Waterlover, Griefcarrier, Meansoaker
An Exploration of Grief, Death, and Immortality in James Joyce’s Ulysses through the Lens of Jung and Kübler-Ross
In the pursuit of truth, James Joyce rarely spares his readers from the complexity of reality. When attempting to explain what Leopold Bloom, “waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier” admired in the “range” of water, Joyce provides his readers with a protracted expulsion of forty-two universal reasons communicated in erudite phrasing and terms. Among these include water’s “universality” and its “democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level,” or its “vastness,” or “strength in rigid hydrants,” or “properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation” (549). Water remains a central motif throughout Ulysses, developing themes of all characters and unifying them in the wheel of Joycean existence as if Joyce himself was a clandestine Buddhist. It is not limited in its application to Ulysses’s themes, either, and is central to Stephen’s exploration of language and historical immortality throughout the Telemachiad, or Leopold Bloom’s neapolitanism as he flows throughout the Riverrun of Dublin, or the flow of Molly Bloom’s thoughts that run along the page in changing rapidity, breadth, and depth like a river of her consciousness.
For this exploration, Joyce’s water motif is particularly useful in explaining Joyce’s perception of grief, the dying, and the memory of the dead. Psychology, generally speaking, didn’t really exist as its own entity until the mid-to-late 19th century as Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory and developed “empirical methodologies that first granted psychology a disciplinary identity distinct from philosophy,” but was overall “riven by tensions and ambiguities” despite “incredible output” (Kim). From there, psychology explored larger, structural ideas with the work of Freud, Jung, Lacan, Skinner, Pavlov, and more, all attempting to establish some universality associated with human motivations, frameworks for human consciousness (and unconsciousness), conditioning, paternal relationships, linguistic constrictions, etc. At its worst, psychology labeled (and continues to label) individuals only to feed the egos of the labelers with haughty vehemence. At its best, psychoanalytical approaches bridge the empathetic ties between readers, authors, and characters and fulfill the unstated promise of developing the human psyche into a healthier, functional, and possibly stable entity.
Because of the necessary progression of the psychological field, nuanced studies into grief didn’t appear until the 1950s as Thanatology began to gain acceptance as a key component of psychological study, despite Ilya Metchenikoff’s solicitations as early as 1903 (Fonseca and Tetoni 158). Joyce actually mentions Metchnikoff in “Circe,” though with a humorously large emphasis on his research associated with syphilis inoculation (Joyce 425, Gifford 498). Thanatology was then popularized by the astonishing success of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s medical approach to the dead and dying. In 1969 (elaborating and extending on her initial lecture in 1967), Kübler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying directly addressed the isolation and treatment of dying patients in the American healthcare system. Focusing on the psychology of terminally ill patients, Ross created a broad, linguistic framework that would be used for the decades to come to label the psychological states of patients, also known as the now prolific DABDA model for grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, this framework was so much more than a cursory, structuralist perspective on the mental state of terminally ill patients, but a malleable guide for understanding the psychological states of doctors, nurses, and family members caught in the torrent of death: “[The five states] are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief” (On Grief and Grieving 7).
Despite having been exposed to the DABDA model in my education and my own personal life, my first-hand experience with Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying made it clear that Ross’s work expanded far more on empathy, compassion, projection, and humanity’s subconscious strifes with immortality and far less than superficially labeling the stages of the damned. She routinely confronts societal avoidance of death, requesting that people make “all-out effort[s] to contemplate [their] own death” in order to “deal with [the] anxieties surrounding [death] and to help others familiarize themselves with these thoughts” and alleviate the “destructiveness” of this psychological turmoil (On Death and Dying 13). Her ultimate goal was to “sensitize family members of terminally ill patients and hospital personnel to the implicit communications of dying patients” and bridge the divide between the fears of the dying and the avoidance of the living (137). She continued her work until her death in 2004 and her book On Grief and Grieving was published posthumously with the help of David Kessler. This work extended that same model of grief to the living, applying the DABDA model to grief and continuing to maintain core elements of empathy, malleability, relativity, and communication. Despite On Death and Dying refraining from overly technical and academic language, On Grief and Grieving simplified the language further, with certain concessions made in the name of increasing the greatest possible impact on her audience. Kessler’s additions on his own personal experiences with grief make it clear that On Grief and Grieving take a more direct and didactic approach with its communication to the reader; it talks to the reader and directs them on their action far more than On Death and Dying, which emphasizes instruction instead of didacticism. Yet, many of the key descriptions and dialogues about grief and dying overlap. For their application to literature, no stark differentiation needs to be made between the grieving and the dying as both are attempting to grapple with concepts of identity, immortality, and nonexistence in a world limited in empathy and communication.
