Duel between narrators and bloom in the episodes of "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa" of Ulysses

Duel between narrators and bloom in the episodes of "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa" of Ulysses

著者（英） Nobuyoshi Saito

journal or

publication title

Doshisha literature

number 29

page range 25‑53

year 1979‑12‑30

権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University

URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000016503

DUEL BETWEEN NARRATORS AND BLOOM IN THE EPISODES OF "CYCLOPS"

AND" NAUSICAA" OF ULYSSES

NOBUYOSHI SAITO

The aim of this article is to investigate the relationship between the character and the narrators and to examine the function and result of narrative method in "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa", two midvl'ay episodes in James Joyce's Ulysses.

The relationship between the character and the narrators has seemed clear for either one of the two most prevailing and opposing interpretations of Ulysses. The first, contending that Ulysses is a vvholescale and thoroughgoing condemnation of the modern world by means of ironic contrast to the heroic age, points out that the narrators satirize, ridicule and denounce the character with their unmitigated malice from a certain vantage point.¹ It is quite true that the nar- rators' attitude toward the character is consistently negative and destructive. Yet this type of interpretation leaves unnoticed the more important question of whether the narrators are the author himself in the first place. A close examination will reveal that under the surface of apparent devastation of the narrators there can be found an unout- spoken yet undeniable bond of identity between the author and the character who was supposed to be a sheer butt of the author's and the narrators' attack. ²

On the other hand, the other type of interpretation has been eager

to point out, perhaps in a way of reaction to the negative reading of the first one, that the book is rather a paean for universal humanity enacted in both the figures of the ancient hero and the modern hero.3 While supporters of the first interpretation have been trying to find the authorial negative statement that Bloom is not Ulysses, those of the second one have been contending that the author is affirming that Bloom is Ulysses. Their contention is right, and in fact the modern man is enhanced, sometimes even too explicitly, to a positively heroic and universal status. Yet it must be said that they also make a mistake when they too easily dispose of or ignore the obvious fact of the nar- rators' destructive act which the first interpretation rightly recognized, in favor of the author's alleged affirmation.

The urgent task for critical assessment of Ulysses now is to find in Joyce himself an organic structure vitally relating both the facts of the narrators' denouncement of the character and the character's positive role as an embodiment of a universal human truth, showing that each of the interpretations contains a partial truth. My assumption is as follows: Ulysses is Joyce's search under the masks of narrators, for the universal meaning of human existence embodied in the figure of Bloom.

The narrators are merely masks for the author, because, while the narrators are consistently negative and destructive towards the charac- ter, the multiplicity and vigorousness of their examination itself betray Joyce's own yet ungrounded faith that humanity has, or should have, a certain ultimate meaning to be attained. These masks have become, however, a sort of second face that he cannot tear off any more. He cannot stop his critical examination of humanity as if in distrust or fear of any ultimate value judgment. The origin and the controlling principle of this double structure of Ulysses is the author's conflict between humanitarianism and scepticism, his unremitting sceptic

in tellect ever attacking what he desperately needs to believe in, that is, the ultimate meaning of human existence. When the author ascetically refrains from making any direct authorial judgment, the meaning of the book is determined by the reader himself. Fritz Senn appropriately concludes that

One of the potential moral effects of Ulysses is that it can condition us, more than any previous novel, to suspend or, at any rate, postpone the moralizing tendency that consists in dispensing blame and credit, in favour of a series of constant readjustments and a fluctuating a\vareness of the complexity of motivation.⁴

Indeed, the "message" of Ulysses depends on the degree of the reader's impatience with "a series of constant readjustments and a fluctuating awareness of the complexity of motivation." That is to say, it depends on the degree of the reader's willingness to give a moral endorsement to Bloom and humanity as a whole in place of the silent author. It is impossible to think that

J

oyce would not take into account such a possible reaction of the reader in his structural design of the book.

After all he has ingeniously structuralized within his fictional world his own inner conflict between his doubt and faith in the opposition of the narrators vs. Bloom and the reader.

In this paper I have chosen "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa" as a touchstone in which to test the validity of my assumption stated above.⁵ In these two episodes the narrators are explicitly opposed and de- structive against the character, and the character is not yet fallen a victim to the overwhelming power of the narrators' language as in the later episodes, and he is strong enough to assert himself and sometimes to call for the reader's moral endorsement. These episodes are con- trolled by parody, one of the most salient features of the narrators'

self-assertion and destructiveness. The movements in them, that is, the initial opposition betw'een the narrators and the character, and the reader's reaction against the narrator which tries to defend the character in proportion as the character recedes before the narrators' agression, presents in its miniature and skillful design the whole struc- ture of Ulysses. In this design, are the narrators and the character really opposed to each other? If so, what is the nature of their op- position, and who will win the fight and how? The following discussion is to answer these questions.

*

In Barney Kiernan's bar or, to put it symbolically, in the cave of Cyclops, Bloom is thrown into a triple circle of hostility and violence.

First, in the actual bar scene he is exposed to overt hostility and physical violence from the Citizen. Next, he, together with the Citizen, has to suffer covert yet more powerful violence within the mind of the in-scene narrator. Finally, all of these three are placed by the off-scene nar- rator or interpolator right into a violence which is ritualized into a soci<JJ convention or formalized into a piece of literature. By their faith in violence, the Citizen, the narrator and the interpolator are aligned together against Bloom. In fact, through these three agents, the violence is heightened in power and purified in quality. What must be noticed here, however, is that as their violence is strengthened and purified, it comes to attack its own agents and finally destroys itself.

