Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition

Patrick Colm Hogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415704250
• eBook ISBN: 9781134491841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Given Ulysses' perhaps unparalleled attention to the operations of the human mind, it is unsurprising that critics have explored the work's psychology. Nonetheless, there has been very little research that draws on recent cognitive science to examine thought and emotion in this novel. Hogan sets out to expand our understanding of Ulysses, as well as our theoretical comprehension of narrative—and even our views of human cognition. He revises the main narratological accounts of the novel, clarifying the complex nature of narration and style. He extends his cognitive study to encompass the anti-colonial and gender concerns that are so obviously important to Joyce's work. Finally, through a combination of broad overviews and detailed textual analyses, Hogan seeks to make this notoriously difficult book more accessible to non-specialists.

1
Shame and Beauty

“Telemachus” and “Nestor”

The opening episode of Ulysses does what opening episodes generally do. It orients the reader to what follows. In keeping with this, “Telemachus” presents a veritable catalogue of the concerns that will drive the book for the next 600 pages or so. This is not to say that there is no change. There is significant change. Indeed, the opening episode suggests that this is what we should expect. Stephen, reflecting on the historical development of Catholic “rite and dogma,” compares “the slow growth and change” of the church to that of “his own rare thoughts.”¹ That change will be a recurring concern in the following pages. The crucial point here is that even the alterations are built on the foundations presented in the opening episode. The themes and emotions developed in the course of the book are “another … and yet the same,” as Stephen says of himself as a boy and a young man.

Buck Mulligan is introduced initially. He is “Stately” and “plump.” The adjectives are significant for what follows. His plumpness is stressed at various points in the episode and elsewhere in the book. First, it is direct and literal. Thus, later on the same page, we learn that his face is “plump.” Subsequently, Buck’s plumpness becomes more resonant, literally as well as figuratively, as when we learn that he has a “wellfed voice.”

It is obvious early on that the opening episode sets up a contrast between Buck and Stephen, with Buck serving as a rather traditional foil for Stephen. But the precise nature of the contrast is important. Stephen is not plump and wellfed. Indeed, his family lacks basic provisions. Some of the most touching scenes in the novel concern his sisters’ hunger and inability to get food. Despite being paid that day, we learn at the end of the novel that Stephen too has skipped both lunch and dinner (16.1572–16.1577).² Moreover, Stephen’s slightness is stressed elsewhere in the episode. Buck Mulligan refers to him as “jejune.” Though sometimes used to mean “puerile,” the earliest meanings of the word are “hungry” and “fasting” (see the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary). The points give a sort of ascetic air to Stephen, particularly in the context of Buck’s fuller statement that Stephen is a “jejune jesuit,” thus a fasting priest.

The point is not simply one of personal contrast. It introduces an important thematic concern in the novel. First, there is the point that money is scarce, not only in Stephen’s family, but in Dublin society generally. This is bound up with other deleterious conditions in the society of the time. In other words, Joyce’s imagination of Mulligan as “plump” and Stephen as “jejune” is not only a matter of character, but a matter of broader social patterns brought into the novel from Dublin itself as an historical place.³ In part, this is a matter of colonialism. Indeed, toward the end of the episode, Stephen complains that he has two masters, thus two institutions that constrain his freedom and require his subservience, demand that he “Kneel down.” One of these is “The imperial British state.” Colonialism is an almost constant presence in the book, both externally and internally. Joyce is not fully explicit about the relation between English colonialism and Irish poverty, but the connection generally seems clear enough. One point where it is suggested is in Stephen’s imagination of a scene at Oxford. Some “Palefaces” (English; see Gifford and Seidman for 1.66) named Aubrey and Ades are ragging a student named Clive Kempthorpe. The boys all have “moneyed voices.” The strange way of characterizing their voices as “moneyed” recalls the conceit of a “wellfed voice” on the preceding page. The two are clearly related. A voice that is moneyed is likely to be wellfed and vice versa.