This framework seems like an appropriate starting point to the 21st century modernization of critical psychological approaches to Joyce’s Ulysses, at least in terms of the study of grief and the dead. Joyce scholarship at present is attached to Freudian conceptualization of character motivations, limiting modern criticism and further pushing Ulysses into irrelevance and antiquity. Joyce regularly asserted that his inspirations for his internal monologue style stemmed from Dujardin, George Morre, Tolstoy, and even his brother Stanislaus (Ellmann 126, 358). Richard Ellmann, in his quintessential biography of James Joyce, asserts that Joyce drew his narrative and psychological inspirations “probably [from] poets rather than psychologists” (85), as Joyce would assert that “Freud had been anticipated by Vico” (340) or consistently redirect attention away from empirical interpretations of the human mind; Joyce would always elevate a more universal, contradictory construction of the human mind that coincided with his ‘esthetic’ sensibilities, subsequently anticipating Jungian psychology. Many of the overtly structured, Freudian approaches to Joyce’s work conveniently cherry-pick examples to confirm preconceived biases, drawing conclusions in a perilous tomb of contradictions as any overtly structured psychological model is destined to fail when applied to Ulysses. Eager to label Joyce and Stephen aspirant mother fornicators or enthusiastic to jump into complex vortexes of esotericisms to seemingly gratify pretentious professorial eruditions, the current state of psychological perspectives on Ulysses is insufficient in navigating the emotional core of the novel, especially in the 21st century.
Ironically (because of common misconceptions of her work), Kübler-Ross’s approach to the dead, dying, and grieving addresses these deficiencies. That emotional core of Ulysses is filled with a wealth of complexity that is often masked by language, history, death, promiscuity, and Joyce’s lovely obscenity. Some of these elements, such as the associative nature of language and history, actually hinder the capacity for some characters to empathize with each other. Death, consequently, acts as a unifying factor and Kübler-Ross’s approach to death and grief emphasizes a subjective, inclusive view that elevates empathy over labels, division, and judgment. Current nuanced approaches into grief and death in Ulysses are valiant efforts to explore the historical connections and broader, thematic impacts of death in the work. For instance, Jibu Mathew George in “James Joyce and the ‘strolling mort’: signification of death in Ulysses” explores the varied, cosmopolitan, and relative experience of death in Ulysses. From the strong criticism Joyce places on Ireland’s “Morbid political cult of the dead martyr” (62), Catholocism’s attachment to the corporeal with special relationship to Leopold Bloom’s father’s suicide (65), or people’s attachment to family members to combat the sense of “finitude of their existence” (67), George compiles an argument that emphasizes the “palimpsestic outlook on death” or a “collective dimension of death… which people adopt to help them interpret, find meaning in, and cope with” where “death has no hermeneutic ground zero” (68).
Building on this approach, the malleability and universality of Kübler-Ross’s work makes it a perfect candidate for developing the discussion surrounding thanatological perspectives of characters’s psyches in Ulysses. Furthermore, the constantly misunderstood and oversimplified nature of her work parallels the misunderstood and oversimplified nature of Stephen’s and Joyce’s grief as scholars simply gloss over the complexity of the emotions associated with them in favor of philosophical posturing that rarely considers the fallacious and unsubstantiated nature of the emotional foundations their arguments are based on. The ultimate goal here is to provide clarity on the emotional core of Ulysses while upholding relative experience. This limited exploration will focus on Stephen in Ulysses with relevant reference to Joyce’s own life. Special care will be taken to avoid seemingly objective labels for the experience of grief and death, labels that cast aside the grieving like exiles cruelly barred from the realm of normal experience.
Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning asserted that “an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior” (20) with the presumption that judgment of ‘peculiar’ or ‘abnormal’ behavior is often done with the motive of separating individuals from whatever that judge deems to be normality. Fittingly, Joyce’s work has been openly criticized for his characters’ deviation from normality, yet Joyce would assert that “no one has [normal tastes]” (Ellmann 361). Thus, it is not the job of the psychoanalytic critic to superciliously identify the abnormalities of characters in a desperate attempt to find stability in the realm of human experience. Instead, they should swim in its assorted incongruities. Labels in this context are used to guide the discussion rather than end it and it is through the incongruous behavior of the characters and in those particular peculiarities that the discordant universal is found. Innumerable psychoanalytic perspectives to literature are desperate to apply a label to a character or an author, without thought to the consequences. Hamid Farahmandian and Lu Shoa in “The Social Isolation of Neurotic Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” for instance, diminish Bloom’s normality as a person fraught with “social isolation,” thus he is forced to “adopt a detached personality” and cope with his detachment through a sense of “superiority, independence and self-imposed restriction on his life” (5). Their observations aren’t necessarily incorrect, but they hold him to be an unsatisfied man because some elements of his life are replete with humiliation or insignificance, immediately labeling him as neurotic, detached, and desperate for a feeling of superiority. This approach reduces people to objects needing repair, ignoring evidence (like his willingness to abide humiliation in “Circe” or “Hades”) for the sake of maintaining the initial hypothesis; confirmation bias made manifest.
