ON THE ‘CYCLOPS’ EPISODE
1. Introduction
There was once a widespread perception that Joyce was a cosmopolitan with no interest in nationalist politics and no sympathy for the agenda of the Sinn Fein movement of his time. Additionally, there was a second widespread perception that Bloom, being an embodiment of this cosmopolitan attitude, had Joyce’s unalloyed sympathy and admiration. These perceptions have been challenged in recent years, notably by Enda Duffy in The Subaltern Ulysses, and Emer Nolan in James Joyce and Nationalism (1). Joyce’s attitude towards Irish nationalism, Fenianism and related issues was complex, and the Critical Writings enable us to follow some of their twists and turns. The present essay is continuous with challenges such as those of Duffy and Nolan; I want to link the issue of cosmopolitanism with a major theme of modernity, liberal internationalism. The ‘Cyclops’ episode has been a focal point of the cosmopolitan reading of Ulysses. It has standardly been accepted that the ‘one-eyedness’ in this episode is to be attributed to the Citizen (or, to the Citizen plus the narrator of the episode). Thus, the episode has often been read as a trenchant expose of the shortcomings of Irish nationalism - specifically the shortcoming of one-eyedness or only being able to see one side in a dispute. However, I want to suggest that it is precisely in this episode that Joyce exposes the shortcomings of liberal internationalism, and of the cosmopolitanism that is one of its central features. Moreover, Bloom - being the embodiment of this liberal internationalist attitude - is being shown up for his limitations as well. One of the key ways in which this is revealed in the episode is through the mode of representation Joyce employs - the way the episode is written(2). The German political thinker Carl Schmitt devoted considerable attention to a critique of liberal internationalism. Many central themes in Schmitt’s work parallel what I see as central themes in the critique of liberal internationalism contained in ‘Cyclops’. Consequently, Schmitt’s work will prove useful for the project of the present paper, and I will be referring to it to elucidate some of my themes.
2. Salute with fierce hostility
I want to begin by considering two brief exchanges in Ulysses, one involving Bloom and the other involving the Citizen. The first is from ‘Cyclops’:
- But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
- Yes, says Bloom.
- What is it? says John Wyse.
- A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.
- By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:
- Or also living in different places.
- That covers my case, says Joe.
(U 12, 1419-1429)
This exchange reads like a parody of a philosophical dialogue, with definitions being given and shown to be inadequate by means of counterexamples. (This can be seen in Plato’s Republic, for example, when Socrates deals with Cephalus’ initial definition of justice by means of counterexamples (Book I, 331B-D).) Of course, the counterexamples to Bloom’s definitions cannot be taken seriously, and are clearly intended to raise a laugh, rather than as attempts at serious dialogue.(3). (This is, incidentally, a widespread Irish vice, and one that Joyce himself was not always above.) But Bloom’s own definitions can themselves hardly be taken seriously, and can be taken as evidence that he has given the question little or no thought. As I will show later (section 5), there is further evidence that he has given the question little or no thought, and what’s more, that he has no intention, even after this encounter, of giving it any more thought in the future.
Moreover, Bloom’s perception of his opponent is of someone not worth taking seriously, someone contemptible and beyond the pale. In a calm moment several hours after the event, Bloom thinks back on his ‘altercation with a truculent troglodyte’ (‘Ithaca’, U 17, 2050-1). It would run counter to everything we know about Joyce’s methods to assume that these are the words Joyce himself would use, rather than being Bloom’s words. The word ‘troglodyte’ means a sub-human creature, precisely the characterisation that, according to Schmitt, liberal internationalism applies to its enemies.
Now for the second exchange, this time from ‘Circe’:
major tweedy
(growls gruffly) Rorke’s Drift! Up, guards, and at them! Mahar shalal hashbaz.
The Citizen
Erin go bragh!
(Major Tweedy and the Citizen exhibit to each other medals, decorations, trophies of war, wounds. Both salute with fierce hostility.)
(U 15, 4618-4624)
This is of course a ridiculous scene, a parody of military ceremonial. As Emer Nolan points out (4) we are disinclined to view the Major and the Citizen as genuine equals, despite the symmetry of their gestures - at least the Major really is a soldier, and has genuinely fought in battle. The Citizen, on the other hand, is habitually so drunk he can barely walk (as we have been told earlier), is unlikely to have seen any military action, and is equally unlikely to be of much use in a battle. Regardless of all this, however, the symmetry remains. This symmetry has often been taken to be Joyce’s way of showing Irish nationalism to be a mirror image of British imperialism - and that is not a claim I dispute. But is this to be taken as meaning that Joyce is taking a stance of being above the battle - of saying ‘a plague on both your houses’, as a reading of him as a cosmopolitan would suggest? Not necessarily. The point I want to pick out in this exchange is that, whether or not the Major and the Citizen actually are equals, they treat each other as equals. Granted, this treating is subordinate to the generally parodic and ribald tone of the passage as a whole: we need not take Joyce to be implying that this is how such people would treat each other in real life. Nonetheless, in the phrase ‘salute with fierce hostility’, he has introduced the thought that two people can be bitter political enemies and yet treat each other as equals. As we have seen, Bloom does not treat the Citizen so.
