James Joyce and Death

Mortality
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James Joyce and the discourse of the ‘strolling mort’: Death

the avant-garde way
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Journal: Mortality
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Manuscript ID: CMRT-2014-0064
Manuscript Type: Original Paper

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strolling mort, death-mystique, palimpsestic, trans-subjective, delicate

Keywords:
epistemology, inter-narrative
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URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cmrt
Page 1 of 28 Mortality
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4 James Joyce and the discourse of the ‘strolling mort’: Death the avant-garde way
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9 Introduction
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11 Exploring the representation of death in James Joyce’s high-modernist magnum opus
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13 Ulysses begins on a note of onerous anticipation and uncanny puzzlement: onerous
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15 anticipation because it would be an existential lacuna if an exhaustive inventory of human life
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18 such as Ulysses did not take into account its (anti)climax. Virtually every aspect of the
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20 spectrum of existence – education, work, leisure, shopping, sleep, family, birth, sex, death,
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22 social camaraderie, religion, politics, and art – finds a place in the encyclopaedic novel. The
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24 endeavour to locate the ‘grave’ (to re-employ Mercutio’s pun in Romeo and Juliet)
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phenomenon of human extinction in Joyce’s joco-serious fictional discourse is prima facie
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29 also a case of uncanny puzzlement. In an interview published in Vanity Fair (March 1922),
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Joyce told Djuna Barnes: ‘on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in
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33 it [Ulysses]’ (Deming 1970, p. 227). The phrase ‘strolling mort,’ used in the ‘Proteus’ episode
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35 of the book (the word ‘mort’ here means a ‘free woman’ held in common by a tribe of
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38 gypsies; Joyce, 1984, 3.373),1 which, on the surface, is a lewd allusion to Richard Head’s
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40 canting song, typifies the cavalierly symbolic ways in which death emerges in Joyce’s avant-
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42 garde art-praxis, and the kind of interpretive extrapolation it demands. This paper attempts to
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44 decipher how death signifies in the book’s maze of fragmentary references, its jarring
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aesthetic, serio-comic play, undermining parody, and ubiquitous irony. The phenomenon of
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49 death occupies a pertinent place in the matrix of Joyce’s complex philosophical outlook, his
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51 historical engagement, social praxis, and his artistic choices. I argue that his multi-discursive
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57 In keeping with the tradition of using the Gabler edition of Ulysses, episode and line
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4 representation of death in Ulysses simultaneously indicates both an affirmation and an inverse
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critique of life.
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9 Joyce’s artistic practice vis-à-vis death consists of a deliberate contrapuntal interplay
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11 of discourses and representations, with a view to de-naturalizing the phenomenon and
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13 exploring the possibility of a multidimensional understanding. The focus of representation
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15 and the meaning of the phenomenon alter with the change in the discursive/experiential
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18 matrix: the delicate memory surrounding the death of an erstwhile lover, indicating
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20 intersubjective opacity in the short story ‘The Dead’; Stephen Dedalus’ guilt-driven
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22 protracted mourning for his mother in Ulysses; critique of the nationalist death-mystique in
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24 the burlesque execution scene of ‘The Cyclops’ episode of the book; Bloom’s assertion of
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bodily rights against grave-centric religio-political discourses which valorize mutilation, and
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29 strategically appropriate death; the communitarian homage and support networks surrounding
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Patrick Dignam’s death and funeral; macro-historical allusions to wars, famines, pestilence,
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33 and the resultant depopulation of nations; and ever-present pathological references, which
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35 suggest the need for a health praxis. For a writer who, albeit jocosely, desired to ‘insure’ his
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38 ‘immortality’ through Ulysses, a product of literary ‘metempsychosis,’ the fictional

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40 heterocosm (the book as a world in itself) furnishes a secular ‘other-worldly’ compensation
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42 for mortality and mutability, with the artist playing an elusive creator-god.
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The ‘here and now’

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48 Joyce began his writing career with the story of a priest (Father Flynn)’s death (‘The
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50 Sisters’), significant for a renegade Catholic who built his art upon counter-ideological
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52 opposition to the ecclesiastical gatekeeping of the other world. For the secular and monetarily
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54 prudent homo economicus Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, the other-worldly
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57 theology of the Church – ‘the infinite and eternal’ – blocked economic initiative and
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4 discounted human effort in the here and now. Bloom repeatedly reflects that Roman
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Catholicism weakens nations by setting their hearts on the hereafter. For an Irish Catholic
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9 such as Joyce, fed on ideas of ‘going up,’ apart from his opposition to the Church’s
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11 ideological control of the intellectual, emotional and sexual lives of the laity, the other-
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13 worldly religion is a camouflage upon the problems of this world which call for redress.
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15 More importantly, for the political pacifist who Joyce was, throughout the colonial
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18 history of Ireland, the Church has been an active accomplice in the cultivation of the death
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20 cult, as the presence of priests in the martyr drama of the ‘Cyclops’ episode testifies. The
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22 death-mystique and cult of martyrdom, the hallmarks of physical force nationalism, are
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24 borrowed from early Christianity. C. L. Innes records that posters which appeared after the
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executions in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916 showed the martyred Padraic Pearse
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29 reclining pietà-like on the bosom of a woman brandishing a tri-colour (Innes, 1993, pp. 24-5).
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The Easter Rising was staged on a premise linking religious and political martyrdom – that
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33 there was no redemption without blood sacrifice. It is against the background of Church-
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35 driven nationalism and a history of violence perpetuated in the name of denominational