While Ellmann’s biography James Joyce serves as a quintessential exploration into the daily reality of Joyce’s life, other approaches such as Birmingham’s The Most Dangerous Book or Maddox’s Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce are all nuanced explorations or biographies that amplify a reader’s understanding of Joyce’s life while deviating from the traditional approaches. Much in the same spirit, this article intends to serve as an exigence for the nuanced study of grief in Ulysses and Joyce’s life from numerous frameworks (not just Kübler-Ross). Just like the emphasis on the publication of Ulysses in Birmingham’s work clarified a multitude elements of Joyce’s life and further cemented the impossibility of Ulysses as a published work in its own right, this approach serves to established that essential foundation for the study of grief and death and pushes for ‘mean-making’ approach to Joyce’s work that is grounded in Jungian psychology.
Forging Identity: Kübler-Ross’s Foundation in Jung
Kübler-Ross’s approach to the study of grief and dying is grounded in Jungian psychology and a couple elements from Jung’s psychological structures are key to contextualizing her work. Individualism, to Jung, was created through the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. His construction of consciousness (the ego, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious) relied on a chaotic unconscious that maintained a general “tendency to autonomy.” Powerful emotions, such as love, hate, or grief, subert the control of the ego by the invading unconscious: “Not much is needed… to make the ego and the unconscious change places” (Jung 278). To Jung, the unconscious manifests itself in generally “chaotic and irrational” behaviors, “despite certain symptoms of intelligence and purposiveness” (283). Thus, the creation of an “indestructible whole” identity is the “old game of hammer and anvil” (288) between the conscious ego and the subconscious (personal and collective) and it is through that conflict and communication between those two elements of ourselves that the “conscious and unconscious contents [are] consummated” and the “rounding out of the personality into a whole” can commence (289). This conflict is then exacerbated by the complexity of language as a conscious mediator to the unlanguaged subconscious, often revealed through imagery and dreams in Jungian and Freudian psychology. Consequently, the application of Lacan’s symbolic order or Derrida’s deconstruction complicates this conflict and people’s capability to process death or grief. This brief digression is beyond the scope of this article, but worthy of mentioning as an area for further exploration.
Throughout On Death and Dying and On Grief and Grieving, Kübler-Ross’s ideas develop on this internal conflict between the conscious experiencer of grief and death, and the subconscious denier of it. Kübler-Ross maintains that people are mostly incapable of processing their own mortality consciously: “...in our unconscious we cannot perceive our own death and do believe in our own immortality.” People regularly use the events of a neighbor’s death or death statistics in war to support a “projection of our infantile wish for omnipotence and immortality” (phrased in a rhetorical question) to assert the possibility of death, yet not within the realm of their own experience (On Death and Dying 14). Thus, underpinning each state of grief and dying in her books is the continual, Jungian conflict between the conscious and the subconscious and the creation of a new identity that is capable of substantiating and processing the death of a loved one or the death of oneself. If the creation of identity is the subsequent combination of factors associated with experience, and that experience is molded by our interactions with loved ones, and the conceptualization of our labels and archetypes is molded continuously through our experience and history, it is fitting to conclude that the new identity formed with the comprehension of the death can be narrowed into this singular conflict: our mortal consciousness provokes our deluded subconscious to accept mortality. Once the subconscious is capable of accepting the concept of mortality (personally or impersonally), the ‘rounding of the psyche’ is able to take place and a new consciousness is formed. Once that identity finds a seemingly cohesive form, it simply awaits the next jarring event to subvert that temporary stability; like a calm river that will develop into a rapid, then return to tranquility again. Death ends this cycle.
Of all the stages of dying, the stage of ‘acceptance’ best exemplifies this. This stage should not be misconstrued as a “happy stage,” but a stage associated with a “void of feelings” (Kübler-Ross 110) and the fear of dying is abandoned. “Peace,” as Kübler-Ross represents it, is not some stoich, calm, smiling affair as it is often romantically interpreted by Hollywood, but the absence of fear and the denial of life. There is a rejection of communication with loved ones and a request for isolation: “a patient reaches a point when death comes as a great relief, and that patients die easier if they are allowed and helped to detach themselves slowly from all the meaningful relationships in their life” (115). Kübler-Ross associates this stage with Bettelheim’s description of infancy, a stage characterized by “primary narcissism” where there is an existence “without fear and despair” characterized by passivity (116); extreme pain is not an impossibility. This stage is the denial of life and the acceptance of death as a preferred outcome to the continuation of living. Consequently, it may be possible that the inversion is true, too: to live is to perpetually deny the possibility of death; humanity must believe themselves to be subconsciously immortal in order to function in life.
