\"The Irish Catholic Peasant, Backbone of our Empire\": Levels of Trauma and Representation in...

$: \"The Irish Catholic Peasant, Backbone of our Empire\": Levels of Trauma and Representation in Joyce's Ulysses$
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In his essay “Subjugation,” James Joyce writes, “Rights when

violated, institutions set at nought, privileges disregarded, all

these, not as shibboleths and war-cries, but as deep-seated

thorough realities, will happily always call forth, not in

foolish romantic madness nor for passionate destruction, but with

unyielding firmness of resistance, the energies and sympathies of

men to protect them and defend them.”1 In this and many other of

his early writings, Joyce evaluates Ireland’s relationship to

neighboring island Britain as a member of the United Kingdom in

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often criticizing

the presumed aggressive hubris of Britain in its economic and

political domination over Ireland, but also lamenting the static

and paralyzed nature of the Irish in their attempt to assert

themselves as a nation-state independent from British and

Catholic cultural hegemony over the country. While he does not

spare Ireland from a stinging criticism of its inability to

resist oppression and to define and rule itself, he exposes the

actual experience of paralysis in the face of foreign rule,

1 James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Ed. Kevin Barry. Trans. Conor Deane (Oxford: UP, 2000) 7.

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allowing the Irish experience of subjugation to be known to the

rest of the world. What Joyce’s fiction exposes most clearly is

the traumatic and paralyzing nature of Irish life, as his

characters come to startling and disturbing realizations of their

lack of agency, of the impossibility of controlling one’s own

fate or destiny under foreign rule.

As Joyce wrote the significant portion of his fiction in the

first quarter of the twentieth century, during which time were

some of the most violent insurrections against foreign rule in

either nation’s history, it is unquestionable that the conflict

between colonialism and nationalism had had an influence in his

work. In this paper, I will show how in Ulysses, James Joyce

stages the colonial conflict between Ireland and Britain before

the Easter Rebellion of 1914 as a way of giving representation to

the various forces and influences permeating Dublin in this era.

I aim to show how the novel presents examples of the

interrelation between the characters’ internal, personal trauma

and broader historical trauma present in all of the characters to

illustrate the effects and consequences of colonialism under

Britain. Though the novel is specifically about Ireland and the

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Irish, the notion of Irish identity is obfuscated and disjointed

in Ulysses in part due to the traumatic experience of colonial

rule from the eighteenth century onward, which frequently caused

an independent Irish culture to be subsumed in the dominant

English control over the country’s politics and public life. But

in reading trauma into the text, the actual experience and effect

of colonial rule in Ireland can be seen in the way these specific

experiences of trauma arise and occur.

Trauma operates at two distinct levels in Ulysses, as

characters recount and re-experience the personal traumatic

experiences of their past, and are affected by the cultural

trauma of Irishness in the United Kingdom, as they are feminized,

simianized and disoriented by the ruling ideology of Ireland’s

Imperial neighbor and the competing ideologies active in colonial

Ireland, including Catholicism, nationalism, and a growing sense

of European cosmopolitanism. The experience of personal trauma

is not only supplemented by the cultural trauma of Irishness, but

is enhanced and intensified by it, as the private and public

effects of trauma serve as aspects of the same experience. The

two traumas reflect and inhabit one another throughout the text,

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playing themselves out jointly in the characters’ recognition of

their own loss and the loss of a unique selfhood denied by the

colonial experience. The personal losses that Dedalus and Bloom

experience are aligned with the public Irish experience of

subordination and abject servitude to Imperial and Catholic

cultural hegemony, underscoring the historic trauma of early-

twentieth century Ireland by showing its pervasiveness in the

characters’ private thoughts and experiences. The novel’s

conjoint effects of personal and cultural trauma bring issues of

masculinity and femininity, national and personal identity, and

the experience of anxiety to bear in the increasingly modernized

environment of twentieth-century Dublin. By making known the

experience of both personal and historic trauma and by making

clear inferences about the effect of cultural hegemony in the

British Empire, the novel serves to chart life under colonial

rule in Dublin and the multiplicity of the Irish identity in a

way that reconciles the collective experience of trauma in part

without entirely resolving its effects. By repeatedly exposing

the traumatic experience of the colonial project in fictional

form, it gives an authentic and original representation of

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colonized Ireland and of the colonized themselves, allowing the

stultifying forces of colonialism to be identified and resisted.

The work of Cathy Caruth has been highly influential in the

field of trauma studies in literary theory. Her theory on

psychological and historical trauma originates from the works of

Sigmund Freud, in particular his essays Beyond the Pleasure Principle

and Moses and Monotheism, whose theories she expands upon to apply

to various works of literature. In her work Unclaimed Experience:

Trauma, Narrative, and History, Caruth introduces Freud’s notion of

trauma with his documentation of the nightmares and flashbacks

suffered by World War I soldiers long after their return from the

battlefield. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud remarks at the

“peculiar and sometimes uncanny way in which catastrophic events

seem to repeat themselves for those who have passed through

them,”2 and the way that these automatic, triggered memories of

shocking violence and danger are beyond the control of those who

experience them. Freud notes in this work that the traumatic

experience revisits an individual because the violent stimulus

that the victim experiences occurs too quickly and jarringly for 2 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) 1.

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the individual’s consciousness to understand it, leaving them to

be confronted with the same experience over and over again.

Caruth likens this definition of trauma to the literary

experience of catastrophe in various works of fiction, in which

characters are confronted with painful memories over which they

have no control, writing that texts “ask what it means to

transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked not by a

simple knowledge but by the ways it simultaneously defies and

demands our witness.”3 Trauma is thus not readily understood or

explicable to those that experience it, yet it still constitutes

a significant aspect of a person’s identity, as it demands to be

acknowledged through its repetitive resurfacing in the

consciousness of the traumatized.

Caruth expands upon Freud’s notion of the personal

psychological experience of trauma by theorizing that traumatic

repetition of memories and experience itself constitutes an

understanding of history as a broad cultural experience. She

writes that history is understood as a history because the events

that constitute it are not directly perceived or understood as

3 Caruth 5.

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they occur, and instead these historical experiences revisit

those who live through them in the same way that the World War I

soldier relives the traumatic episode of the battlefield. These

episodes of historical trauma often make up part of the cultural

identity of those who experience them, as Freud and Caruth make

the example of Jewish identity in the era of Moses and in the

20th century, in which the experience of living under oppression

and eventual liberation is repeated and has been repeated since

the age of Moses. One method for communicating a historical

instance of trauma to those who have not directly experienced is

through through the “enigmatic language of untold stories – of

experiences not yet completely grasped – that resonates and

allows them to communicate, across the gap between their cultures

and their experiences, precisely through what they do not

directly comprehend,” allowing for “a new mode of seeing and of

listening from the site of trauma to be opened up to us as

spectators, and offered as the very possibility, in a

catastrophic era, of a link between cultures.”4 Thus literature

becomes, in Caruth’s understanding, a method of transmitting

4 Caruth 56.

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history in a way that helps to make accessible the confusing and

incomprehensible nature of the traumatic experience.

Caruth furthers her theory of trauma by arguing that trauma

is not only an effect of violence and destruction but also an

“enigma of survival.”5 She explains that like a bodily

experience of a traumatic episode, in which the body

instinctively reacts to negative stimuli it has experienced in

the past, the psyche experiences trauma in the same way, as

something that was not adequately understood by consciousness

upon first encountering it and which revisits the mind in an

“attempt to master what was not fully grasped in the first

place.”6 In a traumatic experience that involves a direct threat

to an individual’s life, the experience is repeated in a way that

reminds the individual of its inability to understand or protect

against the threat, and Caruth writes that “the shape of

individual lives, the history of the traumatized individual, is

nothing other than the determined repetition of the event of

destruction.”7 Caruth theorizes that the events are repeated in

5 Caruth 58.6 Caruth 62.7 Caruth 63.

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the psyche of those that lived through them as a reminder of

one’s own death and as an attempt to claim one’s own survival, to

“assume one’s own survival as one’s own.”8 Traumatic repetition,

in the broad cultural context of creating history, becomes a way

of creating an identity that prepares for the future not by

understanding but repeatedly recognizing and voicing the

experiences of the past. I would suggest that the through this

understanding of trauma, a work of literature is a primary method

of bringing these historical experiences of trauma to bear on

those who read them, by providing an atmosphere for the cultural

recognition of violence and death to be reenacted and

theatricalized non-violently through the work of fiction.

Caruth’s work is significant because it connects

individual’s personal experiences to a larger cultural experience

of trauma, showing how that which seems to be distinct and

incidental in one life represents the identity of a culture at

large. Her contribution to literary studies has repercussions to

many different fields of studies, not the least of which is that

of postcolonial studies. In Joyce’s work, the personal trauma

8 Caruth 64.

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experienced by his characters is inseparable from the historic

trauma of Irishness in the United Kingdom. Caruth’s theory

highlights both the distinct private and public experiences of

trauma in Joyce’s work, but it also shows how both forms of

trauma synecdochically underscore and represent one another in

his fiction. The two traumas are indistinct from one another in

Ulysses as the characters’ private and public lives intersect and

clash. By embedding the experiences of public and private trauma

in one another, the realities of the colonial experience become

apparent and can be expressed as an authentic colonized voice

distinct from the colonial culture affecting it. Thus the

novel’s fictional representation of trauma constitutes a similar

“enigma of survival” for the Irish, as the repetition of the

sense of subjugation under colonial rule allows them to continue

living, creating an identity for the future by voicing and

transmitting the experiences of the past.

