Alec Charles

The Meta-Utopian Metatext: The Deconstructive
Dreams of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
Alec Charles
abstract
Ulysses is a novel of immense and endless structuration, but one that resists structure
itself, which eschews the closure and determinism of stereotypically Utopian mythol-
ogization. Joyces work acknowledges that we continue to cling to our Utopian
dreams, despite all the material evidence. Yet Joyce advances a mode of Utopianism
that, in recognizing the tensions inherent to its relationship with the real, not only
self-consciously deconstructs but also therefore sustains itself. If the Utopian breaks
down upon its contact with material history, then perhaps by inscribingand, more
importantly, integratingits antithesis and its own absurdity within itself, it might
achieve a balance and a self-awareness sufficient to sustain it beyond the moment of
its conception, the revolutionary or revelatory moment, and to translate its abstrac-
tion into the very materiality that had originally threatened to extinguish it. Joyce
reveals Utopian literatures potential for self-deconstruction while at the same time
rehearsing the hypocrisy and tyranny of literalist political interpretations of that dis-
course. Ulysses explores this process at a literary-political level; but it is Finnegans
Wake that, in its dissolution of the dictatorship of the aesthetic, enacts the innate
failure of the project of perfectibility at the level of language itself.
Utopian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2012

Copyright 2012. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 472 13/10/12 12:43 PM

alec charles: The Meta-Utopian Metatext
1. James Joyce and the Epic
It may be argued that Joyces work can be seen either as the defining text of a
real and historically grounded nationhood or, conversely, as the defining text
of an imaginary and ahistorical nationhood. It may in other words be viewed
as either epical or Utopianand as addressing a modernist predilection for
either of those forms. But it may also be argued that Joyces work might para-
doxically be seen as both of these things and that Joyces writing is able to
suspend and maintain such contradictory positions in a synthetic harmony
through its uses of ambiguity and irony. Indeed, it might also be argued that
Joyce herein offers the conditions of possibility of a realizable and sustain-
able mode of Utopianisma Utopianism that inscribes its own opposites (the
dystopian, the anti-Utopian, and the real) and its own impossibility within
a continuously dynamic dialectic. Yet how might this mode of Utopianism
function in relation to the traditions of the genre, and how might it afford a
reinterpretation (or even a revitalization) of those traditions?
The great works of literary modernism tend to boast something of an
epic quality. The Waste Land is the epic that elaborates the state of European
culture after World War I; la recherche du temps perdu, the epic of the bour-
geois salon; Ezra Pounds Cantos, the epic of all human civilization. It is also not
unusual to find James Joyces Ulysses depicted as an epic. Joyce himself dubbed
it an epic of the Irish and Jewish racesalthough in the same passage he also
referred to it as his damned monster-novel.1 One might note more recently,
for example, Kieran Keohanes study or the introduction to Colin McCabes
article on the centenary of Bloomsday2both of which describe Joyces work
as epic. However, this sense of epicality often seems somewhat at odds with
the more problematic and deconstructive implications of Joyces work.
Just as journalists have adopted the term biblical to describe natural disas-
ters of any significance, so the term epic tends, in critical and popular circles
alike, to be grievously misused. There is, for instance, a tendency to define
epicality as a measure of length rather than as a generic status. The phrases
epic proportions and epic scale suggest that size matters, but for once it really
does not. James Camerons Titanic (1997), for example, is certainly a lengthy
film, but it is surely not an epic. Length of text and size of boat are irrelevant:
Sergei Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin (1925) is, by contrast, not a particularly
long film (or as large a craft); but it is, it seems, an epic. Gilgamesh is a lot
shorter than The Da Vinci Codebut it is not Dan Browns text that deserves
the epithet.
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Utopian Studies 23.2
At the age of twenty-one, James Joyce characterized the epical as that

mode of art whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to
himself and others.3 One might refine this sweeping definition to suggest that
those others to whom Joyce refers should constitute, within the epic form,
a hegemonic mass to which the individual is mythologically, theologically,
or historically subsumed and by which that individuals subjectivity is deter-
mined. An epic is the defining narrative of the inception or consolidation of
the zeitgeist of nationhoodone that subsumes individualism and humanity
to that nationhood, to that destiny, in mythological, religious, political, or
historical terms. Each nation (each national age: each era that itself defines
nationhood) should have one: Ancient Greece boasted Homers Iliad; impe-
rial Rome, Virgils Aeneid. Revolutionary England was memorialized, posthu-
mously and allegorically, by Paradise Lost; postrevolutionary Russia recalled
its birth in Potemkin; postCivil War America relived its struggle into being in
The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Yet D. W. Griffiths film raises the question of from whose perspective a
text is defined as epic. Woodrow Wilson may have famously judged it his-
tory written with lightning4but would it also represent the truth of history
to an African American audiencewas it the birth of their nation? The valori-
zation of discourse as truth is, as Foucault always reminds us, the province
of power; and the notion of nationhood is similarly determined by ideology.
Martin Luther King may have dreamed in August 1963 that one day his nation
would rise up and live out the true meaning of its creedbut Malcolm X
understood that there could be nations within nations.
The nation is a shifting concept, an ideological construct, a master
signifier whose function is to maintain or to bring into being its own refer-
ent. A nation is the same people living in the same place, says Leopold
Bloomor also living in different places.5 In these terms a nation is the
historical alibi for the incoherence of geography: it is the invention of an
identity and a rationale for a place or population without a predetermined
identity or rationale. The nation of the epic is as such the diametric opposite
of the Utopian space, a dreamscape that invokes a radical rationalization of
the body politic without actual people or place. Utopianisms mythic delinea-
tions reveal historical nationhoods own lack of definability and suggest that
such teleological definition may be incompatible with historical materiality.
If, after all, Utopianism is a manifesto, then it is one of the imagination, one
without contemporary or coterminous manifestation. Utopianism exposes
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the indeterminacy of nationhood, an immanent uncertainty that echoes

the theories of Werner Heisenberg or, for that matter, of James Joyce. In the
work of James Joyce, that avatar of ambiguity, we find, as Wicht writes, that
national identity is created by the discriminating reinterpretation and refash-
ioning of selected historical data and cultural discourses6nationhood is
not an absolute but a fluid and culturally subjective mode of positioning.
The epic, of course, denies this: it marks itself as definitive, authentic, and
originalas historical in its scope and historic in itself. Should Tolkiens work,
for example, though massive and world-building, be defined (as it has been) as
epic? Only insofar as we can no longer distinguish between material history
and the structurations of fantasya capacity that, as Baudrillard has warned,
we may in effect have lost. In the fashion of Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of the
Will (1935), Tolkiens Lord of the Ringslike its successor, Star Wars (1977)
represents a pseudo-epic, the narrative of an idealized and false consciousness
that reflects a counterfeit and syncretistic history, a mode of invention and
hybridization that provides a foundation for the purportedly original, pure
and true. It is as genuine as Baudrillards twenty-first-century hyperreality, a
world [that] no longer has any need to be true. Or rather it is true, absolutely
true, in the sense that nothing any longer stands opposed to it.7
Yet perhaps all epics are in this manner fraudulent: not merely fictive but
founded upon an invented mythology. What else was Virgils Aeneid than a
propagandistic argument in support of the divine provenance of the golden
age of Augustan Rome? What other has the Torah become (for some) than
a sophistic legitimation of the nation of Israel? The Utopian text, as a satire
upon this nation-building epicity (and thus, in its unadulterated form, upon
itself ), announces this innate duplicity of the epic form. It is a mode of mock or
meta-epic: but it is also, potentially, a mode of mock or meta-Utopianism itself.
The Utopian text resembles the pseudo-epic insofar as it founds itself
upon an alternative or fantastical teleologywhat Bacon, in an allusion to
More, calls a Feigned Commonwealth.8 Yet, in that it distances itself from
contemporary materiality and constantly emphasizes that distance, the
Utopian text is, in its classic literary expressions (if not in its fundamentalist
manifestations and political appropriations), alert to its unrealizably fictive
nature. This text is beyond history: it is mostly in periods of turmoil . . . that
people care much about history, writes Morris. It is beyond geography: He
never thought of telling us whereabouts in the New World Utopia is, writes
Moreno reference to Utopia exists in any geographical work. It is beyond
475

