History and Memory in James Joyce's Ulysses
...lows Stephen going about his normal teaching routine, Joyce does not restrict his character to reciting a simple lesson plan. Instead, Stephen’s memory wanders through not only the history of Ireland and Europe, but also his own fears and wishes. Joyce immediately makes this duality clear in the chapters opening paragraphs. As Stephen prompts Cochrane for the date for the battle of Asculum, his interior monologue blurs the boundaries between past and present: ‘Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, the thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.” (Joyce: 28) Stephen’s lyrical stream of conscious narration offers the reader a complex pacifist metaphor. By using the word ‘fabled’ to describe the victory of Pyrhuus over the Romans in 275 BC, Stephen places the story of the battle as part of oral history, one that has changed in nuance as the story was retold through the centuries. In the context of the novel this idea is ironic, giving that Ulysses brings Homer’s The Odyssey (circa 700 BC) into the twentieth century, but as E. V. Rieu concedes in the introduction to his 1946 translation of this Classical text, ‘Homer was neither an historian or an archaeologist.”5 (Rieu: 10). The Odyssey is therefore not the real history of the Trojan Wars, but a fictionalised retelling of an often told story. This question regarding myth and history is further extended when Stephen’s contrasts Pyrhuus’ victory with William Blake’s rendering of the Archangel Gabrielle in Milton6who acts as protector of ‘…England’s green and pleasant lands.’ (Blake: 218). For Stephen, both Pyrhuus’ and ‘…Blake’s wings of excess’ (Joyce: 28), are examples of mythology being used to form a national identity, which in time has been used to justify wars. However, these myths are still taught in school by teaches like Stephen as an example of history that extols a universal grand narrative. Although Stephen fills that these ‘fabled’ military fictions and their codes of heroic honour are outdated, he fears the power that narratives bring, and the ‘…words that make us so unhappy’ (Joyce: 38) they carry. As Carl Jung acknowledged in Modern Man in Search of a Soul7, the subject only begins socialisation once they have entered a locally defined archetype that has developed from through centuries of myth. A similar process has occurred in the school, and for Stephen it can only end in destruction. This is evident again in Nestor’s when Stephen hears the sounds of war coming from the hockey field. ‘I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mothers darling who seems slightly crawsick…Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men’s bodied guts.’ (Joyce: 40) This passage offers a sharp contrast between the organised chaos of a hockey match and the murderous calamity of the battlefield. The alliteration that flows through Stephen’s description of children playing hockey is connected to that of a Knight’s ‘jousting’ tournament. This juxtaposition suggests to the reader that both are not only practises for a larger battle ahead, but also that men and boys like those at the school fight and die in wars. There is no nobility in war, despite the narratives provided by Pyrhuus and Homer, and Joyce is dismissing the idea that there ever was. In addition to satirising the ideology of war, the question of a self-determined Irish nation free from British colonialism is the other conflict rippling through the unconscious of Stephen and the characters of Ulysses. This topic is addressed in Nestor’s through the conversation Stephen has with Mr Deasy, the Protestant schoolmaster from Ulster. Joyce initially introduces the differences between the two by contrasting their appreciation of money. For Stephen, the British Sterling of his wages is: “A lump in my pocket. Symbols soiled by greed and misery.” (Joyce: 36) The fact that an Irishmen is being paid in a foreign tender is an example of colonialism, and it is a condition that Stephen is acutely aware off. However, for Mr. Deasy, his greatest boast is, “-…I pay my way,” (Joyce: 37) like an Englishman. This motto places the Protestant Ulsterman within another unreliable narrative. It is a cliché from a class divided England, and as Stephen’s interior list of creditors demonstrates (Joyce: 37), it is nearly impossible in a capitalist system to be truly free of debts. Unlike Telemachus seeking the truth of his father disappearance from Nestor in The Odyssey, Deasy is no wise man belaying the truths of history onto the young. Deasy believes that the English nation provides him with a secure identity, but it is an archetype that obscures larger questions regarding his own position in an Ireland undergoing historical change. He is unconsciously aware of himself, as demonstrated when he reprimands his younger colleague for thinking: “…me an old fogey and an old tory…I remember the famine. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the union twenty years before O’Connell did.” (Joyce: 38) Although he is undoubtedly right about Stephen’s perception, his outburst is a purely subjective plea. Whether the Orange lodges had ‘agitated for the repeal of the union’ during and after the famine is a contentious issue, but Joyce was writing Ulysses with the knowledge that politicians such as Sir. Edward Carson had urged Ulster’s Protestant minority to fight against any notion of Irish Home Rule in 1912, causing tensions to build between the two communities. However, Joyce makes clear that both communities were united in a hatred of those of the Jewish faith. For Deasy, England’s demise is because the country has fallen into “…the hands of the jews…Whatever they gather they eat up the nation’s vital strength.” (Joyce: 41) The idea that those of the Jewish faith are vampires is not only an intertextual aside to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it also expresses an overt racism that views Jews as Western Europe’s dangerous ‘other’. Deasy’s form of nationalism is reliant on bad history, and its subjectivity is as blind as that of the Citizen, who interrogate Leopold Bloom on his ethnicity in the Hades of Barney Kiernan’s pub. Indeed, as with fascist Germany, the Citizen would be happy to stop Jew’s like Stephen and Bloom from “…coming over here to Ireland, filling the country with bugs.” (Joyce: 419). As with Homer’s Cyclopes,...