The Columbia History of the British Novel

distinction-smarter, dumber, unluckier, more fortunate-undergo experiences that, to a greater or lesser degree, affect their lives.

But Joyce clearly has something more in mind for his modern mock epics. He sees everyone living over and again in the same kind of universal plot, a story of separation, betrayal, return and satisfaction. In Finnegans Wake, the hero absorbs the role of the storyteller, 'a broadcaster with local wicker jargon.' The 'broad cast' is what T. S. Eliot, in a famous description of Joyce's techniques, calls the 'mythical method,' the means by which Joyce adapted the legends and plots of the past into the idiosyncratic expressions of his own time and place. Behind the mythical method is the modernist notion of a special kind of imaginative coherence for contemporary randomness, an effort to collect from far and wide but always to localize in a series of styles and ideolects that reflect, in Joyce's own phrase, 'the exaltations and degradations' of his culture.

When Leopold Bloom's name is listed among the mourners at Paddy Dignam's funeral during the day of Ulysses the afternoon newspaper drops the l. Only an explosion is left: 'Boom.' That is something of the general effect of Joyce's fiction; he distributes characters to other worlds and other dimensions. It is at the moment when Joyce's characters are -777- dispersed into otherness-the moment when they impersonate the idea of character ('If we were all suddenly somebody else,' says Bloom in the Hades episode of Ulysses) — that the idea of the Joycean parallel comes to the fore. Parallels for Joyce are indications of the repeating impulses of literary and personal history. They reveal something central about Joyce's modernist agenda: the drives, compulsions, movements, desires that constitute specific human actions are, in fact, encoded in recognizable patterns that transcend their local, contemporary expression to become a 'fadograph of a yestern scene,' Finnegans Wakes new realism, a fading photograph of the western past juxtaposed against an evening and a night in a Dublin pub.

Joyce begins his important mythic parallels with the Irish Stephen Dedalus mirroring the original Greek Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist. He continues with that all-round modern Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses. By the time of Finnegans Wake parallels are the comic diet of the book. To initial, as Joyce does, the primary character in the narrative as HCE and then to make the initials an acronym for 'Here Comes Everybody' is to give full voice to the inclusive principle that serves so much of his fiction. Joyce's repetition compulsion makes all stories 'one thousand and one stories, all, told, of the same.' More compactly in Finnegans Wake, all is 'the seim anew'-that is, the 'same,' the connective 'seam,' the imitative 'seem,' and the «seme» or seed that generates the many from the one. That same story is essentially the family romance and all of its filiations: separation from and return to the family bed, sibling and generational rivalry, marital and extramarital desire, the pleasures, pains, and intimate secrets of parenthood and spousehood.

In Ulysses the family romance is by design Odyssean. Joyce exuberantly weaves thousands of parallels to the Odyssey into the fabric of the text, but Stephen Dedalus invokes the Odyssean parallel with much greater economy when he thinks about the plot of Shakespeare's life in terms of the Homeric pattern of wandering and homecoming: 'There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering.' The same notion occurs again to Stephen in a completely impersonal sense embodied in the musical octave in the Circe episode of Ulysses: 'The fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval [which is] the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave.' Even the clichés of the day in Ulysses pick up the Homeric epic parallel. Leopold Bloom remarks -778- offhandedly in Nausicaa, 'Longest way round is the shortest way home.'

There is something inherently comic and parodic in the readaptation of Homeric literary structures-what Ezra Pound called Joyce's 'poached epic'-for modern times. Joyce is fully aware that it is preposterous to displace a classic Mediterranean epic into the confines of the local Dublin itinerary of Ulysses, just as it is preposterous to conjure all the oft-told stories of civilization in the 'worldstage's practical jokepiece' that is Finnegans Wake. But his impulses are encyclopedic and comic. His representational worlds contain multitudes. It is in this light that the Homeric parallels in Ulysses might be enjoyed as well as discerned.

The force of the parallel is based on the comedy of juxtaposition. In the Lotuseaters episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom stands on a street corner in Dublin and tries to view a woman's finely turned ankle as she boards a tram while a friend, M'Coy, inadvertently blocks his view of the woman's body. As M'Coy blabs on about the death of a mutual friend, Paddy Dignam, Bloom cuts into the palaver with the simple sigh: 'Another gone.' His sympathies are with Dignam; his disappointment is over the lost glimpse of a bare ankle. But to absorb the full wit of the scene is to recognize that Joyce recapitulates the moment in the parallel Lotus-eaters adventure of the Odyssey when Odysseus just gets a view of the desired Greek coastal landfall before being blown back out to sea.