This brings us directly to a key theme in Schmitt’s thought. In his book The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt argues that a constitutive feature of the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction, he holds, is just as indispensable to the political as that between beautiful and ugly to the aesthetic, or that between good and evil to the moral. He is careful to point out that this does not mean that a political entity must have enemies; but must at all times retain the possibility of having enemies. He also reserves judgement on whether maintaining the friend-enemy distinction is ultimately desirable; but a world in which it no longer existed would be a post-political world. However, liberalism, he goes on to argue, has difficulty with this distinction. This is because of its universalist, internationalist, claims. (In order to keep this crucial feature of liberalism in mind, I will be using the term ‘liberal internationalism’ throughout this paper.) Liberalism effectively claims to be a friend of all humanity. It does not claim to be just contingently a friend of every person or group, but denies even the possibility that it can be anyone’s enemy. It is possible to see someone as a political enemy, even to the point of making war, while still regarding him as an equal, and without hating him or seeing him as evil. However, this stance is not available to liberalism: ‘The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of the peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity.’(5)
Elsewhere Schmitt more forcefully makes the point that liberalism, unwilling to see its enemies as just that - enemies - reduces them to the status of ‘unpersons’:
Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone belongs to humanity ... “Humanity” thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. If he discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed. Concepts such as “human being” thus contain the possibility of the deepest inequality and become thereby “asymmetrical.”(6)
With the expression ‘truculent troglodyte’, Bloom is shown by Joyce to do just this: reduce his enemies to the status of unpersons. Granted, he shows no desire to destroy them, but, as I will try to demonstrate further later on, key features of the mindset identified by Schmitt are present.
A writer who has some things in common with Schmitt is George Orwell. Despite being a socialist himself, Orwell was unsympathetic to the internationalist outlook that many socialists of his time had in common with liberals. In addition, he was aware of the dangers to the socialists themselves inherent in that outlook. In particular, he thought that it rendered them emotionally shallow, and weakened them by making them unable to understand events going on around them:
One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not (7).
In the decades since Orwell’s death, world events have shown liberal internationalism to be considerably stronger than straw. Bloom’s encounter in Barney Kiernan’s, however, shows him to be pretty weak as a debater. And, I will argue, his liberal internationalism is at the heart of this weakness, as well as of other of his failings.
3. What the technik tells us
One of the most striking features of the ‘Cyclops’ episode as a whole is that its portrayal of the Citizen and his associates seems like a resort to crude caricature, which is highly uncharacteristic of Joyce. It might be gratifying to those who favour the cosmopolitan reading to think either (if they are sympathetic to this alleged facet of Joyce) that it is not a really unfair caricature, or (if they are unsympathetic to it) that Joyce either didn’t know or didn’t care that it is unfair. However, the fact that crude caricature is so uncharacteristic of Joyce, should at the very least motivate us to look for an alternative interpretative approach to those just mentioned. What I propose is that this resort to caricature is entirely self-conscious on Joyce’s part, and is part of the technik of the episode just as much as, say, the catechetic questions-and-answers are part of the technik of ‘Ithaca’. I want to begin, then, by saying something about this technik, and about how I think it alerts us to what is really going on in this episode.
The central facet of the correspondence of this episode to Homer’s Odyssey is the idea of one-eyedness. In brief, I want to argue that this one-eyedness does not primarily apply to the citizen, or to the narrator, but to the text itself. The text’s attitude to its characters is deliberately and provocatively one-eyed. As evidence for my view, I want to show how it enables us to see the technical devices of ‘Cyclops’ as continuous with those of the other later chapters in the book. I will begin with a discussion of two important such technical devices: ambiguous correspondences and the text as subject.
