Introduction
Giacomo Joyce, which James Joyce
wrote in Trieste, presumably sometime between 1912 and 1914, is
considered to be an "etude" linking A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, almost free from Jewish
elements, with Ulysses, full
of Jewish names and elements. Different from Joyce's major novels
whose main locale is Dublin, the setting of Giacomo Joyce is in Trieste.
It is the author's fragmental mental sketches, rather than a
novel. The title "Giacomo Joyce" was given by Richard Ellmann,
the biographer who introduced the manuscript on which, on the upper
left-hand corner of the front cover, the Italian form of the author's
name "Giacomo Joyce" is inscribed. As Ellmann noted, Joyce
certainly allows that the hero is to be identified with himself, for he
calls Giacomo "Jamesy" and "Jim," and once appeals to his wife as
"Nora" (GJ xii & 15).
Trieste was located on the border between Western Europe and
Eastern Europe, or more precisely, between Europe (familiar to Joyce)
and the "Orient" (strange or exotic to him) in Edward Said's definition.1
For Joyce, the Jews are an "Oriental" people. The census of 1910
revealed that Trieste had 5,495 Jews according to John McCourt's Years of Bloom (222).
Giacomo Joyce is a
sketchbook of luscious fantasies in which Giacomo traces his desire for
his "dark lady" or the "mystery lady," who is most commonly identified
with any of Joyce's three middle-class Jewish students: Amalia Popper,
Emma Cuzzi and Annie Schleimer. All of them were highly educated,
independent and spoke at least three different languages (McCourt
199). Vicky Mahaffey argues in States
of Desire that "Giacomo Joyce
has sexist and anti-Semitic overtones that are essential to an
understanding of the operations of prejudice and the power of art"
(151).
As many critics have discussed, Otto Weininger's Geschlect und Charakter (1903), or
its first English translation Sex
and Character published by William Heinemann (1906), or its
first Italian translation by Giulio Fenoglio (1912), seems to have
inspired James Joyce to write Ulysses.
Weininger's view is summarized by Marilyn Reizbaum: "Just as the woman
is the negative force in every human being, so too, according to
Weininger, is the Jew."2
This paper aims to discuss anti-Semitism and anti-feminism in Giacomo Joyce from Weininger's
perspective.
I.
Weininger's Possible Influence on Joyce
Otto Weininger (1880-1903)
was born on April 3, 1880 as the second child of an accomplished
Jewish artisan in Vienna. At the age of 18, he entered the
Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Vienna, ignoring his
father's wish that he should study languages. He converted
to
Christianity (Protestantism) on July 21, 1902, the day he became a
doctor of philosophy. He completed Geschlect und Charakter, which was
first published in German in May 1903. Soon after the
publication, he went to Italy to await results. There appeared to be
none, and during the next four months an intellectual malady, described
by his friends as "a too grave sense of responsibility," became acute.
On October 4, 1903, he committed suicide at the age of
twenty-three. His sudden suicide after conversion reminds
the Joycean reader of the suicide of Leopold Bloom's father Rudolph
Bloom (formerly called Rudolf Virag) at his own Queen's Hotel, Ennis,
County Clare on June 27, 1886 (U
17.622-32).
After Weininger's death, however, Geschlect
und Charakter ironically received a favored reaction from
numerous readers and it has been re-published many times in a number of
European languages.
Geschlect und Charakter
is a voluble and unsubstantiated treatise, which "proved" that women
and Jews did not possess a rational and moral self and, therefore,
neither deserved nor needed equality with Aryan men or even simple
liberty. Weininger was not the first Western thinker to offer a
racist and misogynist vision of the world. The most notable work of
this genre was the German psychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius's Über den Physiologischen Schwachsinn des
Weibes (On the Physiological
Feeble-Mindedness of Woman, 1900). This presumably greatly
influenced Weininger, as Möbius criticized Weininger's work as an
imitation or an adaptation of his work (Takeuchi 395). The
Jewish-Italian psychiatrist, anthropologist and criminologist Cesare
Lombroso's L' antisemitismo e le
scienze moderne (Anti-Semitism
and the Modern Science, 1894) would have been more influential
because Lombroso, as a Jew, disparaged his coreligionists and asserted
that prostitution is the female version of crime and that it is women's
sexuality that makes all women potential criminals.
