SEEDS OF BRIGHTNESS: POETIC MEMORY IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

by

Laura Quinlan DeJong

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, FL

August 2016
Copyright 2016 by Laura Quinlan DeJong

ii 
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project would not have been possible without the encouragement and

insightful direction of my dissertation committee of Dr. Mark Scroggins, Dr. Myriam

Ruthenberg and Dr. Marcella Munson. As well, I am eternally grateful to Dr. Scroggins

for the legacy of the University of Louisville’s Conference on Literature and Culture since

1900, Dr. Ruthenberg for the magical summer ITA 4930 program held in Orvieto, Italy in

2010, and for the combined efforts of my committee to further my teaching career.

In addition to my PhD committee, I would like to thank Dr. Carol McGuirk

(Theorizing Science Fiction) and Dr. Jennifer Low (Shakespeare and Company) for

providing me with valuable, detailed advice on the revision and formatting of my graduate

papers, which assisted me in my writing of this dissertation.

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 ABSTRACT

Author: Laura DeJong

Title: Seeds of Brightness: Poetic Memory in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Mark Scroggins

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Year 2016

This dissertation examines the process of “poetic memory” in James Joyce’s

Ulysses, a term chosen by Italian philologist Gian Biagio Conte to describe allusive

processes in the poetry of classical texts, specifically the epic. Conte examines and

classifies the epic codes and norms residing within and constituting the classical epic

genre. These change with each successive epic according to the author’s culture. The

allusive process enables an author’s dialogue with his or her predecessors, which has

implications for the establishment of textual authority. By applying Conte’s system of

epic codes and norms toward a reading of Ulysses, it is possible to interrogate the novel

and assess how it situates itself within the epic tradition.

In Ulysses, Joyce responds to and revises the epic tradition through his

appropriation and modification of works by classical, medieval and Renaissance authors.

He writes from the advantage of doing so in the early twentieth century, at a point in

history with a wide range of literary material available to it. Through Ulysses’ Homeric

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frame and intricate allusions, Joyce creates a somatic text, one that appropriates the

textual somatic components of the Commedia and Gargantua and Pantagruel. In

appropriating and revising elements of these somatic sites, as well as classical allusions,

Joyce creates a foundational Irish epic, one that ultimately questions and even parodies

statements of authority.

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 DEDICATION

Dit manuscript draag ik op aan Tom DeJong. Bedankt dat je mij door de jaren

heen hebt ondersteund in dit project en het voor mij mogelijk hebt gemaakt mijn dromen

te verwezenlijken.
 SEEDS OF BRIGHTNESS: POETIC MEMORY IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES 
INTRODUCTION: REVISIONIST POETICS IN ULYSSES ........................................... 1 
CHAPTER 1: THE EPIC ULYSSES .................................................................................. 3 
Early Epic Authorship and Dynamics of Appropriation ................................................. 8 
Primary and Secondary Epic (Oral and Literary).......................................................... 16 
Epic Codes and Epic Norms.......................................................................................... 23 
Integrative and Reflective Allusion............................................................................... 33 
CHAPTER 2: JOYCE’S SYSTEM OF WORKING ....................................................... 39 
Quidditas, Claritas and Epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ........... 46 
The Epiphany as Epic Code .......................................................................................... 49 
CHAPTER 3: ULYSSES’ ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE AND SOMATIC
REPRESENTATIONS ..................................................................................................... 57 
Copia and Textual Abundance ...................................................................................... 67 
The Citizen: A Parody of Nationalism ......................................................................... 74 
CHAPTER 4: DANTE’S AUTHORITY AND POETICS IN CANTOS 25 ................... 88 
The Development of Dante’s Poetic Aesthetic in Cantos 25 ........................................ 98 
A Poetics of Somatic Re-membering and Embryonic Gestation ................................ 104 
CHAPTER 5: “OXEN OF THE SUN” – THE BIRTH OF THE TEXT ....................... 127 
The Procreative Text and the Birth of Man................................................................. 129 
Revision of Epic Codes – Incorporation of the Epiphany ........................................... 137 
CHAPTER 6: ADVERTISEMENT AS EPIC CODE ................................................... 152 
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 171 

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 INTRODUCTION: REVISIONIST POETICS IN ULYSSES

The title of this dissertation, Seeds of Brightness: Poetic Memory in James

Joyce’s Ulysses, contains two allusions. The first, “seeds of brightness,” is Joyce’s

reference to a passage in Virgil’s The Georgics, book 3, depicting the impregnation of

ferocious mares. The mares experience miraculous conceptions when “they’ll turn, as

one, towards the west to face the wind/ and breathe its airs and then – a miracle! –

without being/ covered/ by a sire, receive the seed a breeze implants in them” (3:272-75).

In another sense, the seeds pertain to the idea that allusion involves the lifting of words as

seeds from texts to be deposited into other texts. One name for this process, in addition

to “allusion,” is “poetic memory,” a term used by Gian Biagio Conte to denote allusive

poetics in classical Greek and Roman poetry. The term emphasizes the intentional aspect

behind allusive processes. The appropriation of a story, speech or rhetorical marker in a

poem by another signifies not just a response to the poem, its author or the poetic

tradition but also indicates the appropriating poet’s intention to situate his or her work

within a tradition of authority.

Although poetic memory exists in classical Greek and Latin non-epic poetry, it is

also a constituent of the epic genre, and joins other rhetorical devices as a means to

classify a work as epic. While it is my intention to explore, in a limited fashion, allusive

practices in earlier forms of classical and Christian epic, the primary object is to examine

how those practices re-emerge in Joyce’s modernist epic novel, Ulysses. The allusive

practices in the epic dating from Homer’s time onward are part of a framework of poetic

1 
structures and rhetorical ingredients (codes), a subset of culturally inscribed statements

known as norms. Joyce participates in this tradition of epic codes and norms revision;

however, he does so through interior monologue and parody. Accordingly, he creates

new textual possibilities for the epic genre.

In post-Homeric poetry, beginning with the Alexandrian school, poets such as

Callimachus, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Statius and Lucan engaged in a poetics that

involving allusion, revision, signposting and other practices that were commonplace and

integral to the writing of the epic and to poetry in general. Classical scholarship shows

that their work was highly experimental and involved a vigorous appropriation and

modification of others’ scenes, dialogues and stylistic components. Conte, who sees

allusion as a metaphor, builds upon the work of Giorgio Pasquali, who published

important analyses of Horace’s epigraph technique. In his studies, Conte identifies an

ongoing successive engagement in the revision of epic codes and norms. These codes

and norms have changed since Homer’s time, as they have been borrowed and modified

by medieval, Renaissance and modern writers. Joyce’s establishment of his own epic

codes and norms in Ulysses calls for a further exploration of his allusive practices, one

that considers Ulysses’ dual position as a novel as well as an Irish epic.

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 O Muses, o high genius, help me now;
O memory that set down what I saw,
Here shall your excellence reveal itself!

Dante Alighieri, Inferno 2

CHAPTER 1: THE EPIC ULYSSES

Since its publication, Ulysses has acquired a comprehensive scholarship regarding

its epic features. A prose novel, Ulysses does not conform to the classical format of epic

verse; however, there is a precedent for mixed verse/prose narratives in early Irish heroic

tales and medieval Irish epic literature (Tymoczko 73). Writing an experimental prose

novel of highly divergent episodes and epic traces, Joyce signals that Ulysses is an epic

through its title, schema, standard epic formulae and various references to its own epic

possibilities, all of which categorize it as a response to the epic tradition. However, more

specifically, how does Joyce’s participation in an allusive epic tradition inform his own

epic? The primary object of this dissertation will be to examine Ulysses’ allusive

processes within the parameters of its epic status.

The novel’s eighteen chapters, situated within the course of one day, June 16,

1904, were planned and written in accordance with the events in The Odyssey, including

Telemachus’ coming of age, the long and delayed trip home and the homecoming. The

novel contains some traditional epic features - the invocation, the journey, extended

similes, and chapters begun in media res – although many of these are couched in parody.

However, as a prose work, any “epic” designation of Ulysses is made trickier in terms of

its treatment of the heroic models before it. It has invariably been termed a “mock-

3 
heroic” epic, with its unlikely protagonist, Leopold Bloom, termed an “anti-hero” in the

sense that he is a modern day man of various failings and average stature. Joyce assigns

him the wandering mode of Odysseus but Bloom’s wandering is that of a simple man

who lives in modern day Dublin. In many ways, he is an outlier, adrift socially, and a

man who nowhere near possesses the superhuman qualities of epic heroes such as

Odysseus or Aeneas. That Ulysses is an Odyssean text is certain. And some scholars

have classified it as a fable. Ulysses borrows generously from Irish folklore, right at the

outset, as is witnessed by the visit of the milk delivery woman to the Martello tower in

chapter 1 (“Telemachus”). A stand in for the fabled itinerant old woman who haunts

Irish hillsides, she is “A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her

conqueror and her gay betrayor, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret

morning” (Ulysses 1:404-05). Here, her designation as cuckquean foreshadows Leopold

Bloom’s own position as a cuckold, one that will serve as his primary reason for

wandering around Dublin throughout the novel.

The aesthetic choices and strategies underlying Ulysses are intricate. A hybrid

comprised of Irish folklore, Greek and Roman poetics, and medieval philosophy,

Ulysses’ textual fabric is generous in its range of appropriation. Joyce has often been

termed a medievalist or as having a medieval sensibility and his conversations with

Arthur Power indicate a pronounced affection for medievalism. There is a wonderful

passage in chapter 12 of Power’s book that describes the two men’s visit to Valery

Larbaud’s flat so that Joyce could retrieve some books and manuscripts. He had taken to

writing there in a room “shaped like a cabin of a ship” with a “light in the middle and a

long table running down the centre with shelves like small bunks along the wall on either

4 
side at arm’s length” (Power 105). Additionally, the room was “soundproof and

draughtproof,” the irony of all of this being that Joyce did not like to work in it as he

equated the snug chamber with a tomb (Power 105). On the heels of the visit, Joyce

extols the virtues of the Notre-Dame’s roof:

at their amazing complication – plane overlapping plane, angle countering

angle, the numerous traversing gutters and runnels, flying buttresses and

erupting gargoyles. In comparison, classical buildings always seem to me

to be over-simple and lacking in mystery. Indeed one of the most

interesting things about present-day thought in my opinion is the return to

medievalism. (Power 106)

The same reasoning behind his love of the church’s architectural features echoes the

reasoning behind his choices in creating the intricacies of Ulysses. The novel possesses

the textual equivalent of these sudden and confrontational angles, bisections, arches, and

eruptions.

The Joycean text is keenly aware of its process, of its (as Derek Attridge put it)

“effects,” so much so that it almost seems, at times, to highlight its experimentalism to

the point of a kind of creative treatise on style and allusion.1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari, in their concept of “minor literature,” render a fitting description. According to

Claire Colebrook,

Minor literature frees language from a speaking subject, and shows the

ways in which subjects are effects of ‘collective’ ways of speaking. . . . If

                                                            
1
Note Derek Attridge’s claim, in Joyce Effects, at the end of the twentieth century that “Among the
negative evaluations of Joyce on an intra-cultural basis, the most tenacious and widespread (particularly in
relation to the later works) has been that there is an excess of technique over content, intellect over feeling,
and will over spontaneity”(175).
5 
 we take literature to be the expression of some human spirit then literature

is subordinated to something other than itself and is located within a

historical trajectory of human becoming. But if literature is literary then it

must be a minor literature, not the continuation or expression of an already

existing identity but an event of style. (310)

And there are many styles in Ulysses. The distinction here resides in the narrative voice

of the text - a kind of cultural or civic voice disconnected from any discernible

character’s voice. “Great texts,” Colebrook writes, continuing Deleuze and Guattari’s

assessment, “such as those of Joyce and Kafka, can be described as minor precisely

because they are written in such a way that what they say is not located within a speaking

subject” (qtd. in Colebrook 310). In her analysis of Joyce’s earlier story, “A Painful

Case,” Colebrook points to the political voice that opens the story, one that embodies the

rhetoric of Dublin’s consciousness: “Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he

wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he

found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious” (qtd. in Colebrook

310). The voice is not contained within quotes and is political she says, not because it

“expresses a political message but because its mode of articulation takes voice away from

the speaking subject to an anonymous or pre-personal saying” (310). In other words, the

impersonal is more political or universal.

Ulysses contains many moments of such anonymous articulations. For example,

chapter 17 (“Ithaca”), takes the form of an impersonal catechism, with a question and

answer format in block form; chapter 15 (“Circe”), is structured as a play, with titles of

the speakers directly preceding the spoken lines; chapter 13 (“Nausicaa”), while not

6 
anonymous, still contributes to the novel’s shifting feeling as the narrative is shared

between the two perspectives of Gerty MacDowell and Leopold Bloom. As Colebrook

points out, the narratives of Joyce’s earlier work already explore the use of a voice

through which a national consciousness can speak. Ulysses could be said to possess

elements of a collective national voice, although these elements are often difficult to

fathom due to the surrounding parody or their subversion as a result of Joyce’s critical

stance on his country’s notions of nationality and mythic grandeur at the time of its

writing.

Ulysses tends to be upheld as a model for theoretical discussions. It is perfect for

discussions such as minor literature and has collected a substantial record of scholarship

owing to its aesthetics but also to its enormous range of content. Its motifs are often

difficult to trace among the magnitude of detail. Various characters and objects emerge,

disappear, and re-emerge throughout its chapters, the manner of which results in a

piecemeal issuance of information. In this sense, motifs only become apparent when read

from the beginning to the end of the novel. One such motif that will be discussed later in

chapter 5, and part of Joyce’s formulation of one version of his epiphanies, is the bat.

Other motifs include the advertisement of Plumtree’s Potted Meat (discussed in chapter

6), which finds its way through multiple chapters, and the ever present, yet deceased,

Patrick Dignam. These motifs surface in the minds of Joyce’s characters and reveal the

potency of memory, consciousness (both personal and national) and internal dialogues, a

quality thoroughly modern and apart from the simpler specific storytelling narratives of

earlier epics.

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 In conjunction with his prose techniques, Joyce engages in allusive practices,

utilizing codes existing within the epic tradition. As such, Joyce - and Ulysses - engages

in “poetic memory,” the term used by Italian philologist John Biagio Conte to denote

allusion, with the added emphasis on a privileging of the moment of intentionality during

the poet’s use of allusion (Conte 27). With the assistance of concepts derived from

twentieth and twenty-first century philology, Joyce’s allusive processes can be analyzed.

Importantly, Ulysses has an advantage over classical and medieval epic works in that it is

not as restricted in its choice and range of styles and allusive material. A diachronic look

at the epic predictably casts allusive processes in earlier works as more limited, whereas

the later epics, romances and others works of the late medieval and early modern era by

writers such as Francois Rabelais, Torquato Tasso, Luís Vaz de Camões, Edmund

Spenser and John Milton are able to employ a wider range of allusive possibilities in

terms of content. The allusive practices in their work function in accordance with the

epic codes and norms that they engage with, utilize and modify. In order to provide a

fuller picture of the historicity involving poetic practices with respect to epic, the next

section will discuss early epic authorship.

Early Epic Authorship and Dynamics of Appropriation

Epic texts pre-dating classical works exist as early as 1700 B.C.E. (Gilgamesh)

and 1200 B.C.E. in the Babylonian Epic of Creation. In its earliest forms, the defining

characteristics of the epic structure are, at least partially, those meant to facilitate its oral

nature: the lyrical nature of the verse and the repetitive use of “stock words,” words

meant to assist in remembering the details. Those forms appear between 3500 and 4000

8 
B.C.E. and, from these fragments, according to Paul Innes, the epic “gives a sense of

emerging literary traditions” and “stories, including the epic, act as templates to be varied

according to local interpretations” (3). What is most remarkable about the emergence of

these early epic prototypes is that they already reveal a process of appropriation and

revision: “Right from the beginning of the history of the epic, then, there is interplay

across culturally defined notions of authority as these narratives migrate and are

reinvented” (Innes 3). This process of appropriation and revision will be conveyed orally

and can be seen by the presence of heroic markers in epics such as Gilgamesh that will

subsequently convey to the Homeric model:

The great gods created the structure of Unug, the handiwork of the

gods, and of Eana, the house lowered down from heaven. You

watch over the great rampart, the rampart which An founded. You

are its king and warrior, an exuberant person. (ETCSL)

Already evident in Gilgamesh are identifiers such as heroic attributes, the perilous

journey, divine intervention, the superhuman hero and other features such as extended

similes and the three-fold repetition of dreams. Thus, thousands of years before the

Roman epic, there are such formulae as the warrior, with his formidable strength, and the

handiwork of the gods.

Concerning early pre-Homeric epic models, W. R. Johnson notes the following

features: an accompanying lengthy recitation of information pertaining to history,

persons of note, places of renown and other facts that the audience grew to expect during

the telling of the tale. More specifically, “what the audiences wanted from their epic

improvisers was a sort of encyclopedic inevitability cast in narrative form, a record of

9 
whatever information they needed to survive and thrive, a collection of such information

stored in and retrievable from professional poets and their poems” (27). Johnson labels

this info-divulging genre as both “informational epic” (consisting of both the

safeguarding and display of the epic as info on request) and “living encyclopedia” (28).

This encyclopedic nature of the oral epic manages to carry on and reinvent itself across

centuries to re-emerge as a tendency in medieval authors to incorporate “lists” in the

medieval era, also a byproduct of the early medieval importance of amplification. Listing

and cataloguing partially comprise such works as Erasmus Desiderius’ The Praise of

Folly, Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

and, later, the exorbitant listing found in Ulysses.

The Iliad and Odyssey are the foundational epics that all early Roman and later

European writers will look to in order to model their own work after and both were

widely imitated in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Dating to the late 8th or early 7th

century B.C.E., their basic structural features will become widely imitated. Oddly

enough, there is some consensus that the language of the Homeric poems is one that is

“artificial and poetic,” (Knox, The Iliad 11) and a hodgepodge of

archaisms – of vocabulary, syntax and grammar – and of

incongruities: words and forms drawn from different dialects and

different stages of the growth of the language. In fact, the

language of Homer was one nobody, except epic bards, oracular

priests or literary parodists would dream of using. (Knox, The Iliad

11)

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The possibility exists that early epics were products of earlier ballads sewn together in

order to form one full work. In contrast to later critics’ view of the Homeric verse,

Aristotle praises the poems’ rhetoric. Adopting the idea of mimesis from Plato, a concept

that had already been around in Greek culture for a long time, Aristotle “found imitation

natural to man” (Newman 39). He had definitive ideas about the qualities that gave the

epic its greatness, including mimesis. His Poetics is considered to be foundational, the

earliest commentary on literary study that has proved influential in classical times up

through the present. In chapter 24’s comparative discussion on simplicity and

complexity inherent in epic poetry and tragedy, Aristotle states:

In epic, there is also a necessity for reversals, recognitions, and the

depiction of suffering. Here too, thought and diction must be handled with

skill. Homer used all these elements first and in a proper way. For each

of his poems is well constructed; the Iliad is simple and exhibits suffering,

whereas the Odyssey is complex (for there is recognition throughout) and

shows character. In addition to these matters, Homer outstrips all others in

diction and thought. (Poetics 77)

He also identifies various aspects of the improvisation that sets Homer apart from other

poets in his era: “And just as Homer was especially the poet of noble actions (for he not

only handled these well but he also made his imitations dramatic), so also he first traced

out the form of comedy by dramatically presenting not invective but the ridiculous”

(Poetics 65-66). Finally, Aristotle praises him for his imitative techniques and

“speak[ing] in his own person in the poem as little as possible,” (78) which would defeat

his position as an imitator. Despite his laudatory work on the subject of Homer’s epic,

11 
and on its traits “unified and grand in style and [its] subject matter” (44), there is

evidence that the epic form has been abandoned and then revived at some points – for

example, at the end of the 5th century (Newman 44).

The poet seen by history as second to Homer in popularity, if not technique, is

Hesiod. In Ion, Socrates proclaims “Now you assert that Homer and the other poets,

among them Hesiod and Archillochus, all treat of the same subjects, yet not all in the

same fashion, but the one speaks well, and the rest of them speak worse” (Plato 40).

Plato subtly explores the notion of Hesiod as “one of the others,” and Longinus, in his

essay on the sublime, sees fit to contrast a descriptive line from Hesiod (one that he finds

to be “rather loathsome”) to the elevated diction of Homer’s, one in which “Homer

magnifies the higher powers” (101). A large part of this critical consensus is reinforced

by Greek culture’s (and the Aristotelian) viewpoint that tragedy is the highest genre to

aspire to and, as Richard P. Martin notes, “. . . Homeric poetry is best because it more

closely approaches tragic drama” (qtd. in Innes 31).

The Pindar-influenced poet Callimachus, in an attempt to engage with Homer’s

work after it became subject to a corrupted appropriation by other poets in the

Alexandrian era, found it necessary to revisit the work of Hesiod due to the fact that it

offered a range of new material and a new code (Newman 19 and 516). His interest lay

not in narrative or dramatic poetry but in “an arresting, amusing or piquant moment . . . .

[m]odernization, familiarity, brevity, lightness, variety, rapid transition, episodic

curtailment, the startling treatment of detail – all of these were part of the new

Callimachean manner” (Otis 5-6). There is some consensus, by Susan Stephens, that,

along with Appollonius and Theocritus, Callimachus reworked Greek poetry to write new

12 
verse for the court of the Egyptian king, Ptolemy II (c 284 BCE) (Stephens 12-17).

According to Stephens, humor and realism were important to him and the reworking of

Greek mythologies to suit the Ptolemaic court was part of the poet’s aesthetic. She also

identifies deliberate “moments of rupture” in his crafting of verse that seems repetitive

and, as other critics complain, devoid of substance in favor of rigid formalism.

At the same time, Stephen Hinds, in his exploration of the Alexandrian footnote

(labeled as such by scholar David Ross), has brought attention to the fact that poets in the

Alexandrian era, such as Callimachus, were making pronounced references in their verse

through “appeals to tradition and report, such as ‘as the story goes’ (fauna est), ‘they

relate’ (ferunt) or ‘it is said’ (dicitur)” (Hinds 2). The point of all of this, according to

Hinds, is in the rote nature of the usage and such usage as a marker – he terms it the

“Catallan dicuntur” - as a simple reflexive citation, a way of a poet denoting oneself a

scholar (2). In this respect, we can see that the earliest use of allusion is sometimes a

simpler allusive marker, designed to emulate common poetic practice of the time for the

simple purpose of invoking the work of another poet but not necessarily to connote any

particular work or memory.

An example of use of the dicuntur will be seen in chapter 5 during Stephen’s

speech on fertilization and fantastic pregnancies at the Holles Street Maternity Hospital,

one that responds to Dante’s Purgatorio 25. Joyce’s use of the dicuntur enables him to

engage in a dialogue (through Stephen’s dialogue) with both Dante and Virgil, thereby

entering into a negotiation of authority.

Horace, and his 476 line Ars Poetica (10-8 B.C.E.), the longest of his poems, is

important to classical literary criticism. As with Roman poetry’s inheritance of Greek

13 
models, Ars Poetica counts as its influences technical material from the Greeks as well as

ideas contained in the work of Quintilian and Cicero and it holds that poetry should both

instruct and provide pleasure at the same time (Hadas 182). It deserves a place in any

discussion concerning classical literature and theory’s legacy to twentieth century

modernism. His other works – the Epodes (iambi), Satires (Sermones), and Odes – all

afford him a reputation of a great lyric poet, although the Epodes, with their experimental

nature, are the work that serve “as the index of the origin and growth of Horace’s lyric

style” (Hadas 165). Similar to Joyce’s use of various rhetorical styles and parody, the

Epodes constitute a mix of themes and styles, with some displaying a mock approach to

the message. For example, Epode 17 is a “mock recantation of the satire against

witchcraft” (Hadas 166). Horace’s suggestions on the craft of poetry contain sentiments

that resonate with the modernist aesthetic of recycling material. The below selection is

from his letter to the Piso brothers, themselves invested in the study of poetry, and also

includes various snippets about the suitability of genre-specific form, tone, and

consistency.

In weaving your words, make use of care and good taste:

You’ve done it right, if a clever connection of phrases makes a

good old word look new. If you have to display some recondite

matter in brand new terms, you can forge

Words never heard in the pre-tunic days of Cathegus. (85)

Horace’s message, which is actually quite modernist, points to an evolving aesthetic of

appropriation and modification. He emphasizes the nature of poetic art as “a capacity for

objective self-criticism” as well as “a practiced mastery of a craft [and] as a systematic

14 
knowledge of theory and technique” (Leitch 122). By Horace’s time then, there is

already a marked allusive aesthetic at work in Latin authorship that encompasses epic

poetry and the ancillary dialogues regarding the theory and technique concerning its

creation. Equally as important is “decorum . . . [as well as] copying the techniques and

strategies of one’s accomplished literary predecessors” (Leitch 11).

It is clear that Horace occupies Joyce’s thoughts by adolescence, with his

schoolboy translation of the Horatian ode “O fons Bandusiae” into English (Schork 144).

Plenty of pun-like or otherwise modified quotations from Finnegans Wake and Ulysses

derive from Horace. Sometimes, as is the case with other moments in Ulysses, Joyce

merges the Horatian phrase with another allusion to create a new, complex meaning. The

artistry in Joyce’s use of Horatian allusions operates on two levels: the first is the level

of the word, of etymology and language and a choice to interact for the (often playful)

sake of authorial experimentation and the second is praxis. As Schork explains, Joyce is

creating neologisms or puns – using Horatian words to do so - as a nod to Horace’s

dictum to the Pisones to “search for the callida iunctura (clever verbal connections) that

would transform diction by placing familiar words in arresting and extraordinary

collocation” (153).2 While Horace is not the only one to own the distinction of creating

neologisms or engaging in word play, this early legacy of making clever connections and

creating something new undoubtedly has influenced Joyce’s artistic choices.

                                                            
2
Elsewhere the term “callida inunctura” is glossed as “skillful combination” and as a doctrine “which is of
far-reaching importance in the tradition of European poetry, no least in Virgil” (Newman 56).
15 
Primary and Secondary Epic (Oral and Literary)

In Joyce’s adaptation of the Homeric frame, he is using traces of an epic defined

by an oral tradition, but one that also serves as the most popular and original Greek

model in western culture. It is partially from this model that Joyce takes the basic image

of the wanderer, extended voyage, and homecoming. Against the frame of implied

events such as Odysseus’ visits to various islands, his descent to the underworld, and the

transformation of Odysseus’ men into animals, Bloom visits taverns, attends a funeral

and rescues Stephen – and himself - from the clutches of Bella Cohen.

In his 1967 study, From Virgil to Milton, Cyril Bowra notes the differences in the

Homeric and Virgilian models. Homer’s The Odyssey is built upon narratives laden with

repetition and structurally given to a “looseness of construction” that “might be used for

piecemeal recitations and [which] must be ready for them,” as it was commonplace to

recite only portions of the epic at a time (4). Analyzing the composition of the Homeric

and Virgilian models, Bowra notes the following qualities in each:

Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a

whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the singleness of his

effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the

concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed

without irrelevant or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into

bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is

obvious at first sight. (5)

It is this similar fancy, and similar oral classification, that places Homer’s epic in the

same league as “Beowulf, the Song of Roland and a large mass of Jugoslav lays” (Bowra

16 
5). Even later, in the work of Rabelais, Fischart, and Nashe, “the oral art of the

storyteller remained incalculably strong” (Weiman 3). Both the oral and the written

format transfer their structure features but the following quote reveals that written

transfer enables a more facile improvisation:

In oral poetry, the matter of the song and the art of recitation are handed

down from bard to bard, presumably through sustained personal contact.

In literary epic, the new poet signals participation in the epic tradition by

imitating formal, thematic, and stylistic elements of previous epics, so that

an informed reader may readily sense the relation between old and new.

(Gregory 439)

Whereas Homer’s work is defined by the immediacy and pronounced character of

his hero, Virgil’s epic is entirely different. His seminal work, The Aeneid, appropriates

the Homeric structure: the first six books are modeled on The Odyssey, while the second

six of the twelve are modeled on The Iliad. A fable of the events leading up to the

founding of Rome, The Aeneid was written as a means to celebrate the rule of Augustus

Caesar, but takes as its subject a distant set of events, discrete and removed from the time

space of Virgil’s present day empire. Bowra states:

The truly heroic ideal and standards of conduct did not exist for the writers

of the literary epic. [. . .] When he [Virgil] took the traditional epic form,

he had to adapt it to the changed conditions of his own day. Between him

and his heroic models lay a vast tract of history. He looked to the past for

inspiration but his work was invariably shaped by the present. (10)

17 
 The intrinsic quality in Virgil’s epic that became just as important to Camões,

Tasso and Milton was an attempt to “write a poem about something much larger than the

destinies of individual heroes, [and] he created a type of epic in which the characters

represent something outside themselves, and the events displayed have other interests

than their immediate excitement in the context” (Bowra 15). The implication we can

derive from the language in this statement is that the epic took on, with Virgil, a quality

more communal (with respect to empire) and universal rather than individual. In

addition, there is an emphasis on connecting the past with the present:

He sought to provide a poem on the Roman character by linking his

fabulous hero Aeneas to his living patron, Augustus, to bracket past and

present in a single whole, and to give a metaphysical unity to Rome by

displaying the abilities which had made it great in its own day and had

existed in it from the beginning. His first aim is to the praise the present,

but the present is too actual, too complex and too familiar to provide the

material of his poem. (Bowra 15)

As did the Greek poets preceding him, Virgil works within an allusive frame,

finding it necessary to respond to the work of other poets. As Paul Innes notes in Epic,

Virgil inflects his work with a very precise literary posture, a

developmental form of authorial identity that he finds in his immediate

predecessor, Lucretius (c. 100-50 BCE). In Virgil’s formulation, the poet

represents himself as self-consciously elaborating his craft, experimenting

with different devices until he attains the apogee of the epic form. (10)

18 
He was so important to Dante that he was cast in the role of constant companion – a

witness, guide and mentor throughout The Commedia. The move was also a calculated

endeavor for Dante to invest himself with literary credence and authority. There are

strains of “sweetness” in Virgil’s poetry that suggest Dante’s dolce stil novo poetry was

written after the poet’s close consideration of Virgil’s nature verse in order to formulate a

poetics.

Each epic poet appropriates or eschews structural elements, styles, techniques and

allusions from his predecessors. The Aeneid’s major revision to the epic’s genre is

Virgil’s appropriation and modification of the Homeric structure in order to focus on

Rome’s past. According to Paul Innes, “Virgil clothes the literary epic tradition he

inherits from the Greeks in the garb of Roman Imperialism. Since the poem is produced

at the moment of the political shift from republic to empire, The Aeneid reworks the

founding myth of the Roman people” (10). Like other epics, his is stocked with classical

mythology and makes use of epic formulae.

Impressed by Virgil’s Roman epic, Luiz Vaz de Camões creates a Portuguese epic

and takes as his hero Vasco da Gama. Like Torquato Tasso, his Os Lusiadas, published

in 1572, is influenced by his readings of Petrarch. Camões’ aesthetic is largely

influenced by his travel at sea and “[m]aritime expansion and travel, the historical

backdrop of sixteenth century Portugal, exercise an influence on the metaphors and the

real and imagined experiences of the Camonian poetic subject” (Blackmore 1089). His

frame, per Cyril Bowra, is the First Crusade (15) and he is a keen study of Virgil, taking

the similes he reads in Homer and Virgil and reinventing them (Bowra 107). Fanciful

elements pervade his work, an inheritance from his readings of Matteo Boiardo and

19 
Ludovico Ariosto. From his readings of Ariosto’s “marvelous landscapes and magical

gardens” (Bowra 127), Camões creates a ten stanza paradisiacal scene for his Island of

Loves (Bowra 127). This, despite the fact that the adaption of fanciful themes from the

poets led at times to a conflict with his “grave and heroic subject” (Bowra 127). Ariosto

uses jewels for flowers; Camões fills his island with the real flowers of his native

Portugal (Bowra 127-128). Bowra notes that Camões instead “paints the landscape of his

own country as he saw it with the homesick eyes of exile” (128). Camões, like Dante, is

exiled from his native country for almost twenty years, although Dante was never able to

return to Florence. Similarly, Joyce lives under a self-imposed exile. Able to return to

Ireland but unable to live there. Like Joyce, Camões draws material from his country,

preferring to capture its native landscape within his epic. Joyce, of course, will continue

to write of Ireland landscape and cityscape, with the assistance of others providing him

with names and other details.

