process of narrative colonization functions in different ways in each myth. Whereas in the christianized Grail myth the Celtic concept of female sacrality is repressed and male blood and violence are canonized as the primary source of life, in Yeats'sCathleen Ni Houlihan, a central political text in neocolonial Ireland (Deane 147), the female image is retained, and used to provide legitimization for the nationalist ideology of cultural paternity. A harbinger of violence and destruction, Yeats's Cathleen demands blood-sacrifice for the rebirth of the Motherland.

Like thirst-ravaged vampires, Joyce's parodic Cathleens, the sinister sisterhood of the “Gaptoothed Kathleen” (U 9.36-7), and their cohorts, the brotherhood of the “bloodfadder” (FW [Finnegans Wake] 496.26), stalk through the pages of Ulysses in quest of blood. In “Circe” one sister inquires, “(with expectation) Is he bleeding!” (U 15.4778). This quest for regeneration through sacrificial male blood is juxtaposed throughout Ulysses with a quest for regeneration through maternal love: “Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive … the only true thing in life” (U 9.842-3). The endless oscillation between these two quests in Ulysses de-privileges the canonical nationalist myth and enables us to view the Grail as at once the sacrificial blood of a male victim and savior and as the regenerative blood of the mother. The fault line, as it were, around which this revisionary Grail myth is constructed occupies scarcely two lines in Ulysses:

On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly.

(U 15.4691-3)

The dialogized chalice, represented here by an amalgam of the Eucharistic chalice and the womb-chalice of Mina, also serves as a parergon, or enclosing frame, for Joyce's text.¹ Mulligan's shaving bowl, a parodic Eucharistic chalice, frames the opening consecration in “Telemachus,” and Molly's womb, her “chalice” of menstrual blood, dominates “Penelope.” “Telemachus” begins an immense pivoting so that its subtext, the occulted voice of the old Celtic Goddess (the milkwoman who speaks not a word of her own language) dominates “Penelope.” In other words, Joyce's dialogized Grail myth has a dynamic and reversible structure. Viewed from the perspective of the canonical (masculinist) Grail myth, it reinforces the structure of Western patriarchy, but turned on its head, as it were, and viewed from the perspective of the occulted Celtic myth, it subverts that same structure.²

If we are to uncover the subversive force of Joyce's dialogized Grail myth in Ulysses, we need first to uncover the occulted discourse it sets out to retrieve. Thus, before it reaches its subject, my discussion here will require a brief preamble: a review of the main lines of interconnection between the christianized Grail myth and—to use Joyce's words—the “matther of Erryn” (emphasis added), those “grandest gynecollege histories” (FW 389.6-9).³ As Arthur C. L. Brown points out in The Origins of the Grail Legend, the work of Chrétien, the French poet who wrote one of the first christianized versions of the Grail myth in the twelfth century, draws heavily on Celtic mythic motifs. Chrétien's story of Perceval's parentage and boyhood deeds (Perceval le gallois ou Le Conte du graal), he claims, had its remote origins in the Machníomhartha Finn (The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn). Precisely the same theme, the quest for a mysterious cauldron of regeneration, is central to both tales; however, the form this vessel takes differs radically in each version of the myth. Whereas Chrétien's Perceval journeys out in search of the “graal” (Barber 5), Fionn mac Cumhaill (represented here as a descendant of Bran-Nuadu, the chief god of the Tuatha Dé Danann) searches for the crane bag (corrbolg), a strange vessel of poetic inspiration made from crane skin. The pedigree of Fionn's mysterious bag, which James MacKillop links with “the beginnings of the insular alphabet, ogham” (21), is given in “The Crane Bag,” a brief poem which appears in the Duanaire Finn (The Book of the Lays of Fionn). In answer to the question “to whom did the good Crane-bag belong that Cumhall son of Tréanmhór had?,” the poet is told that the bag belonged to Manannán Mac Lir (Mac Neill 119). The Irish literary journal The Crane Bag summarizes the story as follows:

Mananaan the god of the sea … wishing to punish his wife Aoife, transformed her into a crane. She retaliated by ensuring that his secret alphabet of wisdom, which he treasured, would be shared with the populace. Consequently, whenever cranes are in flight they form images in the sky of the secret alphabet for all to read.

(5)

After Aoife's death, Mananaan apparently made the crane bag (corrbolg) of her skin, and in it he kept “every precious thing” he owned (Mac Neill 119). When Jessie Weston—Joyce's “Westend Woman” (FW 292.6)—dismissed the theory of the Celtic origins of the Grail legend, she was obviously unaware of the legend of the crane bag. The Celtic cauldron, she argues, is merely “a food providing” vessel, whereas the Christian Grail, in contrast, is surrounded by an atmosphere of “sanctity” befitting the holiest of relics (73). But the crane bag of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna is much more than a mere “food providing” vessel. Made from the skin of a woman, symbol of fertility and regeneration, source of language and poetic wisdom, it is a feminine pre-Christian counterpart for the Christian Grail chalice.

The old Celtic voyage tales (Immrama), which tell of a series of journeys to the Otherworld, a mysterious Land of Women (Tír na m-Ban) where, as Brown observes, “sex is no sin,” served as the basis for the marvelous adventures of Iwain in Chrétien's work (Brown 3-7). Bran Mac Febail, closely related to “Bran the Blessed” (“god of the sacred cauldron”) in Welsh mythology, is the hero of the oldest of the voyage tales, The Voyage of Bran.⁴ He apparently acquired his sacred cauldron on his voyage to the Land of Women. This otherworld is given a variety of names and assumes a variety of different forms in Celtic myth. Representing, on one level, a submerged state of consciousness (akin, in some senses, to Julia Kristeva's semiotic chora), it is almost always situated in distant islands, beneath the sea, or beneath the mounds of the Sid. As Proinsias Mac Cana notes, it may be reached through a mist, or through a cave, or “simply through the granting of a sudden insight” (125). In some myths, as Mac Cana points out, it appears as a revolving wheel or castle symbolic of the turning world; in others, it is represented as a tower of glass (turris vitrea) or a fortress of glass (Caer Wydyr) (129). In others still, it is Tír na n-óg, the land of the dead and the land of the ever young. Ultimately, whatever form or name it takes, the Celtic Otherworld—“Tear-nan-Ogre,” as Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake (479.2)—is, in its very essence, the opening “tear” to otherness, difference, alterity.