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38 difference and justified by divine teleology, that Bloom reflects: ‘God wants blood victim’
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40 (Joyce, 1984, 8.11-2). Bloom’s comic, demystifying ruminations on religious rituals (the
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42 Eucharist is eating corpse), structured funereal practices, the priestly class which conducts
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44 them (Father Coffey’s name sounds like a coffin), and the belief in the resurrection of the
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dead are a response to the ecclesiastical institutionalisation and mythologisation of death. He
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49 detects the devices by which the Church cleverly and effectively exploits the anxiety
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51 surrounding mortality to be a pious fraud.
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53 From a corporeal perspective, the Church’s dictates over the human body run from
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birth to death, in the form of sacraments that range from baptism to extreme unction. Its
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58 injunctions decide if it is the mother or the child who should live in case of a difficult
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4 delivery – the Catholic Church insists that the life of the child should take precedence (Joyce,
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1984, 14.215). The Church also buries the body. Suicides such as Bloom’s father are denied a
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9 Christian burial.2 It also decides the modes of disposing the body – cremation or burial. In
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11 Catholic Ireland, the church’s control of the corpse comes as a natural climax to a life-long
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13 regime of the body which consists of negative injunctions concerning sexuality and
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15 abstinence, which are internalized by the laity.
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19 The nightmare of history
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21 The representation of death in Ulysses cannot be seen in isolation from the book’s
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23 historicity. Most of it was written during the Great War (1914-18). The centuries-long Irish
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25 struggle for independence was at its gory height during the years of the composition of
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28 Ulysses. Besides references to the milestones of this struggle in the preceding centuries, one
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30 can also sense in the background of Joyce’s writings – and often within them – the Crimean
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32 War (1853-56), the Boer Wars (1880-81 and 1899-1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05),
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34 and anarchist bombings in Europe. Set in 1904, Ulysses has no direct reference to the Great
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War. But the book is full of allusions to its cataclysm. The ‘Nestor’ episode, written late in
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39 1917, during the Battle of the Somme, resonates with the War. The ‘corpsestrewn plain’
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43 the Somme and Flanders. The strife in the playground betrays the violence of the battlefield
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(1984, 2.317-8). Given the scale of losses, even for the Allies the war was another ‘Pyrrhic
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48 victory.’ Stephen’s impatience with Mr Deasy’s harangue on history – ‘All human history
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50 moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God’ (1984, 2.380-1) – is a reaction
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53 Gifford and Seidman refer to the medieval laws which denied the suicide church rites, and
54 stipulated the confiscation of his property. English law, however, permitted burial in
55 consecrated ground in 1823 and religious services in 1882 (Gifford and Seidman, 1989, p.
56 112).
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4 against the metanarratives of Christian and nationalistic teleologies that supplied a
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spiritual/idealistic warrant for life-denying endeavours. It is also the anger of youth, which
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9 had borne the brunt of war, against their elders, who were responsible for bringing the world
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11 to this state. In the ‘Eumaeus’ episode Bloom ponders ‘ the misery and suffering it entailed as
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13 a foregone conclusion on fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest’ (1984,
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15 16.1600-2). The allusion is to the Victorian fear of reverse evolution as a result of war. The
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18 most able go and die in battle, whereas the most incapable stay behind and survive, so that
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20 the next generation becomes the product of an effete parentage. The key phrase that the text
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22 has in view, of course, is ‘the survival of the fittest.’
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24 Joyce was solely devoted to the writing of Ulysses between June 1915 and 2 February
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1922. Though he was physically away from Ireland, the period coincided with the bloody
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29 rebellion and anticolonial guerrilla war that finally gained the country its independence from
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Britain, and the civil war that followed. From 24 to 30 April 1916, Dublin witnessed the
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33 Easter Rising, an attempt by the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army to win
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35 independence from Britain. The Irish Volunteers had been led by Joyce’s Gaelic teacher
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38 Padraic Pearse. The insurrection collapsed, and most of the rebels were executed following
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40 prolonged trials. There were three thousand casualties in the Rising. Set in 1904, Ulysses has
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42 only a veiled reference (Joyce, 1984, 12.669-70) to the event – to Lieutenant General John
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44 Maxwell, who was responsible for the brutal executions.
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On 27 April 1916, in the Battle of Hulluch, the 16th (Irish) Division of the British
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49 Army’s 19th Corps was decimated in one of the most heavily-concentrated German gas
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51 attacks of the World War. From 1 July to 18 November more than one million soldiers died
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53 during the Battle of the Somme, including about 60,000 casualties for the British
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Commonwealth on the first day. Thousands of these were Irish soldiers. A total of 140,000
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58 Irishmen had been killed by the end of the War. In Ireland, the First Dáil Éireann met on 21
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4 January 1919, and declared an independent Republic. The declaration coincided with the
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murder of two policemen by Irish Volunteers in Tipperary. The British Government headed
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9 by Lloyd George responded by sending two paramilitary groups, the ‘Black and Tans’ and
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11 the ‘Auxiliaries,’ as reinforcements to the Royal Irish Constabulary. A bitterly fought Anglo-
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13 Irish War followed. In early 1920, as the first Black and Tans arrived in Dublin, Joyce was
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15 completing ‘Nausicaa,’ that focuses on Gerty’s reveries and Bloom’s autoeroticism.
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18 Through the spring of 1920, when ‘assassinations, ambushes, and reprisals were
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20 the order of the day in Ireland’ (Duffy, 1994, p. 17), Joyce was working on the draft of ‘Oxen
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22 of the Sun.’ Here Bloom visits Mina Purefoy, a woman in labour. With paternal solicitude, he
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24 looks after a drunken Stephen, and decides to safekeep Stephen’s money. The Anglo-Irish
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Treaty, signed on 6 December 1921, created the Irish Free State within the Commonwealth.
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29 A civil war ensued between pro-treaty Free-Staters and anti-treaty Republicans. More
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Irishmen died in the civil war than in the Anglo-Irish War.
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33 Death dispensed by history is seen as an interference with the even keel of life, and
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35 this is a difference not of degree but of kind when compared with what natural death does to
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38 life. For instance, in his reminiscences of James Carey, one of the co-conspirators behind the
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40 Phoenix Park assassinations,3 Bloom ponders the violence done by the surge of violent
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42 nationalism to the intersubjective positions of domestic life: ‘And just imagine that. Wife and
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44 six children at home. And plotting that murder all the time’ (Joyce, 1984, 5.381-2). History
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could create strange patterns of death. Take for example the case of Thomas Kettle, who was
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49 killed in action at the Battle of the Somme leading his company of the Dublin Fusiliers.
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51 Kettle had married Mary Sheehy, for whom the adolescent Joyce had ‘conceived a small, rich
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53 passion.’ (Ellmann, 1983, p.51). The Sheehy family had lost another son-in-law, Francis
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58 Thomas Henry Burke, Undersecretary in the Dublin Castle, in the Phoenix Park.
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4 Sheehy-Skeffington (McCann in A Portrait), a little earlier. Skeffington was arrested during
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the Easter Rising under the Defence of the Realm Act, and shot without trial by a firing squad
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9 at the command of the British Captain Bowen-Colthurst. He had organized a Citizen’s
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11 Defence Force and had gone out on the streets to discourage looters. Referring to the strange
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13 paradox of the twin tragedies, James Fairhall remarks: ‘one was killed by soldiers in British
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15 uniforms; the other was killed while wearing a British uniform’ (Fairhall, 1993, p. 163).
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18 Call it coincidence, clairvoyance, or historical foresight, in Giacomo Joyce (1907),
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20 Joyce’s erotic fantasies about Amalia Popper, his Jewish pupil in Trieste, he proleptically
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22 figures the atrocities of the holocaust: ‘Corpses of Jews lie about me rotting in the mould of
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24 their holy field. Here is the tomb of her people, black stone, silence without hope’ (Joyce,
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1983, p. 6). Ulysses contains some uncanny anticipations of the terror that awaited the Jews
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29 in phrases such as ‘[death by] [l]ethal chamber’ (Joyce, 1984, 6.986), ‘concentration camp’
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(though in the immediate context, they refer to Kitchner’s Boer War camps) (1984, 9.134-5),
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33 and ‘holocaust’ (which is incidentally about the anti-Semitic violence in Barney Kiernan’s
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38 Joyce was outraged by the nightmarish history which dispensed death to millions of
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40 people who were betrayed of their destinies by wars, civil wars, and bloody revolutions. He
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42 hinted that the artist was constrained to make broader statements only in an oblique manner
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44 ‘through the scenes and characters of [his] poor art’ (Joyce, 1957, p. 118). And he wants ‘the
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reader to understand always through suggestion rather than direct statement’ (Budgen, 1960,
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49 p. 21) – a statement lending ample scope for extrapolating on every phenomenon in Joyce’s
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51 works, including death. Let us consider, for instance, the execution scene interpolated in
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53 ‘Cyclops’ (Joyce, 1984, 12.525-675). This scaffold drama chiefly draws upon the hanging
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and posthumous beheading of Robert Emmet in 1803, but it also condenses the history of
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58 sacrificial patriotism in Ireland. The list of martyrs in Irish history is long, and includes Ross
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4 MacMahon, Lord Thomas FitzGerald (‘Silken Thomas’), Lord Edward FitzGerald, Theobald
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Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and the heroes of the Easter Rising of 1916. The ‘Cyclops’
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9 episode presents death at the hands of violent history as a grotesque eroticized spectacle for a
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11 simultaneously lamenting and encouraging audience. Similarly, when Bloom is immolated in
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13 the messianic fantasy scene of ‘Circe,’ attractive, enthusiastic women in commiseration with
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15 the leader commit suicide, pointing to the mass hysteria associated with the death-cult.
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18 Death is a politically charged phenomenon in Irish history, and most vulnerable to
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20 political appropriation. Nationalism draws upon the quasi-religious morbid cult based upon
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22 the dead martyr. Interestingly, several events in Irish history were triggered off by graveside
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24 orations. For instance, Padraic Pearse’s oration at the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa
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in 1915, proclaiming the rise of living nations from the graves of patriots, is widely
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29 considered to be the starting point of the 1916 Rising. Pearse wrote in 1913: ‘We must
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accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may
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33 make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and
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35 a sanctifying thing and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood’
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38 (Pearse, 1916, p. 99). It is this blood-cult and its corollary, the nationalist death-mystique that
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40 is burlesqued in the execution scene. In ‘Sirens’ it is presented in scatological terms. When
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42 there is a passing tram to drown the noise, Bloom breaks wind and simultaneously reads from
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44 a portrait of Robert Emmet at the window of Lionel Mark’s antique shop his last words
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(Joyce, 1984, 11.1284-95). Here Joyce deliberately brings down heroic death into what
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49 Mikhail Bakhtin calls a ‘zone of . . . crude contact’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 23). Stephen decisively
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51 rejects the cult of enchanting violence in ‘Circe.’ Old Gummy Granny, the symbol of Ireland,
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53 hands him a dagger to fight the British soldiers and prays for him to be killed (1984, 15.4737-
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9). But Stephen refuses. Against the life-denying values of sacrificial patriotism, he professes
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4 alternative values of life-affirmation: ‘Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has
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done so. I didn’t want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!’ (1984, 15.4473-4).
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9 Bloom considers death in terms of soil culture – corpse as manure (Joyce, 1984,
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11 6.783). A corpse is merely ‘potted meat.’ It is fruitful to see Bloom’s comic-materialistic
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13 musings (in ‘Hades’) on death and dead bodies both in this context, and in contrast to the
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15 other Dubliners’ sentimental reminiscences of the burials of Charles Stewart Parnell, Daniel
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18 O’Connell, and Robert Emmet. With such sentimental memories, in ‘Hades’ the graveyard
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20 becomes an ironic metaphor for glorification of the past. Obsession with the dead becomes an
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22 obsession with the past. Patriotism is sorrow for the dead. Bloom’s thoroughly unorthodox
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24 and demystifying views, relieve death from religio-metaphysical conceptions, regain its
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ordinariness, and counter the other-worldliness of its orientation. They also present a contrast
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29 to history’s conspiratorial-manipulative use of the phenomenon.
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The ‘Hades’ episode presents a polyphonic discourse of death, a ‘parallactic’ play
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33 (‘parallax,’ an apparent difference in the position of planets when seen from different
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35 positions, is a word whose morphology Bloom ponders). The episode views the phenomenon
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38 from multiple perspectives as if in a cubist portrait – religious, mathematical (burying bodies

