A Cloacal Obsession

“Mr. James Joyce is apparently afflicted with a shameful mania, but, as his works are but little read by sane folk, we say nothing of him.” - Eoin Ua Mathghamhna, 1924

To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here.

About midway through “Aeolus,” Ulysses’ seventh episode, Leopold Bloom has scurried away from the Evening Telegraph newsroom, hoping to track down Alexander Keyes and get his three months’ ad renewal. Bloom, though he is our Odysseus and our protagonist, is not centered in this part of the episode, though the opening pages are narrated from his point of view. Instead, we get a glimpse of Dublin life through the eyes of the other newsroom denizens.

In the section headlined THE CALUMET OF PEACE, editor Myles Crawford dons his jaunty straw hat in preparation to leave the office for a liquid lunch at the Oval with the other men assembled in the newsroom. He is moved to song:

“The editor came from the inner office, a straw hat awry on his brow. He declaimed in song, pointing sternly at professor MacHugh:
’Twas rank and fame that tempted thee,
’Twas empire charmed thy heart.”

“Twas Rank and Fame that Tempted Thee” is a song from the opera, The Rose of Castille. Interrupting like a precocious child desperate to be recognized, Lenehan demands, “Silence for my brandnew riddle!” The other men don’t share his passion for riddles, and the solution won’t be revealed until Mr. O’Madden Burke and Stephen Dedalus arrive a few paragraphs down. Let’s indulge Lenehan, though, and ponder his riddle before diving into the headier stuff:

“What opera is like a railwayline?
—Opera? Mr O’Madden Burke’s sphinx face reriddled.
Lenehan announced gladly:
—The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!”

The pun is fairly straightforward, but what I’d like to take issue with here is that it is far from “brandnew,” as Lenehan claims, and it’s certainly not his own creation. Over at James Joyce Online Notes, Harald Beck tracks this riddle at least as far back as 1863, to a book entitled The Boy's Handy Book of Sports, Pastimes, Games and Amusements, where it reads:

“Of what new opera do the present petticoats remind one?
Rose of Castile (rows of cast steel)”

Lenehan could be forgiven for having missed this riddle in a book for boys that was likely printed before he was born, and the wording is a bit different. However, the Rose of Castile riddle also appeared in the Birmingham Daily Post in 1865 and The Hull Packet and East Riding Times in 1880 with wording more similar to Lenehan’s presentation. I think it’s one of those childish riddles that’s endemic in the population, so it’s doubtful this riddle is new to anyone in the room, which is why the men all ignore Lenehan until he blindsides Mr. O’Madden Burke.

While Crawford’s burst of song awakens a trite riddle in Lenehan, it stirs something deeper in Professor MacHugh. The line “‘Twas empire charmed thy heart” prompts J.J. O’Molloy to quip that “Imperium Romanum” has a nobler ring to it than Brighton or Brixton. MacHugh’s patriotic spirit is moved:

“—Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We mustn’t be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome, imperial, imperious, imperative.”

MacHugh questions the all-encompassing authority of imperialism, speaking about Rome, but really speaking about the British oppression of the Irish. Imperial control and authority is so total over Ireland that it governs even their most private moments:

“—What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.”

The Irish (nature’s gentlemen) had their own way of handling hygienic matters:

“—Which they accordingly did do, Lenehan said. Our old ancient ancestors, as we read in the first chapter of Guinness’s, were partial to the running stream.”

Lenehan, with a keen ear for words that sound like other words, can never resist a pun. Notice his play on “Guinness’s” and “Genesis”. This one’s not too bad, though, and possibly more original than the “rows of cast steel.”

The Dubliners of Ulysses have a variety of complaints against their imperial oppressors, but this one seems rather odd. What exactly is MacHugh opposed to here? Is he saying,“These damn English, just like the Romans before them, impose indoor plumbing wherever they go! Why can’t they just piss in the river like normal people?” MacHugh’s “”frayed stained shirtcuffs” are noted before he launches into his speech, so perhaps MacHugh is self-conscious about his own hygiene? Probably not, as his better-dressed peers are swayed by his arguments. Perhaps it’s a critique of the Victorian preoccupation with cleanliness as a marker of moral purity and social status? Perhaps. If we focus on the phrase “cloacal obsession,” we can discover the key necessary to unlock this mystery.

“Cloacal obsession” is a very particular phrase employed by Joyce, taken from a 1917 review written by H.G. Wells of Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Yes, that H.G. Wells. The review was largely positive and praised Joyce’s command of prose. Wells had some specific gripes with Joyce’s style, however:

“Like Swift and another living Irish writer, Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession. He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation. Coarse, unfamiliar words are scattered about the book unpleasantly, and it may seem to many, needlessly.”