The novel contains many episodes that evoke recognitions of

trauma in the characters in a personal and historical context, at

times evoking both simultaneously. In “Telemachus,” the first

episode of Ulysses, Buck Mulligan taunts his companion Stephen

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Dedalus by criticizing his reaction to his mother’s death, as

Stephen refused to kneel and pray at his mother’s request.

Stephen experiences multiple episodes of involuntary, repetitive

visions of his mother’s demise that closely resembles what Caruth

and Freud refer to as trauma. In one instance, the narrator

relates that:

Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.

Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her

wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an

odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him,

mute reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the

threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother

by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held

a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood

beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had

torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.9

He remembers specific visual details of this scene vividly,

unable to avoid the unpleasant memory of her dying in pain, and

the guilt of having not participated in her dying wish. It is

clear that living through a parent’s death is difficult and

unpleasant, but it is the fact that the specific memory of his

9 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990) 5.

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mother reappears throughout the text that makes this experience

traumatic. Dedalus is confronted by specific associative

memories of his mother that he cannot explain or control, as the

narrator explains, “Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass

of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the

sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for

her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails

reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children’s

shirts.”10 The quick disjointed text here illustrates the

rapidity at which the memories revisit the traumatized subject

and their inability to prevent or fully appreciate the memories.

The richly imaginative images that arise from the memory of the

mother’s death signify that it has more than just a nominal

significance to Dedalus. His fixation on her death and the

memory of refusing her dying wish constitutes a particular part

of his identity that he will address continually throughout the

novel. To Dedalus, the traumatic memory revisiting him signifies

a punishment for an unknown reason, as the narrator relates, “Her

glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On

10 Joyce, Ulysses 10.

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me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on

the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror,

while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me

down.”11 Her image here takes on a Catholicized form as a

horrific priest figure meant to judge the inadequacies and

disobedience of her son. The memory’s inclusion in the text is

meant to introduce the reader to the defining conflict facing

Dedalus throughout the novel: his inability to serve, to

subjugate himself neither to his mother, nor to a Catholic

ideology, nor to his country. The trauma of his mother’s death

represents not only that private experience but also the public

trauma of being an Irish male in a British colony, unable to feel

satisfied in his own country and society yet unable to escape it.

In this way, the traumatic experience serves to expose a number

of incompatibilities that Dedalus must confront and resolve in

order to live on.

Similarly, Leopold Bloom thinks of his son’s death in

certain instances in the novel, as in the episode “Hades,” in

which he attends the funeral of his acquaintance Paddy Dignam.


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When Stephen’s father mentions his son after passing Stephen in a

funeral carriage, Bloom has an involuntary memory in which he

thinks to himself, “If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up.

Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton

suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From

me. Just a chance. […] My son inside her. I could have helped him

on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn German too.”12

Similarly to Dedalus’ horrific memory of his dead mother, Bloom

is visited by recurrent uncontrolled thoughts and memories his

lost son, the frequency of which suggests that the trauma

constitutes a significant aspect of the character’s identity.

The memory of the son’s death demands to be acknowledged and

forces Bloom to confront something about himself. Later in the

novel, Bloom overhears two of his companions discuss suicide in a

conversation. As the one character Mr. Power argues that those

who commit suicide are guilty of cowardice, the narrator relates

that, “Mr. Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again,” then

thinks to himself, “They have no mercy on that here or

infanticide. Refuse Christian burial. They used to drive stake of


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wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn’t broken

already.”13 Bloom, whose father has committed suicide before the

events of the novel, here experiences a painful recollection of

his death, as he thinks to himself, “Found in the riverbed

clutching rushes. He looked at me,”14 which signifies the direct

confrontation of this traumatic experience. The traumatic

recollections in this scene similarly signify a fixation and

identification with lost family members, in this case his son and

father. In both cases he is reminded of the unpredictable and

shocking incidents of premature death, and is revisited by these

memories repetitively in a way that demands his attention and

reasserts their importance in shaping his identity.

The novel’s depiction of a rupture in the family and a break

in the generative cycle adds to the traumatic condition of the

novel, in which the main characters stand out as outsiders and

exiles in the community, and the nation of Ireland figuratively

represents an “other” to the powerful Imperial nation at its

borders. The notions of the literal Irish family and the larger

Irish community are of great importance all across this novel, as13 Joyce, Ulysses 96.14 Joyce, Ulysses 96.

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they represent and affect one another symbolically. A break in

the actual family represents a rupture or a fragmenting of the

society in which the family lives and survives, so that Bloom’s

loss of son and his generative capacity in an unhappy marriage

symbolizes Ireland’s own lack of agency and ability to govern

independently. The literal concept of the family and relation

and the wider “human family” of civilizations and societies are

explored in the work of literary critic Edward Said, whose

concept of “filiation” – the direct relationships formed within a

family that form the basic kindred groups within society –

influenced literary criticism and theory relating to these

issues. He writes in his essay “Secular Criticism” about authors

who explored the family and its representation of the society in

which it exists in their novels and poetry, writing that they

“originates in a large group of late nineteenth and early

twentieth century writers, in which the failure of the generative

impulse – the failure of the capacity to produce or generate

children – is portrayed in such a way as to stand for a general

condition afflicting society and culture together, to say nothing

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of individual men and women.”15 Said’s understanding of family

extends from the bounds that keep it personal and confined to the

home to the external bounds of society and the nation, arguing

that the successes and failures of one are representative of the

other’s as well. In the context of the novel, the failures of

the family, in Bloom’s or Stephen’s for example, represent the

failures of the society that they originate from, which cannot

provide adequate resources or the ability to mend the family or

console one whose family was lost. Yet Said writes that a break

in traditional filiation is not necessarily indicative of a

permanent failure or abject state, as he argues that “writers

like Lawrence, Joyce, and Pound present us with the breaking of

ties with family, home, class, country, and traditional beliefs

as necessary stages in the achievement of spiritual and

intellectual freedom: these writers invite us to share the larger

transcendental [affiliative] or private systems of order and

value which they have adopted and invented,”16 meaning that in

literature, the distorted, broken notion of the family that

15 Edward Said, “Secular Criticism”. The Edward Said Reader. (New York: Vintage,2000), 231.16 Said 234.

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individuals experience in their lives is a stage of development

toward another system that defines the individual’s place in the

larger society, that which Said refers to as “affiliation.”

Literature represents private conflict within the family as

representative of the early stages of development toward

affiliation, a common connection with members outside the family

that represents a new kind of family, as he writes that it is “a

kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an

institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world vision,

[it] provides men and women with a new form of relationship,”17 a

relationship in which the “community is greater than the

individual adherent or member; the ideas, the values, and the

systematic totalizing worldview validated by the new affiliative

order are all bearers of authority too, with the result that

something resembling a cultural system is established.”18

Looking at Ulysses with Said’s theory in mind, Joyce may be

depicting the loss of Dedalus’ mother, Bloom’s father and son,

and the greater catastrophic elements of the Irish colonial

experience as stages of development reflecting the possibility of17 Said 234.18 Said 234.

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growth from the personal trauma of filial loss and the public

trauma of subjugation.

Joyce depicts Bloom’s loss of both his son and father and

Stephen’s loss of his mother not as something coincidental or

merely interesting in developing these two characters in the

novel, but as something integral to their characters and

reflective of the lack of true societal independence denied by

colonialism. The personal losses signify a break in the

characters’ understanding of the family and of filiation, having

had their positions as son and father disrupted by unexpected

early death. This distorted filiation that is no longer clear

and readily claimable is echoed by the traumatic conditions of

colonized Ireland. Without a strong notion of societal and

cultural independence in early twentieth century Ireland, the

idea of the greater societal family of Irish civilization

constituting the shared experiences and practices which form a

society is also impossible to grasp and claim as one’s own.

There is in this novel a sense of de-filiation both in the

private experiences of Bloom and Dedalus and in the social

environment of Ireland that manifests itself in the text as a

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loss of coherence and structure in the narrative, representative

of the characters unable to cohabitate peacefully as a familial

society. It manifests itself particularly in Bloom, who is

constantly and pervasively confronted with his inability to make

sense of his own life and of the loss that he has lived through,

as he thinks of his former life in the episode “Lestrygonians”:

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twenty-eight I was.

She was twentythree when we left Lombard street west something changed.

Could never like it again after Rudy. Can’t bring back time. Like

holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning

then. Would you? Are you not happy in your home, you poor little naughty

boy? Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the

library.19

Bloom is diffident, self-questioning and irresolute in this and

many other passages of the novel, as his sense of paternity has

been shifted by the trauma of death and the trauma of a troubled

marriage. He is unable to live in the world without repetitively

reminding himself of his loss of paternity, his lack of status as

the head of the family, the paterfamilias of the Bloom household.

Not only does the loss of Rudy signify a loss of his place as a


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father but it also represents his consciousness of the unraveling

family lineage that will not continue beyond him. Rudy’s death

means for Bloom the death of a male heir to carry on his

genealogy in Ireland, and thereby represents Bloom’s loss of

status as a contributor to the future of Irish society. Unable

to contribute to the future of his country, he sees himself as a

non-person unable to give a son to the society around him.