epistemology, beyond the realm, that is, of current knowledge: that part of
the South Sea was utterly unknown, writes Bacon.9
Jacques Derrida has suggested that God is that which sees everything and
yet which cannot be seen: He holds me in his gaze . . . while remaining inac-
cessible to me10for, as God explains to Moses in Exodus 33:20, no one may
see him and live. Utopias remain similarly invisible (yet envisionable); they
supersede contemporary epistemologies. Francis Bacona writer for whom
knowledge, of course, was powertherefore writes that his New Atlan-
tians know well most part of the habitable world, and are . . . unknown
they... knew much of our state . . . yet we . . . never heard of the least
inkling or glimpse of this island.11 This, adds Bacon, is a conditioner and
propriety of divine powers and beings, to be hidden and unseen to others, and
yet to have others open and as in a light to them.12 In this respect, the Utopian
mode might be seen to resemble the work, at once omnisciently encyclopedic
and frustratingly obscurantist, of James Joyce.
Where therefore, within this dichotomy between the Utopian and the
epic, might Ulysses stand? Is Joyces work, published the year of the cre-
ation of the Irish Free State, the defining text of his nation, a narrative of
historical determinism, of destinytruly the created conscience of the art-
ists race? Or is it a Utopian texta text that speaks not to history but to a
posthistoricalitya text not of any nation but repeatedly and explicitly (as
for More, Morris, and even Butler) a depiction of no-place, a realm beyond the
possibilities of geopolitical and geographical integrity but also beyond the
epics sense of theological and historical determinism?
Of course, in a way, it is neither: it is a bourgeois comic novel, an unlikely
heir to the realist tradition. Yet Ulysses continues to address both epic and
Utopianist genres and, in its ironization or deconstruction of heroic and abso-
lutist idioms, reveals aporias and anomalies common to both. Ulysses invokes
an epic Everyman13an Odysseus who remains at the same time a no one,
a nomanlike Odysseus himself, to the Cyclops: my name is Nobody14a
Nayman of Noland.15 Joyces Noland might as such appear at first sight,
in its satirical self-problematization, closer to Swifts remote nations or to
Butlers Erewhon than to Morriss Nowhere or to Mores seminal domain.
( Joyces fondness for Swift is well documented, but we might also note his
interest in Butler, as reported by Richard Ellmann.)16
Yet, if no man is an island, that island may turn out, after all, to be Utopia.
Let us not forget that Mores own herald of Utopia, Raphael Nonsenso, has
476

seen even more of the world than Ulysses and is said to resemble Ulysses,
or even Plato.17 Mores narrator is Raphael, an angel (a messenger) not only of
Christianity but also of Judaism (and, for that matter, of Islam)a hybrid not
unlike a Joycean Jewgreek . . . greekjew18a Christian-Platonic everyman and
nomana wandering Ulysses. This figure of allsense and of nonsense is not so
very different from Leopold Bloom himself. He, like Bloom, is a wanderer and
a dreamer, a fantasist of epic and Utopian proportions; like Bloom, he is an out-
sider, a man of mixed and uncertain provenance; his narrator, like Blooms, takes
Ulysses as his model; he is, like Bloom, interested in philosophy and quite
a scholar,19 and yet, like Bloom, he remains a vessel of nonsense, a Joycean
Noman.20 The similarities between these paragons of complexity and prob-
lematization may reveal commensurate parallels between their respective texts.
Like Joyces work, Mores Utopia exposes the ambiguities and impossi-
bilities of its own idealizations. Its promised land is both a terra incognita
and a terra nulliusa no-place of AdemusNopeopleand of Achoriorum
populus, the people of Nolandia.21 Mores Utopia is hardly, in the popular
and simplistic sense, Utopian at all: It may be the prototype of Utopia, but it
is hardly its stereotype. If Joyces work might be seen as Utopian (rather than
Utopianin the tradition, that is, of Mores work rather than of its clich), it
should be in precisely the same paradoxical fashion. Indeed, Mores imaginary
domain might recognize itself in Leopold Blooms reflections on the heavens:
a Utopia . . . a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space ... a past
which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its probable spectators
had entered actual present existence.22 Indeed, Blooms view of Utopia is as
provisional, as ambiguous, and therefore as dynamic as that modern Utopia
imagined by that seminal science fiction writer (and fan of Joyce) H. G. Wells,
a Utopia that is not to be a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and
more of the mental contrariety we find in the world of the real.23
2. Three Utopian Contemporaries: Wells, Bloch, and Marcuse
To what extent, then, does Joyces work fit the Utopian model advanced by
such literary contemporaries as H. G. Wells? H. G. Wells for one understood
that his model in A Modern Utopia (1905) must shape not as a permanent state
but as a hopeful stage leading to a long ascent of stages.24 As envisaged in
A Modern Utopia, Wellss perfect world does not attempt to change the nature
477

of man.25 Thus Wells argues that the Morean or Platonic imposition upon
individuals of a totalizing schematizationwhat George Orwell character-
izes as the wish to freeze history26creates an unsustainably monologistic
realm. Wellss Utopia does not negate the past; it embraces and consolidates
the dialectical process: Utopia too must have a history.27 What remains
then is a Utopia that is resolutely material, historical, and dialogical, not the
perfected state of fundamentalism but the aspirant condition of a critical
humanism.
Chris Ferns has pointed out that Wells is clearly aware of the prob-
lematic character of utopian narrative.28 Perhaps the most significant such
problem Ferns notes is that Wellss Modern Utopia is necessarily written from
a perspective of radical alterity rather than one of possible futurity. Wells
Utopia has a history, certainly, but it is an entirely different history from that
of our world. For Ferns, then, the narrators admission that such a utopia
could only have emerged from a wholly different utopian history leads us to
the conclusion that for utopia to exist . . . it must already have existed: even
while Wells attempts to imagine a society capable of change, he severs its
link with the world which utopia proposes to alter for the betterhis own.29
Thus Wellss Utopian vision falls foul of the primary criticism that, according
to Paul Ricoeur, is repeatedly leveled against the genre: utopia . . . is seen to
represent a kind of social dream without concern for the real first steps nec-
essary for movement in the direction of a new society . . . a way of escaping
the logic of action through a construct outside history.30 Whatever claims
to material historicity Wellss Modern Utopia may make, its is an alternative
historicity, one eventually irreconcilable with our own.
This may be one reason why, when Wells attempts to elaborate a Utopian
vision directly out of material human history, he ends up constructing
a world closer to the dystopias of Huxley or Orwell. Published four years
before A Modern Utopia, H. G. Wellss Anticipations (1901) advances a much
harsher perspective upon the future. Anticipations predicts that the end of
the twentieth century would witness the rise of a naturally and informally
organized, educated class . . . a New Republic dominating the world.31 Wellss
New Republic is no frozen Utopia: its founders will not conceive of it as a
millennial paradise, a blissful inconsequent stagnation, but as a world state of
active . . . human beings.32 Yet this dynamic futurity seems starkly less het-
erogeneous than Wellss Modern Utopia; his New Republics approaches to the
uneducable classes range from the eugenicist through to the genocidal: the
478

New Republicwill tolerate no dark corners where the people of the Abyss
may fester. . . . [I]t is their portion to die out and disappear.33
These anticipations in many ways anticipate the unsentimental vision
of the process of the establishment of the hegemonic and homogeneous
Modern State that Wells presents in The Shape of Things to Come (1933). Here
Wells portrays the apparent inevitability of the violent, uncompromising,
and totalizing imposition of a perfected, absolutist statea pitilessly benev-
olent and oppressively puritanical regime:34 The new government meant
to rule not only the planet but the human will. . . . There was now to be one
faith only in the world, the moral expression of the one world community.35
James Joyce appears to be attempting a vision that balances the comedic
optimism of Wellss Modern Utopia with the historical realism of Anticipa-
tions and The Shape of Things to Come (while at the same time eschewing the
irretrievable fantasization of the former text and the impending dystopianism
of the latter texts). Joyce roots his Utopianism in a sense of material reality
that often inscribes a satire upon that Utopianism within the Utopianist posi-
tion. Joyce was clearly not as averse as Wells to the festering people of the
abyss and the corporeal sensuality of their lives; indeed, in response to Wellss
complaints of olfactory indulgence, Joyce wrote: There once was an author
named Wells / Who wrote about science not smells.36 Indeed, in 1928, Wells
wrote to Joyce delineating their differences: The frame of my mind is a world
wherein a big unifying and concentrating process is possible. . . . Your mental
existence is obsessed by a monstrous system of contradictions.37
If Joyces work embraces contradictions, it does so by suspending them
within a dynamic (and perhaps transitory) harmony reminiscent of Stephen
Dedaluss depiction of Aquinass notion of consonantia in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man: complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its
parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious.38 Stephens medita-
tions upon Aquinas perhaps parallel those of his contemporary, the German
Jewish Utopianist Ernst Bloch: Thomism is eminently aesthetic, balances the
world, and only gives up the Hellenic [or, we might add, Wellsian] unisub-
stantiality of being . . . in order to replace it with a more delightful construct
of a heterogeneous harmony.39 Aquinas supposed that divine and human
goodness might raise humanity above nature40and Bloch similarly pro-
poses a Utopian transcendence of the husk-real of physical nature41but
Joyces vision remains steeped in natural materiality. Thomist idealism is
always for Joyce materialized and corporealized: the aesthetic pluralism
479