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40 in standing position will help save space in cemeteries), physicalist (if the hearse keeled over
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42 and the coffin was knocked about, will the a nail cutting the corpse cause it to bleed?),
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44 mercantile (diseases as ‘canvassing for death’), hypothetical (‘And if he was alive all the
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time?’), and universalizing-numerical (‘Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute.
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49 Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour.’). The ‘Cyclops’
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51 episode adds legalistic (discussions on capital punishment), carnivalesque, grotesque, and
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53 anatomical perspectives (a hanged man’s penis stood erect). The ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode
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not only adds to this catalogue of perspectives (allegorical, mythical, theosophical, and
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4 medical-etiological), but being written in a pastiche of period-styles, self-referentially
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illustrates the linguistic process of creating multiple perspectives.
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9 Reflections on death are conflated with erotic thoughts in a carnivalesque manner
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11 almost throughout the book. Bloom uses the cemetery for erotic fantasies, ponders the
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13 possibility of lovemaking in the cemetery, and wonders about the experience of the woman
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15 who is married to an undertaker. Mourning and masturbation happen within the span of a few
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18 hours. Such grotesque Rabelaisian conjunctions of normally incongruent elements,
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20 ‘oxymoronic combinations and carnivalistic misalliances’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 138), as Bakhtin
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22 calls them, facilitates a play with death. In contradistinction to monomaniacal and monotonal
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24 narratives, life is seen under a non-Cyclopean, many-eyed logic, and found to be
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simultaneously tragic and comic.
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30 The body of history
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32 The bizarre execution drama in ‘Cyclops’ morbidly demonstrates the distortion and
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34 disfigurement that history enacts on the body. If one historicizes Joyce, the inventory of
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history’s violence may include the body’s experiences of distortion, disfigurement, and
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39 annihilation in the mechanical warfare of the First World War; firing squads; the
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41 imprisonments and executions in the Kilmainham prison; the ‘corpses of papishes’ hung in
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43 the Orange lodges remembered by Stephen (Joyce, 1984, 2.274); the Nazi concentration
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camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald, full of living skeletons and heaps of corpses
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48 of Bloom’s co-religionists; and the gas chambers filled with Zyklon B. Joyce’s response to
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50 the poem ‘Des Weibes Klage’ by the Viennese poet Felix Beran is instructive in this regard.
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52 The lines of the poem were sung at a friends’ gathering in Zürich:
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54 Und nun ist kommen der Krieg der Krieg
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57 Nun sind sie alle Soldaten
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4 Soldaten müssen Sterben
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Wer wird nun küssen Meinen weissen Leib
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9 And now comes the war of the war
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11 Now they are all soldiers
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13 Soldiers must die
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15 Who will kiss my white body.
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18 Frank Budgen records that the word Leib in the poem moved Joyce to enthusiasm (Budgen,
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20 1960, p. 13). His enthusiasm indicates an endorsement of the ordinary erotic use of the body
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22 in contradistinction to its violent annihilation. His protagonist, Bloom visualizes his body
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24 reclined in the great bowl of the bath ‘oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved,’ and
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repeats to himself Christ’s words at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body’ (Matthew 26. 26-8).
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29 Bloom proudly looks at his penis – ‘the limp father of thousands’ (Joyce, 1984, 5.567-70).
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The recontextualisation of Christ’s words is significant in that it claims the privacy of the
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33 body against the discourse of martyrdom, especially the religious underpinnings of political
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35 martyrdom in Ireland. The scene also contrastingly asserts pride and pleasure in the body,
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38 genuine care of it, and the promise of continuation through offspring, against mutilation and
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40 mortification. This is Joyce’s response to a history that says: ‘Soldaten müssen sterben.’
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42 As opposed to the mutilated bodies of history, the everyday body of Ulysses is the
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44 object of daily nurture. Ellmann remarks that ‘[m]any novelists never give their heroes a
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square meal. Joyce takes care that Bloom should have three’ (Ellmann, 1972, p. 74). The very
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49 first sentences that introduce Bloom detail his gastronomic preferences. In Bloom’s world,
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51 personal health is considered a sign of wholesome life, and much attention is bestowed on the
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53 body and its health and longevity. Always mindful of the hygienic maintenance of the body,
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Bloom instantly notices Bantam Lyons’s slovenly appearance, and is disgusted by the dirty
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58 eating habits of Dubliners in Davy Byrne’s pub. He is aware of the beneficial impact of fresh
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4 air on memory (Joyce, 1984, 4.136-7). Though Bloom does smoke, he believes that a cigar is
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a ‘[c]hildish device’ and that ‘[t]he mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank
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9 weed’ (1984, 15.1349-51). He intends to restart the physical exercises prescribed by Eugene
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11 Sandow ‘particularly for commercial men engaged in sedentary occupations’ (1984, 4.234,
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13 15.199-200, 17.512-8).
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15 In contrast to the murderous and elegiac dynamics of the body in history, Ulysses
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18 celebrates a private somatic life of pleasure and fulfilment. Molly Bloom sees history through
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20 sensual eyes. Her view of history is one of erotic comprehension; the soldiers who fight, kill,
21
22 and get killed for nations are relevant to her only as lovers. She lost her lover Lieutenant
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23
24 Stanley Gardner, who contracted enteric fever during the Battle of Bloemfontein. Paul
25
26
O’Hanrahan has suggested that ‘Molly’s audacious love-making function[s] as an alternative
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28
29 to war’ (O’Hanrahan, 2006, p. 194). The only instances of bloodletting on Bloomsday are
30
Molly’s menstruation and the blood of Mina’s parturition. It is an irony that in many cultures
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31
32
33 menstruation was tabooed, and warranted the segregation of women while the bloodletting in
34
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35 war and crime went unabated.