The apple, sacred symbol of Venus, figures largely in the Celtic myths of the otherworld. In fact, Avalon, the Otherworld of Arthurian mythology, is, quite literally, the “Apple-Land” of immortality (Walker 479). In The Voyage of Bran, as in many of the Celtic voyage myths, a woman bearing a golden apple bough guides the hero to the Otherworld. Other symbols frequently associated with the Celtic Goddess are blood and milk. As several critics have remarked, Medb of Cruachain, “Naif Cruachan” (FW 526.20), the fertility goddess/heroine of the ancient Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cuailnge), was quite possibly the only woman to menstruate in Irish literature before Molly Bloom. Medb's blood, which flows to form a river at the end of the great cattle raid, is a vivid symbol of female creative power. Significantly, it is Medb's daughter Finnabair who served as the prototype for Guinevere in the Arthurian legends. Milk is one of the chief symbols of the goddess Brigid (one of the prototypes for Biddy the hen in Finnegans Wake) in her role as Cow Goddess. The milk of the sacred cow, as Mary Condren points out, was “one of the earliest sacred foods throughout the world, equivalent to our present day communion” (58). Indeed, so powerful was the symbolism associated with the Cow Goddess in ancient Ireland that it was not until the Synod of Cashel in 1172 that the use of milk in baptism was finally banned (Condren 177).

The final set of mythic symbols I will consider here are drawn from the central tales in Lebor Gabala (The Book of Invasions): the battles of Mag Tuired. These battles were fought between Nuadu, king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and the Fomorians for possession of a queen, Ériu, and for her four sacred talismans: spear, stone, sword, and cauldron. Because it was geis (taboo) for a man with a physical or psychological blemish to rule the country, Nuadu, who lost an arm in the first battle of Mag Tuired, is forced to relinquish his kingship to Bres, his Fomorian enemy. Bres, however, lacks fír flaitheman (which Mac Cana translates as “truth of the ruler”); thus the land becomes a Waste Land, and the queen (a personification of the land) grows ugly and haggard. The Waste Land is redeemed only when the Goddess is reunited sexually with a spiritually and physically worthy spouse. In fact, sexuality plays a major role in the inauguration rite, known as the banfheis rígi (the wife feast of kingship) of the sacral king. This ceremony involves two ritual acts: the female offers a golden cup containing a red drink to her chosen spouse, and this symbolic offering is then followed by sexual intercourse between the king and the “sovereignty” (Mac Cana 114-21). In the Arthurian myths, only one of Nuadu's aspects, that of reigning king, is transferred to King Arthur. His second aspect, that of a wounded (or impotent) god kept alive by the magic talismans of the Goddess, is represented by the Fisher King.

In almost every instance, the motifs and symbols which appear in the “matther of Erryn” correspond closely with those which appear in the later christianized versions of the myth. There is, however, one glaring exception. Whereas in Celtic myth the cauldron belongs to the Goddess, the Christian Grail has a decidedly masculine lineage; in fact, no woman may even hear of it (Weston 137). In the christianized versions of the myth a new world vision is constructed in which all generativity and creativity fall to God, the spiritual father, rather than to the female. With the same masterful stroke, sexuality, now projected onto the female, is assigned to the realm of the sinful. Whereas the quest for a woman's love is a central feature in the mythology of the Celts, we hear no mention of such love in Robert de Boron's Roman de l'estoire dou graal, a work which appeared almost contemporaneously with Chrétien's Perceval. In de Boron's work—which links the matière de Bretagne with the legend of Joseph of Arimathea—the Grail is represented as the cup used to collect the redeeming blood, the sang real, which flowed from the wounds of the crucified Christ. The cup is brought by Joseph of Arimathea to Glastonbury in England (the reputed burial place of Arthur and Guinevere), and, thereafter, it becomes the object of knightly quests that can be achieved only by those who are chaste.⁵

In the “Matter of Brettaine,” which Joyce links with “brut fierce” in Finnegans Wake (292.34), male friendship receives priority. Malory's fifteenth-century version of the Grail myth, Morte d'Arthur, presents a world dominated by battles, civil wars and tournaments. Here, love is a subordinate interest, and the comitatus, the fraternal bond between man and man, replaces the bond between man and woman. Several hundred years later, in Parsifal, Richard Wagner's operatic rerendering of the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach's work, celibacy is again exalted, and the Grail is once again linked with the blood-filled chalice of the Eucharist. Apparently, Wagner's work so influenced Adolf Hitler that he adopted as his insignum the swastika, the age-old symbol of renewal in the Thule Grail mysteries (Whitmont 161).⁶

Beginning in the mists of Celtic prehistory and moving inexorably forward through Chrétien's Perceval, Robert de Boron's Roman de L'estoire dou graal, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and Isolde, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and Richard Wagner's Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde (to name but a few versions of the myth), the language, symbolism, and ideology of the Grail myth has had a profound influence on our civilization and culture. In Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the Grail myth came full circle. Here the powerful Celtic mother figure, the original bearer of the Grail, is de-sexualized and harnessed to the service of an ideology that has at its center not the life-giving blood of the mother, but the sacrificial blood of a male victim-savior. So, by a “commodius vicus of recirculation” (FW 3.2), we return now to Joyce's work, where we find ourselves confronted with a dialogized Grail and a decentered nationalist vision. Pervading the entire text we find almost all of the symbols and motifs from the Celtic Grail myth: the Waste Land, the Grail Castle (the Crystal Palace), the otherworldly Apple Land, the wounded Fisher King, the Loathly Lady, the Gold Cup, and the questing Knight.

