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New Literary History, Volume 39, Number 4, Autumn 2008, pp. 989-1016
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DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0068
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v039/39.4.danius.html
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Joyces Scissors:
Modernism and the Dissolution of the Event
Sara Danius
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery
changes, people come in and go out, thats all.
There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to
days without rhyme or reason, an interminable,
monotonous addition. From time to time you
make a semi-total: you say: Ive been travelling
for three years, Ive been in Bouville for three
years. Neither is there any end: you never leave
a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then
everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers,
everything is the same after two weeks. There are
momentsrarelywhen you make a landmark,
you realize that youre going with a woman, in
some messy business. The time of a flash. After
that, the procession starts again, you begin to add
up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea1
couple of years before the appearance of Ulysses, James Joyce

and Djuna Barnes talked about the stuff that works of literature
are made of. A seventy-year-old Russian baroness had given Joyce
a trunk full of pornographic plates and a pile of obscene letters, hoping
that he would make use of the material collected throughout many years
of a roving life.
Joyce accepted the gift and listened attentively to her anecdotes. But
did he take interest in the trunk? I did not write her story, Joyce told
Barnes. A writer should never write about the extraordinary, that is for
the journalist.2
This essay is for Fredric Jameson. For comments and suggestions, I would like to thank Stephen Donovan, Aris Fioretos, and Stefan Jonsson. Very special thanks are due to Hanns Zischler.
I have presented versions of this essay at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala; and the Department of Literature at Stockholm University.
I wish to thank my audiences on these occasions for their responses.
New Literary History, 2009, 39: 9891016
990
new literary history
Joyce, we know, was the connoisseur of the ordinary. He once said

that a human being never reveals as much about her character as when
she ties her shoes. In 1922, he went on to publish his monument to the
art of shoelacing. A towering record of the quotidian, Ulysses stubbornly
seeks to capture life at its most ordinary, habitual, ritualistic, tedious,
banal, common, compelling.
And it does so minute by minute, hour by hour, until an entire day
in the life of the three Dubliners has passed. A lot is going on in Ulysses,
but nothing much happens: its a record of breakfasts had, walks taken,
soaps purchased, newspapers read, things said, things thought, songs sung,
classes taught, visits paid, ads seen, bottles drunk, sandwiches devoured,
lovers received, bars frequented, coins moved, beds enjoyed. And, yes,
a funeral takes place, with Leopold Bloom dutifully attending. Save for
that, its a day like any other.
Why did Joyce think it best to leave the business of the extraordinary to
the press? That Joyces writings beautifully embody this impulse we know,
just as we know that a vast number of other modernist writers similarly
pursued the ordinary. Gertrude Stein, for one, emphasized that history
concerns itself with what happens from time to time, whereas narrative
concerns itself with what is happening all the time.3
That which happens all the time? We dont have to move very far
back in the history of literature in order to realize how utterly strange
such a position is. After centuries of literary treatments of extraordinary
events, life-affecting changes of fortune, or singular courses of action (say,
Werthers suicide), serious narrative fiction sets its mind on the ordinary,
producing stories where a lot may be going on but very little happens.
To Aristotle, the sheer thought would have been inconceivable. That
which happens all the time? Such is not the stuff that epic is made of,
much less tragedy. The idea would have been equally foreign to Virgil,
Dante, Rabelais, Madame de Lafayette, and Schiller, even to nineteenthcentury writers such as Stendhal, Balzac, the Bronts, and Eliot. Flaubert
envisioned a novel about nothing, its true, but Madame Bovary most certainly would have pleased Aristotle in its attention to those emblematic
strikes of fortune, sometimes good, sometimes bad: marriage, childbearing, adultery, treachery, suicide. For hundreds of years, even thousands,
serious narrative fiction dealt with the extraordinary. Why is it that the
modernist novel decides to stick with the unexceptional?
Its early in the morning on June 16, 1904, and Joyce is about to
introduce his everyday hero into that little story of a day, as he once
called Ulysses.4 Leopold Bloom is in his kitchen together with his cat.
