Franca Ruggieri
Time, history and myth before Ulysses

The aim of this paper is to discover the earliest traces, both lexical and thematic, of myth, mythology and mythopoetics in Joyce’s early works, works where myth is already seen as an escape from the straightjacket of history and from the pressure of the present. The title, in fact, hints at three relevant major Joycean themes, but the choice of this perspective does not imply an exhaustive analysis.

Defining formulas and strict divisions may simplify and ease the work of the reader, but they may also prove deceptive. In the wide field of Joyce studies, readers, critics and scholars often tend to separate the early works prior to 1922 – the year of the publication of Ulysses – from what came afterwards, as if there were distinct, watertight compartments following on from each other. Critical common sense usually suggests that Joyce’s early writing is of a realistic-symbolic nature – and then comes Ulysses, with its complex scheme and writing, ushering in the period that T.S. Eliot labelled as “the mythical method” (Eliot [1923] 1963). It is as if there were a neat demarcation line, and that line coincides with the year 1922.

Things might, however, be rather different. The mythical and the mytho-poetic, i.e. the use of myth, and, in some case the parody of myth, as responses to the deeply-felt conditioning force of history, already emerges, and expressly so, in the writings before Ulysses. It is apparent in the essays written at the turn of the century, particularly in “Drama and Life” and “James Clarence Mangan”, in the first draft of A Portrait of the Artist of 1904 and in some of the stories in Dubliners. The origin of this new aesthetic and cultural sensitivity can be traced to the condition of the fin-de-siècle intellectual; the feeling of unease and confusion caused by the artist’s loss of pre-eminence, a new situation of marginalization and the discomfort provoked by the accelerated rhythm of time and of history.

Together with the complex feelings provoked by the end of the reign of Victoria and of the uncertain move into the new century, the final years of the nineteenth century were marked by a widespread sense of anxiety and curiosity about the notion of “modern”. This was soon to inspire a commitment to experimentation, a search for a renewed balance between past and present and also a desire for new ways of finding roots and the need to acquire new forms of cultural stability which only a new formal order of reality could achieve. There was a profound, yet fleeting sensation of fatigue and exhaustion, of a confused and complex present – seen as the extension of a process of transformation and transition. It was the end of Victorian certainties. Therefore, the idea of “modern” and of “modernity” is both contemporary and parallel to that sense of unease and even revolt against Victorian culture and its conventions. In the very context of this open, “modern” condition of the intellectual, it seems that the accelerating rhythm and irrepressible passage of time and history play a fundamental role and make any “traditional” analysis difficult to perform.

At the turn of the century it is in myths and in the mythopoetical power that creates them that the artist, in search of a critical and balanced vision of reality, finds the answer to that need for “modernity” as a reassuring continuity with the past. The present must be rooted in the past and in a positive projection towards the future. This had already been expressed in the late nineties in Henry Bergson’s concept of “duree”, in the anthropological reflections on magic, rituality, rites and myth in James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and also in the revival, by the end of the nineteenth century, of the works of Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, who had examined the roles and the relations of myths, mythology and intellectuals in human history and culture.

Thus the myth is revisited, updated and upturned by the artist, interpreted and even recontextualized as a modern and bourgeois parody of the heroic myths of the classic Nordic and Mediterranean epics. Indeed the key word here is modern, an echo of Walter Pater’s “modern idea”. An allusive but significant meaning of “modern” had already been suggested in fact by Pater in his essay on Leonardo’s La Gioconda in 1869. In Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, Pater saw the “symbol of the modern idea” (Pater 1986: 80), i.e. the deep sense of the complex history of endless human adventure. Through myth, the active memory of the past survives as the conscience of the self, emerging from the past into the present and projecting itself into the future.

The feeling that the rhythm of time and history was accelerating too rapidly, and indeed beyond control, was relatively widespread throughout the nineteenth century. In the first half, when viewing the results of the industrial revolution, the educationalist Thomas Arnold felt that he had experienced over the last thirty years the history of three hundred years concentrated into a much shorter space of time. Similarly, Mark Twain, who visited London in 1897 on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee, noted the intensity, as well as the anxiety, produced by the rapid passing of time. It was as if British history, then two thousand years old, had moved further ahead from when Queen Victoria was born than it had done in the previous two thousand years put together.