Of course, in context, it is clear that the “moneyed voices” do not simply belong to people who have money. The money shows in the voice—presumably because they are speaking with upper-class English accents. The point reacts back on Mulligan. Despite his name and origin, we may suspect that he too has something of an English accent, or at least a less pronounced Irish accent. Elsewhere in the episode, Mulligan imitates cockney speech (1.299) and grammatically nonstandard Irish speech (1.357–1.362), both for comic effect. We can infer at the very least that he does not have either a cockney or a low-prestige Irish accent. Stephen, in contrast, finds himself “depressed by his own voice.” Joyce, so careful about phrasing, does not say Stephen was depressed by the topic (related to his mother’s death), but rather by his voice. But what about his voice could depress him? Presumably it is its colonial status in contrast with the (wellfed and moneyed) voices of Buck and the Englishman Haines. The idea picks up on Stephen’s reflections regarding his accent and the English dean of studies in A Portrait. There, Stephen thinks, “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit” (453).⁴ The situation is only worse with Haines. Indeed, Haines presents almost a parody of stereotypical English speech, with his insertion of “I say” and “I’m sure” (“I don’t know, I’m sure”) and his exclamation of “By Jove.” Presumably, the difference in accents is part of the reason that Haines “thinks [Stephen is] not a gentleman,” but is apparently willing to award that title to Mulligan.

Buck on Stage

Buck’s ascent up the stairs of the Martello tower in the opening lines of the novel is strange. He has taken up the role of a priest in a mock mass. But, only shortly after beginning his performance, he is “Halted.” The line does not say, “Halting, he peered down,” but “Halted, he peered down.” The suggestion is that something has arrested his progress. Presumably, it is the realization that there is no audience for his performance. That, after all, is what makes the ascent strange. Buck is clearly taking up a role. But there is no one along to applaud his efforts.

Of course, we cannot be sure that Buck is halted by this realization. It is important that we are given no interior access to Buck. He is, in a sense, pure surface. It is almost as if there is nothing below the surface to which we could have access. We all have spontaneous impulses and responses, feelings and ideas that manifest the complex and often contradictory principles that drive our cognitive and emotional lives. At the same time, we all are able to modulate those spontaneous impulses and responses, molding them into more advantageous or less harmful outcomes. In extreme cases, we may say that such molding is insincere or even hypocritical. In milder forms, it may be simply prudent. Very often, it is a matter of conforming our behavior to norms. More rarely, it is a matter of creating a persona. In some cases, that persona is presented as true. In other cases, it is explicitly a performance. Buck’s enactments are of the last sort. Thus they are not precisely hypocritical. The difficulty with Buck, rather, is that it is often hard to see his enactments as modulations of anything. With very few exceptions, he does not seem to have any internal principles about which he could be sincere.

More exactly, Buck is an extreme case of what stylisticians refer to as “self styling” or “identity styling.” Coupland explains that “stylised utterances project personas, identities and genres other than those that are presumedly current in the speech event; projected personas and genres derive from well-known identity repertoires” (154). Buck is continually putting on a show. He sings a song in a cockney accent. He tells an anecdote in the character of Mother Grogan. He recites ludicrous doggerel in the assumed voice of Jesus. If indeed his accent is more English than Stephen’s, we can hardly trust that this is the result of his own idiolectal propensities; we can hardly trust that it is spontaneous. It too seems to be an act, a form of what is sometimes called “mimeticism” or “mimicry.” It is the form of identity styling that stylisticians refer to as “crossing,” defined as “a speaker’s use of a linguistic feature or variety that is usually associated with a social group that the speaker doesn’t obviously or ‘naturally’ belong to” (Coupland 138). In keeping with common observations on self-styling, Buck seems to use the mimicry as a strategy—though this hardly makes the masquerade progressive or anti-colonial, as theorists sometimes suggest. In fact, Buck’s “performance of identity” (as Judith Butler might put it) appears entirely mercenary. In an anomalous moment of apparent sincerity, he councils Stephen not to be sincere with Haines or anyone else. Specifically, referring to Haines in particular, he asks Stephen, “Why don’t you play them as I do?” Yet even this may be a matter of playing Stephen. It is simply a more complex sort of manipulation, in which the audience is let in on the pretense only to be more fully hoodwinked by the performance.

On the other hand, there are some patterns to Buck’s performative orientation. First, there is a pervasively ironic attitude that Stephen aptly characterizes as mockery (1.657, 1.662). Second, there is almost always obscenity in Buck’s performances. Thus the parody of the mass and the priesthood culminates not in the sacrifice of Christ, but of “christine.” The joke about Mother Grogan involves references to urination (1.357–1.362). The “Ballad of Joking Jesus” has urinary jokes as well as an implied pun on bird (1.585). In the cases of both mockery and obscenity, the main motivating emotion is arguably shame. The objects of mockery are often groups from whom Buck apparently wishes to dissociate himself (prominently, uneducated Irish and Catholics). In this way, his mockery is linked with shame. The basic relation of shame to obscenity seems at first too obvious to require comment. But there may be a suggestion here that, rather than inhibiting sexual expression, shame simply distorts that expression, in effect making it obscene. In that sense, obscenity is more a result than a source of shame, contrary to what one might initially imagine.