However, Weininger's work has had a remarkable impact on numerous
writers including Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Franz Kafka, Hermann
Broch, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Joyce, and philosophers like
Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The original German word
"Geschlecht" used for the title can mean both "race" and "sex."
Weininger's theories about Jews, which grew out of his theories
about women, were popular in the early twentieth century: Jewishness
was a state of mind, inferior to that of the Gentiles and the same was
true of women in relation to men, thereby aligning what is Jewish with
feminine or womanly.3
That these researches should be
included in a work devoted to the
characterology of the sexes may seem an undue
extension of my
subject. But some reflection will lead
to the surprising result that
Judaism is saturated with femininity, with
precisely those qualities
the essence of which I have shown to be in the
strongest opposition
to the male nature. It would not be
difficult to make a case for
the view that the Jew is more saturated with femininity than the
Aryan, to such an extent that the most manly Jew is more feminine
than the least manly Aryan.
This interpretation would be
erroneous. It is most important to lay
stress on the agreements and differences simply because so many
points that become obvious in dissecting woman
reappear in the Jew.
(Weininger 306) (Italics mine.)
The book contains spurious comparisons between races, for instance,
Chinese and Jewish. The personal element in Weininger's work,
that is, the relationship between his life and work, may have
contributed more to Joyce's text than the work itself (JJJO 28).
As Reizbaum argues, if we use the text of Ulysses to document Joyce's
connection with Judaism, then we are faced with irresolvable
ambiguities.4 However, we might be
able to interpret
them as artistically significant―Bloom as Jew or non-Jewish Jew.
Joyce had many Jewish friends throughout his lifetime,
especially in Trieste; Italo Svevo (Ettore Schimitz), Ottocaro Weiss,
etc. Italo Svevo is also known to have been a Weiningerian: His
characters in his main works including Senilita (As a Man Grows Older / Emilio's Carnival, 1898) and La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno / Zeno's Conscience, 1923) showed
Weiningerian Jewish characteristics of the self-hating Jew and
misogyny, although Senilita
was published five years earlier than Geschlect
und Charakter. Joyce and Svevo first met at Berlitz School
in Trieste in 1907. Joyce was an unenthusiastic English teacher
there while Svevo was an enthusiastic student trying to learn English
for his business. It is highly likely that Svevo introduced
Weininger to Joyce. Ellmann mentions in his biography that
Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter
contains theories that Joyce generally believed, such as, "The Jews are
feminine people," although he does not make clear how well Joyce knew
or read the book. According to Ellmann, some of the information
about alleged ritual murders by Jews in the Eumaeus episode came from a
protest meeting about a false accusation of ritual murder that the two
men attended together in 1919 (463). Bloom's character, a womanly
Jewish man, applies to Weininger's theories, particularly in the
hallucination of the Circe episode where the (possibly Jewish)
whore-mistress Bella Cohen, who corresponds with the witch Circe in the
Odyssey, becomes defeminized
"Bello" and turns Bloom both into a passive woman and into a pet as he
longed for (U
15.2964-65). Weininger held that woman (like womanly man) is
negation, is nothing, is non-existent, illogical, passive: "Her
instability and untruthfulness are only negative deductions from the
premise of non-existence" (Ellmann 463). "She is the sin of man,"
Weininger insisted (Ellmann 463). Joyce would have largely agreed
with this view and probably initially applied it to characterization of
the I-narrator of Giacomo Joyce, although he is described as a non-Jew
who is a "non-existent, illogical and passive" married man, in love
with a young Jewish lady.
II.
Anti-Semitism in Giacomo Joyce
The virgin reader of the mental sketchbook Giacomo Joyce may not understand
the background very well.
Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy
odorous
furs.
Her movements are shy and nervous. She uses
quizzing-glasses.
Yes: a brief syllable. A brief
laugh. A brief beat of the eyelids.
Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with
quiet disdain and
resignation: a young person of
quality. (GJ 1)
One would even wonder whether Giacomo
Joyce is a fiction or not. Who is "A pale face surrounded by
heavy odorous furs" (GJ
1)? The reader cannot know exactly whether she was a real person
or a fictional character. The question "Who?" remains
unsettled. With this description, one would imagine that she is a
decent and educated young lady, although "with quiet disdain and
resignation" implies her somewhat cynical personality. Then
Giacomo launches forth on an easy weave of tepid speech, showing off
his wide-ranged culture to her. Giacomo, a shy man, however,
seems only to teach English and cannot do anything else to the lady who
"never blows her nose" (GJ
2). All he can do is to observe her and teach English, nursing
lascivious thoughts.
Then, the reader recognizes that she belongs to a different race
called "Jews":
Rounded and ripened: rounded by the lathe of
intermarriage and ripened
in the forcing-house of the seclusion of her
race. (GJ 2)
"Intermarriage" here means "endogamy." If Giacomo knows
that the mystery lady might not be a practicing Jew, however,
"intermarriage" means "marriage with a non-Jewish partner." This
has been called the "Second Silent Holocaust" which is considered to be a
serious threat to Jewish survival. As Ellmann argues, Stephen
Dedalus similarly insists that his Irish girl possesses "the secret of
her race" in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (P
5.1664; Ellmann xxxii). Here Giacomo begins his erotic Oriental
fantasy with the first of several harem images. Giacomo "sets up
an implicit ratio, that Jewish culture is to the larger European
society as the harem culture is to the larger (Near) Eastern society
whence the Jews themselves originally came."5
When the
"wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile," he notices her
"streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour
lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes" (GJ 2). Giacomo finds an Asian
element in her face. According to Weininger, "admixture of
Mongolian blood is suggested by the perfectly Chinese or Malay
formation of face and skull which is so often to be met with amongst
the Jews and which is associated with a yellowish complexion" (303).
The following passage clearly describes the lady's Jewishness:
Mio padre: she does the simplest acts with
distinction. Unde
derivatur? Mia figlia ha una grandissima ammirazione per il suo
maestro
inglese. The old man's face, handsome, flushed, with
strongly
Jewish features and long white whiskers, turns towards
me as we walk down the hill together.
O! Perfectly said: courtesy,
benevolence, curiosity, trust, suspicion,
naturalness, helplessness of
age, confidence, frankness, urbanity,
sincerity, warning, pathos,
compassion: a perfect blend. Ignatius
Loyola, make haste to help
me!
(GJ 5) (Italics mine.)
Paying his duty and taking his compassion to her father, Giacomo is
very conscious of his strong Jewish features and his long white
whiskers, characteristic of the stereotyped solemn Jewish father.
He hopes Ignatius Loyola will help him when his heart is "sore and sad,
crossed in love" (GJ 5) as Stephen in Ulysses
wishes when he discusses Hamlet
in the National Library: "Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!" (U 9.163).
The next passage also leads the reader to notice her
Jewishness. It has a sympathetic tone to the Jewish people who
had been forced to bury corpses in strictly-determined secluded
cemeteries.
Corpses of Jews lie about me rotting in the
mould of
their holy field.
Here is the tomb of her people, black stone,
silence without hope
. . . . . Pimply Meissel brought me
here. He is beyond those trees
standing with covered head at the grave of his
suicide wife, wondering
how the woman who slept in his bed has come to
this end. . . . .
The tomb of her people and hers: black stone,
silence without hope:
and all is ready. Do not die!
(GJ
6)
Giacomo fears for her Jewish fragility of life, the "daughter of
Jerusalem." Immediately before the two sketches of her suffering,
he compares her to two famous fated Italian women in literature,
Dante's Beatrice Portinari, who died at the hand of God, and Shelley's
Beatrice Cenci, who died at the hand of man (GJ 11). Additionally,
"Beatrice" is related to a Joycean character Beatrice Justice in
Exiles. In the first sketch, the housemaid tells Giacomo that she has
been taken to the hospital. In the next paragraph, in the second
sketch, he imagines her operation vividly, "The surgeon's knife has
probed in her entrails and withdrawn, leaving the raw jagged gash of
its passage on her belly" (GJ
11). It also can be interpreted that this image symbolically
expresses Giacomo's depressed desire for committing misconduct with her.
