VERA Beginnings and Endings
VERA Issue No. #3
“Beginnings and Endings� March 2017 Front Cover Cyril Rolando
Editor Aurelius Noble Editors Catherine McAteer Ian Simpson Tobias Bernander Silseth
Contributors Aurelius Noble Ian Simpson Joshua Alston Meg Dyson Tobias Bernander Silseth
Designers Aurelius Noble
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EDITOR’S NOTE
D
ear Reader,
Welcome to the latest edition of Vera, as will shortly be evident, this is a briefer issue than usual, though the articles are perhaps more in depth. The theme of this issue is that of “Beginnings and Endings”, and the issue focuses particularly on the false dichotomy between the two, as well as the lived reality, and lack of, real beginnings and endings. The articles cover a range of topics, from literature, to philosophy and history. I hope you enjoy the issue. -Aurelius
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The Endless Path
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The Doors of Destiny
Kafka and his search for meaning. The futility of attaining lived endings.
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Macbeth and predetermination. The inherent fatalism of literature.
The Pact of Oblivion
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The Spanish transition to democracy, and the shadows of the past.
A Promise of Freedom
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Emancipation in the Caribbean and the chains of freedom.
From Grace to Obscenity
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Joyce’s Penelope and the absence of the female voice.
THE ENDLESS PATH By Tobias Bernander Silseth You’ve arrived. Bus—security—flight—bus. You’ve gotten off at the right stop and come to the right hotel. But among the fragrances of unfamiliar vegetation and the sounds of an alien language blended with the everyday buzzes and clicks of telephones and keyboards; a problem arises. Say you’ve been overbooked or the hotel has lost your reservation. You’re already in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country and all the nearby restaurants are closed. You have no food, nowhere to sleep, no one to call. Another search begins, another departure, another hope for arrival. The arrival was a beginning and beginnings are always problematic. There are other kinds of arrival, like waking up from narcosis or delivering the term’s final exam paper. These arrivals feel like endings, and the terms we use to characterise our lives in retrospect are the terms of storytelling. When you deliver that paper it feels like the end to a chapter or like the final episode of a series. Of course life is not that simple and organized, and neither are stories. Many of Franz Kafka’s stories begin with an arrival rather than a departure. The Castle begins with K. reaching the town where the story will take place; in “The Metamorphosis” Gregor Samsa arrives in a new body (that of a giant bug); and Kafka’s perhaps greatest story of arrival, “The Hunter Gracchus”, begins with a boat arriving at the port town of Riva. It’s a sleepy town. The Bürgermeister makes his way to a building near the dock as two people carry a shrouded body from the boat into the same building. The rest of the story is a conversation between the Bürgermeister and the Hunter Gracchus, who is dead. Gracchus’ arrival is temporary, as he is cursed to travel from port to port for eternity. The curse ensures that the arrival (the beginning of the story) was only a short interlude in an eternity of wandering.
cursed never to reach a final port. Their lack of arrival is part of their being. Whether the wanderer is driven by “the wind which blows in the deepest regions of death”, like Gracchus, or whether the wanderer is driven by the desire not to miss a day’s work, like Gregor Samsa, he lives in a system of predeterminacy. His lack of destination is predetermined and yet some vague desire forces him to keep going. Giacomo Leopardi, the nineteenth-century Italian poet and philosopher, writes about unfulfilled desire in the Zibaldone. Because the desire for pleasure is an eternal, spiritual desire, the pleasurable experiences of life which only give us circumscribed and concrete pleasure can never fulfil us. “The soul imagines what it cannot see”, he writes, “whatever is hidden by that tree, that hedge, that tower, and wanders in an imaginary space and pictures things in a way that would be impossible if its view could extend in all directions, because the real would exclude the imaginary.” When you peek behind that tree and you actually find something, the imaginary power of your desire diminishes. In both Kafka and Leopardi there is a sense that all arrivals are illusory, what seems to be a beginning or an end is only part of a continuum. If so, the stories we create to structure our lives lead nowhere. There are no beginnings or ends in Kafka’s and Leopardi’s worldviews because the reality we experience excludes the possibility of a final fulfilment of desire. There is no end, no punchline, no true fulfilment.
Leopardi and Kafka also share the concern that modern society may strengthen our impossible desire for fulfilment. One of the roles of bureaucracy in Kafka is as a system that predetermines the fate of the characters. A central irony in The Castle is that K., whose troubles arise from dealing with an opaque bureaucracy, is himself a bureaucrat. As a land surveyor he is supposed to draw up legal limits, make borderless Kafka’s central characters are often wanderers who lands part of a system of ownership and debt and pacan never find peace regardless of their earthly cir- perwork. His failure to overcome indecipherable bucumstances. They are, like the Hunter Gracchus, reaucracy is predicated upon him being part of an in6 |
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-decipherable bureaucracy. So our beginnings contain the seeds from which our ends grow. Although there is always a sense of change, that change (at least in Kafka) amounts to nothing at all. We, like Kafka’s wanderers, are waiting for something that will never happen, or work towards goals that cannot redeem us. If modern society—which for Leopardi epitomised by analytical and possibly soul-destroying reason, and for Kafka by private and public bureaucracies—runs on our lack of fulfilment, then how can we ever hope for true arrival? Kafka’s notion of modernity was different from Leopardi’s notion of modernity; how do these notions tie in with our experience of living in a modern society? The illusion that lives are ordered, almost like books, as a series of beginnings and endings is a strong feature of social media, apps, and video games. It is most obvious in the Facebook timeline, which goes back to your date of birth, presenting all the important events, the milestones (like creating a Facebook account); but it is also visible in apps like ToDoist, which gives you points for how many tasks you do in a day and gives you a level based on your number of points (“on this day, you became Enlightened!”). The notion of a timeline or of a point system puts emphasis on superficial changes and hides the predetermined continuousness of experience. Our self-authoring is promoted not only by making us register our personal details, but by appealing to our need to structure our fluid experience of time and space. With this comes the underlying idea that we are all progressing—by doing tasks, earning ‘achievements’, and so on—towards some undefined future. How many points must you amass, how many times must you update Google Chrome, before you reach Jerusalem?
and indeed so much of Leopardi’s work is unfinished. The wish to organise lives and stories into clear sections with beginnings and endings seems to be a quite common human trait. To some the belief in a final end, a Day of Judgment, underpins their understanding of time. But Kafka implies that such anticipation is pointless as well: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.” Limits such as the outer limit of time which marks the arrival of the Messiah can be spatial as well. Human beings seem adept at drawing lines, building walls, and imposing borders upon a world where most borders (as far as we can tell) are fluid. K. in The Castle is therefore an essentially human character. He is a land surveyor who realises that there is no need for a land surveyor—he has come only when he is no longer necessary. Desire for a concrete point in the future and desire for clear borders in the present are both part of a single desire for an ordered past, present, and future.