Stephen’s Attachment to Immortality
When Jung read Ulysses, he was filled with admiration and boredom. In a letter to Joyce in 1932, he described Ulysses as an “exceedingly hard nut” that brought him no end of boredom, grumbling, cursing, and admiration. He described Molly’s soliloquy as a “string of veritable psychological peaches” and admired Joyce’s understanding of the “real psychology of a woman”; Nora firmly refutes this: “He knows nothing at all about women” (Ellmann 629). Joyce’s depiction of consciousness naturally provokes psychoanalytical approaches as it doesn’t stay consistently in a single mode of it. As the novel and the style and the day develops, so does the unconscious; the unconscious slowly invades the consciousness of the characters and the text itself, molding the conscious reality and language of Ulysses in episodes such as “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” “Penelope,” “Cyclops,” and more. It is a persistent, Jungian conflict between the conscious and unconscious as the characters and the text attempt to form an identity around the chaos the unconscious brings through associations and external stimuli. Thrown into this vortexian consciousness are the corpses of the dead that taint and stain consciousness and throw characters into a perpetual state of grief or dying.
One of the most aesthetically striking elements associated with Stephen’s grief is his singing to his mother. Joyce establishes this element early in “Telemachus,” as Buck Mulligan triggers the association when he sings “Who Goes with Fergus?” as he descends the Martello tower. At his mother’s deathbed, Stephen sang “Fergus’s song,” “alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords.” He acknowledges the pleasure it gave his mother, and to himself, as she “wanted to hear my music.” He gazed at her with silent “awe and pity” as she was “crying in her wretched bed” (8). Lines recur in “Circe” as well, with references to “white breast… dim sea” (497) or “Fergus now” (496). Stephen attempts to hold onto this nostalgic memory and grasp onto any element of her being, before the internal monologue is invaded (just like Stephen’s consciousness) with the memory of his mother: “In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, he breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes” (9).
Denial is often characterized by postponement, as patients would ignore appointments for therapy, the confrontation of their own terminal illness (Kübler-Ross 39), and it acts as a starting point as people search for understanding (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 11). To Stephen, that positive, nostalgic association is initially an attempt to process his mother’s reality and it is invaded by the decaying corpse of his mother. The subconscious, immortal self invades his mortal consciousness, and Stephen’s aesthetic reality is twisted by the “wax and rosewood” of his sensory existence. That turmoil is exemplified in this restrained sentence: “Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed” (9). The positive elements of his mother’s memory are “folded away” and brought to form in a time of emotional need. His mother’s entirety is then “muskperfumed,” or stained with the sensory associations of her funeral and corpse, by the invasion of the subconscious. Stephen therefore must reframe the conceptualization of his mother and her identity to him, thus reframing his own identity in association and reference to her. Stephen asks: “Where now?” (8) and begs his mother to “Let me be and let me live” (9), yet the conflict is not between his mother and himself, but within himself entirely. As Stephen wrestles with the ghost of his mother, he is ultimately wrestling with a projection of his own guilt and a guilt that is manifested as an aesthetically grotesque conflation of his anger and denial; Stephen’s anger at his mother’s request, Stephen’s anger at himself, and Stephen’s unwillingness to let his mother’s corpse rest.
In Joyce’s life, “Who goes with Fergus?” was an anthem of grief. In 1903, Joyce sang the song to his mother, Mary “May” Joyce, as she slowly died from cancer (Ellmann 129). His mother seemingly handled her own death with grace, attempting to be “lighthearted” and even nicknaming the doctor “Sir Peter Teazle” (135). This small detail manifested itself in Mulligan’s caustic monologue on death in “Telemachus” (Joyce 7). She did request that Joyce take communion and make his confession in an attempt to return him to Irish Catholicism (Ellmann 139), but was comatose in the final hours of her death (136). James Joyce’s uncle and May Joyce’s brother, John Murray, ultimately made the request that he pray at his mother’s deathbed and it found its way into Ulysses through Stephen’s principal ghost as she “bent over [Stephen]” with “Her eyes on me to strike me down,” rattling “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!” (Joyce 9). The haunting image then carries its way through Stephen’s subconscious as it resurfaces in each of Stephen’s episodes to plague Stephen and interrupt the narration as well.
Joyce also sang the song to George Joyce, his younger brother, in 1902. George Joyce was the brother destined for the same intellectual greatness of James for he showed similarities to James’s “wit and intelligence” (Ellmann 44). However, he was a more “openhearted companion than James could be” according to their other brother, Stanislaus (93). His death was not a catalyst for the family’s demise unlike May Joyce’s, but George’s early death seemed to solidify his place as a frozen, idealized figure who was the ‘best’ variation of James himself. This fact is further exemplified by the name of James’s first child, ‘Georgie.’ In the death of George, James was forced to confront his own personal shortcomings and in response to these shortcomings, resorted to isolating himself from his family and channeling his anger into his work. Joyce improved himself through conflict, persistently seeing friendship as a burden that ultimately leads to betrayal and adversaries (116), then paralleling this mentality with the relationship with his country and family members. Joyce himself argued that he would not want conditions for Ireland to change because they provided him a “shape and a destiny,” for he used the self-perceived exile as a “justification of himself” (109). Not a demonstrative man (136), James Joyce was not disposed to externalize outburst of anger in the same light as John Joyce, yet his anger is clear through his perpetual, self-chosen exile and his contrarian propensities.