At the turn of the century there was a would-be intellectual who shared a similar, deep sense of this rapid change and loss. His words also conveyed a sense of bewilderment and crisis, and consequently, a sense of the necessity for memory and for its reenactment through epic and myth. His words depicted an incisive image of the unbridled force of time. The following passage was written by James Joyce, then a young student of 18, when addressing his fellow students at The Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin, on the 10th of January, 1900:

The forms of things, as the earth’s crust, are changed. The timbers of the ships of Tarshish are falling asunder or eaten by the wanton sea; time has broken into the fastness of the mighty: the gardens of Armida are become as treeless wilds (Joyce [1900] 2000: 28, italics are mine).

The central image of this striking and succinct assertion is that of the “change” that has affected the western world: the “forms of things” – people and objects – and “the earth’s crust”, the surface of the earth itself. The reference to historical time and the very brevity of the text – so topical that it is written in the present continuous tense – also links it through a brief but significant allusion to Biblical myth. The source is the First Book of Kings (22, 41.51) which describes the destruction of the ships of Tarshish, the Phoenician colony in Spain. Josaphat, king of the tribe of Judah, had ten ships built for a voyage to Ophir in order to look for gold in the gold-rich regions of southern Arabia. But, according to the Scriptures, those ten ships could not reach Ophir, as they were wrecked in Ezion Gheber, the Red Sea port on the Gulf of Aqaba. In Joyce’s essay, there follows the image of the destructive forces of time, an uncontrollable violence that no one can escape as it sweeps away everything in its path, even the “fastness of the mighty” and “the privileged and fortified havens of the powerful”. The image that follows is also a brief, but deeply-felt, allusion to the pain, melancholy and nostalgia at the loss of the meaning of poetry and myth which the writer seems to view as inevitable. The “Gardens of Armida”, by now deserted, are those of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (Canto 16). And through the brief reference to Armida and to Tasso’s epic poem, a modern and chivalric revisitation of classical myth set in the Middle East also enters the text. It concerns the struggle between two armies: the Crusaders and their enemies, who are the Arabs, the Infidel, Muslims, Islam. It is both a summa and a palimpsest, a Christian metaphor of Greco-Roman mythology seen through a Renaissance lens, from the wanderings of Ulysses to the Pillar of Hercules, to the more recent expeditions of Columbus well beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. A single line thus contains allusions to Torquato Tasso and Armida, the mythical and literary archetype of the spell-binding, doting enchantress, a re-embodiment of Circe in Homer’s epic and Alcina in Orlando Furioso. The story relates how Armida, the seductress witch, reneges on her promise to make the most heroic knights defect from the army of the Crusaders. In fact she is hopelessly in love with Rinaldo, whom she voluptuously keeps prisoner in her enchanted palace and gardens of the Isles of Fortunate, attempting suicide when he manages to flee and definitively take up his rightful role as Christian knight. The flourishing gardens of Canto XVI of La Gerusalemme Liberata also recall those of Alcinous, Nausicaa’s father, in Book VII of the Odyssey. Indeed, they are equally bounteous, bearing fruit in all seasons of the year, which is the sign of a nature which challenges and imitates art – the traditional imitator of nature. This brief sequence of thoughts and associations is an example of the “train of thought” that moves back from the present towards the past and to myth, to then return to the present. The sentence itself is dense with allusions and meanings; here Joyce expresses his regret for the transformation, for the shift from a fertile past to an inert, desert-like present – and he believed that he could express this change most successfully by suggesting the sense of loss through the literary myth of Armida. Therefore, long before work on the complex structure of Ulysses started, Joyce already felt the need for mythical language as a necessary requirement for composition, a method of composition that was both evocative and synthetic, forming the basis of “modern” writing. As has already been said, this was in fact the writing of the crisis and of the endless tension which went beyond the confines of the century in search of an eventual recomposition.

As early as 1944, Richard Levin and Charles Shattuck in First Flight to Ithaca proposed an interpretation of Dubliners which Giorgio Melchiori (in Joyce 1974: XXVI) has defined as ingenious. Concentrating on the solidity of the overall, complex structure of the stories, they recognised in Dubliners an early version of the structure of Ulysses; a sort of Ulysses in miniature, but only apparently less complex. It is a journey through the various ages of Man in search of his own destiny and homeland, presented as a series of revelatory moments. These moments are those brief illuminations communicated in a few phrases, those instances of what the Greeks called an “epiclesis”, or invocation, and which Joyce discussed in a letter to Constantine Curran in July 1904 (Joyce 1957: 55).

