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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.
11 Joyce, Ulysses 10.
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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
12 Joyce, Ulysses 89.
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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
19 Joyce, Ulysses 168.
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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
20 Joyce, Ulysses 189.
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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
21 Joyce, Ulysses 183.
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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
24 Joyce, Ulysses 33.
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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
25 Joyce, Ulysses 218.
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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.
34
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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.
34 Joyce, Ulysses 113.
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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
37 Joyce, Ulysses 330.
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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
38 Joyce, Ulysses 326.
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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
50 Joyce, Ulysses 484.
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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,
52 Joyce, Ulysses 20.
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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
60 Van Boheemen-Saaf 117.
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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
65 Van Boheemen-Saaf 206.
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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
69 Joyce, Ulysses 629.
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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
70 Joyce, Ulysses 643.
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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,
71 Joyce, Ulysses 643.
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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.
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