The real course of "Cyclops" is the static "movement" of Bloom who resists and endures the triple violence of the Citizen, the narrator and the interpolator, and remains himself throughout their gradual inter- and self-destruction.

At first sight, the Citizen's ill temper seems to be quite authentic.

29

His question, "Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes?" (p. 423)6 shows a genuine grievance at the Irish national tragedy, and his reproof of England, "What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths?" (p. 423) justly reflects the indignation of the Irish people. He hates Jews, for they keep on "Swindling the peasants,.:. and the poor of Ireland." (p. 419) He despises England, for his homeland is under the humiliating domination of England which is nothing but "the great empire they boast about of drudges and whipp- ed serfs." (p. 427) He envisions the day of the liberation of Ireland, when "We'll put force against force," (p. 427) when "they will come again and with a vengeance, no cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan." (p. 428) Thus, his cult of power is justified by his Cltionalism; his violence is grounded on a specific value, that of the lloeration of Ireland.

But it is necessary to examine to what extent his nationalism is authentic and what entitles him to be a legitimate representative of the Irish "lost tribes." His nationalistic harangue has two character- istics complementary to each other: a bombastic flatulence through enumeration of details and a onesided categorical thinking. His image of Ireland is determined by these two characteristics. Look, for ex- ample, at his inventory of "our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world!" (p. 423) or of "our harbours" (p. 425) which he asserts will one day be full again. In his eulogy filled with details from the beautiful past, his country is purified from a multifaceted organic complex into a sort of museum of potteries, textiles and full harbours.

The beautified and anachronistic nature of his nationalism may be best seen in his slogan, "for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, 0." (p. 424)

It is often the case with political reformers and therefore quite understandable that the ideal they advocate gives the impression of being painted in a bright monocolor and somewhat remote from actuality. A true reformist has to find realistic and constructive steps leadjng up from the· reality toward his ideal. The Citizen, however, does not seem to be aware of the need to relate his reality to his ideal in order to make his nationalistic contentions realistic and effective. Just as he is too Irish in his stentorian voice of a past-praising Irish present, so is his existence too Irish as a belligerent, sentimental hypocrite, wandering from bar to bar, waiting for drinks ("the curse of Ireland"

(p. 402) ) from his incredulous yet generous audience. He is unaware of a hopeless discrepancy between his high-blown political contentions and his actual existence. Rather, he unconsciously makes a bar- room vaudeville out of his own nationalism, ,,,,hich is intended not to save but only to entertain himself as well as his fellow countrymen in their misery and lethargy. A flexible and sophisticated view of the multivalent reality has nothing to do with this type of vaudeville: a suitable setting for it would be a puppet stage with simple and clear- shaped puppets of hackneyed ideas, such as the beautiful motherland, Ireland; a ferocious, wicked oppressor, the British; and a shrewd exploiter, the Jew. He regards Bloom as such, and his image of him is no less stereotyped and prejudiced than his reaction to him. His inability to look at reality is confirmed when he willingly sacrifices his own observation that Bloom is a 'whiteyed kaffir ... that never backed a horse in anger in his life,' (p. 435) in favor of the false information that he won on a bet at the Gold Cup race, and lets it add fuel to his anger. What seemed at first an authentic nationalistic indignation betrays itself to be a mere disguise for his personal anger and grudges grounded on no real value.

It is iJ;Ilportant to reJ;Ilember that the Citizen does have a system of value based on nationalism, no matter how bigoted and false it may be.

For this fact is what distinguishes him from the narrator, anotherdevo- tee in manly power and violence. Unlike the Citizen, the narrator has no value at all on which to ground his cult of violence. Within him, violence begins to exist for its own sake, free from any cause or value; and it is sublimated from physicality into a more abstract and universal anger by means of language. What he does in the bar is in fact a holocaust of value by violence and destruction on the mental altar.

Apparently the narrator plays a positive role of deflating the false flatuence in the self-image and view of the world the people around him have, and offorcing them to face the reality through cool and objective observation. As a matter of fact, it is this "objective" narrator that points out the false and ridiculous nature of the Citizen just after his flourish of out-and-out nationalism. His criticism is acute and poign- ant as is seen, for example, in the following passage:

All wind and piss like a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled multitude in Shanagolden where he daren't show his nose with the Molly Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant. (pp. 425-6)

It is also the narrator, a hard-bitten realist, that upbraids Bob Doran deservingly with his intolerable sentimentality drowned in alcohol when he asks Bloom to tell Mrs. Dignam that "he said and everybody who knew him said that there was never a truer, a finer than poor little

\Villy that's dead." (p. 406) His sarcasm is acute and bitter as usual:

[Bob Doran] Choking with bloody foolery. And shaking Bloom's hand doing the tragic to tell her that. Shake hands, brother.

You're a rogue and I'm another. (ibid.)

Nevertheless, it is delusory after all to think that the narrator plays a positive role of deflating the agressive or self-pitying sentimentality of the barflies around him by means of objective observation, for he himself is suffering from this mental disease typical of the Irish bars.

He rejects the Citizen's nationalism for his inflated rodomontade hope- lessly incongruous with the reality; he denounces even a genuine sorrow and pity Doran may perhaps feel for Dignam because of his sentimen- tality drowned in drunkenenss and his obscure family background.

