Leopold Bloom in the House of Habsburg

“That archduke Leopold was it no yes or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? - Leopold Bloom”

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

Midway through “Aeolus,” Ulysses’ seventh episode, Stephen Dedalus re-enters the story just as Leopold Bloom steps out, like two ships passing in the night, or more accurately, just about lunchtime. The men in the newsroom of the Evening Telegraph are more supportive of young Dedalus than of Bloom, sensing his future as a man of the pen, just like themselves.

Mr. Deasy also figuratively re-enters the picture in this scene in “Aeolus.” Stephen dutifully presents the old reactionary’s letter to Myles Crawford, the editor of the Evening Telegraph, as he promised back in “Nestor.” Crawford will eventually accept the letter, but not before sharing a bit of gossip about Old Man Deasy. He may be an antisemite, but it turns out his wife was an absolute terror as well, known to throw soup in the face of wait staff that displeased her. Stephen takes a moment to reflect on Mr. Deasy’s tendency to blame women for various historic tragedies. “A woman brought sin into the world,” Mr. Deasy had claimed. Perhaps that whole speech was a bit of projection due to his “grass widow,” as Crawford terms her, meaning that the two are no longer married, but the ex-Mrs. Deasy still walks on the top side of the grass. In other words, they’re separated.

Mr. Deasy’s personal life doesn’t hold Crawford’s attention for long, though. As he skims the letter, the words “emperor’s horses” catch his eye. In a burst of Crawfordian word association, he continues:

“Habsburg. An Irishman saved his life on the ramparts of Vienna. Don’t you forget! Maximilian Karl O’Donnell, graf von Tirconnell in Ireland. Sent his heir over to make the king an Austrian fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day. Wild geese. O yes, every time. Don’t you forget that!”

Crawford is reading Deasy’s argument in favor of the foot and mouth disease remedy known as Koch’s preparation, which Deasy extols as a cure for the emperor’s horses at Mürzsteg, Lower Austria. The leader of Austria-Hungary in 1904 was Emperor Franz Josef, head of the House of Habsburg who was indeed saved from assassination by an Irishman. To hear Crawford tell it, you’d think this had happened last week, but he’s referring to an event that took place in 1853. As usual, it seems that all of history has sloshed together in the editor’s memory. Crawford is interrupted by Professor MacHugh and doesn’t get to tell the whole story of Maximilian Karl O’Donnell, graf von Tirconnell. O’Donnell was descended from the O’Donnell clan of Ulster, the northernmost province of Ireland. Following the defeat of the Gaelic nobility by the British at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601, several noble Irish families, including the O’Donnells of Tyrconnell, chose exile in mainland Europe rather than a diminished position at home in Ireland. The O’Donnells, one flock of these so-called “wild geese,” ended up in Austria and maintained their titles and noble status (Maximilian’s father was Count Moritz O’Donnell).

On the fateful day in Crawford’s story, O’Donnell, then a military aide, and the emperor were out for a stroll on the bastions of Vienna, when János Libényi, a tailor and Hungarian nationalist, rushed forward and attempted to stab the emperor in the back. The emperor’s thick collar stopped the blade from meeting its mark, and Libényi was subdued by O’Donnell and an onlooker. As J.J. O’Molloy put it, saving princes is indeed a thank you job, and both of the emperor’s saviors were handsomely rewarded with titles and honors after the assassination attempt. Decades later, Crawford draws national pride from this tale of the superiority of “our greater Ireland beyond the sea,” as the Citizen puts it in “Cyclops.”

If we consider the details a bit more deeply, it’s somewhat peculiar that an Irish nationalist would admire O’Donnell while dismissing Libényi. This would-be assassin was no ravening madman. In the preceding years, the Austrian imperial government had imposed harsh, absolutist rule on the Hungarians as retribution for a revolutionary uprising. From this point of view, Libényi wasn’t all that different from the legendary Invincibles who had successfully assassinated Lord Cavendish in the Phoenix Park. It’s unknown if commemorative postcards of Libényi were on sale in Budapest in 1904, as they were for the Invincibles in Dublin.

This parallel may have flown over Crawford’s head, but it was certainly noticed by others. Hungary, a small nation oppressed by imperial Austria, reminded many prominent Irish people of the situation in their homeland. William Butler Yeats referred to Ireland as “the Hungary of the West” in his poem “How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent,” written in honor of martyrs of the 1848 revolution that had precipitated Libényi’s assassination attempt. As late as 1995, Irish President Mary Robinson compared the two nations in a speech to Hungarian president Árpád Göncz in which she favorably noted the similarities between Ireland’s Liberator, Daniel O’Connell, and Hungarian statesman Lajos Kossuth. Hungary’s political fortune in the second half of the nineteenth century diverged starkly from Ireland’s, however. In 1867, Austria and Hungary entered into a shared government. Under this system, Austria and Hungary managed their own internal affairs, but shared foreign policy and defense, with Emperor Franz Josef as head of state of both Austria and Hungary.