of Finnegans Wakes Plurabellethe bringer of Plurabilitiesis always

grounded by the reality of St Tomach.42
Ernst Bloch started writing his Spirit of Utopia in 1915, the year after Joyce
began writing Ulysses,43 published the books first edition in 1918, and pub-
lished a revised edition in 1923, the year after Ulyssess publication. Indeed,
Leopold Blooms Utopian daydreams in Ulysses might be seen as mirroring
Blochs own high-flown aspirations toward a world of the soul, the exter-
nal, cosmic function of utopia.44 To some extent, then, we might envisage
a convergence of Blochs and Blooms journeysbut, in contrast to Blochs
sincerity and literalism, Blooms positions are at once celebrated and ironized
by Joyce. Darren Webb has written of Blochs project as being one of edu-
cating the hope of the little man45but Joyce by contrast does not patron-
ize or attempt to edify the little man (nor, of course, does his hero Leopold
Bloom: he is the little man); Joyce offers a virtual apotheosis of the everyday
and finds his Utopia in that aspirational reality. When Webb suggests that
Ernst Bloch represents a stereotypical example of the utopian parading his
own pedantic cerebrations as the best world for all,46 he could be echoing
Joyces view of Bloom (and thereby of himself )except insofar as Joyce does
not condemn Bloom for his pedantic Utopianism so much as he applauds him
for it, precisely because Bloom is himself a little man with big dreams. Finn
Fordham has argued that Joyces positive emphasis upon the little people
is closely related to his utopian vision in Finnegans Wake of that popu-
lar uprising the novel envisions47the waking of the Finnegans, the resur-
rection, through the restoration of a cultural-historical consciousness, of a
pluralistic, popular, and resolutely earthly voice.
James Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake between 1923 and 1939, during which
time another mid-European Jewish migr (like Bloch, like Bloom), Herbert
Marcuse, was writing arguments for the position that Utopianismwhich
he saw as having for long represented the only progressive element in
philosophyoffered the only possible path toward the realization of free-
dom.48 Marcuse suggested that any truth that could not be realized within
the established social order was designated as Utopian and that this designa-
tion (and the accompanying exclusion from the orthodoxy), far from under-
mining that truth, should be seen as evidence of its validity. This position,
although somewhat absurdly self-justifying, may nevertheless afford a useful
perspective upon Joyces relationship with Utopianism. To extend Marcuses
argument that Utopianism is validated by its exclusion from normative
480

probability, then we might suggest that it is only possible insofar as it is

impossibleor that it, in Paul Ricoeurs words, extends to the boundary line
between the possible and the impossible.49 Utopianism is valuable precisely
because of its impossibility: because it can never be achieved, it is always
formative or aspirational, dynamic, and progressive. Ricoeur suggests that
we might therefore see Utopia not as a fixed state beyond material history
or the human condition but as exactly the opposite of that: the utopian ele-
ment may be the notion of humanity that we are directed toward and that we
unceasingly attempt to bring to life.50 It is because the end is virtually unat-
tainable that the effortand therefore the progressis unceasing.
This mode of Utopian discourse imagined by Ricoeur bears the dynamism
of Wellss Modern Utopia alongside the transcendent aspirationalism of Bloch
and Marcuse. It is at once profoundly historical and at the same time functions
as a prologue to its own history of possibility. If it is absurd, then it may simul-
taneously celebrate, ironize, satirize, and problematize its own absurdity. This
is a mode of Utopianism that the likes of Wells, Bloch, and Marcuse might
have witnessed in the work of their contemporary, James Joyce, the author of
his own PROBAPOSSIBLE PROLEGOMENA TO IDEAREAL HISTORY.51
In synthesizing and problematizing aspects of both Utopian and dysto-
pian discourses contemporary and antecedent to his own writing, Joyce is
able to move beyondand indeed to deconstructthe polarizations inherent
in these discourses. Tobin Siebers has written that if modernism expresses
the desire to capture a sense of wholeness, of the end of destiny pictured
in single objects, be they Finnegans Wake or a Brancusi sculpture, then the
very concept of world war is modernist. It is in response to this concept that
postmodernism will define itself.52 Yet Siebers seems to have missed how
open-ended, heteroglossic, and polysemic Finnegans Wake in fact is. In its plu-
rality of voices and perspectives, Joyces work ultimately comes to refute the
totalizing structures and absolutist strategies of the modernist period and
comes to synthesize, as is surely the essence of the Utopian project, from the
present and the past the radical possibilities of futurityin a text that pro-
gresses modernism into postmodernism, a book that according to Valentine
Cunningham would not exist were it not for the pre-existence of historical
texts and historical phenomena antecedent to it and which Cunningham has
described as the absolute text of (post)modernism53a text that projects
the history of cultural tradition through its contemporary modernity into a
pluralistic future, yet which is absolute only in that it is absolutely transitional.
481

3. James Joyce and Utopianism
Modernism in the arts is often distinguished by a tendency to universalize

and to totalize, to advance theories of everything, whether Utopian, dysto-
pian, humanistic, fascistic, leftist, mythological, theological, or philosophical.
Joyces work is frequently characterized as more than averagely universalist in
its approach, and its increasingly comedic, progressive, and ameliorative tone
thereby leads it in a direction that might be depicted as Utopian. But to what
extent does it fulfill this Utopian model? And to what extent might it in fact
transcend this traditional model, simultaneously deconstructing and trans-
lating into historical materiality a Platonic ideal as enchanting and illusory
asAraby?54
Between World Wars I and II there was a view not uncommon in literary
circles that the more radical expressions of high culture might prevent the
impending collapse of civilization. For some, the experiments of modernism
like those of Nazism, Fascism, or Stalinismwould offer a panacea for the ills
of European society. Literature was perceived, in the words of I. A. Richards,
as capable of saving us . . . a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos.55
As George Gordon wrote, there emerged a belief that England was sick ...
and English literature must save it.56 Indeed, Gordon went on to depict a
doctrine that literature was a holy remedy . . . the only sacrament now left.57
James Joyce famously refuted claims that he was a literary Jesus
Christyet there remain in his work echoes of an ambition to renove that
bible.58 This promise of cultural and spiritual renewal appears to represent
the ultimate object of a project to synthesize a sense of Irish and European
nationhood on an epic scale. This shift from historicity into a transcendent
alterity might for the moment be characterized as Utopian.
Erich Auerbach saw Ulysses as a representational totality, an encyclopae-
dic work, a mirror of Dublin, of Ireland, a mirror too of Europe and its mil-
lennia.59 T. S. Eliot went further than this: he discovered in Joyces work the
articulation of a totalizing and transformational vision not dissimilar to his
owna way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance
to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary his-
tory.60 In The Waste Land, his own survey of European civilization published
the same year as Ulysses, Eliot mythologized this historical situation into a
dystopian tragedy. Joyces comedic affirmation, by contrast, appeared to Eliot
the enunciation of a redemptive Utopianism.
482

In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Ulysses, Declan Kiberd

echoes this shift from the historical to the ideal. Kiberd proposes that Ulysses
is an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds the mirror up to the
colonial capital that was Dublin, 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive
glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those uto-
pian moments.61 In James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, Jean-Michel Rabat
suggests that Joyces ultimate literary gamble . . . has to do with a collec-
tive utopia blending language and politics, a radical utopia with avant-gardist
and anarchist overtones.62 Evans Lansing Smith meanwhile portrays Ulysses
as a novel in which the millennial hopes for renewal cherished by Leop-
old Bloom focus on a fantasized suburban Utopia, referred to as the New
Bloomusalem63while Kieran Keohane sees Bloom himself as embodying
heroic utopian qualities.64
Bloom may be a Utopianist, or at least have moments of idealism or
Utopianism, but it might seem eccentric to suggest that he represents a
Utopian character or a character embodying Utopian qualitiesin the style
of one of Mores two-dimensional model citizens. For Keohane, however,
Bloom represents a utopian idealone that maintains the possibility of the
utopian moment of openness and the promise of futurity in the uncontrol-
lable adventure of modern democratic life.65 Yet Keohanes equation of the
Utopian with openness, futurity, and uncontrollability (indeed, some might
add, with democracy itself ) is not necessarily self-evident. The Utopian system
tends, of course, toward the closed and the controlledinsofar as both are
attributes of the perfected; and if Utopia represents a perfected stability, then
notions of futurity (in terms at least of dialectical history) no longer seem
appropriate: the Utopian way of life, writes More, [is] one which, in all
human probability, will last forever.66 In these terms, Utopias are fixed struc-
tures, and often authoritarian ones at that. Utopia is an absolute, an earthly
paradise.
According to his onetime amanuensis Samuel Becketts essay on Finnegans
Wake (a text for whose composition Beckett had taken dictation), Joyces final
novel is, conversely, purgatorial through its insistence upon the abso-
lute absence of the Absolute.67 This rejection of absolute positions recurs
throughout Joyces work, as when, for example, Stephen Dedalus experiences
his ambivalent epiphanies of transcendental romance and absolutist religion
and in the pluralistic paradoxes of Leopold Bloom. If Bloom represents not
only openness and idealism but also a dynamic combination of Evans Smiths
483