Dedalus too seems stricken with self-doubt and the need for

constant analysis of his status in the world of Dublin, unhappy

with his lack of agency as a schoolteacher and failed poet and

constantly reminding himself of his own loss of family. His

rigorous self-analysis translates outwardly toward what he

experiences around him, observable in his analysis of

Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the library in the episode “Scylla and

Charibides,” during which he argues:

“Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in

the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words

to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been

prince Hamlet’s twin) is it possible, I want to know, or probable that

he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you

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are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the

guilty queen.”20

Dedalus is focused and obsessed with the true identity of Hamlet

and Shakespeare’s reasons for writing the play because the play

echoes his own experience as one who has lost his understanding

of the family, who feels betrayed by circumstances that have

disrupted his own family, and who is unable to live happily or

peacefully because of this traumatic disruption. Not only does

Dedalus give the example of a disrupted family to mirror his own

life, but he allows his own resentment and feelings of betrayal

toward his mother to come through in his argument. Dedalus

recognizes and empathizes with Shakespeare’s need to represent

the traumatic circumstances of his own life in the play, and

Joyce represents Dedalus’ traumatic de-filiation for him with the

constant reminder of the loss of the mother, and thereby the

disruption of his former status as a son.

Bloom is also troubled throughout the text due to his wife

Molly’s multiple acts of infidelity, the knowledge of which

revisits him throughout the text as an anxiety that further


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constitutes his recognition of a loss of the stability of his

former familial life, as a reminder of his failure as the head of

his family. In the chapter “Lestrygonians,” Bloom sees his

wife’s lover Blazes Boylan as he walks down the street, as he

thinks to himself, “Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup

trousers. It is. It is.”21 Bloom then flees the scene and enters

the National Museum where he ogles the forms of the classical

nude statues, presumably to reassert his sexual masculinity.

This visual trigger of Boylan and the emasculating effect it has

on Bloom constitutes a traumatic awareness of his inadequacies as

a husband and as the head of a family. The memory of having lost

part of family means also having lost a sense of control and

balance over one’s home life, and this mirrors Bloom’s knowledge

of his wife Molly’s infidelity. His anxiety at his father and

son’s death both supplements and is reflected by Molly’s

infidelity, further underscoring his lack of agency and self-

determination. In another way, the traumatic encounters that

threaten his security and sense of self highlight Bloom’s status

as an outsider in Dublin society, as he stands out conspicuously


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to the rest of the community as a Hungarian Jewish immigrant in

predominantly Catholic Dublin. Bloom’s traumatic memories bring

attention not only to the individual incidents that brought them

about but other aspects of his character that segregates him and

defines him as an “other,” or an exile.

These two traumatic episodes involving the death of a close

family member constitute much of what defines these two

characters in the novel. The loss of his mother and his

difficult relationship with his father makes Dedalus’ lack of

connection to Ireland as a homeland that much more prominent, and

Bloom’s memory of his lost son and father makes his lack of

control over his home life that much more painful to him. The

traumatic experience of family deaths that these characters could

not prepare for causes them not only regret, but also an

alienation from the culture and atmosphere of Dublin, an

atmosphere that was already rife with conflict from various

avenues, not the least being in its relation to Imperial Britain.

The alienation and dissatisfaction constituent of Dedalus and

Bloom’s characters and the de-filiation that they both experience

serve to represent the larger cultural experience of trauma under

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colonial rule. In this way, the personal experience of trauma

opens the door to the historic trauma of colonialism, showing how

the painful, paralyzed realizations occurring to Bloom and Joyce

are perpetuated and intensified by the shared experience of the

colonized.

Dedalus and Bloom experience the personal trauma in the

deaths of loved ones, but as Dubliners living under British

colonialism in the early twentieth century, they also live

through Caruth’s notion of historical trauma. The novel

frequently depicts the characters’ encounters with characters

that act as vicarious examples of English arrogance and

prejudice, or Fenian nationalists and members of the Celtic

Revival. Joyce himself wrote extensively about colonial politics

and British-Irish relations, lambasting the indifference and open

hostility of the British parliamentary parties in their ambiguous

treatment of the Irish, as in his essay “Ireland at the Bar,” in

which he writes:

“Considering how England sees the Irish question as pivotal to her own

internal politics and yet proceeds with excellent judgment disposing of

the most complicated questions of colonial politics, an observer can

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only wonder whether St. George’s Channel does not open a greater abyss

than the ocean between Ireland and her arrogant mistress. Indeed, the

Irish question is still unresolved today, after six centuries of armed

occupation and over a hundred years of legislation that reduced the

population of the unhappy island from eight to four million, quadrupled

the taxes, and further entangled the agrarian problem with many extra

knots.”22

In this and other essays, he argues that the English and Irish

parliaments were corrupt and ineffective, as ministers for

generations promised Home Rule to the Irish without ever

delivering, all the while exploiting the population through

colonial practices that kept most of the country in poverty.

Though Joyce in his own life was never totally clear or

singularly committed on his views of the fight for Home Rule, the

novel clearly makes strong criticisms of both the Unionist and

the Nationalist side of the Irish question. The fact that there

was a divide between Irish citizens in the early twentieth

century over how their nation should be governed was not

traumatic in and of itself, but the intensely opposed and

frequently violent way in which this disagreement played out in

22 James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing 146.

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the lives of the Irish gives reason to call this era traumatic.

Joyce also wrote critically of the Catholic Church’s place in the

British-Irish conflict, writing that, “the most powerful weapons

that England may use against Ireland are no longer those of

Conservatism, but of Liberalism and the Vatican.”23 Joyce argues

that the Church served to covertly enforce colonial rule by

maintaining a passivity in the Irish, discouraging them from

agitating for better political representation or from outright

rebellion, instead encouraging a subservient obedience to the

Vatican, a cultural relationship Joyce viewed as another form of

foreign rule. And while Liberal ministers in parliament like

William Gladstone made cursory advancements with multiple Home

Rule bills in the British House of Commons, the House of Lords

vetoed these bills, thus invalidating any advancement the Irish

could make toward self-government. In Joyce’s view, the Church

and the Parliament were equally effective in subjugating the

Irish through coercive tactics and brutalizing intimidation. The

political and cultural environment of this period would rightly

be called paralytic, as any advancement made in these fields was

23 Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing 144.

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temporal and ephemeral, and likely to be reversed or nullified by

the British government in following years. It might also be

called “traumatic,” in that the experience of subjugation, lack

of political suffrage, and wide cultural divides were all

something endlessly repetitive for the Irish, something that

defined their culture and served as a reminder of the need to

progress and move beyond these divides.

Joyce frequently displays the dissatisfaction of this time

period in his novels, and the multiple divides that characterized

it, as in the episode “Nestor,” when the school headmaster of the

school where Stephen teaches explains to him that, “England is in

the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance,

her press. And they are the signs of a nation’s decay.”24 The

headmaster, a defender of England, displays here a certain

ideology that betrays a distinct and almost violent antipathy

toward Jews, in a way that directly mirrors the stereotypes and

cultural superiority of English attitudes toward the Irish. The

episode here portrays a re-working or re-orientation of colonial

violence and prejudice originating from Britain’s relationship to


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Ireland, instead directed toward another marginalized group of

Irish society, the Jews. In this episode, the headmaster has

been interpellated by the governing ideology of colonizing

Britain, as he admires and romanticizes the beliefs that

constitute empire and attempts to build a notion of Irish

exceptionalism and individualism around these same beliefs, which

disguises the actual bigotry that underlies them. In other

episodes, Joyce takes a more lighthearted comic approach to the

innumerably disparate aspects of Irish culture. In the first

scene of “Wandering Rocks,” Joyce depicts Father John Conmee

walking through Dublin, with the images and faces that he sees

reminding him of different practices and aspects of Catholicism,

as when the narrator relates, “He passed Grogan’s the tobacconist

against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful

catastrophe in New York. Unfortunate for people to die like

that, unprepared. Still, an act of perfect contrition.”25 Joyce

satirizes the certainties and the immovable belief structure of

Irish Catholicism in this section, showing how the priest can

only understand the world through the limited frame of faith, and


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how this frame provides constant reassurance but is largely

ceremonial, as when the narrator states, “Father Conmee reflected

on the providence of the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs

where men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to

make fires in the houses of poor people.”26 Joyce thus presents

an amusing version of Irish culture that is naively harmless, yet

he subtly suggests that this religious viewpoint, by its reliance

on convention and ritual, maintains an ignorance of the larger

realities of Ireland’s place in the world, which is stultified by

the governing colonial rule of Britain and the cultural rule of

the Vatican. Joyce characterizes the Church in this way to show

how its presumed dedication to social justice and the right way

of living ignores the real experiences of the Irish, as when

Father Conmee walks passes the onelegged sailor on crutches,

callously thinking to himself, “of soldiers and sailors, whose

legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending their days in some

pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey’s words: If I had served my God as I

have served my king He would not have abandoned me in my old days.”27 This

tangent has no discernible purpose and serves as little good to 26 Joyce, Ulysses 218.27 Joyce, Ulysses 219.

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the paraplegic man, and in this way Joyce characterizes the

Church as unable to serve as any specific, material aide to the

man or to the Irish at large. The Church is instead satirically

represented as an indifferent, vaguely spiritual institution that

maintains the status quo of colonial Dublin by invoking realms of

the mystical, and has little to offer those who suffer in poverty

or destitution.

