James Joyce and the Political Economy of Language and the Body: A Quick Note || Azfar Hussain

"It is a mistake for you to imagine that my political opinions are those of a universal lover: but they are those of a socialistic artist." --James Joyce, 1905

I was rereading Enda Duffy's book called _The Subaltern Ulysses_ the other day. Duffy raises quite a question in his book: Might an IRA bomb and Joyce's _Ulysses_ have anything in common? I think that question is more a statement than an interrogation sensu stricto. Joyce is at least an anti-imperial guerrilla-bomber in _Ulysses_.

By the way, a white frat boy--an English major--told us in a class I taught back at WSU (a class in which I used some pages from _Ulysses_): "I wonder if Joyce writes correct and proper English." Joyce himself provides an answer: "Syntax? No syntax but sin-talks." And it's no news that his "sin-talks"--and what might be called his "guerrilla semiotics"--certainly unsettle standard, bourgeois linguistic expectations, as does Joyce's fiercely scatological imagination bursting in his jokes on shitting and fucking and money.

And speaking of money, I find it remarkable that _Ulysses_ implicates the body in language, language in money, and money in everything that circulates: sewage, semen, gossip, letters, telegrams, ads, pop songs, newspapers, commodities, disease, and the literary tradition itself. It seems to me Joyce enacts his "political economy" of bodies, words, and things as the interpenetrating systems of exchange and circulation, which correspond to the wider economic systems of the body politic.

Also, it's really interesting to see the ways in which Joyce shows how the economies of word and flesh correspond to the Odyssean themes of exile and return that structure the action of _Ulysses_. Further, think of Molly Bloom's rhapsody in "Penelope"--one that accomplishes what Stephen Deadalus calls the "postcreation" by morphing the flesh into the word. Indeed, Joyce's "sin-talks" traverse a staggering range of issues and prevail.