Nation, Culture And Gender

Since its publication, Joyce's Ulysses has been receiving controversial criticisms. Besides the controversy between the early attacks on Ulysses, which judge it as the "sardonic catafalque of the Victorian world", and the early praise of it as "the most important expression which the present age has found", the greatest disagreement in the critical world of Joyce is between the transcendentalist approach originating from T. S. Eliot which leads to the interpretation of Ulysses as "a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape", by tracing patterns of imagery and allusion in Joyce's text and relating the discovered pattern to some universalised and universalising structure, and the empiricist approach led by Ezra Pound, which focuses on the realistic presentation of the texture of contemporary experience by finding out minutely detailed accounts of the referents in Joyce's writing. This controversy itself is sufficient to illustrate the most important feature of Ulysses, that is, its inclusiveness or negotiation of the most realistic and the most universal (or the most figurative). This quality in Ulysses once again proves the truth that any great artistic creation must be about its time but at the same time above its time, and must be of contemporary significance as well as permanent truth.As a masterpiece, Ulysses expresses Joyce's profound concern about the present difficult condition, especially the cultural dilemma, of his nation, which has been neglected or misunderstood for a long time by critics who take Joyce as apolitical and indifferent to Irish national cause. Ulysses is of great contemporary significance not only in its author's abhorrence of British colonisation and his repudiation of Irish nationalism, but in his penetrating insight into Irish condition, which results not only from the foreign imperial forces of British colonisation and the Irish Roman Catholic Church's suffocation, but also from the national epidemics of Irish nationalists and the "gay-betrayers" of Irish national cause. But in this modern Odyssey, Joyce would never be content with writing about his own time. He would make his masterpiece above his own time. He not only links the present with history and tries to find something universal in this linkage about the interactions between the ideology of the authority, the centre, the mainstream, and that of the subaltern, the marginalised and "the Other" and the universality of fabrication of "the Other", "the Self and history, but also relates the present with the future. These ideas are much ahead of his time, and will be applausible in dealing with cultural issues. His mock at the imaginary purity of national origin, his penetration into human beings' delight in fabrication, his insight into the core and the shell of history, his much ahead-of-time imagination of the national future pointing to cultural hybridity and heterogeneity, his emphasis on the recognition of differences between and within cultural groups and the broad-versionedacquiescence, tolerance and acceptance based on that recognition of differences, and his probe into the very changeable and flowing nature of identities of both individuals and nations turn out to be permanent treasure for our present and future society, which is inevitably always confronted with cultural clashes and moving to cultural negotiations and cultural hybridity.Of course, Ulysses, as the first postcolonial novel, does not pose itself up unequivocally as a national allegory, due to the mechanisms of the colonial regimes of surveillance and the secrecy they generate. Rather, it employs the strategy of circumspection, cunning and fighting afar that Stephen Dedalus professes at the end of A Portrait, and that are in fact the hidden weapons of many postcolonial fictions after Ulysses. This makes Ulysses replete with what appears to Western readers a surfeit of anthropological and apolitical knowledge, especially about the vulgar and sexual and even the obscene. But under this very veil of surfeit of anthropological and apolitical narrative are interwoven the intricate clusters of analogies for Irish national issues. These analogies are mainly equivocally set up through the depiction of Stephen's personal relationship with other characters, Bloom's domestic and racial positions and Molly's sexual relationships with Bloom and her lovers. That is, Joyce blurs the boundary of race and gender and negotiates national issues and those of sex, gender and matrimony, which demands a linkage between the interpretations of the sexual, gender or matrimonial issues of the male and the female characters and the discussion of the national issues of Ireland.This dissertation, as a postcolonialist study of Ulysses, puts Joyce's ideas of the present, the history and the future of Irish culture into a framework of coordination and explores Joyce's deft and tactful narrative of national issues through that of gender, sexual and domestic relationships and personal relationships, by drawing upon the postcolonialist theories, especially