In On Death and Dying, Kübler-Ross spends most of the text contextualizing and showcasing (through her unaltered interviews) the emotions and stages she labels. She makes it abundantly clear that the inherent ambiguity of ‘anger’ or ‘acceptance’ is not necessarily something that can be alleviated through simple, descriptive language, but that it must be contextualized through people’s action and dialogue. For this reason, it is essential to establish how Joyce externalized his anger. Anger was not a dramatic, flaring, alcoholic rage paralleling his father’s outbursts, but instead a persistent denial of his state in his country and family. His anger was a pacifist’s anger and the anger he held at his mother’s death was associated with abandonment and a death that tore away the “stable world” he was ironically “engaged in renouncing” (Ellmann 130). In Kübler-Ross’s experience, patients that often exhibited rage would provoke rejection, yet were “the most desperate of them all” (Kübler-Ross 55). They, too, believed (often correctly) that people would stay away from them when they are sick (66). There was a strong emphasis on dignity when those patients spoke with doctors, nursing staff, and family, with acute reflection on religion that was often a target for their contempt and hatred. Kübler-Ross’s archetype for ‘anger,’ a nun, also believed she had “somebody else’s religion” (69) as she lived a life where she felt as an outsider to her personal and religious family. She strove to find her own identity and often resented fellow nuns in much the same way she rejected and resented her mother and siblings (76); On Death and Dying carries its own, female variation of Stephen Dedalus.
Stephen finds means of identity through his academics, intellectualism, and riddles. In “Nestor,” the text’s consciousness hides the subconscious attempt at his expression of grief. Stephen asks his students, “‘Tis time for this poor soul / To go to heaven.” The answer he provides is a critiptic attempt at vulnerability: “The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush” (Joyce 22) The answer, a riddle more for the reader than the students, contains three layers: Stephen (the academic ‘fox’) killing his mother under his artistic hollybush or crown of thorns; Stephen killing his mother under his attachment to paganism, associated with celtic heritage here and referenced through the ‘omphalos’ and übermensch; and Stephen destroying the ‘grandmother,’ a portmanteau implying his actions affronted generations of matriarchs and destroyed the ‘grand mother,’ May Dedalus, who was the foundation of the family. The technique of a personal catechism (Gifford 30) that Joyce employs for “Nestor” isn’t isolated within the episode either, as the continuous search for an epiphany that will alleviate the guilt Stephen feels for his mother’s death doesn’t end throughout the novel. Externally, Stephen maintains that he was not responsible for his mother’s death. Internally however, his associations and conflations indicate an immense, crushing guilt and a desperate attempt to intellectualize his way away from it.
Joyce consistently provides the consciousness of Stephen, Bloom, or any of the other characters. The challenge of Ulysses lies in the reconstruction of the subconsciousness not only of the characters but of the text itself. The subconscious manifests itself chaotically and through the form of puzzles and slips, each challenging the reader and the characters to reconstruct the conflict and identify the emotional core that is masked by the often erudite consciousness of the text. In “Proteus,” however, the chaotic subconscious emerges much less cryptically through a slip in his internal monologue. Focusing on the motif of drowning, Stephen meditates on Buck Mulligan’s own supposed heroics (from Stephen’s perspective), wondering if he could save men from drowning himself. It is an internal monologue of masculinity and one of many threads of discord between Stephen’s identity and the identity of those around him. He pictures a man drowning, placing himself in a literally enveloped position that parallels his emotional, metaphoric drowning: “His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I… With him together down…” From there, an altered pronoun shifts the entire monologue and reveals the reality of his subconscious: “I could not save her. Waters: bitter death: lost” (Joyce 38). Painfully, the narration slips away from internal monologue and into dramatic, third-person narration, a trend that Joyce maintains throughout the novel where the emotional turmoil of Stephen builds up so significantly that the narration itself feels overwhelmed (like Stephen) and it avoids the emotional reality of the situation; an expression of denial and avoidance.