Just as Camões’ imitation of Virgil results in a Christian epic, Tasso takes the

Crusades as a frame for his Gerusalemme Liberate and like Os Lusiadas, his work is a

fanciful romance. However, Camões is a seasoned traveler who has experienced warfare

and rough times, while Torquato Tasso writes from the shelter of Alfonso II’s (Duke of

Ferrara) court. Tasso’s poetry reflects the difference, despite the fact that he and Camões

publish only a few years apart3. Even though both aspire to the Virgilian model, have

received excellent classical educations and use the meter ottava rima, their sensibilities in

terms of the content of their works differ (Bowra 139). As well, Tasso’s language is

                                                            
3
Os Lusiadas is published three years prior to Tasso’s epic.
20 
somewhat more elevated and learned rather than Camões’ native Portuguese. On Tasso,

Michael André Bernstein notes:

One general principle, formulated by Torquato Tasso in his Discorso

Primo . . . [is that] Tasso insists upon what is basically an affective or

intentional distinction between the epic and tragedy: in his view, the

principal emotion aroused by an epic should be admiration for some

distinguished achievement, or noble character-trait, rather than the pity

and fear (l’orrore e la compassione”) proper to tragedy. (qtd. in

Dasenbrock 258)

This somewhat contradicts the material that is contained in The Aeneid, since there are

emotional moments. But where Tasso falters, according to Bowra, is in his naivety in

matters of the world and the grounds for the crusade in his epic are unfounded.

Patronage, as well, plays a large influence in Tasso’s writing as he has spent a good

portion of his early years (his father had been in residence) at Ferrara’s house. There,

chivalrous epic “had become a prerogative and Tasso was both expected and prepared to

provide it” (141). Tasso is a product of the Counter-Reformation and Bowra describes

Ferrara’s court as a kind of carefree island of non-acquiescence to French or Spanish

interference, with a tendency toward an atmosphere of make believe in their northern

Italian sphere (142). In the next century, epic poems written by women will include

Enrico, or Byzantium Conquered (Lucrezia Marinella), Judith (Marie de Calages) and the

creation poem Order and Disorder (Lucy Hutchinson) (Gregory 443).

The presence and awareness of poetic theory and analysis of technique continues

through each century. Evidence of the same “make it new” sensibility that emerges in

21 
antiquity and dominates twentieth century modernism can also be found in Geoffrey of

Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova (or “New Poetic”), a guide written in the late twelfth to early

thirteenth century. At once a poem and treatise on poetry, it models its treatise structure

on Horace’s Ars Poetica. Vinsauf uses Horace’s treatise-structured frame to carry his

own commentary on poetics, and “just as his ‘new’ poetics reconceives and revises

Horatian poetics, so aspiring poets . . . best imitate tradition when they renew and refresh

it” (Leitch 226). Remarking upon Joyce’s formative arts, including the schema and other

“rules” that he has placed upon the construction of Ulysses, Umberto Eco notes:

With the same sovereign disinterest, the genius for formalism, the

irreverent and unfair familiarity with the auctoritas that marks the good

commentators of the schools of medieval theology (always ready to find in

Saint Chrysostom or in Saint Jerome an expression adequate to justify the

philosophical solution that appears to be most reasonable), Joyce asks the

authority of the medieval Order to guarantee the existence of the new

world that he had discovered. (46).

The interesting proposition here is Eco’s assertion that Joyce, in formulating an epic

based upon rules and ordering associated with the medieval era, asks the medieval Order

to guarantee the existence of his new world. Living in self-imposed exile and a non-

practicing Catholic, Joyce has a distaste for authority and no need for it from country nor

church. While he would clearly realize the request for and attempts to obtain authority by

classical poets in the textual realm (through a dialogue of allusive practices), it is hard to

say from his writing how much of a sense of authority he receives from the allusive

appropriation and modification of others’ works. Joyce does not live in the dangerous

22 
conditions of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation and yet Eco notes that Vinsauf or

Mathieu de Vendôme, “theorists of the poetry of the twelfth century, would have been

happy with the iron-clad rules that support the discourse of Ulysses” (47). In terms of the

order that Joyce instills in Ulysses’ structure, Eco also sees the irony in its resistance to

order, admitting that Ernst Curtius “notes a metaphysical nihilism at the root, where

macrocosm and microcosm are fused in the void” (44). Noting Dante’s undeniable

influence, “Richard Blackmur mentions that unlike Dante, who gives order to things,

Joyce presents a type of nihilism in an irrational order” (44).

Whatever order or disorder Joyce displays in Ulysses, he participates in the

appropriation and modification of epic codes, a subset of which is the allusion

(metaphor). A discussion of epic codes and epic norms can be found in the next section.

Epic Codes and Epic Norms

An important underpinning of my premise is supported by concepts and terms

offered primarily in the work of scholars Giorgio Pasquali and Gian Biagio Conte, or

those other scholars who write alongside of their work. Pasquali contributes ideas

formulated in his studies of allusion in the work of Callimachus’ Questions (Quaestiones

Callimachae, 1913) and Horace’s Odes (Orazio Lirico Studi, 1920). According to

Heather Van Tress, Pasquali’s work is the first to confront allusion as an artistic

phenomenon, in general (11).4 Conte focuses his studies mostly in the late Augustan era

and has published works and articles on Virgil, Lucretius and Ovid. Other critics have

since picked up the thread of Pasquali and Conte’s work and their subsequent endeavors

                                                            
4
Previous works by de Jan (1893), Perrotta (1924-26) and Herter (1929) focus more specifically on
singular examples of allusion (Van Tress 11).
23 
have informed closer readings of Hellenistic, Neoteric, and Augustan poetries, readings

which have discovered more specific aspects of emulation and imitation. These aspects

include inconsistencies, allusive processes involving authentication, and, in a parallel

movement, text-centered studies that investigate authorship in terms of written choices as

a process of peer related dynamics.

Conte defines the “epic code” as the “objective narrative structure” of the epic

genre, or the stock features that identify the epic as such (Segal 13). For example,

“heroic combat, divine interventions, extended similes, and so forth” (Segal 13). The “so

forth” part of the equation may refer to the lengthy journey, katabasis, the earthly

paradise, prophecy, the invocation to the deity, catalogues, games, and forms of

digression. Epic norms “refer to the cultural contents with which a poet in a given

society will fill that narrative grammar, the ideology that the particular realization of the

epic code will convey” (Conte 13). Segal, in his introduction to Conte, describes part of

the reason why Virgil was the supreme poet that subsequent epic poets looked to as a

model:

Virgil exploits the endlessly rich combinations and choices in the epic

code to broaden the Roman epic norm. The unitary viewpoint of Homeric

epic implies a unitary perspective on the events narrated in the poem and

an absolute standard of heroic values; Virgil introduces a multiplicity of

points of view and thereby relativizes the epic norm. He thus undermines

one of the essential attributes of epic in the classical tradition, its unifying

interpretation and condensation of cultural values in mythic poetry. (14)

24 
What Segal refers to as the “absolute standard of heroic values,” is something that Virgil,

in his own time, cannot relate to. Instead, “Virgil abandons the scheme of life by which

the hero lives and dies for his own glory, and replace a personal by a social ideal” (Bowra

13). Additionally, “[a]bove all, he made it contain almost a philosophy of life and death,

a view of the universe which answered many desires in the heart of man and provided an

impressive background to the new ideal” (Bowra 13). Virgil wants to create an epic

containing a more complex range of involvement and emotions for his characters, such as

the dilemma that Dido faces, and which would amount to more than a series of activities

centered upon glory and heroic courage.

Virgil infuses The Aeneid with a Roman-centric sensibility and history while

engaging in the poetic appropriative and revisionist tradition. Virgil is indebted to the

intricacies of classical Greek and Roman epic and non-epic poetry for their contribution

to epic creation and revisionary poetics. He himself will replace the unitary Homeric

viewpoint in The Aeneid as follows:

The unitary viewpoint of Homeric epic implies a unitary perspective on

the events narrated in the poem and an absolute standard of heroic values;

Virgil introduces a multiplicity of points of view and thereby relativizes

the epic norm. He thus undermines one of the essential attributes of epic

in the classical tradition, its unifying interpretation and condensation of

cultural values in mythical poetry. Virgil meets this task by rebuilding the

epic code, widening its flexibility by the intertextual references to the

whole epic tradition, from the Iliad to Ennius’s Annales. The result is a

new ‘polyphonic’ epic that not only incorporates multiple viewpoints but

25 
 even allows contradiction and incoherence as a fundamental part of its

multilayered texture. (Conte 13-14)

The statement implies that, in Virgil’s writerly process, the incorporation (whether

intended or not) of contradiction and incoherence is novel or game changing. However,

more recent scholarship suggests that many works preceding those of Virgil are filled

with contradiction and inconsistencies, inconsistencies that have often been explained

away by scholars who were searching for unity and did not consider that they could be

deliberate or reflective of the ignorance in speakers other than the primary narrator.5

Either way, Joyce, after reading Virgil’s epic and various novels, also utilizes a

multiplicity of viewpoints, within an even more radically structured frame. Ulysses

contains undependable and sometimes unidentified narrators. More significantly, it

enables the increased textuality and display of the human mind through the internal

monologue, the transition of thoughts and feelings in a linear progression. This style of

writing is enabled by the advent of the novel.

In addition to his definition of epic codes and norms above, Conte draws upon

Giorgio Pasquali’s notions of “allusive artistry” or “art of allusion” (24) in order to

examine appropriative citation. For example, poets such as Callimachus and Virgil write

in response to their predecessors, an elaborate textual dialogue that informs authority and

reinforces or modifies mythical elements of the genre. Allusion, according to Conte, acts

as a rhetorical trope, basically metaphor:

Allusion, I suggest, functions like the trope of classical rhetoric. A

rhetorical trope is usually defined as the figure created by dislodging of a

                                                            
5
See Sean Gurd, Literary Revision as Social Process in Ancient Rome, 2011.
26 
 term from its old sense and its previous usage and by transferring to a

new, improper, or “strange” sense and usage. The gap between the letter

and the sense in figuration is the same as the gap produced between the

immediate, surface meaning of the word or phrase in the text and the

thought evoked by the allusion. The effect could also be described as a

tension between the literal and the figurative meaning, between the

‘verbum proprium’ and the ‘improprium.’ In both allusion and the trope,

the poetic dimension is created by the simultaneous presence of two

different realities whose competition with one another produces a single

more complex reality. Such literary allusion produces the simultaneous

coexistence of both a denotative and connotative semiotic. (23-24)

An allusion (citation), then, acts the same as a metaphor, where a word comes to be

known as possessing an additional or replacement value in terms of signification. In

areas, the fabric of Ulysses is densely allusive – so much so that it is difficult to

determine the number of allusions within one sentence. Joyce often creates single

sentences composed of two or more allusive fragments.

Historically there have been two kinds of allusive appropriations: imitative and

emulative. Imitative citation (imitatio) is the simpler gesture of copying material from

one’s predecessor into the poem or novel. Emulative citation (aemulatio) is best

described as a process “more complicated, [requiring] that the writer attempt to surpass

his model in some way. He might find fault with a passage and try to improve upon it in

his own work, or he might add to it in a way he finds unique, or both” (Van Tress 7-8).

Pasquali’s focus, according to Conte, centers too much on emulative practices in poetry,

27 
those instances “where the allusion stands primarily in a relationship of . . . competition

with and improvement over the original” (26). Rather than focus on how poets “best”

one another through citation, Conte is interested in allusive processes as a poetic method.

To Pasquali, the meaning contained in poetry’s citations was key to understanding the

text as “he maintained fiercely that no interpretation of an art form was possible unless

one recovered and reconstructed its specific cultural identity and exact cultural context in

all its historical density” (qtd. in Conte 24). Conte’s sensibility in approaching referential

readings is a careful one: “One text may resemble another not because it derives directly

from it nor because the poet deliberately seeks to emulate but because both poets have

recourse to a common literary codification” (28). The issue of such a potential trap is

addressed by Stephen Hinds, who points to scholars Jeffrey Wills6 and K. Morgan7 for

further reading regarding the issue.

Materially inert elements (or static allusions) can, Conte claims, fulfill a purpose,

one of imbuing a passage with authority. However, scholarship concerning the

significance or weight of specific allusions reveals that markers denoting allusion can

range from those that appear token to others that create varying layers of meaning in a

text. For example, in Conte’s comparative reading of similar passages in book 14 of

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ovid’s Fasti, and Quintus Ennius’ much earlier Annales, below,

he finds different motivations in Ovid’s references to his own work and that of Ennius:

“One day at a meeting of the gods – I call it to mind, and have recorded

your devoted words in my remembering heart – you said, ‘There will be

one whom you will lift up into the blue spaces of the sky.’ Fulfill your

                                                            
6
Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion
7
Ovid’s Art of Imitation: Propertius in the Amores
28 
 promise now.” With a nod of his head, the all-powerful consented.

([Metamorphoses 14.812-16] qtd. in Conte 37)

The passage above, which contains similar but condensed language in the passage from

Fasti, below, recalls Mars’s reminder to Jupiter of his earlier promise to immortalize

Mars’s human son, Romulus:

“O Jupiter” – he said – “the power of Rome is now strong and safe; it no

longer needs the help of my son. Give him back to his father. Although

one killed the other, the one who is left will be worth both. You told me,

‘There will be one whom you will lift up into the blue spaces of the sky.’

Fulfill your words now, O Jupiter.” With a nod of his head, Jupiter

consented. ([Fasti 2.483-89] qtd. in Conte 38).

Both quotations, while not identical, contain Ennius’ quote, verbatim:

“There will be one whom you will lift up into the blue spaces of the sky”

([Annales 65 Vahlen] qtd. in Conte 38).

The top quote contains the memory of a previous meeting of divine counsel, a

meeting which is literally contained in another text. In this sense, Ovid ties together the

two citations in order to make the promise that much more powerful. However, the

appropriation of the single sentence citation from Ennius seems in no way to contribute to

the poetic ambiguity that Conte explains can derive from allusive pairings, nor does it

add additional depth of meaning to Ovid’s passages. That, according to Conte, does not

matter, as “[t]he aim is not an act of semantic enrichment capable of loading a sign with

an extra meaning valid in itself and for itself within the text” (58). Instead, he offers, the

quote is effective because “Ennius had already written it, so that it already possessed an

29 
independent ‘auctoritas’ (authority). Jupiter had “really” made the promise because

Ennius had said so in his great national epic” (59). The result of the combination of the

three quotes, then, is that Ovid creates a moment in Metamorphoses the complete

meaning of which is contingent upon the earlier described moment from Fasti. Ovid

further invests the moment with authority by relating back to his own previous text –

situating himself as an authority - but also invests the passage with the authority of

Ennius.

There are many variations on the term “allusion” in philological studies. Conte

discusses two types of allusion (poetic memory). An understanding of these concepts

first requires an introduction to the three basic components of the metaphor/trope: the

tenor, vehicle and ground. Adopted from I. A. Richards’ Principles of Literary

Criticism, by Conte and R. Garner8 for use in their own work, the terms “tenor,”

“vehicle,” and “ground,” represent the individual pieces involved in the assembling of a

metaphor (trope) as follows: the tenor represents the pre-existing object (or idea) that

would be the first part of the simile, the vehicle is the substitute for it or the thing that the

tenor is compared to and, finally, the ground represents the possibilities of meaning that

lie between the merger or alignment of the two.

The three terms also extend their properties to citation where one text alludes to

another. These terms, Van Tress writes,

have been applied to allusions as well. The primary text is the tenor, the

text alluded to the vehicle, what the two texts share is the ground, and

some ungrammaticality, some gap in meaning forces the reader to stop and

                                                            
8
See Garner, From Homer to Tragedy. The Art of Allusion in Greek Poetry.
30 
 consider the text more carefully, hopefully coming to a deeper

understanding of what has been read. (10)9

For example, in Purgatorio 10, Dante and Virgil must proceed along an upward path

between “cracked rocks”:

Our upward pathway ran between cracked rocks;

They seemed to sway in one, then the other part,

Just like a wave that flees, then doubles back.

Here we shall need some ingenuity,”

My guide warned me, “as both of us draw near

This side or that side where the rock wall veers.”

This made our steps so slow and hesitant

That the declining moon had reached its bed

To sink back into rest, before we had

Made our way through that needle’s eye; (Purgatorio 7-16)

The tenor in the first line can be considered the written description of the pathway

between the cracked rocks leading to the first terrace of purgatory. The vehicle for that

particular tenor resides in the last line, “that needle’s eye,” which is actually a fragment

of a biblical text, that of Matthew 19:24. The ground is whatever meaning can be found

in the attachment of “the needle’s eye” to the “pathway. In this case, it can be the visual

nature of that is shared, of the cracked rocks’ opening and the space that is the needle’s

eye. According to Van Tress:

                                                            
9
Van Tress also notes that Conte’s theory of citation has some basis in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s concept of
the “intentional fallacy” (19).
31 
 The tenor, vehicle, and ground are all static elements of a metaphor, but

there is also a dynamic aspect that must be interpreted; this is called the

“gap,” “tension,” or “ungrammaticality.” This can be defined as the

failure of the statement on a literal level, or the puzzle that a metaphor

presents. The gap or ungrammaticality stops the flow of the narrative

because the reader must pause to make sense of it. (10)

In this particular case, we recognize that the pathway is compared to “the needle’s eye.”

The specific visual – and reference – triggers an awareness in the reader that there is

possibly an associated meaning attached to it. Particularly, the specific visual to “the

needle’s eye” gives the reader pause. This pause or puzzle is the gap. Those who have

biblical knowledge will make the leap that the pathway for the two travelers is difficult

not just due to its position but because of the implication of getting into a Heaven. As

Christ states to his disciples, “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go

through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”

(Matthew 19:24 qtd. in Mandelbaum Notes 339). Of course, Dante is the one who should

be concerned about getting into Heaven as Virgil has already been assigned his place in

Limbo.

The gap, tension or ungrammaticality, then, is a result of the interaction between

the three static elements described above. Conte, referring to the recognition of the

inherent meanings in allusive texts, states, “Knowledge of the ‘duplicity’ of such

discourse, in which the two different realities stretch a single poetic idea between

themselves, is knowledge of the gap between the letter and the ‘surplus’ of meaning it

shares” (54). While this diagram of the allusion is helpful in terms of conceptualizing the

32 
processes involved in the smaller units of metaphor or the larger engagements of textual

passages, it does not negate the complexity of the process involved in discerning the gap

or surplus of meaning. The section on integrative and reflective allusion, below, provides

a further frame for authorship as it relates to allusion; however, that frame is still a binary

model. The assessment of allusion is still a complex process, the nuances of which do not

necessarily fit into a neat binary frame.

Integrative and Reflective Allusion

As discussed above, the previous terms of tenor, vehicle and ground comprise the

three individual parts of a metaphor, as well as passages of text: the primary (tenor), the

allusion (vehicle) and the exchanged or shared meanings (ground). The fourth ingredient

of that combination is the dynamic aspect of the “gap,” “puzzle,” or “ungrammaticality.”

The terms imitative and emulative stand for the type of allusion used in allusive artistry.

Finally, the terms integrative allusion and reflective allusion, subsets of imitative and

emulative practices, respectively, represent the specific way that the allusion operates in

the text. Conte describes them as follows, starting with integrative:

In such cases of emulation, the literary process takes the form of a

superimposition of two poetic structures made possible by the desire for

fusion between them and involves integration.

During such a process, allusion is absorbed by the author, whose words

appear to be directly expressed by the author as individual directly

responsible for the new whole. The only alternative to such amalgamation

33 
 is the refraction of an earlier word in a later, because they belong to two

different poetic environments. (66)

Van Tress, following Conte, provides an example of integrative allusion from Catallus, as

follows:

“multas pergentes et multa per aequora vectus (“carried through many

peoples and many seas”)

Catallus, she writes, “compares the poet’s journey to visit and honor the grave of his

brother to that of Homer’s Odysseus,” – below:

[Odysseus] who wandered much after he destroyed the might city of Troy;

and he saw the cities of many people and learned their minds and on the

sea he suffered many sorrows in his heart. (The Odyssey 1.1-4)

She continues her examination by reviewing the following passage in which Virgil

“alludes to both the proem of the Odyssey as well as Catullus’ initial line. Anchises

greets his son Aeneas in the underworld:

I receive you carried through what lands and over how many seas”

(Aeneid 6.692-693).

Her interpretation is as follows:

Homer established the pattern of the well-travelled and long-suffering

hero, and Catullus casts himself as a second Odysseus in such a way that

the reader may make other connections between Catullus and the Homeric

hero: the general tragedy of the Trojan War and Odysseus’s nekyia.

Virgil’s Anchises then portrays his son as an Odysseus and a Catullus –

the heroic survivor and the kinsman coming to honor the dead. If we

34 
 approach these passages from a Pasqualian perspective, we might surmise

that both Catullus and Virgil seek to confront and compete with the

Homeric past. However, it seems that neither Catullus nor Virgil appears

to be attempting to compete with or surpass Homer. Instead, both poets

allude to the opening lines of the Odyssey in order to make the image of

Odysseus well up in the reader’s mind, and to enrich the verses of their

own poetry by infusing it with aspects of another poem. (16-17)

The discussions that Conte and Van Tress present on allusion highlight the

differences of integrative and reflective allusive authorship. Integrative citation involves

allusive practices where two texts “integrate” and enrich one another through evocation.

So there is a sharing of meaning, a window of further meaning that is opened. The end

result is that the allusion may also heighten one author’s sense (or status) of auctoritas,

by using the reference to invest one’s work with the threads of authority (the allusive

material). The status granted to the poet whose work is cited conveys to the author of the

new text who borrows. Despite the fact that both Conte and Van Tress wish to avoid a

solely reflective approach to allusion, it appears that it is the somewhat negative

connotation of reflective allusion, the challenge involved, that seems to be malleable in

their view.

In his scholarship on allusive practices in Roman poetry, Stephen Hinds has been

able to examine the validity of certain hermeneutical practices in philological studies

concerning allusion, highlighting in the process the range of citation practices in poetry

and the substance of their operative features. The practice of ferreting out the allusive

surplus in any citation always runs the risk of resulting in an integrative moment of the

35 
barest measure where, as Stephen Hinds notes, one discovers an “accidental confluence,”

or a seeming imitation of, or appropriation of, one artist’s work by another when in

reality, the allusive moment is really a byproduct of authors with recourse to a common

lexicon. The term is similar to a description proposed by D. A. West and A. J. Woodman

in 1979:

Similarities of word or thought or phrase can occur because writers are

indebted to a common source, or because they are describing similar or

conventional situations, or because their works belong to the same generic

type of poem. Only patient scholarship and a thorough familiarity with

the relevant material can reveal whether the similarities cannot be

explained by any of these three reasons. In such cases we may be fairly

certain that direct imitation of one author by another is taking place. (qtd.

in Hinds 19)

The three parts to the beginning of quote, above, constitute the accidental confluence.

Various citations can consist of lightweight duties in terms of their status as a vehicle. In

other words, the allusive fragment may be present for the specific purpose of invoking

the work of another poet (and thus invoking his mystique or authority in the appropriating

poet’s passage), and not necessarily serve as a nexus of complexity in terms of meaning.

Allusions can simply be a series of rhetorical flourishes, or stock ingredients that

are vacant, empty signifiers in terms of allusion. Stephen Hinds refers to the problem of

allusion as a “zone of zero-interpretability,” where the possibilities of reading the allusion

and tracing its path are next to impossible. Still, he invites caution in dismissing the

36 
possibility of some connotation as such a zone is fairly impossible, given the fact that

there is always some kind of reference usually involved, no matter how minimal (32-34)

Hinds’s examination of “accidental confluence” and instances of “finding

meaning where none exists” leads to an analysis of J. C. McKeown’s work on Propertius’

influence in Ovid’s Am. I.I.25-6 because:

me miserum! Ovid uses this exclamation 45 . . . times. It is not found in

Vergil, Horace or Tibullus (heu miserum! at 2.3.78), in Propertius only at

2.33B.35 and 3.23.19. It is fairly common in Comedy and rhetorical

prose; see TLL 8.1105.84ff . . . Ovid favours the idiom because it helps to

produce a lively style . . . Here, he is perhaps echoing and dramatising

Prop. I.I.I Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis. (McKeown qtd. in

Hinds 30)

He cites examples from Ovid and Cicero in order to illustrate the issue:

Here is Cicero on the emotive subject of exile, with one among more than

a dozen instances of exclamatory me miserum and miserum me in his

speeches and letters (Pro Milone 102 qtd. in Hinds 32):

O me miserum, o me infelicem! revocare tu me in patriam, Milo,

potuisti per hos . . .

O wretched me, o unhappy me! You, Milo, were able to call me

back to my country with the aid of these gentlemen . . . . (32)

To the strict student of allusion, an instance of perfect irrelevance to the

nexus centred on Ovid, Am. I.I.25. And yet, like any utterance, this me

miserum comes with a rich freight of cultural resonance; and it may be

37 
 instructive to resist, just for a moment, the philological sense of

discrimination which hears it as mere noise to be tuned out in order for the

allusive nexus centred on Am. I.I.25 to be tuned in. (Hinds 32)

The “noise” mentioned here by Hinds, the “rich freight of cultural resonance,” is a

distraction that can fool the reader and is urged by Hinds to be put aside. He next finds

the source for the phrase in Quintilian’s commentary on Pro Milone 102. “Ovid,” he

states, “is not of course alluding to the Pro Milone,” but is simply the common pool of

cultural discourses to which Ovid has recourse (Hinds 33).

The information presented thus far on allusion provides a series of definitions

and a very basic approach, derived from the philological studies of Roman poetry, which

can be used as a new way to examine Joyce’s work. There are other ideas presented by

such philological studies that may assist in this endeavor. Such allusive processes can

serve as a means to foreground a writer’s dialogue with earlier writers, the

announcement of innovative tendencies and newness (this can be seen in earlier Roman

poetry and undoubtedly influences Dante), and finally, the use of puns and sly exchanges

38 
 CHAPTER 2: JOYCE’S SYSTEM OF WORKING

In chapter 9 (“Scylla and Charybdis”), in his presentation of his Shakespeare

theory, Stephen Dedalus considers Ireland’s ability to produce an epic:

Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr. Sigerson says. Moore is the

man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a

saffron kilt? O’Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old

tongue. And his Dulceana? James Stephens is doing some clever

sketches. We are becoming important it seems. (Ulysses 9:309-313)

The irony, of course, is that Stephen considers such an idea while he exists as a character

in what will become Ireland’s definitive epic. Sigerson, in “Ireland’s Influence on

European Literature,” according to Don Gifford, “argues not that Ireland has never

produced an epic but that Irish influences have produced (among other works) the

Nibelungenlied and The Lay of Gudrun (“the Ililad and The Odyssey of Germany”),

Tristan and Isolde, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, several of Shakespeare’s plays, etc.” (214)

The statement implies that Irish culture has a potency about it, and the necessary

materials to form a national epic, but that these leanings have not come to fruition.

Further, Gifford explains, “Sigerson encourages the champions of the Irish literary

revival to produce epics because the epic traditions of Ireland are so rich” (214). Strains

of Don Quixote pervade the quote, above, as the “knight of the rueful countenance” and

“Dulceana,” are both references to Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. The

presence of Cervantes in Stephen’s thoughts reveals the necessary connection between

39 
the anticipation of writing and the consideration of influences that goes with it. This is

just one of many incidences in Ulysses where the character’s thoughts and deliberations

relegate Ulysses to a text that envisions, records and serves as a notebook for authorial

planning.

Ulysses’ contemplative development, its ability to conceive of itself through its

characters’ minds (effectively writing itself in the process), is enabled by the epic

tradition. Joyce’s epic interrogates the necessity of, and possibility of, a “national” epic,

as Sigerson puts it. Scholar Andras Ungar sees Ulysses as a fable. Ungar’s work is

concerned with “the role of the epic fable as a historical argument mediating between

present and future” and he states that he is not aware that this idea has received any

critical attention (8). He means, by the term fable, a “formally relatively underspecified

segment of narrative. It includes the basic story materials, corresponding to fabula, to

histoire, and to story in works on narrative by, respectively, Propp, Barthes, and

Chatman” (Ungar 9). In building his case for Ulysses as epic, Ungar points to its

collection of historical data and recording of cultural information of an Ireland situated in

1904, and the late nineteenth century’s trend toward historiography: “At the turn of the

century, discussions of the link between history and literature were commonplace.

Dilthey, Croce, Collingwood, all called explicitly on imaginative vision to serve as a tool

of investigation; Pound and Eliot had ‘investigations of history’ frame the workings of

imagination” (Ungar 2). Ulysses contains the essence and apparent methodology of

historiography but subverts certain elements of the historiography process.

There is some precedent in the image of an epic writer considering the

possibilities of his or her work during its creation. However, Joyce’s written

40 
considerations of such possibilities tend to be more discursive and meditative in the

moment; they are different than some of his predecessors’ meditations in that they reside

within the epic text itself, and not in ancillary texts. Dante, for example, develops an

aesthetic dialogue in his Convivio and La Vita Nuova as a way to develop and refine his

aesthetics and which is connected to his Commedia. In the canticles of the Commedia, a

a set of self-aware texts in its own right, he utilizes allusion as a way of establishing

authorial dominance in relation to his predecessors, Statius and Virgil.

As well, as Dante the author, he is able to control the speech and actions of the

predecessors he has placed in the Commedia. Certain dialogues between himself and the

other poets he discourses with serve to solidify their authority as well as his own. Dante,

however, while utilizing Dante the pilgrim in the Commedia to appeal for a clear voice

and success in conveying what he witnesses and would like to describe in his poetry, does

not ruminate directly as to whether he should be writing a Christian epic for Italy or who

would be best-suited to do so. He simply writes one. Dante and Joyce come from vastly

different cultures in terms of what constitutes authority and authorship.

Dante’s work is also central to Joyce’s own and his importance has been

underscored by scholars, including Mary T. Reynolds, who notes that “Joyce scrutinized

closely Dante’s combination of poetic structures in a sublime whole. Dante’s rhetorical

management of complexity was Joyce’s most pervading interest” (12). Despite his

intentions in emulating his role model, Joyce’s epic is a secular epic, different from the

divinely infused cantos of the Florentine poet. And Reynolds agrees with this sentiment,

noting that Joyce’s approach to Dante’s work is a literary approach, as has been the

centuries of criticism that preceded his own:

41 
 . . . such a preoccupation with the literary rather than the theological

aspects of the poem, such an interest in craftsmanship rather than in

doctrine, followed a critical tradition of long standing. The tradition

began with the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola, only some fifty years

after Dante’s death, and it has furnished matter for argument and

controversy down to the present day. Whatever we may think of its merits

or defects, this critical stance, which argues that the Commedia can be

understood through a primarily literary interpretation, is an inclusive

critical position that has been validated by time, and it is the approach that

governed Joyce’s perception of Dante. (Reynolds 12)

It is clear that, as inextricable as Dante’s influence is both to Joyce’s authorial aesthetic

and as a figure in his works, Joyce considers his engagement with Dante’s work as an

ingredient to his own authority as a writer, particularly as a writer of the epic. Dante’s

aesthetic and sense of authority is more fully described in chapter 4.

I consider second to Dante’s influence but perhaps just as important to Joyce’s

development of Ulysses the work of Francois Rabelais. The French writer’s presence is

referenced more explicitly through allusions in Finnegans Wake, but his influence is also

felt throughout Ulysses. As a physician (a profession once envisioned by Joyce as his

own calling), who has experienced exile to escape his persecutors (similar to Joyce’s self-

imposed exile) and who writes highly allusive works that engaged in imitations of

rhetorical styles, Rabelais would undoubtedly appeal to Joyce as an influence.

Joyce’s epic is undeniably parodic. Second, Ulysses is informed by the same

themes of bodily strata in Gargantua and Pantagruel, and there are remnants of

42 
Rabelaisian scenes found in Ulysses. Rabelaisian writing utilizes parodic formulas that,

according to Mikhail Bakhtin, were derived from such literary influences as “parodied

Gospels, parodied liturgies [the All-Drunkards’ Mass of the thirteenth century], parodied

holy days and rituals” (The Dialogic Imagination 184). This “involved the introduction

of religious concepts and symbols into the eating, drunkenness, defecation and sexual-

acts series in Rabelais . . .” (184). Bakhtin lists, as well, the “parodic-witchcraft

literature, black-magic formulas of a type used by sorcerers . . . and they were widespread

and widely known in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance” (184). The same

Rabelaisian eating, drinking, defecation and sexual act series (tropes) can be found in

Joyce’s writing. Chapter 12’s Citizen is a pastiche character, partially contrived of

elements from Gargantua. In addition, the same graphic bodily displays and processes

typical of Rabelais’ defecation series appear in the micturition scenes of chapter 12,

(“Cyclops”) and chapter 17 (“Ithaca”).

