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Joyce's Use of Swift's Polite Conversation in the “Circe” Episode of Ulysses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Mackie L. Jarrell
Mackie L. Jarrell*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College, New London
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Extract

Three consecutive episodes in Joyce's Ulysses—the “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” and “Eumaeus”—are related by parodie technique. There is considerable overlapping in the methods of the three sections, since all three utilize the familiar and the well worn; but they differ in the chief matter selected for parody. The “Oxen of the Sun” or hospital episode is a parodie résumé, in chronological order, of distinctive English literary styles, such as those of Malory and Carlyle, or, where no specific author is parodied, of period mannerisms. The “Circe” or brothel episode collects and parodies the proverb and the cliché. The “Eumaeus” or homecoming episode parodies that variety of long-winded journalese which relies on elegant variation, circumlocution, dead metaphor, and stock expression and makes twenty trite “fine” words do the work of two plain ones. Models for all three episodes can be found in the work of Jonathan Swift. Swift's parodies of literary styles are best exemplified in A Tale of a Tub; his parodie use of the proverb in Polite Conversation; and his ridicule of the trite in A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind. It is my belief that Joyce profits from Swiftian practice in all three episodes; but his use of Swift is most easily demonstrable in the “Circe” scene, which makes direct use of Polite Conversation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , June 1957 , pp. 545 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1957

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References

Note 1 in page 545 Stuart Gilbert's comment that the effect of the episode “is rather of pastiche than of travesty” and that it contains fewer specific parodies than have been found in it seems to me entirely correct (James Joyce's “Ulysses,” 2nd ed., New York, 1952, p. 290). Joyce achieves the general tone of a sentimental variety of Victorian fiction, for example, without limiting his mimicry to a specific author.

Note 2 in page 546 Jonathan Swift (Cambridge, Eng., 1917), p. 44.

Note 3 in page 546 The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Temple Scott (London, 1900–14), xi, 204–205. All page references for Polite Conversation, hereafter cited as PC, are to this edition.

Note 4 in page 546 The 1st edition appeared in London in 1670; the 2nd, in 1678, was greatly enlarged and contains more of the proverbial material used in PC than the first.

Note 5 in page 546 For an analysis of parallels, see my article, “The Proverbs in Swift's Polite Conversation,” HLQ, xx (1956), 15–38.

Note 6 in page 546 The page numbers which follow each quotation refer to the Modern Library edition of Ulysses (New York, 1946) and to PC. In selecting only the relevant part of each quotation, I have treated each parallel as a separate sentence, changing initial capitalization where necessary.

Note 7 in page 546 Cf. “Whispering gallery walls have ears,” Ulysses, p. 81. This proverb, a favorite with Joyce as with Swift, is repeated and parodied in Finnegans Wake (New York, 1947), pp. 289, n. 6, 337, 522.

Note 8 in page 547 Bloom's “pure” may also come from PC, where Swift twice ridicules such usages as “pure good.” See pp. 240, 279.

Note 9 in page 547 The answer, as recorded by Ray, is that “Thought lay a bed and besh— himself.”

Note 10 in page 547 Cf. Lady Smart's “I fancy I know your thoughts,” PC, p. 294.

Note 11 in page 548 Joyce's shortening of “catching” to “catch” may have been suggested by Swift's ridicule of such abbreviations as “hypps, or hippo, for hypochondriacs; bam for bamboozle; and bamboozle for God knows what.” See PC, pp. 217, 262.

Note 12 in page 549 The OED records only two uses of “anythingarian” besides Swift's: one by Thomas Brown (1704) and the other by Charles Kingsley (1850).

Note 13 in page 550 Dublin, 1951, p. 24. Richard Ellmann cites Sheehy's account in “The Backgrounds of Ulysses,” Kenyon Rev., xvi (1954), 349.

Note 14 in page 550 Gilbert notes the similarity but misquotes Miss's remark as “I underconstumble you, gentlemen” (James Joyce's “Ulysses,” p. 304, n.); “your most humblecumdumble” appears also in the Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1948), i, 107.

Note 15 in page 551 A garbled version of Swift's “But in Fact, Eleven Men well armed will certainly subdue one Single Man in his Shirt,” The Drapier's Letters, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1935), p. 79. Cf. “For one man in his armour was a fat match for any girls under shurts,” Finnegans Wake, p. 23.

Note 16 in page 551 Other “old sayings” of Swift's construction are found throughout the Journal to Stella. A typical Swiftian distortion is the conversion of “My tongue runs upon wheels” to “My watch runs upon wheels.” See PC, pp. 235, 267.

Note 17 in page 551 See, e.g., pp. 248, 449, 624.

Note 18 in page 551 The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1937), iii, 961.

Note 19 in page 552 Gilbert, pp. 124, 217, n., 297-298; Prose Works, i, 98, 81–83.

Note 20 in page 552 Quoted in Frank Budgen's James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (New York, 1934), p. 19, from a newspaper review by H. G. Wells of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce uses the phrase in Ulysses, p. 130.

Note 21 in page 553 See the Earl of Orrery's Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift (Dublin, 1752), p. 233.

Note 22 in page 554 James Joyce and the Plain Reader (London, 1932), p. 65.