Ulysses: place, home, and history

In September 1920, Joyce wrote to his Italian friend Carlo Linati that Ulysses is, ‘È l’epopea di due razze (Israele-Ireland) e nel melemino tempo il ciclo cel corpo umano ed anche una storiella di una giornato (vita).’ (It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life).)

The first four chapters of Ulysses introduce us to the identities of the main characters as well as their foibles and obsessions. Stephen is an awkward denizen of the Martello Tower. This is partly because he has become appalled by the mockery of his friend Buck Mulligan and is contemptuous of the ignorance of the English fellow-lodger Haines. But it is also because his location in a building constructed as a fortification to protect Britain in time of war – the Napoleonic war – serves as a symbol for the structures of power in a Dublin which was a remote Western European outpost, albeit supposedly the second city of the British Empire. Of course, Ulysses was published in 1922, after Ireland obtained partial independence. But this seems some way away from June 1904.

The long histories of Irish dispossession inevitably suggest themselves in this location, if in odd ways. An early thought arises when Stephen talks with a servant figure, a woman delivering milk for breakfast. The conversation is awkward, with differences of class as well as language: the Englishman Haines speaks Irish to the old woman. She thinks it’s French. For Stephen meanwhile she metamorphoses into the sovereignty figure of Jacobite Irish poetry, An tSeanbhean Bhocht (the poor old woman), or robbed of her true lover, the Catholic king. She becomes Ireland as violated woman:

Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, messenger from morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell; but scorned to beg her favour.

A barren land, bare waste … Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now It bore the first race … The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman’s: the grey shrunken cunt of the world.

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 … Love … I mean the opposite of hatred.

Pause for thought

Now that you’ve read the article, we want to know what you think. Answer the following question, or just let us know your thoughts more generally, in the comments below:

• How significant is Joyce’s introduction of a Jewish character as an outsider into his picture of Dublin life?