Seduction and Estrangement: World War I Recruiting Posters and the Politics of
Ulysses
Mark Wollaeger Vanderbilt University
"Not one great event but has been
seen for the rest of the world through English eyes or told to the rest
of the world as England wished to tell it. The traditional racial characteristics
of each of us were fitted upon us by England for all the world to learn
by heart. And the myth of 'British fair play' stands above all the characteristics
we suffer under as the greatest masterpiece of them all."
Scissors and Paste, January
2, 1915
"We feel in England
that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame."
Haines in Ulysses
This essay aims
to specify the kind of political work Ulysses
performed within its own historical moment by situating it within discursive
battles over Irish national identity that were exacerbated by England's
poster campaign during the Great War.(1)
After exploring historical
and cultural contexts for the rise of posters and their appropriation by
the nation-state through the advertising industry for purposes of propaganda,
I argue that Joyce encoded the material force of poster images into his
textual practice in Ulysses and propose a heuristic homology between
posters and modern fiction more generally. I then turn to a reciprocal
articulation of the staging of ideological appeals in Ulysses and
Irish recruiting posters in order to show how the aesthetic of dislocation
and interruption in Ulysses tends to undo the rhetorical project
of recruiting posters by re-problematizing the category of Irishness and
the very idea of national identity at a time when the majority of Irish
colonial subjects were beginning to enter into a postcolonial world. Reasserting
the aesthetic hierarchies that value the modernism of Ulysses over
that of the posters, I argue that if art's critical capacity depends on
its estrangement from society in general, then cultural criticism must
continue to evaluate (and possibly alter) the relationship to the social
established by particular aesthetic objects. I locate this critical dynamic
in Ulysses in the increasingly dilated space between narrative event
and narrative discourse, a space that promotes a critical estrangement
from the social and cultural norms set in play by the realistic ground
that Joyce persistently solicits the reader to reconstruct even in the
text's most extravagantly non-mimetic moments. Far from a transcendent
formalism, this critical estrangement is the aesthetic realization of an
historically specific form of cosmopolitan subjectivity that is inseparable
from the history of Ireland's economic, political, and cultural interaction
with England.
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On June
16, 1904, Leopold Bloom, waiting in a post office for Martha Clifford's
letter, gazes at a modern recruiting poster, one "with soldiers of all
arms on display" (5.57). Given that pictorial recruiting posters of the
kind Bloom goes on to describe were not produced before World War I, Bloom's
poster is probably a Joycean invention modeled on posters distributed from
1915-1918.(2) Known for
this pedantic fidelity to the historically verifiable, here Joyce indulges
in an anachronism that distinctly foregrounds the text's complex historical
layering, a layering that needs to be acknowledged by situating Ulysses
more insistently in the period of its composition than is often the case.(3)
Expanding in revision the passage in which Bloom "review[s] again the soldiers
on parade" (5.66), Joyce highlights the moment of reading in which an Irish
subject internalizes, restages, and revises the ideological messages that
were formulated during the war by the British government and obligingly
designed and disseminated by Irish advertising agencies, including, as
it happens, the agency for which Bloom once worked, Hely's.
"I
find the subject of Ulysses," Joyce liked to say, "the most human in world
literature," for Homer's hero is the only "complete all-round character"
ever created. In Richard Ellmann's influential biography, Joyce's Ulysses,
"pacifist, father, wanderer, musician, and artist," comes to seem a portrait
of the artist as a complete man, and Leopold Bloom, accordingly, is figured
as an avatar of universal humanism, "a humble vessel elected to bear and
transmit unimpeached the best qualities of the mind."(4)
Yet the two extant accounts of Joyce's remarks, often used to support claims
of modernism's aspirations to universality, also register a more immediate
historical context for Ulysses: the one figure able to outwit polytropic
man, according to Joyce, as the "Greek recruiting sergeant" who circumvented
Ulysses's feigned madness by placing two-year-old Telemachus in the furrow
Ulysses was ploughing.(5)
Given that Ulysses was trying to escape from mandatory service, it may
seem odd that Joyce casts a scene of conscription as a scene of recruitment.
Yet Joyce made these remarks during World War I, as the British government
was subjecting Ireland to an intensive recruiting campaign featuring public
speakers, parades, and, quite prominently, posters.(6)
Frank
Budgen was the first to supply the appropriate visual context for Joyce's
comments, noting that Ulysses "found his Ajax at the War Office in the
shape of Lord Kitchener," an allusion to the poster image on which James
Flagg modeled his more famous American poster, "I Want You for U.S.
Army."(7) Having designed
his own posters for Dublin's Volta cinema several years earlier, and having
understood the Trojan Horse as the first tank, Joyce may well have relished
the notion that the story of Ulysses's failed draft evasion could have
functioned in its own day as a kind of recruiting poster. The ancient recruiter's
filial tactics, after all, can be read as a precursor to one of the most
famous recruiting posters of World War I: the comfortable post-war father
seated in an easy chair being asked by his children, "Daddy, what did YOU
do in the Great War?" When Joyce himself was asked the same question, the
story goes, he responded, "I wrote Ulysses."(8)
Begun in 1914, Ulysses is caught up in discursive battles over Irish
national identity that were exacerbated by England's poster campaign during
the war. The "sole unique advertisement" Bloom habitually ponders before
falling asleep is a "poster novelty" (17.1771), and posters, as Claude
Gandelman has argued, epitomize the tendency of both modern publicity and
modern art to present themselves "as a sort of theater of the enunciative
process." Susan Sontag, arguing along similar lines, points out that "posters
presuppose the modern concept of the public space -- as a theater of persuasion.
. . . The poster . . . implies the creation of urban, public space as an
arena of signs: the image- and word-choked facades and surfaces of great
modern cities."(9) Taking
the urban space of colonial Dublin as its subject, Ulysses engages
modern techniques of ideological consolidation epitomized in the poster
while contributing to the invention of a particular form of cosmopolitan
subjectivity. Haines, the English ethnographer who wishes to incorporate
Stephen's witticisms into a study of Irish folklore, represents (to borrow
James Clifford's formulation) a discrepant cosmopolitanism, one that throws
into relief the ways in which the cosmopolitanism of Ulysses is
able to produce, owing to Ireland's "premature" decolonization, what historical
retrospect permits us to recognize as a prototype of postcolonial subjectivity.(10)
Distancing himself from violently exclusivist nationalisms and later deeply
ambivalent towards what proved a reactionary new state, Joyce nevertheless
would have welcomed Frantz Fanon's notion that "it is at the heart of national
consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows." For the
political project of Ulysses is consonant with the declared program
of the journal for which Joyce worked as a translator during the war, Zurich's
International Review: "to oppose to the campaign of lies a war of
minds which shall shatter the unholy legends that are forming around us."(11)
Advertising, Propaganda, and the State
In
1916 a writer in The Spark, one of Dublin's many radical weeklies,
complained: "Someone once said that there were three degrees of falsehoods,
namely lies, damn lies and -- Statistics, and now I suggest
the fourth degree -- Recruiting posters" (May 23). The indignation
of the article, entitled "Some Recruiting Ads," can be attached to posters
like the one in which a large photograph of smiling soldiers airing their
quiffs to the camera is framed by the caption: "Come and Join This Happy
Throng Off to the Front." Marketing war as a fun-filled junket, the
poster just as easily could have conjoined the photograph with a caption
observing that "Guinness is Good for You." The Spark's variation
on the adage that truth is the first casualty of war may seem almost quaint
in a time when electronic media, international public relations firms,
and audience response tests help shape public policy.(12)
Yet the very expression "the first casualty when war comes is truth" dates
from World War I, when newly invented propaganda techniques first harnessed
the considerable power of a highly developed advertising industry to the
political aims of the nation-state. Ulysses distinctly registers
the fact that British recruiting propaganda had the kind of success that
would later draw the attention of Joseph Goebbels, whose Ministry of Propaganda
was deeply indebted to Britain's Ministry of Information, established in
1918 to centralize the control of wartime information.(13)
Historical Background for Recruiting in Ireland
During
the Boer War (1899-1902) British recruiting in Ireland elicited, from some
segments of Irish society, fierce anti-British sentiment and strongly sympathetic
support for South African resistance to imperial domination. Yet Dublin
not only furnished a disproportionate number of Irish recruits; the city
enlisted many more soldiers than did Belfast. The years following the Boer
War saw the gradual consolidation, accelerated by World War I, of a resistant
national consciousness that expanded what had been the relatively restricted
influence of various nationalist factions. Click here
for deeper background.
