Fabled by the Daughters of Industry: Temporality, Reification, and Labour in Ulysses

Abstract

Time is central to Joyce’s Ulysses: its occurring in a single day is one of the most famous facts about it. It is also concerned with the social and psychic effects of capitalism. How do these fit together – how does the novel depict the mediation of characters’ experiences and understandings of time by capitalism? And how does the novel’s own mediation by capitalist formations impact reader experience? I answer these questions through Georg Lukács’ concept of “reification,” the spread of the commodity form to all parts of life under capitalism, leading to a divorce of ideas and experiences from the material life that undergirds them. I use Walter Benjamin’s distinction between “isolated experience” and “long experience” to examine how reification is experienced temporally. I focus especially on the temporal effects of the “shock” formations of capitalism, technologies and social forms which cram too much energy into a short space.

I begin by studying how Joyce isolates characters’ and readers’ experiences through shock formations which give the present an excessive energy (advertising, urban anonymity, and periodical forms). This cannot be overcome by retreating to the past, however, because Joyce also depicts how the over-persistence of the past in capitalist modernity means Stephen Dedalus cannot connect his experiences. By formally approximating mass-produced literary anthologies, the episode “Oxen of the Sun” isolates readers’ experience of the past. The novel also shows how these formations’ shock energies can lengthen characters’ and readers’ experiences. This is achieved through Joyce’s representations of the material life that undergirds what elsewhere in the novel appears reified; through what Benjamin calls the “dialectical image” where shock forces us to recognise the past’s unredeemed dreams; and by pushing readers to use external scholarship, a form of shock technology which nonetheless embeds readers in a historical, social process of interpretation.