Cribs in the Countinghouse: Plagiarism, Proliferation, and Labour in ‘Oxen of the Sun’

Abstract

The ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses presents, on several levels, a debate about human proliferation and its effects on the political economy and on the quality of life. Depicting the painful and prolonged delivery of a child to Mina and Theodore Purefoy by means of a capsule history of English prose style, the episode first confronts the inescapable fact of literary debtorship and then demonstrates how Joyce both acknowledges the debts to his predecessors and makes literary capital from them. The episode’s two thematic planes intersect in Joyce’s borrowings from nineteenth-century writers, particularly John Ruskin, whose writings on value, labour, and political economy reveal the same conflicts displayed in the Ulysses episode. Like the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode that anticipates it, ‘Oxen of the Sun’ uses homologies between physical and artistic generation to translate the debate about human proliferation into a self-reflexive questioning of Joyce’s own artistic practice. As it explores parallels between Mr Purefoy’s work in a bank and Joyce’s management of the inter-textual economy, the episode also discloses relationships between the Purefoys’ prolific childbearing and Joyce’s prolixity and textual extravagance. By pairing the intertextual and political economies, ‘Oxen’ ultimately illustrates how Joyce privileges artistic labour — an Irish labour of excess that emerges from debt — over both the female labour of childbearing and the male labour of physical and financial begetting.