Discuss race, nation and religion in James Joyces Ulysses
The narrative style of Ulysses, free indirect speech creates an array of different narrators within the novel. Given this multiplicity of voices, one Ulysses presents the readers with multiple views on race, nation and religion that exist within the book.
An inseparable part of Ireland as a nation is the national religion, in the Wandering Rocks episode the narrator describes the trip of the Catholic priest who is rector at Clowngowes School. Despite the revered social status that the Catholic clergy have in Ireland, one can sense a disenchantment and suspicious treatment in Ulysses that is reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus own loss of faith in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As such, the portrayal of Father Conmee is an unsettling one. Firstly, the mans name, Conmee is aurally the same as con me which immediately perturbs the reader. The first sentence of this passage seems then somewhat sarcastic: The superior, the very reverend John Conmee as if to indicate that despite his ecclesiastical status the man is supercilious. Twice in the section the narrator calls the character Don John, alluding to the villain in Shakespeares Much Ado About Nothing who plots to prevent the marriage and happiness of Hero and Claudio suggesting that Catholicism is a constricting and malevolent aspect of Irish life. The repeated use of Father Conmee throughout the section draws attention to both the fact that a Priest is the omnipresent, pillar of the community his name literally holds up the passage, but also presents a religion that is repetitive and boring, perhaps suggesting too that Conmee is enamoured with his own status he noticeably mixes with other important community members such as police constables and the wife of an MP. The Conmee scene also draws upon another aspect of Irish nation, namely as an oppressed, colonial country of the British Empire.
In 1907, Joyce wrote the article Home Rule Comes of Age in which he compared Ireland to the overseas coloniesIndia and Egypt. In this sense, Ulysses could be seen as colonial literature, exploring the subjugation of the Irish nationalists that certainly to Joyce was equivalent to the more commonly recognised colonies in Africa and India. The theme of Colonialism is drawn upon on in this part of the book, notably when Father Conmee considers the millions of black and brown and yellow souls...a pity that they should be lost, waste one might say. The sound of this seems insincere, the word pity a blas understatement. Father Conmees thoughts quickly flow on from the topic, but at the end of the section an ivory book mark told him the page serve to remind of colonialist plunder. The fact that this small representation of colonialism told him suggests that colonial interests are more dominant and in control than the religion that Conmee represents, literally instructing it. This again signals the dislike of Catholicism by Joyce, who believed that the Catholics sold Parnellwithout extracting their thirty pieces of silver another case of British colonial interests perceived weakening and controlling the Catholic church.
Joyce also explores the Jewish religion within Ulysses. Before the readers encounter Leopold Bloom, they encounter several tangibly anti-Semitic characters, the Englishman Haines who berates the decay of England at the hands of the Jews and Mr Deasy who alludes to the greed of the gold skinned Jews. Only after this are we first introduced to the Irish Jew, Mr Leopold Bloom and the we are unsure what to make of him, on account of the fact he ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, which conjures an animalistic and greedy image one that is made all the more arresting and odd by the fact that most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave his palate the fine tang of faintly scented urine, which makes the character seem immediately strange and slightly repulsive, creating an image which is anti Semitic.
Despite as Mr Deasy incorrectly claims there are no Jews in Ireland, the anti Semitism displayed by Deasy and Haines at the start of the novel returns in The Cyclops episode of part II. Joe and the anonymous narrator of the section discuss a bloodythief, the Jewish Moses Herzog. Dehumanized, Herzog is at once predatory big (and) foxy as well as being a rodent-like little jewy the face on him all pockmarks. Particularly telling is Herzogs mimicked speech: He drink me my teas. He eat me my sugars. Because he no pay me my money. The first person adjective and first person pronoun together repeated three times emphasize the merchants apparent self-centred greed, and by virtue of poor grammar, suggest an inherently foreign and therefore suspicious character. This is juxtaposed with the paragraph that follows, a half page long single sentence legal contract that is overly complicated, and contains confusing legal jargon the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings per pound avoirdupois portraying Herzogs alleged mercantile cunning. As opposed to betraying genuine racism, through his depiction of Bloom and the views of Haines, Mr Deasy, Joe and the unnamed narrator, Joyce instead sets up the Jewish stereotype to be debunked. When the narrator later visits a bar and spies a jew for you (ie. Bloom) as cute as a shithouse rat, again animalising those who are Jewish, Bloom for the first time in the novel defends his religion crying out that the saviour was a Jew and his father was a Jew. Your God. Joyce here negates the anti Semitism through similarity - Bloom essentially points out that they all share the same God - this technique is used throughout the novel when exploring race and nation.
