Potential Unfettered: Narrative Transformation as Historical Transition in Ulysses

Embedded in a moment in which upheaval permeated Irish society, Ulysses maps structural transformations in the colonial world of Ireland. Such transformations are arguably a concern throughout Joyce's work; yet, Ulysses marks a turning point. Compared with Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses is less concerned with historical particulars (political figures, places, and symbols) and more concerned with interrogating the formal conditions of politico-historical change. This interrogation unfolds through a dialectic of structure and movement. On the one hand, Ulysses fastidiously maps the material and symbolic worlds of Dublin, delineating the modes of time and space that structure this world, as well as the changing constellations of concepts used to interpret these structures. On the other hand, Ulysses constantly transforms the structures it maps, creating movement that resonates with—but also, I will argue, intervenes in—the socio-historical transformations that were taking place, including the emerging capitalist modes of circulation and exchange; the changing forms of social and political power; and the kinds of social relations made possible (and impossible) by these forms of movement and power. Focusing on the opening episodes of the novel I argue that Stephen Dedalus provides a constellation of insights that provide a reflexive (if shifting) perspective for understanding how Ulysses both maps and transforms its historical context. Significantly, Dedalus signals the ways in which the world of Ulysses is defined by a tension between two waning masters—the Catholic Church and the British Empire—and an emerging master—modern capital and its concomitant cultural dimensions (which include Irish political and literary nationalism). Within this social transformation, the colonized Irish subject is indebted in multiple directions—a servant, in Dedalus's words "of two masters … an English and an Italian … And a third … who wants me for odd jobs" (U 1.638–41).

These historical assertions are mapped on a more abstract level by Dedalus's repeated allusions to dunamis and, in particular, to the dual nature of this concept. For Aristotle, dunamis refers, on the one hand, to the capacity to produce or form a change, the exercise of which is movement or kinesis: a carpenter has the capacity to build a house, a musician to make music (146a 1–2). On the other hand, dunamis names a potentiality which, related not to movement but to actuality (energeia), refers to the potential to exist in a more completed state (Ide 2–4). The distinction between the two forms of dunamis is important in Aristotle because it allows for a conception of potential that is not immediately determined—practically or logically—by the actual. In Ulysses, I argue this form of potential structures a transformative relation between literary and historical forms. If potential persists independently of its actualization, then actuality—what can be seen, symbolized, acted upon; in short, what is presented—is necessarily contingent and overdetermined at every moment.² In Aristotle, this distinction already implies that no actuality is a totality; in every situation there is a remainder, an unactualized potential that persists alongside the actual. Ulysses enacts a specifically modern permutation of this distinction. It does so by developing a literary structure (as well, I will argue, as a historical intervention) in which the remainder—potential that is not only unactualized but unactualizable—determines the actual.

Developing this idea, I argue that Ulysses' engagement with social transformation is not merely representative—Ulysses does not merely describe historical changes. It also intervenes in this change. By making present what I describe as the unactualized remainder of language, Ulysses transforms how change is represented in its own context. This intervention is premised on an historical disjunction between form and content. Put simply, content changes more rapidly than form such that content overloads and overdetermines existing forms. Ulysses renders such historical overdetermination within the novelistic tradition by generating a dialectic between realism's descriptive accuracy and modernism's formal innovation; by meticulously mapping the material world of Dublin and the modes of circulation and exchange that take place therein, Ulysses demonstrates that the existing orders (novelistic and...