Ulysses's Ireland is a Waste Land (U 14.476-83). The fields are barren, the cattle are diseased, and women, disparagingly referred to as “cowflesh” (U 14.807), have difficulty giving birth (U 14.114-17). The actual drought in June 1904 is reflected in the spiritual paralysis of the people, a paralysis manifestly evident in “Oxen of the Sun” where the agony of Mina (Joyce's everywoman) in “that allhardest of woman hour” is counterpointed by the raucous laughter of Buck Mulligan and his cronies. “I shudder to think of the future of a race,” the young “learningknight” Dixon states, “where the seeds of such malice have been sown and where no right reverence is rendered to mother and maid in house of Horne” (U 14.832-4). The attitude of the callous “medicals,” whose discussion centers around such topics as abortion, contraception, their sexual triumphs with women, and their losses in the Gold Cup Race, is explicitly contrasted with the reverential treatment of the mother in Celtic society (U 14.33-49). We are reminded of the Waste Land theme in Celtic myth, and, indeed, in Chrétien's Perceval, where the desecration of the Grail country is caused by the violation of the Grail maiden and the theft of her gold cup (the gold cup, as Weston points out, is yet another name for the Grail chalice). Significantly, references to a gold cup echo like a Wagnerian leitmotif throughout Ulysses. Represented in the parodic framework of the Gold Cup Race at Ascot, Joyce's “gold cup” theme, like that of Chrétien, is closely associated with the idea of the betrayal of love.

In an ironic inversion of the symbolism of the Christian Grail myth, the Eucharistic chalice emerges in Ulysses as one of the major emblems of the Waste Land. In “Telemachus,” the blood-filled chalice—a key symbol in the rhetoric of Irish nationalism—is explicitly linked with war and death. Here, Mulligan stands on the gunrest of a tower built for defense in time of war, as he holds aloft his “chalice,” a shaving bowl, in an age-old gesture of ritual appeasement. “For this, O dearly beloved,” he declares, “is the genuine christine: body and soul and blood and ouns” (U 1.21-2). A tissue of allusions links Malachi, whose “plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of the arts in the middle ages” (U 1.31-3), with St. Malachy, the celibate Cistercian monk who died in the arms of his friend and biographer St. Bernard, the spiritual father of the Knights Templars (the original Grail Knights). Malachy was responsible for the introduction of Roman ecclesiastical discipline into the Irish Church, thus effectively bringing an end to Celtic Christianity (a system more closely aligned with Gnosticism than with Pauline and Latin Christianity). In thus threatening the power of the British crown in Ireland, he was also in part responsible for the papal bull entitled Laudabiliter by which the Englishman, Pope Adrian IV, granted Ireland to Henry II of England in 1155. Thus, it was Malachy—whose greatest enemy was, significantly, King Stephen of England—and not, as the misogynistic Deasy suggests, “a faithless woman,” who was responsible for bringing “strangers” to Ireland's shores. As a result of the profound changes introduced by St. Malachy into the Irish Church, the Celtic Mother Goddess was dispossessed of her spiritual power, and her womb/chalice of life-giving blood was framed by the blood-filled chalice of the Father.

St. Malachy's triumph over the Celtic Cow Goddess is mirrored in “Telemachus,” where Mulligan dismisses the old milkwoman's can as a urinal: “Can you recall, brother,” he asks Stephen, “is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?” (U 1.370-1). Mulligan's “omphalos” (U 1.544), a Martello tower rented from the secretary of state for war, serves as a type of phallic parergon for Dumha na Bó (the Mound of the Cow), the “omphalos” of the Celtic Mother Goddess at Teamhair (pronounced “tower”) (Condren 58). Indeed, Ulysses is rife with examples of such displacement. In Mulligan's world, a world where “hot fresh blood” is “prescribe[d] for decline” (U 8.729), and dying martyrs have spectacular erections, a world, moreover, where “commodious milkjugs” are “destined to receive the most precious blood of the most precious victim” (U 12.623-4), the once venerated Cow Goddess is reduced to “a wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer” (U 1.404-5). Whereas the Celtic Cow Goddess Brigid was patron of filidecht (poetry), this milkwoman does not even recognize her own language; her milk—a traditional symbol of female wisdom—is “not hers” (U 1.398). Her usurpers, all key exponents of linguistic and cultural nationalism, all “Pretenders” (U 3.313) to the throne of Cathleen, and all, in one sense or another, “bloodfadders,” invariably take on the life-centered imagery of the “milkmudder” (FW 496.26). In “Circe,” Mananaan Mac Lir (alias the “sacrificial butter” [9.64]: the dairy expert, and nationalist sympathizer, A.E.), vehemently and somewhat incongruously insists that he is “the dreamery creamery butter” (U 15.2275-6). Not to be outdone, Malachi Mulligan weeps “tears of molten butter” (U 15.4179), and, with imperial hauteur, his cohort Haines, the Gaelic-speaking Oxonian, the “Britisher” who shares the citizen's goal of bringing “once more into honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided Gael” (U 12.1188-9), demands to know if the milk in his tea is “real Irish cream.” “I don't want to be imposed on,” he adds (U 10.1094-5). The irony is telling.

