Ousted possibilities: critical histories in James Joyce's Ulysses - James Joyce, novelist

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Gregory Castle

Stephen means to upset Deasy's view by portraying the divine goal of history as "a shout in the street," the chaos of boys at play:

Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life....Jousts. Time shocked-rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men's bloodied guts. (32)

For Stephen historical authority and value rest not in a divine manifestation but in materiality, in "shocks" of time, in the anarchistic shout in the street.(7) The visceral reality of play reveals what Deasy's history keeps silent: the violence of power, of jousting fighters who rebound and fight again, the violence of time, "the uproar of battles." The intellectual landscape of the "Proteus" episode renders this same shocked quality in abstract symbolic terms. History becomes merely the wreckage of past times, driftwood mired in the sand, "sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada" (41). In the materiality of nature - in the rhythms which he interprets as a "fourworded wavespeech" 49) - Stephen finds the supreme expression of this historical alternative. But despite the potentially positive message of renewal within the eternal return of nature, he turns away from the pointless and futile repetition of the sea, "to no end gathered: vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back: loom of the moon" (49-50). In the foampool of ceaseless differential repetition he feels the loss of subjectivity, and it is the fear of this loss which creates the irresolvable contradiction of his character: for while he rails against the imposition of historical subjectivity, he is unable to affirm an alternative which would not annihilate subjectivity altogether.

In this way Stephen discovers that the problem of history cannot be resolved by refusing its narrative hegemony over his life. This lesson is driven home later, in the "Wandering Rocks" episode, when he comes upon his sister Dilly, who has just bought a French primer from a second-hand book cart. In a pang of conscience he sees in her a living human victim of history: "She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.... We." (243). The final pronoun suggests the artist's complicity with the "infinite possibilities" ousted by the masters of history here imaged as an oceanic force, engulfing and disintegrating individual presence and identity. In this context Stephen must be understood as one of history's oppressed subjects, not as the self-exiled artist outside of its influence. Refusal is a futile gesture that, as we discover in the "Circe" episode, merely postpones the painful reality of his subjugation.

What Stephen appears to fear and struggles to reject in "Circe" is not so much the Gothic horror of his risen mother but the moment of judgment, which Paul Ricoeur describes as "the eschatological event of |acquittal,' in which the divine initiative is manifested":