Portrait pales in comparison to Ulysses when it comes to obscenity, but it was shocking enough for ol’ H.G. In one scene, Stephen Dedalus describes the soothing effect of certain natural smells:

“That is horse piss and rotted straw, he thought. It is a good odour to breathe. It will calm my heart. My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.”

Wells found this description to be a “turn over from the more normal state of affairs.” To Joyce, however, it is absolutely indispensable that a budding artist like Stephen should connect so profoundly with piss and rot. Even as a young upstart, Joyce made it very clear that he felt an artist’s vocation was as a conduit for all the filth and obscenity produced by society. Notably, he wrote in his 1905 poem, “The Holy Office,” (which we’ve discussed here and here) that:

“But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams…
Thus I relieve their timid arses,
Perform my office of Katharsis.”

Joyce wanted to convey the real world as he perceived it, piss and warts and all, rather than to create an art that is nothing more than an aesthetically pleasant falsehood. The Artist was the sewer (cloaca in Latin) that would filter all the filth and refuse of life into meaningful creative labor. Wells, an astute critic, perceived exactly what Joyce intended, but Joyce’s frank depictions and even celebration of excrement was too much for H.G.'s sensibilities. Clearly this criticism rankled Joyce enough that it was included in Ulysses as a subtle dig at the delicacy of Wells (and by extension, of the British more generally). Joyce turns the tables to show it’s really the English imperialists who are cloacally obsessed, nothing but a bunch of toilet worshipers. Such a fixation obscures the parts of human existence that remind us that we are not gods, that we are animals, nature’s gentlemen, which is in direct opposition to the “civilizing” mission of British imperialism. The English embrace plumbing but reject the natural world while the Irish embrace the running stream and with it a greater natural Truth.

Mark Schechner writes in his book Nighttown in Ulysses that MacHugh’s analogy of the Romans and the British and their obsession with the WC shows their intellectual and spiritual paucity in comparison to the Greeks and the Irish, respectively. Schechner writes that British imperial conquest is also a conquest of the spirit, a “spiritual rebellion that failed.” In exchange for cleanliness and order, the English traded their spiritual freedom. The comparison calls to mind the heresiarch Arius, who Stephen Dedalus recalls “in a Greek watercloset he breathed his last.” In Schechner’s view, the watercloset is a symbol of imperial oppression for Stephen, whose spirit embraces the earthy odor of horse piss and rotted straw.

Wells’ review goes further than simply criticizing Stephen Dedalus’ relationship with horse piss, though. His complaint is not merely with Stephen’s idiosyncrasies, but with Irish culture writ large. He marvels at the fact that among the Irish there is “a living belief in a real hell.” He is also shocked to learn that “everyone in this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated.” Wells wrote this review in 1917, around a year after the Easter Rising, during which parts of Dublin’s city center were leveled by British artillery fire. Ironic, for the author of War of the Worlds, the subtext of which is, "Imagine how WE would feel if an alien empire invaded us." The same man couldn't imagine that the Irish thought of the English as Martians.

Though Wells has been tasked with reviewing a novel about the life of a young Irish man, he seems alienated by expressions of Irish culture. He rounds out his review with:

“It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients itself. I am afraid it is only too true an account of the atmosphere in which a number of brilliant young Irishmen have grown up. What is the good of pretending that the extreme Irish "patriot" is an equivalent and parallel of the English or American liberal? He is narrower and intenser than any English Tory. He will be the natural ally of the Tory in delaying British social and economic reconstruction after the war. He will play into the hands of the Tories by threatening an outbreak and providing the excuse for a militarist reaction in England. It is time the American observer faced the truth of that.”

Wells couldn’t relate to the Irish as depicted in Portrait, but his frustration spilled out into the real world, revealing an antipathy for real Irish folks, not just Stephen Dedalus. It’s odd for a reviewer to get so carried away about the “extreme Irish ‘patriot’” while discussing a novel in which the main character refers to Mother Ireland as “the old sow that eats her farrow.” As mentioned above, Wells’ review of Portrait is largely positive. He later spoke of the genius of Joyce’s two subsequent novels, but I get the impression he was unable to untangle Joyce’s portrayal of turn-of -the-century Ireland from his own prejudices, so much so that he uses a literary review to try to warn American readers to not be too sympathetic toward the Irish.

And so Wells, as a representative of these ponderous, closetmaking Saxons, awoke a deep ire within Joyce. Wells’ criticism of the novel is born of his own bias against the Irish. To support the Irish cause, even as ambivalently as in Portrait, is to jeopardize the Right and True way of good, English liberals who know what’s best for their Irish subjects. It comes across as quite patronizing, and Joyce certainly took it to heart. The passage in “Aeolus” is definitely directed at Wells, as Joyce wrote in a letter to Ezra Pound after Ulysses’ publication:

“I trust that he [Wells] has by now read the remarks on the Cloacal Romans.”