bourgeois suburbanism and Rabats anarchic radicalism, then it may be that

he comes to resemble the very antithesis of the clich of Utopianism.
Fredric Jameson views Joyces single-handed construction of a whole
world as an image . . . of a Utopian transformation of human life.68 James-
ons Utopianist notion of construction-as-transformation recalls Morriss
dream of the conscious sensuous pleasure of all workwhen all work is
art.69 Yet Jameson stresses that Joyces work offers merely an image or an illu-
sion of Utopian construction, not a model for progress but a practice immea-
surably beyond the power of the vast majority of humankind. However,
Jameson appears at first to fail to see that Joyces work itself already appears
aware of this crippling paradox. Jameson views Joyces work as an arche-
typal modernist projecteven goes so far as to offer Ulysses as the quickest
shorthand reference to the modernist noveland thereby links Ulysses with
the Utopian, anti-middle-class impulses of high modernism.70 What he fails
here to recognize is that Ulysses is also simultaneously the opposite (or at least
the critique) of all this.
At the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers, Karl Radek famously condemned
Joyces anally retentive bourgeois tendencies by comparing Ulysses with the
component parts of a heap of dung.71 It is certainly difficult to see bourgeois-
suburban Joyce-Bloom as the epitome of the Modernist-Utopian tradition
advanced by Jameson. Ulysses is a novel of immense and endless structuration,
but one that resists structure itself, which resists the closure and determinism
of epic or stereotypically Utopian mythologization. Joyces work would most
obviously take place in the comic-ironicrather than the mythicstages of
Northrop Fryes generic cycle. As Jameson himself suggests, The incompa-
rable greatness of [Ulysses] comes from its incomplete use of myth: Joyce lets
us see that the myth is nothing but an organizational device, and his subject
is not some fictive unity of experience which the myth is supposed to guar-
antee, but rather that fragmentation of life in the modern world.72 So much,
then, for artificial or organic unities: so much, then, for a Joycean Utopia.
Or perhaps one should say that Joyces version of Utopia, such as it is,
may owe less to a stereotypically monolithic view of Utopia than to the lyri-
cal pluralities of the authors real homeland. Indeed, Joyces work is often
much more Moore than More: not Thomas More but Thomas Moore, the
composer of Moores Irish Melodies (1846). As Atherton points out, Finnegans
Wake quotes all the titles of Moores Melodies.73 But Joyces final novel in its
unmatchable polysemy appears on occasion to be alluding at once to Moore
484

and More: a basketful of priesters . . . to aroint him with tummy moors

maladies.74 Utopianism is, in Joyces terms, a priestly or proselytizing malady;
the arcadian myth is a sickness, an unremitting nostalgia for the golden age,
an ague: the golden age must return with its vengeance. . . . Ague will be
rejuvenated.75
Joyces distance from the Utopian stereotype seems irrefutable: Utopian
placelessness is the very opposite of Joyces insistence upon place. Joyces
dream space is Dublin, the reality of his Irish homeland, the country he
said he never really left. News from Nowhere therefore becomes news from
Naul76the Utopian nowhere is replaced by a real place. (Naul is a village
not far from Dublin.) Finn Fordham proposes that Finnegans Wakes language
is utopian because it is an ideal language from no place77yet this language
is surely as much of every place as it is of no place. It is a language that is as
rooted as it is universal, even if it is rooted in Irelands (or the Irish peoples)
nomadic universalism. It is, as such, a much more material language than
those invented languages it appears to mockthe Esperanto of funktas and
fartas78or, for that matter, the invented language of Volapk, revisited by
Joyce as vollapluck.79 Esperanto and Volapk were both invented toward
the end of the nineteenth centurythe former as a language to promote
international peace and understanding, the latter in response to a divine rev-
elation. Both are missionary projects and are therefore stereotypically Uto-
pian in that they are more focused upon their teleology than upon their his-
torical origins; by contrast, the language of Finnegans Wake is focused upon
its history, insofar as its project is to project that provenance into its dream
of futurity. If Utopia is founded within the invented or imaginary, then(as
Ferns has suggested) like Wellss Modern Utopiait cannot connect with a
reality with which its alterity shares no common provenance; if, on the other
hand, it is grounded in material history and elaborates that materiality into
its imaginary (along with all of the pluralities and paradoxes of that reality),
then, like Finnegans Wake, it may strive to transcend the constraints of the
imaginary. In that sense Utopian fiction or art that at once projects Utopian
desire but also reflects upon the placelessness or impossibility of the fulfill-
ment of that desire (i.e., a fiction that materially inscribes its contradictions)
may be more realizable than that desire in itself. That is to say, paradoxically,
the Utopian imaginary (the self-conscious and therefore self-critical imagi-
nary of Utopian fiction) may be more real than the imaginary but ahistorical
realism of Utopian theory.
485

Wolfgang Wicht suggests that Joyces textual world establishes itself as

a counter-site which is outside all places, oppositional both to messianic uto-
pias and contingent social practices.80 Yet isnt Joyces work, at the same time
asit represents the antithesis to those things, also an amalgam of thosethings
themselves: at once outside and inside everything; the carnivalesque that
addresses its own conditions of license, which includes its own excludedness;
the possibility of idealism and idealization sited within real political geogra-
phy and simultaneously the impossibility of this?
In his review (for Utopian Studies) of Wichts Utopianism in James Joyces
Ulysses, David Samuelson points out that Ulysses undercuts nearly every-
thing it presents, and challenges its readers to question its own and their own
levels of reality.81 Wicht stresses the same point himself: the text decon-
structs the axiological, ideological and intentional implications encoded in
utopian projectsthe text unmasks . . . the deceptiveness and incongruity
of utopian social notions and messianic promises.82 Wicht underlines the
emphasis that Joyce puts upon the contradictions within Utopianisms reifica-
tion of its discursive alterity and its collapse in the face of material reality:
Ulysses reveals that the object of the utopian dream is lost once it is designed
as real.83
Wicht announces Joyces deconstructive disclosure of the utopian as
ideological.84 He suggests in his analysis of Ulysses that Joyce reveals to
us that the archetype of a structural pattern is fashioned that turns utopian
messianism into dictatorial political practice.85 Like Thomas Mores domain
sustained on slavery, Britains colonial Utopia proves, in Ulysses, no more than
a great empire . . . of drudges and whipped serfsyet its subjects, the
unfortunate yahoos, continue to believe in its ideal of itself.86 Furthermore,
as Joyce also implies, this Utopian paradox is as descriptive of Irish national-
ism as it is of British imperialism.
Joyce reveals Utopian literatures potential for self-deconstruction while
at the same time rehearsing the converse hypocrisy and tyranny of literal-
ist political interpretations of that discourse. Joyce exposes the hypocrisy of
the Ireland of Mr. Deasy, the pseudo-pluralist nation that has the honour
of being the only country which never persecuted the jews only insofar as
she never let them in.87 He envisions the tyranny of the new Ireland and
new this, that and the other (a brave new republic that would exclude those
Anglophile, un-Irish Irish that cant speak their own language), the Utopia
anticipated by the nationalist CitizenJoyces Cyclopsan Ireland whose
486

people would come again and with a vengeance to vanquish a culture that
bears no music and no art and no literature worthy of the name.88 This
vengeful awakening is hardly the rebirth of Ireland that Joyce imagines in
Finnegans Wakeone that, by contrast, embraces and indeed appropriates
cultural pluralities. The Citizens vision reaches its absurd climax in the apoc-
alyptic and infernal nightmare invoked by that same Citizencalling on God
to slit the throats of the English dogsin Ulyssess Circe chapter: Brim-
stone fires spring up. . . . Thieves rob the slain. . . . The earth trembles. The
dead of Dublin . . . arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless
yawn.89
The latter follows eschatologically on from Leopold Blooms revelation
of his own New Bloomusalem. Bloom imagines two very different kinds of
Utopia in Ulysses: The first is this apocalyptic fantasy; the second, his rigorously
designed scheme for Flowerville. Joyce describes the former as a colossal edi-
fice with crystal roof, built in the shape of a huge pork kidney90it is a phan-
tasmagorical blend of the stately pleasure-dome of Coleridges Xanadu and
the Crystal Palace (built in London in 1851 to house the Great Exhibition)91
and one might suggest that Joyces novel itself, exuberant, exhibitionistic, and
encyclopedic as it is, is appropriately modeled by this symbolic architecture.
The fact that the New Bloomusalem is specifically constructed in the shape
of a pork kidney also reminds us of the insistent carnality and comicality of
Joyces project.
The New Bloomusalem is a resolutely physical place. Bloom offers new
worlds for old . . . weekly carnival . . . universal language92and it seems
significant that he stresses the value of the carnal alongside the linguistic.
In Blooms Utopia everyone will receive three acres of land and a cow.93 His
followers hand out sausage and, inevitably, loaves and fishes.94 Like Jona-
than Swift, Joyce realizes that you cannot create an Irish Utopia while people
are starving.95 The New Bloomusalem is a profoundly earthly Utopia or, as
Richard Ellmann has called it, a profane salvation.96
Mr. Blooms second envisioning of Utopia is a much more sober and
controlledbut similarly materialaffair. As Joyce has constructed Blooms
universe from its minutiae, so Bloom builds Flowerville out of its individual
objects: its plants, its books, its furnishings, its dinner gong and alabas-
ter lampits shrubbery and beehive arranged on humane principles.97
He imagines his own hobbies and recreations, his civic duties and schemes
of industrial and infrastructural reform. He carefully costs his project and
487

