SOURCE: Latham, Sean. “A Portrait of the Snob: James Joyce and the Anxieties of Cultural Capital.” Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 4 (2001): 774-99.

[In the following essay, Latham contemplates the “inveterate snobbery” of Ulysses, contending that the book “no longer holds the powerful allure it once did.”]

From the very moment of its publication, Ulysses has been a source of scandal. The novel's blunt treatment of sexuality, its formal affront to the conventions of realism, and its minute recording of bodily functions all evoked an outrage that won for Joyce the succès d'exécration (prize of revulsion) the nineteenth-century dandies so ardently desired.¹ Interwoven through this now famous history of obscenity, sexuality, slander, and self-abuse, however, has been a scandal rarely—if ever—commented upon: its inveterate snobbery. As dirty a secret as anything implied by Molly Bloom's “yes,” it has long remained concealed behind a dazzling display of critical and theoretical acumen. The historical and institutional structures that have shunted this issue to the side, however, no longer command the same authority they once did. Writing in no less a forum than The New York Times, James Atlas could in 1997 freely indict Joyce and his fellow modernists as pretentious snobs whose works reach beyond the “ordinary reader” to become “the property of an elite” (41). Danis Rose's “reader's edition” of Ulysses has only further complicated the situation. Designed to introduce the novel to a non-academic audience, this text privileges content over form by adding punctuation to the stream-of-conscious narratives and generally simplifying the grammatical complexity of the work. Largely dismissed by Joyce scholars, Rose's work suffers from the very snobbery he seeks to avoid, for his thorough-going editorial intervention implies that the novel is indeed beyond the reach of all but the most educated readers and must be radically altered to render it fit for a mass readership. It seems clear that as an icon of intellectual prestige, Ulysses no longer holds the powerful allure it once did. Rose and Atlas alike have helped to expose the text's deep entanglement in the flows of social, cultural, and even economic capital, rendering its identity as an aesthetic object indistinguishable from its iconic status as a sign of professional and intellectual accomplishment. With the structures of its reception and circulation increasingly exposed, Ulysses has now begun to emerge as a site of critical meditation on the limitations and pleasures afforded by the literary marketplace.

More generally, modernism—both as an aesthetic idea and as received array of texts—has been too long circumscribed by the cartography of what Andreas Huyssen has famously called the “great divide” between highbrow and mass culture. This Manichean split has produced an image of early twentieth-century canonical literature as a necessarily (though regrettably) “adversary culture” that excludes mass culture because it is a source of potential “contamination” (Huyssen vii).² In his analysis of the cultural field of literary production, Pierre Bourdieu constructs a similar geography wherein highbrow art emerges as the mirror image of the commodity-driven marketplace, but with the rules of “the economic world reversed” (“Field” 29). This structuralist account contends that elite culture is organized according to a hierarchy governed by cultural (and symbolic) rather than economic capital, where popular success actually becomes a mark of failure. Developing this approach in an Anglo-American vein, John Guillory suggests that the American New Critics exploited this fact to transform “literature [into] the cultural capital of the university,” for “in discovering that literature was intrinsically difficult,” students “also discovered in the same moment why it needed to be studied in the university” (172).³ Formal density, textual dissonance, and the rejection of realist codes of representation all came to stand, in other words, for far more than evidence of an author's genius. The ability to decipher such complexities signified the reader's own accomplishment, providing him or her with a small but substantial cache of cultural capital born of what Baudelaire called “a feeling of joy at [one's] own superiority” (161).

It is tempting to pursue the lines of argument laid down by Bourdieu, Guillory, and Huyssen because they create a powerful critical framework seemingly capable of mapping the entire literary field of modernism onto a rational and orderly grid. Yet to follow them too closely is to arrive at the critical impasse Thomas Strychacz reaches in Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism. In his analysis, both modernism and the practices of literary criticism that it inspired are little more than snobbish tricks designed to procure status and income in a field ordered by the logic of professionalism. According to Strychacz, “modernism organizes a special kind of relationship between the text and the reader that depends upon an ability to marshal specific competences (such as the ability to spot and decipher an allusion). Less obviously, modernism evinces a recognition that this kind of writing is demanding” (27). A work like Ulysses, in other words, carves out a place for itself in the complexly structured space of culture by being difficult, trading on a form of cultural capital that will secure Joyce's status as a professional author who differs qualitatively from the middlebrow hack. Academics and artists alike are enfolded in the same snobbish logic, for rather than making any sort of claim to aesthetic value or objective truth, both “must maintain […] the codes, perspectives, and discourse that make possible an expert's claims to truth” (31, emphasis added). This certainly puts the New Critics in their place—in fact, it puts the entire humanistic enterprise in its place. But it is a place where artists and critics alike must content themselves with the disenchanting pleasures to be derived from playing the profitable yet ultimately pointless game of professional sophistication. Originality, even genius, is shown to reside exclusively in finding new ways to exploit the “codes, perspective, and discourse” of aesthetic production, locating new positions within what Bourdieu calls the “perception of the field of possibles offered by the field” (Rules 206).

This is a rather dreary state of affairs, despite Bourdieu's claim that he is freeing us from the New Critical fetish of the ineffable text by illuminating the field of cultural production with the cold light of reason. Has our spite for the formalists led us so deeply into structuralism that we must be content with such an impasse? I have no intention of lifting the structuralists' indictment, but I would like to suggest a possible means of renegotiating the terms of the sentence it has imposed upon us. For Huyssen, Bourdieu, and Strychacz the modern literary field organizes itself according to a series of binary oppositions structured around a hierarchy running between highbrow modernist and degraded mass culture. This model provides invaluable critical and historical insight into the conditions of modernist invention and does indeed free us from the more tyrannical elements of literary formalism.⁴ But it also has its limitations, and to begin to understand them and thus lay the groundwork for an informed reconstruction of the idea of a modernist aesthetic, we must look to those places where this model falters and even fails. Nowhere is it more fragile than in those places where we see evidence of traffic and exchange between the two sites positioned in direct opposition to one another in the literary field. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the now well-remarked recycling of mass cultural forms in high modernist literature. Cheryl Herr, Mark Wollaeger, and R. B. Kershner have charted these exchanges in Joyce's oeuvre with particular skill, examining the traces of the music hall, the cinema, and the mass-market novel in Ulysses.⁵ Operating from a different theoretical perspective, Lawrence Rainey has revealed another failure of the structuralist model in his Institutions of Modernism, meticulously revealing the ways in which Joyce and other highbrow modernists often catered to a distinctly profit-driven market for book collectors.