Long before World War I, when poster art first became a key agent of state
propaganda, the increasingly
obtrusive presence of posters in England had already begun to generate
controversy.(14) By
1904 regulatory agencies had arisen to ensure that few cities were as thoroughly
papered over as they had been in Victorian times. Leopold Bloom, in consequence,
wandering the streets of Dublin, had good reason to admire the ingenious
circumvention of state regulations by the advertiser of Kino's trousers,
whose rowboat on the Liffey rocks "lazily its plastered board": "Good idea
that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water
really?" (8.93-94).(15)
The Poster Arrives
Concomitant
with its commercial ascendancy, by the late nineteenth century the pictorial
poster, borne up by artists such as Jules Chéret in the 1860s and
later Toulouse-Lautrec, was also coming to be recognized as a relatively
autonomous form of artistic expression. The
poster's new authority only intensified the effect of its diffusion
throughout popular culture. By the turn of the century the poster had arrived,
within the rapidly shifting coordinates of popular, mass, and elite art,
at an ambiguous status -- as both objet d'art and utilitarian throwaway
-- an ambiguity that would soon be exploited in the leveling of artistic
hierarchies in modern art more generally. The convergence of poster art's
commercial and cultural authority is epitomized in Ivor Montagu's decision
in 1926 to save Alfred Hitchcock's first important film, The Lodger,
by bringing in E. McKnight Kauffer, an American poster artist whose Cubist
and Futurist images helped revolutionize British design (and who later
illustrated some poems by T.S. Eliot).(16)
How is the Modern Novel
(not) like a Poster?
The
increasingly insistent force of the poster image early in the century was
not lost on novelists, who incorporated posters and their visual urgency
into their fiction with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Beyond instances
of self-conscious appropriation, the poster-novel conjuncture can also
be referred to the material conditions of cultural production. Writing
in 1925, E. M. Forster located the novel along a verbal continuum reaching
from the informative (a "tramway notice") to the "useless" (lyric poetry)
when he observed (with the melancholy of a man who had written his last)
that "the novel, whatever else it may be, is partly a notice board. And
that is why men who do not care for poetry or even for the drama enjoy
novels and are well qualified to criticize them."(17)
Forster's observation gets at the residually equivocal status of the novel
as "art" even after the aestheticizing efforts of Flaubert and James. Like
the poster, many modern novels addressed information about contemporary
life to a mass audience even as they aspired to an aesthetic autonomy,
or "uselessness," modeled on the detachment often attributed to lyric poetry.
Produced and distributed within the modern urban spaces they increasingly
came to represent, modern novels (and poetry) also resemble the poster
in their tendency to prefer images to narrative and scenes to summary.
The very existence of public spaces through which crowds pass quickly,
presupposed by posters and modern novels alike, no doubt contributed to
the appeal of the immediately arresting image.(18)
It is no accident, clearly, that the first novel to feature an advertising
canvasser who dreams of a "poster novelty . . . congruous with the velocity
of modern life" (17.1771-73) is set in the first European capital to have
an electric tramway system, presumably complete (as the Forster quotation
requires I mention) with tramway notices.(19)
In a later section of this essay I shall return to some
questions raised by treating Ulysses and posters as homologous
cultural objects.
Recruitment and the Hibernized
Poster
The
power of the poster image was not lost on the Recruiting Subdivision of
the British War Office either, whose campaign turned increasingly to pictorial
posters.(20) In
the most intensive recruiting years, 1915 and 1918, posters in Ireland
exploited a variety of techniques and images
targeted at specific segments of the Irish population. With economic
and symbolic appeals largely divided between typeset and pictorial posters
respectively, specifically Irish pictorial posters became the locus of
contested representations of Irishness, a discursive field in which Ulysses
also participated.
The
turn towards pictorial posters at this historical juncture also throws
into relief the increasingly recognized effectiveness of the mass-produced
image (propaganda films also came into use at this time) in mobilizing
an ideological consensus. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing in support of
"a poster campaign to whip up hate against Germany," would underscore the
shifting priorities of mass communication by commending the poster's power
to hold up visions even before the reluctant eye: "I do not believe in
pamphlets, because the prejudiced man never even opens them. I do believe
in placards because one cannot help seeing them.(21)
Molly Bloom seems to have come to a similar conclusion when she complains,
after remembering a time she was so bored that she mailed letters to herself,
that men are so "thick" they "never understand what you say even youd want
to print it up on a big poster for them" (18.707-8). Posters themselves
sometimes include a fantasy of their own efficacy. In one instance, a German
soldier on the front is literally run off his feet by a placard announcing
the imminent arrival of thousands of fighting Irishmen. Though the represented
placard is non-pictorial, the
poster's use of red links its lettering with an explosion in the red
sky over the battlefield, as if the power of the inscribed word were being
translated into the force of the encompassing image.
Joyce builds the material force of poster images
into his textual practice
Though
not a visual writer in the painterly sense of Conrad, Lawrence, or Woolf,
Joyce builds the material force of poster images into his textual practice.
Even beyond the clatter of the printing press in "Aeolus," the sensuous
impact of mass-produced signs is pervasive, and visual images in particular
typically conjure a scene of reading in -- and as -- response: "Where was
the chap I saw in that picture somewhere?," Bloom wonders. "Ah yes, in
the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open"
(5.37-38). A moment later, as if acknowledging the aggressiveness of mechanically
reproduced images, Bloom sees "parlour windows plastered with bills": "Plasters
on a sore eye" (5.58). Such somatic links are insistent: gazing at the
recruiting poster in "Lotus Eaters" while holding a copy of the Freeman's
Journal, Bloom inhales the smell of "fresh printed rag paper" (5.58);
Molly, reconjuring the pleasures of Boylan, whom she thinks of as a billsticker,
lingers over the smell of "the sweety kind of paste they stick their bills
up with" (18.126-27); reading a flier for a Zionist settlement in Palestine,
all the while kindling a reverie about the woman ahead of him in line,
Bloom holds "the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and his will,
his soft subject gaze at rest" (4.162-63). If the collapsing distinction
between public and private in such moments gestures towards a brave new
world of administered stimulation, it is important to note
that even in Bloom's characteristic yielding to sensuality Joyce preserves
the possibility of agency within subjected vision by differentiating between
sensory reflex and volitional response. Almost closed here, the space between
seeming immediacy and considered response, the space, that is, in which
images are read and interpreted, is increasingly dilated as the narrative
unfolds. Thus the apparitions of Major Tweedy and Edward VII in "Circe"
during Stephen's encounter with the British soldiers both derive from Bloom's
extended response to the recruiting poster he studies in "Lotus Eaters."
The complexity of that response requires some additional unfolding here.
Having
just collected his letter from Martha Clifford, Bloom looks back to the
post office wall:
He slipped card and letter into
his sidepocket, reviewing again the soldiers on parade. Where's old Tweedy's
regiment? Castoff soldier. There: bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he's
a grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is: royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats.
