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Ulysses and Justice
By James McMichael PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06547-2
CHAPTER 1
JAMES Y
Dublin at One Remove
i read Ulysses as the testament of James Joyce, a person who wants justice. The book's most notable paradox for me is that those peculiarly impersonal elements I refer to as "Jamesy" are basic to what I find most personal about it. Under Jamesy's name, I will be identifying these elements and describing how they render Ulysses more personal.
Jamesy is an illusion constructed by James Joyce. It is the illusion of an impersonal, omniscient, debt-free intelligence that is thoroughly indifferent to what it knows. While I do not forget that a person has constructed the impersonal Jamesy (the name "Jamesy" is itself a personalizing), what Joyce has constructed in Ulysses' peculiar narrator is at once so impersonal and so pervasive that it compels me to suspend my disbelief and think of the narrative as Jamesy's and not the writer's. Jamesy is the name I assign to my thinking that Ulysses issues wholly from an impersonal intelligence and not from the person who constructed him.
When I think of Ulysses as Jamesy's and not Joyce's doing, I pretend that Joyce is not answerable for any unjust elements of Ulysses: because I am fully aware that I am pretending, though, I am holding Joyce answerable all the while. What I am pretending is that Joyce has constructed in Jamesy a scapegoat for one simple but insoluble problem Joyce was stuck with as a writer: no matter how devoted to justice, no matter how personal, phrasemaking is never personal nor just enough. I cannot respond justly to a person until I assign certain (possibly silent) phrases to his needs. Such phrases are the hearing that I give his case. But however much my phrases enable me to know about his needs, they are at most preliminary to justice insofar as I may do nothing with the knowledge beyond sentimentally deriving from it what pleasure I can. And if I am James Joyce and my phrases are written and done with, as Joyce's phrases are in Ulysses, I have removed them from the time in which persons respond to one another and are answerable for the justice of their responses. Jamesy is a blame-absorbing construct for Joyce's self-reproach as the writer of Ulysses, a book that Joyce wanted to be more personal and more just than he could make it be.
However simple Joyce's motive for constructing Jamesy as Ulysses' narrating intelligence, the construct itself is quite elaborate. When I attend to Jamesy, Joyce asks me to do at least two things at the same time: (1) to take Jamesy on Jamesy's own terms by acceding to the possibility that Jamesy's omniscience is the only thing that matters, and (2) to be so repelled by the injustice of such a possibility that I myself begin to act justly. By temporarily setting aside the second of those two things, I must now focus on the first. As neutrally as I can, I will describe those elements that force me to identify Jamesy in the book as a whole. These are some of the matters I will be considering. How might I, a mere person, conceive of so impersonal and vast an intelligence as Jamesy's? How do his disclosures manage to register with me as singularly omniscient? What would it cost me if I were to imitate him in all ways? To what extremes does he go in his godlike isolation from persons? I should warn in passing that Jamesy's knowledge of all things, including persons and justice, may occasionally cause him to be mistaken as my model for how to read Ulysses. Jamesy could not be less of a model for me, though before I leave him and move on to Stephen, the second of the three lines I will be following, I will say what Jamesy contributes to such a model by default.
"A SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE"
"It had better be stated here and now at the outset" (14: 1223) that the narrating intelligence behind Ulysses is a "a superior intelligence" (17: 1008). Persons and characters who substitute for persons think less than everything. Their intelligences are inferior to Jamesy's. As the narrating intelligence behind Ulysses, Jamesy thinks everything.
Describing what that might mean is the more difficult because the normal ways for talking about thinking are inhibited by their applicability to the inferior intelligences of mere persons. When he was nine, Stephen Dedalus had wondered at the enormity of all there was to think.
What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be but he could think only of God.
A line around everything would make everything more thinkable by cutting it down to a size a person could think. But even the thinnest of lines is cheating since it excludes what must not be excluded if "everything" is to be thought. Substituting for a person, Stephen lacks the intelligence to think everything and not just one delimited thing and another. Stephen acknowledges that the thought of everything is too big for a person to think. Then he gives up trying to think what God thinks and thinks only of God.
When he thinks only of God and not also about what God thinks, Stephen thinks God's substance, he accepts that within God's substance there can be no line between the things God thinks. All delimitable things God might be said to think about are substantially one and the same: there is nothing other for God's substance, nothing of another substance than God in the way another person or thing can seem to be substantially other than oneself. As the omniscient intelligence behind Ulysses, Jamesy gives nothing away to God. Just as God's knowledge is not limited to those things the Bible discloses, Jamesy's is not limited to those things disclosed in Ulysses: instead, Jamesy's knowledge, like God's, extends to what is happening right now on the moons of Neptune and in Great Slave Lake. If God's and Jamesy's names are not interchangeable names for the most superior of intelligences, it is not because God alone thinks everything while Jamesy merely thinks delimited things. Though I will pursue the comparison only casually and only in the sense that Jamesy's omniscience is godlike, the differences between Jamesy and God do not involve differences in what they may be said to think: Jamesy, like God, thinks everything, everything he thinks therefore being of one substance with Jamesy himself.
