Abstract
The dramatic entrance of Buck Mulligan impersonating a priest is a blasphemous opening to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Ascending to the top of a Martello Tower, he does not seek refuge with God, for the name Buck, connoting male animal sexuality, is aptronymic given that his ‘ungirdled’ yellow dressing gown hints towards unbridled Wildean-paganism. Later on, Buck theatrically declares his post-religious position in no uncertain terms by publicly reciting Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.’2 With an ironic reversal of Proverbs 19:17, ‘He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again’, Buck imitates the abrasive and populist image of Nietzsche’s iconoclastic philosophy that is supposedly intoned in ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’. This is when Zarathustra descends from the mountains, wishing to bestow and distribute his wisdom: ‘Could this be possible! This old holy man in his forest has heard nothing yet, that God is dead!‘3 Impersonating Zarathustra and staging a mock Catholic ritual in a loose and garish robe, before plunging naked into the cold waters of the Irish Sea, confirms the defiant atheism of Buck Mulligan. However, although the episode ‘Telemachus’ immediately signals a parodic rejection of religion, the underlying irony is that plump Buck, a little on the fat side, appears fatuous when giving his morning salutations to the earthy glory of a new day.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned :
— Introibo ad altare Dei. [I go unto the altar of God]1
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, eds. Philippa Berry & Andrew Wernick (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 1.
Phillip Blond (ed.), Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 1.
Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 19.
Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture and Aesthetics 1910–60 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 5.
Erik Tonning, Modernism and Christianity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 1.
Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2.
Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985), p. 27. ‘The historical power of myth is not founded in the origins of its contents, in the zone which draws its materials and its stories, but rather in the fact that, in its procedure and its “form,” it is no longer something else’ (p. 16).
Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press LTD., 1980), pp. 163–7.
See Paul Holmer, The Grammar of Faith (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1978). Holmer takes his lead from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, i.e. the language of faith belongs to a ‘single grammar’ (p. ix).
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 30.
See for example: Karl Jaspers, Philosophy: Metaphysics, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971). ‘Godforsakenness is not defiance. It involves a sense of distance, a lack of faith that makes me unable to be either defiant or yielding’ (p. 72).
Don Cupitt, ‘Post-Christianity’, from Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Heelas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), p. 228.
Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873), pp. 12–13.
Salile McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (London: SCM Press LTD, 1983), pp. 5–6.
See also J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Pive Nineteenth-Century Writers (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000). ‘The idea of Incarnation was the ultimate basis for this harmony [man, society, nature, and language]’ p. 5.
See K. K. Ruthken, Myth: The Critical Idiom (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 60–1.
Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 3.
Karl Jaspers & Rudolf Bultmann, Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion without Myth (New York: Prometheus Books, 2005). ‘[A] cipher becomes the symbol of a reality that be expressed in any other way’ p. 87.
See also Leonard Ehrlich, Karl Jaspers: Philosophy and Faith (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1975).
Introductory books to theories of myth, such as Robert A. Segal’s Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
and Laurence Coupe’s Myth (London: Routledge, 2008), by excluding the philosophical views of Karl Jaspers, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger tend to give the general impression that myth only equates to a foundational narrative or a discourse of recurring patterns.
Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), pp. 213–14.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (London: Vintage, 1991).
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. Rush Rees, trans. A. C. Miles & Rush Rees (Bishopstone, Herefordshire: The Brynmill Press Ltd., 2010).
See also Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein (London: SPCK, 1997),
& Ronald T. Michener, Postliberal Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark, 2013).
Critics have identified in Harmonium a humanist or ironic style that stands in opposition to the religious commitment or ‘seriousness’ of Eliot. See Joseph N. Riddel, The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991): ‘[…] Stevens never created a dramatic metaphor for his age, like The Waste Land […]’ (p. 56).
‘Western atheism now finds itself in soniething of a twilight zone.’ Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (London: Rider Books, 2004), p. 279.
See David A. White, Heidegger and the Language of Poetry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 108.
Gianni Vattimo, Belief trans. Luca D’Isanto & David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 47.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Scott Freer
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Freer, S. (2015). Introduction: Modernist Mythopoeia — The Language of the In-Between and of Beyond. In: Modernist Mythopoeia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035516_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035516_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44229-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-03551-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)