Timeless Joyce

I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality. (Ellmann 1959/1982: 521)

Many scholars have described James Joyce’s Ulysses¹ as the story of ordinary people transcending the limits of space and time and acquiring universal dimensions. Alistair Cormack, for instance, claims that ‘in Ulysses, the human form is allowed to be infinite’, adding that ‘Ulysses is the epic of recovered time and redeemed space’ (Cormack 2008: 99). In celebration of the 1922 publication of the novel, this volume speculates on the ways in which Joyce’s masterpiece achieves a cosmic propensity that can be described as an ‘aesthetics of infinity’.

The discussion developed in the following lines encompasses the interplay of two spiral moves and three vortexes, a structure inspired by the so-called ‘Symbol of James Joyce’. In 1929, American publisher Caresse Crosby, whose husband had founded the Black Sun Press noted for publishing the early works of many modernist writers, became interested in Joyce’s work. The couple published a limited edition of excerpts from Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ (later Finnegans Wake). To illustrate the volume, they chose a spiral design by Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian-born artist who resided in Paris and had created several portraits of Joyce. Brancusi called his image the ‘Symbol of James Joyce’. It appeared in the Crosby’s volume, Tales Told of Shem and Shaun.² Brancusi later explained the cryptic image to fellow artist Jacques Hérold, noting it represented Joyce because,like the image: ‘he departs from one point, and you’ll never meet him again.’ (Ellmann 1975: 340). Years before, in 1904, a couple of months after his first meeting with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, Joyce had written to her saying: ‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond’ (Ellmann Letters Vol. II 1957: 48). Thus, Brancusi’s image seems an appropriate starting point.

The image represents a spiral, a single line that curves around a centre. A graph between two points, the spiral is both a beginning and an end in itself, giving the impression of a movement towards infinity that comes simultaneously from the two points, the initial and the end. The spiral is possibly the simplest representation of a bounded finite space that, at the same, can become infinite. Resembling a single looking-glass monocle, perhaps reflecting Joyce’s contemporary photos with his decaying sight, Brancusi’s symbol, which also includes three vertical lines of different lengths, invokes the sacred geometry of labyrinth petroglyphs found in ancient cultures all over the world. With its illusion of continuous motion, the spiral conveys the sense of moving in two opposite (complementary) directions: one counter-clockwise towards the centre, perhaps seeking some form of unity, and the other clockwise, towards an outer world, corresponding to a potential release or expansion of something within. With its shifting perspectives, the whirl could be said to represent the different levels encountered in Joyce’s mind and in his narratives; Charybdis, the whirlpool of mysticism and darkness, blown against the rocky edges of the physical material, and the monstrous Scylla, perhaps signified by the straight lines in Brancusi’s image.

The movement towards the inner centre of the spiral in Joyce’s work is a centripetal move that functions by reducing the complex multiplicity of the profuse intertextual web of references and the wide range of sources he uses. This move seeks to become a singularity, a simplified abstraction of the ideas conveyed, with a structural unity that can be easily understood under what T. S. Eliot termed the ‘Mythical Method’. At the same time, this unity is shattered by the centrifugal force that opens up to the outside, still resonating from the multiplicity of theories and ideas, as well as from the interpretations left by readers and scholars. This second move obscures the originary structural framework, a map-location that sought to be both material and conceptual, both sensible, following a body-city schema of correspondences, and intelligible, including a number of narrative techniques associated with the episodes of Ulysses, corresponding to different events in Homer’s Odyssey. Thus, Joyce’s dense net of theory and his use of irony play against the transcendental signified of myth, conferring it an allegorical dimension that simultaneously seeks and refuses a holistic unity.

In his review of Ulysses for the Dial in 1923, Eliot described the ‘Mythical Method’ as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’. He indicated that ‘in using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him’ (Eliot 1923: 480–3). But, how exactly is the ‘Mythical Method’ connected to ideological beliefs in the case of Ulysses? Many myths have a visual iconographic and metaphoric grounding. How can a metaphor, often static, acquire fluidity and movement, entering into the temporal schemes of the novel? This is what we will try to find out.

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Alongside the two temporal spiral moves outlined, centripetal and centrifugal, Joyce’s narrative method occupies a space that I would like to have my reader visualize as a triskelion or triple spiral. The term ‘triskelion’ originates from the ancient Greek triskelés which means three legs. The movement of the single spiral, as represented by Brancusi, is further enhanced by the triple spiral, with its complex form of rotational symmetry, like a propeller. It conveys the idea of a non-hierarchical process structure. The triskelion appears in Neolithic locations in Ireland, for example at the entrance of the 5,000-year-old Newgrange Stone Age Passage Tomb, at Boyne Valley. It was a symbol related to triadic gods and goddesses, as well as the circle of life–death–rebirth, past–present–future. It also represented the three domains of sky–water–land, the spirit–mind–body division and the father–mother–child family unit. In Christianity, it represented the Holy Trinity. All of these triad forms are present in Joyce’s Ulysses.