3.1 Ambiguous correspondences
The correspondences to the Odyssey are sometimes highly playful, but also sometimes constitute insightful commentaries on the characters, on the situations, and on aspects of the modern world generally. Crucially, they are also sometimes ambiguous. That is, in some instances there are two or more possible sets of correspondences to a particular episode in the Odyssey, which are equally coherent. As an example, consider the correspondences in ‘Sirens’. We can ask the question: who are the sirens, and who are the sailors? There are at least two possible answers. Most obviously, the sirens are the barmaids and the sailors are Simon Dedalus and his companions. This answer has in its favour the rather weak point that the barmaids are female and the customers are male. More convincingly, it has in its favour the fact that Simon and company are being led to their ruin by the irresistible (for them) lure of drink and the pub life that goes with it - the temptations of which life include the pretty barmaids themselves. Their impending ruin is slow rather than sudden, but it is just as inexorable as the ruin of the sailors who listen to the sirens in the Odyssey. An alternative answer, however, is that the barmaids are the sailors and Simon and company are the sirens. It is, after all, Simon Dedalus and company who are trying, albeit rather pathetically, to seduce the barmaids, not the other way round. Further, it is they and not the barmaids who sing. The barmaids, like Odysseus’ companions, are deaf to the sirens’ lure. These two readings are, in my view, about equally coherent, and each yields insights into the characters and into Irish pub culture generally. There may be other alternatives too - the sirens may be something more abstract, such as alcohol or pub camaraderie. Thus the correspondences to the sirens episode in the Odyssey are ambiguous, and our reading of the ‘Sirens’ episode in Ulysses is impoverished if we are not open to more than one possible set of correspondences. I eventually want to argue that the correspondences in ‘Cyclops’ are similarly ambiguous, and that this is revealing in a more interesting way.
3.2. The text as subject
In many of the later episodes in Ulysses, the way in which the text is written can be said to exemplify some theme that is being written about. An obvious example is the ‘Aeolus’ episode, which, being set in a newspaper office, is written in journalese complete with section headings in the appropriate manner. This technik allows Joyce to draw our attention to features of the way newspapers are written, and alert us to ways in which that may shape our perception of the subject-matter, without having to say these things explicitly. Moreover, in some of the episodes what is exemplified is a psychological state. In ‘Eumaeus’, for example, the way the text is written exemplifies the state of tiredness. Bloom and Stephen are themselves presumably tired by this time (it is 1 a.m. according to the schema). This tiredness is exemplified by the text, consisting as it does of long rambling sentences which have seemingly been constructed by stringing one cliche after another after another. Pretty much any sentence from ‘Eumaeus’ could serve to illustrate this, so pervasive a feature is it of the episode. Here is how the episode opens:
Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed. His (Stephen's) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr Bloom in view of the hour it was and there being no pump of Vartry water available for their ablutions let alone drinking purposes hit upon an expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman's shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt Bridge where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral.
(U 16, 1-11)
And so it goes, on and on and on, for over forty pages. It is as if the text, having to keep going despite being exhausted, has resorted to filling up space with the smallest possible amount of effort. Repetition might be an alternative, but would perhaps be too obvious. The piling of cliche upon cliche makes for a text that superficially appears very active - grammatical structures of considerable complexity are generated as a result. But it is a lazy way of achieving this complexity. The text itself, it might be said, has solved the problem of filling up the space in an energy-saving way, while trying not to be too obvious about it.
A further example of the text as a subject of psychological states might be the ‘Circe’ episode. Here the state is hallucination - but who exactly is hallucinating? Not Bloom, for, as has been made clear, he is perfectly sober.
Joyce had already perfected the art of letting us see a person’s character and state of mind though the way of writing - in Dubliners and Portrait he repeatedly gives us characters’ thoughts in words that the characters themselves would use at the time. In the early episodes of Ulysses he refined this art even further, being able to signal changes of perspective through changes in the way of writing, and to do so with extreme precision and in rapid succession. As the book progressed, he began to turn this ability to a new use, employing shifts in the way of writing to indicate shifts in perspective or state of mind that are not those of any character, but - we are forced to say - of the text itself. As with the ambiguous correspondences, I want to suggest that Joyce used this treating of the text as a subject as a way to indirectly comment on the characters, on the situations, and on aspects of the modern world generally.
Putting these two ideas together, then, opens up the following possibility: in some of the later episodes in Ulysses, there are two or more sets of correspondences to the Odyssey, and some of the correspondences are to psychological characteristics embodied in the mode of presentation of the text itself. I want to suggest that this is the case in ‘Cyclops’. The key point of correspondence is the idea of ‘one-eyedness’, and one of the ways in which this is embodied is that the text itself is one-eyed. I will develop this idea in the next section.
4. A portrait of the Irish as
Apart from ‘Penelope’, ‘Cyclops’ is the only episode in Ulysses where Joyce chooses to tell the story from a first-person perspective. Were one to read all Joyce’s works in chronological order, one would find first-person narration employed in the first three stories in Dubliners, and thereafter not again until ‘Cyclops’. This sudden shift to first-person narration ought to come as a surprise given that, in between, Joyce has given ample evidence of his ability to show events from a perspective strictly limited to one person, in that person’s own words, and to let us know which person it is in each instance, without employing first-person narration. The narrator’s perspective in the ‘Cyclops’ is, moreover, clearly biased, having little sympathy for Bloom. This, coupled with Joyce’s fondness in other episodes for the text exemplifying aspects of its subject matter - an episode set in a newspaper office being written in journalese and so forth - ought to at least alert us to the possibility that there may be more than one level of bias in the ‘Cyclops’. Perhaps an episode with a biased narrator is itself biased.
