Introduction

Throughout his formative years and during his literary career, James Joyce was absorbed by scandals, both his own and those of others. Margot Gayle Backus opens Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars with this declaration: ‘In his youth, James Joyce became fixated on newspapers and newspaper scandals, which in turn inspired his own notoriously scandalous writings’ (2013: 2). Homosexual scandals, such as the Dublin Castle case of 1884 and the Cleveland Street incident of 1889, piqued Joyce’s interest, but it was the 1895 trials and subsequent fate of Oscar Wilde that proved to be particularly consequential for Joyce’s life and work. The scandals attached to the Wilde trials certainly framed and influenced Joyce’s composition of Ulysses, but we want to advance current thinking on Joyce and Wilde by developing Joyce’s perception of Oscar Wilde. By using the Deleuzian framework of ‘Wilde-as-an-assemblage’, we will demonstrate that Joyce was particularly receptive to the diversity of legal, medical, sexological, and popular perceptions of Wilde. Our approach to Joyce’s perception of Wilde as a protean figure with no fixed or essential identity embodies the nature of the Deleuzian concept of the assemblage, which Thomas Nail describes as: ‘the rejection of unity in favour of multiplicity, and the rejection of essence in favour of events’ (2017: 22). Wilde’s identity was so varied that the scandalous side of Wilde after the trials was just one part of a whole array of Wilde’s various and changing identities. Wilde’s influence on Ulysses has been explicated by many critics, however, the theoretical framework of ‘assemblages’ allows us to show Wilde himself, albeit in costume or disguise, not only appears in Ulysses and informs the complex and polyvalent ontology of Buck Mulligan and D.B. Murphy, but also triggers the resolutions that end the novel after they exit the public narrative. These two complex characters reveal how invested Joyce was in the queer nature of Wilde’s various identities while writing Ulysses and in turn show how radically progressive Wilde’s influence on Ulysses was—bold by the standards of queer politics in the 1920s, anticipatory of the far more complex understanding of queer identit(ies) now.

Wilde-as-Assemblage

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze asks, ‘What is an assemblage?’, to which he posits:

[…] it is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes, and reigns—different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 69).

In other words, the thing—be it person, place, concept, or ideology—has its meaning held in check by everything that it is connected to. For Deleuze, these connections and networks are the thing itself; the thing itself cannot stand alone and is only ever able to signify as a connection—what Deleuze paradoxically calls the nature of the thing itself as a ‘fragmentary whole’ (1980: 4). In ‘What is an Assemblage?’, Thomas Nail reminds us that

Deleuze and Guattari do not ask, ‘What is…?’ but rather, how? where? when? from what viewpoint? and so on. These are not questions of essence, but questions of events. An assemblage does not have an essence because it has no eternally necessary defining features, only contingent and singular features […] if we want to know what something is [or someone, in the case of Wilde], we cannot presume that what we see is the final product nor that this product is somehow independent of the network of social and historical processes to which it is connected (2017: 12).

For Joyce, Wilde was just such an assemblage: scandal created multiple ‘versions’ of Wilde, variously perceived ‘fragmentary wholes’—the newspapers’ version of Wilde, the sexological subject, Wilde the poet, Wilde-as-criminal, etc.—but what Joyce stresses is that this was dependent on the eye of the beholder.

Wilde was a product of the discourses that wrote him into various legible beings; Mulligan and Murphy are likewise composite characters that appear differently depending on which way one looks or just how much one knows. Deleuze and Guattari assert that ‘[t]here are no individual statements, only statement-producing machinic assemblages’ (1980: 45). In other words, a statement, or an individual’s identity, can only communicate a set of circumstances, circumstances which exist as an intersecting mesh of cultural, political and/or ideological aspects. No ‘individual statements’ means that an individual cannot claim to be a unitary singular entity unaffected by the either the passage of time or the interlocking networks of time and space that press upon the individual after any ‘individual’ ‘I’ statement can be uttered. As Wilde was many different things at many different times, so too Mulligan and Murphy are perceived in many different ways by many different characters at various points in Ulysses.

