Rereading 'Ulysses': "Ithaca" and modernist allegory - book by author James Joyce

Briefly, to conclude: Joyce has taken pains to ensure that we read his novel as a cohesive unity that has its center in "Ithaca," that home established by Stephen's (and through Stephen's, by the reader's) recognition of the mystery of the Incarnation. It seems a serious error of criticism to make Joyce into something he is not, a postmodernist who seeks to break down all unities and to debunk all the reader's efforts to discover a "master narrative" that provides cohesion to the many perspectives possible in presenting a man's life. He is instead a supreme example of high modernism, writing a kind of allegory able to overcome the strenuous demands of a mocking realism and establish a level of meaning that is still and fixed, permanent and, in the deepest sense, true.

NOTES

1 Edmund Wilson and S. L. Goldberg both see the second half of Ulysses as a mistake. An illustrative quotation from each: "Joyce has here [in "Oxen of the Sun," "Eumaeus," and "Ithaca"] half-buried his story under the virtuosity of his technical devices" (Wilson 217); "it is a novel, and what is of permanent interest about it is what always interests us with the novel: its imaginative illumination of the moral - and ultimately, spiritual - experience of representative human beings" (Goldberg 30).

Stanley Sultan describes the basic trends in Joyce scholarship: Ulysses is "either a novel with ornamental complications, or a 'poem' (as some have called it) with a trivial action" (53). This critic argues impressively that one must choose between the two, but I hope that my application of the "allegory of theologians" will allow for the two trends to be reconciled.

2 In Four Quartets Eliot also writes modernist allegory, as the special moments of one's experience are made the center of one's meditative life until they become significant of the central Christian mysteries of Annunciation, Incarnation, and Pentecost. That one's interior life can follow the structure of the Christ event is central to Dante's understanding of the "allegory of theologians," and organizes both Eliot's and Joyce's modernist masterworks.

3 It is worth quoting at some length from the famous letter from Dante to his patron Can Grande:

It is to be understood that the meaning of this work [the Commedia] is not simple, but rather it is polysemous, that is, having many meanings. For the first meaning is that which one derives from the letter, another is that which one derives from the things signified by the letter. The first is called 'literal' and the second 'allegorical' or 'mystical.' So that this method of exposition may be clearer, one may consider it in these lines: 'When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from people of strange language, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion.' (cited in Musa 37)

Dante will include this psalm in his second canto of Purgatorio, at the beginning of his wandering in a desert land back home toward Eden. Joyce uses this psalm not only to set the scene for his protagonists' wandering in Bloom's garden but also to align his method with Dante's. I'll deal with this in the fourth section of this paper.