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Race and Nationalism in Joyce's "Ulysses"
From: Cambridge University Press | By: James Fairhall

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION | "But do you know what a nation means?" John Wyse famously asks Leopold Bloom in Barney Kiernan's Dublin pub on 16 June 1904, the day on which all the action of Ulysses takes place. James Fairhall, associate professor in the Department of English at DePaul University, in Chicago, assesses Bloom's reply and, in the process, offers insights into James Joyce's attitudes toward race and nationalism.

egally, in 1904, Leopold Bloom is every bit as Irish as the Citizen or any other Dubliner in Ulysses. That is, he lives in the United Kingdom, has the right to vote for a Member of Parliament, is subject to British law, and would carry a British passport if he traveled abroad. In other words, his Irishness does not receive recognition as an attribute of citizenship in an Irish nation-state. As far as British or international law is concerned, such a state does not exist. Even before the Act of Union (1800), Ireland had never been a nation-state, despite the beguiling flicker of semiautonomy invested in Grattan's parliament (1782-1800). After the Union it became part of the United Kingdom, its official status equivalent to that of Wales or Scotland or England. One parliament, one state, several--several what? Countries? Regions? Communities?

Today, with the Irish component of the United Kingdom limited to that tragic appendage known as Northern Ireland, the ambiguity lingers. The United Kingdom retains "the rare distinction of refusing nationality in its naming" (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983, p. 12)--a distinction which, in 1904, when the prenational dynastic states of the nineteenth century had not yet fallen apart under the impact of World War I, was not so rare. The advantage of such nomenclature was that it could include subject nationalities, such as Irish Catholics, under the umbrella of a state controlled by a dominant nationality and uphold the official pretense that all citizens were equal regardless of where they lived.

Citizenship in this sense, for a subjugated group that would like to make its territory into a separate nation-state, is what Stephen suggests paternity may be--"a legal fiction" (Ulysses 9.844). On a practical level, everyone sees through the fiction. The talk in "Telemachus" illustrates this everyday acknowledgment of an officially ignored reality. A Celtic enthusiast, Haines is visiting Ireland to observe the natives and practice speaking their language in the same spirit in which Orientalists made journeys to more distant outposts of Empire. He addresses the old milkwoman in Gaelic, which she, being a deracinated product of colonization, not only doesn't understand but mistakes for French. Corrected, she asks if Haines comes from the west of Ireland. He replies without hesitation: "I am an Englishman." Mulligan confirms his identity: "He's English ... and thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland" (Ulysses 1.431-32). A little later Stephen calls himself a "servant"--not a citizen--of the "imperial British state." Haines replies patronizingly, "An Irishman must think like that ... We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly" (Ulysses 1.647-48). There is no mistaking an Irishman for an Englishman here, and no mistaking the coercion involved in having made Ireland a supposed partner in the so-called United Kingdom.

<I>Ulysses</I>' Cyclops episode

It seems arguable that Ireland in 1904 was a nation, like Hungary or Poland, aspiring to be a nation-state. Certainly, in the "retrospective arrangement" (Ulysses 14.1044) of history sponsored by the Irish state that did come into being, this is a given. We must ask, however, the same question that puts Bloom on the spot in "Cyclops": "But do you know what a nation means?" The question provokes this exchange:

Ulysses

Most people think they know what a nation is, just as Haines knows he is English and not Irish; yet the concept eludes neat formulation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "nation" as: "An extensive aggregate of persons, so closely associated with each other by common descent, language, or history, as to form a distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory." The OED would exclude from nationhood, then, not only the barflies at Barney Kiernan's but also the United Kingdom, the Dual Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, and Czarist Russia, among other states. In fact, it is only with some gyrations that turn-of-the-century Ireland could be made to fit such a definition. Most Irish people spoke English, not Irish, as the milk woman's inability to understand Haines points up. Ireland was not "a separate political state"--except insofar as the Coercion Acts punctuating its history during the nineteenth century showed that British law operated there differently from elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