In light of the “rebuilding” of epic codes by Dante and Virgil, we can see

evidence in Ulysses that Joyce is also rebuilding epic codes through various experimental

and structural choices. As briefly mentioned in chapter 1, Joyce has a medieval

sensibility and this is reflected in his structuring of Ulysses’ episodic chapters, its somatic

treatments and parody. This chapter will examine a few of the more important aesthetic

concepts that Joyce presented in his earlier works – Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man – including, most importantly, his epiphany. In doing so, this

chapter will support and emphasize the ability to study Ulysses as a text which operates

by epic codes and to treat it as a vehicle for the revision or modification of those codes.

Conte states that the term “epic code,”

43 
 refers not to features that allow us, through concrete induction, to see each

text as governed by the rules of a specific literary genre but to a much

more general system, whose potential may be implemented in new ways

without causing the reader to doubt that the work is an epic poem even if

this or that rule traditionally imposed by the system has been broken. In

fact, such a code allows a community to consolidate its historical

experiences, conferring sense on them, until they become an exemplary

system that is recognized as the community’s new cultural text or

scripture. (142)

Important here is the statement of negotiability “even if this or that rule traditionally

imposed by the system has been broken.” This definition serves as a means to avoid

perceiving the concept of epic codes in an absolutist fashion, and as a rigid, unmalleable

set of values. The “system” referenced above would be the set of values assigned by

those poets working within the epic genre and their acknowledging readership. The

negotiable space that Conte describes is one that enables Dante to write a Christian epic

using the frame of hell, purgatory and heaven to develop his aesthetic while imagining

the comradeship he envisions with other poets. The same flexibility allows Dante to

privilege and modify the vernacular as well.

Epic codes persist by that system in terms of an available matrix, one that changes

over time. Codes (in terms of epic poetry) have already been modified well before the

Augustan age. “Such a code,” Conte continues, “is a source and a storehouse of

interconnected values, vividly displayed in the actions of heroes, on which the

community can draw as an organic arrangement of its own cultural foundations. The

44 
code leaves plenty of room for choice” (142). The storehouse of values is a receptacle

that contains the earlier codes of primary and secondary epic. Some are long forgotten

while the most predominant ones, for example, the heroic endeavors of the epic’s

protagonist, persist. Even so, Bloom, as an unassuming figure in modern Dublin, whose

bravest acts may be informing John Henry Menton that his hat is crushed or defending

his right to be on Irish soil to the Citizen, is hardly heroic. The most ambitious endeavor

he accomplishes is rescuing Stephen from Bella Cohen’s brothel and sobering him up

before taking him back to Eccles Street. Long forgotten values, however, can be

witnessed if, and when, their fragmented texts and ancillary materials resurface over

time. In addition to antiquity’s values, the storehouse accumulates new values with

society’s textual accretion.

In The Faerie Queene, there are the usual epic codes of the heroic combat, divine

interventions, and extended similes, referenced above in chapter 1’s section on epic

codes, epic norms and citation. However, The Faerie Queene draws upon the age of the

knight and chivalry. The epic format and its codes - codes including heroic acts, divine

interventions, extended similes, games and pastoral elements - persist. However, in The

Faerie Queene there are now the codes of chivalry and loyalty, codes adopted from

earlier heroic chivalric poems such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The series of

games in Homeric and Virgilian epics have now been transformed into beheading games.

In this sense, the new cultural script of the medieval era gives birth to a different category

of epic codes. There are still earlier forms of epic codes present in the work; however,

the age in which the Christian epic arises modifies the epic codes according to its

chivalric sensibilities.

45 
 It can be said that Joyce fashions a new cultural text in accordance with Conte’s

statement that “the code leaves plenty of room for choice.” What kind of epic codes does

Joyce develop in his novel? Present are certain longstanding codes such as the invocation

to the muse, beginning chapters in media res, Leopold Bloom’s voyage (in miniature),

and similes. Through his experimentation with these forms, often by merging classical

metaphors with modern assemblages, Joyce is able to produce new codes. Most

importantly, the codes he develops are a product of twentieth century Ireland.

Quidditas, Claritas and Epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Initially, the epiphany is an important facet of Joyce’s (and Stephen’s) prose

aesthetic. From 1900 to 1903, Joyce focuses on developing his prose techniques and it is

during this time frame that he develops his epiphany, the secularized version of the

religious revelation. Not the “manifestation of godhead, the showing forth of Christ to

the Magi” but the “sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment in which

‘the soul of the commonest object . . . seems to us radiant’” (Ellmann 83).

For Stephen Dedalus, the process by which an epiphany happens, the praxis of

which recurs throughout A Portrait, has its basis in Thomas Aquinas’ aesthetic process of

apprehending beauty. As Seamus Deane notes, this is a misreading of Aquinas’

philosophy on Stephen’s part (Deane Notes 319). To the contrary, Deane states, Stephen

has essentially cobbled together an aesthetic process from other sources, one of which is

Duns Scotus’ “theory of haeccitus” (‘thinghood’) by Gerard Manley Hopkins (Notes

319). Before his misreading of Aquinas, Stephen correctly paraphrases Aquinas from

46 
Summa Theologica: “Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and

radiance” (A Portrait 229).

The foundation of Stephen’s theoretical process of apprehension that he wrongly

attributes to Aquinas (but still pertinent for the operant aesthetic in Joyce’s own work) is

(1) the esthetic image presented in space or time, which is apprehended as one thing, in

its wholeness (integritas); (2) the perception of the thing’s collection of parts, of the

harmony in the constitution of its parts (consonantia); and (3) the realization of its

thingness as no other, or its quidditas or whatness, and which possesses a kind of

radiance (A Portrait 230-231). In explaining the concept of claritas, or the “whatness” of

a thing, Stephen Dedalus states:

The connotation of the word is rather vague. . . . I thought he might mean

that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine

purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the

esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But

that is literary talk. I understand it so. (A Portrait 231)

Here, Stephen is ostensibly dismissive of his ideas of something “outshining its proper

conditions”; however, even if he verbalizes his own apparent interpretation of claritas, he

assumes this interpretation for his own purposes anyway as, moments later, he declares to

his sounding board, Lynch, that the radiant whatness of a thing is “apprehended

luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its

harmony” (A Portrait 231). This apprehension by Stephen in turn leads to the mind

being “arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony,” which is the “luminous

47 
silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state” (A Portrait 231). In sum, the epiphany

involves a stasis or a kind of extended moment and/or meditation.

Significantly, before this discussion of claritas, Lynch requests that Stephen

explain what he calls beauty, adding sarcastically “please remember, though I did eat a

cake of cowdung once, that I admire only beauty” (A Portrait 224). Stephen’s response

is one that validates Lynch’s assertion, revealing his thoughts about the artistic merit that

can be derived from life, no matter what the material:

“We are right,” he said, “and the others are wrong. To speak of these

things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to

try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from

the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour

which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have

come to understand – that is art.” (A Portrait 224)

The first part of Stephen’s equation starts with a process of action “to express, to press

out again,” from material such as “the gross earth or what it brings forth,” revealing that

all matter is subject to manipulation, to the writer’s pen. The language which follows

that of the “gross earth or what it brings forth,” however, elevates the general idea of the

“gross earth” to the neutral descriptors of “sound and shape and colour.” Essentially, in

Stephen’s view, no matter the conventional beauty or ugliness of the subject matter, all

matter acts as “the prison gate of the soul,” or the intangible structure surrounding the

senses and perception. The end result is “the image of the beauty we have come to

understand,” which implies that beauty is the result of the evolution of one’s perception

based upon personal experience and understanding.

48 
 In Joyce’s “Pola Notebook” of 1904, he affirms this idea in the twofold act of

apprehension, which entails perception and recognition (Eco 27). In recognition, “the

perceived object is judged satisfactory and therefore beautiful and pleasing . . . insofar as

it is perceived as a formal structure” (Eco 27). In embodying these considerations, Joyce

is questioning the idea of Being and “whether every object is beautiful insofar as it is a

form embodied in a determined matter and perceived through these structural

characteristics” (Eco 27). Umberto Eco explains that the concept of beauty based upon

structural integrity is in keeping with Thomian ideals and that, due to the emphasis on

structural integrity as beauty as opposed to conventional beauty, using Scholastic

aesthetics, it was difficult to individuate an aesthetic “based upon the aesthetic quality of

each common experience” (Eco 28). In tandem with the formulation of the “whatness”

of a thing described above, the epiphany is not subject to conventional definitions of

beauty. This results in an epiphany that allows, as part of its equation, subject matter

execratory, grotesque, or otherwise unpalatable in terms of societal conventions

concerning beauty.

The Epiphany as Epic Code

Joyce kept a working notebook of his epiphanies and examples of their

articulation are present in numerous examples throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man. The subject matter of these epiphanies is usually religious, aesthetic or

political but the material used is often pulled from nature. It is important to look at the

epiphany’s possibilities in terms of its structural components and accompanying

processes, particularly in Joyce’s development of an epic code. Conte emphasizes that

49 
epic codes’ contingency depends upon the era that the epic resides in. Joyce’s creation of

an epiphany from his perspective as a Jesuit educated Irish writer, with all of its

accompanying cultural ingredients, anticipates a rhetorical device that can be considered

a subset of the epic code.

In chapter 5, the epiphany will be examined in terms of its role as a vehicle in a

highly allusive nexus that informs Joyce’s position on authorship in “Oxen.” First,

however, the following passage is the first part of three that comprise an extended

epiphany in the beginning of chapter 3 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the

passage, Stephen meditates on his sinful visits to Dublin’s brothels as he’s sitting in the

schoolroom. As he envisions the women emerging from their houses, he imagines the

street scene as he “prowled in quest . . . would note keenly all that wounded or shamed

them; his eyes, a ring of porter froth on a clothless table or a photograph . . .” (A Portrait

109). His watching of the women (now through his memories) transforms itself through

the mathematical writing of his school scribbler:

The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening

tail, eyed and starred like a peacock’s; and, when the eyes and stars of its

indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again.

The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing;

the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched.

The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and

inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and

inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words,

the words of Shelley’s fragment upon the moon wandering companionless,

50 
 pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust

fell through space. (A Portrait 110)

In contemplating his own watchfulness, Stephen envisions his mathematical

equation growing eyes. The passage is already pronouncedly metaphorical, with the

equation expanding and folding in on itself just as the peacock spreads its feathers and

collapses them. The transition of metaphorical ideas in here is rapid and a simile begins

the passage. The equation’s features are “like a peacock’s.”

Stephen’s mathematics gives way to scribbling, and numbers and signs give way

to feathers. The eyes of the mathematical peacock, opening and closing, represent the

sleepiness of his “weary mind.” The extended description of the equation, itself already a

metaphor, is the tenor or textual backdrop. In the following sentences, one metaphor

follows another: “The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and

closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched” (A

Portrait 110). Present in this rich combination are the multiple connotations of watching,

sleeping, evaluating and working (indices) and a possible reference to sexuality (the

women of the brothels) in the “opening and closing . . . being quenched” (A Portrait

110). Even on its own merits, the passage (epiphany) already works to present a vivid

realization of Stephen’s awareness of ideas both on the physical and mental planes.

Joyce’s passage, or tenor, is highly metaphorical and creates a rapidly shifting

visual picture. The vehicle in this case (or allusion being appropriated) is the fragment of

Percy Shelley’s poem, “To the Moon.” Stephen, questioning the internal music that

accompanies his meditation, thinks “What music?” Then, “The music came nearer and

he recalled the words of Shelley’s fragment upon the moon wandering companionless,

51 
pale for weariness” (A Portrait 110). The words taken from Shelley’s verse, below, are

from lines 1 and 3, with the full poem represented, below, for context.

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth. –

And ever-changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy? (“To the Moon” 1-6)

Here, the poem is the vehicle part of the allusion, imported into Joyce’s mathematical

passage, the tenor. The moon is unnamed and implied, through its positioning and

actions. It appears to be carefully chosen, however, as the passage contains language

similar to Joyce’s. The ground that the fragment shares with Joyce’s passage is the

similar theme of weariness, sight and stars. Shelley’s question “Art thou pale for

weariness,” echoes Stephen’s “weary mind,” while the phrases “gazing at the earth,” and

“like a joyless eyes,” align themselves with the visual trope happening in Joyce’s

scribbling. What then, are the gaps or tension between them?

The moon, as metaphor for an eye, factors into Stephen’s imaginary heavenly

vista of opening and closing eyes. Eyes turn to stars - the eyes of weariness and of

voyeurism. The poem’s fragmentary presence appears to be an integrative, or

complimentary, allusion. Its presence does not challenge the epiphany that Joyce

presents; instead, it appears to suggest that Stephen’s problem might also be the “eye that

finds no object worth its constancy.” In the second part of the unfolding epiphany,

52 
Stephen’s thoughts turn to the exponential nature of his sin, by delineating a similar

creative process, but this time Joyce portrays Stephen’s soul as a dying star:

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation

began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was

his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin,

spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon

itself, fading slowly quenching its own lights and fires. They were

quenched: and the cold darkness filled chaos. (A Portrait 110)

The “dull light” and “cold darkness filled chaos” fit the theme of sin. Additionally, the

music of the first paragraph is missing in this one. The language in both paragraphs is

similar. For example, in the first paragraph, the equation is spreading like a “widening

tail.” In this paragraph, his soul is spreading out; however, the “balefire” reference,

combined with the darkness at the end, signifies the threat of hell.

Important to this section is what follows a few passages later. Stephen continues

to struggle with the sense of his sin after visiting prostitutes, due to desires of the flesh:

“He had sinned mortally not once but many times” (A Portrait 110). Following his

school room epiphany, he meditates, in the ensuing days, on the Virgin Mary, the glories

of which “held his soul captive: spikenard and myrrh and frankincense, symbolizing the

preciousness of God’s gifts to her soul, rich garments, symbolizing her royal lineage, her

emblems, the lateflowering plant and lateblossoming tree, symbolizing the agelong

gradual growth of her cultus among men” (A Portrait 112). The language here is both

religious and sensual. The women he visits have been replaced by the elevated Madonna.

The earlier trope of eyes and sight introduced two pages earlier continues:

53 
 Her eyes seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light

glowing faintly upon her frail flesh, did not humiliate the sinner who

approached her. If ever his soul, reentering her dwelling shyly after the

frenzy of his body’s lust had spent itself, was turned toward her whose

emblem is the morning star, bright and musical, telling of heaven and

infusing peace, it was when her names were murmured softly by lips

whereon there still lingered foul and shameful words, the savour itself of a

lewd kiss. (A Portrait 112)

By now, a number of things have happened. The wandering moon and its “joyless eye”

have been replaced by the clearness of the morning star. The music here is hopeful, of

heaven and peace, as opposed to Shelley’s music of weariness and despair. However, the

foul words and lewd kiss of the last line reflects a last minute deviation. Stephen

thereupon thinks “that was strange” but is called into the schoolroom and is unable to

consider it further (A Portrait 112). The mention of the Virgin Mary in Stephen’s

reading of the lesson from Ecclesiastes 24:17-20 in Latin, shortly after the description of

Mary’s “glories,” provides a vivid synesthesia of the visual and olfactory. The

translation is as follows:

I was exalted like a cedar of Lebanon and as a cypress tree on Mount Sion.

I was exalted like a palm tree in Gades, and as a rose plant in Jericho. As

a fair olive tree in the plains, and as a plane tree by the water in the streets

I was exalted. I gave a sweet smell like cinnamon and an aromatical

balm! I yielded a sweet odour like the best myrrh. (Deane Notes 297)

54 
This passage echoes two features from Dante’s Purgatorio 22, as it is evocative of a

similar tree on the sixth terrace of the gluttonous and also interacts with the message from

the voice that emerges from it. As Dante follows Virgil and the newly arrived Statius,

their “delightful conversation soon/ was interrupted by a tree that blocked/ our path; its

fruits were fine, their scent was sweet” (Purgatorio 22.130-132). Shortly thereafter, and

as they approach it, the tree cries out that its food is denied to them (Purgatorio 22.141).

It continues with a reference to Mary’s concern for guests at the “marriage-feast” instead

of her own nourishment.

The placement of the Ecclesiastes passage in A Portrait does not necessarily mean

that Joyce has lifted the phrase from Dante. However, there is a good chance that he has.

The previous depiction of Mary, in her “rich garments,” “emblems” and sensuality,

recalls Dante’s vision of Beatrice and her favor in God’s eyes. Now, the alignment of

Dante’s passage with Stephen’s dilemma speaks to Stephen’s gluttony in his visits with

women in order to divulge sins of the flesh; however, in terms of the seriousness and love

with which Dante portrays Beatrice, if the suggestion here is a lewd one then it can be

considered a blasphemy.

It can be seen from the aforementioned discussion that Joyce pairs his own

rhetorical device, the epiphany, with allusions from nineteenth century poetry and

Dante’s fourteenth century verse, depending upon the situation. In the first scenario,

Shelley’s poem fragment interacts with the epiphany in a way which creates the “dove-

tail” effect discussed by Conte. In other words, the “desire to appropriate another poet’s

style” (Conte 66) - in this case Shelley’s - creates a harmony and “denotation becomes

loaded with an oriented connotation” (Conte 66). The inclusion of the Ecclesiastes

55 
passage can be considered a “face to face” or reflective allusion as the possible three way

antagonistic relationship between the material from Ecclesiastes, Purgatorio 22 and A

Portrait signifies that both the biblical and Dantean material is being confronted by

Stephen’s meditation on his sins and the blasphemy of a “mock” solution. This is

confirmed later on in chapter 5 of A Portrait when Stephen meets Emma, the young

woman who he obsesses over, and she questions him about his absence and his writing.

In the last diary format section of the novel, he states that his flippant responses made

him feel “sorry and mean,” so he “turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-

heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri”

(A Portrait 275). The statement recalls Dante’s shunting aside of his physical love for

Beatrice in favor of the divine love that she successively teaches him in the three

canticles of the Commedia, but also, paradoxically, implies the refrigeration of his ardor.

Either way, Joyce takes the reference and turns it into the reductive, a trivial mockery.

Finally, as noted in the above analysis, the presence of Purgatorio 22 factors into

Stephen’s musings on the Virgin Mary shortly after his moment of epiphany. As is

revealed throughout Joyce’s work, the epiphany is associated with Joyce’s (and in this

case Stephen’s) poetic aesthetic and development. As referenced in chapter 5 of this

dissertation, in Ulysses, chapter 3, Stephen – as a failed poet - contemplates the nostalgia

of his epiphanies’ possible success, with “copies to be sent . . . to all the great libraries of

the world” (Ulysses 3:141-42). As a supplement to the meaning contained within the

epiphany, Stephen’s meditations show an awareness of Purgatorio 22’s theme of

temperance, as well as the arrival of the poet, Statius, the latter of which will be more

fully described in chapter 4 of this dissertation.

56 
 CHAPTER 3: ULYSSES’ ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE AND SOMATIC

REPRESENTATIONS

Somatic imagery is integral to Joyce’s epic code building in Ulysses. As he writes his

novel, he writes the human body. There are numerous examples of somatic textual

arrangements that serve as loci for Joyce’s appropriation and reconfiguration of allusive

material, thereby enable his own revision of previous epic codes in order to create new

ones. A few of these somatic examples include his creation of the Citizen, discussed in

this chapter, Stephen Dedalus’ embryology speech in chapter 5, and the re-appearance,

chapter by chapter, of Patrick Dignam’s body (or shade, rather), according to the style of

the particular episode. This chapter will examine the basic frames and rhetorical styles –

styles arising from the tropes of abundance and the carnivalesque – that influenced

Joyce’s choice in elevating the body in his works.

In Ulysses, each chapter has been assigned (through the Linati schema), according

to Joyce’s identification of Ulysses as “the cycle of the human body,” an organ of the

human body. It therefore follows that, chapter by chapter, the details of Dublin’s subject

inhabitants unfold under the umbrella of words, implications and processes according to

the chapter’s accompanying organ; this process often includes puns and verbal parody of

the organ in question.

The novel’s somatic emphasis – as to both bodily parts and its totality - can partly

be attributed to the carnivalesque and exploratory literature of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, carnival influenced texts reach their

57 
apogee in terms of cultural popularity. In his discussions with Arthur Power, Joyce

describes Ulysses as being “mediaeval but in a more realistic way” (Power 107). The

medieval, Joyce states, “had greater emotional fecundity than classicism” and professes

his attempts to express in Ulysses the “multiple variations which make up the social life

of a city – its degradations and its exaltations” (Power 110). In the discussions set out

below concerning the somatic building of an early seventeenth century poem, as well as

the consideration of notions of copia and carnival, it is possible to ascertain Joyce’s

authorial pursuit of fashioning a somatic text; in this respect, Ulysses can be conceived of

as possessing a textual corporality and somatics-oriented praxis, where the text itself

attempts to imitate bodily functions.

The Odyssean schema provided by Joyce to his readership establishes a frame for

the novel’s reading, and, “when asked why he entitled his book Ulysses, Joyce replied ‘It

is my system of working’” (Ellmann 359). Homer’s hero and his related wanderings

serve as the armature for Joyce’s eighteen chapters. This decision, as Umberto Eco

notes, has its basis in medieval thought:

The medieval thinker cannot conceive, explain, or manage the world

without inserting it into the framework of an Order . . . . The young

Stephen at Clongowes Wood College conceives of himself as a member of

a cosmic whole – ‘Stephen Dedalus – Class of Elements – Clongowes

Wood College – Sallins – County of Kildare – Ireland – Europe – The

World – The Universe.’ Ulysses demonstrates this same concept of order

by the choice of a Homeric framework and Finnegans Wake by the

circular schema, borrowed from Vico’s cyclical vision of history. (7)

58 
 However, the Homeric trace is not the only ingredient in Joyce’s system of

working. In 1918, Joyce hands the artist Frank Budgen a copy of Phineas Fletcher’s

allegorical poem The Purple Island or The Isle of Man (1633), and suggests that he read

it. A few days later, he holds the following conversation with Budgen, explaining the

impact of The Purple Island as follows:

“Among other things, my book is the epic of the human body. The only

man I know who has attempted the same thing is Phineas Fletcher. But

then his Purple Island is purely descriptive, a kind of coloured anatomical

chart of the human body. In my book the body lives in and moves through

space and is the home of a full human personality. The words I write are

adapted to express first one of its functions then another. In Lestrygonians

the stomach dominates and the rhythm of the episode is that of the

peristaltic movement.”

Budgen begins to respond:

“But the minds, the thoughts of the characters,”

And Joyce continues:

“If they had no body they would have no mind,” said Joyce. “It’s all one.

Walking towards his lunch my hero, Leopold Bloom, thinks of his wife,

and says to himself, ‘Molly’s legs are out of plumb.’ At another time of

day he might have expressed the same thought without any underthought

of food. But I want the reader to understand always through suggestions

rather than direct statement.” (Budgen 21)

59 
 Fletcher’s epic belongs to the genre of psychomachia, or literary works that are

concerned with the vices and virtues of mankind, and he creates a parody of the pastoral

frame in which the story (and building) of The Purple Island is narrated. The human

body, or Isle, arises from “purple dust . . . from the new made earth” (Fletcher 1:44), in

twelve cantos, echoing the biblical story of man’s creation. Fletcher also focuses the

reader’s attention to the Isle’s creation as an art form, incorporating the Renaissance

topos of indexing and the parts’ relationship to the whole. A detailed examination of the

organs and their processes, according to the knowledge of Fletcher’s time, is rendered in

delicate, almost ornate verbiage. However, this rendering, according to Thomas Healy,

is not to discover how it is constructed and how its processes work, but

why it functions the way it does. In this respect, Fletcher’s poem is related

to the long-standing conventions of the psychomachia. His demonstration

of bodily functions is a symbolic epic in which the moral condition of

humanity is displayed in a battle between virtues and vices. In The Purple

Island, the body replaces the ancient classic as a text to be interpreted

allegorically, demonstrating its utility in elucidating Christian, and in

Fletcher’s case specifically Protestant, ideas. (341)

It is an aquatic psychomachia, virtually swimming with copious streams, channels,

basins, pools and fountains, an inheritance from Spenser’s numerous fountains, streams

and pools.

As its title indicates, Fletcher chooses to depict the isle in purple overtones and

provides a detailed sketch of the organs of the body with an emphasis on the venous

connectivity. The building of the poem – and the allegorical body that is constructed

60 
with it, can also be termed a deconstruction of the body in that it is looked at, piece by

piece, broken down in methodical fashion. An omniscient narrator, ostensibly Fletcher,

provides a narrative that encompasses a second narrative “sung” by the shepherd-poet

Thirsil.

Thirsil, who is charged with singing the poem, is dubious as narrator, alternately

evincing airs: “What need I then to seek a patron out;/ Or beg a favour from a mistrels’

eyes/ To fence my song against the vulgar rout;/” (I.21); or begging off due to the heat as

“Our panting flocks retire into the glade;/ They crouch, and close to the’earth their horns

have laid:/ Screen we our scorched heads in that thick beeches shade” (Fletcher 1:60). A

few cantos later, he is relieved that his ornery flock, “which his food refuses” deigns to

eat grass (Fletcher 3.2). Thus, there is a mock quality to his handling of the job that

emphasizes the straightforward part of the poem that delineates the Isle:

Now when the first week’s life was almost spent;

And this world built, and richly furnished;

To store heaven’s courts, HE of each element,

Did cast to frame an Isle, the heart and head

Of all his works, compos’d with curious art;

Which like an index briefly shoul’d impart

The sum of all; the whole, yet of the whole a part. (Fletcher 1:43)

In keeping with medieval and Renaissance ideas of God as the ultimate creator and

artificer (for example, in Dante’s Inferno), Fletcher as narrator/creator casts to frame an

Isle, the heart and head of all his works, and composes with curious art. The language is

that of anatomy and creation, creation both linguistic and somatic. The last line’s concept

61 
of parts to a whole is Aristotelian, just one part in the parcel of evidence of the

Renaissance’s re-discovery of classical philosophy and which proliferates in its poems

and prose.

Finally, the creation itself is likened to an index, or guide to composition. As

Jonathan Sawday notes: “Imitation, a central concept in Renaissance poetic theory,

orders the body, the world, and the heavens into a pattern of replication, in which each

component of the system finds its precise analogical equivalent in every other

component” (23). Through Fletcher’s network of fountains, channels and streams that

serve as its venous routes, the human body is reified and inscribed as a new world to be

explored. Fletcher writes his somatic poem shortly after the publication of Vesalius’ De

Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), in which “the interior of the body began to take on

most of its modern features: Eustachius mapped the ear, Fallopius the female

reproductive organs, Realdus Columbus and Fabricius of Aquapendente the venous

system, and Michael Servetus the pulmonary transit of the blood” (Sawday 23). Much in

the way the anatomy is partitioned and named, Joyce partitions and names the episodic

chapters of Ulysses.

The spillover of science’s newfound discoveries of the human body into the realm

of writing, particularly via the dissection and anatomization in the spectacle of the

anatomy theaters in the sixteenth century, culminates in a body pronouncedly

“textualized,” initially through manuals and charts, and later followed by poetry and

prose. In 1543, Claudius Galenus’s (Galen’s) earlier writings on the body are replaced by

Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporus fabrica libri septem, an event which assists in the

62 
conceptualization of the interiority of the human body. The heightened focus on space

and parts leads to an exploration of the miniature, as noted by Jonathan Sawday:

The period between (roughly) 1540 and 1640, is, therefore, the period of

the discovery of the Vesalian body as opposed to the later invention of the

Harveian or Cartesian body. Guiding the followers of Vesalius was the

belief that the human body expressed in miniature the divine workmanship

of God, and that its form corresponded to the greater form of macrocosm.

(23)

In many ways, The Purple Island reads as a tableside dissection. As noted by

other scholars, the language used in the construction emphasizes the organs and their

surrounding structures (such as ribs, muscles, sinew) in terms of defense, with their

constitution and the spaces they occupy written in terms of vantage point and ability to be

defended (Anderson 5). Aside from Joyce’s intrigue with The Purple Island as a model

for Ulysses’ somatic epic and its organ per chapter schema, its textual allure resides in its

“cross-pollenating genre” of psychomachia, pastoral frame and battle lexicon (Anderson

5). The defensive aspect of the poem, in its representations of the body as partitioned and

fortified, as well as its trope of exploration, are all themes associated with Europe in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

According to Sawday, a burgeoning societal emphasis on individuality is

accompanied by an invasive viewpoint:

A phrase such as the ‘culture of dissection’ suggests a network of

practices, social structures, and rituals surrounding this production of

fragmented bodies, which sits uneasily alongside our image (derived from

63 
 Burckhardt) of the European Renaissance as the age of the construction of

individuality – a unified sense of selfhood. But the ‘scientific revolution’

of the European Renaissance encouraged the seemingly endless

partitioning of the world and all that it contained. It seems an exaggerated

form of medieval ordering. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy

(first published in 1621 and perhaps a little late in this portion of the

paper), with its vast superstructure of divisionary procedures (a text

divided into parts, then subdivided into sections, members, and

subsections), is a late but nevertheless paradigmatic textual example of

this delight in particularization. (2)

Finally, Joyce’s sense of the human body – and its inscription in language – draws

upon Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova, written in the eighteenth century (Seidel 41).

About its connection to Ulysses, Seidel writes, “Vico offers Joyce a theory of language

and the human imagination, the mind traveling through itself to reveal the bodily forms

outside itself” (Seidel 43). Vico likens geographical landscapes to the human body, and

in Poetic Cosmography, “he writes of the linguistic progress from one visual form to

another, from the geographical contours of the earth to the curves of a woman’s body.

Language accommodates the shapes of nature” (Seidel 41). The depiction of the Anna

Liffey in Finnegans Wake uses a similar model of bodily geography. The first few lines

read: “First she let her hair fal and down it flussed to her feet its teviots winding coils.

Then, mothernaked, she sampood herself with galawater and fraguant pistania mud,

wupper and lauar, from crown to soul” (qtd. in Seidel 42). Here, Joyce imagines the

woman’s features in the language of water and river sounds. The image also recalls the

64 
winding hair and watery position of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Similarly,

Vico’s influence can be felt in Bloom’s observations of Molly’s body as she lies in her

bed at the end of the novel.

At home at the end of the night, Bloom considers the possible recourse he has

concerning Molly’s adultery – “Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by

mechanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witnesses),

not yet” (Ulysses 17:2202-04). His thoughts presage the surveillance techniques of the

future and are ironic in considering the bed’s artificial ability to expose the lovers. In

fact, the bed has already exposed their adultery through a natural means. In a preceding

paragraph, while climbing into bed, Bloom notes the bed’s “imprint of a human form,

male, not his” (Ulysses 17:2124). Despite this, Bloom’s vengeful thoughts turn to

Molly’s body, another Viconian representation:

In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and

reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial

hemispheres, in all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored (the

land of the midnight sun, the islands of the blessed, the isles of Greece, the

land of promise), of adipose anterior and posterior female hemispheres,

redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and seminal

warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude,

insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties of expression,

expressive of mute immutable mature animality.

Then?

65 
 He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on

each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mello yellow furrow, with

obscure prolonged provocative mellonsmellonous osculation. (Ulysses

17:2227-2243)

His wife’s physical charms defeat his thoughts of evidence and revenge. The only

revenge that he ultimately perpetrates on Molly, and which is actually just a shift in their

respective roles of power, is his directive that she bring him his breakfast in bed.

The language in Bloom’s re-imagining of his wife’s body, viewed through the

lens of exploration and travel as “islands explored or unexplored (the land of the

midnight sun)”, conceives of it as exotic. In essence, Bloom’s visions and longing for a

new, accepting homeland in the Agendath Netaim, an aim that he has deferred

indefinitely, are realized in the geography of his wife’s curves, the “smellow melons of

her rump” (Ulysses 17:2241). In addition, the transference of the elaborate somatic

imagery, the language of which is enhanced by Bloom’s sleepy mind, contributes to

Joyce’s epic code revision. How does Joyce accomplish this?

In Odysseus’ homecoming, there is no evidence of adultery to encounter and no

exploratory re-envisioning of his Penelope’s backside. Joyce transfers elements of the

Homeric fable to the scene, both in the reference to the “isles of Greece,” and the

homecoming of Bloom to Molly’s bed. There has been less than a twenty-four hour

separation between the two; however, in mirroring Odysseus’ ten year journey to return

home after the Trojan War, Bloom and Molly share a ten year lapse in sexual relations,

beginning with the death of their son. Bloom’s attention to Molly’s body at this point in

the novel is also one of heightened allusion. The kissing of her backside is the more

66 
graphic equivalent of Odysseus kissing “the good green earth” (The Odyssey 13:403).