The original French word that Deleuze uses is agencement, which translates as ‘a collection of things which have been gathered together or assembled’ (Nail, 2017: 26). Joyce, we contend, perceived Wilde’s identity as an ‘assemblage’, that is, Joyce, more than has been acknowledged, took a Deleuzian approach to Wilde’s complex queer identity. What the perceiver sees is what Deleuze calls a ‘fragmentary whole’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 4). For those who saw Wilde through a sexological lens, he was an ‘invert’; for those whose understanding of deviance was informed by representations in the popular press, Wilde’s criminality relegated him into the socially transgressive type. Joyce was receptive to both how Wilde was perceived, and why Wilde was perceived in those ways. Joyce saw Wilde as a kaleidoscopic assemblage of various fragmentary wholes: as a product of the Anglo-Saxon institution, as someone whose name was indicative of his fate, as a cultural ‘scapegoat’ in the eyes of the law, among other assemblages (OCPW: 150). In his essay ‘Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salomé’ (1909), Joyce goes through each aspect of Wilde’s identity as perceived through various lenses, or in Deleuzian terms, various ways of seeing a ‘fragmentary whole’. In turn, this queer perception of Wilde is what informed Joyce’s construction of Buck Mulligan and D.B. Murphy in Ulysses.

Patrick Mullen claims that when Wilde’s private sexual acts were put into discourse by a prying, pressing, and perturbed public, it essentially catalysed what he describes as a ‘queer epistemological crisis of modernity’ (2012: 3). Through such public, legal, social, and medical intersecting discourses, various ‘fragmentary wholes’ emerged where Wilde became different identities at different times. Such an assemblage relied on signifying the absent ‘Other’, that is, the lens of Wilde-as-dandy signified his resistance to masculinity, Wilde-as-invert/degenerate signified a homosexual identity that deviated medically from the normative sexuality, and so on.

Writing in the Wake of the Wilde Trials

For decades, critics have observed Joyce’s keen awareness of Wilde. Richard Ellmann notes that ‘Joyce had been interested in Wilde for a long while’ (1977: 23), and Richard Corballis contends that ‘the life and work of Wilde are given serious and sympathetic attention’ in Joyce’s work (2002: 165). Frances Devlin-Glass states: ‘To be writing in the wake of the Wilde trial, as [Joyce] was, left discernible traces on a writer who on so many other fronts courageously rejoiced in transgression […] Joyce implicitly dialogued with Wilde throughout his writing life’ (2005: 4). Zack Bowen suggests that Joyce used the ‘publicized details of Wilde’s personal scandals as well as his aesthetic to shape certain aspects of Ulysses’ and has counted ‘[a]t least two dozen references to Wilde and/or his work’ (1996: 105) in Ulysses (1996: 106–107). Joyce was more than just interested in or influenced by his predecessor. He was preoccupied with Wilde, both from his jottings in a notebook where he sketched ‘Oscar = bugger’ (see Slote, 1995: 5) and then throughout the composition of Ulysses, and beyond. As Backus reminds us:

Both [Wilde and Joyce] were Irish, and both were repeatedly accused of falling afoul of the British middle class, gentlemanly norms that their public deviations both challenged and defined. Both were stigmatized as outsiders partly by reason of their class and national origins, and partly by reason of their scandalous artistic output (2008: 106).

In their essay ‘Becoming Animal in the Epiphanies: Joyce Between Fiction and Non-Fiction’ (2018), Katherine Ebury was one of the first to demonstrate how Deleuzian frameworks are useful lenses through which to interpret Joycean aesthetics. Extending this suggestion into Deleuzian assemblages in Ulysses, we believe that Joyce disassembled and reassembled Wilde as Mulligan and Murphy, and that Wilde’s costumed and disguised appearances install him as another primary lens—like Hamlet or Odysseus—through which Joyce brings Ulysses into focus. According to Ellmann, Wilde was ‘Joyce’s compatriot’ (1977: 39) and was present at critical moments in Joyce’s life and work. For example, when Joyce first met Nora Barnacle on Friday, June 10, 1904, he arranged to meet her at 1 Merrion Square North, Wilde’s childhood home. Joyce appeared; Nora did not (Bowker, 2011: 121–122). Now the stuff of literary legend, their meeting was rescheduled for Thursday, June 16. But for Barnacle’s tardiness, Bloomsday and Ulysses would have had an even firmer and clearer Wildean foundation. Moreover, in Rome, Joyce read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and wrote to his brother Stanislaus on August 19, 1906:

It is not very difficult to read between the lines. Wilde seems to have had some good intention in writing it—some wish to put himself before the world—but the book is rather crowded with lies and epigrams. If he had had the courage to develop the allusions in the book it might have been better (SL: 96).