Loomba's ideas of the connections between colonialism and nationalism, their common distortion of history and the function of cultural mimicry and hybridity. And accordingly, this dissertation is divided into three chapters, dealing respectively with Joyce's ideas of the present dilemma of Irish culture, nightmarish history from which Irish artists want to wake from, the future pointing to cultural hybridity for Irish culture and Joyce's tactful negotiation of gender and racial issues in writing his Irish national allegory.Chapter One of this dissertation discusses Joyce's penetration into the Irish cultural dilemma. In Ulysses, Joyce exposes the present difficulties Irish nation is faced with, which are not only economic, political, and international but also cultural. The first force that is responsible for the present difficulties is the British colonisation, which not only puts Ireland into great poverty by its robbery and exploitation, but also suffocates Irish culture through dispossessing Irish people of their real native history and filling Irish culture into its stereotype of native backwardness. The second force that is responsible for the present difficult condition is Irish nationalism, which in fact shares the same logic with British colonialism in that both of them are based on the Xenophobic Cycloptic prejudice against "the Other" and generate practices of marginalisation, degradation and demonisation of "the Other" and glorification and beautification of "the Self, and also suffocate Irish culture with its attempt to put Irish culture under the yoke of reviving the imaginary purity of native culture.Joyce's abhorrence of British colonialism and repudiation of Irish nationalism are the centre of hot discussions among contemporary critics, while his equal hatred of the Catholic Church and repulsion of the "gay-betrayers" often escape contemporary critics' notice. In Ulysses, the Catholic Church plays the role of the conspirator of British colonialism in that it suffocates Irish culture with its inhumane doctrine and robs Irish people through the priests who are fat with the kidneys of grains harvested with Irish people's sweat and blood and who make Ireland overpopulated with its strict doctrines against birth control. And the final that is responsible for the present difficulties is what Joyce refers to as the "gay-betrayers" among Irish people, who in Ulysses are constituted by two groups of people, the jackals of British colonialists and pleasure-seeking Irish people. The former are conspirators of British colonialists and only take Ireland as a pawn shop: when they need it, they keep it; when they do not need it, they sell it; the latter ruin Ireland and Irish culture with their indifference to Irish national fate and with their gambling/drinking, and brothel-going, and to Joyce's great abhorrence, with high talk of patriotism (which in fact is only "barsponging patriotism" in Bloom's own view).Joyce, as a great artist, is much ahead of time in that he does not hold British colonialism as the only cause of the dilemma of Ireland, but takes the foreign colonisers and native epidemics all responsible for the present troubles in Ireland, and he does not attempt to isolate one epidemic from the other in bringing about troubles to Ireland but takes them in one sense or another as accomplices in ruining Ireland. His penetration into the very nature of the colonialists' cultural exploitation, the very essence of nationalism, which shares the same Xenophobic logic as the colonisers, the very relationship between the material poverty and cultural barrenness of Ireland and Irish "native" religion, i.e. the Catholic Church, which adheres to its inhuman doctrine, especially its doctrine against birth control and many interventions into national affairs, and the problems in Irish people's life style and national consciousness, if there is one, is what many of his contemporary writers are utterly blind to and what many of his later generations haven't realised until postcolonialism reaches its climax, and, more importantly, until Joycean critics adopt postcolonialist and other cultural study perspectives in recent years.Of course, Joycean critics are not to blame for the much late realisation because Joyce employs very unnoticeable and equivocal analogies in Ulysses to express his penetrations. Among many neglectable analogies, the most important are Stephen's situation in the Martello Tower and Bloom's domestic position. The Martello Tower is an analogical miniature of British colonised Ireland, in which Stephen, as an analogy of Irish culture, has two masters, one British and the other Italian, and there is one servant of these two masters, who demands Stephen to serve him, to be "a servant of a servant". The two masters analogised by the British Haines and the mockingly religious Irish Mulligan stand for British colonisers and the Catholic Church, and the servant demanding Stephen to serve him refers to Irish nationalists who demand Irish men of letters to be devoted to the revival of the imagined purity of Irish national