Note on the Politics of Ulysses

   The politics of Ulysses, like the politics of modernism more generally, have been variously debated over the years. Early on the novel served as an exemplary target and as a valued touchstone for both progressive critics and cultural conservatives.¹ More recent studies, attending to the stated and implied political views of Bloom, Stephen, and Joyce, many of which suggest a socialist or anarchist orientation, have settled on a libertarian or socialist Joyce; other approaches, eschewing character for the formal embodiment of ideology, have produced versions of Joyce ranging from the ineffectual revolutionary to the chronicler of liberalism's demise to the hapless fellow traveler in a general dismantling of critical subjectivity.² Not surprisingly, such debates have not produced any consensus about the politics of Joyce's epic, beyond, perhaps, his hostility to the apocalyptic Irish nationalism associated with Padraic Pearse.³ My own approach, finding a sympathetic theoretical context in Cheryl Herr's work on Joyce's anatomies of culture and a sympathetic political context in postcolonial readings of Joyce's "broken English," aims for a less utopian working-out of Ellmann's revisionary claim in The Consciousness of Joyce that "Ulysses creates new Irishmen to live in Arthur Griffith's new state" - that is, in the Irish Free State, founded in 1922, the same year Ulysses was published.⁴

Notes

1. For a detailed overview of the Marxist reception and a glance at the cultural conservatives, see Jeffrey Segall, "Between Marxism and Modernism, or How to be a Revolutionist and Still Love Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly 25 (Summer 1988).
 

2. For anarcho-socialist and libertarian versions of Joyce respectively, see the important books by Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), and Dominic Manganiello, Joyce's Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), both of which draw on the many socialist and anarchist tracts in Joyce's Trieste library; see the appendix to Ellmann for a list. For the ineffectual revolutionary, see Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1978), who argues for the radical power of Joyce's exposure of "those constitutive processes that render us sexed and civil subjects" but ultimately claims that this revolutionary deconstruction is neutralized by Joyce's inability to address an audience beyond himself (132, 96, 156-57). MacCabe's admirable study is limited only by his tendency to over-empower a de-historicized notion of "language" as the sole determinant of subjective states. Franco Moretti, in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, et al. (London: Verso, 1988), understands Ulysses as an expression of the breakdown of English burgeois liberalism without taking into account specifically Irish circumstances. Vincent Pecora, in Self and Form in Modern Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), extrapolates dismantling of the autonomous subjectivity requisite for a critical relation to modernity. The present essay explores the kind of mediations between subjectivity and culture that tend to drop out in Pecora's challenging analyses. For a broad selection of approaches to the ideological bearings of Joyce's fiction, see Joyce and the Subject of History, ed. Mark A. Wollaeger, Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
 

3. See G. J. Watson's important, contextual work, "The Politics of Ulysses," in Joyce's "Ulysses": The Larger Perspective, eds. Robert Newman

4. See Herr, Joyce's Anatomy of Culture.  My thinking is also indebted to Jennifer Wicke's Advertising Fictions, the first book to explore the historical interrelation of advertising and the novel and the particular relevance of this conjunction to Ulysses. Many have since taken up the conjunction; see the special issue of The James Joyce Quarterly 30-31 (Summer/Fall 1993) on "Joyce and Advertising." For Joyce as "the very prototype of the postcolonial artist," see Colin MacCabe, "Broken English," in Futures for English, ed. Colin MacCabe (Oxford: Manchester Univ. Press, 1988), 12; for the socio-linguistic theory underpinning such approaches as well as brief remarks on Joyce, see Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minnesota: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), chapter three.  For the Ellmann quotation, see The Consciousness of Joyce, 89.  Ellmann ultimately sees Joyce as a revolutionary who formulated a utopian vision of egalitarian unity by means of the pun as leveler of social as well as linguistic hierarchies.  Less sanguine about the utopian effect of anti-hierarchical thinking, I return to the question of hierarchies and their value near the end of this essay.