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Rereading 'Ulysses': "Ithaca" and modernist allegory - book by author James Joyce
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Stephen Sicari
The initial purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Joyce employs, as an organizing principle for his novel, the kind of allegory Saint Paul instituted and medieval exegetes of the Bible perfected in understanding the relation of the Old Testament to the New. This approach allows us to establish the relation of the later episodes in Ulysses, so wildly experimental in nature, to the earlier naturalistic episodes as analogous to the way the New Testament is taken to "reread" features from the Old. What is gained is an understanding of the later experimental episodes as "rereadings" of the earlier episodes in the hope of isolating and focusing on an aspect of "reality" that naturalism is ill equipped to present or acknowledge, an aspect of reality we can refer to as the eternal, the permanent, the spiritual. It is in "Ithaca" that Joyce establishes a fixed point that governs the meaning of the rest of the novel.
Perhaps the thorniest problem facing the last two decades of scholarship on Ulysses has been to find ways to account for the decision to begin the novel with such lucid depiction of sights and sounds and smells, as well as the extraordinary presentation of the thoughts of fictional characters in the interior monologue for which the opening episodes are famous, only to abandon such "realism" in favor of the innovations of the later episodes.(1) My thesis allows us to say that Joyce is not abandoning realism but instead has followed nineteenth-century naturalism to its limit, exhausting its resources and needing new ones if he is to be able to present in Bloom what he wishes for us to find, that in this unassuming ordinary man lies, hidden from the naturalistic narrator's eyes, a dimension that can be called a "Christ dimension." Traditional models of narrative technique having proved inadequate, Joyce experiments boldly to expand Bloom's significance without denying the validity of what naturalism can present. To accomplish in Bloom what Eliot called "the intersection of the timeless with time,"(2) Joyce returns to the central mystery of Christianity, the Incarnation, and the model of reading that was able to comprehend that mystery, the allegory of theologians.
I am acutely aware that this thesis will meet with some resistance because it is still somewhat unfashionable to assert that any work of literature, no less a work as complex and heteroclite as Ulysses, can be approached as having established a fixed center, a transcendental signified that governs its meaning. Inherent in my argument, then, is the contention that Joyce's allegory is a hallmark of modernism in its attempt to defy reductionist accounts of ideals as the result of mere human construction and to point to an event outside the web of language that can ground our idealism. Outside of language is the Christ event; outside of words is the Word.
TWO KINDS OF ALLEGORY
One of the most important events in the history of biblical exegesis occurs within the Bible itself, when Saint Paul explains how a Christian is to read certain events in Hebrew Scriptures. As Robert Hollander explains, "It is in Galatians 4:22-26 that we find the first explicit Christian use of the word 'allegory'" (58). This passage reads as follows:
For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.
Paul's "spiritual" reading of the Old Testament story does not deny the historical validity of the story: Abraham had his two sons in the way Genesis described. But there is another level of significance for this story, one that does not cancel out the validity of Genesis, one that can only be read after the Christ event, and one that "fulfills" the letter with the spiritual truth. The Old Testament story is "reread" from the privileged position of one living after the Christ event.
It is my argument that Joyce uses just this kind of allegory in writing Ulysses, and he devises a passage in "Ithaca" that instructs us about how to read his text in a way strikingly similar to Saint Paul's instruction to the Galatians. In this pivotal late episode, the catechistical narrator describes the "previous intimations of the result" of the Gold Cup Bloom had throughout the day before reading the Evening Telegraph in the cabman's shelter:
In Bernard Kiernan's licensed premises 8, 9, and 10 Little Britain Street: in David Byrne's licensed premises, 14 Duke Street: in O'Connell street lower, outside Graham Lemon's when a dark man had placed in his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah, restorer of the Church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of F. W. Sweny and Co (limited), dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick M. Bantam Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy of the current issue of the Freeman's Journal and National Press which he had been about the throw away (subsequently thrown away), he had proceeded toward the edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction. (17.329-41)