Shame and Desire

As this begins to suggest, shame is a crucial emotion in the novel.⁵ Indeed, we could go so far as to say that it is perhaps the fundamental emotion, the one emotion that consistently motivates characters’ actions. It is worth considering Buck further in this context.

Buck’s sexual obscenity sometimes serves to create a myth of his own sexual potency and experience. We see a case of this when he speaks with a friend at the bathing hole. When the friend mentions a young woman with red hair, Buck comments, “Redheaded women buck like goats.” The implication is that Buck has such extensive sexual experience that he has formulated a typology of female sexual behavior, based in this case on the personality categories associated with hair color. We see examples of the same general sort later in the book, for instance when Buck has calling cards printed advertising his occupation as a stud on a stud farm (16.681–16.688). Despite his boasts, the novel actually presents us with very little reason to believe Buck is much of a ladies’ man.

Indeed, the first episode presents Buck as an imitator of Oscar Wilde. He refers directly to Wilde (1.143, 1.554). As Weir points out (223), he dresses as a dandy, with a “primrose waistcoat” (and, we might add, a desire for “puce gloves”). The dress is broadly part of self-styling—as Buck himself insists, he has to “dress the character”—and not specific to Wilde. Nonetheless, in the episode, Wilde is the most salient model for extravagant self-styling.

It may be argued that the links with Wilde go beyond performativity.⁶ Buck seems to spend an inordinate part of the opening episode posing naked or near naked before other men. He drops his robe before Stephen, announcing “Mulligan is stripped of his garments,” and undresses again at the swimming hole. In later episodes, homosexuality appears to be a greater preoccupation—and perhaps a greater worry—for Buck than for other characters. Recent research suggests homophobia is directly connected with a person’s own denied homosexual feelings (see Adams, Wright, and Lohr). But the idea is an obvious possibility even if one does not have access to such research. Indeed, it is fully in keeping with the implications about shame in Ulysses. If Buck has sexual desire for other men, this would likely be a source of shame for him, given the sexual norms of his society. Given the developments elsewhere in the book, it would not be surprising to find such shame producing homophobia and a false assertion of the opposite of the shameful propensities—thus a false assertion of heterosexual potency and experience. Indeed, there are more direct suggestions that Buck does really have such spontaneous feelings, even if these are expressed only in mockery. For example, in their first exchange, he addresses Stephen as “my love.” Before he enters the water at the naked bathing place, he suggestively says to another young man in the water, “Make room in the bed.”

Stephen has a sense of this as well. There are, indeed, suggestions that he shares the feelings, despite his apparently impeccable credentials as a patron of prostitutes. Many of these connections are explored insightfully by Weir. When Buck takes Stephen’s arm at one point, Stephen thinks, “Cranly’s arm. His arm.” The connection is inconsequential in itself. But it begins to hint at a history of homosexual desires that Stephen senses and appears to reciprocate. As Weir notes, the point becomes clear in the “Proteus” episode. There, Stephen reflects on wearing Buck’s old boots. He then recalls how he (Stephen) was “delighted” when his foot fit into Esther Osvalt’s shoe. The suggestion is that he has his own cross-gender identifications, though it is unclear precisely what this says about his relation to Buck. It could suggest a sexual connection (hinted at by the male foot entering the female shoe). But it may also suggest a contrast. The idea is immediately clarified when he thinks again of Buck, his “friend,” and immediately recalls “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name.” In case the precise friend at issue remained unclear, he goes on to think, “His arm: Cranly’s arm” and to fret, “He now will leave me.” As this final comment begins to suggest, there are indications of a love triangle among Stephen, Buck, and Haines (cf. Weir 222).