Is it the first time in the history of the novel that a cat gets a line? Perhaps. Bloom, at any rate, is a middle-aged ad canvasser working for the
Freemans Journal, although we havent been told as much yet. But were
joyces scissors
991
immediately told, in massive detail, everything we need to know about

Blooms deliciously low menu of breakfast options.
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He
liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with
crustcrumbs, fried hencods roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys
which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her
breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen but out
of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
The coals were reddening.
Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didnt like her
plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob and set it
sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck out. Cup of tea
soon. Good. Mouth dry.
The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
Mkgnao!
O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.5
After a century of impassioned and ambitious literary characters, Leopold

Bloom finally enters the scene. A lot can be said about Bloom, but not
that he is driven by a strong will, nor that he is consumed by passion.
A married middle-aged male, hes more intent on the pleasures of the
table than on changing the way of the world.
Certainly, not all nineteenth-century protagonists are passionate beings. Its enough to think of the wonderfully sluggish Frdric Moreau in
Flauberts Lducation sentimentale, a novel about nothing if there ever was
one. But theres an important difference between Moreau and Bloom:
the former is fundamentally incapable of feeling at home in a kitchen,
whereas the latter enjoys every second of it.6 To put it in more straightforward terms: Flaubert may have been one of those nineteenth-century
writers who introduced the everyday into the world of serious narrative
fiction, but he failed to produce a single character pleased to spend time
in the kitchen. Emma Bovary left that business to her maid; Frdric
ate out whenever possible; Flicit in her turn tried to transcend her
kitchen labors with the help of a stuffed parrot. It took Proust to invent
a kitchen-bound persona like Franoise, just as it took Joyce to produce
a kidney-inclined character like Bloom.
In the nineteenth-century novel, there is exposition, climax, and
vividness of detail. Theres also significant human action. Think of Jane
Austens Sense and Sensibility (1811), Stendhals Le rouge et le noir (1830),
Gustave Flauberts Madame Bovary (1857), George Eliots The Mill on the
Floss (1860), or Gottfried Kellers Der grne Heinrich (1855/1870). As soon
as Ulysses is added to this short list of major realist novels, we realize that
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something radical has come to pass. First of all, Ulysses is the story of a
single day, June 16, 1904no more, no less. It could have been any day
in the lives of the three protagonists. The action could have begun any
time, just as it could have ended anytime. Flaubert, for one, could not
afford that kind of liberty when he told Emmas story, nor could Eliot
when she composed Middlemarch.
I
In August 1934, the first Soviet Writers Congress took place in Moscow.
Karl Radek, a party functionary who also happened to be Stalins secretary, gave a lengthy and eloquent speech. He talked about the author
of Ulysses. What is the basic feature in Joyce? His basic feature is the
conviction that there is nothing big in lifeno big events, no big people,
no big ideas; and the writer can give a picture of life by just taking any
given hero on any given day, and reproducing him with exactitude. A
heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus
through a microscopesuch is Joyces work.7
Totalitarian regimes need a reactionary aesthetic, its true.8 This doesnt
mean that Radek was wrong. Of course he was right. We do get to see the
worms, and we do get to study them as though we are peering through
a microscope on wheels. This, indeed, is what is truly remarkable about
Ulysses. But why was it condemned? Why was Joyces apotheosis of the
tedium of middle-class life in the Irish capital seen as a heap of dung?
Rejected as a stinking emblem of bourgeois literature?
To put things as simply as possible: because Joyce wasnt doing enough.
Not enough was happening, and whatever was happening wasnt worthy
of note.
It surely wasnt the first time that Joyces 1922 epic was banned. In the
U.S., we recall, Ulysses first appeared in serial form in the Little Review, an
avant-garde periodical edited by Margaret Anderson. In the July/August
issue of 1920, the review published the last part of the thirteenth episode
in Ulysses. Its the Nausicaa episode, where Bloom catches sight of Gerty
MacDowell on Sandymount Strand and begins to masturbate, prompted
by her encouraging glances (Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed
his wet shirt. O Lord, that little limping devil. Begins to feel cold and
clammy [U 13:8512]).
