James joyce, p.49
James Joyce, page 49
In the course of his rectorship of the newly established Catholic University in Dublin (1854–58), John Henry Newman published (first in an anonymous edition in 1856) a novel entitled Callista: A Tale of the Third Century. It was about the gradual, almost accidental, conversion of Callista, a Greek living in Roman North Africa, whose execution took place in a persecution of Christians during the reign of Decius as Roman emperor (249–51 CE) in one of the refluxes that preceded the imperial adoption of Christianity. Sicca, the town in which the novel is set, is remote from the empire and imperial decrees, but what seals the fate of Callista is the interaction of a plague of locusts which devastates the economy and inflames the local population with the distant decrees of Decius. It is a strangely beautiful novel in which the martyrdom of Callista is the denouement rather than a pre-inscribed outcome. Newman’s biographer observed that what gave the book much of its interest ‘is the largely unexpressed analogy between the situation of those early Christians and that of English Catholics in nineteenth-century Protestant England. In both cases an esoteric faith found itself in involuntary collision with the established religion of an imperial power’.73
To judge by Taylor’s response, it struck the imagination of its Irish readers from a different angle less to do with religious persecution than with the coercive suasions of an imperial power over subject peoples. That is not really what decides the fate of Callista, who (though not yet a Christian) will not make sacrifice to the Emperor and arises rather from Newman’s dramatisation of the cultural religious and political dialogues of adherents of Rome and Christians, and of Romans and Greeks, against a background in which the pagan ‘Punic deities’ continue to hold a place.
Cornelius, the son of a Roman freedman of distinction, recently returned from Rome at a supper party, extols Rome itself as ‘the greatest of all divinities.… Emperors rise and fall, Rome remains.’74 Later in the novel, Callista’s pragmatic brother Ariosto brings to Callista’s cell a philosopher he esteems, the subtle and conceited Polemo of Rhodes, friend of Plotinus,75 to persuade her to make the gesture of obeisance to the Emperor. Polemo is the ‘comfortable accommodator’ described by Taylor, and he addresses Callista in precisely the manner of Taylor’s ‘intellectual Egyptian’. Resistance is futile and misconceived—‘The whole earth, through untold centuries, has at length grown into the imperial dominion of One.… The principle of dissolution is eliminated. We have reached the apotolesma of the world.’ In the culmination of his address, Polemo lauds the tolerance of Rome confronted with the diversity of beliefs within its empire:
All she said to the peoples, all she dared say to them, was: ‘You bear with me, and I will bear with you’. Yet this you will not do; you Christians, who have no pretence to any territory, who are not even the smallest of the peoples, who are not even a people at all, you have the fanaticism to denounce all other rites but your own, nay, the religion of great Rome. Who are you? upstarts and vagabonds of yesterday. Older religions than yours, more intellectual, more beautiful religions, which have had a position, and a history, and a political influence, have come to nought; and shall you prevail, you, a congeries, a hotch-potch of the leavings, and scraps, and broken meat of the great peoples of the East and West? Blush, blush, Grecian Callista, you with a glorious nationality of your own to go shares with some hundred peasants, slaves, thieves, beggars, hucksters, tinkers, cobblers and fishermen! A lady of high character, of brilliant accomplishments, to be the associate of the outcasts of society!76
It is improbable that the supremely astute Newman, living in Dublin and intellectually alert to Irish nationalism, was entirely oblivious to the possibility of an Irish crossover in the contest of religion and statal allegiance that informed the novel. What is clear is that Taylor was captivated by Callista in a profound way, and that the imaginative conceit of his King’s Inns speech is a brilliantly realised translation of the discourse of Newman’s novel to Irish politics, in which the stunning culmination is Taylor’s own. In the annals of Irish rhetoric, it is difficult to think of a significant speech that owed so much to a single (and, as it happened, non-Irish) literary source as Taylor’s.
Joyce almost certainly knew of Taylor’s invocation of Newman’s novel in his denunciation of Rolleston, whether in the original article or in its invocation in Griffith’s obituary of Taylor. The inspiration of Newman was in any event discernible in Taylor’s King’s Inns speech. Joyce was familiar with Callista—in his assault on Irish Jesuits in Stephen Hero, he sardonically borrows Newman’s graphic description of the plague of locusts.77 Whatever its defiant irreligiousness, that passage is an homage to Newman’s prose, which Joyce never ceased to admire—Joyce’s early biographer, Stuart Gilbert, recalled his habit in his Parisian exile of reciting Newman ‘to his friends in the mellow after-dinner hours at Les Trianons or Fouquet’s (his favourite Parisian restaurants)’.78 Joyce makes no reference to Newman’s novel in Ulysses, but his elaborate reworking of Taylor’s speech is informed by the novel, translated to an Irish politico-historical setting.
The multiplicity of diverse levels at which Taylor’s speech moved Joyce and informed the reworking of the speech in Ulysses is remarkable: the triumphant rhetorical moment of a thwarted figure displaced in the rise of Parnell; the inspiration of Newman for a speech in Dublin on the then-novel issue of the Irish Revival; the parallel of the Irish and the Jews; the themes of the cultural collisions and interactions of East and West and the inexorable rise and fall of empires, civilisations, and religions; and the resistance to conquest of subject peoples across vast expanses of time and space of what was for Joyce history sub specie aeternitatis.