A true arrival and a true ending would not be the fulfilment of a desire for external reasons, but the fulfilment of desire simply as such. Although it seems obvious that this is an impossibility, most people organise their lives in hope of one day being fulfilled. Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis” is obsessed with his work, not because he sees it as a calling or as something extraordinarily important, but presumably because he believes it will, in the end, help him and thus help his family. Endings are not necessarily impossible, but they are always temporary. As there is no fulfilment of desire, there are no endings in life that are not beginnings and no beginnings that are not endings. It is quite fitting that so much of Kafka’s
People have structured time in various ways throughout history, but one of the most important across cultures is the structuring of the year through religious festivals (Christmas, Diwali, Ramadan, etc). This structuring has always coexisted with an economic structuring of the year—in most European languages, the seasons are tied to the agricultural year, with winter being the wet season, spring the season of growth, summer the hot season, autumn the harvest—this is also apparent today, when the year in the western world is structured according to festivals of consumption (Halloween, Christmas, Easter) that coincide and interlink with religious festivals. Social media sites are often used to promote such structuring of the year.
“You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egoistical selves.” - Natsume Soseki
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The societal structuring of time reflects the individual structuring of time. We create our own stories and share them with others, but we also share wider conceptualisations of time. In stories like “The Metamorphosis” and The Trial Kafka dramatises the continuum of existence. Reading Kafka is partly about accepting such an indeterminate temporality which hovers between the very first and the very last day, both of which are unknowable. At every instance the desire for some future gain is evident, even if the fulfilment of particular desires never leads to any form of salvation. Leopardi’s ideas about the impossibility of fulfilling desire inspire an image of desire shaped like a year; it is a circular process of change, which in a sense ends up where it started. In the same way that a lack of fulfilment is engrained in any earthly or heavenly desire, the end is always engrained in beginnings, as beginnings are in ends. If social media influences how we structure our lives, it is helpful to see that this strengthens our desire and thus strengthens our sense of unfulfilment. It is possible to accept the circularity of desire and construct the stories of our lives accordingly. We may still have our illusions of beginnings and endings, but, by accepting that when we have pushed our rock to the top of the hill, the rock must roll down, we may avoid becoming serfs to our desire. And so we return to you on your travels. Hopefully you are still searching for a place to stay and something to eat and have not collapsed in a ditch for lack of hope. There is, after all, plenty of hope! “An infinite amount of hope”, as Kafka told his friend, Max Brod—“but not for us”.
“we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide” - Franz Kafka
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THE DOORS OF DESTINY By Ian Simpson
When one door closes another door opens, so goes the old adage. When something ends, therefore, something new is instinctively set in motion to maintain balance. William Shakespeare’s eponymous tragic hero Macbeth sees himself teeter before his end from the very beginning: time is slowed as the audience view Macbeth’s demise become reality against the bloody backdrop of Scotland. As a tragic hero, Macbeth is placed on a path from which he cannot deviate. Macbeth’s door, then, is very much closed and even padlocked from the opening scene when the three Witches materialise and discuss him. The ‘lost’ battle they speak of amid their chant speaks not only to the battle in which Macbeth is slain, but also to Macbeth’s ‘lost’ battle in trying to elude the theatre’s plan for him. If anything, Macbeth becomes so ‘lost’ in his monomaniacal quest to become king that the only way to ‘find’ himself is to end himself just as Shakespeare had planned from this opening scene. Whether there is any true drama then – true tragedy even – and whether Macbeth has any agency in his seemingly predestined demise is a troubling question which can elicit anxiety within the audience. If Macbeth’s door is indeed padlocked from the initial scene, then where is the door which must subsequently open to maintain balance? Pluck Out Mine Eyes - The Oedipal Fallacy Having just killed King Duncan in his unrelenting pursuit to become King of Scotland, Macbeth calls for his eyes to be plucked out as he laments his actions. In a frantic attempt to avoid being murdered for treason, he and his Machiavellian wife Lady Macbeth frame Duncan’s servants. However, should Macbeth’s eyes have been plucked out, Macbeth as a tragedy would still inherently be Macbeth, for Shakespeare has set the tragic hero on this path; Macbeth’s blindness would not prevent him from pursuing his goals. Even though Macbeth, tragically, is not granted his wish of blindness, his eyes still fail to truly ‘see’ that 10 |
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he is merely walking towards the end which has been mapped out for him from the very beginning. Another eponymous tragic hero, Sophocles’ Oedipus, is a particularly fitting parallel. Unlike Macbeth, Oedipus consummates his desire to be blind by plucking out his own eyes as a punishment for his previous crimes: patricide and having an incestuous relationship with his mother. While Oedipus may achieve the blindness he desires, he has already very much seen the crimes he has committed and this enforced eternal darkness, therefore, only allows him to continuously see these crimes in his subconscious ad infinitum. Macbeth still possesses the physical power of sight; however, he remains blind to the role he plays upon the stage despite the various warnings he is given throughout. Oedipus may have seen his crimes with his eyes, but as a character he was blind to the fact that he was fulfilling the prophecy which was placed upon him at birth. Macbeth has been warned and, therefore, sees each prophecy become actualised but remains blind – perhaps through choice or perhaps through force to cement his status as tragic hero – and unable to divert to a different course. Even with his eyes, Macbeth is placed in eternal darkness with only a pinprick of light that he can strive towards, that pinprick being his end. Perhaps, then, there is no real drama to Macbeth; instead, there is only an extensive ending which begins the moment the curtains rise. Indeed, for Aristotle – who was one of the propounding theorists on tragedy – tragedy was only tragic when it appeared as though characters were subject to their own will as opposed to the will of the playwright. Macbeth certainly has his own will in the sense that he hubristically ignores the Witches and those who support him, but he very much remains under Shakespeare’s pen and Lady Macbeth’s relentless admonishing of him. Whether Macbeth experiences a tragic ‘fall’ is, then, unclear. It would be infinitely more compelling to say he was pushed: not pushed merely by Shakespeare and Lady Macbeth (although they are clear goaders)
