by
Kershner and others.
As these thoughts indicate, ultimately this thesis focuses on the concept of
community: how do we define community in Ireland, and what facilitated community
within what was often a disconnected and sectarian environment? Framed around the
events of a single day, Ulysses acts as a lens through which it is possible to undertake a
reading of the social impact of the Irish media and the existence of an Irish public sphere.
In this analysis I take into account the manner in which the public sphere adapted to the
rise of an Irish printed press industry that had flourished throughout the nineteenth
century, and which was in the process of changing its shape and field of influence during
the first half of the twentieth century. The image of the Irish public sphere has been used
most notably by Joep Leerssen in his two studies Hidden Ireland, Public Sphere (2002) and
Remembrance and Imagination (1996).34 Despite its occasionally over-sentimentalized language,
Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (first
published in 1924), which I will discuss in chapter one, provides an intriguing commentary
on and insight into ‘hidden’ aspects of eighteenth-century rural Ireland, as well as (perhaps
unwittingly) highlighting the state of play within the Irish public sphere at the time Corkery
was writing.35 I recognize the significance of Corkery’s scholarship—not simply in the text
itself, but in the debate, criticism and analysis that has followed. Leerssen’s analysis has
allowed me to consider the role of the public sphere alongside the history of the Irish
communications industry and the significance of the concept of ‘community’, as well as its
representation in Ulysses.
34 Joep Leerssen, Hidden Ireland, Public Sphere (Galway: Arlen House, 2002); Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and
Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day, 1996).
35 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: M. H. Gill and
Son, 1924).
20
Daniel O’Connell, the Repeal Movement, the Young Irelanders and their
newspaper the Nation have often been regarded as central to any discussion of the changing
shape of the Irish public sphere. O’Connell has been credited with opening up the public
sphere to allow Irish Catholics a voice and public representation. The public funeral
became a vital element in this representation, providing a space for mass demonstrations
and a stage for political speeches. As Leerssen notes, ‘one of the unexpected side effects of
Catholic Emancipation was the fact that Catholics could now have recognised places of
worship,’ and ‘the republican funeral has remained an important item of collective
manifestation ever since.’36 I view this mass reclamation of public space as a shift in the
perception, dynamics and function of the public sphere in Ireland. However, in existing
academic analyses of these issues of community, communication, identity and ‘nationness’
in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, the concept of the ‘public sphere’ is
rarely applied. By the turn of the century, it has been suggested, there was simply no longer
a sufficiently sustainable, unified, definitive ‘national question’ or campaign. The story of
Parnell can be seen as a significant moment in which a temporary union of nationalist
ambitions and ideals, was broken-up and separated. As argued by Richard English, Parnell
had achieved ‘“a brilliant but artificial alliance”, and this temporary welding together of
disparate forces – land movement, Parliamentary Party, Fenians, Catholic Church –
embodies one of the most powerful examples of nationalist Irish mobilization and
communal struggle.’37 That this alliance was artificial, limited, and impermanent, then raises
the problem of how to look at the public sphere alongside the concept of community. In
this thesis, I argue on a simple level that the public sphere exists in order to enable public
discourse, and through Ulysses I am able to analyse how Joyce critiques its fallibility, as well
as exploring the concepts of community, inclusivity and the press industry in his own
construction of a public sphere within the novel.
36 Joep
37
Leerssen, Hidden Ireland, p. 28.
Richard English, Irish Freedom and the History of Nationalism in Ireland (London: Pan MacMillan, 2006), p. 195.
21
Dubliners, Parnell, and private and public spheres
For readers in the twenty-first century, the narrative of events that led to Parnell’s very
public fall from grace will be familiar. In Parnell’s manipulation of the press and the careful
crafting of his public persona we can recognize something of the strategies of present-day
media. We can recognize too how, as a politician, Parnell understood the importance of
personality, and how he created a public persona that stood apart from the political crowd.
In this, the importance of personality became interchangeable with the politics actually
advocated by the individual. This became a defining feature of the public sphere during the
rise and fall of Parnell, and it emphasized the public sphere’s infiltration into the private
and domestic lives of individuals. The defamation he was to undergo concerned not only
his public identity, but also his private character. We read of the troubling public scrutiny
of private affairs in Bloom’s anxiety about being labelled a cuckold, as well as in the
Dubliners short story ‘A Painful Case’, which I will explore shortly.
The press and the public gaze scrutinized and attacked Parnell’s private affairs, but
we must recognize too how Parnell used to his advantage the public fascination with the
characters, personalities and private lives of ‘public figures’. In their study Parnell in
Perspective, D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day examine ‘the strategies employed to market
“Parnellism”’, citing M. J. F. McCarthy, who, reporting on the Land War for the Freeman’s
Journal, noted that ‘print had become for the first time an actuality for catholic peasants and
part of their everyday life, […] the newspaper was their evangel, Parnell their saviour, and
his lieutenants their apostles.’38 This is a rather sweeping generalization, but it nevertheless
highlights the significance of newspapers’ role in aiding Parnell’s campaigns and
contributing to his public profile. Boyce and O’Day argue that the securing of Parnell’s
popularity and his legitimacy as leader ‘could not have been convincingly done by reports
38 D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, Parnell in Perspective (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 221; M. J. F.
McCarthy, Irish Revolution, 1 (Edinburgh: 1912), quoted by Boyce and O’Day, p. 225.
22
from nationalist papers alone’, but that it needed corroboration from ‘objective or hostile
sources’.39 They state that ‘this became a speciality of the Nation during the crucial period of
Parnell’s emergence as the leader of the nationalist movement.’40 The role of an established
alternative nationalist newspaper such as the Nation was crucial to the legitimization of
Parnell’s public character in the eyes of the wider Irish nationalist public. Parnell’s own
newspaper, the United Ireland, was edited by William O’Brien. O’Brien was a vociferous
nationalist who demonstrated dogmatic belief in Parnell and his cause of Home Rule. He is
described by Boyce and O’Day as ‘one of the party’s leading propagandists, [who] was
fanatically loyal to Parnell’.41 The United Ireland was launched in August 1881 as the
newspaper of Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). It played a significant role in the
construction of Parnell’s public character and in sustaining the party’s success, popularity
and momentum.
One result of this creation of Parnell’s public character was an attendant
‘fictionality’ or literariness. It was not Parnell the man, but Parnell the icon that was crafted
from his supporters’ press coverage of the Land War. Indeed, a reporter from the Freeman’s
Journal described him as ‘a man who could only be popular at a distance, his refined
features and splendid appearance acting as a charm on those crowds of people who were
never to meet him at close quarters’.42 This mythical element of Parnell’s public figure, if
we are to believe the newspapers and critics such as O’Day and Boyce, meant that when his
private affairs were exposed in the public sphere, there was already something legendary
about him; this heightened people’s reaction to the scandal, and contributed to the
continuation of the myth of Parnell long after his death.
The public fascination with the private lives of others can make for troubling
clashes of interest, as Joyce well knew. He despised the hypocrisy and betrayal involved in
the public condemnation of Parnell; he felt passionately about it, not least because of his
Boyce and O’Day, p. 230.
Boyce and O’Day, p. 230.
41 Boyce and O’Day, p. 233.
42 Quoted by McCarthy, and reproduced by Boyce and O’Day, p. 231.
39
40
23
father’s Parnellism, which Joyce’s younger brother Stanislaus describes as ‘a fanatical lifelong devotion which he handed on to his eldest son’.43 This permeates Joyce’s earlier
writing, not just in his depiction of the press, but in his presentation of a representative
public sphere. The mythical memory of Parnell also infuses parts of the narrative of Ulysses.
In ‘Hades’, as the men decide to visit the grave of Parnell, we read: ‘With awe Mr Power’s
blank voice spoke: / —Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled
with stones. That one day he will come again.’44 Joe Hynes shakes his head and replies: ‘—
Parnell will never come again, he said. He’s there, all that was mortal of him. Peace to his
ashes’ (6.926–7).
Hynes appears in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, a Dubliners story set on the
anniversary of Parnell’s death. Ivy Day falls on 6 October, and is so called because all the
mourners who were waiting for the funeral cortège wore ivy leaves in their lapels. The
title’s reference to a ‘committee room’ describes the location of the story in Dublin, as well
as invoking Committee Room 15 at Westminster, where members of the IPP failed in
December 1890 to carry their support for Parnell as their leader. Their vote is seen as a
defining moment that split the party and ended Parnell’s career. In this way Joyce’s story
contains a direct and sustained reference to Parnell and the public sphere. It is enmeshed in
history by its title, its location and the historical events that are discussed and compared, as
well as reflecting the contemporary political environment of the Dublin by-election, for
which most of the characters have been out on the street canvassing. As a result, Joyce
unfavourably compares the stagnant and disingenuous political climate of 1902 with the era
of ‘the Chief’, Parnell.
Most of the men have returned to the committee room to wait to be paid for the
day’s canvassing:
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, ed. with intro. by Richard Ellmann, preface by T. S. Eliot (London:
Faber & Faber, 1958), p. 49.
44 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (London:
Bodley Head, 1986; repr. 2007 [1922]), Episode 6, Lines 921–924 (6.921–924). Further references to this
edition are given after quotations in the text, by episode number and line reference.
43
24
Mr O’Connor had been engaged by Mr Tierney’s agent to canvass one part of the
ward but, as the weather was inclement and his boots let in the wet, he spent a
great part of the day sitting by the fire in the Committee Room in Wicklow Street
with Jack, the old caretaker.45
When Hynes enters, one of the first things he asks Mr O’Connor is: ‘Has he paid you yet?’
(‘Ivy Day’, p. 117), and it is clear that the electioneering is being done for the money,
without much energy or enthusiasm for the candidate. Crofton the Unionist has been out
canvassing for Mr Tierney as well, since ‘the Conservatives had withdrawn their man and,
choosing the lesser of two evils, given their support to the Nationalist candidate’ (‘Ivy Day’,
p. 128). The subject of Parnell is raised by the men in conversation, and Hynes is asked to
recite a poem in his memory. The passion with which the men discuss Parnell, and the
poignancy of Hynes’s (albeit imperfect) poetry, implies a comparison between their
commitment to the nationalist politics in which they are engaged in 1902, and their
commitment to the continuation of the memory and myth of Parnell.46
‘Ivy Day’ also comments on the theme of urban poverty and degradation. Elements
of this include reference to the Poor Law, Mr O’Connor’s leaking boots, the men’s
noticeable dependence on being paid that day, the depressing, dark and lifeless room in
which they sit, and the discouraging prioritization of alcohol (many of them wait until they
have taken a drink before engaging in conversation). The young boy who delivers the beer
finishes his bottle in one draught, causing the others to observe: ‘That’s the way it begins
[…] The thin end of the wedge’ (‘Ivy Day’, p. 126). The threat of alcoholism is present
throughout, with a stubborn sense of inevitability. The old caretaker Jack confides to Mr
O’Connor at the start of the scene that his son has taken to drink: ‘I done what I could for
him, and there he goes boosing about. I tried to make him someway decent,’ and later, ‘it’s
worse whenever he gets a job; he drinks it all’ (‘Ivy Day’, p. 116–7). In contrast, Parnell
45 James Joyce, ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, in Dubliners (London: Penguin, 1956 [1914]), p. 116.
Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.
46 The merits of the poem have been discussed often enough, and many have spoken of the crude banality of
the verse. However, in his book Ulysses Hugh Kenner highlights what he sees as the intriguing competency of
Hynes’s poem. He argues: ‘The rightness of the poem as Joyce concocted it has been justly celebrated ever
since Padraic Colum drew attention to the way real feeling breaks through its hand-me-down idiom. […] No
one has ever surpassed James Joyce’s skill at contriving plausible limits for expressive competence.’ Hugh
Kenner, Ulysses, rev. edn (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987 [1980]), p. 9.
25
features in ‘Ivy Day’ as, in Andrew Gibson’s words, ‘a figure with a grandeur that
overshadows the insignificant folk who call him to mind and emphasises their smallness
and weakness’.47 His lingering presence and the memory that all, including Crofton, hold in
reverence—‘Our side of the house respects him because he was a gentleman’ (‘Ivy Day’, p.
130)—serve to accentuate the poverty of their present moment. The public sphere seems
to be all but extinguished, both within the committee room and out on the street. The
room represents a place where political debate and discussion would once have taken place;
now instead the lacklustre conversation betrays only disingenuousness in the men’s support
for their nationalist candidate, and a sense of tired futility.
In her essay ‘Parnellism and the Politics of Memory: Revisiting “Ivy Day in the
Committee Room”’, Anne Fogarty produces a lucid counterargument to what has become
the accepted mode of analysis of ‘Ivy Day’. Fogarty argues that Joyce’s story is not solely a
critique of post-Parnellite politics written from the perspective of a devotee of the myth of
Parnell. Rather, she proposes that ‘“Ivy Day” is as much a story about the vicissitudes of
Home Rule as about Parnell.’48 Interestingly, she picks up on James Fairhall’s observations
that ‘Parnell is not the only shadowily invoked historical personage in the story’ and that
‘the socialist leader James Connolly, who ran the 1902 and 1903 election campaigns in
Dublin, provides a further, significant subtext of the tale.’49 I argue that Joyce evokes
Connolly in both Dubliners and Ulysses as a poignant, shadowy historical figure who reminds
us of the state of social deprivation and unrest in Dublin during both the time when the
works are set (1902 and 1904 respectively) and the period when Joyce was writing (1914–
1922). The potent blend of nationalist politics and socialism is personified in Connolly, and
I look in more detail at some of his writing in my second chapter. Connolly’s campaign to
give a voice to the poor and the working class, I argue, goes against the prevailing attitude
Andrew Gibson, ‘“Broken Down and Fast Breaking Up”: Style, Technique and Vision in the “Eumaeus”
Episode in Ulysses’, Southern Review, 17 (1984), 256–269 (p. 266).
48 Anne Fogarty, ‘Parnellism and the Politics of Memory: Revisiting “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”’, in
Joyce, Ireland, Britain, ed. by Andrew Gibson and Len Platt (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006),
p. 105.
49 Fogarty, p. 108.
47
26
of many of the intellectual middle-class nationalist politicians who were on the rise in
Ireland at the turn of the century. In ‘Ivy Day’, as in many of the stories in Dubliners,
poverty and politics coexist. An analysis of the state of the public sphere might prove
illuminating in this regard, as it will consider the situation of the men who participated in
the public sphere, as well as the political and social structure that facilitated its existence.
The figure of Parnell and his myth are interwoven with the fabric of the Dublin
public sphere, not simply as a point of comparison for Joyce’s characters and readers, but
also in the history of the creation of the myth itself. Fogarty’s essay is informative here, as
she seeks to ‘track how the affective potency of folk memorial conflicts with what [Pierre
Nora] calls the “archive memory” or “distance memory” pursued by official
historiography’.50 Joyce’s work is wrapped up with his own studies of the complexities of
historiography, the malleability of individual memory, ‘folk memorial’ and the dominant
discourse of institutionalized myth making. This in turn informs the discourses that operate
within the public sphere.
‘A Painful Case’, which directly precedes ‘Ivy Day’ in Dubliners, tells the story of
James Duffy’s relationship with the married Emily Sinico, the ending of the affair, and Mrs
Sinico’s suspected suicide four years later. The newspaper features in the story as both the
bringer of news and a key motor driving the narrative. But it also brings about a rupture in
the boundary between what is public and what is private. Patrick Collier analyses the
significance of the newspaper in the narrative, arguing that the story ‘suggests unease about
the press’s normative potential’ and that ‘the story’s interpolated newspaper article
dissolves the protagonist’s egocentric aloofness, forcing him to recognize his alienation
from his community; but it also exposes the private suffering of an innocent family.’51
Certainly, Duffy’s reaction to the article is profound, and the presence of the newspaper,
even when he is not reading it, is overbearing, nagging and constant:
50
51
Fogarty, p. 106.
Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), p. 110.
27
He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick
striking the ground regularly, the fringe of the buff Mail peeping out of a sidepocket of his tight reefer over-coat. On the lonely road which leads from the
Parkgate to Chapelizod he slackened his pace. (‘A Painful Case’, Dubliners, p. 109)
This scene accentuates Duffy’s loneliness and isolation, while the newspaper acts as an
unwanted companion. The details of the newspaper report, which include the names of
Mrs Sinico’s husband and daughter, their address, and details of her alcoholism, open up
the private sphere to the public gaze. The story allows us to imagine both public and
private space simultaneously in the prolonged suffering that Duffy experiences in the hours
following his reading of her death, and the newspaper acts as the trigger for this. In her
essay ‘Remapping Nationalism: The Politics of Space in Joyce’s Dubliners’, Fogarty argues
how ‘the disjunctions between public and domestic life and the dangerous splits and
convergences between ideals and self-gratifying delusions are explored’ in Joyce’s tales of
adult life.52 This is highlighted in ‘A Painful Case’: Duffy’s personality becomes a point of
criticism as the story unfolds, and his character—through the opening up of the private
details of the Sinico family—comes under the reader’s scrutiny. As he mounts the crest of
the Magazine Hill, he stops and looks out along the river towards Dublin. The lights of the
city, ‘which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night’ (‘A Painful Case’, p. 113), act to
distance Duffy from the civilization and comfort of a community he has shunned. The
sight of the lovers in the park below him only accentuates this: ‘those venal and furtive
loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been
outcast from life’s feast’ (‘A Painful Case’, p. 113). As Fogarty argues, Duffy’s ‘anguished
vista of Dublin both underlies his remoteness from things and his sudden insight into his
own […] failure’.53 The move from isolated and introspective self-confidence, to the
moment when the newspaper throws open not just the private details of the Sinico family
but also, by association, Duffy’s own privacy and seclusion, leads him to look with self-pity
52 Anne Fogarty, ‘Remapping Nationalism: The Politics of Space in Joyce’s Dubliners’ in Dubliners, James Joyce,
The Dead, John Huston, ed. by Pascal Bataillard and Dominique Sipiere (Paris: Ellipses Edition, 2000), p. 87.
53 Fogarty, ‘Remapping’, p. 88.
28
at his own life: ‘No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast’ (‘A Painful Case’, p.
113).
Joyce, Parnell, ‘history’ and the public sphere
The politics of the public sphere encompass much of Joyce’s narrative in Ulysses. The novel
explores communication networks and community, national identity, and the assumed
public authority of institutions such as the church and the press. Stanislaus Joyce writes:
In his childhood, the vaguely understood drama of Parnell had not stirred any
feelings of patriotism or nationalism in his heart; rather, under his father’s
influence, it had implanted there an early spirit of revolt against hypocrisy and
clerical authority and popular servility to it.54
This popular servility can be recognized not just in the Catholic congregation’s acceptance
of the church’s influence over Irish law-making and the shunning of Parnell, but also in the
behaviour of the Irish press. We see this in Joyce’s essay ‘The Shade of Parnell’, in which
he lambasts those ‘fellow-countrymen’ of Parnell who attacked and vilified him in the
public sphere. Joyce states:
In his last proud appeal to his people, [Parnell] implored his fellow-countrymen
not to throw him to the English wolves howling around him. It redounds to the
honour of his fellow-countrymen that they did not fail in that desperate appeal.
They did not throw him to the English wolves: they tore him apart themselves.55
I argue that Joyce here is referring to a wide range of people whom he holds responsible
for Parnell’s downfall, including the newspapers and the Catholic Church. Collectively,
according to Joyce, the Irish nation betrayed Parnell. With this, Parnell not only provides
Joyce with a hero and a martyr; crucially, he was also a figure who was not aligned with the
Catholic Church. Instead, he embodied the outsider who stood apart from and was bullied
by at least one of the establishments on the list of institutions that marred Joyce’s
experience of early twentieth-century Ireland. Coming from an aristocratic Anglo-Irish
54 Stanislaus
Joyce, p. 172. Here Ellmann gives a slightly more general and abrupt reading, arguing that ‘a
more important after-effect [of Parnell’s death] was that for the Joyces, father and son, all was bathos now in
Ireland; no politician and no politics were worth working for.’ Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 34.
55 James Joyce, ‘The Shade of Parnell’, in Occasional, Critical and Political Writings, ed. and intro. by Kevin Barry
(Oxford: Oxford University Classics, 2000), p. 196.
29
Protestant family, Parnell was far removed from the intellectual Catholic middle-class
politicians and campaigners who later came to dominate the political public sphere of the
time.
The fall of Parnell also allows us to look closely at the different layers of authority
within Irish politics and the communications industry. Parnell’s story lays bare the
disconnection between different communities, and highlights the disproportionate
distribution of power among politicians, the media and the Catholic Church. With the
character of Dante in Portrait, Joyce demonstrates the dogmatism of the church’s public
authority and the power and influence that it held over its congregation. Dante’s response
to Mr Casey’s questions about political sermons being preached by Catholic priests is
telling:
It is religion, Dante said again. They are right. They must direct their flocks.
—And preach politics from the altar, is it? asked Mr Dedalus.
Certainly, said Dante. It is a question of public morality. A priest would not be a
priest if he did not tell his flock what is right and what is wrong. (Portrait, p. 30)
She continues: ‘The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken, […] and they must be
obeyed’ (Portrait, p. 31). In the repeated use of the metonym ‘flock’ to refer to the wider
congregation, Dante exemplifies an unquestioning subservience on the part of the Irish
people. She uses ‘flock’ neither pejoratively nor with irony, but with the total acceptance
that this is the right and correct—‘normal’—relationship between preacher and
congregation. Like sheep in the fold, tended by the priest their shepherd, the congregation
of Dante’s church must obey, believe and follow.
Unaware of the irony in her own imagery, she sees the public authority of the
Catholic Church as absolute and fully justified, and in this Joyce highlights the dangerous
and irrational potential of a public sphere that is dependent for its own existence on
recognition from a particular institutional public authority. That this authority is accepted
by characters such as Dante demonstrates, in part, the problematic nature of the public
sphere within which Joyce and others were operating. In short, the storyline of the rise and
30
fall of Parnell exposes Ireland’s intricate and flawed public sphere to examination. It sheds
light not only on how we can understand the multiple layers of dependency,
communication, manipulation and corruption within the public sphere, but also on how
Joyce’s reaction to it impacted profoundly on his fictional and critical writing years later.
A sense of the very personal anger and betrayal felt by Joyce can be seen in what
remains of one of his earliest pieces of verse. The text, given the title ‘Et Tu Healy’, is
described by Stanislaus as:
A diatribe against the supposed traitor, Tim Healy, who had ratted at the bidding
of the Catholic bishops and become a virulent enemy of Parnell, and so the piece
was an echo of those political rancours that formed the theme of my father’s
nightly, half-drunken rantings to the accompaniment of vigorous tablethumping.56
The poem is lost apart from a small extract, which Stanislaus describes and quotes here:
At the end of the piece the dead Chief is likened to an eagle, looking down on the
grovelling mass of Irish politicians from
His quint-perched aerie on the crags of Time
Where the rude din of this … century
Can trouble him no more.57
The echo of nightly ‘table-thumping’ can be recognized in the argument over the Dedalus
Christmas dinner table, and the influence that it has on Stephen can be traced to the
comparable and profound effect that his father’s ‘half-drunken rantings’ had on the young
Joyce.
Tim Healy was an easy figure to pin as the man who betrayed Parnell. Indeed, the
regional newspaper The Carlow Vindicator and Leinster Standard described Healy as ‘the
ingrate and groundling, who fattened on the bread and butter of Mr Parnell’.58 According
to Conor Cruise O’Brien, Healy was the first person to call Parnell the ‘uncrowned king of
Ireland’ in 1890.59 However, F. S. L. Lyons maintains that there existed a deep antipathy
56 Stanislaus
Joyce, p. 65. Stanislaus writes that he does not remember the poem bearing the title ‘Et Tu Healy’
when Joyce first wrote it.
57 Stanislaus Joyce, p. 65.
58 ‘Death of Charles S. Parnell’, Carlow Vindicator and Leinster Standard, 10 October 1891, p. 2.
59 Conor Cruise O’Brien, Parnell and his Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 290.
31
between Healy and Parnell even before the party split during the scandal.60 While
seconding the motion of support for Parnell, Healy simultaneously used the moment to
demonstrate his own ambitions for power and his absolute independence from Parnell. As
Lyons observes:
Far more typical of his real attitude was his answer to the hypothetical question
—might not the support of Parnell indicate servility on the part of his followers?
Healy’s answer was vehement: ‘Servile to Mr Parnell! Who is servile to him? I am
no man’s man but Ireland’s; and if I stand here to-night, as I gladly do, to second
this resolution, I do so, not for the sake of Parnell as an individual, but for the
sake of Ireland as a nation.’61
This rhetoric from Healy highlighted his determination to distance himself from Parnell at
the point when it was most beneficial to his own political ambitions. Healy had been a
newspaperman, working first on the Nation for T. D. Sullivan, and then as a contributor to
and supporter of Parnell’s own newspaper, the United Ireland. His talent for journalism
served him well, and in 1880, with Parnell’s support, he stood as a nationalist against local
man John Redmond and won. His major clash with Parnell came during the divorce
proceedings between Captain William O’Shea and his wife, Parnell’s mistress Katherine.
As Paul Bew has argued, Healy had legitimate and rational reasons for his hostility
towards Parnell. In 1886 he had watched Parnell nominate and support O’Shea as a
parliamentary candidate for Galway City. Healy was politically opposed to O’Shea, and had
travelled to Galway with another nationalist MP, Joseph Biggar, to contest what he
recognized as an openly Whiggish and anti-Home Rule candidate.62 Parnell intervened and
arrived in Galway to rally support for O’Shea; both Healy and Biggar assumed that the
reason for this was his (now well-known) affair with Katherine O’Shea.63 Healy therefore
had good reason to believe that Parnell was now ‘recklessly endangering’ the relationship
between his party and Gladstone’s Liberal Party. However, as Bew notes:
60 F.
S. L. Lyons, The Fall of Parnell 1890–91 (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1960), p. 74.
p. 74.
62 Paul Bew, ‘Healy, Timothy Michael (1855–1931)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
<http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33788> [accessed 7 December 2012].
63 Bew.
61 Lyons,
32
it is clear that Healy’s invective during the divorce crisis contained themes of
social resentment (‘Mr Landlord Parnell’) as well as a more sexually charged
language which opened the door (‘Who is to be the mistress of the party?’ he
quipped after John Redmond had referred to Parnell as the ‘master of the party’)
to an onslaught of vulgar public abuse of Katharine O’Shea.64
For this speech, which served as encouragement for the ‘public abuse’ of both Katherine
O’Shea and Parnell, Healy was never forgiven by a small but significant group of
Parnellites, and it is here that we can find the roots of Joyce’s vitriol against Healy in his
poem. The emotion displayed in the young Joyce’s poem, as well as in his later critical
writings, highlights an ongoing sentimental attachment to the memory of Parnell, and as I
have argued, this influenced the way in which Joyce constructed the public sphere of
Ireland. Whether in the portrayal of the newspapermen in ‘Aeolus’ or of Hynes in ‘Ivy Day
in the Committee Room’, the memory of Parnell inflects the way in which the public
sphere is constructed in Joyce’s work.
With that in mind, however, I wish now to complicate the notion of Ulysses as a
text that is beholden to history. This is important to my contextualization of the novel, and
to how I critically study events from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish history.
Ulysses is a novel that speaks to certain moments in history, but it does not necessarily forge
any direct link with them. While much work has been done to highlight the importance of
the thorough and accurate use of history in readings of Ulysses, it is my contention that the
novel can also be viewed as a stand-alone time piece or archive that comments on, and
simultaneously fragments and critiques, Irish historiography. This approach allows me to
analyse how the novel deals with the subject of memory and trauma, and how fracture and
fragmentation become tropes within Joyce’s carnival of articulation. Scholarly work such as
James Fairhall’s James Joyce and the Question of History and Robert Spoo’s James Joyce and the
Language of History, both written in the early 1990s, argue that the presence of history is
unavoidable in Joyce’s texts.65 Andrew Gibson’s more recent Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics
64 Bew.
65 James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Robert
Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
33
and Aesthetics in Ulysses (2002) develops the work of Fairhall and Spoo, and provides a
thorough account of Joyce’s engagement with certain historical events, as with the very
concept of history itself. Gibson tells us that the thesis of his book is that ‘in Ulysses, Joyce
works towards a liberation from the colonial power and its culture. He also takes his
revenge on them. There is a will to freedom in Ulysses, and a will to justice, but also a
recognition that the two do not necessarily coincide.’66
The 2006 collection of essays entitled Joyce, Ireland, Britain (to which Fogarty’s essay
on ‘Ivy Day’ belongs), edited by Gibson and Len Platt, provides a sustained critique of the
evaluation of historiography in Joyce criticism. Their introduction demonstrates a
comprehensive and revealing summary of the emergence of ‘historical Joyce scholarship’,
which I will not repeat here.67 My own work speaks to this particular field of critical
discourse, which looks to acknowledge, in a comprehensive manner, the history that
informs Joyce’s work. However, I also wish to explore how he then deals with the notions
of history, memory and myth once they become text within his novel. My argument is that
while drawing from events which inform Joyce’s writing, Ulysses remains aloof and separate
from any direct interaction with history. Rather, it can be viewed as an archive, or house of
memories, in which Joyce considers the complications of mimesis, the articulation of
trauma, and the interweaving narrative of history and memory. This becomes significant as
I explore the construction of the public sphere in Ulysses and its implications for the
understanding of the social history of, and Joyce’s response to, print culture in Ireland.
From Dubliners to Ulysses, it is important to trace the changes in and evolution of Joyce’s
tone of voice as the ferocity of his pro-Parnell rhetoric fades, leaving behind a sense of
lingering nostalgia. This is combined with a wariness about the intrusive powers of the
press, the fragility of what is considered private, and a preoccupation with the use of space
in the creation of places for debate and public discussion.
66 Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), p. 13.
67 Andrew Gibson and Len Platt, ‘Introduction’, in Joyce, Ireland, Britain (see Fogarty, ‘Parnellism’, above), p. 1.
34
Chapter one details an alternative construction of the public sphere. In this chapter
I argue that there exist two types of public sphere: one which is rooted in materiality and
‘place’, which I have explored in this introduction, and another which relies on a virtual
community. In relation to this second type, I explore the importance of objects and
networks of communication within the narrative of Ulysses. I discuss the importance of
such connectivity in terms of the movement of print ephemera within the novel. Central to
this reading of the public sphere is Bruno Latour’s text Reassembling the Social: An Introduction
to Actor-Network-Theory, and his statement that the ‘social is visible only by the traces it
leaves’.68 Latour’s analysis enables me to look at objects that are not themselves social, but
which become social through the networks in which they operate. In addition to Latour, I
look at Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities to evaluate his use of the terms
‘nationalism’ and ‘nation’ and how his work can—or cannot—be applied to an
understanding of Ireland. Through an analysis of print culture, definitions of community
and nationalism, I am able to explore the significance of print media as they are depicted in
Ulysses, and consider how they function to facilitate an alternative public sphere.
Concurrent to this, I examine the significance of cultural nationalism and the place of the
Irish Revival within the public sphere, together with Joyce’s response to this.
Chapter two looks at the public sphere in both senses, as outlined in my
introduction and first chapter. Through a close analysis of the ‘Aeolus’ episode, I discuss
themes of community and representation in the newspaper office, while analysing the
importance of reader networks within the context of the 1916 Easter Rising. First, I discuss
the association between print and oral communication, arguing that in ‘Aeolus’ there is a
relationship between the spoken and the printed word which mimics an ongoing discourse
of communication techniques that can be traced into the twentieth century. Second, I
investigate the position of the newspapers within class conflict and language subversion.
Third, drawing on an analysis of newspapers and social protest, I discuss the retrospective
68 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p. 8.
35
significance of the 1913 Tram Lockout in ‘Aeolus’. The final section explores the events of
the 1916 Easter Rising and the role of communication networks and media technology.
Through an interrogation of two main themes—space and violence—chapter three
analyses the significance of the public sphere in the episode ‘Cyclops’. I explore issues such
as violence, rhetoric, and public and private space in relation to the Habermasian notion of
the public sphere, arguing that its depiction in ‘Cyclops’, shows its role as a facilitator of
discussion, representation and community, to be disingenuous and anachronistic. My
investigation of ‘Cyclops’ looks at how the perception of the space inside Barney Kiernan’s
pub changes shape, slipping from ‘public’ to private space in reaction to the rhetoric used
by its occupants. My critical analysis looks at the politics of place and the functionality of
the public sphere in Dublin. By considering the theme of violence in the public sphere in
‘Cyclops’, I am able to explore how Joyce problematizes arguments that position violence
as central to the building of the nation-state. I argue that Joyce attempts to articulate the
trauma embedded in the violent history of nation building, and in doing so he
demonstrates the fracturing and fragmentation inherent in any attempt to articulate the
unutterable.
The fourth chapter looks at the role of the flâneur on the streets of Dublin as a way
of analysing the social politics of the public sphere and the use of public space in the city.
The first section of the chapter investigates the specific relationship of the flâneur to urban
modernity. The second section explores how Ulysses is informed by the problems of urban
development, metropolitan expansion and decay. This section will look specifically at urban
poverty and the story of Dublin’s decline. I compare the image of destitution with the
growing commercialization of material on the street and the rise of commodity culture
within the city’s public space. Joyce critiques the burgeoning climate of market-driven
consumer culture within the public sphere, and he demonstrates the effect of this
environment on the individual. The concluding section of this chapter looks at the figure
of the prostitute in comparison to the flâneur and the sandwich-board man. In the examples
36
of Bloom and Gerty MacDowell, Joyce demonstrates how they both consume the language
and culture of advertising, while on a number of occasions he blurs the distinction between
Gerty and the image of consumption and prostitution. My discussion in this section feeds
into the chapter’s broader analysis of how the forces of advertising and commodity culture
affect the individual within the public sphere, and how this is critiqued in Ulysses.
In concluding my thesis, I consider the concepts of the public sphere and the
archive. Here I analyse the extent to which the newspaper becomes a souvenir within a
network of information, and in turn whether Ulysses can be viewed as an archive. Ulysses is
an attempt to survey and create a mimetic representation of a specific location, written
from a distance through the use of paper information. Agreeing with Kershner’s
contention that Joyce participated in an imagined community, I argue that the virtual
community of Ulysses not only extends to the reader, but also relates directly to the unique
process of the novel’s creation from the gathering together of scraps of paper, maps and
newspapers. The novel becomes an archive of information that has been used to create a
fictional representation of Dublin in 1904. My conclusion follows the newspaper off the
streets and into locations and collections, acknowledging that the study of circulation,
movement and connectivity inevitably leads us to ask what happens when these objects
reach the end of their journey.
37
Chapter 1: Ulysses and a Different Kind of Public Sphere
Standing at the graveside of O’Donovan Rossa in August 1915, Patrick Pearse delivered a
speech that became famous not only for its rhetoric, but also for its influence the following
year. Pearse’s call to arms declared:
It is perhaps that I may be taken as speaking on behalf of a new generation that
has been re-baptised in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility
of carrying out the Fenian programme. I propose to you then that, here by the
grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows; […] the fools,
the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds
these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.1
This piece of rhetoric has been quoted, analysed and referenced many times, and of course
to quote it again here is to take part in its ongoing circulation. But I want to look again at
the significance of this moment, and at the importance of unpacking the nuances in
Pearse’s speech, in the hope that it will cast light on the themes of this chapter. In my
introduction I looked at Pearse’s 1915 essay ‘Ghosts’, from his pamphlet Tracts. In this
essay, Pearse analyses the rhetoric of Parnell and uses it for his own political agenda. In
doing so he places Parnell in a tradition of Irish nationalist memory and myth making.
Pearse invokes a romanticized, unilateral, ‘Fenian’ cultural identity. This constitutes a
layered narrative of the history of Irish nationalism, and reveals the disrupted intersection
between the two kinds of public sphere that I wish to discuss. Pearse’s rhetorical
framework opens up issues of representation and social privilege within the public sphere.
I shall return to this when looking at the politicization of public space and the dislocation
1 Patrick Pearse, ‘O’Donovan Rossa Graveside Panegyric’, August 1915, Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, in
Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1952), pp. 134–137.
38
between class and gender that occurs. My chapter will discuss various methods of
dissemination within the public sphere, including public oratory, the use of pamphlets and
newspapers, and the further and continued dissemination of speeches and debates beyond
the event. These themes will then be placed in the context of the Irish public sphere in
Ulysses, as I unpack Joyce’s representation of cultural nationalism, print media and public
performance.2
To begin to think about the public sphere is to also question its very existence; to
query the form it takes, and to understand something of the supporting frameworks or
structures by which it is enabled. The story of Irish cultural nationalism, the Irish Revival,
Fenianism and its twentieth-century renaissance, and the lead-up to the Easter Rising of
1916, all form part of a series of events that allow me to interrogate the origin, existence
and role of the Irish public sphere. I argue that there are two ways that the public sphere
can be perceived. First, as explored in my introduction, it exists as a physical political public
sphere, dependent on closed or semi-private locations for reading and debate. Second,
there is a public sphere that relies on the distribution of print media and ephemera. This
second variant of the public sphere does not depend on a set of locations, but exists as a
network of readers who read and circulate material.
It is on the public sphere in this second sense that I wish to concentrate in this
chapter. I argue that this version of the public sphere depends on the existence of networks
of communication, which in turn create virtual communities of readers. In Reassembling the
Social, Bruno Latour complicates traditional definitions of the ‘social’, and in doing so
forces the reader to consider the relationship between objects and agents of connection,
rethinking what it is that creates or defines a network:
2 Incidentally, in the Dubliners short story ‘Araby’, the myth of O’Donovan Rossa, perpetuated in this case
through song, forms part of a medley of unromantic distractions for the young boy as he walks through the
market. He narrates: ‘Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. […] We walked
through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the
shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of streetsingers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land.
These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a
throng of foes.’ James Joyce, ‘Araby’, Dubliners (London: Penguin, 1956 [1914]), pp. 22–23.
39
it is possible to remain faithful to the original intuitions of the social sciences by
redefining sociology not as the ‘science of the social’, but as the tracing of
associations. In this meaning of the adjective, social does not designate a thing
among other things, like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of
connection between things that are not themselves social.3
He states that his aim is ‘to show why the social cannot be constructed as a kind of material
or domain and to dispute the project of providing a “social explanation” of some other
state of affairs.4 Rather, he describes the social as ‘not some glue that could fix everything
including what the other glues cannot fix; it is what is glued together by many other types of
connectors.’5 These ‘other types of connectors’ are central to my analysis of the public
sphere, which in the second sense operates through a virtual network originating from the
transfer of information and stories. For Latour, a network is something that depends on
the constant movement generated by the circulation of ‘agents’ or ‘actors’ to produce
ongoing traces. He describes it as ‘a string of actions where each participant is treated as a
full-blown mediator’.6
My analysis in this thesis is aligned with Latour’s argument that the ‘social is visible
only by the traces it leaves […] when a new association is being produced between elements
which themselves are in no way “social”’.7 We must therefore look at those random items
of print ephemera in Ulysses that are not themselves social but which become socially
activated through movement, creating an associative trace. In doing so they become agents
within a public sphere that is reliant on a virtual community of readers. This public sphere
is composed of books, scraps of paper, letters and handbills, and becomes manifest in their
movement and direction—or lack of direction—through the novel. The recognizable
associations with people and the past that these texts may form can be found only by the
reader of the novel. Within this, I argue, an alternative form of public sphere, different
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p. 8.
4 Latour, p. 1.
5 Latour, p. 5.
6 Latour, p. 128.
7 Latour, p. 128.
3
40
from that described by Habermas, has the potential to exist, and in a small but significant
way this occurs in Ulysses.
Habermas begins with the coffee house culture of the Enlightenment. He then
charts the pattern of change as the public sphere adapts to the shifting relationship
between state power and society. Habermas acknowledges the rise and influence of the
bourgeoisie as a major constituent in the restructuring of the public sphere. He recognizes
the significance of a shift in public authority outside of the control of the state. Thomas
McCarthy tells us in his introduction to Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere:
In the post-liberal era, when the classical model of the public sphere is no longer
socio-politically feasible, the question becomes: can the public sphere be
effectively reconstituted under radically different socioeconomic, political and
cultural conditions? In short, is democracy possible? One could do worse than to
view Habermas’s work in the twenty-five years since Strukturwandel through the
lens of this question.8
‘Democracy’ is an important concept through which to consider the public sphere and its
depiction by Joyce in Ulysses as we explore ideas of community, representation and identity.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s simple definition of democracy as ‘government in
which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole’ or ‘state or community in
which the government is vested in the people as a whole’ indicates that democracy rests on
a system of government that is structured in such a way that open and public debate
informs political decision making and legislation—that is, where the power rests with the
people.9 In simple terms this requires there to be a space in which discussion can be held
and where all sections of society are given representation. In Ulysses, Joyce questions the
notion that any such place exists, and demonstrates how such spaces can become closed
down through misuse. However, he in turn opens up the possibility for a different—
McCarthy, p. xii.
‘democracy, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/49755?redirectedFrom=democracy> [accessed 7 January 2013].
8
9
41
virtual—space to exist, through an anonymous reader network made up of street-based
print ephemera.
Public discourse, then, can be seen to be facilitated by print media and the
distribution of print news and ephemera. The unstructured network of readers created by
these ephemera is shown in Ulysses through the novel’s depiction of a community of
readers. For instance, ‘Wandering Rocks’ illustrates how a collection of billboards,
newspapers, letters, novels, a throwaway handbill and other pieces of transitory print
culture do not necessarily circulate in the traditional sense, but appear and reappear and are
used and reused in a variety of ways. In the process they leave a trace or imprint which
creates virtual connections within the text. For example, the image of Marie Kendall
appears four times in the chapter:
She stared at the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette. (10.380–382)
They passed Dan Lowry’s musichall where Marie Kendall, charming soubrette,
smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile. (496,497)
A charming soubrette, great Marie Kendall, with dauby cheeks and lifted skirt
smiled daubily from her poster. (1141–2)
Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he saw the image of Marie Kendall, charming
soubrette. (1220–1223)
The repetition of ‘charming soubrette’ and the various echoes of ‘dauby smile’ enable the
reader to recognize a trace of connection as the repeated picture is tied together creating an
overall image that conveys a unilinear meaning of association. This amorphous network
represents a conceivable alternative public sphere to that made up of institutionalized or
exclusive reading rooms, pubs, clubs and salons, and helps to locate my second
understanding of the public sphere in the novel. Here, Ulysses indicates that the public
sphere might have the potential to be more than merely a set of locations in which
discussions are held.
As noted, Habermas observes that ‘the public sphere of civil society stood or fell
with the principle of universal access,’ and argues that it became refeudalized as the
42
bourgeoisie monopolized its ownership.10 With the rise of the newspaper, the public sphere
was able to exist outside of lounges, salons and coffee houses, and thus was no longer
restricted to a physical location. News became more widely available, while restrictions on
social access changed. Luke Goode analyses this transformation:
Of course, the ‘audience’ was largely confined to bourgeois and intellectual strata.
But crucially, the press departed from the principle of immediacy: a piece of news
was no longer a private affair, something of interest only to those whom it directly
implicated, but was part of a larger communicative environment premised on a
putative general interest.11
Goode highlights the significance of a shift away from news targeting a small and select
audience, towards a wider and more delineated circulation.
Ulysses embraces this more general readership and shows how it acts upon the
public sphere. Joyce can be seen to be critiquing an old-fashioned system, highlighting the
ways in which it can limit the breadth of representation. Instead, he demonstrates a
potential point of departure, showing that a sphere made up of virtual reading networks
and communities can create a more open and changing forum for public debate. The
various items of paper ephemera that exist in Ulysses, such as Mr Deasy’s letter on foot and
mouth, Stephen’s poem, and the throwaway handbill distributed by the YMCA man in the
opening scene of ‘Lestrygonians’, all begin virtual journeys through the novel. These
examples enable me to acknowledge, in a more concrete way, the influence on this thesis of
theorists of nationalism and print culture such as Benedict Anderson, who argues that the
rise of the printed press facilitated the growth of nationalism. Concurrent with this
(although arguably at odds with Anderson) is Ernest Gellner’s belief that the centralized
standardization brought about by the mass publication of the printed press facilitated the
rise of a unified sense of nationalism.12 The importance here lies in the idea of community
and of what a shared experience can bring in terms of a communal sense of identity: how
the community functions, and how it is facilitated. The intersection between
Habermas, p. 85.
Luke Goode, Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 6.
12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London:
Verso, 2006); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
10
11
43
communication and debate within the community is where the public sphere operates. In
Ulysses this is explored on two levels: in the context of nationalism, and also on a purely
social level.
Networks and reading communities in Ulysses
Tony Thwaites writes that ‘Joyce treats language itself as object,’ but as William Viney
demonstrates, Joyce treats the sum of this language, the text, as an object too.13 Not only
does Joyce figure texts as objects, but he also explicitly determines the significance of their
movement through his novel and through the city of Dublin as objects that can be read.