As valuable as these critical studies have been, however, they have left the structuralist framework relatively intact. Rainey's archival work, for example, takes as its object the conditions of production external to the works themselves, attending only in passing to the texts whose commodification he examines. The theorists of mass-cultural borrowings have plunged quite deeply into the texts they consider, but they preserve essentially a one-way circuit between positions on the literary field's hierarchy: The highbrows borrow from mass culture, but the exchange does not flow the other way, or does so only in the degraded form of advertising or kitsch. This paper will interrupt this circuit altogether by focusing attention on the snob as a figure that challenges directly the structuralist organization of the literary field. Stubbornly inhabiting the site of exchange between sites within the literary field, this figure at once condenses a broad array of anxieties about the segmentation of the cultural marketplace and mediates the terms of contact between the highbrow and the middlebrow. Suspected always of being a fake, a mere poseur, the snob is, in fact, a broker of cultural and symbolic capital who struggles to preserve the hierarchy of the literary field while exploiting those sites where its hierarchical organization falters. More than just a structural position within the field, the snob is also a thematically developed character who emerges with a sometimes startling consistency in the novels of the early twentieth century. This character, I shall contend, provides the writers of the period with an imaginative mechanism through which they both map their own position within the chaos of the expanding literary marketplace and articulate their resistance to its organizational logic.

As a problematic, the figure of the snob emerges with startling persistence in both highbrow and middlebrow texts. The terms of engagement with this problematic, however, are almost always unique, and this paper will focus on the particularity of Joyce's negotiation of snobbery. Specifically, I will attend to two key moments in Joyce's articulation of snobbery: the failure of Chandler's poetic imagination in “A Little Cloud,” and the curious irresolution of the relationship between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. In the first of these texts, one of the last two stories Joyce wrote for Dubliners, the snob emerges as a troubling threat to the act of aesthetic creation. Rather than just another in a series of portraits conceived with “malice aforethought,” this story signals Joyce's first suspicion of the limits his intellectual pretension has placed on his imagination (Stephen Hero 26). This problem, which is further refined in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, then emerges as one of the central motifs of Ulysses. In this iconographic work of modernist sophistication, Joyce struggles to escape the binary logic of the cultural field by constructing a text that insistently calls attention to both the pleasures and limitations of snobbery. The result is an artifact that actively defies the organizational logic of Huyssen's great divide by enumerating the costs entailed by the terms of its success.

THE PROBLEM OF SNOBBERY

Dubliners is laden with a hard-edged pretension. Joyce wrote the stories in the collection with a freely-confessed “style of scrupulous meanness” as an indictment of the city “which seemed […] the center of paralysis” (“To Grant Richards”134). Rendered in the detached voice of a Flaubertian narrator, each piece shares roughly the same structure: a carefully recorded moment of ideological subjection punctuated by an often romanticized moment of epiphany in which the reader alone gains insight into the protagonists' inability to escape or even recognize the oppressive structures enfolding them. “Character development,” as Trevor Williams argues, “has for most Dubliners ceased before the narrative begins. Without the possibility of development, without a future, such characters can only flounder in the space allowed to them, all potentially displaced into false consciousness, petty snobbery, dreams of escape, and fixation on the past” (63). This consistently repeated structure fixes characters like scientific specimens in gross poses of death and decay, producing a Dublin in which history has ground to a halt as its citizens endlessly restage the scenes of their own subjection.⁶ And above this horrifying scene presides the text's narrator, who joins in a conspiratorial pact with the reader to gape in petulant disgust at these epiphanic moments of subjection.

This same snobbish narrator pervades most of the pieces in Dubliners, systematically consigning the characters to a historical dustbin of unselfconscious suffering. The last two stories written for the collection, however, differ strikingly from their predecessors and mark a significant transformation of Joyce's attitude toward his own snobbery. The shift in tone and structure accompanying “The Dead” has been well noted by a wide array of critics, many of whom tend to separate it from the collection as a whole and treat it as a marker of Joyce's growing maturity. Gabriel Conroy's gradual recognition in this story of his isolation from the lives around him suggests an emerging anxiety about the arrogance of the narrative structure itself. No longer content to heap criticism upon hapless characters, Joyce instead introduces a sense of sympathy and even hope: “The crucial difference between ‘The Dead’ and the stories that precede it is that epiphany is an event that takes place within Gabriel's self-consciousness. […] Epiphany no longer points beyond the confines of a character's consciousness to the lack that defines it; the mind now takes possession of that emptiness” (Heller 40). Vivian Heller's acute reading of this shift in the structure of the narrative transforms “The Dead” from merely another diagnosis of paralysis into a far more subtle examination of the psychic effects of Gabriel's attempts to salvage some dignity from the chaotic debris of Dublin. Though this results in a sense of desolation symbolized by “the snow falling faintly through the universe,” it nevertheless grants to Gabriel the ability at least to recognize the bleakness of the situation (225).