Caruth’s theory of trauma can be broadly understood in

reference to the historic experiences of many cultural groups and

identities, including those groups that have experienced

domination, oppression or war in some context. Trauma theory as

a way of studying culture is indeed highly compatible and

comparable to postcolonial studies, which analyzes the legacy and

consequences of imperialism and colonialism that was in many

cases violent, exploitative, and traumatic for the colonial

subjects. Many Joyce scholars writing on postcolonialism in

Ulysses take note of the relationship between early 20th century

colonized Dublin and Imperial Britain, which they argue makes

itself known in the text by Joyce’s modernist style and his

inclusion of specific details that are representative of the

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relationship: in characters’ various experiences of destitution,

in a character representing an English faux-anthropologist

attempting to understand the “real” Irish experience, and in a

confrontation between a fierce nationalist and a metropolitan

dandy. Many of the arguments of these critics can be furthered

and expanded upon with fruitful results when examined in

reference to trauma theory, which could seek to explain how the

colonial relationship is repeated and contextualized within the

text. The argument of postcoloniality in Joyce’s work largely

shows that the traumatic experience represented in characters’

repetitious thoughts of pain, loss, and inadequacy in their

personal reflections is echoed and magnified by the experience of

colonialism in Ireland.

Colonial trauma is present within the text representing the

colony in the same way that it is present in the actual spaces of

the colony itself, visible in the plain dissatisfaction of the

characters and in the repressed conflict of city life in Dublin

in 1904. In the actual history of modern Dublin, the violence

that had been manifested and hidden in the paralysis of colonial

trauma made itself visible by the time of the various rebellions

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that brought armed conflict to the countryside and turned the

small metropolitans in the North and South into warzones and

neighbors into enemies and conspirators. Though Ulysses does not

depict any of these insurrections directly, Joyce wrote the novel

while the Easter Rebellion was taking place and during the whole

of the Anglo-Irish war, during which at least 1,200 died, and

Britain and Ireland’s union came to a violent end. The guerilla-

like violence of the two-year war and the utter lack of effective

diplomatic and political action must have influenced Joyce

writing in Trieste, Zurich and Paris as they lent a necessary

chaotic and disruptive atmosphere to the representation of Dublin

in Ulysses. Writing the specific scenario of 1904 Dublin knowing

that it would in twelve years time devolve into a site of urban

warfare created and reinforced Joyce’s understanding of Dublin as

volatile, contentious, and ready to explode in violence. In

“Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality, and the Politics

of Space,”28 Enda Duffy argues that the real destruction of the

city of Dublin by British forces coinciding with the Easter

28 Enda Duffy, “Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Space,” Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2000).

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Rising of 1916 influenced Joyce’s modernist style, which depicts

the dark horror of the modern city-scape. Modernism is not

simply a skillful method of writing displaying the prowess and

intelligence of the author, but the only style by which violence

and impending destruction can be represented in the narrative.

Joyce deliberately distorts the narrative coherence of the story

as a way of showing the lack of cohesion and the conflict that

will soon boil over to revolt in the cityscape in years to come.

Duffy reads a conflict of interest in Joyce’s novel, as it can be

read either “partly as a record of nationalist desires, as a

litany of the varieties of ressentiment that are the stock-in-

trade of late colonial national movements,” and “as a kind of

pattern book of the manifold varieties of the metropolitan blasé

attitude,”29 meaning that Joyce’s text is unable to clearly

depict the brutal realities of colonial rule under Britain but is

resigned to a flaneuristic text in which Bloom is “inevitably in

thrall to the various ideologies that have interpellated him,”30

and the novel’s double-meaning reflects its uncertainty about its

political standpoint. Just as the political choices for the 29 Duffy 41.30 Duffy 47.

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Irish were limited and unappealing, either through Sinn Fein’s

radical yet unclear nationalism or the ineffectual conciliatory

Irish Parliamentary Party, the novel presents no clear political

way out of stagnation and the violence of colonial trauma.

Bloom’s lack of direction and decisiveness in the text represents

not only his own personal trauma but also the trauma of the

entire island in being unable to direct their desire for self-

governance in any positive direction. The lack of direct

political engagement in the text corroborates this

interpretation, as neither Bloom, nor Dedalus nor any other

character is truly able to do anything substantial to alter the

colonial situation of Dublin. The inability of the characters to

address or confront colonialism in their lives reflects the

inability of the Irish population to confront the realities of

imperial rule. Duffy also notes the marginality of the

characters from any sphere or center of political life, writing

“ostracized solitariness is the condition of every citizen in the

city.”31 It is noteworthy that most of the political engagement

of the text takes place not in the parliament building or a town

31 Duffy 49.

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hall but in pubs, a cabman’s shelter, and at home, as the

public’s debate on independence is not capable of being part of

political discourse, but is marginalized to spaces outside of

spheres of influence where it can have little effect. This

uncertainty of purpose and permanent condition of marginality

reflects Caruth’s understanding of trauma, in repeating the

traumatic experience of exclusion and subordination without fully

understanding it or relieving oneself of it.

The traumatic encounters and repetitions always coincident

with the violence of colonialism were supplemented in Ireland by

the traumatic experience of a country developing from the tribal

and kingdom-societies of the past into the modern nation-state.

Joyce represents the anxiety of the modernizing society in

episodes of the novel depicting the recognition of traditions of

the past in the context of the present, including Bloom’s brief

encounter in the church in “Lotus Eaters,” during which he

imagines communal wine being replaced with Guinness, and Dedalus’

inability to pray for his mother, as he is unable to reconcile

the religious observance with his personal atheism. But in

another way, the disruptive and incoherent narrative associated

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with Joyce’s literary modernism also displays the fragmentary,

anxious status of Ireland’s attempt at modernization in a society

without the clear traditions of the past to guide it. In

Marjorie Howe’s “‘Goodbye Ireland I’m going to Gort’: Geography,

Scale, and Narrating the Nation,”32 the critic describes how

Ireland’s transition from a pre-modern agrarian society to a

specifically colonial modernity was traumatic and uneven, and how

in the early twentieth century, “emigration, the decline of the

Irish language and the imperial origin of national schools were

traumatic, much discussed, and specifically colonial issues.”33

The transition was indeed historically chaotic and uncontained,

as the Great Famine of the 1840’s, the Land Crisis of the 1880’s,

and the mass emigration of half the country’s population

contributed to the difficulty of the country in maintaining its

public finances and in even providing security and food for its

population, thus contributing even more greatly to the country’s

colonial dependence on Britain and preventing its capacity for

self-governance. Howe argues that the inclusion of Ireland into

32 Marjorie Howes, “‘Goodbye Ireland I’m going to Gort’: Geography, Scale, andNarrating the Nation,” Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2000).33 Howes 63.

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the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century was incomplete and

ineffective, and how the growing nationalism of this era did

little to alleviate the traumatic experiences of the Irish. I

would suggest that this uneven balance between the modern and the

archaic that is depicted in Joyce’s text is representative of the

trauma of the colonial experience, in which the rapidity and

urbanization of industrial modernity conflicted with the

traditions of Irish identity, causing an irreconcilable rift

between the modernity that would bring Ireland to economic power

and self-determination and the nationalism that would seek to

preserve its culture and independence at all costs. This trauma

between ideologies is represented repeatedly in the text as

characters confront both the new and the old in Dublin life, and

are unable to fully amalgamate both modernity and community into

their experiences and understanding. This discrepancy between

understandings of the past and the present is represented in

Episode 6, “Hades,” in which the narrator relates Bloom’s

thoughts as he walks through a cemetery after Paddy Dignam’s

funeral, narrating, “Mr. Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by

saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone

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hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands.

More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living.

Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant

him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them

together to save time.”34 This break in the appreciation of

tradition and a modern logic for sensibility is indicative of the

cultural trauma at play in the whole text, as Bloom is unable to

reconcile the traditional identity and practices of the community

with his own thoughts and beliefs, which are rooted in the

modern. Bloom’s inability to appreciate the archaic with the

modern represents Ireland’s transition into the modern world as a

modern nation-state, constantly confronted with the mythologies

and totems of the past but confronted with the realities and

demands of the modern world. Ireland’s difficulty in reconciling

the past with the present also displays the effects of the

colonial project in that country, in that the ritualistic

cultural practices looking toward the past prevent the colony

from becoming independent and modern of its own volition.


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The complex and contentious political environment of Ireland

and Britain in the twentieth-century appears in Ulysses both

implicitly in its hyper-diverse narrative style that entertains

multiple perspectives and as explicit in actual debate occurring

numerous times in the narrative, most memorably in the “Cyclops”

episode. Joyce takes a direct critical view of nationalism in

this episode by challenging the simplistic militaristic and

pastoral narrative favored by nationalists and the Gaelic

society, and in doing so, he criticizes the colonial project that

also sought to define the Irish in a way that limited and

subjugated them. Emer Nolan argues in “State of the Art: Joyce

and Postcolonialism”35 that though Irish nationalism attempted to

transform the colonial state of Ireland so that the sectarian

differences could be replaced by principles of equality that

would legitimize Ireland as an independent state, Joyce

complicates the aims and views of the nationalist project in

“Cyclops” by showing that nationalism as a political thought

largely carries the same prejudices and biases towards outsiders

that colonial imperialism does. Nolan writes that, “Kiernan’s 35 Emer Nolan, “State of the Art: Joyce and Postcolonialism,” Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2000).