Joyce’s exasperation at this particular critique of the Irish didn’t begin with Wells, either. Francini Bruni, a student of Joyce’s at Berlitz in Trieste in 1905 and 1906 recorded the following statement from his former teacher Joyce in his memoir:

“And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The English, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the overstuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget - the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature.”

While Joyce had a tendency to act out petty revenge in his writing, I think this specific complaint predates Wells’ critique and is anything but petty. Wells’ review played right into Joyce’s frustrations with the English, and he was able to make a joke out of it in “Aeolus.” And I do think it’s meant to be a joke. Commentators like Schechner and Richard Ellmann, who we’ll check in with in a moment, tend to see serious social commentary on the stifling oppression of imperialism in MacHugh’s remarks. Kelly Anspaugh, writing in the South Atlantic Review, has a different take, though. To appreciate Anspaugh’s interpretation, we must learn a little about the OG closetmaker.

Sir John Harington is credited with the invention of the flush toilet in the 16th century. He was a godson of Elizabeth I who led some failed imperial forays into Ireland and ultimately decided it was meet to build a water closet. I’d say he fits MacHugh’s definition of an Englishman. Harington was a comedic writer who spent much of his career defining and defending his most famous creation, including in his 1596 book entitled A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax. The book was meant as a lengthy sales pitch for the water closet, filled to the brim with, shall we say, cloacal humor. The title itself contains several puns worthy of Messrs. Joyce and Lenehan. “Stale” is a play on “horse’s stale,” a period term for the Dedalian favorite, horse piss. “Ajax'' was Harington’s name for his invention, a play on “a jacks,” or outhouse, though in the Elizabethan era it was usually termed “a jakes.” Yes, the same “jakes'' visited by Mr. Bloom in “Calypso.” Based on Anspaugh’s writing, I’m increasingly convinced that Joyce’s choice of “jakes'' is a reference to Harington’s writing, explaining why he chose an archaic, Elizabethan term over the more common “jacks.” Harington later wrote a retraction to Metamorphosis of Ajax entitled Ulysses on Ajax (Ulysses on a jacks), which is the exact imagery found in the closing pages of Ulysses’ fourth episode “Calypso”, revealing that Joyce’s cloacal obsession may be Saxon in origin.

Harington didn’t rest on the name “Ajax” as a simple pun, as he created an elaborate, fictionalized etymology telling the story of a young man traveling the world in search of a cure for a rectal inflammation. Harington cribs quite a bit from François Rabelais’ series of cloacal novels Gargantua and Pantagruel. The tale of Harington’s young, cloacal traveler ends with a Homeric allusion, so I can’t resist quoting it here:

“... to honor [Ajax] he changed the name of the house, and called it after the name of this noble Captaine of the greasie ones (the Grecians I should say) AJAX: though since, by ill pronunciation, and by a figure called Cacophonia, the accent is changed and it is called a Jakes.”

Truly, wordplay worthy of the pages of Finnegans Wake (or at least one of Lenehan’s riddles).

Some weirdo eating poo ice cream in Kiyosato, Japan.

But we mustn’t be led away by words. Did Joyce know about Harington or is this mere coincidence? While Harington is not mentioned by name in “Aeolus” or elsewhere in Ulysses, in Finnegans Wake, there is a mention of “Harington’s invention,” as well as multiple plays on “Ajax” and “a jakes.” I’d say that more than makes up for his explicit absence in Ulysses. Joyce and Harington share their cloacal obsession, as both of their careers were defined by their excremental books. Joyce’s books were banned on obscenity charges, and though Harington wrote his books under various pseudonyms, he couldn’t quite escape the nickname M. Ajax. Additionally, though Harington’s book was pointedly critical of Rabelais and the French, a closer look reveals that it was really a veiled critique of the English. Could the same be true of Joyce and Ulysses? Could Joyce’s critique of the anal English and H.G. Wells really be targeting his own countrymen? Anspaugh thinks so.

Joyce wrote to Djuna Barnes on Ulysses that, “on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one serious line in it.” In the context of “Aeolus,” to take MacHugh’s monologue on its face as a serious political critique is to position MacHugh as Joyce's surrogate within Ulysses, which he clearly is not. Joyce’s critiques of single-minded Irish Nationalism, though they eluded Wells, extend to “Aeolus” as well. Further down the road in Finnegans Wake, Joyce refers to a “cultic twalette,” a play on “toilet” and Yeats’ The Celtic Twilight, echoing his castigations of the same crowd all the way back in “The Holy Office.” Both imperialism and nationalism can be used to justify oppression, and therefore countering English imperialism with Irish nationalism leads to a dead end. Edward Said terms this “the nativist impasse'', described as “instead of liberation after decolonization one simply gets the old colonial structures in new nationalist terms.”