culture. And the "gay-betrayers" analogised by Mulligan stand for those jackals of British colonisers and those pleasure-seeking people. Bloom's servitude in domestic life, his cuckoldness and his being persecuted in the inn also analogise Ireland's servitude to and cuckoldness and persecution by British colonialists. And under all these oppressions, Irish art (or, more generally speaking, Irish culture) becomes a cracked looking glass, losing its function of revealing reality and helping to alert people to the reality. In such a dilemma, Stephen, standing for Irish contemporary Irish culture, is searching for a father, or to be more abstract, for fatherhood, which inhabits nowhere else but history, and Bloom, standing for Irish cultural tradition, is searching for a son, or sonhood, which can be found nowhere else but in the future. This shows that Joyce, again much ahead of time, is not merely content with his exposure of the present troubles of his nation, but strives to find answers and solutions by looking back to history and looking forward to the future. Chapter Two focuses on the discussion of Joyce's idea of history in Ulysses, According to postcolonialist theories, history is always the battlefield for the mainstreams to degrade "the Other" and justify the sins committed by "the Self. This idea of history has much in common with Giambattista Vico's. Joyce's ideas of history is profoundly influenced by Vico's theory of history, which takes history as something of human creation (imagination) and its causes are to be sought in human . mind. So Joyce regards history as the tales often heard by other people. In Ulysses, Joyce's idea of history is revealed through a series of seemingly trivial but analogical or symbolic incidents. What people know about history is nothing but the shell of history, just as what Stephen teaches the students is nothing but the fabrications by historians and laymen of history on the basis of the dead relics or simply to cater for their own interests. Human beings have no way to know the core of history, or the truth of history, but can guess something true on the basis of human psychology or human language. History is only a set of "tales often heard by others" (to use Stephen own words) because it is human nature to love to make and hear tales, and because the historical events are nothing but incidents which themselves are only one of the many possibilities and become facts simply by excluding other possibilities and the imagined historical fact is, nothing but one of those possibilities guessed by historians on the basis of random phenomena.In the specific case of the opposition between British colonialists and the sharers of their interests in Ireland and Irish nationalists and average Irish people, both sides save no pain in fabricating history. The Ulster headmaster Mr. Deasy's long Dutch talk to Stephen analogises British colonialists' long fabrication of history, in which they boast of their own pride in economic power, put the blames which should be shouldered by the authorities or the mainstream on their antagonists, mainly Irish nationalists and the Catholic Church, or on the marginalised and persecuted people, mainly the Jews, and on women who are always made scapegoats to shoulder the blames for ruining a nation. The Citizen's propaganda for the glory and purity of Ireland analogises the Cycloptic nationalists' fabrication of history, in which they boast of the glories of Irish history, including Ireland bearing great figures such as Shakespeare and O'Brien Confucius, degrade Anglo-Saxon civilisation as siphilisation, and extremely similar to British colonialists' practice, make the Jews and women as the scapegoats to shoulder the blame for the fall of Ireland and other nations.Quite contrary to the belief of many of His contemporaries, Joyce does not think history goes towards the revelation of God's will (or the will of the authority), as Mr. Deasy, the advocator of British colonialists, hopes. To use Stephen's own expression, history points to a "shout in the street", an epitome of chaos and strifes. Moreover, Joyce does not stop at merely exposing history as a series of narratives and the chaos that result from such fabricated narratives, but instead goes further by exploring various reasons for such fabrications, among which the motivations to justify or escape the feeling of one's sin, to console one's ailing soul by self-deception, and to deceive "the Other" to secure one's own interests are the most prevalent. Stephen's change of the original version of the riddle that the fox is burying its mother is out of the motivation to escape the feeling of guilt of "killing" his mother. Various fabrications in religion and arts, nostalgia for one's past life, arid the illusion in gambling and drinking are out of the motivations mentioned above. And Bloom's illusions of the platonic love for Gerty and Gerty's beautification of the same love for Bloom are out of the same motivation as that of the Citizen in his fabrication of the glory of Irish history.Of course, Joyce's