Too showy. That must be why women go after them. Uniform. Easier to enlist
and drill. Maud Gonne's letter about taking them off O'Connell street at
night: disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith's paper is on the same tack
now: an army rotten with venereal disease: overseas or halfseasover empire.
Half baked they look: hypnotised like. Eyes front. Mark time. Table: able.
Bed: ed. The King's own. Never see him dressed up as a fireman or a bobby.
A mason, yes. (5.65-75)
Triggering a flood of
associations about his father-in-law, the amatory advantage of uniformed
soldiers, and the political authority behind them, the poster also elicits,
as Stephen Watt has observed, a flicker of anti-colonial sentiment in Bloom's
allusion to a leaflet attributed to Maud Gonne.(22)
Yet Bloom's full response to the poster complicates any simple axiology
of engagement/disengagement or resistance/compliance. The poster clearly
exercises a hold on Bloom -- he looks at it twice -- and his memory of
the recruiting controversy sets the stage for the climactic encounter in
Nighttown between Stephen and Privates Carr and Compton. Given the textual
logic whereby "Circe" reworks the materials of the previous episodes, Stephen's
confrontation and subsequent rescue by Bloom unfolds within a dramatic
space inflected by the initial stimulus of the recruiting poster, and Bloom's
capacity to act on Stephen's behalf is anticipated in his response to that
poster. Despite Bloom's absorption, in other words, a critical distance
on the poster's interpellative designs is established in the contrast between
the relative incisiveness of Bloom's thoughts and the "hypnotised" gaze
of the soldiers, who are cast as drunken ("halfseasover") agents of a sickly
yet contagious empire ("rotten with venereal disease") -- English "syphilisation"
the Citizen will later call it (12.1197).
Thus
Bloom's comparatively critical response to the poster can neither be fully
assimilated to the cause of active resistance to recruitment nor dismissed
as a form of skeptical detachment. Though the insight into uniforms as
a technique of recruitment and social control -- "Easier to enlist and
drill" -- is Bloom's, the most critical elements in his interior monologue
are held in suspension as fragments from other printed sources: to register
the invisible quotation marks around such phrases as "disgrace to our Irish
capital" or "an army rotten with venereal disease" is to transform the
represented flow of Bloom's consciousness into a series of textual notations,
a verbal montage in which the possibility of a more engaged political response
can be said to exist, though only in potential, in the unarticulated relationship
among the montage elements. In
Stephen, too, the potential for active engagement is articulated only
to be suspended.
Such
instances of politically volatile subjectivity indicate the limitations
of pegging the politics of Ulysses to any simple form of engaged
radical critique or bourgeois detachment. A reciprocal articulation of
the staging of ideological appeals in Ulysses and Irish recruiting posters,
to which I now turn, will suggest an alternative
understanding of the political work performed by Ulysses.
Reading Posters/Reading Ulysses
As
if trapped in the same labyrinth, Ulysses and recruiting posters
sometimes fix their gaze on precisely the same Dublin street corner. Even
when posters represent rural scenes, these too never escape the confines
of the city. Consider the following pair of posters, each of which disseminates
the image of parading soldiers in order to expand the effective range of
the real enlistment parades that were staged at this time. (Major Tweedy's
Dublin Fusiliers, with their colorful uniforms, became, in such parades,
the functional equivalent of sandwich boards.)
One James Walker poster shows soldiers marching past a farm: "Farmers of
Ireland Join Up & Defend Your Possessions." Despite the direct address
to the farmer, the
poster is actually designed, like all pastoral images, for urban consumption:
a wide city street superimposed on the countryside betrays the fact that
the poster was distributed mainly in Dublin and Belfast. This image joins
with many others like it to represent Ireland as the kind of threatened
rural retreat that E. M. Forster and his ilk wished to preserve in England. An
Alexander Thom's poster provides the urban counterpart, in which civilians,
marked as shirkers by the casual hats modeled on their heads, watch soldiers
parade in front of Trinity College and the Bank of Ireland.
Joyce shows us
a similar scene, though through English (or, in Irish slang, "paleface")
eyes: "Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women sitting fore,
gripping the handrests. Palefaces. Men's arms frankly round their stunted
forms. They looked from Trinity to the blind columned porch of the Bank
of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed" (10.340-43). That the word "blind"
should be read as a transferred epithet (as in the slippery opening apposition
of "Araby": "North Richmond Street, being blind") becomes clear when one
of the buildings is viewed from within (in at least two senses) by Simon
Dedalus, who has escorted Stephen into the Bank to collect his prize winnings
in Portrait: "Mr Dedalus lingered in the hall gazing about him and
up at the roof and telling Stephen, who urged him to come out, that they
were standing in the house of commons of the old Irish parliament." As
if to underscore the contemporary consequences of the history Simon invokes,
Joyce also shows father and son walking up "the steps and along the colonnade
where the highland sentry was parading" (103, 102).
The poster thus frames a peculiarly self-defeating image. Presumably the
poster's imagined spectators are meant to disengage themselves from the
passivity of the inscribed onlookers, yet any such spur to active engagement
might just as well stimulate the ironic recognition that the Irish Parliament,
having voted itself out of existence with the Act of Union (1800), had
become a bank catering to English needs. By 1915, moreover, many Irish
subjects, particularly those in Dublin, where the great majority of these
posters were distributed, would prefer not to have the royal crown on the
flag.(23) If Joyce's
English tourists leave their doorsteps in the morning only to meet versions
of themselves, British recruitment, it seems, can't get its thumb out of
the photograph.(24)
The pressure of such historical ironies becomes even more acute in other
posters.
Recruiting posters throughout Europe deployed strategic images of masculinity
and femininity, casting them in such emblematic roles as La Liberté,
Britannia, motherhood, and frailty. If, as John Berger has argued, modern
publicity operates nostalgically by selling a version of the past to the
future,(25) the peasant
woman in one Hely's poster exploits a specifically Irish myth of
originary rural purity
-- thus "women-folk" -- invented around the turn of the century
and advanced, as David Cairns and Shaun Richards have shown, by different
segments of Irish society towards contradictory ends.(26)
Here, as deployed by British recruiters, the peasant woman,
caught up in a when-are-you-going-to-stop-beating-your-wife gambit, is
used to disarm the question of why Irish Catholics would wish to join forces
with their Protestant oppressor. Encouraging national identification with
another small Catholic country, this one already overrun, the poster is
also designed to evoke the alleged German atrocities committed against
Belgian women that were widely publicized in Lord Bryce's propaganda report
of 1915. That the figure of the peasant woman was constituted within a
violently contested cultural field can be gauged by the Playboy
riots of 1907, triggered in part by the perceived threat to a powerfully
invested emblem of national purity, an emblem whose implication in a discourse
of Celtic authenticity Joyce would ironize in the milkwoman of "Telemachus." Highlighting
the inventedness and potential paternalism of the Gaelic revival (as well
as its debt to Ascendancy figures such as Yeats), Joyce brings his
peasant
woman face to face with Haines, who addresses her in a language she
cannot even recognize as Irish.
Another
Hely's poster transforms the vulnerable Colleen Bawn into a militant figure
reminiscent of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, legendary unifier of Ireland's four
green fields.
Playing on the incongruity of active female and passive male, the image
preys on male fears of female empowerment during the war: with her rifle
dwarfing his ashplant and flame-like strands of hair echoing the frightening
destruction on the horizon, the woman's eager militancy overshadows the
more traditional image of feminine mourning in the background. The female
viewer is thus offered split roles that imply a narrative connection: urge
your man to do his duty or mourn for the losses caused by his cowardice.