In the following passage, she ironically implies how the Jewish
people think of a country. Her opinion has an overtone of a
self-hating Jew.
She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to
haul Ettore Albini, the
critic of the Secolo, from the stalls because he
did not stand up when
the band played the Royal March. She
heard that at supper. Ay.
They love
their country when they are quite sure which country it is.
(GJ 9)
(Italics mine.)
The same allegation can be found in the conversation between John Wyse
Nolan and J.J. O'Molloy in Ulysses.
―And after all, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country
like
the next
fellow?
―Why not? says J. J., when he's quite sure
which country it is.
(U 12.1628-30) (Italics mine.)
Before the conversation, Leopold Bloom is asked by the citizen in
Barney Kiernan's pub:
―What is your nation if I may ask? says the
citizen.
―Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here.
Ireland. (U 12.1430-31)
Even after Bloom affirms his Irish nationality, Irish people around him
do not regard him as Irish because they know that he has a Hungarian
Jewish background.
Then Bloom admits his Jewishness in the pub:
―And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is
hated and persecuted.
Also now. This very moment. This very
instant. (U
12.1467-68)
Bloom's Jewishness is more important to Irish people around him
than to himself. He never forgets his Jewishness even after he
insisted that he was born in Ireland. He abandoned Protestantism
and converted to Catholicism to marry Molly. However, in the
hallucination of the Circe episode, Bloom becomes the
"emperor-president and king-chairman" Leopold the First (U 15.1471-73) and establishes "the
new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future" (U 15.1542-45).
The Jews had often been called "a nation without country" before
the foundation of Israel in 1948. In the early twentieth century,
the Jewish people lived (or wandered) throughout the world.
Weininger was negative to the Zionist movement that arose in Europe in
the late nineteenth century with the aim of reconstructing a Jewish
state in Palestine. Weininger asserted that "Zionism must remain
an impracticable ideal, notwithstanding the fashion in which it has
brought together some of the noblest qualities of the Jews," because
"Zionism is the negation of Judaism, for the conception of Judaism
involves a world-wide distribution of the Jews": "Citizenship is an
un-Jewish thing, and there has never been and never will be a true
Jewish State" (307).
III. Anti-feminism in Giacomo Joyce
Conclusion
Giacomo Joyce was a private
manuscript, but many Joycean scholars and critics have recently
considered it to be an important Triestine writing whose fragments were
to be developed to be used in Ulysses.
A radical anti-Semite or anti-feminist might consider that Giacomo Joyce is an
anti-Semitic or anti-feminist writing. As we have seen, Giacomo Joyce is full of
sexual-oriented or anti-feminist overtones, but it does not have
such "intentional" negative tones of the dark lady's
Jewishness. For Giacomo or Joyce, the pupil is a seductive exotic
lady who happens to be Jewish. As Stephen wrote poems to Emma
Clery in A Portrait, he composed this "novella" to the Jewish
lady, who
later became the archetype of Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Noting this
"novella," Joyce must have practiced writing from a Jewish perspective.
Joyce doubtlessly read Weininger's Geschlect und Charakter, although
he might not have read it very carefully. Geschlect und Charakter and Giacomo Joyce were both written at
almost the same time. Both works are the mirrors that reflect the
anti-Semitic movements as they also echoed the contemporary
conservative men's reactions against the rise of the women's liberation
movement in the fin de siècle.
Weininger's work is considered to be a radical anti-Semitic and
anti-feminist writing, however, while Joyce's private prose is
not. Joyce seems to have experimented with depicting a womanly
man who is in love with a Jewish lady. Later he described Leopold
Bloom as a womanly Jewish man and cuckold whose features are
particularly described in the Circe episode, which was presumably
inspired by Weininger.