universalisation of the fabrications of history is not to advocate nihilism in history. On the contrary, he expresses his belief in some shape, or "form" of history; and he indicates his belief in many episodes of Ulysses. In Joyce's opinion, history is a process of the interactions and counteractions between historical heritage and the breach of heritage, yet there exists possibility to be eternal in history. For the secular Bloom, eternity can be achieved by metempsychosis, that is, for one person's soul to live through another's soul; for the young artist Stephen, eternity can be obtained by keeping a balance between historic heritage and creativity, and by remaining above the trivial and the specific. Joyce's thought about the relationship between historical heritage and creativity is analogised by the father-and-son motif, especially in Stephen's discussion of Shakespeare, and the relationship between the trivial and the universal is analogised by Shakespeare's "all in all" principle.Joyce also expresses bis idea in Ulysses that the development of history also relies on the interactions among contemporaries and clashes among different cultures, the former of which are analogised by the repulsion and love between Shakespeare and his brothers, and the latter of which are analogised by the relationship between Shakespeare and his wife and their respective mistresses and lovers. All these contradictions help in spurring Shakespeare's creativity, which analogises that history develops in the interactions among various contradictions. And the role of the interactions between the historical heritage and creation is further illustrated in "Oxen of the Sun", in which literary works develop on the basis of extracting nourishment from historical heritage and getting rid of the old and the dead in the former works.In the specific case of Irish culture, historical heritage consists of Irish native heritage and British colonial heritage, and it shapes as burdens as well as beneficial models that no future creation can escape. For a subaltern writer, it poses a great problem how to keep a balance between Irish cultural heritage and British cultural heritage, between Irish cultural heritage and creativity, and between British cultural heritage and creativity.In Ulysses, besides the problem posed by heritage and creativity, there is another one closely related to Joyce's idea of history, that is, problem of love and sin. What makes history point to chaos is mainly the sins that exist in every human being. In Stephen's mind, the blood of the pirates is in all of us. But we have one thing real which may provide meaning for life and the foundation for people to solve strifes caused by the sins in human beings, mainly of greed, vanity and selfishness. This one real thing is love, maternal love, which can overpass difference, hatred, greed, vanity and selfishness, and form the foundation of acquiescence, tolerance and acceptance. Acquiescence, tolerance and acceptance in turn are the very foundation for cultural hybridity. Moreover, the appealing charm of maternal love to Stephen analogises Joyce's love for his motherland because he knows a child without his mother's love will be tramped down like a boneless snail by the world, and a countryless man will also be tramped down like a boneless snail by the world.All Stephen's as well as Joyce's findings in history point to one thing: cultural hybridity must be based on the attitude of cultural acquiescence, tolerance and acceptance and on the premise of love for one's nation, which is in turn based on penetrating into the very nature of fabrication (shell) of history and admitting the possibility of the existence of truth (core) of history.Chapter Three deals with Joyce's imagination of a future of cultural hybridity for Irish nation in Ulysses. Joyce's purpose in presenting the present dilemma of Irish culture and penetrating into the nightmare of history is to find some solutions to the present problems, or at least, predict the future for his nation. And Ulysses, as a national epic, is a piece of real art that projects the unknown past and present into the unknown future. Joyce thinks the future for Irish culture lies in cultural hybridity. In this sense, Joyce is much ahead of time and has much in common with the postcolonialists, who also take cultual hybridity as the inevitable future for the colonised nations. But this kind of future of cultural hybridity in Ulysses has often been neglected by Joycean critics. In Ulysses, Joyce expresses his imagination of such a future by employing analogies. Bloom's domestic situation analogises the status of Irish culture, and his impotence analogises the impotence of Irish culture. Boylan is the analogy of British culture, and his strong sexual drive is the analogy of the aggressiveness and vitality in British culture. Molly is the analogy of the future of Irish culture, and her illicit relationships with many lovers analogise the future cultural hybridity of Irish culture with other cultures. The inevitability and reasonability of Irish culture's