Although “The Dead” may be the most closely studied and compelling story in the collection, it actually signals only the climactic moment of a narrative shift in tone and structure that begins in “A Little Cloud.” Written in 1906 as the penultimate addition to Dubliners, this tale is Joyce's first attempt to engage directly the snobbery implicit in his own artistic aspirations. The story itself emerged from a chaotic moment in the author's life when he began to question both the value and the motivation of his self-imposed exile. In a long and introspective letter sent to Stanislaus Joyce in the summer of 1905, Joyce indicated his willingness to return to Ireland and alter significantly the course of his aesthetic project:

I often think to myself that, in spite of the seeming acuteness of my writing, I may fail in life through being too ingenuous, and certainly I made a mistake in thinking that, with an Irish friendship aiding me, I could carry through my general indictment or survey of the island successfully. The very degrading and unsatisfactory nature of my exile angers me and I do not see why I should continue to drag it out with a view to returning ‘some day’ with money in my pocket and convincing the men of letters that, after all, I was a person of talent.

(“To Stanislaus” 96)

This is as close as Joyce ever comes to modesty: concealed within his arrogant concerns about being “too ingenuous,” lies the anxious suspicion that his own flight to Europe was motivated primarily by a desire to return eventually to Ireland as a sort of conquering hero, at last able to cast disdainful glances at a literary establishment that once rejected his work. Joyce, in other words, suddenly saw himself as a snob, sensing that his own project had been severely circumscribed by the desire to transform art into an instrument of social power.

When seeking autobiographical threads in Joyce's work, critics rarely look far beyond Stephen Dedalus, though a few may venture to include elements of Leopold Bloom and even Gabriel Conroy. Few have suggested Little Chandler as an image of fictional self-imagination.⁷ Yet the pretentious protagonist of “A Little Cloud” shared with his creator—among other things—an aspiration for artistic success, a menial clerkship considered beneath his station, a newly born child at home, and a seemingly endless financial crisis. These distinctly lower-middle-class concerns certainly contrast sharply with the more familiar image of Joyce as the expatriated Bohemian, but by 1906 he was working as a bank clerk in Rome, trying to complete a manuscript he would soon abandon in frustration, and attempting to provide for himself, Nora, and their infant son Giorgio. Far from a portrait of the artist, critics have long dismissed Chandler as little more than “the caricature of a compensatory day-dreamer affecting literary aspiration” (Beck 167). These are certainly not the terms fit to describe the author of Ulysses, but recall that in 1906, Joyce himself was only an aspiring writer who had published but a few stories and poems in some obscure Irish papers. Unlike Chandler, Joyce had fled his native country, but he was contemplating a return as publisher after publisher rejected his work. These close connections certainly do not match the richly imagined self-portraiture of Stephen Dedalus, but they might suggest Joyce's growing discontent with the life of a bank clerk possessed of aesthetic pretensions.

Various sorts of snobbery weave their way through the fabric of “A Little Cloud,” as each character struggles to secure some sense of individual distinction as a firewall against the dreary world of Dublin. Chandler's wife, Annie, for example, attempts to fashion for her family a lifestyle appropriate for the Victorian upper middle class, despite the fact that her husband's meager wages make such a project almost impossible. Unable to afford a domestic servant—that icon of bourgeois privilege—Chandler and his wife treat “Annie's young sister Monica [who] came for an hour or so in the morning and an hour or so in the evening to help” (77) as little more than a housemaid; and her absence on his return home at the story's close contributes to his sense of imprisonment within a degraded and tasteless domestic life. Even their “pretty furniture bought […] on the hire system” (79), reveals “something mean” to Chandler (78-79). Like the other claims to distinction in their home, these items are hollow fakes, arranged to denote class status that neither of the Chandlers can ever fully possess. Even Annie's reaction to the gift of a new blouse—delight, followed by a snobbish appraisal of its price and quality—suggests a tired and empty repetition of the codes of middle-class distinction.

This obsession with the signs of sophistication snaps into particularly sharp focus during Chandler's encounter with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher. Now a writer of questionable merit for a London newspaper, the latter returns to Dublin with the very air of the conquering hero Joyce imagined for himself in his letter to Stanislaus. He invites Chandler to Corless's, a chic brasserie where Dublin's elite went “after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs,” and where “the waiters spoke French and German” (66). Chandler recognizes “the value of the name,” and clearly feels ill at ease when he enters the pub, wondering if he will be able to perform the necessary rituals of sophistication required by such an establishment: “The light and noise of the bar held him at the doorway for a few moments […]. The bar seemed to him to be full of people and he felt that the people were observing high curiously” (69). Gallaher compounds this sense of self-consciousness through a spectacular display of snobbery in which he makes his friend acutely aware of the parochialism of Ireland. Calling the waiter garçon and François, he expresses his disdain for “jog-along Dublin” (73) by telling scandalous tales of the Continent: “I've been to the Moulin Rouge […] and I've been to all the Bohemian cafes. Hot stuff! Not for a pious chap like you Tommy” (71). As the evening wears on, Gallaher's stories become even more fanciful and laced with sexual intrigue as he “revealed many of the secrets of religious houses on the Continent and described some of the practices which were fashionable in high society and ended by telling, with details, a story about an English duchess—a story which he knew to be true” (73). These gossipy rumors, tainted with the thrill of both aristocratic scandal and sexual licentiousness, are calculated to impress upon Chandler the superiority of his friend, even as the narrator allows the reader to see through this sham sophistication.⁸ Like Annie, Gallaher remains attentive to the outward signs of distinction, struggling to manipulate them in an effort to construct the arrogant self-assurance of a successful journalist.

The snobbery shared by Annie and Gallaher appears as little more than poorly struck poses which mask their fatuous pursuit of social power. Annie's blouse and Gallaher's stories cannot be enjoyed as ends in themselves, but are instead a means to securing the benefits of a publicly staged superiority. Chandler's snobbery, however, escapes this logic of performativity, for it is almost never displayed to anyone else. He “felt himself superior to the people he passed” (68), and reminds himself during Gallaher's stories that his friend “was inferior in birth and education” (75). He actively accumulates the signs of social and cultural capital, but differs from those around him by refusing to exchange such signs for the public spectacle of arrogant disdain: “He remembered the books of poetry upon his shelves at home. He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness had always held him back; and so the books remained on their shelves” (66). This internalization of the impulse toward snobbery provides Chandler with a rudimentary aesthetic consciousness fundamentally different from that of most of the other characters in Dubliners. Rather than submerging himself in endless performances of distinction, he translates his own sense of superiority into a silently narrated fiction of escape. Thus, after absorbing an impressionistic vision of the “the poor stunted houses” beneath Grattan Bridge, he “wondered whether he could write a poem to express his idea […]. He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely” (68). As poetic experiences go, this one may leave something to be desired, but it does provide a rare moment of hope as Chandler struggles to imagine a life lived beyond the paralysis of Dublin.