In the mid 1980s, the first signs of this recourse to myth in the early writings were investigated and structural evidence of various elements taken from the Celtic version of the myth of Tristan and Iseult was also found in the stories in Dubliners (Ruggieri 1986). At the same time – in fact in the very same year, 1986 – another analysis regarding Dubliners was presented by Donald T. Torchiana. In Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners, in fact, he found that there were “mythic, religious and legendary patterns” (Torchiana 1986: 9) in Dubliners in particular, as well as in the final version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Torchiana, however, did not mention the early essays or the first “Portrait”. In fact he used the same formula that T.S. Eliot had adopted in 1923 (Eliot [1923] 1949), talking again of a “mythical method”, and produced some erudite findings concerning Celtic and Irish folklore: the legends of a world which was limitless and elusive, poetic and musical, made up of ballads and popular songs. Since then, much attention and research has concentrated on confirming the all-important presence of Homeric and Celtic myth in the two major works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This research has privileged the theoretical and exemplifying aspects of the hermeneutic function of myth, the details of the correspondences between the two orders – classical myth and its revival in the modern narrative – and the reflections of Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, Wagner and various others on myth and mythology in relation to Joyce’s mature works. From this perspective there is all the more reason to read his early works in order to record the first tenuous signs of that presence.

In the 1900 essay “Drama and Life”, which is more or less a transcript of the speech given for the student lecture, the allusions to an idea of myth involve a specific linguistic choice, even in the use, in rapid succession, of the two lexical forms, “myth” and “mythus”. This is a more conscious choice than we might expect in a youthful essay which is both provocative and theoretical. At the same time, the passage where myths and mythus are mentioned suggests a recourse to a hermeneutic function of the notion of myth itself, working as a more immediate and incisive form of communication, long before T.S. Eliot introduced the “mythical method” whose revolutionary implications he allied to “a scientific discovery”. Indeed, the hermeneutic function of myths and mythologies was no recent discovery, since many authors with whom Joyce was familiar had each in their own way emphasised that very function.

In De Sapientia Veterum and also in The New Atlantis between the years 1609 and 1626 (the year of his death), Francis Bacon showed to be well aware of the errors that derive from the use of conventional language, of the ambiguities that it involves, the potential incomprehension and the absurd misunderstandings that it might generate. He called all of this “idola fori” – and opted for the language of myth. To him this seemed the most appropriate, and apparently the most simple, linguistic means to communicate ideas. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the first tale in De Sapientia Veterum is that of Cassandra, who according to the myth was destined to speak the truth without ever being believed. Joyce had a copy of an English edition of The Wisdom of the Ancients and The New Atlantis in his Trieste library and so very early on he must have been well aware of the profound, communicative potential of myth, given that it had also been expressed in the work of Bacon. As the centuries pass, in time’s elusive flight which transforms and sweeps all things aside, the hermeneutic function of myth remains. It re-presents itself as a mirror which both reflects and gives solidity to the past, projecting it towards the present and the future.

Indeed, the image of historical time that sweeps everything aside and – as the young Joyce says – breaks into “the fastness of the mighty” (Joyce [1900] 2000: 28), seems to foreshadow the vision of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus that Walter Benjamin described as the storm of progress.[1] In both cases the tragic image is only a fragment of a transversal search for the “sense” of time, an idea which was relatively common to culture as a whole at the turn of the century. As has been noted, a widespread, doleful fìn-de-siècle sense of tension was given theoretical weight in 1896, in Henry Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire, Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit with its assertion of “relative” time, the introduction of the concept of duration and the primary function ascribed to memory as a complete and automatic safeguard of the past.

Thus the Biblical image of the destruction of the ships of Tarshish and, within a few lines, the negative transformation of the gardens of Armida in La Gerusalemme Liberata from fruitful oriental oases to desert wasteland, immediately conveys the idea of the profound change that affects what Joyce refers to as “the forms of things” and “the earth’s crust” at the end of the nineteenth century. And the search for the meaning of the present through myth is not limited to recognising this immediate fact – the incessant rhythm of the history of time – but involves a return to myth within the text. Myth is already the means which, by recuperating the past, can express the life of the present and, as the young writer says, can even provide once again a space for a new heroism in the tired, repetitive routine of everyday life.