hybridity with other cultures can be analogically justified by Molly's justification of her relationship with Boylan: it serves Bloom right for her to have sexual relationship with Boylan simply because Bloom is impotent. But to hybrid with foreign cultures does not mean to abandon native culture. Instead, it is extremely important to keep to what is good and vital in native culture in the process of cultural hybridity, and this is analogised by Molly's determination to restore the ideal relationship with Bloom and merely take Boylan as a useful substitute for Bloom or only a sexual toy for her.Joyce's idea of Irish culture's future is not merely confined to an obscurely imagined hybridity. Besides imagining the future of cultural hybridity, he foresees many potential problems in that future and indicates solutions to these problems in Ulysses. First, cultural hybridity can not be confined to the hybridity between two cultures, or between the colonised and the colonisers. Instead, it is necessary for native culture to hybrid with various cultures, and this is analogised by Molly's having various lovers, who are of various nationalities, social statuses and ages. Second, in the process of cultural hybridity, it is crucial to give up the sense of binary oppositions such as ancient/ modern, backward/ advanced, low/ high and barbarian/ civilised, and to take all cultures as equal. This is analogised by Molly's blending the image of one lover to the image of another. Third, to take all cultures as equal does not mean to neglect or ignore the differences among and within various cultures and subcultures. This is indicated in the analogy of Molly's sense of the complete difference between Bloom and Boylan, Gardner and Mulvey, and Boylan and Mulvey. Fourth, it is of equal importance not to be isolated from and take a Cycloptic view of foreign cultures or to solely rely on foreign cultures or even abandon native culture. It is extremely urgent to put emphasis on keeping to native culture and extracting the beneficial elements from foreign cultures to supplement native culture while repelling what is harmful in it. This is analogically parallel with Molly's determination to return to Bloom and merely take Boylan as a sexual toy.All the above discussions about the past, the present and the future of Irish culture are closely associated with the interpretation of many women characters and some male characters because Joyce conveys his cultural message for his race through the writing of gender and sexual relationships. This is quite common among postcolonialist writings because as a rule their writing of nations is never far from their writing of genders. Joyce's cultural message for his race in his national epic is mainly expressed through several clusters of characters and their relationships. The most important cluster includes Molly, Bloom, and Molly's lovers. Bloom analogises Irish traditional culture, Molly's lovers, foreign cultures, and Molly, the future Irish culture hybriding with foreign cultures on the basis of keeping to Irish native culture. Another cluster includes Bloom, Stephen, and Molly. Bloom analogises Irish cultural tradition, Stephen, the present Irish culture oppressed by British colonialism, Irish nationalism, Irish Catholic Church and the "gay-betrayers" of Ireland, and Molly, the future Irish culture hybriding with world cultures. Stephen's union with Bloom and their union with Molly are a good analogy of Irish contemporary culture's adhering to and relying on Irish native cultural tradition and heading for a future of cultural hybridity. The third cluster consists of the old milkwoman, May Dedalus, Gerty and Molly. The milkwoman is an analogy of Ireland economically and culturally oppressed by British colonialism; May Dedalus, that of Ireland suffocated by the Catholic Church; Gerty, that of Ireland glorified and beautified in the imagination of the Cycloptic nationalists, and Molly, that of Ireland heading for the cultural hybridity. The fourth cluster is constituted by a group of women representing thorough subalternity. They include May Dedalus, Mrs. Breen, and Mrs. Purefoy, who are child-bearers and docile "angels in the house", Gerty, who is a ready would-be child-bearer and docile housewife willing to play the role of the second sex in the patriarchal culture, and Molly, who is multiply oppressed as a professional woman, a capitalist commodity consumer, a Spanish Jewish woman, and an object of men's desire. The last cluster are mainly historical women figures, who have been made by the authorities in both history and the contemporary society as scapegoats to shoulder the blames for the downfall of a dynasty, a nation or a national leader, which in fact should be shouldered by the mainstream and the authorities. Among them, Helen is the scapegoat for the fall of Troy; Lady O'Shea, for the fall of Parnell; O'Rourke's wife, for the fall of Ireland. They have been made the scapegoats just as the Jews have been made scapegoats to shoulder the blame for the decline of many countries' economy.By his writing