Even as Joyce fashions this potentially liberating portrait of an aspiring poet, he meticulously reinscribes it within the more general sense of meanness and subjection characteristic of the collection as a whole. Chandler's poetic reverie is immediately undermined by the young man's severely limited dreams of gaining fame as nothing more than a minor voice of the Celtic Twilight:

He would never be popular: he saw that. He could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds. The English critics, perhaps, would recognise him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would put in allusions […]. It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking.

(68-69)

Chandler's dreams here not only replay the familiar scene of Ireland's subjection to the expectations of England but also fix him as nothing more than a poet of local color.⁹ Furthermore, these thoughts about the reception of his work and the potential need to change his name interrupt the moment of aesthetic creation itself. Rather than writing poetry, or even giving himself over to the experience of the moment, Chandler focuses almost exclusively upon his self-dramatization as an artist. The most attention he can direct to questions of form and composition is to decide to include “allusions” in his imagined works. Despite his apparent ignorance of structure and meter, however, his belief in his own superiority continues to provide for him a bulwark against the snobbish condescension of Gallaher: “He felt acutely the contrast between his own life and his friend's, and it seemed to him unjust. […] He was sure he could do something better than his friend had even done, or could ever do, something higher than mere tawdry journalism if he only got the chance” (75-76). This opportunity never comes, of course, but Chandler's egoism keeps alive a consciousness of both the degradation of his own life and the very real possibility of escape.

The foreclosure of such opportunities for flight punctuate many of the stories in Dubliners, from the immovable protagonist of “Eveline” to the lonely Mr. Duffy in “A Painful Case.” “A Little Cloud” stays true to this form, and Chandler's pitifully limited dreams are smashed against the rocks of his sobering reality. In dismissing Chandler as just another in a long line of paralyzed Dubliners, critics typically point to the lack of sophistication shown by his admiration of “the wrong poem” by Byron (Torchiana 131). Having returned from his trip to Corliss's, the young clerk reads aloud a piece of juvenilia, “On the Death of a Young lad, Cousin of the Author, and Very dear to Him,” while he cradles his sleeping son. Slipping once more into reverie, he “felt the rhythm of the verse about him in the room. How melancholy it was!” (79). For experiencing these emotions, Donald Torchiana—and indeed most critics—condemn Chandler as an inartistic fool, unable to discern authentic art from the mere scribblings of a young poet.¹⁰ In the text itself, however, no such sense of disdain arises. Instead, the stanza leads Chandler to the brink of the same feeling of liberation experienced earlier in the day: “Could he, too, write like that, express the melancholy of his soul in verse? There were so many things he wanted to describe: his sensation of a few hours before on Grattan Bridge, for example. If he could get back again into that mood …” (79). Significantly, he is on the brink here of Wordsworth's mystical moment of aesthetic creation, in which poetry emerges from “the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions […] recollected in tranquillity” (Wordsworth 25). The selection of Byron also suggests that this moment, though severely circumscribed, should be treated as authentic experience of artistic consciousness. Indeed, Joyce would later refashion this very scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen recalls with some chagrin the beating he received for defending the same poet. Byron, a secular saint of flight and liberation, evokes for both Stephen and Chandler the promise of a larger world, regardless of the tastelessness of his poetry. Although this particular piece of verse may reek of a distinctively anti-modernist sentimentality, it nevertheless evokes in this story the promise of liberation through the act of aesthetic creation.

Chandler's moment of poetic inspiration, however, is shattered by the cry of his child, and this is the moment that Joyce's narrator snaps shut the door of the prison house. Fearful of fleeing the life he has built for himself and unable to read or write poetry, Chandler recognizes the futility not only of his artistic aspirations, but of his own pretensions to superiority. Shouting in the face of his child, and thus accused of cruelty by his wife, he can see no opportunity for escape. Yet again an epiphanic moment of paralysis concludes this story, captured in the tableau of the angry wife, the crying child, and the powerless clerk. Unlike Eveline or Mr. Duffy, however, Chandler is admitted into the charmed circle of critical consciousness shared by the reader and the narrator, as he recognizes the exact nature of his own social and ideological confinement: “Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight. He listened while the paroxysm of the child's sobbing grew less; and tears of remorse started to his eyes” (81). Throughout this text Chandler's own snobbery has sustained him, allowing him to venture so far as to imagine the possibility of flight from the paralyzed city of Dublin. As his wife calms the child and berates her husband, however, this self-assurance collapses in the face of the material constraints placed upon him. This scene reveals the powerful disjunction between the poetic life and the life of a clerk with a family, as even the most degraded and circumscribed aspirations collapse into impossibility. Chandler's silent snobbery provides the necessary defense against the vapid pretensions of Gallaher and his own wife, but at the crucial moment of inspiration it fails him, leaving him to confront a life unredeemed by even the dream of escape.

As a snob, Chandler remains pathologically isolated from the world around him, echoing in his own disdain for “all that minute vermin-like life […] of Dublin,” the imperious voice of the narrative itself (66). The possibility for any authentic moment of human connection is foreclosed by the various sorts of snobbery in the story, from the class-consciousness of Annie to the worldly smugness of Gallaher. Even the aspiring poet can do little more than savor fleeting moments of melancholia while thumbing through a page of Byron's verse. Thus, the climactic tears shed by Chandler at the moment of epiphanic recognition cannot be construed solely as the self-pity of a pretentious clerk who glimpses the squalor of his own life. They also signify the “remorse” of the failed artist, whose precocious efforts at cultivation have resulted not in a work of literature, but in an angry shout in the face of his own crying child. It may be unwise fully to collapse Chandler into Stephen Hero or into Joyce as a fictional image of the aspiring aesthete, but this clerk's recognition of the limitations of the arrogant egoism so forcefully commanded by Stephen and Joyce reveals a growing sense of ambivalence about the power and pleasure of snobbery.

