Sovereign Subjects Stephen Dedalus, Irish Conscience, and Ulysses’s Utopian Ethos
p. 65-81
Texte intégral
Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
Stephen Dedalus, diary, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1EMMA’s description of the ethical as ‘the domain of philosophical reflection on ethics and morals, the values of existence,’ with critical attention to ‘conflicts and interferences between the natural passions and the exigencies of interpersonal relations and the collective life,’ invites reflection on the ways in which contested values come into play as an artist portrays actual others in works of imagination.1
2In the domain of the novel, the question of how fictional representations mediate ethical conflicts offers an approach to the dynamics of conscience made visible by Joyce’s portraiture and self-portraiture from Stephen Hero to Ulysses. These works with ancillary documents form a composite genetic text in which we glimpse the artist drawing not only actual Dubliners as fictional characters but—since, in matters of representation, je est un autre—himself as the autobiographical artist-figure Stephen Dedalus. Both Stephen’s key word conscience (‘con- with, together + sci̇̄re to know: see science’)—a way of knowing with (others) — and ethos, which carries the sense (derived from Aristotle’s Rhetoric II. xii-xiv) of ‘the characteristic spirit, prevalent tone or sentiment, of a people or community; the “genius” of an institution or system’ (OED), are inseparable from ‘alterity.’ A provocative character whose critical reception encompasses wide differences of ethical judgment, Stephen functions, I propose, as a touchstone for what we might call the conscience of Ulysses, a fictional medium of his vow, on departing Ireland for the Continent at the end of Portrait, to force a new conscience for his race.
3 Ulysses, published in 1922 but set in 1904, midway between the failed Second and partially successful Third Home Rule Acts, captures a moment when visions of Ireland’s future competed in the proto-national imaginary. The still-colonized Ireland of Ulysses is dominated by what Stephen represents as invading foreign powers—‘the imperial British state’ and ‘the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church’—while his oppressed and impoverished country demands resistance to the one and submission to the other.2 Joyce’s portraiture is the book is thus permeated with conflicts and interferences between individual passions and collective life. In depicting a social world in the midst of a struggle to transform an everyday ethos of submission into an everyday ethos of autonomy, Ulysses at once represents contending dreams of Ireland’s future and embodies a utopian ethos that survives its historical moment and plays no small part in the challenges and rewards it offers its ever-expanding audiences.
4Two signal aspects of Ulysses’s complex reception are worth remarking here. First, Joyce’s work emerged during a vital period in the history of feminism. Arthur Power recalled Joyce’s homage to Ibsen as ‘the greatest influence’ on his generation for his recognition of ‘the emancipation of women, which has caused the greatest revolution of our time in the most important relationship there is—that between men and women; the revolt of women against the idea that they are the mere instruments of men.’3 Ulysses was nurtured by an extraordinary cohort of feminist women without whom it would not exist, at least not in anything like its present form: Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, the editors of the Little Review where Ulysses was first serialized; Sylvia Beach, who published the labor-intensive first edition in Paris, and her partner Adrienne Monnier; Harriet Shaw Weaver, who endowed Joyce’s labor of writing. Once it began to appear, it attracted such serious early readers and critics as Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Dora Marsden, and Katherine Mansfield; later, Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and many more. Some of these women were critical of the book, but, Catherine Driscoll remarks, they would and sometimes did defend Joyce’s work against censorship; they would have concurred with John Quinn’s legal and social position that ‘It is perhaps not a book for all young women.... And yet no young man or young woman of the right fibre would be harmed by it,’ ‘it is just life;’ and they ‘would have understood the morality of Stephen Dedalus.’4
5Driscoll does not characterize Stephen’s ‘morality,’ so transparent to these readers, but a second strong strain in Ulysses’s reception has found it less intelligible. Brian Caraher calls attention to two ‘severely cautionary’ appraisals by eminent critics who foreground the book’s notorious difficulty so far as to discourage reading it at all. Edmund Wilson complains that
Joyce has as little respect as Pound for the capacities of the reader’s attention; one feels in Joyce’s case as in Proust’s, that the longueurs which break our backs, the mechanical combinations of elements which fail to coalesce, are partly a result of the effort of a supernormally energetic mind to compensate by piling things up for an inability to make them move.5
6Decades later, Terry Eagleton refashions this indictment:
‘Ulysses offers itself to the reader as a familiar commodity only to undercut that transaction by its difficulty and self-absorbedness, refusing commodity-status while paradoxically parading, in the crafted, compacted involutions of its every phrase, the intensive labour which went into its production. By virtue of its status as a self-parodic product, the novel struggles to escape the degradation of becoming a commodity; its author consequently becomes a producer without consumers.’
(Caraher 156–157, citing Criticism and Ideology 1976)
7Caraher points to the outdated author-centered interpretive models on which these critics rely. To locate ‘creative, productive or meaning-generating activity’ in the author ‘tend [s] to elide the productive powers of the audience’ and to censure as ‘excessive and difficult’ any art that demands intensive labor of the reader (174–175). Ulysses, by contrast, does not transmit ‘Joyce’s’ meanings to passive readers but engages audiences in the endless work of actively producing meaning. Caraher’s assessment, of course, comes at a moment in Ulysses’ reception when the difficulty Wilson and Eagleton deplore has been vastly mitigated by Gifford and Seidman’s indispensable Ulysses Annotated and other fruits of vigorous scholarly and critical conversations around the world, including some twenty-three international symposia. The transnational audiences of Ulysses, in English and via translation, continue to expand, with no end in sight to the global Joyce industry. Readers will always bemoan the book’s difficulty; still, many plunge into the hard work of grappling with its defamiliarizing challenges so as to experience and explore the rich encounters with people, mind, and world that it perpetually opens (173).
8 Ulysses’s particular way of engaging the ‘spectator or reader’s freedom of response’ (‘Éthique’) is critical to Stephen Dedalus’s aspiration to forge a new conscience for his oppressed people, for, insofar as his ‘morality’ embodies that aim, he exists less as a model to be passively contemplated than as an active challenge to a presumably pre-existent conscience or ethos, which may or may not persist in a given reader, audience, or community. Joyce’s portrait of his young aspiring artist-self calls attention to the conditions and processes that contributed to Ulysses’s making and leave traces in its historical contexts and genetic text, thereby keeping its original inventiveness in play—not just as a donnée, as of any given artwork, but in ways that permit us to pursue a specific question that arises from Stephen’s annunciatory vow to forge a conscience for his Irish ‘race’: what ethical dimensions of the imaginative labor by which an artist transforms the specific, contingent materials of ‘life,’ of ‘experience,’ into a book that would free his people from internalized colonial and religious subjection does the character of Stephen illuminate?
9 Ulysses’s depiction of a contested Irish ethos bears a complex relation to the struggle for national sovereignty, to which Charles Stuart Parnell had almost led Ireland when he died in 1891, and which would be won only in 1922—and then as only a partial victory amid civil wars in a partitioned state. Parnell’s death—the subject of Joyce’s first poem, which he composed at age nine, of the Dubliners story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room,’ and of the mourners’ reflections in Ulysses’s ‘Hades’ episode—drapes in pathos the open question of Ireland’s future in 1904. The censorship of Ulysses—published not in Dublin but in Paris, by an American; banned in England and the United States until the nineteen-thirties; and, though never banned in Ireland, long derided, maligned, and rejected there— attests to its engagement of a contested ethos at a critical moment in Ireland’s history and to its status as an imaginative work that compels critical attention to ‘conflicts and interferences between the natural passions, interpersonal relations, and the collective life.’
10When it comes to Ireland’s proto-national ethos, Bloom usually takes center stage. Indeed, Ulysses would not be Ulysses without this modern Everyman in all his ethical complexity: an everyday scapegoat in Catholic Ireland, a half Jewish half Irish native who has been baptized three times; the everyday kindliness with which he contemplates his cat, wife, daughter, and fellow Dubliners from Stephen and Dilly Dedalus to Paddy Dignam’s widow and children to Mina Purefoy; his courageous avowal of his religious and ethnic heritage in face of the Cyclops’s violent threats; his pronouncement on love, not force, as ‘really’ ‘life for men and women;’ the ethical turn on Odysseus’s slaughter of Penelope’s one hundred seventeen suitors and the dozen housemaids who slept with them that he unwittingly makes possible by accommodating—even desiring—Molly’s adulterous affair (Ulysses 333).6
11But Bloom is a literary character, inspired by Joyce’s purely accidental encounter with Dublin advertising canvasser Alfred Hunter. Who creates him? Who encounters a human being in ‘reality’ and draws him from life into the immortality of his book? Ulysses not only is what Joyce made of such encounters; through Stephen, it depicts ethical dynamics interior to the imaginative processes that mediate between actual Dubliners and the book that portrays them. If Bloom stands as one ethical paradigm, Stephen stands as another. Though Stephen discourses in Portrait on the godlike author’s invisible hand, Ulysses elaborates his vow on the eve of self-exile to forge a new Irish conscience from ‘the reality of experience’ in its study of Stephen: an embodied artist—visible, human, not godlike— takes responsibility for the art; represents its source and logic. Through Joyce’s self-portraiture Stephen comes into focus as an artist not just because we see him writing, although we do (indeed, writing Ulysses as he scribbles a poem in ‘Proteus’)7 but because he is retrospectively portrayed poised between the Dublin life he observes in Ulysses and the book he will write ‘in ten years’ (Ulysses 249). As self-portraiture, Stephen makes visible the artist experiencing the Dublin and Dubliners ‘he’ will portray in Ulysses as he seeks to transform a colonized conscience into an ethos of autonomy.
12Critics often mock Stephen’s dream of forging his race’s ‘uncreated conscience’ as grandiose. Declan Kiberd, one exception, affirms the relationship between the artist and the collective national ethos. In Portrait, Kiberd writes,
one youth claims to incarnate the uncreated conscience of the race... In such a self-charged context, nation-building can be achieved by the simple expedient of writing one’s autobiography; and autobiography in Ireland becomes in effect the autobiography of Ireland.... The republican ideal was the achieved individual, the person with the courage to become his or her full self.8
13Yet Kiberd perhaps too easily leaps the gap between individual autobiography and nation-building. For Joyce (who discarded the thousand-page manuscript of Stephen Hero), autobiographical fiction was no ‘simple expedient,’ nor has his work demonstrably influenced nation-building. The identification of the republican ideal with ‘the achieved individual,’ a fulfilled ‘self,’ leaves open the question of how a representation of any individual can embody a new, inherently collective ethos; can engage a people’s characteristic spirit, tone, and feeling in ways that generate radically new collective values.
14In a very early (1917) draft of Ulysses’s ‘Proteus’ episode, which follows Stephen’s streaming thoughts as he walks on Sandymount Strand, Stephen wrestles with this very problem:
To win their hearts I must live their lives, think, feel as they do. There is no other way: the way of the empire, reared on a common cowardice. He saved men from drowning and you fear a dog’s bark. Eh? Like the courtiers who mocked Guido Cavalcanti he is in his own house, the house of.... We don’t want your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do as much? Perhaps, there would be a boat near, a lifebuoy. Ay, And perhaps. not. Well, would you or would you not? That man that was drowned off the Maidens rock last week. Eh? The truth now. I would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. If I? leaned across the land <under my feet>. I want his life to be saved, yes, and my own also not to be lost. He is a man. His eyes are fixed on me in horror of death. I... With him together.... I could not save her. Waters; bitter death: lost.9
15Stephen confronts a paradox. If he must live, think, feel as his people do, and such a life is formed by ‘the way of empire,’ ‘reared on a common cowardice,’ what becomes of his refusal to serve his imperial masters? Already this draft suggests the way ‘Proteus’ (and Ulysses) will manage this paradox. Rather than either ‘live their lives’ under the heel of empire, or presume to represent them, the artist stages in his mind dialectical contests of values: dangers that call out different kinds of courage, battles against perils physical and metaphysical. Interrogating himself, Telemachus-like Stephen compares himself with his erstwhile roommate in the Martello Tower, medical student Buck Mulligan, a fictional portrait of Joyce’s Dublin friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. Against Mulligan’s physical bravery, Stephen reproaches his physical cowardice: ‘He saved men from drowning and you fear a dog’s bark.’ Here, as in the final text, Stephen recriminates himself for failing to save both an actual drowning man and his figuratively drowned mother: ‘He [Buck] saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur’s yelping.... I could not save her: Waters: bitter death: lost’ (Ulysses 45–46). While his pain at failure encompasses the man and his mother, her bitter death was not by drowning, and what might have saved her is not physical courage but the moral courage required to battle a colonial ethos of submission; an imaginative art powerful enough to engender an ethos of autonomy. In ‘Proteus’ Stephen feels, as ‘stately, plump Buck Mulligan’ does not, the blood of his ancient starving lachlann forebears running in his veins; and this identification rouses his will to oppose, in Mulligan’s guise, what Joyce calls in early manuscript notes on the character of ‘Gogarty’ ‘his false spirit’ that ‘shall not pass away’ and the ‘coarseness’ that ‘is the mask of his cowardice of spirit.’10
16As Joyce’s self-portrait as Stephen moves from seeing ‘no other way’ than to share his people’s oppressed lives to discriminating among kinds of courage, he spins off spiritual cowardliness onto a moral antagonist: the older, richer, plumper, stronger, more entertaining and charismatic, physically braver, socio-emotionally shallow, self-confessedly ‘inconsequent’ Buck Mulligan–the foil whose unreformed conscience Stephen must battle (Ulysses 9). As Stephen contends for Irish conscience, his streaming thoughts lead by every course to the same place: Ireland as a site of grievous, unremediated loss. Moreover, at the moment when this ‘one youth’ seeks to make Ireland’s story his and his Ireland’s—to make of his life-writing a gift to the people whose hearts and minds he would win from ‘the way of empire’—‘Ireland’ breaks into moral pieces. And those pieces become the building blocks of the book. Buck Mulligan becomes Stephen’s foil in matters of conscience and ethos: his physical courage against Stephen’s fears, Stephen’s moral courage against Buck’s pusillanimous spirit.
17Oliver Gogarty was an actual Dubliner, and, other than changing his name while preserving its ‘tripping and sunny’ dactyls, Joyce made no effort to disguise him (Ulysses 4). He draws Gogarty, as he draws himself, from life, and, as Gogarty later reflected in his freewheeling memoir As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, his younger self had had an inkling of what Joyce was up to. In a pub scene in that book, young Joyce excuses himself and one of the company remarks:
Whist! He’s gone to put it all down!
Put what down?
Put us down. A chiel’s among us takin’ notes. And, faith, he’ll print it.... Well-charged with diary of an evening’s dissipation in Dublin, Ulysses [Joyce] could relax from listening to his companions’ talk. But he sat on any resentment he bore by assuring himself that he would crucify us all in due course.11
18In Gogarty’s scene, Joyce has returned from Dublin’s red light district— Monto, the Nighttown of Ulysses’s wildly phantasmagoric ‘Circe’ episode— with a treasure so rare that to this day it is not to be found on internet or youtube: the old Dublin ballad that gave Gogarty his title, ‘As I Was Going Down Sackville Street.’ Someone, perhaps Gogarty, recites it from memory:
This is what Joyce unearthed from No. 4 [Faithful Place]. And he won’t give anyone a copy. It’s paved by the cobblestones of the Eighteenth Century, and in it a braver Dublin rings than we’ll ever see again! Where can we find men now who are not too cowardly to speak of ‘bloody fine whores’?... You’re all a pack of hypocritical funks! (Gogarty 298)
19Gogarty’s Joyce proposes a visit to ‘a shebeen in the kips’—a Monto brothel—and Gogarty assents: ‘“Apart from your quest for natural speech, I have my own reasons for going.... For everyone has business and desires.”... we went into the night. But on looking round James Joyce had disappeared’ (Gogarty 299).
20Given his frank avowal of purposes diverging from Joyce’s ‘quest for natural speech,’ Gogarty would perhaps not have batted an eye at Joyce’s note on his character: ‘The most casual scenes appear to his mind as the theatres of so many violent sexual episodes and casual objects as gross sexual symbols’ (Notes for Ulysses). By 1937 Joyce had long ago ‘crucified’ him in Ulysses, and Gogarty’s memoir confirms Stephen’s and Mulligan’s different approaches to Nighttown in Ulysses, almost as if Gogarty were co-signing Joyce’s portrait of him. I’ve argued elsewhere that Stephen goes to Nighttown not for sex but for prophecy (Froula 1996), more or less as Gogarty describes Joyce doing. By contrast, Joyce depicts in ‘Circe’ a grotesque, obscene Mulligan serving as acolyte in a Black Mass over Mina Purefoy’s pregnant belly—a parody of what Joyce saw as Gogarty’s penchant for turning ‘casual scenes’ into ‘theatres of... violent sexual episodes’ and ‘casual objects’ into ‘gross sexual symbols.’
21Keeping Nighttown and whores to hand, let us turn to critics’ ambivalent reception of Stephen. Kiberd, we noted, takes Joyce’s Portrait as an exemplary mediation of republican nation-building by means of courageous, fully realized, autobiographical Irish selves. So far, so good, as long as that ‘full self’ remains an abstraction. Ulysses, on the other hand, exposes the tensions such a claim elides, manifest in the gap between Stephen’s hope to forge an ethos of freedom for his people and the reception of the book that embodies such a ‘conscience,’ not least by the people to whom he longs to have it speak. Indeed, when Kiberd moves in closer, he vigorously backpedals: Stephen need not be taken seriously; his ‘weighty self-consciousness has often intimidated readers, who may not appreciate that that the portraiture is largely satiric. Joyce is dramatizing a consciousness suffering the overeffects of a recently acquired university education and is immobilized accordingly’; ‘after three chapters,’ Kiberd assures us, ‘Stephen Dedalus disappears into the book’—as if to say that, though Stephen may survive in there somewhere, the book is big and complex enough to eclipse him (Kiberd 1996, 338, 346).
22But does Stephen disappear into the book? To understand what is at stake in disappearing Stephen, we may consider the moment in the ‘Eumaeus’ episode when a prostitute—‘the woman in the black straw hat’— peers into the cabman’s shelter, where, in the late hours of June 16, Bloom has pressed upon the inebriated, undernourished Stephen a cup of ‘what was temporarily supposed to be called coffee’ and a ‘socalled roll’ (Ulysses 622–623). The garrulous, obfuscatory, unidentified narrator—a stylistic parody of Odysseus’s swineherd Eumaeus’s foggy apprehension when his master returns disguised as a beggar—observes Bloom’s immediate discomfiture:
The face of a streetwalker, glazed and haggard under a black straw hat, peered askew round the door of the shelter, palpably reconnoitring on her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr Bloom, scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment, flusterfied but outwardly calm, and picking up from the table the pink sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though why pink? His reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment round the door the same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that afternoon on Ormond Quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the lane, who knew the lady in the brown costume does be with you (Mrs B), and begged the chance of his washing. Also why washing, which seemed rather vague than not?
Your washing. Still, candour compelled him to admit that he had washed his wife’s undergarments when soiled in Holles Street and women would and did too a man’s similar garments... if they really loved him, that is to say. Love me, love my dirty shirt. Still, just then, being on tenterhooks, he desired the female’s room more than her company so it came as a genuine relief when the keeper made her a rude sign to take herself off. Round the side of the Evening Telegraph he just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face round the side of the door with a kind of demented glassy grin showing that she was not exactly all there, viewing with evident amusement the group of gazers round Skipper Murphy’s nautical chest and then there was no more of her. (Ulysses 632)
23Bloom has encountered the same woman earlier in the day, with like embarrassed avoidance. In the musical ‘Sirens’ episode,
A frowzy whore with black straw sailor hat askew came glazily in the day along the quay towards Mr Bloom. When first he saw that form endearing. Yes it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane. Horn. Who had the? Heehaw. Shesaw. Off her beat here. What is she? Hope she. Psst. Any chance of your wash. Knew Milly. Had me decked. Stout lady does be with you in the brown costume. Put you off your stroke. The appointment we made. Knowing we’d never, well hardly ever. Too dear too near to home sweet home. Sees me, does she? Looks a fright in the day, Face like dip. Damn her! O, well, she has to live like the rest. Look in here. [Bloom pretends to interest himself in an antique shop window to avoid her gaze.] Let her pass.... She’s passing now... (Ulysses 290)
24After the keeper shoos her away from the shelter, Bloom addresses Stephen with a confidential air:
— It beats me, ... medically I am speaking, how a wretched creature like that from the Lock Hospital, reeking with disease, can be barefaced enough to solicit or how an man in his sober senses, if he values his health in the least. Unfortunate creature! Of course, I suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition. Still, no matter what the cause is from...
Stephen had not noticed her and shrugged his shoulders, merely remarking:
— In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.
The elder man, though not by any manner of means an old maid or a prude, said that it was nothing short of a crying scandal that ought to be put a stop to instanter to say that women of that stamp (quite apart from any oldmaidish squeamishness on the subject), a necessary evil, were not licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities, a thing he could truthfully state he, as a paterfamilias, was a stalwart advocate of from the very first start. Whoever embarked on a policy of that sort, he said, and ventilated the matter thoroughly would confer a lasting boon on everyone concerned. (Ulysses 633)
25Stephen is absent from ‘Sirens,’ does not notice the woman in ‘Eumaeus,’ and responds laconically when Bloom calls his attention to her. Has he then ‘disappeared into the book’? It would seem so for Kiberd, who, as if identifying with Bloom the paterfamilias while overlooking his comically self-implicating protestations, expands with energy on Bloom’s moral and physical denigration of the streetwalker:
the whore in the black straw hat who unnerves Bloom is both commodity and seller in one. Like the prostitutes of Circe, she is like a corpse that has been beautified to seem forever young, in a ghastly parody of Swift’s Struldbrugs.... The whore is in that sense rather like the Gaelic tradition described by fili [ancient Irish poets]: ‘teasing death, already becoming something else again, something new, as death looks about for her in order to strike her down.’ [Kiberd links her with the barmaids in ‘Sirens,’ who] enacted the iron law of a fashion which ‘turns the body into a sexual commodity and knows how to escape death only by mimicking it.... Contrast Gerty’s consumerism and Molly’s sturdy individualism.... The crime against coition inveighed against in Oxen is the whore’s final resort against aging: to stay lovely she must make herself forever new, but a pregnancy and childbirth would jeopardize her very survival as a commodity, Joyce’s harsh mockery of a labor without production, a belly without a baby, is a repudiation of a sexual act in the guise of work not pleasure... No wonder the doughty deed of the Purefoy couple is celebrated.12
26Writing primarily for a public sceptical of Ulysses, Kiberd assimilates Bloom’s condemnation of the streetwalker in ‘Eumaeus’ to a strenuous critique of her and other women’s self-commodification and for-hire sexual labor that draws in many episodes (‘Circe,’ ‘Sirens,’ ‘Oxen of the Sun,’ ‘Penelope,’ ‘Nestor,’ ‘Nausicaa’) without registering the scene’s irony at Bloom’s expense. Endeavoring to claim Ulysses for Ireland by moralizing it to a strong ideological taste, Kiberd does not merely echo Bloom but recapitulates him as un homme moyen sensuel even more conventional than Bloom is.
27Stephen, meanwhile, disappears only if we don’t see him. Though he doesn’t notice the woman in the black straw hat when she appears outside the cabman’s shelter, though he shrugs and ‘merely’ remarks on her in terse reply to Bloom, he has obviously seen this laboring wanderer of the city’s streets before: she is a familiar Dubliner and, in certain ways, a Dublin familiar or Baudelairean semblable. Moreover, despite the brevity of his response, Stephen intervenes in Bloom’s self-serving invocation of Foucauldian medical and legal disciplinary powers by reclassing the streetwalker as one of ‘them’—one of a group, one of many, one of those women forced to sell her dear-bought body cheap because she lacks ‘power to buy the soul.’ In other words, Stephen not only refuses assent to Bloom’s scapegoating discourse but rejects its terms in favor of an analysis that foregrounds the socioeconomic sex/gender system of ‘this country’ where ‘people sell much more than she ever had and do a roaring trade,’ and so possess ‘power’ to buy both her body and their own souls. Further, the very fact that Bloom’s defensive palaver steamrolls right over Stephen’s parabolic words with their Biblical inversions marks this moment as an ethical crossroads, a meeting point of the ‘old’ conscience and ethos that endow Bloom’s words and the new or ‘uncreated’ conscience Stephen voices to his companion’s deaf ears.
28Within Ulysses, Stephen’s remark on the streetwalker resonates with his accidental meeting, in ‘Wandering Rocks,’ with his impoverished and malnourished sister Dilly at a bookstall on the quays, where, having heard her brother’s tales of the wonders of Paris, she has blown a scarce penny on a French primer. He sees himself in her—‘My eyes they say she has. Do others see me so? Quick, far, and daring. Shadow of my mind’; does not give her any of the coins in his pocket on this payday; and feels ‘Misery! Misery!’ at his impotence to rescue her from her abject state of thwarted longing (243). While one could make an argument about Ulysses’s utopian ethos from this and other evidence within the novel, an early portrait of the woman in the black straw hat in a passage marked for deletion in Stephen Hero, Portrait’s ur-version lets us glimpse the workings as well as the aesthetic fruits of the ethical imagination. In this early scene, Stephen encounters an ‘undersized’ woman in clothes smelling of ‘ancient sweats,’ with ‘a black straw hat poised rakishly above her glazed face,’ and she greets him, ‘Good night, love.’ Responding to her poverty but not her sexual invitation, he ‘transfer [s] coins’ from his hand to hers while wondering whether the devil isn’t ‘annoyed to hear her described as an evil creature?’ (189–190). Later, alluding to Yeats’s Adoration of the Magi, he envisions—we might say, enlists–this outcast as a collaborator in his effort to bring ‘spiritual renewal to the world’—an intimation of Portrait’s Stephen’s aspiration to forge an uncreated Irish conscience: ‘Who have I to help me but the woman in the black straw hat?’ (Marshik 192). Later still, he aligns the streetwalker with the ‘virgin’ Emma Clery in a critique of the socioeconomic marriage system that causes each woman to ‘traffic’ with her body:
she must sell it either as a harlot or as a married woman or as a working celibate or as a mistress. But a woman is (incidentally) a human being; and a human being’s love and freedom [are] not a spiritual asset of the State.... The economic aspect of the affair... was only vivid enough to make him deplore the fact that the solution of moral problems should be so hopelessly entangled with merely material considerations.
(202–203)
29By the time she appears in ‘Eumaeus,’ the woman who, in Stephen Hero, wears a black straw hat ‘in mid-winter’—in Stephen’s eyes, a gallant effort at ‘decorum’ (190)—has been an aspect of Dublin life, part of the ‘reality of experience’ to be shaped into art, for fifteen or twenty years. What gives her such staying power? Who was she, and what is her role in Joyce’s Dublin portrait gallery? What does she represent, appearing as she does not, as one might expect, in Nighttown’s confined hallucinatory psychodrama but on Dublin streets, in broad day in ‘Sirens’ and again in the wee hours in ‘Eumaeus’? And, if we take the alliance Stephen posits in Stephen Hero to remain in force, how does she help to bring ‘spiritual renewal’ to the world, to forge a new Irish conscience?
30Opening the three homecoming chapters at the end of Ulysses’s long summer day, ‘Eumaeus’ recurs to the book’s Irish turn on the Odyssean theme of homelessness at home, sounded early on as Telemachian Stephen hands Mulligan the key to the Tower where he is hosting the English folklorist Haines: ‘if he stays on here, I am off’ (Ulysses 4). Stephen has earlier embraced ‘silence, exile, and cunning’ as necessary tactics for his art (Portrait).13 Homelessness at home is not only Telemachus’s and Penelope’s state but Odysseus’s when he returns in disguise to his island kingdom, where the suitors will murder him if they discover him. As bleary-eyed ‘Eumaeus’ opens, Stephen’s spiritual exile, materialized as the homelessness of a day, is mirrored in his friend Corley’s homelessness, which Stephen mitigates to some slight degree by lending him a coin. No less profoundly is Stephen’s elective exile allied with the radical homelessness of the Dublin streetwalker in the black straw hat, an unwelcome intruder in the place where night-laboring and homeless men find refuge in the night.
31By the same token, this woman’s obvious ‘proper’ place would seem to be Nighttown, and surely Nighttown would have taken her in. From the 1860s to the 1920s, Dublin’s red light district was reputedly Europe’s busiest and most populous, with as many as sixteen hundred prostitutes and clients of all classes. Edward VII, while still Prince of Wales, reportedly divested himself of his virginity there, and the clients who sustained it included British Army soldiers such as privates Carr and Compton, who accost Stephen—who confides that he ‘ha [s] no king myself for the moment,’ elaborating ‘He wants my money and my life... for some brutish empire of his’—and knock him down toward the ‘Circe’ episode’s close (591, 594). Prostitution in Dublin, in short, was sponsored by the imperial British state. No less was sex work involved with the holy Roman Catholic and apostolic church, whose clergy led attacks on prostitution and sometimes, Maria Luddy finds, physical attacks on individual women.14 Like Bloom the hypocrite paterfamilias invoking purity movements in the cabman’s shelter, civic authorities concurred in framing the women, not their male clients, as moral degenerates, although the Irish suffrage movement foregrounded the destructive force of gender-based poverty, lack of education, and lack of employment opportunity upon women (Luddy).15
32Why, then, does Joyce place Stephen’s spiritual collaborator not in ‘Circe’ but in ‘Eumaeus’? Perhaps, there being prostitutes aplenty in Nighttown, it is to deepen by her passage the resonance of the episode that holds suspended the degrees of homelessness, real and symbolic, temporary and permanent, that Bloom, Stephen, and other Dubliners experience on 16 June 1904. We know where Bloom lives and what has happened in his home on this momentous day; we know where Stephen no longer lives, and why. Where does the woman in the black straw hat live?—or, rather, how does keeping the streetwalker on the street ‘help’ to forge a new ethos? If Stephen, the artist who would free his people’s oppressed spirit, is Ulysses’s conscience, the woman in the black straw hat If Stephen, the artist who would free his people’s oppressed spirit, is Ulysses’s conscience, the woman in the black straw hat is not as ephemeral and inconsequent as her brief appearances would make her seem, nor does she ‘disappear.’ Her portrait indirectly manifests the creative imagination that translates ‘the reality of experience’ into the book; through her, Stephen’s ambition to forge an Irish conscience takes on vibrant, intelligible substance. An outcast cast out even from the shelter for Dublin’s homeless outcasts, the woman in the black straw hat, whom Bloom—and Kiberd—would secure at the margins of the book’s ethical purview by calling down upon her the legal and medical disciplinary machinery of social purity ideology, becomes on reflection an embodiment and a real-world test of Ulysses’s utopian ethos. She is the occasion for Bloom to voice—and, in protesting so ostentatiously, to embody—an ‘old’ conscience or ethos that converts the woman in the black straw hat into an object to be ‘described, judged, measured, compared with others, ... trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.’ (Foucault 191)—an ethos grounded in ‘the way of empire’ in which Stephen Dedalus would intervene. It is his presence, face to face with Bloom, that transforms her from ‘a woman of that stamp, ... a necessary evil,’ into a limit case that throws the old ethos into high relief, even as she calls out the new conscience Stephen seeks to forge. This moment of ‘Eumaeus’ stages Bloom face to face with Stephen and his old and valued ally in the work of art and artmaking in shaping ethos.
33The dialectical force of Stephen’s presence in this scene points to the fact that, while the woman in the black straw hat endures from 1905 to 1922, one detail of her characterization changes. In Stephen Hero, we noted, Stephen struggles to understand prostitute and wife as economic symptoms, finding in their relation to sexual mores a ‘moral problem... hopelessly entangled with merely material considerations.’ Greeted by the streetwalker, he ‘transfer [s] coins’ from his hand to hers as a gift, not fee for service, which makes him feel very good about himself. In ‘Eumaeus’ he does not notice her, much less give her money. Are the coins the early Stephen gives her sovereigns? Surely not such a princely sum, but whatever their denomination, they are obviously English, each stamped with a British sovereign’s head. As such, the coins, like the imperial economy they mediate, are tainted with the oppressed, colonized conscience that Stephen seeks to liberate. In Stephen Hero16 he finds no other way to signal the socioeconomic sex-gender system (‘merely material considerations’) than by abstracting this transfer of coins from any material transaction; but in Ulysses Stephen displays, from the moment Mr Deasy pays him his salary in ‘Nestor,’ a principled carelessness with sovereigns. Even before a ‘flusterfied’ Blooms sights the woman in the black straw hat, ‘Eumaeus’ foregrounds the tainted credit and conscience of imperial coins when the Stephen, drunk and disoriented after being punched out in Nighttown, meets his feckless friend Corley, who has nowhere to sleep and asks for a loan. Stephen at first thinks he has no money (Bloom is holding it for safekeeping), then finds coins he mistakes for pennies; Corley identifies them as ‘half crowns, man,’ and Stephen, having ‘informed him’ ‘I have no place to sleep myself,’ lends him one (Ulysses 617–618). Reprising Stephen’s painful encounter with his sister Dilly in ‘Wandering Rocks,’ this coin confers virtually no ‘power’ to mitigate its possessor’s oppression. Rather, this ‘half crown’ lent to a homeless person by a homeless person betokens a profound impoverishment of Irish people under British rule, a poverty inseparably material and spiritual under ‘the way of empire.’
