Dead end in Dublin: how not to read James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’
In his new book, James Joyce and the Irish Revolution (University of Chicago Press, $35), Luke Gibbons, confused by the contents of his own mind, offers heterogeneous concepts yoked by violence together. In a series of forced comparisons he states: “Though Joyce is often perceived as set apart from events in Ireland, in this book I try to show multiple points of intersection between the literary avant-garde and the Irish revolution. . . . The Dublin of 1904 in Ulysses [1922] prefigures events taking place in Ireland during the later composition of the novel. . . . It may be that critical and historical accounts of the Irish revolution would benefit considerably from being recast in the light of Joyce’s revolution of the word. . . . Joyce’s writing may have offered a similar reprise of the hopes that drove the Irish revolution” [my italics].
But assertions are not evidence, repetitions are not arguments. Gibbons persists with other far-fetched speculations: “Joyce’s work provided pointers to the forces that were gathering to foment revolution. . . . Maps of sites of military conflict during the Easter Rising resemble the dispersal of action in ‘Wandering Rocks’. . . . Dislocated narratives in Ulysses resemble the multi-tracking of Volunteer movements through the city. . . . O’Malley deployed in his military activities qualities not unlike those Joyce brought to bear on Ulysses [my italics].
Gibbons does not provide an essential description of the Easter Rising on April 24-29, 1916. (The German attack on the Polish Post Office in Danzig on September 1, 1939, portrayed in Günter Grass’ novel and film The Tin Drum (1959), was like the British attack on the Irish-held Post Office in Dublin in 1916.) The Easter Rising was a disastrous military failure and perfect example of how not to organize a revolution. Michael Collins, assassinated in 1922, “noted that from the outset, events bore all the ominous signs of a death foretold.” The attempt to seize the transatlantic wireless station collapsed when the Volunteers died in a drowning accident. Sir Roger Casement, landing in a German submarine to rouse the Irish people, was immediately captured, soon convicted of treason and hanged. The Rising was suppressed in a few days and 14 of the leaders were executed. As Joyce wrote in Ulysses about the Roman Battle of Asculum, “Another victory like that and we are done for.” Gibbons quotes Stephen Dedalus’ famous pronouncement in Portrait of the Artist, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” without noting that it comes from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852): “History weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” The revolutions in Europe in 1848, in France in 1870, in Russia in 1905 and 1917 were far more historically influential than the short-lived Easter Rising.
The Rising took place 12 years after the day, June 16, 1904, described in Ulysses. Joyce lived abroad in Trieste (an Italian city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), in Paris and in Zurich; he took no part in Irish political events and rarely mentioned them. The attitude of Joyce, condemned in Ireland as a “pariah,” was “studied indifference.” Joyce described an Ireland in a state of paralysis, the dominant theme in Dubliners (1914). Gibbons admits, “Such was the paralysis under colonial rule that national sentiment could not even rise to the task of building a statue in honor of the founder of Irish republicanism, Wolfe Tone.”
In Ulysses Ireland was far from being, as Gibbons claims, “a nation on the verge of revolt.” Gibbons explodes his own thesis by quoting the “hallucinatory delirium . . . of barely literate priests and monks flitting to and fro among the mud hovels . . . . The bleak, shiftless, sordid, soulless Ireland that came to an end catastrophically in 1916.” This was certainly not, as he maintains, a receptive audience for rebellion. The baffling avant-garde content of Ulysses, which frustrated readers searching for political commitment, provides a striking contrast to Boris Pasternak’s powerful portrayal of the Russian Revolution in Doctor Zhivago (1957).
Gibbons’ book is fatally flawed by his leaden style, which feels like moving through mud. He features 106-word Germanic sentences, 10 proper names in 5 lines, and paragraphs 2 pages long. Only the most dedicated reviewer would continue reading after his turgid Preface and Introduction. His most irritating device is the wild proliferation of digressive and irrelevant quotations, such as Georges Didi-Huberman on the art critic Aby Warburg, as well as from 100 other imperceptive critics. On page 9, for example, he writes: “favored by Warburg,” “the dynamics of form for Warburg,” “as Stephen Greenblatt notes,” “according to Paul K. Saint-Amour,” “according to Mary Colum,” “when Umberto Eco questions,” “Douglas Goldring intent on writing,” “writes Guy Woodward,” “praise from T. S. Eliot,” “Sigmund Freud’s critical parapsychology” and “Jean-Martin Charcot’s symptomatic readings.”
Trained in grad school to assume the correct cringe to fashionably opaque critics, Gibbons solemnly offers a selection of absurdities: “Bakhtin’s concept of ‘chronotype’ is helpful at this point”; “Theodor Adorno explained the only crime of the defeated is that they did not appear to have the forces of history on their side”; Slavoj Zizek declares “that an Event involves subjectivity: the engaged ‘subjective perspective’ on the Event is part of the Event itself” [Zizek should promise never to write again]; and Alain Locke, a must-include Black critic: “Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin had for the New Ireland” [my italics]. Gibbons mentions Henrik Ibsen a few times, but does not see that Ghosts ends with “The Sun. The Sun,” A Doll’s House ends with “Nora! Nora!” and Ulysses ends with “yes I said yes I will yes.” Gibbons completes his torture session with boring chapters on minor Irish writers, including Standoffish O’Grady, 21 pages on Ernie O’Malley and 22 pages on Desmond Ryan, which shed no light on Ulysses.
Gibbons’ trendy attempt to link Ulysses and African civilization is also woefully misguided. In the “Cyclops” chapter a murderous, cannibalistic Zulu chief, visiting the cotton magnates of Manchester, “drank a loving-cup of firstshot uqsquebaugh to the toast Black and White from the skull of his immediate predecessor in the dynasty.”
Jeffrey Meyers’ book on his novelist friend James Salter will appear in 2024,
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