That Joyce compares Gerty MacDowell to the Blessed Mother didnt
make things any better. On October 4, Anderson tells us, the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice descended on the Washington Square
Bookshop for having sold a copy of the obscene episode to someones
daughter.9 As a consequence, the Little Review was brought to court. In
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joyces scissors
the meantime, one outraged reader of the review wrote to inform the
editor that the thirteenth episode is the most damnable slush and filth
that ever polluted paper in print.10 The U. S. Post Office acted swiftly,
confiscated the slush and filth, and burnt it. It would take yearsthirteen
years, to be exactbefore the ban in the U. S. and England was lifted.11
In Ireland, it would take decades.
Back in the USSR, Joyce was rejected because too little was going on.
In the U.S., Joyce was rejected because there was too much. Who was
right? In the end, this is a misleading question. Both reactions can be
traced back to one and the same root cause. More radically than any
other early twentieth-century novel, Ulysses invites us to witness the dissolution of the event.
II
In March 1935, Gertrude Stein gave a series of lectures at the University
of Chicago. She had already developed a philosophy of the sentence. She
had then moved on to the paragraph.12 Now she decided to approach
what happens when you put paragraphs together in a certain way. That
is to say: she advanced to narrative.
Stein developed a highly original and intricately argued philosophy
of narration, which she presented to audiences throughout the United
States.13 She did not announce it as a theory of narrative, but that is
what it was. Narrative, Stein stipulated, is what anybody has to say in
any way about anything that can happen has happened will happen in
any way.14
What defines narrative is that something happens. Indeed, the single
most important feature, in Steins view, is neither character, nor narrator,
nor plot, but that something somehow takes place. Although she does
not put it that way, we might say that for Stein a narrative is an account
of some kind of event, or series of events.
What makes her theory of narrative interesting is this: it goes beyond
the literary world proper.15 It can do so precisely because it gravitates
around neither character nor plot but around things happening. Narrative, for Stein, is more than just an abstraction: it exists on its own, and
can be understood on its own, although its always materialized in one
way or another. She discusses an unlikely variety of media and genres,
tracing their boundaries: newspapers as well as novels and detective
stories, biographies as well as autobiographies. She even includes historiography and conversation.
Narrative is what anybody has to say in any way about anything that
can happen has happened will happen in any way. But what does it
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mean to say that something happens? That something can happen, has
happened, will happen? Such a question takes us straight to the heart
of narratology.
In Goethes classic formula, a tale tells of an unheard-of event that
has already occurred. Or to quote him in the original: Was ist eine
Novelle anders als eine sich ereignete unerhrte Begebenheit?16 Goethe
had the novella in mind, a narrative genre that flourished in nineteenthcentury Germany and that can be traced back to Boccaccios Decameron
and Chaucers Canterbury Tales.
In the novella, we can study, as though in a nutshell, a basic feature
of storytelling. For what survives in the novella is that original and constitutive impulse that sits at the heart of the art of storytelling, no matter in what form: the desire to commemorate an extraordinary event.17
Historically speaking, this is what it means to say that something has
happened.
Consider nineteenth-century writers such as Heinrich von Kleist,
Johann Peter Hebel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
all formidable masters of the novella. For all their differences, they
have one thing in common: they wrote stories that center on a singular
piece of action, a miraculous, scandalous, unaccustomed, marvelous,
enigmatic, or simply unprecedented piece of action. Think of Kleists
tale, Die Marquise von O , that perplexing short story about the
young widow who discovers that she has been made pregnant without
her knowing how, when, or by whom, and who ends up marrying her
rapistand happily so.18
Think of Hebels Unverhofftes Wiedersehen, a tale about a poor
young woman in Falun about to marry a young man working in the
mines. On the eve of their wedding, he mysteriously disappears, only
to reemerge decades later, brought up from the depths of the mine in
perfectly preserved condition, as though no time had passed at all since
that ominous morning.19
Or, for another tale dealing with an unheard-of event, think of Hofmannsthals story about the French officer, Bassompierre, and his dazzling erotic adventures with a Parisian woman who, it turns out, never
existed.20 We might also think of Flauberts Trois Contes, especially the
legend about Julien who unwittingly comes to slay his beloved parents,
dies in the arms of a leprous man, and turns into a saint.
