Temple-Thurston, Barbara. “The Reader as Absentminded Beggar: Recovering South Africa in ‘Ulysses.’” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1990, pp. 247–256. www.jstor.org/stable/25485129.

With nationalism and imperial as topics central to parts of Ulysses, Barbara Temple-Thurston seeks to expand this conversation within the novel by drawing comparison to the Boer War in South Africa, and illustrates that Joyce likely used the conflict as source material to broaden the conversations within the novel. After pointing out that the conflict was frequently in Irish newspapers between 1899 and 1902, she makes the claim that “the complexities and ironies of the South African struggle provided Joyce with rich source material for metaphors for his own views on… nationalistic fanaticism, the brutality of imperialism, and the cruelty of betrayals resulting from collusion” (247-248). Notable discussions about nationalism and English imperialism flood Cyclops, with Bloom and the Citizen narrator at each other’s throats trying to define what a nation is and who fits in Ireland as a nation specifically. Temple-Thurston explains how Joyce was a student at the time of the Boer War, and resistance against the English popularized the Boer cause among Irish Nationalists, while also calling on stories from Joyce’s life and interaction with these ideas. Referencing Joyce’s own childhood and history, paired with textual analyses of the imperialist and nationalist metaphors, Temple Thurston’s historicist analysis of the Boer War opens the door to analysis of imperialism and nationalism in Ulysses outside of the specific Irish context, offering a deeper analysis of these contexts.

Obsessions and themes:

Imperialism and Nationalism

Blackness

Irish History

Joyce’s Own Life and Childhood

African History

Bar

Forms:

Bar (N) [musical term], Bar (N) [ legal term], Bar (N) [Slang for currency] Bar (N) [geographic]

Related:

Barmaid, Barrister, Crown

Explication:

It is hard to pin down the usage of the term bar in Ulysses, as it is not used with any particularly consistent meaning. With numerous brief, one-off uses as slang for money or geographical features, it is difficult to find a unifying symbolic meaning tying all uses together. Despite this, there are certain instances where individual uses of the word fit well into analysis of other related words. I expected to find it used in reference to a tavern frequently throughout the novel, simply because of how central bars are to so much of the book. However, it is used in this sense almost only to refer to the role of Barmaids. There is an instance where Bloom tries to remember something he has heard about MR Power’s wife. He remarks to himself, “Not pleasant for the wife… there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played out pretty quick… What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury’s.” (U.6.245-248). Additionally, in Sirens, the episode is kicked off with a long interaction between Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, a pair of barmaids at the Ormond bar. They begin to talk about the horrors of “being married to a man like that” (U.11.169) which echoes the sense of unpleasantness that Bloom thought of while recalling Power’s wife. Bloom’s remark of how unpleasant his barmaid wife may be is echoed by Douce and Kennedy’s expression of how unpleasant it would be marrying greasy Bloom.

Bar appears as a geographic marker carrying the meaning of a riverbank or something blocking the entrance to a harbor. Its use in this form appears a few times through the novel, seeming only to provide a location present or remembered.

 Bar appears in terms of its musical definition as a unit of measurement of a written piece of music. It has a literal meaning as a physical line used to measure music on a page, as well as is used to refer to a section in recital. In this form, it is used as “He drones bars of Ferrando’s aria di sortita,” (U. 3.) to refer to the brief excerpt whistled to Stephen, not written on a page. The frequent act of recalling and singing brief pieces of songs tends to invoke this use of the word, even if Joyce does not explicitly use it.

Bar is used in Episode 12 to refer to “The Bar” in a legal sense, as a profession and as an institution. An interesting amalgamation of this meaning and the musical meaning is found in the moment when the Irish singer Caruso Garibaldi is described, and it is said that “His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press and the bar and the other learned professions” (U. 12). Here, the obvious use of the bar is in reference to the profession. However, in describing the skill of this singer, saying that other musicians, or representatives of the bar in this different sense of the word also noticed his skill would also get the point of his skill across. With a term like bar that is used most frequently in colloquial slang, the overlap and blending of these two meanings in this instance demonstrates the possibility of creative usages for a word with so many meanings. Another occurrence of bar in the legal sense is in Aeolus, lines 705-710, where J.J. O’Molloy and Myles Crawford are having a conversation about the state of law in Ireland, pining after the days of famous and great barristers “like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silvertongued O’Hagan.” Crawford remarks that the current members of the bar are “in the hook and eye department” and “in the halfpenny place,” meaning that they are of significant lower quality than these great, famous barristers. While this usage does not carry the musical double meaning with it, it is still a useful and interesting example of characters’ thoughts on the Irish governmental and legal system outside of an explicitly colonial context. Much of the discourse regarding the state of Ireland centers on England’s involvement in Irish affairs, while here we have Irish people talking about Irish affairs on their own terms. Joyce occasionally uses “The Crown” as a stand in for the Bar, both referring to the same legal institution as a proper noun. This is important to keep in mind as it offers a similar double meaning with bar used as a slang for currency.