36
37
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38 The body is not only the locus of pleasure and care, but also of anxieties surrounding
39
40 its vitality, and conversely, decay. Issues of disease, ageing (sign of gradual dying), and
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41
42 sexual prowess are uppermost on the characters’ minds. Bloom and Molly are victims of
43
44 anxiety surrounding ageing. By mistake or probably motivated by a desire to stall ageing,
45
ly
46
47
Molly says she will be thirty three in next September (Joyce, 1984, 18.475). She also thinks
48
49 of women who remained attractive even in their old age, such as Mrs Galbraith, Kitty
50
51 O’Shea, and Lilly Langtry. She takes the previous day’s bread loaves (1984, 4.82-3) and
52
53 plans to cut off all her pubic hair (1984, 18.1134-5) so as to look and feel young. Her fears of
54
55
being ‘finished out’ (1984, 18.1022) are reinforced by the fact that her husband rarely
56
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58 embraces her. The affair with Boylan has come as a reinforcement of her fading youth.
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13
1
2
3
4 Bloom has also prematurely aged (1984, 15.3171). His daughter tells him in ‘Circe’: ‘O
5
6
Papli, how old you’ve grown!’ The self-comparison between Bloom of the past and of the
7
8
9 present (‘Me. And me now.’) is about both marital estrangement and growing old (1984,
10
11 8.917). The problem of growth, decay, and mutability is always on top of his mind. His own
12
13 plan to ‘[t]ravel round in front of the sun’ and to ‘steal a day’s march on him’ (1984, 4.84-5)
14
Fo
15 will keep off ageing at least mathematically. Like Molly, Bloom possesses erotic antidotes to
16
17
18 ageing and decay. He frequently conjures in his mind thoughts of a voluptuous feminine
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20 form. Molly’s ‘ample bedwarmed flesh,’ ‘opulent curves,’ ‘warm human plumpness,’ and the
21
22 prospect of meeting young girls rejuvenate him. When Martha Clifford makes a
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23
24 typographical error in her anonymous letter to him, Bloom stretches the implications of the
25
26
error to affirm the plenitude of the human world around in contrast to the poverty of the other
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28
29 world. She writes: ‘I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world [instead of
30
‘word’; added emphasis]. Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word?’ (1984, 5.244-
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33 6). Bloom responds to the error several pages later in the Prospect Cemetery:
34
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35 There is another world after death named hell. I do not like that other world she wrote.
36
37
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38 No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let
39
40 them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm
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42 beds: warm fullblooded life. (1984, 6.1001-5)
43
44 Death comes primarily as the culmination of a personal bio-history. Ulysses has
45
ly
46
47
several instances of this moment, remembered or talked about. The list includes Stephen’s
48
49 mother; Patrick Dignam; Rudy; the parents of Bloom and Molly; Nancy Blake, their old
50
51 acquaintance; Matthew F. Kane, the real-life model for Martin Cunningham, who died by
52
53 accidental drowning; Percy Apjohn and Lieutenant Gardner, who died during the Boer War;
54
55
Dr. Horne, who died of stomach ulcer like Joyce; the names in the obituary columns; and the
56
57
58 drowning case at Sandycove. Justifying his rude expression ‘beastly dead,’ Mulligan tells
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60
14
1
2
3
4 Stephen that deaths occur daily and corpses crop up in Richmond and Mater every day
5
6
(Joyce, 1984, 1.204-7), and shows death as an everyday phenomenon when seen on a social
7
8
9 level. The thought of decay and death on a universal scale inspires nausea in Bloom: ‘Dead:
10
11 an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world. Desolation. Grey horror seared his flesh. .
12
13 . . Cold oils slid along his veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak’ (Joyce,
14
Fo
15 1984, 4.227-32). Such depressing visions of cosmic and historical futility suggest that only by
16
17
18 experiencing the body as a lively everyday phenomenon, as Bloom does, can the crude
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20 automatized processes be transformed into ‘warm fullblooded life.’
21
22
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23 Framed by mortality
24
25 What is routine and everyday on the universal scale is singular at the individual level.
26
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28 For the Dignam family, which lost its head, 16 June is a day of loss and bereavement, a day
29
30 that will always be remembered. Death and the act of dying have an experiential profundity
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31
32 both for the dying and the bereaving, which Joyce places beyond parody. This is evident in
33
34 Rudolf Bloom’s suicide. On their way to Dignam’s funeral, Bloom’s co-passengers in the
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35
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37
carriage discuss suicide without being aware that Bloom’s father poisoned himself. Bloom
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38
39 remembers his father’s last wishes in the words of the deceased: ‘Poor old Athos [the old
40
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41 man’s dog]! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in
42
43 the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away’ (1984, 6.125-7). Why did Rudolf
44
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Bloom commit suicide? Probably, due to loneliness after the death of his wife, or because he
46
47
48 was exhausted with life. Rudolf was a pathetically lonely widower who used to sleep with his
49
50 dog and make love to Molly’s old clothes. His son poignantly reflects on the church’s refusal
51
52 of a Christian burial to suicides: ‘They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the
53
54 grave. As if it wasn’t broken already’ (1984, 6.346-8). That Rudolf Bloom purchased ‘a new
55
56
57 boater straw hat’ (1984, 17.629-32) before his suicide speaks volumes about his inner life,
58
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60
15
1
2
3
4 which contrasts with the matter-of-fact manner in which Joyce makes Bloom recollect the
5
6
scene of the inquest.
7
8
9 The reality of inner life which precedes a death possesses an experiential intensity
10
11 which is not accessible to another person, especially in a world marked by inter-subjective
12
13 opacity. The world of the dying and the bereaving has a singular experiential value
14
Fo
15 (paradoxically, death is understood as the end of experience) which is beyond external
16
17
18 comprehension. In Joyce’s works, the validity of its experiential truth is left intact, and resists
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20 the label of sentimentality. Despite the representative inadequacy of narrative art to capture
21
22 this experiential truth, he endeavours to grapple with its pathos. A notable instance is young
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24 Isabel’s death-scene in Stephen Hero, in a home ruined by Simon Daedalus’ spendthrift
25
26
habits, irresponsibility, and recklessness. In her final moments ‘[h]er eyes turned constantly
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28
29 between the two figures nearest to her [her parents] as if to say she had been wronged in
30
being given life’ (Joyce, 1956, p. 169).
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31
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33 The world of the bereaved also has an intensity, but of a different kind. For example,
34
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35 full sexual relations between Bloom and Molly came to an end with their infant-son Rudy’s
36
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38 death. For the young Stephen of A Portrait, his mother was a refuge from the callous forces
39
40 of the harsh male world outside home. The intimate and tender nature of his bond with her is
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42 clear from the fact that though she is weighed down by housekeeping under arduous financial
43
44 conditions, she scrubs him even when he is a university student (Joyce, 1956, p. 107). In
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ly
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47
Ulysses Stephen has lost his mother, and that is one of the complex reasons why he is so
48
49 destitute. His famous reluctance to take a bath is thus overdetermined, and on Bloomsday it is
50
51 also in this sense part of his mourning for her. Mulligan’s pseudo-scientific sophistry (Joyce,
52
53 1984, 1.204-7), referred to earlier, insensitively objectifies this reality, but fails to counter its
54
55
truth. Stephen remembers her in death-bed:
56
57
58
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60
16
1
2
3
4 a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus’ song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the
5
6
long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe
7
8
9 and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words,
10
11 Stephen: love’s bitter mystery. (1984, 1.249-53)
12
13 Stephen’s sorrow is all the more because he had refused, due to his ideological convictions,
14
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15 when she asked him to kneel down by her death-bed and pray.
16
17
18 As we saw with Rudolf Bloom’s straw hat, even objects partake of the intensity of
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20 death. The lamb wool corselet that Molly knitted for Rudy, and with which she buried him
21
22 (Joyce, 1984, 14.269) and the bowl of china into which Stephen’s mother vomited the bile in
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24 her deathbed (1984, 1.108-10) are experiential tokens of a life that is unknown, of an
25
26
unaccounted history. Such objects need not be directly related to death to attain this intensity.
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28
29 The operating factor is that they are framed by loss, by absence, by finitude. Small things of
30
ordinary human life matter because they are framed by mortality. The finitude of life imparts
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33 an existential momentousness and an emotional gravity to non-events. When people are gone,
34
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35 these small things attain an unprecedented significance by ‘retrospective arrangement,’ a