In all these cases wondrous things happen, unique, unanticipated,
exceptional, miraculous, extraordinary things.
But what happens in Joyce?
Turn Goethes dictum inside out, like a glove. A tale, he said, tells of
an unheard-of event that has already occurred. What do we get? When
we have turned the glove inside out, this: a tale tells of ordinary occurrences that are about to take place. In short, we get Ulysses.
joyces scissors
995
How did this come to pass? How is it that in the early twentieth century a literature begins to emerge in which precious little happens? Its
enough to mention writers such as Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner,
Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Paul Valry, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Nathalie Sarraute. And, of course, Proustthink of that dinner party in A
la recherche du temps perdu which requires some three hundred pages to
unfold, not to mention those opening pages which so bored Andr Gide
that he rejected the entire manuscript.
According to a commonly held view, this is so because the novel,
starting in the nineteenth century, begins to explore everyday life like
never before. Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, was the first to highlight this
literary-historical high noon moment: the serious treatment of the everyday.21 And what defines the world of the everyday is precisely that its
unable to house major events. The everyday may have an affinity with
the particular, but not with the exceptional. It must resist the unheardof, rebel against the singular, say no to the marvelous.
Franco Moretti, in an essay on the nineteenth-century novel, writes
about narrative fillers, those distances that a story must travel in order
to move from occurrence to occurrence, those nonsignificant stretches
that a writer must insert into the tale so as to sculpt the significant. It all
starts with Jane Austen. From Austen on, the filler begins to expand and
proliferate. As the novel decides to treat daily living as literary raw material in its own right, the filler becomes the stuff of which literary works
of art are made. The background slowly conquers the foreground, and
little by little the space of the unheard-of shrivels up. In the meantime,
the novel acquires a new rhythm, indeed, a new form.
Moretti also wants to know why it is that the filler moves into the foreground, trading places with the unheard-of. To know why, he looks over
the edge of the literary and into the sociological. The rise of the filler,
he suggests, is a response to the needs of that political subject known as
the bourgeoisie, a class whose daily life is governed by the logic of the
protestant ethic. Fillers thus offer the kind of narrative pleasure that fits
the new regularity of bourgeois life. They are an attempt at rationalizing
the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer
adventures, and no miracles at all.22
Although Moretti doesnt discuss the dissolution of the event as such,
his account goes a long way toward explaining its emergence. But there
is more to be said about this momentous turn to the everyday and the
dissolution of the event. Lets look over another edge: lets imagine for a
moment the media landscape of which the novel is part. For what happens
between Goethe and Joyce, between the unheard-of event and the trivial
incident, is the rise of a new narrative space: printed news media.
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III
In 1936, shortly after Stein traveled around the United States to talk
about narration, Walter Benjamin published an essay called Der Erzhler, or The Storyteller. The essay deals with the nineteenth-century
Russian writer Nicolai Leskov, but theres also a more general focus: the
decline of the art of storytelling. Benjamin goes so far as to argue that
this age-old art has come to an end.
Benjamin is talking not about the novel but about storytelling. The
difference is crucial. Not only does he make a sharp distinction between
the novel and narration, he also argues that the rise of the former is a
sure sign of the decay of the latter. For although it has accelerated in our
age, the decline of storytelling is far from a modern phenomenon.
Genuine storytelling, Benjamin argues, is based in a face-to-face situation. The art of telling a story is a human skill that begins to deteriorate
as early as the early modern age, coinciding with the emergence of the
printed book, of the novel, and of the literary market proper. From
now on, storytelling ceases to turn around the collective and its way of
exchanging experience by way of narrative.