Taylor’s Speech in ‘Aeolus’
In Ulysses Joyce radically reworks Taylor’s speech and sets it within an intricately geometric interpretative frame, through a diversification of perspectives. The sequence in ‘Aeolus’ in which Taylor’s speech is discussed and purportedly re-narrated is set in the office of the Evening Telegraph, the sister paper of the Freeman’s Journal which shared the same premises. The small office is a curiously crowded space because of the presence of habitués who have no professional reason to be there. Prominent among these are the two figures through whom the reception of Taylor’s speech is principally mediated. The first figure, who delivers the central parts of Taylor’s speech, is professor MacHugh.79 He is learned, a purveyor of classicising chiefly Latinate allusion and cliché, and given to un-obstreperous declamation that does not violate the norms of urbanity that prevail in the office. His title is given in lower case and the accumulation of anomalies subverts the idea that he is in fact a professor. If he were a professor, what would he be doing at midday in a newspaper office, where he even answers the phone? Moreover, reflecting Joyce’s social realism in rendering the Dublin of 1904, his ‘frayed stained shirtcuffs’ and his ‘unglazed linen collar … soiled by his withering hair’ do not suggest professorial status or income. None of these hints quite prepare the reader for the interposed comment, in the course of his rendering of Taylor’s oration, that ‘a dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech’.80
The second figure is J. J. O’Molloy, who is conceived by Joyce with exceeding imaginative subtlety. Unlike professor MacHugh, he has no shadow of a conjectural real-life correlative, nor could he have. He has been succinctly epitomised as ‘a broken-down barrister’.81 He is also mortally stricken, as is made plain from his entrance when he meets Simon Dedalus:
—How are you, Dedalus?
—Well. And yourself?
J.J. O’Molloy shook his head.82
J. J. O’Molloy has a dual existence in the novel. He is both a character in his own right and, as if in a spectral mirror, a reflection of J. F. Taylor, whose death, aged forty-nine, had occurred two years before the date on which Ulysses is set. (The exorbitant topographical fetishisation of the Dublin of Ulysses distracts from the fact that it is also a city of ghosts in which the living and the recently dead fleetingly overlap.) This dual aspect enables Joyce to render O’Molloy as a figure whose character is quite at odds with the fractious persona of the real-life Taylor. J. J. O’Molloy is mild and intuitively perceptive, sympathetic to Stephen, and interested in his future as a writer. Joyce’s exaltedness in his negotiation of the living and the dead, of actuality and literary invention, goes so far as to allow him to include in Stephen’s stream of consciousness on J. J. O’Molloy a disorienting reference to Joyce’s own story ‘The Dead’: ‘Believe he does some literary work for the Express with Gabriel Conroy.’83 Thus O’Molloy is only incidentally a conventionally conceived fictional figure in the novel. He owes his existence to Joyce’s elaborate strategising of how the Taylor speech, as rendered by professor MacHugh, is to be apprehended. The same strategising ensures what may at first reading seem odd—and disappointing at the level of sentimental expectation (which Joyce deliberately holds in check)—that it is professor MacHugh rather than the more sympathetic proxy for J. F. Taylor who delivers the version of the Taylor speech.
The bustling emergence of the editor Myles Crawford from his inner sanctum sharpens the exchanges in the outer office. Professor MacHugh opens his declamation on empire with the statement, ‘We think of Rome, imperial, imperious, imperative’.84 He proceeds to condemn the civilisation of Rome, reducible to a ‘cloacal obsession’ in which the construction of sewers and water closets anticipated the English who followed. He holds obdurately to his theme: ‘We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful’. He resumes, ‘The closetmaker and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our spirit. We are liege subjects of the Catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar and of the empire of the spirit, not an imperium, that went under with the Athenian fleets at Aegospotami. Yes, yes. They went under.’85
Myles Crawford vaunts the feat of Ignatius Gallaher in reporting the Phoenix Park murders, and lauds other successful members of his profession. He passes on to a lament for the decline of eloquence at the Irish bar in remarks directed to J. J. O’Molloy, who responds by referring to a speech of Seymour Bushe in the Childs murder trial (which Joyce had attended as a student in October 1899),86 reciting, under the headline ‘A Polished Period’, a rather extravagant evocation of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in Rome.
Stephen is embarrassed to find he is moved: ‘Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed’.87 Part of the effect was achieved by J. J. O’Molloy’s gestures: ‘His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall.’88 Rhetoric and patriotism are linked in ‘Aeolus’, as are forensic oratory and journalism. Stephen is susceptible to both while willing himself to resist the temptation they represent. That resistance is a defining attribute of his conception of the artist he has not yet become. After professor MacHugh commences his rendition of Taylor’s speech, Stephen thinks, ‘Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?’89 Joyce is also pre-signalling the impact of the more powerful Taylor speech on Stephen (an impact which is not otherwise described).
