Who speaks for Fergus? Silence, homophobia, and the anxiety of Yeatsian influence in Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2005 by Russell McDonald

Throughout most of the first half of Ulysses, Mulligan gleefully provides the voice for Yeats that Stephen does not. His numerous invocations of Yeats are generally parodic; they target both Yeats's work itself and the Irish nationalist literary agenda it serves. In particular, Mulligan is obsessed with the Dun Emer Press's 1903 edition of In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age. His quip over breakfast about genuine Irish folk material clearly parodies this collection of lyric and short narrative poems: "Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind" (1.365-67). (9) In the Seven Woods, as its colophon says, was printed by Yeats's sister, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, on "the sixteenth day of July in the year of the big wind, 1903." As Yeats explains in a note at the end of the volume, the phrase "the big wind" refers to a mammoth storm that "blew down so many trees, & troubled the wild creatures, & changed the look of things" in the Seven Woods of Coole Park shortly after he had wandered there in search of poetic inspiration (Variorum 814). The colophon also indicates that the book was limited to 350 copies and crafted from paper handmade in Ireland, signaling its importance as an aesthetic object with a political agenda. Yeats's reworking of Celtic myths throughout the volume further emphasizes this agenda's investment in Irish nationalism. (10) Mulligan's flippant proposal to write about "the folk and fishgods of Dundrum" belittles Yeats's use of Celtic myth, and his joke about having his work published by "the weird sisters in the year of the big wind" scorns Yeats's project by casting Yeats's sisters as Macbeth-like witches. Never content to let a good joke die, Mulligan repeats the idea in "Oxen of the Sun." He imagines having his "British Beatitudes [...] printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two designing females. Calf covers of pissedon green. Last word in art shades. Most beautiful book come out of Ireland my time" (14.1453-57). Here, however, he raises the stakes, conflating In the Seven Woods with the preface Yeats wrote for Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne, a book of translations from Gaelic myth that Yeats extolled as "the best that has come out of Ireland in my time" (Preface vii). Mulligan speaks for Yeats, but he does so in a way that takes Yeats's sincere, if overwrought, praise for Lady Gregory and twists its context to make Yeats sound egotistical.

Mulligan alludes earlier to Yeats's preface to Cuchulain of Muirthemne near the end of "Scylla and Charybdis" as part of what is probably the most intricate web of Yeats allusions in Ulysses. The web begins with Mulligan inviting Stephen to accompany him out of the library, calling him "wandering Aengus of the birds" (9.1093). Mulligan adopts this epithet from Yeats's phrase "O Aengus of the birds" from the short narrative poem "The Old Age of Queen Maeve," which, not surprisingly, appears in the Dun Emer Press edition of In the Seven Woods. In the context of what Stephen has just accomplished in this episode, his silent acceptance of the Yeats-inspired epithet here is particularly striking. Stephen has just "triumphed" with his algebraic proof that Shakespeare is both the son and father of his entire race, "an androgynous angel" who gives birth to Hamlet like "a wife unto himself" (9.1052). Fanciful as this argument may be, it does show Stephen engaging Shakespeare as a literary forefather head-on. One might expect him to be primed and ready now to grapple with Yeats. However, not only does his silence imply a continued incapacity to deal with Yeats but it also resituates Stephen in the eternally repeating nightmare of history from which he will never awake. The remainder of "Scylla and Charybdis" finds him listening to Mulligan riff on Yeats on the steps of the library, which is where he first contemplated Yeats in Portrait. Despite the promise of his journal entry that he would soon be ready to deal with Yeats, his silence at the conclusion of "Scylla and Charybdis" has brought him right back to where he started.