Each of these contribute to that conflict between Stephen’s subconscious guilt and his conscious attempts to distance himself from external forces that exacerbate and amplify that guilt. Externally, Stephen maintains a state of denial as the actions that align with social expectations (such as wearing black) seem like actions to appease the ‘rabblement.’ Internally, however, it is an expression of defiance and subdued anger as Stephen makes careful choices that undermine their power and further isolate himself. In isolation, Stephen remains in a state of depression with spurts of anger leaping from his subconscious to accost the ghost of his supposedly angry, judgemental mother: “No mother. Let me be and let me live!” (9). It should be noted that the construction of Stephen’s mother is just that: a construction. She is the conflation and projection of Stephen’s own anger, judgment, and shame (of impiety) directed squarely toward himself. His attempts to escape or intellectualize his grief reach their climax and culmination in “Circe.” Here, Joyce dissolves the division between the conscious and the subconscious and has the subconscious chaotically manifest itself throughout the reality of Bloom’s, Stephen’s, and the reader’s experience. That chaotic manifestation is especially prevalent in the linguistic associations that fit themselves associatively, conflating the reality with thematic and emotional connections, rather than physical ones; thematic and emotional realities are elevated above physical ones much in the same spirit as expressionism. That conflict between the various consciousnesses of the characters inevitably results in the conflict between Ulysses as a literary text and the narrative expectations the field of literature holds for its contributors. Parallels between the various hallucinations furthers the unity between Stephen and Bloom, supporting Jungian approaches to the psyche because of their universality.
Stephen’s grief is thus made manifest within “Circe,” but still restrained by Ulysses’s emphasis on Leopold Bloom. The vast majority of “Circe” explores Bloom’s own insecurities, fears, griefs, regrets, and more, but when Stephen’s subconscious invades the narrative space, it circles around the guilt he holds for his refusal to pray. It begins with Stephen’s false epiphany: “Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become” (412). He punctuates the dialogue with “Ecco!” or ‘Behold!’ in Italian, indicating a subjective belief in the epiphany’s validity. However, it is much more likely that this epiphany, which suggests a deterministic view (all people are preconditioned to act, thus no free will exists), is Stephen’s desperate attempt to alleviate the guilt that adorns the grief he feels for his mother. Bloom’s variation a few hundred lines later carries similar weight thematically, but with less emphasis on conditioning: “Past was is today. What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester” (420). Bloom also avoids answers to the riddles of life and doesn’t treat experience like a catechism, prefering to swim and live the realities with all their relative inconsistencies.
The attempt at new epiphanies never stops for Stephen as he uses elusive allusions and riddles to divert and avoid his grief. The riddle of the ‘Fox’ appears again, this time manifesting itself in dialogue and hallucination. The pronoun “her” once again dominates a line as Stephen states “‘Tis time for her poor soul / To get out of heaven” (455), and Stephen’s subconscious conducts an act of necromancy. The fox “probably… killed her” (456) and is later chased, “having buried his grandmother,” running “for the open” as a “pack of staghounds follows… hot for a kill” (467). The imagery suggests that Stephen, the fox, is hunted by a variation of the ‘rabblement’ who he believes to be Buck Mulligan, his mother, father, the Catholic church, the King of England, and more, and a sign of cruel, artistic oppression that doesn’t understand his esthetic vision. However, it is far more likely a form of displacement as Stephen externalizes the anger that would more appropriately be directed toward his failure to kneel. It is the extension of his anger toward her and an expression of his rage through his pacifist outlet of education and erudition. People typically “know more about suppressing anger than feeling it,” (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 16) and anger is often displaced “in all directions and projected onto the environment almost at random” (Kübler-Ross 50).
This externalization of his anger affects Stephen’s associations and imagery, too. He intellectually associates the Sphinx with his mother as a “beast that has two backs at midnight. Married” (Joyce 456). That association originates from Oscar Wilde’s poem where the Sphinx exists as an exquisitely “grotesque” and “Half woman and half animal” (Gifford 510) creature. May Dedalus’s grotesque, decaying appearance at the emotional climax of “Circe” is also tainted with continued imagery of the dead. She is unleashed within the mercurial reality of “Circe” with a “smile of death’s madness,” uttering a “silent word” as a choir professes the silent prayer Stephen has been repeating throughout the novel. Stephen attempts to intellectualize her death, claiming that “Cancer [killed her], not I. Destiny,” but that answer is insufficient for the guilt he carries. His mother demands that he “Repent,” laying thick the guilt of “Years and years [that she] loved [him],” holding the “fire of hell” under Stephen with her “outstretched finger.” It is only then that Stephen’s unrestrained, unfiltered, undisplaced rage surfaces: “Shite!... Ah non, par exemple! The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!” Stephen then brands “Nothung,” his ashplant-as-sword to smash a chandelier and the darkness consumes the scene, a “ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (Joyce 473-5). It is a moment of grandeur, a demonstrative, declarative statement by the part of Stephen and a resolution and promise to his art. However, it is a failed one.