Professor MacHugh delivers his version of Taylor’s King’s Inns speech. It is a redraft by Joyce of the idea of the speech which superbly maintains a fidelity to what gave Taylor’s speech its contemporary renown, while also improving on it. The principal change wrought by Joyce to Taylor’s rhetorical conceit is that Taylor’s ‘intellectual Egyptian’ becomes a high priest of Egypt in whom the merged authority of religion and state were vested. Joyce thereby elided Taylor’s subtext of an attack on the Trinity professors (subsequently elaborated on in his Freeman’s Journal article): ‘It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.’90
Professor MacHugh’s rendering of Taylor’s speech continues, ‘Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen; we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth; our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme … furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions; we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.’91
The reference to ‘a polity’ is striking. It is central to Joyce’s comparative thinking about Ireland as he refined it in exile. Conquered by a neighbouring imperial power, it was denied self-constitution as a polity and the narratives and literature of independent statehood by which Great Britain defined itself. The closing peroration of Joyce’s reworking of Taylor mingled with the book of Exodus runs,
But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop, nor would he ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.92
Afterwards professor MacHugh craves an acknowledgement of the effect created by his performance, which he is denied. In the silence, J. J. O’Molloy, ‘not without regret’, observes abstractedly, in his spectral aspect, ‘And yet he died without having entered the land of promise.’93
With this, Parnell flares into memory. In his speech in the Rotunda on his return to Ireland, he had famously expressed the aspiration ‘to walk with you within the sight of the promised land, which, please God, I will enter with you’,94 lending personal identification to a pre-existing comparison with Moses. His supporters drew heavily on the parallel in the Split. While never far away, evocations of Parnell directly or at length are comparatively infrequent in Ulysses, reflecting Joyce’s calculated obliquity in his treatment of the Irish leader. When professor MacHugh, still trying to drum up a compliment, says ‘that is oratory’, it is as if the spell of Taylor’s speech is broken. Stephen’s thought pivots away from Parnell to the Daniel O’Connell of two of the famous ‘monster meetings’ for repeal of the Union in 1843: ‘Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of porches. The tribune’s words, howled and scattered to the four winds. A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more.’95
Still trying to cadge a response, the professor nudges Stephen: ‘That is fine, isn’t it? It has the prophetic vision. Fuit Ilium! The sack of windy Troy. Kingdoms of this world. The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today.’96 Greeks and Trojans coalesce in their geostrategic obscurity. Troy scarcely equated to contemporary Turkey. The complacent dismissal of contemporary Greece (to whose achievement of a form of independence Joyce was greatly sympathetic) exemplifies professor MacHugh’s inexorable drift from Latinate fatalism to passive imperialism.
Joyce’s strategy of having professor MacHugh deliver Taylor’s speech and framing it by reference to the professor’s pronouncements before and after is of masterly intricacy. As Joyce worked it out, it required and called into being the figure of J. J. O’Molloy. The realisation of that strategy enlisted all his imaginative cunning to convey something that is central to his treatment of Irish politics and rhetoric. On a superficial reading, professor MacHugh’s earlier declamations are consistent with the spirit of the speech of Taylor which he is shortly to deliver. But in a characteristic Joycean move, professor MacHugh’s declamation is a negation of Taylor’s argument. There is a fundamental disjuncture. For all his own immiseration, professor MacHugh’s views are those of the Catholic professional classes. The lowercase-p professor delivers as a party piece a speech whose force he apprehends at the level of pure rhetoric but to whose political and imaginative resonance he is deaf. His pedagogic classicism immunises him against any idea of revival. He does not quite ‘get’ the speech that he re-delivers. His conception of Ireland as a country whose native Catholic leadership went under the waves at Trafalgar like the Greeks at Aegospotami is as extravagant in its absurdity as any of the propositions of the Citizen in the ‘Cyclops’ episode later in the novel. Above all, professor MacHugh sentimentalises Irish defeat and abjection. After that lyrical outburst, O’Madden Burke chimes in, drawing on Matthew Arnold via Yeats, ‘They went forth to battle but they always fell’.97 Insofar as Taylor’s speech had within its larger argument a specific target, Joyce redirects it through the persona of professor MacHugh away from Trinity professors to the Irish educated professional class, which largely identified itself with the Irish Parliamentary Party. That underscores the rendering of Taylor’s speech on the revival of the Irish language delivered by a classicist pedagogue temperamentally impervious to the idea of any Irish revival, linguistic or political.
Authorially, Joyce in Ulysses leaves Taylor’s speech to speak for itself within the intricate framing devices of the ‘Aeolus’ episode, which permits Joyce (and Stephen) to hold himself at a certain distance from it. Stephen Dedalus must hold out against the siren songs of patriotism and rhetoric. If Stephen responds, it is in rendering his own enigmatic ‘Parable of the Plums’. Yet within the framing devices, the Taylor speech rendered by professor MacHugh is left, as it were, geometrically open. Joyce’s own tendresse towards Taylor’s speech as reworked in Ulysses is reflected in the fact that it is the only part of Ulysses that he recorded, with haunting rhythm and passion, on phonodisc in 1924.98