The Citizen - along with, for the most part, the other denizens of Barney Kiernan’s - is portrayed as drunken, bigoted, aggressive and unable to listen to reason. Through the device of mock-epic and mock-officialese interpolations, these traits are ostensibly contrasted with nationalists’ hopelessly romanticised view of old Ireland, and with officialdom’s equally unrealistic picture. The chapter on ‘Cyclops’ in Stanley Sultan’s The Argument of Ulysses(8) suggests that Joyce is showing the degraded state into which Ireland has fallen in contrast with its glorious ancient past. But this is to ascribe to Joyce the view that either the overblown rhetoric of his mock-epic interpolations, or their models in the romanticised nineteenth-century translations of ancient Irish poems, bear some relation to what Ireland really was like at some time in the past. It is highly unlikely that Joyce actually thought this, and hence highly unlikely that his intent was as Sultan suggests. Maria Tymoczko, in The Irish Ulysses, has convincingly shown that Joyce was well aware of what the genuine ancient Irish epics were like, and of how different they were in form and content both from the classical Greek and Latin epics, and from the 19th-century nationalist pseudo-epics that he parodies in the ‘Cyclops’(9). In any event, there is surely a nice parallel between the overblown rhetoric of the mock-epic passages, and that of the mock-officialese ones, a parallel that would be lost if we took it that Joyce was respectful or reverential towards the models on which those mock-epic passages are based. One might still be tempted to appeal to the unrealistic nature of the mock-epics or their models, to show that the Citizen and company are ridiculously out of touch with reality in addition to their other failings. But even if they are (a question to which I will return in section 5), are they the only ones?
If one accepted these figures as representative of either Ireland, or Dublin, or Irish nationalists - at any rate with those who would determine public policy should Ireland become independent - one would think there was perfectly good reason for keeping Ireland under British rule. The characterisations in this episode are as caricatural and as propagandist as the depictions of the Irish as semi-apes in pro-imperialist British literature of the nineteenth century. But could Joyce have meant to convey the idea that these people are representative of Ireland, Dublin or nationalists? As Ulysses shows, Joyce thought Dublin was capable of producing the gentle and abstemious Bloom, and the intelligent and cultured Stephen Dedalus. These facts should raise the suspicion that Joyce was not offering the drunken raggle-taggle of Barney Kiernan’s as representative at all. An alternative view is that Joyce is portraying a portrayal of a supposedly typical group. The supposition is not Joyce’s. One could imagine an apologist for British rule in Ireland pointing to these specimens and saying: look what these Irish are like! How can they be expected to rule themselves? The fact that the story is narrated by one of the pub-denizens only intensifies this - the apologist might say: this information is from one of their own, we didn’t make it up.
In objection to my view that Joyce does not think of the characters in ‘Cyclops’ as representative of a bigger group, one might say, firstly, that Joyce in plenty of other places presents us with Irish characters beset with alcoholism, futility and empty boasting (think of Simon Dedalus, for example); and secondly, that the episode can be shown to be based on meticulous observations, down to Joyce having a specific part of Dublin in mind for the narrator’s diction, and the Citizen being based on a real person (Michael Cusack). Joyce knew full well, this argument might continue, that these types existed in reality (alcoholism was - and still is - a serious problem in Ireland), whereas the semi-apes of nineteenth-century imperialist propaganda didn’t exist.
In response to the second point first, I would argue that it is one thing to acknowledge that a certain type of person exists, but quite another to take that type as representative of a broader class of people. They represent the class of people who are like themselves, but that is vacuous. To mislead, one does not have to tell direct falsehoods: one can also mislead by omitting to say things. Joyce was a master omitter in a different sense, in that he expects his readers to fill in things for themselves(10). And it’s not as if Joyce didn’t provide clues to a more complete picture of Ireland or Dublin elsewhere in Ulysses. As already mentioned, there are Bloom and Stephen. There are also, in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, Stephen’s reflections on the rising prominence of Ireland in the world of literature: ‘We are becoming important, it seems.’ (U 9, 311-13) There is a hint of wry irony in this line, and the ‘it seems’ suggests a touch of scepticism on Stephen’s part. But this need not mean that Joyce himself shares the irony or the scepticism. After all, Ireland really was becoming important in the world of literature at that time. To ignore these other indications of what is happening in Ireland - as they are ignored in ‘Cyclops’ - is to be as one-eyed as the Citizen himself.