Bar is used briefly in this sense Wandering Rocks, referring to the value of a pound. While this is brief usage, it opens the door to examining another double meaning of the word bar. Crown is also used as a slang for currency (e.g. U.8.1132: “Send her a postal order two shillings, half a crown.”) This means there are two usages of bar that Joyce equates to two different usages of crown, a great demonstration of the interesting games that he plays with language and meaning, as well as the possibility that comes from blurring the intended meaning of a word with other synonymous and slang usages.

Definitions and Examples:

1. In Music. ‘A vertical line drawn across the stave to divide a musical composition into portions of equal duration, and to indicate the periodical recurrence of the accent’ (F. Taylor in Grove Dict. Music); also, the portion contained between two such lines, technically called the ‘measure.’ double bar: two parallel vertical lines, marking the close of a strain or section. attrib. in bar-line.
2. “He drones bars of Ferrando’s aria di sortita. The grandest number, Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.” (U. 3.100)
3. “These opening bars he sang and translated extempore.” (U.16.1817)

1. In Law. The whole body of barristers, or spec. the barristers practising in a particular court, circuit, or country. (Cf. 23b.)
2. “His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press and the bar and the other learned professions.” (U.12.922-926)
3. “Where have you a man now at the bar like those fellows, like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silvertongued O’Hagan. Eh?… Only in the halfpenny place. (U.7.706-708)

3. See Crown: 3. The sovereignty, authority, or dominion of which a royal crown is the symbol; the rule, position, or empire of a monarch.

• “The Crown had no evidence, Mr Power said.” (U.6.473)

• A pound; esp. in half a bar, ten shillings. slang.

1. “Two bar entrance, soldiers half price.” (U.10.1136-1137)

1. See Crown: British or English coin (latterly silver) with a face value of five shillings or (now) 25 pence, now minted only for commemorative purposes. Hence: a monetary unit based on this, the sum of five shillings.

• “Send her a postal order two shillings, half a crown.” (U.8.1132-1133)

1. A bank of sand, silt, etc., across the mouth of a river or harbour, which obstructs navigation.
2. “Were there schemes of wider scope?

A scheme to be formulated and submitted for approval to the harbour commissioners for the exploitation of white coal (hydraulic power), obtained by hydroelectric plant at peak of tide at Dublin bar or at head of water at Poulaphouca or Powerscourt…” (U. 17.1710-1714)

1. Barmaid: A female who sells food and drink at the bar of a tavern or hotel.
2. “Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it told me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played out pretty quick. What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury’s.” (U.6.245-248).

I’m beginning to center my thinking about blackness in Ulysses in a manner that moves beyond solely examining the presence of American racism by looking more into what this racism means in an Irish context. While I’m still very interested in the spread of an American brand of anti-black racism globally, there is much to be said about the way this racism functions in Ireland and within the context of Ulysses.

Most of the source material for the instances where American racism functions in an Irish context occur in the Cyclops episode. Barbara Temple Thurston writes about an instance in Cyclops where There is an instance where Bloom insults the Citizen narrator with a phrase from a Kipling poem, calling him a “whiteeyed kaffir”. Temple Thurston writes that this reference extends the extent of Irish discrimination to include South Africa, going beyond an American conception of racism and providing evidence that Irish people have their own racist expressions. With this in mind and after coming across this evidence, I think that I have a much better shot at moving away from my concerns about getting stuck analyzing American racism and using Ulysses as a source. I feel much more comfortable making a claim about the interaction of American racism in Ireland with Ireland’s own racist conceptions, especially since the overlap of the two happens so prominently in Cyclops.

Bar

Forms:

Bar (N) [musical term], Bar (N) [ legal term], Bar (N) [Slang for currency]

Related:

Barmaid, Fivebarred, Debarred, Barrister

Explication:

Bar appears in terms of its musical definition as a unit of measurement of a written piece of music. It has a literal meaning as a physical line used to measure music on a page, as well as is used to refer to a section in recital. In this form, it is used as “He drones bars of Ferrando’s aria di sortita,” (U. 3.) to refer to the brief excerpt whistled to Stephen, not written on a page. The frequent act of recalling and singing brief pieces of songs tends to invoke this use of the word, even if Joyce does not explicitly use it.