As an island, its territory was definite enough. But within that tight little island many inhabitants, concentrated in the north, gave their primary allegiance not to Ireland but to the Queen--and so fervently as to make civil war seem a threat in the event of a successful Home Rule Bill. (Any war talk in Britain during the early summer of 1914--only ten years later--referred to the threat of conflict in Ireland.) Mr. Deasy's combativeness--"For Ulster will fight / And Ulster will be right" (Ulysses 2.397-98)--reminds us that both the United Kingdom and Ireland herself were disunited. Only a foreigner would have thought Ireland to be populated by a single "distinct race or people." Protestant avatars of cultural nationalism, such as Thomas Davis in the 1840s and Yeats in Joyce's day, valiantly pushed a concept of Irish nationality that downplayed differences in religion and ancestry. These are precisely the differences Bloom ignores in advancing his definition of a nation. For his Irish Catholic audience, however, they are crucial, and the Citizen angrily excludes Bloom from his Ireland.

People and places

Bloom's idea of a nation as the same people living in the same place is not so ludicrous as it might appear. The more specific one becomes in defining "nation," the more one is contradicted by the reality of nations that don't fit the definition. It does not help much, either, to look at how individual nations define themselves, since nationalisms are notable for "their philosophical poverty and even incoherence" (Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 14). The author of Nations and States writes in frustration: "All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one" (Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 1977, p. 5). Though circular, this statement is useful because it emphasizes the role of the imagination in creating a nation. It leads us toward Benedict Anderson's more elegant definition of a nation as "an imagined political community." Anderson elaborates:

It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion...

[I]t is imagined as a community, because, regardless of ... inequality and exploitation ... the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. (Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 15-16.)

Anderson's formulation brings into sharper focus the issues of Bloom's verbal skirmish in the pub. Any nation differentiates its citizens from those of other nations in terms of certain shared traits, while it ignores inconvenient facts that tend to subvert the illusion of unity. Ernest Renan alluded to this illusion in writing: "The essence of a nation is that all its individuals should have many things in common, and also that they all should have forgotten many things" (quoted in Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 15). Bloom offends the Citizen and his drinking companions because he is a walking paradox, a threat to the imagined unity of Ireland. The question--"[W]hy can't a jew love his country like the next fellow?"--spurs instant disavowals:

Ulysses

Even the rumor that "Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith" (Ulysses 12.1574) is disturbing, since it shows a foreign influence at the heart of the country's latest nationalist movement. With virtually one voice, the community of drinkers in Kiernan's rejects this bundle of contradictions whose political and religious affiliations are uncertain and whose father was a Hungarian Jew. (They would be even more disconcerted if they knew that Bloom's mother was one Ellen Higgins, very likely of Irish Catholic stock on her mother's side [Ulysses 17.536-37].)

Ironically, though, this community itself reverberates with contradictions. The Citizen represents the blustery, public face of physical-force nationalism, yet cannot return to his rural hometown because other nationalists are "looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant" (Ulysses 12.1315-16). Cunningham, a Castle Catholic, works for the regime the Citizen would like to overthrow. Crofton is a Protestant Unionist. Most of the drinkers seem to embody Cruise O'Brien's "Fairyhouse tradition"--that is, they belong to the mass of citizens who passively accept the existing power structure. Yet, in spite of these differences, they all agree on a tacit definition of Irishness that includes themselves and excludes Bloom.

"The outsider"

We see Bloom's status as a national outsider, a "dark horse" (Ulysses 12.1558), throughout Ulysses. In "Hades" the sight of an elderly Jew, by implication a pawnbroker, creates among Bloom's Gentile companions an instant community from which he is shut out. Mulligan, leaving the National Library with Stephen, warns him about the "wandering jew" (Ulysses 9.1209). The "Cyclops" episode begins with the scurrilous narrator's anecdote of a swindled Jewish merchant, is interspersed with slurs directed at Bloom, and ends with the Citizen's attempt to brain the "bloody jewman" (Ulysses 12.1811). In "Ithaca" Stephen, in Bloom's own kitchen, sings an anti-Semitic ditty about ritual murder. Here, ironically, the would-be artist-rebel represents the larger community; and Bloom, wanting acceptance, remains the outsider.



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