"TO SUBSTITUTE OTHER MORE ACCEPTABLE PHENOMENA"
For mere persons who read it, Ulysses' tiny sampling of all that Jamesy thinks may seem to connect with Dublin on June 16, 1904. It does not. Filling everything, ethereal, the substance that is Jamesy's thinking does not admit connections. A connection requires the same gap in substance that Stephen seeks so that he might insert his "thin thin line." For there to be a connection, there must be a gap between the things connected, a gap between the connection and the delimited things it connects. Jamesy's thinking does not admit a gap. As a mere person, I assume that Dublin on June 16, 1904, was its welter of phenomena for persons. What persons tended to regard as the "real" Dublin on that day, I assume, was what persons knowing less than everything took it to be. If persons knew everything, if they could think what Jamesy thinks, they would not only know what is real but would themselves have substance or being: they would be real. Instead, persons are what Stephen thinks of them as: "Beingless beings" (10: 822). From the perspective that accords godlike omniscience to Jamesy, Jamesy alone is real. A person in any place on any day is subject to the sensibilities that are peculiarly his or her own. Since for any sensibility the thought of everything is too big to think, substance (or being, or reality) is closed to persons. Subject to thinking one delimited thing and another, subject to making connections, sensibilities offer only woefully imperfect approximations of all there is to think.
Jamesy, by contrast, is unencumbered by sensibility. Because he thinks everything, his thinking is the one true substance, a substance that fills what persons are subject to regard as gaps between delimited things. Because he discloses at least something of his substance in Ulysses, each person who reads Ulysses, is privileged to deal not with a place and time as each merely takes it to be but rather with Ulysses, as it most substantially is. No two persons will read Ulysses, the same way. Its parts of speech are therefore merely phenomena and not reality. But because these parts of speech disclose something of Jamesy's superior intelligence, they are more acceptable phenomena than phenomena of the "real" Dublin or the "real" Anywhere Else. "Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other more acceptable phenomena in place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed" (17: 1008–10), I pretend that Jamesy has removed "real" place and time and has substituted for them the phenomena you and I encounter in Ulysses' parts of speech.
ALMOST SEEING IT
Bloom is admiring binoculars at Yeates and Son in Grafton Street when he thinks, "There's a little watch up there on the roof of the bank to test those glasses by" (8: 560–61). Was there "really"? Dubliners interviewed in 1969 could not remember having heard of it. A little watch was either "there" on the Bank of Ireland's roof in 1904 or it was not. If it was not, it is the more acceptable as substance insofar as it was never seen. "Can't see it," Bloom decides as he tries to make it out with the naked eye. "If you imagine it's there you can almost see it. Can't see it" (8: 562–63). Seeing it is less acceptable, less pure than almost seeing it. Seeing it implicates sensibility, and sensibility taints by delimiting. Sensibility fractures the pure selfsameness of Jamesy's substance. Into portions a mere person can think, sensibility separates the undelimitable "everything" that Jamesy thinks and is. Almost but not seen, the watch remains forever the purer insofar as its substance and Jamesy's are not separable by as little as "a thin thin line," the line by which the person who "really" saw it would necessarily have distinguished the watch from "everything" that it was not. Almost but not seen, the "watch" is Jamesy's watchfulness over both the Dublin of Ulysses, and the reader of Ulysses. It is a vigil at which Jamesy succeeds perfectly because of his superior, perfectly indifferent intelligence.
TESTABLE CONNECTIONS
Without compromising his superiority, Jamesy might have seen to it that there are only the most arbitrary of resemblances between the "real" Dublin and the Dublin of Ulysses. And yet while it is what he does disclose that constitutes as much substantial reality as mere persons are privileged to receive, is it not too much to ask of them that they receive his disclosures as if they were the divine truth concerning what is real? Though Ulysses' parts of speech are "more acceptable phenomena" than other phenomena against which they might be tested for their truth, mere persons are subject to their respective sensibilities and cannot accept that Jamesy knows what Dublin truly was on that day until they submit Ulysses to some tests. Just as the binoculars could be tested by the little watch, Jamesy's knowledge of the "real" Dublin on June 16, 1904, may be tested by newspapers, maps, schedules, directories, and the way specific buildings deflected the light. Such tests are a handy means for understanding how connectable Jamesy's substitutions are. When Lenehan tells M'Coy to "come over in the sun" (10: 530–31), Jamesy has replaced that part of Dublin with the knowledge that two people would indeed be moving from shade to sun if, under a clear sky, they were to cross to the north side of Wellington Quay at just that time of day and year. When Nurse Callan is so startled by a flash of lightning in "Ireland's westward welkin" (14: 82) that she is compelled to cross herself, Jamesy has replaced another part of Dublin with the knowledge that the front door of the National Maternity Hospital faces west. He has replaced a certain part of the bay with the knowledge that it is "five fathoms" (1: 673) deep, that its current tends toward the northwest, and that the second high tide in Dublin on June 16, 1904, occurred "about one" in the afternoon.
