‘that dark permanence of ancient forms’ The triumph of this tradition was so complete that it not only came to dominate
criticaldiscourse but also, like anydoxa, provoked criticism. InUlysses, arguably
the greatest rewriting of an epic text, written during and after the butchery of
the First World War and itself a dialogue with the epic genre and all its aesthetic
modulations, Leopold Bloom will encounter an archetypal epic ‘Patriot’, presented
thus:
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broad-
shouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded
widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged
ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero.^2
The whole section is a magnificent, intellectually subtle analysis of the difficulty
of distinguishing clearly between noble savage and ignoble barbarian, of the
fundamentally problematic and hybrid nature of a certain historically determined
articulation of nationalism and the epic. It is not just that Joyce here mocks a certain
Achillean, Cyclopean patriotism, not just that this patriotism manifests itself as a
series of portentous platitudes expressed in a problematic public space—the pub
(the fallen version of the ‘Great Hall’ and its ‘mead-benches’)—in a ‘widemouthed’
way, it is not just that in cadging drinks thePatriot is parodying the generosity
of the ‘ring-giver’ leader of war bands; it is also that Joyce draws attention to the
fact that, while Nausicaa/Gerty MacDowell in the following section is the voice of
the sentimental novel (a genre seen as predominantly feminine), so the Patriot is
ventriloquized by the voice of the epic seen as the incarnation of a brutal (and,
paradoxically, sentimental) patriotism. In the passage quoted above, what is being
‘taken’ from the epic (and inflated) is ‘hyperbolic’ eulogy for the hyper-virile
combatant. Here the real ‘hero’ of Joyce’s epic odyssey is not, as the reader knows,
the racially pure (redhaired freelyfreckled) Celtic patriot, but the ‘impure’ and
feminized Jewish Bloom. Once again, Joyce mocks a certain popular if not populist
late nineteenth century’s absurdly inflated enthusiasm for and mix of nationality
and virility, and also points, more subtly, to the fact that this discourse of purity is
grounded in the ‘impure’ in a hybridized (not ‘Hibernian’) text:
From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every movement of his portentous
frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many
Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine
hostages...Goliath...Charlemagne...The Last of the Mohicans...The Woman who
Didn’t...Napoleon Bonaparte...Dark Rosaleen...Patrick W. Shakespeare...Arrah na
Pogue...^3
Joyce is suggesting in his selection of tribal imagery (the term ‘tribal’ is itself
rightly mocked—indeed, it is a term that has haunted, confused, and envenomed
(^2) James Joyce,Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 243. 3
Ibid. 244.