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more.” - William Shakespeare
but pushed by himself to become King regardless of the sacrifices needed to be made. Macbeth is eventually crowned King of Scotland after having ruthlessly murdered most of the characters the audience meet. He has now seemingly gained all that he wanted; however, he must now defeat Macduff’s army who have come to overthrow his illegitimate reign. When the Witches chant their incantation – the famous ‘double double toil and trouble’ speech – they warn Macbeth that he will be impenetrable until he becomes King of Scotland and fights at Dunsinane Hill, the setting at which the civil war against Macduff’s army occurs. As soon as Macbeth gets the crown, then, he consummates the prophecy and begins his end. However, his quest for kingship was evident from the opening scenes and, despite protestations from people warning him otherwise, Macbeth nonetheless blindly continues. Macbeth, then, very much starts at the end. That Macbeth should both begin and end with civil war is of particular importance: the lack of structural advancement shows that, as a tragic hero, Macbeth begins at his end, and ends where he begins. A Standing Ovation - The Open Door Back to Reality? That the audience should know that Macbeth is destined to die from the very outset is a technique which acts as a catalyst to drive the drama forward from the beginning of the end to the very end of the end. Much literature makes use of fatalism to reflect the fact that the characters are indeed trapped; even when the character believes they have changed course it will still lead them to the same predestined outcome. Unlike the onstage characters the audience are able to leave the fantasy of the theatre and return to their lives having witnessed a spectacle which Aristotle believed purged the audience of emotions to restore bodily harmony. As the curtains fall the audience rise and leave through the theatre doors; perhaps this, then, is the door which Macbeth’s padlocked door allows to open. Yet this opening of the theatre raises questions for the audience, are their own doors padlocked too and, if so, who has padlocked it and are they even aware of its being padlocked? While the audience may leave the theatre and return from the fantastical to reality, whether this newly opened door does actually lead back to reality or merely a perception of reality is something that re-
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-mains truly unanswerable. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, created the theory of predestination: the idea that humans, like both Macbeth and Oedipus, are placed on a path from their inception which is unchangeable. Maybe this is why literature – and theatre in particular – makes so much use of fatalism; it acts as a metatheatrical reminder that the audience are no different from Macbeth and that, perhaps, there is an audience watching us that we are merely blind to ourselves. This is a theory philosopher René Descartes conceived; the idea that humans are actually mere ‘brains in a vat’ and everything we believe we ‘see’ is merely a construction our brains have fabricated. However, for this theory to work there must be an external presence to place a brain in a vat. Maybe our existence, then, is one extensive performance which only ends when we begin to realise this. The door from the fantasy of theatre to the outside world of ‘reality’ is this realisation. Whether literature should make such prevalent use of fatalism is a debate which creates much anxiety. It raises fundamental existential questions such as whether life is determined by origin and why, if this is not the case, literature emphasises it. Perhaps Shakespeare and so many other writers imbue their characters with fatalism to highlight the fact that humans are not plagued with fatalism and are instead graced with free will. Consequently, there is a marked difference between the audience member and Macbeth: the viewer can watch the spectacle with a high enough degree of dissociation to act as a didactic warning not to succumb to flaws such as Macbeth’s insatiable drive to acquire things which do not naturally belong to him. Shakespeare’s dynamic characterisation renders his characters real enough for the audience to draw parallels with; however, the free will they are (perhaps) given shows that the theatre – and literature more generally – never does truly represent ‘reality’. Macbeth’s beginning as a character then is also, simultaneously, his ending as a character. To try and unlock Macbeth’s door is a fruitless endeavour, but when the doors of the theatre open the audience are reminded that they can freely open and shut their doors with great liberty: we have the power to begin and end an infinite number of times. Or do we? Perhaps, amidst all this our end has been marked by and from our beginning and every action – without our 12 |
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knowledge – only leads us closer to our padlocked door of destiny. After all, all the world’s a stage and we are (perhaps) only a mere brain in a vat playing out our imagined entrances and exits which will, despite our best efforts, remain the same thing…
“The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you” - Marcus Aurelius
THE PACT OF OBLIVION By Aurelius Noble In 1986 Prime Minister Felipe González declared that ‘The Spanish Civil War is definitively history’; a notion which would come to permeate Spanish society as a sort of “collective amnesia” during Spain’s transition to democracy. In histories of the period this focus on forgetfulness, stability and reconciliation has largely been seen as the primary, though profound, influence of the memory of the Civil War, which had torn apart the country nearly forty years earlier. This politically centred narrative, focused on the “Pacto del Olvido”, gives the largely uncontested impression that memory of the Civil War served foremost as a warning about the dangers of radicalisation. However, in many ways memory of the war was restricted to influencing transitional justice. The post-transitional institutional framework was more clearly a response to the memory of the Second Spanish Republic, and its specific political failures. In both these political interpretations the transitional state was shaped by memory, but in forgetting it often sought to destroy memory at a local level. Despite the “Pacto del Olvido”, the scars of the war remained. The prevalence of grassroots anti-fascist protest and government suppression of it during the transition suggests that, as in the histories, attempts to raise the voices of the traumatised have been largely suppressed by notions of overarching stability. Even the desire for stability seemed to echo the writings of Francoist historians. Forty years on, direct memory had faded, and it was the subsequent Francoist interpretation of memory which was central to later recollections. Notions of democratic instability and “collective madness”, which permeated the transition, were rooted in Francoist histories; and desires for universal forgiveness, though pragmatically sound, paralleled Francoist notions of equal responsibility for the war.
