Listing to the right: authority and inheritance in 'Orlando' and 'Ulysses.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Caroline Webb

The comedy inspired by the gigantic passage is of course only part of the dynamic of "Cyclops": the chapter's energy depends on the oscillation between these passages and the deliberately demeaning and denigratory language of the unnamed barfly who also narrates its events. This oscillation further highlights the absurdities indicated in the gigantic passages. To the barfly, for instance, the Citizen is "not as green as he's cabbagelooking. Arising around from one pub to another, leaving it to your own honour, with old Giltrap's dog and getting fed up by the ratepayers and corporators. Entertainment for man and beast" (312; 257:752-54). Like the exaggerated claims of the list of heroes but with far more directness, the narrator depresses the pretensions of the Citizen, who is being "fed" by the community simply by hanging around the bar until the drinkers feel obliged to stand him one while he supplies "Entertainment for man and beast" by enacting his endless complaint of being "fed up."

The barfly's attack on the world is direct: where Joyce's humor in the list of names unfolds by juxtaposition, the other narrative moves to insult and contempt, implicitly and by its very contrast highlighting this aspect of the hyperbolic effusions in the gigantist moments, their border on satire. But the opposition also detracts from the authority of both visions, as has been frequently observed; the devaluing of Bloom both narratives enact, whether by naming him "Senhor Enrique Flor" or "Old lardyface" (333; 273: 1476-77) may be set aside in favor of the reader's sense of a greater understanding. We are likely to seek a "truer" vision, and feel triumph in perceiving an undescribed heroism in Bloom's "actual" behavior in the episode. The very power of Joyce's humor thus disables itself; where Woolf's respectful mimesis subverts by the subtlety of its deviations from tradition, Joyce's excesses eventually defy plausibility, leaving their targets -- at least those we perceive through other narrative perspectives elsewhere in the text -- more or less intact.

Where the humor of Woolf's Preface prepares for the humor of Orlando as a whole, then, Joyce's humor in "Cyclops" cuts across the shifting patter of Ulysses. But this is of course the strategy of Ulysses: it keeps changing modes and means each time the reader feels at ease. Although this experience itself unsettles our understanding of literature as representation, of "realism" as real, the humor of "Cyclops" merely provides one more aspect of this; indeed, the relative simplicity of "Cyclops" 's broad humor is less disconcerting than a number of the novel's other technical tricks. Joyce himself remains in place as linguistic master, able to manipulate these perceptions, so that we, the privileged readers admitted to the elite of understanding by literary sophistication rather than the quiet domesticity of Woolf's in-jokes, are finally affirmed in our relation to the literary past. The laughter with which we greet the Citizen's pretensions affirms our faith in Joyce's -- and our own -- claims to the inheritance of a great tradition.