considers how he might afford it. He imagines the reclamation of wasteland

and the utilization of human excrement.98 Bloom painstakingly creates his
world in his own imagination, as Joyce does, from out of physical and eco-
nomic realities: Flowerville is at once a parody of Utopianist pedantry and
an incongruously (but perhaps necessarily) comedic expression of the realiz-
ability of Utopian ambition. Flowerville may be a fantasy, but it is one that is
constructed out of real cash and real filth.
Out of these reflections upon its impossibility, then, the promise of
Utopia seems to have become almost possible in its paradoxical grounding in
material reality. As Wicht has demonstrated, Ulysses explores the Utopian at a
literal and literary level; but it is Finnegans Wake that, in its dissolution of the
dictatorship of the aesthetic, enacts the innate failure of the project of per-
fectibility at the level of language itself and thereby realizes that projects pos-
sibilities in an emphatically physical realma Utopia again that provides real
food for the soul: When there shall be foods for vermin as full as foodsfor
the fett, eat on earth as theres hot in oven.99
4. James Joyce and Irony
If Joyces writing seems, from a purely chronological perspective on his works,

increasingly comedic, then we may see it as eschewing the tragedic or even
farcical cycles of historical inevitability that Karl Marx diagnosedas it moves
from the maleficent and sinful being100 (or state of being) of the paralysis
of Dubliners toward a perspective in which historical repetition is confronted
with the possibility of developmental change: history repeating itself with
a difference.101 This may be why Finnegans Wake adds an extra age to Vicos
historical cycles, an age of chaos and of contradictions but therefore one of
pluralistic possibilities in its disunited kingdom.102 Joyce, in this sense, signi-
fies choicea joyful and comedic array of literary and linguistic possibilities:
acomedy of letters.103 At the level of literary language, this phenomenon is
perhaps most clearly manifested in Joyces emphasis upon a semantic inde-
terminacy that liberates the reader from authorial authority through such
linguistic and rhetorical devices as ambiguity and irony. Giambattista Vico
supposed that irony is formed from falsehood by dint of a reflection which
borrows a mask of truth.104 Joyces ultimate irony is herein based, if not
upon the certainty of falsehood, then upon the definitive and irretrievable
488

indeterminacy of what purports to be an absolute transparency of language

and therefore a medium of transcendental truth.
To what extent, then, is this ironizationthis celebration and cerebra-
tion of indeterminacyconsistent with a progressive and dynamic mode of
Utopian thought? Or might it indeed be supposed that this inscription of a
plurality of perspectives is not only consistent with but essential to a mode
of Utopianism as an expression of the manifestation of imagination in a
moment at which art and theory convergeinsofar as such contradictions
allow for the fact that, as Walt Whitman suggested, we are large and con-
tain multitudes105and inasmuch as (in Karl Poppers words) irrefutability
is not a virtue of theory . . . but a vice, in that every genuine test of a theory
is an attempt to falsify it?106 Could the imaginary testing of theory advanced
by art offer the beginning of a grounding of theory in historical materiality?
Could art build its Utopian foundations precisely by deconstructing them?
Joyces world constantly undermines its own foundations. In this
respect its aesthetic system resembles the perspective of Samuel Butlers
Erewhonians: when they profess themselves to be quite certain about any
matter, and avow it as a base on which they are to build a system of practice,
they seldom quite believe in itthey very often do not believe or mean
things which they profess to regard as indisputable.107 Thus Stephen Dedalus
in Ulysses (and in the National Library), having elaborated at some length his
extraordinary biographical exegesis of the works of William Shakespeare, is
asked whether he believes his own theory and replies that he does not.
Joyces vision of the world is based not upon certain faith but upon what
Jean-Michel Rabat has described as the relativity of doubtdoubt oddly
appears as the only firm ground on which the edifice of the work steadies and
secures itself.108 Indeed, doubt, according to Rabat, offers a key . . . because
of the great suspension it affords, to the essence of Life.109 This sense of doubt
is therefore not only deconstructive: it is both substantive and constructive.
Irony and uncertainty are tonally and philosophically central to Joyces work:
this is what Herring dubbed Joyces Uncertainty Principle. His world is a plural-
ist, shifting, and ambiguous spaceyet (or because) it remains an irreducibly
real, historical, and material space, one that challenges its own idealization. It
is the creation of an author who denied his own artistic apotheosis, an echo
of the similarly discordant literary, political, and religious canonization of
Thomas More. It is, after all, the work of a writer who argued that a man is a
martyr only for things of which he is not quite sure.110 Insofar as the certainty
489

of salvation might negate its weight of sacrifice, Jesuss death, for example,
is therefore valorized, in Matthew 27:46, by his loss of absolute faith: My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? It is a similar rejection of total
dependence upon external forces, be they divine or historical, that heroically
shifts the Homeric epic toward Joycean humanism.
Mr. Leopold Bloom, at the end of his ruminations upon the civic Utopian
project of Flowerville, wonders why he should meditate on schemes so dif-
ficult of realisation.111 His answer is that such dreams help him to sleep. This,
then, is the corporeal extent of the consolation of Joycean philosophy. Joyce
eventually eschews the totalizing and transcendental metanarratives and
grand theories of post-Morean Utopianist literalismdespite the portentous
claims that he and others have made for his work.
Jacques Derrida, for example, tells of being asked by an American tourist
in a Tokyo hotel whether there is a single definitive book. Derrida writes that
he almost replied that there are two of them, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.112
Derrida depicts Finnegans Wake as a hypermnesiac machineone that con-
tains all cultures, histories, languages, and literatures: you can say nothing
that is not programmed on this 1000th generation computer.113 Derrida dis-
covers divinityYahwehin Finnegans Wake; but there we might more per-
tinently also find Joyces Yahoos: truemen like yahoomen.114 If all men are
Yahooswho are, as Swift emphasizes, creatures of deceitthen true men
cannot be men of truth. Humanity no longer matches its divine self-image:
When is a man not a man? . . . [W]hen he is a . . . Sham.115 In its prag-
matic reflection of material reality, Finnegans Wake reveals its own idealiza-
tions as counterfeit. Thus Derrida comes to witness the simulacrum of this
forgery.. . the ruse of the invented word.116
At first sight, Finnegans Wake offers itself as a text of infinite cyclicity and
relentless resurrection: Finn, again117but also start againwake. As such,
it melds the finis(h) with the phoenixengendering the Phoenis118 or the
phoenish119 in a manner that is resolutely Irish (Irelands material geography
and history are recalled in these phonemes echoes of Finnegans, Fenians, and
Phoenix Park) and at the same time self-consciously linguistic: Joyces phoenix
text is primarily a phonic text.
Umberto Eco has thus suggested that Finnegans Wake synthesizes a rigid
correspondence between phonetic and semantic suggestion.120 Its portman-
teau words, by generating semantic structures out of phonetic resemblance,
appear to deconstruct the unbridgeable Saussurean gap between signifier and
490

signifiedor, as Joyce himself puts it, make soundsense and sensesound kin
again.121
This phoneticsemantic relationship purports to transcend languages
failure to mean. As such it might claim to transcend (in a way we might see as
Utopian in a Thomist or Blochian sense) the inherent problems of the mate-
rial human condition. For Joyce this eventually represents a transformation
of death (which is the ultimate loss of meaning) into life (or at least into the
infinite and immortal memory that literature encompasses). The phonic turns
the finis into the phoenix; yet for Joyce this symbol of resurrection and redemp-
tion is not unproblematic in itself (or in the tension between the Utopian
ambition and the real history that it holds in suspension): It is Fiendish and
sphinxishit is a foenixa plagiarist, a parasite, a parrot.122 It is parodys
bird rather than any Utopian bird of paradise.123 As Herring has suggested,
this is a text that witnesses language at war with itself.124
Meanwhile another word underpins and undermines the finis/phoenix/
phonic suite of phonemes: that word, inevitably, is phoney. The possibility of a
positive, direct, and lucid relationship between signifier and signified is counter-
feit: Joyce herein reveals his own phoney habit . . . in his clairaudience.125 The
promise of phonic redemption proves false and even risible, not only phoney
but ineluctably funny, in Joyces tellafun book.126
As he pledged at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce has
succeeded in forging (both creating and counterfeiting) his world. Daedalus
the master architect is also his own son Icarus, the overreacher destined for
oblivion. This is the Joyce who has forged out his sentencesthe pseudo-
messianic author of a piously forged work.127 If this work is a transcendental
epic, a narrative of nationhood, then it is an epical forged chequeevery
dimmed letter of it . . . a copy . . . the last word in stolentelling.128 This indeed
is Derridas forged simulacrum: the shamwork129 that reveals that Finnegans
Wake was always, as its title announces, a massive F . . . ake.
However, it is not so much that Joyce is denouncing his own project; it is
more that he is inscribing his critics, allowing his refutations lease to disprove
his works positiongiving them enough rope to let them bind themselves
ineluctably within that position. The voices of artist and critic are bound
up into a Joycean harmony of contradiction (in Finnegans Wake chaos finds
itself harmonious): as Finn Fordham has suggested, the relation between
Shem and Shaun is like that between two parts of his own self: the visionary
artist . . . and the revisionary critic who chides, reproaches, denigrates, and
491