The failure is made evident through his displaced “center of gravity” (481) and the raising of the “dead of Dublin” for the subsequent closing of the chapter (488). To Jung, a healthy conflict between the conscious and the subconscious is supposed to forge a new, “indestructible whole, an ‘individual’” (Jung 288), but Stephen’s refusal of his mother is the continuation of the conflict and sign of fissural expansion within his psyche. Stephen is not attempting to communicate his anger and frustrations, but instead further isolates himself physically and through his commitment to art. Anger can “isolate [people] from friends and family at the precise time [they] may need them most” (Kübler-Ross and Kessler 16). This is a familiar pattern for Stephen as he avoids his father and sisters throughout the narrative despite their grief paralleling his own; Simon’s exclamation of grief in “Hades” (Joyce 89) and Stephen’s silent moment with his sister in “Wandering Rocks” with Dilly’s eyes “drowning… Save her… All against us” (200). His coping fails miserably as he dives deeper into compunction with his mother’s confrontation. For Kübler-Ross, “patients do best who have been encouraged to express their rage, to cry in preparatory grief, and to express their fears and fantasies to someone who can quietly sit and listen” (Kübler-Ross 116), but Stephen’s ability to express these elements and allow his unlanguaged subconscious to interact with his consciousness in a safe environment is nonexistent. Worse, it is often hindered through his own actions and conceit.
Stephen consequently feels trapped in time’s “one livid final flame,” believing himself to be caught in the “ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (Joyce 20). He is a victim, not a participant, to the course of history, and much like Bloom feels victim to Blazes Boylan and Molly Bloom’s infidelity, Stephen feels powerless. The vision of his father in “Circe” as The Cardinal asserts that “[Stephen] lies in the lowest dungeon / With manacles and chains around his limbs” (427) which expresses Stephen’s emotional core that is amplified by other manifestations of his subconscious that affirm that “All is not well” and “Lei rovina tutto”; “You ruin everything” (Gifford 496). Stephen’s grief is then agitated by his feelings of hopelessness and isolation, an isolation that he consistently attempts to embrace through his learnedness. Nonetheless, his capacity for coping with his grief is reduced because he continues to entrench himself in education and avoid the simple, emotional answer. “The devil is in that door” for Stephen as he suffers “the agony of the damned” (428), refusing to acknowledge his emotions for the sake of upholding intellectual notions of art and persona associated with stoicism, Nitsche’s übermensch, Aristotle, and Matthew Arnold. Instead of accepting his own fragility and fallibility, he continues to hold himself to an inconceivable standard that reduces the qualities of character that allow Leopold Bloom to be Ulysses.
The result of the confrontation between Stephen’s mother and him seems like a cry of resolution, but is actually a continued displacement of his anger. Stephen once again redirects his anger toward an entity he feels comfortable accosting, rather than addressing his own emotional deficiencies. He places blame on the King, the Catholic church, his father, and Buck Mulligan, but his ultimate reality is that of the conscious self attempting to intellectualize his grief with the chaotic subconscious, desperately attempting to communicate the reality of his action: it was his own, free choice to refuse the prayer. In the attempt to uphold his intellectual, esthetic beliefs, Stephen abandons his emotional foundation and he fortifies this arrogance until it leads to his eventual abasement in “Circe.” It should also be noted that while many of the characters showcase cruelty toward him, they do not necessarily speak untruths. However, Stephen is incapable of listening to Buck Mulligan or anyone else because their cruelty does not coincide with Stephen’s conceptualization of the beautiful and esthetic. Stephen seemingly searches for someone to empathize with, but much like Joyce in reality, only searches for an enabler (James Joyce’s rejection of J. F. Byrne; Ellmann 131). This leads Stephen to believe that his capacity to deal with grief is out of his control, and like the terminally ill patients in denial in On Death and Dying, Stephen searches for any answer and acquires false epiphany after false epiphany in order to postpone realities of death (Kübler-Ross 38-39). Denial is particularly close to feelings of immortality, as people prioritize those emotions over the almost inconceivable acknowledgement that “we too have to face death” (Kübler-Ross 41), and Stephen is far too attached the eternity of Sandymount strand at the moment to emotionally deal with the death of his mother.
Wavewhite Griefcarriers Stressed, Two by Two
Stephen’s solution to his grief is found partially in Leopold Bloom. Bloom is by no means less tormented by his own history or by the history of his nations, but his resolve and positivity and expressions of kindness despite humiliation showcase a man of free will. Bloom has had significantly more time to process the grief associated with his son Rudy, but he is much more capable of dealing with the “sins of [his] past” that rise against him; the “Many. Hundreds” (Joyce 438). He endures incredible literal and figurative pain, especially within the realm of “Circe,” that includes humiliation, mocking, stripping away of national identity, immolation, hanging by the eyelids, smothering with the thighs of a dominatrix, and violation as he is feminized and stripped of his masculinity. Yet, Bloom remains standing at the close of “Circe” and supports the crumbling Stephen in “Eumaeus.” Conversely, Stephen, obdurate at heart, mutters faint remnants of his guilt and grief and despite being a pacifist, he acts violently with self-destruction. Bloom tells Stephen that he “resent[s] violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything… It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people” (525), yet the form of hatred and violence Stephen takes is one of self-flagellation. Stephen’s actions subsequently amplify his grief and anger and like the escalation of a military conflict, the internal strifes of his consciousnesses are magnified.
