James Joyce in E(a)rnest

Chapter 1 Ulysses: James Joyce in E(a)rnest. In a lecture given in Trieste entitled “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” James Joyce refers to the writings of Oscar Wilde as being “overrated”. James Joyce, “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages”. James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Ed. by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000), 123. This statement will prove to be highly ironic in light of the preoccupation that Joyce develops with Oscar Wilde throughout the course of his life and work. This obsession with Oscar Wilde is discernable in a number of episodes in Joyce’s life. In 1909, Joyce “wrote to Robbie Ross asking permission to translate [Wilde’s essay] “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New and Revised Edition. (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 274. In 1918, Joyce was involved in a Zurich production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. At the end of the first performance, Joyce cried out to: “Hurrah for Ireland! Poor Wilde was Irish and so am I”. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 426. Joyce even carried his enthusiasm to the extent of writing an essay about the life of Oscar Wilde which he called “Oscar Wilde: The poet of Salomè”. (This essay was published in Trieste in 1909 in Il Picolo della Serra). Such activities hardly seem consistent with a person who believed that Wilde was over-rated. It is entirely possible that Joyce’s self-imposed exile from Ireland that began on 8th October 1904 was (at least in part) inspired by Wilde’s leaving Ireland for England exactly thirty years before. Joyce was to remark in “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” that “[n]o self-respecting person stays in Ireland”. James Joyce, “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages”, 123. and this statement can be just as applicable to Wilde as it is to himself. Joyce and Wilde were certainly self-respecting people so both of them refused to stay in Ireland. The difference between Joyce’s exile from Ireland and Wilde’s lies primarily in their choice of destinations: Wilde went to England and Joyce went to the continent. Éibhear Walshe has made the following argument concerning Joyce’s attitude towards Wilde: “Because Wilde challenged the hegemony of the British Empire, Joyce begot him as it were, as a precursor for his own aesthetic of exile, disgrace and defiance”. Éibhear Walshe, “The First Gay Irishman? Ireland and the Wilde Trials”. Éire Ireland 40.3 (Winter/Fall 2005), 52. Wilde’s romantic mixture of exile and rebellion became for Joyce a model for defining himself as an artist. One very possible reason for Joyce choosing the continent as opposed to Britain as his place of exile could be that he did not want to run the risk of meeting the same fate that Wilde did in London. Joyce was fleeing Ireland to escape (what he regarded as) persecution so he would not have wished to exchange one set of persecutors for another. It must also be observed that Joyce was not the only Irish writer of this period to interpret Wilde as a tragic and romantic hero. W.B. Yeats also perceived Wilde in such terms as is evident in Autobiographies concerning Wilde’s decision not to leave England for Paris after his libel action had failed but to stay and face his accusers: I have never doubted for an instant that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that half of his renown…Tragedy awoke another self, the rage and contempt that filled the crowds in the street, and all men and women who had an over-abundant normal sexual instinct. Éibhear Walshe, “The First Gay Irishman? Ireland and the Wilde Trials”, 53. Here, Yeats was attempting to construct Wilde as “the archetype of the Irish tragic artist, the lone figure standing against the commonplace and suffering as result at the hands of over-sexualized heterosexuals”. Quoted in Éibhear Walshe, “The First Gay Irishman? Ireland and the Wilde Trials”, 53. Like Yeats before him, Joyce was willing to engage with the scandal of the “Wilde Trials” in both his critical and fictional writings. Such a need to respond to Wilde’s downfall seems natural when one considers that Joyce “came to adolescence in the very year Oscar Wilde thrice came to trial”. Joseph Valente, “Joyce’s (Sexual) Choices: A Historical Overview”. Quare Joyce. Ed. by Joseph Valente (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 8. In “Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salome”, Joyce defends Wilde against the charges of perversion that were leveled against him by the English legal system: The truth is that Wilde, far from being a monster of perversion that inexplicably arose in the midst of the modern civilization of England, is the logical and inevitable product of the Anglo-Saxon college and university system. James Joyce, “Oscar Wilde: “The Poet of Salomé”. James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Ed. by Kevin Barry. (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics), 2000, 150 What Joyce is referring to is the homosocial environment that existed in English schools and universities where males would exclusively associate with men and form bonds of great intimacy. The implication is that many of those who condemned Wilde for his same sex inclinations would themselves have experienced such desires at some point in their lives. Joyce himself would have had knowledge just such an environment because he attended the all-boys school Clongowes Wood which was very much modeled on English public schools. Joyce would go on to depict the vaguely homoerotic undercurrents that existed in this school in the early portion of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For a full account of this reading of Portrait, see Joseph Valente’s essay “Thrilled by his Touch” in the collection Quare Joyce. Ed by Joseph Valente (University of Michigan Press, 1998): 47-76. Joyce would further demonstrate his interest in Wilde’s work and life when he wrote to his brother Stanislaus from Trieste in 1906 and told him that he had just finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel had made a sufficient impression on Joyce that he felt compelled to give a mini-review of it to Stanislaus: It is not difficult to read between the lines [of the text]. Wilde seems to have had some good intentions in writing it-some wish to put himself before the world-but the book is rather crowded with lies and epigrams. If he had had the courage to develop the allusions in the book it might have been better. James Joyce, Selected Letters, Ed. by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber), 1975, 96. In this letter, Joyce is hinting at a certain disappointment he feels at finding Wilde, his rebellious artist hero, resorting to masks and subterfuge to convey his message rather than having the courage to make his radical theme (homosexual desire) more explicit. Nevertheless, Joyce would pay Wilde’s novel the compliment by taking a line from the book and using part of it in the title of his first novel: “Harry, every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist [my italics] not of the sitter” (Picture, CCW, 9 ). The subtle way in which Joyce uses this Wildean line without quoting it in its entirety has been read by Joseph Valente as being a repetition (either conscious or unconsciously) of Wilde’s evasion of explicitly dealing with the issue of homosexuality in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Joyce’s title answers Wilde’s deliberate circumspection with an unconscious disavowal; it simultaneously reveals and conceals the intense homotextual relation between his bildungsroman and its precursor”. Joseph Valente, “Thrilled by His Touch: The Aestheticizing of Homosexual Panic in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, 51. Portrait of the Artist is the work in which Joyce first reveals his partiality to a Wildean aesthetic. Stephen Dedalus’ growth as an artist is achieved by his acceptance of art as an entity that is separate from life and also a creator of new worlds and forms of existence. This view of art is most famously articulated by Wilde in “The Decay of Lying” (“Decay” CCW, 1071-1093). At the beginning of the novel, Stephen is threatened by Dante with having his eyes plucked out by an eagle if he persists with his desire to marry the protestant girl Eileen. Stephen’s defense against the trauma of this gruesome prediction is to compose a poem about the incident: Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes. Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6. Thus, Stephen is protecting himself against the cruelty and intolerance of life by escaping into a world of art which he finds a more hospitable and ordered place. The order of art is emphasized by the clear rhythm and rhyming scheme of the poem that Stephen composes. After his encounter with the “bird-girl” on Dollymount strand, Stephen resolves to fully commit to the role of the artist by “recreat[ing] life out of life” James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 145., a statement that echoes Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying”. This decision is one that Joyce himself could have made because Portrait of the Artist does contain many details and incidents from his own life but structures them in the form and style of a work of art. As Jeri Johnson has observed: “Unlike Stephen Hero, Portrait shows Joyce compressing, selecting the salient detail, arranging things to suit the aesthetic pattern of the novel, not to accord with the timing of his own life history”. Jeri Johnson, “Introduction” Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, xiv. Both Joyce and Stephen are thus not only revealed as artists, they are also shown to be Wildean artists who are developing before the readers eyes. Near the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist Stephen voices his rejection of Yeatsian/Revivalist forms of art and possibly signals his desire to emulate the older, Wildean form of artistic production: Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness that has not yet come into the world. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 212. By first paraphrasing and then refuting Yeats’ “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty”, See William Butler Yeats, “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty”. Yeats’s Poetry, Drama and Prose (New York: Norton Critical Ed, 2000), 25. Stephen renounces any connection with the Irish Revival which Yeats championed and then proceeds (as Wilde himself had done) to align himself with a style of art that will make the world anew rather than the Revivalist model which Joyce (rightly or wrongly) saw as merely imitating a bygone age. However, Joyce does not allow the readers of Portrait to be utterly convinced that Stephen can produce works of great artistic value in the same way that Joyce and Wilde could. When Stephen begins to narrate his life in the first person at the end of the novel, he contravenes the theory of the artist that he had vocalized earlier in the work: The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea… The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 180-181. By referring to himself in the first person, Stephen is made very visibly present as the creator of his own artistic life and thus has not been refined out of existence as he had stated an artist should be. He is also acting against the advice the advice that Wilde had given to Andre Gide which was that, in all matters concerning art: “Never use I [my italics]” Andre Gide, Journal entry for 1 October 1927, The Journals of Andre Gide, 4 Vols. Translated by Justin O’Brien. Vol. 2. 1914-1927 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1948), 409.. Joyce uses Wilde’s own theories to create a distance between author and character and shows how, as Jeri Johnson has contended: “[Joyce]… [was able to write] a novel Stephen could never have written. Jeri Johnson, “Introduction” Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, xix. The primary focus of this chapter will be on how the influence of Oscar Wilde’s life and works are once again clearly in evidence in the Joycean text that succeeded A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses. This is the work of Joyce’s has been selected for study because it is the Joycean text that still has many unexplored avenues of study in terms of finding Wildean echoes in Joyce’s work. When the collection of essays, Quare Joyce, was published in 1998, approximately half of the papers contained in that volume had some mention of Wilde’s presence in Joyce’s work. However, discussion of Ulysses was kept to a minimum with most of the authors opting to discuss either Portrait of the Artist or Dubliners and only a brief mention was made to Ulysses. As Frances Devlin Glass has demonstrated in his essay, “Writing in the Slipstream of the Wildean Trauma”, Ulysses makes many uses of Oscar Wilde that could be fruitfully analyzed using the critical tool of Queer Theory. The shadow of Wilde that hangs over Ulysses extends to references concerning Wilde the man, both implicit and explicit, and Joyce’s adherence to many of Wilde’s philosophies such as the superiority of art over life and the need for every man of culture to rewrite history. The focus of this chapter will be on the episodes where the influence of Wilde is the most notable: “Telemachus”, “Nestor”, “Proteus”, “Scylla and Charybdis” and “Circe”. “Circe” will be examined in the most detail because it has many subtle allusions to Wilde’s life and work that have not been fully extrapolated. The shifting of gender roles and the domination of a womanly man (Leopold Bloom) by a manly woman (Bella Cohen), is a nightmare version of Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest. The extent to which Bloom in this episode could be a veiled version of Wilde himself will also be examined. At the conclusion of this chapter, I intend to have proven that, without the legacy of Oscar Wilde, the book that has been widely lauded as the greatest literary work of the twentieth century would have been something very different indeed. Zack Bowen has stated that “anyone reading Ulysses…can hardly deny Joyce’s interest in his Irish predecessor [Wilde]”. Zack Bowen, “Wilde About Joyce”. Joyce and Popular Culture. Ed. by R. B. Kershner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 105. He also says: “At least twenty references to Wilde and/or his work appear in Ulysses alone”. Zack Bowen, “Wilde About Joyce”, 105. This chapter shall reexamine some of those twenty, give certain new interpretations for those references, and argue for additions to that number. The “Telemachus” episode of Ulysses is, with the exception of “Scylla and Charybdis”, the most overtly Wildean of all the episodes in Joyce’s “epic” masterpiece. The character of Buck Mulligan is portrayed by Joyce as a kind of “anti-Wilde” and a warning of how Wilde’s legacy can be distorted if it is left in the hands of such an unworthy heir. I would argue that when Stephen Dedalus refers to Mulligan as the “gay betrayer”(U,15), it is not just Ireland and the Irish people that he is accusing Mulligan of betraying, but also the spirit of conformist rebellion that was Wilde’s legacy to his native country. Mulligan, at first glance, can be said to embody many of the stock Wildean traits. He has a great reverence for what he calls “the real Oxford manner” (U, 3) which is a quality that he admires in Stephen. This brand of Englishness would also have been acquired by Wilde when he went to study at Magdalen College Oxford in 1874 and by expressing his admiration for this signifier of identity, Mulligan is attempting to cast himself in the role of a twentieth-century version of Wilde. It must be remembered, however, that when Wilde did go to Oxford, he insisted on signing the registry book using his full name, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. This action offers proof that Wilde regarded himself as an Irish man and that he did not wish this fact to be forgotten by his English hosts. Buck Mulligan, on the other hand, with his affected “manner of Oxenford” (U, 279), would be most likely to shirk off all aspects of his Irishness if ever he moved to Oxford. That Mulligan is familiar with Oscar Wilde’s work is made clear (naturally enough) when he quotes Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray at Stephen while the young man is examining himself in the mirror: “The rage of Caliban at seeing his face in the mirror… If Wilde were only alive to see you” (U, 6).This quotation has to be seen, however, as an example of Mulligan’s simultaneous appropriation and perversion of Wilde’s work. In order to see how far Mulligan has strayed from the true intent of Wilde’s words, it is necessary to examine the line as Wilde originally wrote it: “The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass” (Picture, CCW, 17). Wilde is using the image of a raging Caliban as a metaphor for the English peoples dislike of seeing their own shortcomings (and barely contained savagery) reflected back at them as Wilde was about to do in The Picture of Dorian Gray. . This diagnosis of the English psyche was proven to be completely accurate by reviewers of the book who, almost unanimously, claimed that the work “was immoral”. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 306. Mulligan has appropriated Wilde’s maxim purely for the purpose of belittling Stephen by resorting to the English stereotype of the Irish as Calibanesque savages. This image of the Irish people as savages was enhanced by popular English publications such as the magazine Punch in which the appearance of satiric cartoons depicting the Irish as simian like creatures were a very common occurrence. By using Wilde’s writing as a means of voicing a crude English stereotype about his fellow countrymen, Buck Mulligan has performed his first act of betrayal of both Wilde and the Irish people. That Joyce himself did have a regard for The Picture of Dorian Gray is evidenced by the fact that he wrote to his brother Stanislaus from Rome on the 16th August 1906 to inform him that he was “reading The Picture of Dorian Grey [sic] in Italian”. James Joyce, Selected Letters. Ed. by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 95. Stephen’s response to Mulligan’s pejorative reference to him as Caliban is to refer to the “cracked looking glass of a servant” (U, 6) as an appropriate symbol for Irish art. This is a play on a line from Wilde’s essay/dialogue, “The Decay of Lying” in which Cyril says to his friend Vivian: “I can quite understand your objecting to art being treated as a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the condition of a cracked looking glass” (“Decay”, CCW, 1076). As Declan Kiberd has argued, the meaning that the image of the broken looking glass held for both Wilde and Joyce was that “the cracked looking glass no longer depicts a single image but instead a multiplicity of images”. Declan Kiberd, “Oscar Wilde: The Resurgence of Lying”. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Ed. by Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 285. Most of the characters in the Wildean repertoire can indeed be seen as representing the cracked looking glass by their multiplicity of identities. The character of Lady Markby in An Ideal Husband was speaking for the majority of Wildean characters when she observed that “as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else” (Ideal, CCW, 519). Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan appears originally to embody all the characteristics of the archetypal whore when she seduces all the men around her at Lady Windermere’s party. It then emerges that she can equally accommodate the identity of the maternal Madonna when she rescues her daughter from certain ruin by preventing her from eloping with Lord Darlington and persuading her to return to her husband. Certainly the most obvious example of Wilde’s championing of the multiplicity of personalities is contained in The Importance of Being Earnest, in which the character of Jack is able to play at being the paragon of virtue when in the company of his ward Cecily, but is equally adept at playing at the role of the “profligate Ernest” (Earnest, CCW, 372) when he is in town. By the end of the play, it has emerged that Jack really is Ernest and vice versa. By rephrasing one of Wilde’s sayings while still remaining true to the spirit of Wilde’s meaning, Stephen has shown himself to be the true Wildean while Mulligan is exposed as an example of what Wilde’s teachings can be reduced to when they are invoked by lesser beings than himself. Mulligan may be of the opinion that the Irish have “grown out of Wilde and paradoxes” (U, 21), but Stephen can appreciate the value of linking two seemingly conflicting opposites together and by so doing, creating unity between them. Mulligan can also be seen as a grotesque caricature of Wilde in his relationship with Haines, the Englishman who is lodging with them in the Martello tower in Sandycove. Mulligan fulfils the role of Irish servant to his English master by making Haines his breakfast and hoping that Stephen will borrow money from Haines because the only source of income that Mulligan has at the moment is what the Englishman will deign to give him. Stephen gives the most apt description of Mulligan when he refers to him as a “jester at the court of his master” (U, 29). Mulligan certainly does pander to a stereotypical role of Irishness for Haines’ gratification as is evidenced when he does his impersonation of old mother Grogan: “when I makes tea I makes tea…and when I makes water I makes water” (U, 13). This rendition of the “Irish idiom” could have come from a stage-Irish play such as those written by Dion Boucicault. Stephen is notably silent during this episode which could, very conceivably, be read as Stephen’s refusal to allow Haines to copy his sayings down into his notebook. Unlike Mulligan, Stephen does not want to allow his identity and his art to be put at the service of a crude, English anthropological exercise. “Court jester to the English” is an accusation that Joyce leveled at Wilde in his paper: “Oscar Wilde: the poet of Salome”. However, the term “conformist rebel” Quoted in Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1995), 3. as espoused by Norbert Kohl, is the most apt encapsulation of Wilde’s character. Wilde can be read, on a superficial level, as fulfilling the function of Irish jester to his English masters by writing witty social comedies for the amusement of the English. However, within these plays he has slipped in sharp critiques of the English concept of duty, their antithetical attitude towards women and their “earnest” notions about the fixity of identity. Thus, in his art, Wilde can be seen as conforming to his role within Victorian society while at the same time rebelling against it. As Richard Pine has observed: “Wilde lived both openly and covertly within English society”. Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland, 6. While Mulligan can also be described as a conformist, the rebel aspect of Wilde seems to have escaped him. The one note of rebellion that Mulligan does sound is when he promises Stephen that he will “bring down Seymour and we will give him a ragging” (U, 6). The likelihood of that occurring is shown as being remote when Mulligan rushes down to make Haines’ breakfast the minute that the Englishman calls to him for it to be made. “Telemachus” closes with Stephen’s description of Mulligan as a “usurper” (U, 28) and I would argue that one of the things that Stephen feels that Mulligan has usurped is the liberating aspects of Wilde’s doctrine which Mulligan has corrupted into just another form of Irish subservience. Stephen will resist such a role and will instead attempt to construct his artistic persona along Wildean lines. Stephen had already drawn the battle lines between his and Mulligan’s vision of Irish art earlier in the episode: “He fears the lancet of my art as I do of his. The cold steelpen”(U, 6). Wilde memorably stated in his “Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “All art is at once surface and symbol” (Picture, CCW, 17). Joyce intends Mulligan to represent the debased, surface reading of Wildean art while Stephen should be regarded as the more profound and symbolic practitioner of Wilde’s legacy. In the “Nestor” episode, which follows “Telemachus”, Stephen is beginning to put his Wildean evolution into motion. Whilst he is teaching a history class on the subject of Pyrrhus, his mind is pondering the prescriptive and constricting nature of history. He begins to consider the “infinite possibilities” (U, 30) that have been ousted by accepted versions of history: “had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death” (U, 30). In so doing, Stephen is echoing Wilde’s belief that that “the only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it”. See the Introduction to this thesis. Wilde expressed this opinion in his play A Woman of No Importance when it was put into the mouth of an English dandy, but it holds more resonance when it is applied to Ireland. Since the Irish people were denied a full sense of their own identity or history as a result of colonization, their option was to imagine a history for themselves. Thus, for the Irish, “the telling of stories and the recounting of history share this imagistic, profoundly existential use of the imagination, creating a tradition ex-nihilo, a presence out of absence”. Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland, 41. It can therefore be surmised that, when Stephen declares later on in this episode: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (U, 42), he had already begun this awakening process by using his imagination to make history bend to his will, mentally rewriting it and thus unlocking the hidden possibilities that had lain dormant as a result of years of historical fossilization. That these events never actually occurred is immaterial to Stephen because he recognizes that history is merely what is “fabled by the daughters of memory” (U, 30) and therefore Stephen feels completely justified in using his memory and imagination to create a version of history that is at odds with what is recounted in the history books. The schoolmaster, Mr. Deasy, is presented as being the antithesis of Stephen in terms of his relationship to history. His office contains a collection of Stuart coins and apostle spoons which makes him synonymous with an official and fixed version of history, one which is static and unchangeable (despite the number of times that Deasy gets his historical facts wrong). Deasy can be interpreted as Joyce’s example of what Wilde would call a person who has given up learning and so has taken to teaching. Both Wilde and Joyce were of the opinion that, once a person begins to teach, they have begun to subscribe to a supposedly stable and immutable view of life and thus are unreceptive to learning new ideas or embracing other points of view. When Stephen tells Deasy that he does not wish to be teacher but “a learner rather” (U, 43), he is referring to the Wildean maxim that “nothing that is worth learning can ever be taught” (“Maxims”, CCW, 1242). By vowing to always be a learner Stephen intends to be perpetually “a work in progress”. Like Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, Stephen would never wish to be perfect because “it would leave no room for developments” (Earnest, CCW, 364). Before Stephen leaves Deasy at the close of this episode, Joyce slyly uses the schoolmaster to comment upon the fictional component of accepted accounts of history: When Deasy says to Stephen: “Ireland, they say, has the honor of being the only country that never persecuted the Jews… because she never let them in” (U, 44), he is, in fact, uttering a historical fallacy because the Jews were at that time a very established presence in Ireland. There were Jewish enclaves in several of the counties of Ireland. In 1904 (the year that Ulysses is set), there was an especially violent pogrom against the Jews in Limerick. “The disturbances in Limerick started in mid-January 1904, and then rumbled on for quite a long time afterwards”. Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2002, 44 Therefore, both of Deasy’s historical claims are in fact false: Ireland did let the Jews in and she did persecute them. It is significant that, directly after he makes this claim, Mr. Deasy begins to cough and lets out of his mouth a “rattling chain of phlegm” (U, 44). This would imply that what has just come out of Deasy’s mouth is, literally and figuratively, bile. Unlike the blissfully ignorant Deasy, Stephen does rewrite history and, by so doing, aspires to a state of being that Oscar Wilde had observed in the Greeks and which he discusses in his essay, “The Rise of Historical Criticism”: “At an early period in their intellectual development, the Greeks reached that critical point in the history of every civilized nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealed truth” (“Rise”, CCW, 1199). By seeking to model his art on Greek historical criticism as practised by Herodotus and Thucydides, Stephen is embarking on the distinctly Wildean project of Hellenizing Ireland. The Hellenization of Ireland was an ambition that was expressed by Buck Mulligan in the “Telemachus” episode but Stephen has proved himself to be infinitely more capable of realizing this project. The “Proteus” episode opens with Stephen beginning to embark on a trial run of artistic creation using Wilde as his guide. He rejects the “ineluctable modality of the visible” (U, 45) by closing his eyes so as to enable himself to create the world out of his own imagination. This rejection of realism on Stephen’s part can be seen as having been influenced by Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” in which Wilde argues: “Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact” (“Decay”, CCW, 1078). Stephen’s intention to question reality in his art is indicated by him cracking seashells with his boots as soon as he closes his eyes. Like Wilde, Stephen rejects the idea that art should merely imitate the “natural world” that we see around us because, as Lawrence Danson has argued, “what we take as natural is someone else’s lie—the previously thought or the already created—which we unwittingly imitate”. Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 86. Like Synge’s two tramps in The Well of the Saints, Stephen decides to temporarily abandon the seeing world for the unseen one which he will create as his own utopia by the power of his artistic imagination. As Wilde had already observed: “A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth glancing at” (“Soul”; CCW, 1184). Stephen is presented in this episode with the option of either engaging in the real or in the imaginative when he debates with himself whether he should go to his visit his Aunt Sara or not. Stephen’s eventual choice is not to go but instead to imagine what his visit to her would be like. He then proceeds to enact in his mind a long conversation with his uncle Richie as though he was dealing with events remembered: “Call me Richie. Damn your Lithia water…Uncle Richie really” (U, 48). Stephen has adopted the pose of the Wildean artist who has no desire to conceive of life as it really is, but will instead create for himself his own reality. Stephen does not exile himself from the realm of reality completely. After closing his eyes for a brief moment, he does reopen them and re-enters reality. This displays an openness to reality on Joyce’s part that marks him as, in some respects, different from Wilde. I would argue that one of Joyce’s aims in this episode is to set up a dialogue between art and life in an effort to create a certain amount of unity between them. Stephen plunges himself into the world of art, appropriates its energies and brings them back with him into the realm of the real in order that both states of being might be enhanced by such an encounter. In contrast, Wilde’s oeuvre displays total detestation for the world of reality and resolutely champions the world of art. This is apparent than in the short story, “The Birthday of the Infanta”, where a deformed dwarf believes himself to be extremely handsome until he is confronted by his reflection in the mirror. This collision with reality results in the dwarf realizing that he was “misshapen and hunchbacked, foul to look at and grotesque” (“Birthday”, CCW, 234) and his heart breaks as a result. While Joyce recognizes the necessity of an engagement with reality, Wilde believes that “it is better to live in darkness and ignorance than to suffer in the light of day”. Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland, 179. Stephen’s artistic creativity is implied at the conclusion of “Proteus” when Stephen picks his nose and places its contents on a rock. This act is meant to evoke memories of the “Telemachus” episode when Buck Mulligan declared “snotgreen” to be a “new color for our Irish poets” (U, 3). Stephen appears to have taken this onboard and, by placing his snot upon a rock on Sandymount strand, he has commemorated it as the place where he embarked upon his first artistic endeavor. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, Stephen is set the challenge of negotiating a middle passage for himself between two extreme perceptions of Wilde’s art. The first of these is that Wilde was essentially an English author who drew all of his inspiration from the English literary canon. The second is that he was merely an Irish entertainer whose sole purpose was to write diverting comedies for his English audience. Stephen is first urged to ape English literary traditions when John Eglinton emphatically states: “Our young Irish bards… have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside the Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (U, 236). While Stephen may seem to be falling back on the inspiration of the great English bard when he begins to espouse his theory of Hamlet, his purpose is, in fact, more subtle and more radical. As Wilde had done originally in The Portrait of Mr. WH, Stephen is artfully denigrating one of the great icons of the British Empire, William Shakespeare. As Andrew Gibson has noted in his book, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses, Shakespeare, “in the course of the reformulation of British national identity which followed the Glorious Revolution, came to serve as part of the acceptable face of the national past, and suitably moralized, became by the 1760s one of the symbols of British national identity”. Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses, 68-67. Wilde wrote The Portrait of Mr. WH as a self consciously fictional piece of literary critiscm in which he argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to a young boy actor called Willie Hughes. Such a contention would prove repugnant to English readers for two central reasons. Firstly, the possibility that Shakespeare was a homosexual was unpalatable to the English since it hardly equated with their constructed image of him as an icon of national purity. Secondly, even if the possibility that Shakespeare was a homosexual had to be borne, what was even more unthinkable was that England’s greatest writer would lust after a lowly actor (despite the fact that Shakespeare was originally an actor himself). Such a portrayal of Shakespeare certainly is not compatible with his role as the exemplar of English national purity. The Portrait of Mr. WH was not to be the last time that Wilde was to bring Shakespeare’s name into disrepute. During his second trial, when Wilde himself was in the dock, he gave a speech defending “the love that dare not speak its name” (homosexuality). He claimed that such a love was to be found “in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare…It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare”. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 435. Such a claim would certainly not have endeared Wilde to English public opinion and may have been one of the determining factors that sent Wilde to prison for two years. Stephen attempts a similar denigration of Shakespeare in Ulysses when he argues that Shakespeare is the model for Hamlet’s father because he had been cuckolded by his wife, Ann Hathaway, who had affairs with Shakespeare’s three brothers. “To Shakespeare the English master… Stephen counterposes a Shakespeare whose art proceeds from sexual trauma, a sexual wound that will never heal”. Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses, 68. As in the first three episodes of Ulysses, Stephen is embarking on an artistic quest in which Wilde is his guide. Joyce pays due tribute to Wilde’s essay in this episode when Eglinton says that the most brilliant Shakespearian theory is “that story of Wilde’s…That Portrait of Mr. WH…It’s the very essence of Wilde, don’t you know” (U, 254).In proper Wildean fashion, after expounding his very elaborate theory, Stephen admits that he does not really believe his own theory. This creates a link between Stephen and Cyril Graham, the theorist in Portrait of Mr. WH, who convinces his friend of the validity of his argument “at the very moment that he stopped believing in it himself” (“Portrait”, CCW ,57). At the end of his essay, “The Truth of Masks”, Wilde again refuses to give support to his own theory when he states: “Not that I agree fully with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree”( “Masks”, CCW, 1173). By persistently refusing to make claims for factual accuracy in his essays, Wilde was masterfully creating the concept of the “critic as artist” (to quote the title of another Wildean essay). The artistic critic is one who is capable of creating fictions that are just as elaborate as any novelistic author or dramatist. It is this concept of creating critical fictions that Joyce is proposing in “Scylla and Charybdis”. Stephen is fully aware that his argument concerning Shakespeare may be pure fiction but that does not stop him espousing it in a most eloquent and inventive manner. As Wilde’s Gwendolen said: “In matters of grave of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing” (Earnest, CCW, 406). Stephen has also fashioned himself as a specifically Irish artistic critic because he has recreated the idea of a spoken (as opposed to written) critical essay, in the classic Irish style. Wilde’s idea of critiscm being a kind of art form has proved enduring in twentieth century literary critiscm. In Modern Irish Literature, Vivian Mercier makes the argument that Lucky, in Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot, can be read as a version of the Messiah: “he is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, a true Suffering servant. Pozzo, his cruel and indifferent master, reminds one at times of Herod and at other times of Pontius Pilate”. Vivian Mercier, Modern Irish Literature: Sources and Founders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 319. Immediately after putting forward this highly plausible argument, Mercier writes (in a Wildean fashion): “I do not expect this interpretation to be accepted… I do not quite believe it myself”. Vivian Mercier, Modern Irish Literature: Sources and Founders, 320. Mercier’s imitation of Wilde is very understandable when one considers that they both went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen and also to Trinity College Dublin. The literally and metaphorically larger than life (albeit fictional) Buck Mulligan reappears in “Scylla and Charybdis” and, for once, Joyce uses him to make an accurate reference to the Wildean doctrine. When Mulligan refers to Shakespeare as “the chap that writes like Synge” (U, 254), I would argue that Joyce is implicitly subscribing to the statement made by Wilde during a lecture that he gave in San Francisco in 1882: “The Anglo-Saxon took our lands and left them desolate. We took their language and added new beauty to it”. Quoted in Noreen Doody, “Wilde, Yeats: Nation and Identity”. New Voices in Irish Criticism vol. 1. Ed. by P.J. Matthews (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), 28. Joyce is claiming that the Irish, far from being the servants of the English language, have in fact become the masters of it and that any poetry that the language contains can be traced back to the Irish peoples contact with the English idiom. The same point will again be reiterated by Joyce in the “Circe” episode when the character of Best quotes Keats: “A thing of beauty don’t you know. Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says” (U, 627). While Wilde himself is not singled out in either of the above quotations, he is the prime example of an Irish writer who “out englished” the English. Before writing Ulysses, Joyce had already made common cause with Wilde when he wrote: “The Irish, condemned to speak in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. The result is then called English literature”. James Joyce, Selected Letters, 226. Now that Stephen has successfully steered clear of the peril of creating an Irish art that merely pandered to British tastes, he now must avoid the trap of becoming a “performing Irishman” who would be asked to regurgitate his eloquent theory ad infinitum for the amusement of an audience. This danger is placed before Stephen when Mr. Best enquires: “Are you going to write it [his theory]… You ought to make it a Platonic dialogue…Like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote” (U, 274). Stephen does not answer which implies that he has no intention of doing anything of the kind. Stephen knows that, if it is published, he will become immersed in the society that he has forsworn. He will be used as an entertainer as Wilde was and he will lose that status of an outsider that is so sacred to him. In “De Profundis”, Oscar Wilde categorically stated: “The one disgraceful, unpardonable and to all time contemptible action of my life was my allowing myself to be forced into appealing to Society for help” (“Profundis”, CCW, 1041). By suing the Marquess of Queensbury for libel, Wilde subjected himself to the laws of society and thus vacated his role as an artistic outsider. This was ultimately to prove his undoing. With Wilde’s cautionary tale as an example, Stephen is able to avoid the mistakes that were made by his artistic role model and thus retains his avowed weapons of “silence, exile and cunning” James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 281. which he stated as being invaluable during the conclusion of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Buck Mulligan’s attitude towards Stephen, there is a predatory homosexual undertone that had become synonymous with Wilde’s character during and after his three trials. “Wilde had been accused, in the public press and in the dock of “systematic corruption” of youth” Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason, Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland, 347. and it is this attempted corruption, both sexual and spiritual, that may lie behind Mulligan’s relationship with Stephen. When Mulligan refers to Stephen as “my love” (U, 2) or, as the “loveliest mummer of them all” (U, 4), there is an implied flirtation or “come on” in his words. It seems likely that, in “Scylla and Charybdis”, when Mulligan tells Stephen that Leopold Bloom, who has just entered the library, “looked on you to lust after you” (U, 279), Mulligan is either expressing jealousy at a perceived rival for Stephen’s affections, or, is projecting his fantasies onto one who is safely “other”, the Jewish Leopold Bloom. Whichever of these is true, Mulligan is quite right to warn Stephen: “O Kinch, thou art in peril” (U, 279). The peril that Stephen is facing is, however, entirely emanating from Mulligan. What Bloom can offer Stephen is the pure affection and guidance that an older man can give to a younger man. Such a relationship is outlined by Wilde in his speech from the dock: “It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy and glamour of life before him”. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 435. Wilde had enacted this relationship with boys such as Lord Alfred Douglas, Robert Ross and Charles Parker but the Platonic purity that he aspired to was misunderstood by Victorian society and Wilde suffered as a result of the narrow-mindedness of his age. At this point in Ulysses, Joyce makes his conflicting views concerning Wilde clear. He subscribes to many of his theories and artistic practices while at the same time fearing to replicate Wilde’s mistakes by conforming too much to society and public opinion. It is very appropriate that it should be the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode in which this balancing occurs because the central theme of this section of Ulysses is finding a middle ground between opposing extremes. Joyce has also indicated that he fears the image of Wilde as a sexual predator and corrupter of youth, an image that Joyce could not have failed to be aware of given it’s prominence in the media at the time. Joyce also acknowledges that the image that the media created for Wilde was an inaccurate one by allowing Bloom to embark with Stephen upon a true Platonic friendship, in which Bloom becomes the perfect father figure for Stephen. The quest for a father figure was one that Stephen had been undertaking throughout the earlier chapters of Ulysses. Up until this point, all Stephen has encountered has been inadequate father figures such as Mulligan and Mr. Deasy. With Bloom, Stephen’s quest will come to satisfactory resolution. Their friendship will come into being in the “Circe” episode and will develop (in ambivalent directions) throughout the rest of the book. “Circe”, is Joyce’s masterpiece of Wildean art. In this episode, Joyce has crafted a play that follows and, in some cases, betters Wilde’s vision of art as a utopian entity that is distinct from life and which offers a space where human desires and ambitions can be realized. Leopold Bloom’s changing of his sex from a man into a woman is one example of art’s capacity for granting human desires that are denied in real life. This occurs half way into the episode during Bloom’s farcical trial when Dr. Dixon says that Bloom “is about to have a baby” (U, 614). This prompts an ecstatic cry from Bloom:” O, I so want to be a mother” (U, 614). All during the day, Bloom has been identified as an androgynous figure. This was made implicitly clear in the “Calypso” episode when we first encounter him making his wife breakfast in bed and when we are told that he had a picture of a nymph hung over his bed. A nymph is a mythological creature whose defining trait is its androgyny. In the “Cyclops” episode, Bloom is the only man in Barney Kiernan’s pub who shows any concern for Mrs. Breen, a woman whose husband is showing signs of dementia. This identification with women has made Bloom a source of derision for all the hyper- masculine men he has encountered during the day. In this utopian realm of art however, Bloom is revered as “a finished example of the new womanly man”(p. 614) and one person says of him: “He’s a man like Ireland wants” (U, 606). Bloom has always had a fascination for the mysteries of the female sex and now, in this carnivalesque world of art, he is able to experience the female psyche for himself. As Kiberd has observed: “Circe” is a midnight carnival and in classical mythology, at the carnival of androgynes, men become pregnant”. Declan Kiberd, Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1985), 180. Oscar Wilde himself had written a carnivalesque play in which he created androgynous figures and gave the world that is evoked in the play a feeling of beautiful reality. That play is, of course, The Importance of Being Earnest. In this play, women are the dominant sex and utter lines such as “men should never dictate to women “(Earnest; CCW, 363) and “home seems to be the proper sphere for the man” (Earnest; CCW, 367). Rodney Shewan has described this play as “the dandy’s holiday, a treat for “the few choice spirits”, an idyllic trip to the utopian land of doing as one likes, where only reason and external authority are denied entry”. Rodney Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (London: Macmillan, 1977), 187. This description of the play perfectly encapsulates Wilde’s achievement: the creation of a work of art that is entirely contained inside its own reality and is not subservient to any external laws or influences. With Earnest, Wilde has created his own reality as opposed to imitating a ready made one. It must be observed that Joyce’s vision of androgyny has a dystopian edge that is entirely absent from Wilde’s depiction. When Bloom turns into a woman for the second time in this episode, he is subjected to a series of humiliations by the whore-mistress, Bella Cohen, who has turned into a man and is now called Bello. Bello sits on top of Bloom, squeezes his/her testicles and farts in his/her face. “Androgyny of this sort involves the exaggeration of traits supposedly typical of the opposite sex: masculine aggressiveness becomes sadism in Bello, while feminine passivity becomes masochism in Bloom”. James Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 191. Joyce (very possibly) intended this hellish depiction of the androgyne to be a distorted version of Wilde’s Earnest. Bello can be read as an exaggerated version of Lady Bracknell, who ruled her social world with an iron fist that was decidedly masculine. Bello’s domination of Bloom can be read as another version of Lady Bracknell’s domination of her husband. Lord Bracknell is never seen in Earnest which immediately communicates to the audience just how unimportant he is. When Lady Bracknell’s nephew, Algernon Moncrieff, is unable to dine at one of his aunts’ parties, he is told by her that Lord Bracknell “would have to dine upstairs. Fortunately he is accustomed to that”( Earnest, CCW, 364). In Victorian households, it was normally the male’s prerogative to tell the female to dine upstairs. The fact that it is the Lord that is being told by the Lady to dine upstairs, shows how the gender roles have been reversed. In Wilde’s play, male domination by women is meant to be humorous and covertly subversive. In “Circe”, however, it is portrayed as a scene from a twisted fairy tale. Joyce gives his readers a clue as to Wilde’s influence on his grotesque depiction of androgyny. When Bella says to Bloom “Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest [my italics]” (U, 647) Joyce is possibly placing part of the title of Wilde’s most famous play into his/her mouth to indicate that he wrote this depiction of gender role reversal with Wilde in mind. Leopold Bloom is himself no stranger to appearing plays that have gender-role reversal in them since (as he freely admits) he played the role of a woman in a play in high-school called Vice-Versa. Joyce himself was no stranger to masochistic and androgynous impulses. “Just as Leopold Bloom would wallow in the inner organs of beasts and fowls, Joyce wanted to wallow in the inner maelstrom of woman’s desire”. Edna O’Brien, James Joyce (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1999), 70. In her biography on Joyce, Edna O’Brien makes reference to the notorious letters that Joyce wrote to his partner, Nora Barnacle when he was in Dublin in 1909 and about how, in one particular letter, he expressed a desire that he be dominated and feminized by her in the same way as Bloom is by Bello: “She [Nora] was depicted in different roles, a stern creature summoning him into a room to reprimand him and there seated on a chair, her fat thighs apart, a cane in her hand about to flog him”. Edna O’Brien, James Joyce, 72. Nora had an androgynous nature which was certainly one of the aspects of her being that most attracted Joyce. In her biography on Nora Joyce, Brenda Maddox has written about how Nora would “dress up in men’s clothes, hair tucked under a man's cap and explore the streets of Galway and Eyre Square”. Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (London: Hamilton, 1988), 29. This was in order that she would not be caught outside at night by her uncle Tom Healy but it also shows that Nora had no qualms about crossing gender boundaries. It also demonstrates Nora’s courageous nature because “cross dressing was no light matter at the turn of the century. In Paris, women were forbidden by a strictly enforced ordinance to wear male attire” Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce, 29.. “For Nora, pulling on trousers and a cap revealed an acceptance of the masculine elements in her personality”. Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce, 29. James Joyce wished to explore the female elements in his character. He felt inhibited from doing so by society and its oppressive dictates so his only option was to transfer his desires into his art and enact them in the artistic realm, just as Wilde had done before him. Frances Devlin-Glass, although not enamored by the fact that Joyce (as far as Glass is concerned) “chose to work within the “compulsory heterosexuality” paradigm and to back away from a clear interest in homosexual expressions of sexuality” Frances Devlin-Glass, “Writing in the Slipstream of the Wildean Trauma: Joyce, Buck Mulligan and Homophobia Reconsidered”. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 31.2 (Fall 2005), 27. singles out the “Circe” episode of Ulysses as the moment in Joyce’s work when he “celebrate{s} anarchy, deviance and performative excess for its own sake”. Frances Devlin-Glass, “Writing in the Slipstream of the Wildean Trauma: Joyce, Buck Mulligan and Homophobia Reconsidered”, 32. Put another way, “Circe” is the episode of Ulysses when Joyce was at his most Wildean. The way in which identities are changed and inner desires are explored in this episode makes it an overtly fantastic version of Wilde’s Earnest where Jack and Algy change their names and identities when they go either to the country (in Algy’s case) or to town (in Jack’s case). By bestowing upon themselves different names, both men are able to act out repressed facets of their personalities that society insists they keep secret. Nighttown affords Bloom the same freedom of self expression that the country did for Algy/Bunbury and that town for Jack/Earnest. Up until this moment in Ulysses, Bloom was a character with a heightened sense of interiority. He had a very rich inner existence with many hidden desires which some would have considered unnatural (such as his lust for Gerty McDowell) and were thus kept hidden. At this point however, all restraint is removed from Bloom and he final embraces what one character calls his “quadruple existence” (U, 586). He shifts identities from Leopold Bloom to Henry Flower to Dr. Bloom Dental Surgeon and he also says that he is a naval officer. At one moment when he is put on trial for certain immoral actions, he blames it all on his brother Henry Flower. This is a not so subtle reference to Wilde’s play in which Jack blames all his nefarious activities on his fictitious brother Earnest and thus avoids any stain on his moral character. Bloom’s reinvention of himself is in fact taken even further than Jack or Algy ever were capable of when he makes himself the mayor of the ”new Bloomusalem” (U, 606). Despite the many nightmarish elements that are contained in this chapter, Joyce does allow for certain utopian moments for Bloom that outdo Wilde’s play in their depiction of man’s capacity to create for himself an identity that is far more glorious and liberating than the one that society forces him to embody. The fact that “Circe” is set in the so-called Nighttown area of Dublin is important in terms of how darkness can set a subject free from a static and stable selfhood. When one is in the dark, their body is not visible and therefore not fixed or clearly defined. This enables a reimagining of one’s self in both corporeal and spiritual terms. Bloom does just that when he imagines himself as a great man of strength and also when he thinks that he is physically capable of having a baby. This usage of the dark as a means of liberation is something that Wilde does in The Picture of Dorian Gray when Dorian journeys alone at night to various London dens of iniquity and indulges in various unspecified acts that the polite society that he moves in by day would almost certainly have disapproved of. Another more recent example of an Irish writer who uses the power of darkness in this way is John McGahern in his 1965 novel The Dark. In this work, the narrator is constantly changing from first to second to third person. It is almost as if he is telling his story in the dark where his subjectivity is free to flow at will and the need to use the limiting pronoun “I” is avoided whenever possible. That McGahern saw darkness as a powerful entity is confirmed by the fact that he wrote a play in 1991 entitled The Power of Darkness. “Circe”, like “Proteus”, offers release from the realm of the “real” through the agency of art. Bloom himself becomes a stand-in for Wilde during the “Circe” episode when he finds himself accused of indecent acts by numerous people and is brought to trial. Bloom’s defenses against the charges leveled at him are very similar in essence to Wilde’s defense during his three trials: Bloom: Gentleman of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare’s nest. I am a man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable married man, without a stain on my character. My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, who do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of Britain’s fighting men who helped to win our battles... I follow a literary occupation. Authorjournalist (U, 583-584). That Wilde believed himself to be a scapegoat is certainly true and Joyce also believed this to be the case, as has already been referenced in his essay on the life Wilde. In this essay, Joyce argued that many of the people who condemned Wilde were themselves subject to the same homosexual urges and Wilde was being used merely as a shield for them to hide their own guilty secrets behind. It is very probable that when Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensbury for libel, he believed that no one would imagine that he was prone to same-sex passion because (like Bloom claims to be) he was a respectable married man and also that his wife was a well-thought of woman with a good background. Also, as Zack Bowen has observed, “like Wilde, Bloom’s initial defense is that he is a literary artist” Zack Bowen, “Wilde About Joyce”, 113. since he believes that this will allow him to portray himself as a human entity that is subject to different laws and rules to other people. This was certainly Wilde’s strategy during his first trial when Queensbury’s defense council, Edward Carson (future father of Ulster Unionism) attempted to examine Wilde on the moral content of his works: Carson: May I take it that no matter how immoral a book was, if it was well written it would be a good book?... Wilde: I say if a book is well written, that is if a work of art is beautiful, the impression that it produces is a sense of beauty which is the very highest sense that I think human beings are capable of…No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), 80. Wilde was confident that his status as an artist would make people perceive him as being above ordinary law or standards. This strategy failed to be effective for Wilde as it also failed for Bloom. One piece of prosecution evidence that was produced against Bloom was a piece of literature that he supposedly plagiarized from Philip Beaufoy but made it altogether more vulgar: “Moses, Moses, king of the jews, Wiped his arse in the Daily News” (U, 586). The written word proved as damning to Bloom as it did to Wilde when Edward Carson examined him as to the meaning of certain passages in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Carson: An illiterate person reading Dorian Gray might consider it a sodomitical book?...The affection and the love that is pictured of the artist towards Dorian Gray in this book of yours might lead an ordinary individual to believe it had a sodomitical tendency, might it not? Wilde: I have no knowledge of the ordinary individual. Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess, Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde, 81. Bloom’s movement from being a man who worshipped as a new messiah to someone who is pilloried in the docks can be seen as following the same path as Wilde did. Wilde went from being the toast of London to one of the most hated men in Empire when his subversive behavior came to light. Bloom was on the verge of establishing his new utopia when the people inexplicably turned on him and he was reduced to bewailing his sorry lot in life with the words: “Poor Bloom” (U, 617). It is perhaps coincidental but description of Bloom as being poor is exactly the way that Joyce described Wilde during his speech after the first production of Earnest in Zurich in 1918 (at which time Joyce was in the throes of writing Ulysses). One of the central arguments contained in most of Wilde’s work is: “Life imitates art” (“Decay”, CCW, 1082). Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest is an example of just such a process. She enacts an affair and eventually an engagement with her “wicked cousin Ernest” (Earnest, CCW, 378) by means of fictitious letters and diary entries. Eventually, her “real” life takes the lead of her art and she becomes engaged to Algernon/Ernest. Joyce also makes the real world, as depicted in Ulysses, conform to the dictates of this overtly fictitious and performative episode. As I have already observed, Bloom becomes a mother in the fantasy section of “Circe” and when he re-enters the world of reality, he finds himself playing the maternal role of nurse to Stephen who has been assaulted by two army officers. Joyce has, therefore, taken the idea of a man becoming a mother out of the realm of fantasy and into reality by the power of art. Joyce was personally of the opinion that his art held a prescriptive power over reality. He is recorded as saying to Oscar Schwartz, a friend of his in Trieste: “My art is not a mirror held up to nature. Nature mirrors my art”. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 690. He was able to give many examples to support this claim. One such example was “Cosgrave’s suicide in the Thames in accordance with Stephen’s prediction about Lynch in Ulysses”. Richard Ellamnn, James Joyce, 690 The Importance of Being Earnest was to contain many incidents that were to prove prophetic for Oscar Wilde’s life: Jack is given a vigorous cross-examination by Algy about who it was that gave Jack a cigarette case. This foreshadows Wilde’s cross examination during his first trial by Edward Carson about cigarette cases that he had given to “rent boys”. Another such example occurs when Lady Bracknell worries about missing her train because that might expose her to “comment on the platform” (Earnest; CCW, 412). Comment on a train station platform was what Wilde was to be subjected to when he stood, in prison uniform, at Clapham Junction waiting to be transferred to Reading Gaol. As Barbara Belford has accounted in her biography of Wilde:“He [Wilde] had to wait a half an hour on the platform at Clapham Junction, where he was recognized and ridiculed. It was a humiliation that he never forgot”. Barbara Belford, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius (London: Bloomsbury) 2001, 268. Both Wilde’s and Joyce’s work can thus be seen as having anticipated real life events to the extent that it looks as though their lives have imitated their art. A full list of all the moments in The Importance of Being Earnest where Wilde’s later downfall is foreshadowed can be found in Christopher Crafts essay, “Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest”, in the collection Representations, No.31, Special Issue: The Margins of Identity in Nineteenth Century England (Summer, 1990),19-46. The “Circe” episode ends with a final image of art’s infinite superiority over life. As Bloom is comforting the severely inebriated Stephen, he is visited by a vision of his dead son, Rudy, whose death ten years ago has been a source of great trauma to Bloom all day. By having his son restored to him, albeit momentarily, as a result of artistic fantasy, Bloom is able to reconcile himself to his paternal loss in a way that the realm of reality had denied him. The ultimate importance of the “Circe” episode is the bringing together, for the first protracted period of time in the book, of Bloom and Stephen and thus paving the way for the “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” episodes where they will attempt to find a common bond between each other’s views on life. The uniting of Bloom and Stephen represents a bringing together of body and soul that was of great relevance in an Irish context. The 19th century author and essayist, Matthew Arnold, had characterized the difference between Ireland and England as that between body and soul. In his essay on “The Study of Celtic Literature” (1867), Matthew Arnold argued that “sentiment is the word which marks where the Celtic races really touch and are one”. Quoted in Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland, 28. Arnold believed that the Irish possessed a spiritual and soulful nature but needed to be ruled by a country such as Great Britain, whose people were more grounded in physical reality. The connection between the British and the body is very clear when one considers that the term “muscular Christian” (U, 130) is very often used to refer to the ideal product of a British public school. Stephen Dedalus is an exemplar of the spiritual world since most of his thoughts and ideas are concerned with philosophy and literature. Bloom, in contrast, is more grounded in practical matters. He is an ad canvasser whose thoughts are always grounded in the world that exists around him. When he does think about spiritual matters, it is always from a pragmatic standpoint. One such example is when he is contemplating the use of Latin in the modern mass: “Good idea the Latin. Stupefies them first.” (U, 99). Bloom regards the church merely as a business that needs to attract customers as he attempts to do with his ads. Bloom’s association with the body and the physical world is made explicit by the fact that it is only after he appears in Ulysses that its episodes begin to have organs as their symbols. When Stephen and Bloom sit down for coffee in the “Ithaca” episode, Joyce is attempting to create what Yeats would later refer to in a poetic title as “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” See William Butler Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”. W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 185. and thus explode the myth concerning the division between the soulful Irish and the practical English. Wilde is to be regarded as an example for Joyce in this project because, in “The Decay of Lying”, Wilde created a Platonic dialogue between the physical world, which is championed by Cyril, and the world of art and imagination, which is championed by Vivian. At the conclusion of their dialogue, Cyril accepts, at least in part, the superiority of art over life and Vivian agrees to go outside into the natural world and so a compromise has been reached between these two opposing views and a unity has been created between the body and the soul. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994, 103. The Picture of Dorian Gray can be read as Wilde’s commentary on the English division between the body and the soul and the Irish and the English. Dorian separates his soul from his body as a means of enjoying all the experiences and sensations that society denies him. His soul, as represented by his portrait, bears all the weight of his repressed corruption while his body remains unstained. I would argue that Dorian’s portrait is Wilde’s metaphor for the Irish onto whom the English, according to Declan Kiberd, “attributed all those emotions and impulses which a harsh mercantile code had lead them to repress in themselves”. Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1995), 30. Dorian’s portrait/soul becomes ugly and simian like (much like the depiction of the Irish in English cartoons) while Dorian’s body maintains the appearance of an English “Prince Charming” (Picture, CCW, 51). The ending of the novel represents Wilde’s disavowal of the possibility of destroying the soul without destroying the body. Dorian attempts to stab his portrait and thus destroy his impure soul and leave himself with only his pure body. In so doing, Dorian kills himself and proves how interconnected the body and the soul are. I believe that this final scene is also a comment on the constructed nature of the binaries that exist between Ireland and England and the futility of absolutist statements of difference between the two. Wilde once said: “Those who see any difference between the body and the soul have neither” (“Phrases”, CCW , 1244). This epigram finds its happy fulfillment at the end of Joyce’s great work. When Stephen and Bloom commune together in the latter’s house in Eccles St near the conclusion of Ulysses, the soul (Stephen) has gains a body and the body (Bloom) gains a soul. Although Joyce expressed dissatisfaction at what he perceived as Wilde’s deferral and concealment of meaning in The Picture of Dorian, Joyce himself was to employ similar strategies when dealing with Wilde in Ulysses. Although Wilde is specifically mentioned on several occasions throughout the course of the work, there are many other moments when he is only implicitly alluded to and these instances have been one of the main focuses of this chapter (while also not neglecting to examine the more direct mentions of Wilde in the text). At the time when Ulysses was being written (1918-1921), the name of Wilde was still one of execration and infamy because of the associations that it had for many people. As a result, I would argue, Joyce had to mask many of the references to Wilde, his aesthetic theories and his so-called crimes, by using the same subtlety and linguistic evasion that Wilde had used in The Picture of Dorian (although considering that Dorian Gray was one of the primary pieces of evidence that was used against Wilde at his libel trial, this strategy cannot truly be counted as a success for him). In the “Circe” episode, Bloom refers to his pursuit of Stephen as a “Wildgoose chase” (U, 579). It is my contention that Ulysses can at many points be considered a “wilde-goose chase”. Wilde himself was one of many Irish people who flew the nest in search of better prospects than those afforded him in Ireland so the original term does have a valid application to him. In Ulysses, Joyce is chasing after the powerful and transgressive legacy of Wilde and attempting to recreate it in his work. Buck Mulligan represents the perversion of Wilde’s doctrines because, while he models himself on Wilde to some degree, Buck is merely a figure of fun and entertainment for the English Haines. However, the characters of Bloom and Stephen are presented by Joyce as possessing the true essence of Wilde and through them, Joyce’s chase comes to an end. PAGE 30