even slanders. There is an interchangeability in these inseparable twins.130

The vision can only be realized through confrontation and reconciliation
with its opposite. The Utopian and the anti-Utopian (which is not the dys-
topian but the critique of the Utopian essential for the realization of Utopia)
bring each other into being. It is the dynamic friction between them that con-
cretizes Utopian abstraction.
Joyce reminds us that this explicit admission of the counterfeit nature
of the Utopian project has lain at the heart of literary manifestations of
Utopia since Thomas More coined that self-emptying termor indeed
since More dubbed his perfection of all parliaments (in his Latin original)
Mentiranusor (in Turners translation) Lietalk.131 The true Eutopia is, by con-
trast, a realm of absolute truth: it is the land of Swifts Houyhnhnms, who
have no word . . . to express lying or falsehood.132 Theirs is a civilization
without words for power or governmentone that has attained such perfec-
tion that the only topic remaining to debate at its quadrennial assembly is
whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth.133
Joyces (and Mores) continuing insistence upon the problematics of Utopian
idealization defers the finality of this Swiftian solutiona state of perfection
whose genocidal ambitions make those of Swifts Modest Proposal seem truly
modest by comparison.
The great builder of worlds denounces his own projectand therefore
every totalizing, world-building literary or political enterprise, be it histori-
cal (epic) or fantastical (Utopian): you have reared your disunited kingdom
on the vacuum of your own most intensely doubtful soul.134 Ulysses does
not transcend the dystopian paralysis of Dubliners;135 but in the euphoria
of Bloomsday it may take Finnegans Wake to remind us of that. Ulysses is a
mock epic in the same way that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is mock-
epiphanic: the young Stephen Dedaluss eager epiphaniesof family, sexu-
ality, religion, romance, and philosophyultimately (when confronted with
material circumstances) do not quite attain the transcendental climaxes he
might have expected of them. Ulyssess Utopian cornucopia might thereby be
seen as eventually as anticlimactic as Dublinerss exotic dreamsthe Eastern
enchantment of Araby.136 But that would be to impose a closure upon
Ulyssesor, for that matter, upon Finnegans Wakethat the text stridently
resists. It is not that these texts fail to attain their visions; it is just that they
have not done so yet. Their endings (if they can be said to have endings)
are therefore not so much anticlimactic as affirmingly preclimactic. As such,
492

they seem to represent a mode of that foreplay that Jacques Derrida sees
as the province of literary pleasures. But while Derrida views such textual
pleasure as null and endless,137 Joyces later work might be characterized as
endless (which is not to say directionless) and full: an inexhaustible crescendo
of Barthesian jouissance.
Louis Althusser once invoked a new philosophy, one which was no
longer an interpretation, but rather a transformation of the world.138 Yet Joyce
at times reminds us that texts are merely representational and interpreta-
tionalthey are not literally or fundamentally transformative; they do not
in the end build brave new worlds, try though they may. As Roland Barthes
would suggest, dominant meanings are privileged in the generation of such
connotative semantic structures as literatures and cultures: this process for
the most part represents an act of ideological reinforcement, one contained
within Orwells hegemonic whale. At its most radical, therefore, literature
may from this perspective advance a work of subversion or deconstruction
rather than one of intentional revolutionary constructionthe synthesis of a
satirical Laputa rather than of a realizable Utopia.
Nicholas Brown proposes that in a first, utopian moment, Ulysses
short-circuits the rift between subjectivity and the object-world, miraculously
imbuing the accidents of daily life with inscrutable significance. However,
as Brown adds, this Utopia fails to bear on an actuality for which it can only
compensate. But in a second moment this failure makes itself manifest.139
In Jamesons words, such manifestations of the anti-Utopian impulse as
those we appear to witness in Joyces work may afford the discovery that
our most energetic imaginative leaps into radical alternatives were little more
than the projections of our own social moment and historical or subjective
situation.140
Material history translates the soaring dreams of Daedalus into the down-
fall of his son. Joyces apparent bourgeois distrust of progressivist idealism
or Utopianismrecalls that of Edward Bellamys nineteenth-century social
skeptics: The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the
career of humanity. . . . The race attained the perihelion of civilization only
to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.141
Those who share Bellamys aversion to this bourgeois skepticism might do
well to consider whether the end of the twentieth century saw Bellamys
golden future to humanity or in fact the era of corporate tyranny that
these skeptics predicted.142
493

Reality inevitably interrupts the dream: you cannot have theHouyhnhnms

without the Yahoos. You cannot have the Utopian visionaries without their
literalist interpreters. Lenin once wrote that without revolutionary theory
there can be no revolutionary movement.143 Paradoxically, the problem is
that the converse is also true. The problem is not the writers who do not
quite believe their own theories: the problem is their fundamentalist followers
whodo.
Mr. Leopold Bloom vainly explains to his own literalist Yahoos, the
Cyclopean clientele of Barney Kiernans, his belief that any hope of futurity
should not be focused upon Utopian dreams of a New Jerusalem but simply
upon loveupon Ulyssess own final affirmation of love, its immortal and
uncompromising Yes.144 Yet, in spite of this (or because of this), Joyce and
Bloom continue to dream (deconstructively yet irrevocably) of their Utopia
that overtly absurd golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the
Nova Hibernia of the future.145
As Jacques Derrida proposes, by continuing to dream the Utopian dream
we refute its impossibility: Tragedy would leave this strange sense, a contin-
gent one finally, that we must affirm and learn to love instead of dreaming of
the innumerable. . . . But where would the dream . . . come from if it is indeed
a dream? Does not the dream itself prove that what is dreamt of must be
there in order for it to provide the dream?146 William Morris similarly argues
of his own Utopia, his Nowhere, that if others can see it as I have seen it,
then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.147 Morris believes that if it
were merely a dream, he should not have been conscious all along that [he]
was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in . . . the
distrust of this time of doubt and struggle.148
In a parallel fashion, Edward Bellamys narrator, toward the end of Look-
ing Backward, awakens from his dream of a Utopian twentieth century and
finds himself again in the suddenly dystopian Boston of the nineteenth cen-
tury. But a few pages later he wakes from that nightmare to discover that his
return to the nineteenth century had been the dream, and [his] presence in
the twentieth was the reality.149 By enveloping contemporary material real-
ity within the dream, Morris and Bellamy maintain the possibility that their
Utopian visions may overcome that reality.
Blooms own vision of the New Bloomusalem takes place in a similarly
ambiguous realm between dream and reality, as if Joyce remains unwilling
finally to consign that paradigm to either state. This ambivalence perhaps
494

recalls Mores Utopian city of Amaurotum, that amaurotic or (visually)

obscure domain that, as Turner reminds us, recalls the vagueness of Penelo-
pes vision of Athene in Homers Odyssey.150 Leopold Blooms Utopia remains
correspondingly blurred (as if by Joyces own failing eyesight) between the
Homeric ideal and the historical real.
James Joyces work acknowledges that from Plato to More and Morris,
we continue to cling toto assert the possibility ofour Utopian dreams,
despite all the material evidence: All kinds of Utopian plans were flashing
through his . . . busy brain.151 One therefore eventually comes to wonder
whether Joyces pragmatism is really anti-Utopian at allor whether it is in
fact meta-Utopian: a Utopianism that, in recognizing the tensions inherent
to its relationship with the real (tensions ignored, for example, in the shift
from Marxism into Leninism), not only self-consciously deconstructs but also
therefore sustains itself.
Jameson defines the meta-Utopian as including both the Utopia and its
generic adversary.152 Tom Moylan identifies within a parallel mode of self-
critical utopian discourse the potential for a process that can tear apart the
dominant ideological web.153 One might inquire, in this context, whether
Thomas Mores own apparent Utopianism does not immanently resolve itself,
or fail to resolve itself, into a similar set of practices. More himself challenges
the condition of his Utopian citizens by announcing the grand absurdity on
which their whole society was based.154 Mores satire upon Utopia occupies
precisely the same textual space (which is therefore a metatextual space, a
paradoxical and impossible space, a no-place) as does the satire upon his own
sociopolitical reality, which that Utopia/Utopia represents. It is through this
self-problematizing praxis (and its implicit and essential rejection of autar-
chy) that More offers the possibility of Moylans critical Utopia: a seditious
expression of social change . . . in a permanently open process of envisaging
what is not yet.155
If the Utopian breaks down upon its contact with material history, then
perhaps by inscribingand, more importantly, integratingits antithesis and
its own absurdity within itself (as indeed Mores Utopia literallyby the argu-
ment of its first partdoes), it might achieve a balance and a self-awareness
sufficient to sustain it beyond the moment of its conception, the revolution-
ary or revelatory moment, and to translate its abstraction into the very mate-
riality, the physical placedness, that had originally threatened to extinguish
it. Finnegans Wake may be a dreambut it is a cyclic one: one from which
495