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pub is strikingly at odds with, even subversive of, the imagined

milieu of a Gaelic nationalism which promoted cultural purity, a

closed and repressive view of native tradition,”36 due to the

scene’s cacophonous relation of voices that are hardly if at all

able to be assimilated into a singular national identity. Both

the dialogue and the narration in this scene come across as

cryptic and indirect, only partially signifying recognizable

topics, and often digressing entirely from the scene itself into

satirical lists of Irish legends of the past, some real and some

fantasies. This fracturing of communication in the scene can be

noted regularly in the text, as when the narrator relates the

spoken lines:

-What’s your opinion of the times?

-I think the markets are on a rise, says he, sliding his hand down his

fork.

So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says:

-Foreign wars is the cause of it.

And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket:

-It’s the Russians wish to tyrannise.

36 Nolan 80.

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What the bar’s denizens refer to here cannot be readily

discerned, and this difficulty in communication reflects the

larger cultural experience of being unable to address the real

and serious problems affecting the Irish nation. It is also

almost impossible to tell who is who and what they are saying,

further complicating this discussion of the nation by displaying

the discussers’ vagaries and hostilities toward the outside

world. The denizens are instead distracted by phantom

oppressors, romanticized visions of the past, and vague

possibilities for future rebellion, none of which have relevance

to 1904 Ireland or actual, real political action, as when the

citizen states, “Those that came to the land of the free remember

the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a

vengeance, to cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of

Kathleen ni Houlihan.”37 Nolan argues that the bar’s denizens,

despite their desire for nationalism, represent the colonial

notion of the subaltern, who is unassimilable into the state

under which he or she lives, and is thus unable to contribute to

the discourse of power in the state. In this way, colonialism as


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an ideological force indoctrinates the colonized into nationalism

by giving them no other option toward self-determination and

identity. Nationalism becomes a counterpart to the colonial

project as an ineffective reaction toward injustice that only

intensifies the colonial relationship without removing the cause

of it or progressing toward any future of independence from the

Empire. Yet Joyce doesn’t seem to totally disregard the hostile

arguments of the citizen, as many of the character’s diatribes

accurately represent the colonial trauma inflicted by Imperial

Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, as he asks, “Where are our

missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of

four, our lost tribes,”38 referring to the Irish diaspora

following the potato famine and land crisis of the nineteenth

century. This may be one of many impassioned points in the

citizen’s argument, but it is rooted in the actual historical

experience of Ireland. Joyce writes the scene partly with

sympathy and understanding of the anger of the citizen, though

Joyce implies that the citizen’s solutions to colonial injustice

are naively militaristic and self-aggrandizing. He seems to give


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more support to Bloom’s argument, that the colonial hostilities

of Britain should not be resolved through violent means, as Bloom

says, “But it’s no use. Force, hatred, history, all that.

That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred.”39 Bloom’s

argument is characterized by an ambivalent acknowledgment of

Ireland’s troubles lacking the forthright aggressiveness of the

citizen. He seems to think that injustice in all forms should be

resisted through compassionate means and love, as the narrator

relates, “Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist.

Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy

that has the bicycle. M.B. loves a fair gentleman.”40 The

implication of this narrative of free indirect discourse is that

despite the hostile conditions of colonial Ireland, there is love

that transcends the anger of colonialism, though this idealistic

vision is not entirely appropriate to the real lived conditions

of colonial Ireland. Both Bloom’s and the citizen’s arguments

are not entirely complete or applicable in practice, but they

display certain political and ideological positions that have

definite influence in a sense of public discourse. The denizens’39 Joyce, Ulysses 333.40 Joyce, Ulysses 333.

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collective discourse, according to Duffy, displays a cultural

“hybridization,” which incorporates many of the different beliefs

and practices of the Irish, as he writes, “Joyce’s practice of

writing reflects the multiple possibilities for future

development which belonged to the colonized Irish by virtue of

the cultural damage, or hybridization, they have suffered,”41

giving voice to those in Irish society that may have been

unheard. Joyce’s inclusion of many disparate voices in this

scene is not meant to parody or belittle the Irish, but to

portray the lack of, and need for, coherent political

representation and the actual state of multiplicity and hybridity

at play in Irish culture. Joyce seems to suggest that there is

no singular political ideology to be gleaned from all of the

debates and discussions on nationalism and Ireland’s place in the

world, but rather a medley or a democracy of voices to interact,

though not necessarily dominate, one another. Nolan’s argument

is largely in accordance and is supplemented by Caruth’s theory

of trauma, in that this scene represents the articulation in a

literary context of what may not have been able to be articulated

41 Nolan 83.

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previously – that of the subaltern experience of colonial Dublin

and the desire for autonomous self-rule that accords with the

hybridity of metropolitan life. Joyce’s inclusion of multiple

perspectives from what might be called the political right and

left signify a plausible solution to colonial paralysis and

trauma: political discourse and dialogue that is directed not

solely towards the oppressor but toward one another. By

participating in a political debate or discourse that is caustic

but mostly non-violent, the characters resist and recover from

the paralysis of colonial oppression by rejecting their subaltern

position and forging a sense of political independence.

The confluence of public and private traumas in the colonial

space manifests itself in a variety of ways in the novel, one of

which is in the notion of masculinity and self-determination that

is heavily influenced by the recognition of colonial trauma and

which underlies the attitudes and behaviors of the male

characters throughout the novel. The “Cyclops” episode is again

indicative of the affects of colonial trauma in this way, as the

characters exchange a variety of remarks that show what the

variegated notions of manhood meant in 1904 Dublin under British

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rule. In his essay “Neither Fish Nor Flesh; or how ‘Cyclops’

Stages the Double-bind of Irish Manhood,”42 Joseph Valente argues

that the “Cyclops” episode stages a dramatic conflict between

multiple notions of manhood espoused by the English and Irish in

the late Victorian and Edwardian period. One such notion,

Valente maintains, suggests that manhood meant exercising

rational self-control over one’s passions, which he argues was

specifically endorsed by the English middle-class. Manhood was

treated as “symbolic capital” that encouraged strict gender

hierarchies in this era, and was expanded “beyond their immediate

frame of reference and into wide ranging contests over class

enfranchisement, colonial rule, and national independence,” an

expansion which served to justify British colonial rule of

Ireland. This is one of the methods by which Britain maintained

colonial rule in Ireland and in any number of foreign colonies,

in actually dictating what the cultural dichotomies and

definitions of human behavior and identity, and thereby limiting

the population’s ability to self-identify and allowing the colony

42 Joseph Valente, “‘Neither Fish Nor Flesh’; or how ‘Cyclops’ Stages the Double-bind of Irish Manhood,” Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and MarjorieHowes (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2000).

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to be easily governed and managed. Valente argues that Ireland

was on “the receiving end of both typological barrels: on one

side, the discourse of simianization; on the other side, the

feminizing discourse of Celticism,”43 seen as both less-than-

human and feminine in relation to their English superiors. Being

at the lower end of this ideological hierarchy ensured that the

culture of Irish resistance was destabilized and not nationally

endorsed, thus ensuring the continuation of colonial rule, as he

argues that “most politically articulate Irishmen internalized

the broad Eurocentric ideology of gendered racial stereotyping,

in which narrow Anglo-Saxon supremacism quickened and

flourished,”44 so that “the Irish trauma of manhood would be

reproduced, at least fractionally, in every attempt to overcome

it.”45 Britain thus set up an ethnic hierarchy in which the

English “male” had a duty to maintain control over the “feminine”

and irrational Irish, confrming and condoning the colonial

project by reinforcing this anthropological model.

43 Valente 101.44 Valente 102.45 Valente 106.

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In this episode, the trauma of Irish masculinity can be

understood as being an extension of the colonial ideology of

Britain, one that saw cultural hegemony and domination as

something natural, inherited, and inescapable. The citizen’s

argumentative standpoint and delivery certainly seem boorish and

narrow-minded as perhaps they were intended to be, but his

character can be said to have developed because of the conditions

of colonial Ireland, in which his only recourse against the

perceived injustice of colonialism is in maintaining a hyper-

masculine, perpetual hostility against Britain and the outside

world. But his “simian” and “passionate” nature reinforces the

colonial ideology of Britain: that the more refined, civilized

society has a moral duty to maintain control over the unreason of

the colony in the aim of protecting law, order and goods and

supplies to maintain the Empire. This conservative ideology

popular during the Victorian rule of Prime Minister Benjamin

Disraeli and the Tory party still had support and credence in

early twentieth-century Britain, as Britain continued to justify

fighting wars of Empire in South Africa, Nigeria, and Tibet.

Valente argues that this “double-bind” of Irish manhood is also

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enacted in the “Cyclops” episode as Bloom’s equivocal,

dispassionate defense of an international and metropolitan Dublin

contrasts sharply with the citizen’s monolithic and narrow-minded

support for Irish nationalism. Bloom’s educated

internationalist views also lack the conviction and strength to

adequately resist colonial oppression and dominance, as he sees

more good in maintaining the status quo with vague aims of

progressing “love” in the community while being victim to the

same paralysis that affects the other characters. With this

ideology in practice in the colony of Ireland, resistance was

suppressed through covert means, by marginalizing and punishing

quickly those who would rebel violently and feminizing those with

the intellectual ability to organize political resistance non-

violently. It ensured that the majority population of the two

isles could maintain its dominance over the minority populations

for endless generations. The colonial project also ensured that

people like the metropolitan Bloom and the nationalist citizen

would be unable to coalesce into a singular political force by

segregating them into to various irreconcilable types: as Gaelic

revivalist, Hungarian, Jew, hyper-masculine, or feminine. The

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nature of this “double-bind” ensures that there would be little

middle ground between the nationalist (citizen) and the

internationalist (Bloom), since their positions are deeply rooted

in a gender stereotypes that extend to cultural stereotypes.

