A V ico n ia n Sen ten ce in U ly sse s
by M atthew Hodgart
The work of salvage, removal of débris, human remains etc has been entrusted
to Messrs Michael Meade and Son, 159, Great Brunswick Street, and Messrs
T. C. M artin 77. 78. 79 and 80 N orth Wall, assisted by the men and officers
of the Duke of Cornwairs light infantry under the general supervision of
H. R. H. rear admiral the right honourable sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas
Corpus Anderson K. G., K. P., K. T., P. C., K. C. B., M. P., J. P., M. B., D.
S. O., S. O. D., M. F. H., M. R. I. A., B. L , Mus. Doc., P. L. G., F. T. C. D.,
F. R. U. I., F. R. C. P. I. and F. R. C. S. I. ( Ulysses, Modern Library Edition,
p. 338).
This sentence occurs towards the end of the C yclops episode: the ferocious
Citizen, Michael Cusack, has just thrown a biscuit-tin at the retreating Bloom,
just the Cyclops threw a great rock at Odysseus as he made his way to safety.
In a long paragraph of inflated fantasy, it is described how the crash, as the tin
lands, produces a tremendous seismic catastrophe; this reduces much of Dublin
to ruins, but the ruins are cleared up by a number of people including one
Anderson, of many names and titles. M r Robert Adams in his excellent new
study, Surjace and Sym bol, the consistency of James Joyce’s Ulysses, (New
York, Oxford University Press, 1962) discusses this mysterious Anderson,
adding that “certain inconceivably remote complexities are involved in this
improbable sequence of names, of which M r Matthew Hodgart will shortly be
giving us an exposition.” I must therefore take his friendly challange, and offer
an explanation of what may not seem “inconceivably remote” to readers of
Finnegans Wake.
M r Adams thinks the name may «make allusion to a certain Constable
John Anderson, much in the news around 1904. He had been suspended from
the Royal Irish Constabulary, charged with criminal assault upon a girl, and
then reinstated by the government; hence one connotation o f‘Habeas Corpus’».
I would not doubt this; but I think we can go further in exploring even the
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“surface” of the name (i. e. its literal and historieal meanings) before we look
at the “symbol” , to use M r Adam ’s useful terms. There were a number of
military men of prominence at the time when ‘Cyclops’ was being written and
revised, some of them with titles as numerous and bizarre as Joyce's mythical
character. In Burke’s Lcmded G entry of Ireland we can find, under Anderson
of Grace Dieu, Sir Charles Alexander Anderson K. C. B., K. C. I.E . C. B.,
Liutenant-G eneral; Sir Francis James, K. B. E., C. B., Brig. Gen. R. E.; under
Anderson formerly of Old Dunbell, Sir William Maurice Abbot, C. V. O.,
M. V. O., M. B., B. S. Durham, M. R. C. S., Surg-Capt 3rd London Rifles,
“Physician - in-ordinary to H. R. H. T H E PRINCESS ROYAL, Duchess of
Fife” ; Edward Abbot and Louis Edward Anderson, both Major-Generals.
In the Landed G entry of England, under Anderson formerly of Bourhouse
and St. Germ ain’s, there is a Lieutenant-General whoes sons were (1) Lt.-Gen.
Sir W arren Hastings Anderson, (1872-1930) K .C .B . (1922), C. B., Offr.
Legion of Honour, Grand Offr. Order of Avis and Order for Christ of Portugal,
St Stanislav of Russia lst and 2nd Cl. with swords, and (believe it or not)
O rder of the Sacred Treasure of Japan; (2) Admiral Sir David M urray Ander­
son, K. C. B., C. B., C. M. G., M. V. O., etc. This kind of honorific nonsense
played straight into Joyce’s hands. I think that he built up his parody from
W ho’s Who and the Landed G en try ; and since he liked to overload every rift,
he may also have intended a reference to yet another Anderson, Sir John, later
Lord Waverley, a prominent Scottish politician who played an unpopular role
in the Irish Troubles when Ulysses was being written.
Joyce’s character is also HIS RO YAL HIGHNESS, and so there is nothing
unusual about his dragging such a string of initials behind him: the full designations of the Royal Family, as given in W hitaker’s Alm anack, are even longer.