the reader can never awake, yet within which its own waking-from is already
inscribed and therefore preempted. Yet does this Viconian cyclicity refute
the possibility of Utopia? Utopian historicity is necessarily progressive and
teleological, rather than endlessly cyclic. But it seems that these two posi-
tions might be reconciled if we view the cycle itself as dynamically Utopian,
rather than any single point in that cyclethe divine, heroic, democratic, or
chaoticas a necessary end point, a stereotypically static Utopia.
This opposition between the static and the dynamicand the triumph
of the latter in Finnegans Wakeis modeled by Sheldon Brivic in terms of
Joyces symbolic uses of gender within the novel: The male story enacts
conflict and decline, but the female one may be seen as showing discovery
and development that proceed through the disintegration of the discourse of
patriarchal coherence.156 Yet one might suggest not so much that the novel
is about gender difference as that it deploys gender difference to symbolize
the dichotomy between the static and dynamic historical perspectives upon
which it reflects. Brivic admits that his feminist reading of Finnegans Wake
should not claim to reveal the novels ultimate or real meaningand if (as
he writes) the novel represents history as progress through literary work
in a way that offers freedom through the disintegration of stable identity,157
then it may be that, in order to engage with that progressive idealism, such
determining terminologies as feminismor Utopianism, for that matterand
all of the categorical polarizations they involve might no longer seem par-
ticularly relevant. A static Utopia has no need for Utopianists (perfect worlds
do not need dreamers); and a dynamic Utopiaa world populated by such
aspirantswould have no need for such deterministic, static, and outmoded
categorizations. A progressive Utopia must be unfinished; it is not a state but
a perpetual coming-into-state in which all of its subjects continue to dream,
to hope, to aspire. This work of progress is, like Finnegans Wake, an unending
work in progress. It may at first seem incongruous that this Utopia of unceas-
ing movement is also the Utopia of real, material place, but it is clear that
one of the defining characteristics of material reality is that it never stays still.
This unceasing flow is precisely what, according to Julia Kristeva, articu-
lates the semiotic function of writing in what she calls a pulsating chora158
an idea glossed by Brivic as the level of maternal pulsation in language.159
Kristeva identifies this chora as a totality formed by the [semiotic] drives...
in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.160 She cites Joyces
work as representative of that rare set of literary texts that cover the infinity
496

of the [signifying] process, that is, reach the semiotic chora.161 In that Joyces
writing confronts patriarchal regulation with this deconstructive, progres-
sive, and chaotic flow, its attraction to feminist theorists is clear: as Brivic
notes, Joyces experiments directly inspired two of the leading thinkers of
the criture fminine movement, Hlne Cixous and Julia Kristeva.162 Like
poststructuralist feminism, Joyces work advances a mode of Utopianism
that necessarily resists categorization. In discussing her notion of criture
fminine (a literary form in which she includes Joyces workindeed she
wrote her doctoral thesis on Joyce),163 Hlne Cixous has suggested that it
is impossible to define such modes of writing and that this is an impos-
sibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed,
codedwhich doesnt mean that it doesnt exist.164 While Herbert Marcuse
may have suggested that the Utopian is validated by its categorization as
such (and thereby by its exclusion from normative, hegemonic discourse),
the mode of Utopianism expressed by Kristevas chora or Cixouss criture
fminine is validated by virtue of the fact that it cannot be so categorized.
Like Joyces word known to all men,165 Utopia is too fluid for such reduc-
tive definition.
Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses, expansively describes the Utopian as afford-
ing no known method from the known to the unknown.166 Utopia is a place
that is impossible to arrive at by any known route, in that it is not really a
place at all. It is therefore essential that, in order to reach Utopia, one takes
an unknown and unknowable route, a path determined by its indeterminacy,
a passage that deconstructs its own rationalistic epistemological foundations.
It is only in its paradoxical nature that such a route, beyond sense (which
forbids entry into the unreal), might discover the reality of that unreality.
For, in the end, despite its fantastical absurditiesits self-conscious nowhere-
nessJoyces Dublin, like Butlers Erewhon, is the opposite of nowhere: it is
somewhere. It is by inscribing the material (the somewhere) within the dream
(the nowhere) that the dream might be sustained; and it is also by inscribing
the dream within the real that material existence can continue.
Ruth Levitas has suggested that in the move beyond modernism, the
Utopian method needs to be seen as provisional . . . dialogic . . . and . . .
reflexive.167 Joyce himself makes this move: his work does not engage in the
theoretical absolutism of so much classical modernisman absolute faith in
the transcendental authority of theoretical ideals that so often led toward
a political fundamentalism of the Left or of the Right. By contrast, Joyces
497

writing operates from a heteroglossic perspective that parallels Bakhtin

and preempts postmodernist pluralism. Unlike Orwell or Huxley, Joyce
demonstrates that a democratic literary response to absolutist Utopianism
need not take the form of a cautionary dystopianism. Joyce instead offers an
affirmatory and comedic set of possibilities.
Milan Kundera has described this kind of comedy as echoing a joyous,
life-affirming laughterthe serious laughter of angels expressing their joy
of being.168 But that is not to suggest that there is anything divinely pious in
this position: if Joyce is an angel, then he is one, like Stephen Dedalus, who
will not blindly or uncritically serve.169 In commenting upon an earlier version
of this article, Patrick Parrinder spoke of the difficult relationship between
Utopia and comedy. This relationship is problematized by the fact that Uto-
pia rarely seems able to laugh at itself or therefore to offer the liberating pos-
sibilities of comedy. Joyces later writing, however, appears to advance the
rare chance of a pluralist, ambiguous, and dynamic vision of Utopia: a Utopia
that might be sustained into futuritya Utopia that still has room for dream-
ers and for democrats. But is it still possible that we can call this realm of radi-
cal openness, this flux of possibilities, this resolutely material site, Utopian?
And do we really need to? This kind of Utopia is not a category or a frame
but a direction, a progress, a confluence of streams of consciousness and of
unconsciousness, flowing into the river of life: not just a symbolic river but a
real one too, the Liffey, the great Anna Livia Plurabelle herself. Or as Joyce put
it, more succinctly (and more joyously), it is simply Lff!170
Notes
1. Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1975),
27071.
2. Kieran Keohane, The Revitalization of the City and the Demise of Joyces Utopian
Modern Subject, Theory, Culture, and Society 19, no. 3 (2002): 33; Colin McCabe, James
Joyces Ulysses: The End of Masculine Heroism, OpenDemocracy, July 1, 2004.
3. The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann
(New York: Cornell University Press, 1989), 145.
4. Cited in Robert Stam, Film Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 32.
5. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1986), 272.
6. Wolfgang Wicht, Utopianism in James Joyces Ulysses (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), 165.
7. Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner
(Oxford: Berg, 2005), 34.
498

8. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (London: Dodo Press, 2006), 23; Thomas More,
Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (London: Penguin, 1965), 103.
9. William Morris, News from Nowhere (London: Penguin, 1984), 207; More, Utopia,
3031, 34; Bacon, New Atlantis, 1.
10. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 33.
11. Bacon, New Atlantis, 7, 10.
12. Ibid., 10.
13. Joyce, Ulysses, 598.
14. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu (London: Penguin, 1946), 149.
15. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), 187.
16. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 148.
17. More, Utopia, 33, 38.
19. More, Utopia, 38.
21. More, Utopia, 78, 58.
23. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London: Penguin, 2005), 87.
24. Ibid., 11.
25. Ibid., 12.
26. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 1954), 172.
27. Wells, Modern Utopia, 81.
28. Chris Ferns, Narrating Utopia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 89.
29. Ibid., 98.
30. Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George Taylor (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 12.
31. H. G. Wells, Anticipations (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 163.
32. Ibid., 182.
33. Ibid., 194.
34. H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (London: Penguin, 2005), 361, 415.
35. Ibid., 34647.
36. See Ellmann, James Joyce, 414.
37. See ibid., 608.
38. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Panther, 1977), 192.
39. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), 20.
40. Thomas Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. Timothy McDermott
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 424.
41. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 3.
42. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 120, 53.
43. See Jeri Johnson, Composition and Publication History, in Ulysses, by James Joyce
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xl.
499

44. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 3. Cf. Joyce, Ulysses, 395, 591.