Bloom’s success foils Stephen's failure, as Bloom accepts the realities of life rather than attempting to intellectualize them or defeat them with haughty statements of importance. Bloom is a poet, but not one that attempts to mold reality to suit his intellectual and artistic sensibilities. Instead, he is the poet of reality and of daily life and a master of finding meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. This disparity is crowned by the sight of Bloom’s son in “Circe,” “a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book…. inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page” (497). His sight is ethereal, but grounded in the earthly reality of Stephen’s body lying beside Bloom. Joyce restrains the text, providing the reader with only imagery associating Rudy with Hermes (Gifford 529), and nothing more; no third person narration or dialogue between the two. In The Odyssey, Hermes was the God that provided Odysseus with the root to prevent him from being ‘unmanned’ by Circe. Retrospectively, Rudy’s image underlies the text of Bloom’s consciousness, grounding Bloom’s subconscious in a similar manner to Stephen’s mother. However, Rudy’s memory is a call to kindness and a signal from a victim “kidnapped” from life. Bloom stays obedient to Rudy’s memory, while Stephen rejects his mother’s, and uses his memory to provide purpose to his life: “...everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” (Frankl 66)
In “Oxen of the Sun,” Joyce provides readers and Bloom with a cyclical perspective on life: “Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother’s womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came” (316). Joyce calls for readers to contemplate their own death and birth, anticipating Kübler-Ross and thanatology fittingly. Joyce’s conceptualization of life is not a grim, funnel-shaped vortex that ultimately terminates in a compressed, apocalyptic view of history. Instead, it is a vortexian torus, better representing the cyclical repetition of suffering, grief, pain, hope, joy, prosperity, gloom, and whatever other shades comprise the cosmopolitan reality of life. The reality and reality of grief that Joyce produces is one of “potentiality,” of “utility,” of “strength,” “solidity,” “cleansing,” “simplicity,” “violence,” filled with whirlpools, maelstroms, and “ubiquity” found in the range of water (549), and to read and live the reality of Ulysses is to participate in that universality and understanding.
There is so much left to explore from a thanatological, Jungian, and mean-making perspective in Ulysses, Joyce’s life, and Joyce’s other works. Kübler-Ross’s work was only faintly examined in this exploration with an emphasis on only her two most impactful books; Jungian archetypes have found some traction in Joycean criticism, but other elements, especially concerning identity, seem sparsely researched (Jesús López-Peláez Casellas’s “Joyce’s Ulysses and Jung’s ‘Process of Individuation’: The Search for Completeness” stands as one example, published only in Spanish and not widely available); Viktor Frankl’s logotherapeutic, mean-making branch of psychology could offer great insight into Bloom’s success over Stephen’s in terms of navigating the perils of their realities; Buddhist allusions have been explored to some extent (by Eishiro Ito and Roshan Attrey), but parallels between the philosophies of the characters and Buddhist philosophy has not been explored to any extent; Lacan’s and Derrida’s disputes with language complicate how the languaged and unlanguaged elements of human consciousness process grief; Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, and Joyce’s own life remain relatively untouched from any of these approaches.
All this is an attempt to modernize the application of Ulysses to a modern audience and to ground the literature in something more than historical, erudite esotericism. It is not to reduce Ulysses to a ‘self-help’ book or a cautionary tale, but to help fortify a mean-making perspective to a book that best represents the complex, seeming purposelessness of life. The labels given throughout this exploration are not objectivist, prescriptive labels intended on casting Stephen into a diagnostic medical journal, but labels to navigate his emotions through the empathetic, humanistic lens. Meaning from Ulysses is not freely given and the continuous false epiphanies and disorienting allusions and associations mean that readers must actively work to reconstruct as vast and elusory subtext as cumbersome as the text itself. In the reconstruction of that subtext, readers practice their capacity to understand the variety and contradictory existence of humanity; reading Ulysses is an act of empathy. These elements of Ulysses are lost when an overly historical and academic approach is taken and then critics find themselves lost on their own figurative Sandymount, attempting to recreate some immortal stone and masonry.
Works Cited
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 1959. First Revision, Oxford University Press, 1983.
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Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. Univ. California P, 1992.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Edited by Hans W Gabler, Vintage Books, 1986.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. 1968. Edited by Sir Herbert Read et al., Translated by Richard Francis Carrington Hull, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1990.
Kim, Alan. “Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu, 2016, plato.stanford.edu/entries/wilhelm-wundt/.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, and Ira Byock. On Death & Dying : What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy & Their Own Families. 1969. Scribner, A Division Of Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2014.
Kübler-Ross Elisabeth, and David Kessler. On Grief & Grieving : Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. Simon & Schuster Uk Ltd, 2014.
Written June 26, 2022
Last Edited March 9, 2023