In the meantime, traditional narrative categories undergo a sea change,
a formal development that in Benjamins view reflects the fact that the
very communicability of experience is decreasing as well. This is happening for at least two reasons.23 First, experience itself has disintegrated,
slowly but steadily, and become more or less impossible to narrate. This,
then, is a crisis of narratibility.
Second, the communicability of experience has decreased because the
media that communicate human experiencefor example, the novel
and the newspaperare inadequate to the task. The novel is aimed not
at the collective but at the solitary individual. And the newspaper, in its
turn, communicates not experience but something radically different:
information. This, then, is a crisis of narrative forms.
How are we to understand the dissolution of the event?24 What would
a history of the literary event look like? And how should we approach
that history so that it could become a contribution to the sociology of
literary forms?
Benjamin is instructive here, not because of his nostalgic account of
experience, but for other reasons: first, he usefully introduces a historicalmaterialist perspective; second, he suggests that in the age of information, the category of the plausible has been substituted for that of the
miraculous; and, third, he insists on discussing narration, the novel, and
the press in one and the same context, thus indirectly saying that the
rise of the press as a mass medium is singularly important to the study
of modern narrative.
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joyces scissors
Stein does something similar in Narration. Stein is especially interested

in printed news media, a topic she announces right at the start and elaborates at some length. She wants to show that there is a vital difference
between newspapers and any other kind of storytelling. In the end, the
difference boils down to this: newspaper stories have neither beginning
nor end. They simply go on, day after day, caught up in a logic that
compels them to always seek out the new, thus remaining ever the same.
This is why Stein concludes that the news, for all its close affiliation with
the real, is the least realistic of all modes of narration.
This is an interesting argument, to be sure, and Stein is right on the
mark. But her theory of narrative has a cardinal weakness. She assumes
that a fundamental incompatibility separates the world of the news from
that of novels, short stories, biographies, and so forth. We find the same
weakness in Benjamin, who suggests that information and genuine storytelling are mutually exclusive. Benjamin may well be right, of course,
just as Stein is right to assert that the news has very little to do with
the real. But as always, things are more complicated. We dissociate the
world of the press and that of literature at the cost of not recognizing
the richness and hybridity of modernism.25 In particular, we wont be
able to recognize the print-historical origins of modernism.
After all, Joyces 1922 novel is perfectly comfortable with the press.
In fact, it would be unthinkable without it. Bloom, we know, works for
a newspaper, canvassing advertisements day after day.26 Whats more,
an entire episode of the novel takes place in a newspaper office, and
the narrative text is interspersed with crossheads.27 Above all, the novel
itself has a voracious appetite for news material, all the way from weather
forecasts and car races to faits divers, feeding on it much like a whale
preys on plankton. The same is true of works such as Alfred Dblins
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and John Dos Passoss 42nd Parallel (1930).
The point is very simple. We need a more nuanced description of the
relation between the narrative space of the news and that of the novel.
IV
Shortly before starting work on Madame Bovary, Flaubert explained
what he was aiming at. He wanted to write a novel about nothing. What
seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing,
a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together
by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the
void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would
have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost
invisible, if such a thing is possible.28
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In Flaubert we can study, in delicious detail, the emergence of two

competing orders both of which vie for the readers attention: the order
of the narrative event and that of the linguistic event, that is, events that
take place in narrative and events that take place in language.29 The first
stirrings of this bewildering development can be seen in early nineteenthcentury writers, those early realists who display a radically new interest
in the everyday world and, in so doing, pursue not so much the general
as the particular, especially the visible particular: the look of a button,
the shape of a collar, the color of a soap bar.
But its only in Flaubert that we can observe a parting of the ways, that
is to say, a widening gap between narrative events and linguistic ones.
Its a spectacular bifurcation, preparing the puzzling destinies of the
category of the event in the early twentieth century.