45. Darren Webb, Marx, Marxism, and Utopia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 159.
46. Ibid., 160.
47. Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 228.
48. Herbert Marcuse, Negations, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (London: Allen Lane, 1968),
143, xvii.
49. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 253.
50. Ibid.
51. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 262.
52. Tobin Siebers, What Does Postmodernism Want? Utopia, in Heterotopia:
Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994), 4.
53. Valentine Cunningham, Renoving That Bible: The Absolute Text of
(Post)Modernism, in The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Lanham, Md.:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1984), 47, 1.
54. James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Panther, 1977), 2531.
55. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1926),
8283.
56. George Gordon, Discipline of Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 12.
57. Ibid., 13.
58. Selected Letters of James Joyce, 106; Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 579.
59. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968), 547.
60. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 177.
61. Declan Kiberd, introduction to Ulysses, by James Joyce (London: Penguin, 1992), lxxx.
62. Jean-Michel Rabat, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge: Cambridge
63. Evans Lansing Smith, Ricorso and Revelation: An Archetypal Poetics of Modernism
(New York: Camden House, 1995), 130.
64. Keohane, Revitalization of the City and the Demise of Joyces Utopian Modern
Subject, 30.
65. Ibid., 40.
67. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (London: John Calder, 1983), 33.
68. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1991), 307.
69. Morris, News from Nowhere, 262.
70. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2007), 337, 89; Jameson,
Postmodernism, 56.
71. Andrei Zhdanov, Maxim Gorky, Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, and Aleksei Stesky,
Problems of Soviet Literature, trans. H. G. Scott (London: Martin Lawrence, 1935), 179.
72. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 263.
73. James Atherton, The Books at the Wake (London: Feffer and Simons, 1974), 269.
500


75. Ibid., 112.
76. Ibid., 333.
77. Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, 221; cf. 132.
78. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 160. The language is identified as Esperanto by William York
Tyndall, A Readers Guide to Finnegans Wake (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996),
130. See also Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 52 (identified as Esperanto by Tyndall, Readers Guide
to Finnegans Wake, 79).
80. Wicht, Utopianism in James Joyces Ulysses, 107.
81. David Samuelson, Wolfang Wicht. Utopianism in James Joyces Ulysses, Utopian
Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 279.
82. Wicht, Utopianism in James Joyces Ulysses, 9, 229.
83. Ibid., 11.
84. Ibid., 38.
85. Ibid., 92.
87. Ibid., 30.
88. Ibid., 25052, 255, 270, 267.
89. Ibid., 484, 488.
90. Ibid., 395.
91. The Poetical and Dramatic Works of S. T. Coleridge (London: William Pickering,
1847), 267.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid., 396.
95. Cf. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (London: Penguin, 2009).
96. Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber, 1984), 149.
98. Ibid., 590.
100. Joyce, Dubliners, 7.
103. Ibid., 425.
104. Giambattista Vico, Selected Writings, trans. Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge
105. Walt Whitman, A Choice of Whitmans Verse, ed. Donald Hall (London: Faber,
1968), 82.
106. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 2002), 48.
107. Samuel Butler, Erewhon (London: Penguin, 1985), 162, 174.
108. Jean-Michel Rabat, Joyce upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (London: Macmillan,
1991), 1, 35.
109. Ibid., xxv.
501

110. James Joyce, Stephen Hero (London: Panther, 1977), 157.

112. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge,
1992), 265.
113. Jacques Derrida, Two Words for Joyce, trans. Geoff Bennington, in Post-structuralist
Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984), 147.
115. Ibid., 170.
116. Derrida, Two Words for Joyce, 149.
118. Ibid., 590.
119. Ibid., 4, 322.
120. Umberto Eco, The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. Ellen Esrock (London:
Hutchinson, 1989), 53.
122. Ibid., 196, 324, 23, 182, 334, 493, 534.
123. Ibid., 11.
124. Phillip Herring, Joyces Uncertainty Principle (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1987), 181.
126. Ibid., 86.
127. Joyce, Stephen Hero, 66; Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 182.
128. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 181, 424.
129. Ibid., 613.
130. Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake, 221.
132. Jonathan Swift, Gullivers Travels (London: Penguin, 1985), 281.
133. Ibid., 291, 31819.
135. Joyce, Dubliners, 7.
136. Ibid., 27.
137. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981), 57.
138. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (Delhi: Aakar Books,
2006), 20.
139. Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 42.
141. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (London: Penguin, 1986), 43.
142. Ibid., 65, 64.
143. V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? trans. Robert Service (London: Penguin, 1989), 91.
144. Joyce, Ulysses, 273, 644.
145. Ibid., 395.
146. Jacques Derrida, Choreographies, Diacritics 12, no. 2 (1982): 76.
502

147. Morris, News from Nowhere, 301.

148. Ibid., 300301.
149. Bellamy, Looking Backward, 230.
150. More, Utopia, 153; Homer, Odyssey, 8586.
153. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination
(London: Methuen, 1986), 213.
155. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 213.
156. Sheldon Brivic, Joyces Waking Women (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1995), 5.
157. Ibid., 133, 135.
158. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984), 40.
159. Brivic, Joyces Waking Women, 29.
160. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 25.
161. Ibid., 88.
162. Brivic, Joyces Waking Women, 6.
163. Hlne Cixous, Lexil de Joyce ou lart du remplacement (Paris: Grasset, 1968).
164. Hlne Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in
The Portable Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 35.
165. Joyce, Ulysses, 41, 474.
166. Ibid., 575.
167. Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, paper
presented at Modernism and Utopia, Birmingham and Midland Institute, Birmingham,
England, April 2324, 2010.
168. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Heim (London:
Penguin, 1983), 233.
169. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 222; Joyce, Ulysses, 475.
503

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The Meta-Utopian Metatext: The Deconstructive

Dreams of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Utopian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2012

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 472 13/10/12 12:43 PM

1. James Joyce and the Epic

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 473 13/10/12 12:43 PM

At the age of twenty-one, James Joyce characterized the epical as that

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 474 13/10/12 12:43 PM

the indeterminacy of nationhood, an immanent uncertainty that echoes

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 475 13/10/12 12:43 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 476 13/10/12 12:43 PM

2. Three Utopian Contemporaries: Wells, Bloch, and Marcuse

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 477 13/10/12 12:43 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 478 13/10/12 12:44 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 479 13/10/12 12:44 PM

of Finnegans Wakes Plurabellethe bringer of Plurabilitiesis always

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 480 13/10/12 12:44 PM

probability, then we might suggest that it is only possible insofar as it is

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 481 13/10/12 12:44 PM

3. James Joyce and Utopianism

Modernism in the arts is often distinguished by a tendency to universalize

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 482 13/10/12 12:44 PM

In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Ulysses, Declan Kiberd

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 483 13/10/12 12:44 PM

bourgeois suburbanism and Rabats anarchic radicalism, then it may be that

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 484 13/10/12 12:44 PM

and More: a basketful of priesters . . . to aroint him with tummy moors

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 485 13/10/12 12:44 PM

Wolfgang Wicht suggests that Joyces textual world establishes itself as

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 486 13/10/12 12:44 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 487 13/10/12 12:44 PM

considers how he might afford it. He imagines the reclamation of wasteland

4. James Joyce and Irony

If Joyces writing seems, from a purely chronological perspective on his works,

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 488 13/10/12 12:44 PM

indeterminacy of what purports to be an absolute transparency of language

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 489 13/10/12 12:44 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 490 13/10/12 12:44 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 491 13/10/12 12:44 PM

even slanders. There is an interchangeability in these inseparable twins.130

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 492 13/10/12 12:44 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 493 13/10/12 12:44 PM

Reality inevitably interrupts the dream: you cannot have theHouyhnhnms

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 494 13/10/12 12:44 PM

recalls Mores Utopian city of Amaurotum, that amaurotic or (visually)

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 495 13/10/12 12:44 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 496 13/10/12 12:44 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 497 13/10/12 12:44 PM

writing operates from a heteroglossic perspective that parallels Bakhtin

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 498 13/10/12 12:44 PM

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 499 13/10/12 12:44 PM

44. Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 3. Cf. Joyce, Ulysses, 395, 591.

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 500 13/10/12 12:44 PM

74. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 492.

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 501 13/10/12 12:44 PM

110. James Joyce, Stephen Hero (London: Panther, 1977), 157.

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 502 13/10/12 12:44 PM

147. Morris, News from Nowhere, 301.

UTS 23.2_08_Charles.indd 503 13/10/12 12:44 PM