Here, Joyce criticizes Wilde for not directly addressing homosexuality, yet, in an ironic self-indictment, neither does he—not even in a private message to his brother, much less in a published novel. Nevertheless, Joyce was sufficiently impressed with Wilde’s work, as Mahaffey points out (1998: 44), to give A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a title that alludes to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The title recalls the line in the novel’s first chapter, in which the painter Basil Hallward says that ‘every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist’ (Wilde, 2012: 61). Finally, in 1918, as manager of the English Players in Zurich, Joyce chose as the company’s debut production Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a coded drama of double lives, inverted worlds and words, one in which Buck Mulligan could have easily inhabited, sharing quips and cucumber sandwiches with Algernon and Jack (Devlin-Glass, 2005: 30). During the curtain call on opening night, Joyce reportedly shouted: ‘Hurrah for Ireland! Poor Wilde was Irish, and so am I!’ (Ellmann, 1982: 426).

To mark the premiere of Richard Strauss’ opera based on Wilde’s play Salomé in Trieste, Joyce produced what presumably was to have been an introduction to the opera for a general audience in Il Piccolo della Sera. However, his erudite essay, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salomé’, offers much more. Devlin-Glass writes that the essay ‘reveals both how attractive Wilde’s transgressive aesthetic was to Joyce and how conflicted he was about Wilde’, containing ‘the seeds of a more liberal understanding of what Wilde’s trial meant to Joyce and to Ulysses’ (2005: 27). Joyce opens the essay as follows:

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. These were the high-sounding titles that with juvenile vanity he wanted to have printed on the title-page of his first collection of poetry. By this vain gesture which he believed would lend him dignity, he sculpted, perhaps symbolically, the marks of his empty pretences and of the fate that awaited him (OCPW: 148).

Joyce breaks Wilde down into selves and pieces. His interest in the ideological resonances that affect Wilde’s development as an artist, scapegoat, and disgraced exile is evident. Joyce contents that, ‘far from being a monster of perversion that inexplicably arose in the midst of the modern civilization of England’, Wilde was assembled as ‘the logical and inevitable product of the Anglo-Saxon college and university system, a system of seclusion and secrecy’ (OCPW: 150). The system that, in Joyce’s opinion, encouraged homosexuality. Backus echoes this polymorphous and ideologically contingent version of Wilde, reflecting on Joyce’s acute receptivity to Wilde-the-phenomenon as opposed to Wilde-the-individual. They describe how ‘Joyce’s depiction of Wilde in “The Poet of Salomé” similarly focuses on ways which Wilde was, through the logic of the British legal system, reduced to an inchoate, humiliated, and distressed object of Otherness’ (2008: 115). Joyce, therefore, sees Wilde as an assemblage—not as a collection of parts that are assembled to construct a pre-determined whole, but rather as a writer whose ontological reality is determined by how such parts are put together. For Joyce, Wilde is a process of ‘becoming’ rather than an entity ‘put together’, that is, not an achieved, static product, but a procedure of self-making, an act of assemblage. Joyce’s systematic mapping out of ‘Wilde-as-[x]’ asks readers not only to consider all the disparate aspects of Wilde’s life and work, but to examine how each Wildean fragment is determined by other fragments, and why such an assemblage of different Wildean parts may have occurred in the first place.

