Rereading 'Ulysses': "Ithaca" and modernist allegory - book by author James Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Stephen Sicari

It is the essential feature of the "allegory of theologians" that certain literal events of the Old Testament are found to have their fulfillment in the Christ event. Paul, who initiates this way of reading the Old Testament, is "the first great Christian theologian of the Incarnation" (Hollander 59). And this is true of Dante's use of this kind of allegory: "With its first meaning as an historical meaning, the allegory of the Divine Comedy is grounded in the mystery of the Incarnation" (Singleton 74). John Freccero emphasizes the way events are read in Dante's poem from the perspective of the Incarnation:

This retrospective illumination is the very essence of biblical allegory, what Dante called the "allegory of theologians." The Christ event was the end term of an historical process, the "fullness of time," from the perspective of which the history of the world might be read and judged according to a meaning which perhaps even the participants in the history could not perceive. (132-33)

All events are to be judged in "retrospective illumination"(4) from the privileged point of view of the Incarnation, the "Logos" made flesh. It's not just any set of ideals that Joyce presents if we are to call his method "modernist allegory." We must learn to see how "Ithaca" contains an analogous "Christ event" and so functions as the fixed perspective from which the rest of the novel may be read and understood, in just the same way as the Christ event functions as the fixed point from which to review Hebrew Scriptures. The novel is "reread" from the privileged vantage point of "Ithaca."

One last point by way of introduction: This proposed thesis will also show that Joyce is taking pains to teach us how to read his novel as he presents enough exegetical clues to direct our way toward the fixed point of "Ithaca." This thesis will cause, no doubt, some discomfort among the practitioners of what Charles Altieri has labeled "the various hermeneutics of suspicion"(5) because I am asserting the primacy of the author's intention as he points us to the allegory of theologians as our guide to Ulysses. This author's intention is not implicit and to be assumed; it is made part of the text itself.

THE LIMITS OF NATURALISM

In an age of skepticism, an allegorical figure is open to the keen scrutiny and facile mockery of the practical man, and so Joyce opens his novel with the voice and sensibility of one of the greatest mockers in all literature, Buck Mulligan. The very first scene in the novel presents Mulligan in the process of offering a mock Eucharist. For a Catholic, the Eucharist is the sacrament in which ordinary bread and wine is transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ; in other words, the Eucharist is the ritual celebration of the Incarnation, of the active participation of God in human affairs as a human being. To mock the Incarnation is to mock this possibility of the holy inter-acting with and granting significance to the human dimension. Robert Bell sees Mulligan's role well: