A paper given by Philip Harvey at the Bloomsday in
Melbourne annual seminar, held upstairs in the Imperial Hotel, Melbourne, on
the morning of the 16th of June 2018.
I.
“Introibo ad altare Dei”
We are alerted to parody from the very start in
Ulysses. When stately, plump Buck Mulligan intones the introit words of the
Latin Mass while shaving in the open air, high above Dublin Bay, we are
reminded instantly of how words can have a straight meaning or a not-straight
meaning, depending on the context. Mulligan’s delivery is word perfect, only
this is happening in a bohemian Martello Tower, not in the Catholic church down
the road, where the words would be delivered with a different kind of reverence.
Is Mulligan being blasphemous? Or is Joyce simply
indicating to his readers that this character is irreverent and to expect more?
It sets the scene for a novel alive with parodic playfulness, a novel reliant
on the assumption that very little is just as it seems.
By startling us from the start with an act of
parody, Joyce unsettles our expectations about novels and story-telling. Can we
rely on the narrative voice for authority and guidance? Actually, we are going
to hear multiple voices in Ulysses. We are going to be left to interpret these
voices and their true intent for ourselves. Joyce is not going to use inverted
commas when he parodies.
A little later, Mulligan jests at Stephen Dedalus’s
theory on Shakespeare.
-
What is your idea of Hamlet?
Haines asked Stephen.
-
No, no, Buck Mulligan
shouted in pain. I’m not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the fiftyfive reasons he
has made to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first.
He turned to Stephen, saying as he pulled down
neatly the peaks of his primrose waistcoat:
-
You couldn’t manage it under
three pints, Kinch, could you?
-
It has waited so long,
Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.
-
You pique my curiosity,
Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?
-
Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We
have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It's quite simple. He proves by algebra
that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the
ghost of his own father.
-
What? Haines said, beginning
to point at Stephen. He himself?
Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his
neck and, bending in loose laughter, said to Stephen’s ear:
-
O, shade of Kinch the elder!
Japhet in search of a father!
-
We’re always tired in the
morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is rather long to tell.
Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his
hands.
-
The sacred pint alone can
unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said. (Ulysses 20-21)
Mulligan here parodies a theory, Dedalus’s “idea of
Hamlet”, that later in the day is actually expounded correctly by Stephen in
the National Library. In other words, Joyce prepares the reader for the theory
by first giving us a spoof of it. He communicates and forewarns from the get-go
through parody. He has reversed the order of things. Parody usually follows the
thing parodied, while here the parody comes first. Leaving us to ask: who are
we to take seriously? Mulligan? Dedalus?
Joyce? Anyone? What is straight and what is slant? What is sláinte and
what is pogue mahone?
II.
Whichever way we progress through Ulysses, from back
to front, or the other way, we find that Dubliners are parodists themselves.
The episode in the editorial office of the Freeman’s
Journal is run through with arguments about good and bad English because such
places are testing grounds of daily usage, acceptable and unacceptable English,
normative and pretentious English. Which, we observe, is what’s going on in
parody, in both its malign and benign forms. Parody is an imitative yet
critical game where written experiment tests out the feeling of a writer and
expands our imaginative responses as readers.
Stephen Dedalus, a person who takes himself much too
seriously, composes romantic celtic prose virtually parodic by its nature, that
does not survive the scrutiny of the hard men at the newspaper office. He
writes lyric poetry in the style of Elizabethan song that would be parody, if
that were Stephen’s intention. That it is not his intention and the poetry is
removed from experience and unconvincing, only adds to the dilemma and pathos
of his youthful artistic crisis.
Leopold Bloom’s monologues contain frequent
references to everyday language that has been misremembered or misunderstood
and that therefore comes out as parodic mimicry of the things Bloom has
absorbed. Bloom is always getting things half-right, meaning half-wrong
usually, and this is expressed to comic effect throughout the book, a kind of
running parody of reality as it’s meant to be. Or is it?
Molly Bloom seems to have the same weakness of
recall (if that’s what it is) as her husband. Her vast repertoire of songs
includes lines she changes in order to satirise them or make an alternative
point, songs she quotes or misquotes in incongruous contexts, and songs that
get the treatment (like ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ itself), so that their original
mood is forgotten through absurd rendition. Not weakness of rendition: it’s
creative license, alive to the possibilities of words. Molly is also a brazen
parodist of other people’s words. The things she does with metempsychosis are a
leitmotif of her current situation with Poldy, and what she could do with the
term leitmotif doesn’t bear thinking about.
Parody is one of the treasures in the bag of tricks
that the Irish use to make fun, make time, or make a point. Then, parody is a
literary device, one that is not simply comical or mocking, one that may be
more admiring and respectful of that which it parodies than any slavish copy.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Oliver St John Gogarty, one of the
models for Buck Mulligan, was a well-known parodist in Dublin, but that’s as far as it went:
Gogarty had an ear for mockery and burlesque. Here is his sonnet on Keats’ poem
on Chapman’s Homer:
On First Looking into
Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathosexualis
Much have I travelled in
those realms of old
Where many a whore in
hall-doors could be seen
Of many a bonnie brothel
and shebeen
Which bawds connived at by
policemen hold.
I too have listened while
the Quay was coaled,
But never did I taste the
Pure obscene -
Much less imagine that my
past was clean -
Till this Krafft-Ebing out
his story told.
Then felt I rather taken by
surprise
As on the evening when I
met Macran,
And retrospective thoughts
and doubts did rise,
Was I quite normal when my
life began
With love that leans
towards rural sympathies,
Potent behind a cart with
Mary Ann?
All
well and good, but it is essential to appreciate that parody for Joyce is not
an end in itself, but always serves some artistic end. In this respect he parts
company with Gogarty. Put it down to his Jesuit schooling, if you must, but
Joyce’s classical education taught him to push the form beyond its limits, into
some new means of artistic expression.
III.
All
of which brings us to the great showpiece of parody in Ulysses, the episode we
celebrate today set in the maternity hospital. The opening lines are a mock
incantation “Deshil Holles Eames” three times of a Roman hymn to the goddess of
fertility, and echo the mock incantation of Buck Mulligan that opens the book.
Joyce
launches forth on a linguistic charade of the history of English style. The
episode’s structure is foregrounded bluntly, as he shifts from Anglo-Saxon to
Middle English, from Latinate ornament to Shakespearean Fancy, from the
balanced standards of Augustan English through the sentimental romantic gush of
Victorianism.
Joyce
wrote to his sugar mummy, Harriet Shaw Weaver, during composition of Oxen: “the
most difficult episode in an odyssey, I think, both to interpret and execute.”
(Ellmann 475)
Joyce’s
idea was to mimic the growth of the language with that of human nine-month
gestation in the womb and it’s difficult at first to disagree with the critic
(John Gross in The Oxford Book Of Parodies) who found this idea “surely a sadly
half-baked one”. (Gross 257) Only problem is, there’s very little description
of gestation in Oxen, very little about the progress of pregnancy, as such. There is a great
deal about Mina Purefoy’s labours, extending over the biblical three days, an
immense amount of medical ;humour about virility and fertility (or lack
thereof) of the Irish race; and plenty about drinking and eating, notably those
very suggestive sardines. But are we really seeing the growth of a language?
The cumulative effect of the parodies is to collapse
notions about evolution of a language, as after a while one style is
interchangeable with another. In fact all styles are transitory products of
time, with evolution, in the sense of progress or improvement, a misnomer. T.S.
Eliot read the episode as a revelation of “the futility of all English styles.”
(Ellmann 476) Not only that, this could be seen as Joyce’s purpose. Languages
grow and change, but it is mistaken to say that the English of Charles Dickens
is an evolutionary advance on that of William Shakespeare.
IV.
So if we must step away from these standard understandings
of this episode, we are left asking, why parody? He could have chosen any mode.
And why at this stage in Ulysses? Why did Joyce bother writing Oxen of the Sun
at all in this way?
a Drag show
Weird and odd are not common technical literary
critical words, however when I look at this part of Ulysses these words come to
mind. Oxen is weird and odd. It’s cock and bull in all sorts of ways. Readers
unused to Joyce’s shifts of style must find it even stranger, because he leaves
no signposts to tell us what’s going on. It is doubly surprising because the
episode not only speaks throughout through ventriloquilism, i.e. Joyce gives
the voices of a drag queen flaunting different period costumes, but it also is
presented in a mode completely contrary to all previous modes of narrative
control. It’s a bit like George Saintsbury played by Karen from Finance. It’s a
bravura and poser performance. The only way to understand it is to go along
with its full frontal parody.
b Imperial anthologies
Dublin academic Declan Kiberd draws attention to the
episode as a send-up of the kinds of style manuals of English literature that
Joyce would have seen as a student at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere.
Kiberd says: “The anthology of
which he based many of his parodies was made by William Peacock. Designed to
illustrate Darwinian notions of evolution, it was a smug selection of the best
that had been thought and said over the centuries in which English developed as
a modern literary language. Such anthologies were often brought to places like
colonial India or colonial Ireland, to be studied there by native elites who
might learn by imitating English masters how to assimilate themselves to the
project of the British Empire. Like readers of this episode, students were asked
in exams to identify the author of an ‘unseen’ passage, or to make an educated
guess based on the period style of the sample. Versions of these anthologies,
first tested in the colonies, would in time be brought home to Britain, for use
in classrooms to initiate scholarship boys and girls from the lower orders in
the classics of civilisation.” (Kiberd
212)
I will admit that we indulged in the same exercise
in the English Department of the University of Melbourne in the mid-seventies.
The subject was called Dating, which one tutor described to me once as “very
Cambridge.” Perhaps he was a “sometime regius professor of French letters to
the university of Oxtail,” who can tell? It’s why, for some of us, this episode
makes so much sense: Joyce is playing a word game, lodging in his novel the
acclaimed writing of school rooms and university tutorials.
But Kiberd goes further: “Joyce’s aim was to escape
being ‘captured’ by such systems and to produce a subversive reversal anthology
of his own. He knew that the imperial mindset was obsessed with anthologies,
often as a way of refusing to know a native culture in all its depth and
rigour, when its turn came to be anthologised. Too often anthologies of Indian
or irish writing contained only brief, exemplary extracts of major classic
works. If anthologies of both British and native art were used by the imperial
powers on the periphery of their global holdings, what Joyce attempts here is a
radical inversion of the whole process. One of his objects right through Ulysses
was to make his book unassimilable to such an anthology by refusing to settle
into a single ‘hallmark’ style.” (Kiberd 212-213)
If we accept Kiberd’s theory, then not only is Oxen
a parody of English literary styles, it is a parody of the whole project of
enshrining English literature as an exemplar of everything true, beautiful, and
good. Rather than treating the episode as just a bit of a laugh, a party trick
where clever people like us spot the famous authors, Kiberd invites us, I
think, to read it as a ferocious attack on the pretensions of Victorianism and
its imperial ambition, a sensationally absurd reminder of how the British used
their literature to keep people in their place, more particularly in this
context (it can be surmised) the Irish in their place.
c Historic meeting
One of the great truisms of Ulysses is that Stephen
finds in Leopold a father figure who liberates his creativity, while Leopold
finds in Stephen a replacement for his own lost son. The two main narratives of
the book meet when they meet. Yet this meeting occurs in the maternity hospital
and, despite the climactic language of their companions, is something of an
anti-climax. Indeed, the meeting is so obscured by the great panoply of parody,
you could miss it if you blinked. The accidental nature and seeming
insignificance of their actual meeting is in keeping with Joyce’s intentions of
celebrating the mundanity of everyday life, of subverting fictional
expectations about great moments in literature. Listen to this piece of
Scottish Enlightenment logic:
“Contemporaneously, a heated argument having arisen
between Mr Delegate Madden and Mr Candidate Lynch regarding the juridical and
theological dilemma in the event of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other,
the difficulty by mutual consent was referred to Mr Canvasser Bloom for instant
submittal to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent, whether the better
to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the garb with which he
was invested or in obedience to an inward voice, he delivered briefly, and as
some thought perfunctorily, the ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to put
asunder what God has joined.” (Ulysses 538-539)
Joyce cloaks meanings about their meeting that would
be more difficult using the styles of previous episodes. Its high artifice
speaks of their respective dilemmas in code, saying the unsaid. Here is Joyce
channeling Sir Thomas Malory:
But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by
cause he still had pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their
labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only
manchild which on his eleventh day of live had died and no man of art could
save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart for that evil
hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of lamb’s wool, the flower of
the flock, lest he might perish utterly and lie akeled (for it was then about
the midst of the winter) and now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild
for an heir looked upon his friend’s son and was shut up in sorrow for his
forepassed happiness and as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle
courage (for all accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less
measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and
murdered his goods with whores. (Ulysses 510)
d Alcohol
Procreation is the set theme of Oxen, but a
secondary theme runs parallel, one that is more upfront, or downstage, than
procreation, and that is drinking. Or more precisely, the consumption of
alcohol. Is it not observable that the woman, who has been in labour three