Weininger explained that the bitterest Anti-Semites are to
be found amongst the Jews themselves (304).11
Jean-Paul Sartre also asserts, "No anti-Semites exist like the Jewish
people" (129). In another passage he defines Jews in his book Reflexions sur la Question Juive
(1954) as "what other people think of them"; in other words,
"Anti-Semites create the Jewishness" (82). Weininger's concept of
"self-hating Jew" would be used by Joyce to create Bloom who might hate
Jews and the Jewishness most in Ulysses.
Thus, Joyce borrowed two concepts from Weininger, "Jew as a
womanly man" and "self-hating Jew," for his works, Giacomo Joyce and Ulysses.
Notes
*This is
a revised version of the paper presented at IASIL 2005,
Charles University, Prague, Czech, July 28, 2005.
1 Cf. Said's Orientalism: "For Orientalism was ultimately a
political
vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference
between
the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the
strange (the Orient,
the East, 'them')" (43). Cf. also McCourt,
p.42. To describe his
imagination on the dark Jewish lady, Joyce
constellated many Eastern
elements in Giacomo Joyce: "A ricefield near
Vercelli" (GJ 2), "A
sparrow under the wheels of Juggernaut" (GJ 7), "the breaking East"
(GJ 9),
etc.
2 Marilyn Reizbaum, "The Jewish Connection, Cont'd" (The Seventh of
Joyce), p.231.
3 Reizbaum, James
Joyce's Judaic Other, pp.27-28. Hereafter referred
to as JJJO.
4 Reizbaum, "Weininger and the Bloom of Jewish Self-Hatred
in Joyce's
Ulysses" (Jews & Gender), p.207.
5 Joseph Valente, "(M)othering Himself: Abjection and
Cross-Gender
Identification in Giacomo Joyce" (Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other),
p.123.
6 Cf. "Rete Civica Trieste":
<http://www.retecivica.trieste.it/joyce/vis_articolo.asp?pagina=-&link
=20&tipo=articoli_dx_6&ids=3>
Accessed: November 20, 2005.
7 Cf. Mahaffey, "Giacomo Joyce" (Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other),
pp.39-40.
8 Cf. "Rete Civica Trieste":
<http://www.retecivica.trieste.it/joyce/vis_articolo.asp?pagina=
-&link=6&tipo=articoli_dx_6&ids=3>
Accessed: November 20, 2005.
9 Cf. "Rete Civica Trieste":
<http://www.retecivica.trieste.it/joyce/vis_articolo.asp?pagina=
-&link=23&tipo=articoli_dx_6&ids=3>
Accessed: November 20, 2005.
10 Cf. Ellmann, p.263: In the early autumn of 1907, Gogarty came
to
Vienna to complete his medical studies, and
wrote a letter to Joyce.
On receiving a pleasant reply, he invited
Joyce on December 1 to go
to Athens and Venice with him, and then
invited him for a week in
Vienna, and next proposed that Joyce settle in
Vienna. Joyce pondered
this invitation very seriously but at last
yielded to his brother
Stanislaus's objections and declined (Ellmann
263). Joyce and Gogarty
met again in 1909 in Dublin (Ellmann 277).
11 Weininger also mentions that "Antisemitism of the Jews bears
testimony
to the fact that no one who has had experience
of them considers them
lovable―not even the Jew himself; the
Antisemitism of the Aryans grant
us an insight no less full of significance: it is
that the Jew and the
Jewish race must not be confounded" (304-5).
Selected References
Armand, Louis and Clare
Wallace, eds. Giacomo Joyce:
Envoys of the Other.
Bethesda, Academica Press, LLC, 2002.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce.
New and Revised ed. Oxford and New York,
etc.: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Harrowitz, Nancy A. and Barbara Hyams, eds. Jews & Gender: Responses to
Otto Weininger.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.
Joyce, James. Giacomo Joyce.
With an Introduction and Notes by Richard
Ellmann. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1968; pap.1983. Referred
to as GJ.
---. A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Hans Walter
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Referred to
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Hans Walter Gabler. London: The Bodley Head, 1986.
Referred to as U x.y (x= the episode number, y = the line number
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episode).
Klein, Viola. The Feminine
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Mahaffey, Vicki. State of
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Experiment. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
McCourt, John. The Years of
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Reizbaum, Marilyn. James
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