JOYCE'S GREATEST GAMBLE

“A Little Cloud” sets forth the problem of snobbery, and it does so in the semi-autobiographical vein that Joyce deployed so successfully throughout his work. The story concludes, however, with the same sense of diagnostic paralysis that pervades Dubliners, illuminating for a moment the conudrum of snobbery but providing little sense of how the problems it poses might be solved. Like Bourdieu's analysis of the field of cultural production, Joyce's narrative remains locked in a structuralist fantasy of synchronic temporality that forecloses the possibility of conceptual or historical change. In Ulysses, however, this rigidity gives way to a more subtle attempt to exploit the gap between the actual practice of aesthetic consumption and the structures governing the organization of the literary field. By juxtaposing Stephen Dedalus's alienating arrogance with Leopold Bloom's expansive generosity, Joyce exploits the snob as a figure of mediation and exchange capable of troubling the binary logic of Huyssen's “great divide.” Stripped of even Chandler's modest claim to epiphany, the intellectual aesthete now emerges as a severely circumscribed snob who cannot match the imaginative freedom and empathy of a modest canvasser. In Bloom, Joyce forges a new sort of hero, whose pursuit of originality leads him not to pose brashly as the creator of his race's consciousness, but to interrogate endlessly the world around him. Apparently no more than a mild-mannered advertising agent, he in fact possesses the most vital aesthetic consciousness in the novel, creatively integrating art, culture, science, economics, politics, and history. More than simply contemplating the world around him, Bloom actively engages it and risks himself in the apparently trivial exchanges that the structure of the novel itself assigns epic proportions. From challenging the racism of the Citizen in Barney Kiernan's pub to offering Stephen a roof and a bed, Bloom generates and sustains a complicated and even utopian subjectivity that is not premised on the public performance of snobbish pretension.

And yet to produce such a utopian figure, Joyce ultimately relies upon a novelistic structure of such dazzling complexity that Bloom seems to disappear beneath the sheer spectacle of it. In reading Ulysses, one cannot help but notice the paradoxical snobbery of a novel that would be almost unreadable by its own protagonist. Bloom seems at times to be nothing more than the unconscious and unwilling subject of narrative vivisection, in which characters are merely empty markers to be moved about by a clever author for the enjoyment of his audience. This ambivalent use of snobbery to critique the pretensions of the artist, however, constitutes not a fatal flaw within the work, but the essential wager of the novel itself. In fashioning a heroic Bloom and ridiculing the arrogance of the artist, yet all the while defying the conventions of realist narrative, Joyce seeks to create a text that disrupts the boundaries between high and mass culture.¹¹ Refusing simply to appropriate the forms of the latter, he instead struggles to imagine a space of mediation and exchange which challenges all readers to extend the horizons of their world beyond the invidious divides of social, cultural, and economic capital.

To stake this incredible wager, Joyce antes up no less a figure than Stephen Dedalus, whose arrogance at the conclusion of A Portrait implied that snobbery alone could free one from the constrictive nets of Ireland. In the opening episodes of Ulysses, however, Stephen no longer appears as a heroic artist, but as an exhausted and even pitiful stereotype of the aesthete. Shrouding himself in the snob's air of disdain, he endlessly stages his own intellectual distinction, struggling desperately to impress his importance on those around him. His familiar arrogance takes on a darker and more depressing tone as the novel unfolds, for Stephen seems to have realized that such performances of distinction have become empty displays leading nowhere. Now, rather than embracing the opportunity to display his wit at a party by proving “by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father,” the frustrated aesthete instead worries that he is nothing more than a clown permitted to dance before the imperial gaze: “Tonight deftly amid wild drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed winning a clement master's praise” (Ulysses 2.42-5). Snobbery still pervades Stephen's self-consciousness as he imagines his mind to be a heroic knight dressed for battle, but he senses that even his wittiest conversation will amount only to an empty and ultimately pointless display of erudition. Even his epiphanies, the core elements of his youthful aesthetic, are revealed in this self-examination to be the insubstantial signs of a derivative aestheticism: “Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?” (3.141-3). No longer emblems of timeless genius, he sees these artifacts of his youth as nothing more than props for the performance of a snobbery that he continues to stage: “My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves (3.174-75). […] Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul'Mich', I used to” (178-79). He recognizes that the outward signs of the expatriated artist he so carefully manages are but empty signifiers of a genius he can only simulate.

Joyce sustains his attack on Stephen's arrogance throughout the novel, consistently exposing the young aesthete's imprisonment within the performance of his own pretension. Confined to the isolation of his own sense of self-importance, he is unable to forge any meaningful connection with the surrounding world that is not itself an already exhausted pose. At times, Joyce's critique is quite stinging, as in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode where he casts Stephen in the roles of “Boasthard” (14.429), “morbid-minded esthete and embryo philosopher” (14.1295). Ridiculing the young poet's meager verse, the novel revels in its own ability to appropriate the entire history of narrative. Thus, in the language of deQuincy, Stephen's snobbish authority becomes indistinguishable from a drug-induced hallucination, unsubstantiated by any legitimate production: “I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of [the imaginative] life. He encircles his gadding hair with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father” (14.1115-19). He remains a poet who has produced almost nothing, and the incredible pretension of his claims to greatness collapse even as he attempts to seize the laurels of the true artist. Measured against the complexity and formal brilliance of this chapter, Stephen appears less as a portrait of the artist than as a comic pantaloon, the very “jester at the court of his master” he earlier feared he would become. Exhausted, drunk, and caught in a lie that what little money he has is payment for a poem, this snob proves to be an enemy of the true artist. As Joyce experiments with language of writers from the pre-Socratics, to Defoe, Carlyle, and Dickens, Stephen appears as little more than a pale imitation of Whistler or Wilde, playing his severely circumscribed role amidst the background of a much larger literary achievement.

