Andew Gibson James Joyce (pdf)

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124
A Dublin Jewish
family in the early
1900s.
and, to a more limited extent, with D. P. Moran and The Leader
Joyce was stoutly opposed to their disastrously narrow conceptions
of Irish nationality. He knew that their lapses into bigotry were a
logical consequence of colonial Irish history, not least, of a racist
habit of thought whose origin was English and went back at least as
far as the Tudor invaders. But he also knew that, for Ireland to liber-
ate itself properly from its history, it had to liberate itself from such
consequences. In effect, he says that through Bloom. Bloom shows
us what Irish modernity might mean. He also shows us how far
Joyce s Ireland still had to go properly to reach modernity.
Bloom s personality also reveals what Joyce thought was lacking
in Irish culture. Bloom is even Joyce s paradigmatic modern
Irishman. He represents a direction in which Ireland needed to
turn. In his ordinary, pedestrian central character, Joyce presents
an image for the Irish future. Bloom is even a utopian figure. Joyce
locates him solidly where he belongs, amongst Dublin Catholics.
Bloom spends most of his time in the midst of this community,
and it looms much larger in his mind than does Dublin Jewry. In
125
their own mild but distinctive way, Bloom s politics are also the
politics most evident in the Catholic community: pro-Parnellite,
anti-imperial, sympathetic to nationalism. But at the same time,
he is a non-Jewish Irish Jew who has been baptized as both a
Protestant and a Catholic.
When asked why Bloom, Joyce replied that only a foreigner
would do. Bloom is both intimate with and foreign to the Dublin
culture fashioned by the two imperial masters. It is the culture he
knows best. But he has neither the intimacy nor the complicity with
it that stems from historical disaster and profound hostility to the
conqueror. This means that he can serve as an extremely subtle and
flexible instrument of critique. For Bloom, colonial structures turn
out to be a source of perplexity, common-sense surprise, amuse-
ment or just indifference. His reflections on them repeatedly take
place at a liberating distance. So, too, he is close to his Catholic
acquaintances, but also estranged from them. As a Jew, Bloom
comes from a people who have known oppression, misery and
catastrophe. Unlike Joyce s Dubliners, however and pointedly
unlike Stephen when the thought of historical desolation threat-
ens to overcome him, he swiftly bounces back: Morning mouth
bad images. Got up wrong side of the bed. Must begin again those
Sandow s exercises. On the hands down (u 4.233 4). Through
Bloom, Joyce partly identifies with the interests of the Catholic com-
munity. But he also points to the limits of its political and cultural
ambitions and its stifling obsession with the retrospective view. In
doing so, he develops an intricate, composite politics of his own.
Joyce uses Bloom, then, to turn Dublin inside out, to make it
familiar and unfamiliar together. He uses him to show the con-
straints colonial Irish culture imposes on the character and inde-
pendent development of his Dubliners. Having set this process
going, however, Joyce seems increasingly to have felt that he had to
double it. Bloom is a man of average education. He has only a limited
experience of colonial Irish institutions and institutional discourses.
126
He also has only a very limited knowledge of Irish Catholicism.
These very limits are partly what make him such a useful weapon
against Church and state. But they also restrict his scope. Joyce had
to open up a second front. In the most general terms, this front is
linguistic. In A Portrait, Stephen had described his soul as fretting
in the shadow of the English language. With the partial exception
of Chapter 7, however, it is only from the ninth chapter of Ulysses
onwards that the struggle for freedom also clearly becomes a seri-
ously linguistic struggle.
The famous styles in the second half of the novel have attracted
a great deal of attention as supposedly modernist tours de force.
In fact, Joyce generated them out of his struggle with England and
Rome, and the long history of their domination of his country. He
usually chooses a contemporary English or Anglo-Irish discourse
or verbal structure as a basis for a style. He may put this discourse
together with others, or with a Catholic one. He then treats it (or
them). Each chapter thus subjects a discursive complex to a set of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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