Goaded by the narrator's powerful and refreshing muckraking of their miserable realities, the reader laughs together with him at these two self-deluded sentimentalists. The reader does so, because he has no knowledge of them except what the narrator tells him about them, or in other words, because he is not shown their actual existences real and concrete enough to resist their second-hand representation by the narrator. But as soon as the narrator begins to present Bloom, the reader notices that he is laughing with the narrator despite his perfect awareness of his deliberate and malicious manipulation. He comes to understand that the "objectivity" of the narrator is in fact peculiarly biased.

Like the Citizen, the narrator rebuffs Bloom, but it is not because he shares the Citizen's nationalism and general anti-Semitism based on it. What a fraud case by "one of the bottlenosed [Jewish] fraternity"

(p. 417) arouses in him is not a pity for the Irish victims nor a rightful aversion to the deceptive business practices, but only a sense of superi- ority over the dull gullible people. As his rancor against Bloom is

33 accelerated by a false assumption that he made a fortune at the Gold Cup race, it is dramatically revealed that his hostility and opposition are not based on any legitimate cause or value. His violence turns out to be a pure violence for its own sake, free from cause or value. On the other hand, the reader, who, despite his awareness of a gap between his knowledge of Bloom which he already has from the earlier episodes and the narrator's presentation of him, has been overwhelmed by the vivid language of the narrator and has been laughing with him at Bloom, realizes suddenly that the narrator is trustworthy in no respect, and finally deserts him to laugh at him. The narrator is trapped by his own violence and destroys himself as a victim of his own ridiculous mis- understanding. And in the reader's mind, Bloom comes out of the whole scene guiltless of not only his last alleged offence but of all previous offences attributed to him, and asserts himself.

Yet the narrator is not a fanatic devotee to pure violence as he seems to be. His violence of language is rather a disguise of and compen- sation for his helpless defeat in the reality dominated by violence.

Despite the undiscriminating destructiveness in his mind, he keeps his silence in the actual scene cautiously and almost timidly, especially in front of the Citizen. His violence is effective only to those who are less capable of self-assertion than he. Look at his triumphant abuse of Garryowen, for example: he turns the dog, which may be a perfectly ordinary dog for other two-eyed people, into a "bloody mangy mon- grel." (p. 380) This is a self-projection rather than a description of . the dog. In his image of the dog, he reveals his own bigoted and

barren verbal triumph based neither on an objective observation nor on a legitimate cause. Or he does have a reason for his ill temper:

it is the fact that before entering the bar, his miserable existence was pointed out by no one more than 'an old plumber named Geraghty':

"Tell him [Moses Herzog] says he, I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him to send you round here again or

if

he does, says he, I'll have him summoned up bifore the COUTt, so will I, for trading without a license." (p. 377) He challenges him to "Come out here, Geraghty, you notorious bloody hill and dale robber!" (p. 380), yet obviously he will not and cannot do anything about him. Another day, another Geraghty will come up and humiliate him simply by pointing out his actuality and he will be making up for his helpless and miserable existence with illusory strength by means of alcohol and language.

While the Citizen justifies violence on the ground of his nationalistic value and the narrator emotionally liberates it from any value and thus purifies it, the off-scene narrator or interpolator plays a double role towards both and excels them in the exaggerated universalization of violence. First he heightens violence to a "gigantic" status only to suddenly bring it to bathos. Next he formalizes it into various codes of social decorum. And finally he destroys it in its sheer absurdity because of his hidden nihilism unable to indicate any value behind his violence.

The interpolator goes back and forth between inflation and deflation characteristic respectively of the Citizen and the narrator.

The description of "Inisfail the fair" (pp. 378-380) placed just before the appearance of the Citizen on the scene is in perfect accord with the Citizen's vision of "Ireland on the fair hills of Eire," (p. 424) Its enumeration of a great number of fishes, heroes, fruits, vegetables and dairy products, its rhetorical crescendo leading up to a simplified and beautified image of the fair motherland, both of these are characteristics also prominent in the Citizen's nationalistic image of his native land.

The Citizen, who behaves himself as if he were a commander in chief on the battlefield of politics, would make a hero fit to be described in the style of Thomas Moore (pp. 382-4). The primary function of

this heroic passage, or at least of its first part, is to echo his habitual inflation and materialize it into a piece of literature, to express what he imagines himself to be as truthfully as possible. Yet, because of its powerful exaggeration excelling his heroic imagination, the inflation of this passage begins at a certain point to work against the Citizen, in an opposite direction toward deflation. An imitation of heroic prose turns into a parody and a mock-heroic. The result is not an imitation but a parody, because it shows that the interpolator does not believe in the style he bOrr014/S and its subject-matter. At a certain point in a series of no less than sixteen compound adjectives preceding "hero,"

a rhetorical crescendo by accumulated details changes into a decrescendo indicating the ridiculous nature of the Citizen's hyperbolic self-image.

Then, is the real function of this passage a deflation? Is the interpolator proposing as a real value an objective and realistic view of the self and the world indirectly behind his mockery of the Citizen?

As in the case ·with the narrator, it is delusory to suppose that he plays such a positive role. In the course of this long heroic presentation, he gives up the critical distance necessary to indicate the presence of an unspoken yet felt value behind the passage. Instead, he comes to embody absurdity himself which seemed at first to be the object of his satire. In the last part of the passage he is absorbed so much in representing absurdity and enjoying it so whole-heartedly that it is unbelievable that he should have another value to set forth indirectly through his absurdity. Can there be any unified and unifying system of value in what he is supposed to be proposing behind a procession of no less than eighty-nine 'Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity' in which are included among other names the Village Blacksmith, Dante, Columbus, The Last of the :Mohicans, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Banapatre, Cleopatra, Sir Thomas Lipton, Shakespeare, Confucius

and Ben Howth? What is clear is his sheer enjoyment of absurdity.