Susan Stewart, writing on the object and the souvenir, tells us of the ‘capacity of objects to
serve as traces of […] experience’.14 I would add to this the ability of these ‘textual objects’
to create a virtual community through traces of connectivity, manifested in the passing on,
handing over and recycling of reading material. As discussed, this form of public sphere is
facilitated by a ‘host of little objects circulating their way through Ulysses’.15 In this, I will
use three examples of print ephemera in Ulysses: Stephen’s poem, Mr Deasy’s letter, and the
throwaway handbill that announces ‘Elijah is coming’. While standing on the beach of
Sandymount Strand, Stephen asks: ‘Who ever anywhere will read these written words?’
(Ulysses, 3.414). He cannot answer, and the question haunts him throughout the day.
Stephen’s anxiety over readership, his not knowing whether his poem will be read or by
whom, demonstrates his preoccupation with reception.16 He doubts the existence of a
community of readers; we, however, can observe how the narrative of Ulysses can be
followed through the traces and imprints left by passers-by, readers linked with other
readers, texts passed around the narrative as objects, leaving a trace of connection.
13 Tony Thwaites, Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises, and Countersignatures (Gainsville, FL: University Press of
Florida, 2001), pp. 85–86; William Viney, Waste: A Philosophy of Things (London: I. B. Tauris, forthcoming).
14 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000), p. 135
15 Thwaites, p. 83.
16 This has been further highlighted by John Nash in James Joyce and the Act of Reception: Reading, Ireland,
Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
44
Wyndham Lewis dismissed Ulysses as ‘incredible bric-á-brac in which a dense mass
of dead stuff is collected.’17 Contrary to this statement, in Ulysses we see the sequence
become circulation, and when considered in terms of a network of reading material, that
expanse of lifeless objects, the material remains of a past, comes alive, altering and
inverting the disposability of such objects. They become part of the ongoing movement of
the narrative, and hence representative of the life of a city such as Dublin. The very
existence of such transient literature is maintained through its movement, and hence
through its inclusion within an anonymous community. Any meaning evoked through the
language of this shared literature is created and sustained by its movement through the
novel; I argue that its constant use and reuse maintains its energy and its agency within
networks of ‘handlers’ or readers. Here we can return to Latour, who states that a ‘network
represents one informal way of associating together human agents’.18
Mr Deasy’s letter and its torn-off counterpart, which is taken and used by Stephen
to write his poem on the beach of Sandymount Strand, provide examples of the movement
of texts as objects through the virtual narrative of Ulysses. By tearing off the bottom half of
the letter and scribbling down his words, Stephen sets off a movement of the use and reuse
of reading matter that can be traced throughout the novel. Both objects—the letter and its
counterpart—will act as important points of comparison in my discussion of the role of
reading objects, and the two linked episodes are key moments through which to discuss the
significance of reader networks and the afterlife of texts. The silted mass of language and
meaning presented on the beach in the episode ‘Proteus’ provides us with a useful
metaphor with which to proceed and to begin to trace what Steven Connor calls the
‘textual economy’ as it is born and configured.19 The beach is portrayed as a collection of
detritus, and it is from this detritus, while standing in its midst, that Stephen tears off and
uses the bottom half of Deasy’s letter. It is the constant use and reuse, the repositioning of
17 Wyndham Lewis, ‘Wyndham Lewis on Time in Joyce’, in James Joyce: the Critical Heritage 1: 1902–1927, ed. by
Robert H. Deming (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 359
18 Latour, p. 129.
19 Steven Connor, James Joyce (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 56.
45
text and object that begins with the tearing of the letter, that creates the textual economy—
the manifestation of those elusive networks of reading communities in which I argue a
public sphere can exist.
While browsing the second-hand book carts in ‘Wandering Rocks’, Stephen muses:
‘Thumbed pages: read and read. Who passed here before me?’ (10.845–846). Stephen’s
awareness of a connection with past readers is significant, and we can link it to his own
preoccupation with the existence of a readership for his poem. John Nash discusses the
significance of Stephen’s question, ‘who ever anywhere will read these written words?’
(3.414–15), arguing that through his questioning of the past lives of the books on the cart,
Stephen sets up ‘anticipatory and reflective histories of reading: in the first case, by looking
ahead to his own reception by the would-be readers of his poem; and later, at the bookcart,
by placing himself as the latest in a series of readers’.20 Building on Nash’s analysis, I argue
that Stephen places himself within a community of anonymous readers, giving his poem
the potential for being read. Stephen’s awareness of being part of an imagined community
within the novel can be likened to the responsibility of the reader of Ulysses. It becomes
part of the reader’s role to map out the traces of connection and the virtual communities
which shape Joyce’s representation of Dublin, thus echoing what Nash describes as ‘one of
the classic problems in studies of reception’: that of reader identification. Nash’s argument
makes it apparent that character and reader have a parallel awareness of the burgeoning
network of reading material in Ulysses. A comparison between Deasy and Stephen reveals
the importance of the relationship between author and reader and their contrasting
anxieties of reception. The two writers, Deasy and Stephen, are aware of their audience in
ways that demonstrate differences in performance and in the writers’ perspectives. Deasy is
writing for an assumed newspaper audience, while Stephen is left to ponder the
unknowability of his own anonymous reader community.
20
Nash, p. 2.
46
Nash notes that ‘Joyce’s work signifies its modernity in its self conscious concern
for reception.’21 This concern is mirrored by the characters’ own preoccupation with
notions of audience or readership, demonstrated here by Deasy and Stephen. While Deasy
boasts, ‘I don’t mince my words, do I?’ (2.331), Stephen wonders ‘who ever anywhere will
read these written words?’ (3.414). Significantly, this is also portrayed in the very act of
reading, passing on and collecting texts. It is unclear what happens to Stephen’s poem,
whether it falls onto the beach and is picked up by Bloom, or gets put into Stephen’s
pocket and remains there. The movement of the scrap of torn-off paper becomes
uncertain, while Stephen has to remind himself not to forget to hand in Deasy’s letter: ‘I
mustn’t forget his letter for the press’ (3.58). Furthermore, Stephen remains connected
through his constant awareness of reception, which follows him throughout the novel.22
Deasy is so confident of his letter’s acceptance for the newspaper and of its being
read that he thanks both the editor and the newspaper reader ‘for the hospitality of your
columns’ (3.337). However, we could argue that the foregrounded audience created in the
commodification of readership, the sense of security found in the newspaper’s collection
and circulation, and the ready-formed creation of ‘the reader’ all bring with them the
expectation that the work will be read, while simultaneously removing the writer’s
independent voice as he himself becomes a representative of the newspaper. Interestingly,
Deasy seems more preoccupied with finding a publication in which to print his letter than
with what the publication in question might be: ‘You see if you can get it into your two
papers. What are they? / —The Evening Telegraph… / —That will do, Mr Deasy said. There
is no time to lose.’ (2.417–420). Deasy’s letter is a public act, yet it is an oddly disinterested
Nash, p. 3.
A connection can be drawn between the distribution and circulation of texts, the concerns with reader
reception and the public sphere seen in the narrative of Ulysses, and the modernist literary movement.
Lawrence Rainey has made an extensive study of the production of modernist texts and their relationship
with public culture, and it is interesting here to consider an important observation of his. He argues that
modernism created its own space of cultural production, which retreated from what he calls the ‘domain of
public culture’, by which he means popular culture. He does, however, acknowledge that the two overlapped
and intersected in the public realm. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 5.
21
22
47
act. He firmly believes that he has something to contribute to the debate about the foot
and mouth crisis, and that the matter is of significant urgency. However, the impression is
given that he writes more for the sake of performing a public act than in order to resolve
the crisis itself. Deasy is presented to the reader as a residual nineteenth-century gentleman,
and his mannerisms, opinions (which include misogyny and anti-Semitism) and actions are
quickly dismissed as irrelevant or farcical, partly because he is depicted as outdated. He tells
Stephen:
You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I saw three
generations since O’Connell’s time. I remember the famine in ’46. Do you know
that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before
O’Connell did […]? You fenians forget some things. (2.268–272)
His archaic and misinformed attitude is here highlighted in his calling Stephen a Fenian,
and in his own confused use of history to defend his position as an Orangeman.
To return to the concept of reader communities and the movement of print
ephemera, Nash echoes Michel de Certeau when he writes of ‘how reading has been
constructed as a form of social practice […] in which reading is one of the many material
means by which people construct their own sense of the world’.23 In his work The Practice of
Everyday Life, de Certeau maintains that ‘reading has become determined by social
relationships,’ arguing that social hierarchization conceals the reality of the practice of
reading.24 If reading is a form of social practice, determined by social relationships which
help people to construct their own sense of the world, then in Ulysses Joyce inverts this
state of affairs, revealing how a shared sense of community, which the reading of objects
and the passing on of texts creates, is manifested within the narrative. Joyce demonstrates
the dual importance of the act of reading and the movement of the text as object. This is
significant for our understanding of the public sphere in Ireland. The act of reading and the
movement of texts—dissemination and distribution—form a foundational framework for
the history of the constantly changing structure of the public sphere. This is what this
23
24
Nash, p. 19.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 172.
48
thesis critiques and interrogates in the specific context of Ireland. In part, it asks the
question: what role does reading play in the formation of public life? Here we have reading,
or the act of reading, joined with the act of passing on the read material. On the one hand
we can see this in the inclusion and acceptance of Deasy’s letter in the newspaper and the
subsequent industrial production of that newspaper. On the other hand we see the
importance of the separation of the letter: the split or schism performed by Stephen, and
the beginning of a second journey. Deasy’s letter becomes part of that day’s issue of the
Evening Telegraph, which in turn is read by Stephen while he sits in the cabman’s shelter.
Returning to the moment when Deasy hands his letter to Stephen, we can begin to
understand the contrasting possibilities between the letter and its counterpart. Deasy
addresses Stephen as the letter moves from author to carrier: ‘—I have put the matter into
a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It’s about the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it.
There can be no two opinions on the matter’ (2.321–323). Note his use of language: ‘I have
put the matter into a nutshell’ suggests a physical act of limiting space for discussion. His
letter does not only highlight the problem of foot and mouth ‘in a nutshell’, but also places
it within a space in which ‘there can be no two opinions on the matter.’ Deasy’s letter is
written in order to be confined within a collection in which the hermeneutical possibilities
of discussion are at once restricted. He highlights the material importance of ownership
and the commodity within newspaper space in his written preamble, in which he asks, ‘may
I trespass on your valuable space?’ (3.324).
Stephen’s poem is initially lost in the ‘Protean’ coagulation of language. We read:
He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat bloodying the sea,
mouth to her mouth’s kiss.
Here put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to mouth kiss.
No. must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to mouth’s kiss. (3.397–400)
Images in the not yet fully fledged poem are immersed in the language of Stephen’s
thoughts, and in the use and reuse of material that embodies the nature of ‘Proteus’. As
Maud Ellmann demonstrates: ‘The pale vampire who stars in Stephen’s only poem in
49
Ulysses, represents the parasitical condition of the Joycean self, dependent on
“recirculation” of the energies of others’ (3.397).25 Previously, Stephen has noted that
‘these heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here’ (3.288–89). The moving,
silting, sifting sands of the beach both hide and reveal the detritus collected by the ebb and
flow of the sea and the city. Stephen’s ability to create language from objects, his use of the
beach as a text or tablet on which to play with his own artistic imaginings, is revealed by
Joyce in the language of the episode: ‘Proteus’ becomes a synecdoche for the process of
turning detritus into meaning. Joyce mirrors the physical ebb and flow of the beach, the
covering and uncovering of objects which in turn signify the movement and manipulation
of language, the tools by which the artist, Stephen, can begin the process of turning, in
Steven Connor’s words, ‘detritus into meaning, and meaning into detritus’.26
If the beach on Sandymount Strand is a metaphor for Stephen’s silted canvas, then
his tablet is the rock on which he leans to scribble his poem. If Deasy’s letter represents the
restriction of language, its counterpart represents its expansion. Furthermore, while Deasy’s
letter is immediately contained and collected, not just in its language and rhetoric but also
physically and literally in the newspaper, Stephen’s poem, the torn counterpart, is passed
into the flow of free-floating textual objects: the scrap of paper falls and sits in anonymity
on the beach and—potentially—waits to be picked up by Bloom. Bloom too uses the
beach to write on, in ‘Nausicaa’: ‘Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his
foot. Write a message for her. Might Remain. What?’ (13.1256–7). He acknowledges the
transience of his silted canvas, that ‘some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless.
Washed away. Tide comes here. […] All these rocks with lines and scars and letters. O,
those transparent!’ (13.1256–1262). Rather than allow the tide to wash away his letters, he
removes the fragmented message himself: ‘Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow
25 Maud Ellmann, ‘Ulysses: The Epic of the Human Body’, in A Companion to James Joyce, ed. by Richard Brown
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), p. 58.
26 Connor, p. 56.
50
boot. Hopeless thing sand. Nothing grows in it. All fades. […] He flung his wooden pen
away. The stick fell in the silted sand, stuck.’
Ulysses can be followed through the traces and imprints left by passers-by, readers
linked with other readers, texts as objects passed around the narrative, leaving a connective
trace. This is highlighted by the throwaway handbill passed to Bloom in the opening of the
episode ‘Lestrygonians’. The flyer announces the arrival of an evangelical preacher called
John Alexander Dowie, who refers to himself as ‘Elijah the restorer’. We read that ‘a
sombre Y.M.C.A. young man [...] placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom’ (8.5). ‘Elijah
is coming,’ announces the throwaway, ‘Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of the church of
Zion is coming’ (8.13–14). Bloom throws the handbill off O’Connell Bridge to see if it will
be caught and eaten by hungry sea gulls. We read:
Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quaywalls,
gulls. [...] They wheeled lower. Looking for grub. Wait. / he threw down among
them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo feet per sec is com. Not a bit. The
ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of swells, floated under the bridgepiers. Not
such damn fools. (8.51–61)
Rejected by the gulls, the throwaway falls into the Liffey, and from here it begins its
journey through the city. From the moment that it falls and is taken up by the river in
‘Lestrygonians’ to its resurfacing in the episode ‘Wandering Rocks’, we are reminded of its
presence by the echo or memory of its announcement that ‘Elijah is coming,’ and this
becomes the trace within the text. Although the throwaway is initially passed from one
hand to another, its mode of transport through the rest of the novel is the Liffey. The river
denotes a fixed space in which motion occurs. The handbill is carried within this
immovable space outlined by the banks of the river, which shape and enclose the flowing
water. Furthermore, Joyce provides us with a view of the throwaway as seen from the
riverbank; concurrently we can also see the river from the perspective of the throwaway as
it moves downstream. This is demonstrated in the following two passages:
A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the Liffey,
under Loopline bridge, shooting rapids where water chafed around the
51
bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains, between the
Customhouse old dock and George’s quay. (10.294–298)
North wall and sir John Rogerson’s quay, with hulls and anchorchains, sailing
westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the ferrywash,
Elijah is coming. (10.751–753)
Joyce’s use of the term ‘skiff’ is intriguing. A skiff is either a ‘small sea-going boat’ or a
‘slight gust of wind or shower of rain’; it can also mean to ‘move lightly and quickly’.27 The
skiff changes shape and can be either a noun or a verb. It becomes less of a tangible thing,
and more of an embodiment of movement: a message carried through a river which is itself
clogged and crowded with material pieces of detritus.
The image of the body in the city—or rather the city as a body—in the episode
‘Lestrygonians’ offers an important parallel understanding of the concepts of motion, space
and meaning in a novel that Joyce once described as an ‘epic of the body’.28 Maud Ellmann
argues: ‘The city in Ulysses takes the form of a gigantic body circulating language,
commodities, and money, together with the Dubliners whirled round in these economies.’29
As epitomised in Bloom’s image of ‘cityful passing away, other cityful coming’, the
constant movement and passage of objects through the city is likened to the consuming,
digesting and passing on of food and waste through the body. This Joycean preoccupation
with the body and waste demonstrates a certain connection between the man and the city
he lives in. Reiterating the significance of this in Ulysses, the Linati schema for the chapter
states that the scene is lunch, the organ is the oesophagus and the technic is peristaltic.30
Thwaites argues that these images in the schema ‘are forever playing off the process of
‘skiff, n’, ‘skiff, v,’ OED Online,
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/180841?rskey=dijRKj&result=1&isAdvanced=false> [accessed 1
March 2013].
28 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 21.
Joyce wrote to Budgen, who quotes him in his book: ‘“Among other things,” he said, “my book is the epic of
the human body. […] In my book the body lives in and moves through space and is the home of a full
human personality. The words I write are adapted to express first one of its functions then another. In
Lestrygonians the stomach dominates and the rhythm of the episode is that of the peristaltic.”’
29 Ellmann, p. 55.
30 Reproduced in James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1992 [1922]), and as an appendix to Richard
Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey, repr. with corrections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 186.
27
52
meaning and digestion: meaning as digestion’.31 He writes: ‘What “Lestrygonians”
emphasizes is the way in which all these objects are residual: leftovers from something else,
negligible in content, or worse, dijecta, excreta.’32 In ‘Lestrygonians’, Joyce presents us with
the Ulysses alternative to collective detritus: digestion. Rejected by the gulls, the throwaway
is consumed by the city and passes through it, carried along by the river. The collected
‘dense mass of dead stuff’, which may have silted the meaning of the language on the beach
in ‘Proteus’, here passes into a system of circulation, and the memory of the single object is
passed on and repeated.
‘Elijah is coming’ is the image of a recurring memory which demonstrates the
interconnectedness of arbitrary events and of the objects they leave behind on a single
day—in a single novel. Its significance lies in the movement demonstrated by the trace of
that journeying object. This brings us back to my original use of Latour’s argument that the
‘social is visible only by the traces it leaves’.33 The afterlife of the handbill becomes, in the
words of Jacques Derrida, ‘a synecdoche of Ulyssean narration, at once smaller and greater
than the whole’.34 Through the repetition of the phrase ‘Elijah is coming’ the throwaway
becomes a persistent echo that moves through the city, giving it its shape. As it resurfaces
in the episode ‘Wandering Rocks’, a chapter constructed around journeys and encounters,
the journey of the handbill acts to enforce varying degrees of representation through
motion, space and place. It produces the effect of simultaneity within a panorama, allowing
the reader a privileged viewpoint on multiple encounters and exchanges across the city. It
carries the reader from the micro perspective of, for example, a scene inside the
impoverished Dedalus household, to the macro and panoramic image of the ongoing
journey of the throwaway, which calls out place names as it is carried downstream. We
read:
Thwaites, p. 84.
Thwaites, p. 84.
33 Latour, p. 128.
34 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 286.
31
32
53
Maggy, pouring yellow soup into Katey’s bowl, exclaimed: / —Boody! For
shame! / A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the
Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting rapids where water chafed around the
bridgepiers. (10.292–298)
Agency and significance gained through repetition is the dominant trope in the role of the
throwaway in Ulysses. Derrida writes: ‘The memory of a promise initiates the circle of
appropriation, with all the risks of technical repetition, of automized archives, [...] of
simulacrum, of wandering deprived of an address and destination.’35 Once the throwaway
enters the river it loses its material existence in the narrative, but it remains as a memory or
echo in the text. Indeed, what is significant in the case of the throwaway is its lack of
materiality once it becomes part of the river: the connection is manifested solely within the
virtual, created through a repeated echo. It becomes a memory of a promise kept alive by
the momentum of its movement and the motion of the river. Its physical presence is
transferred to the landmarks and place names that are called out as it floats downstream.
We read:
North wall and sir John Rogerson's quay, with hulls and anchorchains, sailing
westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the ferrywash,
Elijah is coming. (10.752–4)
If, as Thwaites states, ‘all these objects are residual: leftovers from something else,
negligible in content,’ then by retracing the journeys of the leftovers silting up the beach on
the Strand, and through the imagery of consumption and bodily waste in ‘Lestrygonians’,
we can see that the lingering imprint of printed ephemera is especially important. The trace
is not necessarily left in physical form, but is imprinted as a memory within the text of
Ulysses. This trace or connection is then able to create a virtual community within which
there is the potential for the public sphere to exist.
35
Derrida, p. 278.
54
Benedict Anderson, nationalism and the imagined community
The political scientist Benedict Anderson sees nationalism as a phenomenon that is reliant
on a centralized form of state unification, driven by the ability to reach an imagined
community, and facilitated by the rise of print culture. Anderson’s work Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is central to my analysis of the
print-mediated communities and networks that exist in Ulysses. It is also key to any analysis
of the social forces behind the formation of Irish nationalism, the national community and
the public sphere. It is important to understand the origin and development of Anderson’s
concept of the imagined community, as well as to consider how it sits within the history of
Irish nationalism, specifically of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. For these
reasons I will now expand on Anderson’s thesis before analysing its relevance to the Irish
public sphere and its construction in Ulysses.36
Written in 1983, Anderson’s work is situated at the end of a century that had seen
two world wars and the disintegration of a number of empires. In a time of nationalist
ascendancy, when there was a significant shift in the balance of power within Europe, it
became necessary to reappraise the term ‘nationalism’. Anderson defines it as:
an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will
never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet
in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.37
Importantly, Anderson viewed the imagined community as unique in its ability to reach
across class inequality, creating a horizontal and universal sense of ‘comradeship’. He
writes: ‘finally, [nationalism] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual
inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a
36 Concurrently, it is important to note the difference between the two terms, ‘virtual’ and ‘imagined’; both of
which I will continue to use, separately, throughout this thesis. ‘Virtual’ is used to denote a network that is
rooted in the materiality of the print ephemera that exists in the narrative of Ulysses. It is something that is
recognizable to the reader of the novel only, and for which I use Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory to
introduce. ‘Imagined’, as will be explored further in this coming section, defines the concept of a borderless
community, also in part manifested by the dissemination of print media (created and critiqued by Benedict
Anderson), but a community that can be recognized by both the characters of the novel and the reader. This
imagined community, as stated by Anderson enables all people to imagine themselves to be part of a
community that exists across time and space.
37 Anderson, p. 6.
55
deep, horizontal comradeship.’38 Anderson traces the history of nationalism, what it is to
become a nationalist or simply to see yourself as part of a nation—to think communally
about your nation. ‘Nation, nationality, nationalism,’ he writes, ‘all have proved notoriously
difficult to define, let alone to analyse.’39 In an attempt to do just that, however, he looks
back at the pre-modern era. By revisiting older imaginings of state, empire and kingdom,
Anderson is able to picture a community which was built around a centralized governing
body, but which was not restricted by boundaries or borders. In his analysis of the origin
and subsequent rise of nationalism in the modern world, he considers how such an
environment might be replicated. He argues that print culture, specifically the newspaper
and the novel, became the agent that enabled a borderless community to exist. The
manifestation of such a community was not simply the physical or geographical
connections within a town, village or state; indeed he accepts that ‘in fact, all communities
larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are
imagined.’40 Instead, what is key is the idea that it became possible to ‘“think” the nation’, a
form of consciousness manifested within a community that would connect the once
disconnected.41
Anderson uses Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature to produce an understanding of simultaneity that is essential to the formation of
the imagined community within which it is possible to think collectively and communally
as a nation. Auerbach writes:
The here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is
simultaneously something which has always been, and will be fulfilled in the
future; and strictly, in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something
omnitemporal, something already consummated in the realm of fragmentary
earthly event.42
Anderson, p. 7.
Anderson, p. 7.
40 Anderson, p. 6.
41 Anderson, p. 22.
42 Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 64, quoted by Anderson, p. 24.
38
39
56
For Anderson, this transformation in how we view and interact with time is the key to the
birth of the imagined community, which, as discussed in my introduction, he argues is
manifested in the basic structures of the novel and the newspaper:
The newspaper reader […] is continually reassured that the imagined world is
visibly rooted in everyday life […] fiction seeps quietly and continuously into
reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is
the hallmark of modern nations.43
For Anderson, this was the framework that facilitated the genesis of modern-day
nationalism: the anonymous community forged out of imagined connections through the
act of reading the same newspaper. As he writes: ‘These fellow-readers [of the newspaper],
to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible
invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.’44 This remains the essence
of my own construction of the public sphere, built around the manifestation of virtual
communities.
Certain problems arise from Anderson’s attribution of the birth of nationalism to
the imagined community. Luke Gibbons demonstrates the limitations of Anderson’s theory
when it is applied to the specific example of Irish nationalism:
Anderson is correct in stating that the emptying out of time in print culture is
constitutive of certain kinds of nationalism, but this applies mainly to forms of
nationalism driven by state formation of the advanced Western kind,
characterised by centralization, unification and, one might add, colonial
expansion.45
It is a struggle to apply this concept of centralized unification driven by state formation to
Ireland. In generalized terms, an Irish sense of identity and community is also motivated by
a disparate and frequently sectarian sense of exclusivity that is simultaneously coupled with
a more rigid sense of belonging, not to the wider national community, but to the smaller
and more insular communities of, for example, the village, the farm, the town, one’s
Anderson, p. 36.
Anderson, p. 44.
45 Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day,
1996), p. 135.
43
44
57
religion or one’s family.46 In this sense of the word, the Irish nationalist idea of community
is also defined by its domestic and localized boundaries. Thus the term nationalism, when
applied to Ireland, can be more easily aligned with Ernest Gellner’s description in Nations
and Nationalism, which defines nationalism as:
A theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not
cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given
state […] should not separate the power-holders from the rest.47
For Anderson, all boundaries are permeable within the imagined community, and in this he
demonstrates a broader sense of the political than Gellner. The imagined community
manifests itself through an emptying out of time, brought about by the immediacy of news
media that crosses borders as well as time zones. However, even at this level, this is at odds
with a specifically Irish notion of community and cultural production. This can be seen in
the Irish newspaper industry at the start of the twentieth century. Despite being termed
‘national’, many newspapers were distributed within limited local areas and had close
allegiances with particular local politics. On a social level, many Home Rule newspapers,
notably the Freeman’s Journal and Irish Independent, continued to write exclusively for a
middle-class Catholic elite.
The development of newspaper distribution in Ireland was slow to progress, and
this hampered any attempts to produce a newspaper that could truly be read as a national
paper. As observed by Hugh Oram, the first newspaper to use motorized vans for its
distribution and supply was the Irish Independent in 1911, under the leadership of William
Martin Murphy. Oram tells us:
previously, Dublin distribution had been by horse-drawn van and bicycle. The
[new] Ford vans had brass fittings, acetylene lamps and no protection for the
driver, so it was with some apprehension that Frederick Brannigan drove the firstever newspaper lorry from Dublin to Cork.48
I recognize that this has the potential to reduce the Irish experience of community, and that such an
experience is not unique to Ireland. However, it is important, for the sake of my argument to consider the
limitations and complications of an Irish sense of community and identity.
47 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 1.
48 Hugh Oram, The Newspaper Book: A History of Newspapers in Ireland, 1649–1983 (Dublin: MO Books, 1984),
p. 117.
46
58
Murphy pioneered what became known as the ‘dawn patrol’ for delivering his newspapers,
as well as introducing ‘hoppers’ ‘to liaise between the paper and the newsboys’.49 As
described by Oram, hoppers would act as the go-betweens ‘from the circulation and
dispatch departments to the newsboys’, creating a smoother working relationship between
the newspaper and distributors, as well as going some way to recognize and legitimize the
job of the newsboys.50
Anderson distances himself from Gellner’s argument that ‘nationalism is not the
awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’51 But
Cairns Craig suggests that in putting forward his argument, Anderson obscures his own use
of the fictional aspect of the ‘imagined’. Craig argues: ‘Anderson’s own analysis […] is
designed precisely to reveal how the fictional—in the sense of “fabrication” and “falsity”—
is fused with the real through the act of “imagining.”’52 Anderson’s discussion of semantics
allows him not only to distance himself from Gellner, but also to open up the various
meanings of ‘imagined’ that then allow him to proceed with his argument. The only way to
do this is to rely on a fictional or literary reading of the framework within which the
imagined community can operate.53
I will now look at how this sits with Joyce’s imaginings of the Irish national
community. Gibbons observes that in the closing sequence of ‘The Dead’ it ‘is striking that
[…] Gabriel’s mental journey westwards is recreated in the profane image of the
newspaper’.54 As Gibbons acknowledges, this has led many critics to suggest that Joyce is
Oram, p. 118.
Oram, p. 118.
51 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), p. 169, quoted by Anderson,
p. 6, emphasis Anderson’s.
52 Cairns Craig, ‘Benedict Anderson’s Fictional Communities’, in The Influence of Benedict Anderson ed. by Alistair
McCleery and Benjamin A. Brabon (Edinburgh: Merchiston Publishing, 2007), p. 25.
53 It is interesting to briefly observe how Anderson’s work overlaps with Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding
Media (published in 1964). McLuhan writes: ‘Nationalism itself came as an intense new visual image of group
destiny and status, and depended on a speed of information movement unknown before printing.’
McLuhan’s interest lies primarily in the speed of communication and the technological revolution which
brought this about. Anderson’s reading of Benjamin, which emphasizes ‘homogenous, empty time’, has
echoes of McLuhan, who writes: ‘The point of the matter of speed-up by wheel, road, and paper is the
extension of power in an ever more homogeneous and uniform space.’ Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1964), p. 177, p. 92, emphasis added.
54 Gibbons, p. 134.
49
50
59
evoking what Anderson would later describe as an ‘imagined community’. The newspapers’
prediction of snow directs the reader’s voyage across the Irish landscape in a sweeping,
imagined panorama:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling
on every part of the dark central plain, […] falling softly upon the Bog of Allen
and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. […]
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the
dead. (‘The Dead’, p. 225)
Not only do the newspaper reports allow Gabriel’s imagination to draw connections
between himself and the furthest geographical corners of Ireland, but it also exhumes the
historical, mythical Irish past upon which Miss Ivors had earlier accused him of turning his
back. However, this is not about a network of readers connected through the newspaper;
indeed, the materiality of the newspaper and its contents are all but unnecessary here.
There is no action that signifies the reading of the newspaper, merely a statement about the
weather. Gabriel senses an awakening of nationalist sentimentality, not from the newspaper
but in his wife’s story and the romantic positioning of the west of Ireland by both Gretta
and Miss Ivors.
The oral culture of storytelling and retelling connects Gabriel with a mythical
heritage. Gibbons argues:
For Joyce, it is this remnant of oral culture, rather than the ‘empty, homogenous
time’ of the newspaper, which is characteristic of the most resilient strains of Irish
nationalism—or any subaltern culture, I would contend, which attempts to speak
in the aphasic condition of colonialism.55
In Ulysses, as we have noted, the virtual networks of readers and the trace of print
ephemera through the novel can be clearly linked to Anderson’s sense of the imagined
community. Texts such as ‘The Dead’ highlight a more antithetical reading of this, and
allow us to think in more detail about the changing landscape of the Irish public sphere
and how it is represented in Joyce’s different texts. Gibbons refers to a condition of
aphasia as something that belongs to the residues of an oral culture that existed before the
55
Gibbons, p. 134.
60
invention of print. He argues that, as it is represented by Joyce, this declining oral culture
speaks for a subjected and subaltern condition of colonialism that has now been silenced,
not only by the colonizer, but also by new print-mediated communications. By asserting
that the newspaper is characteristic of the ‘most resilient strains of Irish nationalism’, he
acknowledges the long history of the influence of print in Ireland and couples it with the
diminishing role of oral culture, associating it more prominently with a particular essence
of modernity.
Gibbons highlights the important binary opposition between print and oral culture
as manifested in the montage that appears to Gabriel Conroy’s imagination. The newspaper
represents the world to which Gabriel belongs; it is the last recognizable asset of his own
modern, literate and urban life, and it is left behind as his vision stretches out across the
Irish countryside, the ‘Bog of Allen’ and the ‘dark mutinous Shannon waves’. But this
image is brought to Gabriel through Gretta’s bourgeois romanticism, which is of a kind
that echoes Molly Ivors’s sentimentalization of the west of Ireland. Michael Furey is ‘a boy
in the gasworks’ (p. 221), a figure of modernity enmeshed in technology, which is mediated
through Gretta’s own mythologizing process. This criss-crossing between the two worlds
occurs in Dubliners more than in Ulysses, which offers a close urban and literary
representation of the public sphere in Dublin. In Ulysses we observe a sphere of discussion
and debate in which the practice of hermeneutics, although mocked by Joyce, plays a
significant role in the nationalist movement. Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ is an
important element in the discussion of the Irish public sphere, and particularly of the way
in which it is represented in the urban environment of Ulysses. It serves to highlight the
importance of the printed press, and demonstrates in more detail the significance of the
movement of print ephemera depicted in Ulysses.
61
Hidden Ireland, cultural nationalism and the community
The term ‘public sphere’ enables me to describe a liminal zone that exists between the
construct of ‘society’ and that of ‘community’, in which people can engage in political and
social debate. In simple terms a community is created when a collection of people become
connected through a common theme, cause or interest. As I have discussed in relation to
Anderson’s Imagined Communities, location is only one part of the system that creates a
community. The sense of existing under a common understanding, by reading the same
newspaper or hearing of an event that connects you with others, can create a community
which in physical terms is more disparate than, say, a society in the same town. In Hidden
Ireland, Public Sphere, Joep Leerssen looks at Ferdinand Tönnies’s definition of the
difference between community and society. He also expresses surprise that it is not
referenced by Anderson. Tönnies characterizes community as:
small-scale, pre-modern, with fixed and traditional power relations, little or no
social mobility, strong social control over the individual, and tight network of
mutual interest and solidarity. This is opposed to ‘society’, large-scale, modern and
urbanized, with more fluid power relations, greater social mobility, social control
entrusted to a state apparatus, and with a higher degree of anonymity, individual
freedom, and solitude.56
Leerssen’s use of Tönnies’s theory demonstrates a particular difference of definition
between community and society. According to Tönnies, a ‘community’ has a fixed
framework that does not allow social mobility or change in the structure of power; ‘society’
encompasses fluid power relations, but is dependent on modernity and urbanization.
Leerssen’s project maps out the period of transition, from the late eighteenth
century through to the end of the nineteenth century, as ‘the hidden Ireland’ became part
of a recognized public sphere. Leerssen highlights that for Ireland the great breaking points
were the Act of Union (1800), Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the Famine of 1845–49.
These events, for different reasons, became watershed moments in the history of the
56 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), paraphrased by Joep Leerssen, Hidden Ireland, Public
Sphere (Galway: Arlen House, 2002), p. 34.
62
changing nature of the public sphere. They also played significant roles in defining the
divide between rural agrarian Ireland and the growing urban class. Leerssen writes:
A massive cultural transfer took place in Ireland between the Gaelic tradition and
the urban, English-speaking, educated classes. This transfer was practically nonexistent before 1760 and all-dominant after 1840, and involved the complete
Gaelic re-orientation of Ireland’s public space and public sphere, especially after
Catholic Emancipation.57
Catholic Emancipation gave Irish Catholics access to legitimate and acknowledged places
of worship, as well as providing them—thanks to the agitation of Daniel O’Connell—with
a voice on the streets and a forum for debate in public space. While acknowledging
Habermas’s definition of the public sphere, Leerssen provides a preliminary, rudimentary
description of the public sphere as ‘actual, physical space: the streets, the areas of
concourse open to the public-at-large’.58 He provides a key example of this in his
discussion of the republican funeral, as well as in O’Connell’s ‘monster rallies’. These
events determined what he calls the ‘deep consequence of Emancipation: the fact that
Catholics now also had a stake in Ireland’s public space and a right to manifest their
presence there’.59
Leerssen contends that the native tradition of Ireland had no place within the
public sphere, and therefore had no form of legitimate community or communal voice.
This, he writes, ‘defines the true importance of Emancipation—which opened up access to
Ireland’s public space for the Catholic majority—and […] it also may count as a fair
description of what used to be known as the “Hidden Ireland”’.60 The term ‘hidden
Ireland’ is associated with Daniel Corkery and his 1924 book of the same name.61 Leerssen
describes this book as a work of ‘built-in pieties and sentimental overstatements’, and as
Leerssen, p. 13.
Leerssen, p. 27.
59 Leerssen, p. 28.
60 Leerssen, p. 31.
61 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: M. H. Gill and
Son, 1924).
57
58
63
‘the first attempt to give a literary history of a particularly obscure century’.62 As Patrick
Maume writes:
The Hidden Ireland […] seemed an elegy for a world that might be lost forever, as
Corkery tried to restate the ideals of the Gaelic League for a new generation in his
struggle against ‘The Literature of Collapse’.63
Maume argues that Corkery’s project became an uncritical and polemical celebration of the
past, which risked the appropriation of historical events and traditions for political gain.
Despite the obvious problems with his work, Corkery nonetheless highlights the
existence of a public sphere that was not reliant on the printed press, and which
contributed to national memory not just in its cultural and material form, but also in what
Ian McBride describes as the more arcane ‘cult of ancestors, a shared heritage of glorious
triumphs and common suffering’.64 Corkery’s work is testament to the importance of
considering the alternative communities within which a public sphere can exist. As
Leerssen argues, ‘the most striking aspect involves the inaccessibility of print. Irish
literature functioned in an oral, or at best handwritten form.’65 First published in 1924,
Hidden Ireland has never gone out of print. Corkery tells us:
The Hidden Ireland, then, the land that lies before us, is the dead half of that
stricken body; it is the terrain of the common enemy, ruled by deputies of
deputies of deputies, and sunk so deep in filth and beggary that its people have
been thrust, as torpid and degraded pariahs should, beyond the household of the
law.66
The state of degradation in stricken rural Ireland is not to be contested here; but his use of
the poets and their art as a means of disseminating a mythical, national collective memory
through the handing on of poetry in oral form, a kind of ‘proto-nationalist memory’ as
described by McBride, is more problematic. McBride describes Corkery’s message as the
belief in a ‘powerful folk-memory of dispossession’, and goes on to argue:
Leerssen, p. 31.
Patrick Maume, ‘Life that is Exile’: Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish
Studies, 1993), p. 96.
64 History and Memory in Modern Ireland, ed. by Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.
1.
65 Leerssen, p. 31.
66 Corkery, p. 20.
62
63
64
The notion of two antagonistic Irelands—the world of the Gaelic underclass, the
cottier’s cabin and the hedge school abruptly juxtaposed against that of the Big
House—is a misleading one; rural Ireland possessed an increasingly complex
social hierarchy of large and small tenant farmers, dairymen, artisans, cottiers and
labourers.67
Corkery’s most vocal critic was his former protégé, Sean O’Faolain, who argued that ‘Irish
social problems were […] obscured by the ideological mist of romantic nationalism.’68
Bryan Fanning writes that this ideological mist was ‘epitomised by Corkery’s The Hidden
Ireland, a hugely influential text [which O’Faolain] saw as legitimising cultural isolationism
and censorship’.69 As Fanning demonstrates, O’Faolain attacked what he saw as the cultural
isolationism and racial purity advocated by Corkery, condemning it as an ideological
cultural defence of the Irish nationalist tradition that excluded heterogeneity and idealized
an unrealistic ‘national memory’ of the real lives and experiences of the Irish peasantry.
Cultural nationalism encompassed a range of groups, societies and activists, many
of which had differing opinions regarding the purpose and future direction of the Irish
cultural movement. They included the Irish Literary Revival as well as (among others) the
Irish language movement headed by Douglas Hyde, and the Gaelic Athletics Association
(GAA) founded by Michael Cusack (whom I will discuss in more detail in chapter three). It
looked to organize, encourage and provoke a sense of Irish identity through the pursuit
and reinvention of Irish tradition, culture and language—of what it meant to be Irish. This
often included anti-British propaganda and a purist notion of the Irish language, tradition
and national identity. In his biography of Patrick Pearse, Joost Augusteijn argues that many
members of the Gaelic League ‘idealised traditional Irish society and saw a clear dichotomy
between a democratic rural society based on peasant proprietors and mass industrial urban
society’, writing that
an Irish folk community with heroic and visionary ideals was contrasted with an
English class society which was utilitarian and commercial. In their eyes the real
McBride, p. 28.
Bryan Fanning, ‘Hidden Ireland, Silent Irelands: Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor versus Daniel
Corkery’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 95, 251–259 (p. 251).
69 Fanning, p. 251.
67
68
65
Ireland was morally superior and untainted by the vices of positivism, materialism
and hedonism, but this was now under threat.70
Douglas Hyde’s lecture entitled ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’, which he
delivered to the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin on 25 November 1892, defined
what it was to have an Irish identity and articulated a strong anti-Anglo direction in popular
cultural nationalism. Movements such as the GAA and the Gaelic League created
networks, groups and communities around the country; venues such as pubs, town halls
and purpose-built clubs acted as meeting places for members. We can see a version of this
depicted in the ‘Cyclops’ and ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episodes of Ulysses, as well as in short
stories such as ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ and ‘A Mother’ from Dubliners. Cultural
nationalism and the organizations that existed within it influenced and organized the Irish
nationalist public sphere into something that became semi-institutionalized through
association, and through the clubs, societies and schools that promoted its cause. In this it
mimicked the repeal movement of the 1800s, which set up a network of reading rooms
throughout the country.
In his study, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, the Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the
Irish Nation State, John Hutchinson considers ‘the relationship between the modernising
state and the development of cultural nationalism’, arguing that it became separate from
political nationalism.71 He argues:
[There were] two kinds of cultural nationalist intellectual: those (mainly historical
scholars and artists) who formulate the cultural ideals of the movement, and those
(generally journalists and politicians) who transform these ideals into concrete
political, economic and social programmes. But each converges on cultural nationalism in
response to a crisis of identity and purpose that is rooted in the modern world.72
How these nationalist intellectuals communicated and facilitated their response to the crisis
of identity defined the framework of an Irish public sphere which became more than
simply a public reaction against the existing state hegemony. Hutchinson argues that
70
Joost Augusteijn, Patrick Pearse: The Making of a Revolutionary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 76.
71 John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, the Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 5.
72 Hutchinson, p. 3, emphasis added.
66
cultural nationalism worldwide ‘has its own distinctive aims—the moral regeneration of the
national community rather than the achievement of an autonomous state—and a
distinctive politics’.73 Importantly for our discussion, Hutchinson maintains that cultural
nationalists tend to ‘establish informal and decentralized clusters of cultural societies and
journals’, which are ‘designed to inspire a spontaneous love of community in its different
members by educating them to their common heritage of splendour and suffering’.74 He
observes that these clusters of cultural societies work to create a national community that is
separate from the hope of an autonomous state.
Pearse’s speech is an example of the mergence of militant and cultural nationalism.
The splintered public sphere in Ireland was driven by the differing aspects of cultural
nationalism seen in the work of Hyde, Cusack and the Revivalists, and it was mediated by
such figures as Arthur Griffith and D. P. Moran.75 Griffith in particular stood for the
political mobilization of cultural nationalism, and his newspaper the United Irishman directed
the debate about how to define Irish national identity; Griffith and Sinn Féin used cultural
nationalism as a vehicle through which to reappropriate an ideal of Irish national identity
and put forward a case for independence. Hutchinson’s important analysis provides us with
an interesting insight into and evaluation of how cultural nationalism fits into the grander
narrative of the multifaceted Irish political public sphere.
The Revival and the public sphere
Such considerations impel a return to the point at which this chapter began: Pearse’s
graveside oratory. Pearse acknowledges his and others’ responsibility to continue in the
tradition of ‘the Fenian programme’, but he is also trying something new. His rebranding
Hutchinson, p. 9.
Hutchinson, p. 14.
75 D. P. Moran The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, intro. by Patrick Maume (Dublin: University College Dublin
Press, 2006 [1905]), p. xxiv. Mediated but not always supported, as noted by Patrick Maume in his
introduction to the 2006 edition of Moran’s The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, who writes that his ‘claims that Yeats
was reinventing the Irish Protestant claim to inherent spiritual superiority over Catholicism by cultivating
occult mystification as a substitute for defeated Evangelism was a viciously unsympathetic but not entirely
inaccurate caricature’.
