The Nameless Shamelessness of Ulysses - Palgrave

The ‘nameless shamelessness’ of Ulysses 47
1890) and Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). Oscar Wilde’s criminal
prosecution of Lord Queensbury in 1895 may have been partially inspired by
Whistler’s success, though it produced disastrous results when it ranged beyond
matters of taste and ambiguity to the intractable facts of Wilde’s sexual life.
48. Clive Hart, ‘James Joyce and Sentimentality’, James Joyce Quarterly, 41 (2003),
35–36.
49. Typescript page titled ‘Ulysses’ from the Richard Ellmann Collection, McFarlin
Library Special Collections, University of Tulsa, series I, folder 89.
50. William Empson, Using Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984),
225. For Hayman’s influential theory of the ‘Arranger’, which is designed to
mediate between authorial intention and the intentional fallacy, see David
Hayman, ‘Ulysses’, the Mechanics of Meaning (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1982).
51. In the common law, the power of interpretation is explicitly reserved to the jury
as the triers of fact, but before a suit can proceed a judge must first determine
that words can, in fact, bear some defamatory meaning. For a full description of
this process see Dobbs, The Law of Torts, 1131–4.
52. Sebastian D.G. Knowles, The Dublin Helix: the Life of Language in ‘Ulysses’ (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 2001), 7.
53. As is so often the case in Ulysses, the card itself presents a difficult textual crux.
Even its potentially libellous content is unclear, since when Bloom initially reads
it he sees only the two letters, yet when Josie Breen recites its contents she
says ‘u.p: up’ (8.258). She may simply be running the letters together, or the
card itself may contain the colon and word ‘up’ as well as the letters. The card
later resurfaces in ‘Circe’ (8.485) where Alf Bergan recites it, but since this is
an essentially hallucinatory event, it does not resolve this curious aporia which
leaves us not only unsure of the card’s meaning, but of its contents as well.
54. Robert Byrnes, ‘ “U.P.: up” Proofed’, James Joyce Quarterly, 21 (1984), 175–6.
55. Joyce used the pseudonym ‘Stephen Dædelus’ to sign the first version of ‘The
Sisters’ in 1904, thus only further compounding the interplay of real and fiction
names which complicate this episode.
56. Ellmann, 364 argues that ‘according to friends’ Joyce took this theory of
Shakespeare’s plays more seriously than Stephen does, suggesting ‘that Ulysses
divulges more than an impersonal and detached picture of Dublin life’, but is
instead a roman-à-clef.
57. Mark Shechner, Joyce in Nighttown: a Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Ulysses (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1974), contends that ‘Shakespeare, then, is only
the pretext of “Scylla”; James Joyce is the text’ (27).
58. Ulick O’Connor, Oliver St John Gogarty: a Poet and His Times (London: J. Cape,
1963), 84.