and a return to the dark days of the war resulted in a lack of transitional justice, institutional reorganisation and radical change. Polling conducted from 1975-77 shows that for a majority of Spaniards ‘peace, order, and stability’ remained the priorities. Fears of violence were not unfounded, shouts of ‘España, mañana; Será republicana’ [Spain, tomorrow; will be republican], which rang through the streets of Madrid, were eerily reminiscent of the 1930s. In particular, fear of military intervention limited the scope of transition; General Fernando de Santiago made this clear in September 1976 by circulating a letter which stated that ‘restraint and understanding [was] ultimately limited’. The 23-F coup in 1981, in which 200 armed officers broke into the Congress of Deputies to try and force a change of government, illuminated this fear, sharply marking the end of exhumation of Republican graves, which was deemed politically insensitive. The transitional period was marred by an outburst of political violence from both right-wing and left-wing groups, which left over 500 dead between 1975-80, and led the leader of the Partido Comunista de España (PCE), Santiago Carrillo, to state in May 1977 that ‘we have had enough [wars] already’. Paradoxically the relatively peaceable transition began with the assassination of Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973 by the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA); uncannily mirroring the start of the Civil War. Violence primarily emanated from the ETA, who were responsible for almost 400 deaths between 1973 and 1982. This was largely a continuation of the separatist violence that began under Franco, but contrary to its aims of polarisation, it brought political parties together in their thrust for moderation and stability.
Unlike most transitional regimes, violence and the memory of violence combined to maintain existing ‘Pacto del Olvido’ hierarchies within Spain, there were no bureaucratic purges in Spain; and the “Pacto del Olvido” and reThe memory of the Civil War had a profound effect sultant Amnesty Law of 1977 were emblematic of a on politics in the fledgling democracy; fear of violence collective desire to forget. One of the first steps taken 14 |
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by Juan Carlos, the King of Spain, was his granting of a provisional reprieve on November 22nd 1975. Indeed, the primacy of stability, which was rooted in memory of the Civil War, is clear from polls which show that in 1975 61% of Spaniards preferred a gradual transition, and that 61% approved of the 1977 Amnesty. The Amnesty Law foreclosed any possibility of prosecuting either side, and became an important tenet of democratisation, demonstrating the war’s centrality in collective thought.
radical change during transitional democracy. Likewise, the Ley para la Reforma Política of 1977 sought to reduce radicalism and increase representation by introducing a bicameral legislature operating on two different electoral systems. These measures were duplicated in the 1978 Constitution, which affirmed Spain as a constitutional monarchy; a far cry from the revolutionary politics which had contributed to the demise of the Republic. Certainly, the memory of the Second Republic was ‘overwhelmingly present’ during discussions of electoral law. This is evident in Lorenzo Olarte’s assertion during constitutional debates that ‘he who loses continues to exist’, a clear reference to those defeated in the 1936 elections. Furthermore, the issues of regionalism which had plagued Franco and the Republic were central to transitional politics, which sought to avoid the mistakes of the ‘experiment that failed’; creating a homogenous autonomous territorial structure and recognising the existence of multiple “nacionalidades”, as opposed to granting special privileged to certain regions.
Attempts at further reconciliation were not made until decades later, with the introduction of various acts which were deemed too provocative during transition. Although there was an Amnesty Act passed in 1977, this forbade the pardoning of members of the Republican Army or the Unión Militar Democrática. Furthermore, no memorial was constructed in memory of Republicans until 1986, when a monument to heroes of the Peninsula War was modified to ‘honor all those who gave their lives for Spain’; no condemnation of the dictatorship was issued by the Cortes Generales until 2002; and pensions were only given to Republican widows in 2007.Thus, the transition A Victors History was not only limited by the Civil War, but itself limited memory of the Civil War. Yet, the influence of collective memory seems oddly perverted; though it fermented a desire for reconciliRepublican Politics ation and stability, it might have just as easily caused radicalism and hatred. Indeed, 70% of the populaYet, if post-Franco amnesty served as the rejection of tion was under forty and had no recollection of the Civil War mentalities, then post-Franco politics acted Civil War or the Second Republic; instead it was the more clearly as a rejection of Republican politics. In- Francoist retelling of these periods which played an deed, leftist politics were relatively moderate from integral role in transition. During the Francoist period the 1960s onwards; the PCE adopted a conciliatory (1939-75) the legitimisation discourse shifted to focus tone, rejecting the use of force and signing the Pacto on the regime’s ability to maintain peace, and conpor la Libertad in 1970; committing them to reaching sequently on the Republic’s “revolutionary” nature, measured agreement with all parties. Likewise in June this remained paramount to transitional politics. This 1962 the exiled members of the Partido Socialista Francoist narrative focused on the supposed intrinsic Obrero Español (PSOE) renounced the use of violence incompatibility of Spaniards with democracy, but ironas a political tool, they were well aware of the dan- ically led to a focus on stability once democracy was gerous effects of political radicalisation. Although in achieved. The primacy of stability (or at least mem1974 the PSOE and PCE were divided in two coalitions ory of Republican instability), so clear in transitional in 1976 these merged into Democratic Coordination; politics, found its roots in the works of Francoist hismemory of the divisions which had delegitimised the torians from the 1960s; with Torcuato Fernández-MiSecond Republic were paramount in left-wing coop- randa stating in 1960 that society was ‘based on the eration. Indeed, it was centrists who fared the best healthy desire for stable […] coexistence’. Likewise at elections, with the extreme right performing ex- Gaspar Gomez in 1961 referred to the Civil War as an tremely poorly in 1977 elections, thus it was the con- act of ‘collective insanity’, a consistent theme in Frantinuity and stability represented by the Unión de Cen- coist histories which was echoed in the transitional tro Democrático which won out; there would be no period. Indeed, he even stated that he would not dis-
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-cuss the war for fear of seeming a ‘passionate echo of [books] that sustained it’; the war, as it would be fifteen years later, was forgotten to maintain a sense of impartiality. It was this Francoist telling of the Civil War as a “collective madness” which was reflected in transitional justice, which equally sought to forget the crimes of the left and the right. Even the prominent journalist Enrique Meneses wrote of the commonly held doubts about stability as a result of a perception of the ‘fire in our veins’; memory was not an immovable monolith, but an ever-shifting mass which reflected the influence of the past forty years as much as the original events. The Scars of War The rapid expansion of Civil War histories during transition is testament to the continued influence of the war, with an estimated 60% of topics being researched ‘to some degree’ by the end of the 1990s. Indeed, the popularity of Luis Pío Moa, a neo-Francoist historian, questionable as his work is, is evidence of the continued influence of the Civil War on social consciousness. While politicians had relinquished the power of legal redress, public remembrance continued nonetheless; as Juan Marsé wrote in his 1982 novel, The Return of the Hero, though forgetting is necessary for progress ‘[we] keep our finger on the trigger of memory, just in case’.