Charles Bovary surely doesnt know it yet, but he is gazing at his future wife: Her neck rose out of a white collar, turned down. Her black
hair, brushed so smooth that each side seemed to be in one piece, was
parted in a delicate central line that traced the curve of the skull; and,
just revealing the tip of her ear, it coiled at the back into a thick chignon,
with a rippling pattern at the temples, something that the country doctor now observed for the first time in his life. Her cheeks were touched
with pink. She had, like a man, tucked into the front of her bodice, a
tortoiseshell lorgnon.30
No sooner have we been invited to observe how Emmas neck rises
out of her collar than her neck acquires a linguistic life of its own.
Meanwhile, Emma herself recedes into the background. But the central
event in this passage is not the behavior of the neck: its the conduct
of the hair. Flaubert uses sixty words to describe the shape of Emmas
hairdo, as though it had a life of its ownand syntactically speaking,
this is exactly what is going on.
Carefully crafted, Flauberts description reproduces the visual impression of Emmas coiffure within the space of a single sentence: not so
much hair as rather meticulously styled pieces. The thinglike character
of the hairdo is even echoed in the patterning of the sentence. Just as
Emmas hair detaches itself from the visual appearance of which it is a
part, so Flauberts sentence liberates itself from its narrative context and
acquires autonomy. And just as the parting divides Emmas hair into two
distinct volumes, so the semicolon bisects Flauberts sentence into two
separate yet related propositions.
What we have before us here is not a narrative event but a linguistic
one, an event that takes place not in narrative but in language. Flauberts
writings abound with such passages. There is a straight line between
Emmas hairdo in Madame Bovary and Molly Blooms teaspoon in Ulysses.
Sitting in her bed, Molly suddenly smells something strange, the smell
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of a burned breakfast kidney: Her teaspoon ceased to stir up sugar.

She gazed straight before her, inhaling through her arched nostrils (U
4.37879). Or consider the description of that poor bookseller standing
before Leopold Bloom: onions of his breath came across the counter
out of his ruined mouth (U 10.59697). Such events take place not in
narrative but in language, and in language alone. Things may be going
on in these sentences, but what is happening?
V
All forms of narrative, even at their most awkward and unaccomplished,
are concerned with change. In one way or another, a transition takes
place. Something happens. Could we even conceive of narrative without
change? We might well imagine a lyric poem that is not built around
change, but hardly a narrative work in prose. If Stein is right when she says
that poems are based on nouns, then prose fiction is based on verbs.
Lets also assume that the early nineteenth century was a historical
period that was preoccupied with change, change in the guise of the
new. The reasons should be obvious: the proximity of the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, the Napoleonic Wars, industrialization,
commodification, new technologies, the rise of the metropolis, and so
on. There were three major ways in which the new was dealt with in the
early nineteenth century, Andreas Gailus suggests in an article on the
German novella, and each of these three ways corresponds to a narrative
genre. We might think of them as ideal types.
First, theres the narrative genre known as historiography, in particular
that teleological, progress-oriented mode of writing history. The new is
assimilated to the extent that it can be seen as necessary to the evolution
of progress, or else its bracketed out, as Zufall (coincidence), simply
because its not pertinent to the progress of history, that is, the coming
to consciousness of a certain historical logic. The new is nothing other
than meaning on the way to its own self-knowledge.31 In other words, the
eventthe accident, the contingent, the chance occurrenceis readily
assimilated and absorbed into the intentional design, or else rejected.
Second, theres the narrative genre known as the bildungsroman, which
provided the nineteenth-century novel with an extraordinarily productive
and pliable pattern, especially in France and Britain but also in Germany
and Scandinavia. In the bildungsroman, the new is neither assimilated nor
bracketed out. Rather, it is handled as a field of possibilities, subsumed
under the individuals quest for self-discovery and self-formation.
Third, theres the narrative genre known as the novella. This is the
genre that Goethe had in mind when he spoke of tales as accounts of
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unheard-of events. Its easy to forget that the designation itself actually
means a piece of news, deriving as it does from the French word nouvelle.