Austria-Hungary’s power sharing agreement captured the political imagination of Irish politician Arthur Griffith, who saw hope for Ireland’s future as a small nation attempting to take on an imperial power. In 1902, Griffith called for Irish MP’s in Westminster to abandon their posts and establish their own government in Dublin, an effective strategy in Hungary. The following year, Griffith laid out what he called the Hungary Policy in a series of 27 articles, in which he outlined the need for Irish MP’s to boycott Parliament, set up their own legislature in Dublin, and ultimately demand that Ireland be given control over its own affairs within the British Empire. The Hungary Policy was like a more radical version of Parnell’s Home Rule. In 1904, Griffith published his 27 articles in a bestselling book entitled The Resurrection of Hungary. Actually implementing this plan in the British Empire would be an uphill battle, to say the least.

James Joyce himself had a close, personal association with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writer Andras Ungar explains, “Joyce’s general experience of the Hapsburg monarchy was far more comprehensive than anything available in Griffith’s propagandistic summary.” Indeed, as a young man, Joyce left British rule for his self-imposed exile in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, mainly in the city of Trieste in modern-day Italy. Joyce fled Trieste at the outbreak of World War I, but the thriving, diverse port city greatly influenced both his worldview and his art. Even the short passage from “Aeolus” quoted above bears the influence of Joyce’s social circle in Trieste, which included an Ulsterman called Henry Blackwood Price. Price’s pride for Ulster and his obsession with eradicating foot and mouth disease inspired the pet interests of schoolmaster Mr. Deasy in “Nestor”. It was Mr. Price who cajoled a young Joyce to use his journalistic contacts to get an article about an Austrian cure for foot and mouth disease published. Mr. Price’s life appears in Ulysses in one further way - Joyce wrote in a letter to his brother Stanislaus, “I think Price ought to look for a cure for the foot and mouth disease of [his wife] Anna Black Price,” a sentiment repeated about the former Mrs. Deasy.

Given Joyce’s connection to Austria-Hungary and his penchant for including obscure details in his novel, we should examine his thoughts on Griffith’s policy and if its influence also bubbles up to the surface of Ulysses. Back in the newsroom, Crawford, before he is interrupted by Professor MacHugh, is able to get out the phrase:

“—I’ll tell you how it was, Myles Crawford began. A Hungarian it was one day…”

Indeed it was a Hungarian who took aim at Franz Josef, but Ulysses’ protagonist is also a Hungarian of sorts. And if we’re looking for a connection with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it certainly can’t be a coincidence that St. Leopold is a patron saint of Austria and St. Stephen is a patron of Hungary, right?

Bloom’s Hungarian ancestry connects him to Austria-Hungary as well as Griffith’s Hungarian policy. For instance, the Bloom family has a tradition of alternating the given names Leopold and Rudolph for their sons, two names also closely associated with the Habsburgs. Bloom’s father was Rudolph, he is Leopold, and his son Rudolph again. Tragically, the Bloom line has been severed by the death of Bloom’s son, as it is stated in “Oxen of the Sun”:

“No, Leopold. Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from thee—and in vain. No son of thy loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.”

Due to Leopold’s (saintly symbol of Austria) sundering from Rudolph (another Austrian symbol), he is pushed towards Stephen (saintly symbol of Hungary) to create the merged, dare I say hypostatic, Austria-Hungary. This creates what Ungar characterizes as an “ideal order” and a symbol of Griffith’s attempt to graft Austro-Hungarian politics onto English-Irish needs. Bloom is not pursuing this merger with the conscious goal of establishing an interpersonal Austria-Hungary, but he is pushed along by subtle, subtextual forces. For instance, in “Circe”, Bloom is crowned “Leopold the first” with “St. Stephen’s iron crown,” which Ungar points out is based on Griffith’s own description of the coronation of Franz Josef. So, yes, though Leopold and Stephen, symbolically Austria and Hungary, merge in the hallucinatory context of “Circe”, earlier in the day, during “Lestrygonians”, Bloom struggles to recall even basic trivia about the Habsburg line:

“That archduke Leopold was it no yes or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs?”

While Bloom is unaware of this connection, his peers are more suspicious of his entanglements. In “Cyclops”, the men gathered in Barney Kiernan’s pub directly and openly tie Bloom to Griffith’s plans, both to his Hungary policy and to Griffith’s political party, Sinn Fein. In 1905, the year after the publication of The Resurrection of Hungary, Griffith rebranded the Hungary policy as the Sinn Fein policy. Theoretically Martin Cunningham and the boys wouldn’t know about this, but Joyce did. Cunningham says in “Cyclops”:

“—He’s a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that in the castle.”