The “isles of Greece,” is also an allusion to Byron’s Don Juan, thus imbuing the passage

with a hint of Bloom’s own internal womanizing. In addition to the Homeric strains, the

“isles of the blessed” are the “Fortunate Islands, somewhere in the unexplored western

sea, where mortals favored by the gods went after death” (Gifford 604). Don Gifford

glosses the location as comparable to the Tir na n-og or the Irish “Land of Youth,” a

“mythical island to the west of Ireland envisioned as a realm where mortal perfection and

timeless but earthly pleasures were the rule” (220).

Bloom’s homecoming scene is a complex ground, the site of a multiplicity of

meanings. His wishes for a new homeland, the immediacy of his thoughts through

internal monologue, the textual influence of Vico, Homeric allusions and Irish myth all

merge to create a new epic code. Ireland’s mythology and scenes of domesticity, as well

as Irishman Joyce’s literary knowledge, transform the longstanding epic code of

homecoming into a modern day homecoming.

Copia and Textual Abundance

Francois Rabelais and Joyce both employ lists in their works. The pages are filled

with minutiae concerning food, clothes, games and titles, to name a fraction of the

material they incorporate. It is helpful to consider Terence Cave’s exploration of

Desiderius Erasmus’ De copia to consider their motivation in compiling these lists. The

title’s copia stands for abundance and the word derives, according to Cave, from the

Latin copis, which “already embraces the domains of material riches, natural plenty

(personified by the goddess Ops) and figurative abundance” (3).

67 
 The questions posited in Cave’s chapter on “Imitation,” reveal some of the same

concerns with appropriation discussed elsewhere in this dissertation. Cave writes, “[i]n

imitation, indeed, the activities of reading and writing become virtually identified. A text

is read in view of its transcription as part of another text; conversely, the writer as

imitator concedes that he cannot entirely escape the constraints of what he has read” (35).

A concern persists in the mid sixteenth century about imitation attempted subject to the

potential trap of simple copying. There is a powerful desire for authenticity, Cave

explains, and “[t]he appropriation of authentic discourse – a moment of presence to be

discovered amid fragments of the textual past – will be the goal of theories and fictions,

poetry and prose, throughout the sixteenth century” (33). Some of this is based upon the

writer’s idea of himself or herself as aligned with an authority (53).

The sense of textual abundance and proliferation is encouraged (or enhanced) by

European printing capabilities. In his introduction to The Cornucopian Text, Terence

Cave explains how the advent of the printing press gives rise to an increase in texts, both

in terms of production and genre varieties. The three major vernacular writers of France

– Rabelais, Ronsard, and Montaigne – produce writing that reflects these changes in the

form of open-ended texts (ix). The writer, according to Erasmus, must find a way to

“both multiply and fragment his models so that he is not trapped by the prestige of a

single author” (xi). Curiously, Ulysses is written as though Joyce has produced it

alongside of Erasmus’ advice as Joyce’s various authorial influences transect each other

in a lattice work effect throughout the text. Part and parcel of this process, Cave

explains, is covered in book 2 of Copia, wherein Erasmus discusses the “‘notebook

method,’ probably derived via Agricola from the imitation techniques of Italian

68 
humanists on the one hand and, on the other, from late medieval sermon rhetoric” (27).

The following explanation of the notebook method can be considered a model of Joyce’s

own collective practices. It is necessary to clarify that the “notebook method” referenced

below does not pertain simply to the process of jotting down language or lists in a

notebook but rather an inexhaustible assimilation of words and phrases, a process which

influenced Erasmus’ own writing of De copia (Cave 25-27). Nonetheless, for purposes

of assessing Joyce’s own writing, it is relevant:

The method is expanded so that it draws on the whole corpus of classical

writing, and involves the intermediate ‘processing’ technique of thematic

and dialectical classification which will be exemplified in the index of the

Adages. Here copia takes on the sense of ‘storehouse,’ although store is

always envisaged in terms of release mechanisms which will allow the

processed materials to flow back into the stream of writing. (Cave 27)

The index referred to above belongs to Erasmus’ Adagia, a collection of adages that he

noted from his familiarity with classical texts. The idea of first processing thematic and

dialectical material and then subsequently releasing it back into the “stream of writing,”

is envisioned in the following segment from Ulysses, chapter 15 (“Circe”), where, in the

hallucinatory realm of Bloom’s inebriation, he envisions himself as Lord mayor of

Dublin. In this panorama of festivities and the “Venetian masts, maypoles and festal

arches” that depict a procession of Irish mayors and civil personnel, the narrative gives

way to an itemization of members of the “guilds and trades and trainbands with flying

colours”:

69 
 . . . coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law

scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimneysweeps, lard refiners,

tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church

decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries,

salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners,

export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse

repository hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters,

riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glover, plumbing

contractors. (Ulysses 15:1427-36)

Joyce’s catalogue, a blend of the modern and medieval, is artful in its drafting as it is

both specific and beautiful in its precision. The list bears the same tendency toward copia

of such writers as Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II), whose work Cave references as

an example of listing making, and Rudolph Agricola, a scholar and progenitor of the

notebook method referenced above. Agricola’s agency enabled “the aims and methods of

Italian humanists such as Valla – and indeed Piccolomini himself – [to be] transmitted

into the cultural climate of northern Europe towards the end of the fifteenth century”

(Cave 12). More specifically, Agricola’s “systematic assimilation and classification of

materials of classical literature” (Cave 12) can lead to rhetorical creativity, as is

evidenced by his views on schooling:

Characteristically, it is left to the student to devise his own categories and

assemble his own material, while the ‘fruition’ or production of

knowledge by constant practice (exercitatio), and the invention of new

‘things’ on the basis of what is known, are given high priority. Thus

70 
 Agricola envisages a constant process of absorption and creative re-

production. (Cave 12)

Cave also notes that Erasmus is influenced by Quintilian’s notion of “treasure house of

things” (19). In further explanation of this, Cave adds that, where copia and brevitas is

concerned, the balance of the two “enables Erasmus to suggest that true plenitude of

language is to be found not in simple extension, but in inventive and imaginative

richness” (Cave 21).

These ideas resound in James Joyce’s extraction of materials from those around

him, in the form of notes taken from anecdotes and characters from his time in Dublin,

both early and through later visits (Ellmann 365). The open-ended voluminous text is

one that pleases Joyce. He appeals to those around him in efforts to gain material for

Ulysses, including one of his visitors in the thirties, whom he asks to “secure a complete

list of the names and addresses on Mecklenburg Street” (Ellmann 367). In early 1920, he

writes to his Aunt Josephine Murray for material to finish “Nausicaa” and “Oxen of the

Sun”:

I want that information about the Star of the Sea Church, has it ivy on its

seafront, are there trees in Leahy’s terrace at the side or near, if so, what

are these steps leading down to the beach? I also want all the information

you can give, tittletattle, facts etc about Hollis Street maternity hospital.

Two chapters of my book remain unfinished till I have these so I shall feel

very grateful if you will sacrifice a few hours of your time for me and

write me a long letter with details. (Letters 136)

71 
The passage shows the extent to which Joyce aims to portray the reality of Ireland, to

memorialize it as a snapshot in Ulysses. In his attention to capturing these details, as well

as those of numerous songs, poetry, advertisements, news items and other Irish cultural

artifacts, his novel becomes a storehouse of history and culture. The only possible

downside to this is that such a dense materiality leaves the reader with the feeling of that

he or she is just sorting through material.

In the medieval era, enargia becomes attractive to writers interested in imitation

theory. Cave defines the word as “the evocation of a visual scene, in all its detail and

colors, as if the reader were present as a spectator” (27-28). The concept is different from

ekphrasis. To illustrate, Cave cites Quintilian: “But if you open up those things which

were included in a single word, there will appear flames pouring through houses and

temples . . . [etc.]” (qtd. in Cave 31). In enargia, the emphasis is on a verbal vision, and

the transference of its verbal possibilities gives way eventually to copia, which

encompasses those possibilities but enables representations both true and false (Cave 30).

The transference of a bright, sharp verbal vision to the extension of description on the

verbal plane carries with it an inherent pleasure, with writing as a kind of hedonism. The

following quote from Quintilian’s section on enargia, reveals its bearing on authorship:

But when the whole thing concerns pleasure, as is usually the case in

poetry, and in apodeixis, which are treated for the sake of exercising and

displaying one’s talent, it is permissible to indulge more freely in fictions

of this kind. To this category belongs Homer’s descriptions, as when he

arms his gods or heroes, or describes a banquet, a battle, a retreat, a

council. (qtd. in Cave 31)

72 
Agricola’s work, Cave explains, examines enargia as “one of the most powerful devices

for moving the affections” (32). It appears to carry a sensation-oriented effect with it, in

terms of being awe-inspiring and capable of emotional arousal with respect to grandeur

and nostalgia evoked from verbal depictions.

Desiderius Erasmus’ ideas are profoundly influential on the work of Francois

Rabelais, as are those of Joachim du Bellay, whose “Deffence argues that French poetry

can only hope to attain perfection by imitating the classics and that, while the true poet is

born, only education in the classics will protect his talent from being useless or ill-

informed” (Hall, Hardison and Kinney 1163). Rabelais’ imitative practices incorporate

the ideas and writings of Lucian, Homer, Erasmus and a host of other writers in his

Gargantua and Pantagruel. He also employs a copia of itemization, listing and

enumeration similar to that listed above and which Joyce will use centuries later. For

example, multiple chapters of Gargantua and Pantagruel contain lists of activities

(Gargantua, chapter 10), games (Gargantua, chapter 20), fowl for a feast (Gargantua,

chapter 36), the effects of corn on the body (chapter 2 of The Third Book of Pantagruel),

and the formal listing found in chapter 32 of The Fourth Book of Pantagruel, wherein

physical activities are paired with a corresponding (nonsensical) description, and which

include expressions from Erasmus’ Adages. The following section envisions, in Joyce’s

Citizen, a copia that manifests itself in the form of lists and verbal surfaces that enact

certain linguistic possibilities of plenitude.

73 
The Citizen: A Parody of Nationalism

In “Cyclops,” the Homeric overlay of Polyphemus and his lair co-exist with

Joyce’s interrogation of Irish nationalism, including the revivals of the Irish language and

the Irish insistence on its self-perception as a mythic race. The chapter’s theme is

“gigantism,” and contains trace images from more than one source, including Odysseus

and his crew’s stay at Polyphemus’ cave. Polyphemus himself is represented by a

character called the Citizen who, according to Richard Ellmann, is modeled after

“Michael Cusack, the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association” (61). Cusack fits the

necessary ingredients of Joyce’s Polyphemus: “Carrying a heavy blackthorn, he would

come into a pub and shout at the waiter, ‘I’m Citizen Cusack from the Parish of Carron in

the Barony of Burren in the County of Clare, you Protestant Dog!” (Gifford 61) Joyce’s

interpretation of the tale of Polyphemus’ wine-induced sleep translates into the chapter’s

setting of Barney Kiernan’s pub.

There are other echoes of The Odyssey, such as the numerous references and

double meanings involving eyes and vision. For example, the Citizen’s “couched spear

of acuminated granite” (Ulysses 12:200), is the equivalent of both Cusack’s walking stick

and Polyphemus’ club, taken and shaved to a point by Odysseus’ men. The image here is

literal but there is mention of the word itself, with the citizen and Bloom “having an

argument about the point” (Ulysses 12:488), Bloom telling the citizen that “You don’t

grasp my point” (Ulysses 12:522), and other references to eyes, vision and blindness.

The throwing of a stone into the bay at Odysseus and his crew by Polyphemus translates

into the Citizen’s throwing of the biscuit box as Martin Cunningham and Bloom pull

74 
away from the pub10. Other familiar representations transplanted in Ulysses can be found

in the similarities between the cyclops’ hills with their prime farming land and the

mention of Inisfail’s (Ireland’s) “pleasant lands” and streams, fish and produce (Ulysses

12:68-99). As well, the language of “innumerable of bellwhethers and flushed ewes and

shearling rams,” recalls Polyphemus’ flocks, the same that Odysseus and his remaining

men would strap themselves to in order to escape their captor’s detection – including the

“bellwether ram, the prize of all the flock” that Odysseus lashes himself to (The Odyssey

9:482).

Maria Tymoczko sees a parallel reference of one eyed giants in the Irish

Fomorians, “the most chaotic figures in early Irish literature” (34) as well as in the Irish

mythical race, the Fir Bolg. As a source available to Joyce, she continues, The Book of

Invasions or Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), “explains some of

the puzzles about Bloom, Stephen, and Molly” (32) in that “in the Irish story we find the

unified source for the constellation of main characters in Ulysses, the constellation of

Greek, Jew, and Mediterranean woman” (29). She writes:

The Book of Invasions contains the pseudohistory of Ireland: the

traditional history of Ireland before A.D. 432, the usual date for the

coming of Patrick and the beginning of written history in Ireland. Its

prototype was probably composed in the seventh century to fill in the gap

for Ireland in such standard late Roman universal histories as those by

Origen and Eusebius. (Tymoczko 25)

                                                            
10
David Hayman refers to it as a small representation of Virag Bloom’s coffin.
75 
Joyce, she explains, would have had numerous opportunities to read The Book of

Invasions, indirectly if not directly, since Joyce alludes to Milesians (a race of people it

describes) in Ulysses as well as A Portrait of the Artist (27). Joyce’s reading of Irish

mythology and pseudo-history also prefigures his own lists, particularly in “Cyclops” and

“Ithaca”. In Tymoczko’s continued examination of Joyce’s Irish textual influences and

chapter 12’s Citizen, she writes:

Listing became a more prominent feature of Irish narrative after the

twelfth century; this development coincides with the popularity of the later

alliterative prose style, which is characterized by alliterative runs,

including descriptions replete with lists of alliterative adjectives. . . . Lists

in the medieval Irish texts are often outrageous and absurd because of a

tendency for Irish schemata to become symmetrical or artificial in other

ways, even to the point of inconsistency. (Tymoczko 150)

Apparent in the Citizen’s appearance and attire, along with chapter 12’s parody, is

Joyce’s decision to combine Homeric and Irish myth with the gigantism of Rabelais’

Gargantua and Pantagruel. Clothed in deerskin and a garment of “recently flayed

oxhide” representing a kilt, the Citizen also wears a girdle “of plaited straw and rushes,”11

recalling the straw-like haven of the Greek giant’s sheep’s den/cave and his status as a

crude shepherd (Ulysses 12:168-69). Hung with seastones carved into crude visage and

scenes, it is this ekphrastic and phallic adornment, a semiotic overlay on the already

metaphorically inscribed Citizen, that establishes his ironic potency as both a symbol of

Irish nationalism and the conveyor of Ireland’s artistic and symbolic legacy. Violent in

                                                            
11
Don Gifford glosses the item as a suguan, or Irish rope. “Notes,” p. 320.
76 
his thoughts and sensibilities, and antagonistic to Bloom, the Citizen is an anti-Semite,

just as Cusack and other characters are.

The seastones represent a diverse and dense textual landscape:

From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every movement

of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art

the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin,

Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, rian of Kincora, the ardri

Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O’Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen

Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott,

Soggarth Eoghan O’Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry

Joy M’Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg

Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott,

Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal

MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the

Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for

Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, the Man in the

Gap, The Woman Who Didn’t, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte,

John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar,

Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes,

Muhammad, the Birds of Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the

Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius,

Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and

Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier

77 
 Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn,

Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben

Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss

Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva,

The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky

Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Don

Philip O’Sullivan Beare. (Ulysses 12:173-199)

The list contains Irish kings, heroes, revolutionaries, rebels, military personnel and

businessmen, as well as saints, martyrs, names from Irish songs and stories.

From this list it is clear that narrator’s “tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of

antiquity” is not to be trusted, as some of the names are clearly not Irish and, instead,

fictional characters. Joyce’s point is that the myth of a united Irish race is a false one. R.

J. Schork’s list of allusions for chapter 12, many of which are not contained in Gifford’s

Notes, identifies the source of the Citizen’s stones as Virgil’s victims of the monster and

cattle thief Cacus: “nailed to his high and mighty doors, men’s faces that dangled,

sickening, rotting, and bled white . . .” (The Aeneid 8:228-229). On the seastones (with a

pun on sea/see), Cacus’ victims are transformed into striking “tribal” images. The

implication is that the varied natures of the human personalities are the result of different

tribes and, in turn, that Ireland’s tribe is an assemblage of varied ethnicities. While Cacus

is the monster in The Aeneid 8, the cyclops are the forgers of Aeneas’ shield. In fact, the

ekphrastic nature of the passage suggests the same detail found in the ekphrastic passages

that celebrate the shields of Achilles and Aeneas in their respective stories, although this

78 
passage is not one of movement but stillness – a written collection of token likenesses,

hanging silent in their “rude” appearance.

The seastones’ crude faces, mostly the faces of Irish folkloric, political and

revolutionary characters, are clearly designed to be worn by the Citizen as a means of

authority. The move is likely a comic jab at Cusack, as Joyce provides a list of identities

in what appears to be a mixed bag of names, with identities both Irish and non-Irish alike.

Whether the images are Irish or not, a pseudo Irish nationalism is implied. If we are to

read the images as a trace of Homer’s The Odyssey, the passage mimics the “collection”

of men that Polyphemus trapped and partially ate in his cave, as the likenesses also hang

in close proximity to the Citizen’s stomach. If we are to read the images as a trace of

Virgil’s The Aeneid 8, with an accompanying unauthorized appropriation of the dead,

then the Citizen has taken the stones without being entitled to them. The Citizen’s

nationalism (and perhaps the nationalism of real Irish citizens) looks to sources fantastic

and without merit, and parodies the fabricated nature of Irish history and royal lineage.

Conspicuously present in the seastones’ group is the poet Dante Alighieri, whose

presence can be felt throughout Ulysses and in Joyce’s earlier works. His inclusion in

this ekphrastic collection signifies his aesthetic influence on Joyce, as well as what

appears to be an implicit sanctioning of Joyce’s authority in writing an Irish epic.

However, Joyce’s choice to include him on the Citizen’s girdle is likely mischievous and

parodic. In Inferno 25, Dante sees the centaur Cacus in the eighth circle of thieves,

adorned with snakes and a dragon (Inferno 25:20-23). Virgil explains to Dante that he

has been placed there for stealing cattle (Inferno 25:28-30). Inferno 24 and Inferno 25

contain a series of somatic reordering considered to be an important statement by Dante

79 
about his poetics. Because of this, the emergence of Dante on the Citizen’s girdle implies

that the Citizen really is intended by Joyce as a modification of Cacus. Alternately, Joyce

may be insinuating that where Dante had imprisoned Cacus, now Joyce “owns” Dante,

The complete meaning that Joyce wishes to depict in the Citizen’s accessory is a

mystery. Although the images may be Virgilian, they are represented as “seastones,”

recalling Stephen’s walk on the “damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles,

that on the unnumbered pebbles beats . . . [u]nwholesome sand flats . . . at the land a

maze of dark cunning nets . . . Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master

mariners. Human shells (Ulysses 3:148-157). The stones’ placement fall in the space

allocated to the stomach and procreative organs, and the word “stones” is slang for the

male genitalia. Finally, their location and visibility on the Citizen’s body may refer

loosely to the idea of “having someone in one’s pocket,” in terms of approval and

support.

Cacus’ simple and bloody trophies have been elaborated into a symbolic plenitude

- one that consists of varying elements of myth, exploration, prestige, invention, empire

and authorship. In their proximity to the Citizen’s generative organs, the stones serve as

a metaphor for his procreative possibilities. In this respect, the Citizen’s girdle recalls the

codpieces – and their accompanying symbolism – in Gargantua and Pantagruel. In the

representation, I see Joyce’s appropriation and transformation of Cacus’ heads as

deriving from the same plenitude with which Rabelais invests his stories. Joyce is

creating a Citizen from equal parts Irish giant, Homeric giant, Virgilian crime, and

Rabelaisian accessory. The following passage describes Gargantua’s codpiece:

The codpiece of the boy child Gargantua can be described as follows:

80 
 For his codpiece were taken sixteen and a quarter ells of the same cloth.

In shape it was like a flying buttress well and merrily attached to two

beautiful golden buckles and fixed on by two enamel booklets; in each of

them was mounted a large emerald as big as an orange (for as Orpheus

states in his book On Precious Stones and Pliny in his final Book, it has

properties for erecting and invigorating the organ of Nature). (Rabelais

230)

Curiously, the booklets are mounted with emeralds (stones), although Terence Cave

states that the referenced sources of Orpheus and Pliny are erroneous (184). The

booklets’ presence on the decoration indicate a textual component, a potential for

reading. In his study of Rabelais (and thus the inherited readings of Erasmus), Cave sees

Gargantua’s braguette as a site of abundance:

[I]n Gargantua 8, the magnificent braguette worn by the child Gargantua

is assimilated to the horn of plenty. The myth here, it would seem,

attached firmly to the theme of sexual performance rather than to that of

writing. Yet one may perceive, by tracing its figurative development, a

fundamental movement inscribed in Rabelais’s text at many levels –

rhetorical, grammatical, and lexical, as well as thematic; it may thus be

taken as a point of departure for a textual exploration which will point

back insistently to the two-faced myths of plenitude in the Prologue to the

Tiers Livre. (183)

In the depiction of the codpiece, Rabelais’ emphasis on abundance is parodic:

81 
 The opening of the codpiece was about a pole in length; it was slashed like

the hose, with the blue damask cloth puffing out as before. But on seeing

the beautiful embroidery on it, with its threads of gold, as delightful strap-

work garnished with fine diamonds, fine rubies, fine turquoises, fine

emeralds and Persian pearls, you would have likened it to a horn-of-plenty

such as you can see on antiques and such as Rhea bestowed on Adrastea

and Ida (the two nymphs who brought up Jupiter). It was ever vigorous,

succulent, oozing, ever verdant, ever flourishing, ever fructifying, full of

humours, full of flowers, full of fruits, full of all delights, As God is my

witness it was good to see! (Rabelais 230-231)

As has been explained elsewhere, the imagery and language in the continued description

implies a maternal, nourishing fruit-like visual display, hyperbolic and also sly in that one

verb – “oozing” – depicts a state incompatible with the remainder of the description, as it

possibly indicates a venereal disease. “Full of humours” is also ambiguous. The

potential for sexually transmitted diseases is real and the theme is already present through

the syphilitic narrator. Especially if, as Cave writes, “The thematic function of this

cornucopian codpiece is, apparently, to designate the sexual potency and fertility of what

it contains” (184), then its allusive association with the detailed seastones acts as an

amplifier of artifice. In Rabelais’ codpiece, Cave sees the abundance topos emerging

through a careful use of language:

The recurrence of ‘tousjours’ and of ‘plene’ establishes perpetual fullness

as the thematic axis of the figure; and the notations of dampness,

fructification, and the seasonal cycle unambiguously evoke the world of

82 
 nature. Yet this glimpse of natural plenty is perceived through the lattice

of art: not only is the codpiece an artificial object; the cornucopia itself

appears as an antique cameo, as the representation of a myth.

Furthermore, the precious stones recall the textual domain of lapidaries

(Rabelais cites erroneously, the pseudo-Orpheus and Pliny). (Cave 184)

Cave’s analysis points out that the symbols contained on the codpiece serve as a

representation of a myth. In contrast, the descriptions of several of the Citizen’s stones

already contain a built in mythological status, through their identities. The qualities

depicted by Gargantua’s codpiece fit the qualities proposed by the Citizen’s seastones.

They, too, are crafted through artifice but their connotation is one of death rather than

abundance. As Cave notes, however, the Third Book of Pantagruel, chapter 8 (the sister

chapter to Gargantua, chapter 8), also discusses codpieces. In it, Rabelais mocks Galen’s

theories of human sexuality, particularly the production of semen. The bodily location of

its production was debated at the time. The Citizen’s seastones have a war-like,

revolutionary aura, similar to the Third Book’s codpiece symbolizing war and the

perpetuation of the species. The ekphrastic connection between chapter 12 and Rabelais’

chapters 8 underscores, on the visual and verbal planes, a connection between the

potential authority that the Citizen represents (however parodic) and the efforts of Bloom

as a true citizen. I also see the Citizen’s seastones as a reminder that Bloom is a mock-

hero, since he is not, as Odysseus was, a warrior. The ekphrasis serves as a means for

Joyce to conflate a classical metaphor with Irish mythology, resulting in a revision of

epic codes.

83 
 Toward the end of the chapter, the narrator describes Bloom as having a

fundamental role in the nationalist move of providing support to Arthur Griffith. More

specifically, “it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all

kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off of the government and

appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries” (Ulysses

12:1573-76). Here, as in the rest of the claims against Bloom, his involvement is skewed

in the eyes of the pub’s denizens toward that of a manipulative interloper on Irish soil.

The role that Joyce assigns Bloom provides him a nationality that is greater than the

verbal declarations and venting that transpire in the pub, effectively making the Citizen’s

responsive Irish phrases and interest in renewing the Irish language hollow. His

inclinations are the product of an investment in pseudo history, a myth and grandeur that

is accompanied by a profound racial bias, whereas Bloom’s words amount to a praxis that

can affect the Irish political landscape.

Ungar points out, in his writing of The Resurrection of Hungary, that Arthur

Griffith argues for an Ireland that could “free itself from the domination of England by

emulating the campaign that the Hungarian leader Feren Deák initiated against Vienna

after the national defeat in 1849” (20). Griffith “advocated a boycott of the parliamentary

maneuvering at Westminster. . . . Through passive resistance, Griffith wanted Ireland to

insist on the recognition of sovereignty that the Irish Volunteers had wrung from Britain

in 1783” (Ungar 20). When this initiative failed due to Griffith’s preference for a non-

violent abstention from the Irish, Sinn Fein split (Ungar 21).

The actual date assigned to Bloom’s involvement is, of course, fictional, with

Joyce, according to Andras Ungar, writing Ulysses in such a way that it plays a pivotal

84 
role in the founding of Sinn Fein. In 1904, Griffith “did not have local prominence, nor

did the Sinn Fein connection, not in 1904” (Ungar 21). Further, Ungar writes:

Essentially . . . Joyce took deliberate steps to highlight the connection

[between Griffith, Sinn Fein and Bloom]. For one thing, he backdates the

controversy over Sinn Fein to 1904 in order to involve Bloom. The

Resurrection of Hungary was, indeed, published in 1904, but as James

Fairhall points out “Sinn Fein was founded in 1905, peaked in significance

in 1908, waned almost from notice altogether between 1910-13, only to

rise again thanks to popular anger at the executions following Easter

1916” (qtd. in Ungar 21).

This move, Ungar argues, increases Ulysses status as a fable, one that aligns itself with

Ireland’s rebirth. To that end, the move implies Joyce’s awareness that his epic gains

value in the connection between Bloom, Griffiths and Sinn Fein. Joyce’s writing of

Ulysses as the promise of a free Irish state looms is compatible with Cyril Bowra’s notion

of a prime era in which to write epic. Bowra notes,

Literary epic, if we may judge by its best examples, flourishes not in the

heyday of a nation or of a cause but in its last days or in its aftermath. At

such a time a man surveys the recent past with its record of dazzling

successes and asks if they can last; he analyses its strength, announces its

importance, urges its continuance. Such a detachment does not belong to

poets who write in the middle of a great struggle when the outcome is dim

and the issues are undecided. Periclean Athens, Elizabethan England,

85 
 France under Louis XIV, had their own superb literatures but no literary

epic. (28)

Ulysses, although written with the hope of home rule on the horizon, was underway by

June 1915, at which time Joyce had begun writing the third episode (Ellmann 383). It

would be published in its entirety in 1922, the same year that Ireland would see the

establishment of the Irish free state. In the sense that there had been a long struggle that

Joyce could look back to, the time accords with Bowra’s notion of a survey of the recent

past, although there were still undecided issues as to the fate of Ireland’s home rule.

In “Cyclops,” Joyce enables a statement on Ireland’s “national-ness” through a

revision of history through Bloom’s actions and his portrait of the Citizen. As Conte

notes, epic codes operate in tandem with epic norms. Ulysses’ epic norms – in this case,

a text involved in the progressive establishment of Ireland as a free nation - are

underscored by its epic codes. As previously mentioned, the metaphor, long established

in epic works and other poetic writings dating back to classical Greece, serves as an epic

code. It also denotes authority. In this case, Joyce establishes his authority as an author,

an authority that is also political, by investing the Citizen with a multiplicity of

connotations. His character is comprised of Homeric and Virgilian elements while his

accessory, the seastones, adopts the generative, textual abundance of Gargantua’s

braguette. In doing so, its curse as “maledictive” stones - referenced as represented

within the ekphrastic facecloth that Joe Hynes passes to the Citizen to clean himself after

he spits in response to Bloom’s declaration of citizenship - multiplies. The added

Rabelaisian connotation throws the Citizen into a position of increased nonsense but also

danger, in keeping with the violence of the Homeric Polyphemus.

86 
 As well, the frequent lists – of Irish landmarks, the arboreal wedding attendees of

Jean Wyse de Neaulan and the sacred procession instantly visualized when Martin

Cunningham calls out, during the hostilities in the pub, “God bless all here” (Ulysses

12:1673) – recall the medieval literary experimentation with copia. Inside the bar, the

legacy of both Irish folklore and of Rabelaisian writing creates a rich textual allusion that

constitutes an epic code.

As an epic code, the Citizen is a multiplicity of texts. Joyce’s writes him through

an appropriation of epic and non-epic authorities. As Ungar points out, Joyce utilizes the

Homeric frame to write Ulysses, and this enables Joyce’s “shaping of the epic as

historiography” (1). While the Citizen does not help Bloom’s case, he does help Joyce

create a space of authority and assists in his revision of the epic genre.

87 
 CHAPTER 4: DANTE’S AUTHORITY AND POETICS IN CANTOS 25

Dante Alighieri’s aesthetic already figures strongly in Joyce’s earlier work,

Dubliners as it will in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Dante’s

sense of authority and poetic development is important to Joyce’s own aesthetic and an

examination of Dante’s textual poetics in Purgatorio 25 will be compared to Joyce’s

response to those poetics in “Oxen.” There, Joyce continues his process of modifying

epic codes through the allusive incorporation and modification of Purgatorio 24’s

passage on embryology.

Dante’s poetic aesthetic, and its accompanying authority, is a portrait composed

of various lyrics and prose found in Rime (lyric poems), Vita Nuova (New Life), De

Vulgari Eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vernacular), Convivio (The Banquet), Epistles

(Letters), his three books of The Commedia – (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), De

monarchia (Monarchy), Eclogues (Pastoral Lyrics), and Quaestio de acqua et terra (A

Question about Water and Earth). The authoritative running commentary in his

approach to his ideas – statements of poetic merit, acknowledgement, self-congratulation

and the ideas of beauty and art – is a product of his classical influences. His stylistic

fashioning of his four major treatises, along with instructive passages in the Commedia, is

influenced by the scholasticism in force between 1100 and 1400, an era in which the

Aristotelian prologue became a guide to commentaries on scriptural auctores (Minnis

160). His authorial sensibilities were flavored by the instructional guides and glosses that

accompanied those auctores. Through the combined influence of these written models,

88 
and his self-aware stylings of Virgil’s commentary in his own poetry, Dante develops a

tendency toward auto-exegesis

Joyce’s works reveal the development of an aesthetic similar to Dante’s.

Throughout Dante’s Commedia and his treatises such as Vita Nuova and Convivio, the

emergence of his writing and his auto-revisionist tendencies coexist alongside of an

evolving authority. This growing sense of authority stems from his belief in the divine

sanctioning of his work. The age in which he lived saw a distinction between “God as

transcendent Author of authors, and the human authorities which derived from him”

(Ascoli 79). Scripture “is the product not only of several human authors, to whom

differing degrees of ‘faith and obedience’ are due, but also, and ultimately, of a single

divine Author whose encompassing intentions unite and/or supersede those of the

‘scribes of God’ through whom He speaks” (Ascoli 79).

However, in Dante’s Christian epic, he displays a markedly self-aware vision of

himself as author. In Convivio, he actually equates authority as “nothing else than the

activity proper to an author” (209), with a second meaning that

the other source from which ‘author’ is derived, Uguccione testifies in the

beginning of his book on Derivations, is a Greek word pronounced

autentin, which is Latin is equivalent to ‘worthy of trust and obedience’.

And thus ‘author’, which is derived from this word, is used for any person

who deserves to be trusted and obeyed. (Convivio 210)

The treatise also reveals a studied, sustained inquiry into imperial authority.

Inferno’s structural layers depend upon the work of the classical auctores as well

as that of Dante’s own peers – usually poets or his fellow Florentines. Dante, along with

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later epic authors, engages in an ongoing dialogue of poetics that spans centuries and

which has evolved through a process of allusion, appropriation, competition,

modification, and imitation. His own place in this textual legacy, as is illustrated through

the Commedia and the works preceding it, is accompanied by his ongoing and

pronounced discourse on the subject of writing that can be related to his status as an

“auctor,” or authority.