The fact that Joyce makes Herzogs first name Moses is all the more ironic; in Irish Nationalist propaganda, Parnell was likened to Moses, leading the Irish people out of the Egyptian-like British bondage. By setting up the stereotype of Moses Herzog, Joyce is comparing the Irish to the Jews: both groups who have been persecuted. This increases the sense of hardship that the Irish have suffered at the hands of the English, making their struggle one that is epic and Biblical in magnitude and also implies that God is on the side of the Irish, who have spent the last 103 years of English rule since the Act of Union exiled in their own land.
But what of the persecutors? If then the Jews and Irish are likened then by implication the English are likened as their mutual persecutors. Indeed, this is done early on in the novel with the figure of the anti-Semitic Englishman Haines, who has a cold gaze that measured [Stephen]. The fact that Haines is not all unkind by definition means that he is not all kind either, making his statement we have treated you rather unfairly feel insincere. Despite this pseudo apology, he still exhibits a divisive us and them mentality, identifying himself of course, Im a Britisher, while Stephen is an Irishman. Technically true, the distinction nevertheless begets a certain sense that Haines is patronising Stephen and ergo Ireland as a whole, presuming that an Irishman must think like that, I daresay. Haines also devolves British responsibility, concluding that it seems history is to blame.
Similarly whilst Deasy is an Irishman, he is a protestant Ulster Unionist and so sides with the English, the mutual persecutors of the Jews and Irish Nationalists. As such when he laughs at his anti-Semetic joke, Joyces description is particularly grotesque: A coughball of laughter lept from his throat dragging with it a rattling chain of phlegm. The rattling chain suggests that he represents oppression and imprisonment. The dragging phlegm suggests that Deasy has unbalanced humours: in medieval medicine those thought to be phlegmatic showed the characteristics. believed to result from a predominance of phlegm not easily excited to feeling; stolidly calm, self-possessed, imperturbable; (with pejorative connotation)apathetic [italics my own]. This image then as well as unpleasant is particularly derogatory to Deasy, the fact that he presents symptoms of an antiquated medical belief implies that the man and his views, are equally backward and outdated.
Another of Joyces comparisons is between Stephan Dedalus and Bloom in that both of them have if not lost faith, they have at least lapsed. On the morning of June 16th Bloom enjoys a pork kidney, immediately signalling to the reader that he is not kosher, whereas Mulligan observes Stephen Dedalus couldnt pray at his mother death bed side, ironically comparing Stephens fervent atheism with the fervent zeal of the Jesuit strain. Matthew Hodgart sums up the similarity between the two, observing that Dedalus is a bad catholic, Bloom is a bad Jew .
Despite the debunking of the anti-Semetic image, Joyces portrayal of Bloom is none the less at times strikingly unpleasant and corporeal. He seems predatory, and in the butchers in the morning, after lingering on the last kidney ooz[ing] bloodgouts, he rested his eyes on the girl in front of him in the queue, and comments on her new blood, and on leaving the shop Bloom wants to catch up and walk behind her linking his consumption of offal to sexual attraction. Blooms greed is mimicked by the pace of the passage in which he eats with relish steak and kidney steak then kidney, bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate. The tight repetition of steak, kidney, bite and ate in such a short sentence reinforces the greedy consumptive nature of Bloom.
As well as this, Bloom masturbates at the beach in the darkness, whilst watching Gerty MacDowell adding a perverse sexual dimension reinforced by his buying of Sweets of Sin, a lewd novel the title of which reminds of confectionary, again alluding to consumption and greed. If, as Hodgart claims Bloom is an everyman then he is a flawed hero. In this sense then, Bloom is normal he eats and defecates, desires and copulates like normal human beings. By recognising the imperfections in Bloom, Joyce ensures he creates a credible and realistic character to explore race, nation and religion.
The multiplicity of voices that the free indirect speech creates allows Joyce to present a reader with a theses, an antitheses and then finally a syntheses with regards to race, nation and religion. At first, Judaism is presented as a foil to the Irish but the synthesis is that both are similar in their persecution. As such the anti Semitism displayed by the native Irish characters is all the more ironic. By contrasting ideas of nation, race and religion, Joyce reconciles the differences that exist in the nation he presents, and simultaneously highlights his own political views. The journey that the title Ulysses implies is then not so much Blooms own journey around Dublin on June 4 1904, rather it is the readers journey as they are led by Joyce through his own views, and others views, of race, nation and religion at the start of the 20th Century.
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Bibliography
Ulysses James Joyce, Penguin, 1992
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce ed., Derek Attridge, CUP, 2007
James Joyce A Students Guide Matthew Hodgart, Routledge and Kegan, 1978
James Joyce Studies ed., Jean-Michel Rabate, Palgrave Advances 2004
James Joyce Occasional, Critical and Political Writing ed., Kevin Barry, OUP, 2000
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