In many early Celtic myths, the Waste Land is redeemed only by a quest into the otherworldly Apple Land of Women. In Ulysses, a text where almost everything contains “two thinks at a time” (FW 583.7), no such singular solutions are forthcoming. Here even the apple, the traditional passport to the Otherworld, is dialogized. Joyce's “Applewoman” makes her first appearance in “Lestrygonians” where she hawks her imported “glazed” wares “Two for a penny!” (U 8.69-70). She reappears in “Circe” as a supporter of the nationalist cause. In a parody of the traditional role of the Celtic Goddess as emissary to the Otherworld, she joins the chorus of voices urging Bloom to assume his role as successor to Parnell, hero-martyr for the motherland: “He's a man like Ireland wants,” she says (U 15.1540). Although it is impossible to determine whether the Apple-woman calls Bloom to a Christian hell or a pagan heaven, her counterpart, Old Gummy Granny, who propositions Stephen in “Circe,” places her bid for sacrifice in an explicitly Christian context: “At 8.35 a.m.,” she promises, “you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free” (U 15.4737-8). Joyce's intertextual layering of Christian and Celtic motifs here points to an aporia or double-bind in nationalist rhetoric. In the ancient Irish myths from which the nationalists took their myth of origin—myths where, as Stephen discovered, there is “no trace of hell,” where the “moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution” (U 10.1082-4)—the apple is the passport to eternal life. In the Christian myth from which their doctrine of sacrificial renewal derives, however, the apple is the forbidden fruit, the cause of the fall, and the emblem of (woman's) original sin: our “grandam,” as Stephen puts it—drawing, appropriately enough, on the work of St. Bernard and St. Augustine—“sold us all, seed, breed and generation, for a penny pippin” (U 14.300-1). The Applewoman's wares in Ulysses, the fruit at once of redemption and damnation, straddle, as it were, the strategic fault-line between two antithetical narrative paradigms. The result is a dialogism that mocks simultaneously the nationalist concept of a monological voice of culture, and the Christian concept of an authoritative narrative of origin.

Like the apples of wisdom, Joyce's parodic Otherworld, his Caer Wydyr (crystal palace), is hopelessly convoluted and divided. There is some irony in the fact that the crystal palace makes its first appearance in the “Cyclops” episode, an episode resonant with references to blood-sacrifice—“a genuinely instructive treat” (U 12.551)—cattle-disease, pornography, and, significantly, misinformation with regard to the winner of the “gold cup” (U 12.1898). The irony is compounded by the fact that the episode is presided over by the misogynistic, xenophobic “Citizen,” the self-styled champion of “Kathleen ni Houlihan” (U 12.1375), for whom woman is, paradoxically, one of the chief representatives of cultural “otherness.” “A dishonoured wife,” he states, “that's what's the cause of all our misfortunes” (U 12.1163-4). His obsessive catch cry is “Sinn Fein … Sinn Fein amhain” (U 12.523). In a text where the axis of otherness is constantly being displaced, his doctrine of political and cultural separatism is constantly being mocked. Consider, for example, the paragraph in which the crystal palace appears:

In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown … Lovely maidens sit in close proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs … And heroes voyage from afar to woo them … princes, the sons of kings. And there rises a shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen by mariners who traverse the extensive sea in barks built expressly for that purpose …

(U 12.68-89)

The passage evokes the romantic imagery typical of nationalist rhetoric; however, the crystal palace-Inisfail-questing hero complex of images, which gives it its distinctly Celtic resonance, is framed by an imperialist context. As Weldon Thornton observes, the paragraph almost certainly derives from James Clarence Mangan's translation of “Prince Alfred's Itinerary through Ireland” (257). Joyce's intertextual dialogism here unsettles the idealist quest for meaning (selfhood) that belong to “Sinn Fein,” Ourselves Alone. Indeed, even the crystal palace reference itself is a type of Trojan horse. In the context of the Celtic myth, it represents the Otherworld, but it might also refer to the British Crystal Palace, the icon of imperialism erected in Hyde Park, London, for the Great Exhibition in 1851 (Thornton 258). The connotation of the word Inisfail (a traditional name for Ireland) is also open to question, since the stone from which it derives its name, the Lia Fáil (the Stone of Fál or “stone of destiny,” one of the four sacred symbols of the Tuatha Dé Danann), is itself colonized. Apparently the “Liam Fail”—as Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake—now rests under the Coronation throne in “Westmunster” Abbey (FW 131.10-11). The blurred demarcations between the self and the other, the carefully controlled counterpoint between antithetical (imperial and Celtic) motifs and quest myths, here exemplify Joyce's dialogic practice in destabilizing hegemonic nationalist and, moreover, imperialist, narrative forms.

Let us turn our attention now to Joyce's two potential knights, the two “Seekers on the great quest … East of the sun, west of the moon: Tír na n-óg” (U 9.411-13). Both Sir Leopold, “bedight in sable armour” (U 12.215), and—to use Biddy the Clap's words—“yon sable knight” (U 15.4636) Stephen Dedalus are cast in two quest myths simultaneously. One of the structuring features of Joyce's dialogized Grail myth, as I suggested earlier, is the opposition of blood-filled chalice and the womb. As we trace the threads of this theme as it relates to Stephen through Ulysses, we see a new pattern emerging, one in which both chalice and womb are equated as purveyors of death. If the bloody “cup” offered to him by Cathleen Ni Houlihan, alias Old Gummy Granny (U 15.4736), represents for Stephen the nightmare of Irish history from which he is trying to escape, the mother is the “Womb of sin” (U 3.44), the “allwombing tomb” (U 3.402); to both he says “Non serviam!” (U 15.4228).