In short, here he deflates his own function of deflation. His "mock- heroic" collapses into sheer nonsense failing to show any real value.

Another characteristic of this passage is its formality. All of his inflation, deflation and collapse into absurdity are contained, at least apparently, in a stylistically consistent heroic prose. The Citizen's cult of violence, which is ridiculous after all, is represented as if it were one of the natural attributes of a hero. Despite its essential absurdity, the procession of heroes and heroines passes before the reader with the same solemnity as that of a religious rite. By concealing violence behind his heroic style or formalizing it into a sort of ritual, the interpolator distorts reality. His concealment and ritualization of reality, and especially its violence, may be seen more clearly in some other inter- polations. A legal document between Moses Herzog and Michael Geraghty (pp. 377-8), a piece of sports journalism reporting a boxing match between Myler and Percy (pp. 412-3), a genteel and ceremonious newspaper account of Bloom's departure from the bar after the squabble (pp. 445-6), the languages of all these interpolations are intended to transform the reality of extreme violence into something remote and mild, to make aggression acceptable, and even a murder palatable.

In one way or another, each of the interpolations performs one or more of the functions of inflation, deflation, concealment and ritu- alization of violence, and collapse into absurdity. Relatively shorter ones, for example, the description of Mr. and Mrs. Breen in the style of Irish legend (p. 385) or the handshaking of Bob Doran and Bloom in the language of a sentimental genteel nineteenth century fiction, are unified in their effect neatly enough to serve as a deflation by means of mock-heroic or satire. Yet, in the longer ones, e.g., the wedding scene of "the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan ... with Miss Fir Conifer of

Pine Valley" (pp. 424-5), or a quasi-religious procession of patron- saints of the bar, etc., as soon as the interpolator inevitably resumes his habitual detailed enumerations, he descends to his personal game of absurdity, neglecting either function of inflation or deflation. The latter type of interpolations are so conspicuous that their predestined collapse into absurdity denies the presence of an unspoken value on which mock-heroic or satire in the first type of interpolations are sup- posed to be based. Therefore, the total effect of the series of inter- polations is a self-betrayal of the interpolator as someone who is addicted to concealment and ritualization of reality and its violence with his various yet consistently onesided kinds of language, and who finally falls trapped in his self-made absurdity, in short, as a nihilist having no real value to uphold. The function of all the interpolations as a whole is to level all ages and places to make the whole of human existence in time and space look like one enormous pageant of absurdity. Some of the interpolations are so long and autono- mous as to interrupt and displace the narrative of the actual bar scene. They transform the original narrative into another interpola- tion. What final message the reader reads from numerous mosaics, placed so as to seem relativistic to each other on the wall of Cyclops' cave is a nihilistic view that humanity in the world and in history has been and will continue to be driven on by violence ranging from physical agression to mental onesidedness.

What distinguishes Bloom from the three Cyclops-Citizen, narrator, and interpolator-and is finally the cause of their enmity against him is the fact that Bloom alone has a vlaue which is real and materializes it in his action. Against the challenge of John Wyse to

"stand up to it [injustice] then with force like men,' he declares:

--But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that.

That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

--What? says Alf.

--Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. (p. 432)

The reason why the value of universal love he proposes is real to him is, first of all, that he abides by it in all his actual existence. In the first place, he dropped in the bar with no other purpose than to consult with Martin Cunningham over a necessary legal procedure to secure Mrs. Dignam's and her children's interest. And he alone showed any amount of genuine pity and compassion for Mrs. Breen trudging at her husband's heel from office to office for the matter of a malicious postcard presumably sent to him by Alf. Among the people whose proclaimed morality and actual behavior are so hope- lessly separate and even contradictory to each other, the perfect accordance of value and action in Bloom is already his great virtue.

It is true that the validity of his call for love is not ultimate in itself, for, as in the case of Doran's and Bloom's pity for Dignam, it may be no more than a reflection of his mawkish sentimentality. The destruc- tive interpolator never misses the chance to make the point: "Love loves to love love .... And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody." (p. 433) Yet, after all, the reader judges the value of love to be ultimately valid, to be more meaningful for humanity than the Citizen's false value or the narrator's cult of pure violence or the interpolator's sheer nihilism. In a sense, the interpolator is too super- or infra-human to hold that value. And the reader, together with Bloom, wills to remain human.

39

Now there remains the final interpolation of Bloom's ascent to be examined. Its function or effect is paradoxical, because the reader reads it against the explicit intention of the interpolator, in its counter- direction toward Bloom's possible heroic status. The intention of the interpolator is obvious: it is to make it serve as a mock-heroic focusing on an ironic contrast between Bloom and Elijah, that is to say, to assert that he is not Elijah. Yet, since the reader realizes by the end of the episode that what seems to be mock-heroic has in effect no real value as its unspoken basis, the effect of this final passage as a mock-heroic is already seriously undermined for the reader. It is so undermined as if to countersuggest that Bloom may not be "no-Elijah." The possible changes of this statement into an affirmative one, that Bloom is Elijah wholly depends on the degree of willingness of the reader to give him his moral endorsement. Since incessant and multiple examination of Bloom in the previous course of Ulysses warns the reader against any easy endorsement, he feels the necessity of suspending his final judgment without advancing any further than to contemplate the possibility suggested in the passage that Bloom might be like Elijah.