(Of course that narrative is vulnerable to recasting: urge your man to
do his duty and then mourn his loss.) In the distant grouping of
father and son -- or perhaps, more pointedly, grandfather and grandson
-- we also catch a glimpse of the filial theme emphasized in other
widely distributed posters. The cautionary tale of Belgium, finally, is
again brought home, quite literally this time, and a ruined cathedral,
an emblem of ravaged Catholicism, is visible on the far right of the horizon.
Further collapsing the space between battle front and home front, another
Hely's poster brings the war home as an even more direct threat to
bourgeois comfort, using a very theatrical space to break down the boundaries
between the private sphere of domesticity and the international theater
of world war. Here, as in Ulysses, the idea
of "home rule" takes on pointedly multiple meanings. (The poster's challenge
would have found a particularly vulnerable target in Leopold Bloom.) Reinforcing
fears of invasion were claims, advanced by John Redmond, for one, at a
Dublin Mansion House recruiting conference, that detailed maps of Ireland
had been found on the corpses of Prussian officers at the front.(27)
And If that's a poker lying at the father's feet, not only
is this man poorly equipped to resist the Prussian bayonet threatening
to pierce his wife, but one views the seeming rape from the vantage of
the hearth, a proverbially secure location violated here by the second
soldier's direct gaze at the spectator. The child in the foreground --
whose christological pose invokes the slaughter of the innocents -- focuses
the fear of helplessness that also attaches to the wife and grandfather;
her line of sight, moreover, seems to confirm the dropped poker as a symbolic
unmanning.
This globalized domestic strategy, common enough in melodrama and war literature,
is also Joyce's in "Circe," where the colonial violence of Stephen's encounter
with Privates Compton and Carr, released from barracks as living recruitment
ads, helps to collapse distinctions between the local and the global, the
provincial and the cosmopolitan. (Insofar as the reader of "Circe" is also
asked to confront, in a peculiarly seductive way, his or her own sense
of the sexually normative, the phantasmagoric exposure of Joyce's own erotic
obsessions may also have an invasive effect, though of a different sort.)
Less dramatic than Stephen's fist fight but equally pointed are Ulysses's
pervasive reminders that modern metropolitan spaces are traversed by signs
of empire, from the Bolivian postcard in "Eumaeus" that induces Bloom's
reverie of traveling to London ("the great metropolis, the spectacle of
our modern Babylon"), to the posted notice for a sermon on "the African
Mission" that triggers mental images of natives "sitting round in a ring
with blub lips, entrances, listening" (16.514,5.323,335-36). In "Aeolus,"
even the institutional site of textual flow, as
Ian Baucom has observed, operates under the sign of imperial supervision:
"THE WEARER OF THE CROWN" hovers over a paragraph describing not the British
sovereign but the mailcars bearing his initials -- as well as "sacks of
letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels, insured and paid, for local,
provincial, British and overseas delivery" (7.14,16-17).(28)
The fundamental logic of the British poster campaign emerges distinctly
in a series of specifically Irish images. One poster's
silly
literal-mindedness does not obscure the problem of national identity
that lies at the heart of the rhetorical project enacted by recruiting
posters. "If you are an Irishman," says these images, you must look like
a model for cigarette ads or shaving kits (you may even have shamrocks
in your hat) as you march off to war to the sing-song rhythms of an advertising
slogan: "Enlist To-Day, and Have it to Say, You Helped
to Beat the Germans." In
the nineteenth-century Irish political cartoonists responded to English
caricatures of the Irish as apes and the English as angels by reversing
the contrast.(29) At
this juncture in the continuing history of mutual misrepresentation, the
English have reappropriated the Irish angels, now transformed into commodified
images of the handsome hero-shill, in order to ventriloquize them through
Irish advertising agencies.(30)
Going to battle with shamrocks in your hat, you hope to come back looking
like Michael O'Leary, a frequent speaker at recruiting rallies and subject
of another James Walker poster, this one showing O'Leary as matinee idol
gazing directly at the viewer from within a Victoria Cross.
Collapsing a narrative of achievement into a moment of identification --
you too can take on Germans ten at a time (eight, actually, according to
other sources), become a hero, and have your face plastered about town
-- the poster aims for a process of compression that Joyce reverses in
"Circe" by dilating moments of conflicted identification into expanded
narratives of empowerment and martyrdom. Like the parade posters, the O'Leary
poster also extends the effective range of staged recruiting spectacles
by operating, in Sontag's words, as "a kind of instant visual theater in
the street."(31) Contemporary
accounts indicate that the crowds at actual recruiting events were sometimes
as fractious and volatile as the audience for Bloom's "stump speech" in
"Circe," though no one, apparently, met Bloom's fate, set afire in a pillory
until "mute, shrunken, carbonised" (15.1956). Unsympathetic
observers were, however, inclined to view public recruiting oratory
as a form of low farce or political pantomime.
At rest, a hero like O'Leary might look like this paragon of Irishness
who, complete with bagpipes and wolfhound, graces a David Allen poster.
The attitude towards Irishness encoded in this image can be understood
as a motivating context for Joyce's satire in the divided narration of
"Cyclops," an episode in which the writtenness of the interpolations disrupts
the continuity of Joyce's only first-person retrospective narrator. Modeled
on the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the "Citizen" expands,
by means of epic catalogues and mock heroic descriptions, into a gigantic
caricature of artificial Irish authenticity, wearing seastones "graven
with rude yet striking tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines
of antiquity"; he is accompanied, moreover, by "the famous old Irish red
setter wolfdog" Garryowen, a.k.a. Owen Garry, who composes verses that
bear "a striking resemblance (the italics are ours) to the ranns
of ancient Celtic bards" (12.151, 173-76, 712-23). The Citizen is seated
"at the foot of a round tower" (an emblem frequently picked up in recruiting
posters) and the list of ancient Irish heroes graven on his seastones takes
up nearly an entire page.
As
if plastered over the mimetic realism of the anonymous narrator's voice,
the accumulated excess betokening the Citizen's Irishness ironically reveals
the deployment of such symbols as a cover for British interests.
Like the poster, Joyce's Citizen is best seen as the ventriloquizer of
a polemicized Irishness: the Irish poster boy recruits the Irish to the
British cause; Joyce's new stage Irishman, we learn, has grabbed "the holding
of an evicted tenant" (12.1315-16). The episode, in David Hayman's terms,
has shifted from the microparataxis of first nine episodes -- primarily
the associational discontinuities within interior monologue -- into a macroparataxis
of colliding forms.(32) No
longer naturalized as the flow of Bloom's memory, what was once a tissue
of quotations or allusions begins to fragment into autonomous set pieces
in such a way that the very page, as in the simulation of newspaper format
in "Aeolus," becomes "posterized"
-- transformed, that is, into a kind of textual hoardings, a verbal space
in which disparate images are linked by the syntactical approximation of
collage techniques.
The Politics of Collage:
Joycean Assemblages and Scissors and Paste
Although
the collages by Picasso and Braque in 1912 are generally credited with
influencing the development of verbal cognates, Joyce may also have been
influenced by Arthur Griffith's Scissors and Paste, which aimed
both to circumvent censorship and to contest what it considered the English
media's biased editing of world news by subversively arranging clippings
from other publications.(33)
An English account of military valor might be juxtaposed with accounts
of German victories or, more puckishly, an Englishman's letter to the editor
complaining about his verbal passport description might be supplied with
the headline, "An Englishman's Face: Oval or Intelligent?" (February 24,
1915). The aesthetic relevance of these political assemblages to Ulysses
is perhaps clearest in "Aeolus," and in fact it was during the thorough
rewriting of that episode in 1921 that Joyce inserted, along with the headlines,
an allusion that for a long time was read only as a snippet of Bloom's
unspoken commentary on the slicing of an ad out of the newspaper: "Scissors
and paste" (7.32).(34)
Later, in "Sirens," the first episode to foreground the recycling of earlier
narrative materials -- "As said before he ate with relish. . . ." -- abruptly
clipped sentences and even words -- "He saved the situa. Tight trou. Brilliant
ide" -- also produce a cutting-and-pasting effect, though the scissors,
as in Dada productions, are handled with less concern for wholeness and
coherence (11.519-20,483-84). Ironically, though it was "Sirens" that prompted
Ezra Pound's laconic advice that "a new style per chapter not required,"
Pound's own doctrine of the image, substituting rhythm for syntax and fragmentation
for pictorial unity, in effect authorizes that episode's narrative mode.(35)
For the political legacy of Scissors and Paste, however,
we must turn back to the juxtaposition of various styles in "Cyclops."