In Joyce's treatment of Stephen's relationship with his mother, we find a recapitulation of themes and motifs from a number of Grail myths, particularly Chrétien's Perceval. Stephen's quest, like that of Perceval, revolves around the motif of the question, and like Perceval too, he is obsessed with guilt at the plight of his sister and the death of his mother: “They say I killed you, mother,” he screams, “choking with fright, remorse and horror” in “Circe.” “Cancer did it,” he pleads, “not I. Destiny” (U 15.4186-7). As Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz have remarked, the failure of Perceval's quest in Chrétien's work is due to an offence against the emotional, spiritual side of the self represented by the mother. Perceval, they state, “did not attend to his mother and he did not ask about the Grail—and the latter offence is actually described as a consequence of the former.” “As its primal image,” they add, “the Grail takes the place of the mother” (181). In Ulysses too, Stephen's quest and his neglect of the mother are inextricably intertwined. In fact, the question which haunts him throughout Ulysses is posed directly to the mother: “Tell me the word, mother,” he begs at the climax of the novel in “Circe,” “if you know now. The word known to all men” (U 15.4192-3). Significantly, no answer is forthcoming. The motif of the unanswered question (a motif found in a number of Grail myths) is closely bound up with the notion that “meaning” cannot be imposed by an external authority. Rather, it must be sought within the self. Stephen's quest for the word of the mother, then, is both an inversion and an interiorization of his quest for the Word of the Father. Whereas the nationalist (and Christian) quest myth centers around a quest for a defined “good”—the rejuvenation of a political abstraction called Cathleen Ni Houlihan—and the attendant defeat of an “evil” other, these polar oppositions are interiorized in the quest which centers around the mother. In his drunken state in “Circe,” Stephen is dimly aware of the fact that it is in his own consciousness that he must kill the scapegoated other: “the priest and the king” (U 15.4437). It is in himself too, as the reader discovers in “Scylla and Charybdis,” that Stephen has buried the Grail of love (the repressed “woid” of the mother) that will heal the Waste Land of the spirit (U 9.429-30).

That the Celtic quest myth is, in its very essence, a narrative detailing the growth of individual consciousness is evident from the fact that in several versions of the myth the Otherworld may be reached “simply through the granting of a sudden insight” (MacCana 125). In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen, the fledgling poet, had a fleeting vision of this hidden world: he heard “a voice from beyond the world” (P [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] 167) and saw a woman, a “strange and beautiful seabird” with legs “delicate as a crane's” (P 171). “Her eyes had called to him,” but he turned away from her and dedicated himself to the “old father, old artificer” whose name he bore. This link between the would-be poet and the crane woman is particularly significant since, as I have already pointed out, the Grail of Fionn, the poet of the Fianna, is a mysterious bag of poetic wisdom made from the skin of the crane woman, Aoife. In rejecting the visionary woman for the Father, Stephen rejected the Grail he so desperately sought, committing himself instead to the very paralysis he struggles to escape from in Ulysses. Trapped in a selfish aestheticism, fearful of death and the fluidity of the feminine, he remains at the end of Ulysses “the eternal son and ever virgin” (U 14.342-3). The meaning of love, like the apples of wisdom and self-knowledge (U 3.432), remains for him a “bitter mystery” (U 15.4190).

Like Stephen Dedalus, Bloom, the would-be architect of “Bloomusalem,” an otherworldly New Jerusalem “with crystal roof” (U 15.1548), is cast in two quest myths simultaneously: he is at once Joyce's Christian Fisher of men and his pagan Fisher King. The “cod-eyed” Bloom (U 15.1871), the “last sardine of summer” (U 11.1220-1), whose nickname, by the way, is “Mackerel” (U 8.405), is, as the Citizen so eloquently puts it, “[a] fellow that's neither fish nor flesh” (U 12.1055-6). Sex, the key to renewal in the pagan quest myth and an impediment to renewal in the Christian quest myth, is the aporia on which Bloom's dialogized Grail quest rests. He may be “the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service to lady” (U 14.184-5), yet, from the perspective of his wife, his “service” leaves something to be desired. Molly resents the fact that she has been cast in the role of the Loathly Lady: “its a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time,” she complains, “living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me” (U 18.1399-1401). This “new apostle to the gentiles” (U 12.1489), who has not had sexual intercourse with Molly since the death of their only son almost eleven years before, is, it seems, a celibate (of sorts). Appropriately enough, he assumes the role of the chaste redeemer in “Circe” where, wearing “a seamless garment marked I.H.S.,” he burns “amid phoenix flames” (U 15.1935-6). Bloom's credentials as a Christian redeemer, however, are somewhat sullied by the fact that, like the Fisher King of the Grail castle, his celibacy is due to impotence (of a sort). Fearful of the feminine, which he associates with death and corruption, this middle-aged Tristan looks to virgins for consolation, to “Green apples” (U 13.1086), and to the cold curves of stone “goddesses” (U 8.922). In “Lestrygonians,” he imagines these plaster virgins as immortals drinking nectar from “golden dishes” (U 8.925-6). Conscious of his own mortality, he envies them their fleshless state. The icons in Bloom's salle aux images, the statue of Venus in the National Gallery (U 8.1180-1), the various pornographic “Venus in Furs” figures that populate his daydreams, the disgruntled nymph framed over his bed, the immature Gerty MacDowell, the mysterious Martha Clifford, and, most importantly, Cathleen Ni Houlihan—the sterile icon of the militant nationalist group he is reputed to have been instrumental in founding—are the psychological equivalent of the condom he carries in his pocketbook. They enable him to indulge his erotic desires, yet, at the same time, they shield him from the (for him) horrors of female fecundity, and its corollary, death.