73
74
67
of the rhetoric of Fenianism speaks both to the old guard and to the new generation to
which he belonged. The statement marks a moment of change in the constantly shifting
environment of nationalist rhetoric and idealism in the Irish public sphere. By 1915 Pearse
was already a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and had been sworn into the
Supreme Council and Secret Military Council; he had been active in gun-running and
stockpiling arsenal, and had been using St Enda’s to store weapons. Although he is seen as
involved in the cultural nationalist movement, he joined the Gaelic League in 1895 and was
for a time the editor of their newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light). By the
time he spoke at O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral, he was convinced that military action was the
only way for Ireland to break free from Britain. His rhetoric denotes a shift within the
public sphere, and invites us to debate the development of the mediation of the public
sphere alongside Fenianism and cultural nationalism.76
It is important to see how Joyce, during the years leading up to the eventual
publication of Dubliners and then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was engaging with
the politics and shifting rhetoric of the Irish public sphere. In Ulysses, Joyce demonstrates
that Ireland lacked a viable public sphere in the traditional sense, highlighting the
unavailability of representation to those on the fringes of society (something to which I will
return in more detail in chapters two and four). In short, he introduces and unravels the
concept of community and its relationship with the individual. Within the narrative of
Ulysses there exists a discourse on the development of communities in the networks of
communication that facilitated the public sphere in Dublin. Ulysses presents its own virtual
community inside the novel. It highlights many of the conflicting issues that hampered the
development of the public sphere. Joyce primarily uses newspapers and print ephemera to
develop this theme in the novel. Not only does he mimic the language of the press, but he
also demonstrates the role of newspapers and print media in generating reading
76 Joyce’s essay ‘Fenianism: The Last Fenian’ highlights some of his views of the republican movement, and
in a small but significant way enhances our understanding of the development and creation of twentiethcentury Fenianism within the Irish public sphere. I will discuss the essay in further detail in chapter three.
68
communities. These communities are both virtual and physical, and their image can be
traced back to the historical context of the novel.
The Irish Revival features in Ulysses most obviously in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’,
however the shadow of the Revival and its impact on Ireland’s cultural and political
landscape, colours Joyce’s writing throughout his novel. The Revival brings to light
important issues of community, the role of the artist, cultural nationalism and education, as
well as the role of the audience or reader. This is key to my analysis regarding the concept
of community in Ulysses. The manifestation of community in Ulysses relies on the network
of print media that exists in Joyce’s representation of the city. The acknowledged processes
of commodities and the market within which print media functions, together with the
specifically urban and street-based culture to which such networks of communication
belong, means that Joyce’s communities are inextricably linked to the kind of urban
modernity that some have argued goes against the ideology of the Revival.
In line with this argument, in his 1998 study Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce
and the Literary Revival, Len Platt argues that in Ulysses, Joyce’s depiction of Irish culture is
antithetical to the Revival. Platt argues that ‘against the Literary Revival’s celebration of an
aristocratic culture of heroism is Joyce’s celebration of the culture of Dublin’s streets.’77 A
key difference, Platt highlights, is the determined sense among the Revivalists of
maintaining an anti-modern stance, of doing away with the materiality of modernity and
embracing a mythical and imaginative—folkloric—culture of national identity. Platt quotes
W. B. Yeats to emphasize that in the eyes of the Revival, ‘the Gaelic community was bound
together, not by materiality but by “imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which
have grown out of life, and by a past of great passions which can still awaken the heart to
imaginative action”.’78 However, as noted by Clare Hutton (among others), the revivalists
may have encouraged and evoked the traditional, folkloric and mythical Irish past, but they
77 Len Platt, Joyce and the Anglo-Irish: A Study of Joyce and the Literary Revival (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998),
p. 8.
78 Platt, p. 30.
69
also understood the importance of the growing print culture on the streets and in the
reading rooms of Ireland, as well as the currency for an Irish publishing industry. Hutton
writes that newspapers and periodicals ‘have an advantage over books in that they are
cheap, relatively easy to distribute, and, in many cases, require less sustained and skilled
attention from the reader’, concluding that it is ‘no surprise that Yeats and his peers chose
to publish and publicize the revival of Irish literary culture in widely read newspapers like
the Freeman’s Journal and United Ireland.’79 This observation that Yeats and others used Irish
newspapers to publish work and publicize their events allows us to consider the impact of
a Dublin newspaper readership on the successful engagement of the Revival with those
who read the papers.
Hutton’s analysis acknowledges the importance of a Revival readership as well as
the practicalities of facilitating the cultural shift that they strove to achieve. This readership,
which Hutton argues is grounded in the materiality of print media, can be seen as a
recognisably Joycean community, and we are able to observe its relevance and impact on
the virtual communities of Ulysses. This in turn directs us to consider the impact of such
reading communities on the Irish public sphere, specifically within a Dublin reading public.
To this end, Ben Levitas in his essay, ‘Reading and the Irish Revival, 1891-1922’, discusses
the relationship between the revivalists, reading habits and the popular press, describing
‘the complex dynamics that evolved between education, reading, and national identity in a
period of revolutionary change’. 80 Regarding newspapers and other print media, Levitas
argues that ‘Ireland’s newspaper and periodicals […] offered an ambivalent series of media
that both threatened cultural nationalism and presented a crucial tool for its
promulgation.’81 This opposition between those cultural nationalists who viewed
newspapers and popular periodicals as damaging to the education of the reading public,
Clare Hutton, ‘Publishing the Irish Cultural Revival, 1891-1922’ in The Irish Book in English: 1891-2000, ed.
by Clare Hutton and Patrick Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 21.
80 Ben Levitas, ‘Reading and the Irish Revival, 1891-1922’, in The Irish Book in English: 1891-2000, ed. by Clare
Hutton and Patrick Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 43.
81 Levitas, ‘Reading and the Irish Revival, 1891-1922’, pp. 63-4.
79
70
and those who recognised the opportunity that the mere existence of such a community of
readers brought to the Revival, demonstrated a binary (but seemingly workable)
relationship between the Revival and the press industry of the day. As summarized by
Levitas: ‘reading in Ireland during the revival was not merely the reading of the revival, but
a cheek-by-jowl encounter with a crowded shelf of new works, newspapers, established
standards and popular fiction, priestly homily, polemic, and rhetoric.’82 We encounter this
in Ulysses as Joyce refers to newspapers, the penny dreadful, sensation novels, and much
more. As we shall see, within this constant interpolation of ‘voices’, Joyce refers his reader
back to the cultural nationalism of the day and the impact that it had on the Dublin public
sphere.
Returning to the revivalists themselves, in their ‘Manifesto for Irish Literary
Theatre’ of 1897, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn wrote:
We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment,
as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident
of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying
out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us.83
Ten years before the Playboy riots, the rhetoric of the Revivalists’ language was of a unifying
and collective—collaborative—movement. So what went wrong? Levitas, in his study The
Theatre of the Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916, examines this question:
If their attempt to treat a national subject was so successful, what made the
National Theatre Society (NTS) such a controversial outfit? What place did their
performances have in the aspirations of Irish nationalists to reassert a native
culture or to establish Ireland’s political independence? In other words, what role
did the national Drama have in the National Drama?84
Following on from this, we can note that by 1900, the phrase ‘national question’ had an
almost oxymoronic quality, thanks to the lack of any unified or collaborative ambition. As
Eric Hobsbawm argues:
Levitas, ‘Reading and the Irish Revival, 1891-1922’, p. 69.
W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, ‘Manifesto for Irish Literary Theatre’, 1897, in Lady
Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972), p. 145.
84 Ben Levitas, The Theatre of the Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 2.
82
83
71
The ‘national question’ as the old Marxists called it, is situated at the point of
intersection of politics, technology and social transformation. […] Nations exist
not only as functions of a particular kind of territorial state or the aspiration to
establish one […] but also in the context of a particular stage of technological and
economic development.85
Hobsbawm is alluding to the importance of recognizing social and economic change and
upheaval, and of the possibility that the group included in and represented by the ‘national
question’ might change and expand. He writes: ‘“national consciousness” develops
unevenly among the social groupings and regions of a country.’86 It became in many ways a
question of interpretation as to what ‘the Nation’ and ‘the national question’ meant and
whom they represented.87
When J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World premiered at Dublin’s Abbey
Theatre in 1907, the audience rioted, with students from Trinity College in the stalls
brawling with those in the pit. The play had been running for only two nights, but already it
had received heckling and jeers. Synge’s comic portrayal of a remote Mayo community
taken in by a young outsider’s tale of patricide struck a raw note with many of those
watching. Unsure how to respond to what was perceived as the glamorization of murder,
and to the somewhat accidental depiction of Mayo girls as quick to lift their skirts, the
audience grew agitated, and word spread quickly that the latest Abbey production was
causing offence. Paige Reynolds records:
When Christy asserted in the third act “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I
care if you brought me a drift of Mayo girls, standing in their shifts itself maybe,
from this place to the Eastern World,” the theatre erupted in hissing, stamping,
and yelling, and the remainder of the play was noisily overwhelmed.88
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 10.
86 Hobsbawm, p. 12.
87 Taking for his title a quote from Yeats’s Nobel address, Patrick Maume’s study The Long Gestation: Irish
Nationalist Life 1891-1918 provides a detailed account of the economic and political contexts that surrounded
those who began to re-gather a cultural movement which drew from the ideology of the Young Irelanders
and posited themselves against the struggling Irish Parliamentary Party. Patrick Maume, The Long Gestation:
Irish Nationalist Life 1891-1918 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999).
88 Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), p. 39. Reynolds notes that some of the details she describes ‘are taken from newspaper reports
collected in James Kilroy, The ‘Playboy’ Riots (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971)’.
85
72
The Freeman’s Journal called the play an ‘unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant
men and worse still upon peasant girlhood’.89 That the Freeman’s hit upon the two
outstanding provocations: the attack on Irish peasantry and on Irish womanhood, is
interesting. As noted by Reynolds, traditional views of Irish womanhood was only one of
Synge’s intended targets: ‘the Church, the peasantry, the family, and other valued
institutions also fell victim to his satire.’90 Yeats, who testified against those who had
disturbed the performances, gave an interview, again with the Freeman’s Journal, in response
to the first night’s reception. In it he fuelled the discontent when he proclaimed that those
protesting were unable to understand the importance of the autonomy of art—for which
he was pleading—because ‘the people who formed the opposition had no books in their
houses.’91
In just three nights Synge’s play had wrenched open the underlying social
disconnection between the intellectual elite of the Irish Revival and the Dubliners who had
watched the performance from the pit. Yeats’s continued response to the Playboy riots
demonstrates a disengaged attitude towards his audience. In his poems ‘On Those that
Hated “The Playboy of the Western World”’ and ‘September 1913’, Yeats accuses the Irish
people of lacking artistic principles. In line with this, Gregory Castle writes that ‘the Irish
National Theatre was not primarily a nationalist project’, arguing that projects such as the
Abbey Theatre grew into their role as a nationalist theatre, becoming recognised as, in
Castle’s analysis, ‘an early example (though severely conventional) of resistance theatre—if
only because it so effectively countered the stage Irishmen of the Queen’s Royal Theatre
89 Freeman’s Journal, 28 January 1907, quoted by Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000
(London: Profile Books, 2004), p. 95; see also Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 130.
90 Reynolds, p. 39. As an interesting addition to this, P. J. Mathews’ work Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin,
The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement, focuses on the different cultural and political strands that can be
seen to be actively engaged in the Celtic Revival. Within this, he lists the Irish Agricultural Organisation
Society alongside the Abbey Theatre and the Gaelic League. A more ‘plural’ perspective of the Revival and
what organisations we can include within it, makes for a more complicated reading of the Playboy riots:
certainly the event highlighted cultural antagonisms between the producers at the Abbey and their audience,
but potentially this can be viewed as a more isolated incident within the grander framework of a more overtly
political—all-encompassing—Revival, which Mathews argues for. P. J. Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre,
Sinn Féin, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field
Day, 2003).
91 Quoted in R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 1, p. 360.
73
and the crude, racist stereotypes of British Propagandists.’92 In this light, Castle views
Synge’s project as an attempt to challenge the primitivism of the recognized depiction of
the Irish peasant current in the public sphere at the time, and demonstrate ‘that both
tradition and modernity suffer from the same debilitating absence of authenticity.’93
Similarly, Reynolds demonstrates that Synge attempts to use spectacle as a form of
pedagogy against his unwitting audience. She argues how ‘from its inception, the Abbey
Theatre produced promotional, editorial, and creative writings that outlined its perceptions
of and intentions for the Irish national audience. This was a theatre that attended to its
audiences, if only in a quest to transform them.’94 This concept of the revival theatre as a
spectacle which tries to convert as well as teach its audience, returns us to the notion of the
‘national question’ and the confusion over what and who it refers to. As argued by
Reynolds:
The founders of the ILT [Irish Literary Theatre] imagined their audience as a
cohesive group, united by a desire to support the staging of native drama—a
community bound by its antipathy to the popular theatre of England, a frustration
with misrepresentation of the Irish as dirty, drunken louts, and the shared wish to
depict “the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland.”95
When faced with a rioting audience in 1907, it became a time for the modernists of the
Revival to be schooled in the importance of national sentiment. Reynolds argues that while
‘Gregory and Yeats represented the audiences for these first productions as unenlightened
philistines who failed to recognize Synge’s genius […], Synge and his cohort should not be
seen sympathetically as the bewildered victims of a nationalist audience’s attack.’96
So how does Joyce respond and react to the idea of a national (as well as a catholic)
audience and readership? Six years earlier, in 1901, he published his essay ‘The Day of the
Rabblement’, in which he lamented the demise of the Irish Literary Theatre at the hands of
popular opinion:
Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 136-137.
Castle, p. 134.
94 Reynolds, p. 40.
95 Reynolds, p. 41.
96 Reynolds, p. 40.
92
93
74
The Irish Literary Theatre gave out that it was a champion of progress, and
proclaimed against commercialism and vulgarity. It had partly made good its word
and was expelling the old devil when after the first encounter it surrendered to the
popular will.97
Joyce saw potential in the Irish Literary Theatre’s project, and was disappointed to see it
give way to what he perceived as a narrow-minded provincialism by accepting and abiding
by the censor. Furthermore, Joyce accuses the censor of being guided by popular opinion,
sentimentality and a demotic sense of moral righteousness. He published the essay
alongside his friend Francis Skeffington’s ‘A Forgotten Aspect of the University Question’,
on women and the university. Both essays had been rejected by the university journal St
Stephen’s, and instead the authors self-published them in a pamphlet. The pamphlet’s
preface states:
These two Essays were commissioned by the Editor of St. Stephen’s for that paper,
but were subsequently refused insertion by the Censor. The writers are now
publishing them in their original form, and each writer is responsible for what
appears under his own name.98
Joyce and Skeffington bypassed the censor and distributed their essays outside of
the institutionally accepted public sphere. In their own small way, they entered and
facilitated a public counter-sphere; their actions questioned the authority of a public sphere
which operated under and collaborated with censorship. In his essay, Joyce writes:
If an artist courts the multitude he cannot escape the contagion of its fetishism
and deliberate self-deception, and if he joins in a popular movement he does so at
his own risk. Therefore the Irish Literary Theatre by its surrender to the trolls has
cut itself adrift from the line of advancement.99
It is a common understanding that Joyce believed he would be unable to succeed as an
artist while remaining in Ireland, that he had to escape the nets of ‘nationality, language,
religion’ (Portrait, p. 220) that ensnare Stephen Dedalus in Portrait. But here in 1901 he
writes: ‘Until he has freed himself from the mean influences about him […] no man is an
97 James Joyce, ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, in Two Essays, ed. by James Joyce and Francis Skeffington
(Dublin: Gerrard Bros., 1901), p. 7.
98 James Joyce and Francis Skeffington, ‘Preface’, in Two Essays.
99 Joyce, ‘Rabblement’, p. 8.
75
artist at all.’100 In his essay Joyce confronts the influences restricting the Dublin literary
public sphere, and expresses his scorn for the ‘placid and intensely moral’ rabblement of
the Irish audience; its destructive influence on the growth of the artist reappears in both
Portrait and Ulysses.101
Much of my analysis focuses on the role of communities in the facilitation of public
discourse, and on the potential of those communities to drive social and political change.
Craig Calhoun writes that ‘Habermas’s two-sided constitution of the category of public
sphere is simultaneously about the quality or form of rational-critical discourse and the
quantity of, or openness to, popular participation.’102 The quality of debate and the
openness of access to this debate are two things that Joyce highlights as problematic.
Habermas’s critical awareness of the closing in and institutionalization of something that
had such a strong potential for universal accessibility is again important and relevant to my
discussion. Those who lack representation, as described by Habermas in his narrative about
the emergence of the public sphere, appear in Joyce’s text as figures who often lack the
voice or cultural currency to participate as represented members of the public sphere.
Habermas writes: ‘The public sphere with which Marx saw himself confronted
contradicted its own principle of universal accessibility—the public could no longer claim
to be identical with the nation, civil society with all of society.’103 This is essential to my
analysis of the representation of communities in Ulysses, which I will discuss further in
chapter two.
In line with this, Goode reminds us that:
Of course, illiteracy and poverty excluded much of the rural and the property-less
urban populations, and the literature that was energising the bourgeoisie […]. The
literary public sphere, though less exclusionary than its political counterpart, was
also gendered: whilst women played an active role in the salons that were attached
to private households, their participation in circles convened in the coffee houses
and other public spaces was heavily restricted.104
Joyce, ‘Rabblement’, p. 8.
Joyce, ‘Rabblement’, p. 7.
102 Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 4.
103 Habermas, p. 124.
104 Goode, p. 8. In this passage, Goode references Habermas, pp. 37–38, p. 33.
100
101
76
Often the pretence of community in Ulysses highlights the closed exclusivity of private
groups. Joyce demonstrates the conflict arising out of terms such as ‘public’, ‘collective’
and ‘community’ by highlighting how, through the actions of the characters and the
perception of space that their rhetoric manipulates, public space can be closed down,
becoming exclusive and private. This is shown in Ulysses in venues such as the newspaper
office in ‘Aeolus’, Barney Kiernan’s pub in ‘Cyclops’, and the meeting of Dublin’s literati in
‘Scylla and Charybdis’. Although the office of the Evening Telegraph in many respects is a
private space, as a newspaper it represents a public voice, as well as being a facilitator of
information and public discussion. In ‘Aeolus’, Joyce shows us the back-room machinery
behind the creation of the newspaper, and the politics of class that make up the bedrock of
the public sphere are disclosed to the reader. What Habermas describes as the
refeudalization of the public sphere by commodity fetishism is seen at work in the
production of the newspaper, manifested in the advertisements and the sale of space in the
newspaper’s pages:
Red Murray’s long shears sliced out the advertisement from the
newspaper in four clean strokes. Scissors and paste.
—I'll go through the printingworks, Mr Bloom said, taking the cut square. (7.31–
33)
Later in the chapter Bloom ponders while gazing at the foreman’s back:
It’s the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the official
gazette. Queen Anne is dead. Published by authority in the year one thousand
and.105 (7.89–91)
Within the term ‘public sphere’, the word ‘public’ stands for a form of authority,
while communal identity in Ireland rests on the discordant debate over how to define
national identity. Clíona Ó Gallchoir argues: ‘the concept of collective Irish identity which
prevails and has prevailed since the nineteenth century is based on a fixation with the
construction of identity in a national public sphere’, emphasising that this is expounded by
105 Interestingly, ‘Published by Authority’ was the masthead of the Dublin Intelligence, which ran from 30
September 1690 until May 1695. For more on this, see Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
77
a select male bourgeois community.106 Gallchoir states that Irish criticism has been
inhibited by its failure to recognize that the construction of Irish national identity was a
singularly masculine endeavour. Joyce explores this in the Dubliners short story ‘A Mother’.
The sense of an ill-conceived awareness of public authority governs this debate and
becomes a troubling issue. It is critiqued by Joyce in his depiction of a small Dublin-based
nationalist community.
In Dubliners, Joyce probes notions of community and equality in the public sphere.
His short stories draw the reader into private domestic spheres, focusing on the miniature
and the micro. However, when we view the collection as a whole, Joyce levels with us,
presenting a macro account of a collection of miniature communities, names and places, all
on the broad canvas of the city of Dublin. The stories of Dubliners belong in a sense to their
own virtual or imagined community. They belong both to the small community of each
immediate story, and also to the community of Dublin, as well as to the imagined
community that exists within the collection and is recognized only by the reader. The ideas
of community and identity are paramount to how the stories function, both individually
and in interaction with one another.
In ‘A Mother’, a story which can be associated more closely with the more formal,
original definition of the public sphere, Joyce questions the authority of institutions such as
the Irish Literary Revival. The closed and insular communities that we read of in Ulysses
exist in Dubliners in a more concentrated form, as does Joyce’s tendency to problematize
the notion of public authority. In his critique of the public sphere in Dubliners, we can
recognize John Wilson Foster’s reading of the Irish Literary Revival, which, he asserts,
was what Foucault has called a ‘fellowship of discourse’ whose function it is ‘to
preserve or to reproduce discourse, but in order that it should circulate within a
closed community, according to strict regulations, without those in possession
being dispossessed by this very distribution.’107
Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (Dublin: University College Dublin
Press, 2005), p. 180, quoted by Emer Nolan, ‘Postcolonial Literary Studies, Nationalism, and Feminist
Critique in Contemporary Ireland’, Éire-Ireland, 42, (2007), 336–361 (p. 338).
107 John Wilson Foster, Colonial Consequences, Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991),
p. 50.
106
78
In the story, Mrs Kearney challenges the committee men by refusing to allow her daughter
to continue her accompaniment of the performances. The story demonstrates the tensions
present in a public sphere facilitated by institutions such as the Irish Revival. It depicts a
society whose fellowship of discourse is maintained though the club-like exclusivity of the
men of the group, as well as by the representatives of the press who attend the
performance. It highlights the discrimination against women manifested in the implicit
understanding that they do not have the same authority in the public sphere as men.
This chapter has explored a new understanding of the possibilities of the public
sphere and how it is defined. It draws on the definition of the public sphere presented in
my introduction, which rests on the historical narrative of the creation and growth of the
public sphere, recognizing its dependence on institutionalized and semi-private locations
where the opportunity to take part depends on ownership and belonging. An alternative,
more abstract concept of the public sphere was born out of the recognition of the virtual
trace that can be drawn between different readers of the same text. This becomes a
network of participants that can only ever be recognized from a virtual perspective. This
second notion is particularly important when thinking about the virtual world of Ulysses. In
Ulysses, both types of public sphere are represented in the narrative, and I argue that Joyce
makes a point of presenting the reader with an anachronistic vision of the first, historical,
institutionalized public sphere, demonstrating its social limitations. Simultaneously he
reveals that, through a network of print media and ephemera, a community can form that
owes its connective trace to the movement between objects and readers. In the chapters
that follow I shall now go on to explore more closely how both conceptions of the public
sphere can be recognized in the narrative of Ulysses.
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Chapter 2: Forms of Media and Community in ‘Aeolus’
This chapter will explore the relationship between the print and oral dissemination of news,
alongside key points in the history of the loss of the Irish language from the public domain,
the relationship between the press industry and the urban poor of Dublin, and the use of
communication networks during the Easter Rising. In this chapter I shall refer to both of
the two versions of the public sphere discussed in the introduction and chapter one. In the
episode ‘Aeolus’, Joyce encourages the reader to look beyond the confines of the
newspaper office and onto the streets of Dublin; but as we do so our gaze turns back to
the office, as we compare the newspapermen with the noisy reality of the street below.
Joyce engages with the history of communication during a time of social and political
unrest, and I will explore this through the examples of the Tram Lockout of 1913 and the
Easter Rising of 1916, together with their retrospective significance for ‘Aeolus’. The
behaviour of the characters in the newspaper office and Joyce’s depiction of the newspaper
industry mirror and critique the insular and disconnected attitude that was an inherent
characteristic of early twentieth-century Irish print culture. Connections can also be drawn
between the scenario of the newspaper office and the practices of the eighteenth-century
salons, reading rooms and coffee houses that facilitated the growth of the public sphere.
From this critical angle I am able to look in further detail at the social significance of the
public sphere in twentieth-century Dublin, and at how Joyce reflects on the state of the
public sphere through his depiction of the politics of community and communication in
Ulysses.
80
The varying constructions of community and the public sphere in the Ireland of
1904 are crucial to this discussion: they became defined by the press industry’s engagement
with wider social and political issues. While the creation of a community might facilitate the
growth of the public sphere, and the development of the public sphere might in turn
enable a continued sense of community, the two remain separate conceptions, although at
times they are closely intertwined. Much of this chapter looks at the fluctuating relationship
between definitions of community and the public sphere. In his introduction to Irish
Freedom: The History of Irish Nationalism in Ireland, Richard English argues:
The true definition and explanation of nationalism lie in a particular interweaving
of the politics of community, struggle and power. And if we ask what, at root,
makes people into nationalists and makes nationalists of so many people, then the
crucial place to start is with the necessity and appeal of community.1
While the public sphere, community and nationalism are all independent constructions,
they also depend on each other in order to function. This is why it is important to look at
the three concepts as both separate and related when exploring Joyce’s representation of
Dublin’s printed press and public sphere in Ulysses.
Running parallel to this are the themes of identity and representation, which reach
to the heart of Joyce’s critique of the principles of the public sphere. As Joep Leerssen
comments, ‘an Irish identification lies at the very foundation of any form of Irish
nationalism, so much so that to state the fact is practically a tautology.’2 Following
Leerssen, I argue that the creation of this Irish identification is in some way determined
through the partnership between oral and print culture, and I will use the setting of
‘Aeolus’ to explore the relationship between these two modes of communication. In his
appraisal of nationalism in Ireland, English notes that ‘a darker feature of nationalist
community—but again one which both defines and explains its appeal—is to be found in
the idea of exclusiveness.’3 English highlights the challenge of trying to locate a sense of
national identity through community, when the very concept of community is dependent
Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London: Pan Macmillan, 2006), p. 12.
Joep Leerssen, Hidden Ireland, Public Sphere (Galway: Arlen House, 2002), p. 14.
3 English, p. 14.
1
2
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upon a form of exclusivity. Through this, I am able to consider exclusivity in relation to
class discrimination. This particular social tension will be analysed with regard to the Tram
Lockout of 1913 and the representation of the newsboys in Ulysses.
Divided into four subsections, this chapter will first look at the history of oral
rhetorical performance and Joyce’s presentation of it alongside the print media in the
newspaper office. The second section will look at the newspapers’ social responsibility. The
third explores the events of the Tram Lockout of 1913, with specific interest in the role of
the newsboys and their depiction in Ulysses. The fourth section explores the retrospective
significance of the Easter Rising of 1916, with particular emphasis on the use of
communication networks during the rebellion.
Speaking, listening and reading
The printed and the spoken word are presented in ‘Aeolus’ as two separate yet connected
means of communication. Often positioned in opposition to each other, they represent
two cultures of communication, both of which are viable media in the construction of the
public sphere. R. B. Kershner describes the dialogue as ‘a mixed chorus of contending
voices’ in which ‘the characters in the Freeman’s offices seem assembled by Joyce as
examples of a preliterate, oral culture, hypnotized by the sounds of their own voices and
the voices of their ancestors.’4 The episode is a celebration of oratorical skill alongside the
technology of the newsroom. Beginning with Stephen’s reaction to Professor MacHugh’s
praise for J. F. Taylor’s speech, I shall look at how dialogue in ‘Aeolus’ enables the reader
to compare the two modes of communication, print and oral, and to look back at their
respective histories. Importantly, a public speech is able to communicate with an illiterate
audience as well as a literate one. However, while rallies and large meetings might draw a
mass audience, they were always restricted to a particular moment in time as well as by the
size of the venue, and they relied on the dissemination of the speech to a wider
4
R. Brandon Kershner, The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 97, p. 102.
82
community, often through a pamphlet or newspaper report. This history of the working
relationship between print and oral communication can be found within the narrative of
‘Aeolus’.
Inside the newspaper office, we bear witness to the comically inflated grandeur of
the characters’ speech: ‘—Bombast! the professor broke in testily. Enough of the inflated
windbag!’ (7.315). Words and sounds are heard but often ignored or closed down by a
competing performer: ‘—O! Mr Dedalus cried, giving vent to a hopeless groan. Shite and
onions! That’ll do, Ned. Life is too short’ (7.329–30). In contrast, Stephen’s ‘Parable of the
Plums’ is described as one that ‘outdoes Zola in naturalistic dailiness, […] a perfect
example of the anti-newspaper story, a sort of Dublinesque “dog bites man”.’5 Through
clowning and wordplay, Joyce introduces the reader to a discordant mix of sounds and
voices in the press rooms, and amid this noise and buffoonery he offers a sustained critique
of the history of communication, the public sphere, and issues of class and representation.
This is structured around the relationship between two forms of news dissemination: the
spoken word versus printed media. ‘Aeolus’ presents the reader with a cacophony of
sounds, all seeking forms of representation and acknowledgment. We read that Bloom
competes with the printing machines, ‘slipping his words deftly into the pauses of the
clanking’ (7.139–140). From the draymen to the newsboys, from the machines to the
voices of the past conjured up in the performances of the characters in the office, all of
these sounds and voices belong to a community, and within this exists an implicit hierarchy
as to who or what is heard or listened to.
While in the newsroom, the men discuss a speech given by the barrister J. F.
Taylor, a performance which Professor MacHugh describes as the ‘finest display of oratory
I ever heard […] full of courteous haughtiness and pouring in chastened diction’ (7.792–
805). Stephen contemplates the implications of Taylor’s speech as MacHugh performs it to
his audience. Stephen thinks: ‘Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at
5
Kershner, p. 103.
83
it yourself?’ (7. 836–7), while the Professor concludes, ‘That is oratory’ (7.879). Stephen
responds to MacHugh’s performance by drawing on the image of Daniel O’Connell.
O’Connell was a skilful orator: he used and manipulated public space, and was able to
gather mass support through the choreography of what became known as his ‘monster
meetings’. He provides us with a potent (and, as we shall see, contentious) example of a
speaker who used his oratorical skill to communicate with his audience at a level that
allowed him to reach a wide and varied crowd of followers. Sean O’Faoláin writes that
before O’Connell the Irish people had had ‘no absolute sense of themselves as a nation’.6
O’Connell certainly transformed how the Irish saw and used public space: he facilitated
communication across class boundaries, and reclaimed ownership of the public sphere.
But, as Terry Eagleton notes, O’Connell ‘aestheticized politics’.7 He argues:
The shift from politics to culture is accordingly one from state to nation. Michael
Davitt sees Daniel O’Connell as having forged a ‘national public opinion’ in
Ireland, bringing to birth a whole new style of discursive politics in the manner of
the classical public sphere.8
What Eagleton describes as a ‘new style of discursive politics’ is important to my analysis
of ‘Aeolus’, as I argue that Joyce sets up and critiques the use of rhetoric as a progressive
means of communication. He emphasizes this in both the printed word of the newspaper,
and more importantly in the celebration of oratorical performance by the pressmen.
J. F. Taylor’s speech, which was witnessed by Joyce in 1901, uses the allegory of
Moses in his defence of the revival of the Irish language.9 Joyce revisits it in ‘Aeolus’
through MacHugh’s performance, which mimics Taylor’s description of how Moses
brought ‘the chosen people out of their house of bondage’ and ‘spoke with the Eternal amid lightnings on
Sinai’s mountaintop’ (7.864–869, italics original). Stephen’s later mention of Mullaghmast and
Tara leads us to recognize that there is a second allegorical figure at play within the
Séan O’Faoláin, King of the Beggars: A Life of Daniel O’Connell (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1980), p. 2.
Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995), p. 228.
8 Eagleton, p. 228.
9 James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed. by Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1974), p. 120–121. Note that the subject of Taylor’s speech is in line with the theme of the
traditions of communication. Another important speech that resonates with our discussion is Douglas Hyde’s
1892 ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’.
6
7
84
narrative’s imagery: that of Daniel O’Connell. The reaction that the performance provokes
in Stephen is significant. Stephen challenges a particular legend of O’Connell as the
champion of the people, the great communicator and reinventor of the Irish tradition. His
response reads:
Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of
porches. The tribune’s words, howled and scattered to the four winds. A people
sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that ever anywhere
was. Love and laud him: me no more. (7.879–83)
Stephen is referencing two of O’Connell’s ‘monster meetings’, at Tara (August 1843) and
the Rath of Mullaghmast (October 1843). In his notes to Ulysses Don Gifford tells us that
‘in Theosophical lore, the Akasa is an all embracing medium, the infinite memory of eternal
nature in which every thought, silent or expressed, is immortalized.’10 This is confirmed by
an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary which records an 1895 use of ‘akashic record’ to
describe ‘a scene from the past [that] may be reproduced in all its living reality; for in the
Âkâshic Records it exists, imprinted there once for all’.11 This definition and use of ‘akasic
record’ highlights Joyce’s preoccupation with the mythical element of record-keeping, of
historical narratives and archives. For a scene to be reproduced in such a way implies that it
is not a true memory or record of the past, but an attempt at mimetic reproduction or
literary verisimilitude. This creates a record whose permanence will eventually trump the
original memory and become ‘imprinted there once and for all’. The recreation and
reinterpretation of history is something that we can recognize in Joyce’s overall project for
the novel, as well as its being discussed here by Stephen.12 To return to Stephen’s thoughts,
Gifford argues that the phrase ‘scattered to the four winds’ implies that O’Connell’s
speeches, for all their oratorical success, were ultimately wasted, as he was imprisoned on
Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses: Annotated Notes for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1988), p. 150.
11 ‘Akashic record, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online,
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/308010?redirectedFrom=Akasic> [accessed 8 February 2013].
12 Interestingly, the OED’s reference comes from a book entitled Karma by the social reformer and
theosophist Annie Besant, some of whose books Joyce owned in his Trieste library.
10
85
14 October 1843 for ‘the “seditious conspiracy” of the monster meetings’.13 While this is
indeed true, the choice of language and the use of wind imagery also work within the
overall schema of ‘Aeolus’, relating to the bag of winds that redirect the travellers in the
Odyssey, steering them off course and thwarting their efforts to return home. In this,
Stephen is referring to a more anonymous, abstract, blustering distraction, which upsets
O’Connell’s communication, and by association, both Taylor’s and MacHugh’s
performances are seen to disappoint.
Emer Nolan reminds us that ‘O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation in
the early nineteenth century is often cited as the first significant mass political mobilization
of the Irish peasantry in a recognizably “nationalist” movement.’14 Nolan also notes that
O’Connell’s meetings left no records; they were before the era of literacy in the working
classes, and the primary record and method of dissemination was therefore singularly oral.15
Poignantly, we find the trace of Taylor’s speech and the memory of O’Connell relocated to
the newspaper office of ‘Aeolus’, where these two versions of dissemination are both in
play. Oral and print culture are contrasted in the retelling of the speech as Stephen
deconstructs the significance of records, memory and myth, together with O’Connell’s
performance and his relationship with his audience.
Stephen refuses to either celebrate or condemn the speech or O’Connell. Images of
dependence and protection are signified by the symbolism of ‘ears’ and ‘porches’, and of
sheltering within his voice. But this is then combined with the acknowledgement that as a
Gifford, p. 150.
Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 89.
15 Nolan is correct to highlight literacy as an important factor in the history of mass communication among
the working classes. However, it should also be noted that according to what remains of the 1841 Census in
Ireland, there was a significant number of men and women whose work did not require them to be literate,
but who reported to the censor that they had a degree of literacy. Cormac Ó Gráda’s study of school
attendance and literacy before the famine analyses the results of the 1841 Census alongside educational
records from the 1820s, and provides a useful commentary on the state of literacy among the poor and
working class in Ireland. Ó Gráda’s study highlights important variables such as teachers’ pay, housing
conditions, and the previously unconsidered influence of Sunday schools as a potential contributor to
‘reading-only’ literacy in women. He queries whether literacy could ‘offer any insurance against the Great
Famine’, noting that ‘there is evidence, for instance, that literacy was linked to height in the pre-famine era,
and height is a good proxy for nutritional status in infancy and youth.’ Cormac Ó Gráda, School Attendance and
Literacy before the Famine: A Simple Baronial Analysis, (Dublin: UCD Centre for Economic Research, 2010), p.
24.
13
14
86
politician, O’Connell in turn was dependent on those crowds and their continued support.
To invert the symbolism: while the shelter is created from O’Connell’s words, the image of
the porch is produced from his listeners’ ears. We read of ‘miles of ears of porches’ and ‘a
people sheltered within his voice’ (7.879–82). O’Connell provides shelter with his words,
and in return his audience provides those words with the shelter of their listening ears.
Within his response Stephen expresses a sense of disappointment. If O’Connell failed in
his promise to provide shelter with his words, then by extension the effectiveness of the
allegory of Moses also fails. Joyce, through Stephen, is commenting not simply on
O’Connell the man, but also on a mode of rhetoric that is reliant on myth, allegory and
metaphor, and which can only draw links with a singular, often sentimental representation
of history.
Within Stephen’s response, O’Connell stands alone, an isolated leader of a vast,
general and indefinable group of people. Amidst the chatter and celebration of speeches
and speechmaking, we notice that in his oblique way, Stephen is complaining about
O’Connell’s use of Irish oral tradition. Stephen seems aware of the criticisms that
surrounded O’Connell, including accounts of his ability to trample over the very oral
tradition that he harnessed to suit his political needs. Frederick Engels despaired of what
he saw as O’Connell’s failed revolution: ‘How much could have been done if a sensible
man possessed O’Connell’s popularity or if O’Connell had a little more understanding and
a little less egoism and vanity!’16 Furthermore, James Connolly comments on the emptiness
of rhetorical speech and performance: ‘They get no moonshine from me. I’d rather talk
honestly to four or five earnest men than win unthinking applause from a thousand who
would forget what I’d said five minutes after the meeting.’17 Connolly highlights a
fundamental cynicism which he associates with O’Connell’s political campaign. In a 1908
article entitled ‘The Language Movement’, Connolly goes further, highlighting what he
16 Frederick Engels, ‘Letters from London’, first published in Schweizerischer Republikaner 51, 27 June 1843,
reprinted in Marx, Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), p. 43.
17 James Connolly, quoted in Socialism and Nationalism: A Selection of Writings of James Connolly, ed. by Desmond
Ryan (Dublin: At the Sign of Three Candles, 1948).
87
describes as the destructive nature of O’Connell’s use of English in his performances. He
argues:
The great Daniel O’Connell, the so called liberator, conducted his meetings
entirely in English. When addressing a crowd in Connaught where in his time,
everybody spoke Gaelic and over 75% of the people nothing else but Gaelic,
O’Connell spoke exclusively in English.18
Connolly charged O’Connell and others with betraying the Irish language: ‘He [O’Connell]
thus conveyed to the simple people the impression that Gaelic was something to be
ashamed of—something fit only for ignorant people.’19 In Joyce, O’Connell’s performance
is the scene of empty rhetoric, and we can locate this sentiment in Stephen’s thoughts:
‘Gone with the wind […]. The tribune’s words, howled and scattered to the four winds
[…] Dead noise’ (7.880–2).20 In the same essay Connolly goes on to be even more
damning:
It is well to remember that nations which submit to conquest or races which
abandon their languages in favour of that of the oppressor do so, not because of
the altruistic motives, or because of the love of brotherhood of man, but from a
slavish and cringing spirit.21
The memory of O’Connell’s Repeal Movement and the fight for Catholic Emancipation
are tainted by Connolly’s dismissal of it as the epitome of the failure and abandonment of
the Irish language.
When the Young Irelanders broke from O’Connell and the Repeal Movement, they
took with them the newspaper the Nation. First published on 15 October 1842 by Charles
Gavin Duffy, Thomas Davis and John Dillon, originally as the organ of O’Connell’s Repeal
Movement, copies were distributed via repeal rooms around Ireland, creating small,
localized pockets of reading groups. There is anecdotal evidence—written up by
James Connolly, ‘The Language Movement’, The Harp, April 1908, reprinted in Connolly: Selected Writings, ed.
by P. Beresford Ellis (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973), pp. 288–289.
19 Connolly, ‘Language’, p. 289.
20 Interestingly, we are reminded not to take Joyce’s seeming criticism of O’Connell and the Irish language as
absolute when Joyce himself comments on the use of the Irish language in the nationalist movement in a
letter in which he discusses Sinn Féin. We must continue to view Joyce’s commentary and criticism as wide
and multifaceted, and at times contradictory. He states: ‘If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish
language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content to recognise myself an exile: and,
prophetically, a repudiated one.’ Letters of James Joyce, 2, ed. by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber,
1966) p. 187.
21 Connolly, ‘Language’, p. 288.
18
88
Christopher Morash—that the Nation was read aloud to those who could not read, an
image that has been immortalized by Henry MacManus in his painting ‘Reading the
Nation’.22 Its founder, Gavin Duffy, is quoted as saying that its ‘slow and silent operation
acts on the masses as the wind, which we do not see, moves dust, which we do not see’.23
Eagleton discusses the motives behind the Young Irelanders’ separation from O’Connell:
‘Repelled by O’Connell’s guileful softsoaping of the nation, the Young Irelanders neither
pandered to the masses nor superciliously despised them.’24
The description of the Nation as a newspaper that was read by those who could
read to those who could not reveals a community of readers who enabled the further
spread and dissemination of the newspaper’s content. It justifies Morash’s claim that it was
‘the most influential newspaper of its time’. 25 Furthermore, the use of repeal rooms as
reading rooms for the newspaper mirrors Enlightenment venues for the public sphere, as
described by Habermas and analysed in my introduction. The newspaper office in ‘Aeolus’
similarly constitutes a setting in which there is the potential for the public sphere to exist.
In this Habermasian depiction of the public sphere, links can be drawn between the history
of newspaper reading, the public sphere, and the episode ‘Aeolus’. In short, by
acknowledging the place of the Nation in the history of the public sphere, I am able to
locate the scene in the newspaper office in ‘Aeolus’ within a broader historical narrative of
newspapers and reading communities in Ireland. Moreover, the Nation can be seen as an
example of two modes of news dissemination and communication—reading and
listening—interacting and working together to create a dynamic public sphere. The
structure of the community in ‘Aeolus’ in many ways mimics the environment the Nation
facilitated, but as we shall see, Joyce infuses this depiction of a twentieth-century print-
Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 82.
Morash, p. 82. Duffy uses the metaphor of wind to describe a powerful and influential yet mysterious
force; Joyce’s etymological link between the word ‘Aeolus’ and the story of the bag of winds in Homer’s
Odyssey presents a rather more negative and directionless image of the wind’s subversive nature.
24 Terry Eagleton, Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 134.
25 Morash, p. 81.
22
23
89
mediated public sphere with the behaviour and attitudes of the men in the newspaper
office.
In ‘Aeolus’ much of the rhetoric harks back to a supposedly bygone era of
performance and wit. This constant level of performance adds layers of storytelling to an
already bloated mythologizing process of which Stephen is not willing to be a part. These
records are stored in the print archive of the newspaper and its office, and also within the
text, concealed by the use of allegory. Allegory is the rhetorician’s link to the past: as Walter
Benjamin saw it, ‘allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of
things.’26 The problematic relationship between content and mode of expression that
Benjamin highlights can also be traced to Stephen’s own dissatisfaction with the poetic
discourse of religious and historical memorialization. O’Connell’s meetings have become
mythical in their remembrance, and the image that Stephen holds onto is of a nation of
people sheltered beneath O’Connell’s dubious leadership, leaving the celebration of his
speeches clouded in doubt. For Stephen, the potency of Taylor’s speech has been diluted;
the memory not only of the speech but also of the figure of O’Connell sits uneasily with
him. We see in ‘Aeolus’ how as a speech is performed and re-performed, written and
rewritten, accumulating to itself the history that accompanies the passage of time, it loses
its initial meaning and potency, and the mythical figure of the speaker loses its substance.
The noises of the printing machines, which interrupt the men’s words and
speeches, add to the confusion of sounds heard throughout the episode. The machines are
portrayed as being in dialogue with the men, and at times they match the characters’
competitive attitude to conversation. We read:
Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with
sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call
attention. Doing its level best to speak […] Everything speaks in its own way.
(7.174–6)
26 Walter Benjamin, ‘Allegory and Trauerspiel’, The Origin of German Tragedy, trans. by John Osborne (London:
NLB, 1977), p. 178.
90
Bloom’s egalitarian habit of allowing the inanimate, the non-human and the mute to speak
is applied here: ‘everything speaks in its own way’ can also be read as Bloom’s
acknowledgement that everything should be allowed to have its say. Similarly, in ‘Aeolus’,
everyone and everything will indeed try to speak, whether welcome or not. It is with this in
mind that I wish to think about representation on a social level, and to begin to question
how this is presented in the community of the press office and reflected in the public
sphere.
Newspapers and social responsibility
History, that ‘nightmare from which you will never awake’, manifests itself in Ulysses
through the language of trauma and loss (7.678). In ‘Aeolus’, the reader experiences both
analepsis and prolepsis: the narrative is affected by the burden of history, as well as by the
anticipation of the 1913 Tram Lockout and the 1916 Easter Rising. Both of these highlight
issues of national and social unrest. History carries the trauma felt in the loss and rejection
of the Irish language, and this lingers as a memory or an echo within the dialogue of the
newspaper office. We first read of how Stephen feels the loss of his own language as a
betrayal by his forbears when he tells his friend Davin in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man:
My ancestors threw off their language and took another […] They allowed a
handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own
life and person debts they made? (p. 220)
Stephen’s confrontation with his university’s dean of studies demonstrates the various
frustrations of communication that are being articulated here by Joyce. This scene between
Stephen and his teacher becomes, for Stephen, an existential confrontation, as he reflects
on his own reaction to the man who he realizes is ‘a countryman of Ben Johnson’ (p. 205).