Drama, Joyce had said earlier in the same essay, “arises spontaneously out of life and is coeval with it” (Joyce [1900] 2000: 26). And if drama is the form that expresses life, the theme of that form is always myth: “Every race has made its own myths and it is in these that old drama often finds an outlet. The author of Parsifal has recognised this and hence his work is solid as rock. When the mythus passes over the borderline and invades the temple of worship, the possibilities of its drama have lessened considerably” (Joyce [1900] 2000: 26, italics are mine). In this way, myth is seen as the overriding theme of the dramatic form and Wagner, the author of Parsifal, united these two things, drama and myth, in an exemplary way.

“But”, continues the text of “Drama and Life”, “the deathless passions, the human verities which so found expression then, are indeed deathless, in the heroic cycle, or in the scientific age. Lohengrin, the drama of which unfolds itself in a scene of seclusion , amid half-lights, is not an Antwerp legend but a world drama” (Joyce [1900] 2000: 28). And here, right at the end of the essay, there is an emphatic return to the central theme that the very title of the essay itself suggests: the inseparable link that exists between “deathless passions” and the eternal laws of life – whose interaction, as he previously said, defines the essence of truth – and “drama”, as the highest form of art, the only form that can express those “deathless passions”. It is a theme which Joyce has argued on different levels up to this point in the essay, often relying on his readings of D’Annunzio and directly quoting from Wagner’s 1851 work, The Artwork of the Future, collected in a 1892 edition of the Prose Works in the Trieste library. The first level, following an influential quotation from Verlaine, is to criticise, in a provocative way, literature as a trade, as a convention and as artifice; in contrast, the second is the continuation of a discussion, begun the previous year (1899) when discussing a painting, in which he claims that drama, which he defines in Wagnerian terms as dramatic art, is the perfect form of art. Therefore, the immortal passion of the myth and the human truth of the past continue through time in the age of science as in the heroic age; the drama of Lohengrin is not merely an Antwerp legend but a universal drama. In this way, myth immediately acquires the potential that is contained within its own symbolic structure. On the one hand it takes on a creative function which is also the “mythological layer” that is fixed, as Lotman (Lotman 1974: 32; Ruggieri 1986: 29) says, in the conscience making it heterogeneous, ending up by creating a tension between the poles of mythological perception and those of non-mythology. This is the case in the subsequent reference in Joyce’s text to Ibsen’s Ghosts, seen as a new bourgeois myth. On the other hand myth is presented as a timeless, immortal archetype, those “deathless passions” which Joyce evokes along with Lohengrin and which the artist reinvents continually (Joyce [1900] 2000: 28). Thus in one short passage, it is possible to recuperate the whole hermeneutic and creative function that myth has performed in the history of our culture, from Hesiod’s Teogonia and Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Francis Bacon, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico. Here, for Joyce, Lohengrin, Parsifal and the Holy Grail are the primary archetypes of the “heroic cycle” which, reworked by Wagner or by Verlaine, are always ready to interpret that “world drama”, drama as the highest form of an art which is universal and eternal, which runs through the whole of history and expresses that mythological stratum which is fixed in our conscience for all time (Joyce [1900] 2000: 28). For Lotman, “the understanding of mythology” is also equivalent to “the re-emergence of a memory” (Lotman 1974: 97) which can also coexist with logical-descriptive thought, i.e. λογος. That is how, a little further on in the text, Joyce celebrates the novelty of Ibsen’s Ghosts, where both the symbolic and the mythical structure seem to overlap and become a means allowing us to overcome and provide unity to the fragmentary nature of the present, hitherto seen as a collection of unrelated moments which follow on from one another. Here, in “Drama and Life”, the aforementioned “myth” and “mythus” variants recall the Greek concept of μυθος which neither overlaps, nor simply alternates with that of λογος. In fact, the origin of the world of λογος, and thus, of philosophy – of rational thought and science – marks, if anything, the conventional origin of an absolutely different order, produced by man and set up at his side in history. In Joyce, however, the barriers between the two orders – of myth and of λογος – seem to collapse. And it is myth which takes possession of the dramatic qualities which are also seen in the banal repetition of a decadent age. Thus rational thought – philosophy seen as the action of conscious thought – does not exclude, but contains within itself the mythic and the mythological form. In fact, in “Drama and Life”, allusions to some of the most popular Nietzschian and Wagnerian themes – the Dionysian and the Apollonian spirit of tragedy as interpretation of “drama” (Nietzsche 1999) – and to the theme of the myth when discussing Wagner, Lohengrin and Parsifal, are set alongside the choice of the “dreary sameness of existence”, the “scrupulous meanness”, the “depressing monotony” of daily life as a complex subject to narrate, which, well before the writing of Ulysses, had to involve both drama and myth.