Robert Ascoli, in his introduction to Dante and the Making of a Modern Author,

provides a definition of author, distinguishes the differences between author and text: “In

the Middle Ages, an ‘author’ (Latin auctor and autor, Italian autore) was not any old

writer of literature, but was instead, and against the modern definition, a person who

possessed auctoritas, and who might also have produced texts that were known as

auctoritates (Ascoli 6). Further, auctores denote texts, more specifically, auctores

“consisted of a limited number of classical texts that had accrued cultural capital and with

it the status of guarantors of truth and models for imitation over the centuries” (Ascoli 7).

In this period, the authority that accompanies authorship is premised upon a divine

bestowal of ability, with the author invested with a special ability to conceive of and

relate universal truths:

The essential point was that these texts had been proven to have

transcended the limitations of the inevitably fallible men who wrote them

and to bear truths that exceeded the limitations of historical contingency –

being valid in any time and any place. (Ascoli 9)

In keeping with this divine bestowal, Dante writes the Commedia in such a way that

autoexegesis and autocitation enable him to reside within a Christian frame where he can

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envision his poetic status and his poema sacra (sacred poem) as a means to gain Heaven.

Beatrice Portinari, the neighbor that Dante meets at the age of nine, will become the

focus of his writings, first in Vita Nuova and later in the Commedia. Her memorialization

in the works, particularly in the Commedia, as Dante’s divine benefactress and instructor,

identifies her as a significant part of Dante’s meditations on and facilitation of authorship.

As scholars have discussed at length, Dante’s position as an authority differs from

his predecessors in that (1) he chooses to writer in the vulgate (or Italian vernacular)

instead of Latin, a language long considered the superior choice for authoritative texts;

(2) his position as exile and his lack of a public office or other official designation

compromises the accompanying authority that such an endeavor was usually predicated

upon; and (3) there is the challenge of rising to the authority of his predecessors, “Latin

authors long dead,” as Ascoli puts it. The sense of his authority is more apparent in the

various dialogues between himself and others in Commedia, the direct addresses to his

reader and his statement about poetics in the cantos. However, he says little about his

authority directly in his works. As Ascoli notes, “In his whole oeuvre, he uses words for

“authority” or “author” in relation to himself along in only two isolated cases” (9).

Dante’s more radical contributions to the epic consist of a marked textual

awareness of and commentary on his authorial process in order to become poet par

excellence. These contributions include the choice to place a wide range of figures

literary, historical and known to the author in his work, thereby creating important

dialogues; his ability to situate his own auctoritas through the epic tradition; and the text

as a means of assessing and interrogating his writing.

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 Dante takes the journey central to all epics and re-envisions it, fitting it into a

Christian frame. Instead of wartime activities, the danger his characters face relate to the

momentary dangers of hell in the Inferno and (for Dante the pilgrim) lapsing into fear,

weakness of will, or the inability to finish the journey. In the Christian framework of his

epic, he accomplishes many things that his predecessors had not. He continues, as Virgil

has done, to re-define the epic codes and norms of the genre by using the Christian frame,

placing and utilizing (for various purposes) a great many real life acquaintances, friends,

family and enemies known to him in real life in its cantos. Joyce learns from this

technique, using real life models with full or partial pseudonyms, sometimes including

details and personas of deceased Dubliners. And like Dante’s ability to write a narrative

that examines his own poetics, Joyce treats Ulysses as a means to develop his literary

aesthetic. In both cases, the inclusion of many characters in the text leads to a fleshly

quality, partially for the important purpose of enabling aesthetic, philosophical and

psychological discourses.

The conversations in the Commedia are a natural extension of Dante’s verse

dialogues with poets in his day. For example, as early as 1283, Dante is already using

poetry to converse with Dante da Maiano, in order to respond to the other poet’s question

about a dream that he had concerning a beautiful woman and which had circulated in

Florence (Ruud 313). His response is an attempt to analyze the dream’s symbolism but,

more importantly, it reveals his need to develop poetic discourse with other writers for

the innovative challenge of fashioning the planes of hell, purgatory and paradise. Dante

considers da Maiano a mentor and will continue to show him his poems in order “to test

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their worth” (Ruud 314). Da Maiano will not be the only poet he corresponds with by

verse; he does so with Guido Cavalcanti, Meuzzo Tolomei da Siena, and Forese Donati.

His exchanges with Donati in Purgatorio 23 are provocative, with some scholars

assuming that Dante’s reference to his wife, Nella, in an unfavorable light to be an insult

and indicative of an estrangement. Dante will address this scenario later on in Purgatorio

23, casting Nella in a good light during a moment of homage to Donati; however, Dante’s

portrayal in their earlier exchange seems a type of forerunner to the misogynistic blasons

of the late sixteenth century. These exchanges illustrate that Dante is already formulating

a dynamic which will anticipate poetic exchanges with Virgil and other poets in The

Commedia, with the additional plus that he is attempting to make amends in Purgatorio

for his real life actions on earth. Dante’s exchange is a palinode, or recantation - one of

many in his work. Teodolinda Barolini and Robert Ascoli, among others, have

researched substantially Dante’s use of the palinode and other recantation oriented

practices in his corpus. One concerns Dante’s allusion to The Aeneid in Inferno, the

result of which points to a conflict concerning Virgil’s influence of Dante and Virgil’s

pagan status.

The scene of Pier della Vigna (in the form of a tree) on the plane of the suicides

recalls Virgil’s spear riddled body of Polydorus in The Aeneid 3. Pier della Vigna was

minister and chief counselor to Frederick II before committing suicide. In Dante’s

transformation of the body of Polydorus for Inferno, it becomes a black gnarled tree in a

mass of trees and brambles. In Aeneid 3, Aeneas comes upon the dead body of

Polydorus, killed by the King of Thrace, initially believing it to be a thicket of dogwood

and myrtle spears (The Aeneid 3:28-29). Intrigued, he twice tears a branch from the

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mass, hoping to use the branches to make a canopy for a sacrificial altar for Venus, his

mother. Each time the branches secrete blood (The Aeneid 3:30-39). On the third and

last try, Aeneas hears a groan and the following words:

‘Why Aeneas,

why mangle this wretched flesh? Spare the body

buried here – spare your own pure hands, don’t stain them!

I am no stranger to you. I was born in Troy,

and the blood you see is oozing from no tree.

Oh, escape from this savage land, I beg you,

flee these grasping shores! I am Polydorus.

Here they impaled me, an iron planting of lances

covered by body – now they sprout in stabbing spears!’

(The Aeneid 3:47-55)

Dante appropriates the scene for his own purposes because there is an issue with a proper

burial after a horrendous death. Dante’s metamorphosis of Polydorus removes the sign of

war from della Vigna’s body. The body that is transferred allusively from Polydorus to

Pier della Vigna is no longer a warrior but a writer, who was a “judge, canon lawyer . . .

[and] agent for the foreign affairs of Frederick II” (Petrocchi 180). Falling into disfavor

with the court, “he was imprisoned and blinded. The orator’s suffering under torture led

him to suicide” (Petrocchi 181). In the forest of brambles, Virgil advises Dante, “If you

would tear/ a little twig from any of these plants,/ the thoughts you have will also be cut

off” (Inferno 13:28-30). When Dante complies, the following accusations ensue:

. . . its trunk cried out: “Why do you tear me?”

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 And then, when it had grown more dark with blood,

it asked again: “Why do you break me off?

Are you without all sentiment of pity?

We once were men and now are arid stumps:

your hand might well have shown us greater mercy

had we been nothing more than souls of serpents.” (Inferno 13:33-39)

Giorgio Petrocchi attributes Dante’s action to his realization that “[f]oreseeing exile,

Dante expresses its cause, ingratitude, and its effect, the abandonment of all friendships

and the unbreakable bond between the personalities of men and political misfortune”

(179). The snapping of the bramble is a metaphor for the severing of political ties and

ties with Florence. Nonetheless, Dante provides a further commentary on della Vigna’s

situation by allowing him to clear his name:

I was faithful to my splendid office,

So faithful that I lost both sleep and strength

The whore who never turned her harlot’s eyes

away from Caesar’s dwelling, she who is

the death of all and vice to every court,

inflamed the minds of everyone against me;

and those inflamed, then so inflamed Augustus

that my delighted honors turned to sadness (Inferno 13:62-69)

In both cases, the characters - although Polydorus is fictive – are servants of the court and

suffer from political violence. Allen Mandelbaum notes the literary connotation in della

Vigna’s manner and its effect on Dante’s verse:

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 The mannered style of Pier’s discourse has been seen as a historical

characterization of Pier’s own chancellery style, of which Pier’s epistles

are masterly examples (Novati); but Spitzer, noting that this style

penetrates Dante’s own style in the canto, sees historical characterization

as “not the sole or even the prime, artist motive behind the use of these

rhetorical devices.” Instead, he sees “a sort of linguistic, or onomatopoetic

rendition of the ideas of torture, schism, estrangement.” But it is also true

that Dante is given to the same exacerbation of rhetoric in very un-suicidal

contexts. (Inferno Notes 365)

Despite the uncertainty of Dante’s textual intentions concerning style, the poetic memory

here is intended nonetheless. Because the allusion involves Virgil, a poet, and della

Vigna, a writer of epistles, the literary atmosphere of the scene results in Dante’s use of a

divergent style. Additionally, the tenor of della Vigna’s brambles in conjunction with the

vehicle of Polydorus’ spear struck body results in a new meaning. On the simplest level,

the ground between the two, or similarity, lies in various aspects such as the body/rod or

body/branch visual, as Polydorus has become bush-like, the spears signifying the same

danger of pain associated with the brambles.

In both scenes, the souls of the shades are revealed when Aeneas and Dante tear

off a leaf or bramble. Both envision a body, transformed, that can still speak in death.

Polydorus is given a “fresh new burial” (The Aeneid 3:74) by Aeneas and his men, while

della Vigna will remain in the form of a bramble, subject to his suicide. The irony is that

they share a similar fate in being remembered, both in story and in literature. Polydorus

is buried and remembered: “And so we lay his soul in the grave as our voices raise his

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name” (The Aeneid 3:80-81). Likewise, della Vigna requests of Virgil and Dante: “If

one of you returns into the world,/ then let him help my memory, which still/ lies prone

beneath the battering of envy” (Inferno 13:76-78).

The scene between della Vigna, Virgil and Dante takes on new meaning as Virgil

chastises Dante for not believing the injury to Polydorus in The Aeneid: Virgil

apologizes to della Vigna:

Wounded soul, if earlier,

He had been able to believe what he

Had only glimpsed within my poetry,

Then he would not have set his hand against you;

But its incredibility made me

Urge him to do a deed that grieves me deeply. (Inferno 13:46-51)

At this point, Dante’s engagement with poetic memory turns the episode into a mingling

of metaphor and a reflection on aesthetic choice. Both contribute to the manipulation of

time. Dante snaps della Vigna’s branch because he has read Virgil’s work and cannot

believe its incredibility even though he still places such an incredible act of

metamorphosis in Inferno 13. The incident represents a palinode, or retraction, and is

part of a set of textual modifications noted by Ascoli:

Dante evokes his own earlier texts or those of others in a variety of ways

(verbal or conceptual echo, generic modeling, narrative episode, dramatic

representation), only to define a limit to their value as models, usually in

the form of a critique of the doctrinal substance conveyed by their literary

practice. (278)

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The defining action mentioned here along with the critique can be seen in the evocation

of Virgil’s text (Polydorus) in Dante’s Inferno (Pier della Vigna), above. Dante

orchestrates a critique of Virgil by deliberately ignoring the references in his allusion.

Dante, through Virgil’s chastisement, is essentially representing the text of Aeneid as a

warning about the consequences of snapping the branch. However, since Virgil is pagan,

and not Christian, Dante cannot treat his text as an authority, so his snap is the critique of

the lack of doctrinal substance in Virgil’s work. Ironically, Dante tears the branch to

acknowledge Virgil’s representation and influence on the poet. The next section looks at

the more complex allusive statement on authority present in the connection between

Dante’s cantos 25.

The Development of Dante’s Poetic Aesthetic in Cantos 25

Vita Nuova, with its thirty-one lyric poems and accompanying prose passages, is

an integral part of Dante’s corpus. According to Jay Ruud, the format of poems threaded

with prose commentaries is, for its time, “unusual and Dante probably borrowed it from

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius’s sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy” (349).

The concept of unrequited love, along with the associated humiliation and pain Dante felt

from Beatrice Portinari, is felt throughout. In Vita Nuova 25, a canzone in the midst of a

series of canzoni concerning Beatrice and her father’s death, Dante explains his aesthetic

choice of using personification (allegory) in depicting love as a god. He also explains

that

any metaphor or rhetorical similitude which is permitted unto poets,

should also be counted not unseemly in the rhymers of the vulgar tongue.

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 Thus, if we perceive that the former have caused inanimate things to speak

as though they had sense and reason, and to discourse one with another . . .

it should therefore be permitted to the latter to do the like. (Musa)

In placing the defense of allegory and rhymes of the vulgar tongue in Vita Nuova, Dante

continues a privileging of the Italian vernacular, thereby lending it authority for poetic

works and also enacting a modification of the Italian language. In terms of Beatrice’s

presence, Eric Auerbach notes a few of the intricacies of her role as a poetic force,

writing that in addition to becoming “a necessary part of the plan of salvation, decreed by

Divine Providence,” she was a “living synthesis of sensuous and rational perfection”

(62). Her memory persists in Dante’s life and works and her poetic character contains

features derived from the Christian-infused strains of love poetry as well as the

connotation of secret truth that appears to underline her presence in the Commedia;

however, Auerbach considers her as a sophisticated presence, one that is more profoundly

Christian than the “troubadours’ cult of the saints: she is transfigured and transformed

while preserving her earthly form” (62).

The Italian language, or vernacular, is important to Dante’s method. In Vita

Nuova 12, there is a conflation of Dante’s concern with Beatrice (she has snubbed him)

and a question concerning his use of the vulgate. He is visited by God, who addresses

him in Latin:

And he said these words to me: Ego tanquam centrum circuli, cui simili

mo do se habent circumferentie partes; tu autem non sic. (“I am like the

center of a circle, equidistant from all points on the circumference; you,

however, are not.”) Then, as I thought over his words, it seemed to me

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 that he had spoken very obscurely, so that I decided, reluctantly, to speak,

and I said these words to him: “Why is it, my Lord, that you speak so

obscurely?” And this time he spoke in Italian, saying: “Do not ask more

than is useful to you.” (Musa)

Upon hearing Latin, he refers to God’s language as “obscure.” The response he receives

is in Italian. The change from Latin to Italian can be interpreted as God’s divine

sanctioning of Dante’s decision to write his seminal work in Italian. Dante writes such an

event in order to affirm that, as an auctor who is divinely inspired, his use of Italian is

acceptable and ordained. The power invested in Beatrice by God (and Dante) sets the

stage for her presence later on in the Commedia. Dante passes Beatrice on the street and

is mystified as to her snubbing of him:

And so, I began telling him about the greeting that had been denied me,

and when I asked him for the reason why, he answered me in this way:

“Our Beatrice heard certain people who were talking about you that your

attentions to the lady I named to you on the road of sighs were doing her

some harm; this is the reason why the most gracious one, who is the

opposite of anything harmful, did not deign to greet you, fearing your

person might prove harmful to her. Since she has really been more or less

aware of your secret for quite some time, I want you to write a certain

poem, in which you make clear the power I have over you through her,

explaining that ever since you were a boy you have belonged to her; and,

concerning this, call as witness him who knows, and say that you are

begging him to testify on your behalf; and I, who am that witness, will

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 gladly explain it to her, and from this she will understand your true

feelings and, understanding them, she will also set the proper value on the

words of those people who were mistaken. (Vita Nuova 17-18).

Aside from the divine implications of Beatrice’s presence, Dante is already revealing a

tendency to address others, a tendency that will become part of his poetic process. These

dialogues become a means to negotiate space and time in order to address perceived

misunderstandings (see the Forese Donati reference above) or to envision some response

that is not forthcoming. Sometimes the dialogues are proleptic, with shades warning of

events that Dante has experienced. In this case, the God’s directive to write a poem binds

up the multiple themes at issue: love, inspiration (of Beatrice to Dante), the search for

truth and divinely inspired authorship.

Virgil’s influence and presence is particularly important to Dante’s establishment

of himself as poet par excellence and he fills many roles: guide, protector, surveyor, tutor,

communicator and overall facilitator of Dante’s journey through hell and purgatory. The

pairing is one that figuratively places him on the same poetic path and provokes a

comparative glance at the two poets’ works. Virgil’s duties stop at purgatory as he is not

allowed into heaven. In addition to the verbal exchanges that he shares with Dante through

the Commedia, certain features of his poetic style are absorbed by Dante into his own

aesthetic. Although Dante crafts a guide/mentor relationship between himself and Virgil,

this issue of his auctoritas is eternally present, confronting Virgil’s.

Upon meeting Virgil, in Inferno 1, Dante proclaims his reverence for

him:

O light and honor of all other poets,

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 May my long study and the intense love

That made me search your volume serve me now.

You are my master and my author, you –

The only one from whom my writing drew

The noble style for which I have been honored. (Inferno 1:82-87)

The noble style mentioned here refers to Dante’s endeavor of writing verse termed the

“sweet new style” (dolce stil novo). In The Georgics, Virgil writes of his own “wish”

concerning poetry:

And as for me, my most ardent wish is that sweet Poetry,

Whose devotee I am, smitten as I’ve been with such commitment,

Would open up to me the courses of the stars in heaven,

The myriad eclipses of the sun and phases of the moon,

Whence come earthquakes, which are the reason deep sees surge

To burst their bounds before receding peacefully,

And are why winter suns dash to dip themselves into the

ocean

And are what causes long nights to last and linger. (The Georgics 2:475-

483)

Virgil’s pronouncement of his devotion and love of “sweet” poetry comes at the end of

book 2, after verse that discusses farming, the propagation of trees, and various themes of

nature, including the tending of bees and cutting of clover. Occasionally, Virgil will

address his love of nature poetry directly: “What ties me to the theme of bigger trees”

(The Georgics 2:435)? This investigation of his authorship will provoke similar ones in

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Dante. His poetic aspirations extend to the celestial sphere, as he wishes poetry to open

up to him “the courses of the stars in heaven, the myriad eclipses of the sun and phases of

the moon” (The Georgics 2:477-78). Shortly after the first “sweet” reference above, he

evinces the same kind of authorial concern that Dante will imitate. He addresses his

fellow farmers and countrymen on the subject of the husbandry of sheep and goats:

Now you’ve your work cut out for you – stake your hopes of

Fame on it, courageous countrymen.

Don’t think I’m not aware how hard it is to find the words

For such a theme and dignify one that’s so circumscribed.

But love’s sweet force transports me to Parnassian peaks

Where none has ever trod before, where there’s no beaten path

Easing downward to the spring at Castalia.

Now I appeal to you, Pales, inspire me with some authority. (The Georgics

3.287)

Four major themes can be identified in the passage above: fame as a reward following

hard work; the acknowledgment of difficulty in finding language elevated enough to

dignify the theme and write it; the same “sweet” force that can lift the poet to Parnassus;

and attempting, through his poetry, to gain authority. However, the same “love’s sweet

force” that can transport Virgil to Parnassus is tied to the poet’s love of the land. His

poetics are intertwined with his experiences in farming, animal husbandry, the routines of

bees and other forces of nature, whereas Dante’s “sweet new style,” concerns a poetry

that is tied to feelings of romantic love, an inheritance from the troubadour genre. His

poetry is less about the sheer appreciation of nature and more about human concerns. He

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creates a realm of both discipline and favor by assigning his fellow countrymen spots in

the Commedia.

As regards appropriation and modification, Dante will lift passages from Virgil’s

work as he does with other classical authors such as Lucan, Statius and Ovid, for varying

purposes. Sometimes the appropriation serves to establish his poetic prowess. At other

times, he wishes to valorize Virgil’s auctoritas in order to heighten his importance and

relevance to Dante’s work. Either way, the allusion works as a metaphor and Dante’s

appropriation precipitates the same model of multi-nuanced meaning that Joyce employs

in his work. For purposes of illuminating Joyce’s intentions for “Oxen,” the next section

will examine the connection between the bodily re-membering in Inferno 24-25 and

Statius’ depiction of the embryo in Purgatorio 25. The poetic implications in Statius’

speech will be later be adddressed by Joyce in “Oxen.”

A Poetics of Somatic Re-membering and Embryonic Gestation

Throughout Inferno, Dante is constantly requested by the shades to remember

them to others when he returns to Florence. A trope of re-membering the physical body

accompanies these requests for verbal reconstitution among the living. What can be

metaphorically reproduced by Dante, post-hell, through memory on the plane above, can

be torn apart below. Striking poetic examples of transformations of the body take place

in Inferno 24-25, striking in their descriptions and the authorial statement that Dante

proposes in the verses surrounding the scenes of somatic restructuring. In the gradual

journey from Inferno 20 to 25, the pilgrim poet expresses his weariness and the

increasing difficulty of continuing.

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 At the beginning of Inferno 20, right before the horrific metamorphoses of thieves

Vanni Fucci, Agnello de’ Bruelleschi, and Puccio Scancato, Dante informs his readers “I

must make verses of new punishment and offer matter now for Canto Twenty of this first

canticle – of the submerged” (Inferno 20:1-3). In this moment of metafiction, the

endeavor of authorship appears almost too difficult, as though Dante needs to reiterate

and thus reaffirm his role as poet. His difficulties are paired with various corporeal

restructurings as both poets continue through the eighth circle, beginning with the

landscape of contorted and misaligned limbs in Inferno 20. The visual panorama brings

Dante to tears. Included in these figures is Tiresias, the prophet who, “changed his mien/

when from a man he turned into a woman,/ so totally transforming all his limbs/ that then

he had to strike once more upon/ the two entwining serpents with his wand/ before he had

his manly plumes again” (Inferno 20:40-45). The allusion is to Ovid’s Metamorphoses

and the snakes and transformation are a precursor to a larger physical and allusive

transformation in Inferno 24-25. The contortions witnessed here are static ones, meaning

there has already been a metamorphosis, a reassignment of limbs and twisting of heads

and torsos. The fallen move around - contorted, but frozen. Those static images will be

replaced by more movement in the cantos that follow.

In Inferno 24, just after Virgil and Dante navigate the difficult eighth circle of the

Malebolge (or the level of fraud, where the “hypocrites” are placed), Dante rests, finding

it increasingly difficult to continue. Virgil counsels him, stating, “Now you must cast

aside your laziness,/ for he who rests on down/ or under covers cannot come to fame;/

and he who spends his life without renown/ leaves such a vestige of himself on earth/ as

smoke bequeaths to air or foam to water” (Inferno 24:45-51). Dante carefully places

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Virgil’s words in this passage as they pertain to the fame that comes with superior

craftsmanship as a poet.

This is not the first time Virgil has had to counsel Dante. In placing Virgil in such

a role, Dante prepares the reader for the activities a short time later during the bodily

metamorphoses, in which Dante declares his superiority: “Let Lucan now be silent”

(Inferno 25:94); “let Ovid now be silent” (Inferno 25:97). However, the lines that follow

also indicate his journey is a spiritual one: “Therefore, get up; defeat your

breathlessness/ with spirit that can win all battles if/ the body’s heaviness does not deter

it” (Inferno 24:52-54). The irony in this passage is the knowledge that the spirit will

eventually leave the body and live on; also, there is a writerly implication that the canto

can only continue, in writing, if there is a physical hand to write it.

Inferno 24 and 25 contain numerous statements regarding authorship. Inferno 24

opens with the pastoral: a comparison of a shepherd’s expression to Virgil’s troubled

face. The pastoral simile is a nod to that genre’s reputation as the poetic precursor to the

writing of the epic. This comparison contains a simile where “hoarfrost mimes the image

of his white/ sister upon the ground - but not for long, because the pen he uses is sharp”

(Inferno 24:6-7). The words “mime” and “pen” imply authorship and mimicry, which is

relevant owing to Dante’s engagement with and imitation of his precursors in this canto.

Virgil’s unease is soon replaced by and expression Dante terms “that sweet manner I first

had seen along the mountain’s base” (Inferno 24:20-21).

The reference to “sweet” in Virgil’s manner again recalls Dante’s own authorial

stilnovisti past, one that likely owes some credit to Dante’s readings of Virgil. However,

the bridge that the two are about to cross is pointedly referenced as “broken” (Inferno

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24:19), “ruined” (Inferno 24:42), and the ridge beyond it as having crags “more jagged,

narrow difficult and much more steep than we had crossed before” (Inferno 24:61-62).

The landscape is physically taxing to the pilgrim-poet. It is symbolic of the authoritative

battle that lies ahead.

Arriving at a moat near the eighth embankment, and discerning a voice from a

ditch that “was not suited to form words,” Dante asks Virgil’s permission to descend the

wall they are walking along, to the lower belt. Virgil responds by emphasizing action:

“The only answer that I give to you is doing it . . . A just request is to be met in silence,

by the act” (Inferno 24:76-78). The two descend to a moat filled with the follow scene:

serpents so extravagant in form –

remembering them still drains my blood from me.

Let Libya boast no more about her sands;

For if she breeds chelydri, jaculi,

cenchres with amphisbaena, pareae,

she never showed – with all of Ethiopia

or all the land that borders the Red Sea –

so many, such malignant, pestilences. (Inferno 83-90)

Lines 86 -87, as Allen Mandelbaum notes, are taken from book 9 of Lucan’s Pharsalia,

the one remaining work of his lost corpus. Moses Hadas writes that, while he

acknowledges the more hackneyed features of Lucan’s Civil War epic, “Compared to

other post-Vergilian writers of epic, [Lucan] wrote almost as if he had never read Vergil”

(263). He considers this a compliment and sees Lucan’s epic as admirable in terms of its

freshness and characters who are not so heroic as to be larger than life. Dante, who has

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placed Lucan in place of pride in Limbo along with Homer, Horace and Ovid, thinks him

important enough to name him in the authority themed Inferno 24. Dante’s inclusion of

Lucan’s serpents is most likely due to Lucan’s reputation for extended, detailed

descriptions of animals. His presence is one more reminder that Dante is situating his

own work against the work of epic masters.

The image of the writhing pit is further made horrifying by the souls who run

through it and who are restrained, pierced or otherwise manipulated by the serpents

surrounding them, a pool of transformations. The poets notice one of the serpents’

targets, Vanni Fucci:

And – there! – a serpent sprang with force at one

Who stood upon our shore, transfixing him

Just where the neck and shoulders form a knot (Inferno 25:97-100).

Fucci’s transfixion and knotting serves as the first in three metamorphoses that befall three

sinners in Inferno 25. At this moment of “undoing,” the passage continues:

No o or i has ever been transcribed

So quickly as that soul caught fire and burned

and, as he fell, completely turned to ashes;

and when he lay, undone, upon the ground,

the dust of him collected by itself

and instantly returned to what it was. (Inferno 25:97-103)

In this brief simile, the process of writing is likened to Fucci’s burning soul, the inverted

vowels of o and i representing the Italian first person pronoun of Io (I).

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 Fucci is reconstituted from ash and admits to his stealing of the “sacristy of its fair

ornaments and someone else was falsely blamed for that” (Inferno 24:137-139). In terms

of the rule of contrapasso in Inferno, he must repeatedly be “robbed” of his constitution.

Dante’s choice to showcase his appropriative writing in the circle of fraud and hypocrites

serve as a comment about the “true” nature of writing and authority. Textually, the

“knot” that connects Fucci’s neck and shoulders recalls other knots that proliferate

through the Commedia. The knots are a feature of Dante’s poetics and can be found in

other locations that involve transformation. For example, the monster Geryon has flanks

adorned with “twining knots and circlets” (Inferno 17:15). His language of his

construction implies artifice: “No Turks or Tartars ever fashioned fabrics more colorful

in background and relief, nor had Arachne ever loomed such webs” (Inferno 17:16-18).

Virgil will appeal to the monster in order to descend to the eighth circle of fraud. The

implication is that an artificial representation accompanies fraudulent activities.

Vanni Fucci’s transformation reveal a somatic re-ordering that carries with it

semiotic transformation. First, I propose that Dante uses a sign, the combination of the

small letters o and i, and its permutations, during the moment of Fucci’s flash burning

(with one letter resembling the navel and the other a snake) as a means to “refigure” an

allusion while privileging the Italian vernacular. In this brief analogy, the physical

process of writing is compared to the body’s transformation. The o/i combination –

reversed – spells io – the Italian first person pronoun. Latin, the language of the high

style and classicism, has been replaced by the Italian vernacular. Literally, the self is

undoing the self (in the form of rough shapes similar to the o and i and also through the

combined forces of the letters – as the Italian personal pronoun io (“I”). This is

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something that has not been presented in the Metamorphoses of Ovid or in Virgil’s scene

concerning the priest Laocoön in The Aeneid 2.

In Inferno 25, the re-membering of Dante’s sinners continues with the second

sinner, Agnello, as follows:

A serpent with six feet spring out against

One of the three, and clutches him completely.

It gripped his belly with its middle feet,

And with its forefeet grappled his two arms;

And then it sank its teeth in both his cheeks;

It stretched its rear feet out along his thighs

And ran its tail along between the two,

Then straightened it again behind his loins. (Inferno 25:50-57)

The passage contains allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses 4, wherein the deity Salmacis

latches onto and tries to restrain the son of Atlas, Hermaphroditus. Dante appropriates

the same wrapping, folding and melding properties that can be found in Ovid’s tale,

wherein Salmacis “twines around him like a serpent,” (Metamorphoses 4:358-59) and

“wraps her coils around his head and feet and with her tail, entwines his outspread wings”

(Metamorphoses 4:362-63). Finally, after her appeal to the gods to not separate them,

“they merge the twining bodies; and the two become one body with a single face and

form” (Metamorphoses 4:375-77). In the process, the new combined body seems neither

woman nor man, “it seemed neither and seemed both” (Metamorphoses 4:384).

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 In Dante’s revision of Ovid’s passage, the man/woman merger has been replaced

by Agnello and Cianfa, the serpent. More specifically, the next description of the episode

recalls Ovid’s imagery, with Dante adding two similes as the two merge:

Then just as if their substance were warm wax,

they stuck together and they mixed their colors

so neither seemed what he had been before

just as, when paper’s kindled, where it still

has not caught flame in full, its color’s dark

though not yet black, while white is dying off. (Inferno 25:61-66)

The first simile entails Agnello and Cianfa blending as warm wax. The snakes’

comparison to wax is followed by a similar comparison of burning paper. The

combination of the two connotes the process of writing, as paper is used for writing and

wax is used in seals. Thus, Dante emphasizes the literary aspect of the transformation

with an allusion to the writing process. Many of Dante’s epic similes employ the same

use of precise, vibrant detail.

The next scene, with its partitioning of the body’s procreative and digestive areas,

anticipates the relationship between Inferno 25 and Purgatorio 25, particularly Statius’

statement on embryology. The new entity that was Agnello, now “two heads . . . joined

in one” (Inferno 25:70) and with “every former shape . . . canceled there,” (Inferno

25:76) turns its attention to the other two sinners and attacks them, “moving against the

bellies of the other two” (Inferno 25:83). Then, “attacking one of them, it pierced right

through the part where we first take our nourishment” (Inferno 25:85-86). Again, the

ensuing merger of the two leaves “no sign that was discernible” (Inferno 25:108).

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Therefore, in hell, the possibility of nourishment is eradicated. The scene is the antithesis

of embryo’s nourishment in Purgatorio 25. Whereas the sixth terrace of Purgatorio

deals with longing and the possibility of satiation, there is no such possibility present in

Inferno.

Between the beginning of this second metamorphosis and its conclusion, Dante

champions his own description of events, engaging in a discourse of “outdoing”:

Let Lucan now be silent, where he sings

Of sad Sabellus and Nasidius

And wait to hear what flies off from my bow

Let Ovid now be silent, where he tells

Of Cadmus, Arethusa; if his verse

Has made of one a serpent, one a fountain,

I do not envy him; he never did

Transmute two natures, face to face, so that

Both forms were ready to exchange their matter. (Inferno 25:94-102)

Throughout these exchanges, Dante has incorporated metaphors of writing (both in the

language of the io pronoun and in the imagery of wax and paper). The allusion can be

classified as reflective. He challenges Ovid by responding to his meticulous poetics. His

language subtly recalls the trading of poetic material as in “forms were ready to exchange

their matter.” Wax is used to show figurative levels of firmness and constancy in both

hell and purgatory. While Agnello and Cianfa stick together as if “their substance were

warm wax,” the poet Dante informs Beatrice later in his journey, after she claims his

“intellect . . . [has] grown opaque,” that “Even as the wax the seal’s impressed,/ where

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there’s no alteration in the form,/ so does my brain now bear what you have stamped”

(Purgatorio 23:78-81). The sinners located within the level of fraud have no constancy,

whereas, Dante, in ascending to Paradiso – and in his constancy to her – retains

Beatrice’s word as though solid impressed wax.