Nationalist, freemason, Jew, Christ figure, advocate of universal love, and self-cuckolded lover, Bloom is the personification of Joyce's indeterminacy principle. Although he has apparently immersed himself in a new type of fatherhood, the regenerative fatherhood of Sinn Féin (U 18.1227-9), he, nevertheless, rejects the nationalist ethic of justice and domination in favor of an ethic of care and responsibility. “Force, hatred, history, all that,” he argues, offers no “life for men and women.” “And everybody knows,” he points out, “that it's the very opposite of that that is really life” (U 12.1481-5): Love. Throughout Ulysses, Bloom searches ceaselessly for “that other world” (U 13.1262-3). His quest, which begins in what might be described as the “Perilous Chapel” in “Hades” and ends in Molly's “Perilous bed,” “a lair or ambush of lust or adders” (U 17.2116-18), in “Penelope,” reaches its climax in “Circe.” In this dream-world of dissolving identities and blurred boundaries, the dual-gendered Bello/Bella serves as his guide on his journey to the otherworldly “womancity” (U 15.1327). “For such favours,” she claims, “knights of old laid down their lives” (U 15.3080-1). Here, Bloom comes face to face with all the debased images of women that have appeared throughout Ulysses. He unveils the virginal nymph who “flees from him unveiled, her plaster cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks” (U 15.3469-70). Gummy Granny in her role as the blood-thirsty Cathleen is also banished. Finally, in the Black Mass scene at the end of “Circe,” the diffuse thematic pattern of this postmodernist Grail myth reaches its climax. Bloom has a vision of the dialogized Grail:

On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the fieldaltar of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns … On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly.

(U 15.4688-93)

In German legend, as Jung and von Franz point out, the “round mountain of St. Barbara” is the home of the Knight of the Swan (Lohengrin). Here, it is said, “Venus lives in the Grail” (121).

If Ulysses begins with an image of a colonized “Mother Ireland,” “Silk of the kine and poor old woman” (U 1.403), it ends, like Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan, with an image of a revivified Mother Goddess. Whereas Yeats's Cathleen is rejuvenated by heroic sacrifice, we find no mention of sacrificial martyrdom in “Penelope”; whereas the maternal embodiment of the nation in the discourse of Irish nationalism was rigorously chaste and virginal, Joyce's “Gea Tellus” is a sexually active woman. Molly Bloom has no patience with the “trash and nonsense” (U 18.384) of “Sinner Fein or the freemasons” (U 18.1227). In the place of dogmatic nationalism, she offers “plurabilities”; in the place of sacrificial death, she offers a vision of cyclical life.

The two powerful female icons Molly tries to transcend in Ulysses are the sexless Cathleen, the Grail of the Nationalists, and the Virgin Mother, the chaste icon of the Templars, the first Christian Grail Knights.⁷ Appropriately enough, Molly, the daughter of a Templar, shares both the name and the birthday of the Virgin. Yet, although she is herself a bereaved mother famous for her stirring rendition of Rossini's Stabat Mater, Molly Bloom recalls not the Christian Mater dolorosa, but Isis, the Sacred Moon Cow, the prototype not only for the Virgin Mother but also for the Celtic Cow Goddess, Brigid. According to the Isis myth (possibly the earliest version of the Grail story) the origins of life are not male but female. Isis was originally the mother/wife of Osiris, the earliest resurrected god. The pagan myth, Barbara Walker notes, was copied by Christianity, “except for one vital point: the agent of Osiris's resurrection was not the heavenly father,” but the mother (216).

A rejuvenated Sacred Cow Goddess, “Marion of the bountiful bosoms” (U 12.1006-7), presides over Joyce's otherworldly “Apple Land” in “Penelope.” Her blood-filled commode is, significantly, “totally covered by square cretonne cutting, apple design” (U 17.2102-3). Molly is, as she herself puts it, “a mixture of plum and apple” (U 18.1535). The proliferation of O's in her language points to the Irish ubhal (apple), a word which, Harold Bayley—the Scottish scholar of symbolism whose work influenced Yeats—points out, “resolves itself into iabel, the ‘orb of god,’ oko, ‘the great O’” (303). Furthermore, Molly's curiosity about the “capital initial of the name of a city in Canada, Quebec” (U 17.679-80), an interest linked to her fascination with Irish “hieroglyphics,” points to the Q the letter of the Quert (apple) in the Oghamic tree alphabet. In the “penelopean patience” of “Penelope,” as Anna Livia observes in Finnegans Wake, the “feminine libido” is represented by “those interbranching ogham sex upandinsweeps” (FW 123.4-9).

The final passages in “Penelope” are awash with images of fertility and regeneration. Blazes Boylan, Bloom's rival for the affections of Molly, has lost his bet on the Gold Cup Race, and he has also lost the affections of Molly. In spite of the size of his “tremendous big red brute of a thing” (U 18.144), Boylan, it seems, lacks fír flaitheman. Molly is convinced that Bloom “has more spunk in him” (U 18.168); she believes, moreover, that “he understood or felt what a woman is” (U 18.1578-9). Bloom did not, of course, place a bet on the Gold Cup Race, he is no “winner”; yet, as Molly observes, “if anyone asked could he ride the steeplechase for the gold cup hed say yes” (U 18.955-6). In her “snakespiral” (U 17.2116) bed, her omphalos—a symbol of the mystery of nonduality—Molly is planning to initiate Bloom into the life-empowering mysteries of love; she is planning what is, in effect, a banfheis rígi. Yes, she will give him “one more chance” (U 18.1498). “I suppose hed like my nice cream too” (U 18.1506), she thinks, as she plans her early morning shopping trip to her local crystal palace (the Dublin fruit and vegetable market). She will “throw him up his tea” in an imitation Crown Derby cup, and she will serve him eggs (the sacred symbol of Isis) while he sits in bed “like the king of the country” (U 18.931).

Although the title of the final illustration in Sebastian Evans's translation of The High History of the Holy Graal (one of Joyce's main sources for the Grail theme) is “Perceval Winneth the Golden Cup,” the final chapter in Ulysses offers no such Telos; here “nought nowhere [is] never reached” (U 17.1068-9). Even as Molly determines to effect changes in her relationship with Bloom, her “new womanly man” is asleep at “the wrong end” of her; in short, Bloom still views the feminine from an inverted perspective. His dilemma, like that of all Grail knights—Bran-Nuadu, Arthur, Perceval, Gawain—when faced with la vieille ogresse, the “old shrivelled hag” (U 18.1399), who embodies the ever-revolving cycle of life-in-death and death-in-life, centers on the question of vision. As long as he fears death—which he projects onto the feminine—he will reject Molly, and the Waste Land will prevail. But if he can accept her as she is, if he can restore the phallic spear (as in Wagner's Parsifal) to her Grail/womb, he will—in mythopoeic terminology—achieve kingship in her timeless realm, and the Waste Land will be fruitful once more.