And Jamesy's knowledge may be found to connect with the "real" Dublin even when that knowledge is implicit only, not manifest in Ulysses' parts of speech. Between the first and second chapters of Ulysses—which is to say within Ulysses but in no words—Jamesy has replaced the distance between Sandycove and Dalkey with the knowledge that a young man setting out around 9:30 in the morning would have time to walk that mile and not be inordinately late for the class he was to teach at 10:00. Between the second and third chapters, Jamesy has replaced the distance between Dalkey and Irishtown with the knowledge that even a young man would have to go by tram back north again past Sandycove, Kingstown, Blackrock, and Merrion if he is to be spotted by another man just after 11:00 near Watery Lane.
It is admittedly no proof of superior intelligence that Jamesy knows one distance is greater than another. Nor is there anything extraordinary about the kinds of things he knows. Though he knows everything on his own and has no need to supplement his knowledge, what he knows is so commonplace that he might seem to have cribbed it from intelligences inferior to his own, from persons whose sensibilities subjected them to the "less acceptable phenomena" of "real" Dublin on one day. On that day, of course, there were persons in Dublin who offered descriptions of how things went and were likely to go. Many of their offerings are still available. Tide tables and nautical charts can be consulted in many good libraries, and a contemporary map of Dublin bears the letters "Hosp." in a west-facing square off Holies Street. Since Jamesy might have come by it in the most mundane of ways, any one thing he seems to know about Dublin is unimpressive as knowledge. And yet what clearer evidence could there be that Jamesy thinks everything? For the more common and expendable each thing he thinks, the less it seems that there were things too common and too expendable for him to think.
Not that a looked-for connection between the "real" Dublin and Jamesy's knowledge does not sometimes reveal him to be "in error." Clive Hart has catalogued a number of discrepancies between Ulysses and the "real" Dublin: what Jamesy calls the "Royal Canal" was instead the Grand, Grattan's statue was not "stone" but bronze, "MacConnell's corner" was not a corner, the Merrion and "Metropolitan" Halls have been confused. While Jamesy has it that the Earl of Dudley's "cavalcade" made its way through Dublin on "16 June, 1904," Robert Martin Adams discovered that it "really" did so more than two weeks earlier and with a very different cast of characters.
Hart and Adams do not defer to Jamesy's superior intelligence. They proceed as if "less acceptable phenomena" were commensurate with "more," as if the "real" Dublin as persons took it to be was not riffled with impurities but was instead the measure of what Jamesy does and does not know. Jamesy has easier going with me—or at least so I am pretending. I have already shown a willingness to grant that his intelligence is of a different, higher order and that persons simply cannot test it. For there to be something Jamesy does not know, something tests might catch him not knowing, he would have to be separate from that thing. Because what he knows is unconnected, its testable connections with the "real" Dublin prove nothing about its truth but are instead mere exercises of inferior intelligence. Whether the phenomena of Ulysses pass these tests is incidental to their status as knowledge. Unlike Hart and Adams, and despite much sympathy for their resistance, I will be granting Jamesy whatever superiority it would take (1) to remove the separate, gross bodies of the "real" world as persons take their world to be, and (2) to replace that world with the subtle, selfsame, uninterrupted substance that is his omniscience. To the end of seeing what Jamesy's substance yields, I am going to consider Ulysses as his completion of a "task"—the task of substituting pure and certain knowledge for the impure, uncertain efforts at sense making that occupy mere persons during their waking hours. Before I do that, I should say explicitly that my use of terms that make it sound as if I am celebrating Jamesy's omniscience is more than a little ironic. Terms like "pure and certain" would be positive for me only if I held that knowledge for its own sake is more important than persons, which I do not: whatever such terms may imply out of context, therefore, they are decidedly negative for me insofar as they point toward qualities of Jamesy's knowledge that render it wholly impersonal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ulysses and Justice by James McMichael. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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