There is a third unspoken reference in these passages. The transformations of

Ovid and Dante recall the separate story of Virgil’s Laocoön, wherein the Trojan priest

warned Troy of the horse gifted to them by the Greeks. The priest launches an arrow into

the horse’s belly, provoking Athena’s anger and his and his sons’ demise, as follows:

Laocoön, the priest of Neptune picked by lot,

Was sacrificing a massive bull at the holy altar

when – I cringe to recall it now – look there!

Over the calm deep straits off Tenedos swim

twin, giant serpents, rearing in coils, breasting

the sea-swell side by side, plunging toward the shore,

their heads, their blood-red crests surging over the waves,

their bodies thrashing, backs rolling in coil on mammoth coil

and the wake behind them churns in a roar of foaming spray,

and now, their eyes glittering, shot with blood and fire,

flickering tongues licking their hissing maws, yes, now

they’re about to land. We blanch at the sight, we scatter.

(The Aeneid 2:259-270)

Virgil’s statement “I cringe to recall it now” echoes Dante’s admission, midway through

the Inferno’s metamorphoses, of his own incredulity: “If, reader, you are slow now to

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believe what I shall tell, that is no cause for wonder, for I who saw it hardly can accept it”

(Inferno 25:46-48). While Dante’s transformation engages poetic memory in utilizing

specific depictions of the Ovidian metamorphosis, his statement to the reader is Virgilian.

The passage continues:

Like troops on attack they’re heading straight for Laocoön –

first each serpent seizes one of his small young sons,

constricting, twisting around him, sinks its fangs

in the tortured limbs, and gorges. Next Laocoön

rushing quick to the rescue, clutching his sword –

they trap him, bind him in huge muscular whorls,

their scaly backs lashing around his midriff twice

and twice around his throat – their heads, their flaring necks

mounting over their victim writhing still, his hands

frantic to wrench apart their knotted trunks,

his priestly bands splattered in filth, black venom

and all the while his horrible screaming fills the skies,

bellowing like some wounded bull struggling to shrug

loose from his neck an axe that’s struck awry,

to lumber clear of the altar . . .

Only the twin snakes escape, sliding off and away

to the heights of Troy where the ruthless goddess

holds her shrine, and there at her feet they hide,

vanishing under Minerva’s great round shield. (The Aeneid 2:256-288).

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This is the passage in Virgil’s earlier work, The Aeneid, which precedes both Dante’s and

Ovid’s transformations; however, Dante pointedly ignores it in the Commedia, most

likely due to its comparative simplicity. It does not perform the kind of intricate

metamorphoses that Ovid’s text establishes. However, the passage displays the same

reactive statements that Dante uses in his own descriptions, and the same asides to the

reader. Dante borrows from Virgil the same dicuntur or statement that “recalls” or

“remembers” something happening in the moment of allusion, and which is a standard

feature of classical poetry.

Inferno 24 and 25’s metamorphoses are violent somatic processes, punishments

according to the infernal law of contrapasso. In Purgatorio 24 and 25, the concerns are

philosophical and the cantos are replete with dialogue rather than brutal action. The

cantos of Purgatorio 21-25 have long been noted by various scholars as a commentary on

Dante’s poetics. Notably, Purgatorio 24 and 25 contain two important poetic devices:

the autocitation in canto 24 (one of three in the Commedia) and the auctoritas of

Aristotelian ideas conveyed through Statius’ speech in canto 25.

Statius appears in Purgatorio 21 after a tremendous shaking of Mount Purgatorio

where he has been held for five hundred years, explaining: “Soul had the will to climb

before, but that/ Will was opposed by longing to do penance/ (as once, to sin), instilled by

divine justice” (Purgatorio 21:64-66). He has been freed, ostensibly to ascend to

paradise, as is witnessed by his realization that he “just now felt/ my free will for a better

threshold; thus you heard the earthquake” (Purgatorio 21:68-70). Not realizing Virgil is

Dante’s guide, he reveals his admiration and love of Virgil when he admits he would

gladly spend one more year in purgatory if he had been able to live on earth while Virgil

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lived (Purgatorio 21:100-102). In response, Dante explains to him that Virgil is guiding

him through Purgatory to heaven (Purgatorio 21:124-126).

The discussion quickly turns to poetics. Statius reveals the level of influence that

Virgil’s The Aeneid has had on his own work, Thebaid: “The sparks that warmed me, the

seeds of my ardor, were from the holy fire – the same that gave more than a thousand

poets light and flame. I speak of The Aeneid; when I wrote verse, it was mother to me, it

was nurse; my work, without it, would not weigh an ounce” (Purgatorio 21:94-99).

According to Jennifer Fraser, Edward Moore reveals the nature of the appropriation:

Edward Moore has shown that Dante has taken from Statius’ own poem

the Thebeid the words of praise and devotion that the fictional character

here applies to Virgil. Moore reads Statius’s lines as a kind of valedictory

address to his own poem, vital for my purposes is that his comparison

reveals that Statius’s likening of Virgil to a flame, as well as the

designation of the poet as a mother, belong fully to Dante’s imagination

and the dictates of his poetic project in the Commedia.” (77)

Such a fictional liberty supports Christopher Kleinhenz’s identification of Statius as a

disguised persona of Dante. Kleinhenz states, “The celebration of Virgil . . . yields to the

celebration of Statius, who might be considered, by extension, to be that of Dante

himself, for the figure of Statius is a carefully crafted alter ego of the Florentine poet”

(236). Further, Robert Ascoli sees the Dante’s grouping together of Virgil, Statius and

Dante in terms of the “historicization of authorship”:

The meeting of Virgilio, Stazio and Dante-personaggio is possible, as the

initial encounter with Virgilio and then other classical poets was, because

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 it takes place beyond ‘the land of the living’ and outside of historical time.

Nonetheless, it unfolds so as to generate a multiplicity of histories,

beginning with a history of the relationship between Roman culture and

Christianity (Virgil is pre-Christian; Statius a produce of the period when

pagan and Christian cultures coexisted; Dante lives in a time of Christian

dominance). More directly to the point, the scene generates a history

and/or a historicization of authorship. (324)

Ascoli’s assertion also has implications for the manner in which Dante reconfigures the

epic form. His somatic Commedia is filled with shades. The shade is also feature of

ancient epic. It exists in the pages of The Odyssey as well as The Aeneid. However,

Dante takes the code (to which, arguably, a shade belongs) and makes it integral to his

poetics by providing his shades with voices so that they can discourse about poetics and

philosophy in a non-temporal space.

How does this idea fit with Joyce’s presentation of the dead? While there is no

possible equivalent of the shade available for Joyce to incorporate in his work, the

deceased that circulate in Ulysses through the memories of others, appear a different

variety of shade; however, they are static. Mrs. Dedalus, Patrick Dignam, Rudy Bloom,

and Rudolph Bloom circulate throughout the text as the static shapes through the

memories of living characters, but are also more active and aggressive creations of

Bloom and Stephen in the hallucinatory chapter 15 (“Circe”). The idea, however,

becomes plausible if we consider that it provokes the internal thoughts of Joyce’s

characters, even if there is a one-sided dialogue.

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 Purgatorio 25 illustrates the correct divine way of bodily creation and proportion

that is not available to the souls in Inferno 24-25. In terms of creation, God instigates and

overseas the creation of the human body and its soul. However, Dante, in re-membering

the sinners of Inferno 24 and 25, becomes the poetic force behind radical physical

transformation – of both bodies and poetry – a very different kind of authority. Through

the navel as a signifier in these bodily/textual transformations, I see Inferno 24 and 25 as

maintaining a dialogue with the structure and thematic material of discussion in

Purgatorio 25, particularly concerning digestion and procreation. If the sinners in

Inferno 24 and 25 pay for their sins through repeated phallic/digestive and procreative

attacks, Statius’ explanation of the procreative-digestive system in Purgatorio 25 is a

negation of the evil, unnatural aspects of the sinners’ thievery.

Statius’ instruction of Dante begins in response to Dante’s questioning of the

creation of the soul. Regarding the lustful shades who hover nearby, he asks: “How can

one grow lean where there is never need for nourishment?” Virgil replies that

appearances can be deceiving, advising Dante to consider a mirror’s capture of his image.

He defers to Statius in the educating of Dante (Purgatorio 25:25-26). Statius then

explains the progression of a soul from conception to the post-life creation of the shade.

He begins, “If son, your mind receives/ and keeps my words, then what I say will serve/

as light upon the how that you have asked/ (Purgatorio 25:34-36). The statement

continues a trope of listening and remembering that persists throughout the Commedia. It

will also remembered by Joyce, who turns the moment into an entire chapter in Ulysses:

The thirsty veins drink up the perfect blood –

But not all of that blood: a portion’s left,

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 Like leavings that are taken from the table.

Within the heart, that part acquires power

To form all of another’s human limbs,

As blood that flows through veins feeds one’s own limbs.

Digested yet again, that part descends

To what is best not named; from there it drips

Into the natural receptacle,

Upon another’s blood; the two bloods mix,

One ready to be passive and one active

Because a perfect place, the heart, prepared them. (Purgatorio 25:37-48)

The ideas contained in the passage derive from Aristotle’s Generation of Animals

(Mandelbaum 378). Allen Mandelbaum notes that, through Statius, Dante is able to

opine on a philosophical question that “had been discussed at length by medieval

scientists, philosophers, and theologians (Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus,

and Siger of Brabant, among others) (Purgatorio Notes 378). Therefore, in addition to

his novel appropriation of utilizing the shade to provide discourse, Dante’s epic is

revisionary in that it includes medieval theories and holds discussions about them. The

simplistic and primitive medical processes outlined above, which completely bypass any

idea of procreative apparati, would have amused Joyce, especially as he once had

ambitions of becoming a doctor. The antiquated theory outlined above possibly

culminates in his decision to create a parodic nexus of folkloric witchcraft and

superstition surrounding Stephen’s oratory at Holles Street Hospital. The continued

passage, below, anticipates the faunal evolution trope in “Oxen”:

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 The active, having reached the passive, starts

To work: first it coagulates – and then

Quickens – the matter it has made more dense.

Having become a soul (much like a plant,

Though with this difference – a plant’s complete,

Whereas a fetus still is journeying),

The active virtue labors, so the fetus

May move and feel, like a sea-sponge; and then

It starts to organize the powers it’s seeded.

At this point, son, the power that had come

From the begetter’s heart unfolds and spreads,

That nature may see every limb perfected. (Purgatorio 25:49-60)

Here the fetus is not stationary or contained within the uterus but appears to

journey throughout the body, migratory. The metaphor of the fetus as sea-sponge

undoubtedly triggers both the faunal evolution theme identified in Joyce’s schema on the

chapter, as well as the fanciful renderings of Stephen’s speech. The “powers it’s seeded,”

also recalls the Virgilian seeds reference in his speech.

Dante continues his argument through Statius, this time introducing the topic of

Averroës’ “possible intellect”:

But how the animal becomes a speaking

being, you’ve not yet seen; this point’s so hard,

it led one wiser than you are to err

in separating from the possible

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 intellect the soul, since he could see

no organ for the mind – so did he teach. (Purgatorio 25:61-66)

Mandelbaum describes Averroës’ philosophy as follows:

The “possible intellect,” man’s capacity to reach the knowledge of

universals, was only present to each man during his lifetime; only during

that lifetime do we share in the universal, unique, and separated mind of

the human species as a whole. That intellect was eternal, but trans-

individual. It was immortal, but the individual soul was not. . . . [Dante],

in his ardent desire to see the intactness of each individual in the

summative soul – where life, sense, and reason are joined by God’s direct

intervention in the wake of the formative power – he would set aside

anything that might threaten the specificity and immortality of the person.

(Purgatorio Notes 379-380)

Averroës has already been placed by Dante in Inferno 4, the canto designated as Limbo,

along with scientists, philosophers and poet laureates – including Virgil and Statius

themselves. When Dante see him, he refers to him as Averroës of the great Commentary

(Inferno 4:144). Despite his declaration (through Statius) that Averroës has erred in his

thinking, Dante still places him in the idyllic Limbo and sees him as important enough to

include in his embryology passage. However, the philosopher is dangerously

controversial for his time. As Jay Ruud explains, while Averroës is at the court of

Córdoba, he is confronted by “a conservative religious element who saw some of his

philosophical arguments as heretical and burned a number of his books upon his exile”

(389). Joyce, quite possibly recalling the situation in chapter 2 (“Nestor”) has Stephen

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Dedalus consider the plight of Averroës and Moses Maimonides while attempting to

assist one of his simpler students in solving a math problem:

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. . . . Across the page the

symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing

quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner:

so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world, Averroes and

Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their

mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in

brightness which brightness could not comprehend. (Ulysses 2:151-160)

Don Gifford explains that the two philosophers were pronounced “‘guilty’ of scrying,

divination by the ‘mirrors of the sorcerers’ (a crystal ball or other shining surface, such as

a vessel filled with water)” (33). The mirror reference, oddly enough, is situated in

Virgil’s charge to Dante, in response to his initial question, to consider the fleeing image

of himself in a mirror. If Dante intends the mirror as a symbol of Averroës’ philosophy,

then structurally, he has created a tension in the text between the words of Virgil and

Statius, with one championing the philosopher and the other critical of him.

Statius continues to describe the shade’s creation and physicality after the death of

the body:

There, once the soul is circumscribed by space,

The power that gives form irradiates

As – and as much as – once it formed live limbs. (Purgatorio 25:88-90)

The choice of “irradiates” as a verb is strange given soul’s designation as a “shade.” This

and the following description imply a physicality that is still heavier than air, although

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lighter than flesh: “where the soul stopped, the nearby air/ takes on the form that soul

impressed on it,/ a shape that is, potentially, real body (Purgatorio 25:94-96). After

Statius finishes, Dante hears singing and the refrain “Summae Deus clementiae,” a matin.

Mandelbaum glosses its third stanza as relating to the temptations of the flesh

(Purgatorio Notes 380-381).

Dante’s placement of Statius’ monologue in Purgatorio 25 serves to reinforce the

authority behind Dante’s poetics, as Statius also imitates Virgil; however why does Dante

choose Statius to deliver the gestational monologue? The choice may be influenced by

Statius’ close attention to, and writing of, maternal themes and the suffering of children

that he writes of in Thebaid. For example, in book 4 of Thebaid, the Argives encounter

Hypsipyle, sole resister of the madness-induced frenzy in which the Lemnian women

slaughter their males. The madness is retribution from Venus for the Lemnians’ failure

to worship her. Hypsipyle manages to save her father, helping him to escape from

Lemnos. Eventually, word reaches Lemnos that Thoas, her father, is still alive. Knowing

that Hypsipyle did not partake of the slaughter, and ashamed of their own involvement,

the Lemnians turn on her and she leaves, finding refuge with Lycurgas, the Argive king.

Hypsipyle becomes nurse to the royal infant, Opheltes, son of Lycurgas and

Eurydice. Statius writes, “Hypsipylem fair in her/ sadness. Opheltes, not hers but the ill-

starred child of/ Inachian Lycurgus, hangs at her breast, her hair is/ disheveled, her

clothing poor; yet on her face are marks of/ royalty . . . “ (Thebaid 4:748-750). She leads

the thirsty Argives to a river, leaving Opheltes by himself in the woods, and proceeds to

tell them her story. Statius describes Opheltes’ dismay at his nurse’s absence in poignant

detail:

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 But the boy in the bosom of the vernal earth, the lush

herbage, now buts and levels the pliant grasses with his forward

plunges, now calls for his dear nurse, crying loud

for milk; and again he smiles and essays words that struggle

with his tender lips. He wonders at the forest noises or

plucks at what comes his way or with open mouth draws

in the day. (Thebaid 4:793-98)

The depiction of his death in book 5 is equally vivid, the narrative intensity increased by

the delay of Hypsipyle’s intervening story of the Lemnian slaughter. A dragon, described

as a Serpent, enraged due to the arid land, arrives shortly after Opheltes “sinks his heavy

eyes and drooping head on the lush/ ground and wearied with length of childish doings

glides/ into sleep. His hand stays clutching the grass” (Thebaid 5:502-504). Shortly

before the child’s death, Statius writes: “What god’s allotting, little one, gave you the

burden of/ so great a fate? By this enemy do you lie low scarcely at/ life’s first

threshold? Or was it to make you die sacred/ through the ages henceforth to the peoples

of Greece,/ worthy of so grand a tomb?” (Thebaid 5:534-39) The direct address to the

child by the narrator imbues the passage with a pronounced pathos, ahead of the

depiction of his death, wherein “Grazed by the lash of the tail tip/ you perish child, and

the snake knows not of it. Sleep/ fled your limbs straightway and your eyes opened only

to/ death” (Thebaid 5:538-40). Hypsipyle finds him near “grass stained with bloody

dews” (Thebeid 5:591-92). Chapter 6 is devoted to funeral games for the child, a

decision of the Argive men, and there are pronounced depictions of mourning by

Lycurgas, Eurydice and Hypsipyle.

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 Elsewhere in Thebaid, the themes of parenthood and children persist, with

Hypsipyle’s own children by Jason, long-separated from her, managing to find her at the

beginning of Opheltes’ funeral preparations. Book 9 sees the death of the youth

Crenaeus, whose last word is “Mother” (Thebeid 9:349). Statius’ epic gives ample space

to childhood, even early childhood, containing verse in which children witness slaughter,

as well as verse depicting their own slaughter. His depiction of women and children’s

suffering in warfare, despite the brutality in his scenes, indicates to me that he has a

profound sensitivity to life that informs his poetry. The pathos in his work is probably

one of the reasons that he is charged by Dante to deliver the gestational dialogue, as well

as Dante’s depiction of him as fatherly – he references Dante twice as “son.”

Earlier in this chapter, I note that Robert Ascoli’s discussion of the historicity of

Dante’s placement of all three poets – Virgil, Statius and Dante – together and the

implications of each poet representing a different time frame (and accompanying

religion). Joyce’s rewriting of this manipulation of time by Dante takes place in the

realm of narrative style. “Oxen” displays a shifting historicity represented by its display

of styles of the English language. Similarly, the chapter’s focus is conception, gestation,

birth and associated elements scientific and societal. Although Stephen, Bloom,

acquaintances and the hospital’s medical staff belong to the temporality of twentieth

century Dublin, Joyce interprets the atemporality of Dante’s meeting and discourse by

depicting his characters’ meeting in the shifting temporality of his narrative.

In the following chapter on “Oxen”, Joyce responds to various concepts and

events portrayed in the cantos of both Inferno and Purgatorio, with an emphasis on the

embryology discourse by Statius. Joyce’s chapter is largely parodic; however, there are

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still aesthetic implications in Joyce’s appropriation that reflect on his own authorship.

The chapter’s narrative details and discussions are, at times, fantastic – seeming even

ridiculous. However, the entire project is radical in terms of its reinterpretation of

Purgatorio’s poetics.

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 CHAPTER 5: “OXEN OF THE SUN” – THE BIRTH OF THE TEXT

This chapter will examine Joyce’s multi-faceted approach in responding to the

poetics set forth in Inferno 24-25 and Purgatorio 25. Stephen Dedalus’ discussion at the

Holles Street Hospital alludes to Purgatorio 25’s dialogue between Statius, pilgrim Dante

and poet Virgil, wherein Statius delineates Aristotle’s theory of the embryo. Joyce

incorporates this moment in the textual design of “Oxen,” a two-fold allusive design

which partially relies on ideas formulated in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The first half of the design pertains to the inscribed reification (or series of re-births) of

Leopold Bloom; the second pertains to Stephen’s speech, one that combines ideas about

procreation, birth and authorship. In total, they illustrate the radical method in which

Joyce can appropriate and revise epic codes in writing Ireland’s epic.

“Embryonic development” is the technique that Joyce assigns to the chapter. As

Stephen, Buck Mulligan, other friends and medical doctors assemble at the Holles Street

Maternity Hospital, Mina Purefoy labors in childbirth. The scene is meant to

recapitulate, in echoes and fragments, Odysseus’s conversations with his crew,

specifically his warnings to stay away from Helios’ cattle. Their fatal dismissal of his

warning brings about their downfall. The chapter is replete with references to cattle and

bulls, including fertility references and mythology. In one of the hospital’s meeting

rooms, roughly depicted by Joyce as an Anglo-Saxon hall, the men engage in an extended

discourse on matters pertaining to birth, sexuality, and women, as though the very

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phenomenon of Mina Purefoy’s condition provokes the birth of language. In that sense,

she is the “everywoman” of the chapter.

In the Commedia, Dante has taken the epic model, with its substrata of epic codes

and epic norms, and refashioned it for his own Christian epic. With a parodic backdrop

of several textual styles, Joyce continues his own revision of epic codes and epic norms,

and their associated allusive processes. In 1920, Joyce delineated his intentions for

“Oxen” to Frank Budgen:

This procession is also linked back at each part subtly with some

foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of

development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general”

and the “double thudding Anglo-Saxon motive . . . to give the sense of

hoofs of oxen (Letters 138-139).

As Don Gifford notes, the primary metaphor in the chapter compares the development of

the human embryo (ontogeny) and the evolution of the species (phylogeny) to the

embryonic development of language (409). Frank Atherton, who characterizes “Oxen”

as “an exercise in imitative form,” with Joyce “trying to make words reproduce objects

and processes” (313) further explains its pattern as “an attempt at producing a verbal

equivalent for an object, the convoluted sentences enclosing a central core corresponding

to the layers within the cell” (313). These layers configure an image of the chapter’s

sentences wrapping around each other, adhering to each other and enclosing the “central

core” that Atherton refers to. As is standard with all of Ulysses’ episodes, there are

allusive connotations from multiple eras and genres of literature. The following section

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looks at Joyce’s further technique of giving birth to his characters through poetry and

prose.

The Procreative Text and the Birth of Man

Joyce adopts Purgatorio 25’s discourse on the embryo and rewrites it. This

means that Joyce takes Statius’ theme and writes an entire chapter that conflates the

subject of the embryo with traces of book 12 of Homer’s The Odyssey. To that end, he

assigns “Oxen’s” characters embryonic and reproductive parts. For example, Bloom is

spermatozoon, the Holles Maternity Hospital is the womb, the nurses are the ovum and

Stephen is the embryo (Gifford 408). As the discussion progresses, there is a sense that

time is being accelerated, similar to the manner in which a human embryo would develop

over time. This is due to the progression of rhetorical styles that provide the chapter’s

narrative.

The invocation, a primary feature of the epic from the classical period up through

the modern era, has been revamped by Joyce, who turns it into a modern Irish equivalent.

Traditionally, it is an appeal to a muse for assistance; for example, as in Homer’s “Sing to

me of the man, Muse” (The Odyssey 1:1) or Virgil’s “Tell me, Muse, how it all began”

(The Aeneid 1:9). The first line of Joyce’s invocation reads “Deshil Holles Eamus”

(Ulysses 17:1) (which can be parsed as “to the right, turning clockwise, to Holles street,

let us go”); the second, which can be considered the closest thing to the classical

invocation in terms of its request for help, is “Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn,

quickening and wombfruit,” (Ulysses 17:2-4); and the third is the nurse’s cry of Hoopsa

boyaboy hoopsa!” (Ulysses 17:5) These thrice repeated elements do not resemble the

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traditional appeal to the muse. The first and last seem activity oriented and concern

arrival (to the hospital and then to life itself), with the middle line requesting the help of

the doctor rather than the muse. Joyce’s choice to create an invocation comprised of a

combination of directions, chant to the hospital doctor, and a traditional cry to provoke

the baby’s breath is characteristic of the bricolage found elsewhere in Ulysses.

A prose style imitating the Latin of Roman historians Sallust and Tacitus begins

the chapter. Thereafter, the language wanders from Old Anglo Saxon to the

contemporary. Paragraphs advance rapidly from the medieval prose of the morality play

to the fifteenth century prose style of Sir Malory and onto the seventeenth century prose

of Jonathan Swift. This continues in a linear fashion up to Joyce’s time. The progression

represents one facet of “Oxen’s” statement on the birth of textuality, alongside of man.

The symbolism of the embryo overriding all of this represents Stephen’s

consciousness and artistic sensibility. Through rapid change, the text supersedes his

artistic struggles and paralysis in order to continue developing. It births itself,

experimenting with language and parody, developing an aesthetic all its own while Mina

Purefoy labors alongside of it. Stephen as artist is, of course, an extension of Joyce as

artist. It can be said that Joyce, in ascribing the designator of embryo to Stephen (and

therefore Stephen’s consciousness), is presenting the “Oxen” chapter as a statement about

the incubation of influences, past readings and information ingested in his own psyche, in

order to establish his own authority as a writer. While the chapter writes itself, Joyce also

becomes a writer. And he does so in the first several pages, by formulating a figurative

technique based on one employed by Virgil, Ovid and Dante.

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 Stephen and company discourse, negotiating a discursive space as language

provides early modern and more recent characterizations of themselves. Biblical

references to birth, possible paternity of the Purefoy baby, the female reproductive

system, abortion, birth control, fertility, geldings, eunuchs and various theories on

medicine stream into the hospital meeting room. Bovine descriptions, traces of The

Odyssey, abound in unlikely places, for example, regarding the laboring woman, two

days past delivery point, who would soon deliver “a bullyboy from the knocks, they say .

. .” (Ulysses 14:514). After all, the main event is the arrival of the newborn boy. The

theme of Odyssean wandering is joined by scenes of wandering in The Exeter Book, the

everyman of the Everyman text, The Travels of St. John Mandeville, the Morte D’Arthur,

and Saint Ultan of Arbracan.

In all of this, Bloom experiences a metamorphosis of rebirthing as soon as he

enters the hospital. The poetic memory contained within “Oxen’s” written gestational

style takes place in the following fashion: as new information (content) unfolds, the text

imports a particular textual style. Bloom’s arrival at the hospital is depicted through

references to wanderers and movement, recalling both Odysseus as wanderer and

Bloom’s meanderings around Dublin. Essentially exiled (even if self-imposed due to his

wife Molly’s indiscretions), Bloom wanders. Now, as he arrives at the hospital, he does

so through while being textually inscribed. His inscription is a controlled one, however;

instead of being described by name he is identified in simple terms: “Some man that

wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming. Of Israel’s folk was that man

that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till

that house” (Ulysses 14:71-73). We recognize the man Leopold Bloom since he has

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previously discussed Mrs. Purefoy’s condition with Mrs. Breen in chapter 8

(“Lestrygonians”). Also, being Jewish, he is “of Israel’s folk” (Ulysses 14:72).

Otherwise, the language deliberately obscures the features identifying him, simply

referring to him as “Some man that wayfaring was” (Ulysses 14:71). Even though the

characterization is vague and almost appears to mark Bloom as insignificant (some man),

it is a necessary characterization since Joyce’s allusion marks him as both wanderer and

textual reference. The event becomes more complex, tripling in meaning.

The second meaning of Bloom’s entry is Odyssean. Just as Odysseus stole into

his house to confront and slay the encroaching suitors that kept fast to Penelope’s hall,

Bloom is also the wayfaring man who stands by the housedoor in the interest of checking

on Mina Purefoy. However, the underlying Odyssean narrative is eclipsed by a new,

third allusion: the Anglo-Saxon lament “The Wanderer” from the Exeter Book. Lines 70

through 106 echo the elegiac lament, and they connect Bloom’s position with that of the

speaker who is “deprived of my homeland, far from dear kinsmen” (Gifford 410). Joyce

undoubtedly plays upon Bloom’s exiled status as the cuckhold deprived of his home (due

to Molly’s indiscretion with Blazes Boylan). He wanders Dublin most of the day to

escape a run in with the two and, as a Jewish man, he is already the proverbial wanderer

as his people are in exile. Bloom himself, or his presence, is reconfigured in Joyce’s

depiction of him as an assemblage of Odyssean and Anglo-Saxon wanderers.

As he presents to the hospital, an allusive textuality emerges: the arrival of

Bloom means the simultaneous insertion/appearance in both the text at hand, the poem

“The Wanderer,” and The Odyssey. He cannot arrive to the hospital – or the “Oxen”

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chapter – solo; his person and arrival are circumscribed by multiple texts. To be on the

threshold of the hospital entrance, and entry itself, is to be present on a textual threshold.

Since the epic tradition necessitates the author’s appropriation and revision of his

or her predecessor’s material and technique, Joyce improves on the genre by taking the

Odyssean figuration of the wanderer and turning it into a birth of text and man. He does

so by pairing richly allusive “knots” of textual allusions with the emergence of some

character (or characters) onto the scene at the moment of doing so. The result is the

appearance of characters who are shade-like in their allusive, textual composition – as

much Dantean in their shade-like existence as they are Joycean.

When Bloom shows up and is depicted as “some man that wayfaring was,” he

remains unformed, unnamed, a shadow – or a shade. His unnamed status recalls the

opposite theme of the meeting of Dante, Virgil and Statius with Forese Donati in

Purgatorio 24, wherein the subject of the naming of shades is discussed. Dante asks of

Forese, “. . . tell me if, among those staring at me,/ I can see any person I should note

(Purgatorio 24:11-12). The other poet responds “It is not forbidden to name each shade

here,” (Purgatorio 24:17-18). He proceeds to name “many others, one by one, and at

their naming they all seemed content; so that – for this – no face was overcast”

(Purgatorio 24:25-27). In other words, the shades, in being named, are remembered.

The naming here takes place on the level of purgatory known for poetic dialogue. To be

named is to be reified and born through the textual realm. If Joyce is responding to

Purgatorio 24’s topos of naming by doing the opposite with Bloom, he can respond to

Dante’s poetics by creating the textual birth sequence and not name, thereby both

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modifying Dante’s poetics as a statement on his own poetics and by adding a Dantean

connotation to his re-creation of Bloom.

The event provokes ideas concerning ontology, textuality and becoming. Joyce

avoids naming Bloom, instead hinting at his presence through features that the reader

could identify or allowing the emerging text (through its style and other markers) to do

the job. For example, even though Bloom is mentioned invariably as “Bloom,” “sir

Leopold,” “Mr. Canvasser Bloom,” and “Mr. L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.),” at various points

in the chapter, his title reverts back to the “stranger” in the narrative (Ulysses 14:1356).

In addition to Bloom’s re-naming, the others at the hospital receive shifting designations,

according to the style of the writing. Joyce lists and renames the group at 14:187,

14:408, 14:467, 14:504, and 14:1203.

Dante’s representation of real life Florentines and other figures in his Commedia

manifest simply as themselves, and they often confront or otherwise engage in dialogues

with Dante as he continues his journey. Joyce follows suit by placing real acquaintances

(some under fictive names and others under real ones) in Ulysses (Adams 93). As R. M.

Adams notes, Patrick Dignam was a fictional character for his real life counterpart.

Matthew Kane, and almost everyone who attended the funeral took a position in “Hades,”

via pseudonyms. The funeral scene is a conflation of Kane’s, Joyce’s mother Mary’s,

and his brother George’s funerals (93-94). The difference is that Joyce is actually pairing

individual emergence with a textual component. This process implies that the very nature

of human birth is a textual birth. Rhetorically, these “knots” are reminiscent of Roland

Barthes’s designation of a text as “a multidimensional space in which a variety of

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writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn

from the innumerable centers of culture” (Richter 876).

There are already textual meditations on the shape and material of man and his

soul earlier in Ulysses. For example, in chapter 3, Stephen Dedalus sits on the shoreline,

contemplating his “manshape ineluctable”: “I throw this ended shadow from me,

manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? (Ulysses

3:412-413) This same preoccupation with form and its continuation anticipates Molly’s

discussion with Bloom about metempsychosis, or, the transmigration of souls. Her

discovery of the term begins a discussion of the ancient Greek belief in the soul’s ability

to take on plant or animal form after death:

There’s a word I want to ask you.

Metempsychosis?

Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?

Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek. From the Greeks. That

means the transmigration of souls.

...

Some people believe . . . that we go on living in another body after death,

that we lived before. . . . They [the Greeks] used to believe you could be

changed into an animal or a tree, for instance. What they called nymphs

for example. (Ulysses 4:331-377)

The metempsychosis theme will resurface in Ulysses on multiple occasions. It is part of

the novel’s larger concern with representations of the human body. These representations

include corpses, Bloom’s museum goddesses, displays of eating in the pubs, and, in this

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chapter, the physicality of the embryo. At the end of the novel, Bloom will find the

indentation of Molly’s and Boylan’s forms in the marital bed sheets, the physical

impression of the body left behind.