Here, Joyce stages this trauma as a repetitive, incomprehensible

pattern of subjugation that perpetuates the powerlessness of the

Irish male, and the lack of political force that goes with it.

However, theatricalizing the trauma of Irish manhood seems a way

of comically critiquing a pervasive and unfair ideology and

making it possible to resist these divisive binaries.

Trauma is a contingent aspect of the Irish identity in

Joyce’s work, as it pervades both the private and public

awareness of the characters, but its ubiquity throughout this

novel and in world literature displays itself something common to

many cultures throughout the world in the early-twentieth

century. Joyce portrays his characters as distinctly Irish yet

also relatable and universal in a larger sense, in a world-

historic sense of being a member of a society living under the

auspices of Empire and colonialism. The characters’ common

experience of subjugation and paralysis connects them with the

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experience of any number of oppressed peoples worldwide, and in a

way, this universality affords an opportunity to relieve the

stultifying effects of the colony. In her work “Phoenician

Genealogies and Oriental Geographies: Joyce, Language and

Race,”46 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford argues that in Ulysses, Joyce

imagines Bloom to be a cultural hybrid, with roots in Phoenician,

African, and Spanish genealogies, and in doing so compares the

postcolonial position of Ireland to Britain to other contemporary

colonies, writing that the “imaginative connections between

oppressed groups demonstrate that the postcolonial condition is

widely shared, destabilize essentialist conceptions of national

identity, and increase the potential complexity of literary

metaphors.”47 The text acts as not an exposition of a single

culture but a link between world cultures and civilizations, as

the fragmentary and variegated nature of identity represented in

the text signifies not the breakdown of a singular cultural

identity but the real representation of a world culture that

shares the common experience of oppression and colonialism.

46 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, “Phoenician Genealogies and Oriental Geographies: Joyce, Language and Race,” Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge andMarjorie Howes (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2000).47 Cullingford 220.

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According to Cullingford, including this vision of cultural

hybridity criticizes both the Irish nationalists’ urge toward

insularity and the Unionists’ defeatist view that the country’s

proximity to Britain determines its political destiny. What

Joyce seems instead to be interested in are the common threads of

human experience that unite cultures from across the globe in an

absence of cultural hierarchy, in a way that manifests itself as

a fusing of segments of culture from across the globe, a kind of

catch-all culture embodied in Bloom. There are many examples in

the text of the influence of multiple historic cultural forms on

the Irish, one of which being that of early Semitic religion in

Phoenicia. In one instance in “Aeolus,” the character Professor

MacHugh remarks in the Freeman newspaper office:

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening

to the remarks

addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend.

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. And it seemed to me that I heard

the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like

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haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was

revealed to me. 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 wealth: our cities are hives of humanity

and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner

merchandise 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. You pray to a local and obscure idol: our

temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of

Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and

the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is a host and

terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the

world trembles at our name. 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 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 image of

the outlaw.48

The professor here is relating the Trinity College Historical

society’s debate for the continuance of the Gaelic tongue, and 48 Joyce, Ulysses 142-3.

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though he suggests that the connection between the biblical story

of the Exodus and British colonialism in Ireland is tenuous,

Joyce introduces the relationship between the two stories as a

way to show the “imaginative connections” between cultures across

a wide historical gap. Bloom serves as a bridge between the

separate cultures of Irish, Jewish, and European genealogies in

the text as a permanent outsider or exile within the community of

Irish Catholic Dublin. To Cullingford, Bloom represents the

“peripatetic Jew whose ethnic identity is uncertain, who

fantasizes about the Orient, and who is subjected to the racial

hatred of Irish nationalists, embodies Joyce’s affirmation of

cultural hybridity through the myth of wandering Ulysses, the

Semitic Phoenician,”49 whose cultural hybridity threatens both

the colonial powers and the nationalist forces, both of whom

maintain power by segmenting and coalescing different members of

society into groups, alternately supporting or demonizing them in

a “divide and conquer” strategy. It is possible that by

endorsing cultural hybridity in the character of Bloom, Joyce

means to show how the traumatic experience of bigotry is shared

49 Cullingford 233.

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by many cultures, and that a global understanding of trauma can

serve to resist the cultural hegemony associated with both empire

and nationalism. Joyce at times suggests that Bloom’s

eccentricities and other-worldliness affect a kind of joyful

celebration of multiculturalism that counters the ugly bigotries

common in 1904 Dublin, as in the episode “Circe,” in which Bloom

is depicted as a political leader guiding his constituents to a

new bright future of diversity and hybridity, as he says, “My

beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you

verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye

shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new

Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future.”50 Bloom’s comic

Moses-like character counteracts the traumatic effects of

colonialism by proudly bearing his identity, acting out against

the divisive and segregating atmosphere in which he acts, and

encouraging others in this brothel to do the same. Cullingford’s

argument shows very effectively how Joyce uses Bloom as a

celebration of the multiform “other,” the representative of

marginalized members of society to point out the inconsistencies


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and fissures in the colonial project and how they can be

exploited to resist their traumatic effects. The result of this

resistance to colonialism is an identity that constitutes parts

of both the culture from which the colonized originates, and the

common aspects of identity shared by oppressed peoples

everywhere.

Trauma clearly complicates any singular notion of identity,

be it as a personal selfhood or a cultural understanding of an

individual’s home and background. Colonial trauma may be one of

the most potent ways in which a cultural identity is subsumed and

distorted by a lack of coherent self-definition, yet it also

becomes a significant part of identity as it repeats itself as

compulsion and memory. Having an identity connected to the

trauma of the past and present grants the traumatized an ability

to express themselves, to communicate the trauma that is embedded

in their self. In his work “Authenticity and Identity: Catching

the Irish Spirit,”51 Vincent Cheng argues that the notion of

Irish “authenticity,” investigated by the English character

51 Vincent Cheng, “Authenticity and Identity: Catching the Irish Spirit,” Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2000).

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Haines in the “Telemachus” episode of the novel and encouraged by

Irish nationalists, ensures a kind of static “otherness” that

encourages cultural dominance over and violence against

“inauthenticity” in Ireland. This insistence on defining another

or one’s own culture as an “other” distinct from all others

contributes to the isolationist, exclusive tendencies of both

British colonialism and Irish nationalism. Haines attempts to

limit the entirety of the Irish population into types or

“tropes,” thereby invalidating their self-made diversity or

identity. By performing ethnographic “research,” Haines

perpetuates the colonial project of assigning identities and

values to those that he observes, thereby controlling the

population by separating and placing a discursive value onto

them. The scientific efforts of Haines can be observed in

“Telemachus”, in which Stephen and Haines talk of Stephen’s

poverty, as the narrator relates,

-After all, Haines began…

-Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was

not at all unkind.

-After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your

own master, it seems to me.

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-I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an

Italian.

-Italian? Haines said

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

-And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

-Italian? What do you mean?

-The Imperial British state, Stephen answered, his color rising, and the

holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

-I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think

like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather

unfairly. It seems history is to blame.52

Haines callously and flippantly ignores the colonial practice of

subjugation by the English toward the Irish, and reinforces the

continuation of these practices by perpetuating a revisionist

history in which the English are free from blame for any of their

colonies’ troubles. In this and other episodes, Joyce uses

Haines as a comic foil to Dedalus and Buck Mulligan to criticize

the domineering yet slyly charming manner of the English in their

treatment of the Irish. In his essay, Cheng criticizes what he

perceives as the quasi-anthropology of Haines, which he argues

represents the actual English perception of the Irish as rustic,


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archaic, and vaguely literary, and the Celtic Revival’s discourse

of Irish identity, which Cheng argues was a “sentimentalized

whitewashing of sordid and vulgar realities,” that was “certainly

at odds with Joyce’s attempt to make the Irish take a good look

at themselves in his nicely polished looking glass.”53 Cheng

argues that the real cultural identity of postcolonial Ireland is

based on Frantz Fanon’s notion of colonial identity as inherited

from domination and resistance to it, such that what “ensues and

survives over time are cultural forms that carry both the traces

of the violence and trauma of the colonial encounter, as well as

the countermechanisms of survival and adaptation.”54 It is only

possible to constitute a unique colonial identity by recognizing

the effects of domination and what actions one takes to resist

it, adapt to it, and survive from it. Joyce plays with the idea

of constituting an Irish identity while depicting the heavy

influence of English culture by including lengthy parodies of the

English novel perfected by Dickens, Thackeray, and Defoe, as in

the “Oxen of the Sun” episode in which the narrator relates,

53 Cheng 253.54 Cheng 257.

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It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted

transcendentalism to which Mr S.

Dedalus’ (Div Scep.) contentions would appear to prove him pretty badly

addicted runs directly counter to accepted scientific methods. Science,

it cannot be too often repeated, deals with tangible phenomena. The man

of science like the man in the street has to face hardheaded facts that

cannot be blinked and explain them as best he can.

In these passages of parody, Joyce both shows his own prowess as

a manipulator of prose and a respect and deference to the hyper-

linguistic influence of English literature. He shows that an

Irish style or identity can never be totally divorced from the

neighboring English culture, and instead uses the influence and

subverts the authority of the English novel to create a narrative

form that is decisively Irish, thus re-appropriating the

dominance of the colonial culture to forge a new independent

culture. This identity is not solely subordinately related to

England nor whitewashed by revivalism, but constitutes an

“authentic” selfhood that has its roots both in the traumatic

experience of colonialism and in the cultural practices which

proceed with it. Thus it is not ignorance of disagreeable

aspects of culture but the recognition of trauma that is a

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central part of identity-formation and represents the real

historic experience of Ireland under colonialism.