36
37
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38 repeated phrase in Ulysses.

39
40
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41 Coping with loss

42
43 An important weapon of mortals against the finitude of their existence is an age-old
44
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idea – the promise of cross-generational continuity. The maturation of children reminds

46
47
48 parents of their youth and ageing. In children, they see a repetition of their own biological
49
50 life. Molly thinks that Milly’s breasts are bouncing in the blouse like hers, and people look at
51
52 her the way they did when she was her daughter’s age (Joyce, 1984, 18.1036). The genetic
53
54 similarities between parents and children and between siblings are touchingly drawn in
55
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57 Ulysses. Though estranged from his father, Stephen thinks of the man (his father) with his
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60
17
1
2
3
4 voice and his eyes (1984, 3.46). Bloom considers himself partly unfortunate in this regard
5
6
because he has lost his son. Seeing Simon Dealus ‘[f]ull of his son,’ he imagines regretfully:
7
8
9 ‘If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly
10
11 in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be’ (1984, 1.74-7). These
12
13 are the silent moments of everyman’s history in its ancestral-generational aspect, with
14
Fo
15 recognitions that give emotional sustenance and, conversely, a sense of loss and regret. They
16
17
18 give mortal historical subjects faced with finitude what Merleau-Ponty calls a sign of
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20 ‘permanence in the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 90).
21
22 Another element of death and bereavement which help the affected cope with the loss
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24 is the fact that it has a communitarian (gemeinschaftlich) aspect. In Ulysses, Patrick
25
26
Dignam’s death, funeral, and the social response to both represent the support networks
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28
29 surrounding death and bereavement. The gathering at home for which Master Dignam buys
30
pork steaks represents this support network. Martin Cunningham, a fellow Dubliner, spends a
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33 considerable time of the day trying to redeem Dignam’s mortgaged insurance policy, and
34
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35 Father Conmee is on his way to Artane to get Dignam’s son into a charitable institution.
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38 Ulysses presents a community bound together by traditional mutual obligations and

39
40 courtesies. One of the indicators of this sense of community is the funeral procession and
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42 burial of Dignam. The procession takes a route through the centre of the city so that the
43
44 members of the community can pay their respects. Their responses express a courteous
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47
solidarity. A M’Coy, who cannot attend the funeral, expresses to Bloom his desire to be
48
49 counted, and the latter complies (Joyce, 1984, 5.169-70). Even Bob Doran conveys his
50
51 drunken but sincere condolences (1984, 12.780-3). The caretaker’s humorous story to relieve
52
53 the mourners’ grief, and Mr Power taking Simon’s arm when the latter breaks down at his
54
55
wife’s grave (1984, 6.647-8) are moments of mutual emotional support. There are always
56
57
58 others to fall back on in the event of personal and familial loss. The words and thoughts of
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18
1
2
3
4 the mourners also reveal a pre-history of common traditions and beliefs surrounding death. A
5
6
lot of the beliefs that the characters hold or allude to are popular superstitions or folk wisdom
7
8
9 [e.g. the touch of a dead man’s hand cures warts (1984, 15.2389); and the three traditional
10
11 indications of imminent death: ‘Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles
12
13 of his feet yellow’ (1984, 6.849-50)].
14
Fo
15
16
17
A palimpsestic outlook on death
18
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19 In Ulysses, we find a curious device with the help of which people interpret, find
20
21 meaning in, and cope with, death. I call it a palimpsestic outlook on death. Joyce’s later
22
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23 works, encyclopaedic and intertextual by design, point towards expanded significations of
24
25 death. By any account, the historical memory of Ulysses is more than that of an average life
26
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28 span. In the intertextual world of the book, death has no hermeneutic ground zero. With
29
30 deaths in history, myth, literature, and other arts being employed to make sense of mortality,
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32 it becomes a long-historical, pan-cultural hermeneutic of death. The larger world and longer
33
34 history afford resources for a creative hermeneutic of death by engaging life in a deep-
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37
existential manner, thus producing meanings whose scope lies beyond immediate
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39 circumstances. Everything that has gone before and we are aware of, shapes, often
40
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41 unconsciously, our understanding of the phenomenon. Besides providing compensatory