Cutting across the dispersed heterogeneity of the interpolations, the episode's
underlying concern with political violence tends to forge associations
even across narrative modes: an exchange about national identity (in which
the Citizen consolidates his sense of Irishness by excluding Bloom as a
Jew) is framed on one side by a newspaper photograph of a black man in
the American South, described by the narrator as "strung up in a tree with
his tongue out and a bonfire under him," and on the other by a long paragraph
detailing a "muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth,"
whose "emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs,"
idealizes the "dirty crumpled handkerchief" Stephen lends to Buck: "A new
colour for our Irish poets," says Buck: "snotgreen" (12.1325-26, 1438-39,
1.71,73). Regrounding, as usual, the idealization in the realism of the
body -- hallowed Irish traditions become the handkerchief's "incrustations
of time" -- Joyce juxtaposes jingoist fervor with the recurrent image of
the hanged man, prominent in his Cyclopean montage, to suggest
the violence inherent in the monological versions of racial, ethnic, and
national identity that Scissors and Paste came into existence to
disrupt.
If
the potential recruit had trouble hearing the call in the previous David
Allen poster, he's given more help elsewhere, so long as he can read music.
If true Irish art, emblematized by the harp and sanctified by a cross between
the Virgin Mary and Queen Hibernia, calls one into the army, here, then,
is Stephen's "cracked lookingglass of a servant" (1.146). As
if uttered by the allegorical figure, the question "WILL YOU ANSWER
THE CALL?" fuses the theological resonance of "call" as vocation with the
patriotic call to arms scripted in the musical notes. The image partakes
of a certain brilliant absurdity: channeling the bugle's clarion
call through the harp, the poster translates the music into -- again
-- a kind of political collage, battle scene overlaying the Irish landscape;
Irish art, by implication, necessarily resonating to England's tune. Used
to similar effect in Dubliners,
the harp seems to effect both a spatial and temporal displacement: the
battle scene is at once superimposed over the bucolic background as if
transported from Europe, yet the repetition of the lake visible both through
the harp and to its side suggests that the harp, like pre-War English invasion
novels, foretells the time when those Prussian maps of Ireland will be
put to use.
An Englishman's Poster: Self-Subverting or
Stupid?
The
sheer naiveté of the harp-bugle image raises some interesting questions
about design and reception. One has to suspect that any Irishman with the
slightest nationalist inclination or even a moderately developed sense
of irony would laugh Queen Mary (or the Virgin Hibernia) off the wall.
We have seen already that poster images sometimes contain the means of
their own subversion, whether in the material trace of a dissonant historical
narrative (the Bank of Ireland) or in a symbol of community that recapitulates
the contradictions within the symbolic project as a whole (the crowned
harp), and the overdetermination of such ruptures requires multiple explanations.
In the Hibernia-Virgin Mary poster, the ventriloquized harp, de-iconized
even more than most poster images, foregrounds the appeal structure of
recruitment to such extent that one wonders if it could retain any perlocutionary
power. Perhaps this poster is better interpreted as an instance of unconscious
confession, a baring of the device whereby British propagandists systematically
appropriated symbols of Irishness for ends potentially hostile to Irish
interests. Certainly there is no warrant, other than the conspiratorial
pleasure the scenario affords, to believe that Irish advertisers were gulling
their English clients by producing images they knew would be ineffective.
(In fact, if most advertising firms were, as David Allen was, owned by
Protestants, it may be that the representations of Catholicism in these
posters encode a form of class condescension.) Elusive intentions aside,
it is likely that the political mobilization of national emblems in the
context of Anglo-Irish relations at this time necessarily involved such
a degree of bad faith that no particular assemblage could have neutralized
the contradictions inherent in the project. The volatility of historical
contestation inevitably short-circuits, in Slavoj Zizek's terms, the process
through which an ideological field is stabilized around an empty or "pure"
signifier, in this instance the overcharged sense of "Irish duty" set in
place to superordinate national, political, and theological imperatives.(36)
Available evidence verifies the suspicion that some posters simply could
not have worked very well. It was illegal to tear down a recruiting poster,
and newspapers record various arrests for having done so. Ironically, perhaps
the single most significant political poster in Irish history was itself
torn down by a member of the Royal Army Yeomanry: in 1916, the one posted
copy of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic was plastered over a British
recruiting poster on the General Post Office.(37)
I have been unable to discover, alas, which poster was effaced; I have,
however, turned up one particularly evocative poster and a response to
its call.
Recovering Contestation: Reception and its
Discontents
A
column in The Gael, another radical weekly, lists several items
under the heading, "We Want to Find." One item reads: "The equal in audacity
to the chap who designed the war poster -- 'Island of Saints and Soldiers'"
(February 5, 1916). If
sophisticated ideology critique sometimes seems a privilege afforded the
present over the past, the following critical narrative in The Gael,
written three weeks after the brief notice, serves as a reminder that historical
criticism does not have to invent contestation so much as recover it for
its own purposes.
Having stopped to gaze at the poster, the writer, identifying herself only
as Maeve, recalls being accosted by a policeman, who warns her not to touch
it. "'My good man,'" [Maeve] replied, 'I would not touch it with a ten-foot
pole.'" Noting that the policeman followed her down a side street for a
bit, Maeve then describes the poster image for her readers, noting that
"the simple and tense legend underneath . . . evidently needs no explanation
beyond the picture." Yet as she continues Maeve patiently unravels
the poster's ideological seams precisely by playing the words off against
the image. Viewed in the context of other posters, this one, with its ruined
cathedral and pious farmer, can be seen to redeploy the now familiar suggestions
of advancing threats to Catholicism and Ireland's rural peace, as well
as the specter of paternal authority, located here in the hortatory spirit
of Saint Patrick. Maeve's own voice, however, deserves its own hearing:
When I was quite a little girl,
I learned a good many things about Ireland, one of them being that Ireland
was at one time known as the Isle of Saints and Scholars. Scholars, mind
you. My memory does not play me false on this point. I was also told that
England tried to wipe holiness and religion from the valleys and hills
of Ireland; told the meaning of the Mass rock; told of the Penal Laws against
religion; told also of ruined churches, of holy women and priests outraged.
. . . Later on I read of the Penal Laws against education. Then I knew
why so many Irishmen kiss the hand which scourges them -- lack of education.
. . . I cursed England and began to hate with a bitter hate. By this time
I also knew that Ireland had, and has, great soldiers as well as saints
and scholars. I learned, too, that the reason they became soldiers was
the English occupation of Ireland. Now, is it not strange an English recruiting
poster should proclaim Ireland to be an Island of Saints and Soldiers?