themselves as ‘Communists from before’. Tensions remained high throughout transition and attempts to forget were met with stern resistance. After voting to remove the Monumento a los Caídos in Santa Coloma on the 25th May 1979, the city’s mayor immediately received death threats from a Falangist (fascist) group. After a Fuerza Nueva march in August 1979, hostilities broke out between the group and anti-fascist protestors; the use of guns and Molotov Cocktails led to several deaths. A year later, the mayor received a parcel believed to be a bomb, which led to the organisation of a huge antifascist demonstration on the 20th October. Yet, when the parcel was discovered to just be flowers the President of the Generalitat, Jordi Pujol, denounced the anti-fascist demonstration as ‘irresponsibly generating a psychosis of terrorism’. While locally contestation of the past was evident, the political elite, understandably, would rather the nation forgot its dark past than contest it.
In post-transition histories silence has often been made deafening, and political narratives have largely drowned out the unceasing voices of those individuals for whom the war could not be forgotten. Certainly it is evident that, on a macro-scale, Spain wished to forget, to reconcile; but while this certainly aided the transition, on an individual level legal efforts could not sustain absolute silence indefinitely. Whilst memNumerous initiatives at a local level, particularly re- ory of the Civil War undoubtedly influenced efforts garding exhumation, pensions and “lost children”, to forget the past, as well as the institutional and demonstrate that politically imposed silence was lim- legal structure of Spain; the focus on stability at all ited in its scope. A key example is that of the village costs largely arose in the post-war period as a result of Torremejía, where in August 1979 permission was of Francoist retellings of the Republic, the war and of granted to unearth thirty-three Republican corpses the “25 Años de Paz”. Though this is not to deny that and rebury them. Though later exhumations would forgetting was essential in achieving a peaceful tranbe banned, the attendance of this ceremony by ap- sition, it suggests that the success of this transition proximately 1000 people shows memory could not was, ironically, in part due to Francoist propaganda. just disappear when government demanded it do so. Likewise, in 1978 the inhabitants of Villarrobledo led a collective homage to the Republican dead, petitioning the government to grant the legal status of widow to a number of widows whose husbands had been executed; clearly some scars would never heal. There was certainly some sense of betrayal towards those left-wing parties which had so readily forgotten the past; after the PCE abandoned calls for ruptura in favour of reforma pactada in 1976, there was no hesitation from the Villarrobledo Commission in describing 16 |
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A PROMISE OF FREEDOM By Joshua Alston Britain abolished slavery. It was the first country to do this in the western world, and William Wilberforce was the creative and dynamic leader behind this. Such is the popular narrative of the anti-Slavery movement. It is also wrong.
of power falling to slaves was not without historical precedent. On the island of Saint Domingue in 1789, slaves and free people of colour rose up and expelled the planter class. In Barbados, in 1816, and Demerara in 1823, more slave revolts shook the foundations of Caribbean and British metropolitan society. It was Emancipation did not create freedom. It was not clear to most people that the slave system was creakdesigned to create freedom. Restrictions placed on ing and on the verge of collapse. For the great men of ‘freed’ slaves were legion; among these, a ban on the white abolitionist movement, emancipation was voting, a complex series of pass laws and restrictions a way of saving the slave system and racial hierarchy on the movement of former slaves, designed to keep rather than opposing it. them on the plantations, and a criminal justice system which looked to fulfil the disciplinary functions Another emphasis of white abolitionists, particularly that could no longer be fulfilled by overseers. Slav- Thomas Clarkson, was the possible financial beneery was replaced by a brutal colonial system which fits that could be drawn from the abolition of slavery worked to maintain the power of the slave owners and its replacement with waged labour. Much of this and of the colonial state of their newly emancipated critique was influenced by the growth in the promiworkforce. The object of the planter class and its as- nence of India as the key site of the British Empire. Insociates in government was an emancipation in which dian colonialism relied on a indentured labour system there was as little change in the political and material rather than a slave system. Many abolitionists sugstatus of slaves as possible. Emancipation was never gested that a change in the structure of the Caribbean an endeavour born out of a British desire to uproot labour market, to a system of indentured labour, or the plantation system, or a humanitarian concern for to wage labour, could rejuvenate the economic posithe treatment of slaves. Instead the changes that took tion of the Caribbean within the British Empire. Much place in the Caribbean during the 1830s and 40s were of the critique of the slave system was based on the the results of the active resistance of former slaves. white abolitionist belief in the supremacy of the free market, and the British mission to spread capitalism Why Abolition? to backward parts of the world. The lack of concern for the produce of other slave societies such as Cuba The abolition of the slave trade was popularly consid- or almost equally brutal indentured labour systems, ered to be one of the greatest humanitarian move- such as those operating in India, indicates the selecments of all time. The motivations for the abolition tivity of any moral concern. Indeed, as the historian of slavery were mixed. Much of the humanitarianism and former Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams of the abolitionist movement was characterised by an argues, the reason that Caribbean slavery was attractemphasis on the slaves as a passive object, waiting ing so much humanitarian attention was the gradual to be rescued, by the white abolitionists. This atti- decline in profitability of the plantations and the ecotude reflects the Abolitionist movement’s opposition nomic failure. to the political and economic power of slaves and of Africans. For the vast majority of white abolitionists The white abolitionist movement never wanted their vision of freedom came without suffrage or po- emancipation to lead to the end of white supremacy. litical power being devolved to freed slaves. This fear Abolition was instead seen as a way of maintaining 18 |
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white supremacy. Slave protest and uprising led to the fear that not only would slavery be overthrown, but the entire mechanics of white supremacy in the Caribbean would be lost. The economic crisis in the plantation economy since 1810 formed a similar existential threat to white supremacy. Abolition was a way of protecting white supremacy, not a way of bringing about its end.