days, is in need of an anaesthetic while the young men, who have no need of an
anaesthetic, progressively get themselves sozzled? Where’s the pethidine? The
young men’s opinions and jokes get more outlandish the more they drink, such
that it’s hard to know how to take them seriously. Our novice reader of
Krafft-Ebing is described thus:
“Mr Mulligan handed round to the company a set of
pasteboard cards which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell’s bearing a
legend printed in fair italics: Mr
Malachi Mulligan, Fertiliser and Incubator, Lambay Island. His project …
was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief
business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and devote
himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed … He
had been led into this thought by a consideration of the causes of sterility,
both the inhibitory and the prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn
were due to conjugal vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as
whether the prohibition proceeded from defect congenital or form proclivities
acquired. It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded
of its dearest pledges … He proposed to set up a national fertilising farm to
be named Omphalos with an obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt
and to offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of
what grade of life soever who should there direct to him with the desire of
fulfilling the functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor
would he take a penny for his pains. The poorest kitchen-wench no less than the
opulent lady of fashion, if so be their constructions, and their tempers were
warm persuaders for their petitions, would find in him their man.” (Ulysses
526-527)
They couldn’t have put it better in The Tatler or
The Spectator. The successive parodies, each a little bit more unreal than the
last, imitate mimetically the heightened state of the conversationalists, as
they go from convivial to tipsy to drunk. That the parodies serve as
disjunctions from sober, realistic judgement or expression becomes apparent in
the last few pages, as they exit the hospital. All semblance of parody
disappears. The text turns into a screed of disconnected word and phrases,
representative of the disintegration of intelligible communication into that
state Australians call ‘totally smashed’ and which is reminiscent of the worst
excesses of Finnegans Wake. Childbirth has won the day, we are told in ironic
language, but on the evidence at hand, so has alcohol.
I wish to suggest that the ultimate poetic effect of
the parodies is to stimulate an increasingly heightened sense of reality that
is actually disconnected in stages from objective experience, in other words,
getting drunk. In such a state we can speak in an elevated way, think ourselves
scintillatingly clever and wise, while all the time becoming increasingly
absurd and incoherent, and revealing our own hidden feelings and attitudes. In
vino veritas.
e The male voice
Following on from this, we then ask, what to make of
a series of voices that are, without exception, male. In the moment of #metoo
it has to be asked how an entire discussion about reproduction and birth, about
women’s bodies and women’s role, is made in comic vein, without any female
voice being heard other than the screaming of Mina Purefoy, the woman in
labour. While the men (Joyce included) launch forth on one sophisticated
language exchange after another, boasts, banters, and ejaculations of almost
every kind, the woman groans and yells next door in a language of few words, a
language that cannot be parodied. Read this way, the episode depicts marked
gender difference, the unequal relationship that exists between men and women
in Dublin society. While it is the men who are in the privilged position of
making idiots of themselves (and what better way of accentuating foolishness
and pretension than through parody) the woman delivers yet another into this
world, without much certainty about the future. As the men get progressively
more inebriated, behaviour that today would be labelled ‘inappropriate’, the
woman endures the extreme reality of childbirth, without any help from them,
thanks very much.
Read in this way, the phantasmagoria of parody of
the whole episode itself plays out the otherworldliness of the males, their
self-preoccupation and self-interest, the insularity of their assumed
superiority over women. except for the sensitive interpolations of Leopold
Bloom, there is nothing in their talk that shows much insight into the lives of
women, or that challenges the status quo of inequality.
f Is Ulysses
a novel?
When, as a teenager, I first tried to comprehend
Ulysses, Oxen was weird and odd because I was told Ulysses is a novel, and
novels don’t do that. Oxen not only broke the unwritten rules of English
fictional narrative, it threw into question the trustworthiness and timeless
naturalism that novels were supposed to possess. The author’s voice should be
something we can connect with, the thinking went, just as we rely on say the
telling courtesies of Jane Austen, the sonorous authority of Henry James, or
the emblematic warnings of Patrick White.
Who is James Joyce to talk to us in this way? Which
voice is his and which ones aren’t? Ulysses, like Finnegans Wake, is called a
novel, but are they? What kinds of novels? Joyce’s employment of overt parody
over sixty pages pushes these questions into the open. The gloves are off. The
violent verbal mayhem at the conclusion of Oxen is only an overture to the
hallucinatory scenes that follow in Bella Cohen’s brothel. Is Ulysses novel or
mock epic? A phantasmagoria on Dublin? A Dublin street map with characters?
Answers to these questions take days to address, with parody only one clue.
