Inverted Commas, Unreality, and Chiasmus in “Aeolus”

This article links Joyce’s objections to the quotation mark with his rejection of realist representation. In Theodor Adorno’s theory of the modern novel, the realist approach to language is the same as journalism’s: both suppress writing’s mediating role. In fact, for Adorno, as its entertainment value grew, journalism rendered the realist novel obsolete. Novels, Ulysses in particular, were therefore free to develop in increasingly nonrepresentational directions. This study thus focuses on the contact between journalism, literature, and textual materiality in “Aeolus,” where a crucial exception is made to Joyce’s prohibition on quotation marks, and traces how a chiastic model of mimesis supplies an alternative to the quotation mark, which suppresses the role of mediation in its relation to reality. Ultimately, in contrast to Adorno’s view, the stylistic shift observed in “Aeolus” is not an historical overcoming of realism by modernism but a synchronous expression of the two as inverses of one another.