Bar is used frequently in Episode 12 to refer to The Bar in a legal sense, as a profession. An amalgamation of this meaning and the musical meaning is found in the moment when the Irish singer Caruso Garibaldi is described, and it is said that “His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press and the bar and the other learned professions” (U. 12). Here, the obvious use of the bar is in reference to the profession. However, in describing the skill of this singer, saying that other musicians, or representatives of the bar in this different sense of the word also noticed his skill would also get the point of his skill across.

Another occurrence of bar in the legal sense is in Episode 7, lines 705-710, where J.J. O’Molloy and Myles Crawford are having a conversation about the state of law in Ireland, pining after the days of famous and great barristers “like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silvertongued O’Hagan.” Crawford remarks that the current members of the bar are “in the hook and eye department” and “in the halfpenny place,” meaning that they are of significant lower quality than these great, famous barristers. While this usage does not carry the musical double meaning with it, it is still a useful and interesting example of characters’ thoughts on the Irish governmental and legal system outside of an explicitly colonial context. Much of the discourse regarding the state of Ireland centers on England’s involvement in Irish affairs, while here we have Irish people talking about Irish affairs on their own terms.

OED Definitions:

1. Music. ‘A vertical line drawn across the stave to divide a musical composition into portions of equal duration, and to indicate the periodical recurrence of the accent’ (F. Taylor in Grove Dict. Music); also, the portion contained between two such lines, technically called the ‘measure.’ double bar: two parallel vertical lines, marking the close of a strain or section. attrib. in bar-line.

†24. A barrier or partition separating the seats of the benchers or readers from the rest of the hall, to which students, after they had attained a certain standing, were ‘called’ from the body of the hall, for the purpose of taking a principal part in the mootings or exercises of the house. Obs. See barrister n.   Hence the phrases:— to be called to the bar: to be admitted a barrister. †to cast over the bar: to deprive of the status of a barrister, to disbar; gen. to reject.¶After 1600, when utter-barristers, as well as sergeants and apprentices-at-law were allowed to plead in the law-courts, bar in these phrases seems to have been popularly assumed to mean the bar in a court of justice, outside of which ordinary barristers appear to plead, while King’s Counsel and Sergeants-at-Law have places within it. Hence the mod. phrase to be called within the bar: to be appointed King’s (or Queen’s) Counsel.

The problem I have with consolidating my ideas is that most of my blog posts have been pretty close together in both purpose and content. Looking back, I’ve been gathering examples of American racism showing up in Ulysses. While this is a topic I am interested in for a final project and while I think there is enough content worth delving into, I’m worried that consolidating may be the opposite of what I need to do.

Essentially, I’ve only analyzed the presence and instances of racism, looking at the history and context behind the blackface performances or the racism contained in the newspaper advertisement. The problem is, with the arguments I’ve been constructing in my blog posts, I feel as though I’m setting myself up to write an essay about American racism that uses Ulysses as an example, not as much about racism and blackness in Ulysses. I’m thinking instead of consolidating, I may need to go back and look more at the context surrounding these instances of blackness and think about how they function within their place in the novel, instead of simply pointing them out and analyzing where they may be coming from in the real world. Additionally, I think it would be beneficial if I could make more of a claim about the characters interacting with these images of blackness instead of merely providing a background explanation of them.

Circe has given me the chance to begin to analyze and make a claim about Bloom’s attitude toward blackness and his own subconscious racism. With the instance I analyzed in my blog post from Tuesday, I was able to make a claim that Bloom’s thinking of the minstrel performance in a fit of jealousy over Molly’s interest in Black men is a demonstration of his using racist images and ideas to build himself up. It is one thing to think that this is his only idea of blackness, but another to consider that he purposefully uses this image to degrade the black men he imagines her being with. My goal is to dig back into the context around examples from past blog posts to develop more of an idea of characters’ relationships to the images of blackness rather than doing a project on the historical context surrounding the images.

As has been the case throughout most of Ulysses, blackness appears in the form of blackface performers. However, the difference in “Circe” seems to be that instead of the narrator or characters reacting to performers in a brief, one-off reference moment, here the performers are willed into existence during Bloom’s hallucination. They come about early on, in the moment where he remarks that Molly is interested in “the exotic”. He says if she had money, she would have “Negro servants in livery.” Immediately upon thinking of the words “exotic” and “negro”, two blackface performers appear with banjos, and perform a rendition of “Someone’s in the house with Dina.”