In the introduction to this essay I suggested that Joyce sets out in Ulysses to decenter the nationalist myth of sacrificial renewal by confronting it with an opposing voice. This type of “ideological decentering,” as Bakhtin points out, will occur only when a national culture, or a national myth is dialogized: when it “loses its sealed-off and self-sufficient character, when it becomes conscious of itself as only one among other cultures and languages” (370). In Ulysses, Joyce achieves his purpose by initiating a dialogic exchange between the hegemonic nationalist Grail myth and its own occulted Celtic prototype. Thus, in the place of a monological myth of origin in Ulysses, we find two versions of the same myth—to use Bakhtin's words—“mutually animating one another.” In the earlier myth, a moral and humanitarian principle of love, represented symbolically by “Amor matris” (U 9.842-3), is represented as the source of life, spiritual and physical; in its successor, patriotic martyrdoms and war take the place of love. In one myth, dualism is emphasized; in the other, we find a recognition of the positive values of otherness and difference that have been suppressed by the hegemony of logos. The endless oscillations between these two Grails in Ulysses ensure that meaning is never final but is in a constant process of metamorphosis. Here, there are no “winners,” but only the constant whirling of antithetical impulses. As Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake,

there are two signs to turn to, the yest and the ist, the wright side and the wronged side … It is a sot of a swigswag, systomy, dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze. Why? Such me.

(597.10-22)

Notes

1. The word “parergon” is used here and elsewhere in the essay in the Kantian/Derridian sense of the term. For an interesting discussion of “parergonal logic”—to use Derrida's term—see Barbara Johnson's “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida” (Young 225-43).

2. Richard Ellmann's catalogue of Joyce's library in The Consciousness of Joyce provides ample evidence of Joyce's interest in the Grail myth while writing Ulysses. The library includes such works as Sebastian Evans's translation of The High History of the Holy Graal (112), Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh Mabinogion (118)—described as the “Welsh Greal” in the introduction to Evans's work—a heavily annotated copy of Francis Hueffer's The Troubadours: A History of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages (112), Joseph Bédier's Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut (101), several of Richard Wagner's works, and an assortment of titles on Celtic themes by various members of the Irish Literary Renaissance.

   One of the earliest studies of the Celtic roots of the Grail legend to which Joyce had access in Dublin was a summary of A. C. L. Brown's Iwain: A Study of the Origin of Arthurian Romance, which appeared in the November December 1903 issue of Celtia (the journal of the St. Stephen's Green Celtic Association). Contrary to popular opinion, Joyce's access to Celtic manuscript materials was in no sense restricted when he left Ireland. In fact, during both of his sojourns in Paris (1902-3 and 1920-39), he had access not only to the Celtic materials in the Bibliothèque Nationale but also to the extensive holdings in the library of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne. The materials in the Sorbonne library range from relatively obscure journals such as Celtia, to facsimile copies of rare manuscripts such as The Book of Ballymote (this contains several hundred Ogham cipher-alphabets), to translations of old Irish poetry like the Duanaire Finn. The library also contains a comprehensive collection of scholarly works on Celtic mythology, history, religion, and the Celtic languages, including to name but a few—Alfred Nutt's Studies in the Legend of the Holy Grail, Kuno Meyer and Nutt's The Voyage of Bran (the latter includes an interesting discussion of the relationship between the Greek and Celtic doctrines of metempsychosis), John Rhys's Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom, and Eugene O'Curry's Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History. Both Rhys's and O'Curry's works provide extensive background information on all aspects of Celtic culture, history, and literature, and both touch on such Grail-related motifs and topics as the voyage theme, the apple motif, the stone of Fál, and the Otherworld of women.

3. The Grail myth, the creation of centuries of accretion of religious and mythological themes, contains elements from several different traditions, including Celtic mythology, Anglo-Saxon and French courtly traditions, Christian iconography, alchemical lore, classical myth, Arabic poetry, and Sufi teaching (Whitmont 153). Symbols and motifs from several of these traditions are threaded throughout Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Joyce's earlier works as well. A discussion of the significance of the Grail myth for the entire Joycean œuvre—a topic well beyond the scope of this essay—is the subject of a book-length work in progress.

4. For a brief, yet comprehensive survey of the various cycles of Celtic myth discussed here, see Mac Cana.

5. For a chronological list of Arthurian literature since 1800, see Taylor and Brewer 324-60.

6. Hitler is quoted in the work of the German historian Wilfried Daim as having said:

   You ought to understand Parzifal differently from the way it is generally interpreted. Behind the trivial Christian dressing of the external story, with its Good Friday magic, this profound drama has a quite different content. It is not a Christian, Schopenhauerian religion of compassion, but the pure, aristocratic blood that is glorified … The eternal life that is the gift of the Grail is only for the truly pure and noble … How is one to stop racial decay? Politically we have acted: no equality no democracy. But what about the masses of the People? … Should we form an elect group of real initiates? An order of templars around the grail of the pure blood?

   (Daim 140; quoted in Whitmont 162-3)

   Hitler found in the Grail myth a justification for one of the most horrific bloodbaths in human history. Although the goals of the Nazi “templars” were in no sense analogous to those of Yeats and the Irish nationalists, it is significant that many of the same mechanisms they exploited to incite Germany's collective madness in the Jewish holocaust were used to unify the emerging nationalist movement in Ireland. Both systems were marked by a union of religious and military force; both were predicated on the deliberate manipulation of an alienated people through the exploitation of the archetypes of universal history contained in the Grail myth; in both systems the mother archetype (represented by Ostara in Germany, Cathleen in Ireland) was coopted by a patriarchal system hostile to women and nature; and, finally, in both systems this mother archetype was virginized.