We read:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are
the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write
these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will
91
always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My
voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (p. 205)
The everyday words such as ‘home’ and ‘ale’ are interspersed with ‘Christ’ and ‘master’.
Stephen is unable to think about language without acknowledging his subservient position
to the church and the British state. This seemingly familiar string of nouns demonstrates
the church and state’s shared reliance on language as a means of control. Played out in the
dialogue above is a troubling discourse surrounding the ownership of language.
Language loss is present as an echo in the dialogue in ‘Aeolus’. However, there is
also a sense of complicity in Joyce’s portrayal of the pressmen: language betrayal is also
present. Myles Crawford’s praise for Ignatius Gallaher’s communications coup in getting
the story of the Phoenix Park murders across the Atlantic celebrates not only the reduction
of language to advertising symbols, but also Gallaher’s ability to reduce history to a concise,
communicable and translatable—transparent—experience. We read:
CLEVER, VERY
—Clever, Lenehan said. Very.
—Gave it to them on a hot plate, Myles Crawford said, the whole bloody history.
Nightmare from which you will never awake.
[…]
—History! Myles Crawford cried. The Old Woman of Prince’s street was there
first. […] That’s press. That’s talent. Pyatt! He was all their daddies! (7.674–689)
Lenehan’s syntactical inversion of the order of ‘clever’ and ‘very’ mimics the reduction of
language, just as Crawford depicts history as something that can be condensed to a
communicable size. The voice of Stephen’s anxiety is heard clearly: an echo of an earlier
chapter, but also the echo of trauma, and of a site of memory that refuses to be reduced to
signage and signature.
Michel Foucault writes that ‘the document is not the fortunate tool of a history that
is primarily and fundamentally memory; history is one way in which a society recognizes and
develops a mass documentation with which it is inextricably linked.’27 History is pinned
down by memory; however, the need to document, record and communicate is a way for
27
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, (London: Routledge Classics, 2002 [1972]), p. 7.
92
society to cope with and accept its history. Through this process of documentation, history
takes on the form of something different; it is no longer purely the memory of a past event,
but is a document that encompasses much of the historical trauma in a mediated form.
Foucault describes how ‘the document, then, is no longer for history an inert material
through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only
the trace remains.’28 This is demonstrated in the celebration of inflated and reduced—but
never whole—forms of communication in ‘Aeolus’. Different characters attempt to
articulate varying methods of memorialization, while the truest form of memory is
represented in the trace or echo of Stephen’s conscience.
Robert Welch argues that ‘words signify, they denote; we traffic with time in the
arts of language, and with history we come back to fracture and cleavage.’29 First in A
Portrait and then in Ulysses, the trauma of history and the strained medium of language
become intertwined. Declan Kiberd tells us that ‘Joyce captured, better than most, the
sense in which every child feels colonized and used by language, by words which mean one
thing and then another.’30 In Ulysses this is a struggle with the knowledge that the very
language in which you are speaking or writing is a subjected, empty, colonized sound,
without authenticity. Although Kiberd is writing exclusively on the forced acquisition of
English by the Irish, his phrase ‘used by language, by words which mean one thing and
then another’ allows us to take this further, to argue that the people of Ireland were being
manipulated by the duplicity of language. This encompasses not just the loss of the Irish
language, but importantly also its lack of representation in print culture, and hence of its
role within the public sphere in Ireland.
This lack of representation applies on two levels: language betrayal and class.
Together they lead to the systematic distortion of how the subordinate classes view
themselves and the society in which they live. This manipulation of consciousness is carried
Foucault, p. 7.
Robert Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 3.
30 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 267.
28
29
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out by the governing institutions of the state, through which a normalized framework of
society is enforced. Habermas writes: ‘Marx denounced the public opinion as false
consciousness: it hid before itself its own true character as a mask of bourgeois class
interests.’31 The reading experience of the citizens of Dublin is framed on the one hand by
institutions and industry, and on the other by the active and ongoing betrayal of their
language. As Susan Stewart acknowledges in her study On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature,
the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Marx reminds us that the very notion of ‘lived
experience’ is a product of social history.32 Added to this (although Marx never used the
term ‘false consciousness’) is the notion that lived experience is governed by institutional
and state apparatuses. If we agree with Louis Althusser that ideology cannot solely be
governed by consciousness, but is also dependent upon a set of institutions that reproduce
social states of understanding, then we must understand that the Irish press as an
institution was complicit in creating a twofold false consciousness.33 Men such as William
Martin Murphy, owner of the Irish Independent, represented the newspapers’ allegiance to
industry and the ruling capitalist elite. In an article entitled ‘Press Poisoners in Ireland’,
Connolly responds to what he condemns as the ‘effectual hoodwinking of the working
class’ by the Irish News.34 He attacks the newspaper for the ‘clever manipulation of the news
items, by an unscrupulous use of their power to suppress truth and suggest falsehood when
apparently only retailing the daily happenings’.35 Connolly attacks the treachery of the press
and highlights the betrayal of Irish labourers by Home Rule newspapers such as the Irish
News.
How then can we situate this social unease in Joyce’s representation of the Dublin
public sphere of 1904? Cheryl Herr argues that ‘the reader can discern in Joyce’s essentially
31 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,
trans. by Thomas Burger (Massachusetts: MIT, Polity Press, 1989), p. 125.
32 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000 [1984]), p. xiii.
33 Here I am paraphrasing Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an
Investigation)’, in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971).
34 James Connolly, ‘Press Poisoners in Ireland’, first published in Forward, 30 August 1913, reprinted in Ireland
Upon the Dissecting Table (Cork: Cork Workers’ Club, 1975), p. 49.
35 Connolly, ‘Press Poisoners’, p. 49.
94
middle-class worlds an exploration of the ideological structure of bourgeois Dublin
positioned within a hierarchical class system.’36 In ‘Aeolus’ this system is acknowledged not
only through the fringe existence of the labouring classes, but also through the image of
poverty and degradation that lurks in the margins of Joyce’s Dublin. Class and poverty in
Ulysses are not interchangeable: a character’s financial situation does not necessarily
determine their class position. A character such as Simon Dedalus, although povertystricken, cannot be labelled working class, because he has a means of representation: his
voice is still heard in the same public sphere in which papers such as the Freeman’s and the
Evening Telegraph operate. Herr and others have argued effectively to this end, warning the
reader not to oversimplify their understanding of Ulysses in class terms, since ‘the terms
“working class,” “bourgeoisie,” and “upper class” fail accurately to describe the varieties
and intersections of domination that occurred in Victorian and modern Irish society.’37
This does not mean that the critic who states that there is no working class in the novel is
right to say so, or that the novel does not engage in social and class distinction. By
analysing the conflicting depictions of class boundaries in Ulysses, together with the ways in
which the newspaper interacts with issues of class and social disenfranchisement, my thesis
also engages in a broader analysis of the themes of communication and representation
within the print-mediated public sphere.
Connolly writes that ‘political and social freedom are not two unrelated ideas, but
are two sides of the one great principle, each being incomplete without the other.’38 He
believed that newspapers such as the Freeman’s Journal refused to provide the poor and the
disconnected with the representation that they required and deserved within the framework
of the public sphere. He writes: ‘Does not the howl set up by all those middle-class
journalists when any of their number is exposed, and their little treacheries held up to the
Cheryl Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 19.
Herr, p. 20.
38 James Connolly, ‘Declaration of Principles of the Irish Socialist Federation’, New York, January 1908,
reprinted in Socialism and the Irish Rebellion (Florida: Red and Black Publishers, 2008), p. 65.
36
37
95
light of day, betray an uneasy conscience?’39 His mistrust of what he sees as disingenuous
commentary by papers such as the Freeman’s highlights a spilt in ideology between the
representatives of the press, such as the characters in ‘Aeolus’, and a growing nationalist
labour movement. He writes: ‘I am just inclined to think that the onward rolling ocean of
Labour will pay as little heed to the bland advice which the Dublin dailies are so freely
distributing on the question of labour representation,’ adding, ‘and be assured that the
democracy of Ireland are not in the least afraid of “revolutionary ideas” even if the old
woman of Princess Street [Freeman’s] is.’40
In contradiction to Connolly’s argument, Myles Crawford cries: ‘History! […] The
Old Woman of Prince’s street was there first’ (7.684). History and its misrepresentation are
on display throughout Ulysses. However, what also becomes evident is the implementation
of false consciousness, understood as the manipulation by institutions such as the national
press of the subordinate classes’ self-perception. In the next section I will look at how
social tension manifests itself in the image of the barefooted newsboys who appear
throughout the episode. I will argue that the events of the Tram Lockout and other, more
minor and transient moments of civil unrest provide a useful context for my study of the
representation of the public sphere in ‘Aeolus’.
‘Aeolus’ and the Tram Lockout
The episode’s opening sequence reads:
THE WEARER OF THE CROWN
Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and polished. Parked
in North Prince’s street His Majesty’s vermillion mailcars, bearing on their sides
the royal initials, E. R., received loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards
[…].
GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS
39 James Connolly, ‘Home Thrusts’, 3 September 1898, reprinted in The Lost Writings of James Connolly, intro.
and ed. by Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh (London: Pluto Press, 1997), p. 22.
40 Connolly, ‘Home Thrusts’, pp. 24–25.
96
Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores
and bumped them up on the brewery float. (7.14–22)
This opening scene depicts a busy Dublin intersection, watched over by both the British
state and the pressmen. Joyce’s cinematic switching of location—from the porch of the
GPO, to Prince’s stores, to the cutting office of the Freeman’s Journal—emphasizes the
newspapermen’s distance from the activities underway at street level. He elevates the
gentlemen of the press through the use of subheadings or announcements, printed in block
capital letters and centralized on the page: ‘THE WEARER OF THE CROWN’ and
‘GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS’ are titles that distinguish the newspaper office and the
imperial state alike from the work being done on the Dublin streets.
In ‘Aeolus’, Joyce sets up a disparity between the bluster and chatter of the
characters in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal and the Evening Telegraph and the events and
activity outside those offices. I wish to explore the relationship—or lack of one—between
the newspapermen of the Evening Telegraph and the disconnected and disenfranchised urban
poor on the streets of Dublin, through the lens of the 1913 Tram Lockout and the reaction
to it by Dublin’s Home Rule newspapers. In this I will acknowledge the significance in the
episode of the marginal existence of the newsboys, who belong to what is described in
‘Eumaeus’ as the ‘submerged tenth’ (16.1226), and who are thrown out of the office of the
Telegraph.41 The inclusion of navvies, draymen, newsboys and tramwaymen, who represent
the working class of Dublin, in an episode structured around the theme of communication
highlights the important relationship between the Dublin communications network and the
labouring classes.42 Joyce—who began gathering notes for ‘Aeolus’ in June 1917—places
his episode under the shadow of two recent events: the Tram Lockout of 1913 and the
Easter Rising of 1916. In doing so he demonstrates the strained relationship between the
41 The phrase ‘submerged tenth’, used in ‘Eumaeus’, can be found in the vocabulary of the national press of
the day; for example, the headline ‘THE SUBMERGED OF DUBLIN’ appeared in the Irish Independent,
Saturday 19 August 1911, p. 6.
42 Len Platt writes: ‘The association between the press and barrels of Guinness in “Aeolus” (7.21, 45) is
suggestive of the Guinness family’s interest in newspaper ownership,’ acknowledging the role of the
Guinness family together with Alfred Harmsworth in the creation of a ‘new’ press empire. Len Platt, ‘Pisgah
Sights: The National Press and the Catholic Middle Class in “Aeolus”’, James Joyce Quarterly 35/36 (1998),
735–746 (p. 740).
97
Irish press and the labouring classes, as well as revealing the existence of a network of
communication outside of the traditional public sphere.
Images of resistance, of labour demonstrations and rebellion, are present in the
episode. However, they are depicted in fragmented and imperfect form. In part, resistance
and rebellion exist in the sentimental rhetoric of some of the men in the office, but the
image of insurgency also appears in ‘Aeolus’ through the presence of the newsboys. The
boys, who are depicted as unruly and presented en masse, sing the tune of ‘We are the Boys
of Wexford’, a militant nationalist song dating from the 1798 rebellion, when local
Wexford boys fought and beat the notorious North Cork Militia. Bizarrely, Myles
Crawford also references the North Cork Militia earlier in the episode:
MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED
—North Cork militia! the editor cried, striding to the mantelpiece. We won every
time! North Cork and Spanish officers!
—Where was that, Myles? Ned Lambert asked with a reflective glance at his
toecaps.
—In Ohio! the editor shouted. […]
—Ohio! the editor crowed in high treble from his uplifted scarlet face. My Ohio!
—A perfect cretic! the professor said. Long, short and long. (7.358)
Crawford seems to be referring to General Edward Braddock’s abortive invasion of the
Ohio Valley in 1755. Braddock had recruited from two British regiments stationed in Cork;
however, these men were not specifically part of the North Cork Militia, and as Gifford
notes, ‘to say the least, those regiments did not “win every time.”’43 Crawford seems here to
be celebrating the ‘triumphs’ of a militia that fought on the side of the British during the
1798 rebellion; it demonstrates how far removed he is from the newsboys and the nuances
of nationalist memory.
Crawford and his colleagues bar the door to and ignore the activity and labour on
display at street level. This is aptly demonstrated when he dismisses a barefooted newsboy,
shouting, ‘Throw him out and shut the door […] There’s a hurricane blowing’ (7.399–400).
Indeed, Crawford’s hurricane can be seen as a metaphor of the future chaos of 1913 and
43
Gifford, p. 135.
98
1916, events from which the Freeman’s Journal and the Evening Telegraph were isolated.
During the 1913 Lockout, the Freeman’s charged James Larkin, the leader of the Irish
Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), with aiding Ireland’s enemies by
disrupting the united front needed for Home Rule.44 During Easter Week 1916, the offices
of the Freeman’s and Evening Telegraph burnt down. The recurring image of the newsboys
reminds us that the narrative of ‘Aeolus’ functions within an interplay of political and social
retrospection. Len Platt writes:
personal failures are harmonized in ‘Aeolus’ within a wider context of cultural and
political failure and displacement that is imaged in a range of narrative detail like
the portrayal of the newspaper boys squatting ‘on the doorsteps’ of the Telegraph
office, playing ‘We Are the Boys of Wexford’, once a rallying call of nationalism,
on a mouth organ (7.426–28).45
This image of the newsboys and the rousing nationalist song being piped out on a mouth
organ add to the sense of bathos that surrounds the Telegraph office.
‘Aeolus’ embodies a struggle to create and utilize a sense of community. The crowd
of performers in the office celebrate the achievements of great oration, but fail to
recognize the importance of solidarity. In relation to this, Patrick Collier analyses
newspapers’ responsibility for creating a sense of community by inviting their readers to
‘see themselves as part of something larger than themselves’; then, argues Collier, ‘they also
do the exclusionary work of identifying individuals and groups that lie outside the
community’s boundaries, delineating the signs of their Otherness.’46 This duplicitous
attitude on the part of the press is personified in the community of the newspaper office in
‘Aeolus’. They engage with one another in a spirit of banter and camaraderie, but the jovial
tone masks an exclusive and defensive attitude towards their own community, and
highlights the characters’ need to protect the sovereignty of their group. As Platt describes
it, ‘there is a clannishness about the men in the Telegraph office that is not just a matter of
44 Joseph O’Brien, ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’ A City in Distress, 1899–1916 (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1982), p. 233.
45 Len Platt, ‘Pisgah Sights’, p. 737.
46 Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), p. 124
99
acquaintance or friendship.’47 Banter, chatter and rhetoric are shown on many levels to be
empty and negative. The whole purpose of the banter is to exclude while appearing to
include: ‘The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to the dusty
windowpane’ (7.237–238) as Bloom enters the room. The inside joke or smart comment
made at another’s expense is a form of discourse cloaked in ugliness: verbal tactics are
disguised as friendliness but used to exclude. This form of banter is fundamentally
competitive. Characters compete through their abilities to perform as rhetoricians; the ‘gift
of the gab’ is also a defensive tool to keep others at arm’s length. Importantly, wit and
banter are something that Bloom is unable to join in with, and this identifies him as an
outsider.
As Bloom walks past the office of the Evening Telegraph he hears a ‘screech of
laughter’ from inside (7.232). The laughter is beguiling, and he decides to ‘pop in a minute’
(7.233). He enters midway through the conversation, and is treated as an outsider; people
and objects bump into him, and he is dismissed twice by Crawford. The first dismissal is
made in a friendly manner: ‘He [Bloom] looked indecisively for a moment at their faces.
The editor who, leaning against the mantelshelf, had propped his head on his hand,
suddenly stretched forth an arm amply / —Begone! he said. The world is before you’
(7.432–5). The second time, Crawford refuses to help Bloom in his quest to secure the
space for his advertisement: ‘He [Alexander Keyes] can kiss my royal Irish arse, Myles
Crawford cried loudly over his shoulder. Any time he likes, tell him’ (7.991–2). Once on
the street, Bloom is still a lone and isolated figure, trailed by a crowd of mischievous
newsboys. From the security of the office the newspapermen watch:
Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr Bloom’s
wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking kite, a tail of white
bowknots.
—Look at the young guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said […]. O,
my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the walk. Small nines. Steal upon
larks. (7.444–6)
47
Platt, ‘Pisgah Sights’, p. 735.
100
So often in Ulysses, Joyce separates the viewer from the street as he leads the reader from
the micro to the macro, from the internal to the panoramic. We witness Bloom’s loneliness
and the attitudes directed towards him, and there is a sense of injustice at his portrayal by
others as a laughable and clownish figure. To an extent he serves, through his isolation, to
highlight the closeness of community inside the Telegraph office.
Bloom’s internal monologue connects the reader to the activity at street level; he
acts as our translator of the streets of Dublin. It is the presence of the street and the voices
of the marginal figures who operate ‘at street level’ in ‘Aeolus’ that remind us of the history
of civil unrest which overshadows the episode—the ‘shout in the street’ that is not heard
by the men in the press office (2.386). At an earlier moment, in ‘Nestor’, between Stephen
and Mr Deasy, we read:
The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history
moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
[…]
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. (2.380–6)
Initially this seems to be an attempt by Stephen to confuse and frustrate Deasy with his
non-committal answer and oblique statement. He inverts Deasy’s belief that human history
is one teleological movement towards the manifestation of God; rather, shrugs Stephen, we
must find life’s rationale in the reality of today. For Stephen, that reality is the warlike cries
of the school playing field, or the shout in the street. It is a distress call, a shout to
communicate, the echo of an event, or the memory of trauma locked up within the history
of a place. That particular shout of trauma in the street remains with us throughout Ulysses,
and exists in many different forms of echo and memory.
We return to ‘Aeolus’ as the noises of the street float up to the windows of the
Telegraph office, which remains separate and isolated. Colin MacCabe describes Joyce as
setting up ‘an anachronistic political allusion in the prominent place assigned to the
101
newspaper boys and the trams of Dublin’.48 Newsboys and trams are set against the cutting
and editorial rooms of the newspaper, the site of which would soon be at the centre of
both the Lockout and the Easter Rising. MacCabe also highlights further opposition
between Irish politics and social class, which he sees as present within the discourse of
‘Aeolus’. He argues: ‘The resonances and allusions of this chapter indicate that the paralysis
of Irish politics is a result of the illusions about class antagonisms that were fostered by the
nationalist ideology.’49 I will now explore this further as I look closely at the events and
implications of 1913.
The Tram Lockout brought Dublin to a standstill for four months. Disputes
between industry bosses and employees led to strikes and the lockout of workers as
employers attempted to break Larkin’s ITGWU. The living and working conditions of the
Dublin poor were the worst in Europe, with exploitation and low wages, deplorable
housing conditions, overcrowding, and a lack of sanitation which led to the spread of
disease through the tenements.50 Connolly wrote in the Irish Review:
Dublin, a city famous for its charitable institutions and its charitable citizens,
should also be infamous for the perfectly hellish conditions under which its
people are housed, and under which its men, women and children labour for a
living.51
The exploitation of the poor by landlords and employers, many of whom were prominent
councillors and Home Rule politicians, demonstrated the disparity between political
rhetoric and actual practice. R. F. Foster discusses this division between the upper and
lower classes, quoting Connolly, who wrote in 1914:
Scully [the high Sheriff of Dublin] is running in the interests of the United Irish
League […] and high rates, slum tenements, rotten staircases, stinking yards, high
death rates, low wages, Corporation jobbery, and margarine wrapped in butterpaper.52
Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), p. 140.
MacCabe, p. 140.
50 See Kevin C. Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1994).
51 James Connolly, ‘Labour in Dublin’, The Irish Review (Dublin) 3, October 1913, pp. 385–391, p. 386
52 R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 437.
48
49
102
Foster adds that ‘this was not fanciful rhetoric: a housing inquiry of 1913 showed that
sixteen Corporation members owned eighty-nine tenements and second-class houses.’53
The mistreatment of the Dublin poor by the very men and women who were campaigning
for Ireland’s freedom did not go unnoticed by activists such as Larkin and Connolly. In
Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History, Kevin C. Kearns writes that ‘the Dublin Corporation
failed, generation after generation, to force negligent landlords to improve their
properties.’54 He continues:
Since only the Corporation could enforce laws pertaining to tenement properties
tenants were utterly powerless to improve their living environment. The Dublin
Corporation itself was clearly identified as one of the most egregious landlords in
the city.55
William Martin Murphy was a prominent campaigner for Irish nationalism, and an
MP for Dublin from 1885 to 1892. Murphy made his fortune by creating an empire around
newspapers and the transport system.56 Indeed, the communication network on display in
‘Aeolus’ was operated by the workers of the Dublin United Tramway Company, which was
owned by Murphy. Murphy embodied the iniquitous disparity between Home Rule political
rhetoric and the exploitation of the poor and vulnerable of Ireland. Connolly lambasts the
nationalists who exploited the Dublin workers:
it is also well to be clear upon the fact that a readiness to fight or even to die for
national freedom might co-exist in the same person with a vehement support of
industrial despotism or landlord tyranny […] public opinion in Dublin gradually
came to believe that poverty and its attendant miseries in a city were things
outside of public interest, and not in the remotest degree connected with public
duties, or civic patriotism.57
The situation came to a head on 26 August 1913 when tram workers deserted their vehicles
in protest at their employer Murphy’s decision to forbid his workers to join the ITGWU.
Encouraged by Murphy, many of the city’s largest employers locked out all workers who
R. F. Foster, p. 437.
Kearns, p. 10.
55 Kearns, pp. 10–11.
56 Hugh Oram writes that Murphy’s ‘two legacies to Ireland were the Irish Independent and an efficient
public transport system in Dublin’. The Newspaper Book: a History of Newspapers in Ireland, 1649–1983 (Dublin:
MO Books, 1983), p. 102.
57 Connolly, ‘Labour in Dublin’, p. 387.
53
54
103
refused to abandon the ITGWU. Employers’ resistance to workers’ rights was most potent
in the character of Murphy, who threatened starvation unless his employees signed an
agreement not to join the union. A month earlier he had given a speech to his employees
which threatened them with hunger if they attempted a strike:
what chance would the men without funds have in a contest with the Company
who could and would spend £100,000 or more. You must recollect when dealing
with a company of this kind that every one of the shareholders, to the number of
five, six, or seven thousands, will have three meals a day whether the men succeed
or not. I don’t know if the men who go out can count on this.58
Murphy became the belligerent enemy of the working class of Dublin, and because of his
refusal to sit down with Larkin he was widely blamed for the starvation of many of the
families of the locked-out workers.
Figure 1: ‘Vulture of Dartry Hall’59
Much of the war of words was played out in the press. The two main rival newspapers
were Murphy’s Irish Independent and Larkin’s Irish Worker. In response to the first day of the
strike, the Independent printed a multiple-page spread attacking Larkin, with rows of
headlines such as ‘LARKIN’S FAILURE’, ‘THE STRIKE THAT FAILED’, ‘BULK OF
Quoted by Padraig Yeates, Lockout: Dublin 1913 (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 2001), p. 7.
‘Vulture of Dartry Hall’, published in the Irish Worker, 6 September 1913, p. 1. The cartoon depicts Murphy
in the aftermath of ‘Bloody Sunday’, 31 August 1913. The caption at the bottom of the image (not shown
here) read: ‘‘“The Demon of Death spread his wings on the blast, / And spat on the face of the poor as he
passed. —From Lord Byron (slightly altered).’”
58
59
104
MEN LOYAL’ and ‘COMPANY’S ADMIRABLE ORGANISATION’.60 As
demonstrated in the above cartoon, which appeared in the Irish Worker in September 1913,
propaganda was not limited to the pages of the Independent.
Larkin is reported to have accused John Redmond, the leader of the Irish
Parliamentary Party (IPP), of allowing Dublin to rot during the Lockout.61 Indeed, the
silence of many Dublin MPs further highlighted the isolation of the working classes. In
‘Aeolus’, the figure of Nannetti, based on the Irish-Italian printer and politician of the same
name, represents one such person. Nannetti was a Dublin MP as well as a member of the
Dublin Corporation from 1900 to 1906, and was Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1906 to
1907.62 His allegiance to the Corporation and his position as a Home Rule politician and
member of the IPP placed him at the centre of the controversy. However, Nannetti was
also a trade union leader, and MacCabe argues that he is ‘one of the few unionised working
class figures in Ulysses’.63 I do not wholly agree that Nannetti can be classed as a unionized
working-class figure. His allegiance was to an older model of the unions, one that looked to
protect skilled workers and their shared interests with their employers. However, through
his work as both a Corporation member and a printer for the Freeman’s Journal, Joyce’s
fictional Nannetti provides a significant link to the politics of the unions.
The kind of union with which Nannetti associated himself was one that Murphy
had worked hard to protect, as Patrick Maume explains: ‘Murphy’s labour relations strategy
focussed on maintaining good relations with craft unions representing skilled workers…
(unskilled workers were more biddable and expendable).’64 One such craft union was the
Dublin Typographical Provident Society (DTPS), which had a strong membership among
skilled employees at the Independent. The DTPS allied itself with Murphy’s cause to stamp
Irish Independent, 27 August 1913, pp. 6–7.
O’Brien, p. 232.
62 Gifford, p. 130.
63 MacCabe, p. 140.
64 Patrick Maume, ‘William Martin Murphy, the Irish Independent and Middle-Class Politics, 1905–19’, in Politics,
Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland, ed. by Fintan Lane (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp.
230–248, p. 235.
60
61
105
out the syndicalism of Larkin’s ITGWU. According to Larkin, twenty-eight of the fifty-six
Independent DTPS members wanted to strike in 1913, but they were dissuaded.65 Maume
writes that Murphy subsequently contrasted Larkinism with the DTPS, calling the latter
‘the gentlemen of the press’, a phrase that we can recognize as the first description of the
newspapermen used by Joyce in the opening to ‘Aeolus’.66
Furthermore, in light of our use of ‘Aeolus’ to highlight the disjunction between
the Irish press and the representation of isolated sections of society, we can note the
significance of Bloom’s observation that Myles Crawford had also worked as editor of the
Independent before joining the Freeman’s. Bloom echoes a sense of cynicism regarding the
newspapermen and their political allegiances as he ponders:
Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new
opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same breath. Wouldn’t know which
to believe. One story good till you hear the next. (7.308–11)
Under Murphy’s ownership the Irish Independent arose from the ashes of the Parnell split to
become ‘the first halfpenny popular paper in Ireland’.67 In contrast to the Freeman’s Journal,
the Independent was cheap and lightweight, with condensed news and a large entertainment
section. Although Joyce complained to Stanislaus that ‘the “Irish Independent” is really
awful,’ by January 1908 it was selling 40,000 copies daily.68 In February 1912 Murphy was
made president of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, increasing his hold over Dublin
trade and industry and giving him a powerful position of influence to demand tougher
measures against the unions.
A year earlier the ragged army of newsboys, Larkin’s younger disciples, had gone on
strike and taken to the streets, provoking further violence and rioting that spilled over from
the initial dispute. This display of unrest by the newsboys is intriguing. The sudden
outbreak seems to have died down as quickly as it had flared up, and reports of the events
in the Dublin press reveal confusion about what had sparked the protest. Furthermore, the
Maume, p. 235.
Maume, p. 236.
67 Oram, p. 100.
68 Letters of James Joyce, 2, ed. by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 77; Oram, pp. 105–106.
65
66
106
depiction of the newsboys and their dispute demonstrates a complete lack of willingness on
the part of the press to acknowledge the boys as individuals deserving of a representative
voice. This highlights familiar Victorian sentiments about the crowd as an apt mode of
representation for the poor and dispossessed. The newsboys did not belong to a union, and
according to the newspaper reports they had refused representation from the Independent.
The Freeman’s reports of the court proceedings tell a confused story:
Mr Brewster, manager of the ‘Irish Independent’ Company, was in court and
could not explain the cause of this attack on their vans. He had made exhaustive
inquiries, but there was no complaint of any kind forthcoming from the newsboys
and no request or representation of any kind made to the management. Without
the slightest warning the vans of the company were attacked by newsboys on
Friday evening and papers scattered about the street. If the newsboys had a
grievance of any kind the least they might have done was to have made a
representation to the management before proceeding with conduct such as that
described by the constable.69
The reports go on to describe how a van driver employed by the Independent had been
attacked ‘by a hostile crowd of newsboys, who threw stones and sticks at him’.70 The
response of the judge presiding over the case was reported as follows: ‘Mr. Drury said that
he did not care whether the newsboys had a complaint to make or not, he would not allow
such conduct as this on the streets, at such a time especially.’71
The presence of the newsboys in ‘Aeolus’ serves to remind us of the Freeman’s
coverage of the plight of the children of Dublin’s destitute labourers, especially those of
the locked-out workers of 1913. Margot Backus’s essay ‘“The Children of the Nation?”:
Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913’
establishes that the representation of the children of striking workers was disingenuous.
Backus argues that the Freeman’s
consistently represented the interests of the most economically and politically
powerful caste to claim nationalist credentials, while at the same time presenting
those interests as those of the nationalist movement as a whole.72
‘Newsboy Strike / Court Report’, Freeman’s Journal, 21 August 1911, p. 2.
‘Newsboy Strike / Court Report’, Freeman’s Journal, 21 August 1911, p. 2.
71 ‘Newsboy Strike / Court Report’, Freeman’s Journal, 21 August 1911, p. 2.
72 Margot Gayle Backus, ‘“The Children of the Nation?”: Representations of Poor Children in Mainstream
Nationalist Journalism, 1882 and 1913’, Éire-Ireland 44, 118–146 (p. 120).
69
70
107
As the stand-off between the workers and the companies intensified, the image of the
street child became a potent propaganda tool for both sides. The picture of the
malnourished, mistreated, barefooted street urchin posed a problem for a paper such as the
Freeman’s Journal, which strove to maintain a consistent view of ‘Mother Ireland’ as a
supportive society. As Backus argues, the Freeman’s ‘increasing focus on secure, welleducated, and well-cared-for children […] afforded the reader a sense of comfort
concerning “Mother Ireland’s” nurturance of her children’; however, this was in stark
contrast to ‘the surfacing of narratives of maltreatment […] of vulnerable children, as
during the 1913 Lockout’. These narratives ‘threatened Ireland’s self-image’ and were
something the newspaper chose to ignore.73 The Freeman’s stance against Larkin and the
unions led it to print many articles (often by Catholic priests) denouncing socialism and the
labour movement. However, as more images of starving children and the families of the
locked-out workers began to emerge, the paper needed to respond. Further to this, Tom
Kettle, a moderate nationalist, academic and friend of Joyce, wrote an article published in
the Freeman’s that highlighted the disparity between the nationalist ideals touted by the
Freeman’s and the reality of many of Ireland’s inhabitants. Kettle linked public disturbances
with the fact that ‘many of our fellow-citizens are endeavoring to enact the Ten
Commandments on fifteen shillings a week.’74 As quoted by Backus, while denouncing the
‘excesses of Larkinism’, Kettle asked: ‘What social policy did we, the comfortable, offer
[Dublin workers]? What hope for their children?’75
The role of the children of the Lockout and their treatment by the nationalist press,
specifically the Freeman’s Journal, makes us rethink the depiction of the newsboys in
‘Aeolus’. On 19 September, around sixty schoolboys went on sympathetic strike in protest
against the bookseller Easons, which was locking out workers. This marked a turning point
in the growing politicization of school-age boys during the period. In what seems to have
Backus, p. 128.
Quoted by Backus, p. 131.
75 Backus, p. 131.
73
74
108
been an attempt ‘to defuse the embarrassment that the slow, deliberate starvation of literal
children by purportedly nationalist employers seems to have been causing all parties’, the
Freeman’s published a satirical sketch that depicted the schoolboys’ strike.76 The comic
belittling of the actions of the schoolboys, and the cruel depiction of a ‘pale-faced’ boy with
‘irregular teeth [that] were busy on some oat kernels to conceal the nervousness
with which he regarded his excursion into leadership’ […] served to subtly cast
the striking schoolboys as caricatures of the adult strikers, thereby satirizing and
discrediting the aims of the larger strike.77
With this in mind, I argue that Joyce’s use of the barefooted newsboys constitutes a
very specific criticism of the Freeman’s Journal as a newspaper which, in an attempt to
protect the conservative Catholic middle class, manipulated the representation of the
children of the urban poor, specifically in relation to workers and their families during the
1913 Lockout. In doing so, the Freeman’s isolated itself from the growing socialist
nationalist movement, which sought to acknowledge within the wider public sphere the
role of the working class in the lead-up to the War of Independence. Scenes such as the
moment when Professor MacHugh throws the ragged newsboy back out onto the street
demonstrate the boys’ potentially anarchic energy as they pound the halls of the offices,
kicking up loose sheets of news, tissues and bits of paper detritus, only to be quickly turfed
out by the men inside. We read:
Screams of newsboys barefoot in the hall rushed near and the door was flung
open. […]
Professor MacHugh strode across the room and seized the cringing urchin by the
collar […]. The tissues rustled up in the draft, floated softly in the air blue scrawls
and under the table came to earth. (7.391–397)
The newsboys outside the office ‘squatted on the doorsteps’ (7.426) or trailed Bloom down
the street in a ‘troop of bare feet’ (7.877), forming shapes as a mass of one. Significantly,
the boys’ role in the novel is primarily to maintain the communications network that
operates within a Dublin public sphere to which they do not belong.
76
77
Backus, p. 136.
Backus, p. 136.
109
The events of August 1913 were the beginnings of the final battle in the war
between Larkin and Murphy, a battle that led Larkin to declare in Manchester on Sunday
14 September 1913 that it was ‘better to be in hell, with Dante and Davitt than to be in
heaven with Carson or Murphy’.78 The significance of the press in this dispute is central to
my reading of ‘Aeolus’. Changing attitudes towards the press, the newspapers’ effectiveness
in relation to ideas of community and class representation, and their role in the shifting
climate of Irish politics and the public sphere can be seen in the narrative of ‘Aeolus’ as it
unfolds beneath the memory of 1913 and 1916.79 The office of the Telegraph represents a
version of the public sphere that operated within a closed environment in which discussion
and debate shaped the means by which the educated men of the press made informed
decisions on the state of society and influenced the politics of their day. As I have shown,
this breaks down in ‘Aeolus’, and because of their lack of action and their reliance on
sentimental and inaccurate historical storytelling, the newspapermen’s attempts at
hermeneutics fail to engage actively with events outside the office.
Easter 1916 and communication networks
‘All communication with Dublin—telegraph & telephone—ceased at 12:45 p.m.’80
Networks of communication in many ways defined the action of the 1916 Easter
Rising. From the shutting down of telegraph and telephone communications into and out
of Dublin, through the iconic image of the General Post Office (GPO) as the central hub
of postal networks across Ireland and the British Empire, to the rebels’ failed initiative to
link up simultaneous rebellions across the country, the use of the Irish School of Wireless
Telegraphy, and the lack of printed news emerging from Dublin during the week—the
story of Easter Week is bound together by different methods of information exchange and
Emmet Larkin, James Larkin: Irish Labour Leader 1876–1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1965), p. 128. Reported
in the Manchester Guardian, 15 September 1913.
79 Morash, p. 123.
80 British Postal Museum Archive (BPMA), POST 56/177, quoted by Keith Jeffery, The GPO and the Easter
Rising (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), p. 16.
78
110
communication. I will now analyse the significance of this with regard to my own
definition of an alternative virtual public sphere and its construction through the network
of print ephemera in Ulysses.
When Samuel Guthrie, Superintendent of Telegraphs in Dublin, was forced out of
the GPO, his immediate response was to find an alternative means of contacting London.
As his report of the event demonstrates, it seems that communication was key to the action
of the Easter Rising:
At 12noon [Irish Time] a great many of the wires—including all the cross channel
wires—became disconnected, apparently close up. At 12.10 pm. I was informed
that the Sinn Féin Volunteers were taking possession of the Public Counter and
after a short time I heard the breaking of glass in the lower story.81
The first Guthrie knew of the Rising was the destruction of the GPO’s infrastructure. The
shutting down of communications was the moment signifying that the rebellion had begun,
and it is from this starting point that I now wish to discuss the importance of
communications networks and the state of the public sphere during the Rising. So far, we
have discussed how Joyce highlights the dynamic of dependence and antagonism between
speech and print in the dissemination of news and public discourse. By placing his
‘newspaper chapter’ in the retrospective shadow of social and political unrest, he allows us
to study the relationship between old and new forms of media and the public sphere—of
the changing mediated experience—that were woven into the history of the Easter Rising.
The events of 1916 created an opportunity for unity between the disparate nationalist
groups. James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, created to support the ITGWU in 1913,
joined together with the Irish Volunteers and members of the IRB to forge a militant
united front against the British. The initial coming together of hitherto exclusive
communities of nationalists seemed on the face of it to be the culmination of the wish to
create a combined and integrated rebellion. In relation to this I shall discuss the role of
81 Samuel Guthrie (Superintendent of Telegraphs) to the Central Telegraph Office Controller, GPO, BPMA,
POST 31/80B, file III, quoted by Jeffery, p. 110.
111
communications networks during the rebellion, and ask how this is reflected retrospectively
in ‘Aeolus’.
The events of both 1913 and 1916 are centred on political and social constructs of
communication, community and the public sphere. Ireland had seen gradual improvements
in its communications infrastructure. Richard Kirkland writes in Cathal O'Byrne and the
Cultural Revival in the North of Ireland, 1890-1960:
In the years leading up to 1916, and thanks mainly to the railway system, new
roads and the telegraph, communications in Ireland had vastly improved and it
became increasingly possible to visualise the island as a coherent entity.82
This is significant: seeing the nation as a single, consistent body of people remained a
necessary goal within the grand narrative of nationalism in Ireland. As I discussed in my
previous chapter, Luke Gibbons states that according to Benedict Anderson, what defines
a nation is its ability to be imagined as a coherent political community. Gibbons argues that
the theory that nationalism is generated by the rise of print-mediated communications can
only be applied to a certain type of nationalism, one which is ‘driven by state formation of
the advanced Western kind, characterised by centralization, unification and […] colonial
expansion’.83 Nonetheless, the tale of the rise of Irish nationalism and the eventual creation
of the Irish Free State can indeed be told alongside the story of the growth and expansion
of communications technology in Ireland.
Ireland played a key role in the history of the wireless telegraph system and the
creation of an international communications infrastructure. In 1898 Guglielmo Marconi
tested his wireless transmitter from Rathlin Island. In the same year he was commissioned
by the Dublin Daily Express and its sister paper the Evening Mail to transmit messages from
yachts taking part in the annual regatta at Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire). According to
Michael Sexton in Marconi: The Irish Connection, ‘the Dublin newspapers were determined to
82 Richard Kirkland, Cathal O’Byrne and the Cultural Revival in the North of Ireland, 1890-1960 (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2006), p. 137.
83 Gibbons, p. 135.
112
initiate the use of wireless telegraphy in journalism and this would be the very first
reporting of a sporting event.’84 The Mail’s reporter describes his reaction to the event:
I felt that I had been privileged to assist at an experiment that was destined to
revolutionise our means of communication and link nation to nation by the
strong yet subtle bonds of the ‘viewless winds’. Prospero’s Island with its spirits,
will henceforth be a true image of the world.85
The unionist Express’s excitement at the prospect of Ireland becoming connected to and
part of England and the continent includes a sense that Ireland need no longer feel like an
isolated and peripheral island. Ireland’s geographical position as a promontory facing onto
the Atlantic meant that it quickly became the ideal location for Marconi to test his new
telegraphic emissions internationally. By 1901 there were wireless telegraphic stations in
Crookhaven, County Cork, and Rosslare, County Wexford; by 1916 the Dublin Wireless
Club had already been in operation for three years, while the Irish School of Wireless
Telegraphy existed to train new technicians.
However, partly because of Marconi’s commercial priorities, wireless telegraphy
dominated the Irish landscape as a means of communication not necessarily overland, but
out over the seas, connecting ships with the land.86 Morash highlights the double-edged
effects of the expansion of the telegraph industry on Irish nationalism:
On the one hand, the telegraph had literally bound the British Empire together
with copper wires, so that London, Bombay, Sidney and Dublin existed, for the
first time, in the same informational field. […] At the same time, as the Irish
diaspora […] became increasingly woven into the fabric of American cultural life,
Irish nationalism felt less and less isolated in a world in which there was instant
communication with ‘the greater Ireland beyond the seas’.87
Instant communication produced a feeling of community and cohesion not only for the
Irish diaspora, but also for those back in Ireland. This is significant when we look at the
lead up to the Easter Rising. For example, Clan na Gael, the Irish-American sister
organization of the IRB, provided important links with Germany, from whom the
Michael Sexton, Marconi: The Irish Connection (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), p. 43.
Quoted by Sexton, p. 129.
86 Wireless telegraphy only arrived in Ireland through a commission from the shipping insurer Lloyds of
London.
87 Morash, p. 129.
84
85
113
insurgents hoped to receive military backing. The communication networks in Ireland,
including the road, rail and telegraph networks, national and regional newspapers, and the
courier network, all played an important role during the lead-up to the Rising. These
operated nationwide, while other networks functioned on a smaller level on the streets of
Dublin during the rebellion. In this there are several key points to be highlighted: the
attempt at the simultaneous dissemination of news across Ireland and the creation of an
imagined community; the intended synchronization of rebellions across the country; and
the ‘network of people’ on the streets of Dublin.
Eoin MacNeill’s order to cease all manoeuvres was printed in the Sunday Independent:
The Easter manoeuvres of the Irish Volunteers, which were announced to begin
to-day, and which were to have been taken part in by all the branches of the
organisation in city and country, were unexpectedly cancelled last night.
The following is the announcement communicated to the Press last
evening by the Staff of Volunteers:—
April, 22, 1916
Owing to the very critical position, all orders given to Irish Volunteers for
tomorrow, Easter Sunday, are hereby rescinded, and no parades, marches, or
other movements of Irish Volunteers will take place. Each individual Volunteer
will obey this order strictly in every particular.88
Both MacNeill’s order and the later messages countermanding it relied on a network of
couriers who delivered written and spoken messages. Witness statements collected by
Annie Ryan from the Bureau of Military History demonstrate the extent to which the
volunteers relied on this courier network. Ryan reports that ‘young couriers waited outside
the large room where the “Volunteer people”, who included MacNeill, Sean T. O’Kelly,
Sean FitzGibbon and Cathal Brugha, met.’89 Ryan’s work demonstrates that conversation,
word of mouth and the courier network (using trains, motorcars and bicycles) were
essential to the effectiveness of the network of volunteer forces throughout Ireland during
the lead-up to the Rising. James Ryan was selected twice to act as courier during Easter
weekend, the first time to deliver a message from Sean McDermott to Tomás MacCurtain
88 The Irish Times Book of the 1916 Rising, ed. by Shane Hegarty and Fintan O’Toole (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 2006), p. 29.
89 Annie Ryan, Witnesses: Inside the Easter Rising (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2005), p. 86.
114
(travelling by train), and the second to deliver the countermand from MacNeill (this time
travelling by car, driven by MacNeill’s brother). He tells us:
Sean McDermott asked me if I would take a despatch to Cork that evening […].
He said it was a very important message and that I should prevent it from falling
into hostile hands, even if I had to use the revolver […]. I had never been to
Cork.90
The command from MacNeill (‘There will be no manouvres [sic] tomorrow. All manouvres
are cancelled. This must be obeyed by every officer’) was couriered across Ireland by Ryan,
driven by James MacNeill, to Pierce McCann in Tipperary, MacCurtain in Cork, and the
commanding officer in Tralee; remaining copies of the notice were to be handed out to any
Volunteers Ryan might see on parade during his journey.