*

Apparently the function of the narrator, presumably a female, In the first half of "Nausicca" seems to be all too obvious: it is to deflate Bloom's pronouncement of love in "Cyclops", to point out its false nature by an ironic contrast between a genuine and pure form of love and his "hypocritical" one, between the spiritual mariol- atry and his most "abominable" act of masturbation. The narrator's role as a deflator, however, is illusory or totally ineffective, because, as is gradually revealed, the "genuine" quality or "purity" of love which she proposes is in fact guaranteed only by her deliberate self-

deception and concealment of reality, by her fundamental hypocrisy refusing to face and represent reality as it is. As this fact becomes clear, her spiritual mariolatry and Blooms' masturbation, which seem at first to be poles apart, turn out to be two aspects, complementary to each other, of a romantically onesided view of reality, one in terms of the spiritual, the other in terms of the physical. It is true that, no matter how temporarily it may be, Bloom does succumb to this onesided view like the narrator in his dishonorable act. Yet more important is it to notice that he finally gets over the temporary onesidedness in his perception of reality. For him masturbation works as a final and definite exorcism of "romantic" love based on a biased view of real- ity. His temporal collapse into "romantic" love is a proof of his humanity and also prepares him for a more wholesome and charac- teristic view of reality. And in this reliable foundation of impartial perception and acceptance of reality his magnanimity will be finally and irrevocably planted in later episodes.

The narrator flies back and forth between Sandymount Strand and a seaside church, Mary, Star of the Sea, and is busy working out allegorical correspondences between them or placing the former gracefully against the background of the latter. While she places Gerty MacDowell in the light of purity and mercy of Mary in the Litany of Our Lady, a prayer offered in the church, she supplies the Christian goddess of love with rich and realistic details of a seventeen- year-old Dublin girl. I vory and rose in the following description of Gerty are explicit symbols of the Virgin Mary: "The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivory like purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect." (p. 452)7 The narrator says that the blue is Gerty's own color (p. 456): her eyes are

" of the bluest Irish blue" (p. 453) and she is wearing "a neat blouse

41 of electric blue" and "a navy three quarter skirt." (p. 455) Blue is also the color of beauty, chaste affections and true love and an attribute of the Virgin Mary. And Gerty's girlish treasures contain a "child of Mary badge." (p. 473)

Against the background of spiritual correspondences with Mary, a more secular feminine world forms and determines directly the figure of Gerty. It is a world consisting of a great number of feminine concerns and paraphernalia: iron jelloids, Widow Welch's female pills, queen of ointments, milk footbath (p. 452), chenille at Clery's summer sales (p. 455), the newest shoes "with patent toecaps and just one smart buckle at her high-arched instep" (p. 455), a christmas almanac distributed by Mr. Tunney the grocer and Walker's pronouncing dic- tionary (p. 462), IVfaria Cummins' sentimental novel, The Lamplighter (p. 473), violet ink bought at Hely's on Dame street (p. 474) and so on and on. Undoubtedly Gerty has read about each and every item on this list in beauty and fashion columns, gossip, sensational "inside"

stories, advertisements of patent medicines and health gimmicks, etc.

in various female magazines such as Princess Novellette (p. 453), Lady's Pictorial (p. 455), Pearson's Weekfy (p. 460), etc., some of them with pretensions to fashionable upper class, the others namby-pamby penny weeklies. The only goal this feminine world, epitomized in these magazines, seems to set up is a passionate love and a following happy married life. These secular authorities in the form of magazines declare unanimously that love is "a woman's birthright" (p. 457)

A religious concept oflove as is seen in mariolatry and a secular one found in feminine magazines are fused to form Gerty's concept of love and control her way of expressing it. She says she will forgive the sins of a strange man on the beach, heal his sorrows and accept his whole existence in the wake of the Virgin Mary, "a refugee of sinners." Or

as the authority of magazines announces a pretty little girl-wife should be, she desires to be accepted and protected in the embracing hands of her guardian-gentleman-husband with a passionate yet self-restrained love for her. Finally her aspiration for love, "the cry of a young girl's love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages," (p. 477) reaches a climax when it declares the liberation through love:

The old love was waiting, waiting with little white hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart of mine! She would follow her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he 'was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free. (p. 475)

That Gerty is hoisted up to a notion of self-liberating love is an inevitable sequence of gradual yet steady inflation or "tumescence" in Joyce's own term,S in the first half. But, liberation from what? From what will she be free? Her "liberation" is, in fact, an escape from the reality of her self and world into a conventionally and onesidedly romanticized view ofthem. Under the thick covering ofthe narrator's language wrapping and falsifying her figure, sometimes her reality does not fail to reveal itself in its bareness. And her reality thus revealed in turn brings to light the hypocrisy underlying the narrator's language. Gerty is not only a victim of the narrator's hypociritical representation: she is also her accomplice in that she willingly sur- renders to her language in order to avoid reality. Her perception of herself is perfectly identical with the narrator's representation of her.

She agrees with the narrator in sacrificing her self-subsistent existence independent of language to a romantic illusion in the narrative.