Backus concludes that ‘Joyce’s essay on Wilde marks the point of origin for an image pattern that recurs throughout Ulysses, suturing together elements of Wilde’s case’ (2008: 113). She is right; Wilde hovers throughout—and even appears in—Ulysses. A few pivotal examples must suffice. First, Joyce constructs a miniature version of Wilde’s ‘gross indecency’ debacle in the ‘Hades’ episode, substituting Simon Dedalus, Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus for the Marquess of Queensberry, Oscar Wilde, and Lord Alfred Douglas, respectively (see Bowker, 2011: 111). Bloom is in the carriage with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and Jack Power, and they are on their way to the cemetery for Paddy Dignam’s interment when he spies Stephen on his way to Sandymount. ‘Your son and heir?’ (U 6.43), Bloom says to Dedalus, who in turn asks: ‘Was that Mulligan cad with him? His fidus Achates?’ (U 6.49), the latter phrase translating to ‘devoted follower’. No: Stephen is alone, yet his father erupts, channelling Queensberry’s rage at Wilde:

—He’s in with a lowdown crowd, Mr Dedalus snarled. That Mulligan is a contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks all over Dublin. But with the help of God and His blessed mother I’ll make it my business to write a letter one of those days to his mother or his aunt or whatever she is that will open her eye as wide as a gate. I’ll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me (U 6.63–68).

Queensberry, of course, devastatingly ‘tickle[d]’ Wilde’s catastrophe.

Sam Slote’s contribution to the present collection focuses on Wilde’s presence in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ (2024: passim). In the episode, Stephen offers his theory of Hamlet, teased in ‘Telemachus’, that makes complex connections between artists’ lives and their work. Wilde emerges alongside Shakespeare to dominate the episode and the explication. As the discussion moves away from Hamlet to the Shakespearean sonnets, an undertone of same-sex attraction emerges, especially after Mulligan, who seems to have been eavesdropping, enters (U 9.485). The assistant librarian, Mr Best, brings Wilde to the surface: ‘The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde’s, Mr Best said, lifting his brilliant notebook. That Portrait of Mr. W. H. where he proves that the sonnets were written [for] a Willie Hughes, a man of all hues’ (U 9.522–24). In light of the work of Kershner (1978), Danson (1991), Bristow (1997, 2022), Corballis (2002), and Slote (2024), among others, Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W. H. may have been the reservoir from which Joyce’s drew much of the complexly depicted sexuality of Bloom, Stephen, Mulligan, and even Molly. More importantly, perhaps, Mr. W. H. not only suggests the transmigration of souls but the translation of one culture into another, an inspiration that prefigures the dominant conceit of Ulysses itself, one buried in Joyce’s title. In other words, Mr. W. H. may be more than the portal into queer Ulysses; The intertextual lens that is The Portrait of Mr. W. H. may be as important to the novel as The Odyssey or Hamlet.

Then there is ‘Circe’, in which, according to Corballis, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest […] assumes particular prominence’ (2002: 160). The episode, rendered in a form associated with Wilde—the drama—involves gender and occupational inversions, medical evaluations, fetishism, sexual innuendo and, of course, alleged crimes, all rendered in a circus-like nightmarish atmosphere. People, places and things are topsy-turvy. Wilde, for one, has been transmigrated into Bloom, who, just like Wilde, endures multiple trials that make use of faeces-smeared material as discovery—Bloom’s Matcham’s Masterstroke toilet paper and Wilde’s stained sheets from the Savoy. Backus writes: ‘[T]he entire courtroom fantasy in “Circe” pointily recalls the defeat of Wilde’s libel change against Queensberry by a sensational public display of shit-marked “sheets”’ (2008: 107). For Bowen, ‘[t]he Bloom/Wilde conjunction [in “Circe”] was more than a wise choice among self-styled martyrs; the result was the creation of a Bloomian comic masterpiece based on Wildean tragedy’ (1996: 113–115; Casey Lawrence’s contribution to the present collection interprets ‘Circe’ as a direct parody of the Wilde trials). Like Dante, Joyce is building a comedy—an instructional text that begins in betrayal and exile but ends in promise and homecoming. Joyce’s fictive family, his trinity—Bloom, Stephen, and Molly—achieves a redemption that was denied Wilde in life and Ulysses, but one he’ll finally receive in the Wake.