Trauma shows itself as active in many parts of the text,

manifesting itself in the private and public lives of the

characters, defining the cultural environment that the novel

inhabits, and providing a context for the actual experience of an

ethnic group living under the auspices of Imperial colonialism.

But acknowledging the presence of trauma in the text does not

resolve its effects nor give an indication of what the future

might hold for the traumatized. Becoming aware of the effects of

trauma in the text allows a question to arise: what is the

author’s place in the text or reason for writing trauma into the

text, and toward what end where does the author lead this

historic and personal psychological form in the text? In her

work Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History, Christine Van

Boheemen-Saaf attempts to answer this question by exploring

Joyce’s use of language as a means to expose and distort the

trauma of Irishness in the twentieth century. She writes that

“Joyce’s encrypting of the experience of destitution in the

material location of his text opens up a new, intersubjective

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realm of communication which may help to make it possible to work

out the heritage of the past and transform the ghostly

uncanniness of the trauma into full discourse,”55 arguing that

Joyce’s non-traditional fragmentary style of storytelling allows

trauma to become confrontationally apparent to the reader.

According to Van Boheemen-Saaf, Joyce’s use of the English

language rather than Gaelic automatically refers the reader to

the colonial conditions of Ireland in relation to Great Britain,

reminds them of the “loss of a natural relationship to language,

the lack of interiority of discourse and coherent selfhood,”56

and undoes the effects of the oppressor’s language by unraveling

it textually. She argues that representing trauma has a

fragmenting and repetitive effect upon Joyce’s texts that causes

a perpetual self-mirroring, self-criticizing effect that follows

throughout, always casting Ireland in the shadow of its

subjugated, traumatized self. She writes that the “text of Joyce

may work to ‘tell’ us something about the incomprehensibility of

Irish history which resists representation,” arguing that Joyce

55 Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative and Postcolonialism. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 1.56 Van Boheemen-Saaf 2.

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“depicts his artist-figure Stephen Dedalus as involved in such a

circular and retrospective quest for access to the self through

compulsive repetition” told through the textuality of a

“performative speech act of the trauma of Irishness,”57 meaning

that the unspeakable condition of Irish trauma can be represented

by the work of fiction that repeats the traumatic experience for

the reader, giving them a vicarious experience of trauma. The

expression of trauma in the text is only possible by mimicking

its repetitiveness to the characters as specific events, who are

affected by them as frequently as the reader is in reading these

traumatic events, and as a discursive style, which permeates and

constitutes the entire narrative of the novel and is always

available to the reader.

As it is visible throughout the events of the text and

arises in the actual narrative storytelling of the novel, trauma

is both depicted and already embedded in the actual text. It is

already present in the text due not only to its depictions of the

real conditions of 1904 Dublin but also as a manifest cultural

aspect of Irish writing at any time. Trauma is always already

57 Van Boheemen-Saaf 23.

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active in the writing of the Irish experience because there is no

alternative for depicting Irish life, and Joyce’s work embodies

it. Boheemen-Saaf writes that Joyce’s deliberately frustrating

precision and detailed text “dramatizes the impossible condition

of a masculine/paternal/writerly authority under colonial

rule,”58 arguing that writing a singular self-defining Irish

narrative would be difficult or impossible under British

colonialism which stifles the ability to communicate the real

lived experience of Irishness. Joyce’s dramatization of the

Irish subject shows us the injustice of colonialism and creates

the possibility of escaping it. She explains, “Joyce invents a

way of encrypting the traumatic wound of the moment of entry into

a kind of language that transforms the pain trauma into a

productive force, attended with a hilariously comic effect owing

to the realization of a desperate mastery,” and that he

“represents an example of the inability to constitute a stable

self-identity, without surrendering to despair but transforming

it into sovereign laughter,”59 characterizing Joyce’s comedy and

the playful stylistic method of narration as a way of combatting 58 Van Boheemen-Saaf 74.59 Van Boheemen-Saaf 98.

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the surety of trauma. The text’s lack of traditional,

information-granting authority is also a method of traumatic

storytelling, as she writes, “the obsessive insistence on

fleshing language out on the one hand, and reducing the aura of

authority conventionally attached to print on the other, is not

just a symptom of a particular form of anxiety but also an act of

resistance against violence with which Irish culture effectuates

subjectivity.”60 The subjective experience of Irishness and

Dublin culture that Joyce wishes to transmit in the text is

inseparable from the violence that influenced this culture, and

is thus inseparable from the text itself.

Joyce’s transcription of trauma is a recognition and a

testimony of the Irish experience of colonialism, but it pares

down the actual depiction of the traumatic experience and spins

it out, multiplying its effects and examining them in the text so

as to give insight as to what the experience is and toward what

possibilities it can lead. By repeating the effects of trauma

compulsively in the text, he gives the reader no choice but to

acknowledge its power and influence. In many cases, he uses the


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narrative to break the traumatic experience apart and turns it

into comedy, parodying the lived conditions of the Irish and the

personal traumas of the characters. Van Boheemen-Saaf defines

trauma as the compulsive repetition of the “death-instinct,” a

term borrowed from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle which refers to

the frequent memory of death or near-death that propels and

drives the traumatic experience. She argues that Joyce depicts

the intense compulsion to repeat indicative of trauma but also

self-consciously self-analyses the representation of trauma in

splitting the text into a multiform hyper-stylized narrative.

Joyce does this to demand that the reader pay attention to the

occasion of trauma in order that he would be able to “articulate

the history of what can only manifest itself as an irreducible

gap in Joyce’s psyche and textuality.”61 Van Boheemen-Saaf

further argues that Joyce, by self-analyzing consciously in his

work, continued to break discursive territory in an attempt to

articulate the story which “through the recovery of the memory of

trauma might undo its consequences,”62 showing the consequences

of colonial and personal trauma in the text as something that 61 Van Boheemen-Saaf 197.62 Van Boheemen-Saaf 198.

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ruptures the normal sequences of discourse, that interrupts the

flow of narrative with repetitive, compulsive thoughts and words.

By frequently parodying and appropriating the form of the English

novel throughout the text, he dislocates the empirical certainty

of Western representation and the canon, and uses the embodiment

of trauma in the text as an “act of resistance against the

violence with which Irish-Catholic colonial culture effectuated

subjectivity.”63 Van Boheemen-Saaf concedes that it is difficult

to read a direct representation of colonial trauma into a text

that is so multiform and difficult to interpret as any one

singular significant. But she argues that the ambivalence of the

text is an intentional method of transmitting this trauma,

writing that by “testifying to the historical occasion of the

state of hybridity, Joyce wants to re-open the question of the

nature of the relationship of subjectivity to language which has

brought us to an impasse, by making his readers experience the

crisis.”64 By placing the reader directly into the static

conditions of 1904 Dublin and confronting them with the hybrid

confusion of a modernizing state facing a colonial power, Joyce 63 Van Boheemen-Saaf 201.64 Van Boheemen-Saaf 206.

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recreates the traumatic experience, as the reader is unable to

directly appreciate the entirety of what colonial trauma means

but can see many of its effects in the events of the novel and

its hybrid form. The novel’s lack of definitive resolution

reflects the lack of resolution granted by living in the presence

of a historic trauma, as she writes, “Joyce wants his readers to

witness and live the dark as a place of multiplicity of belief

and productive differentiation, where different or independent

perspectives inhabit the same place.”65 Just as the personal

trauma experienced by Bloom and Dedalus in the novel is

unresolved at the end of the novel, the trauma of Irishness in

the face of colonialism was also left unresolved by the time of

the novel’s publication, and well into the twentieth century.

The repetition of the traumatic experience in the text is

indicative of its constant presence in Irish life and in any

colonial space, but Joyce’s inclusion of trauma is not

coincidental or fatalistic, but a direct account of Ireland and a

testament to the nation’s cultural variety, its strength under

duress, and its ability to define itself as independent, at least


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speaking of its culture. Van Boheemen-Saaf argues that Joyce

uses trauma as a motivating force in Ulysses, as it drives the

events and characters of the novel forward into scenarios that

give readers a vicarious experience of the crisis of colonialism

in Ireland. Though she claims that the novel leaves trauma

unresolved at the end of the text, the three main characters

eventually reach a kind of understanding or communion with one

another that is not based around nationality, race, or religion,

but genuine human compassion, creating possibilities of not a

resolution but an easing of trauma and the formation of a new

form of human collectivity not based around imperial or

nationalistic demands but affection. In this way, the trauma

embedded in the earlier parts of the novel and coming to a head

in the hallucinatory and grotesque scene of the “Circe” chapter

is a stage from which Said’s notion of “affiliation” can be

formed, an affiliation that binds Dedalus, Bloom, and Molly

together as a new “family-esque” group which serves to represent

the larger society of Ireland, as Said writes, “this new

affiliative structure and its systems of thought more or less

directly reproduce the skeleton of family authority supposedly

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left behind when the family was left behind,”66 giving those who

are dealing with the trauma of filial and cultural loss a basis

from which they can survive and rebuild new communities.

