James Joyce: "The loveliest mummer of them all"

Frances Jeanette Fitch, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation examines mummery in Ulysses, analyzing its personal and social contexts and employing Bakhtin's theories to do so. As a historic carnival genre, mummery resists being seen as a controlling context. Its ambivalent social, political and economic operations augment Joyce's own ambivalence over specific aesthetic, political, and economic issues. To examine this I take up three contexts for Joyce's uses of mummery: the cultural activity called mumming in Ireland and elsewhere which takes place on St. Stephen's Day; Joyce's uses of the term outside Ulysses; and last its internal contexts in Ulysses. First I show that mummery's cultural operations in Ireland are deeply ambivalent in political, social, and economic arenas. As a social genre of exchange, it serves not to center interpretation on a death and resurrection narrative but rather allows us to detect similar operations of ambivalent exchange in Ulysses and in Joyce's early polemic uses of the term, uses which both distance him from his aesthetic milieu and yet raise the issue of his own ambivalence over the practice of a mimetic art exempt from simony, begging and debts. I argue that his exploration of this ambivalence moves him from an aesthetic economy of isolation, initiation, and privileged inquisition to an aesthetics of the text as carnival mummer performance. I examine his treatment of simoniacal exchanges not only in the public realm of mummer priests but in the private realm of sex and paternity. Bourdieu's analysis of gift exchange helps us understand Joyce's desire to institute a "love gives, freedom takes" economy in which the pejorative mummer figure (the father) can be a source of "symbolic capital." Then I examine both Buck Mulligan's pejorative and Stephen's metaphor for a heteroglossaic or mummer text--an algebraic "grave morrice" of meanings. Lastly I argue that Stephen performs a mummery in the library in which he gives up attempting to "adequate the balance sheet" with a mummer/simoniac father in order to reinterpret his ways as "absentminded beggar"--not as a figure of betrayal and loss but as one of "abcedminded" gain, a mummer's accumulation of heteroglossia, a treasure trove of language.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Selig, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

COinS