ers into debt, which could be used as a mechanism for forcing labourers to work for almost nothing. The maintenance of the level of discipline expected by the plantation owners was another problem. The use of deductions to wages as punishments put planters in a position where they were firmly in control over the conditions which operated in their workforce, and could exercise a certain amount of discipline over their workforce. Other plantation owners viewed The Planter Class: Forging a New White Supremacy the changes that took place because of abolition as a way to rationalise their workforce by getting rid of The abolition of slavery prevented challenges from those who were considered too old or infirm to work, the plantation owners and the colonial state, which or by moving people such as nurses, who previously operated almost entirely on behalf of the plantation provided services largely to maintain the running of owners. They had to forge a new apparatus of white the plantation, into the field. Plantation owners used supremacy, one where violence was a power devolved their economic power as provider of wages to reinlargely, though not entirely, to the colonial state, and force their control and white supremacy within the less of a casual recourse for plantation owners. High Caribbean. on their list of priorities for the new system, was to keep the former slaves on their plantations doing the Another major change in the power structure was a same labour as cheaply as possible. The period after new, more interventionist role for the colonial state in emancipation was one where the colonial state and the control of the plantation labour force, as it had to the plantation class sought to create new structures take on policing and disciplinary roles which had prein order to maintain their power and control over for- viously been devolved to plantation owners or their mer slaves. overseers. During the 1840s programs of legislation were introduced in island parliaments to restrain the Between 1833 and 1838, there was a period of appren- movement of people and to keep people on the fields ticeship for ‘freed’ slaves. This meant ‘freed’ slaves in the employment of plantation owners. Vagrancy were bound to their former masters and unable to laws were introduced and used to criminalise those leave employment in plantations in which they were with little money not in employment by plantation slaves. They slave owners because the slaves couldn’t owners. Prison laws were reformed so that the state leave maintained similar recourse to violence. Al- had greater power to detain people who in any way though the slaves were paid in wages, and were tech- transgressed the bounds of the colonial system. The nically age labourers on a par with apprentices in En- police and magistrates acted in the service of the gland, the apprenticeship system did not engender a planter class, possibly owing to the predominance of significant change of status for former slaves, and was former overseers within it, and was involved in putting in effect a perpetuation of their slavery in very similar down protests against high rents organised by plantaforms. This system left ex-slaves without a significant- tion workers. The unequal justice system criminalised ly enhanced ability to control how they work, protect insubordinate actions by former slaves, while technithemselves from the violence of the plantocracy, or cal legal infringements such as the beating of Black gain better living conditions. workers by plantation owners or their overseers were excused. Cultural practices—which offered a culture After apprenticeship was abolished in 1838 it became independent of the plantation, and fostered oppormore difficult for plantation owners to control the la- tunities for people of colour to meet in large groups bour of their newly emancipated workforce. The ten- with the potential to become nuclei of resistance to ancy at will system, which combined rents and wages the colonial state, —were regarded with suspicion. was designed to tie former plantation workers to their The practicing of creole religions such as Obeah or plantations and allow the plantation owners to main- Vodoo was harshly repressed. The post-emancipation tain control over their labour. Often, rent was higher Caribbean underwent a change from an economic than their personal income, forcing plantation work- system based on slavery to one which resembled co-
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lonialism in India, or later colonialism in Africa, and therefore a change in the nature of white supremacy rather than a challenge to it. The liberal author Anthony Trollope, during his travels round the British Caribbean in the 1850s described the essential task of the plantation elites as a desire to ‘make [the former slaves] do an honest day’s work without making them slaves’. This reflects the desire and the aim of the planter class to create an economic system that resembled slavery in all aspects except the categorisation of their employment. Emancipation did not lead to the slaves’ freedom, but to a change in the nature of their un-freedom; from being slaves to the planter class, to being an agricultural proletariat, oppressed by the combination of repressive measures instituted by their employers and by the colonial state. Running and Resistance: FInding Freedom Neither the colonial state, nor the plantocracy, nor even the abolitionists had any intention of emancipation being used to create a significant change in the economic or political system. Despite the array of British conservative forces looking to preserve the plantation system as it was before the abolition of slavery, abolition did lead to change in the plantation system. The key force behind this change was the flight from the fields, a process by which former slaves fled and left employment on the plantation, taking up work in the towns, or as peasant farmers in free villages. Life as a peasant farmer gave former slaves a degree of independence from the slave-owners, and a way of partially escaping from a system which in many cases embodied an experience of horror and violence. Leaving plantation employment—often overcoming the economic structures set by plantation owners and the the legal structures set by the colonial state—is a form of resistance with a long history in the Caribbean. Maroonage, the process of running away from slavery and the plantation, and living off the profits of small agriculture and petty crime, often in remote illegal communities, , was a common form of resistance before the abolition of slavery. Abolition offered a more conducive environment to pursue this form of resistance. Opting out of oppressive capitalist or pre-capitalist systems, was an idea common to radical thought on both sides of the Atlantic. The Chartist movement was attempting (through its land scheme) to resettle unemployed factory workers as 20 |
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small peasant agriculturalists living off the land. The flight from the field helped turn the conservative abolition envisioned by the British elites into one which brought some significant changes in the plantation economy and the relative power of freed slaves. The flight from the fields created a crisis of labour within the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. The price of sugar continued to rise, and the plantations were less able to cope with competition from other colonies within the rising British Empire. Many of the older estates, the stalwarts of the slave system, were driven to bankruptcy or abandonment by their owners. By 1846, over a third of sugar plantations were no longer operative. By 1860 sugar was a tiny fraction of the Jamaican economy. Abolition was born from fundamentally conservative ideas, out of a desire to preserve white supremacy and to preserve the plantation system. It was the continued resistance of former slaves, rather than abolition, which changed the structure of the Caribbean economy. The Use of Abolition The idea of abolition from above, gifted to the backwards slaves by the British parliament, has been a prevailing myth almost since the bill was signed in to law. Much of the popular perception of the abolitionist movement has not moved on from the self-aggrandising autobiographies published by the likes of Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson. The idea of Britain as the great emancipator of slaves grew to play a prominent role in colonialist and nationalist discourse during the later 19th and early 20th century. In South Africa, the British stand against slavery became part of the justification for British expansion through barbaric slave owning Afrikaner and native African societies. The myth that Britain was the first society to abolish slavery, still present in museums to this day, was used to justify the self-image of colonialism as a moralising paternalistic force, righting wrongs and educating the primitive colonised people. The role that the myth of abolition from above plays in writing out resistance by the slaves, undermines the effectiveness of resistance against colonialism, reinforcing the vision of the unchallengeable hegemony of the colonial state.