Characteristically they are so repelled at alimentation, defecation and sexuality, the most fundamental facts about human existence, that they cannot bear mentioning them without some mild and obfuscating euphemisms: "beetoteetom,' which is feminine baby-talk for the rump, is "an unladylike thing like that' (p. 459), and the lavatory is only 'that place' (p. 462); menstruation is only 'that thing' (p. 466) and masturbation is only 'something not very nice' (p. 476); sexual inter- course itself is no more than 'the other thing' (ibid.) For Gerty, necessity to eat is something disgraceful and humiliating to her 'spirit- ual' existence, and she cannot help wondering 'why you couldn't eat something poetical like violets or roses.' (p. 458) In spite of her vehement pursuit of love, she recoils from a notion of sexual intercourse as a natural form of its consummation, which no doubt must be a basis of a happy married life in her dream: "No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister." (p. 474) After all, the concept of pure and chaste love in her and the narrator's mentality is set up precariously on their deliberate self-deception and concealment of reality, and hence is doomed, utterly barren.

Gerty's rather chilly reality, nevertheless, can be seen occasionally through this tight-woven mesh of religious and secular incantation of love. The narrator may emphasize a friendly atmosphere among the girls as ifin a pastoral, but what actually presides over their relationship is a constant, if not aggressive, hostility: their thoughts ranging from clothing and appearances to their boyfriends are never free of jealousy, malice, contempt and pride. Just as the squabble between Tommy and Jacky is restrained from growing into an actual violence only by virtue of their infancy, so the hostility among the girls is saved from catastrophic overtness only because it is controlled by their physical inaction under a mask of feminine gentleness. Gerty may make up

her dream-home out of her girlish rummage stored in her drawer, yet her actual household is on the verge of collapse because of her alcoholic father. Her father, suffering from gout, sometimes forgetting himself completely and lifting his hands to his wife; his mother, taking pinches of snuff and being struck down by occasional splitting headaches; and their daughter, looking for an advertisement of powders which is said to cure the drink habit for her father, spraying every fortnight the chlorate of lime in lavatory, trembling to confess the onset of men- struation to a parish father, probably for want of solicitous ears of her mother; it is impossible to imagine that these three are having a happy family life. Moreover, Gerty is lame from "an accident coming down Dalkey", a fact which 'she always tried to conceal." (p. 474) She is obsessed throughout the episode with legs, shoes, stockings, etc.; Edy and Cissy are carefree in laughing at her when she fails to kick back the "stupid ball" (p. 463); and she hopes, as if in revenge for their laughter, that Cissy will "trip up over something accidentally" and

"get a fine tumble" (p. 468); these are enough to show the horrible impact of the sudden deformity on her, her desperate need to conceal and forget it, and the intolerable cruelty of her laughing friends.

That Gerty should try to conceal or escape from her hard and bitter reality is quite natural and deserves the reader's sympathy. In this respect, the language the narrator offers to her is a suitable method to satisfy her desperate need. In a sense, that kind of hypocrisy that the narrator is ready to present is now the only hope for her. Yet, in the end, the narrator fails to accomplish either the total concealment oJ reality or Gerty's escape from it. Gerty, as well as the reader, cann01 get rid of keen and constant awareness of reality. Then, when it ii utterly ineffective (the author seems to insist that any language im- pregnated with such an intention is doomed to be ultimately ineffective)

the narrator's attempt to falsify reality becomes destructive to Gerty herself. That is to say, after her obvious failure to conceal reality, the narrator is denounced for her inability to present the whole of it. This denouncement is made by the reader who has been made aware willy- niIly of the seamy sides of reality and who, now with increasing desire to know the whole reality, wants not to give Gerty more of literary opium but to find in her a true foundation of as much sincere sympathy as she deserves.

While Gerty and the narrator are busy trying to conceal or escape from reality, Bloom is keen enough to perceive what is really going on between them. Just a glance at her lameness brings forth within him a picture of an unhappy life for this ')iIted beauty" and incites a genuine pity for her. "With a surprising accuracy, he perceives and understands facts about her that both of Gerty and the narrator have been trying to conceal with so much care and timidness, those facts such as her predestined break-down of her dream-love with a boyfriend, her poor and miserable family life, silent yet bitter hostility among her and the other girls, her long frustrated desire to be loved, and her irresistible sexual desire aroused with an onset of her period. His ability to look right into her reality is quite refreshing for the reader after so many sugarcoatings of false "sweetness," so much stifling smell of perfume which is "sweet and cheap: soon sour." (p. 488) Bloom matches Gerty's sexual desire in the form of exhibitionism with his own in the form of masturbation. This means that they meet each other on the plane of sexuality as "an inevitable, undeniable and natural, if troublesome, part of every [human] experience."g His act sanctions her as a sexual being which the narrator stubbornly refuses to acknowl- edge. What the narrator is ready to do with this seaside incident is just to apply to it a conventional and essentially artificial framework of

"a brute" wretchedly answering to a call from "a fair unsullied soul."

(p.478) It is irrefutable by the end of the first part of the episode that this framework, or language itself, is hopelessly separate from Gerty's reality. What really is between her and Bloom is a sort of republic of human sexuality and she is allowed into it for the first time in her life and entitled to its citizenship by her elder fellow citizen. Bloom whispers that "it was a kind of language between us." (p. 485) It is the opposite of the narrator's artificial language, a constructive and truly romantic one, based on unbiased perception and acceptance of human reality, which enables communication.

Yet, the exchange of female exhibitionism and male masturbation is an incomplete encounter yielding no real fruit in reality, and the language between them is merely romantic, which is only one of many types of onesided views, because humanity cannot be reduced to its sexual aspect but rather much more than. that. Bloom perfectly understands this. He knows that an equation of the whole humanity with its sexual aspect is possible only by intentionally discarding the other aspects and under overwhelming influences of particularly intended stage settings. From the standpoint of an admirer of inflated sexuality, he frankly admits: "Glad I didn't know it [that Gerty is lame] when she was on show," (p. 479) or "See her as she is spoil all.

