“The Sassenach wants his morning rashers”: The Colonial Market and the Commodified Animal in “Telemachus”

As part of its sustained examination of the ways in which late-colonial modernity and its highly specific arrangements of capital and power structured life in the Ireland of his time, Ulysses contemplates the condition of the animal, and especially the commodified, consumable animal in this nexus of the delayed or uneven distribution of capital in the empire-colony relationship. My essay traces Joyce’s ethical and economic engagement with animal capital from the point of view of cultural and agricultural practices that were reconstituting the relation between rural and urban Ireland, as well as Ireland and imperial England, at the time that Joyce is writing. Drawing on both canonical and very new work in the emerging field of critical animal studies, this study charts the ways in which social relationships within the colony come to be dominated by the demands of the market, and how the animal is perpetually caught up in these reconfigured arrangements of colonial consumption, power, and trade.