On January 7th 1904 Joyce wrote an autobiographical essay at great speed, based upon the effect produced by an uninterrupted series of allusive and obscure epiphanies communicated in an essentially metaphorical language deriving from oxymoron and dislocation. It was the first version of that first “work in progress” that would conclude only ten years later with the publication of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The ambitious plan of the young writer was to show a new point of departure for himself and for the literature of his country, a new form of narrative: introspective, but not psychological, ideological, but not symbolist. It was there that the “epiphany” itself answered the need for an expressive and dynamic, rather than static, form to communicate a message for the future. A Portrait of the Artist – this was the title of the essay – is a mosaic of quotations from the Bible, Aristotle, Ovid, Giordano Bruno, Gioacchino da Fiore, St Augustine, Oscar Wilde, D’Annunzio; there are classical myths and visions, alchemy, events in Dublin history, cultural tradition, life. Among these sources was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the book that Joyce would explicitly have in mind for the final version of the Portrait, which he may well have read in the beautiful translation of Arthur Golding, and also in the later edition edited, among others, by John Dryden. In Ovid’s time too, writing of myths of “change” took on a therapeutic meaning; the transformation myth acquired a hermeneutic function when viewed alongside the radical social transformations that the policies of Augustus were creating. Throughout the centuries, in fact, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this book of genesis in Latin culture, has always appeared as an epoch-making poetical masterpiece, a sort of pagan Bible and history of the world, told through evolutionary myths of transformation and of metamorphosis; in its way, an encyclopaedia. And “encyclopaedia” is also the term used by James Joyce to define Ulysses in the September 21st 1920 Italian letter to Carlo Linati (Joyce 1966: 366-67; translated in Joyce 1957: 146).

It is in a short passage in the 1904 A Portrait, where Joyce alludes to the myth of Actaeon, handed down in western history from Ovid to the Renaissance, that the reader perceives the actual materialisation of the short theoretical message on the function of myth suggested in the earlier “Drama and Life” (Ruggieri 1999). Joyce had read of this in Ovid and it had also been filtered through the Giordano Bruno version in Degli Eroici Furori, published in London in 1585. Here Bruno introduces Actaeon as the intellectual hunter who identifies himself with his prey to such an extent that he achieves a vision of divine nudity – the goddess Diana bathing – the symbol of divine truth. This is a vision that both nullifies and leads to dissolution, which actually “transforms” Actaeon through thoughts. The dogs which devour him are his thoughts, and these thoughts tear him to pieces. In this way, subject and object become one; the depersonalised artist identifies with his object and through myth – the myth of Actaeon – the idea of the impersonality of the artist, which was to become central to the poetic vision of Joyce and T.S. Eliot, here, for the first time, takes shape and acquires the weight of myth. The passage I have in mind describes the adolescence of the artist:

Field sports (or their correspondents in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure, but for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic hunt was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen tom his advantage. But behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered. Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to the highlands after their game; there was his ground: and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers. There was evident self-flattery in the image but a danger of complacence too. Wherefore, neglecting the wheezier bayings in that chorus which no leagues of distance could make musical, he began loftily diagnosis of the younglings. His judgement was exquisite, deliberate, sharp; his sentence sculptural (Joyce [1904] 1973: 42).

What is of interest here – and what is immediately apparent – is the exceptional difficulty of this text, which only precise references to Ovid and Bruno can clarify. It is not at all surprising that when the young author submitted this brief Portrait of 1904 for publication to the editors of the magazine Dana, they sent it back to him saying it was incomprehensible. The artist-protagonist of A Portrait had no name; there is only the all-comprehensive third person masculine pronoun. A few days later, Joyce would again take up the project of the portrait/self-portrait, passing on to the second phase in the project by beginning Stephen Hero. And in this way, with the combined choice of the two names of the eponymous hero, Stephen Daedalus – by then James Joyce’s pseudonym as the author of his letters and also of his first short story published in The Irish Homestead – there was the autobiographical link between the writer and the two fundamental myths of western culture: the Christian, through the allusion to the early Christian martyr Saint Stephen, and the classical Greco-Roman, through the allusion to the artificer-artisan-artist Daedalus, father of Icarus.