FROM GRACE TO OBSCENITY By Meg Dyson
Grace to obscenity, loyalty to infidelity, chaste elegance to a lustful and lusted after body - this is the journey that brings us from Odysseus’ wife Penelope to Molly Bloom, and to the end of Ulysses. But what does Joyce have to say about women? Why does he end his epic with Molly’s inner monologue? In 1955, Eve Arnold took a picture of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. It looks – and apparently was – unstaged. Monroe is wearing a swimming costume and sitting in a children’s playground. She seems to be reading the final pages, the chapter known as ‘Penelope’ (Joyce did name the chapters, but replaced the names with numbers before the final draft; however, almost all publishers have kept the names. Ulysses - and ‘Penelope’ in particular has always been the subject of debates surrounding femininity, obscenity and sex. This is, perhaps, why the image of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses in a swimming costume is so iconic – she embodies the risqué element, the scandal involved in ‘The Most Dangerous Book’. Ulysses was banned in the UK until 1936, and was not widely available in Joyce’s native Ireland until the late 1950s. Joyce’s quest for publication in the USA was even more convoluted: in 1921, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, US publishers of the serialised version of Ulysses in The Little Review, were found guilty on obscenity charges because of the scene in the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter when Leopold Bloom masturbates watching a girl on a beach. The two women had their fingerprints taken and were fined; throughout the 20s, it was illegal to buy or sell Ulysses in the USA, and any copies found were seized and burnt by the police. In 1933, Random House Publishers tried to import Ulysses in a deliberate attempt to provoke the authorities. Once again, Ulysses was on trial. In the memorably titled case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, the One Book won - Judge John Woolsey proclaimed that although the novel contained ‘many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for 22 |
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dirt’s sake’, and Ulysses was published in the USA. But in this trial, and in this discussion of dirt, the focus was on ‘Penelope’. The prosecutors had intended to read aloud sexually explicit sections of the chapter, raising the question of how they chose the most obscene words out of a passage which offers us such gems as ‘I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs around him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all’ alongside the oddly innocent fantasy ‘I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white’, and even a description of Molly’s period being brought on by her earlier sexual activities with Blazes Boylan, the man with whom she is cheating on her husband: ‘O Jesus wait that thing has come on me yes now wouldnt that afflict you of course all the poking and rooting and ploughing he had up in me now […] O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea’. Molly referring to her period as ‘that thing’ has prompted controversy in Joycean scholarship: how uncensored is this passage really? If Molly herself can only refer to her period using a vague euphemism, can Joyce really be trying to get to the very deepest corners of her mind? Either way, the prosecutors never read the passages aloud - the plan was abandoned when they saw women sitting in the courtroom. A familiar paradox emerges: women are most susceptible to corruption by the obscene thoughts of … women? Margaret Anderson, one of the publishers of Ulysses in The Little Review, pointed out this irony in an article she wrote after being accused of obscenity in ‘Nausicaa’: ‘If the young girl corrupts, can she also be corrupted?’ The question of the role of women in Ulysses - and Ulysses’s effect on women - has been chewed over by scholars, feminists, and psychiatrists alike, some seeking redemption for Joyce and some pointing out the myriad flaws in his representation of women. Carl Jung wrote to Joyce after reading Ulysses, ‘I shall
probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it […] How I cursed, and how I admired. The 40 pages of non-stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.’ Jung, the great thinker that he was, raises some important points. Anyone who has read Ulysses will be familiar with the confusing melee of emotions one experiences, ranging from boredom to awe to the urge to throw the book into a wall...or a fire. Jung picks out one of the most interesting aspects of ‘Penelope’: it is presented as the genuine, unadulterated thoughts of a woman on the edge of sleep through the ungrammatical ‘flow’ of the language. But, remembering Molly’s euphemistic statement about her period, is it really that unadulterated? Grammatically speaking, it is unhinged and free from the constraints of punctuation. The French post-structuralist feminist scholar Hélène Cixous declared that Joyce’s writing is an example of the ‘écriture féminine’, a term she coined to describe writing which rejects traditional rules and transgresses boundaries in order to cast off patriarchal discourse and to write ‘the other’. ‘Penelope’ certainly rejects rules and boundaries - but does it cast off patriarchal discourse, or affirm it? Is Joyce’s examination of Molly’s thoughts an act of privileging and inclusion, or distancing and alienation?
say, as have Boylan, and Lenehan and Richie Goulding and all the other men who say Molly’s name, discuss her, and fantasise about her. A constructed reality of Molly is given to us before and in lieu of her thoughts. The third-person narrator who details the events of Bloomsday, including Bloom’s masturbation on the beach, Stephen’s grief over his mother, and Boylan’s lust for Molly while he has a lunchtime drink in the Ormond Hotel, ignores Molly. In many ways, Ulysses is a book about books, and a narrative about narrative. Molly’s absence from the implied objectivity of the narration, however intriguing and illuminating her first-person monologue may be, is inherently ostracising.