As a general rule, the novella utterly fails to assimilate the new into its
universe. Change is not subsumed; it is radical, in the literal sense of
the word. The event is not only unheard-of; it remains unheard-of. Its
inert; its pure resistance. It cannot be integrated into the world of the
narrative (the system, the whole, the structure, and so on), lest that world
change beyond recognition. In the novella, the category of the new is
the absolute other of the subject.
Following Gailus, we might say that the three narrative modes under
discussionhistoriography, the novel, and the novellarepresent three
major ways in which a given collective finds ways of dealing with the
new. Change, contingency, singularity: each genre offers a specific way
of construing and handling the event. Each, indeed, offers a socially
symbolic narrative space.
There is, however, a fourth narrative category that we must add to
Gailuss scheme. That category is journalism. For what is a newspaper
other than a forum where a given society tells stories about itself?
Lets pause here for a moment. What happens to the very notion of
the eventthe contingent, the accidental, the exceptional, the singular,
the different, the otherwhen, as in the nineteenth century, there is an
unprecedented expansion of that printed news medium known as the
daily press? The primary task of the newspaper, after all, is to bring the
new to its readers on a twenty-four-hour basis. In a word, the business
of the press is to traffic in the new.
Two things in particular characterize the newspaper, then as now. First,
its aimed at a mass reading public. It was during the second half of the
nineteenth century that the press became a means of mass communication proper. Consider the French press: in 1824, there were twelve daily
papers in Paris, with a total print run of 55,000 copies; in 1870, less than
half a century later, the number of Parisian papers had tripled, and their
combined sales had increased by twenty-five times, to 1,200,000 copies.
The French provinces saw a similar growth. Germany followed much
the same pattern. The circulation of Frankfurter Zeitung, for example,
increased by five times between 1856 and 1920.32
But it was the United States and Britain that led the development. The
professionalization of the journalist happened early. Advances in printing technology, faster folding machines, the invention of electricity, a
significant decrease in paper prices, the extension of literacy, the growth
of metropolitan cities: these all paved the way for a newspaper-oriented
culture. News could be had for a penny, then for half a penny. What is
more, in the 1880s there emerged a sensational journalism directed at
the urban masses.33
1001
joyces scissors
The second feature that characterizes the newspaper is that it has to

be brought out every day, regardless of whether anything newsworthy
has happened. This circumstance alone is enough to explain the power
of modern news media. This we know. Indeed, we dont need to read
a single media theorist to understand that the press not only serves
to mediate the new but also to produce the new. The formidable Karl
Kraus, the Austrian writer who launched Die Fackel, understood this better than most. Devoting his entire life to exposing the universal stupidity
of his age, Kraus had a single source: the press. Half a century before
Marshall McLuhan, Kraus asserted that the medium itself is the event.
On December 5, 1914, shortly after the Great War had broken out, he
wrote apropos of the war coverage: Is the press a messenger? No: the
event. A discourse? No, life itself.34
From what Ive said so far, with the help of Stein, Benjamin, Kraus,
and others, a notion is beginning to take shape. In the nineteenth century, the press throws open a new anthropological space. Heres Stein
meditating on the nature of newspaper reading:
[T]he newspaper reader wants to read the newspaper every day because he
wants the idea of happenings happening every day and if there is a day without
the happening of that day which is really the happening of the day before then
the newspaper reader feels that it is like the sun standing still or any abnormal
thing there is a day and nothing has happened on that day.
That makes anybody feel that you cannot call a day a day if it is not a day if
nothing that had been happening has happened on that day.35
The root cause behind this new kind of experience may be easy to
graspagain, the newspaper has to be brought out all the time, no
matter what, and in the final product, there must be no vacant spaces
whatsoeverbut the consequences are far-reaching: eventually the medium itself becomes the event.
Yet things are even more complicated. Not only does the newspaper
open a new anthropological space, encouraging new modes of experiencing time and temporality. It also opens a new literary space. The signature
feature of this new literary space is a journalistic phenomenon known as
the fait divers, and Joyce was the first writer to take full advantage of it.