As is often the case in Ulysses, the text itself offers the best explanations of the various narrative techniques Joyce employs in it, and the art of paralleling is no exception. During the Aeolus episode, Professor MacHugh listens to Stephen Dedalus construct a fable about Irish home life that invokes the story of the promised land of Moses and the Jews: 'I see… we gave him that idea,' the professor says after noticing that Dedalus has composed his fable out of the scraps of conversation he has just heard among local Dublin newspapermen musing about incidents in biblical and Roman history. It is the nature of a people's sense of themselves to find analogues for present action in the past. What Professor MacHugh «sees» is an instance of two cultures overlapped-Irish and Jewish. Joyce does the same for the Greek epic characters who appear in Ulysses as Irish.

Sundering, wandering, and return provide the overriding structure of Joyce's parallels, but there are Joycean plot initiators that are also uni-779- versal. In almost all his fiction, the moment of sundering is necessitated by the acts of betrayal perpetrated by rivals. Rivalry is at the very core of Joycean narrative action. He cannot imagine the conduct of literature or life without it. Family members, fellow countrymen, rival artists were all marked by Joyce as obstacles to his own success, and he chose to represent in his fiction the stories of rivalry that mark the race. Among the many titles for the discovered document that turns up as an analogue for the whole of Finnegans Wake is 'A Dear Man and his Conspirators and how they all Tried to Fall him.' Odysseus might say the same of the action in the Odyssey, and, in Stephen Dedalus's theory worked out in the library episode of Ulysses, Shakespeare surely thought the same. Plots for Joyce stem from the inability to parcel out desire among rivals. Someone has-or someone else thinks that someone has-what another wants. As Joyce puts it in the Wake, still thinking of the analysis of Shakespeare's life and art, the mine and thine of life are always at issue, rivaled and doubled: 'what is main and why tis twain, how one once meet melts in tother wants… all the rivals to allsea, shakeagain.'

Rivals are rivulets born of the same source but moving in various directions. The nature of narrative action is to set devices in motion that portray the desire to retrieve what was lost to or taken by a rival, the Wake's 'polar anthisishis,' where possessiveness is buried in opposition. There are rivals everywhere in Joyce, most powerfully described in Stephen's set piece on Shakespeare and most powerfully imaged in the twins Shem and Shaun from Finnegans Wake. The twins in the Wake are stand-ins for all the antitheses and rivalries in Joyce's work, between time and space, brains and brawn, even technological sight and sound: 'Television kills telephony in brother's broil.'

The literary action of taking back from those whose goal is to dispossess is not only at the heart of the Odyssey but at the heart of the career of the artist. To displace the more traditional rivaled hero with the rivaled artist is one of Joyce's major contributions to modernism. The artist is perpetually under attack in Joyce's vision, a combination of real and perceived abuse that cries for artistic revenge-'Hast thou found me, O mine enemy,' Stephen Dedalus says to rival Buck Mulligan shortly after fronting his other Irish poetic brethren in the library who have excluded him from a planned reading: 'See this. Remember.' Stephen's earlier formula for the artist's life from Portrait-'silence, exile, and cunning'-was also part of his almost paranoid response to -780- the Irish home front. His program is the opposite of the palaver, paralysis, and sentimentality of Irish life. Finnegans Wake picks up Stephen's message in one of the many a.k.a's for its central figure, HCE: 'Hush, Caution, Echoland,' a sort of revolutionary code in which «Echoland» is the sound and image of the artist's imaginative articulation from a state of exile. The struggle to regain control over rivals by artistic revenge becomes one of the goals of Stephen's and Joyce's modern odyssey.

In his own mind, Joyce takes over as the betrayed and exiled 'Homerole poet,' described in Finnegans Wake, a hero and writer who plays Homer's role and is played, in turn, by the characters he creates. One of the important things Joyce understands about Odysseus for his own Ulysses is that he is a special kind of hero, one who gains his revenge in part by the powers of his verbal imagination. Odysseus is as much a model for the voice of the epic as for the action in it. King Priam of Troy altered the heroic perspective from appearance to language when describing Odysseus in the Iliad, admitting that he was not much to look at: 'Yes, you would call him a sullen man, and a fool likewise. / But when he let the great voice go from his chest, and the words came / drifting down like the winter