This is essential to my analysis of the role of community and communication
networks in Ireland. The witness statements from the Easter Rising poignantly
demonstrate the closeness of community and the sense of familiarity among the rebels.
Annie Ryan writes:
The strong fabric of society, based as it was on the interlinking friendships of
large families, is much in evidence in the witness statements. The camaraderie and
ease of social contact between the sexes were stronger in the 1916 period than
they are today.91
This community constituted a close-knit network of people who could carry
communications throughout Dublin. Clair Wills demonstrates that there were networks of
streets and pathways created by the people who lived in close proximity to the GPO. She
tells us that the GPO was situated at the centre of ‘a network of small streets and alleys,
lanes and passages’:
much of the activity in the GPO depended on the rebels in-depth knowledge of
this area—many of them lived in shouting distance of the building or had friends
and relatives there. This street-scape was augmented by a parallel ‘insurgent’
network connecting up buildings by boring through internal walls, laying planks
between rooftops […]. But it was also a network of people.92
Ryan, p. 83.
Ryan, p. 30.
92 Clair Wills, Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO (London: Profile Books, 2009), p. 33.
90
91
115
Such was the dynamic of this ‘network of people’ that the Rising quickly became an urban
communications event. This is highlighted in accounts that describe how, as people began
to arrive sporadically throughout the beginning of Easter Week, they sought out familiar
faces for confirmation that the Rising was going ahead. Seamus Robinson describes
arriving in Dublin on the morning of Easter Monday at Beresford Place:
Margaret Skinneder, whom I knew, rushed over to me and said ‘It’s on.’ I asked
‘What’s on?’ She said, ‘The rebellion of course.’ This was the first positive
information I had that action was to be taken that morning.93
The contrast between the print-mediated news of MacNeill’s orders countermanding the
action and the slow trickle of news that it was to go ahead, which was passed along in
hand-to-hand messages and by word of mouth, reveals the forms of news dissemination at
work during the Rising.
The contrast between these two communication networks relates back to the
second form of the public sphere, which I introduced in chapter one. The Rising not only
provides an important historical context for the analysis of media and community in
‘Aeolus’, but is also an example of the virtual form of the public sphere. The hand-to-hand
passing on of messages and the connective network of streets and passageways behind the
GPO demonstrate that the Rising can be seen in terms of a virtual network similar to the
alternative public sphere which I argue exists in Ulysses. Wills’s observation that the Rising
was made up of a ‘network of people’ is a sharp reminder that it was the rebels’ and their
families’ unorthodox use of communication techniques and the resulting (albeit
fragmented) imagined community that defined much of the action during Easter Week.
While the observations and analyses in the previous chapter were conducted at the social
level, here, in the retrospective context of the Easter Rising, the analysis of reader networks
and community takes on a specifically political significance.
The rebels’ attempts to use the most current media technology demonstrates a
shrewd recognition of the importance of new forms of media, such as national radio, as
93
Ryan, p. 117.
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they attempted to broadcast the action of the Rising across Ireland and beyond. Morash
states that ‘in its basic structure—the actions of a few reaching and influencing the
masses—the 1916 Rising mapped perfectly to the shape of a new media world.’94 The
significance of the volunteers’ attempted use of communication technology, together with
the role of the local communication network engineered at street level, reaches to the
centre of my analysis of ‘Aeolus’. The Phoenix Park murders of 1882 were a particularly
Dublin-based event. In the following extract, Crawford celebrates how the fictional
journalist Ignatius Gallaher sent a map of the event to the New York World (which had a
large Irish-American readership) by setting a code for the map in an advertisement for
Bransome’s Coffee:95
What did Ignatius Gallaher do? I’ll tell you. Inspiration of genius. Cabled right
away. […]
He flung back the pages of the files and stuck his finger on a point.
Take page four, advertisement for Bransome’s coffee, let us say. Have you got
that? Right.
The telephone whirred.
A DISTANT VOICE
[…]
His finger leaped and struck point after point, vibrating.
T is viceregal lodge. C is where murder took place. K is Knockmaroon gate.
[…]
– F to P is the route Skin-the-Goat drove the car for an alibi, Inchicore,
Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh. F. A. B. P. Got that? X
is Davy’s public house in upper Leeson street. (7.650–669)
The murders can be seen retrospectively as a media event. I have already discussed
Gallaher’s message as a reduction of language for the sake of communication. Here we can
understand its importance as a communication of local information to a wider and more
dispersed community. Kershner analyses its significance in terms of the technology
available at the time:
Gallaher’s coup was a product of the technical limitations of the early twentiethcentury communications network. The telegraph cable linking the British Isles
with New York was, of course, incapable of transmitting a map, which is what the
Invincibles trial especially called for.96
Morash, p. 128.
See Kershner, p. 103.
96 Kershner, p. 103.
94
95
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The example of Gallaher’s coded message not only demonstrates the reduction of language
in communication, but also epitomizes the need to make the disparate and dispersed
belong to and feel part of something local and intimate. The story characterizes the
imagined community not solely by the immediacy of the use of the telegraph system, but
also by the need to let people visualize and feel part of the event through the cartographic
description created by Gallaher’s code. In similar terms we can think of the comparable
forms of communication at play during the Rising. Connolly attempted to transmit news
from the Rising by radio, but as the Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook reports, ‘all telegraphic
wires were cut, thus isolating the city from the rest of the country.’97 Nevertheless, the
capture of communication hubs within the city was strategic: they included the GPO, the
telephone exchange and the Irish School of Wireless Telegraphy, from which a group of
rebels ‘worked to erect an aerial and repair a transmitter that had not been used since
1914’.98 The aim was to broadcast the Proclamation of the Irish Republic; however, as
Morash highlights, ‘in spite of their best efforts, the Volunteers found that they could
transmit, but not receive messages.’99
It is important to recognize that the communication networks formed around the
Rising contributed not just to the facilitation of the rebellion, but also to its consequences
for the imagined community in Ireland. Morash analyses Connolly’s hope that ‘once a
stand was made, however brief, in Dublin, the country would turn in mass against the
British government and overthrow it,’ arguing that ‘the Rising was a media event as much
as it was a military operation.’100 Connolly hoped to create a network of simultaneous
rebellions facilitated by the linking up of events through the use of new media technology.
For this to work, the imagined community needed to hold together under the common
cause of nationalism and follow Dublin’s lead. On this count, the Rising not did not just
fail to bring together an imagined community in Ireland, but it further distanced the
Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook. Easter 1916, ed. by Fred Hanna (Dublin: Irish Weekly Times, 1917)
Morash, p. 126.
99 Morash, p. 126.
100 Morash, p. 129.
97
98
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republicans in the north. For Kirkland, what the Rising became (‘a Dublin rebellion
involving only a tiny number of combatants’) had ‘the effect of fundamentally isolating the
republican movement in Ulster’.101 Kirkland’s analysis of the internal power-play within the
leadership of the IRB during the year leading up to the Rising sheds some light on the
impossibility of a unified national insurrection. He writes that it was ‘precisely in the
execution of this event—its keynote moment in history—that the IRB was to demonstrate
both its own internal divisions and the manner in which Ulster remained ideologically
distinct from the rest of Ireland’. Furthermore, the trickle of news from Dublin that did
reach Belfast during Easter Week served as a ‘startling reminder that Belfast remained a
long way from Dublin’.102
The Irish public sphere had been dramatically altered. The newspaper reports
during Easter Week highlight confusion and general disbelief at the actions of the rebels.
The Belfast-based Irish News printed the headline ‘Keep Cool,’ with a line that read: ‘We
trust sincerely that Rumour has magnified the story […]. But it is certain that evil has been
done’.103 The Freeman’s Journal, whose office was burnt to the ground during the fighting,
filed a retrospective issue that read: ‘our late office was situated in the centre of the most
exciting episodes of the recent trouble.’104 While claiming to be part of the ‘exciting’ action,
the newspaper referred to the leaders of the Rising as ‘men without authority,
representative character, or practical sanity’.105 Even though the executions of the rebel
leaders by the British had already begun, the Freeman’s and other papers continued to
condemn the rebels. On 5 May, the Irish Independent under the title ‘Wipe out the Stain’,
looked to solve the problem of how ‘to help materially to obliterate the memory of the
nightmare of last week’, and called on young men to offer themselves to the Irish Army’ in
order to ‘atone for the crime of the recent insurrection’, calling it an ‘act of criminal
Kirkland, p. 136.
Kirkland, p. 133, p. 137.
103 ‘Keep Cool’, Irish News, 25 April 1916, p. 4.
104 ‘The Freeman’s Journal’, Freeman’s Journal, 5 May 1916, p. 2.
105 ‘Sinn Fein Insurrection’, Freeman’s Journal, 5 May 1916, p. 2.
101
102
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folly’.106 The unionist Irish Times wrote that ‘the story of last week in Dublin is a record of
crime, horror, and destruction’, calling for ‘the rapine and bloodshed of the past week [to
be] finished with a severity which will make any repetition of them impossible for
generations to come.’107 The Irish News was the first Home Rule newspaper to call for a halt
to the executions, which according to Kirkland ‘was a credit to both its compassion and its
regained political acumen’.108 The lengthy series of executions that followed, in which a
total of sixteen men were killed, became for many the Rising’s overwhelming legacy,
uniting people in their outrage and guaranteeing ongoing support for a nationalist
insurrection.
This chapter has analysed Joyce’s construction of the public sphere through the
lens of the Dublin newspaper industry’s relationship with the city as depicted in ‘Aeolus’.
The episode has allowed me to explore the social imbalance of representation within the
public sphere, as well as to situate my argument about communication networks and the
imagined community in relation to key historical events. By looking back to activists such
as Daniel O’Connell and the Young Irelanders, I have been able to consider the troubled
historiography of the public sphere starting from the moment of Catholic Emancipation,
while the Tram Lockout has provided a crucial context for my examination of the class
discrepancies within Joyce’s public sphere. James Connolly has featured as a central figure
in this; his firm belief in the importance of nationalism and socialism, together with his
fiery rhetoric, enabled him to drive home his accusations against the powerful and
influential Home Rule newspapers, indicting them for criminally betraying the poor and
destitute of Ireland. The year 1916 has often been cited as a significant retrospective
moment in the narrative of ‘Aeolus’. I have treated the 1916 Rising as an important media
event, through which I have been able to consider the various communication networks
‘Wipe out the Stain’, Irish Independent, 5 May 1916, p. 2.
‘The Insurrection’, Irish Times, 1 May 1916, p. 2
108 Kirkland, p. 139.
106
107
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that operated in the build-up to and during the Rising, as well as the break-up of the
community and the growing isolation of the north.
In ‘Aeolus’, the machines’ thwart attempts to overpower the men’s chatter, the
lurking significance of the Dublin communications and transport network, and the power
cut at the end of the episode all reveal a faltering ability to come to terms with and fully
utilize the technology available. Significantly, the episode highlights an unwillingness to
look forward, as Kiberd notes:
Both the 1916 Rising and Ulysses can be interpreted in rather similar ways: as
attempts to achieve, in the areas of politics and literature, the blessings of
modernity and liquidation of its costs. In other words, the Irish wished to be
modern and counter-modern in one and the same gesture.109
This accusation by Kiberd is a not unfamiliar criticism of Ireland’s relationship with the
trappings of modernity, and I will explore this further in chapter four. The characters in
‘Aeolus’ celebrate the past in a setting that should encompass the future of
communications and the Irish public sphere. Joyce allows us to rethink significant
moments in Ireland during the first decades of the twentieth century, in which the
construction of the public sphere and the means with which the events were
communicated, mediated, commented on and finally archived to history are illuminated
within the novel. Ulysses itself becomes in some way an archive of events, and takes on the
same form as the akasic records that Stephen thinks of in ‘Aeolus’. Joyce’s novel is so laden
with a particular burden of history that it looks both forwards and backwards from 1904.
109
Kiberd, p. 330.
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Chapter 3: Space and the Language of Violence in ‘Cyclops’
This chapter explores the politics of space, the representation of community and the public
sphere in the episode ‘Cyclops’, setting aside the concept of the virtual community to
concentrate instead on the traditional Habermasian notion of the public sphere, which
depends on physical locations that facilitate discussion and debate. The chapter will
examine how the public sphere in this sense can be manipulated, distorted and ultimately
shut down by the speech and actions of those who inhabit it. By choosing the theme of
space for my first section, I will look at how public and private space is defined. It has
become an accepted critical norm to describe the private sphere as separate and distinct
from the public; my analysis looks at how these two distinct concepts of space shift and
overlap in Barney Kiernan’s pub in ‘Cyclops’. I explore how our perception of a space as
either public or private can be manipulated by the language used by those who occupy it: a
space that was initially seen as public can become private and exclusive thanks to the
language used within it. Second, violence is the overriding image through which I critique
the dynamic of the public sphere and the interactions between the characters in the pub. In
this regard I analyse whether the public sphere is able to function under the social
conditions that are present in the episode, in which the language of the Citizen and his
companions shuts down the functionality of the public sphere inside the bar, reducing it to
something that is purely symbolic and ultimately inert. As a result I am able to consider
how Joyce responds to the trauma of events during the escalation to the War of
Independence. In this section I look at issues of racism and discrimination, their
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legitimization by mainstream newspapers, and the ways in which they are encouraged in the
rhetoric of the Citizen and others. The image of the crowd ties together my arguments on
the politics of space and the depiction of violence within the public sphere, as I link the
homogenizing effect of the crowd to narratives of urban degeneration and issues of literary
representation.
Space and the Public Sphere
Space and control, newspapers and authority
The study of public and private space in Ulysses brings to light arguments over identity,
ownership and authority. Habermas uses the term ‘public sphere’ to describe a space that
allows for the mediation between the private sphere and the sphere of public authority.1 In
this section I wish to explore how Joyce complicates his depiction of the private and public
sphere, and to demonstrate how the notion of public authority, as it is depicted in Ulysses, is
split into different layers of representation. The mediated space between the private sphere
and the sphere of public authority is a zone in which critical discussion is able to inform
the action of the state; it permits us to distinguish the ways in which the ‘public’ can inform
debate unhindered by state influence.
According to Craig Calhoun, the challenge of ‘reading and responding to The Public
Sphere is to keep fully in mind Habermas’s two-sided constitution of the category of public
sphere as simultaneously about the quality or form of rational-critical discourse and the
quantity of, or openness to, popular participation’.2 The public sphere relies on popular
‘public’ participation, but importantly this works alongside the sense of public authority by
which the public discourse of the state is critically informed. As Luke Goode argues:
The bourgeois public sphere imagined itself to comprise private people coming
together as a public. Power and domination were anathema to a sacrosanct
1 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,
trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT, Polity Press, 1989), p. 11.
2 Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. by Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 4.
123
selfhood: the public sphere wanted to wrest culture and its interpretation from
authority structures corrupted by public power.3
Goode describes how the public sphere resides within a liminal zone in which public
opinion and public authority combine to challenge state decision-making. In relation to the
episode ‘Cyclops’, this section of my chapter addresses what happens to the political
dynamic of the public sphere (as described by Habermas, Goode and others) when the
actions of its participants affect its relationship with private space. I will explore what
happens to that space and to the notion of the public sphere when its authority and
autonomy are challenged, not necessarily through the influence of state-imposed structures
of authority, but rather through the emergence of a ‘power vacuum’ within the public
sphere itself. I argue that in this scenario public space can no longer remain public, but is
‘shut down’ and manipulated into something private, closed and exclusive.
‘Cyclops’ is an episode which obsesses over the ownership, control and
manipulation of space. The need to remain in control of the space around them informs
the behaviour of the characters. Framed by the traditions of pub culture, ‘Cyclops’ can be
situated within the history of what David Lloyd refers to as a masculine drinking economy.
Lloyd’s analysis demonstrates how all-male communities, such as that on display in Barney
Kiernan’s pub, are created and then maintained through drinking. Lloyd observes that the
masculine drinking culture was both ‘an expression of and an antidote for economic and
emotional anomie’. He argues that, while they were increasingly practised inside the closed
space of the public house, traditions and etiquette (such as buying a round) resembled ‘a
surviving moral economy’ and maintained ‘specific oral performances like storytelling and
banter’; he concludes that ‘the non-modern pleasures of oral space continue to haunt the
public house.’4 Lloyd highlights the importance of the counter-modern culture
demonstrated in the continuing traditions of the public house—a space which he describes
Luke Goode, Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 8.
David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Cultural Modernity, 1800–2000: The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 88.
3
4
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as a ‘partially hidden public sphere’.5 I argue that this counter-modern culture can be found
in ‘Cyclops’, and that to emphasize this Joyce uses a time flux within his narrative, which
alternates throughout the episode. For example, as the narrator and Joe Hynes walk to the
pub, the language switches almost mid-thought. We read: ‘Jesus, I couldn’t get over that
bloody foxy Geraghty, the daylight robber. For trading without a licence, says he. / In
Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld
of men afar’ (12.66–69).6 The narrator is still mulling over the story of Michael Geraghty
when the language changes, facilitating a transformation of perceived time in the narrative
as it moves to something ancient and counter-modern.
‘Cyclops’ represents a dream space in which the sense of time is manipulated,
pulled backwards, forwards and outwards through sudden changes in language and the
regular switching of narrative perspective. Joyce draws a mediated link between the present
(1904 Dublin) and the past, between urban Dublin and the traditions of storytelling
associated with rural Ireland. In doing so he creates two different, stylized worlds, and
builds up a tension between the representation of the past and the depiction of the present.
The present is shown to the reader through the eyes of the narrator, an anonymous
commentator whose anti-Semitic views are demonstrated early on in the text as he admits
to Hynes: ‘Jesus, I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out’ (12.30), while later we
read ‘I’m told those jewies does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them’ (12.452–3).
The past is presented as a form of escapism from the close and confined—urban—space
of the pub. Joyce’s interrupted voices carry the reader into a phantasmagorical space,
outside the sphere of the pub, in which the contemporary narrative is linked to mythical
and historical visions. We read:
Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf. / Terence O’Ryan heard him and straightway
brought him a crystal cup full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin
Lloyd, Irish Culture, p. 89.
Gifford tells us that this particular section ‘makes specific use of James Clarence Mangan’s translation of
“Alfrid’s Itinerary” and in general lampoons the style of works such as Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men
(1904).’ Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses: Annotated Notes for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1988), p. 316.
5
6
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brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning
as the sons of deathless Leda. (12.279–283)
In ‘Cyclops’, space is controlled primarily through the language used by the characters:
here, language can intimidate and bully. Bloom attempts to fight back and counter the
rhetoric of the Citizen. Interestingly, Bloom too uses a form of rhetoric in his defence
against the hostile and anti-Semitic crowd. He retorts: ‘Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl
Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. […] Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me’
(12.1804–1809). Bloom cites what he hopes are familiar cultural and religious figures in an
attempt to relate his own personal experience to something the Citizen will recognize. But
he does so defensively and aggressively, and it is this that sees him finally ejected from
what, during the course of the episode, has become the Citizen’s own private space; we
read that Martin Cunningham ‘got them out as quick as he could’ (12.1768). Barney
Kiernan’s pub is viewed by its inmates as a confidential safe haven away from the streets
outside; somewhere where outsiders are not trusted. As the episode progresses, the
perception of Kiernan’s pub changes from that of a ‘public house’ to a sealed-off and
surreal enclave in which the behaviour of the occupants takes on an ugly and anarchic tone.
The use and manipulation of space raises several issues surrounding the
construction of the public sphere. As well as exploring the management of space inside
locations such as the public house, it is important to also analyse the control of ‘public’
space, such as the city streets. This leads me to consider the relationship between ‘outside’
and ‘inside’ urban spaces, and to analyse how they impact on each other. While much of
‘Cyclops’ takes place inside the pub, there is a small but significant amount of action which
occurs outside on the street. On these occasions, the reader is presented with a snapshot of
supposed Dublin life. On the street we can observe that it seems crowded, and that there is
a mix of different types of men. In the opening sequence the narrator tells us:
I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of
Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near
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drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my
tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes.
(12.1–5)
Curiously, the narrator, who once inside the pub appears to subscribe to Irish nationalist
politics, is on a street corner talking with a member of the Dublin Military Police. Enda
Duffy writes in The Subaltern Ulysses that this implies something more sinister than simply
passing the time of day with an old acquaintance, arguing that ‘collusion is suggested.’7
Whether one agrees with Duffy or argues (as I do) that such an acquaintance would have
been less unusual than he suggests and that people of different political beliefs did coexist
in Dublin, there is a sense that surveillance and collusive power were indeed functioning on
the streets of colonial Dublin.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault uses the image of
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon to introduce his own thesis on surveillance, containment
and control. He describes the Panopticon as ‘the architectural figure’ of ‘an omnipresent
and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the
ultimate determination of the individual’.8 One aspect of Foucault’s analysis is that ‘the
major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and
permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power,’ and this can be
applied to methods of intelligence-gathering by the British in Ireland, as well as to the
symbolic presence of power in the form of the statues and monuments strategically erected
in towns and cities.9 Furthermore, tied into this sense of permanent visibility, although
independent of it, is the ongoing presence of printed ephemera and the press on the streets
of Dublin; in Ulysses the print industry and newspapers are omnipresent.
In relation to imperial surveillance, Andrew Thacker, writing on Ulysses, describes
how the ‘static image of imperial power, the panopticon-like gaze of the colonizer, finds a
Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 114.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York, NY:
Vintage, 1995 [1977]), p. 197, p. 200.
9 Foucault, p. 201.
7
8
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mirror image in this paralysis of the Dublin trams [in ‘Aeolus’].’10 Thacker’s analysis looks
at the role of Nelson’s pillar:
Joyce’s employment of Nelson’s pillar […] demonstrates how the literary form of
his text is implicated in spatial relations of power-knowledge, as the column
shadows the opening and closing of the episode, forming an impression of the
city as being under surveillance.11
Surveillance exists in ‘Cyclops’ too, although the manifestation of colonial power here is
subtler than Nelson’s pillar. Joyce wrote a large portion of ‘Cyclops’ during 1919, a year in
which hostilities escalated between the British and the Irish insurgents. It was a time when
espionage and the use of informants were crucial for both sides. In his study of the origins
of the Irish conflict, Michael Hopkinson highlights how quickly Michael Collins realized
‘the central importance of a spy network’ and set up his own intelligence organization.12
Unexplained postcards, print ephemera with hidden messages—such as the comical ‘U. P:
up’ (12.258) which first appears in ‘Lestrygonians'—as well as unexplained meetings on
street corners are all fitting images of an escalating guerrilla war. Furthermore, surveillance,
espionage and collusion are also factors in the competition to control public space.
As we return to the theme of print and the press, the Citizen sits encircled by
newspapers and print ephemera. This image of immersion in paper is not limited to the
Citizen: Bloom’s day too is informed by print. As Patrick Collier has discussed, Bloom’s
awareness of the media’s ability to both reveal and misrepresent makes him hyperaware
that he is constantly being scrutinized, and induces in him a sense of permanent visibility.
Collier argues:
Newspapers participate in what Stephen Greenblatt has called ‘the enforcement
of cultural boundaries through praise and blame’ (226). It is not surprising in this
context that one of Bloom’s nightmares of shame in ‘Circe’ involves being
exposed in a newspaper listing ‘the new addresses of all the cuckolds in Dublin’
(15.1125–8).13
Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity, Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003), p. 125.
11 Thacker, p. 121.
12 Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Montreal, QU: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), p.
19.
13 Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), p. 124.
10
128
Collier goes on to highlight, with specific reference to ‘Cyclops’, that ‘in a modern society,
the press possesses both a “legislative” power of negotiating social mores and the “judicial”
power of punishing transgressive behaviour through the shame of public display.’14 What is
interesting in ‘Cyclops’, however, is that despite its abundance, the content of all the print
paraphernalia is made redundant through its misuse and misinterpretation by the men in
the pub. In effect, the presence of the newspapers suggests their potential to wield the
legislative and judicial power of which Collier writes, while simultaneously demonstrating
the damaging effects of the Citizen’s and others’ use of the information with which they
are provided.
We see this when the Citizen reads out the story of the Zulu chief’s visit to
London, supposedly printed in the United Irishman. It begins:
Did you read that skit in the United Irishman today about that Zulu chief that’s
visiting England?
—What’s that? Says Joe.
So the Citizen takes up one of his paraphernalia papers and he starts reading out.15
(12. 1509–1513)
John Nash tells us that ‘there was no such piece in the United Irishman, of that day or any
other; rather, the parody was composed with the aid of reports in The Times.’16 The piece
serves as a pretext for the depiction of irony in the characters’ use of it, and in their
subsequent conversation about Roger Casement’s report on Belgium’s mistreatment of the
Congolese. They align themselves in solidarity with those ‘under similar colonial servitude
to European powers’, but in the very next moment the Citizen calls Bloom ‘that whiteeyed
kaffir’ (12.1552).17 The men in the pub are unable to see the irony in their own racist
attitudes, and they are blind to the fact that Arthur Griffith, the supposed author of the
Collier, p. 127.
Gifford notes that although the paper printed skits similar to this, it did not print the one mentioned, p.
365.
16 John Nash, ‘“Hanging Over the Bloody Paper”: Newspapers and Imperialism in Ulysses’, in Modernism and
Empire, ed. by Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 188.
Nash’s scholarship has been especially important to this chapter. His understanding of Joyce’s use of the
London Times has allowed me to understand much of the tone of voice used by the men at the bar to pick
apart the newspapers as part of Joyce’s multilayered and complex response to both the British and the Irish
press industries.
17 Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 180.
14
15
129
skit, supported slavery. What is more, once we realize that Joyce has lifted the skit from the
Times, the irony acquires a second level: the characters consume and regurgitate
information that originated in a pro-imperial British newspaper.
Nash argues that the target of Joyce’s satire here is not principally the Citizen or the
figure of Arthur Griffith, whom he is careful to distance from the text. Nash determines
that the target ‘is clearly the economy and pomposity of British imperialism’ embodied in
the Times:18
The imperial history of The Times makes it a fitting medium for Joyce’s moulding
of historical documentation into the intimate nuances of everyday Edwardian
Dublin, as news stories from London circulate through Joyce’s writing and are
recontextualised in Dublin.19
The Times was for many the outstanding representative of imperial Britain, and a bastion of
colonial thought and advocacy. The twofold irony created by Joyce has his characters
criticizing their own newspapers while unwittingly using the language and information
supplied by the Times. Crucially for my argument, Nash highlights how ‘the actual source of
the skit, and Joyce’s reference to its fictional origin, points to the critical difficulty in
reading this chapter: who speaks, and what authority can be attributed to the different
voices of the text?’20 The question of authority brings us back to issues surrounding the
perception of space and the public sphere in ‘Cyclops’. Once the authority of those within
the public space is questioned, the viability of the public sphere is thrown into doubt. Joyce
uses language, both in the contrasting voices in his text and in the various sources used for
his own research abroad, to interrogate issues of authority in the episode.
Space and representation
This ‘carnivalesque space’, as Duffy describes it, contains conflicting and contrasting
voices.21 Yet both of the main characters, Bloom and the Citizen, are depicted as particular
Nash, p. 191.
Nash, p. 176.
20 Nash, p. 176.
21 Duffy, p. 114.
18
19
130
types: the Jew and the rural drunk.22 In light of this observation, it is pertinent to consider a
letter dated 5 August 1918, in which Joyce writes: ‘the problem of my race is so
complicated, that one would require all the resources of an elastic art in order to convey it
without simplification. […] I feel constrained to attempting it by means of the scenes and
characters of my poor invention.’23 These ‘resources of an elastic art’ seem to appear in
‘Cyclops’ in the form of a ruptured and fractured text. Duffy, who describes ‘Cyclops’ as
‘the most glaringly split text in the whole high modernist canon’, writes:
With the task of imagining a new subject, however, which became urgent at the
moment of revolution, native writing faced a crisis. At this point, a nervous
fracturing, strategies of splitting that curiously mirror the split subjects of colonist
representations of the subject, begin to appear in both literary and popular
works.24
Stephen’s quip in ‘Telemachus’ that the symbol of Irish art is ‘the cracked lookingglass of a
servant’ (1.154) is tellingly played out in the depiction of the Citizen: Joyce appropriates the
language of the colonizer to describe his own most troublesome character. We read two
contrasting introductions to the Citizen: ‘there, sure enough, was the citizen up in the
corner having a great conflab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel’ (12.118–9);
‘The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a
broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled
shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded […] sinewyarmed hero’ (12.151–154).
Anti-Irish British propaganda depicted the Irishman as an inarticulate drunkard
who was prone to barbarity. L. P. Curtis in his 1971 study Apes and Angels: The Irishman in
Victorian Caricature discusses the rise of the stereotype Irishman in Victorian British culture:
the transformation of Paddy from a harmless or primitive peasant into a ferocious
hybrid of man and ape became a way of not only justifying harsh measures against
the agents of aggressive nationalism and agrarian outrage but of dismissing the
political aspirations underlying those acts.25
Duffy, p. 114.
James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce, 1, ed. by Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), p. 118. The letter
is in French; the English translation above is mine. Gilbert notes that there is ‘no indication of the name of
the addressee. Perhaps Mlle Guillermet of the Journal de Genéve.’ The French reads: ‘Du reste, le problem de ma
race est tellement compliqué qu’on a besoin de tous les moyens d’un art elastique pour l’esquisser – sans le résoudre.’ [sic]
24 Duffy, pp. 95–96.
25 L. P. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, WA: Smithsonian Institution,
1997 [1971]), p. xi. In Paddy and Mr Punch connections in Irish and English History, R. F. Foster launches a spirited
22
23
131
In his depiction of the Citizen, Joyce presents a drunken and violent Fenian character
whose political aspirations are overridden by his stereotypically brutish and aggressive
behaviour. In this way Joyce combines his critique of the racist historical discourse
manifested in British depictions of the Irish with his own criticism of the purist Irish ideals
held by some factions of the nationalist movement.
In Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England, in which
Curtis explores a ‘specifically English and Victorian form of ethnocentrism’, he defines
ethnocentrism as something that
characterizes that nucleus of beliefs and attitudes, cultivated and cherished by
people who seek relief from some of their own anxieties and fears, which make
for more or less rigid distinctions between their own group (or in-group) and
some other collection of people (or out-group).26
As we shall see, this definition of ethnocentrism can be applied not only to the British
propagandists, but also to Irish nationalism’s more stridently purist advocates of Gaelic
culture, here represented by the Citizen. In Joyce, Race and Empire, Vincent Cheng argues
that the figure of the Irish (and of members of other colonized races in the British Empire)
was formed in the British popular imagination by ‘homogenizing all “others” […] within a
universalized, all-encompassing essentialism of the “Other” as primitive, barbaric, and
uncivilized/uncivilizable’.27 He asserts that the portrayal of the Irish by elements of the
criticism of Curtis’ use of the satirical journal Punch as a major example of the caricaturists who depicted the
Irish as beastial or animalistic. Foster urges an understanding of the complexity of Punch’s use of the
stereotype and for a recognition that Punch was, after all, in the business of caricatures, emphasizing that the
Irish were not the only people to be caricatured in the journal. He argues that ‘Punch gives a more varied
representation of it than might be expected.’ He charts a shift in the journal’s attitude towards Ireland, noting
that ‘as Young Ireland became more Anglophobic and irreconcilable (with good cause), Punch lost all
patience.’ R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin, 1993), pp.
174-176. Colm Tóibín, writing in the London Review of Books, that same year, tells us how ‘Roy Foster loves
two minds, the dual inheritance. Although the essays in Paddy and Mr Punch were written for different
occasions and contexts, there is a single concern running through the book: the way in which the intersection
between Ireland and England affects individuals and institutions.’ In a sense this returns us to my own use of
Curtis’s two studies, as I analyse how Joyce tackles the crudity and cruelty of stereotype and caricature. I
analyse how this affects the individual within a community, and will continue to use certain terminology from
Curtis and others as a means of exploring issues of stereotype, racism and purism within Joyce’s critique of
the problems of literary representation. Colm Tóibín, ‘New Ways of Killing Your Father’, in London Review of
Books 15 (18 November 1993), pp. 3-6.
26 L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Connecticut:
Conference of British Studies at the University of Bridgeport, 1968), p. 7.
27 Cheng, p. 21.
132
British press became an accepted image; so embedded was it in the popular imagination
that for many it became a reality. As Homi K. Bhabha argues:
Colonial power produces the colonised as a fixed reality which is at once an
‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible. It resembles a form of narrative in
which the productivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in a
reformed and recognisable totality.28
This leads Cheng to observe that ‘all of this would seem to suggest that the popular
English conception of the Irish as a backwards Celtic race had attained the broad cultural
force behind it consistent with the Gramscian notion of hegemony.’29
The notion of hegemony needs to be unpacked in order to understand its potency
in the context of the public sphere. In Ideology: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton argues that in
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, ‘the crucial transition is effected from ideology as
“systems of ideas” to ideology as lived, habitual social practice’.30 This leads Eagleton to
ask: ‘how do we combat a power which has become the “common sense” of a whole social
order, rather than one which is widely perceived as alien and oppressive?’31 The idea that
something can become so ingrained in one’s consciousness that it becomes ‘common
sense’ leads Gramsci to associate hegemony ‘with the arena of “civil society”’.32 Hegemony
exists within a space that extends across political, economic and cultural institutions and
encompasses cultural and literary discourse—a space in which the public sphere also
operates. As Bhabha goes on to note:
the ‘stereotype’ requires, for its successful signification, a continual and repetitive
chain of other stereotypes. […T]he same old stories of the Negro’s animality, the
Coolie’s inscrutability or the stupidity of the Irish which must be told
(compulsively) again and afresh, and is differently gratifying and terrifying each
time.33
Newspapers are included in this; they provide a framework that facilitates a practice of
hermeneutics which in turn supports the public sphere. Nash describes the London Times
28 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonisation’, in The Politics of Theory:
Proceedings of the Essex Sociology of Literature Conference (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), p. 199.
29 Cheng, p. 24.
30 Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 115
31 Eagleton, p. 114.
32 Eagleton, p. 113.
33 Bhabha, p. 204.
133
of the long nineteenth century as the ‘primary organ of imperial hegemony in the
production of news’.34
Joyce confronts the British press’s representation of the Irish in his essay ‘Ireland at
the Bar’. In it he recounts the story of Myles Joyce, an Irish speaker accused of murder. In
Joyce’s account of the event, Myles Joyce did not speak English, which was the language of
the court. Joyce describes how the man’s animated speech and gestures were reduced to
single-word translations by the court interpreter, effectively silencing him. He writes: ‘the
figure of this bewildered old man, left over from a culture which is not ours, a deaf-mute
before his judge, is a symbol of the Irish nation at the bar of public opinion.’35 He
concludes his essay by arguing that ‘like [Myles Joyce], Ireland cannot appeal to the modern
conscience of England or abroad. The English newspapers act as interpreters between
Ireland and the English electorate,’ adding ‘so the Irish figure as criminals, with deformed
faces, who roam around at night with the aim of doing away with every Unionist.’36 This
image of the Irish as criminals is parodied in ‘Cyclops’ when Hynes greets the Citizen with
the phrase ‘Stand and deliver’ (12.129).
Duffy refers to a photograph of an Irishman, depicted as dirty, poverty-stricken
and somewhat ‘simianized’, to suggest:
For the author of Ulysses the question was this: How could a native writer, at the
critical moment of decolonization, take a model of the self as grim as the one
given in the photograph and re-represent that subject as a worthy member of the
polis that is about to come into being?37
Duffy recognizes a crisis of identity in Joyce’s written expression in ‘Cyclops’. But I would
question the claim that Joyce is seeking to depict the Citizen as a worthy member of the
polis. Indeed, in much of Ulysses, and in Joyce’s other texts, there is an overriding
recognition of the fallibility of the Irish, something that many of the more dogmatic
nationalists struggled to acknowledge. As Robert Welch notes, the Citizen and his cronies
Nash, p. 188.
James Joyce, Occasional, Critical and Political Writings, ed. and intro. by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford
University Classics, 2000), p. 146.
36 Joyce, Occasional, p. 146.
37 Duffy, p. 95.
34
35
134
who berate the British are unable to see how their own actions begin to mimic the same
kind of extreme, purist ideal that they so despise and that has caused them such suffering.
Welch argues:
There is a superb ironic play going on in Joyce’s text: the inflexibility of the
nationalist Citizen, the Cyclops, comes out of a fixation with Britain that
dominates every aspect of his thought. He becomes what he hates. His
nationalism is a mirror image of the imperialist authority he professes to despise.38
Significantly, the image described by Duffy engages with the challenge of representing the
Irish in literary form. The fracture and fragmentation of Joyce’s language can be recognized
as a response to such a challenge. Lloyd quotes Maria Edgeworth, who, writing in 1899,
tells her brother:
It is impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in the book of fiction—realities are
too strong, party passions too violent, to bear to see, or to care to look at their
faces in a looking glass. The people would only break the glass and curse the fool
who held the mirror up to nature—distorted nature in a fever.39
Edgeworth’s comments must be taken out of their immediate historical context in order to
be applied to our discussion of Joyce. However, she both raises and problematizes the
issues of representation and the Irish character in print. Joyce takes what Edgeworth calls
‘distorted nature in a fever’, captures it and exploits it, first in Ulysses and then in Finnegans
Wake, a novel which is arguably fraught with the trauma of schism in response to the Irish
Civil War.
Space, newspapers, time and the public sphere
The setting for ‘Cyclops’ is built around the framework of the classic public sphere. The
pub is at first sight a specific space in which the characters engage in discussion that is
independent of state interference, but which is informed by print media. Up to a point the
public sphere needs to be ‘an enclave within a society separating itself from the state’,
within which a certain amount of public authority and public information is used to inform
Robert Welch, Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 5.
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993), p.
134.
38
39
135
discussion and debate.40 The newspaper in ‘Cyclops’ (as in other episodes) plays a vital role
in the dissemination of information and the facilitation of discussion. Newspapers both
introduce and inform the conversation: they are able to facilitate the creation of a public
forum for debate, thus playing a key role in the production of a public sphere. The first
clear description of the Citizen is given when the narrator announces: ‘There he is […] in
his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working the bloody cause’
(12.122–3).41 The Citizen is surrounded by papers, and we see later how both the
newspaper and the hangman’s letters are passed around and read aloud by the characters in
the pub:
For the old woman of Prince’s street, says the citizen, the subsidized organ. The
pledgebound party on the floor of the house. And look at this blasted rag, says he.
Look at this, says he. The Irish Independent, if you please, founded by Parnell to be
the workingman’s friend. (12.218–223)
As Nash writes: ‘this chapter is not only built from newspapers but is also centred around
newspapers for its characters’ discussion.’42
The Citizen mocks the Freeman’s Journal and the Irish Independent for their political
and social agendas. Previously named the Daily Irish Independent, the Irish Independent was
relaunched by William Martin Murphy in 1905 after it had become insolvent following the
Parnell scandal; Murphy bought it and turned it into ‘the first halfpenny popular paper in
Ireland’.43 Hugh Oram notes that the Independent (in which ‘Murphy had invested “40,000
golden guineas”’) ‘had a devastating effect on the rest of the newspaper industry’.44
According to Felix Larkin, the Freeman’s Journal was ‘during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century and until after the general election of 1918, the semi-official organ of
the Irish Party’.45 Indeed, Larkin quotes an anonymous memorandum in the Redmond
Habermas, p. 11.
Cheng notes that the only cause the Citizen is working for is ‘cadging free drinks’, p. 198.
42 Nash, p. 186.
43 Hugh Oram, The Newspaper Book: A History of Newspapers in Ireland, 1649–1983 (Dublin: MO Books, 1983),
p. 100.
44 Oram, p. 100.
45 Felix M. Larkin, ‘The Dog in the Night-Time: the Freeman’s Journal, the Irish Parliamentary Party and the
Empire, 1875–1919’, in Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c.1857–1921, ed.
by Simon J. Potter (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 113.
40
41
136
papers from around 1916 which describes the Freeman’s as ‘a sort of political bulletin
circulating amongst already staunch friends of the party’.46 The paper’s language was
defined by its support for Home Rule, but not necessarily by its interventions on other
social and moral issues of empire.
While we see the disparity in the characters’ rhetoric of solidarity when they speak
about the mistreatment of the Congolese by Belgian imperialists, we can also note that the
men’s attitudes echo the lack of interest within the Freeman’s pages. Larkin quotes Keith
Jeffreys, who writes of the ‘“the paradox that Ireland was both imperial and colonial” (his
italics)’, and concludes that ‘this paradox is reflected in the columns of the Freeman’s
Journal.’47 By 1919 the paper had reached the nadir of what had been a fairly relentless
period of decline dating from the fall of Parnell in 1891. Its last issue appeared on 19
December 1924, and it ‘was subsequently absorbed by its rival, the Irish Independent’.48 By
the end, the Freeman’s had gained a reputation for being particularly toothless when it came
to defending the principles of nationalism and Irish independence, and we see that this is
already present in the references made to it by those in Barney Kiernan’s pub.
The attempt at hermeneutics by the men in the pub as they deconstruct passages
from the newspaper and the hangman’s letters demonstrates the various possible
interpretations of print ephemera, highlighting the malleability of the content of the papers,
and blurring the lines of interpretation and communication. In After Habermas: New
Perspectives on the Public Sphere, Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts observe that
newspapers
created a pressure and a force for change, approximating an ideal to which
Habermas appears to have subscribed in much of his later work; namely, a
situation in which the critical reasoning of the public constitutes an effective
steering force in both society and polity.49
Larkin, p. 113.
Larkin, p. 119.
48 Larkin, p. 112.
49 Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public
Sphere, ed. by Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 4.
46
47
137
In contrast to this, the newspaper in ‘Cyclops’—and by extension in Ulysses—displays the
bathos of a promise that leads to nothing. The Citizen hurls a biscuit tin and misses as
Bloom is driven away; as with much of the action in Ulysses, neither character succeeds in
making their point. After missing Bloom, the Citizen returns to the bar, and nothing has
been achieved.
It is crucial to this discussion to note that Catholic Emancipation had brought
about a watershed in the opening up of the Irish public sphere, leading to a turning point
in Irish nationalism. As Joep Leerssen has argued: ‘The great sea-change of the Irish
Sattelzeit lies in the fact that Gaelic culture is transferred from the narrow confines of high
scholarship and the Hidden Ireland, into the public sphere.’50 Leerssen is referring to the
ideal expressed in the aspirations of the Revival and the Gaelic League. However, Joyce
shows us that Gaelic culture cannot be brought into the public sphere in the manner that
Leerssen suggests. The Citizen and his cronies debase and remythologize Gaelic culture,
inserting it into the cycle of use and reuse, appropriation and reappropriation. They pit
‘Irishness’ against what they see as the degenerative influence of outsiders:
What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.
—Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and, gob, he
spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner. (12.1430–1434)
These men falsify the status of nationhood, entering a discourse of purism and
xenophobia. In this way they shut off and close down the public space of Kiernan’s bar,
creating an exclusive and private enclave. In ‘Cyclops’, no information, discussion or
communication will filter out into the mediated space of the public sphere. Instead, Joyce
precludes anything from being remembered or continued outside of the pub. The language
of ‘Cyclops’ ensures that it all remains enclosed and isolated, limited to its own private
space.
50
Leerssen, p. 27.
138
In Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, writing on the ‘link between the
organization of space and the post-babelian multiplicity of world languages’, Valérie
Bénéjam asks: ‘what happens to space through the creative transmutation of his writings?’51
In Ulysses there is a form of spatial transience or flux in which the narrative slips from the
external to the internal. In this way Joyce presents his reader with both public and private
(personal) accounts of the city. This switch from introspection to public observation
enables a malleable and fast-changing yet fragile representation of Dublin, where privacy
and public discourse are often at odds. With the term ‘fragile’ here I wish to suggest a sense
of confusion and uncertainty generated by the disagreements between conflicting accounts
of the city. Joyce’s fragmentation of his text can be read as an unwillingness to look
forwards to the future. Luke Gibbons writes that ‘in “Nestor”, Stephen reflects that the
past is over but it is not done with, and may contain narratives whose time has yet to
come—“Or was that only possible which came to pass?” [2.52]’.52 In ‘Cyclops’ the fear of
what is to come, the threat of violence, is manifested as a failure to communicate, a kind of
literary aphasia demonstrated in the inability to produce what we might term a ‘fair
representation’—either it is fragmented and unclear, or it is presented as stereotype.
Joyce’s depiction of space in ‘Cyclops’ represents stasis and inertia. The space
inside the pub represents a place that has been sealed off from the day-to-day business of
Dublin and is in some way caught in a time warp, ‘museum-ized’ by Joyce. Henri Lefebvre
writes that it was Joyce who ‘really established the idea of daily life in literature’,53 while
Stuart Elden agues that ‘Ulysses famously shows us that life is a succession of days.’54
However, even if one agrees with Elden that Ulysses as a whole is capable of demonstrating
that life is a succession of days as it counts down the hours of 16 June, ‘Cyclops’ represents
John Bishop and Valérie Bénéjam, Making Space in the Works of James Joyce (New York, NY: Routledge,
2011), pp. 2–3.
