An Immodest Proposal: The Politics of the Portmanteau in Ulysses

Much criticism of Joyce falls into three camps: one that understands Joyce as an exemplar of artistic autonomy; another that finds in the author’s language a hybridity that resists the logic of colonialism; and a third that locates his works’ politics in their narrative material. This essay argues for a fourth position: that a distinct anti-imperial politics can be located in the style of Ulysses, if style is construed not at the level of the sentence but rather at that of the word. In the inauguration (in “Proteus”) and strategic and asymmetrical deployment (in “Scylla and Charybdis”) of the portmanteau, Joyce attempts to create a language that surpasses Standard English and the political project it supports.