Abstract
The novel Ulysses shows not only that nationalism fails to envision what a nation actually looks like but also that any democratic vision of literature itself cannot, by definition, be contained within one form. If the current rise of the Alt-Right and Donald Trump suggests a trend toward what Zygmunt Bauman posthumously terms “retrotopia,” or a retreat from the global into the intensely local, tribal, and even fetal, then a renewed assessment of Joyce via Gilles Deleuze shows the broad failure of a variety of nationalist discourses in addressing who or what actually makes a nation or, in the words of Trump himself, “makes a nation great.” Oppressive retreats into tribalism do not make a nation “great” or even constitute a nation period; they only fail to account for the citizens that make up that very nation. In short, a retreat from diversity and difference is a failure of imagining the human condition, an imagining only aided by literature and critical theory as egalitarian as Joyce’s and Deleuze’s.
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Notes
- 1.
“Donald Trump in Scotland: ‘Brexit a Great Thing,’” BBC, last modified 24 June 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-36606184
- 2.
“EU Referendum – Results,” BBC, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/politics/eu_referendum/results
- 3.
Tori Watson, “Brexit Could Reignite Conflict in Northern Ireland,” BBC, last modified September 14, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-45513462
- 4.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16.
- 5.
Ibid, 78.
- 6.
Ibid, 78–79.
- 7.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 6.
- 8.
What Is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 158.
- 9.
Ibid, 105.
- 10.
Ibid, 105.
- 11.
Ibid, 200.
- 12.
Ibid, 200.
- 13.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage Books, 1996), 4.
- 14.
Ibid, 263.
- 15.
David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1999), 33, italics original.
- 16.
Emer Nolan, James Joyceand Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1994).
Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics inUlysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 17.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley et al. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 382.
- 18.
Kiberd, Inventing, 126.
- 19.
Kiberd, Inventing, 280.
- 20.
Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 3.
- 21.
James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 1.744/19.
- 22.
Ibid, 1.643–44/17.
- 23.
Ibid, 15.4473/482.
- 24.
Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, “The Last of the Milesians: The 1801 Anglo-Irish Marriage Contract and The Wild Irish Girl,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (September 2012): 393, doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2011.00421.x
- 25.
Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Charles Stewart Parnell”, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, July 2018.
- 26.
Joyce, Ulysses, 11.9/210, 11.225–26/215.
- 27.
Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 291.
- 28.
Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics, and Aesthetics inUlysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 106.
- 29.
Joyce, Ulysses, 11.340/217.
- 30.
Gifford, Annotated, 298.
- 31.
Marie-Dominique Garnier, “The lapse and the lap: Joyce with Deleuze,” in James Joyce and the Difference of Language, edited by Laurent Milesi (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 108–09.
- 32.
Joyce, Ulysses, 11.1051/233.
- 33.
Giffford, Annotated, 293.
- 34.
Gifford, Annotated, 307.
- 35.
Joyce, Ulysses, 11.1148/235.
- 36.
Joyce, Ulysses, 11.1142–45/235.
- 37.
Gifford, Annotated, 316.
- 38.
Gifford, Annotated, 316.
- 39.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.71–74/241.
- 40.
Bridgette Anton, “James Clarence Mangan,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Sir David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 41.
James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. by Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 135.
- 42.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.90–91/242.
- 43.
Gifford, Annotated, 318.
- 44.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1808–09/280.
- 45.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.1811/280.
- 46.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.152–58/243.
- 47.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.159–63/243.
- 48.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.176–99/244.
- 49.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.190–91/244.
- 50.
Gifford, Annotated, 321–26.
- 51.
Joyce, Ulysses, 12.176–77/244.
- 52.
Gifford, Annotated, 320–21.
- 53.
Gifford, Annotated, 321.
- 54.
Gifford, Annotated, 321.
- 55.
Joyce, Ulysses, 11.86–88/212.
- 56.
Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, 106.
- 57.
Massumi, Event, 3.
- 58.
Karen R. Lawrence, Who’s Afraid of James Joyce? (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010), 40.
- 59.
Kiberd, Inventing, 126.
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Johnson, M.L. (2019). Liberation Through Oppression: Deleuze’s Minor Literature and Deterritorialized Nationalisms in James Joyce’s Ulysses. In: Battista, C., Sande, M. (eds) Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18753-8_9
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