This is perfectly compatible with accepting that the Citizen himself is also one-eyed, something I have no wish to deny. Harry Blamires is correct in saying that ‘Joyce’s peculiar quality as an artist is that he rejected one-eyed outlooks’<(11). Given this, it is unlikely that Joyce intended us to accept either the one-eyed view of the Citizen, or the equally one-eyed view that the Citizen and his companions are typical examples of a broader (non-vacuous) class.
At the end of the Cyclops episode in the Odyssey, Odysseus blinds Polyphemos. Homer gives us a vivid and gory description:
They seized the beam of the olive, sharp at the end, and leaned on it
into the eye, while I from above leaning my weight on it
twirled it, like a man with a brace-and-bit who bores into
a ship-timber, and his men from underneath, grasping
the strap on either side whirl it, and it bites resolutely deeper.
So seizing the fire-point-hardened timber we twirled it
into his eye, and the blood boiled around the hot point, so that
the blast and scorch of the burning ball singed all his eyebrows
and eyelids, and the fire made the roots of his eye crackle.
As when a man who works as a blacksmith plunges a screaming
great ax blade or plane into cold water, treating it
for temper, since this is the way steel is made strong, even
so Cyclops’ eye sizzled about the beam of the olive.
(Book IX, lines 382-394) (12)
Does any part of the ‘Cyclops’ episode in Ulysses correspond to this? The narrator tells us that a sweep ‘near drove his gear into my eye’ (U 12, 3). This happens at the beginning of the episode, not at the end. That doesn’t mean that it can’t still be intended as a correspondence, but I have already argued that there can be more than one. If Bloom is Odysseus and the Citizen Polyphemos, then we ought to look for some way in which Bloom can be said to blind the Citizen at the end. Bloom himself, recalling the episode later, congratulates himself on his victory over the Citizen: ‘Got my own back there.’ (U 13, 1216) Perhaps he imagines he has blinded the Citizen with brilliant arguments. I will discuss the passage in which this occurs at more length in the next section. Here I want to point out that Bloom’s arguments can hardly be considered blindingly brilliant. Bloom, it might be said, plays a blinder, at least in the theatre of his own self-perception. But perhaps it is Bloom himself who is really blind, or at least one-eyed.
5. Odysseus has an Achilles’ heel
On the ‘innocent’ reading of ‘Cyclops’, Bloom comes across as open-minded and reasonable, promoting humanitarian ideals in the face of aggressive bigotry. Yet perhaps this is a situation where Joyce reveals to us one of Bloom’s weaknesses as a character. For all his aggressiveness, the Citizen has some perfectly good arguments. ‘Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes?’ (U 12, 1240-1) he asks. True, the final phrase ‘our lost tribes’ can be seen as a piece of cultural nationalist romanticizing. However, it cannot be denied that Ireland did suffer massive depopulation in the nineteenth century due to famine and emigration, while under British rule. Even if this is not the whole story, it is part of the story (I do not deny that the Citizen is one-eyed). As a matter of fact, Joyce said pretty much the same thing in propera persona in ‘Ireland at the Bar’, one of three articles he wrote in 1907 for the Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo della Serra:
There are twenty million Irishmen scattered all over the world. The Emerald Isle contains only a small part of them. ... In fact, the Irish question is not settled even today, after six centuries of armed occupation and more than a hundred years of English legislation, which has reduced the population of the unhappy island from eight to four million, quadrupled the taxes, and twisted the agrarian problem into many more knots.
(CW, p. 199)
Of course, Joyce may have had, or adopted, a different outlook when writing Ulysses. In response to the above, one might perhaps attempt to counter-argue that the famine and emigration would have happened anyway, or that some British people tried to help, but assuming one could make such a case, in order to do so one would have to present historical facts. Bloom, however, presents as his counter-argument a vague appeal to ‘love’:
- But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
- What? says Alf.
- Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
(U 12, 1481-5)
This passage is often cited as an example of Bloom’s two-eyed, open-minded attitude. In fact, it shows him as subscribing to key features of the liberal internationalist outlook. Note that among the things that are ‘no use’ is included ‘history’ - an echo perhaps of Henry Ford’s ‘history is bunk’. Note also the universalism assumed in ‘everybody knows’. The point on which Bloom stakes the whole is ‘love’. The Citizen might perfectly reasonably reply that love is not an appropriate attitude to take to one’s oppressor. One might be tempted to see Bloom’s view as a straightforward application of the Christian injunction ‘love your enemies’. (In fact, ‘love thy neighbour’ is quoted by one of the Kiernanites, John Wyse, a few lines later.) Schmitt has some things to say about this injunction which, if he is right, mean that it cannot be applied to salvage Bloom’s position. He points out that the word translated as ‘enemies’ is inimicos, not hostes - that is, personal enemies, not political enemies:
As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and the political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted “love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros,” άγαπ τούς έχθρούς ύμών, and not diligite hostes vestros. No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary. The Bible quotation touches the political antithesis even less than it intends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people(13).