With strong similarities with the ancient Greek Meander Key, the triskelion (or tripod) is also connected to the Greek concept of apeiron (from ἀ- a-, ‘without’ and πεῖραρ ‘end, limit’), meaning that which is unlimited, boundless and infinite (Liddell & Scott 1940). The apeiron is central to pre-Socratic cosmological theory, envisioned as a whirl that generates the cosmos from the movement of the void. It was represented in the so-called ‘omphalos’, originally located at the Temple of Delphi. Looking like a grinding-stone supported by two rotating pieces, the omphalos, one of the terms used by Joyce to name the Martello Tower where the novel begins, is a large marble stone, with knotted cereal symbols carved on its surface. It has a spiral-like hollow centre that widens towards the base. The stone functioned as symbol of the birth navel-cord, mounted on bronze tripods supported by three dancers. Looking like the triskelion, the symbol is also similar to that of the cosmic tree, an axis mundi that links the various spatiotemporal regions of the universe. Similar images related to creation myths appear in various traditions all over the world (for instance, in India, representations of Lord Shiva dancing show a similar spiral movement). The water-like curvature of the three spirals within the triskelion conveys temporal aspects of flux and eternity. The figure contains three whirlpools or vortexes that can also be thought of as architectural pillars or cornerstones. The spatial interconnectedness of the figure prefigures its dynamic temporality.

Using this symbol to explain the main aspects involved in Joyce’s masterpiece, it can be said that the first vortex of Ulysses circulates a profusion of sources that are nested around an apparently simple domestic plot. Leopold Bloom, a wandering Jew and a father who mourns the death of his son Rudy, acts as devil’s advocate to Stephen Dedalus, a twentieth-century ‘flânneur’ who struggles to find himself as an artist, and has no time to fulfil the ideal of the good prodigal son. The third protagonist is Molly Bloom, assigned the mark of infinity in Carlo Linati’s schema and no number in Stuart Gilbert’s, who claimed for her the role of ‘Great Mother’ and ‘creator of life’ (Gilbert 1930/1955: 20). The characters of Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope in Homer’s epic align with the three protagonists of Joyce’s novel, forcing a sort of repetition in illo tempore, to use Mircea Eliade’s expression, which creates a correspondence between the atemporal sacred space of myth and the profane contingency of everyday reality. After he began writing Ulysses in 1914, Joyce told Georges Borach, one of his language students in Zurich, that he thought that the story of Odysseus was ‘the most human in world literature’, and later explained to his friend Frank Budgen that Odysseus was the most ‘complete all-round character’ for he ‘is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy, and King of Ithaca’ (Ellmann 1959/1982: 435).

Thus, this first gyre of the triskelion includes the stream-of- consciousness of the three characters. It also incorporates very complex forms of intertextuality on various levels. It is commonly thought that this mode of narration should be credited to Henri Bergson enthusiast, William James. However, according to Richard Ellmann, during a trip to Tours, at a railway kiosk, Joyce picked up a book by Édouard Dujardin, Les lauriers sont coupés (1887), and ‘no matter how diligently the critics worked to demonstrate that he had borrowed the interior monologue from Freud, Joyce always made it a point of honor that he had it from Dujardin’ (1959/1982: 126). His biographer adds that Joyce could not have failed to notice the act of self-creation on the part of Dujardin’s hero, who on the first page of the 1887 novel invokes himself into being ‘from beneath the chaos of appearances’ (Ellmann 1959/1982: 126). In his review, Eliot also pointed out that Dujardin had applied Wagnerian mythopoeia and leitmotifs in his novel, noting the influence of Bergsonism and psychology. With precursors like Laurence Sterne’s 1757 novel Tristram Shandy or Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, the stream-of-consciousness became a favourite experimental method used by Proust, Joyce, Woolf and others, as British author Dorothy Richardson explained to bookseller and publisher Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, which published Ulysses in 1922 (Richardson 1995: 282). This narrative mode was an attempt to capture the individual inner temporality of the characters in true Bergsonian fashion, and to show how human sensations changed with time and with the impact of emotions upon consciousness and unconsciousness. The technique was partially present in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which Joyce had begun back in 1907, first serialized in the English literary magazine The Egoist between 1914 and 1915.

The intertextual complexity of Ulysses, voiced through the inner minds of its characters, continues to baffle scholars, contributing to never-ending interpretations. In this light, the line from Stephen in Chapter IV of A Portrait, well known for the winged Hermes-like crane-girl epiphany, acquires new meanings: ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!’ (200).³ The androgynous figure of the Greek god Hermes was responsible for delivering messages. An agent of creativity, this trickster god prized cleverness and amusement above all else. Hermes was similar to Sumerian Enki (the Egyptian Thoth), a cunning craftsman who shaped humans from the clay-dirt under his fingernails.⁴ Likewise, Joyce, who sought to be a god of creation, worked ‘within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’ (A Portrait: 252) once the work was done. Joyce’s aesthetics of infinity is grounded in a network of correspondences and numberless willed allusions nested in his novels, all of which open up many paths for speculation, some of which this volume will unthread.

The succession of events that the characters face in the novel also encompasses a fractal universe of historical planes on different layers. Despite Stephen’s desire to awake from the nightmare of history (U 2.34), there are constant allusions to expose the social grounding of his beliefs and convictions. The bulk of references to Ireland’s past contained in Joyce’s first works, Dubliners and A Portrait, make their way into Ulysses, in accordance to Stephen’s dictum in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode: ‘hold to the now, the here through which all future plunges to the past’ (U 9.178). Echoes and characters from Joyce’s previous novels populate some of the episodes in Ulysses, contributing to the network of voices, coming from real life as well as from all the bookish sources that Joyce used to create his masterpiece. However, this dynamic net of associations and allusions should not be taken at face value. Although religious and political insights might lay bare some aspects of the personalities of his main characters, Joyce refuses to offer a closed reading of his text. His deceptive strategies, like those of Odysseus, lie in his crafty use of language and irony, the third vortex.