34In ‘Eumaeus,’ although Stephen does not notice the woman in the black straw hat or transfer any coins to this most abject yet spirited partner in his enterprise of forging a new Irish conscience, she sees him. With characteristic incoherence, the garrulous narrator describes her ‘demented glassy grin showing that she was not exactly all there, viewing with evident amusement the group of gazers round Skipper Murphy’s nautical chest and then there was no more of her’ (Ulysses 632, emphasis added). A comical sight, those gawkers around Murphy’s extravagantly tattooed chest, refracted through the ‘evident amusement’ of one whose ‘love and freedom’ or ‘soul’ an earlier Stephen sought to endow with coins freely if sentimentally given, and futile, pending the spiritual renewal that he aspires with her ‘help’ to foster. In ‘Eumaeus’ he does not traffic with sovereign coins but, insofar as he is continuous with the artist who draws all these characters, gives her a striking subjectivity. Whereas Bloom in ‘Sirens’ denigrates her ‘face like dip’ and uneasily observes, while trying to make himself invisible, that she ‘Sees me,’ and Stephen doesn’t see her in ‘Eumaeus,’ she sees them—as do we, through her eyes.
35The oldest profession is nothing new in 1904 Dublin, nor are the purity movements which paterfamilias Bloom invokes to reduce the woman in the black straw hat to ‘a wretched creature... reeking with disease’ a manageable and managed object of social discipline, so to avert his eyes from this face, these eyes that, here and in ‘Sirens’ see him. As Joyce (unlike Bloom and Kiberd) depicts her, she, the outcast, is not cast out but brought into the realm of the human, the category of the social and economic, the domain of the ethical, the analytic ‘light of day’ (Stephen Hero 186). Her composite portrait captures her radical homelessness and poses it against the ‘power’ that buys and sells her, body and soul, while also painting in ‘decorum,’ ‘love,’ ‘gallant’ spirit, humor, emanations of the ‘soul’ she can ill afford, yet manifestly somehow still possesses. The scapegoat of the scapegoated Bloom as of the scapegoater Mr Deasy, she, no less than Bloom, is lifted by the narrative ethos out of the scapegoat’s invisibility to become a Levinasian face17 with eyes who looks back with amusement at the flusterfied, fake-righteous Bloom—here, hardly an ethical paragon, or rather, a paragon of what Stephen’s presence provokes us to see as the old ‘way of empire.’ Instead of coins Stephen gives her a ‘soul’ while the artist who depicts these Dubliners gives her eyes, a place, a future in his book, where she at once wanders beyond the pale by the measures of old conscience and marks the limit case of the ethos of autonomy that Ulysses calls out, not, finally, in Bloom, Stephen, or herself, but in real readers.
Notes de bas de page
1 ‘Éthique de l’altérité, confrontation et responsabilités.’ Études montpellié-raines du monde anglophone (EMMA), Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3,http://pays-anglophones.upv.univ-montp3.fr/files/2012/04/Descriptif-axe-Ethique-de-lalt\%C3\%A9rit\%C3\%A9-confrontation-etresponsabilit\%C3\
% A9s.pdf, last accessed on 21 September 2012.
2 James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; New York: Modern Library, 1992) 20.
3 Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974) 34.
4 Catherine Driscoll, ‘Feminist Audiences for Joyce,’ Joyce’s Audiences, ed. John Nash. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002) 179–200; 182.
5 Brian G. Caraher, ‘Protocols of Reading Ulysses,’ Joyce’s Audiences, ed. John Nash (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002) 153–177; 124–126 (citing Axel’s Castle 1931).
6 See Christine Froula, Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture and Joyce (New York: Columbia UP, 1996).
7 Christine Froula, ‘Scribbling into Eternity: Paris, Proust, “Proteus”,’ Renascent Joyce, eds. Daniel Ferrer, Sam Slote, and André Topia (Gainesville, Fla.: UP of Florida, 2013) 105–121.
8 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996) 119.
9 James Joyce, ‘Proteus,’ Manuscript Draft, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, NLI 36,369/7A, http://catalogue.nli.ie/pdflookup.php?pdfid=vtls000194606_09, last accessed on 21 September 2012. ‘Proteus’ 6 of 17; Joyce’s ellipses.
10 James Joyce, ‘Notes for Ulysses: Telemachus [Buck Mulligan],’ James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden, Series 4. Vol. 3, A Facsimile of Epiphanies, Notes, Manuscripts, & Typescripts, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland. 1977-78) 124–126.
11 Oliver St. John Gogarty, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street: A Phantasy in Fact (London: Rich & Cowan, 1937) 294, 296.
12 Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2000) 470.
13 See James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York: Viking, 1964).
14 See Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007).
15 See Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003).
16 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, a part of the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Theodore Spencer (1944; New York: New Directions, 1963).
17 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
Auteur
-
Christine Froula
Northwestern University – USA
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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