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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Gregory Castle

The symbolism of the Judgment says ... that men are pardoned in a body, not each one for himself;"the individualism of religious experience is encompassed in the collective adventure of the history of salvation; . . . it is all mankind, enumeratively and structurally, which is implicated in the |type' of the cosmic judgment. (277)

The "history of salvation" and its conclusion in the moment of "cosmic judgment" - the absorption of the subject within the Absolute - is merely another expression of the historical telos espoused by Deasy. As the emblem of the Christian apocalypse, the violent closure to the providential historical narrative limned in the scriptures, the ghost of Stephen's mother rises before him as a grotesque distortion of the salvation offered - as the answer to a prayer - by the Church. It is precisely this conjunction of personal and world-historical salvation that precipitates his symbolic annihilation of time and space. He utters his Luciferian creed - "non serviam" - and then asserts, "No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you if you can! I'll bring you all to heel!" (U 582). Then, with a flourish, "He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry" (U 583).(8)

In the conventional reading of this section of "Circe" the hero's destruction of space and time frees him from the nightmare of history and signals what Marilyn French calls "the beginning of the timeless" (202).(9) But far from annihilating history, his symbolic and imaginative act leaves the reality of history unscathed. Once he has fled from Bella Cohen's brothel, he is confronted by privates Carr and Compton, two representatives of the British crown, who bring home to him, in a quite physical way, the reality of historical authority; their violence toward him illustrates graphically the position of the Irish national subject vis-a-vis the "brutish empire" (U 594). His first words outside the brothel (at "the fringe of the noisy quarrelling knot") recall his earlier musings on the marginalized Irish: "You are my guests. The uninvited. By virtue of the fifth of George and seventh of Edward. History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory" (587). The "uninvited" (like the "ousted" possibilities on which he meditates in "Nestor") are peripheral, marginal, subaltern elements whose absence from history occurs "by virtue of " the actions of English kings; and the Irish, as always, are faulted for their timidity and betrayal: as Stephen himself puts it, Ireland is "the old sow that eats her farrow" (595). In the closing pages of "Circe," then, Stephen's behavior reveals not the salutary effect of an emancipation from history but the much more oppressive effect of a returning nightmare.

Stephen Dedalus, self-proclaimed heretic and rebel, returns to teach history and crawl around the back streets of Dublin-returns, in others words, to the tyranny of "home, fatherland, and church." In the narrative of his socialization - his Bildungsroman(10) - he reverts to type and returns home; but in his imagination the creator-artist continues the fight: "(He taps his brow.) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king" (589). Yet even in this "inner world" the fundamental rules of the game are retained and he finally settles for a Wildean inversion: "Let my country die for me" (591). Far from eliminating the authority of history, far from awakening from its nightmare, he appears to have internalized the central figures of the historical drama (priest, king, oppressed subject) and refashioned them into the elements of a psychic narrative. What he refuses, perversely, to accept - or even acknowledge - is that this "inner world" exhibits the same tensions and contradictions we find both in the historical world and in the narratives that claim to represent that world. In the context of Stephen's story the artistic subject, though it enjoys a pseudo-autonomy based on psychological processes (stream of consciousness or what Dorrit Cohn calls "narrated monologue"), is nevertheless the subject of an authoritative and totalizing history.