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Ulysses: place, home, and history

In this article, Professor Matthew Campbell discusses the relationship between Ireland and Israel in Ulysses.
Map of Jaffa region of Palestine

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.
Leopold Bloom is shown also having breakfast three chapters later. He goes out to buy some kidneys. On the way back he reads on the sheets of newspaper that are used to wrap the meat about opportunities to invest in settlements in Palestine. In 1904 the Zionist movement proposed the setting up of a separate Jewish homeland in lands formerly known as Israel – then the Turkish colony of Palestine. After the Holocaust, in the subsequent history of the Jews in Europe and the establishment of the state of Israel, this is momentous material. For Bloom in 1904 – and for Joyce publishing in 1922 – this was maybe not yet that pressing. To Bloom’s practical mind a Zionist state merely offers opportunities to grow olives and Jaffa oranges and little else in a place that he imagines is desert. He is not a sharer in the belief that in Israel – as in Ireland – questions of land and home are fundamental to convictions of self.
Bloom also knows that Palestine has a long history. It is a place of origin, the contested land from which Judaeo-Christian and Muslim civilizations have come. In one story, that of Eden and the Book of Genesis, it is the location of the ‘first race’. Entertaining the thought of return to an originary place, Bloom dismisses it:
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.
Stephen and Bloom both think about ideas of originary places located in the past. These are feminised places, of homes from which they wander. Both repudiate a history based in myths of origin or rootedness, of forces which have brought them to a state of dispossession. Twentieth-century history was to develop in horrific ways that neither foresaw. Written during a world war, Ulysses is haunted by inter-ethnic violence, the martyred Irish dead, executions, assassinations, and massacres long ago. The novel shows its Dubliners sucked into the violence of thinking about roots, origins and homelands.
As Bloom is escaping from the clutches of the Citizen/Cyclops he reminds his pursuer of the shared heritage of Christian and Jew – ‘the saviour was a jew’, he tells the Citizen, ‘and his father was a jew. Your God.’ The comic response to this riposte is for the Citizen to throw a biscuit tin at Bloom. And in the phantasmagoria which is the massively expanding rhetoric of the mock-epic in which much of the episode is written a huge explosion appears to decimate half of inner-city Dublin. Joyce knew that actual explosions did destroy much of Dublin, in the rising of Easter 1916 and the bombing of the Four Courts by Free State troops in the Civil war in 1921. Once unleashed, the primal forces of ethnic essentialism are immensely difficult to contain. For Bloom, it’s no use…
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?
© University of York/Matt Campbell
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Reading James Joyce: Life, Place, Fiction

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