In Maeve's reading, the
verbal displacement of "scholars" by "soldiers" essentially recapitulates
the historical process whereby Ireland's English educational system transforms
Irish scholars into "loyal British subjects." Turning back to the remembered
image, she continues to unfold its ironies: "The young man in the poster
is ploughing, so the farmers are especially appealed to. They got their
land so cheaply and easily, and were let keep it so long unmolested for
such a long time that they should be only too glad to run away from it,
and extend their operations by manuring the fields of Europe with their
own blood and bones, instead of manuring their own land with somebody else's
blood and bone mixture." Rising to her concluding paragraph, Maeve completes
her "musings" by imagining the insurrection that was just over a year in
coming: "Perhaps England may 'get' the soldiers of Ireland in a way she
does not anticipate. She may find them lined up not to fight for her, but
against her, and she may find them rather good at driving her from the
land, as her German cousins are rather good at driving her from the sea."
Although Maeve represents her spectatorship as beginning within a doubly
coercive space -- an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), the poster, is
reinforced by a Repressive State Apparatus, the police -- her critical
narrative traces several kinds of resistance.(38)
If the police patrol the main street, the individual can take to the side
streets, bearing with her an afterimage of the offending poster; the internalized
gaze of surveillance does not, like some state-sponsored computer virus,
exhaust all available memory. The poster trace, like the image of Tweedy
that returns to Bloom in "Circe," assumes a place within the individual
subject's other memories, which include narratives of Catholic resistance
to English attempts to impose Protestant hegemony. Contesting the official
indoctrination of a central ISA, the educational system, whose goal, according
to another article in The Gael (October 17, 1915), is to teach Irish
youth that "Cromwell was broadminded in religious matters, and that Irish
liberties are perpetually safeguarded by the provisions of Magna Charta,
and the Habeas Corpus Act," Maeve offers resistance in an act of critical
response that draws on communal memories of subjection to reassert an alternative
history occluded by, yet suggested in, the poster.
Maeve's canny reading of the visual image and its verbal supplement re-opens
a space of rational, deliberative agency within the individual subject.
Even as Stephen's skeptical response to political oratory, "Gone with the
wind" (7.880), counsels a more sober assessment, Maeve's stirring rhetoric
fosters the sentimental temptation to ignore the institutional forces within
which individual agency is constituted. Bound not only by the various historical
forces converging to make a war-time rebellion possible, Maeve's self-assertion
is both enabled and limited by the particular constellation of subject-positions
available to her as an Irish colonial woman: if she could draw on the empowering
legacy of the Ladies Land League, suffrage was still several years ahead,
and, writing for The Gael, she no doubt spoke from within a restricted
range of oppositional stances. Nevertheless, without simply dismissing
the Foucauldian model of totalized containment, one can say that Maeve's
article, neither a ruse of power nor a voice of transcendent critique,
serves as a valuable reminder that reactions to specific hegemonies, as
Jonathan Dollimore has recently argued (and as modern history has repeatedly
demonstrated), may result in genuinely effective acts of transgression
even within the very real constrictions of modern disciplinary society.(39)
The very existence of recruiting posters and other forms of propaganda
testifies to England's awareness of the contingency
and potential instability of the existing field of Anglo-Irish relations,
even as the effort to stabilize and secure such key terms as "Irishness"
and "national duty" inevitably encodes the very contradictions meant to
be concealed.
The
openly violent transgression Maeve advocates is inseparable from such contests
over meaning, a point chillingly illustrated in a photograph of Dublin's
Four Courts taken just after Easter 1916, when British shelling pounded
the city into submission. Barely visible in the lower left, just to the
right of the gentleman stroller, on the wall papered over with various
recruiting advertisements, is a damaged
poster showing three jovial soldiers playing bridge. A surviving copy
makes legible the legend torn in the photo: "WILL YOU MAKE A FOURTH?".
The seemingly dapper insouciance of the inscribed spectator, his back to
the poster, his gaze meeting our own, challenges
the apparent detachment of an observer free to relish the ironic echo of
the building's name in the poster's caption, as if the words inscribed
on the poster were, like the card game, only a shuffling of signs.
Bloom and the Resistant Force of Poster Critique
Itself
often treated as a semiotic puzzle, Ulysses models and enacts multiple
instances of transgression and resistance. If for Joyce the cost of transgression
was limited (his fears of Parnellian martyrdom notwithstanding) to the
banned text's restricted availability, Stephen's resistance elicits a punch
in the nose, an encounter Joyce's stage directions link to the Easter Rising
(15.4661-63). More important for my purposes here, Bloom's transgressive
responses to the public text of the city suggest ways in which transgression
depends on the prior existence of the law without necessarily being contained
by it.
Wandering through the streets (and side streets) of Dublin, Bloom takes
note of the cleverly placed Kino's ad floating on the Liffey before recalling
illegally posted ads for a "quack doctor for the clap" in all the public
urinals: "Got fellows to stick them up or stick them himself for that matter
on the q.t. running in to loosen a button. Flybynight. Just the place too.
POST NO BILLS. POST 110 PILLS. Probably some chap with a dose burning in
him." (8.101). Bloom is probably remembering the material subversion of
the letter of the law by means of strategic erasures; he may be imagining
it. Either way, the text offers a model of reading as transgressive response
that extends beyond this example of a legal prohibition turned inside out.(40)
"Damn bad ad," thinks Bloom in response to a "horseshoe poster over the
gate of college park": "Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then
the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big: college. Something
to catch the eye" (5.551-54). Although the recruiting poster, as
we have seen, elicits a faint anti-colonial echo, typically, as here,
Bloom's revisionary eye is more immediately pragmatic than explicitly political;
the racing poster, he feels, simply won't work. It is Buck Mulligan, after
all, who, echoing nineteenth-century attacks on outdoor advertising, facetiously
attributes "every fallingoff in the calibre of the race" to the malign
effect of "hideous publicity posters," a claim Joyce toys with in Miss
Dunne's response to "the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette":
"She's not nicelooking, is she? The way she's holding up her bit of a skirt.
Wonder will that fellow be at the band tonight. If I could get that dressmaker
to make a concertina skirt like Susy Nagle's. They kick out grand. Shannon
and all the boatclub swells never took his eye off her" (14.1246-50, 10.380-86).
The ease with which Miss Dunne is interpellated as a consuming subject
underscores Cheryl Herr's observation that the Kendall publicity poster,
smiling down on the viceregal cavalcade in "Wandering Rocks," provides
an immanent critique of the English culture industry by exaggerating "the
natives' friendly reception of the viceroy, a reception enhanced by the
attitude-shaping entertainment imported into Ireland."(41)
As a counter to Miss Dunne's docility, however, as well as to the "hypnotized"
soldiers in the recruiting poster, the resistant force of Bloom's poster
critique, can be recovered on another level, in two ways.
Ideology and the Aesthetic:
in Defense of Hierarchy
First,
Bloom's pragmatic assessment raises the question of the place of the aesthetic
in calibrations of political effect. Without the capacity to impress itself
on the reluctant eye, a poster will have no effect whatsoever, political
or otherwise. After all, the rhetorical power of the Seymour Bushe oratory
delivered by O'Molloy, a polished period too easily assimilated to the
supposed emptiness of all rhetoric in "Aeolus," registers in the blushing
response of Stephen, "his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture"
(7.776). My research indicates that of the recruiting posters discussed
here, only the "Isle of Saints and Soldiers" elicited a detailed, passionate
response in the radical weeklies, and that response should be linked to
the perception that this poster is the most complexly forceful of the lot.
At once more subtle and powerful than, say, Hibernia with a harp, "The
Isle of Saints and Soldiers" sets up a dynamic relation between foreground
and background within a carefully balanced hierarchical arrangement of
apparition, cathedral, and farmer; the sweep of the plough handle draws
the eye up to the farmer's expression of stunned piety, and the ploughed
earth, which comes to resemble the scene of battle by picking up the crumbling
form of the cathedral, poses the question of the proper field for male
labor in wartime. More than any other, this poster represents a target
whose aesthetic power makes it worthy of Maeve's critical intelligence.