What seems strange to me, though, is that the description of the performers is anything but exotic. The blackface practice was often used to portray Black American Slaves who had assimilated into the system of slavery, reinforcing the mythical idea of a slave becoming friends with his master. See in the excerpt here:

(Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes, leap out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and tusks they rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to back, toe heel, heel toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.)

TOM AND SAM:

     There’s someone in the house with Dina     There’s someone in the house, I know,     There’s someone in the house with Dina     Playing on the old banjo.

 (They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.) (U. 15.362.408-426).

The physical description of the clothes they are wearing and their performance seems to portray a very domestic idea of African American behavior. So, it is strange to me that Bloom thinks of this as exotic, while there were minstrel shows popular in England during the late 1800s that attempted to portray Africans in the context of their own home nation, not through the context of American slaves. An example comes to mind exhibited in Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man, where amidst a circus freak show in 1884, people taken from African performed a song and dance number called Queens of the Congo. This fictional representation of a real life minstrel tradition makes sense to be called exotic, but the traditional American Blackface performance that Bloom imagines seems to be incredibly based on a desire of domesticity to me.

I think it would be interesting to examine Bloom’s behavior when coming into contact with racism throughout the book and compare it to this episode, in this moment where his inhibitions are cast aside and the slightest thought that he cannot control is told to us. I seem to remember him leaning toward unity of people rather than exclusion during the nationalist discussion in episode 12, but here, amidst his hallucination where he cannot control what bounces through his head, is this talk of the exotic and the apparent jealousy of the African men that Molly is interested in a different picture of Bloom? Does he keep his racism contained to himself until he is unable to control his rapid, racing thoughts? And are his racist grumbles here motivated by jealousy of the men Molly has desire for or are they deeper characteristics of Bloom not in the context of his relationship with Molly?

Bar

Forms:

Bar (N), Bar (V), Bars (N)

Related:

Barmaid, Fivebarred, Debarred

Explication:

Bar appears in terms of its musical definition as a unit of measurement of a written piece of music. It has a literal meaning as a physical line used to measure music on a page, as well as is used to refer to a section in recital. In this form, it is used as “He drones bars of Ferrando’s aria di sortita,” (U. 3.) to refer to the brief excerpt whistled to Stephen, not written on a page. The frequent act of recalling and singing brief pieces of songs tends to invoke this use of the word, even if Joyce does not explicitly use it.

Bar is used frequently in Episode 12 to refer to The Bar in a legal sense, as a profession. An amalgamation of this meaning and the musical meaning is found in the moment when the Irish singer Caruso Garibaldi is described, and it is said that “His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press and the bar and the other learned professions” (U. 12). Here, the obvious use of the bar is in reference to the profession. However, in describing the skill of this singer, saying that other musicians, or representatives of the bar in this different sense of the word also noticed his skill would also get the point of his skill across.

OED Definitions:

16. Music. ‘A vertical line drawn across the stave to divide a musical composition into portions of equal duration, and to indicate the periodical recurrence of the accent’ (F. Taylor in Grove Dict. Music); also, the portion contained between two such lines, technically called the ‘measure.’ double bar: two parallel vertical lines, marking the close of a strain or section. attrib. in bar-line.

†24. A barrier or partition separating the seats of the benchers or readers from the rest of the hall, to which students, after they had attained a certain standing, were ‘called’ from the body of the hall, for the purpose of taking a principal part in the mootings or exercises of the house. Obs. See barrister n.   Hence the phrases:— to be called to the bar: to be admitted a barrister. †to cast over the bar: to deprive of the status of a barrister, to disbar; gen. to reject.¶After 1600, when utter-barristers, as well as sergeants and apprentices-at-law were allowed to plead in the law-courts, bar in these phrases seems to have been popularly assumed to mean the bar in a court of justice, outside of which ordinary barristers appear to plead, while King’s Counsel and Sergeants-at-Law have places within it. Hence the mod. phrase to be called within the bar: to be appointed King’s (or Queen’s) Counsel.

Within Bloom’s conversation with the nationalist barflies in Cyclops lies an interrogation of the concept of what makes a nation. Bloom remarks that the history of the world is full of “perpetuating national hatred among nations,” before Bloom seems to describe Irish identity in a unifying way, calling it “the same people living in the same place,” (12, 1422-23). But, he is met with complete mockery by his audience.