Of course this may not be the final word on the subject. The pacifist stance may be defensible, or one might argue that love need not exclude acts of resistance. Some of the Citizen’s remarks about the British are clearly unfair - the claim that England has ‘no literature worthy of the name’ (U 12, 1199), for example, would be extremely easy to refute. And Joyce, as an enthusiast for Dowland and other English composers, would have known how unfair the remark about ‘no music’ (ibid.) is. Whatever about whether one need hate one’s political enemy, the Citizen quite clearly does. But what is significant is that Bloom does not engage the Citizen in real argument at all - Bloom is not listening.
One might say that any serious attempt to argue with the Citizen would be futile. But this is because of the Citizen’s aggressiveness, not necessarily because the views he is articulating are unreasonable. It would be easy - and one-eyed - to use the aggressiveness of the Citizen as an excuse to disregard what he is saying. One might expect that Bloom, with his famed open-mindedness, would give some thought to the Citizen’s views later on, at a distance and after the heat has died down. However, even in the episodes after ‘Cyclops’, Bloom never reflects on the possibility that the Citizen might have been even partially right. In ‘Nausikaa’, we are given this stray thought:
Then that brawler in Barney Kiernan’s. Got my own back there. Drunken ranters what I said about his God made him wince. Mistake to hit back. Or? No. Ought to go home and laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in company. Afraid to be alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant.
(U 13, 1215-20)
The final sentence here does bespeak an attitude of forgiveness on Bloom’s part, which has its nobility. But note how Bloom revels in his victory over the ‘drunken ranters’ on the issue of anti-semitism, while at the same time showing no awareness of what a poor showing he himself made on the issue of Irish nationalism. He also shows no inclination whatsoever to revise his views on this latter issue, even after the heat of battle has died down (it is three hours later). As Schmitt observes, liberal internationalism prides itself on its tolerance, but that tolerance has strict limits.
Another telling feature of this passage is Joyce’s characterisation of the Kiernanites (and, by implication, all their kind, whoever their kind might be) as ‘like a child of two’ in being ‘afraid to be alone’. One thing that might be said here is that these people may simply enjoy company, however Bloom or anyone else might feel about the particular company, rather than being afraid to be alone. But the fact that Bloom sees them in this way is telling for a different reason. Bloom is himself very much alone, and not just in the sense of not being gregarious. Emer Nolan is perceptive on this point:
He appears in Ulysses both as life-affirming homme moyen sensuel, contentedly fleshy and lustful, and as extraordinarily squeamish and reserved in his negotiations with actual human bodies. ... In “Lestrygonians” Bloom views the human body as a consumption machine. At an earlier point in the text this carries comic and demystifying implications in its refusal of somber religiosity, but seems here increasingly the mark of an alienated vision. Society presents itself to him merely as a panorama of blood lust and natural appetite: the modern world is grasped as a post-historical era, inhabited only by living dead, whose very possession of human instincts is horrifying(14).
Bloom’s aloneness, then, consists in his unwillingness to identify himself with any community, which - if Nolan is right - is a deep-seated feature of his personality, linked to a physical discomfort with other humans and an, at least intermittent, perception of them as ‘consumption machines’. Many critics of liberal internationalism would claim that, because it is a concomitant of capitalism, ‘consumption machines’ is precisely how it views people. Moreover, Charles Taylor has argued that a pervasive feature of liberal thought is its ‘atomism’(15) - that is, its failure to acknowledge individuals as in any way constituted by the communities to which they belong. Further evidence of Bloom’s alienation from any community may lie in the fact that, although (as we are told in ‘Ithaca’, U 17, 542) he has been baptized three times, he seems to have no sense of identity with other Christians: in the climactic confrontation at the end of ‘Cyclops’ he refers to Jesus as ‘Your God’ (U 12, 1805, emphasis added). He does not seem particularly committed to the Jewish faith of his ancestors either - it may be revealing that he conceives of his Jewishness as a racial - that is, a biological -trait, not a cultural or religious one. He says ‘I belong to a race’ (U 12, 1467), not ‘I belong to [say] a people’. True, he ridicules Catholic priests for the easiness of their fasts compared with the black fast Yom Kippur (U 8, 35-6) and thus sides with the Jews against the Christians. But this identifying is not strong enough to prevent him from eating pork, marrying a gentile or, for that matter, letting himself be baptized a Christian three times. It is, then, not entirely unreasonable for Ned to ask: ‘Is he Jew or gentile or Holy Roman or a swaddler or what the hell is he?’ (U 12, 1631-2) But this remark is tied up with the issue of anti-semitism.