42
43 mechanisms against anxiety, fear, and agony, the grand repertoire of history and culture can
44
45
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yield narratives which are more complex and dynamic than those of universality and
46
47
48 inevitability.
49
50 Ulysses is a book in which literary, liturgical, and Biblical quotations, proverbs, and
51
52 snatches of songs, and even advertisement jingles punctuate the thoughts and words of
53
54 characters. Death is also a part of this cultural palimpsest. Culture caters to the imaginary of
55
56
57 death. Judeo-Christian, Greek, and Celtic mythologies (e.g. ‘No trace of hell in Irish myth’)
58
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60
19
1
2
3
4 constitute, often in joco-serious terms, a whole pre-structure that help negotiate the meaning
5
6
of mortality. The links between death and art are so richly articulated in Ulysses as to raise
7
8
9 them to meta-literary levels of textual discourse. A major part of Stephen’s apocryphal
10
11 psycho-biographical Shakespeare theory is based on deaths in the bard’s life. Stephen makes
12
13 good use of the apocryphal biographical information that Shakespeare died ‘dead drunk.’
14
Fo
15 This is significant because alcoholism was a widespread source of illness and death in
16
17
18 Dublin. For example, alcoholism is the cause of Dignam’s death after a defunct period (1984,
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20 15.1231-2).
21
22 For those who are affected by death in one way or the other, beyond mere emotional
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24 resource, the exercise of watching death against the backdrop of civilization affords a trans-
25
26
subjective existential repertoire and a method of apprehension. Meanings of death change for
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28
29 individuals and communities consequent to the broadening of the subjectively organized
30
lived world (Lebenswelt). For instance, Stephen’s protracted mourning over his mother’s
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33 death receives a larger archetypal signification when seen against Hamlet’s, and his guilt over
34
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35 the agnostic refusal to kneel down by her deathbed resonates against a history of heretics who
36
37
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38 died for their beliefs. In the latter connection, he also thinks of Saint Columbanus, the
39
40 passionately eloquent Irish missionary to the Continent, who is reputed to have left his
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42 mother ‘grievously against her will.’ Literature furnishes Stephen a pertinent Middle English
43
44 phrase which describes the state of his mind – agenbite of inwit (remorse of conscience).
45
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47
Lines from Milton’s monody Lycidas and Yeats’s poem ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’, which
48
49 Stephen sings (‘And no more turn aside and brood / Upon love’s bitter mystery; / For Fergus
50
51 rules the brazen cars’) serve as psycho-social aids to the delicate epistemology of extinction
52
53 and sublimates the agony of separation which it involves. Such archetypes, an important
54
55
principle of modernist literature, aid the hermeneutic of death as they do the hermeneutic of
56
57
58 the quotidian. Borrowed words, phrases, ideas, and identities furnish frameworks over a
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20
1
2
3
4 difficult situation, and often help the characters fix or creatively construct the meaning of the
5
6
situation. Such instances of intertextual play and simultaneous meaning-creation manifest an
7
8
9 inter-narrative that mediates between life and death. They provide what Martin Heidegger
10
11 might have called a ‘fore-structure’ (Vorstruktur) of understanding.
12
13 Literary representations console and convince us that human agonies and
14
Fo
15 predicaments are not banal. A sentimental memory becomes an existentially profound
16
17
18 recollection. Self-revulsion is appropriately sublimated into moral dilemma. Fleeting
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20 moments of banality are given ‘a local habitation and a name.’ Not mourning one’s mother’s
21
22 death (as in Camus’ L’Étranger) and the refusal to wear black (as in Ulysses) are installed in
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24 the realm of significant entities when ‘re-viewed’ by art against the larger horizon of human
25
26
existence. At the meta-literary level, the unidentified ‘man in the Macintosh’, whom Bloom
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29 sees in the Prospect Cemetery, and who is widely considered a personification of death,
30
draws upon generic precedents surrounding the mystery of death. Art is also part and parcel
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33 of the fond memories of the dead. For instance, Bloom recalls his deceased father’s
34
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35 enthusiasm for theatre in general, and for Leah the Forsaken (a translation and adaptation of
36
37
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38 Salomon Hermann Mosenthal’s play Deborah) in particular, and makes an association

39
40 between the suicides of Ophelia and of his own father.
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42 A bio-history
43
44 The universality of death implied in the foregoing discussion is not merely a matter of
45
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46
47
creative hermeneutic. The larger framework of death reveals a silent bio-history. ‘Bio-
48
49 history’ is a term coined by Michel Foucault to describe ‘the pressures through which the
50
51 movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another’: ‘The pressure
52
53 exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very strong for thousands of years;
54
55
epidemics and famine were the two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always
56
57
58 dominated by the menace of death’ (Foucault, 1984, pp. 142-3). The former includes
59
60
21
1
2
3
4 variables such as the age of marriage, birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, the
5
6
precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the impact of contraceptive practices, the state of
7
8
9 health, and patterns of diet and habitation. It is the significance of the biological that compels
10
11 society and state to exercise what Foucault calls ‘biopower’ through a calculated
12
13 multiplication of discourses surrounding the body (1984, p. 143). ‘People’ have been of vital
14
Fo
15 importance to kingdoms and empires as the source of military recruitment and as labourforce.
16
17
18 An outbreak of war necessitated the diversion of the labour force to the front. The mismatch
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20 between people and resources became the impetus for Malthusian views on population.
21
22 Citing Harold Wright, the English demographer, Fernand Braudel, historian of the Annales
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24 School, shows how numbers count in political history:
25
26
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in 1821 [a time of relatively good
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29 demographic progress], Ireland represented half the population of England; England
30
could ensure its own security only by dominating its overpowerful neighbor. In 1921,
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33 Ireland was ten times less populated than England; there was no longer any problem
34
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35 in conceding it its independence. (Braudel, 1980, p. 139)