This man has only nineteen; all, as M r Adams says, “perfectly conventional
except the one that follows D. S. O., i.e. S. O. D .” - which is a rude slang
abbreviation to show what Joyce the anarchist thinks of the official world.
It is not just a remote possibility but virtually certain that Joyce intended
the name to have symbolic overtones. The whole of Ulysses is based on the
Mass; both Bloom and Stephen become God the Father and Christ the Son
at crucial points of the book: and this passage is immediately followed by a
cluster of Scriptural quotations. We are reading a version of the Last Judgment
or Second Corning, taking place in Dublin at the End of the World. I think
we can take Anderson as Christ the King (H. R. H.), the Hero who delivers
mankind (Hercules), the General of his victorious Army of Saints (Hannibal),
and the Body (“Hoc est enim Corpus meum”). But why “Anderson”? ‘Ander’
A Viconian Sentence in Ulysses
203
can be Scandinavian for ‘other’ (Germanic anthar) and if we turn to the
Circe episode we shall find Jesus described as the other m an’s son, in Virag’s
blasphemies: “He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed . . . Panther,
the roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories.” (M odern Library
Edition, pp. 509-510). At the beginning of the C yclops sentence it is Anderson-Christ who performs “the work of salvage” (i. e. salvation) and “re­
moval of débris, human remains” (i. e. he gets rid of the Old Adam, or the
remains of Original Sin).
If everything in Ulysses has a theological parallel, the theology is consistently reinterpreted. Joyce, whose mind is supersaturated with a religion which
he does not ‘believe’, puts new humanistic wine into old mythological bottles.
As a parallel to his Christian-eschatological version of the Second Corning,
he gives a secular-historical view of the same story; and this, as in Finnegans
W ake, is based on Vico’s philosophy of history. Anderson’s name contains the
three stages of human history according to Vico: Hercules (the age of the giants
and theocracy), Hannibal (the age of the heroes and feudalism), and Habeas
Corpus (the age of law and democracy). To be more precise, Hercules is to
Vico a type of the later of “god-fearing” giants, whose labours symbolize the
subjection of the Earth by agriculture» (The N ew Science, tr. T. G. Bergin and
M. H. Fisch, abridged edition, Anchor Books, 1961, p. 146). He stands in
contrast to the Cyclops, who is the type of the lawless, primeval giants (op. cit.
p. 136-37). Indeed, one can trace Viconian notions throughout the C yclops
chapter. But again, why “Anderson”? N ot only does the root imply “other”
and “second” (as in Second Corning), but it suggests by simple translation
“alter” . It is the Viconian R icorso which alters the movement of history;
society breaks up in the kind of catastrophe described here (and in many parts
of Finnegans Wake) and the Ricorso brings us round again to the first age.
Thus, in one view it is Christ who is the motive force behind human history;
in another, history moves itself cyclically according to Viconian laws. That
Joyce is thinking on these lines is made likely by a strongly Viconian passage in
Finnegans Wake, where two of Anderson’s names re-occur in a description
of the dirty streets of Dublin (as hard to cross the Alps as to clean up the
Augean stables): “If this was Hannibal’s walk it was Hercules’ work.” (FW,
81.03).
It would be possible to trace these names further in Finnegans Wake. For
example, Habeas Corpus Anderson beoomes H. C. Earwicker combined with
Hans Christian Andersen (“Reads the charms of H. C. Endersen” FW 138.16)
but this would take us too far away from the C yclops passage. It is becoming
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clear, however, that Finnegans W ake is but an extension of Ulysses; not only
must we look continually to Ulysses to understand many of the themes and
references in Finnegans W ake, but we should not be surprised to find some of
the ideas and techniques of the W ake already present in the earlier book. Mr.
Adams concludes that “the outrageous, labyrinthine elaborations” which I find
“in the name are artistically indefensible, but, alas, schematically convincing” .
(,Surface and Sym bol, p. 201) I shall not try in this place to defend the artistic
effect of the sentence from Cyclops; but if it cannot be defended, then neither
can any part of Finnegans Wake, and that I cannot believe. I would agree,
however, with M r Adams that it is not necessary to read Ulysses with an eye
to this kind of elaboration: if we do not, “we surrender a type of patterning
. . . only to assert more strongly an energy which every reader must have
sensed.”