Cunningham associates Bloom’s Judaism and Hungarian background with the Hungarian policy directly, delivering the news as a kind of state secret from Dublin Castle. It seems like a tall order for the Leopold Bloom we grow to know over the course of Ulysses to be a secret political mastermind, but we’ll come back to that. The unnamed narrator of “Cyclops” also has a hot tip about Bloom’s backroom dealings:

“...John Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries.”

Notice that in this passage, Bloom is connected with both the Hungary policy and Sinn Fein, meaning that these two concepts intersect deeply in the minds of these average citizens. All of their claims are counterfactual to the point of nonsense, but the most confusing is how they’ve wrapped poor Bloom into their various conspiracy theories. Some of this may lie in a subtle connection between Bloom and the real-life contemporary politician Albert Altman, as we’ve discussed here and here, but let’s focus for now on how this affects Bloom’s characterization within the pages of Ulysses. Bloom spends more time in Ulysses worrying about Molly’s pronunciation of voglio and whether or not Greek statues have buttholes than he does about complicated foreign political affairs. Furthermore, he is quite disconnected from his Hungarian heritage. He wasn’t born in Hungary, knows little about its culture or language, and doesn’t associate with other Hungarians. Griffith would have been foolish to approach the Bloom we know to draft such an intricate and sensitive political proposal. Furthermore, Bloom is known about town as a member of the freemasons, a staunchly anti-Catholic organization, making it hard to square his involvement with pro-Catholic Sinn Fein. Additionally, in 1904 Sinn Fein and Arthur Griffith were openly anti-semitic, including supporting the Limerick pogrom earlier that year. It serves to underline just how outlandish Cunningham and Wyse’s allegations against him are.

Joyce was quite skeptical of the monomaniacal nationalism found in characters like the Citizen, Mr. Deasy or even Crawford and MacHugh. In part, this is because this type of nationalism excludes people like Bloom, no matter how Irish they may feel. From “Cyclops”:

“—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.”

Joyce, writing these passages from the relatively cosmopolitan Trieste, rejected this sort of simplistic mindset. He felt similarly about Griffith’s Hungary policy. Joyce found merit in some of its economic features, but ultimately felt it leaned too heavily on an overly simplistic analogy between Hungary and Ireland. He even wrote a rejection of the policy into Stephen Hero, an early version of the novel that would become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“A glowing example was to be found for Ireland in the case of Hungary, an example, as these patriots imagined, of a long-suffering minority, entitled by every right of race and justice to a separate freedom, finally emancipating itself In emulation of that achievement bodies of young Gaels conflicted murderously in the Phoenix Park with whacking hurley-sticks, thrice armed in their just quarrel since their revolution had been blessed for them by the Anointed, and the same bodies were set aflame with indignation [at] by the unwelcome presence of any young sceptic who was aware of the capable aggressions of the Magyars upon the Latin and Slav and Teutonic populations, greater than themselves in number, which are politically allied to them, and of the potency of a single regiment of infantry to hold in check a town of twenty thousand inhabitants.”

Stephen Dedalus bedeviled by nationalism

Joyce’s characterization of Magyar (Hungarian) intolerance and Irish nationalists as hurley-wielding thugs contrasts strongly with Griffith’s optimism for his Hungary policy. Single-minded nationalism may ultimately cede control to brutal ideologues no matter how noble or deserving the oppressed group seem in the beginning. The oppressed can become oppressors in the right circumstances, a reality Griffith fails to take into account. This doesn’t mean that oppressed groups don’t deserve the right to self-governance, but that the system of governance must be built on something more solid than rhetoric based on weak analogies and shallow stereotypes. Ungar writes:

“There was a ‘Cuchulain’ type of posturing in Sinn Fein. Crude idealizations, the heroicizing of Ireland and her friends, and the demonization of Britain and her allies, deformed the understanding of the issues at stake.”

This “deformed understanding'' is demonstrated in Ulysses by the misinformation spread in Barney Kiernan’s pub. Returning to “Aeolus”, applying Arthur Griffith’s Hungarian analogy to Crawford’s tale of wild goose Maximillian O’Donnell reveals faulty logic. It doesn’t make sense for an Irishman, the supposedly natural ally of the oppressed Hungarian, to defend an Austrian monarch, a stand-in for the British monarch, against a Hungarian. But nonetheless, as we mentioned above, this still inspired national pride in nationalist Crawford, whose nationalism is a bit squishier than the Citizen’s at least. The inconsistency of nationalism is on display in these two sequences in the character of J.J. O’Molloy, who interjects politely in the company of Crawford, but resorts to open anti-semitism in the presence of the Citizen.