36
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38 The historical dimensions of life, death, survival, and health are important for Joyce’s Ireland
39
40 because the country has a history of demographic stagnation and depopulation. The potato
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42 blight and the resultant famine of 1845-48 brought about unprecedented and long-lasting
43
44 demographic changes. 1.5 million people died of starvation and disease. Another one million
45
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47
emigrated due to the intolerable conditions that existed between 1845 and 1855. The
48
49 population of Ireland declined from 8,295,061 in 1841 to 6,574,278 in 1851. It continued to
50
51 fall through the rest of the nineteenth century, until by 1903 it was 4,413,655 (Gifford and
52
53 Seidman, 1989, p. 35). The famine also started a wave of migrations, to the United States in
54
55
particular. This gave rise to the ultra-nationalist Citizen’s epithet ‘greater Ireland’ (Ulysses
56
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58 12.1364-5) for the overseas Irish, who enthusiastically raised money for the IRA and the Sinn
59
60
22
1
2
3
4 Féin, and provided insurrectionists. Thus the potato famine and the resultant demographic
5
6
changes were to become a factor in the political life of the country.
7
8
9 That the bodily well-being and proliferation of its populace have been of central
10
11 concern to Ireland is made explicit in the idealism of the archaic sentences with which the
12
13 ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode opens:
14
Fo
15 by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than
16
17
18 by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude
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20 for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when
21
22 fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted
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24 benefaction. (Joyce, 1984, 14.12-17)
25
26
That is why, as the passage goes on to say, albeit with the usual meta-literary irony, the
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29 science of medicine was highly developed among the Celts. They accorded top priority to
30
care for pregnant mothers and infants, by establishing maternity hospitals ‘so that women,
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33 whatever their financial means, should be properly attended in childbirth’ (Blamires, 1966, p.
34
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35 153). The first maternity hospital on the British Isles was set up in Ireland. The Rotunda
36
37
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38 Hospital for the Relief of Poor Lying-in Women was opened in Dublin in 1745. The ‘Oxen of
39
40 the Sun’ episode pays rich tributes to the procreative history of humankind. The medical
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42 students who appear in the episode take up a variety of issues related to life, death, and
43
44 survival, such as sterility, contraception (or, absence of it due to the Church’s regulation),
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46
47
Sturzgeburt (stillbirth), miscarriage, and maternal and neonatal death.
48
49
50 The ‘massacre of innocents’
51
52 Infant mortality features in Ulysses as the death of Rudy, the child’s coffin that
53
54 flashes by in ‘Hades’ (Joyce, 1984, 6.322), and the VD-infected prostitute Mary Shortall’s
55
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57
58
59
60
23
1
2
3
4 child who died of convulsions (1984, 15.2579-80). The ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode is explicit
5
6
about the emphasis on this grave issue:
7
8
9 Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy parents and
10
11 seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs unaccountably in early
12
13 childhood (though other children of the same marriage do not) must certainly . . . give
14
Fo
15 us pause. (1984, 14.1273-7)
16
17
18 The references assume significance because infant mortality was a critical issue at the
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20 beginning of the twentieth century in Dublin. In 1900-04 the city had an appalling infant
21
22 mortality rate of 164.4 per 1,000, and a child mortality rate of 123.4 per 1,000. This was
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24 higher than other cities in the country. During the same period, Belfast had an infant
25
26
mortality rate of 149.3 per 1,000 and a child mortality of 107.2 (Ó’ Gráda, 2006, p. 39). The
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29 death rate among infants under the age of one was 156 per 1,000 live births every year during
30
the period 1900-09, compared to 132.4 in London (Daly, 1985, p. 244). Though the Irish
ev
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32
33 figures were not above the English average in the 1890s, they failed to match the later
34
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35 improvements shown in English cities. These do not include stillborn infants, a glimpse of
36
37
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38 which we get in the ‘misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool’ in Mrs
39
40 MacCabe’s bag (Joyce, 1984, 3.36-7). As Bloom notes, ‘[t]hey are not even registered’
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42 (1984, 8.389). Children were vulnerable to a series of diseases, most of which fell under the
43
44 category called ‘Zymotic diseases’ (epidemics; O’Brien, 1982, p. 105). Diarrhea, bronchitis,
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47
and pneumonia were the most dangerous elements during the first year of life causing the
48
49 ‘massacre of innocents’ (1982, p. 108). Infectious diseases such as diarrhea, dysentery,
50
51 whooping cough, and measles accounted for the high death rates among children under the
52
53 age of five (Ó Gráda, 2006, p. 36). Bloom himself had suffered from dysentery sometime in
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the past, and this had necessitated an emergency evacuation into a bucket of porter. We learn
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58 from her parents’ memories that Milly had had measles, mumps, wildfire [erysipelas], and
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24
1
2
3
4 nettlerash. Bloom thinks that Milly luckily did not get whooping cough, which ‘[d]oubles up’
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‘poor children’ ‘black and blue in convulsions’ (Joyce, 1984, 6.121-2). He considers it a
7
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9 matter of shame that such diseases are not eradicated. Many of these diseases feature in the
10
11 program of Bloomusalem.
12
13 The immunity of infants to fatal diseases was understandably very low. Several
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15 reasons, including lack of pre- and post-natal care, the ignorance among mothers as to the
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18 proper feeding of infants, the inadequacy of nutritious food available to mothers and children,
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20 the extra-domestic employment of mothers and the consequent abandonment of breast-
21
22 feeding, the unavailability of sterilized milk supplies, and, above all, insanitary environment
ee
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24 were given for this. Among the poorer classes additional reasons included insanitary housing,
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overcrowding, and accidental suffocation of infants by drunken parents, commonly referred
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29 to as ‘sleeping over’ (O’Brien, 1982, p. 108).
30
The magnitude of ill-health among adults is clear from the fact that during the early
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33 twentieth century, Dublin had the fifth highest death rate in the entire world. The annual rate
34
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35 was 30.62 per 1,000 during 1871-80, 29.65 during 1891-1900, and 23.92 during 1901-10. In
36
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38 1873 the city had a higher death rate than London’s Eastend (Daly, 1985, p. 274). Life
39
40 expectancy at the beginning of the twentieth century was 48.5 for males and 52.4 for women
On
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42 (Lyons, 1981, p. 185). It was only in the 1970s that the figures rose substantially to 69.2 and
43
44 75.5 respectively. As O’Brien remarks, infectious and communicable diseases accounted for
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one-third of all deaths in Dublin at the turn of the century (O’Brien, 1982, p. 104). These
48
49 diseases fell into three categories: Zymotic diseases, TB in all forms, and local diseases of the
50
51 respiratory and circulatory system. During the typhus epidemic of 1817-19, one-fifth of the
52
53 Dublin population, numbering 42,000, was admitted, of which 2,000 died (1982, p. 20). The
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outbreak of cholera in 1832 caused 5,632 deaths in Dublin alone (1982, p. 20). The city was
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58 scourged by typhus, small pox, scarlet fever, and cholera in the 1860s, by smallpox and
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25
1
2
3
4 measles in the 1870s, typhus and scarlet fever in the 1880s, and measles in the 1890s. The
5
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outbreak of measles in 1899 caused 650 deaths in the city. Milly suffered from it in the
7
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9 1890s. There was another smallpox scare in 1903, when thirty four of the 250 reported cases
10
11 resulted in death (1982, p. 115). In Ulysses Bloom is worried about the smallpox in Belfast,
12
13 which Molly is going to visit as part of her concert tour, particularly because she had refused
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15 a repeat vaccination (Joyce, 1984, 5.188-9). There was indeed an outbreak of smallpox in
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18 Belfast during May-June 1904.
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20 At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, smallpox and cholera gave way to
21
22 steady mortality from bronchitis, typhoid, and TB, along with rheumatic fever. We find quite
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24 a few references to diseases of the respiratory system in Ulysses. The ‘Wandering Rocks’
25
26
episode is particularly ‘symptomatic’ in this regard. The ‘phlegmy coughs’ of the bookshop
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29 man (Joyce, 1984, 10.632), Lenehan’s cough and wheezing (10.544), Flynn’s snuffle
30
(10.479), and the phthisic O’Molloy’s ‘white careworn face’ (10.236) could be symptoms of
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33 respiratory diseases. Besides the above-given references in ‘Wandering Rocks,’ Bloom thinks
34
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35 of the buried bodies of ‘consumptive girls with little sparrow’s breasts’ (1984, 6.625-6).
36
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38 Michael Furey, Gretta Conroy’s erstwhile lover, was tubercular (Ellmann, 1983, pp. 248-9).
39
40 Shem the penman has ‘hereditary pulmonary T.B.’ (Joyce, 1975, p. 172). At the beginning of
On
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42 the century 1,300 persons were dying annually from TB in the city (O’Brien, 1982, p. 113).
43
44 In the essay ‘Home Rule Comes of Age,’ Joyce lamented that the ‘specters’ of TB and
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ly
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47
insanity ‘[sat] at every Irish fire place’ (Joyce, 1959, p. 195). The facilities for the treatment
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49 of TB were few in the early twentieth century. There were only two facilities in Ireland,
50
51 namely the Royal National Hospital for consumption at Newcastle, County Wicklow; and a
52
53 small facility at Breda, County Down. Both were opened in 1896. Further, there were no
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55
facilities to quarantine the sick. A proposal to set up a TB sanatorium was defeated in 1905.
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58 Often, nationalist pride came in the way of proper measures to address the issue. When
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26
1
2
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4 Dublin’s Samaritan’s Committee paid the rent for separate sleeping accommodation for
5
6
families of TB victims, the efforts were satirized by Arthur Griffith, the leader of Sinn Féin,
7
8
9 as the ‘viceregal microbe idea’ (Daly, 1985, p. 267).
10
11 The lack of sanitation facilities, including a proper daily filth removal system and
12
13 sewage facilities, lack of clean water supply and personal hygiene, overcrowding, and the
14
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15 general way of life characterized by malnutrition, particularly in the infamous slum
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18 tenements of Dublin were bound to cause such ill-health. Such subhuman conditions of life
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20 which endanger lives call for praxis. It is not surprising that the first character that appears in
21
22 the novel (Mulligan) is a future member of the medical profession. Joyce draws attention
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24 away from sloganeering politics to such vital concerns as health. For Joyce, life, not death, is
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26
the supreme value. Such vital engagements might seem surprising for a writer who cultivated
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29 the image of a detached aesthete. It needs to be noted in this connection that Ulysses presents
30
life in a linguistically mediated form using all the modernist strategies of narrative
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33 estrangement. The artistic transmutation functions as an anticipative analogue for social
34
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35 transformation. Joyce foregrounds the constructed character of his fictional discourse,