Despite this powerful attack on the pretensions of the aesthete, Joyce's own conception of the chapter's symbolism suggests that we must not lose sight of the potential artist still submerged within Stephen's consciousness. Calling the technic for this episode “embryonic development” and setting the evolution of narrative prose against the prolonged but ultimately rewarding birth of a child in the National Maternity Hospital links the creative acts of the artist and the heterosexual couple. As Marilyn French argues, “coition between people leading to conception parallels coition between mind and reality leading to expression, otherwise called literature” (17). Readers and critics have long noted this symbolic connection, and despite his humiliation Stephen does appear to emerge here, at times, as an earlier image of the novelist himself—albeit an artist who has yet to escape the bondage of his own pretension by fertilizing his own imagination with the larger world.¹² In The Making of Ulysses, Frank Budgen recalls Joyce's insistence upon the importance of this symbolic network in Oxen of the Sun. Budgen writes that “Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo, […] the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition” (215-16). Throughout the novel, Stephen refuses to see the world as anything other than a series of objects to be manipulated by his own god-like powers and consistently sterilizes his imagination by isolating himself behind the protective shield of an involuted snobbery. Even at his most engaging, as in the National Library or atop the Martello Tower, he maintains a vast chasm between himself and his listeners, commenting on both their limitations and his own brilliance. In this passage, however, Joyce suggests not only that Bloom offers the possibility of fertilizing the aesthetic consciousness, but also that a fully mature artist already exists in embryonic form. Stephen's snobbery, in effect, inhibits his proper imaginative development, for it exiles him to a dreary world of empty performance. His sneering, if silent, antipathy for those around him, as well his extreme self-consciousness, prevents him from forming any sort of productive relationship with the larger and more complex world of Dublin through which he moves.

In suggesting that Bloom is the spermatozoon that could potentially contribute some element vital to the creation of Stephen's embryonic aesthetic consciousness, Joyce reveals the precise limitations of the aesthete's snobbery. Far from arrogant, “of prudent soul” (Ulysses 12.216), and possessed of a capacity for “sufferance which base minds jeer at” (14.865), Bloom differs fundamentally from the imperious and contemptuous Stephen. Rather than one of the paralyzed rubes of Dubliners, he is “a cultured allaround man” (10.581) with a complex emotional and mental life who contains within himself the multiform traces of the world of human relationships from which Stephen sought exile. As we initially enter Bloom's mind in “Calypso” and “Lotus-Eaters,” we find Stephen's sense of desolate isolation replaced by a wide and complex array of thoughts and experiences that do not spiral inward into an endless meditation on the self. Bloom's richly textured stream of consciousness takes in a wealth of naturalistic details and arranges them in a shifting mosaic of complex and creative relationships. In advertisements, the sound of a hungry cat, snippets of song, the taste of burned kidneys, the experience of defecation, and in all the other objects he encounters and events he experiences on that famous June day, Bloom maps out a world that extends far beyond the limits of his own ego. In pursuit of his breakfast, for instance,

He approached Larry O'Rourke's. From the cellar grating floated up the flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the end of the city traffic. For instance M'Auley's down there: n.g. [no good] as position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from the cattlemarket to the quays value would go up like a shot.

(4.105-110)

This is Bloom at his best, absorbing the commonplace detail of a public house into his thoughts and enjoying the process of uncovering its intricate relationship to a larger world of tramlines, marketing, and city planning.

This contrasts sharply with Stephen's parallel wanderings on the beach, where his voracious egotis organizes each detail he notices into an image of alienation and suffering:

His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck's castoffs, nebeneinander. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in tripundium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt's shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. Tiens, quel petite pied! Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde's love that dare not speak its name. His arm: Cranly's arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all.

(3.446-452)

The creases of the borrowed boots plunge Stephen only deeper into his own thoughts, leading through a string of associations that leads to his absolutist assertion of the primacy of his own ego.¹³ For this snobbish artist the self must be protected against all relationships, so that he may remain secure in his own pretensions to god-like omnipotence, “as I am.”¹⁴ From paragraph to paragraph in both “Calypso” and “Proteus,” this same contrast between Bloom and Stephen returns. Both focus on some otherwise obscure detail, the former placing it in relation to the larger world, while the latter uses it as a weight to drag him ever deeper into his own imperious self-consciousness. In showing us first the sad spectacle of Stephen, then moving to Bloom's “good genius” (16.811), the novel starkly illuminates the cramped restraints of the artist's snobbery. The heroic advertising agent who allows himself to be drawn into the disorienting and decentered world of experience opens vast new panoramas unglimpsed by the bowed, navel-pondering aesthete.

To argue simply that Ulysses unproblematically carries through a definitive attack upon snobbery's blind and futile pursuit of sophistication smacks of the same sort of interpretive haziness that ignores Stephen's departure in order to suture together a satisfying union of artist and everyman at the conclusion of “Ithaca.” After all the complexity of this novel—its demand for a reader with immense patience, a broad education, and a willingness to savor the circumvention of a realist structure—inescapably invokes the very hierarchy of distinction it carefully critiques. Episodes such as “Oxen of the Sun,” which requires an expansive knowledge of the history of English prose, or “Aeolus,” which derives its richness, in part, from its masterful control of the elements of classical rhetoric, nearly obscure the quotidian Bloom beneath their virtuosity. Like Stephen's treatment of Shakespeare in the National Library, Ulysses seems, at times, to use Bloom merely as a means to display its impressive intellectual achievement, maintaining the nominal protagonist as little more than an empty signifier of its egalitarianism. For Stonehill, who points to this “paradoxical status of Ulysses as an ethically democratic but esthetically élitist work,” the novel simply fails in its desire to close the gap between high culture and the middle class:

By simultaneously creating and disrupting the narrative illusion, Joyce is […] able to give with one hand and take with the other. He can celebrate the virtues of a seemingly ordinary Dubliner of unassuming generosity while simultaneously elaborating one of the most complex, arcane, and sophisticated works of art in the century. This does not permit him, alas, to be all things to all readers. Ulysses renders the mundane accessible to the mandarins, but not vice versa.