7. The link between the Templars, the Grail, and the cult of the Virgin can be traced back to “Bernardus” (biographer and friend of St. Malachy), the authority on Christian doctrine to whom Stephen refers in “Oxen of the Sun” when he points to the apple, Eve's “penny pippin,” as the emblem of the fall (U 14.299-301). St. Bernard was not only personally responsible for the phenomenal increase in the popularity of the cult of the Virgin which took place in the twelfth century, but, primarily, through his eighty-six sermons on Solomon's “Song of Songs” (U 17.729-30), he lent doctrinal authority to the beliefs put forward by one of the leaders of the First Crusade—the Muslim Prester John (U 12.190)—beliefs that linked the Temple of Solomon with the Grail. “Salmonson,” as Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake, “set his seel on a hexengown” (297.3-4). Bernard himself preached the Second Crusade and wrote the rule of the Order of the Templars, commending the celibate warrior Knights (who took their name from the Temple of Solomon) to the protection of the Virgin in their bloody quest for the New Jerusalem, the Visio Pacis flowing with milk and honey. The last depository of the Templar tradition in the twentieth century, as Arthur Edward Waite points out, is the Masonic order, an all male sect (to which Bloom, it seems, also belongs) whose avowed vocation it is to use mathematics to rebuild Solomon's Temple of the soul (235-9). In fact, it is precisely here, in this Faustian quest to control nature and create a New Jerusalem of the spirit, that Molly's two male protectors, her Templar father and her Mason husband, find common ground.

   On St. Bernard's influence on the Grail legend see Cleland 39-61. On St. Bernard and the cult of the Virgin, see Julia Kristeva's “Stabat Mater” in The Kristeva Reader.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Barber, Richard. The Arthurian Legends. New York: Bedrick, 1979.

Bayley, Harold. The Lost Language of Symbolism. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1988.

Brown, Arthur C. L. The Origin of the Grail Legend. 1943. Rpt. New York: Russell, 1966.

Celtia: A Pan Celtic Monthly Magazine. [Dublin.] 111:8 (October 1903).

Cleland, John. “Bernardian Ideas in Wolfram's Parzival about Christian War and Human Development.” The Chimera of His Age: Studies on Bernard of Clairvaux. Cistercian Studies Series 63. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian, 1980.

Condren, Mary. The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. San Francisco: Harper, 1989.

The Crane Bag 4.1 (1980).

Daim, Wilfried. Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab. Vienna: Institut für politische Psychologie, 1958.

Deane, Seamus. A Short History of Irish Literature. London: Hutchinson, 1986.

Ellmann, Richard. The Consciousness of Joyce. London: Faber, 1977.

———. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. 1948. New York: Dutton, 1958.

Evans, Sebastian, trans. The High History of the Holy Graal. London: Dent, 1910.

Hutchinson, John. The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State. London: Allen, 1987.

Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959.

———. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1939.

———. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968.

———. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. New York: Random, 1986.

Jung, Emma, and Marie-Louise von Franz. The Grail Legend. 2nd edn. Trans. Andrea Dykes. Boston: Sigo, 1986.

Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Mac Cana, Proinsias. Celtic Mythology. Harmondsworth: Newnes, 1983.

MacKillop, James. Fionn mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in English Literature. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Mac Mathúna, Séamus. Immram Brain: Bran's Journey to the Otherworld. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983.

Mac Neill, Eoin, ed. and trans. Duanaire Finn I: The Book of the Lays of Fionn. Irish Texts Society 7. London: Nutt, 1908.

Meyer, Kuno, and Alfred Nutt. The Voyage of Bran. 2 vols. Grimm Library Series. London: Nutt, 1895-7.

Nutt, Alfred. Studies in the Legend of the Holy Grail. London: Nutt, 1897.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise. “A Lost Chance to Save the Jews.” New York Review of Books 27 April 1989: 27+.

O'Curry, Eugene. Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History. 1873. Rpt. Celtic Review 1 (1904-5).

Raine, Kathleen. Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Work of W. B. Yeats. London: Allen, 1986.

Rhys, John. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom: The Hibbert Lectures for 1886. London: Williams, 1888.

Taylor, Beverly, and Elisabeth Brewer. The Return of King Arthur: British and American Arthurian Literature since 1900. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes, 1983.

Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in “Ulysses”: An Annotated List. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

Waite, Arthur Edward. A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry. London: Rider, 1921.

Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. San Francisco: Harper, 1988.

Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957.

Whitmont, Edward C. The Return of the Goddess. New York: Crossroad, 1987.

Yeats, William Butler. Memoirs. Ed. Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan, 1972.

———. Mythologies. London: Macmillan, 1959.

Young, Robert, ed. Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Boston: Routledge, 1981.

Abbreviations

Quotations from the following works are cited in the text, parenthetically:

CW Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1959.

FW Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1939.

P Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Viking, 1964.

Joyce, James. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968.

U Joyce, James. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. 3 vols. New York: Garland, 1986.

Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Random; London: Bodley Head; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986

Passages from Ulysses, following its editor's suggestion, are identified by episode and line number. Sections of Finnegans Wake are identified by book (roman numeral) and chapter (arabic), as in “ii.4.” Quotations from the Wake are identified by page and line number—“313.21-35”—except that lines in footnotes in ii.2 are numbered separately. Thus, “FW 279fn.21” designates the twenty-first line of footnoted material on page 279 of Finnegans Wake. The James Joyce Archive and the Letters of James Joyce are cited by volume and page number.

These conventions follow, with minor exceptions, the format prescribed by the James Joyce Quarterly.