52 Luke Gibbons, ‘Spaces of Time Through Times of Space, Joyce, Ireland and Colonial Modernity’, in
Field Day Review, ed. by Seamus Deane and Breandán Mac Suibhne (2005), p. 85
53 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Towards a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s
Death’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1988), p. 79.
54 Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 112.
51
139
the opposite of this. The episode draws the reader off the street and into a private space in
which time—as depicted through the language—goes into flux. The lack of forward
temporal movement in the text stands for the tension between autonomous and fair
representation that Joyce is trying to reconcile in his work.
Caught between the acknowledgment of history and the failure to look forwards,
the temporal situation generated in ‘Cyclops’ is echoed in the text by the alternations in the
narrative as it fluctuates between historical, antiquated language and the present day. The
passage continues in this style as Joyce parodies the language of nineteenth-century
translations and revisions of Irish poetry, myth and legend. In a challenge to the regulation
of time, the Cyclops’ cave constitutes a linguistic moment recognizable as one of Henri
Bergson’s moments of ‘duration’. In his work Time and Free Will, Bergson writes: ‘We must
not be lead astray by the words “between now and then,” for the interval of duration exists
only for us and on account of the interpenetration of our conscious states.’55 Bergson’s
statement can enable us to recognize how Joyce uses fictional and linguistic alternations
between narrative and internal monologue to keep us in flux between the nightmare of
history and the fear of future violence. The moment inside Barney Kiernan’s pub is
extended and elongated as the variety of languages and their significance draws us away
from the present moment.
Gibbons writes that ‘the true measure of psychic dislocation under colonial
modernity is that both public and private are permeable, and that the unrequited past
comes across with the lived intensity of personal experience.’56 The permeability of private
and public experience allows the past to become a constant focus within the present. The
lived intensity of the past is a nightmare from which neither Stephen nor Bloom can wake,
and it arrives by means of their private thoughts, often triggered by a reaction to something
in their immediate external environment. Here we see the public sphere both inform and
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, translated by F. L. Pogson (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971 [1910]), p.
116.
56 Gibbons, p. 85.
55
140
respond to the switch between the personal and the exterior, as well as the past and the
present. While Stephen acknowledges and dwells on this introspectively, for Bloom it often
arrives as a sudden and violent memory:
Mr Bloom put his head out of the window.
—The grand canal, he said.
Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got it. Poor
children! […] Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss
this chance. Dog’s home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold,
is my last wish. Thy will be done. […] Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are.
A raindrop spat on his hat. He drew back and saw an instant of shower spray dots
of grey flags. (6.121–130)
This episode in ‘Hades’ is an example of how Bloom switches from the public space of the
cab on the streets of Dublin to his introspective memories, only to be drawn sharply back
to the present by the raindrop on his hat. Time slows down here to allow us a moment of
introspection. Retrospection and introspection work in synergy, so that memory arrives as
a permutation of public experience within the private lair of the skull.57 The cave of the
‘Cyclops’ is a physical manifestation of that lair. It is only through this use of space in the
episode, and in the novel more widely, that we can see how the traditional notion of the
public sphere breaks down and becomes redundant; and it is within this anachronistic
vision—what is left of the public sphere—that Joyce depicts his particular trauma of
national representation.
Violence and the Public Sphere
Violence, representation and the past
‘Violence is always without the law,’ writes David Lloyd in his essay ‘Violence and the
Constitution of the Novel’.58 In this study Lloyd explores the depiction of violence and its
correlation with issues of representation and literary verisimilitude in the novel. He unpicks
the political narrative that enables violence to be portrayed both as an ‘outrage’ and as
57 Anderson writes that Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning
prayers, which are performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006 [1983]), p. 35
58 Lloyd, Anomalous, p. 126.
141
something that can be sanctioned within the law. He writes that ‘violence is radically
counter-historical, even against narrative, always represented as an outburst, an “outrage”,
spasmodic and without a legitimating teleology,’ except that ‘within nationalist history,
what was violence becomes, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, “sanctioned” and thereby ceases
to be violence insofar as bloodshed is subordinated to the founding of the state.’59
Benjamin asks whether there can exist a ‘system of just ends’ within which violence might
be sanctioned.60 He goes on to clarify that a critique of all forms of violence cannot be
located directly within such a system of just ends, ‘for what a system, assuming it to be
secure against all doubt, would contain is not a criterion for violence itself as a principle,
but, rather, the criterion for cases of its use.’61 Such criteria, which can be applied and used
in the systematic justification of violence, are what become in the context of ‘Cyclops’ the
founding narrative of the Citizen’s purist and at times racist rhetoric. I shall use Lloyd’s
argument to initiate my own analysis of Joyce’s depiction of violence in ‘Cyclops’. This in
turn feeds into my overarching analysis of the construction of the public sphere in Ulysses,
and of how, through his depiction and interrogation of the role of the public sphere, Joyce
critiques the use and manipulation of concepts of community, communication and identity.
Lloyd highlights the paradoxical ways in which violence is defined, justified and
legitimized. In doing so he emphasizes the existence of a hierarchy of historical narratives,
in which the dominant history has the power to sanction acts of violence in the name of
the creation of a nation-state; in this dominant narrative, violence is no longer seen as an
anarchic, spasmodic outrage. Lloyd goes on to argue that the subaltern must always be
portrayed as violent. Drawing on Gramsci’s use of the term ‘subaltern’ to refer to the
proletariat or economically dispossessed (to give a somewhat schematic definition), he
argues that Gramsci’s portrayal of the subaltern’s history can be read against itself:
Lloyd, Anomalous, p. 126.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. by
Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Peter Demetz (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 277.
61 Benjamin, p. 277.
59
60
142
If one defines the subaltern not as that which desires the state but as that which is
subaltern because it resists or cannot be represented by or in the state formation
[then o]f course, from the perspective of dominant history, the subaltern must be
represented as violence.62
In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes: ‘Let us now move to
consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent silenced center) of the circuit
marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the
tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat.’63 In her critique of the Eurocentric
application of post-colonial studies, Spivak criticizes the western intellectual practice of
disallowing the subaltern’s self-representation, arguing that such theorists are unable to
acknowledge the heterogeneity of the subaltern: ‘one must nevertheless insist that the
colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous.’64
Developing Lloyd and Spivak’s crucial work, I wish to explore Joyce’s depiction of
violence in Ulysses, the implications of his representation of the Citizen as violent, and how
this affects our reading of the public sphere, both in Ulysses and in pre-independence
Ireland. To this end I will look at moments of violence and discrimination during the years
that led to the War of Independence in an attempt to locate what I believe is a particular
sense of trauma that permeates the text of ‘Cyclops’. This will lead me to look briefly at the
history of nationalist insurgency and nation-building in Ireland, which encompasses a
discourse that seeks first to define, and then to legitimize or condemn, acts of violence.
Further to this I wish to continue to explore how the stereotype of the Irishman in the
British press also played an important role in determining how the Irish were depicted in
their own national literature. As Lloyd argues, ‘the repeated stereotyping of the Irish as
violent permits the presumption of their incapacity for self-representation and underpins in
turn the “legality” of state violence in terms of both ends and means.’65 In many ways, we
are faced with the question of legitimation through acknowledgment and ‘fair’
Lloyd, Anomalous, p. 128.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A
Reader, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (London: Harvester and Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 78.
64 Spivak, p. 79.
65 Lloyd, Anomalous, p. 128.
62
63
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representation in historical narratives. The dominant assumption that the Irish are ‘violent’
is perpetuated in the British imperial press, and becomes a tool with which to undermine
Irish attempts to represent themselves in their own literature, as well as to collectively
determine the legality of violence within a legitimized narrative.
Lloyd’s analysis of violence and the novel underpins my own analysis of the
portrayal of violence in ‘Cyclops’. However, R. F. Foster’s recent work Words Alone: Yeats
and his Inheritances emphasizes that it is important not to draw too casually on questions of
self-representation when critiquing the Irish nineteenth-century novel, a genre around
which Lloyd frames his argument. Foster argues that ‘to see the early-nineteenth-century
national tale as “setting out to address issues of Irishness” and in the process raising the
question of “slavery” and “defensive orientalism” may involve some over-interpretation.’66
He maintains that while ‘the politics of violence usually hover in the background,’ it is
‘usually evaded; at the end resolution comes in the form of emigration for some (the
irreconcilable or the ineducable), agricultural improvement for others, and a symbolic
marriage for the principals.’67 Foster uses Joep Leerssen’s term ‘auto-exoticism’ to argue
against what he describes as ‘the way that Irish writers present their country as bizarre, sui
generis, “other”, even to themselves’, defining ‘auto-exoticism’ in Leerssen’s words as
‘looking for one’s own identity in the unusual, the extraordinary, the exotic aspects of
experiences, to conflate the notions of one’s distinctness and one’s distinctiveness’.68 In this
way Foster critiques an often nationalist mode of literary historical scholarship, and his
study works well to balance Lloyd’s analysis.
In ‘Cyclops’, Joyce investigates various modes of representing the Celt, and in
doing so he draws from a variety of literary genres. In a chapter entitled ‘How Time Passes
in Joyce’s Dublin’, Leerssen asserts that in order to locate the ‘un-English aspects’ of Irish
identity, the writers and artists of the nineteenth century looked to ‘the cultivation of the
R. F. Foster, Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 34.
Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press in association with Field Day,
1996), p. 225, quoted by Foster, Words Alone, p. 34.
68 Foster, Words Alone, p. 2.
66
67
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ancient, pre-Norman past’ and linked it with ‘the cultivation of the contemporary
peasant’—what he humorously terms the ‘past and peasant’.69 Not only does the conflation
of these two help to produce an ‘un-anglicized, ideal Ireland’, but they ‘also meet because
both are imagined as situated outside factual history: the one in a mythical prelapsarian
past, the other in a de-historicized chronotope situated on the margins of the world as we
know it’.70 He argues that ‘in the case of Dublin, the works of James Joyce offers an
interesting example of how one and the same place can be seen as peripheral at one
moment, central at the next.’71 Similarly, in ‘Cyclops’, Joyce’s use of language mimics, and
at times mocks, the need to draw from ancient and mythical forms of literary history, and
in doing so suggests an argument similar to Leerssen’s: that one of the reasons to cultivate
a conflated myth of the ancient past and the contemporary peasant is ‘because both are
imagined as situated outside factual history’.72
By analysing the debate surrounding forms of literary representation, I will explore
how Joyce critiques the notion that violence becomes justified when it is placed within
what Lloyd describes as a ‘legitimating teleology’, but I will also show that Joyce questions
the limitations of this framework. In ‘Cyclops’, Joyce presents the reader not just with the
act of violence against Bloom at the end of the episode, but also with a performance of
intimidation and bullying enacted through the language of racism and xenophobia. Because
this is performed by the characters and is justified by them through the jingoistic rhetoric
of their Irish nationalism, it is necessary to critique their behaviour alongside a discussion
of violence, representation and the public sphere in Ulysses, as well as of the xenophobia
and anti-Semitism that was courted by influential Irish nationalists and frequently mediated
through the rhetoric of Celtic purism. This enables me to explore how the discourse of
violence in Ireland also frames the Irish public sphere, particularly with regard to the way in
which the media discuss acts of violence.
Leerssen, Remembrance, p. 225.
Leerssen, Remembrance, p. 225.
71 Leerssen, Remembrance, p. 227.
72 Leerssen, Remembrance, p. 225.
69
70
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Violence in ‘Cyclops’ arrives sanctioned or predetermined, and much of Joyce’s
criticism is directed towards the place of authority at which violence has in some way
already been justified or manipulated through the rhetoric of politicians, newspaper editors
and insurgents. Benjamin writes that ‘all violence as a means is either lawmaking or lawpreserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity.’73 I argue that
‘Cyclops’ is the episode of Ulysses in which Joyce depicts violence as invalid and impotent,
as he questions its ethics and places it within a trauma-ridden narrative in which the ‘hot
air’ of the men in ‘Aeolus’ is replaced by a drunken nightmare of racism and aggression. In
so doing Joyce scrutinizes the threat of and response to violence in the public sphere as
much as the violent act itself.
Writing on the influence of the Civil War in Finnegans Wake, Nicholas Allen
describes Joyce’s late novel as an ‘unknowable constitution of an as yet unknown state, the
ever-expanding webs of allusion a rebuke to the terms of a treaty’.74 In ‘Cyclops’, in which
we witness an embryonic version of the interpolated style of prose which became the
building blocks of the language of Finnegans Wake, Joyce tackles the fear of the unknown
state that is yet to be configured. We see this again in ‘Oxen and the Sun’, which is
compiled from different forms of language representing the past, present and future. In the
opening paragraph we read:
Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening womb fruit. Send us bright
one, light one, Horhorn, quickening womb fruit. Send us bright one, light one,
Horhorn, quickening womb fruit. Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy
hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! (14.2–6)
This use of repetition to induce the sense of a mantra or prayer introduces the reader both
to the imagery of birth and also to the phantasmagorical theme of the episode. Joyce
underscores the concept of birth with the theme of Genesis; he conflates the Old
Testament, biological evolution and mythical ancient tales. We read:
73
74
Benjamin, p. 287.
Nicholas Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 17.
146
the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his
breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for
which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might
suffice. (14.128–131)
A link to the age of the dinosaurs and ‘faunal evolution’ is compared to the trivial event of
being stung by a bee, which is later followed by mentions of ‘the survival of the fittest’
(14.1285).75 References to Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals, among other similar texts,
are compared with lines such as: ‘They are entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer with
the willed, and in an instant (fiat!) light shall flood the world’ (14.1069–1070). Here is a
reference to Genesis 1:1–3—‘and the darkness was upon the face of the deep’—when God
creates heaven and earth and light by fiat.76 These emphasize Joyce’s preoccupation with
images of beginnings.
Within this span of history, which is represented linguistically in ‘Oxen’, Joyce
emphasizes the fear of an unknown and uncertain future, which is manifested overall in the
metaphor of birth. On his writing process for ‘Oxen’, Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen:
Am working hard at Oxen of the Sun, the idea being the crime committed against
fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition. Scene: Lying-in-hospital. Technique: a
ninepart episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude
(the unfertilized ovum), then by way of earliest English alliterative and
monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon [...] until it ends in a frightful jumble of pidgin
English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel. […] /
How’s that for High?77
This letter was written on 13 March 1920, at a time when Joyce was completing but still
making changes to ‘Cyclops’ as well as beginning work on ‘Oxen’, while in Ireland the
violence of the War of Independence was escalating. While Joyce does not address directly
the ongoing violence and conflict in Ireland in his letters, a particularly sensitive awareness
of it is highlighted in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In Ulysses, this is demonstrated most
poignantly in the prose of ‘Cyclops’, ‘Oxen’ and ‘Circe’, as the language becomes fractured
and split, and articulacy is overtaken by a form of fraught, and arguably trauma-ridden,
interpolated style of prose. In ‘Oxen’ this goes some way to depict a sense of crimes being
See Gifford, p. 411.
Gifford, p. 432.
77 Letters of James Joyce, 1, pp. 138–139.
75
76
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committed against fertility through the very act of procreation, crimes which go back
through the many ages of history to the dawn of evolution.
‘Cyclops’ can be read as an attempt to understand and come to terms with the
justification and condoning of violence. The Citizen’s use of the article on the practice of
flogging in the British navy highlights his need to show the British as barbaric, cruel and
‘inglorious’, and to counter the stereotype of the Irish that he himself unwittingly
embodies. The Citizen’s brash defiance can be seen as a response to the language used by
British newspapers to depict his countrymen—a supposed hitting back at the British
institutions of the navy and the newspapers. We read:
Read the revelations that’s going on in the papers about flogging on the training
ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself Disgusted One. […] That’s
your glorious British navy […] that bosses the earth [...] That’s the great empire
they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs. (12.1330–1350)
Curtis’s use of the term ethnocentrism, as discussed earlier in this chapter, although
somewhat outmoded, allows us to consider what Richard Brown and Joseph Valente have
called ‘the double bind of hyper-masculinity that may be said to react to a sense of political
oppression with violence’.78 Brown highlights the problematic and often contentious
countering of violent and oppressive colonial authority with a ‘reduplication’ of the same
purist and aggressive discourse. He argues: ‘the Citizen’s discourse is locked within the kind
of binary mode that postcolonial critics describe as a problematic reduplication within
emerging nationalist discourse of the imperialistic authority they wish to resist.’79
This ‘double bind of colonial hyper-masculinity’ emphasizes the Citizen’s (and
others’) need to hold onto the sense of superiority found in the ethnocentrism that Curtis
describes. However, I would argue that there is something a little more complex which
emerges from the dialogue of the men in the pub. On the face of it they embody the kind
of binary mode of aggression that Brown discusses. What we must remember, however, is
78 Richard Brown, ‘Cyclopean Anglophobia and Transnational Community, Re-reading the Boxing Matches
in Joyce’s Ulysses’, in Twenty-First Joyce, ed. by Ellen Carol Jones and Morris Beja (Florida: University Press
Florida, 2004), p. 90.
79 Brown, p. 90.
148
that Joyce adds another layer to further confuse the Citizen’s sense of purist national
identity, and this lies in the composition of the text itself. As Nash has documented, the
source of much of Joyce’s research was the London Times. On that basis we can
understand how the tone of the Citizen’s speech, which is so aggressive, has been
influenced by the language of the newspaper which epitomizes much of what he hates.
Joyce pits against each other two sizeable egos: that of imperial Britain, and the other of
purist Celtic nationalism.
Violence, rhetoric and race
To understand how Joyce arrived at the image of the Citizen, I return once more to Curtis,
who observes that ‘ethnocentric thinking flourishes in a climate of anxiety, fear, and guilt
[…] and it is reinforced by the delusion that the values or physical proximity of the outgroup somehow pose a direct threat to [one’s] own way of life.’80 This analysis allows us to
return to the notion of community, and to how the exclusionary discourse that is
performed in the pub not only smacks of racism, but also works to shut down the potential
for a functioning public sphere. Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin and editor of the
United Irishman, and Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA),
were influential sources in the creation of the Citizen. Both Griffith and Cusack were
instrumental figures in the nationalist Irish public sphere at the turn of the century and
throughout the early twentieth century. While it is commonly understood that the real-life
model for the Citizen was Cusack, Griffith also held many of the exclusionary opinions
that colour the Citizen’s language, and he even features in the narrative. As we shall see, in
many ways the Citizen embodies a combination of both men.
The violence of Fenianism is certainly present, and this can be ascribed to the
figure of Cusack. W. F. Mandle in his 1987 book The Gaelic Athletics Association and Irish
Nationalist Politics 1884–1924 comments on the coalition between the GAA and the Irish
80
Curtis, Anglo-Saxons, p. 7.
149
Republican Brotherhood (IRB), arguing that ‘the alliance of forces, both open and
concealed, that the GAA represented—the church, parliament, agrarianism and
Fenianism—operated in the same uneasy and, as it proved, transitory alliance that existed
on the political front.’81 The uniting of the institutions of church and parliament within an
agrarian-centric framework indeed sums up a certain stereotype of Fenianism, which is
reflected in the character of the Citizen. Furthermore, Griffith’s policy of cultural and
economic resistance is also present in the scene, including the anomalous storyline that
Bloom gave Griffith the idea of following the Hungarian model of non-violent economic
resistance. The narrator tells us: ‘So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John
Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all
kinds of jerrymandering’ (12.1573–5). This is further substantiated by Martin Cunningham:
‘Is that a fact, says John Wyse, what I was telling the citizen about Bloom and the Sinn
Fein? / —That’s so, says Martin. Or so they allege’ (12.1623–5).
In earlier writing, Joyce expressed his admiration for the political ambition of
Griffith, whose non-violent policy became the founding principle of Sinn Féin. The
creation of Sinn Féin in 1905 developed the case for a national movement that
encompassed both cultural nationalism and republicanism. Griffith advocated a cultural
revolution with one clear motivation: to see Ireland established as a republic. In his essay
‘Fenianism: The Last Fenian’, Joyce uses the death of John O’Leary to declare that the old
form of Fenianism has finished:
The death of John O’Leary, which took place in Dublin recently, on St Patrick’s
Day, the Irish national holiday, perhaps marked the disappearance of the last actor
in the turbulent drama that was Fenianism.82
In this article, written for the Italian nationalist socialist newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera
(Trieste, 22 March 1907), he articulates the clash between what he defines as ‘the physical
W. F. Mandle, The Gaelic Athletics Association and Irish Nationalist Politics 1884–1924 (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 1987), p. 13.
82 Joyce, Occasional, p. 138. Barry notes that ‘John O’Leary (1830–1907) died at 5:20pm on 16 March, the day
before St Patrick’s Day.’ It seems that by altering the date to 17 March, Joyce adds a certain romantic
sentimentalism to the piece.
81
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force party’ and the ‘moderate nationalists’.83 John McCourt has written extensively on
Joyce’s time in Trieste, and provides a detailed account of how Joyce acquired the
commission for this and other articles. According to McCourt, Joyce spoke at length with
Roberto Prezioso, the acting editor of Il Piccolo della Sera, and discussed with him ‘the
ignorance that existed about Ireland on the continent’.84 As McCourt argues, Joyce was
keen to impress on the editor the lack of understanding of Irish Fenianism, and also the
lack of recognition of the similarity between Trieste’s subservient position as a colonized
city and Ireland’s fight for independence. McCourt observes how ‘to make his point Joyce
showed the Italian editor that evening’s issue of Il Piccolo della Sera drawing his attention to
how John O’Leary’s name “had been mutilated as almost to be unrecognisable”.’ 85 At the
end of their conversation, McCourt tells us, ‘Prezioso asked him if he would be willing to
write a piece himself on Fenianism and Joyce was pleased to accept.’86
Joyce’s essay contains moments of inaccuracy, and should perhaps be read more as
a piece of political musing than as an authoritative account of the rise of Sinn Féin. Joyce is
engaging in an intellectual debate over the presentation and ongoing history of Fenianism,
prescient in the public sphere, and the opinions expressed in the essay can be traced in
Ulysses. For instance, in relation to the execution of Robert Emmet, some of the scorn
expressed by Joyce in his description of ‘the ridiculous rebellion of Robert Eminet’ (sic) can
also be recognized in the long and detailed parody in ‘Cyclops’, to which I shall return later
in the chapter.87 Of Sinn Féin he writes:
as violent agrarian crimes are committed less and less frequently, Fenianism has
once again changed its name and form. The new Fenians have regrouped in a
party called ‘ourselves alone’. […] From many points of view, this latest form of
Fenianism may be the most formidable. Its influence has certainly once again
remoulded the character of the Irish.88
Joyce, Occasional, p. 138.
John McCourt, ‘Joyce on National Deliverance: The View from 1907 Trieste,’ Prospero: Rivista di Culture
Anglo-Germaniche 5 (1998), 27–46; quotation taken from Stanislaus Joyce’s Triestine diary, p. 37; also quoted
by Kevin Barry, ‘Introduction’, in Joyce, Occasional, p. xix.
85 John McCourt, Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000), p. 93.
86 McCourt, Years, p. 93.
87 Joyce, Occasional, p. 138.
88 Joyce, Occasional, p. 140.
83
84
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Joyce wrote to Stanislaus expressing his view of the United Irishman: ‘In my opinion, it is the
only newspaper of any pretensions in Ireland. I believe that its policy would benefit Ireland
very much.’89 And again on 26 September 1906: ‘In my opinion Griffith’s speech at the
meeting of the National Council justifies the existence of his paper. […S]o far as my
knowledge of Irish affairs goes, he was the first person in Ireland to revive the separatist
idea on modern lines nine years ago.’90
Both Richard Ellmann and Dominic Manganiello (a former student of Ellmann’s)
argue for the importance of Joyce’s seeming political alignment with Griffith. Manganiello
also highlights that Joyce later criticized the violent rhetoric of Sinn Féin’s slogan ‘“We’ll
put force against force” (329; 427)’. 91 However, Ellmann observes that Joyce found
Griffith ‘unassuming and sensible’, arguing that ‘the policy of Sinn Féin […] would bring
about economic and political independence at home, just as Joyce, abroad, would achieve
the necessary artistic independence for his countrymen to import.’92 This rather general link
between Griffith and Joyce has to some degree been discredited; as Nolan demonstrates,
Griffith’s racism and specifically his anti-Semitism were at odds with Joyce’s ‘sense of
himself as the victim and subject of a general British imperialism, and his hostility to
racism’.93 As Michael Spiegel argues: ‘For nationalists like Arthur Griffith who insist on
notions of pure identities, the assimilated Jew personifies a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” (U
12.1666). Jews present themselves as one thing (Irish) when, in fact, they are quite another
(Jewish).’94 Joyce’s indictment of the anti-Semitic behaviour of the men in Kiernan’s pub, I
argue, can be linked to criticism of organizations such as the GAA and Sinn Féin and their
respective leaders, and of their role in the public sphere of Ireland.
Letters of James Joyce, 2, p. 102.
Letters of James Joyce, 2, p. 110.
91 Dominic Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 137.
92 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1959]), p. 334.
93 Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 22.
94 Michael Spiegel, ‘“The Most Precious Victim”: Joyce’s “Cyclops” and the Politics of Persecution’, James
Joyce Quarterly 46 (2008), 75-95, p. 78.
89
90
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Griffith is an important character in ‘Cyclops’, and his anti-Semitic rhetoric, as well
as other forms of racism found in his paper, can be traced in the language used in the
episode. In 1913 Griffith wrote:
The right of the Irish to political independence never was, is not and never can be
dependent on the right of the admission of equal rights in all other peoples. It is
based on no theory of, and is in nowise dependent on theories of government and
doctrines of philanthropy or universalism.95
To get a sense of the frictional and divisive anti-Semitism that existed in Ireland at the start
of the twentieth century, and to understand how it affected the public sphere at the time, I
wish to look briefly at an event that became known as the Limerick pogrom. In January
1904, the Jewish community in Limerick suffered at the hands of anti-Semites, and it is
likely that Joyce, who was still living in Dublin at the time, would have learnt of this.
Paul Bew writes:
In January 1904 Father John Creagh, a senior Limerick City priest, delivered a
wide-ranging denunciation of Jews in history (including accusations of ritual
murder) and alleged contemporary usurious practices. The Jews, according to
Father Creagh, had come to ‘our land to fasten themselves on us like leeches and
to draw our blood’.96
Creagh’s sermon resulted in local violence against the Jewish community, and a boycott of
Jewish trade in the city which lasted into 1905. Cormac Ó Gráda in his study Jewish Ireland
in the Age of Joyce states that ‘the Limerick events are often regarded, and rightly so, as the
most serious outbreak of anti-Semitism in recent Irish history.’97 However, he also argues
convincingly that wider ‘Irish anti-Semitism existed, and traces doubtless still persist, but it
was of a relatively mild variety.’98 What remains interesting with regard to the public sphere
in Ireland is the response that it triggered in the press.
95 Quoted by Emer Nolan and Arthur Griffith, ‘Preface’, in John Mitchel, Jail Journal (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1913);
Nolan, p. 22.
96 Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 364.
97 Cormac Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006), p. 192. Ó Gráda points out that Creagh may well have been influenced by the Dreyfus Affair,
given that he had been living in France at the time, as well as highlighting that ‘both the Welsh and Limerick
outbreaks [of anti-Semitic violence] (despite Creagh’s theological fulminations) were heavily “economic” in
content: neither, it seems, involved the destruction of Jewish religious or communal property,’ p. 193.
98 Ó Gráda, p. 192.
153
The violence was condemned by many leading nationalists, and discussed with
disdain in the letters pages of both nationalist and unionist newspapers. Michael Davitt
wrote in the Freeman’s Journal:
I protest as an Irishman and as a Catholic against this spirit of barbarous malignity
being introduced into Ireland, under the pretended form of a material regard for
the welfare of our workers. […] Let me suggest a field for his [Father Creagh’s]
reforming energies which will not require the invocation of any poisonous feeling
of racial animosity or of un-Christian hate. Let him attack the English rule of
Ireland which levies £12,000,000 of taxes, every year, on our lives and industries,
not to the good, but to the injury of our country.99
In the Irish Times, a conservative newspaper known for its unionism and anti-Home Rule
stance, the letters section included the following two examples:
Is it too much to expect that the spirit of Christian charity will induce some
Roman Catholic divine to come forward at this time, and to preach a Gospel of
peace and goodwill towards the members of an outcast and persecuted race, who
have sought a home in our midst.100
Certainly I think for the future if we hear any of the customary rabid declarations
as to the extreme tolerance of the Roman Catholic proletariat and the intolerance
of Belfast Protestantism, we may summarily dispose of everything of the sort by
asking the very simple question, ‘what about the Jews?’101
Griffith, however, responded to the event, as well as to Davitt’s open letter, by writing in
the United Irishman: ‘No thoughtful Irishman and Irishwoman can view without
apprehension the continuous influx of Jews into Ireland.’102 ‘The Jew,’ he insisted, ‘is in
every respect an economic evil [… and] is ever and always an alien’.103
Griffith’s phrase ‘ever and always an alien’ resonates throughout the narrative of
‘Cyclops’, as does the both implicit and explicit sanctioning of violence from press, pulpit
and politicians. This is what is under discussion in Joyce’s representation of violence in
‘Cyclops’. The manner in which Bloom is discussed by the other characters highlights their
anti-Semitic beliefs, which in this case are also linked with high nationalist rhetoric.
Griffith’s use of the racist stereotype of Jewish economic meanness is replicated in the
Michael Davitt, ‘Letter from Mr. Davitt to The Editor of the Freeman’, Freeman’s Journal, 18 January 1904,
p. 5.
100 E. H. Lewis-Crosby, ‘Jews of Limerick’, Irish Times, 28 January 1904, p. 8.
101 James Stanley Monck, A.B., ‘Jews of Limerick, Irish Times, 28 January 1904, p. 8.
102 Quoted by Paul Bew, p. 364.
103 Arthur Griffith, ‘All Ireland’, United Irishman, 23 April 1904, p. 1.
99
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episode when Bloom is accused of winning on a horse but refusing to buy a round. We
read:
Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver. Mean
bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There’s a jew for you! All
for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to five. (12.1759–61)
As the group discuss the story that Bloom gave Griffith the idea of following the
Hungarian model of resistance,104 we read:
And after all, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country like the next
fellow?
—Why not? says J. J., when he's quite sure which country it is.
—Is he a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the hell is he?
says Ned. Or who is he? No offence, Crofton.
—Who is Junius? says J. J.
—We don't want him, says Crofter the Orangeman or presbyterian.
—He's a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was he drew
up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that in the castle.
(12.1628–1637)
Racism and the politics of exclusion are inherent in this language. Given Griffith’s antiSemitic display in response to the Limerick events, this fictional story of Bloom and Sinn
Féin demonstrates what Frank Callanan describes as Joyce’s ‘consummate familiarity with
the political and print world of the [United Irishman]’, emphasizing his engagement with the
public sphere.105
At the start of this section I asked: how do we go about recognizing a commentary
on violence in Ulysses? My analysis has revealed that the violence is seen to have been
endorsed through the language of newspaper journalists, politicians and activists in the
public sphere. Joyce presents an image of violence as something that is sanctioned and
accepted within the public sphere. He demonstrates that by accepting violence as necessary
within a legitimating teleological narrative, the characters in ‘Cyclops’ have allowed
themselves to become clouded and ultimately defined by prejudice, discrimination and
violence. Rather than drawing direct and potentially crude contextual links to specific
104 Hence the initially mystifying reference to ‘Ikey touch that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest’ in
‘Calypso’ (4.103–4).
105 Frank Callanan’s ‘James Joyce and the United Irishman, Paris 1920–3’, in Dublin James Joyce Journal 3 (2010),
51–103, p. 90.
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events that tie in with this perception of violence in the public sphere, Joyce fragments his
text, layering it with violent rhetoric sourced from both Irish and British newspapers. In
this way he presents a crisis of representation and articulation within an unstable public
sphere.
Violence and the crowd
Joyce’s text engages with Lloyd’s argument that ‘the novel must not merely be seen as a
form which seeks passively to reflect, amongst other things, the linguistic habits of a given
community.’106 By way of conclusion to this chapter I wish to use the image of the crowd
in order to consider concepts of the stereotype, public and private space, community and
the public sphere. Bhabha identifies a stereotype as
a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an
arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference
(that the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the
representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations.107
In the crowd individuals are merged into one fixed form of representation, which results in
the problems of identity and social relations that Bhabha associates with the use of the
stereotype. In her study Gestural Politics Stereotype and Parody in Joyce, Christy L Burns
connects notions of stereotype with community, writing that
[Joyce] creates a community of speakers whose identities shift and re-emerge,
neither approaching a utopic peace nor collapsing into the valorization of violent
exchange. In his complex critique of nationalist extremes, Joyce therefore builds a
new concept of interaction between culture and individual subjects that calls into
question the nature of group identity and ideological subscription.108
Here, through an analysis of his depiction of the crowd, we can explore further how Joyce
examines and manipulates concepts of community and identity within the use of stereotype
in ‘Cyclops’, understanding that historically a crowd is depicted as a whole, or a single
mass, where identities can become blurred and homogenized.
Lloyd, Anomalous, p. 131.
Bhabha, p. 203.
108 Christy L. Burns, Gestural Politics Stereotype and Parody in Joyce (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2000), p. 16.
106
107
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In ‘Cyclops’ Joyce places a crowd on the street at the end of the episode, as well as
featuring one in the story of Robert Emmet’s execution. In both cases, the crowd also
figures as the audience for the main action of the event. In his depiction of the crowd in
the report of Emmet’s execution, Joyce takes us back a century, drawing the reader out of
the current and immediate context of Ulysses and reminding us of the historical role of the
crowd and the political and social significance of its depiction by others. In ‘Cyclops’ we
shift from 1904 to 1803 through the use of archaic newspaper language. Joyce apes the
tone of a nineteenth-century newspaper’s high-society column and its method of reporting
social events, but he also uses a nineteenth-century mode which is both outdated and
journalistic to describe his crowd. They are the ‘serried ranks of bystanders’ (12.637), ‘the
huge concourse’ that ‘roared with acclamation’ (12.597). The crowd is described as fickle
and emotional, but most of all as wholly reliant on the performers on the platform for
entertainment:
That monster audience simply rocked with delight. But anon they were overcome
with grief and clasped their hands for the last time. A fresh torrent of tears burst
from their lachrymal ducts and the vast concourse of people, touched to the
inmost core, broke into heartrending sobs.
(12.650–654)
Daniel Pick writes on the urban crowd at the turn of the century, arguing that ‘the city
dweller, it seemed, had become a monstrous physical travesty.’109 If the crowd in Joyce’s
description of Emmet’s execution is monstrous and without class or identity, then the
crowd that gathers to watch as Bloom escapes from the Citizen resembles a certain literary
representation of a body of people who, in the previous century, had for many defined the
degenerate urban class.
The image of the crowd can in turn be linked to my previous discussion of the
textual interpolations in the episode and the role of the newspaper in Kiernan’s pub.
Violence already exists within the pub; however, the anarchic atmosphere is contained
within its closed environment. The violence of the pub, once it spills out onto the street,
109 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.
174.
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resembles the mob brutality that was present in the characters’ rhetoric while they were still
sitting inside. The crowd of onlookers in the final scene is portrayed as menacing; they
heckle Bloom, using a low, demotic tone of language: ‘Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!’
(12.1802).110 In the image of the crowd Joyce presents a marginalized and unclassified
section of Dublin society who figure on the periphery of Ulysses. This returns us to Lloyd’s
and Spivak’s arguments, and particularly to Spivak’s statement that we must ‘move to
consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent silenced center) […] men and
women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban
subproletariat’.111 In Ulysses, characters who are otherwise depicted as violent and lacking in
representation include figures such as the newsboys in ‘Aeolus’ and the crowd in ‘Cyclops’.
Although the scene outside the pub allows us to see the more multifarious
population of a Dublin street, the crowd is a non-partisan example of an unrepresented,
marginalized class of Dubliners whose depiction in Ulysses resembles nineteenth-century
literary narratives of urban degeneration. Joyce reminds us of the alternative picture of
Dublin: the racism, the potential for violence, the redundancy of the newspapers. This is
not unique to ‘Cyclops’: it exists in the early stages of the novel too. In ‘Nestor’ we read of
Mr Deasy’s misogyny and anti-Semitism: ‘Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is
in the hands of the jews. […] Wherever they gather they eat up the nation’s strength’
(2.346–9). ‘They have sinned against the light.’ he tells Stephen, ‘and you can see the
darkness in their eyes’ (2.361–2). On women, Deasy remarks that ‘a woman brought sin
into the world. […] A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, […]. A
woman too brought Parnell low’ (2.390–4). In ‘Cyclops’, we read that the crowd becomes
‘all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation’ (12.1796), which then changes into ‘a large and
appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from the metropolis and greater
110 The use of the demotic register by Joyce is significant: it is etymologically linked to the Greek word
‘demos’, meaning of the people or the populous, and was used pejoratively when the avant-garde was being
pitched against the popular literature of the time.
111 Spivak, p. 78.
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Dublin’ (12.1814–5). Joyce demonstrates the duplicity of representation in his use of the
literary urban crowd and the politics of space in the public sphere.
The concepts of public and private space and the depiction of violence tie together
the problematic and controversial image of the public sphere in the Dublin of 1904. If the
public sphere provides an arena which facilitates debate that can inform society, then in
‘Cyclops’ Joyce’s depiction of the men in the pub and their attitudes towards community
and public space create a vision of an anachronistic and disturbed public sphere. His
depiction of the crowd leads us to consider the public space of the street and the
possibilities for the manifestation of a public sphere outside of the fixed locations upon
which its Habermasian version relies. This takes us into my final chapter, which explores
the possibilities for the public sphere to function on the street, together with the role of the
individual within the urban environment.
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Chapter 4: Ulysses and the Public Sphere on the Street
Emerging from Davy Byrne’s pub, Bloom walks on to Dawson Street and encounters a
blind stripling whom he helps to cross the road. The blind man, also making his way
around Dublin, suggests to Bloom an alternative impression of the city.
Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone tweed.
Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there? Must have felt
it. See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense of volume. […] Queer idea
of Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. (8.1106–1110)
The ‘eyeless feet’ that Bloom guides across the road and onwards present a perspective that
is the opposite of his own sensual and overtly visual impression of Dublin. Bloom’s
narrative relies on an exchange between the interior and the exterior, the public and the
private. What he sees acts as a trigger for what he thinks. For instance, following on from
his encounter with the blind man, he looks up to see an advertisement:
Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His Excellency the lord lieutenant. Sixteenth. Today
it is. In aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital. The Messiah was first given for that.
Yes. Handel. What about going out there: Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use
sticking to him like a leech. Wear out my welcome. Sure to know someone at the
gate. (8.1162–1166)
Bloom’s thought process moves from the bazaar, to Handel’s Messiah, to Ballsbridge (the
location of the bazaar), to Alexander Keyes and his working relationship with him, and
then back to the bazaar.
Like both Bloom and Stephen’s interior monologues, such geographical fluctuation
is a constant and important feature of the novel, and it is mimicked by the physical
comparisons between the city’s streets and the fixed and immovable spaces of locations
such as pubs, the library reading room and the cabman’s shelter. It highlights the intimate
160
relationship between the individual, the street and the reader. The polarities—internal and
external, private and public, mobility and stasis—guide the reader as to the functions of
Ulysses’s narrative. They act as framing devices. They work together simultaneously,
overlapping, and often confusing the reader as to which voice is the more dominant. In
this way Joyce presents us with a deliberately imperfect, even anachronistic depiction of the
public sphere. Extending chapter three’s analysis of space, ownership and identity, this
chapter turns to the streets of Dublin and considers the politics of commodity, class and
control. Again the reader experiences two versions of the public sphere, as described in my
introduction and first chapter.
First, there is a version of the public sphere that belongs to the reading room and
the coffee house, the model of which in Ulysses can be recognized in the public house,
cabman’s shelter and library. As Andrew Kincaid argues, ‘the public sphere is both real and
figurative. It identifies a series of physical, material institutions […] where an independent
bourgeoisie “assembled to form a public body” and “confer in matters…of general
interest”.’1 This version of the public sphere, which has been prominent in my last two
chapters, depends on fixed locations, places and spaces, in order to function. Second, there
is a public sphere that is manifested in the newspapers on the street, and in the narrative of
consumption that pertains to them and to other items of print ephemera. This version of
the public sphere works in line with Luke Goode’s observation, in a development of
Habermas’s original concept of the public sphere, that ‘the press departed from the
principle of immediacy: a piece of news was no longer a private affair.’ Goode argues that
the rise of print media ‘integrated the bourgeoisie (and, of course, their workers who were
not generally privy to the new communication flows) into regional and national networks
of interconnection and interdependency.’2
Andrew Kincaid, Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 18, quoting Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Massachusetts: MIT, Polity Press, 1989), p.
49.
2 Luke Goode, Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p. 6.
1
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In this chapter we move onto the streets and focus on the second of these two
versions of the public sphere, which exists within a virtual community born of networks of
communication. As I have argued, such networks are formed in Ulysses through the
movement of newspapers and print ephemera. Within this public sphere, amid the
newspapers, postcards, throwaway handbills and letters, there also exist the advertisements,
billboards and sandwich-board men that crowd the city, and I now wish to explore the
relationship between the individual and the increasing commodification of the urban public
space as it is depicted in the Dublin of Ulysses. This chapter explores the relationship
between the public sphere and the street.
The act of reading the newspaper is an experience in which the public and private
intertwine. Reading a newspaper is fundamentally a public act—but it is enacted in private.
The image of the ‘private lair of the skull’, discussed in the previous chapter, describes the
ceremonial experience of the daily newspaper reader. As Benedict Anderson highlights, the
mass ceremony of reading the newspaper is paradoxical because ‘it is performed in silent
privacy, in the lair of the skull,’ and so remains a solitary and private experience.3 Only
through interpretative discussion with others does the content of the newspaper then
become part of the public sphere. In the case of Ulysses, this impacts on the actions of the
characters and on the narrative in significant ways.
By considering the external, interwoven world of the street in relation to
newspapers and street advertisements, we might more fully understand the significance of
Joyce’s construction of the public sphere on the streets in Ulysses. Walter Benjamin asserts
that ‘the street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades
of houses as a citizen is in his four walls.’4 The flâneur is an intriguing figure through which
to consider the social interactions of the individual and the street in Dublin. For Benjamin
the image of the flâneur was encapsulated by the poet Charles Baudelaire in mid nineteenth-
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London:
Verso, 2006 [1983]), p. 35.
4 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1973), p. 37.
162
century Paris, which between 1853 and 1870 underwent extensive remapping and
renovation at the hands of Baron Georges Haussmann. Can we regard Bloom as a flâneur?
Assessing the history and philosophy of the flâneur might enable us to ask to what extent
we can compare early twentieth-century Dublin with pre-Haussmann Paris. As I will
explore, there are key similarities between some of the anxieties expressed by Baudelaire as
he witnessed changes to his city and Joyce’s vision of Dublin as it is manifested in Bloom’s
responses.
Enda Duffy, who believes that Joyce’s novel is ‘manifestly interested in flânerie’,
argues that Ulysses is ‘very much a novel of pedestrians; its primary spectacle is that of
Leopold Bloom on the move. Walking is the primary motif in Bloom’s representation as a
character.’5 Duffy acknowledges the challenge in comparing a metropole such as Paris with
a ‘late colonial city like Dublin’, but he argues that for Bloom walking is an emancipatory
act, and he writes that the narrative requires Bloom ‘to stay in the street, so that the
spectacle of the city as colonial and revolutionary nexus emerges in Ulysses as its political
unconscious’.6 Duffy’s analysis seeks to reveal elements of revolutionary insurgency within
the novel, and he compares this to W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’, which he describes as
‘focusing on insurgency and […] using flânerie as its mechanism of point of view’.7 Duffy’s
use of the image of the flâneur in Ulysses relates to his overarching argument surrounding
the presence of insurgency in the novel. As this chapter will demonstrate, I agree with
Duffy that the flâneur is an intriguing and important presence on the streets of Joyce’s
Dublin. However, the spectacle that emerges from the perspective of flânerie in Ulysses is
not so much revolutionary insurgency, but rather the spectacle of consumerism and the
commodity, revealing a complicated relationship between the individual and the street that
in turn can be seen to operate through interactions with print media in the public sphere.
Enda Duffy, The Subaltern Ulysses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 54.
Duffy, pp. 55–56.