Relations between aesthetic and ideological effects have been notoriously
troublesome for radical theorizations of culture: to assert an absolute
distinction between the two, long a central tenet of humanism and often
a disguised assumption of materialist criticism, threatens to produce an
untenably essentialist notion of the literary as that which disrupts ideology
and a reductive notion of ideology as otherwise free of the internal contradictions
and contestations brought into focus by the aesthetic.(42)
Yet without the distinction aesthetic hierarchies come crashing down. If
some have welcomed such a collapse as a form of radical egalitarianism,
the potential social value of actively contesting specific cultural hierarchies
is thereby lost as well. Here I accept Martin Jay's argument that "the
attempt to break down a hierarchical cultural relationship [in various
cultural criticisms] may unintentionally have contributed to the maintenance
of a still hierarchical social one" -- the deauraticizing of art having
given us avant-garde lobbies in architecturally postmodern banks and surrealist
dislocations in consumer advertising -- and that "the process of establishing
new hierarchical evaluations itself remains, at least for the foreseeable
future, inescapable and indeed worthy of our approbation."(43)
If art's critical capacity depends on its estrangement from society in
general, then criticism must continue to evaluate (and possibly alter)
the relationship to the social established by particular aesthetic objects.
To employ the idea of aesthetic value, therefore, even while acknowledging
that one's sense of the aesthetic is historically produced and subject
to change, makes sense as a strategy of cultural criticism if the aim of
such criticism is the preservation or renewal of possibilities for cultural
and political change. It follows that if Ulysses, as many have argued,
levels cultural distinctions, criticism may perform a service by refusing
to reproduce that anti-hierarchical operation -- an operation that would
include, for instance, the conflation of modern fiction and posters, a
move whose heuristic value I have nearly, but not quite, exhausted.
Second, Blooms' professional poster critique also transforms the reader
who sees through his eyes into, momentarily, the producer as well as the
consumer of poster images. Insofar as the conflation of production with
reception carries with it, as Peter Bürger has argued, the avant-garde
promise of reception as active restructuring, Ulysses strikes an
effectively critical relation towards the national culture it explores.(44)
POST NO BILLS; POST 110 PILLS: only scratch the surface to uncover English
"syphilisation." Through Bloom's role as advertising canvasser, then, Joyce
introduces an attitude towards everyday life that reproduces his own relationship
to the evolving text of his novel: Ulysses having grown by one third
in proof, Ellmann notes that for Joyce "the reading of proof was a creative
act."(45)
Of course, Bloom remains one character constituted within a larger structure,
and Joyce does not aim to sustain, over the course of the narrative,
a continuous novelistic identification between the reader and any character. Here
the increasingly complicated relations between narrative and narrative
discourse must be addressed, and it is this formal issue that will return
us to some closing reflections on the intersection and divergence of the
cultural spaces enclosed by posters and Ulysses.
Identification as Autonomy -> Cultural Predication
Consonant
with the Joyce constructed in the Ellmann biography, the widening gap between
narrative discourse and narrative event in Ulysses could be understood,
taking up the model provided by Pierre Bourdieu, to indicate the increasing
detachment from social and economic exigencies characteristic of bourgeois
aestheticism: a disengaged, ludic space in which form and style function
to refine worldly necessity out of existence.(46)
Certainly one recognizes a version of Joyce in this characterization, the
one who, nearing the completion of Finnegans Wake and the onset
of World War II, rebuffed his brother Stanislaus's attempt to talk politics
with the claim that his only interest lay in "style."(47)
And yet to understand the "allincluding most farraginous" literariness
(14.1412) of Ulysses solely as a sign of its aspiration to bourgeois
autonomy is to privilege and generalize versions of Bloom as petit bourgeois
functionary and Stephen as escapist aesthete that the text's mechanics
of meaning substantially complicates.
Stephen's own theory of Shakespeare only emphasizes how far he has to go
before he can rival Shakespeare by authoring himself. After the library
episode, Joyce raises the critique of Stephen's fantasies of autonomy to
a principle of structure by shifting away from the identification-based
mode of his "initial style." Comprising interior monologue, naturalistic
dialogue, and subtle shifts of focalization (Kenner's "Uncle Charles Principle"),
the initial style grants an originating centrality to the subjectivities
of Bloom and Stephen in the first nine episodes.(48)
However much interior monologue comes to seem a kind of bricolage when
passing allusions are traced and their cultural contexts invoked, the
fundamentally realist experience of identifying with Bloom and Stephen
in order to leap the gaps in the represented flow of their thoughts produces
a powerful illusion of moving in and out of intimate relation with autonomous
subjects.(49)
After the library episode, however, characters increasingly come to seem,
in what can be called a process of cultural predication, more objects of
discourse than sources of language: the trajectory of narrative modes from
"Wandering Rocks" on begins to explore the problem of private experience
and individual agency disappearing within increasingly powerful and invasive
public discourses. In "Sirens" Bloom becomes absorbed into the songs sung
around him, his character seemingly dispersed and overwhelmed by the musical
transformations of narrative voice, interior monologue, and dialogue. By
the end of the episode Bloom will pull himself back together: "Cowley,
he stuns himself with it: kind of drunkenness. . . . Thinking strictly
prohibited" (11.1191,11994). But in the meantime he has lost himself in
"Siopold," a verbal chord uniting Simon (singing), Lionel (operatic character),
and Leopold (listening); under the gaze of a siren/barmaid, moreover, he
is grammatically objectified by the operations of language -- "Winsomely
she on Bloohimwhom smiled" (11.309) -- a transformation whose cultural
and political resonance becomes more explicit in "Circe," when Bloom, accosted
by the night watch, is "declined" case by case ("Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom.
Bloom.") until he reaches, appropriately enough, the accusative, and his
trial begins (15.677). Episode by episode the autonomy of characters is
diminished (though not extinguished) by the pressure of public discourses:
from the subtle insinuations of popular songs in "Sirens" the reader moves
to the vicious imposition of cultural stereotypes in the nationalism, masculinism,
and anti-Semitism of "Cyclops"; from there to the complex dialectic of
mutual objectification, mediated by pulp romance, fashion advertising,
and pornographic peepshows in "Nausicaa"; to the history of literary English
in "Oxen of the Sun"; music hall pantomime and German expressionism (among
other things) in "Circe"; to the catechistic forms of theology and popular
science in "Ithaca" -- until the reader is finally returned to what has
often been understood as the unmediated flow of Molly's mind in "Penelope."
Yet even in "Penelope" the readerly effort to grasp syntactical relations
from the unpunctuated verbal sequence complicates the experience of identification
by creating a heightened dialectical shuttling between the writtenness
of the text and the illusion of pure voice.(50)
Soliciting intense identification as the only means of navigating the apparent
discontinuities within interior monologue in the first nine episodes, in
the second nine Joyce increasingly foregrounds the process whereby the
seeming privacy of individual subjectivity is not simply imprinted with
but produced by the operations of culture. And that culture,
Joyce shows, is thoroughly permeated by the ideological hailings of the
British empire.
Reinventing Ireland: Ulysses and the
Art of Dislocation
Irish
recruiting posters, aiming to an interpellate a colonial subject tailored
to England's international needs, represent a particularly charged contribution
to the historical process whereby, as Declan Kiberd has put it, England
"invented the idea of Ireland."(51)
Ulysses is one of the ways in which Ireland returned the favor.