No sooner has Bloom been identified as wanderer than he is defined by another

textual reference – to the morality play, Everyman. The reference emerges during

Bloom’s conversation with Nurse Callan about Doctor O’Hare’s death and Bloom’s

inquiry into Mrs. Purefoy’s condition:

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the

dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he

came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend

him at the last for to go as he came. (Ulysses 14:107-122)

Specifically, the passage is modeled on an instruction directed to the audience by

the play’s messenger:

The story saith: Man, in the beginning/ Look well, and take good

heed to the ending,/ Be you never so gay./ You think sin in the

beginning full sweet,/ Which in the end causeth the soul to weep,/

When the body lieth in clay./ Here shall you see how fellowship

and jollity,/ Both strength, pleasure, and beauty,/ Will fade from

thee as a flower in May./ For ye shall hear how our Heaven-King/

Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning. (qtd. in Gifford 10-20)

On top of the Everyman reference, Joyce includes fragments from two other allusions in

his condensed passage: (1 Job 14:1, “Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full

of trouble” (Gifford 411) and (2 Job 1:21, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and

136 
naked shall I return thither” (Gifford 411). The combination of these references,

beginning with “Therefore, everyman,” marks a point in the text where, just as the

messenger of the morality play addresses the audience, the Joycean text intervenes to

address its audience. Again, this continues the theme of bodily textual inscription.

The subsequent (and immediate) textual appearance coincides with the entry of “a

young learningknight yclept Dixon” (Ulysses 14:125), a doctor, and Bloom’s entry into

the general hall where Stephen, Mulligan and medical students will hold their

conversation. The paragraph begins “And whiles they spake the door of the castle was

opened” (Ulysses 14:123). The quotation alludes to the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a

medieval compilation of fantastic travel stories. The travel genre seems apropos in light

of the hospital’s recent arrivals, and a fitting conclusion to the earlier journey to the

hospital referenced in the chapter’s opening incantation of “Deshil Holles Eamus”

(Ulysses 14:1-6).

Similar incidences occur, for example, in textual reifications of the characters

near the end of the episode when Joyce lists the men by their seating arrangement, and

depicts them as caricatures. By lifting Statius’ embryology discussion from Purgatorio

25 and using it to turn “Oxen” into a written embryo, Joyce succeeds in transforming an

organic process of growth into a series of textual births.

Revision of Epic Codes – Incorporation of the Epiphany

During the prolonged conversation at the Holles Street Hospital, Stephen

participates in a discussion on the dangers of difficult childbirth to both child and mother.

His second statement pertains to miraculous conceptions, while still responding to

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Purgatorio 25’s embryonic theme, and is both fantastic and parodic. However, these

elements match the fantastic tone of the entire chapter. Thematically, it is also important

to remember, in his treatment of Dante’s Purgatorio 25, that Joyce termed “Oxen” as

“the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition”

(qtd. in Atherton 314). Such a crime would invalidate the complete viability of the text in

terms of its treatment of serious subject matter such as the same ideas found in Aristotle’s

On the Generation of Animals and its reproduction in Purgatorio 25. This same “crime”

may also refer to the textual crimes of parody, hyperbole, puns, and misreadings. Of

note, Dante’s Inferno also contains quite a few misreadings.

The conversation at the Holles Street Hospital is meant to mimic Dante, Virgil

and Statius’ walk through purgatory while conversing about Aristotle’s theory of

nutrition and the embryo. The conversation includes specific references to Statius’

discussion, not by mentioning the poet but in Joyce’s dispersion of its traces throughout

the chapter. These traces refer to the Aristotelian theory in Statius’ oratory and

references to Virgilian works. As previously stated in chapter 1 of this dissertation,

allusion can create a “poetic dimension is created by the simultaneous presence of two

different realities whose competition with one another produce a single more complex

reality” (Conte 24). The following allusive passage is key to Joyce’s revision of

Purgatorio 25. Joyce’s engagement in poetic memory responds to Dante’s work, thus

tying together Joyce’s process with Dante’s process.

When Stephen speaks for the first time, it is to comment on the subject of the

church’s view of an unborn child’s life taking precedence over the mother’s. When he

speaks a second time, it is an odd speech:

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 Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast

him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions, of

bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires

mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the influence of the occident or

by the reek of moonflower or an she lie with a woman which her man has

but lain with, effectu secuto, or peradventure in her bath according to the

opinions of Averroes and Moses Maimonides. He said also how at the end

of the second month a human soul was infused and how in all our holy

mother foldeth ever souls for God’s greater glory whereas that earthly

mother which was but a dam to bear beastly should die by canon for so

saith he that holdeth the fisherman’s seal, even that blessed Peter on which

rock was holy church for all ages founded. (Ulysses 14:241-14:252)

This highly allusive passage blends fantastic ideas concerning procreation. Stephen

opens and closes his statement with parody, via the language of “mother Church,” and

within those demarcations are a mixed bag of mythology pertaining to impregnation, a

reference to his own poem, and Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals. On the subject

of pregnancy, and the human soul, the language is sterile in the sense that it does not

appear to contribute anything to the discussion. In fact, when Stephen is done speaking,

no one responds to him: “All the bachelors then asked of sir Leopold would he in like

case so jeopard her person as risk life to save life” (Ulysses 14:252-53). Bloom, put on

the spot, responds in such a fashion that he dissembles “as his wont was” (Ulysses

14:254) and “scaped their questions” (Ulysses 14:258-59).

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 There are various references to Aristotle’s work in “Oxen” at 14.247-48, 14.387-

89, 14:1231-33, 14.1233-34, 14.1236-39. The first pertains to the reference in the

passage above, with Stephen stating, “He said also how at the end of the second month a

human soul was infused” (14:247-48). Statius remains unmentioned in the passage,

although the embryology traces persist, having been reduced significantly and now

floating free in the text. The Aristotelian reference at 14:1236-39 is paired with science,

through a reference to German embryologist Oscar Herwig, “who demonstrated that male

and female sex cells are equivalent in their importance and that fertilization consists in

the conjunction of equivalents” (Gifford 437).

In Purgatorio 25, Statius’ dialogue is primarily for the purposes of looking at the

development of the embryo in conjunction with the development of the shade. Dante’s

original question to Virgil pertains to the leanness of shades when nourishment is

unnecessary (Purgatorio 25:20-21). He is told, “This airy body lets us speak and laugh,/

with it we form the tears and sigh the sighs/ that, perhaps, have heard around this

mountain” (Purgatorio 25:103-105). At the end of Statius’ depiction, the poets, who

have been discoursing while walking, reach a spot where “from the wall, the mountain

hurls its flames,;/ but, from the terrace side, there whirls a wind/ that pushes back the fire

and limits it;” (Purgatorio 25:112-114). Shortly after this and upon his hearing of

“Summae Deus clementiae,” Dante sees “spirits walking in the flames” (Purgatorio

25:122-124). The physical, organic growth of the embryo Statius has just described gives

way to a fiery body.

In addition to Joyce’s Aristotelian references, there are references to Lilith,

legendary first wife of Adam who “metamorphosed into a demon after she was replaced

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by Eve” (Gifford 413), and two examples of unorthodox impregnation – through the

sharing of sperm with another woman post coitus, and (in the case study of Averroes’

Colliget), the impregnation through semen in shared bath water (Gifford 413). The

overall tenor of this passage is conception and the strain appears to be that of conjecture,

mystery and false notions of conception over time. Inferno and Purgatorio also present

examples of misuse, palinodes, and the inability to speak, including instances where

Virgil and Dante appear to only be able to signal each other, due to moments where they

are horrified or find it otherwise difficult to describe what they witness or feel. This

tendency diminishes as the poets move from hell to purgatory.

Stephen’s speech also ends with a parody of religion’s dismissal of the idea of

medical intervention when the mother’s life is at stake. Gian Balsamo notes:

Stephen draws an analogy between the reproductive potency of Dante’s

‘wind of seeds of brightness,’ which stands for purgatory’s prolific wind,

capable of making the plants on earth fructify without recourse to seed

(seme palese) [Purgatorio 28:103-17], and the ‘potency of vampires

mouth to mouth.’ (91)

Balsamo references Dante’s Purgatorio 28; however, Dante’s source is likely Virgil’s

Georgics, book 3, and Don Gifford glosses the passage according to the Virgilian

reference. The passage in The Georgics pertains to the mares’ miraculous conception

when “they’ll turn as one towards the west to face the wind and breathe its airs and then –

a miracle! – without being covered by a sire, receive the seed a breeze implants in them”

(The Georgics 3:272-75). According to the equally fantastic seeding that takes place in

Dante’s purgatory, Balsamo sees the seeds and the vampires as representing, respectively,

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“the chaste pollination by an incorporeal, intangible seed of light” (91) and “the unchaste

one by a daemonic agent of periodic ovulation” (91). In other words, they share

connotations of miraculous fecundity (91) and that “it bespeaks, in Stephen’s vision of

postcreation, the extinction of procreation and the eclipse of Eros” (91-92).

What is ironic about Balsamo’s statement is that, while he identifies in the

passage the extinction of procreation, he does not address the possible implications of the

passage’s various allusive elements. A portion of Stephen’s poem encompasses Virgilian

ideas: “of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires

mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the influence of the occident” (the Zephyr or

west wind). Here, the “potency of vampires mouth to mouth” is part of the larger re-

written stanza that Stephen has authored replacing the original final stanza of Douglas

Hyde’s “My Grief on the Sea”. Hyde’s version reads:

And my love came behind me –

He came from the South;

His breast to my bosom,

His mouth to my mouth. (Gifford 62)

While Stephen’s reads:

On swift sail flaming

From storm and south

He comes, pale vampire,

Mouth to my mouth. (Ulysses 7:522-25)

Stephen’s psyche is burdened by a struggle with poetry in A Portrait of the Artist and

Ulysses. His vampire poem above has been scribbled upon paper torn from Garrett

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Deasy’s letter on the subject of foot and mouth disease in cattle. In a sense, that earlier

movement is prophetic in that his philosophies will be shared in a chapter figuratively

threaded with the topos of cattle. When he turns the letter over to the editor, who

comments on its torn nature, he thinks of the poem’s lines, thereby publishing it (instead

of Deasy’s letter) in his mind’s eye.

Stephen Hinds designates, in his work on allusion, the incorporating text as the

writer’s primary original written piece (or the text acquiring the allusion), whereas the

incorporated text equals the allusive element that is being imported (103). Joyce’s

incorporating text is his vampiric poem fragment. Hyde’s poem is the incorporated text.

By encapsulating Stephen’s poetic fragment between Joyce’s reference and the act of

speaking (“Virgilius saith”), Joyce creates a complex new allusive device. The single

strand of free indirect discourse is a tenor that already has several elements of poetic

memory at work. An example of periphrasis, its allusive nature and mixing of metaphors

goes beyond catachresis. The metaphors remain independent and operate closely

together but do not replace one another.

The phrase “Virgilius saith” is a form of the dicuntur discussed in chapter 1.

More specifically, it is a reflexive annotation, a form of sign-posting that has been

explored in studies of Roman poetry (Hinds 3). Phrases such as “are said to have”

(dicuntur) or “I used to say, I remember” (dicebam, memini) serve as a means in classical

texts to indicate the presence of allusion in the text, a hint to look for additional meaning,

as well signify participation in poetic memory (Hinds 3). Because the dicuntur signifies

that it participates in allusive artistry, it is also a signature of authorship. The dicuntur in

Catallus 64 can be seen in the following example: “Once upon a time pine-trees, born on

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Pelion’s peak, are said to have swum through Neptune’s clear waters” (qtd. In Hinds 2).

This particular dicuntur is an “added, editorial intervention external to the events of the

immediately surrounding narrative” (Hinds 3).

Joyce acknowledges the tradition by alluding to, and importing as an authority,

Virgil. Virgil possesses auctoritas, and the mention of “Virgilius saith” is Joyce’s

imitatio at work. He is engaging in the ages-old process of forming new epic codes when

he builds such a densely constructed passage; however his responsive poetics and

imitation is also a parody, with mock overtones, as the combination of the elements

(noted above by Balsamo to be “demonic”) subvert standard conventional attributes of

authority. I see the combination as posing a dilemma: the signposting of Virgil to invoke

authority and to recall a connotation of Purgatorio 25 involves two separate processes.

Virgil’s name and presence in the text invokes Dante’s work and frame of aesthetics.

However, what Virgil saith appears lightweight in terms of allusive importance. The

language used in the tenor passage pertains to fantastic, surreal imageries of conception.

However, the allusion succeeds in making a statement about Purgatorio.

Gian Biago Conte has already classified certain rhetoric devices, such as the

extended simile – as a staple in the epic - under epic codes. As an extended (prolonged)

meditation on a situation or emotion, with metaphoric elements in its unfolding, the

epiphany can be considered a subset of epic codes. Joyce has now developed his

epiphany as a rhetorical device that interacts with and modifies allusive practice. Dante,

previous to Joyce and most likely exceeding Joyce in this respect, inscribes his work with

a revisionary praxis.

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 In terms of Stephen’s poetic fragment, Hyde’s less ominous lyrics have been

transformed into a new song of horror through the presence of the unnamed author of

Dracula, Bram Stoker. Joyce ties together fragments of the literary production of two of

Ireland’s most conspicuous natives– Douglas Hyde, academician turned President of

Ireland, and Ireland’s noted gothic writer, Stoker. By positioning the vampire reference

in Hyde’s verse, Joyce draws attention to both Irish nationality and its literary authorship.

He further draws attention to these subjects by invoking a series of passages from A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that associate Ireland with the bat.

In chapter 5, as Stephen passes Maple’s Hotel, the name of which annoys him, he

envisions the metamorphoses of its inhabitants:

He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which

he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland house in calm.

They thought of army commissions and land agents: peasants greeted

them along the roads in the country; they knew the names of certain

French dishes and gave orders to jarvies in highpitched provincial voices

which pierced through their skintight accents. (A Portrait 258-59)

In his anger at the privileged, he visualizes the beginning of a metamorphosis through

their “highpitched provincial voices” and “their skintight accents.” They are, most likely,

the Protestant, England-enabled transplants that have been front and center at the political

unrest of Ireland. In the next passage, the concept of the Irish race is cast into a metaphor

of desire and transformation. Just as the vampire is the transformation of a human into a

monster with the traits of a bat, Stephen now sees the transformation of his apprehension.

He apprehends the perceived social inequity of “mingling” blood with the oppressor. In

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meditating upon this, he envisions the cultural collective of Ireland turning to a frenzied

motion, the monster of the troubles.

How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the

imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them, that

they might breed a race less ignoble than their own? And under the

deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he

belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes, under trees by the

edges of streams and near the poolmottled bogs. (A Portrait 258-259)

The race that he despairs over is his own, the Irish. What initially takes on the physical

characteristics of the bats (the intruders) now takes on a mental similarity in his own style

of thinking.

And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his

anger was also a form of homage. He had left the classroom in disdain

that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her race lay

behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow.

He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the streets that she was a

figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat-like soul waking to the

consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness, tarrying

awhile, loveless and sinless, with her mild lover and leaving him to

whisper of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear of a priest. (A

Portrait 239-240)

Bats, in the two passages above, are associated both with the Irish landscape and

Stephen’s consciousness. More specifically, they are associated with the thoughts,

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desires, loneliness and secrecy of the individual, thereby associating those subjects with

nature and a national consciousness. Prior to “Oxen,” Joyce employs the motif in chapter

3 (“Proteus”) and chapter 13 (“Nausicaa”).

In chapter 3 (“Proteus”), where Stephen is still considering the symbolism of the

bat, bodily images are conflated with the act of writing. As Stephen passes a midwife,

his thoughts turn to the same fertility and birth that will take place later in “Oxen:”

One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from

nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord,

hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable

of all flesh. . . . Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve.

She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of

taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from

everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin. (Ulysses 3:35 – 3:44)

The strandentwining cable is a symbol of humanity’s evolution; however, the original

(and first) woman, lacking a navel due to direct creation by god, has for a belly of a

“buckler of taut vellum.” This “buckler,” or shield of vellum, carries connotations of

writing, thereby representing writing as birth. Later, as he witnesses the passing of a

couple at Sandymount, Stephen envisions the bat/vampire trope again and turns to write

his poem on paper. He links the flight of the vampire of his poem with a closing phrase

from Percy Shelley’s Hellas, which has as its subject “Greek liberty and the War of

Independence” (Gifford 61-62). The bat will later re-emerge in the form of bats flying

during Bloom’s visit to Sandymount Strand in chapter 5 (“Nausicaa”). In that episode,

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Joyce continues to position their presence as a symbol of Ireland and its national

consciousness.

Throughout the beginning of “Nausicaa,” Gerty McDowall has been

surreptitiously flirting with Leopold Bloom from her position on the rocks at Sandymount

Strand. As the afternoon turns to dusk, the scene is perceived by Gerty to be beautiful in

a national sense: “How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse

of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat flew forth

from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither with a tiny lost cry” (Ulysses

13:624). The subsequent fireworks display on the beach and exposure of herself to

Bloom becomes a “secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to

know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little

bats don’t tell” (Ulysses 13:750-53), The bat, previously belonging only to the Irish

landscape, has now transitioned to the internal landscape of voyeuristic intimacy.

The bat motif in “Nausicaa,” aside from enabling the switch from external

landscape to a symbol of secrecy and intimacy, also accompanies the change from

Gerty’s perspective to Bloom’s. After she leave the rocks, the narrative shifts to his point

of view (one less sentimental and romantic) and reveals his own sexual climax, and his

varied thoughts on his wife and his cuckold status. Just as Gerty considers the details of

an Irish seaside moment with its nostalgic overtones, Bloom, notices his surroundings in

language that destroy nostalgia: “Howth. Bailey ldight. . . . Trees are they? An optical

illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast.

My native land, goodnight” (Ulysses 13:1068-1078). Just as Stephen is disdainful of

intruders taking up residence in his territory and envisions their transformation into bats

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in A Portrait, so Bloom notices a bat, as he considers home rule: “Ba. What is that

flying about? Swallow? Bat probably. Thinks I’m a tree, so blind. Have birds no

smell? Metempsychosis. They believed you could be changed into a tree from grief.

Weeping Willow. Ba.” (Ulysses 13:1117-1120).” Gifford glosses the word “Ba,” as both

the “life breath” and the soul, according to ancient Egyptian religion (400). He points out

that the weeping willow reference is a confusion on Bloom’s part of “metempsychosis”

(the transmigration of the soul into another human or animal) with Ovid’s

Metamorphoses, specifically, the tale of Daphne’s flight from Apollo and transformation

into a laurel tree (Gifford 400).

Joyce, by framing his poetic fragment between Virgil’s words, also foregrounds

Stephen’s failure at poetry. However, this failure is a success in terms of Joyce’s

construction of the passage. Underlying the failed writing is a trope that serves as a

vehicle for an Stephen’s (and Joyce’s) epiphany, one that has as its source the history of

Ireland. Two of the epiphanies seen in this paper successfully figure into Stephen

Dedalus’ (and Joyce’s) poetics. Earlier, in chapter 3 (“Proteus”), as he is walking on

Sandymount Strand, Stephen contemplates his work:

Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep,

copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world,

including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few

thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very

like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one

feels that one is at one with one who once . . . . (Ulysses 3:141-146)

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If Stephen’s simple verse is a failure, the epiphany is not. Through the signposting in the

Aristotle/Virgil passage, the tension between Stephen’s stanza and epiphany can be

compared. Thus, the passage performs the same auto-exegesis found in Dante’s work.

Stephen’s poem, a fragment, emerges in multiple chapters, often in the process of

becoming. In “Oxen,” the poem emerges at a key moment during Joyce’s extrapolation

of Purgatorio 25 as a means to connect with Dante’s aesthetic. Traces of it can also be

found toward the end of “Oxen,” when Francis questions Stephen about school friends.

“Why think of them?” he responds, “If I call them into life across the waters of the Lethe

will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? (Ulysses 14:1112-14). The reference is to

Purgatorio, where Dante must cross the Lethe to be cleansed before moving on to

heaven. Stephen pronounces himself “Lord and giver of their life” (Ulysses 14:1116)

before crowning himself with “a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent” (Ulysses

14:1117). The commentary is suggestive of Dante’s ability as a “giver of life” in the

Commedia, as an author who can give life to the memories of Florentines in his poem.

Vincent responds “That answer and those leaves . . . will adorn you more fitly when

something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father”

(Ulysses 14:1119). His response is Joyce’s way of commenting on his own development

of an aesthetic, a method informed by Dante, but also parodies the same self-

congratulatory moments that can be found in Dante’s Commedia.

This questioning of Stephen’s proposed authority (however lighthearted) is

echoed in Ulysses 14:988, when the subject of plasmic memory arises one possible

reason for various abnormalities of the physical body. In refuting this,

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 an outlandish delegate sustained against both these views, with such heat

as almost carried conviction, the theory of copulation between women and

the males of brutes, his authority being his own avouchment in support of

fables such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin

poet has handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. (Ulysses

14:991-96)

It is clear that through the Dantean references in both Stephen’s embryology statement

and his self-crowning, Joyce acknowledges and continues to parody the Florentine poet’s

influence. The Ovidian allusion replaces medical authority with literary authority and

this accords with the parody, fantastic elements and conjecture that pervade “Oxen.” In

terms of the authority Dante cultivates in the Commedia, how are we to approach “Oxen”

as a similar statement on Joyce’s poetics?

Joyce writes an epic that maintains a running commentary about Ireland’s fate.

The issue of nationalism is more fully described in chapter 3 of this dissertation. In

“Oxen,” the textual births taking place alongside of the human birth establish an Irish

institution (the Holles Street Hospital) as a textual institution, beginning with the

midwife’s chant. Its status as a physical place (non-descript in its actual features) is

positioned against the text’s shifting temporality. The hospital itself is a modern

establishment. In terms of epic precedents, there is no “institution” similar, as it is a

product of the modern city and is inscribed by rhetorics located in another time and place.

Finally, it can be said that to be in Ireland in 1904 is to be situated in a place marked by

and partaking of atemporality.

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 CHAPTER 6: ADVERTISEMENT AS EPIC CODE

Leopold Bloom, as public canvasser, advertises on multiple levels. His

consciousness, the inner monologue that Joyce has assigned to him, is the ultimate public

canvasser. His advertisement endeavors are on display internally (to the reader) and

externally (to his fellow characters) as he moves throughout Dublin on June 16, 1904.

Bloom cooks his breakfast, visits the Turkish baths, attends Patrick Dignam’s funeral,

visits Barney Kiernan’s pub and the Holles Street Maternity Hospital, gets swept along to

Bella Cohen’s brothel and eventually turns toward home, all the while advertising, a

process central to his identity. His position as an unheroic twentieth century Irishman

(his only battles are internal and he can claim no great deed) is one that positions him –

among other things - as the kind of Odyssean wanderer who canvasses everything.

Throughout much of chapter 8 (“Lestrygonians"), a veritable landscape of ads,

Bloom contemplates how to get ads and also contemplates the layout and implications of

ads that he notices. He envisions the luminous crucifix being peddled by the

Birmingham firm – “Wake up in the middle of the night and see him hanging on the

wall” (8:124); sees Charles Wisdom Hely’s sandwichmen whose garb of white smocks

and scarlet sashes “across their boards” recall the papacy, and are comprised of the red

and white of the English flag (and Bloom inwardly criticizes Hely for having “ideas for

ads like Plumtree’s potted under the obituaries, cold meat department”) (127); sees a

rowboat anchored with an advertisement for Kino’s II/ Trousers (8:90-92); sees an ad for

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a typist (8:326) and considers “Best paper by long chalks for a small ad” (8:334). He

plans to search for an ad in the national library (8:369). Most notably, he meets Martha

Clifford through an ad: “Wanted, smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work”

(8:326-27). The irony is that Stephen is supposed to be the writer in Ulysses, not Bloom.

Equally as ironic is Joyce’s procurement of material for Ulysses through his non-writing

character, Bloom.

Numerous motifs appear, disappear and reappear. Bloom considers material

things; for example, the noisy brass springs of the marital bed, the soap that he picks up

for Molly, the Agendath Netaim (planter’s colony), Patrick Dignam, liver and kidneys,

the bill sticking Blazes Boylan, his deceased son and Martin Cunningham’s kindness.

Some of these ruminations concern enterprise and his ability to make money.

Advertising leakages often emerge as fragments of his psyche. When we read his

thoughts, we read advertisements. In “Ulysses in History,” Fredric Jameson writes:

What I want to suggest is that the analogous recurrence of events and

characters throughout Ulysses can equally be understood as a process

whereby the text itself is unsettled and undermined, a process whereby the

universal tendency of its terms, narrative tokens, representations, to

solidify into an achieved and codified symbolic order as well as a massive

narrative surface, is perpetually suspended. I will call this process

‘dereification’ . . . . (151)

This suggestion ably describes the novel, as information is constantly delivered in

fragments to the reader in a roundabout fashion. Jameson applies his assessment of the

narrative to an analysis of the city and its involvement in the structure of Ulysses, along

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with the subject of gossip. For my purposes, I will only use his excellent point that the

process of dereification affects narrative structure by sending descriptive elements of

Bloom’s and Stephen’s world repetitively throughout the text as though pieces of paper

on the wind. Jameson further stresses the materiality of the dilemma:

The process is to be sure more tangible and dramatic when we see it at

work on physical things: the statues, the commodities in the shopwindows,

the clanking trolleylines that link Dublin to its suburbs (which dissolve, by

way of Mr. Deasy’s anxieties about foot and mouth disease, into Mr.

Bloom’s fantasy projects for tramlines to move cattle to the docks) . . . or,

to take a final example, that file of sandwichmen whose letters troop

unevenly through the text, seeming to move towards that ultimate visual

reification fantasised by Mr. Bloom virtually in analogue to Mallarme’s

‘Livre’:

Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in

wonder, a poster novelty with all extraneous accretions excluded,

reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the

span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern

life. (U 1961:705; U 1986:592; 17-1770) (153)

Jameson clearly has “Lestrygonians” in mind, with Bloom’s lunchtime visit to Davy

Byrnes’ pub as he meanders toward the National Library, thoughts in advertisement

mode. He writes, “The visual, the spatially visible, the image, is, as has been observed,

the final form of the commodity itself, the ultimate terminus of reification” (154). As

well, the accompanying “increasing sense of the materiality of the medium itself” is, “one

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of the classic definitions of modernism” (154). In this sense, Joyce and his text anticipate

the multiplication and rapidity inherent in technological development and material

dissemination that will later prompt Marshall McLuhan’s statement “The medium is the

message.” In Ulysses’ fragmentary nature of loosely floating signs, epic codes from

previous centuries – in the form of imported allusions, arrive to participate in modernity,

doing so through the fragmentary and often detrital nature of his characters’

consciousness and thoughts.

The sandwich boards serve, as Jameson notes, both as a textual and visual

component in the modern city. They are carried by Charles Wisdom Hely’s

sandwichmen, whose garb of white smocks and scarlet sashes “across their boards”

vaguely recall the papacy as well as the red and white of the English flag. In addition to

the aggressive marketing tactic, and a position that is coveted by its employees, the

presence of the sandwichmen play on the theme of voyeurism and objectification in the

chapter (if not the entire novel). The essence of trade, commodity and purveyance, in

addition to Joyce’s frame of cannibalism according to the Homeric parallel he chooses,

renders the energy of the chapter as an aggressive, all-consuming need to devour and

possess.

There are certain textual and visual components in Ulysses that carry an added

somatic connotation. A good example can be seen in the newspaper ad for Plumtree’s

Potted Meat that Bloom notices, in chapter 5, in his copy of the Freeman: “What is home

without/Plumtree’s Potted Meat?/Incomplete/With it an abode of bliss” as (5:144-147).

While the ad and position in the paper are known to be fictional, a George W. Plumtree

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sold potted meat in Dublin and the phrase “to pot one’s meat” is a crude reference to

copulation (Gifford 87).

The phrase “with it an abode of bliss,” may allude to book 2 of The Faerie

Queene, wherein the knight Guyon and his squire, Palmer, visit Acrasia’s bower of bliss,

a place where “art works by excess, not complementing nature but competing with or

merely copying it” (MacLean and Prescott 218). The garden that Guyon steps into is

false, full of artifice and multiple temptations. He finds Acrasia there, with a young

warrior-like captive, who has been weakened by her, a victim to her manipulation and

seduction. The entirety of the garden and bower stands for intemperance. The

connection of the bower of bliss/abode of bliss’s with Plumtree’s Potted Meats would

amplify the implication of sexual indulgence, the type that Molly and Blazes Boylan

partake of. In addition, the bower is associated with falsity (2:44) and the god Genius,

ostensibly a god of generation but secretly one who was the “foe of life” (2:48). Joyce

may have had this “foe of life” in mind concerning Bloom’s son, Rudy, who lives only a

short time after birth. Overall, its presence in the text is significant as it re-emerges in

Bloom’s consciousness to the point where Bloom’s consciousness continues to advertise

for Plumtree throughout the remainder of the novel. Even Molly has fond memories of it

in her bed by the day’s end.

Joyce is not averse to the commodification of the deceased – in this case, Patrick

Dignam. Bloom’s advertising consciousness has aligned the corpse with a concrete

physical ad (Plumtree). The advertisement, persisting in simple forms leading up to the

modern era, informs Joyce’s writing of Ulysses. In Joyce’s dereification of the text, it

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connects itself with various themes, allusive and transient, enabling Joyce to create new

epic codes.

Gifford’s Notes reveal glosses on chapter 8’s Dublin landmarks as well as Irish

persons of note, including Arthur Griffith and Charles Stewart Parnell. Allusions of

butchering and consuming promote the cannibal theme of the chapter. Bloom walks

toward the National Library and decides to enter Davy Byrnes’s pub for lunch, where he

will contemplate the dry and canned food staples on the shelves behind the bar. Images

of rude devouring, mastication and regurgitation fit with the associated parallel of

consumerism’s greedy devouring of material both physical and visual. Having seen the

Plumtree ad earlier in the day, Bloom reviews it again when he spies the product in the

products on a shelf behind Byrnes’ bar:

Potted meats. What is home without Plumtree’s potted meat? Incomplete.

What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a

plumtree. Dignam’s potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice.

White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork. Expect the chief

consumes the parts of honour. Ought to be tough from exercise. His

wives in a row to watch the effect. . . . With it an abode of bliss. Lord

knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced

up. Puzzle find the meat. (Ulysses 8.742-51)

Patrick Dignam is a presence throughout Ulysses, with his death and memory persisting

in unlikely moments. Joyce creates, through Bloom’s consciousness, a particularly

aggressive conceptual stance toward the treatment of his body. In chapters 6 (“Hades”)

and 15 (“Circe”), his corpse is on display in often graphic and grotesque detail. In

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chapter 7, having just come from the cemetery, Bloom still considers “that old grey rat

tearing to get in” as an extension of his thoughts during the earlier carriage ride through

the cemetery. While riding with the funeral entourage, and after hearing Martin

Cunningham’s story of a coffin capsizing from a hearse and spilling into the road, Bloom

imagines the same happening to Dignam:

Bom! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy

Dignam shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too

large for him. Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what’s up

now. Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. Then the insides

decompose quickly. Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also.

With wax. The sphincter loose. Seal up all. (Ulysses 6:421-426)

Bloom’s treatment of death and its presentation is not limited to Dignam. While passing

the conveyance of a dead child’s casket, he pictures his son Rudy’s face: “[a] dwarf’s

face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was. Dwarf’s body, weak as putty, in a

whitelined deal box” (Ulysses 6:326-327). Watching the carriage proceed, Bloom thinks

“Rattle his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns” (Ulysses 6:333). He

essentially assigns the moment to music, as the words belong to a song by Thomas Noel,

“The Pauper’s Drive” (Gifford 111). The pauper reference is telling as Dignam’s family

will be jeopardized due to his lack of an adequate insurance plan.

If Bloom’s earlier outrageous thoughts of Patrick Dignam’s upset hearse and

consequent spilling of his corpse in the road is not un-dig-nified enough (Dignam is

anagram of “dig man”), Bloom now associates the potted meat with his corpse,

envisioning his name on the menu. “White missionary too salty” echoes Bloom’s earlier

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thoughts at the funeral, where he muses on the rats that tenant Prospect Cemetery and

how they might communicate the arrival and subsequent feast of Dignam’s corpse

amongst themselves: “Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse…” (Ulysses 8:94). The rat is

represented in Ulysses almost as frequently, if not more than, the bat - a symbol Joyce

aligns with Ireland’s collective consciousness. Later, in chapter 15 (“Circe”), the image

of a dog that hounds Bloom and others throughout the episode surfaces again as a beagle

that “lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam . . .all the nose and

both thumbs are ghouleaten” (Ulysses 15:1204).

