ABSTRACT

Like Lawrence, James Joyce is a narrative machine-breaker. In the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom first confronts machines that seem to “[r]ule the world,” he is looking, significantly, at a printing apparatus: at machines that not only rule the material world of Dublin in 1904, but the material conditions of the text itself. Thus, starting with typographical transgressions of its own coherence in the same episode, Ulysses begins to fight its machines through the subversion of its own mechanics—and turns to myth, in the famous structure of Homeric parallels, as a means of holding together a text that is constantly taking itself apart. Unlike Lawrence, however, Joyce seems well aware of the tyrannical potential of the mythic structure he creates and thus takes steps to undermine the Odyssean parallels also. Subverting the expectations inspired by the Homeric story, the parallels finally undo their own authority, and thus help constitute one of the most radical works of anti-instrumental modernism. Disrupting every mechanical tendency as well as the mythic strategy that threatens to become one—resisting every form of instrumental domination, including its own—Ulysses finally becomes a machine to undo machines: an anarchic, self-deconstructing, utopian machine.