Conclusion

Like Mulligan, Murphy assembles various manners, tones of voice, names, signs and symbols, and cannot be considered reliable or even coherent. Both Mulligan and Murphy contain multitudes and seem more than happy to contradict themselves; they would therefore not be perturbed by the hermeneutical anxiety that they instil in those who encounter them in Joyce’s fictive world or by the mixed signals they send to readers. Murphy imparts a great deal of information about his background, but like Bloom, we are prone to doubt the authenticity of these disclosures, which are redolent of assembled stories—stories configured to provoke a reaction rather than inform. For example, Murphy tells Stephen and Bloom that he knows Simon Dedalus (U 16.378), but this turns out to be another person with Stephen’s father’s name who is purportedly a circus marksman. We are also told that Murphy originates from Carrigaloe in Queenstown, yet he claims not to have seen his wife once in the last seven years, thus precluding any spousal witness who might verify what he says. Murphy also sensationally narrates an anecdote about a killing in Trieste while dramatically holding his dagger. However, when Murphy is asked questions that are off-script, so to speak, he stumbles because he doesn’t have the benefit of prior assemblage; when Bloom asks for more information about Gibraltar, for example, he struggles to form a timely response. As a result, the conversation with Murphy directly invokes Wilde for Bloom: ‘he brought to mind instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves’ (U 16.1184–86). Bloom recalls those administrators who were arrested for homosexual acts in the Dublin Castle scandal and commits to protecting Stephen from Murphy as well as from Mulligan, thus saving him from the fates of the defendant of the Dublin case—and the tragedy of Wilde.

But most importantly, perhaps, both Mulligan and Murphy are messengers. Mulligan’s first name, Malachi, is Hebrew for ‘my [God’s] messenger’; the Old Testament prophet Malachi foretells the return of ‘Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord’ in Malachi 4 (Slote et al., 2022: 7). As for Murphy, Richard Ellmann reports that Joyce gave Carlo Linati ‘an intricate scheme for Ulysses which showed its Odyssean parallels and its special techniques’ (1982: 519). In it, Joyce refers to Murphy as Odysseus Pseudoangelos, a lost ancient Greek play of unknown authorship, known only through a mention in Aristotle’s Poetics, translated to Odysseus, the False Messenger (Ramey and Ramey, 2007: 98–99). While that correspondence in ‘Eumaeus’ is recondite even by Joycean standards, it nonetheless labels Murphy, like Mulligan, as another (or the same) messenger. Each of their messages is as powerful as any deux ex machina in the ancient Greek canon. Both messengers miraculously generate homecomings for Joyce’s protagonists, and each is equally responsible for bringing Ulysses to a close. In ‘Telemachus’, Mulligan’s message to Stephen to turn over the key to the tower pushes Stephen to walk away; ‘I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go’ (U 1.739–40). Mulligan’s words set Stephen on a different path and into a new day. Murphy, on the other hand, as a living message-board, causes Bloom to draw closer to Stephen and invite him home, rekindling an emotion that will stir even after Stephen, refusing to spend the night, walks into the dawn and goes on ‘to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race’ (P 252–253).

Wilde, then, through his avatars, not only appears in Ulysses, costumed as Mulligan and Murphy, but also triggers salvation for both Bloom and Stephen, resulting in Molly’s romantic reception and Stephen’s promising new workday. The Mass, begun in ‘Telemachus’, and continued in parts throughout the day, reaches its climax in ‘Ithaca’, when Stephen imbibes in the drink Bloom makes for him, before Stephen goes off in peace.

Preparatory to anything else, Wilde frames Ulysses. Wilde not only appears in Ulysses disguised like Homer’s wily hero, but he provides the text’s architecture, manifesting himself in the kaleidoscopic assemblages—Mulligan and Murphy—who, as Deleuzian assemblages, animate and define the opening and closing of the novel. Wilde is therefore the engine of Ulysses: Without Mulligan and Murphy, there’s no reunion for Bloom and Molly, no masterpiece on the horizon for Stephen. In short, without Oscar Wilde, there is no Ulysses.

Acknowledgements

We’d like to acknowledge the inspiration provided by our colleagues who attended Caliban’s Mirror: the 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium at Trinity College Dublin—especially Casey Lawrence—where earlier versions of this paper were presented. We took special incentive from the keynote speaker, Margot G. Backus. Finally, we appreciated the corrections and suggestions offered by Andrew Kay and Christopher McCarrick. Any remaining errors or obscurities are our own.

Competing Interests

The author is also an editor of this Special Collection and has been kept entirely separate to the peer review process of their article.