Irish cultural issues through writing gender and domestic issues, Joyce deftly tries to escape the colonialist regime of surveillance, and successfully voices his concern about Irish present conditions, his penetration into the Irish history, which has witnessed centuries of occupation and colonialisation, and his expectation of a future of cultural hybridity for Irish culture.To sum up, the dissertation explicates, by drawing on the theories of postcolonialism, neohistoricism and gender studies, Joyce's seemingly coincidental and fragmental but in fact conscious and systematic thinkings about the fate of Irish culture in Ulysses. Ulysses, the Irish national epic, is much ahead of time for the following aspects: it not only expresses the Irish native people's antagonism against British colonialism, but also sees through the nature of exploitation and degradation in cultural activities of British colonialist agents; it not only expresses Joyce's close association with Irish cultural issues, but also shows Joyce's much ahead-of-time insight into the problems resulting from within Ireland, especially his repudiation of Irish Cycloptic nationalism, his attack on the suffocating Catholic Church and hypocritical Protestant believers, his hatred for the collaborators of British colonialists among Irish people and his disappointedness with the pleasure-seeking Irish people. Ulysses is of permanent as well as contemporary significance in that it not only probes into the causes of Irish present cultural dilemma, but also puts Joyce's concern about his nation into the framework of the past, the present and the future. Joyce links Irish present cultural problems with history and finds out that history is full of fabrications by both the colonialists and the native people, especially the Cycloptic nationalists, and that the secret to create the "uncreated conscience" for his race is to keep a balance in the relationships between historical heritage and creative originality, between native culture and foreign cultures, and between the artists and his contemporaries, and to develop the ability to be above the trivial and the binary oppositions, to be "all in all", and to cherish maternal love, which is the very basis for transcending the trivial and the oppositional in the process of cultural hybridity. Joyce's greatest permanent significance lies in his imagination of the future for Irish nation and his foresight of the potential problems in that future. This future lies in Irish culture's hybriding with foreign cultures on the basis of taking all cultures as equal while admitting differences among and within cultural groups and keeping to native culture while absorbing nourishment from foreign cultures.The dissertation is new in the following aspects. First, to my full knowledge, it is the first to discuss Joyce's concern about Irish culture in the framework of the present, the past and the future from a postcolonialist perspective, that is, it is the first to discuss the connection between Joyce's concern about Irish cultural issues and the historical nightmare and the future cultural hybridity. Second, it is new in exploring Joyce's penetration into the causes of Irish present cultural dilemma from a more complete perceptive, that is, it is of originality in finding out the four causes (namely, British colonialism, Irish Cycloptic nationalism, Irish Catholic Church, and the "gay-betrayers" of Irish national causes) for Irish cultural problems and their interrelationships. Third, it is pioneering in its research on Joyce's ideas of history in a fuller range. It not only discusses Joyce's exposure of the nature of fabrication of history, but also comments on his investigation of how various ideologies interact in the cultural battlefield of history. It not only studies Joyce's thinkings about the relationship between historical heritage and creative originality, between the author and his contemporaries, and between the marginalised and the mainstreams, but also argues that Joyce believes in that maternal love arid artistic eternity is the basis for cultural hybridity. Fourth, it is the first to interpret the future of cultural hybridity in Ulysses and Joyce's warning against some problems that are likely to arise in the future hybridity, that is, it is pioneering in interpreting Joyce's closure of the novel as Joyce's imagination of a definite and bright cultural future. This future is a future pointing to a cultural hybridity based on the recognition of differences among and within cultural groups, taking all cultures as equal, and on the basis of keeping to native culture and extracting nourishments from foreign cultures. And the last, but not the least, originality of this dissertation lies in its interpretation of Joyce's cultural message by bridging the gap between the writing of colonial cultural issues and gender, sexual and domestic issues, and its systematic interpretation of the analogies shaped by clusters of images in Ulysses, some of which have escaped Joycean critics' notice, within the framework of postcolonialist study.