Nationalist changes pervade Bloom’s thoughts, In his earlier sojourn to the pub,

Bloom considers Arthur Griffith as a ruler: “is a squareheaded fellow but he has no go in

him for the mob” (Ulysses 8:462). Shortly afterward, a cloud blocks the sun and his

consciousness sees a pattern and rhythm to the city around him:

Trams passed on another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words.

Things go on same, day after day; squads of police marching out, back:

trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off.

Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out

of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second.

(Ulysses 8:476-481)

The depiction of Dignam’s removal, situated next to the labors of Mina Purefoy while

Bloom contemplates his lunch and witnesses scenes of consumption around him, is

deliberate. Joyce engages in a medieval tradition of visualizing and processing the details

of the body, of death, procreation, digestion and defecation, all at once and in close

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proximity. The cannibalism of Dignam’s corpse recalls the same death-consumation

series that Rabelais employs in his writing.

As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, “The death series – with a few exceptions – appears in

Rabelais on a grotesque and clownish plane; it intersects with the eating and drinking

series. On the same plane there are disquisitions on the question of a world beyond the

grave” (194). The parallel in terms of Joyce’s and Rabelais’ treatment of death is

pronounced. In his analysis of Gargantua’s traversing, with his companions, a “stream

made of urine, across the piled-up corpses of drowned men,” Bakhtin writes,

Everyone gets across successfully (book 1, chapter 36),

With the exception of Eudemon, whose horse had plunged its right

leg knee-deep into the belly of a blubbery fat good-for-nothing

who had drowned on his back, and the horse could not pull its leg

out and, therefore, stayed stuck there until Gargantua shoved the

rest of the scoundrel’s giblets into the water with his staff, and then

the horse pulled out her leg and (by what miracle of veterinary

science!) was cured of a tumor on that leg, through contact with

that fat oaf’s guts.

What is characteristic here is not only the image of death-in-urine, or the

tone and style of the description of the corpse (“belly,” “guts,” “giblets,”

“blubbery fat good-for-nothing,” “scoundrel,” “fat oaf”), but also the

healing of the leg through contact with the innards of a corpse. Analogous

cases are very widespread in folklore; they are based on one of the general

folkloric assumptions concerning the generative power of death and of the

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 fresh corpse (a wound is a womb) and the idea of healing the death of one

by the death of another. (195)

The example above contains the same physical invasiveness and dark humor present in

Bloom’s observations of Dignam’s cadaver. The difference is that Joyce does not invest

Bloom’s conceptualizations with the same intensity of parodic humor that Rabelais uses.

Joyce’s explicit renderings, as well as those of his predecessors, are clearly the expected

product of the human imagination and he presents them as such. The human mind’s

tendency to envision beauty and filth, equally, is a feature of the realism present

alongside of parody throughout the novel and part of the aesthetic Joyce maintains in his

writing of A Portrait. The presentation of graphic detail, the idea that no thought, visual

or possibility is left unturned, is a feature of both Joyce’s and Rabelais’ writing.

At lunch, Bloom continues his voyeuristic appreciation of the female body,

deciding to examine the naked goddesses at the library museum, which symbolize to him

“Aids to digestion” (Ulysses 8:922). On contemplating Juno’s loveliness, Bloom’s

thoughts quickly turn to defecation and the graphic nature of the body:

Lovely forms of women sculpted Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we

stuffing food in one hole and out behind; food, chyle, blood, dung, earth,

food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked.

I’ll look today. Keeper won’t see. Bend down let something drop. See if

she. (Ulysses 8: 928-932)

As in other areas of the text, Bloom’s predisposition to voyeurism sends him into a secret

planning. With the other objects of his voyeurism usually flesh and blood, the inclination

here is comic and desperate, with Bloom resorting to a stone replica, a replacement of his

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wife. The statues also recall those near the cemetery, thus importing an added

connotation of death in his musings.

In continuing his process of epic code building through the passage above, and his

tendency to tie multiple allusive elements together in one condensed space, Joyce merges

the reference to Kalypso’s serving of food to Odysseus and his men with an allusion to

Giordano Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity.

In discussing “the dynamics of the ‘soul of the world’ and its endless

proliferation of material forms Bruno writes: “Don’t you see what was

seed becomes stalk, and what was stalk becomes corn and what was corn

becomes bread – that out of blood the seed, out of the seed the embryo,

and then man, corpse, earth, stone, or something else in succession – on

and on, involving all natural forms?” (Gifford 183)

The passage resurrects the same embryo that Joyce frames “Oxen,” although here it is

microcosmic. Its elements are natural, with the seeds, stalks, corn and embryo

representing nature’s work as opposed to the artifice created by man (which includes

advertisements). This artifice is emphasized by Joyce’s placement of the stone statues in

close proximity of the Bruno allusion. Joyce draws parallels between nature’s mundane,

rote processing of materials and Bloom’s earlier experiencing of the sensations of

Dublin’s energy and activities: “Trams passed on another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging.

Useless words. Things go on same, day after day; squads of police marching out, back:

trams in, out” (Ulysses 8:476-478).

I agree with Jennifer Wicke’s assessment that Ulysses can be seen as “a species of

advertisement in its own right, an advertisement of the very modernity of under-

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modernized colonial Ireland as it moves to a post-colonial status” (240). The lens she

uses to consider Ulysses as advertisement stems from Joyce’s creation of Bloom in the

form of a man who, like Joyce, also thinks in symbols and signs:

Joyce draws a comparison between the literary procedures of Bloom as ad

man and Joyce’s political procedures as literary man. Ads are

constellations of desire; prise them apart recirculate them, translate them,

and they signal a transubstantiation devoutly to be wished. Wishing is

part of the game – decolonizing the mind has to do with the articulation of

wishes, and their creative enactments. Joyce’s entire book works – on

only one of its many levels, as if it were the Keyes ad. (240)

Wicke refers to ads as “constellations of desire” but they can also instill dread. Later, in

chapter 17 (“Ithaca”), Bloom returns to the marital (and adulterous) home to find the

physical manifestation of the Plumtree ad:

What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the

kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?

On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal breakfast

saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a moustachecup . . . [and]

an empty pot of Plumtree’s potted meat . . . . (Ulysses 17:552)

Additionally, when Bloom later considers his own inventive nature concerning games,

arguably Joyce’s conception of the modern remnants of epic games, the question arises,

“What also stimulated him in his cogitations?” The games he considers are “obsolete

popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard, catapults’ (Ulysses 17: 571). In response

to the question, the text asserts: “The financial success achieved by Aphraim Marks and

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Charles A. James” (Ulysses 17:577) and “the infinite possibilities hitherto unexploited of

the modern art of advertisement” (Ulysses 17:581). It is in this same chapter that the

narrative focus, which moves through the contents of Bloom’s house and his

consciousness, reveals his feelings of personal success based upon his career as a

canvasser:

What were habitually his final meditations?

Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder,

a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its

simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision

and congruous with the velocity of modern life. (Ulysses 17:1770-73)

This thought is one that competes with Hely’s sandwichmen. By envisioning an

advertisement that “is congruous with the velocity of modern life,” Bloom recalls the

earlier midday modern conveyances and processes of Dublin’s streets.

Later, the Plumtree ad, which has haunted him all day, is present in his thoughts at

home as he converses with Stephen. This time, however, there is blame assigned for the

positioning of the ad under the obituary notices (by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti), along

with a caveat: “Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat. Plamtroo”

(Ulysses 17:600-605). The warning about imitations recalls, once again, the artifice (at

the expense of nature). The next four words in succession represent two anagrams - “pot

meat,” and “Plumtree,” – followed by anagrams of more obscure origin. The

inaccessibility of meaning in the latter two words points to the idea that the product is a

mix of questionable elements on the figurative level but also emphasizes the artifice in

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language (and advertisements). The product emerges once again when Bloom returns to

the marital bed:

What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?

New clean bed linen, additional odours, the presence of a human form,

female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs,

some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed. (Ulysses

17:601)

Here, the emblem of artifice and intemperance has figuratively and literally found its way

into the marital bed, the result of which reduces the previous occupants to mere forms –

female and male – and Bloom is charged with removing the trace of “leftover

copulation.” The experience provokes a series of thoughts in Bloom, including Molly’s

previous suitors, his emotions concerning her adultery, the possibility of divorce, and

Rudy’s death.

How does Joyce configure the advertisement as an epic code? The answer is

partly its status as an emblem of Irish culture. George W. Plumtree “was listed as a

potted-meat manufacturer at 23 Merchant’s Quay in Dublin” (Gifford 87). As part of

Bloom’s consciousness and an emblem that connects him with Dublin, it connects the

Irishman with the modern city. Through Bloom’s consciousness, Joyce creates a running

advertisement for an Irish ad, one that employs a graphic sensibility in its use of the same

lower bodily stratum that Francois Rabelais found in his experiences of the marketplace.

Mikhail Bakhtin describes the major influence of the marketplace, along with its various

feasts, fairs and other public spectacles that Rabelais attended, and the resulting presence

of its advertising in his writings.

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 As a separate and distinct venue from the Church and its authority, the fair is a

site of subversive possibility, with a separate authority that enabled and authorized

festivity, gaiety, humor, parody and folklore. Rabelais attended many of these fairs

(Bakhtin Rabelais 154-157). The fair and marketplace language (including that of

advertising, invective and comedy) and the language of the Church emerge in his writing

and he situates the activities of Pantagruel and Gargantua within a parodic framework

that depends upon the tension between the two authorities (one official and the other

unofficial). The textual nature of the fairs, and by this I mean the rhetoric, dialogues, and

performances that arise from their activities, is further heightened by its association with

publishing. Bakhtin notes that, in Rabelais’ time, the Lyon fairs “represented one of the

most important markets of publishing and bookselling, second only to Frankfurt. Both

these cities were the center of book distribution and literary advertising. Books were

published with an eye to the fairs” (156). The importance of Lyon and its fairs would

increase in their importance to Rabelais, who “had first published three scholarly works,

later became the provider of mass literature and therefore entered into a closer

relationship with the fairs. He not only had to calculate their dates but also their

demands, tastes, and fashions” (157).

About Rabelais’ writing of the marketplace dynamic, and its billingsgate, humor

and merger of authentic medicine with theater, Bakhtin notes the early cross-over of

marketplace advertising techniques into realm of publication:

The cris de Paris were composed in verse and were sung in a peremptory

tone. The style of the barker inviting customers to his booth did not differ

from that of the hawker of chapbooks, and even the long titles of these

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 books were usually composed in the form of popular advertisements. The

marketplace of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was a world in itself,

a world which was one; all “performances” in this area, from loud cursing

to the organized show, had something in common and were imbued with

the same atmosphere of freedom, frankness, and familiarity.’ (Rabelais

and His World 153)

Similarly, titles formed in the shape of advertisements can be found in Joyce’s work, with

the difference in that the titles can reflect the thoughts of the characters.

In chapter 7 (“Aeolus”), Bloom visits the offices of the Freeman’s Journal to

place an ad for Alexander Keyes and also instruct the editor on changes. At the same

time, Stephen Dedalus arrives, delivering Garrett Deasy’s letter on foot and mouth

disease. The chapter is ostensibly patterned after Odysseus’ visit to Aeolia, “warden of

the winds” (Gifford 128), with the connotation of the news office being subject to

changeability and windiness (due to its chit chat and conjecture). Present also is the

Odyssean theme of getting blown off course. Hype and hyperbole do not equate with

staying the course. The chapter consists of narrative divided by headlines, similar to that

of a newspaper; however, the headlines are designed by Joyce according to the moment

by moment situations that the various characters encounter, and are inconsistent with

respect to tone. For example, under one headline - “K.M.R.I. A.” - editor Myles

Crawford responds to Alexander Keyes’s requirements for renewal of his wine merchant

advertisement, by telling Bloom that Keyes can “kiss my royal Irish arse” (Ulysses 7:

990).

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 Again, the use of headlines in “Aeolus” recalls the prologues in Rabelais’

Gargantua and Pantagruel, and their French marketplace invective of the sixteenth

century. Providing an in depth analysis of the intertwined themes of billingsgate,

marketplace advertisement, and praise in the prologue to Pantagruel, book 2, Mikhail

Bakhtin notes the prologue’s range of tone and subject matter, beginning with its praise

addressed to the reader:

O most illustrious and most valorous champions, gentlemen and all others

who delight in honest entertainment and wit. I address this book to you.

You have read and digested the Mighty and Inestimable Chronicles of the

Huge Giant Gargantua. Like true believers you have taken them upon

faith as you do the texts of the Holy Gospel. Indeed, having run out of

gallant speeches, you have often spent hours at a time relating lengthy

stories culled from these Chronicles to a rapt audience of noble dames and

matrons of high degree. On this count, then, you deserve vast praise and

sempiternal memory. (Rabelais qtd. in Rabelais 159-160)

The reader is addressed as though he or she is a participant in the audience of the

marketplace or fair (also the site of various mysteries and other performances). This

elevated style (however parodic) is fleeting. After a defense of his book, the author’s

speech quickly degrades into an invective-laden ending:

However, before I conclude this prologue, I hereby deliver myself up body

and soul, belly and bowels, to a hundred thousand basketfuls of raving

demons, if I have lied so much as once throughout this book. By the same

token, may St. Anthony scar you with his erysipelatous fire . . . may

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 Mahomet’s disease whirl you in epileptic jitters . . . may the festers, ulcers

and chancres of every purulent pox infect, scathe, mangle and rend you . .

. . (Rabelais qtd. in Rabelais 164)

“Soul, body and bowels” recalls Joyce writing of death in close proximity to food and

“aids in digestion,” (a different kind of consumption). As Bakhtin points out, the

combined pieces of the prologue draw upon a range of social cues, performances and

languages existing within the realm of the marketplace:

Such is the structure of Pantagruel’s prologue. It is written from

beginning to end in the style and tone of the marketplace. We hear the cry

of the barker, the quack, the hawker of miracle drugs, and the bookseller;

we hear the curses that alternate with ironic advertisements and ambiguous

praise. The prologue is organized according to the popular verbal genres

of hawkers. The words are actually a cry, that is, a loud interjection in the

midst of a crowd, coming out of the crowd and addressed to it . . . At the

same time, however, this entire prologue is a parody and travesty of the

ecclesiastical method of persuasion. Behind the “Chronicles” stands the

Gospel . . . . (167)

This passage designates the prologue as an imprint of societal consciousness. The

bookseller and hawker are precursors to modern advertising. Joyce’s internal monologue

episodes enable the thoughts of Stephen and Bloom (but especially the emotional

landscape of the latter) to act as the advertisements of consciousness.

This chapter examines Joyce’s unique advertising structure – one that includes

commodity, graphic conceptions of the dead, parody, digestion and other corporeal

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concerns and finds in these ingredients the assembly of an epic code. More importantly,

what does it mean to have a consciousness that recycles these elements? This assembly

draws from classical mythology, the medieval and the early 20th century.

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 CONCLUSION

The impetus behind this dissertation is to determine Joyce’s purpose and

methodology in creating Ulysses’ highly allusive structure. I have been intrigued with its

intricacy since 2004 after discovering, in a graduate course, Dante’s presence in Joyce’s

work. Since epic poetry is allusive by nature, and Joyce employs an Odyssean frame, I

decided to study allusion, both in Greek and Latin poetry and in the Commedia. Gian

Biagio Conte’s concept of epic codes and norms, developed in his readings of Virgil and

Lucan, offers a valuable hermeneutical tool in which to investigate Joyce’s work.

Through his close readings, Conte notices a negotiation of authority contained in classical

imitative and emulative allusion. The allusive contents of Ulysses reveal that Joyce

engages in the same allusive practices. I argue that, in writing his Irish epic, Joyce

modifies epic codes and norms, even creating a few. Such a modification results in a

preeminent Irish epic.

Conte finds a revisionary poetics in the work of Virgil and Propertius. In addition

to Virgil’s modification of epic codes to create a Roman epic, The Aeneid, he also writes

in response and against to the popular derivative style that follows Homer. Conte

describes the poets’ efforts to break free of the influence of Ennius:

In literature, it is traditional to fight tradition. An instructive instance from

classical literature is the artistic self-consciousness that the ‘neoteroi,’ and

more especially the bucolic Virgil and the elegiacal Propertius, evolved in

opposing the pompous affectation of the Ennian tradition. They turned to

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 Callimachus and others of the Alexandrian “revolt” to see what choices

they had made when opposing the poetic conventions of the Homeric

tradition. Since refutation had already been codified within the literary

system, it was there to be reused. (92)

His statement reaffirms the literary system as a culturally constituted zone of authorial

modification as well as the existing “artistic self-consciousness,” that anticipates Dante’s

poetics of auto-exegesis. How does Joyce revise the epic tradition?

Chapter 1, “The Epic Ulysses,” briefly examines Ulysses’ epic and medieval

constitution followed by a history of early epic authorship and appropriation. Classical

poetry, through appropriation and modification, enables dialogues between poets. A

dialogue increases the aesthetic value of the text and invests it with an authoritative

praxis. A discussion of treatises from Horace and Socrates illustrates a longstanding

poetic process that evolves alongside of poetry. As well, the chapter explores the

differences between primary (oral) and secondary (literary) epic. Virgil’s revision of the

epic is important in the traditional shift from oral epic to literary epic. The Aeneid is

considered the foundational literary model that will influence later poets. Also discussed

is the distinction between imitative and emulative allusive practices, including integrative

and reflective appropriation of poetic material. In responding to other poets’ models and

words, successors can increase the authoritative value in their work. The primary frame I

chose in investigating Joyce’s allusive practices is found in the philological studies of

Gian Biagio Conte.

Conte’s approach, notes Charles Segal,

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 offers a more systematic via media between the newer Structuralist

directions of recent French criticism and the emphasis on sources, models,

and imitation that has been a dominant interest of classical literary studies.

His work is less a radical departure from traditional scholarship than a

reorientation of its goals. His concern is with the synchronic rather than

the diachronic aspects of literary influence, with literature as a system

rather than as historical evolution. (8-9)

The conciseness of his findings lends itself to a straightforward means of studying

Joyce’s asethetic. Ulysses responds to and builds upon previous epic forms, including the

Commedia. Joyce states that Ulysses is his “system of working.” Therefore, the very

title of his work brings attention to the novel’s ordering. The challenge is to see how far

this system of working extends. As discussed earlier, epic norms “refer to the cultural

contents with which a poet in a given society will fill that narrative grammar, the

ideology that the particular realization of the epic code will convey” (Conte 13). Joyce,

self-exiled from Ireland until his death, could have provided his epic protagonist with a

different nationality; however, his version of the cultural contents that epic norm-building

is predicated upon could only be found in Dublin.

Chapter 2, “Joyce’s System of Working,” briefly examines Ulysses’ Dantean and

Rabelaisian underpinnings, as well as Andras Ungar’s concept of Ulysses as a

historiographic fable. The historicity of Ireland’s politics and Dublin’s streets, shops,

conveyances and language is extracted from daily life and situated alongside of – or

within - Homeric traces. Together, this historicity and frame assist in forming a unique

narrative; however, the apparent fact that neither could stand alone supports Ungar’s

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claim that the Homeric framework is the ideal receptacle for the historiography of

Dublin. Historiography, aside from referring to the history of a place, may also pertain to

the construction of its cultural ideologies and mythology. Undeniably, there is a

commentary running through Ulysses on the subject of Ireland’s paralysis, antagonism to

the British Empire, and history with Roman Catholicism. As early as the writing of

Dubliners, Joyce was concerned with writing Dublin. Seamus Deane notes that:

Joyce tried to persuade the publisher, Grant Richards, that his collection of

stories, Dubliners, was about a city that still had not been presented, or

represented, to the world. He insists, on many occasions, on the emptiness

that preceded his own writings about that city. It is an historical but not

yet an imaginative reality. Although Dublin has been a capital for

‘thousands of years’ and is said to be the second city of the British

Empire, Joyce claims that no writer has yet ‘presented Dublin to the

world’. (36)

A city can be presented in multiple ways. One of these ways includes mapping. The

mapping of Dublin, illustrated both in Don Gifford’s Notes and in Ulysses’ migratory

narrative, is a natural outcome of Ulysses’ episodes. The novel’s two main characters,

Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, wander. The other manner in which the city can

be depicted, is in its gritty realism. Joyce’s representations are not just gritty but

exorbitant, with a wealth of detail about city life. Deane continues:

By insisting that Dublin had not been represented before in literature,

Joyce was intensifying the problem of representation for himself. He

abjured the possibility of being influenced by any other Irish writer,

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 because there was, in effect, none who belonged to his specific and

peculiar version of his civilization. He was bound, therefore, to find a

mode of representation that was, as far as Irish literature was concerned,

unique (37).

The key point implied here is in Joyce’s divergent technique. His combinatory aesthetics

- of a non-heroic stand in for Odysseus, the internal monologue and the unusual move of

using medieval, Homeric and other frames - leads to an ordering that is non-paralleled.

As well, he is the recipient of a solid education through the Jesuits, one with a rigorous

study of the classics. Joyce’s system of working includes, early on, the development of

the epiphany. The earlier investigations of Thomas Aquinas in A Portrait of the Artist as

a Young Man assist him in their development. I argue that these epiphanies can be

considered one form of Joyce’s epic code and the chapter details an example of the

epiphany in A Portrait. The epiphany analysis in chapter 2 also makes clear Dante’s

influence in Joyce’s formulation of his aesthetic.

Chapter 3, “Ulysses’ Organizing Principle and Somatic Representations,” looks at

Joyce’s Linati schema and his medieval mindset as an author. It explores the influence of

early modern texts, texts influenced by somatic imagery found in the medieval era, such

as Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island or The Island of Man, and Francois Rabelais’

Gargantua and Pantagruel. To further emphasize the corporeality of Ulysses, I discuss

the somatic textual philosophies that influence Joyce, such as the somatic geographical

landscapes typical of Giambattista Vico’s Poetic Cosmography, and the imitative theories

of writing and concept of copia (or abundance) found in the writings Desiderius Erasmus.

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 The last half of the chapter contains an analysis of the Citizen in “Cyclops,” who

Joyce’s cobbles together from Homer’s Polyphemus and Virgil’s Cacus. A parodic

symbol of Irish nationalism, his image enables Joyce to explore and hyperbolize the

mythical fabric of Irish culture. In Inferno 25, Dante spies the centaur, Cacus, as he

journeys through hell. As explained by Virgil, he has been assigned to the eighth circle

of thieves for stealing cattle (Inferno 25:28-29). In “Cyclops,” Dante’s likeness is

portrayed as one of many seastones that hang from the Citizen’s ekphrastic girdle. The

stones and their likenesses of various persons are an allusion to the heads of Cacus’

victims in The Aeneid. Repugnant in character and an Irish nationalist, the stones identify

the Citizen as a stand in for Cacus. Among other things, this suggests that Joyce may be

parodying allusive practices and the tradition of imitation and emulation in the epic and

poetry in general. As Joyce is aware, highly allusive textual sites can serve as sites of

authority. Dante’s likeness hangs in silence. The implication is that his authoritative

word is no longer necessary, his face is enough; however, another interpretation would be

that the primitive nationalism of the Citizen has trivialized art. Art is to be “collected”

and displayed, even boasted about, but its meaning is irrelevant.

Chapter 4, “Dante’s Authority and Poetics in Cantos 25,” provides a glimpse of

the Florentine poet’s authorial process, emphasizing the auto-exegesis in his work. The

primary focus of the chapter is to prepare for chapter 5’s discussion of Joyce’s “Oxen”

chapter, which responds to Dante’s poetics. The medieval terms of autore (author),

auctoritas (authority) and auctoritates (texts) are defined and there is a brief examination

of his poetic authority due to his public position. Dante’s authority is not pronounced in

his time due to various reasons: his intention to write the Commedia in the vernacular

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rather than Latin, his later exile and his lack of a public office. Despite this, he writes an

epic that is visionary in its Christian framework and he takes the innovative step of

holding dialogues in the three canticles as well as assigning punishments and positions to

within the Commedia to those he knew in life. The chapter also defines the palinode

(recantation), a part of Dante’s poetics, as well as Virgil’s influence.

A study of the somatic re-membering that takes place in Inferno 24-25 is

compared to Purgatorio’s arrival of Statius and his oratory on the embryo. The shades of

hell constantly request the human pilgrim Dante to remember them to others. The

remembering of some personages through memory is often juxtaposed with a somatic re-

membering of others. In most cases, hell has somehow modified or otherwise disfigured

its inhabitants and Dante must speak with the shades in order to determine who they are.

One thing is clear: in the twenty-fifth level of each canticle there are statements being

made about poetics. Those discussions taking place in Inferno happen alongside of

physical metamorphoses and violence. Those in Purgatorio and Paradiso (of which only

Purgatorio will be discussed) take place within the realm of discourse.

Inferno 24-25 presents a highly visual and allusive physical restructuring of Vanni

Fuccci and Agnello in the thieves circle. Throughout Inferno, Dante’s sinners serve to

prophesize events that will take place in Florence, situating them in such a way that they

have not already happened. The appearance of Statius and his relationship to Dante

reveals a possible alter-ego for Dante. Robert Ascoli’s sees the meeting of Virgil, Statius

and Dante in Purgatorio as a “historicization of authorship” (324). Part of this chapter

also examines the pathos in Statius’ poetry as a possible reason he is chosen to provide

the theory of the shade’s soul.

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 Chapter 5, “Oxen of the Sun” – The Birth of the Text,” is a comparative view of

Dante’s Purgatorio 25 and Joyce’s “Oxen.” Extrapolating elements of Statius’ speech

and threading them through “Oxen,” Joyce also takes the theme of the embryology

passage and creates a micro-version in Stephen Dedalus’ speech. In addition to the

microcosm, Joyce is a master of the macrocosm. He takes the embryo trope and applies

it to the narrative style in “Oxen.” The evolution of language, in this respect,

accompanies the gestation of the embryo. The first part of Joyce’s modification of

Purgatorio 25 takes place through a motif of textual births that are used to define

Leopold Bloom’s arrival and movements at the Holles Street Hospital.

In Stephen’s speech, Joyce writes a cryptic response to Dante’s Purgatorio 25,

through an allusive nexus that incorporates the theme of the embryo, Homeric traces, and

references to both Virgil’s The Georgics and Stephen’s failed poetry (containing Irish

literary symbolism). While the theme of Stephen’s speech is fantastic, the underlying

issue – his poetry – designates the passage as an auto-exegetical moment similar to those

in Dante’s Commedia.

Chapter 6, “Advertisement as Epic Code,” explores the advertising consciousness

of Leopold Bloom. Fredric Jameson’s concept of dereification pinpoints Ulysses’

inability to “solidify into an achieved and codified symbolic order” (151). Also, the

image is “the final form of the commodity itself, the ultimate terminus of reification”

(154). Elements of voyeurism and consumption are the focus of this chapter.

Advertising acts as a means of processing, similar to the body’s processes of

nourishment, digestion, sexuality and death. The museum goddesses that Bloom

obsesses over are viewed as “aids to digestion” (Ulysses 8:922). Bloom is fascinated

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with orifices, including those of the goddesses: “They have no. Never looked. I’ll look

today” (Ulysses 8:930-931). The same drive to verify that the goddesses are able to

imitate bodily functions and to examine the human body in detail leads to a similar

consideration of Patrick Dignam’s corpse: “Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes,

also. With wax. The sphincter loose. Seal up all (Ulysses 6:425-426). While the

goddesses are to be examined for openness, the deceased are to be examined for closure.

If Bloom does not have control over Molly’s body – due to her affair with Blazes Boylan

– then he will have control over those of the museum goddesses and Dignam.

The argument in this chapter is that the modern advertisement has been turned

into an epic code. Plumtree’s potted meat (the surname of which is belongs to the real

life Irishman, George W. Plumtree) is referenced in various ways throughout the book

and becomes a symbol that invariably denotes death, marital bliss, nostalgia and

sexuality. Bloom is ever conscious of the ad. Language is part of the thinking and the

internal vocalizations of the mind can equate with the oral cries of the marketplace.

Space is provided in the chapter to early modern advertising in the marketplace and its

placement in the works of Rabelais.

Finally, this dissertation’s premise is that a further reading of Ulysses’ allusive

frame can reveal Joyce’s modification of the epic tradition. As discussed in chapter 1,

Gian Biagio Conte defines the epic code as the “objective narrative structure” of the epic

genre, or the stock features that identify the epic as such (Segal 13). In Ulysses, Joyce’s

epic code modifications result in the replacement of the traditional invocation of the muse

with the mock rite of Buck Mulligan in chapter 1 (“Telemachus”); a modest bargeman on

a raft towed by a haulage rope on the royal canal replaces a ferryman on the River Styx; a

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brothel replaces Circe’s island; and scenes of battle and epic games are replaced with

discussions of literary and medical theories. In chapter 14 (“Oxen), the invocation to the

muse is a chant to an obstetrician; the theatrical send up of Rudolph Virag Bloom, Patrick

Dignam and Stephen’s mother in chapter 15 (“Circle”) becomes a parodic form of

katabasis; and, finally, a catalogue of weapons may end up replaced by the catalogue of

the contents of a drawer in Bloom’s house.

Leopold Bloom is Odysseus recast as a Semitic Irishman, and Joyce infuses

Bloom’s comparatively humble wandering throughout Dublin with the promise of a

return to an idyllic homeland, Israel, with its Agendath Netaim. This promise is initially

introduced to the reader through an advertisement in chapter 4 (“Calypso”), the first

chapter in which Bloom and his internal monologue make an appearance. At the butcher

shop, he spies a pile of cut sheets of various advertisements. The first is of “the model

farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias,” a cattle farm that he envisions becoming

a winter sanatorium (Ulysses 4:154-56). The second is the paradisiacal Zionist colony:

Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay eighty

marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges,

almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial irrigation.

Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered for life as

owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the balance in

yearly instalments. (Ulysses 4:194-197)

The possibility appeals so much to Bloom, who repeatedly envisions a return to the

Jewish homeland, that at Patrick Dignam’s funeral he thinks “Lay me in my native earth.

Bit of clay from the holy land” (Ulysses 6:819). In comparison, moments later he thinks

180 
“The Irishman’s house is his coffin” (Ulysses 6:822). Through the advertisements, he

considers land as a commodity and financial security but the description of Agendath,

above, also implies a sense of belonging. If he cannot find acceptance as both an

Irishman and a Jewish man, he can find acceptance where one can be an “owner in the

book of the union.” Bloom does not voyage as Odysseus does. His own delayed

homecoming is the result of Molly’s affair, and he only journeys around Dublin in

avoidance of her paramour. Instead, Joyce takes him through a voyage of the

imagination. For example, in addition to his imagining of Kinnereth and Agendath, a

move which places him in the far east, in chapter 5 (“The Lotus-Eaters”), as he stops in

front of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company. His reading serves as his Odyssean

journey as he regards the “legends of leadpapered packets” (Ulysses 5:18):

Choice blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely

spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on,

cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like

that. . . . Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in

Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. (Ulysses 5:29-35).

However, just as he turns away from that possibility of Agendath, he wonders at his

ability to tolerate the hothouse climate of the far east. Odysseus visits Circe’s island for a

year; Bloom envisions the far east only for a minute.

Bloom’s journeys exist through his reading of newspapers, sheets, packets,

postcards and ads. He also reads books, as we find out from the catalogue of his personal

library in chapter 17 (“Ithaca”), and he reads letters from Martha The fact that he reads

sets him apart from the typical epic protagonist, as the heroes of Homer, Virgil and

181 
Statius are concerned with the journey and warfare. In his investigation of Virgil’s epic

poetics, Gian Biagio Conte writes:

A work that had only original elements would be doomed to

incomprehensibility. For this reason individual experience must emerge

from the private sphere, must become imbued with a systematic formal

design, or “ratio,” and must submit to the process of conventionalization.

The conventional forms are not added as an afterthought to the

spontaneous nucleus that is their original substance; they are not a form of

pressure from without. Rather, poetic experience moves along

conventional tracks and is revealed within an already codified morphology

of content and expression. (91)

Joyce’s individual experience emerges and has multiple formal designs. The emergence

of individual experience from the private sphere and the subsequent application of a

systematic formal design find compatibility in Andras Ungar’s statement, in chapter 3,

that Joyce uses the Homeric frame to enable Joyce’s “shaping of the epic as

historiography” (1). However, the shaping of the epic traditionally involves a

modification of its codes and norms. Ulysses illustrates that Joyce creates an Irish epic

thorough the ambitious practice of this modification.

182 
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