(48)

Sharing this same sense of the novel's structural snobbery, a number of cultural critics have highlighted the importance of Joyce's inclusion of forms that would be unrecognizable to the mandarin reader. Cheryl Herr's landmark study of Joyce's use of the conventions of the pantomime in “Circe” leads an array of works that argue that “by refusing the cultural hierarchy that most readers take for granted, Joyce builds a principle of accessibility into his work” (Attridge 24).¹⁵ Faced with the apparent snobbery of the novel, we find ourselves, in effect, trapped on either side of an imposing divide: either to regret the inevitable arrogance of the work or to protest that it can indeed be all things to all readers.

Rather than glide down either one of these slippery slopes, I want to argue that the text's closing sense of ambivalence, its frustration of our expectations in the departure of Stephen, poses an open-ended and skillfully wrought question about the problem of snobbery itself. Beginning in “Calypso,” Joyce makes clear Bloom's desire to become a writer, tracking his various plans to write a prize-winning story for Titbits, a pornographic novel such as The Sweets of Sin, or even a naturalistic novel of his own life: “Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story from some proverb. Which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she said dressing” (Ulysses 4.518-20). When locked in conversation with Stephen in the cabman's shelter he goes so far as to offer a glimpse of the very conception of Ulysses itself:

Still to cultivate the acquaintance of someone of no uncommon calibre who could provide food for reflection would amply repay any small. Intellectual stimulation, as such, was, he felt, from time to time a firstrate tonic for the mind. Added to which was the coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row, old salt of the here today and gone tomorrow type, night loafers, the whole galaxy of events, all went to make up a miniature cameo of the world we live in. […] To improve the shining hour he wondered where he might meet with anything approaching the same luck as Mr Philip Beaufoy if taken down in writing suppose he were to pen something out of the common groove (as he fully intended doing) at the rate of one guinea per column. My Experience, let us say, in a Cabman's Shelter.

(16.1219-31)

Like Stephen's aesthetic productions, Bloom's too are only hallucinatory, emerging most clearly in the nightmare world of “Circe” where he claims, “I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist. In fact we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected with the British and Irish press” (15.801-4). This unexpectedly snobbish appeal to the authority of cultural capital leads almost immediately to his trial in “The King versus Bloom,” where he is called to account for every errant thought, devious desire, and misdeed. Philip Beaufoy himself, the author of one of the stories in Titbits, arises to condemn Bloom for daring to pose as an author despite his limited capabilities: “No born gentleman, no-one with the most rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak masquerading as a littérature” (15.819-23). Though but a figment of this episode's narrative imagination, Beaufoy is nevertheless quite right. Despite his generosity of spirit, his resistance to snobbery, and his utopian humanity, Bloom simply cannot be the author of Ulysses.

In neither the humble Bloom nor the arrogant Stephen do we glimpse the mind capable of producing this unique novel, a mind which blends the quotidian events of a Dublin Jew with some of the most complex and challenging narrative structures ever deployed. The one lacks the learning and the rebelliousness needed to manipulate the structure of language, while the other is limited by an involuted snobbery that cannot reach beyond itself to a larger world. It should therefore come as little surprise that the “Ithaca” section of the novel, which marks the final homecoming of the hero, unfolds as a protracted series of questions. In the Linati schema, Joyce calls this technic “catechism (impersonal),” and as Kenner notes this style borrows not only from the Catholic tool for the instruction of dogma, but from nineteenth-century textbooks as well (134-35). The narrative self-consciously assumes the form of scholastic and theological authority, instructing us in the proper interpretation of the events that mark the close of Bloom's day. We are interpellated here as students rather than readers, required to study attentively the novel's careful handling of the complex relationship between Stephen and Bloom. As Kenner notes, this structure leads us precisely to the sort of symbolic or archetypal readings that allow Schwarz and others to see a satisfying climax even in Stephen's departure:¹⁶ “the liturgical cadences prevail, and can be insidious. In repeatedly exalting arrays of particulate information, subsuming whole orders of experience into the domain of the archetype, they work […] on our sense of the two men present […] who become both more and less than the characters we know so well” (137). Yet in a novel that dedicates itself to an assault on the dogma of form and language, we must see this catechism of the novel itself as—at best—a provisional attempt to forge some means of closure. The mystical union of the artist and Everyman in “Stoom” and “Blephen” remains an open question precisely because the novel uncloaks its inner workings and offers us this meager conclusion as a rote answer to its own dogma. In consistently contrasting Stephen and Bloom, Joyce interrogates the snobbery not only of the artist but of Ulysses itself and wagers that the still immature Stephen will eventually overcome the imperious arrogance so integral to the personality of the artist. The outcome of this gamble, however, depends not on the mystical union ironically passed on to us through a catechism, but on the reception and acceptance of the novel itself by the very people it claims to represent.

