For a linguistically inventive people, no substitutes are
necessary to convey dislike. Creative use is made of the
ordinary name, from Mulligan’s “God, these bloody
English! Bursting with money and indigestion” to
the brilliantly funny revenge ditty placed in the mouth of an
only slightly exaggerated Citizen in Circe:
May the God above
Send down a dove
With teeth as sharp as razors
To slit the throats
Of the English dogs
That hanged our Irish leaders.
But nicknames do come in handy. In Cyclops the
Citizen speaks of "the Saxon robbers." In Telemachus
Mulligan calls Haines "A ponderous Saxon,"
and Stephen, who is energetically
resisting the Englishman's overtures of friendship,
thinks, "Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a
Saxon." All three, according to a common saying,
are things to fear. The Scots Gaelic equivalent of Saxon, “Sassenach”
(Irish Sasanaigh), is used several times, once by
Mulligan (again, speaking of Haines to Stephen) and twice by
the Citizen ("the bloody brutal Sassenachs"). For
many centuries this term has been used for people born in
England, and not for those who have assimilated (the latter
were called gaill or foreigners in the old
annals).
The distinction between nativized Anglo-Irish settlers and
more recent arrivals also figures in the slang word that
Stephen uses in Telemachus for Oxford students, "Palefaces."
This term supposedly originated with Native Americans
confronting their own English settlers, and the Irish
apparently use it to reverse the current of racist hatred
implicit in 18th and 19th century British stereotyping of the Irish as
dark-skinned, brutish, and subhuman, like Africans and Native
Americans.
The Citizen declaims, "We have our greater Ireland beyond
the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the black
47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were
laid low by the batteringram and the Times rubbed
its hands and told the whitelivered Saxons there
would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in America."
If the Irish can be characterized as redskins, then
corresponding language can be applied to the people across the
Irish Sea: "Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women
sitting fore, gripping the handrests. Palefaces.
Men's arms frankly round their stunted forms" (Wandering
Rocks).
But this term also plays on the fact that Dublin has always
been the city of foreign conquerors, from its founding by the Vikings to
its Georgian splendor under the British. In the late Middle
Ages, the Pale was the small part of Ireland that remained
under the direct control of the English crown after most of
the Anglo-Norman invaders forged
alliances with Gaelic chieftains and intermarried. As
the territory under the control of the English crown
contracted to the area around Dublin, and as its perimeter was
progressively ditched and fenced to hold off the natives, it
came to be known metonymically by the Latin name for a stake (palus)
driven into the ground to support a fence. Those outside the fence were
“beyond the pale.” Those inside it—essentially, the
inhabitants of greater Dublin—were “Palemen.”
Perhaps the most interesting of these slang epithets is
“stranger,” or “stranger in the house.” Stephen uses it when
thinking of Haines, Deasy of the Anglo-Norman invaders in the
12th century, and Stephen again in Scylla and Charybdis
when he alludes to the Countess
Kathleen bemoaning “her four beautiful green
fields, the stranger in her house” (i.e., the four
provinces of Ireland, and the English invaders). Old Gummy
Granny, Circe’s hallucinatory version of the
mythical Poor Old Woman,
spits, “Strangers in my house, bad manners to them!”
In light of the novel's frequent use of this Irish expression
of resentment, it is interesting that Bloom is called a
stranger several times. The anti-Semitism
expressed by many of Dublin’s citizens prepares the reader for
this nomination. At the end of Nestor, Mr Deasy
jokes that Ireland has never persecuted the Jews “Because she
never let them in.” In Cyclops, the xenophobic
Citizen extends his dislike of the British to the Jewish-Irish
Bloom. "We want no more strangers in our house,"
he says. Oxen of the Sun appears to
perpetuate this mentality when Mulligan and the other young
men in the maternity hospital think of Bloom several times as
“the stranger.” Perhaps they are simply not
used to seeing him in the hospital, but their use of the term
may very well be xenophobic.
All three of the book's protagonists could be called
strangers: the partly Jewish Bloom, the exotically
Mediterranean Molly, and the young man with an "absurd name,
an ancient Greek."
Joyce's dislike of British rule
was tempered by his awareness that Ireland has been shaped by
repeated waves of conquest and assimilation. In Finnegans
Wake he created another male protagonist who is
regarded suspiciously as an outsider. Mr. Porter, the
(possible) daytime instantiation of HCE, seems to be a
Protestant, just as Bloom is Jewish, and HCE is associated
repeatedly with the seafaring conquests of Danes, Norwegians,
Jutes, Normans, Englishmen, and other Germanic invaders. His
recurrent compulsion to defend his existence seems connected
to Ireland's aggressive suspicion of outsiders: "So this is
Dyoublong? Hush! Caution! Echoland!"
In The Irish Ulysses (U. California Press, 1994),
Maria Tymoczko argues that the ancient Irish text called The
Book of Invasions "helps to explain why the central
characters in Ulysses are all outsiders though they
stand as universalized representations of Dubliners, for the
invasion theory of Irish history in Lebor Gabála is
predicated on the notion that there are no aboriginal
inhabitants of the island. In this scheme, everyone is an
outsider, descended as it were from immigrants. From the
perspective of Irish pseudohistory, the cultural alienation of
Stephen, Bloom, and Molly mirrors the heritage of all the
island's inhabitants as descendants of invaders" (35). Greek,
Jew, and Spaniard, by this reading, stand in for Nemedians,
Formorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha de Danann, Goidels-Milesians,
Dane-Vikings, Anglo-Normans, English, and Scots.
