By Grant Wei
A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disappears. Bloom with his sceptre strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported. Bloom’s bodyguard distribute Maundy money, […] 40 days’ indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages…
Indulgences, a reference to the former abuses of power of the Catholic church, reflect Joyce’s disdain for its role in supporting Irish nationalism. Through physically embracing Parnell in his hallucination, Bloom as the “the world’s greatest reformer” demonstrates his resolve to the Irish nationalist cause (Joyce 383). Favoring radical nationalism, “Joyce’s emphasis on Charles Stewart Parnell as a positive figure of heroic Irish anticolonial resistance forced his to repress the figure of Connolly, Connolly and Parnell being mutually cancelling alternatives’ in Joyce’s mind (Booker 110). As an Irish writer during a time of colonialism, Joyce’s writing is unable to be divorced from the politics of his time, as “the possibility of maintaining one’s integrity as an artist while being involved with a community’s enterprise was, initially at least, looked upon with scepticism by Joyce (Deane 31). Joyce’s usage of indulgences as a reward for his soldiers, as a strictly Catholic tradition not found in Protestantism references the political climate between English and Irish identity revolving around religious affiliation.
Critics of Ulysses “sought to divorce Joyce’s work from politics altogether,” but the characterizations of Stephen and Bloom and their vocalizations towards many pertinent issues regarding national identity make a nonpartisan reading extremely difficult. Joyce’s stance, however, remains ambiguous, as critics have also attempted “to delineate the specifics of the political implications of Joyce’s work...emphasizing Joyce’s opposition to Catholicism and Irish Nationalism, relatively safe targets from a bourgeois point of view (Booker 9). Booker continues to describe Joyce’s dilemma, “Catholicism, after all, represents a holdover from the feudal aristocracy (historically the natural enemies of the bourgeoisie), while Irish Nationalism has been consistently depicted by outsiders as dogmatic and even fanatical” (Booker 9). Yet, just as Joyce, through Bloom’s massacre, critiques the Catholic church for condoning violence, he also has similar grievances on the oppressive nature of the British Empire. Joyce utilizes Ulysses “as a subversive method of critique of Ireland’s twin masters, the British Empire and the Catholic Church. In particular, Joyce indicts both the Church and empire as centrally informed by perversion and violence” (Booker 109). The Catholic church, still a ingrained part in Irish identity, also symbolizes the violence of Irish nationalism that Joyce dislikes.
Through ordering the shooting of the Man in the Macintosh for his opposition against Bloom’s radicalism, Bloom, through the usage of violence, demonstrates his resolve as a radical Irish nationalist, yet “the fact that Bloom retains such notions as church and state at all immediately calls into question the real radicalism of his project” (Booker 133). Such a violent action performed in the name of nationalism, however, is at odds with Bloom’s characterization, as many readers are “unwilling (or unable) to see Leopold Bloom as a similar figure of the postcolonial bourgeois, instead reading him, in the time-honored tradition of Joyce scholarship, as a figure of resistance to colonialism through his own lovable tolerance of difference” (Booker 12). As self-proclaimed apolitical writer, Joyce’s “repudiation of Catholic Ireland and his countering declaration of artistic independence are well-known and integral features of his life-long dedication to writing” (Booker 28) Yet, Joyce reconciles his inability yet desire to write apolitically, he criticizes all aspects of Irish politics, “particularly the triumvirate of Catholicism, British colonialism, and Irish nationalism (Booker 110).
Stephen reflects similar sentiments to Joyce’s disdain towards the Catholic church, refusing to pray during for his mother. Similar to Bloom, Stephen also “cannot transcend certain religious and artistic elements of his Irish cultural background (Booker 134). In support of Irish nationalism against British oppression but also against the violent means of the Catholic church, Stephen “regard[s] English political rule and Catholic religious rule as two parallel forms of imperial domination in Ireland” (Booker 2). Having a difficult relationship with his father, a fervent Irish nationalist in support of Parnell, Stephen’s inability to fully support the Catholic church “can be taken as an indication of the inadequacies of irish nationalism itself, becoming a ‘formal expose of that nationalism as an exercise in mimicry’ of bourgeois ideology (Booker 122). To Stephen, “there are two forms of Catholicism… One is European, the other Irish. European Catholicism, as he has [spoken] of it in Ulysses, is based on the doctrine of the Trinity; Irish Catholicism… is a more sentimental faith, based on the idea of the Holy Family, the vulgar version of the Trinity (Booker 42). Thus, Catholicism provides [Stephen with two versions of parenthood and of community, Trinity and Holy Family (Booker 42). As a representation of the Catholic church that condones violence in the name of Irish nationalism, indulgences are used in “Circe” as a reward to soldiers committing atrocities against political moderates. Although Joyce provides “detailed critique on British imperialism” in Ulysses, he balances his critiques among both the Catholic church and the British Empire (Booker 16). As an apolitical writer, he is supporter of the movement against the British Empire but not a supporter of the violence committed in the name of Irish nationalism.
Work Cited
Booker, Marvin Keith. Ulysses, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce after the Cold War. Greenwood Press, 2000.
Deane, Seamus. “Joyce the Irishman.” The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 28–48.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter. Gabler, Garland, 1986.