The initial reviews of the novel, the circumstances of its publication, and even the decision to lift the blight of American censorship suggest that this great wager ultimately met with failure. The text passed from a small circle of collectors, through the artistic coteries of Paris and New York, and wound up in the classrooms and monographs of academics across the world. Joyce unquestionably enjoyed this affirmation of his genius, and he accrued enough cultural capital from this novel to “live off its interest” for the rest of his life (Wexler 67). As Ellmann asserts, “the ironic quality of Joyce's fame was that it remained a glorie de cénacle, even when the cénacle had swelled to vast numbers of people. To have read Ulysses, or parts of it, became the mark of the knowledgeable expatriate” (527). Today, this cénacle now encompasses the still relatively circumscribed “Joyce industry,” and the ironies of such success have only become more pronounced. The novel that struggled to find a way out of the limitations of snobbery has itself become an icon of literary and cultural sophistication, largely restricted to a Stephen-like audience that applauds the heroization of Bloom. Throughout his life, Joyce feebly protested that Ulysses could be read by anyone, and he only reluctantly released the schemas and outlines that for Judge John M. Woolsey provided the novel with the necessary apparatus of critical sincerity.¹⁷ Yet, he also sensed that the great gamble taken with Bloom had met with little success. Despite the great virtuosity of the novel, despite its telling protest against the limitations of intellectual, it still failed to exploit the critical potential of its own ambivalent snobbery, withdrawing into the very cultural hierarchies of value it sought to contest.

Notes

1. In his 1890 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, James McNeill Whistler helped define the essence of modern snobbery by publicly staging his own cultural superiority: “There are those, they tell me, who have the approval of the people—and live! From them the succès d'estime; for me […] succè d'exécration—the only tribute possible from the Mob to the Master” (107).

2. Huyssen's argument is more complex than I give him credit for here. He does begin his study, After the Great Divide, with the assertion that modernism was an essentially “adversary culture” which constituted itself through a conscious strategy of “excluding mass culture as a site of potential “contamination” (vii). This stark divide, however, is not as absolute as it initially appears, precisely because modernism forms itself around this idea of opposition to mass culture. Thus, even at the heart of the highbrow modernist text, elements of mass culture can be located in what Huyssen later describes as a “hidden subtext” (47).

3. In his own work on modernism and mass culture, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, Michael North notes a similar trajectory in the construction of a postmodernism that produces cultural capital through its engagement with the popular forms modernism supposedly rejected. “Since postmodernism defined itself in large part by its greater eclecticism and stylistic openness, it required as foil a modernism as exclusive as possible. Thus, the rivalry between postmodernism and modernism was read back into history, quite openly, as an antipathy between modernism and mass culture, one whose existence has always seemed more a matter of theoretical necessity than of empirical fact” (10).

4. Think, for example, of works like Harold Bloom's How to Read and The Western Canon. In these works he attempts to create and maintain a hierarchy of highbrow texts that can be judged solely in terms of their “quality.” This project falters not because of any failure in Bloom's considerable critical acumen, but because it refuses to engage the readers and texts which lie beyond the boundary of what he considers aesthetic excellence. The result is at least the appearance of an anti-populist tyranny, one profoundly jealous of its own intellectual privileges.

5. See Herr's The Anatomy of Culture, Wollaeger's “Stephen/Joyce, Joyce/Haacke: Modernism and the Social Function of Art,” and Kershner's Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder.

6. The brutality of these pieces and their adamant refusal of redemption make clear Joyce's defiant rejection of the Celtic Twilight. Rather than a native Irish mysticism, Joyce puts on display what he perceives to be ideological deadlock and social decay. As can well be imagined, such sentiments made it quite difficult for Joyce to find a readership for these stories in Ireland.

7. The singular exception is John McCourt, who argues in The Years of Bloom, that “‘A Little Cloud’ can indeed be read as a reflection of the crisis in which Joyce and Nora found themselves around the time of Giorgio's birth and in the latter half of 1905” (40-41).

8. In this brief encounter, Joyce restages his own earlier meeting with Yeats, as the snobbish Gallaher proudly displays his metropolitan sophistication to the aspiring young poet. Trapped within a colonial discourse that privileges London over Ireland, both Gallaher and Chandler find themselves enacting a ritualized performance of distinction. In this case, Joyce's ironies hollow out the encounter, exposing both its inexorable logic and its brutal vulgarity.

9. Joyce would later restage this same dilemma in Ulysses, where Stephen too fears becoming “a jester at the court of his master” (2.244), staging his Irish wit for the romanticizing gaze of Haines, the “ponderous Saxon” comes to indulge his romanticized fantasy of Dublin's intellectual life (1.51).

10. In Terence Brown's notes for the 1992 Penguin edition, the snobbery of the editor rises to a near fever pitch in the annotation for these lines of verse: “The poem is Byron at his most affectingly sentimental and scarcely represents him as the romantic he was. Rather it is a piece of emotional trifling, in a wearisomely conventional mode” (Dubliners n 45, 273-4).

11. Cheryl Herr's Anatomy of Culture has become the locus classicus for this sort of reading of Ulysses that highlights the often obscured elements of lowbrow and popular culture so integral to the text.

12. For discussions of this episode and Steven's role as an unfertilized ovum see Bazargan, Kenner, and Schwartz.

13. One could easily imagine that were Bloom to ponder the creases in his boots, he would be led not into the psychic depths of his consciousness, but into an extended meditation on the shoemaking trade and the importance of proper footwear for the maintenance of good health.

14. This of course echoes the famous passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen compares the artist to an “indifferent” God, “paring his fingernails” (215). By this point, the ambivalence of this earlier passage has essentially evaporated, leaving in Ulysses only the crusted sediment of Stephen's pointless snobbery.

15. The importance of popular culture in Ulysses has only recently been addressed. For a representative look at the field see Kershner, Wicke and Leonard.

16. Daniel Schwarz rhetorically asks, “is it too much to say that while the discourse or metaphorical level affirms Stephen's acceptance of Bloom as the necessary father figure and implies his future maturation, the story does not substantiate this?” (231) In a word, yes, it is too much to ask, for Stephen remains exiled, isolated, and still ensnared in snobbery's endless performance.

17. As Kelly notes, Joyce refused to grant Bennett Cerf permission to publish the schema for the novel he gave to Herbert Gorman. Fearful that such critical aids would set the novel apart as a curiosity intended for serious scholars alone, Joyce insisted that the novel “must stand on its own feet without any explanation” (Kelly 135-36).

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