As Bloom and Dedalus enter the cabman’s shelter after

leaving Bella’s brothel in the “Circe” episode, Bloom becomes

more vocal about the political beliefs he holds, only hinted at

in earlier episodes. In offering Dedalus to stay at his home for

the evening, he says, “Needs, Mr. Bloom ejaculated, profession

not the least surprise at the intelligence, I can quite credit

the assertion and I guarantee he invariably does. Everyone

according to his needs and everyone according to his deeds,”67

revealing a slightly social-liberal perspective revealing his

concern for others. He displays an awareness of the suffering of

those around him, and particularly for Dedalus, as he thinks to

himself, “Grinding poverty did have that effect and he more than

conjectured that, high educational abilities though he possessed,

he experienced no little difficulty in making ends meet.”68 In

these later chapters, Bloom develops a sense of fatherly

66 Said 236.67 Joyce, Ulysses 619.68 Joyce, Ulysses 629.

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responsibility for Dedalus and an awareness of others’ hardships

that might characterize him as a proponent of social democracy,

concerning himself with others’ wellbeing and the public good

rather than merely private interests. Bloom’s acceptance of

responsibility in caring for a drunk Dedalus and offering him a

place to stay displays his desire for re-filiation, as a

reforming of a personal notion of family that both he and Stephen

have lost. Bloom in this chapter connects narratives of the past

in Ireland to the present, as the narrator relates, “He vividly

recollected when the occurrence alluded to took place as well as

yesterday, some score of years previously, in the days of the

land troubles when it took the civilized world by storm,

figuratively speaking, early in the eighties, eightyone to be

correct, when he was just turned fifteen,”69 as he recollects the

land crisis of only twenty years before that left many Irish

homeless and exiled from their homeland, adding to the Irish

diaspora that would continue into the twentieth century. Bloom

here again forges a sense of civic or public responsibility and

an awareness of the traumatic injustices facing the Irish, both


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personal and public. There is a subtle connection between

Bloom’s awareness of Dedalus’ own personal destitution and the

stifling circumstances that would have brought it about,

including the colonial experience that they both live under. By

voicing his concern for his fellow citizen, he attempts to

reclaim the familial and cultural identity that had been

previously lost to him by the trauma of his personal and public

life. He then voices his objections to both the English empire

and a violent Irish insurgency that he believes serves little

benefit to anyone, as he says, “But with a little goodwill all

round. It’s all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what

about mutual equality? I resent violence or intolerance in any

shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A

revolution must come on the due installments plan. It’s a patent

absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live

round the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak.”70

Bloom understands here the appeals of Irish nationalism in

voicing a hyper-masculine opposition to the British Empire, as a

way of reacting to the violence of colonialism. But he voices


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his opposition to the violence of nationalism too, and makes

clear that political change should not be brought about on the

heels of hatred and mutual aggression, but by discussion and the

exchange of discourse. Here he reasserts himself as a self-

defining Irish subject unbridled by personal anxiety and

subjugation in his attempts to reclaim filiation in his own life

and his country’s life. By making a clear, well-reasoned

argument for non-violence, Bloom resists both the colonial

project of keeping silence among the colonized and the

nationalist project of making every citizen a firebrand, and

instead theorizes a third way of “revolution on the installments

plan,” that would bring about change through cooperation and

mutual respect. Bloom confidently asserts his political

viewpoints on the growing, modernizing state of Ireland as he

relates:

I’m, he resumed, with dramatic force, as good an Irishman as that rude

person I told you about at the outset and I want to see everyone,

concluded he, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable

tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the

neighborhood of 300 pounds per annum. That’s the vital issue at stake

and it’s feasible and would be provocative of friendlier intercourse

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between man and man. At least that’s my idea for what it’s worth. I call

that patriotism. Ubi patria, as we learned a small smattering of in our

classical day in Alma mater, vita bien. Where you can live well, the

sense is, if you work.71

What Bloom argues here is that the aim of the Irish and the

British should not be towards cultural domination and colonial

opportunism but towards making a fair and egalitarian society

through practical means of giving every citizen the same

opportunities to live well. Bloom comes across as a supporter of

socialist and labor governmental policies here, as a part of a

political ideology that was only just beginning to gain real

traction at the beginning of the twentieth century. His outward

endorsement for Irish patriotism that translates to social

awareness and responsibility shows Said’s notion of affiliation

taking its course in Bloom’s development, as Said writes in

“Secular Criticism,” “if a filial relationship was held together

by natural bonds and natural forms of authority – involving

obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict – the

new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem

to be transpersonal forms – such as guild consciousness,


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consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the

hegemony of a dominant culture.”72 Joyce depicts this scene to

show a different concept of Irish identity formed from the

imaginative consciousness of one of its citizens, one who also

symbolizes the emigration and hybridity of a number of different

cultures from around the world. In one way, Bloom represents the

affiliation that Said refers to as one who is representative of

an affiliated “global family” that transcends the incidental

failures and of the family and prejudices of the nation at large

and allows for a cooperative, egalitarian society to be theorized

and brought to the table of discourse. Bloom’s expression of

beliefs here signifies a possible new direction for the Irish

political discourse of 1904, one that would hopefully lead

Ireland away from violent confrontation and toward meaningful

reform, if possible. What Joyce means to show in this scene are

the possibilities for progress in Dublin by way of a comic scene

of casual conversation, and a way out of the paralytic stagnation

brought about by the trauma of colonialism. The trauma of

colonialism is by no means resolved at this point in the novel

72 Said 234.

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nor in the real atmosphere of twentieth-century Dublin, as the

violence engendered in the system of colonialism would spring

more rebellion in the years of World War I. However, Joyce

presents this scene as a representation of some of those affected

by trauma who might come to terms with it in a positive non-

reactionary way, and who might forge new ways of healing it by

affiliating with one another.

There are many merits of trauma theory in reading literature

and culture, and performing this kind of critical interpretation

can yield new perspectives on representations of psychology and

relationships between peoples and nations in the world. In

today’s era, in which the destructive effects of the imperialism

of the past are still manifesting themselves in different ways,

and in which mourning and methods of dealing with it constitute a

significant aspect of identity, the field of trauma studies has

significant relevance in exploring these subjects. Trauma

studies gives those who study the arts an opportunity to show how

culture serves as a tool for the communication of both an

individual’s and a society’s experiences, a communication that

may have been unavailable previously. The field has

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ramifications not only for Irish and postcolonial studies, but

for all fields relating to cultures affected by oppression,

catastrophe, or violence. In Ulysses, Joyce embeds the private

trauma of personal loss in the mourning process and the public

trauma of colonialism as a way of bridging the personal and

public spheres of Irish existence, in an effort to orchestrate

the many conflicting ideologies and experiences that

interpellated the Irish daily. There is a shared sense of

absence and loss both in coming to terms with the death of a

loved one and with the impossibility of maintaining a stable

cultural self-identity under colonialism. Both traumas are

formed by experiences out of the control of those affected by

them, and arise as experiences and memories of pain, fear, and

defeat. But by exposing the traumatic experience of colonized

Ireland in the novel, Joyce presents a way out and a way forward

from the stagnant paralysis that affecting the Irish. Joyce

represents Bloom and Dedalus as figures who can express the

trauma of Irishness, identifying the causes and manifestations of

trauma in these characters, and who can observe the positive

method of reclaiming discourse as a method of healing the effects

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of trauma. In a more readily apparent way, Bloom’s concern for

Dedalus in the last three chapters offers a kind of relief of the

trauma of the loss of Rudy, while Bloom serves to represent a

surrogate parent to Dedalus at a time when he needs guidance and

direction. The conversation they share in Bloom’s house offers

them an easing of the personal trauma of having lost a loved one,

but also represents their rebellion against the paralysis caused

by colonial trauma, as they creatively discuss philosophy and

their beliefs. Joyce writes this novel and his other works as a

way to bear witness to the past and form a new possibility for

the future of Ireland, to show that its aspirations and

uniqueness as a nation of diverse, creative and intelligent

people are not subsumed by the tragedies and violence

characterizing its past and present. Joyce’s work shows that a

cultural identity is not something granted by a governing power

or institution, but something formed by individuals and their

interactions with one another, including in the culturally

representative work of fiction. Through narrative fiction’s

representation and healing of trauma, a new aspect of identity

can be contributed to the larger understanding of culture and can

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offer new possibilities for the future of a culture, as Cathy

Caruth writes in Literature in the Ashes of History, “we encounter, across

different languages, a variety of narratives that bear witness

not simply to the past but also to the pasts we have not known,

and which, in so doing, repeatedly return us to a future that

remains beyond imagination.”73

Works Cited

Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 73 Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 2013) 92.

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2013.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.

Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Cheng, Vincent. “Authenticity and Identity: Catching the Irish

Spirit.” Semicolonial Joyce. Ed.

Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes. Cambridge, U.K.:

Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. “Phoenician Genealogies and

Oriental Geographies: Joyce,

Language and Race.” Semicolonial Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge and

Marjorie Howes. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,

2000.

Duffy, Enda. “Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, Postcoloniality, and

the Politics of Space.”

Semicolonial Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes.

Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Howes, Marjorie. “‘Goodbye Ireland I’m going to Gort’: Geography,

Scale, and Narrating the

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Nation.” Semicolonial Joyce. Ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie

Howes. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Joyce, James. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Ed. Kevin Barry.

Trans. Conor Deane

Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Nolan, Emer. “State of the Art: Joyce and Postcolonialism.”

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Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes. Cambridge, U.K.:

Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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