The combined effect of the chapter’s position at the end of the book and its first-person point of view is an inversion, and at the same time a confirmation, of the anxieties and ironies revealed in the multiple trials of Ulysses: the inner thoughts of women are so obscene, so unhinged and flowing, that they can only be expressed by women, once the rest of the book is asleep and safe from their influence. They cannot be uttered in a courtroom, or indeed in any of the many places visited by Bloom in his Dublin wanderings: pubs, shops, a hospital, a brothel, a newspaper office. ‘Penelope’ is a whisper, unheard by anyone other than Molly herself, at the end of the book, and at the A closer look at the language and position of Penelo- end of the day. She is geographically excluded by her pe sheds some light. As well as almost causing the end confinement to Eccles Street, and indeed to her bed; of Ulysses due to its alleged obscenity, ‘Penelope’ is at she is temporally excluded by her lack of voice until the end of the book. It is the final chapter, a forty-page everyone else is asleep; and, she is excluded by the stream of consciousness monologue, one of only two very structures of grammar and narration that Cixous chapters written in the first person, with almost no claimed Joyce inverted in order to write the ‘écriture punctuation – each of the chapter’s eight sentences féminine’. are multiple pages long. It deals with everything from Molly’s hatred of Catholic confession to her grief over There is, of course, a grand tradition of excluding her lost child, from fantasies about her husband’s female thought. Within Ulysses itself, we have the new friend, Stephen Dedalus, to an almost forgotten ‘Nausicaa’ episode, in which a young girl called Gerty knowledge of Spanish; it takes us from menstruation watches Bloom on a beach, and he watches her while to memories of flowers (pun intended by both myself masturbating, as she leans back to reveal her underand Joyce). The other characters have gone to sleep, wear, ‘the sight of the wondrous revealment half ofand according to one of the charts which Joyce made fered’. The narration of the chapter is divided, with to explain the structure of the book, the time is ‘infini- some overlap, between the two characters: Joyce’s use ty’. Molly seems to lie outside the main narrative: quite of free indirect speech allows the narrator to reflect literally, she lies in her bed for basically the entirety of their thought patterns and distinguish between them, the book, and although she plays a crucial role in the even when in the third person. We are used to the plot, until this chapter she is only seen through the tenor of Bloom’s thoughts, so Gerty’s thoughts sound thoughts and words of other characters. The effect different and consciously feminine: ‘Gerty MacDowell of reading Penelope after struggling through the rest who was seated near her companions, lost in thought, of the text is that our opinions of Molly are already gazing far away into the distance, was in very truth partially formed: Bloom and Stephen have had their as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one MARCH 2017
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could wish to see’. This is, then, Joyce’s first attempt in Ulysses to delve inside the female mind, to unfold the discourses of a female consciousness. But – and it’s a big but – we have to remember that the boundary between Gerty’s narration and Bloom’s is porous, and we can see this whole episode as an extension of Bloom’s thoughts: Joyce himself, when asked what really happened in this scene, stated, ‘Nothing happened between them. It was all in Bloom’s imagination’. Whether or not we accept Joyce’s retrospective analysis of his own work, it is clear that Gerty is another example of female thought constructed at least in part by male perspectives. We also encounter women, somewhat unsurprisingly, in the episode of Ulysses which takes place in a brothel. The ‘Circe’ episode is set in what Joyce presents as Dublin’s red light district, ‘Nighttown’. As this name suggests, the episode takes place once the characters are on the edge of sleep. The clock has seen midnight come and go, and the reality of Ulysses, already tested by Joyce’s linguistic experiments, begins to give way to drunkenness, madness, hallucinations and visions. We encounter Molly here: ‘Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket slashed with gold’. This is one of a series of fantasies Bloom has in the brothel, corresponding with the magic of Circe in the Odyssey, which turns Odysseus’s men into pigs (interestingly, the magical herb which reverses this transformation is called ‘μωλυ’; ‘moly’). After Bloom’s vision of Molly, a bar of soap he has been carrying in his pocket comes to life and sings, ‘We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I, / He brightens the earth, I polish the sky’. The soap is not really the point, but it illuminates the context in which women are written into Ulysses: mirages and fantasies, daydreams and hallucinations – all the constructs of other minds. Returning to the Odyssey, we see that this tradition of exclusion stretches proudly back to the earliest forms of western literature. In Book 1, Penelope confronts a bard who is singing, admittedly with little tact, about the troubles of heroes returning home from Troy. In response, her son Telemachus tells her ‘Go to your quarters now, and attend to your own duties at loom and spindle, and order your maids about their tasks: let men worry about public speaking, and I especially, since I hold the authority in this house.’ Mary Beard has astutely described this as ‘the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to shut up’; the words ‘get back to the kitchen’ also spring to mind. Ulysses inherits
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from the Odyssey not only its structural motifs and the theme of fathers and sons, but also a manual on the silencing of public female voices. In 2006 the Guardian asked writers to pick their favourite image of a woman reading. Jeanette Winterson chose Marilyn Monroe and Ulysses, and said: ‘We are the voyeurs, it’s true, but what we’re spying on is not a moment of body, but a moment of mind. For once, we’re not being asked to look at Marilyn, we’re being given a chance to look inside her.’ This duality of voyeurism is also how we must view ‘Penelope’. We have already been offered Molly’s body, along with her clothes, her voice, and the lust she inspires: the minds of the men of Dublin present a picture of Molly from which her thoughts are necessarily absent. In ‘Penelope’ her thoughts are all that there is – but what Joyce discovers in his character’s mind ostracises her from the main narration of Bloomsday. Joyce may know more about women than Carl Jung or the devil’s grandmother, and there is no doubt that he attempts to convey with admiration and interest the dimensions of female thought, allowing his readers to be voyeurs of mind as well as body. He offers us the mind of Molly Bloom in her own words, free from the pollution of Dublin, noise and gossip. In some ways, this is revolutionary; as Jung’s letter makes clear, this chapter pays an almost unprecedented amount of attention to the mind of a female character. But the positioning of ‘Penelope’ at the end of the book and in the first person alienates as well as privileges: Joyce does not want to include women in his Dublin, a literary space defined by the narratological and grammatical structures of the text. Through the subversion of these structures by the chapter’s position and point of view, and through his construction of an artificial ‘unadulteratedness’, Joyce invokes the duplicitous power of ‘Penelope’: it is erotically forbidden and fascinatingly explicit, it is ‘The Most Dangerous Book’, it is Marilyn Monroe in a swimming costume; but, it is also a confirmation of the suspicions held not only by the book’s other characters but by its readers and critics alike, that the thoughts of women - however complex and multi-faceted - have no place in the public life of the city. Joyce shows us the mind of Molly, but in doing so he restricts her once more to the private, domestic sphere, and banishes her into the night that can only begin once Bloomsday has ended.