This issue crops up many times in Ulysses. Indeed, Joyce is one of the few modernist authors to consistently show sensitivity on this. Even before Bloom comes on the scene, we are presented with an anti-semitic pot-shot from Mr. Deasy in ‘Nestor’. According to him, ‘Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews’, because ‘she never let them in.’ (U 2, 437-442) Many commentators have taken Joyce to be making an analogy between the Jews as persecuted outsiders in their own home, and the Irish as persecuted outsiders in their own home. One might question just how good this analogy is, but it is in fact drawn by Bloom himself. Bloom speaks impassionedly - and with justice - about the persecutions suffered by the Jews:
- And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant.
Gob, he nearly burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.
- Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.
(U 12, 1467-72)
It is, incidentally, not very plausible that the episode’s narrator - half-drunk as he is, and biased against Bloom - would report Bloom’s words in the eloquent and coherent form in which they are actually reported. This should alert us, once again, to the one-eyedness of the episode itself, as discussed above: Bloom is made to sound reasonable and eloquent, and his interlocutors are not. Bloom acknowledges the justice of at least some of the citizen’s complaints on behalf of the Irish, albeit in a way that appears to brush them aside. (‘Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was ...’ (U 12, 1376).) But he seems unable to understand that indignation at injustice might boil over into the desire to fight back. He might, as already suggested, try to make a case for a nonviolent stance, but we have already seen how feeble are his attempts to do so. Those attempts show no signs of having given the matter much thought. One has to wonder what caused Bloom’s disillusionment with Sinn Fein - but it does not seem to have arisen from giving the matter careful consideration.
Something to which the issue of anti-semitism ought to draw our attention is one of the forms it takes - namely, the presentation of Jews in crude caricatural form. But the Irish were also in a position to complain about this. And to accept the ‘innocent’ reading of ‘Cyclops’ is to collude in just such a caricatural presentation.
The reading of ‘Cyclops’ I have been suggesting should shed light on Joyce’s portrayals of portrayals of nationalism in other parts of Ulysses. One such portrayal of a portrayal occurs, once again, in ‘Nestor’, in some of the things said by Stephen’s employer Mr. Deasy. Deasy is a proud supporter - perhaps member - of the Orange Order. Yet he is quick to argue that that does not automatically make one a unionist: ‘Do you know that the Orange lodges agitated for home rule twenty years before O’Connell did or before the prelates of your communion denounced him as a demagogue?’ More revealingly, he says to Stephen immediately after this: ‘You Fenians forget some things.’ (U 2, 270-2) Thus, not only does he presume to know what Stephen’s political affiliations are, but he also presumes that ‘Fenians’ have a simplistic - one-eyed - view of things, while at the same time he is keen to ensure that no-one presumes that his own Order is similarly one-eyed. Thus Joyce here alerts us to the possibility that one might take this kind of double-standard approach - seeing one’s opponent’s views as one-eyed while at the same time pointing out the nuances in one’s own view.
As in religion, so also in politics, Bloom seems to be a man who has lost his faith. He is credited as the man ‘that gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper’ (U 12, 1574). If that is the case, however, there are clear signs that he has left all that behind him by 1904. As we have seen, his current stance is that ‘all that’ is ‘no use’. His disaffection with the cause of independence is perhaps also being signalled when, in ‘Circe’, he says ‘I’m as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir.’ (U 15, 794) (It is, admittedly, difficult to know what is ‘really’ happening in that episode, however.)
We find in Bloom evidence of not only the liberal internationalist outlook and atomisation, but a still further trait which has been taken by critics of modernity to be part of the same nexus - namely, what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, call ‘instrumental rationality’(16). This is a feature of modernity (although they claim its beginnings are much older) which consists in the subordination of the pursuit of scientific knowledge, indeed knowledge generally, to instrumental ends. It may or may not be a coincidence that The Dialectic of Enlightenment contains a lengthy meditation on the Odyssey, wherein Odysseus is seen as the embodiment of instrumental rationality. Be that as it may, his modern counterpart, Bloom, shows clear signs of the trait. In ‘Ithaca’ we are told that he and Stephen respectively represent the ‘scientific’ and the ‘artistic’ temperaments (U 17, 560). And immediately afterwards:
What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science?
Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once revolutionary, for example the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water siphon, the canal lock and winch with sluice, the suction pump.