7 Duffy, p. 54.
5
6
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In framing this chapter around the image of the urban walker, I am indebted to the
innovative work of Susan Buck-Morss, who has argued for the value of the figure of the
flâneur for illuminating the productive processes of the ‘man of letters’. She highlights that
‘rather than reflecting the true conditions of urban life, [the flâneur] diverted readers from
its tedium.’8 Joyce creates in Bloom the alternative figure of a Dublin flâneur, and in doing
so he illustrates the importance of bringing back into literary representation the
acknowledged tedium of urban life, underlining the intricate relationship between the
individual and the street. Perhaps a Joycean text more obviously apposite to the concept of
the flâneur is his early unfinished novel Stephen Hero, in which the youthful Stephen’s
constant metropolitan wanderings continually play on the shift from public to private, and
are bound up with the young artist’s anxieties about his relationship with his home and his
country, as well as his role within the public sphere—on the street and in the debating hall.9
As Luke Gibbons argues, ‘to call into question the integrity of the family [which Stephen
does] was to undermine the foundational fictions of the colonial public sphere.’10 This
continues into Ulysses in what Gibbons describes as the ‘links between the public and the
private’ which survived as ‘the endangered traces of unofficial street or public culture’.11
The first section of this chapter will explore the specific relationship of the flâneur
with urban modernity. Acknowledging the influence of Benjamin and Baudelaire on the
configuration of the flâneur, I will ask how this is then transferred into the character of
Bloom in Ulysses, and how Dublin can be compared to the imperial capitals, such as Paris
and London, more usually associated with flânerie. The second section looks at how Ulysses
is informed by a narrative of urban decay. The poverty and deprivation of Dublin are
intriguingly juxtaposed with the competitive, market-driven world of commodity culture on
8 Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’, New German
Critique 39 (1986), 99–140 (p. 112).
9 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, Part of the First Draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. by Theodore
Spencer, rev. edn by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956).
10 Luke Gibbons, ‘“Have You No Homes to Go to?”: Joyce and the Politics of Paralysis’, in Semicolonial Joyce,
ed. by Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 168.
11 Gibbons, p. 168.
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the streets. Here I will analyse the significance of the figure of the sandwich-board man,
together with the advertising culture of the streets and newspapers. Both sections inform
my analysis of how Joyce configures the public sphere in Ulysses. They demonstrate how
the view from the street tells us of the anachronisms inherent within the vision of a
cohesive and inclusive public sphere. This is emphasised by two examples: the marketdriven competition for advertising space (which is consumed by both canvasser and the
individual), and the state of neglect and decay in significant sections of the city, highlighting
a lack of responsibility for, or interest from those influential members of the public
corporation. The image of the flâneur allows Joyce’s narrative to facilitate this unique
perspective (via Bloom) of ‘street level’, as well as taking into account the importance of
the history of urban expansion, modernisation and decay.
The third section analyses the figure of the prostitute in Ulysses. As an image of
inequality, subjection and commodification, she is a defining image of an underrepresented
class, albeit not in any straightforward sense. Joyce complicates representations of
prostitution by conflating ideas of the commodity, the street, popular print culture and the
female body in characters such as Gerty MacDowell, Cissy Caffrey and the black-hatted
prostitute who peers into the all-male space of the cabman’s shelter. By foregrounding the
role of popular print culture, specifically women’s magazines, in his depiction of Gerty
MacDowell, Joyce obfuscates the literary representation of women and the public sphere.
Indeed, I shall argue that it is in the image of consumption that Joyce links Bloom and
Gerty—as well as the image of the prostitute—as they absorb the consumerist culture that
surrounds them and allow it to colour their thoughts and their perception of both others
and themselves. Benjamin wrote in his arcades project that the flâneur ‘takes the concept of
being-for-sale itself for a walk’.12 He argues that the final incarnation of the flâneur is to be
found in the figure of the sandwich-board man, who embodies—and is consumed by—
what he sells. The act of ‘selling ourselves to strangers’, then, as Buck-Morss puts it, can be
12
Quoted by Buck-Morss, p. 107.
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embodied in all three of these urban walkers: the flâneur, the sandwich-board man and the
prostitute.13
The flâneur and urban modernity
The significance of the flâneur for the growth of the public sphere may not immediately be
clear. In simple terms the flâneur is a city stroller who immerses himself in the crowded
streets of the metropolis, while also remaining aloof.14 By viewing Bloom as a flâneur—even
an imperfect one—we are able to gain the perspective of someone who walks the street as
an observer. More importantly, by considering the figure of the flâneur and applying it to
Bloom’s position on the street, we can observe the politics of commodification and
objectification which are part the flâneur’s historical narrative. Indeed, Kieran Keohane
argues that while Bloom embodies some of the ‘heroic utopian qualities of Benjamin’s
flâneur’, Ulysses itself ‘offers a critical representation of the central problem of modern city
life—the obliteration of individual and subjective culture by abstract processes and
objective culture in mass society.’15 Through the work of both Simmel and Benjamin,
Keohane explores the history of social inequality and antagonism in Dublin and analyses
what he sees as Joyce’s response to it. His work is of particular interest for my own because
of the emphasis that he places as a social historian on the state of degradation that existed
in Dublin. While he does not acknowledge the construction of the public sphere and its
representation in Ulysses, Keohane recognizes a particular essence of homelessness, or
Buck-Morss, p. 104.
Keith Tester in his introduction to The Flâneur argues that ‘flânerie can, after Baudelaire, be understood as
the activity of the sovereign spectator going about the city in order to find the things which will occupy his
gaze and thus complete his otherwise incomplete identity; satisfy his otherwise dissatisfied existence; replace
the sense of bereavement with a sense of life.’ His analysis regarding the flâneur’s incomplete identity,
dissatisfied existence and bereavement of a sense of life is compelling when applied to Bloom. There is
certainly a sense that Bloom looks for objects and sights and allows even trivial observations to fully occupy his
gaze, and as I shall go on to argue, the sights and sounds of the street act upon Bloom’s keen sense of loss
and loneliness. The Flâneur, ed. by Keith Tester (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), p. 7. Furthermore, Eli
Blanchard’s 1985 study In Search of the City uses Georg Simmel’s analysis of The Metropolis and Mental Life to
argue in relation to Baudelaire that ‘the city whose existence would seem to depend on the collective
consciousness of all those who live in it is actually determined by the private consciousness of each and
everyone of its inhabitants.’ Marc Eli Blanchard, In Search of the City: Engels, Baudelaire, Rimbaud (Saratoga, CA:
Anma Libri, 1985), p. 75.
15 Kieran Keohane, ‘The Revitalization of the City and the Demise of Joyce’s Utopian Modern Subject’,
Theory, Culture and Society 19 (2002), 29–59 (p. 30).
13
14
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liminality, in Bloom’s position on the streets, and he equates it to flânerie. Mary Gluck takes
a related position here, arguing that the demise of the nineteenth-century flâneur led to his
‘metamorphosis into the hero’ of the twentieth-century novel.16 Bloom straddles both these
roles, as the fictional flâneur in Dublin—a city that had yet to experience the changes that
London and Paris underwent—and the ‘everyman’ hero of the twentieth-century novel.
Gluck and Buck-Morss agree that while it is possible to see the image of the nineteenthcentury flâneur in the hero of the twentieth-century novel, crucial elements of the former
are lost, leaving ‘only brilliant traces of its earlier existence’ in a character such as Bloom.17
The attempt to connect the realm of the flâneur to the world of the modern novel
requires a few caveats, of course. Gluck outlines the need to reconnect the concept of
modernity with everyday life.18 She argues that the hero of the novel embodies
characteristics of flânerie which ‘pointed to a common cultural enterprise’ and enabled a
crossover between emerging modernism and these two figures of modernity. She states
that the hero of the novel was also ‘a textual creation as well as a creator of texts, and thus
constituted a symbolic bridge between the realms of social experience and aesthetic
representation’.19 Bloom is the embodiment of the urban ‘everyman’, and Joyce is careful to
reproduce the banality of the everyday in his narrative. In doing so he appropriates aspects
of the realist novel for his own mimetic project. We can note the urban detail of Bloom’s
experience as we read: ‘In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and
Oriental Tea Company and read the legend of leadpapered packets: choice blend, finest
quality, family tea’ (5.17–19).
What Gluck describes as the ‘bridge between the realms of social experience and
aesthetic representation’, which she argues is embodied in the hero of the novel, is revealed
in Ulysses through the observations of both Bloom and Stephen, projected through their
Mary Gluck, ‘Reimagining the Flâneur: The Hero of the Novel in Lukács, Bakhtin, and Girard’,
Modernism/Modernity 13 (2006), 747–764 (p. 755).
17 Gluck, p. 755.
18 Gluck, p. 748.
19 Gluck, p. 755.
16
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internal monologues. Moreover, the newspapers, pamphlets and billboards that aid Bloom
and Stephen’s interactions with the street are essential components in their active
responses to their urban surroundings. The virtual world of the public sphere, which is
created in the print ephemera on the streets, manifests itself through the actions of Bloom
as he walks the streets of Dublin in the mode of the flâneur. As Bloom leaves his house in
‘Calypso’, we can see that he not only becomes immersed immediately into the variegated
multiplicity of a very urbane version of urban life, but that his own daydreaming interacts
with his surroundings. We read:
His eyelids sank quietly often as he walked in happy warmth. Boland’s breadvan
delivering with trays our daily but she prefers yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp
crowns hot. Makes you feel young. […] Walk along a strand, strange land, come
to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too […] leaning on a long kind of spear.
Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. […] Kind of stuff you
read: in the track of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing
himself. What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a
homerule sun rising up in the northwest. (4.81–102)
Beginning with the sight of the sun ‘nearing the steeple of George’s church’ and the feel of
its warmth, Bloom’s daydream takes a turn for the exotic and the oriental, infused with
imagery from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and the travel story In The Track of the Sun—listed
in Bloom’s library—before returning, by way of the image of the Freeman’s headpiece, to his
immediate surroundings, which include the open cellar door of Larry O’Rourke’s, from
which ‘floated up the flabby gush of porter’ (4.105–6).
In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire praises the artist Constantin
Guys for his use of the crowd. Baudelaire describes Guys—whom he transforms into a
mythical figure through his reverential description of the artist—as a kind of light-splitting
entity:
the lover of universal life [who] moves into the crowd itself as though into an
enormous reservoir of electricity. He, the lover of life, may also be compared to a
mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness,
which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its
multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all elements that go to compose life.20
20 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. by P. E.
Charvet (London: Penguin, 2010 [1972]), p. 13.
168
In both of these passages light plays a role in constructing the immersion and absorption
of the artist in the surrounding street. Light in Baudelaire’s description is absorbed,
reflected and split to make patterns through the kaleidoscope, which ‘presents a pattern of
life, in all its multiplicity’. In Joyce’s passage, it is the sun’s warmth that first triggers
Bloom’s thoughts, but the image of the sun then remains—‘in the track of the sun’, and
then in a burst on the title page, which can refer to both a splash of sunlight on the page of
the newspaper and the symbol of the masthead for the Freeman’s, which depicted a sun
rising behind the Bank of Ireland. These are both images of daytime urban walking in
which the light and warmth of the sun reflect and refract images and observations. For
Baudelaire, the flâneur does not simply mirror the crowd, but acts as a kaleidoscope in its
reconfiguration: he transforms it, gives it colour and interest, fragments the image,
interprets what he sees and figures it as a work of art that he then calls his own. It is a role
that is only available to those in a privileged position, those who have ‘leisure time’ and are
able to access the many areas of the city.
In Ulysses, there are many characters whose time is leisurely and uninhibited by
work, often thanks to a lack of employment. These men with time on their hands inhabit
street corners, public houses, reading rooms, even newspaper offices: the narrative of
Ulysses depends on their free time. The phrase ‘passing the time of day’ is an apt description
of much of the activity of the characters in Ulysses. ‘Cyclops’ begins with the narrator ‘just
passing the time of day’ (12.1), while in ‘Wandering Rocks’, ‘Constable 57 C, on his beat,
stood to pass the time of day’ (10.217). In ‘Eumaeus’ we read that ‘while the other was
reading it on page two Boom (to give him for the nonce his new misnomer) whirled away a
few odd leisure moments in fits and starts’ (16.1274–6). Bloom, one of only a few
characters to do any work, is adept at seeming to be busy, at displaying a purpose to his
leisure time. The dreamy ‘Lotus Eaters’ episode shows a strolling Bloom immersed in his
own thoughts, daydreaming of love letters and fantasies. The hot weather encroaches on
169
his comfort: ‘So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and hair’
(5.27–8). The advertisement for Ceylon tea diverts his mind to thoughts of the Far East:
‘Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses,
[…] not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel.
Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness’ (5.29–34). Yet Stephen worries that
he gives the impression of being idle, as we read in ‘Aeolus’:
I want you to write something for me, he said. Something with a bite in it.
You can do it. I see it in your face. In the lexicon of youth...
See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.
(7.616–8, emphasis original)
This leisure time allows the characters to view their world at their own pace; in this, they
are privileged. Time, and one’s seeming autonomy over it, is an issue of class: it is a
determining factor in the creation of a public sphere which is in turn dependent on the
reading and passing on of printed media, and on the leisure time that requires.
To return to the flâneur, Benjamin is concerned with what lies under the surface of
the city’s appearance and how it is made explicit. For him, the crowd both hides and
reveals the true nature of the city. It provides a refuge for the flâneur to morph into
anonymity within a mass of people who hide and disguise their identity. Writing of this
phenomenon, Benjamin gestures towards an almost automaton-like quality in the flâneur’s
position as someone who is abandoned within the crowd, and he likens this to ‘the
situation of the commodity’: ‘[he] is not aware of this special situation, but this does not
diminish its effects on him and it permeates him blissfully like a narcotic.’21 This key
observation by Benjamin demonstrates how street dwellers of all classes are appropriated
by the forces of capital, which dictate the relationship between humans and objects.
The flâneur not only resembles the commodity in his immersion within the crowd,
but his actions as a consumer are also directed and prescribed by the forces of capital. One
of many such occurrences in Ulysses demonstrates how the commodity fetish merges with
21
Benjamin, p. 55.
170
the language of advertising. In this instance it dictates the way in which Bloom observes
Bantam Lyons: ‘Bantam Lyons’s yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants a
wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears’ soap?’ (5.523–5).
Anne McClintock’s pioneering study Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest, which looks at ‘the project of imperialism, the cult of domesticity and the invention
of industrial progress’, considers the advertising campaign for Pears’ soap during the late
nineteenth century as ‘the vanguard of Britain’s new commodity culture and its civilising
mission’.22 The impact of the brand’s message of civilizing through cleanliness emerges in
Bloom’s train of thought as he looks at Lyons’s dirty fingernails. The effect is important: it
highlights the sense that Bloom has absorbed the commodity culture that surrounds him to
the point that it penetrates his thoughts and observations.
In a line of argument that runs concurrent with McClintock’s analysis, Benjamin
explores the politics of commodification within the historical narrative of urban walkers
and the flâneur. He argues that the anonymous sense of empathy which exists between
buyer and commodity can also exist between a person and an object within a crowd:
If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it
would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it
would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to
nestle. Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons
himself in the crowd.23
Benjamin translates this unique connection between a commodity and its potential buyer as
empathy. This empathy flows through the urban crowd, ‘intoxicating’ the flâneur and
producing a feeling of community and belonging.24 Baudelaire’s interpretation of the flâneur
and the crowd, as seen in his work on Guys, anticipates a similar formulation, albeit with
less awareness of the flâneur’s dependence on the crowd. The flâneur remains separate and
alone; he uses the crowd in the same way as one uses a single object or commodity.
22 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York, NY:
Routledge, 1995), p. 4, p. 208.
23 Benjamin, p. 55. Cf. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, ed. by Karl Korsch, Berlin: 1932, p. 95 (English edn, p. 84).
24 Benjamin, p. 55.
171
Benjamin’s admiration for and fascination with the relationship between the flâneur
and the street helps us think about Ulysses. The flâneur belongs to the façades, streets and
arcades, but there is something ‘unhomely’ in the flâneur’s street too, which is important for
this discussion: it is somewhere to escape to and gain anonymity—to hide in, but then to
feel ‘at home’ all over again in the crowd. For Bloom, the street is also somewhere to find
solitude while simultaneously being immersed in its sights and sounds. However, his
complicated relationship with home—his fears and anxieties about Molly’s infidelity, and
the painful memory of Rudy’s death, along with his concerns about Milly—mean that the
thoughts and memories conjured up through his engagement with the street provide a
strange, double form of release, as he removes himself from his home but then constantly
revisits it as a site of memory and subconscious unease. We see this in ‘Lestrygonians’:
Bloom walks past Adam Court, thinking of Bob Doran’s drinking. He allows his memory
to direct his thoughts:
I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She
twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never
like it again after Rudy. Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.
Would you go back then? Just beginning then. Would you? Are you not happy in
your home you poor naughty boy? (8.608–612)
As the representative city of the modern novel, Dublin is caught in a faltering state
of engagement with modernity. In many ways, the Dublin of Ulysses embodies the
disruptive and changing nature of modernity itself. Baudelaire writes: ‘By “modernity”, I
mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the
eternal and the immutable.’25 Baudelaire’s description of modernity highlights temporal
transition or ‘flux’, a sentiment of liminality which defines the spirit of the modern as the
point where progress and paralysis collide; this is what makes Dublin a city of modernity by
definition. Gluck comments: ‘Modernity as used by Baudelaire implied not so much a
specific historical time, as an unprecedented experience of change and disruption that was
25
Baudelaire, p. 13.
172
characterized by the loss of stable external references for individual perception.’26 Within
the shifting narrative of Ulysses, which moves from the public to the private and back again,
the flâneur is an important figure with which to draw a connection between modernity’s
effects on the city and on the individual. As Bloom walks the streets in ‘Lestrygonians’, we
read:
His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly […]. Things go
on the same, day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. [...]
Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on,
passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks,
stones. [...] Shelter, for the night. (8.475–492)
This passage depicts the constancy of the city over time, yet its presentation evokes the
sensation of moving past static images that depict the various stages of urban sprawl, ruin
and degradation. The movement of objects and people through, around and within the city
of Dublin is fundamental to the narrative of Ulysses, and it is interesting that this poignant
montage is presented to the reader through the perspective of Bloom’s internal
monologue.
For Lynda Nead, the process of metropolitan modernization is ‘not simply a
question of the shaping and organisation of space, it also concerns the experience of that
space, the expectations and fears of those who occupied the spaces of the modern city’.27 If
modernity is marked by a process of urban modernization which creates different angles,
layers and perspectives in the structure and perception of the city, then its landscape reveals
the physical history of the processes of building and development. Rather than
understanding modernity as a moment of fracture and schism that has left its mark on
urban space, we can see it instead as an accumulation of traces and memories, a ‘kind of
archaeology of modernity, in which the sites of the modern city stand on layer upon layer
of an underground city’.28 Dublin bears not only the cracks and fissures brought about by
the process of modernization, but also the fault lines of a city struggling to become modern
Gluck, p. 748.
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2000), p. 5.
28 Nead, p. 6.
26
27
173
while under foreign rule. Terry Eagleton writes that ‘like Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus,
[Ireland] will move backwards into the future with its eyes fixed sorrowfully upon the past,
impelled into that new creation by the winds let loose from a paradise it has lost.’29 Dublin
is unable to simultaneously move forwards and banish the memory of its own past. This is
the experience of those who walk the streets. Bloom (and to some extent Stephen) reveals
what Nead suggests is key to modernity: the lived experience of those who occupy the
spaces of the modern city.
However, there is no narrative of the lived experience of the city dwellers whose
experience of Dublin was one of poverty, deprivation and social inequality. Dublin has
been described as ‘Europe’s worst slum in 1900’, ‘the squalid, backward, capital of
Europe’s Third World country throughout the twentieth century’.30 The abject poverty of
many in Dublin existed alongside an affluent middle class. Social and class antagonism was
rife, and the hope for a united national community, which would enable a public sphere to
flourish, rested on bridging the gap between the poor and those whose ideal of nationalism
was at odds with the very real urban poverty in Dublin. In chapter two I explored James
Connolly’s (and others’) response to the disparity between political aspiration and social
reality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland. Building on this analysis, this
chapter looks at the physical urban landscape and the juxtaposition between urban decay
and commodity-driven paraphernalia on the streets of Dublin, and analyses the impact of
this juxtaposition on the representation and functionality of the public sphere. The
movement of the middle classes into the suburbs meant that the split between affluent
Dublin and the inner-city poor was geographical as well as purely political. Jacinta Prunty
notes in her essay ‘Improving the Urban Environment: Public Health and Housing in
Nineteenth-Century Dublin’ that ‘suburbanization deprived the city of the interest and
political influence of wealthy residents who might be expected to give a lead in the
29
30
Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995) p. 281.
Keohane, p. 29.
174
administration and beautification of the city, as well as their financial basis.’31 As Prunty
argues, the fragmentation of the administration of the different parts of the city meant that
for too long the slum areas did not receive the necessary level of ‘interest’ needed to push
for reform.
This split between wealth and poverty destroyed any remote possibility of a unified
general community within the city, and is an important component of Joyce’s rendition of
Dublin’s public sphere in Ulysses. Declan Kiberd asserts that:
The split between modernity and underdevelopment was obvious to Joyce within
Ireland itself in the almost surreal juxtapositions of affluence and dire poverty, of
ancient superstition and contemporary anomie. No merely realist method could do
full justice to that. A form had to be created which would, in the words of Salman
Rushdie ‘allow the miraculous and the mundane to coexist at the same level—as
the same event.’ That form was adumbrated in Ulysses.32
If we agree with Kiberd, then the avant-garde and experimental form of the novel means
that Ulysses sits astride two contesting states of time as it represents the flux of modernism:
the novel indicates in its language the faults and fissures that denote the paradox of
modernity. As the artist Robert Smithson writes of the poetics of his own archaeological
endeavour: ‘Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and
ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up a series of faults, into a
terrain of particles each containing its own void.’33 In Ulysses the series of faults within
Joyce’s syntax opens up the possibility of poetic interpretation and representation. A
layering of language covers and then reveals the history of the city that it describes.
In his essay ‘The Prose of the World’, Foucault offers an alternative to what he
describes as a ‘totality of independent signs’:
Language stands halfway between the visible forms of nature and the secret
conveniences of esoteric discourse. It is a fragmented nature, divided against itself
and deprived of its original transparency by admixture; it is a secret that carries
31 Jacinta Prunty, ‘Improving the Urban Environment: Public Health and Housing in Nineteenth-Century
Dublin’, in Dublin Through Space and Time (c.900–1900), ed. by Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2001), p. 168.
32 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 339.
33 Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. by Jack Flam, 2nd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1996), p. 107.
175
within itself, though near the surface, the decipherable signs of what it is trying to
say.34
Foucault’s argument explores the fragmented nature of language as it functions under what
he calls an esoteric discourse. His critique of esotericism as the hierarchical hijacking of the
written word highlights a power struggle in the use and manipulation of written language.
He states that the ability to hide and disguise meaning within the fractured nature of
language is a symptom of the history of written expression. It is only in the cracks and
fissures of this discourse, he tells us, that we can find the decipherable signs of articulation.
Joyce too draws on the trope of disguised meaning through fragmentation: the very
essence of Ulysses rests on the dual nature of narrative, observation and history, split and
interpolated within his prose. In this way he is able to switch between and then combine
observation and the stream of consciousness, allowing his characters to interact with and
also to question the ongoing changes in the urban landscape surrounding them.
Joyce was not alone in exploring these new possibilities. In his poem ‘The Swan’,
Baudelaire discusses the new Paris as a city in perpetual flux, the cityscape continuously
warped by the hands of developers. He writes: ‘the old Paris is gone (the form a city takes /
More quickly shifts, alas, than does the mortal heart)’.35 The flâneur’s place in modernism is
rootless and unsure: he is unwilling to be part of the changing cityscape of Paris, yet is
grounded in and dependent on the commodity fetishism of objects on display on the
streets. While the poet is unable to move with the changing landscape of the city, he
recognizes the shifts that are taking place. I see this as the route through which the literary
flâneur can maintain his presence in modernist literature: acting as observer, and recording
the traces that are left by constantly evolving streetscapes and the uses of urban
architecture. But the recording, too, can become a relic: Baudelaire’s swan, ‘this hapless
creature, sad and fatal myth’, bathing in the dust where once lakes and rivers flowed, lingers
as an allegory of the poet’s own faltering attitude toward the fluctuating city. We read:
34
35
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2001 [1970]), p. 38.
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Swan’, in Flowers of Evil (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1993), p. 175.
176
Paris may change, but in my melancholy mood
Nothing has budged!
[...]
I think of my great swan, his gestures pained and mad,
Like other exiles, both ridiculous and sublime,
Gnawed by his endless longing!36
Baudelaire mourns the loss of what he sees as the city’s ability to accommodate the flâneur.
Furthermore, in her 2011 study Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity, Françoise Meltzer
argues that ‘Baudelaire too responds to the city with an emphasis on vision,’ highlighting
that ‘Haussmann himself […] sought to change perception by altering the space of Paris.’.37
With the demolition of the arcades and the dispersal of the crowds, the space for
interaction on the street diminishes.38 Gluck argues that the remapping of Paris
transformed it into a ‘rationalized and impersonal public space’ which destroyed ‘the
physical and cultural preconditions of flânerie’.39 For Baudelaire, the flâneur was part of a
relationship of mutual dependency with the city which could no longer exist. But as we will
note later in this chapter, the ‘preconditions of flânerie’ which were erased by the Paris city
planners still existed in Dublin in 1904, and in a sense this facilitated the movement of and
interaction with people and reading material that allows the conceptual public sphere of
Ulysses to exist.
In ‘Lestrygonians’, we encounter Wisdom Hely’s sandwich-board men:
A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards him along
the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like that priest they are
this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He read the scarlet letters on
their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S. Wisdom Hely’s. Y lagging behind drew a
chunk of bread from under his foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and
munched as he walked. Our staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the
gutters, street after street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly.
(8.123–130)
Baudelaire, ‘Swan’, p. 175.
Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 4.
38 Richard Terdiman tells us that Haussmann and his planners ‘foresaw that their alteration of the city would
change more than its geography. They consciously sought to alter the habits and the perceptions of Parisians.’
Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory of Crisis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p.
123, quoted by Meltzer, p. 3.
39 Gluck, p. 755.
36
37
177
The hungry men marching in file carrying their sandwich boards represent a desperate state
of urban poverty as they are objectified and exploited to advertise products they
themselves cannot afford. As such, they morph into the commodity they advertise. They
literalize Benjamin’s comment that the sandwich board is the last incarnation of the flâneur.
Writing on the conditions of those who carried sandwich boards, Buck-Morss states:
The sandwichmen, casual labourers, part-time and non-unionized, were recruited
from the ranks of the clochards […] Marginal people, proletarian declasses, these
were ‘the whole population of the ragged, the tattered, and the hungry which
society had cast out’.40
The sandwich-board men of Ulysses embody a pitiful state of social inequality.
As seen in chapter two of this thesis, other characters also exist on the fringes of
the novel, indicating Dublin’s marginalized, ‘ragged’ population. In ‘Wandering Rocks’, a
one-legged soldier makes a journey down Eccles Street in what can be read as a parody of
Father Conmee’s route through the episode as a whole. We read: ‘A onelegged sailor
crutched himself round MacConnell’s corner, […] and jerked himself up Eccles street. […]
he growled unambiably: / —For England ….’ (10.228–232). Joyce depicts a socially
stratified Dublin street. Characters include the ice cream seller Rabaiotti, Larry O’Rourke
the publican, the poverty-stricken Katey and Boody Dedalus, the lawyer J. J. O’Molloy,
Ned Lambert, two barefoot urchins, and ‘a stout lady [who] stopped, took a copper coin
from her purse and dropped it into the cap held out to her’ (10.238–9). We read:
The sailor grumbled thanks, glanced sourly at the unheeding windows, sank his
head and swung himself forward four strides. […] Two barefoot urchins, sucking
long liquorice laces, halted near him, gaping at his stump with their
yellowslobbered mouths. (10.238–245)
The sailor swings himself across the street, performing for loose change, and all the while
he looks up expectantly at the series of private and sealed-off domestic spaces and, more
specifically, in expectation that Molly’s ‘generous white arm from the window in Eccles
street’ (10.222) will fling another coin down onto the street below.
40
Buck-Morss quoting George Brassaï, p. 110.
178
In ‘Eumaeus’, Corley tells Stephen: ‘I’d carry a sandwichboard only the girl in the
office told me they’re full up for the next three weeks, man. God, you’ve to book ahead’
(16.200–202). Corley’s poverty and his state of inebriation are clear to see: Stephen, ‘not in
an over sober state himself recognised Corley’s breath redolent of rotten cornjuice’
(16129–30). Initially Bloom is comically suspicious and fearful of Corley, aware of the
‘desperadoes who had next to nothing to live on to be abroad waylaying and generally
terrorizing peaceable pedestrian by placing a pistol at their head’ (16120–123). Bloom’s
behaviour demonstrates his distance from characters such as Corley or the one-legged
sailor. Indeed, as Karen Lawrence demonstrates, ‘Despite his sympathies with workers,
peasants, and tenants (expressed in the chapter), [Bloom] takes pains to separate the
“peaceable pedestrians” like himself from the “famished loiterers” (16.121–22, 123).’41
An analysis of Bloom’s role as a twentieth-century flâneur in Dublin needs to be
combined with Joyce’s critique of the active disenfranchisement of the Dublin poor from
the national—and nationalist—community. Joyce creates a portrait of the ruins of the
public sphere on the streets of Dublin, while tentatively exploring the potential for an
alternative public sphere to exist in the form of the virtual community that features in the
novel. The street-level view demonstrates the anachronism of a vision of cohesion and
community, and in a mode that is characteristic of the modernist novel, Ulysses provides a
metanarrative on the interrelationship between the politics of the street and the internalized
musings of the character.
Dublin, degeneration and the commodity
As stated above, the narrative of Ulysses is framed by an exchange of opposites. As well as
exploring the relationship between public and private, we can also see the novel as
structured around the conflict between mobility and stasis. The state of paralysis in Dublin
41 Karen R. Lawrence, ‘Bloom in Circulation: Who’s He When He’s Not at Home?’ in Joyce on the Threshold, ed.
by Tim Martin and Anne Fogarty (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005), p. 22.
179
has most notably been recognized in Dubliners, but it exists in Ulysses too. This seeming
inertia can be attributed to two main factors: Dublin’s subservient position under British
rule, and the polarization of social class, which led to a lack of consensus within the public
sphere. Eagleton observes that ‘British rule in Ireland had been a force for both progress
and paralysis: if it modernized the country it had also, in Patrick O’Farrell’s words,
“arrested the internal development of Irish self-awareness, preserving it in a pre-modern
condition”.’42 The paralysis depicted in Joyce’s works has been used by some critics as a
metonym for O’Farrell’s description. This section of the chapter will explore the clash
between the dilapidation and degradation found in Dublin and the increase of industry and
commodities on its streets, arguing that these two symptoms of modernity also created a
situation of paralysis or flux in Dublin’s progress, which in turn affected the inclusion and
mediation of the public sphere.
During the nineteenth century, Dublin suffered an extended period of decline, a
consequence of (among other things) the Act of Union and the Famine.43 As Kevin C.
Kearns writes:
During the great famine and its aftermath Dublin became the principle catchbasin for the desperate masses fleeing the rural districts. […] Consequently,
during the second half of the nineteenth century competition for housing among
the city’s expanding poor was intense.44
Many of the former grand Georgian Ascendancy houses had become home to large
numbers of the dispossessed poor. The wealthy moved out as the city lost its fashionable
attraction. Many of those who left were also landlords of central Dublin residences, and in
Eagleton, p. 278.
Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms’s edited collection of essays entitled Dublin Through Space and Time (c.900–
1900) (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001) provides a thorough analysis of the rise and fall of Dublin’s fortunes.
They too argue that ‘the Act of Union (1801) had a major impact on the city.’ In their introduction to the
essays on the nineteenth century, Brady and Simms note that ‘it is probably fair to say that if the city has an
image from the nineteenth century, it is one of poverty and neglect. […] The nineteenth century offered
many challenges to the city in terms of how to meet what we would now see as social obligations and, even
by the most generous analysis, the city cannot be said to have responded adequately’ (pp. 159–160). Jacinta
Prunty’s important study Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press,
1999) provides a crucial analysis of the state of urban decay in Dublin. Andrew Kincaid’s Postcolonial Dublin
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), specifically the first chapter, is an informative,
investigation of the ‘urbanization’ of Dublin. Important to this thesis is Kincaid’s acknowledgement of the
role of Habermas’s public sphere, which ‘allows one to theorize a whole host of urban changes, such as
parks, markets, urban spaces, civic architecture, and space’ (p. 18).
44 Kevin C. Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1994), p. 7.
42
43
180
leaving the city they distanced themselves geographically from their responsibilities for the
maintenance of the houses that they left behind.45 The once fine townhouses were quickly
transformed to accommodate the increasing population of poor and working-class
Dubliners. Prunty notes that ‘homes designed for one family were repeatedly subdivided
and sublet, while even the most enclosed and airless spaces in backyards and gardens, in
courts and alleyways, were filled with poorly built and even more poorly serviced
cottages.’46 They became what R. F. Foster describes as ‘warrens of indescribably squalid
tenements’.47
By 1904 the health and housing situation in Dublin was in crisis; as Katherine
Mullin notes, in 1900 ‘one third of Dublin’s population, 21,475 families, lived in singleroom tenements, a proportion of poor again far exceeding that discovered in London.’48
The reactions of the press are intriguing, as Mullin comments:
Contemporaries were quick to note the spectacular nature of Dublin’s
degeneration. For D. P. Moran, slums were ‘hideous eyesores’, supplying intensely
visual images of ‘sordid misery, dilapidation and dirt’, The Leader, 25 January 1913.
In 1898 The Daily Nation ran a series of articles on ‘Our North Slums’, where
headlines such as ‘More Deplorable Filth’, ‘A Terrible Picture’ and ‘Further
Horrible Scenes’ drew attention to the shocking visibility of festering
slaughterhouses, derelict tenements and overflowing privies.49
Note Mullin’s emphasis on the shock of the visibility of the deprivation. She highlights that
the language sets a tone not of sympathy, but of disgust and spectacle, expressed as looking
or having to look. For the journalists, the tenements and their residents were ‘hideous
eyesores’. In this regard, once again, we must see Dublin not as a twentieth-century
contemporary of London or Paris, both of which had undergone significant development,
but rather as resembling the Paris of 1850, the pre-Haussmann Paris comprised of
45 This is commented on by, among others, Kearns, and John Finegan in The Story of Monto: An Account of
Dublin’s Notorious Red Light District (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1978).
46 Prunty, ‘Improving’, p. 216.
47 R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 436.
48 Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.
177. Statistics taken from Kearns, p. 10.
49 Mullin, pp. 177–178, quoting ‘Our North Slum’, The Daily Nation, 5, 10 and 12 September 1898.
181
networks of streets and alleys, and of a familiarity of place in which the flâneur was able to
immerse himself, albeit anonymously.
As Paris underwent a radical and disruptive change under Haussmann, London also
experienced a modernizing process, but in a more gradual sense. Nead argues that
modernity cannot be understood ‘as a rupture with the past, or fresh start’, describing it
instead as ‘an accumulation of uneven and unresolved processes of urbanisation’.50 For her
it follows that ‘in this sense, it is possible to speak of the multitemporality of history, or of
any object or time.’51 Nead’s astute analysis speaks to my own argument regarding the role
of Ulysses as representative of, but not beholden to, pockets of Dublin history. According
to Nead, the interpolation of the city’s history shapes and informs the process of
modernity. This layered ‘multitemporality’ exists in Ulysses to the degree that the novel does
not embody a single historical narrative, but draws on a collection of events, memories and
moments of trauma. Although it is informed by key moments of Irish history, Ulysses, as I
will argue in my concluding analysis, remains a stand-alone object that embodies an
independent temporality befitting an archive. In this sense, the situation of the modern city
as made up of moments of history is re-enacted in Joyce’s novel.
The Act of Union in 1801 meant that the city lost its prestigious status in the
empire, while simultaneously remaining dependent on Britain. After its successful and
affluent period during the Georgian era, Dublin lacked any specific industry (unlike cities
such as Belfast); as we have observed, Dublin in the nineteenth century began a long
downward spiral of decline. Monto, Dublin’s notorious red-light district and the setting for
Joyce’s episode ‘Circe’, is symbolic of this decline. A small area not much bigger than St
Stephen’s Green, Monto became symptomatic of the changes in Dublin from 1800
onwards. Its main street, Mecklenburgh Street—described by John Finegan as ‘rulerstraight and half a mile long, composed mostly of two-, three-, and four-storey Georgian
houses’—was a once-upmarket, upper middle-class residential street that fell victim to the
50
51
Nead, p. 8, p. 5.
Nead, p. 8.
182
deterioration of the city during the nineteenth century.52 Finegan notes the proximity of the
ports and the increased numbers of British soldiers following Robert Emmet’s abortive
Rising of 1803 as two likely reasons for the fate of the area. He tells us that ‘good-time girls
quickly came to the surface on the arrival of the soldiers, and lodging houses degenerated
into disorderly houses […]. By the middle of the nineteenth century one half of the houses
in Mecklenburgh Street Lower were officially classed as tenements.’53 The story of Monto’s
decline can be seen as representative of the story of Dublin, and of Ireland as a whole. The
macro picture of Ireland shrinks to the city of Dublin, then to Monto, and then to
Mecklenburgh Street. This in turn allows us to connect the situation of Monto, not only
with Joyce’s depiction of it in Ulysses but also to the broader issues of urban degeneration.
This is seen to alter both the geographical landscape of the city, as well as the relationship
between the individual and public space as we observe the ‘ghettoization’ of certain areas
which act to disenfranchise residents from the wider public sphere.
Against the backdrop of degradation connected to the social conditions of Dublin,
we see the increasingly influential presence of newspapers, advertisements, handbills and
billboards. This increased appearance of advertisements and consumer-driven print
ephemera on the streets of Dublin is in contrast with the poverty of the slums. These
elements of print media create the collage of commodification depicted in Ulysses. This
collage of advertising—the advertisements and the products they sell—brought with them
a certain essence of modernism which was lacking elsewhere as Dublin struggled to
progress as a modern city. In ‘Lestrygonians’, Bloom allows his mind to wander as he looks
down at the river:
His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the
treacly swells lazily its plastered board.
Kino’s
11/–
Trousers
Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. (8.87–93)
52
53
Finegan, p. 7.
Finegan, p. 7.
183
This passage helps to illustrate how advertisements colonize public space and as well taking
over the interior, private sphere of one’s thoughts. We observe this as the boat triggers
Bloom’s thought process:
How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream […]. All kinds of
places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used to be stuck up in all
the greenhouses. […] Didn’t cost him like Maginni the dancing master self
advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up or stick them up himself for that
matter on the q. t. running in to loosen a button. Flybynight. Just the place too.
POST NO BILLS. POST 110 PILLS. (8.93–101)
Bloom’s unchecked imagination is a crowded space, full of the possibilities for advertising
and incapable of filtering out his anxieties. As the two collide, thoughts of ‘the clap’ lead
him to think of Boylan:
If he…?
O!
Eh?
No …… No.
No, no. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t surely?
No, no.
Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that.
(8.102–109)
Franco Moretti notes that ‘advertising becomes an indispensable aid to modern
trade precisely at the time of Ulysses.’54 Moretti makes this observation in the course of his
wider argument about the decline of English society. Analysing Ulysses as Joyce’s
monumental autopsy on the social formation of capitalism and commodity culture, Moretti
argues that Joyce represents advertising and its language with the aim of highlighting the
failure of capitalism. There is also, however, a case to be made that Joyce embraces the
language of advertising and its effect on the language and visual stimuli of the urban
landscape. In relation to this, Garry Leonard’s study Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce
combines the twentieth-century philosophy of communication and Lacanian theory with a
reading of Joyce’s use of the language of advertising. Leonard justifies his reading of
advertising in relation to Ulysses by stating:
54 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 2005 [1983]), p.
193, p. 185.
184
Joyce does not cite individual advertisements merely in pursuit of realism or
verisimilitude. On the contrary, he presents the overall dynamic of advertising in
order to demonstrate the extent to which social relations, nationalist aspirations,
power structures, class distinctions, gender constructions, and subjectivity itself all
intersect with, and even depend upon, the simulated universe of advertisements.55
There is certainly no denying that Joyce’s intentions are to incorporate and interpolate a
complex historical narrative of the role of empire, capitalism and the individual into the
text of Ulysses, or that the language of advertising assists in this endeavour. However,
Leonard’s broad gestures of contextualization are problematic. In one sense I agree with
him that Ulysses needs to be read with an eye to historicist scholarship. However, by then
reducing such a grand and loaded list of themes to one particular element of capitalist
culture, namely advertising, Leonard undoes his own argument about the importance of
accurate historicist analysis.56
The selling of advertising space in newspapers was a vital part of the modern
press. Frank Budgen describes Bloom as a ‘spacetimehound, seeing that he sells quantities
of space for periods of time’.57 In the context of the printed press and mass media, space
and time become commodities in their own right.58 Indeed, Richard Terdiman tells the
anecdote that ‘Villemessant, the notorious editor of Le Figaro during the Second Empire,
declared that he was satisfied with an issue of his paper only when every singe line within
it had been bought and paid for in some way.’59 Bloom thinks: ‘It’s the ads and side
features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the official gazette. […] Learn a lot teaching
55 Garry Leonard, Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (Gainesville, FL: University Press
of Florida, 1998), p. 12.
56 Leonard, p. 16. This is typified in the statement that reads: ‘In a sense, what I am trying to do is to read
Joyce in a different way by showing how he writes the history of consumption for the first time, and does so
in parallel with the oft-written history of the Industrial Revolution,’ p. 8. My thanks to Matthew Hayward for
a fruitful and informative conversation regarding Leonard’s use of historicism and his application of critical
theory. For further reading, please see Matthew Hayward, ‘Advertising and Dublin’s Consumer Culture in
James Joyce’s Ulysses’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Durham, 2012).
57 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 93.
58 In line with this, Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts write in their introduction to After Habermas that
Habermas notes that ‘media markets generate problematic dynamics and tendencies within public space. As
mass media began to establish itself as a viable economic market, he argues, it was both hijacked for the
purpose of selling goods, via advertising, and became a considerable saleable commodity in its own right.’
After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere, ed. by Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 6.
59 Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth Century
France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 124.
185
others. The personal note, M.A.P. Mainly all pictures. Shapely bathers on golden strand.
World’s biggest balloon’ (7.89–98). Bloom incorrectly remembers T. P. O’Connor’s
journal as ‘Mainly all pictures’ (7.97), when in fact the acronym stood for Mainly About
People. The front page of M.A.P. demonstrates the significance of advertising space on
the front page of newspapers and journals at the time when Joyce was writing.
Figure 2: M.A.P.60
In Ulysses we also witness the currency of words and space. From posters, leaflets
and newspapers, to the language of sensation novels, letters on foot and mouth, love
letters, and letters home from Milly to her father, Joyce fills his pages with a ‘plurality of
voices’ woven into the narrative, many of which are mediated through printed ephemera.
Further to this, the book itself is also a commodity. As Lawrence Rainey argues:
It [the first edition of Ulysses] signalled the decisive entry of modernism into the
public sphere via an identifiable process of commodification, via its
60 Front page of T. P. O’Connor’s journal M.A.P. Courtesy of Aida Yared, Joyce Images,
<http://www.joyceimages.com/chapter/7/?page=3> [accessed 11 April 2013].
186
transformation into a product whose value could now be assayed within the
framework of several overlapping institutions61
To emphasize this point, we can consider Joyce’s calculations, given in a letter to Harriet
Weaver. They highlight the importance he gave to the minutiae of calculating the value of
the pages of his book. The letter is dated 10 April 1921, and was written soon after Joyce
broke with the American publishers Huebsch and agreed to work with Sylvia Beach. He
writes:
The proposal is to publish here in October an edition (complete) of the book so
made up: / 100 copies on Holland handmade paper at 350 frs / (signed) / 150
copies on verge d’arches at 250 frs / 750 copies on linen at 150 frs / that is, 1000
copies with 20 copies extra for libraries and press.62
Advertising is part of the novel’s narrative. Jennifer Wicke writes that advertising
is ‘the apotheosis of commodity fetishism’, telling us that the ‘stream of consciousness
and crisis of the ideology of the free individual meet under the ensign of advertising’.63
The intermingling of the language of advertisements with the private thoughts and
expressions of individuals blurs the distinction between the autonomous personality and
one whose consciousness has been colonized by the commodity culture of the streets.
Furthermore, I argue that it is through the act of consuming that we can draw a link
between Bloom, Gerty and the image of prostitution. Wicke argues that advertisements
typify ‘the modern condition of writing’, and highlights how Bloom’s world of the local
newspaper has become enveloped by consumerism.
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1998), p. 44.