There is further evidence regarding these issues in later episodes. For example, in “Scylla and Charybdis,” Stephen thinks of Cranly in terms that seem more fitting to an erring husband than a friend—“My soul’s youth I gave him, night by night.” Later in the episode, Buck again addresses Stephen as “my love,” though this time in Irish (see Gifford and Seidman for 9.564), thus perhaps recalling the Irish-speaking English rival, Haines. On hearing Buck’s poem about a group of men who, “Being afraid to marry on earth … masturbated for all they were worth,” Stephen in his mind comments dryly, “Know thyself.” The point bears not only on masturbation, but on the avoidance of marriage and on the apparent falsity of Buck’s self-fashioning as a heterosexual stud. Finally, Buck seems unusually ready to impute and condemn homosexual desires. Specifically, on the basis of (apparently) nothing he concludes that Bloom “looked on” Stephen with “lust.” The suggestion is that Buck is very much inclined to find and denounce homosexual desire. He is also the most concerned with “the charge of pederasty brought against” Shakespeare.

Stephen does not seem to experience a great deal of discomfort over whatever homosexual impulses he may feel. But, again, Buck’s behavior suggests that he, in contrast, may be in considerable distress about these desires.⁷ This leads to the somewhat surprising conclusion that, underlying Buck’s bravado, there is something, a “real” Buck, concealed and vulnerable. This returns us at last to the opening word of the book, “Stately.” Buck’s bearing is the opposite of shameful. It is proud and upright. But (unlike his plumpness) this may be a matter of self-styling, of performance.

It is perhaps worth noting that this account of Buck goes against the view, associated with the work of Judith Butler, that gender performance is progressive or liberating and that assumptions of “natural” sexuality are inhibiting. It is undoubtedly inhibiting to assume that everyone in a certain category, such as “male” or even “gay,” has exactly the same desires because those desires are “natural.” However, it is something very different to assume that, at a given point in time, an individual does have desires— desires for a particular person, desires for a certain attribute common to several persons (e.g., a certain set of sexual features), and so on. It is clearly wrongheaded—even a tad demented—to claim that, say, wearing a skirt is the spontaneous expression of women’s nature. But it is quite a different thing to say that an individual’s desires at any given moment may be either distorted or expressed sincerely. Butler is undoubtedly correct that identity categories are reductive. But that does not mean there is no difference between identity styling and the expression of one’s current feelings. Indeed, in forcing gays and lesbians to style themselves as straight men and women, heteronormative society was repressive precisely because it denied them the right to express their desire spontaneously—it coerced “performativity.”

Shame and National Identity

Returning to Buck, it is worth considering the heavily weighted first word of the episode a bit further. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “In early use, … stately” meant “befitting or indicating high estate…. noble, majestic.” In the case of Buck, this bears most obviously on his assumed role at the moment, that of a priest. But the word itself recalls rank in government more than in the church. Thus Buck’s “stately” self-styling connotes both of Stephen’s masters (the British colonial government and the Catholic Church). But what does this tell us about self-styling?

A key aspect of the dual mastery decried by Stephen is that both masters inspire shame. The church cultivates shame over sexual impulses. The colonial state produces shame over national identity. In both cases, the results are complex. But in some way spontaneous impulses are disfigured. In sexuality, this may lead to a phobia of sexuality (particularly if one’s desires are nonnormative) and/or a kind of sexualization of shame (as in the development of obscenity).

Regarding national shame, there are many possible responses. One is to repudiate precisely the aspects of the colonized society that are denigrated in colonial society. Here we begin to get a sense of one reason for Mulligan’s mockery of the Catholic Church and Stephen’s distaste for that mockery. Historically, the Catholic Church has been one of the main targets of English colonial denigration. It is perhaps not coincidental that Buck mocks the Catholic Church before the English visitor. Indeed, in his thoughts, Stephen accuses Buck of speaking “in mockery to the stranger.” The “stranger” is of course Haines, the colonial ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ulysses and the Human Mind
• 1 Shame and Beauty: “Telemachus” and “Nestor”
• 2 Identity and Emotion: “Proteus”
• 3 Simulating Stories: “Calypso,” “Lotus Eaters,” and “Scylla and Charybdis”
• 4 Narration, Style, and Simulation: “Hades,” “Aeolus,” and “Lestrygonians”
• 5 Psychological Realism and Parallel Processing: From “Wandering Rocks” to “Sirens”
• 6 Critical Realism and Parallel Narration: “Cyclops” and “Nausicaa”
• 7 Style Unbound: “Oxen of the Sun”
• 8 Metaphor, Realism, and Fantasy: “Circe”
• 9 Narrational Duality, Loneliness, and Guilt: “Eumaeus,” “Ithaca,” and “Penelope”
• Afterword: An Outline of Theoretical Concepts and Principles
• Notes
• References
• Index