Ousted possibilities: critical histories in James Joyce's Ulysses - James Joyce, novelist

In the invocation of an "idea" that justifies morally questionable activities we hear an echo of Charlie Marlow, the ambivalent narrator of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to." (10)

The "conquest of the earth" takes place under the auspices of "ideas" that have the effect of undermining the traditions and ways of life of indigenous peoples; but neither Bloom nor Marlow can articulate the "idea" clearly enough to justify to themselves the production of this effect. Both are critical of imperialism - which is to say, they are critical of the master narratives of progress and enlightenment - but they hesitate to condemn their own culture for practices that disrupt the lives of people different from themselves; their hesitation grows out of a conviction (only half-felt, it would seem) that the imperial powers must be acting on an idea the nobility and utility of which is unassailable. Thus both are ambivalent about the exercise of socio-political power that they see at work around them primarily because they are ambivalent about the idea - the abstract justification of power - that lies behind it. Their ambivalence - which may in fact have to do with a certain investment in the authority of the Father who stands behind, as symbolic guarantor, of socio-political power and its ideas" - is manifested as both criticism and tolerance, the latter coming about as the inevitable compromise struck with a historical legacy that, while open to criticism, cannot (as Stephen naively believes) be entirely repudiated.

The salutary benefit of Bloom's tolerance is that it allows him to situate himself in history on his own terms - in effect, to write his own history. In the "Calypso" episode Bloom recalls the title page of a book he owns, In the Track of the Sun; inspired by his own ruminations, he places himself, as Jewish outsider, in the narrative of liberation that underwrites the history of the Irish nationalist tradition: "What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch that: homerule sun rising up in the northwest (U 57). Such musings on the "Jewishness" of Irish nationalist symbolism and his evident admiration for Irish nationalists like James Stephens, Arthur Griffith, and Parnell, places Bloom at the center of Irish political resistance. Indeed, a kind of legend springs up in the course of the text to the effect that Bloom gave Griffith the idea for Sinn Fein; and while it is reasonable to believe that those who retail the legend (principally John Wyse and Martin Cunningham) seriously doubt its validity, the link between Bloom and Griffith nevertheless remains as a mark of Bloom's spurious Irishness.(13) Even an accidental meeting with Parnell becomes for Bloom "a matter of strict history" (654-55). But the precarious union of Jew and Irishman ultimately leads (as we discover in the "Cyclops" episode) to misunderstanding and violence when Bloom fails to convince the Citizen and his cronies of his Irishness; Bloom's nearly incoherent argument that "a nation is the same people living in the same place" (331) does little to efface the obvious difference between him and the others.