MacHugh isn’t offering some genius critique here; his critique is based on an idealized stereotype of Irish culture, rather than a denigrating stereotype like Wells’. Writing in the James Joyce Quarterly, scholar David Mikics says that this puts MacHugh on par with the chauvinism of Mr. Deasy. Joyce’s indignation in this case is more of an eyeroll than an impassioned political argument. At least in this regard, Joyce has more in common with Harington than with MacHugh or certainly with the Citizen, who also mocks the English obsession with the cabinet d’aisance in “Cyclops.” We’re meant to see MacHugh as foolish for his odd take on British imperialism rather than as sagely defending the honor of the Nation. It’s the empty windbags in the newsroom who are moved by his speech. We mustn’t fall for this empty rhetoric ourselves.

The hollowness of MacHugh’s position becomes especially apparent when we look a little closer at his second argument positioning Greek over Latin. MacHugh is a professor of Latin, so his stumping for Greek reveals him to be as much of a “weathercock” as his journalistic pals. While he cautions O’Molloy not to be “led away” by the sweet-sounding Latin (reminiscent of the parishioners in All Hallows Church back in “Lotus Eaters”), MacHugh engages in his own rhetorical flourish in this section immediately following his caution:

“—Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We mustn’t be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome, imperial, imperious, imperative.”

MacHugh goes on to compare the Irish favorably with the Greeks, who he sees as spiritually superior:

“A smile of light brightened his darkrimmed eyes, lengthened his long lips.
—The Greek! he said again. Kyrios! Shining word! The vowels the Semite and the Saxon know not. Kyrie! The radiance of the intellect. I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind. Kyrie eleison!”

MacHugh sees the British, along with the Romans, as materialistic and warlike, unworthy of the Irish spirit:

“The closetmaker and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our spirit. We are liege subjects of the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar and of the empire of the spirit, not an imperium, that went under with the Athenian fleets at Aegospotami.”

MacHugh’s critique is largely linguistic rather than social, though. As we know through our study of enthymemic rhetoric, words can be twisted to hide the darker sides of society. He pits British imperialism against the “catholic chivalry of Europe,” joining the Irish cause with the Bonapartist cause defeated at Trafalgar, turning Catholicism into a political identity rather than a religious identity. He calls out the Greek “Kyrios,” meaning “lord” as radiant in its beauty, and therefore superior to the more harsh, oppressive Latin “Domine,” though its meaning is the same. This is despite the fact that Latin remained in use largely due to the Catholic Church. He also lumps “the Semite” in with British materialism, though this viewpoint will be refuted quite eloquently in John Taylor’s speech as recited by… Professor MacHugh. I think it’s fair to say he’s talking out his ass here.

This is by design on Joyce’s part. We’re not meant to take MacHugh’s argument seriously. His nationalism is as faulty and unexamined as Mr. Deasy’s unionism. I always enjoy reading MacHugh’s pontifications, and I find it easy to get caught up in them because they play to my own biases. It’s all the more important for someone like me to be wary of this faulty logic. There’s certainly a strong case to be made against colonialism, but this isn’t it. I’m being led away by MacHugh’s words because they’re funny and they confirm my preconceived notions, but there’s not much depth or nuance there.

To drive this point home, Joyce immediately undercuts MacHugh’s impassioned oratory through the blunt instrument of Lenehan. First, following MacHugh’s concluding statements, Lenehan immediately leans over and whispers a limerick into Stephen’s ear:

“—There’s a ponderous pundit MacHugh
Who wears goggles of ebony hue.
As he mostly sees double
To wear them why trouble?
I can’t see the Joe Miller. Can you?”

Presumably MacHugh is seeing double because he’s as drunk as Myles Crawford ranting about the North Cork militia. MacHugh’s soaring, impassioned speechifying is reduced to drunken babble in one fell swoop. Additionally, Lenehan’s riddle is finally revealed right on the heels of his whispered limerick. Richard Ellmann sees Lenehan’s riddle as an example of bathos, reducing MacHugh’s argument to utter idiocy. The Rose of Castille, as artistic expression in operatic form, parallels the Greeks’ spiritualism in MacHugh’s dichotomy, while “the rows of cast steel,” a surface-level pun cribbed from a children’s joke book, parallels the materialism of Roman imperialism and Latin.

So, the cloacal imperialism is a misdirect. We’re the real fools if, like Wells, all we see is the filth and are taken in by eloquent arguments as hollow as an Easter egg. An excessive fixation on any ideology, whether it’s the morality of cleanliness or a fiery national pride, does not serve our intellect. It’s not that either idea is fully right or wrong, just that a complex system reduced to a binary conceals many important subtleties that could bring us closer to something like Truth. If we get caught up in this simplistic thinking, we’re no more intellectual than Lenehan’s silly riddles.

Further Reading:

Leopold Bloom in the House of Habsburg

MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED: The Sham Squire and the Boys of Wexford