Vincent Cheng points out that the desire to establish a national identity centers around the idea of establishing oneself as a form of other. He finds an irony in this mission, identifying it as the same sort of mission as the imperialist English mission, writing “both projects, that of a racialist imperial discourse and that of a nationalist self-definition, Authenticity and identity are, although emanating from very different political positions, both engaged in defining lrishness as distinctively “other” and different;’” (Cheng 242-243). It is through this mission of othering that the barflies attempt to disregard Bloom’s opinions due to his Jewish identity. They essentially argue that being born and living in Ireland is not enough to make count as an Irish identity.

This inconsistency in discussions of Nativeness and Foreignness are reflected all too frequently in discussions of American Blackness. Despite being a group of people living in the same place as other people, people of African descent are historically (and in many ways currently, but that’s a whole other argument) treated as though being born in and living in America still does not make them part of the national identity. As portrayed within Ulysses, American blackness has taken the form of a racist caricature in the newspaper and as blackface performance. Both depictions of blackness are created by white people on a mission of othering African Americans, whether to establish a national identity or for the purpose of entertainment. Within this inconsistency lies a tension between the historical lack of acknowledging African Americans as Americans while still using their image as an export, a product of American industry and identity. Blackface and other racial caricature is an effort to control and profit off of the image of this othered group of people. This desire to control seems to be reflected in Ulysses through the manner with which Haines criticizes the milk woman in the very first episode. While this Englishman others her and regards her as lower, he expresses the desire to make her behavior reflect his own. This is the same behavior exhibited by those who utilize blackface performance: othering, yet embracing; disregarding an aspect of the foreign while trying to make it a part of the native.

Having read the portion of Ulysses I had, I expected the word “bar” to have more of a correlation with its modern use, as a synonym to tavern of pub. Instead, it has taken a hefty amount of digging to find a definition fitting this modern usage. Instead, the most frequent definition seems to be closer to:

1. A piece of any material long in proportion to its thickness or width.

* Of shape only.

However, the most relevant usage seems to me could be “bar” used in terms of currency, as follows: “c. A pound; esp. in half a bar, ten shillings. slang.”

The rest are as follows:

1. An ornamental transverse band on a girdle, saddle, etc.; subseq.an ornamental boss of any shape. Also, a girdle or band. Obs.

 b. A small slip of silver fixed transversely below the clasp of a medal, as an additional mark of distinction.

1. A straight strip or stripe, narrow in proportion to its length, a broad line; e.g. of colour. stars and bars:

6. Heraldry. An honourable ordinary, formed (like the fess) by two parallel lines drawn horizontally across the shield, and including not more than its fifth part. bar sinister: in popular, but erroneous phrase, the heraldic sign of illegitimacy; see batn n., bend n.1, (sinister). bar-gemel: a double bar, or small bars placed in couplets.

8. esp. A stake or rod of iron or wood used to fasten a gate, door, hatch, etc.

1. In colloq. phr. behind bars, of a person: in prison, locked away.

11. [Getting more into the alcohol vein of the word:] A transverse piece of wood making fast the head of a wine-cask. (If a cask is lying horizontal, wine is drawn from ‘below the bar,’ when it is more than half empty.)

Very quickly into episode 7, we encounter a veiled reference to an American racist institution. Included in the newspaper is a page called “Uncle Toby’s Page for Tiny Tots.” (7.94-95). As illustrated in Ulysses Annotated, this is a play on a children’s activities page in an Irish newspaper called The Weekly Freeman called “Uncle Remus’ Address to his Nieces and Nephews. Uncle Remus was a book of African American folktales for children published in the late 19^th century, using the stereotype of an old former slave passing on stories romanticizing his past as a slave, serving as a testament to the myth of the kind and gentle slave owner. I tried to find a photo online of one of these pages to confirm that it is intended to be the same Uncle Remus that gained popularity in Reconstruction Era America, but that proved harder than I thought. Assuming it is the same though, it seems to be a fairly decent summary of what blackness in Ulysses has seemed to be thus far: mentions of blackness and racist language seem to come from a romanticizing of, or fantasizing about, an imaginary exotic other, in this case the other being the old, gentle, American slave, the “Uncle Tom” figure. We have not encountered the exotic other explicitly in the form of blackface and minstrel performance yet, but in this reference to Uncle Remus, Joyce is making a connection to an American institution of racism in pop culture. It is one that while not unknown to the Irish, carries entirely different meaning in Joyce’s country. The sight of Uncle Remus does not carry with it a sort of Old South Nostalgia as it would in America, but rather the same sort of curiosity that caused people to flock to freak shows and circuses to see Africans as though they were animals in the zoo. It is interesting to me that even though Ulysses takes place across an ocean, that a wholly American form of racism has taken a hold there in the form of this newspaper column.