(U 17, 561-8)
(Incidentally, the word ‘cogitating’ here must surely remind us of Descartes.) Further evidence of Bloom’s instrumental rationality can be found later on in the same episode, in his meditations on schemes for the accumulation of ‘vast wealth’ (U 17, 1698ff.). These are in fact doubly indicative of the trait, since he justifies to himself the practice of indulging in such meditations by a separate appeal to usefulness - they ‘alleviated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and renewed vitality’ (U 17, 1758). Also, it might be asked why does he characterise ‘all that’ as ‘no use’, rather than (say) ‘no good’?
It might be said, then, that Bloom is modernity personified. It would, of course, be a grave injustice to Bloom to say that that is the whole story about him. It remains the case that Bloom has many virtues. He is genuinely and spontaneously generous despite being unfairly - and in anti-Semitic stereotypical terms - maligned for meanness, notably by the Kiernanites in the ‘Cyclops’ episode itself. He is also, despite my remarks about instrumental rationality above, possessed of genuine intellectual curiosity; even if his tendency is ‘towards applied, rather than pure, science’, his interest in the practical applications of knowledge is just that - he finds them interesting - rather than being dependent on any personal gain he stands to make from them. To reduce Bloom to a mere personification or emblem of modernity would also be a grave injustice to Joyce, for just as it would be highly uncharacteristic of Joyce to resort to crude caricature, it would be equally uncharacteristic of him to make a character a mere emblem. Bloom has been presented to us throughout Ulysses as a complex, multi-faceted personality. Indeed, some of the more post-modernist commentators on Joyce see his presentation of the people in his books as an assault on the very idea of stable ‘characters’, as people are presented in more conventional novels As it happens, I have reservations about that radical view, as I think it both underestimates the consistency of Joyce’s characters and underestimates the psychological complexity and subtlety of earlier novelists. That is, if the novelists Joyce is being contrasted with are not just the authors of simplistic thrillers and trashy romances but include - for example - Flaubert, George Eliot or Tolstoy, then Joyce’s appreciation of the complex and ever-changing nature of personality does not place a great gulf between him and them. Be that as it may, a character may play an emblematic role at times, even while the greater complexity of his or her personality is acknowledged. It is, then, consistent with Joyce’s methods that, although Bloom is a complex (or even ‘unstable’) character, one of his facets is that he at times fulfils the emblematic role of personifying modernity. More generally, it would be an extremely reductionist view of Ulysses that saw it as nothing more than an attack on liberal internationalism in the vein of Schmitt, or as nothing more than a critique of modernity in the vein of Adorno and Horkheimer. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that critique of liberal internationalism and modernity generally is one of the threads in the rich tapestry of the book.
6. Conclusion: modernism versus modernity
The term modernism has proved rather recalcitrant to attempts at definition(17). We can characterise it vaguely as that movement, encompassing a wide range of different art-forms, which had its peak in the early part of the twentieth century, and had among its most representative figures Stravinsky, Picasso, T.S. Eliot and Joyce himself. Modernity names a much broader intellectual, political and social movement which has its origins in the enlightenment, and has among its representative ideas atomism, instrumental rationality, social contract theory, the scientific study of human nature, hostility to religion and to tradition generally, and a low opinion of the Middle Ages. Liberal internationalism is another one of its representative ideas. Many of the modernists were deeply critical of modernity. This anti-modernity stance is characteristic, in the present writer’s opinion anyway, of most of the best exponents of modernism. The Italian futurists were loudly enthusiastic for at least many key elements of modernity - although not for its liberalism - but their art cannot (in the present writer’s etc.) be considered modernism at its best. Among the anti-modernity modernists were people who were close to Joyce both personally and artistically. T.S. Eliot is a salient example. In his lecture series After Strange Gods, for example, he speaks of the society he lived in as being ‘worm-eaten with liberalism’(18). Eliot often stresses the importance of maintaining communal and national identity in the face of liberalism’s disintegrating force. In the same lectures series, he talks about the importance of tradition, and in this connection he says:
What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits, and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ‘the same people living in the same place’(19).
Strikingly, ‘the same people living in the same place’ is word-for-word identical with Bloom’s initial attempt at defining ‘nation’, as was quoted above, and Eliot may well have been aware of this. The difference between Bloom and Eliot however, is that Eliot shows evidence of having given thought to what this means.
I am not claiming that Joyce would have agreed with Eliot on every point. But in exposing the shortcomings of modernity’s representative Bloom, and in particular of his liberal internationalism, Joyce shows that his thought shares key themes with that of other major literary modernists. It shares key themes, too, with that of Schmitt, Adorno, and others among modernity’s most severe critics.
Abbreviations for Joyce’s works
D: Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes in consultation with Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1967.
U: Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1984, 1986. (References to Ulysses are given by episode and line number.)
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Sarah Hitchen, Brendan O’Byrne and Dan Watts for reading drafts of this paper and making useful comments and suggestions.