The first word of Cyclops, "I," comes as a narrative shock. All preceding chapters have been told in the third person, but now a caustic, mean-spirited character hijacks the telling of the story. Although his voice is intensely, dramatically personal, his identify is never revealed. Joyce underlines his anonymity in Circe by introducing "the featureless face of a Nameless One" who speaks in the same idiom as the man who has narrated Cyclops. This strange appellation recalls a detail in Homer's epic, and also the title of a 19th century Irish poem, but both analogues feel like red herrings, allusive dead ends.

Until Cyclops Joyce consistently employs third-person narration shot through with interior monologue and free indirect style––what he called the "initial style" of his book. After the first six chapters, newspaper-like headlines (in Aeolus), brief dramatic scripts (Scylla and Charybdis), chopped-up space and time (Wandering Rocks), and chopped-up words and phrases (Sirens) work strange twists on the formula, but the underlying style of narration remains intact. In The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses, Karen Lawrence notes that the twelfth chapter kills it off, ushering in a dizzying array of new techniques for the remainder of the novel. But after the defamiliarizing strangeness of Sirens, "the sudden appearance of this [new] person is, for the most part, reassuring. No matter how 'limited' a point of view he represents, the presence of a definitive narrative self is comforting" (101).

The absence of any name or past attached to that self, however, keeps the comfort level far from Dickensian. Ulysses teems with unknown or barely known people: actual Dubliners hiding behind pseudonyms, characters like "Martha Clifford" who may be concealing their true identities, mysteries like the man in the macintosh, dimly recognized "whatdoyoucallhim" people, unnamed workers in business establishments, anonymous people on the streets (the "boy for the skins" and the "smaller girl" beside him, the "blind stripling," the "whore of the lane," the "onelegged sailor"). To have the narration of an entire chapter commandeered by such a shadowy presence is disconcerting, and Joyce does not follow the traditional strategy of encouraging readers to identify with the speaker by giving him endearing qualities. The narrator's chief personal characteristic is snarling misanthropic contempt. His stream of palaver is endlessly entertaining, however––hilarious, in fact, when read by Stephen Rea.

In Circe Joyce briefly reincarnates the man's voice via hallucination, when a jury of Bloom's peers convenes. Eleven are acquaintances who have been with Bloom during the day, but the twelfth spot is filled by "the featureless face of a Nameless One." When this man speaks, it becomes clear that he too has been around Bloom on June 16. Picking up on a theme of cuckoldry introduced a few lines earlier, he says, "Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised her." Alert readers may recall the Cyclops narrator responding to Bloom's remark that Blazes Boylan is "an excellent man to organise" Molly's concert tour: "Excellent. / Hoho begob says I to myself says I. That explains the milk in the cocoanut and absence of hair on the animal's chest. Blazes doing the tootle on the flute.... That's the bucko that'll organise her, take my tip." Another "tip" in Cyclops concerns the Gold Cup nod supposedly given to Bantam Lyons: "he told me Bloom gave him the tip. Bet you what you like he has a hundred shillings to five on." This detail too returns in Circe: "(Snarls.) Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five."

The narrator's namelessness is of a piece with the fact that the man who dominates all the conversation in Barney Kiernan's is called only "the citizen" and never clearly identified. The anonymity of these two, their aggressive contempt for others, and their placement in a dark pub where men become dissolved in alcoholic fumes strongly evoke the story in book 9 of Homer's Odyssey, where giants called Cyclopes live solitary, inhospitable lives in caves and where the chief Cyclops sinks into an alcoholic stupor after drinking Odysseus's wine. Anyone who has read this story will think of the striking moment when Odysseus says that his name is "Noman." But this is a trick that the hero uses to outwit the giant into whose cave he has unwisely wandered. The Cyclops himself has a name: Polyphemus. Joyce's Odysseus figure, Leopold Bloom, does have a name, while the threatening troglodytes in Barney Kiernan's do not. If intertextual conversation is taking place, it seems unusually garbled. 

Similar allusive confusion arises from the fact that "The Nameless One" is the title of a famous lyric by Joyce's favorite 19th century Irish poet. Dubliner James Clarence Mangan (1803-49) was a major poetic talent––Yeats considered him a genius, and Joyce praised him extravagantly in an early lecture––but he led a doomed life, drinking heavily, using opium, suffering homelessness and sickness, and dying wretchedly poor and emaciated. "The Nameless One" describes this fusion of existential misery and imaginative exaltation:

...Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,
How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom,
No star of all heaven sends to light our
Path to the tomb.

Roll on, my song, and to after ages
Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,
He would have taught men, from wisdom’s pages,
The way to live.

And tell how trampled, derided, hated,
And worn by weakness, disease, and wrong,
He fled for shelter to God, who mated
His soul with song....

Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long
To herd with demons from hell beneath,
Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long
For even death.

Go on to tell how, with genius wasted,
Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love,
With spirit shipwrecked, and young hopes blasted,
He still, still strove....

And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow,
And want, and sickness, and houseless nights,
He bides in calmness the silent morrow,
That no ray lights....

Mangan became the Nameless One through substance abuse––a possible link to the drinkers in Barney Kiernan's, and Barney Kiernan himself drying out in a hospital––but his highminded romanticism has nothing in common with the narrator's reductive cynicism. It seems incredible that Joyce's high opinion of Mangan could have changed so radically from 1902 to 1919 that he chose to reincarnate him as a venomous drunk in whom no embers of poetic, political, or spiritual idealism glow. Nevertheless, he echoed Mangan's verses five more times in Ulysses, all but one of them in Cyclops where the poet's language adds to the overblown hibernophilia of the parodic intrusions. Did he intend some kind of ironic contrast with the Nameless narrator? Some obscure affinity?

The Nameless One has not been subjected to anything like the feverish hunts for hidden identity inspired by the anonymous man in the macintosh and the possibly pseudonymous Martha Clifford. But it is conceivable that detective work may succeed in tying him to some character mentioned elsewhere in the novel under a familiar name. At least one critic has made such a claim. In "The Identity of the Cyclops narrator in James Joyce's Ulysses," Journal of Modern Literature 5 (1976): 534-39, E. I. Schoenberg argues that the voice heard in the twelfth chapter belongs to Stephen's father, Simon Dedalus. Schoenberg makes some plausible observations but avoids some difficult questions, one of which is this: if Simon is the narrator, how can both of them serve on the jury in Circe?

Read More

John Hunt 2024