Toward the middle of the “Nighttown” episode ofUlysses,Leopold Bloom has become both Messiah and Ruler, but his hegemony is threatened by jeers from the Man in the Macintosh. Fearing that the populace will be alienated, Bloom and his bodyguard take immediate countermeasures: they distribute to the crowd “Maundy money, commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges . . . , 40 days’ indulgences, spurious coins,” and a host of similar items, all either cheap, useless, or counterfeit. But the climactic gift is a set of “cheap reprints of the World’s Twelve Worst Books: Froggy and Fritz (politic), Care...

Dublinersrecords the breaking of the silence: the silence before Joyce’s first mature work and the silence given to the child-protagonist in response to the multitude of passionate questions that he already knows he must refuse to ask. Certainly this is a book about the confrontation with languages at the most fundamental level. In each of the first three stories the child encounters an adult or group of adults who speak a different language, what might be termed a “language of the initiate” that refers perpetually to something always unstated but always implied in their speech. Through silences and gestures...

In most of the preceding stories, sexuality has played a leading role. Nascent and idealized in “Araby,” perverse in “An Encounter,” shackled to economics in “Two Gallants” and “The Boarding House,” it has still maintained a kind of innocent integrity and force as primum mobile. But in the stories of “maturity” sexuality itself appears mediated, especially by power relationships. In “A Little Cloud” Chandler’s sexuality is challenged by Gallaher’s grossly “masculine” personality and by his reduction of Chandler’s marriage to blind bondage, “put[ting] your head in the sack” (D, 81). Farrington’s only sexual venture in “Counterparts” is frustrated, while his...

To move fromDublinerstoA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manis to move from narration in which at most two or three narrative voices interact dialogically with protagonists’ voices to a narration that is radically destabilized, both dependent upon the protagonist’s voice and unable to be identified with it. Where inDublinersthe narration responded preeminently to the protagonist’s voice, only infrequently allowing subsidiary characters to affect its tonality, inPortraitmany subsidiary characters from Uncle Charles to Cranly enter into dialogical relationship with the narrative; each has a discrete zone of dialogical influence. In addition,...

If popular novels of the genre ofThe Count of Monte Cristoare the most significant formal precursors ofPortrait,at least from the perspective of the artist’s developing image, countless other evanescent works also come into dialogical interaction with Stephen’s consciousness as its verbal structures evolve within the novel. Paramount among the texts which offer a structure and a repertoire of images to the mind of the young Stephen are his schoolbooks. The few of these which are specified inPortraitinclude Doctor Cornwall’sSpelling Book(P, 10), the nameless geography text whose illustration of the earth among clouds...

Roughly between 1900 and 1915, Joyce apparently gave a great deal of serious thought to the problem of sexuality and marriage. In this he was entirely representative of “advanced” thought of the period in the British Isles. Perhaps, as Foucault has argued, this was not a radical break with Victorian repression; according to Foucault, sexuality had been encouraged as a topic of discourse since the seventeenth century: “A first survey . . . seems to indicate that since the end of the sixteenth century, the ‘putting into discourse of sex,’ far from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary...

The implications of a Bakhtinian reading of Joyce tend to be expansive rather than narrowing; that is, unlike other, perhaps more rigorous critical methodologies—such as the vulgar Marxist or the unreconstructed Freudian—Bakhtin’s questioning of texts produces widening circles of suggestion, instead of a reaffirmation of the tenets of the methodology by means of the text. There is no end to the dialogical interactions within a given text, nor to the intertextual relationships a book bears to its literary surroundings and antecedents. The final objects of Bakhtinian analysis might be said to be at one extreme the individual utterance,...