Wild geese like O’Donnell, though they inspire pride in Crawford, were also viewed skeptically by Joyce. Crawford urges Stephen, “Don’t you forget!” about the contributions of the wild geese abroad, echoing Mr. Deasy’s insistence that, “You fenians forget some things.” Crawford wants us to remember the greatness of Irish Catholics abroad, fighting for the causes of Catholic countries, just as MacHugh opines in the section headlined KYRIE ELEISON, while Deasy implores Stephen to remember that orange lodges agitated for repeal of union, which is blatantly false. Crawford is closer to the mark in this instance, but he makes other claims that are equally as fact-free as Deasy’s claims, making Stephen aware that both men’s worldviews are lacking.
Stephen has a far more complicated view of the Wild Geese. We’ve already examined his thoughts on the sad, cautionary tale of Kevin Egan in “Proteus”. Back in Portrait, Stephen also expressed doubt to his friend Davin about the Wild Geese:

“[Davin’s] nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood towards the myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dullwitted loyal serf. Whatsoever of thought or of feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password; and of the world that lay beyond England he knew only the foreign legion of France in which he spoke of serving.
Coupling this ambition with the young man’s humour Stephen had often called him one of the tame geese and there was even a point of irritation in the name pointed against that very reluctance of speech and deed in his friend which seemed so often to stand between Stephen’s mind, eager of speculation, and the hidden ways of Irish life.”

“Tame goose” is quite evocative in this passage. Stephen sees these would-be revolutionaries as more bluster than action, akin to an online “slacktivist” in the parlance of our times. Davin likely won’t join the French foreign legion; he just thinks it sounds cool. Crawford mythologizes the Wild Geese and the North Cork militia, but seemingly knows very little about either. Deasy is proud of his ancestor John Blackwood but can’t recall whether he rode from Down to Dublin to vote for or against the Act of Union. Stephen (and we as readers) have a hard time squaring this pride against the harsh lived reality of lonely Kevin Egan, Irish patriot exiled in Paris. Stephen has attempted to fly free once, and senses he needs to again, but is troubled by the difficulty of “flying by the nets” of his homeland. Robert Adams Day writes:

“The wild goose embodies what Stephen saw and did in Paris; he has toyed with playing the part of a wild goose, but has been providentially warned off by envisioning that goose in senile decay and himself drowned in an Irish sea.”

Stephen sees through the problem of Crawford’s overly optimistic take. Yes, the Irish have flourished abroad, but it’s because there was no hope for advancement at home. As O’Molloy said, saving princes is a thank you job, and what thank you did the Irish ever get for all the heroic things they’ve done abroad? There’s also the perception of an Irish habit of backing lost causes. In “Aeolus”, MacHugh interrupts Crawford’s speech about O’Donnell to say:

“We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal to the successful. We serve them.”

The Irish have never backed the right horse, according to MacHugh. They end up serving the winners rather than being the winners. John Wyse, speaking in “Cyclops”, gives an even darker take:

“—Ay, says John Wyse. We fought for the royal Stuarts that reneged us against the Williamites and they betrayed us. Remember Limerick and the broken treatystone. We gave our best blood to France and Spain, the wild geese. Fontenoy, eh? And Sarsfield and O’Donnell, duke of Tetuan in Spain, and Ulysses Browne of Camus that was fieldmarshal to Maria Teresa. But what did we ever get for it?”

In backing the Habsburgs, O’Donnell technically backed a dynasty that would lose its throne within the century (though O’Donnell himself was quite comfortable for the rest of his life). Griffith’s admiration for Austria-Hungary would end up the same way. Austria-Hungary would collapse due to the first world war, which Crawford predicted, (“Going to be trouble there one day.”) but Griffith didn’t. Griffith’s own Hungarian plan would become a dead letter after the Easter Rising in 1916. By the time Irish MP’s rejected Westminster and formed Dáil Eireann in 1919, they sought to totally expel British rule from Dublin castle rather than enter a power sharing agreement like Austria and Hungary. If we follow this analogy to its most important Ulyssean conclusion, just as Ireland failed to adopt Griffith’s Hungarian policy, Bloom fails to adopt Stephen at the end of “Ithaca.” Stephen, our Ireland-Hungary avatar, chooses instead to wander off into the night armed only with his wits. So too, the allegory concludes, must Ireland, as Bloom, for all his good intentions, can no more meet Stephen’s needs than Griffith’s plans could meet Ireland’s. Stephen, and Ireland, must set their own course.

Leopold Bloom in the House of Habsburg

Further Reading

The Invincible Ignatius Gallaher

A Cloacal Obsession