Ousted possibilities: critical histories in James Joyce's Ulysses - James Joyce, novelist

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Gregory Castle

Of particular interest in the present context is the influence of post-structuralist methodologies and assumptions which have added a trans- or supra-historical dimension to the discourse on Joyce's historicity. As a result of this influence the "rehistoricization" of Joyce studies often relies (as a kind of bottom line) on principles or strategies that are, in fact, ahistorical. A recent example of this paradoxical situation can be found in Vicki Mahaffey's Reauthorizing Joyce, where the metaphors of weaving and fabrication are used to link history and language; but in this reading Joyce's textual world bears only an analogic or parallel (not an interdependent and immediate) relationship to the historical world outside the text. Patrick McGee's study of ideology and style in Ulysses, to cite another example, also depends on transcendental theory of textuality: the Althusserian framework that governs McGee's analysis permits him to introduce "language" or "the text" as the (apparently) supra-historical field on which the Absent Cause of history encodes itself.(4) Even a materialist like Fredric Jameson cannot resist the temptation to fuse text and history - even as he rejects the possibility.(5)

The few critics who manage to give Joyce credit as a serious critic of culture nonetheless fault him on historical grounds. Thus Jeremy Hawthorn writes, "|Ulysses' certainly does not give us an exhaustive and comprehensive view of the historical situation of Ireland at the start of this century," but "it affirms certain human values in their social and historical specificity with such force that we cannot afford to dismiss it or them" (124). Though Hawthorn and others (like Jeffrey Segall) are more charitable than Georg Lukacs,(6) the tendency is clearly to find a blind spot in Joyce's critical historical sense. Others, most notably Franco Moretti and Fredric Jameson (in "Ulysses"), continue the Marxian tradition first articulated by Lukacs in 1938) which condemns Ulysses for being ideologically reactionary and thus uncritical. I believe that this tendency is rooted in the fact that Stephen Dedalus's symbolic repudiations of history have convinced most critics that Joyce has repudiated it as well. But as I have tried to show above, the situation is quite the reverse: history repudiates Joyce, who in turn struggles against the historical imperative not in order to exclude its narrative but in order to make room for his own alternatives to it - alternatives that arise in the context of a critique of traditional (that is to say, following Nietzsche, monumental and antiquarian) history. Thus I believe that a case can be made for just the kind of critical history that Nietzsche calls for:

If he is to live, man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past: he does this by bringing it before the tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it; every past, however, is worthy to be condemned. ("Uses" 75-76)