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Joyce and the Colonial Commodity

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Authors

Nolan, Emer

Issue Date
2004
Publisher
서울대학교 인문대학 인문학연구원
Citation
인문논총, Vol.52, pp. 23-39
Abstract
Joyce depicts Irelands underdeveloped, colonial economy in Ulysses. But
he also shows us how, in certain historical conditions, commodities become
invested with political, utopian desire. Ulysses demonstrates the power of
these utopian fantasies, but also understands their limits. Joyce also
appreciates that his own artistic practice is implicated in consumer society,
its pleasures and its pitfalls. His great novel Ulysses can therefore usefully be
re-read in the context of Irelands twenty-first century Celtic Tiger
economy.
1) I will begin by discussing a passage not from Joyce, but from another
great modern Irish storyteller, Maurice OSullivan. In his book, Twenty years
a-growing, a memoir of his childhood in the Blasket Islands off the coast of
Co. Kerry in the south west of Ireland, he tells how in the course of the
First World War, all kinds of wonderful things were washed up on the
shores of his native island. These had all come from ships destroyed in the
war at sea, and included luxuries like wine and chocolate and precious
items such as gold watches. The older inhabitants of the island thought that
the paradise described in Irish legends had finally arrived for them.
However, the islanders also discovered many bodies of those lost at sea on
the beaches.
2) This story illustrated some features of the modern in colonial or
underdeveloped conditions. To some extent, the very new connects with
the archaic as the old legends are remembered. Note the excitement and
the holiday feeling of the islanders. But the bodies of the dead also remind
them of violence and atrocity. This is the kind of nuanced understanding of
modernity, and of capitalism in the context of Ireland, that I believe we
need in order to understand Joyces writing. Ireland did not see any process
of steady industrialization in the course of the twentieth-century. Rather the
economic boom of the 1990s brought for most Irish people their very first
experiences of prosperity and the consumer society. Joyces writings help
us to appreciate some important aspects of this historical experience.
3) Joyce was fond of describing the Irish past in modern images,
especially that of the busy, populous metropolis (which Dublin was not, in
his own time!). In this he tends to abolish the distinction between the
traditional and the new. The major conflict in Ulysses appears to be that
between the metropolitan, modern Leopold Bloom and his fellow citizens
who are xenophobic, backward-looking and nationalist. This culminates in
the conflicts between Bloom and the citizen in Cylops. However, both
parties to this conflict have been somewhat misrepresented, I believe. The
nationalists are also modernizers; the modern man (Bloom) is by no means
the happiest of human beings. To some extent, he — like many modern
people — seeks compensation in the pleasures of the city and of the
commodity for things that are absent in his own life — a sense of purpose
or belonging, or even a happy family life.
4) In this way, we can understand Joyce as a superb interpreter of the
culture of modernity. He shows us how modern culture can serve as a
phantasmagoric substitute for a real Utopia — an ideal human community.
Although he commodified his own art in the pursuit of aesthetic perfection,
conferring on Ulysses an auratic sense of transcendence and
accomplishment, we can also read in his great novel the traces of the
impoverished (and still unfinished) history out of which it grows.
ISSN
1598-3021
Language
English
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/10371/29507
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