Heinous Hainau and the Blooms
U 17.868-9: […] blond, born of two dark, she had blond ancestry, remote a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau, Austrian army Franz Stanzel was the first to identify, tentatively but convincingly, Milly Bloom’s violating ancestor Herr Hauptmann Hainau as Julius Jacob von Haynau (1786 –1853), an Austrian general who was prominent in brutally suppressing insurrectionary movements in Italy and Hungary after 1848. Such was the notoriety of the “hyena of Brescia”1 in Europe that on a tour of Britain in September 1850 he barely escaped alive when outraged English brewery workers attacked him. As Stanzel points out, Carl von Schönhals, a high-ranking officer who knew Haynau personally and who published a biography of him in the year Haynau died, describes Haynau as originally blond, with a high forehead, blue eyes and a huge moustache.2 Seemingly contradictory personal descriptions of the merciless and hated officer responsible for the atrocities committed in Brescia and Hungary can easily be explained by the fact that Haynau was by then in his sixties. A passage from Charles Holte Bracebridge’s Sketches on Italy illustrates the atrocities Haynau and his troops were blamed for:
In Germany, satirical papers like Kladderadatsch, Mephistopheles or Almanach zum Lachen caricatured and derided Haynau, for example in the poem “Das Lied vom General Haynau”,3 or in the example below - a short novel of four chapters. These two publications turn him into a robber by the name of Hainau Hainaunino or Haynau Haynaunino, a name which alludes to the Italian bandit chief Rinaldo Rinaldino. The following extract from the novel has striking similarities to Joyce’s reference: the spelling of Haynau’s name as “Hainau”, and his military rank (with a pun here on the common title of a bandit chief); the ravenblack4 Jewess with a name alluded to in a memory of Bloom’s father in the Lotus Eater episode; and her intended violation by the blond victor. Considering Joyce’s long stays in Austrian Trieste (and also in Zurich) his acquaintance with this or a similar text seems likely:
We should not overlook that what seems like a momentary whim of the author of Ulysses in turning an early version (“Fair of two dark parents she had come from some ancestor & a youthful love”5) into a tale of rape by a well-known military man has its foundation in the ancient myths on which his novel is based: Antikleia, the mother of Odysseus, was "violated" by Sisyphos, but Laertes, his father, married her in spite of it. Harald Beck 1
Edmund Flagg, Venice: the City of the Sea (1853),
contains a section with this page heading on p. 237. |
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