In those same years, the objects and images of western culture in Dubliners would convey a sense of dislocation and isolation, with the form and the places of their heroic vocation either upset or lost and disregarded by the ignorant masses. The allusion to myth is reduced, becoming a parody of the original when inserted into an urban setting – a city which is crowded, chaotic and indifferent, like any fin-de-siècle capital. And Dublin at the start of the twentieth century was a small, complex capital, already something of an oxymoron in itself. This is the situation in “Araby”, where the young main character follows his aunt through the crowd, doing their Saturday evening shopping through those places most hostile to the “romance” that the young narrator is experiencing for Mangan’s sister. In that everyday world, which has nothing to do with myth, there is the image of the chalice borne through hostile crowds as her name springs to his lips – the mythical abstract woman embodied in the occasional appearance of Mangan’s sister. And in the brief vision of the chalice, the chalice of an adolescent love, the spell of memory materialises for a moment. It is an image which is both sacred and profane, of the immortal passion of the Holy Grail.

In 1905, the fragmentary structure of the allusions to the Tristan and Iseult myth emerges in “A Painful Case”. A middle-aged bourgeois bank clerk, an intellectual, a writer of aphorisms and a reader of Nietzsche and D’Annunzio, finds himself at the centre of an “unfortunate” and “painful” episode which is also a matter of love and death, a matter, in the end, of being inadequate to life and one’s responsibilities. As dark and melancholy as his name (Duffy means “dark” in Irish) Mr James Duffy, the main character in “A Painful Case”, already seems to be a bourgeois version and parody of Tristan. The very beginning of the tale alludes to the places of the myth: “Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen” (Joyce [1914] 2000: 82). The keyword is Chapelizod, an anglicisation of “Chapel d’Iseult”. Chapelizod, the setting at the beginning of the events, like the later references to Phoenix Park and the fleeting offer of illicit love from Mrs Sinico – perhaps an older, frustrated Iseult herself – also recall the Tristan myth, probably in its Celtic version. In Richard Wagner and Joseph Bédier, the lovers are heroic figures who abandon themselves to a passion which finally destroys them, but the Tristan in “A Painful Case” is Tristan in reverse. No longer a hero, no longer a generous, courteous, ardent, sorrowful lover, he is a man without qualities, a withdrawn and authoritarian, hesitant and wavering, cowardly and conformist fin-de-siècle intellectual, like countless others. He is an ordinary, self-seeking inhabitant of Dublin, the pathetically reduced imitation of the “superman” of Nietzsche and D’Annunzio.[2] He has constructed his own isolation, cutting himself off from his own feelings and living a bourgeois life in the fragmented space of the myth, between Chapelizod and Phoenix Park. It is this anti-heroic dimension which forces him to refuse, through his own self-regard, the adulterous love of Mrs Sinico, thus condemning her to desperation and alcoholism. The irony is clear in the contrast between the archetype, the model of the myth, and Joyce’s story, which occasionally has touches of pathos and tragic irony. And some 30 years later, the ambiguous, negative allusion to the passion and love pervading the story would have been emphasized and reinforced in Finnegans Wake – Chapter VII, Book 1, 187.3 – through a series of parodies on the titles of the stories in Dubliners. There the “case” of the title becomes “sake”, as if to suggest and define the inversion of the myth to which the story so vaguely alludes.

The romantic triangle in the myth, Mark, Tristan and Iseult, could also be the inspiration, with a subtle inversion, for the three main characters of Gabriel Conroy, Gretta and Michael Furey in “The Dead”. The last story in Dubliners ends on a deeply symbolic note, with the slow loss of consciousness of the defeated Gabriel, who is, however, ready to start a new journey as he listens to the sound of the snowflakes softly falling through the universe, “faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (Joyce [1914] 2000: 176). And through the figures of Gabriel-Mark, the allusion to the myth of Mark, Tristan and Iseult suggests the image of continuity, the uninterrupted flow of tradition and the history of thought that unites “the living and the dead”, life and death, in one, single stream.

It is here, in these last lines of the last story in Dubliners, that a new sense of history and tradition is achieved, sustained by an allusion, if not an explicit recourse, to myth. And in this there is the idea of a new and a sturdier humanism that can bind and recompose the fragments of that vision of the written word which will ultimately be presented in Ulysses and in The Waste Land.

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The picture that accompanies this paper is entitled “Joyce writing a sentence” and is the work of Guy Davenport [Editor’s Note].