Parody throws into question the authority, finality and acceptance of a written
literature, even as it confirms canonical status by paying ironic tribute to
such literature. By parodying great English writing Joyce is throwing doubt on
its claims to absolute and permanent hold over Irish writing, even as he
simultaneously is acknowledging the tie and the debt Irish literature has with
English.
g A preface to FW, the breakthrough into a new way
of writing
We know each of the eighteen episodes of Ulysses is
written in consciously different styles. Joyce once told Stuart Gilbert that
style is the subject of his book. (Kiberd 217) It’s in Oxen that this aspect of
his work is overtly objectified in the form of a literary game. And it is this
episode that is the most manifest harbinger of what happens after Ulysses,
Joyce’s composition of a story in which everything about English style is
stretched past breaking point; where notions of correct mode and acceptable
expression are exploded; where English grammar becomes no more than a vehicle
to glide a polyglot narrative of multi-lingual puns; where English diction
itself is simply the mainstay for something linguistically much more complex,
what someone has called Eurish (Prendergast); and where style is whatever you
want it to be, whatever makes things happen.
In Oxen, Joyce is “already halfway to the technique
of Finnegans Wake, Joyce has put English to sleep, revealing the deeper idiom
of dreams.” (Kiberd 217) By parodying English style, it seems, Joyce wishes to
bring English down to size, to prove that it’s human (even), to show it is
manageable. One of the many paradoxes of Finnegans Wake is that while he would
say he had done with English, in truth Joyce had so mastered the language that
he could make it do new, never before seen or heard effects. The texture of the
text is cross-weaved with inventive possibility.
V.
James Joyce’s proclivity for parody is writ large in
his mature work. Ulysses is, in a quizzical and haunting way, a parody of
Homer. It also parodies other epic literature, including the Irish Celtic tale
of Cuchulain of Muirthemne. Those who think this somehow diminishes Ulysses as an
achievement might reflect on another great work of world literature that is
even more essentially parody than Ulysses. One of the world’s most read books,
especially in the Hispanic world, Don Quixote, is a book that only exists
because of the chivalric stories and legends that inform it. But while Don
Quixote is one of those big books one has either read, or should have read,
Amadis of Gaul and other medieval knight’s adventures are only read today by
specialists in the field. Miguel de Cervantes strikes the Renaissance death
knell of the old code, he skewers it with the lance known as parody.
In preparing this paper I had toyed with the idea of
composing an extension of the Oxen episode bringing us up to the Age of
Twitter. Except, I thought, Joyce undid such repetition by ending the episode
in cacophony. Another thought was to present a history of parodies of James
Joyce himself. This is a fascinating part of reception history of the author,
reminding us that parody is a form of literary criticism, and could be the
subject of another Bloomsday seminar. But it’s Don Quixote who prompts me to
conclude my thoughts about the transformative power of parody in Ulysses. Parody
in Ulysses is a reawakening of ancient literature, fanning the embers into
flame. Literatures as old and tangled as English and Irish have to find new
ways and means of saying what must be said. This was a central challenge of
modernism, so-called, and Joyce took to it with ferocity.
Yet in Ulysses, parody is also a sign to the future.
Joyce is in the process of pushing both style and expression beyond all the
norms that has frustrated his artistry as a young man. In Oxen he finds a way
to turn upsidedown all the accepted forms of writing – fiction, non-fiction,
poetry, history, playwriting, aphorism – with, in the process, finding a way
into inimitable new strategies of wordplay. The result was his next book, one
in which he wrote a short history of the world in language of multiple meaning
upon multiple meaning. And I finish with this prophecy of Shem the Penman, the
great ‘I’ written with his own bodily fluids, in the Daniel Defoe parody of
Oxen of the Sun:
“… and he bought a grammar of the bull’s language to
study but he could never learn a word of it except the first personal pronoun which
he copied out big and got off by heart and if ever he went out for a walk he
filled his pockets with chalk to write up on what took his fancy, the side of a
rock or a teahouse table or a bale of cotton or a cork-float. In short he and
the bull of Ireland were soon as fast friends as an arse and a shirt.” (Ulysses
524)
Sources
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New and revised
edition. 1983
Gifford, Don & Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses
annotated : notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. 2nd ed., revised and
enlarged. (University of California Press, 1988)
Gross, John (editor). The Oxford book of parodies.
(Oxford University Press, 2010)
Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and us : the art of everyday
life in Joyce’s masterpiece. (W.W. Norton, 2009)
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. With an introduction
by Seamus Deane. (Penguin Books, 1992)
Joyce, James. Ulysses. With an introduction by
Declan Kiberd. (Penguin Books, 1992)
Macdonald, Dwight (editor). Parodies : an anthology
from Chaucer to Beerbohm – and after. (Faber, 1960)
Prendergast, Christopher. “Pirouette on a sixpence”,
a review of ‘Dictionary of Untranslatables’, London review of books, Vol. 37,
No. 17, 10 September 2015, page 35
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