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Abstract
Death occupies a pertinent place in the matrix of James Joyce’s complex philosophical outlook, his historical engagement, social praxis, and his artistic choices. This essay shows how his high-modernist magnum opus Ulysses deconstructs and undercuts in a carnivalesque fashion the powerful religio-political appropriations of death, particularly in the Irish context of violent nationalism, and the death-cult surrounding the martyr associated with it. The subversive, heterodox perspectives on death presented in the book relieve the phenomenon of manipulative-conspiratorial meanings as well as religio-metaphysical conceptions, and regain its ordinariness. Further, operating in the precarious space between the existential and the cultural, Joyce jealously salvages the experiential dimension of mortality for reflection. The essay also argues that Joyce’s ‘polyphonic’ discourse (theorised by Mikhail Bakhtin) of death, paradoxically, suggests an inverse critique of life and the transformation of both death-dispensing histories, and narratives thereof, in the service of life. The polyphonic method enables Joyce to make death the focus of an alternative historical trajectory by thematising in Ulysses what Michel Foucault calls a ‘bio-history’. This alternative emphasis establishes such vital concerns as health and the quality of life as the true field of historical praxis and the criterion for evaluating historical initiatives.
Notes
1 In keeping with the tradition of using the Gabler edition of Ulysses, episode and line numbers are cited instead of page numbers.
2 According to Bakhtin, polyphony, a term he borrows from music, is a narrative feature he associates with Dostoevsky’s novels, which allows a democratic play of multiple voices and points of view as opposed to a single, unifying vision.
3 Many Irishmen had hoped that Parnell’s version of constitutional nationalism implied by the Kilmainham treaty, signed with Gladstone in 1882, the year of Joyce’s birth, would bring home rule.
4 ‘Bás i-nÉirinn’ is a famous Gaelic drinking toast which means ‘To die in Ireland’.
5 Roy Foster’s (Citation2004) Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923 traces the dynamics of passion in the revolutionary world.
6 Of course, the Irish cultural nationalism of the generation preceding Joyce – that of Yeats and Lady Gregory – was not necessarily Catholic and included prominent Protestant families. In fact, the biggest aporia in the narrative of Catholic nationalism was that the prominent leaders of the independence movement, such as Henry Grattan, Wolfe Tone and Parnell were not Catholics at all. These ‘piquant and significant facts’ (J. Joyce, Citation1959, p. 162), as Joyce would have called them, however, did not negate his long-held view that Irish cultural and political nationalism as well as the Catholic Church were associated with the cult of death and with the control and sacrifice of living human bodies.
7 Such subversions are the essence of the carnival, the logic of which Bakhtin outlines in the book Rabelais and His World. He characterises them as a ‘gay transformation’ (Bakhtin, Citation1984b, p. 91) of disciplines, fears and oppressions into ‘degrading games’ (p. 83).
8 Joyce incorporated the living body into the schematic organisation of Ulysses. Every episode has its corresponding body organ. The narrative techniques of several episodes parallel bodily processes. The ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode is about birth rather than death.
9 In his review of Fielding-Hall’s book on Buddhism The Soul of a People, entitled ‘A Suave Philosophy’ (1903), Joyce endorses a world view ‘which does not know that there is anything to justify tears and lamentations’ (Citation1959, p. 94).
10 Harrison, of course, considers the human obeisance to the authority of the dead a species-specific characteristic: ‘Nonhuman species obey only the law of vitality, but humanity in its distinctive features is through and through necrocratic’ (Harrison, Citation2003, p. ix).
11 The term ‘parallax’ denotes an apparent difference in the position of planets when seen from different positions. It is a word whose morphology Bloom ponders.
12 Though Rudolf Bloom was a Hungarian Jew by origin, he converted to Christianity. Gifford and Seidman cite the mediaeval laws which denied the suicide church rites, and stipulated the confiscation of his property. English law, however, permitted burial in consecrated ground in 1823 and religious services in 1882 (Gifford & Seidman, Citation1989, p. 112).
13 Gérard Genette, the influential French literary theorist, used the term as a metaphor for his 1982 book Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, on hypertextuality, his term for the relationship between the source-text/hypotext and the hypertext, which is grafted upon the former.
14 The conditions in the tenements not only bred diseases, but the overcrowding denied any possibility of segregating the sick, especially those with contagious diseases. People who were in the later stages of consumption could be found along with the healthy in one room (O’Brien, Citation1982, pp. 136–137). These facts give a more-than-figurative meaning to the statement in Ulysses that ‘[t]he Irishman’s house is his coffin’ (6.821-2), which is a play on the English saying that ‘an Englishman’s house is his castle’.