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Joyce and the Jews pp 85–138Cite as

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Joyce and Jewish Typology

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Abstract

It is no surprise that Moses should be first among Jewish archetypes favoured by Joyce. As exile, lawgiver, prophet, nation-builder, and leader, the personal and political parallels between Moses and Joyce were explicit. The elements of persecution, exposure, and recognition fitted well with Joyce’s own self-image, the political conditions of Ireland and his conception of Bloom. In Finnegans Wake the prophetic, nation-builder, and sacrificial elements of Moses became integrated with the general issues of fall and resurrection. Parnell, of course, became the locus classicus of the Moses archetype for Joyce, whose earliest reference to the political leader and religious figure occurred in his 1912 essay for Il Piccolo entitled ‘The Shade of Parnell’. In A Portrait, Stephen refers to Parnell’s death in Mosaic terms (P 93), while the ‘Aeolus’ section of Ulysses contains explicit references to the common analogy. Collectively, these and other references and parallels indicate the significance of the Moses typology throughout Joyce’s writing. By typology I mean ‘a mode of thought and … a figure of speech’, as well as a theory of ‘historical process’ and ‘analogue of causality’.1 For Joyce, the typology of Moses functions in these and other ways.

‘New worlds for all!’

Finnegans Wake (412.12)

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Notes

  1. Northrop Frye, The Great Code, The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press, 1982), 80–1. Frye also adds that typology ‘is a figure of speech that moves in time: the type exists in the past and the antitype in the present, or the type exists in the present and the antitype in the future’ (80).

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  1. University of British Columbia, Canada

    Ira B. Nadel (Professor of English)

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© 1989 Ira B. Nadel

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Nadel, I.B. (1989). Joyce and Jewish Typology. In: Joyce and the Jews. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07652-9_4

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