Must have the stage setting, the rough, costume, position, music."

(p. 482) Sister-virgins in Tranquilla convent, shoals of girls pouring every evening out of offices, men swarming at Mutoscope pictures in Capel Street, Val Dillon the apopletic mayor having an eye on a lady sitting beside him in a coach, girls and women, including Milly and Molly, who are sensitive to and fastidious in appearance, cosmetics, dances, studied gestures and all other trivialities; what really controls reality for each and all of these is their "natural craving" (p. 479), which

is so undeniable and so ingrained in their existence that one cannot but accept it. An unobscured perception of humanity as a sexual being as well as the calm acceptance of other fundamental facts, such as alimentation and defecation, form the foundation of Bloom's humanity.

He frankly admits, wonders at and accepts "the strength it [the sexual act or sexuality itself] gives the man." (p. 482)

Characteristically and unconsciously, however, Bloom refuses a possible logical consequence that all we have to do is to live comfort- ably in a kingdom of sexual strength, meeting another Gerty on another seaside evening. Rather, after his acknowledgment of sexuality in the form of masturbation, he is detached from his sexual desire to look through his sexuality and his own existence toward the larger human reality as if led by a philosopher's aspiration. He rejects the principle underlying Gerty's and the narrator's attitudes toward rea- lity, "See ourselves as we want to see," and resumes his healthier and after all habitual tendency to "see ourselves as others see us." (p.490) For him reality is a magnetic field where human beings are drawn to- gether like puppets or metal pieces by their own irresistible sexuality:

Back of everything magnetism. Earth for instance pulling this and being pulled. That causes movement. And time? Well that's the time the movement takes. Then if one thing stopped the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit. Because it's arranged . ... Woman and man that is. Fork and steel. Molly, he. Dress up and look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you're a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming, legs, look, look and if you have any guts in you. Tip. Have to let fly.

(p. 487)

Sexual magnetism as Prime Mover of life, originator of human time, is a universal law working at all times and all places : "Year returns.

History repeats .... All that old hill has seen. Names change: that's all.

Lovers: yum yum." (p. 491) Here is finally accomplished his exorcism of "love," his statement that "Hate, love. Those are names." (p. 368) He transcends romanticism as a onesided view of the self and the world based on an individual self-hood, and acquires an impassible regard of Sirius with which he stares at the universal truth of human reality.

He must descend, nevertheless, from such a philosopher's height down to his own reality determined by his unique hie et nunc. That is what he must face and accept first of all. Then he is made immediately and poignantly aware of the fact that in spite of eternal recurrence of human existence as a species in history, his own existence as an indi- vidual is heading every minute toward inevitable destruction. With a full recognition of this desolate fact, he whispers, "Tired I feel now.

Will I get up? 0 wait. Drained all the manhood out of me, little wretch .... My youth. Never again. Only once it comes." (p. 491), or "O! Exhausted that female has me. Not so young now. Will she come here tomorrow ? Wait for her somewhere forever. Must come back. Murderers do. Will I?" (p. 497) But that horrid fact tells him that he never will or can come back. Man is brought into existence by blind and undeniable sexuality, goaded by necessity to eat, and drawn together to another by the same blind and irresistible sexuality to bear another new one. This extratemporal truth about humanity in general may make out of us something of a serene con- templative, yet in actuality man is bound to his own unique existence determined by a unique hic et nunc and ever being precipitated to inevitable death. If there is a meaning in human existence, it must be found in his existence in the now and here, but it seems hopeless to be found. What he is faced with is nothing other than "the nightmare of history, "the profound est problem for him in the course of the whole

book. In order to awake from the nightmare, he desperately tries to express and convey a universal meaning of his own existence as some- thing that cannot be universal, which is after all what Stephen calls

"the word that shall not pass away." (p. 511) I t will be a real language as opposed to the "romantic" language between him and Gerty. Yet he cannot finish the sentence, "1. AM. A." (p. 498) It is not because he is not an artist but merely a citizen. Jayce the artist himself does not give any direct authorial judgment in the book which is essentially his attempt to express such an eternal meaning, and in fact he cannot give one for the same reason that Bloom cannot finish the sentence.

The author seems to be saying that no human being can possibly attain a universal meaning which he believes his existence must be based on.

Yet Bloom maintains a morality even without any universal mean- ing or value on which to base it. I t is a blind morality already self- realizing in his humanity before it is rationally proved and grounded.

He decides to see Mrs. Purefoy in the lying-in hospital. Calmly recalling the incident with the Citizen in Kiernan's bar, he even encourages himself to "look at it other way round. Not so bad then.

Perhaps not to hurt he meant." (p. 496) These pieces of his thoughts show that he finally has achieved magnanimity, almost miraculously, right in the middle of unresolved tension between his keen awareness of the man's inability to attain a universal meaning of his historica,l existence and his ungrounded compassion emerging by itself and for itself from the innermost core of his humanity.

As if to give a coup de grace to the half-asleep Bloom, the narrator triumphantly finishes his unfinished sentence: he is a "cuckoo/cuckoo/

cuckoo." (p. 499) Her statement is true, as he himself has no illusion about it. But the reader has been supplied with far more knowledge of him than the narrator so that he knows that he cannot be only a

cuckoo, That truth in itself is not even a very important aspect of his existence: his cuckoldry is only an allegory for the nightmare of history and if it is understood as such, no human being is not a cuckold. Just a simple and depreciative noun is too shallow and artificial to accom- plish his attempt to express a universal and everlasting meaning.

