Burdens of the Past: Examples of Anti-teleology in James Joyce's Ulysses
Ulysses is a treasure trove of a book; you can find many hidden meanings, allusions, patterns and beautifully crafted sentences in the many nooks, crannies and wide avenues of this story about a certain June day in 1904 Dublin. Here, we celebrate a sliver of that gem: Joyce's revolt against the teleological-centered, Hegelian mindset of 19th century society.
History is more than just a theme in Ulysses; it is to an exceptional degree a condition of the novel's aesthetic production (Spoo, 4).
Teleology, simply put, is the belief or account that "there is a reason for everything", that everything move towards an end or a final cause, that there is progress moving towards that point (whatever that point is). Instead, Ulysses seems to argue that the idea of progress in history is a delusion, that history is cyclical instead of linear.
To begin, (with difficulty, since it is not easy to summarize a book about everything but a book in which nothing much happens), Ulysses is about Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) as he goes about an ordinary day in Dublin, Ireland. He goes out to get breakfast, is dejected to be keenly aware about his wife cheating on him, meets people in the street, goes into bath houses, attends a funeral, looks at the backs of the statues of goddesses in the museum to see if they have butt holes, ends up in the red light district, and finally back home. The other two main characters are Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus) and Molly Bloom (Penelope). The book is arranged into chapters reflecting the chapters in Homer's Ulysses, with its own preoccupation with specific organs, arts and literary techniques. For example, we see Bloom attending the funeral in the Hades chapter with his thoughts centered on death and religion; in the Sirens chapter, he is in a room with singers and the chapter is preoccupied with music and sounds; in the Ithaca (Ulysses' home) chapter, we see him back home with the literary technique as catechism (the whole chapter is formatted in a question and answer) and is absorbed in the idea of astronomy, etc.
Spoo's book, James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus's Nightmare takes a few of these chapters to focus on the passages that places history as the forefront of its topic. For the sake of brevity, I will discuss only some of the chapters that I feel most obviously characterizes Joyce's absorption with anti-teleology.
Chapter 2 Nestor - Scene: school, art: history, technique: catechism (personal). In this chapter we find Stephen teaching history to a room full of schoolboys. The technique is catechism--Stephen is asking his students historical questions and they answer. His question about Pyrrhus reveals his mind's preoccupation with the violence of history and its nonsensical, anti-progressive qualities. A pyrrhic victory is a hollow victory won with great sacrifice; a toll so great it negates the victory. A student's confusion with language and the word Pyrrhus leads them to another topic,
—Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.
—Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book, what is a pier.
—A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the water. A kind of a bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.
—Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.
The words troubled their gaze.
A pier may also serve as a symbol in Stephen's mind for history. A thing that seemingly leads somewhere, but does not--a disappointed bridge.
At the end of class, Stephen gives his class a riddle:
The cock crew, The sky was blue: The bells in heaven Were striking eleven. 'Tis time for this poor soul To go to heaven.
The students don't have a clue. They ask him to repeat the riddle. Ultimately, they give up and ask him what the answer his. He replies,
—The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.
The readers are as baffled as the students. One has to question if this riddle has a point. It seems like nonsense; as history to Stephen seems chaotic and nonsensical. Spoo calls it a non sequitur (it does not follow, an invalid argument). A further reading shows that Joyce, while he was visiting the ruins of Rome, remarked that "Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother's corpse." The fox burying his grandmother may also represent Stephen himself trying to bury the past. In the first chapter, while he is thinking about his dying mother (with guilt, because he refused to kneel down and pray for her while she was dying because he did not believe in her religion), we find him remarking, "No, mother! Let me be and let me live." Here again he is looking to flee the past, to bury his own history. In fact, we find Stephen throughout the Ulysses trying to bury not only his own past, but the violence of history that is always in his mind. Stephen's surname points to his preoccupation with escape: in Greek mythology, Daedalus was the artist/artificer who fashioned wings to fly in order to escape the Labyrinth he had built. Thus Spoo remarks, "Joyce was both obsessed with escape from history and quite soberly aware that no escape was possible" (161).
After class, we see the bannerman for teleology in the form of Mr. Deasy, the school headmaster, who enlightens Stephen that "All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God." Stephen replies,
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
--A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
Deasy's motto is "per vias rectas" or by straight paths. Stephen counters this in the mind with "lal the ral the ra / The rocky road to Dublin."' Deasy is the allegorical symbol for History while Stephen is Art. The two are placed counter to each other because Joyce believes that history is a prison--what had been imprisons us to what we are now. Art, however, is liberating. In the "Proteus" chapter, we see how art leads to "rich potentialities".
Chapter 3 Proteus - Scene: the strand, art: philology, technique: monologue (male). In Proteus, we find Stephen taking a walk on the strand. We are privy to his thoughts and are inside his mind throughout the whole chapter. He is absorbed in philology, the study of language--the technique is the internal monologue. Proteus in the Greek mythology is the sea god capable of changing forms; thus, change is the theme. Richard Spoo gives us an enlightening account of the dynamics between this chapter and the previous Nestor chapter, and its relationship to history and art:
"Proteus" is a repetition of "Nestor" with a difference--a movement from rigid actualization to rich potentialities, from history as closed, manmade system to the alternative rhythms of a feminized landscape. The allegorical contest between history and art, initially embodied by Deasy and Stephen, is reincarnated in the dialectical relationship, the thesis and antithesis, of "Nestor" and "Proteus," a dynamic dyad that will be repeated...It should not be surprising that Joyce chose "philology" as the science/art of "Proteus," for, after the unhappy-making big words of the second episode, there is a genuine relief in the shifting, kaleidoscopic language of the third, the many-colored "wavespeech" of Stephen's virtually uninterrupted interior monologue (Spoo, 109).
The "big words" that Spoo refers to are "home, Christ, ale, master"--words that Deasy easily makes use of. Stephen replies, "I fear those big words...which makes us so unhappy." Instead of these heavily laden, historic words, we have instead Stephen's protean sea language:
Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
Chapter 14 Oxen of the Sun - scene: hospital, art: medicine, technique: embryonic development. Counterteleology reaches its textual and literary embodiment in this chapter. After having heard that Mina Purefoy was in the hospital, now three days in labor, Bloom has come to see how she was doing. He is in the company of medical students and Stephen (who is acquainted with them). He sits with them as he waits for Mina and watches them as they drink and make profane statements about women, birth, and pregnancy. It corresponds to Homer's Ulysses where Ulysses and his men arrive on the island of Helios and are warned not to harm the cattle. The men kill the cattle and eat it while Ulysses sleeps. The literary technique is Joyce imitating/parodying the prose styles of the English language through the ages--its gestation from Latin prose style to the chaotic modern slang of Dublin.
The episode offers itself as an image of the historical process, a pageant of English prose styles form the Anglo-Saxon period to the late nineteenth century, ending in a babel of modern slang, dialect, and other extraliterary forms (Spoo, 136).
Consider the opening paragraph of the chapter,
Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipotent nature's incorrupted benefaction. For who is there who anything of some significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on the contrary anyone so is there unilluminated as not to perceive that as no nature's boon can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance or with diminution's menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating function ever irrevocably enjoined?
Spoof explains brilliantly how this "teleological process" of cultural transmission from one generation to the next is "contested by a resolutely counterteleological syntax."
the opening paragraphs of "Oxen" lay seige to the sentence as a unit of meaning--its ability "to unite as rapidly as possible a cause and an end," as Roland Barthes said of the French preterite--and thus impede its wonted teleology and initiate a project as a whole takes up, to great cosmic effect (Spoo, 146).