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38 indicating that social reality is also a human creation like fictional reality, and hence
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40 changeable through human agency. Life can imitate art.
On
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42 References
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44 Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson and M. Holquist,
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ly
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Trans; M. Holquist, Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
48
49 Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics (C. Emerson, Ed. and Trans.).
50
51 Manchester: Manchester University Press.
52
53 Blamires, H. (1966). The Bloomsday book: A guide through Joyce’s Ulysses. London:
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Methuen.
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58 Braudel, F. (1980). On history (Trans. S. Matthews, Trans). Chicago: University of Chicago
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4 Press.
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6
Budgen, F. (1960). James Joyce and the making of Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana University
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9 Press.
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11 Daly, M. E. (1985). Dublin the deposed capital: A social and economic history 1860-1914.
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13 Cork: Cork University Press.
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15 Deming, R. H (1970). James Joyce: The critical heritage (Vols. 1-2). London: Routledge.
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18 Duffy, E (1994). The subaltern Ulysses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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20 Ellmann, R. (1972). Ulysses on the Liffey. London: Faber.
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22 Ellmann, R. (1983). James Joyce (Rev. ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
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24 Fairhall, J. (1993). James Joyce and the question of history. Cambridge: Cambridge
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University Press.
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29 Foucault, M. (1984). The history of sexuality (R. Hurley, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
30
Gifford, D., & Seidman, R. J. (1989). Ulysses annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses
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33 (Rev. ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
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35 Innes, C. L. Woman and nation in Irish literature and society, 1880-1935 (1993). Athens,
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38 GA: University of Georgia Press.

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40 Joyce, J. (1956). Stephen hero: Part of the first draft of ‘A portrait of the artist as a young
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42 man’ (T. Spencer, Ed.). London: Cape.
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44 Joyce, J. Letters of James Joyce (Vol. 1) (1957 (Stuart Gilbert, Ed.). London: Faber.
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Joyce, J. (1959). The critical writings of James Joyce (E. Mason and R. Ellmann, Ed.). New
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49 York: Viking.
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51 Joyce, J. (1975). Finnegans wake. London: Faber.
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53 Joyce, J. (1977). A portrait of the artist as a young man: Text, criticism, and notes (C. G.
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Anderson, Ed.). New York: Viking-Penguin.
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58 Joyce, J. (1984). Ulysses: A critical and synoptic edition (Vols. 1-3) (H. W. Gabler,
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4 W. Steppe, and C. Melchior, Ed.). New York: Garland.
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Lyons, J. B. Diseases in Dubliners: Tokens of disaffection. Irish Renaissance Annual, 2,
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9 185-203.
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11 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans).
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13 O’Brien, J. V. (1982).“Dear, dirty Dublin”: A city in distress, 1899-1916. Berkeley:
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15 University of California Press.
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18 Ó’ Gráda, C. (2006). Jewish Ireland in the age of Joyce: A socioeconomic history. Princeton,
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20 NJ: Princeton University Press.
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22 O’Hanrahan, P. (2006). The geography of the body in ‘Penelope.’ European Joyce Studies,
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24 17, 188-196.
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Pearse, P. H. (1916). Collected works of Padraic H. Pearse: Political writings and speeches.
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29 Retrieved from
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http://www.archive.org/stream/collectedworksof00pearuoft/collectedworksof00pearu
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33 oft_djvu.txt.
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35 ------------
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James Joyce and Death

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James Joyce and Death

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Mortality

James Joyce and the discourse of the ‘strolling mort’: Death

Manuscript ID: CMRT-2014-0064

Manuscript Type: Original Paper

strolling mort, death-mystique, palimpsestic, trans-subjective, delicate

38 ‘immortality’ through Ulysses, a product of literary ‘metempsychosis,’ the fictional

The ‘here and now’

35 driven nationalism and a history of violence perpetuated in the name of denominational

41 (Joyce, 1984, 2.16) in Stephen’s imagination is definitely determined by the battlefields of

35 pub) (1984, 17.2051).

38 from multiple perspectives as if in a cubist portrait – religious, mathematical (burying bodies

35 war and crime went unabated.

35 these small things attain an unprecedented significance by ‘retrospective arrangement,’ a

38 repeated phrase in Ulysses.

41 Coping with loss

idea – the promise of cross-generational continuity. The maturation of children reminds

38 Ulysses presents a community bound together by traditional mutual obligations and

41 unconsciously, our understanding of the phenomenon. Besides providing compensatory

38 Salomon Hermann Mosenthal’s play Deborah) in particular, and makes an association

35 in conceding it its independence. (Braudel, 1980, p. 139)

35 transformation. Joyce foregrounds the constructed character of his fictional discourse,

38 GA: University of Georgia Press.

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