Rather the reader wills to redirect this crowning ironic statement, which the narrator clearly intends to be a final and definite judgment of Bloom, toward herself, toward hypocrisy, onesidedness and artificiality of her language. At the end of the episode the reader finds himself sympathizing and identifying himself with Bloom. The base for his final identification with him is his judgment that humanity, as Bloom sees it and ultimately what he is, is truer than what the narrator makes it seem, and his moral endorsement given to Bloom who wills to remain a human right in the nightmare of history, refusing to be transformed into something else by distortion or concealment of human reality.

*

As is shown above, the relationship between the narrators and the character is far more complex than it seems at first sight, and most vital for a critical interpretation of Ulysses as a whole. Some fail to recognize this. David Hayman, for instance, concludes in his discussion of "Cyclops" as follows:

We must conclude ... that incoherence and irreverence are in complex ways yoked to reverence and a respect for forms and even for human values. This is also true of the obvious satirical content, since satire always implies respect for some sort of reason and a positive if implicit order.Io

Curiously enough, he somehow fails to investigate the "complex ways"

51 themselves in which "incoherence and irreverence are yoked to rever- ence and a respect for form and even for human values." There is indeed "a positive if implicit order" in the episode, but it is something that can never be ascertained by such a crude generalization that satire always implies the presence of an unspoken value behind the text. The positive order can be attained only after the long and impetuous strug- gle between the two specific and opposing orders, one the narrator's, the other Bloom's, and after the moral endorsement the reader gives the latter, in his consciousness while reading. What mars some of Mr. Hayman's very perceptive observations and thereby delays his quest for the final positive order is the very unawareness of the need to focus upon the opposing relationship between the narrators and the character, which is in fact the real movement of the epidsoe and its unifying structure.

What originates the opposition between the narrators and Bloom both in "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa" is the difference between acceptance and refusal of the nightmare of history. The narrators contend that if human existence cannot attain nor express in his reality an everlasting positive value, that is, if it is ultimately a meaningless and delusive existence, then the whole of humanity and the world is nothing but a feast of meaninglesness. It is the reader that judges this contention to be nihilistic. In a sense, reality itself has disappeared for them: it has not substance enough to resist their distortion or concealment: reality is reduced to a matter of how language makes it. And there seems to be no real substance nor value on which to reprove their subjective and tyrannous creation of reality by language. Bloom's opposition to and resistance against their nihilistic pageant is not motivated by any value he should be presumably supporting; he himself is placed in the nightmare of history, unable to attain any universal substance and

value. Rather, what motivates his opposition, what enables him to have a morality right in the moral void as that of the narrators, is a morality at the nethermost part of his existence which is realized for itself and by itself, without any reason for it, without any value judg- ment. Intellect collapses into the nihilistic void when it cannot find a rational foundation for value. Bloom is saved from his possible collapse into the void by a mysterious human soul which transcends intellect.u

The reader's identification with Bloom depends first on whether or not he believes in the possibility of man's attainment and expression of universal meaning, and secondly, if he cannot believe in this possibility, on whether or not he wills to remain human in spite of the nihilistic void which the narrators embody.

NOTES

1. The most aggressive advocate of this interpretation ^IS Hugh Kenner in his Dublin's Joyce (1956).

2. The present author dealt with this relationship between the character and the author in his MA thesis, "The Art of Identification: Stephen, Bloom and Joyce," submitted to the English Department of Doshisha University in 1978.

3. Richard ElImann in his James Joyce (1959) and WiIIiam Y. Tindall in his James Joyce: His Way qf Interpreting the Modern World(1950) are the two main advocates of this second interpretation.

4. "Nausicaa" in James Joyce's " Ulysses": Critical Essays, ed. by C. Hart and D. Hayman (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 279.

5. In his quite positive study on Joyce's writing of Ulysses, (" Ulysses" in Progress, (Princeton, N. J.: Prince ton U niv. Press, 1977)), Michael Groden assigns the five episodes from" Wandering Rocks" to "The Oxen of the Sun" to the middle stage of his writing and of the book itself. According to him, the middle stage is a long transitional stage of work where J oyce's interest shifted from characters and their novelistic human story to schematic correspondence and symboiistic

structure, and accordingly there is a gradual shift in technique from elaboration and playful handling of the monologue technique, so-called initial style in the preceding nine episodes; toward final replacement of the method with parodic styles, which foreshadow and prepare for the tour de force of the later episodes.

" Cyclops" and " Nausicaa " are an epitome of this middle stage, for they show most clearly J oyce's waning interest in realistic story and his growing attraction toward parodic styles.

6. All the quotations of UTysses hereafter are from the 1960 Bodley Head edition.

7. Although" rose" is associated here with the more frivolous Greek god of love, it is also a symbol of Mary: in the Litany she is described as "mystical rose. "

(p.462)

8. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's " UTysses," (New York, N. Y.: Vintage Books, 1955) p.278.

9. I\1arilyn French, The Book as World: James Joyce's "UTysses" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), p. 164.

10. "Cyclops" in James Joyce's " UTysses": Critical Essays, p. 267.

11. This is exactly where the core of the father-son relationship of Bloom and Ste- phen is seen, as is strikingly revealed in the following words of the young man:

It [fatherhood] is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotton. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. (p. 266)