Situated within this contested field of mutually constructed national identities,
the novel works towards the reversal of the rhetorical project of recruiting
posters by re-problematizing the category of Irishness and the very idea
of national identity at a time when the majority of Irish colonial subjects
were beginning to enter a postcolonial world. Bloom's habitual "final meditations"
before retiring, his fantasy "Of some one sole unique advertisement to
cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous
accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not
exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of
modern life" (17.1769-73), represent an aesthetic and political
antithesis to the exuberant stylistic and narratological excesses of Ulysses,
which both exploits and counters the arresting effect of the "poster novelty"
with a countervailing strategy of disruption and dislocation.(52)
Bloom himself momentarily embodies this strategy when handed a flier announcing
the arrival of the evangelical preacher Alexander J. Dowie -- "Bloo ....
Me? No. Blood of the Lamb" (8.8-9) -- but the principle is integral to
the montage/collage dimension of Ulysses as
a whole and its disruption of the hero worship and stereotyping solicited
by the posters.(53)
It is no accident, then, that the first structural departure from Joyce's
initial style comes in "Wandering Rocks," where, the pretense of simultaneity
notwithstanding, a discontinuous and fragmented narrative mode subverts
the idealized colonial harmony solicited by the vice-regal cavalcade. Of
the major figures in the episode, only Bloom, Stephen, and Molly, tucked
away in the side streets, fail to acknowledge the political procession.
Rather than interrupt the display of imperial power with distinctly anti-colonial
countergestures, Ulysses heightens the experience of disruption
as such: Bloom's fart in "Sirens," after all, disrupts the epitaph of a
nationalist martyr, Robert Emmett, at least as effectively as the "Poddle
river," which hangs out "in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage" (10.1196-97),
disturbs the passage of the cavalcade. These interruptions are designed
to provoke, in the words of "Ithaca," an "oscillation between events of
imperial and of local interest" (17.428). Such an oscillation, we are told,
was partly responsible for preventing Bloom from "completing a topical
song . . . entitled If Brian Boru could but come back and see old Dublin
now . . . for the grand annual Christmas pantomime." Inhibiting also
was "apprehension of opposition from extreme circles on the questions of
the respective visits of Their Royal Highnesses the duke and duchess of
York (real) and of His Majesty Brian Boru (imaginary)" (17.417-23, 431-33).
Brian Boru, King of Ireland and victorious defender against invading Danes
at Clontarf in 1014, represents the pure Irish sovereignty called for by
Maeve, herself named for a mythical queen of Ireland; the English royals,
cheered on their entry into Dublin, represent the power of total subjection.
Eschewing such ideological polarities, Ulysses enabled its first
readers (as it still does today) to "come back and see old Dublin now"
-- the now of its publication coinciding with Ireland's troubled decolonization
-- by establishing an oscillating perspective from which national consciousness
could be grasped as a function of (post)colonial global interrelation.
Beginning with Valery Larbaud, who declared that with Ulysses "Ireland
is making a sensational re-entrance into high European literature," the
completed novel's early reception registers a somewhat confused yet revealing
response to the cosmopolitan dynamic Joyce set up.(54)
What links many of the early reviews of Ulysses (apart from complaints
about its obscenity, obscurity, and resemblance to a telephone directory)
is a shuttling between issues of local knowledge and speculations about
how the text might be received elsewhere, that is, from an alternative
national perspective. Many reviewers felt that Ulysses was a hoax
to which some critics in Paris and London had fallen prey, and a London
reviewer, well-known for having initiated the emetic tradition by remarking
that "the main contents of the book are enough to make a Hottentot sick,"
was confident that readers in Dublin, London, Glasgow, and Cardiff would
be united in a disgust evidently co-extensive with the United Kingdom.
For Shane Leslie, having lived the life of an Ascendancy baronet before
converting to Roman Catholicism and Irish nationalism while at Cambridge
University, entry into Joyce's meticulously rendered yet extravagantly
reworked local knowledge presupposed the path of colonial power. He presents
this power as the very precondition of Ulysses's intelligibility:
"And all this effort has been made, not to make any profound revelation
or to deliver a literary message, but to bless the wondering world with
an accurate account of one day and one night passed by the author in Dublin's
fair City, Lord Dudley being Viceroy (the account of his driving through
the streets of Dublin is probably one of the few passages intelligible
to the ordinary English reader)." George Bernard Shaw, in contrast, was
disturbed by the novel's overwhelming local realism. On one hand he distinctly
resents that his fellow Irish émigré has forced him
to feel (his letter to Sylvia Beach is filled with the rhetoric of coercion)
that he still belongs to Ireland, even at a distance; on the other hand,
he wants "to put a cordon around Dublin; round up every male person in
it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it." Agitated by the
intense inside/outside perspective brought on by Ulysses, Shaw evidently
experienced his own sense of being an Irish European or European Irishman
in terms not easily reconciled with Joyce's: the book reminds him of his
motivations for emigration even as it conjures, in the manner of Dubliners,
a fantasy of enforced internal exile. Mary Colum, writing from within Ireland
about Stephen's early exchange with Haines, may have pinpointed the source
of Shaw's discomfort: "where has the peculiar spiritual humiliation that
the English occupation of Ireland inflicted on sensitive and brilliant
Irishmen ever been expressed as in this book?"
In the recruiting posters -- English appropriations of the locally Irish
-- intrinsic contradictions remain latent. In Ulysses, as one exasperated
reviewer observed, one is made to see through its "distorted" lenses "what
essentially was never consciously known."(55)
Even temporality, theorized by Benedict Anderson as a privileged mode of
propagation for a national imaginary, is revealed in Ulysses as
a discrepant cultural construct when Bloom, raising his eyes to the time
ball on the Ballast Office, stumbles over the relation between Irish time
(Dunsink) and English time (Greenwich): off by as much as twenty-five minutes,
Bloom's miscalculation is strikingly out of key in a text otherwise obsessed
with temporal precision."(56)
With the contrast between latent and manifest contradictions I do not mean
to reclaim, in the spirit of Adorno's defense of autonomous art, a power
of subversion intrinsic to modernist irony, as if the experimental features
of Ulysses simply supplied the ironic perspective missing in the
posters. Rather, to locate my argument within the long-standing debate
about the politics of realism versus modernism, the increasingly
dilated space between narrative event and narrative discourse in Ulysses
promotes a critical estrangement from the social and cultural norms set
in play by the realistic ground that Joyce persistently solicits the reader
to reconstruct even in the text's most extravagantly non-mimetic moments.
That critical estrangement is not the work of a transcendent formalism,
nor does it imply a disengagement from history. It is rather the aesthetic
realization of an historically specific form of cosmopolitan subjectivity
that is inseparable from the history of Ireland's economic, political,
and cultural interaction with England.(57)
If Joyce himself had ever leaned toward a form of nationalism (and there
is no evidence he did), the cultural repressiveness of the Irish Free State
quickly would have ended that flirtation. Even in Stephen Hero,
written between 1904 and 1906, when Joyce was most interested in radical
political theorists, his eventual shift away from a sharply defined ideological
position of any kind towards an interest in the propagation of ideological
messages across national boundaries is discernible in Stephen's eager awareness
that "Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of
the world" (Stephen Hero 265). A few months before Easter 1916,
a writer in The Spark, underscoring, in effect, the need for Scissors
and Paste, declared that "The time is ripe for an authoritative statement
of Ireland's position under England being sent broadcast throughout the
world. It should be sent all the Chancellories of Europe, to the United
States, to the British Colonies, to every self-governing country in the
world, showing the actual position of affairs here, and the means, the
cowardly, immoral but truly English means, by which Irish recruits are
obtained to fight England's battles, north, south, east and west, from
the Seine to the Ganges" (February 2, 1916). Ulysses, written in
Trieste-Zurich-Paris and finding its way, eventually, around the world,
would answer the call, but with a species of address The Spark's
rabid nationalists could neither have foreseen, nor accepted.
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