62 Letters of James Joyce, 1, p. 162, also quoted by Rainey, p. 50. The 1992 release by the National Library of
Ireland (NLI) of the ‘James Joyce – Paul Léon Papers’, an archive of correspondence between Joyce and
Léon which included 220 letters with assorted notes and drafts from between 1931 and 1940, reveals much
about the day-to-day pressures and stresses of publishing a novel such as Ulysses. This is highlighted by
Patricia Donlon, the Director of the NLI, when she writes: ‘The major themes running through these letters
and indeed through the entire collection are the major themes of the last decade of Joyce’s life: his efforts to
get Ulysses published in England and in America and to finish and publish Finnegans Wake, his money worries,
his concern for his daughter Lucia and his efforts to secure publication of her illuminated letters or lettrines,
and his own ill health.’ ‘Foreword’, in The James Joyce – Paul Léon Papers in the National Library of Ireland: A
Catalogue, compiled by Catherine Fahy (Dublin: NLI, 1992), p. vi.
63 Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement and Social Reading (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1988), p. 122.
61
187
From Bloom’s advertisement canvassing to the pictorial refrains of
advertisements such as ‘Plumtree’s Potted Meat’ (5.144–147), Joyce creates an
omnipresence of commodity culture both on and off the street, something that Thomas
Richards discusses in his hugely informative study The Commodity Culture of Victorian
England. Richards argues that ‘from 1851 to 1914 the advertising industry was
transformed beyond recognition as fully modern agencies replaced the early Victorian
space brokerages.’64 Drawing on Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle, Richards
discusses the ‘normalizing’ effect of the commodity on the daily ritual of everyday life,
through which advertising becomes a ‘series of related images in which the consumer sees
“the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived”’.65
Joyce’s use of billboards, sandwich-board men and newspaper advertising space
creates a visual and sensual collage of the modern culture which has infiltrated the public
sphere. His ‘scissors-and-paste’ attitude towards the blending of material in the narrative
can be compared to papier collé.66 Visual and sensual interruptions to the text linger as
refrains in Bloom’s subconscious. In the butcher’s shop in ‘Calypso’, Bloom gazes at a
female customer’s ‘crooked skirt swinging whack by whack by whack’ (4.164). He then
watches as ‘the pork butcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime
sausages and made a red grimace’ (4.165–6). The two images then combine as Bloom
hurries to ‘catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams’
(4.164–172). Writing on Cubism, Robert Rosenblum highlights that:
the cubist sensibility to the kaleidoscopic assault of words and advertising images
to be found in the most commonplace urban situation represents the first full
scale absorption into high art of the typography environment of our century.67
Ulysses too makes a visual and sensual onslaught, absorbing the reader into the
environment of the street. David Cottington, writing on Picasso and the influence of
Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (London: Verso, 1990), p. 12.
Richards, p. 13.
66 Joyce wrote to George Antheil on 3 January 1931: ‘I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors
and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description.’ Letters of James Joyce, 1, p. 297.
67 Quoted by David Cottington, ‘What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso’s Collages of 1927’,
Art Journal 47 (Winter, 1988), 350–359, p. 350.
64
65
188
Cubism, states that ‘the comparison to Joyce […] is instructive here. For Ulysses is perhaps
the most extended and memorable attempt in our literature to represent the language and
consciousness characteristic of the modern urban experience.’68
In his poem ‘Zone’, Guillaume Apollinaire celebrates the potential for commodity
and collage on the streets of Paris.69 He ‘registered the jolt that modernity had registered
on [him] by celebrating the linguistic pleasures of billboards and street signs’.70 Apollinaire
celebrates the aesthetic joys not only of the metropolis, but also of the industrial
commodity that is fastened to the city’s streets. We read:
You read the handbills the catalogues the singing posters
So much for poetry this morning and the prose is in the papers
Special editions full of crimes
Celebrities and other attractions for 25 centimes.71
In Ulysses we can see both a celebration of the impact of print media and an apprehension
of instability as Joyce mixes the celebration with the crisis of language, identity and
representation. Bloom buys his newspaper in ‘Calypso’ and reads in it an advertisement
for a planters company named in Hebrew ‘Agendath Netaim’ (4.191–2), meaning the
promised land.72 Initially his senses are led back to memories of ‘eucalyptus trees […]
Orangegroves, immense melonfields north of Jaffa’ (4.193–4). However, the imagery
swiftly moves to ‘a barren land, bare waste […] a dead sea in a dead land, grey and old.
Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race’ (4.219–24). Invoking the image of the exiled
Jewish race, Bloom’s thought process continues:
It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman’s: the grey
sunken cunt of the world.
Desolation.
Cottington, p. 357.
In his 1982 essay ‘Joyce’s Use of Collage in “Aeolus”’, Archie K. Loss explores the influence of collage on
Joyce’s work, focussing on the inclusion of the headlines in ‘Aeolus’. Loss also acknowledges in some detail
the influence of Cubism, Dada and poets such as Apollinaire and Marinetti, writing: ‘Because collage makes
such extensive use of newspaper headlines, this technique, first practiced by the Cubists in 1912 […], suggests
itself as a possible source, especially since the similarities between Cubist and Futurist collage and “Aeolus”
go beyond mere appearances.’ Archie K. Loss, ‘Joyce’s Use of Collage in “Aeolus”’, Journal of Modern Literature
9 (1982), 175–182 (p. 176).
70 ‘Art Since 1900’, in Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism, ed. by Hal Forster et al. (London: Thames
and Hudson, 2004), p. 112.
71 Guillaume Apollinaire, Zone, trans. by Samuel Beckett (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972), p. 9.
72 Gifford, p. 74.
68
69
189
Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned into
Eccles Street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his
blood: age crusting him in a salt cloak. (226–232)
The newspaper begins this journey of emotions for Bloom, and interestingly, in an attempt
to divert his mind, he tries to think of another cultural institution: ‘Must begin again those
Sandow’s exercises’ (3.234). Eugene Sandow was a popular bodybuilder, whose book on
self-improvement is owned (and, we can assume, read) by Bloom. R. B. Kershner argues
that Sandow was an expert in self-advertisement and self-promotion; he ‘managed to
disseminate himself throughout a commercial empire that always reflected back upon
himself’.73 With his aggressive self-promotion and the commodification of his own body,
Sandow stands for many of the effects of popular culture and advertising on the individual.
Bloom the advertising man, whose head is filled with images from popular culture and
advertisements, tries to move his thoughts away from the troubled images that plague his
memories and thoughts of home; but he thinks of Eugene Sandow, a walking advert.
In Ulysses, an awareness of billboards and advertisements works its way into the
characters’ subconscious, and so into the consciousness of the novel. Bloom inhabits
both physical and metaphysical space within the text, as the narrative of ‘Lotus Eaters’
exemplifies:
Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multi-coloured
hoardings. Cantrell and Cochrane’s Ginger Ale (Aromatic). Clery’s Summer Sale.
No, he’s going straight. Hello. Leah tonight. Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Like to see
her again in that. Hamlet she played last night. […] Why Ophelia committed
suicide. Poor papa! (5.192–197)
As with the previous example, Bloom’s thoughts make connections between what he is
looking at and his powerful and often emotionally destabilizing memories. Similarly, the
front pages of the newspaper, bill stickers and news placards have a physical presence on
the streets of the city, while also finding their way into the characters’ subconscious.
Patrick Collier comments on this:
73
R. Brandon Kershner, The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 154.
190
newspapers write their way into consciousness, establishing, in contest and in
tandem with other discourses, the perceptual categories through which the novel’s
characters view the world.74
The press and the advertising men of Dublin can be seen to be attempting to reclaim the
spaces of their city, both on the external level—on the streets and signposts—and also
within that ‘private lair of the skull’ which Gibbons and Stephen Kern both highlight as a
refuge for the reader.
Urban deprivation and advertising make strange bedfellows. The sandwich-board
man epitomizes the objectification of the body within a competitive, market-driven
world, and yet those who carry a sandwich board are often the poorest in society. Joyce
acknowledges this in ‘Lestrygonians’, but he complicates the assumption of good versus
bad to be found in the rhetoric of increased commodification. The language of
advertising is beguiling to Bloom and he allows it to permeate his thoughts, while print
ephemera belong to the same culture of advertising as the commodification of textual
space in newspapers. The public sphere, which is created out of a virtual community and
made up of a network of readers, mingles with and is dependent on this culture. Joyce
creates a complex image of a public sphere which recognizably belongs to a city that is in
the process of becoming modern.
Women, the street and the public sphere
‘But who was Gerty?’ (13.78)
According to the narrator of ‘Nausicaa’, ‘Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her
companions, lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a
specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see’ (13.79–80). She becomes
the object not only of Bloom’s gaze, but also of the narrator’s: she is studied and looked
at through a range of narrative voices. Here again, we can see the Ulyssean interplay
between internal and external as we view Gerty from various narrative perspectives. The
74
Patrick Collier, Modernism on Fleet Street (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), p. 127.
191
question ‘who was Gerty?’ is a starting point from which to consider the perception of
women in society, on the streets and in the public sphere.
In ‘Nausicaa’ we explore Gerty’s use—or consumption—of the language and
content of popular journals. Many critics have contributed important scholarly work on
the role of women in Joyce’s writing, often focusing on Molly or Gerty.75 In this final
section, I will consider the image of Gerty as a consumer, exploring her interaction with
print culture and the self-perception that it encourages. This will then enable me to draw
a link between Gerty and Bloom through their respective responses to the print media
which surrounds them. Furthermore, the figure of the prostitute encompasses the
market-driven objectification and commodification of the female body. It can be seen as a
link between the flâneur, the rise of advertising and print culture on the streets, and the
role of women in the public sphere. Concepts of consumption and the consumer
demonstrate similarities between Gerty and Bloom, allowing us to evaluate the
relationship between the commodity and the individual within the urban public
environment.
This section will explore the engagement between women, print culture and the
public sphere, and will analyse whether a woman on the street is able to function with the
same freedom as the urban flâneur without becoming—like the sandwich-board man—a
commodity herself. Indeed, Baudelaire explores this dilemma of modernity in his poems
‘La Belle Dorothée’ and ‘Mademoiselle Bistori’, both of which consider the ambiguity and
arbitrariness of the label ‘prostitute’ in nineteenth-century Paris. Maria Scott discusses
Baudelaire’s stance on the nature of prostitution, arguing that
75 These include Women in Joyce, ed. by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless, (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), which
contains Henke’s essay ‘Gerty MacDowell: Joyce’s Sentimental Heroine’; Bonnie Kime Scott James Joyce
(Brighton: Harvester, 1987); more recently, Karen R. Lawrence, Who’s Afraid of James Joyce (Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida, 2010), in particular her chapter entitled ‘Compromising Letters: Joyce, Women,
and Feminism’, which includes a useful brief history of the development of feminist studies in Joyce
scholarship, and of the rise of women within the field. See also Andrew Gibson’s chapter ‘Waking up in
Ireland: “Nausicaa”’, in Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), and Katherine Mullin’s James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), both of which I will return to later in this chapter.
192
If the heroines of ‘La Belle Dorothée’ and ‘Mademoiselle Bistori’ are ambiguous
prostitutes, the duality constitutive of prostitution even invading their textual
inscription, they may consequently serve as appropriate emblems or allegories of
the potential duality of Baudelaire’s prose poetry.76
Scott’s analysis brings to light the treatment of women on the streets of Paris, and allows
us to contextualize some of Baudelaire’s more perplexing depictions of women in his
work. Scott tells us that ‘working-class women in public places were often mistaken for
unregistered prostitutes,’ and that under French law the prostitute was required ‘to be at
once visible and invisible to passers-by, legible to some but illegible to others’, leading to
the impossible dilemma of ‘how to give herself to be read in two different ways,
depending on whether her interpreter was a potential customer or not’.77 Baudelaire
recognizes the liminal and precarious existence to which this leads. Indeed, if we return to
‘The Painter of Modern Life’, he describes the courtesan as ‘a sort of bohemian
wandering on the limits of a regular society, the triviality of her life, which is a life of ruse
and combat, appears inevitably from behind her outward pomp.’78 The fringe existence of
the courtesan can be related to the ambiguous nature of the image of the prostitute and
the lone woman on the streets of Paris or Dublin, particularly when analysed through
what we have already discussed as an urban public sphere dominated by a masculine
consumerist environment.
Therefore, ‘who was Gerty?’ can be considered as a question about how women
are looked at in comparison with the male flâneur and his use of urban public space, about
how women look at themselves, and about the degree to which that gaze is prescribed
through the language of magazines such as the Lady’s Pictorial. Here we must acknowledge
that the culture of popular journals dictated society’s expectations of women, and that the
pervasiveness of such print culture on the streets—building on my description in my
introduction of a public sphere reliant on print media—shaped and manipulated the
construction of the public sphere. In Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of
Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 55.
Scott, p. 53.
78 Quoted and translated by Scott, p. 53.
76
77
193
Disorder, R. B. Kershner argues that all of the major characters in Ulysses are affected by
Joyce’s choices of reading. This is demonstrated through Gerty, whose description is
mediated through the language of certain ladies’ periodicals:79
Gerty was dressed simply but with the instinctive taste of a votary of Dame
Fashion […]. A neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes (because it was
expected in the Lady’s Pictorial that electric blue would be worn) with a smart vee
opening down to the division and kerchief pocket. (13.148–154)
This description of Gerty implies not only that she has modelled herself on the
expectations expressed in the Lady’s Pictorial, but also that the narrator of ‘Nausicaa’ too
has been influenced by the culture of popular print media, which, as Kershner describes,
‘lie scattered’ throughout Joyce’s text. The reader of the novel is encouraged to look at
Gerty through the lens of these magazines, and to perceive her character as an invention
of popular print culture.
Andrew Gibson suggests that Gerty’s character is moulded from the material she
reads. He argues that ‘Gerty’s conception of the world is […] deeply and densely
embedded in the world of the magazines,’ and that ‘they make up the substance of
Gerty’s cultural imaginary (as distinct from her consciousness).’80 Gibson’s description
supports his further argument that ‘Joyce is chiefly concerned, not with a fictional style,
but with the magazine culture as a whole.’81 This analysis helps to identify how the
reader’s experience of the episode is influenced by the print culture that informs the
narrative. If we agree with Gibson, then we are being asked to evaluate not only the
depiction of Gerty and the interaction that takes place between her and Bloom, but also
the culture of print magazines that frames and informs the episode.
Joyce’s fascination with popular magazines, and his interest in using them as key
material in his novel, is demonstrated in a postcard to his Aunt Josephine from Trieste on
5 January 1920, in which he requests ‘a bundle of other novelettes and any penny hymnal
79 R. B. Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 2.
80 Gibson, p. 139.
81 Gibson, p. 139.
194
you can find as I need them’.82 Joyce used the material and information sent to him by his
aunt and others to piece together his own fictional image of Dublin. They are what
Kershner is referring to when he writes of ‘the reading that Joyce painstakingly specifies
[…], giving the book so much of its period flavour.’83 Indeed, in the same postcard to his
aunt, Joyce wrote:
Another thing I wanted to know is whether there are any trees (and of what kind)
behind the Star of the Sea church in Sandymount visible from the shore and also
whether there are steps leading down at the side of it from Leahy’s terrace. If you
can find out these facts for me quickly I shall be glad.84
The precision of detail on which Joyce seems to insist has led critics to emphasize his
need for verisimilitude in his replication of Dublin. However, as Kershner has
demonstrated, Joyce also seems interested in the idea of ‘writing as detritus’. Quoting a
letter sent by Joyce to Budgen in 1921 ‘to ask for a cheap handbook on Freemasonry “or
any ragged, dirty, smudged, torn, defiled, effaced, dogeared, coverless, undated,
anonymous misprinted book on mathematics or algebra or trigonometry or Euclid from a
cart”’, Kershner argues that ‘from the tone of these descriptions, clearly he is not
interested in the texts as sources of reliable information, but more as a kind of cultural
bricolage, random remnants of the great Victorian age of information.’85 I would add that
such pieces of print ephemera are not simply relics of a great Victorian age, but are also
fragments of the all-informing and all-consuming popular print culture within which both
Bloom and Gerty exist.
Gerty’s character is modelled on the nineteenth-century American sentimental
novel The Lamplighter, a story about female development and improvement in which the
protagonist, Gertrude Flint, is portrayed as an innocent young woman.86 While Gerty’s
character might well have been modelled on The Lamplighter, much of her behaviour
Letters of James Joyce, 1, p. 135.
Kershner, Popular Literature, p. 2.
84 Letters of James Joyce, 1, p. 135.
85 Kershner, Culture, p. 86, quoting Letters of James Joyce, 1, p. 160.
86 Gifford, p. 384.
82
83
195
directly contrasts with the wholesome Flint. Mullin emphasizes the contrast between the
two characters:
In sharp contrast to Gertrude Flint’s innocence of ‘coquettish desires’, Gerty
MacDowell is acutely conscious of herself as an enticing sight, not only removing
and replacing her hat to display her ‘unusually fine head of hair’, but also tilting it
so she can monitor the effect of her display on Bloom. […] Joyce thus places the
issue of spectacle and spectatorship at the heart of his subversion of the ‘young
person’, filtering the affiliated questions of innocence and agency through the
visual.87
What Mullin notes as spectacle and spectatorship is confirmed as Bloom watches Gerty
‘perform’ for him. Mullin’s analysis complements my own regarding the ambiguous
nature of Gerty’s sexuality and performance, as well as of her role, if any, in the public
sphere.
Furthermore, Mullin demonstrates that the view shown of Gerty mimics the male
gaze through a mutoscope.88 Indeed, Bloom thinks: ‘Ah, yes. Mutoscope pictures in Capel
street: for men only. Peeping Tom. […] Do they snapshot those girls or is it all a fake?
Lingerie does it’ (13.793–96). The mutoscope, as described by David Trotter, was ‘a
motion picture device consisting of a series of photographs mounted on a cylinder’.
Trotter explains that ‘Mutoscopes showed a wide range of “films,” but the most popular
tended to involve young women in various states of undress.’89 The ‘peephole’
construction of the mutoscope adds a voyeuristic element to the experience, which can
also be recognized in the actions of Bloom as he watches Gerty. Mullin describes the
mutoscope as a ‘technologically novel and distinctly shady […] fin de siècle optical toy
which destabilized the ideas of youth, femininity and violated innocence upon which
social purity rhetoric depended’.90 Tropes such as femininity, innocence and social purity
are keenly emphasized in stories like The Lamplighter. By having Bloom liken his
experience at the mutoscope venue on Capel Street to his interaction with Gerty on the
Mullin, p. 143.
Mullin, p. 141.
89 David Trotter, ‘T. S. Eliot and Cinema’, Modernism/Modernity 13 (2006), 237-265, p. 261.
90 Mullin, p. 141.
87
88
196
Strand, Joyce overturns the impression of Gerty’s innocence, and puts Bloom in the
position of a voyeur.
As well as providing a gendered perspective on the language of the popular
culture and print media that dominate the streets of Dublin, Bloom’s scrutiny of Gerty’s
body objectifies her: her relationship with Bloom is a relationship between her body and
his gaze, his looking and her response to him. Bloom’s objectification of Gerty is evident
at the moment when he realizes that she is lame:
Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That's why she's left on the
shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was wrong by the cut of her
jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite.
Glad I didn't know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same. I
wouldn’t mind. (13.772–6)
Here we read how he also sentimentalizes her as the ‘jilted beauty’. He is simultaneously
both sympathetic and dismayed at the sight of her disability.
Gerty’s willingness to perform, to lift her skirt and lean back, demonstrates a lack
of innocence already embedded in her personality. Much of what dominates her
behaviour is connected to both Bloom’s and her own experiences of popular culture and
entertainment. Bloom reacts by likening her to ‘those skirtdancers behaving so immodest
before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking’ (13.728–33). Bloom’s gaze is
fixed on Gerty as he draws a connection between public spectacle and private
performance. Furthermore, Mullin argues that Gerty bears similarities with a prostitute:
Gerty accrues the familiar props and gestures of prostitution, and Bloom, in
recalling the prostitute ‘in Meath street that night’ (13: 868–9) and the mutoscope
as parallel contexts for his encounter with Gerty, attests to the instability of the
contemporary boundary between the commodification of sex and of sexual
spectacle.91
What Mullin describes as the ‘instability of the contemporary boundary between the
commodification of sex and of sexual spectacle’ is key. Not only does it underline the
commodification of the female body, but I argue that it is also a result of the exclusion of
women from the public sphere, and of the efforts made to enforce this.
91
Mullin, p. 149.
197
If, as Rainey suggests, the Habermasian public sphere was transformed into a
discursive space in which ‘norms of rational argument began to take precedence over
status, tradition, or the identity of participants in civic discussion,’ then this opened up the
potential for a more equal community in which there was no hierarchy based on land
ownership or inherited status.92 As he traces the development of the public sphere,
Habermas notes that the crucial change in the dynamic of power and status in society
determined who held the public authority needed to facilitate change through the public
sphere. He argues that by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the feudal powers, the
Church, the prince, and the nobility, who were the carriers of the representative publicness,
disintegrated in a process of polarization; in the end they split into private elements, on the
one hand, and public ones, on the other.’93 Habermas states that the bourgeoisie was an
ineffectual replacement for the feudal powers that had once held sway over the public
sphere with their perceived authority.
The opening up of the public sphere, onto the street and into public discourse, is
what enabled it to continue to exist. The role of the print media, which had already
facilitated much of the change and expansion of the public sphere under modernity, aided
the creation of a virtual network of communication. Beginning with a close reading of
Gerty MacDowell, I have argued that women’s place within the public sphere and their
relationship with the street was limited and problematic, and that this was magnified by the
growth of commodification and advertising on the street. The growth of advertising and
the increased commodification of public space—which, as Richards argues, had been
constructed entirely for the bourgeoisie —goes some way to explaining why for Habermas
the bourgeoisie by its very nature ‘could no longer create for itself a representative
Rainey, p. 5.
Habermas, p. 11. Interestingly, Habermas adds that ‘religion became a private matter. The so-called
freedom of religion historically secured the first sphere of private autonomy; the Church itself continued to
exist as one corporate body among others under public law,’ pp. 11–12.
92
93
198
publicness’.94 Richards argues that, up until the end of the nineteenth century, the culture
of advertising ‘consisted almost entirely of the bourgeoisie talking to itself’.95
The female body in the public space of the streets is something to be objectified: a
commodity to be looked at and controlled. We recognize this in Gerty, not just in her own
consumption of the fashions prescribed in her magazines, but also in how she is looked at
by Bloom, and how she fits into the role of a woman in a public space. Griselda Pollock
compares the male flâneur with a female one in order to emphasize the disparity between
the public roles of men and women. She argues:
The flâneur symbolizes the privilege or freedom to move about the public arenas
of the city observing but never interacting, consuming the sights through a
controlling but rarely acknowledged gaze […]. For women, the public spaces thus
construed were where one risked losing one’s virtue, dirtying oneself; going out in
public and the idea of disgrace were closely allied.’96
How does this important analysis tie in with Gerty and her interaction with Bloom?
Certainly, as we have explored, Gerty performs for Bloom, whose gaze is likened to that of
someone looking through a mutoscope. But equally, Gerty holds onto a certain amount of
control, and she undoubtedly takes pleasure in the risqué performance on the beach.
Richard Brown has attempted to unpack Joyce’s relationship with women. He
points to a note made by Joyce in his Scribbledehobble notebook that reads: ‘cruelty of sexual
idiocy (Desdemona)’.97 Brown uses this to argue that ‘virginity is not innocence but coyness
and flirtation, whether conscious or unconscious. That is the point of transporting Gerty
MacDowell’s friend, Cissy Caffrey, […] to “Circe” where she appears as a “shilling
whore”.’98 This reading of Joyce’s opinion of women clearly stems from Stephen Hero, in
which Stephen compares the sexual attitude of a prostitute he passes on the street with the
Habermas, p. 13.
Richards, p. 7.
96 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London and New York:
Routledge, 1988), p. 69.
97 James Joyce’s Scribbledehobble: the Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake, ed. with notes and intro. by Thomas E.
Connolly (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), p. 60. In his introduction Connolly notes that
this comment is made by Joyce on the ‘page devoted to “A Little Cloud”’: ‘When we apply the remark to “A
Little Cloud,” we can see that story as a kind of inverted Othello in which the woman assumes the dominant
sexual role and destroys her husband in the process,’ p. xiv.
98 Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 118.
94
95
199
character of Emma. As Brown points out, Stephen ‘works out his thoughts in conversation
with Lynch, coming to argue that it is the “virgin” Emma who is greedy and materialistic in
her sexual behaviour and the prostitute who is generous and loving (SH 206–8).’99 Brown
argues that this particular mindset ‘comes back into focus […] at the end of the “Sirens”
episode of Ulysses where Bloom, leaving the Ormond Hotel, encounters the “whore from
the lane”’.100 While Brown’s important study opened up much of the scholarly discussion
that is still ongoing about Joyce and sexuality, his reading of Stephen’s jilted and angry
description of Emma as ‘greedy and materialistic’ in comparison with the prostitute’s
‘generous and loving’ approach to sex, and his argument that this thread of opinion is also
to be found in Ulysses, is disengaged not just from the complex and troubling narrative of
Joyce’s relationship with women, but also from the dynamic and complicated discourse of
gender and the male gaze explored in Ulysses. Stephen’s frustration with Emma brings to
light his own selfish and adolescent attitude towards women, which does not resurface in
Bloom’s character. What is produced in Ulysses, however, is an opening up of the debate
surrounding the social status of women on the streets, and the interrelationship between
the female body as object and the subversive power of commodity culture in the public
sphere.
If Gerty and others represent women who occupy public space, then Molly Bloom
represents the private and domestic sphere. Molly is rarely seen, and when she is, she is
often portrayed as an incomplete character. Joyce introduces her to the reader in parts
which eventually come to represent her whole character. In her first appearance, partly
covered by the bed sheets, Molly is monosyllabic and inarticulate: ‘A sleepy soft grunt
answered: / —Mn’ (4.56–7); in ‘Wandering Rocks’ we catch a glimpse of ‘a generous white
arm from a window in Eccles street’ (10.222). Molly is confined to the domestic sphere of
the home, and when we are allowed a fuller perspective on her character, it is given
through the most private of monologues. Her character both epitomizes and complicates
99
Brown, Sexuality, p. 119.
Brown, Sexuality, p. 120.
100
200
the traditional gender divide between the feminine domestic sphere and the male public
sphere, as well as continuing to engage in the switching narrative perspectives of internal
and external, public and private, and their social implications. Furthermore, Molly is
discussed by a number of male characters, often in passing, in such a way that she is
objectified and depersonalized by men who discuss her from a distance. Her perceived
voluptuous femininity is used by others to undermine and emasculate Bloom. For instance,
as Lenehan and McCoy meet in ‘Wandering Rocks’, Lenehan discusses Molly:
She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt’s port under her bellyband.
Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights!
She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning. (10.557–561)
However, these observations should not be allowed to obscure the extent to which Molly
herself uses her body in a manner that embraces the sexualized male gaze.
The role of women in public space and their exclusion from the public sphere is
epitomized in Ulysses in the figure of the prostitute. Prostitution in the novel reveals the
thin line between how men perceive women in public and how their gaze objectifies them
and turns their bodies into commodities. In ‘Eumaeus’, Bloom is embarrassed to see a
black-hatted prostitute peering through the door of the cabman’s shelter in what can be
seen as a moment of potential crossover from the street into the shelter. He feels impelled
to pass judgement and comment, partly out of embarrassment and partly out of a need to
disguise his own association with the woman. We read:
It beats me, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen, medically I am speaking, how a
wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital reeking with disease can be
barefaced enough to solicit […]. Unfortunate creature! Of course I suppose some
man is ultimately responsible for her condition. (16.728–732)
Bloom is referring to the lock hospitals which existed in Britain and Ireland, and which had
been created as a result of the Contagious Diseases Acts passed in Britain in 1864, 1866
201
and 1869 ‘as exceptional legislation to control the spread of venereal disease among
enlisted men in garrison towns and ports’.101
The influence of these controversial laws, if we are to believe Bloom, was still being
felt in Dublin in 1904. Judith Walkowitz describes their impact on the liberty of women in
public space:
Under the acts, a woman could be identified as a ‘common prostitute’ by a special
plainclothes policemen and then subjected to a fortnightly internal examination. If
found to be suffering from gonorrhoea or syphilis, she would be interned in a
certified lock hospital.102
The legislation that enabled such abuse of women demonstrates the double standards of
the male-dominated public sphere with regard to what was seen as morally acceptable.
Furthermore, such legislation sanctioned the arbitrary invasion of women’s bodies, and
unsurprisingly it sparked a backlash against the power it gave to men in the public sphere.
As Walkowitz tells us,
Under the leadership of Josephine Butler, the LNA [Ladies’ National Association,
formed in response to the legislation] issued a sharply worded Ladies’ Manifesto
denouncing the acts as a blatant example of class and sex discrimination. The
manifesto argued that the acts not only deprived poor women of their
constitutional rights and forced them to submit to a degrading internal
examination, but they officially sanctioned male vice.103
This is especially pertinent to our study of Dublin because the legislation began as a result
of the spread of venereal disease in garrison towns following the introduction of British
armed forces into those communities.
In her essay ‘Joyce, Prostitution, and the Colonial City’, Clair Wills asks: ‘How does
colonialism intersect the representation of the prostitute and her associations in modern
literature with the city, the market, and commodification?’104 She answers that ‘perhaps the
trope of the prostitute functions partly as a point of resistance to masculine constructions
101 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), p. 1.
102 Walkowitz, p. 2.
103 Walkowitz, p. 2.
104 Clair Wills, ‘Joyce, Prostitution, and the Colonial City’, South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (1996), 79-96, (p. 79).
202
of the public domain.’105 By way of conclusion to this chapter, I wish to think through this
statement by Wills, acknowledging that it in many ways goes right to the heart of my own
analysis, and to link it with my earlier consideration of the role of the flâneur on the streets
of Dublin. If, as I have argued, the flâneur, through his demise, registered a moment of
crisis in modernity, memorialized in Baudelaire’s dying swan, then the prostitute is
symptomatic of the corrupted—male-dominated—public sphere. Interestingly, as
Rosemary Lloyd notes, Baudelaire’s swan can be read as an allegory for a woman:
Andromache, the widow of Hector, who was immortalized by Euripides. Lloyd argues that
‘Andromache surges into the poet’s mind in “Le Cygne (The Swan)” as exile and as widow
but also more straightforwardly as woman.’106
Throughout this chapter, my intention has been to analyse the role of the public
sphere as it is constructed in Ulysses, and to question how it functions once we turn to the
streets of Dublin. In doing so, I have looked at how the two versions of the public sphere
laid out in my introduction are able to coexist. This has allowed me to analyse the
representation of the flâneur, his heritage, and whether he can exist in Dublin in the fictional
form of Bloom. It has also brought into question Dublin’s poor health and housing
situation, and has related it both to the individual and to the public sphere on the streets.
In many ways, the figure of the prostitute binds these themes together. As Lloyd argues:
The second half of ‘Le Cygne’, where the disparate bric-a-brac of memory is
pulled together to form the allegory of loss, makes it abundantly clear that we are
to see Andromache’s grief as going beyond despair caused by a loss of power and
dignity.107
It is poignant to consider the sense of trauma and loss that pervades the narrative of
Ulysses, and the allegories and images which serve to remind us of this. The corrupted body
of the prostitute does indeed stand for what Wills describes as a ‘point of resistance to
masculine constructions of the public domain’, and I think that Joyce recognizes this and
the implications that such an image provokes.
Wills, p. 79.
Rosemary Lloyd, Baudelaire’s World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 92.
107 Rosemary Lloyd, p. 92.
105
106
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Conclusion: The Public Sphere and the Archive
In his essay ‘History and Memory in Modern Ireland’, Ian McBride analyses the possibility
that ‘present actions are not determined by the past, but rather the reverse: that what we
choose to remember is dictated by our contemporary concerns.’1 He explores this idea by
looking at Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory, which, unlike Freud’s notion
of an archive of memories housed within the individual’s unconscious, states that
‘recollections cannot endure outside social networks of communication.’ McBride argues:
In isolation, our individual images of the past are fragmented and transitory; to be
properly stabilised they require repeated confirmation by other members of our
community. When we recall the past, then, we do so as members of groups—a
family, a local community, a workforce, a political movement, a church or a trade
union.2
In Ulysses we can see that both forms of memory—the internal and the external, the
communal and the private—are crucial to the narrative, and it is the public sphere that
facilitates their intermingling with the past.
With this in mind, and by way of conclusion, I wish to consider Ulysses’s role as an
archive. In both of the versions of the public sphere in Ulysses explored in this thesis, the
past is discussed at length, and the characters’ use and construction of history has been a
central point of my analysis. History and memory are potent —and often controversial—
emotional and political points of reference in Ulysses. In a thesis which focuses on the
significance of the interaction between people and print culture in the construction of the
1 Ian McBride, ‘Memory and National Identity in Modern Ireland’, in History and Memory in Modern Ireland, ed.
by Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 6.
2 McBride, p. 6.
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public sphere, it is important to consider how memory exists within communities as well as
in the private, internal, personal archive of the individual’s subconscious. As we have
noted, in Ulysses these two forms coexist.
Walter Benjamin famously asked ‘with whom the adherents of historicism actually
empathize’, finding that ‘the answer is inevitable: with the victor.’3 The way in which we
choose to archive our records speaks to certain principles of political power, which work
on a cultural level; thus in many ways a thesis on the construction of the public sphere
must end with a consideration of the archive. In simple terms, the archive is the resting
place where the movement and circulation of documents, print ephemera, newspapers and
paper information stops, and where they are all collected together. The library epitomizes
this. If, as I have argued throughout my thesis, the alternative public sphere described in
chapter one is facilitated by the movement of and interaction with print media, then we
must ask what happens when this material ceases to move and circulate, when it finally
comes to rest. Furthermore, it should be noted that archives are engaged with the public
sphere, even though they represent a documented history of past events. Importantly, if
the archive is incomplete, or if its contents have been selected to suit a particular historical
narrative—which arguably all documents do—then its influence on discussions in the
public sphere is problematic. As I have argued in my chapters on ‘Aeolus’ and ‘Cyclops’,
this is repeatedly critiqued by Joyce in Ulysses.
Throughout this thesis my aim has been to examine the role of the public sphere
and print culture in Ireland during the years leading up to the Irish War of Independence. I
have explored how the public sphere is constructed and construed in Ulysses through my
analysis of the movement and usage of print ephemera in the novel. This has led me to
investigate the history of the public sphere and its relationship with the print culture of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Ulysses is set in 1904, Joyce wrote it between
1914 and 1922, and his work is informed by events of the late nineteenth century as well as
3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by
Harry Zohn (London: Random House, 1999 [1970]), p. 248.
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of the first two decades of the twentieth. Ulysses is held in a state of flux as a novel that
both refers to pre-twentieth-century Irish history and also responds retrospectively to the
tumultuous first two decades of the twentieth; my analysis attempts to reflect this.
Building on my introduction and first chapter, I have argued that there are two
possible models of the public sphere. The first is the traditional sense of the public sphere
as existing within a semi-private and institutionalized set of locations. Tracing Habermas’s
foundational work on the development of the public sphere from its inception during the
Enlightenment through to the twentieth century, I have been able to consider its role in
society and how it has changed through the centuries. In this way I have critiqued the
concept of the public sphere in the context of pre-independence Ireland and its depiction
in Joyce’s Ulysses. Habermas describes the role of print culture as an initiator of discussion
and a force for change, but he then observes that the appropriation of news mediation and
communication meant that ‘the press was systematically made to serve the interests of the
state administration.’4
As I argued in chapter four, the print industry of turn-of-the-century Dublin was
built around consumer culture, and as Habermas again argues, ‘the history of the big daily
papers in the second half of the nineteenth century proves that the press itself became
manipulable to the extent that it became commercialized.’5 This commercialization of the
print-mediated public sphere is critiqued in Ulysses through the infiltration of the
commodity into the subconscious, and is epitomized in characters such as Gerty
MacDowell and Bloom himself. Joyce complicates our reading of his text as a literary
rendition of ‘street-based’ commodity culture in his seeming celebration of the new forms
of language in the public sphere, forms which have emerged through the jargon of
advertising. However (and concurrently), he acknowledges the marginalized and the
4 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,
trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT, Polity Press, 1989), p. 22.
5 Habermas, p. 185.
206
vulnerable who are exploited by the corruption of consumer culture, as shown in the
figures of the sandwich-board men and the prostitute.
Much of my discussion throughout the thesis focuses on the interweaving of
public and private space. It examines their profound mutual permeability, and for this
reason my work has explored the movement from the street to the interior, and has led me
to explore how space can become exclusive and private through the actions of its
occupants. Chapters two and three analyse the exclusivity of space and the effect of this on
the role of the public sphere and nationalist politics. The public sphere of the street is
manifested by print culture. Objects of reading become agents of connection which,
following Bruno Latour’s argument in Reassembling the Social, create a trace that is ‘social’.6 In
Ulysses this is seen in the movement and use of print ephemera: objects such as the
throwaway handbill that announces ‘Elijah is coming’ (8.13), the postcard that reads ‘U.P:
up’ (12.258), or Mr Deasy’s letter on foot and mouth disease. The movement of, and social
interaction with, print ephemera in the novel creates networks of communication which
build a virtual community of readers.
For the reader, Joyce depicts Dublin as a community intricately connected by
ephemeral print culture. He outlines the difference between a community within a
location—a committee room, pub or cabman’s shelter, say—and the community of the
street which helps to create a second conceptual community, one that can only be truly
recognized by the reader of the novel. This second community, I argue, is where an
alternative public sphere has the potential to grow and to adapt to the changing forms of
news distribution. In this sense, Ulysses is a novel that shows the potential of
communication networks and the urban imagined community. In his study of the history
of communication networks, Armand Matteland writes that ‘the communication network is
6 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p. 128.
207
an eternal promise symbolizing a world that is better because it is united.’7 Joyce
demonstrates the possibility of a public sphere created from the trace left within the
network of print and paper ephemera, but ultimately this does not symbolize a better
world. Instead, he complicates our understanding of a connected and universal public
sphere, and highlights the constant disunity among communities. Ulysses depicts a
marginalized and disenfranchised urban poor whose image speaks to a history of
fragmented communities and a lack of consensus in national politics.
Understood in this way, Ulysses is an attempt to create a mimetic representation of a
specific location, written from a distance through the use of print information. This returns
us to R. B. Kershner who notes: ‘Thanks to the unique commodity status of words, Joyce
could live anywhere, without abandoning Ireland’s imagined community.’8 Certainly, as I
argued in my introduction, Joyce remained networked into an imagined community of
readers. The imagined community of Ulysses extends to the reader, but as Kershner argues,
it also relates to the way in which the novel was produced, as Joyce drew on information
gained from reading newspapers, journals, novels and other items of print ephemera, often
sent to him by his Aunt Josephine or his brother Stanislaus. Seen in this way, the novel
becomes an archive of print information, patched together to produce a fictional
representation of 1904 Dublin.
From this observation, I wish to return to our opening image of memory and the
archive, and to consider the concept of the archive in light of my analysis of the public
sphere and Ulysses. In his study The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire,
Thomas Richards writes that ‘the narratives of the late nineteenth century are full of
fantasies about an empire united not by force but by information.’9 Richards analyses the
use of knowledge and the gathering together of information as a means of power and
7 Armand Matteland, Networking the World, 1794–2000, trans. by Liz Carey-Libbrecht and James A. Cohen
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. vii.
8 R. Brandon Kershner, The Culture of Ulysses (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 83.
9 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), p. 1.
208
control. He argues that this archive, collected and stored at the centre of the empire,
created a virtual link between Britain and its colonies:
The civil servants of Empire pulled together so much information and wrote so
many books about their experiences that today we have only begun to scratch the
surface of their archive. In a very real sense theirs was a paper empire: an empire
built on a series of flimsy pretexts that were always becoming texts.10
This concept of the paper empire created out of an archive of information informs our
reading of Ulysses and our discussion of the construction of the public sphere. Richards
describes the archive as ‘the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or
knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal
point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire.’11 In his description
of the imperial archive as encompassing ‘all that was known or knowable’, we can
recognize the limitations and implausibility of this enterprise, as well as the imperial
arrogance it displays.
So what is Ulysses? Certainly, the novel represents an attempt by its author to
contain and articulate huge and abstract concepts of knowledge, memory and history. This
is done through a particular act of reduction: Joyce takes the structure of the epic and
reduces it to a narrative of the everyday. Furthermore, as is central to my argument, the
reader of Ulysses can recognize the presence of an imagined community in the framework
of the fictional narrative, and as I have demonstrated, it is here that a public sphere is also
able to function. The public sphere that operates within locations such as Barney Kiernan’s
pub or the cabman’s shelter refers back to Habermas’s assessment of the public sphere’s
beginnings in the coffee salons of the eighteenth century. These locations in turn act as
collection points for some of the paper ephemera which move through the streets of
Dublin. As we have seen in ‘Cyclops’, the pages of the newspaper surround the Citizen at
the bar, while in ‘Eumaeus’ the cabman’s shelter serves as the final resting place—so to
speak—of the Evening Telegraph, a text read by both Bloom and Stephen. There also exist
10
11
Richards, p. 4.
Richards, p. 11.
209
other pieces of paper ephemera which are passed around the group of men and which
facilitate discussion, such as the newspaper read by the cabbie, the Sailor’s postcard, and
even Bloom’s photograph of Molly.
‘Scylla and Charybdis’ is located in the National Library, a space into which Bloom
escapes from the ‘dangers’ of the street, and which can be seen to engage with the public
sphere as well as serving its primary role as an archive. Interestingly, as Don Gifford notes,
in Homer’s Odyssey Circe warns Odysseus not to fight the monster Scylla, whom he will
find to be ‘a nightmare [that] cannot die’; this links to Stephen’s anxieties about history and
historiography as the nightmare from which he is trying to awake (2.377).12 Caught between
the imminent threat of bumping into and potentially having to converse with the
approaching Boylan, and the potential dangers that lurk in the library, Bloom chooses the
latter. The archives of the National Library and the National Museum house not only the
artefacts that make up the ‘national’ historical collection or archive, but in Ulysses at least,
they also provide a home for the Dublin literati, the men whose discussion makes Stephen
feel (paraphrasing St Augustine) as though he is rushing backwards into the past: ‘Hold to
the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past’ (9.89). Gifford provides us
with Augustine’s words:
For what is done needs expectation, that it may be done, and memory, that it may
be understood as much as possible. And expectation is of future things, and
memory is of things past. But the intention to act is of the present, through which
the future flows into the past.13
Augustine moves to and fro between the image of memory and the expectation of action,
emphasizing the interdependence of past and future actions. He creates an almost cyclical
image with his argument, which in the final clause accepts that what we expect from our
future flows back into the past.
12 Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses: Annotated Notes for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1988), p. 192. See also Circe’s description of Scylla and Charybdis in Homer,
The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles (London: Penguin, 2001 [1996]), pp.201–203.
13 Gifford, p. 199.
210
This dependence on the past, on memory and the uses of the interpretation of
history, litters the narrative of Ulysses. We read how it affects Stephen’s language in ‘Scylla
and Charybdis’ as he thinks: ‘Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in
space of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned’ (9.352–3). Thoth,
Egyptian god of learning, was ‘keeper of the divine archives, patron of history, and the
herald, clerk, and scribe of the gods’.14 Stephen recognizes the image of the archive as an
encased and enclosed space. The ‘coffined thoughts’ that surround him do not simply refer
to the physical space of the library and the restrictions that such an archive potentially
places on thought and critical discussion; his reaction again emphasizes the limitations of a
reliance on the past—on the constant instinct to look backwards. This moment therefore
constitutes another critique of the role of the public sphere and the limitations placed on it.
If Ulysses is an archive, it is a different archive from that of the National Library or
locations such as the pub and the cabman’s shelter. Once housed within the novel, the
communal interactions of memory, which occur on the streets and in discussions, continue
to be in play and to divert our understanding of history. The public sphere provides a
forum for debate and discussion, which can then be disseminated further and wider
through the imagined community and the networks of newspaper readers. Therefore, even
when we observe the failings of the public sphere and of particular appropriations of the
past, we can simultaneously recognize that, as McBride argues, ‘memory […] has a history
of its own, and like the best forms of history it teaches us to think again about what we
have taken for granted.’15 The characters’ discursive interactions within the public sphere in
Ulysses, the interplay between private and public realms of experience, and importantly the
recognition of an alternative virtual public sphere, provide a space for the reader of Ulysses
to identify the various representations of memory that go into creating a continuous
historical narrative, perpetuated—or archived—by the public sphere.
14
15
See Gifford, p. 217.
McBride, p. 6.
211
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