VI
A French expression, fait divers simply means small news item.36 But its
not any kind of news story. A fait divers is almost always an extraordinary,
singular, or curious piece of news.37 In English, its translated as small
news item, human interest story, or soft news. Sometimes its trans-
1002
lated as filler. Most often, the fait divers is a tidbit, but it can also be a
more substantial story. The topics, however, remain the same. The fait
divers is a closely packed story about this or that stroke of luck, this or
that misfortune: murders, lotteries, burglaries, poisonings, strikes, natural
disasters, traffic accidents, mysterious natural phenomena, and so on.
The nineteenth century was the golden age of the fait divers, but as
any newspaper reader knows, the genre is far from extinct. The world
of tabloids would be unthinkable without the fait divers. Even highbrow
newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the New York
Times make sure to treat their readers to such stories.
Roland Barthes, in a pioneering article on the fait divers, provides
us with a beautifully crafted theory of newspaper writing and its two
basic narrative modes: information and fait divers. Indeed for Barthes,
as for Stein before him, the news is an essentially narrative form. He
approaches the fait divers as an eminently literary artifact, drawing on
age-old storytelling traditions. At the same time, he also presents the fait
divers as an heir to ancient rhetoric.
A murder has been committed, Barthes writes. If its a political murder,
its information. If it isnt, its a fait divers.38 Barthes places the same event
in two different journalistic contexts. And in doing so, he cuts straight
to a fundamental division of labor within the world of the press. He is
able to point to two kinds of information, two kinds of narrative, and,
yes, indeed, two distinct kinds of event.
If the killing is a political one, its a piece of partial information. If the
killing is not political, then its a piece of total information. Why? Because
in the former case, Barthes suggests, the news is embedded in a larger
context that necessarily precedes the event. The context is implicit. The
news of the political murder refers to a world that extends far beyond
the homicide and in relation to which the event acquires significance,
that is to say, is rediscovered as big news. Because it assumes other stories,
as it were, this kind of news is essentially episodic.
With the fait divers, things are very different. The context is explicit.
All the necessary information is given. The fait divers, we might say,
is immanent: it contains within itself all we need to know in order to
grasp the story: the circumstances, the causes, the past, the things at
stake. There is nothing episodic about the fait divers. Its self-sufficient,
independent, autonomous. And so it is that in the political murder, the
structure is open. In the nonpolitical murder, by contrast, the structure
is closed. For this reason, the news story has an affinity with the novel,
whereas the fait divers is related to the tale (conte).39
Barthes, in his many analyses, uncovers a ruling passion in the world
of the fait divers: causal relationships. His vital insight is not that the fait
divers has an identity but that it has a structure, and that this structure
joyces scissors
1003
organizes how the fait divers says what it says. In other words, he is interested not in the texture of the fait divers but in a more deep-seated
pattern: its rhetoric. For the fait divers is able to say what it says, not
because it takes on certain topics (divorce, suicide, accidents, disasters,
fires, poisonings, and so on), nor because it comes with a set of thematic
obsessions all its own (say, bitten-off noses, sweet children causing havoc,
Himalayan women playing ice hockey), but because it always explores
a particular kind of relationship. In its simplest form, it looks like this:
causality versus coincidence. Earthquakes, pickpockets, crimes passionels:
the fait divers always stages a metaphysical drama: the battle between
causal laws and pure chance.
To understand this, we first need to understand that the fait divers is
governed by a rule. This rule is a simple one, but its consequences are
far-reaching: the fait divers must contain an element of surprise. This is
why it revels in the inexplicable, exceptional, singular. In this sense, too,
there is a striking affinity between the older tale and the fait divers.40
Because it contains an element of surprise, the causality that emerges
in the fait divers is a troubled one. The cause never quite fits the effect.
This is the stuff that the fait divers is made of. A woman attacks her partner
with a knife. Jealousy? Far from it: they had different political sympathies. A
young maid kidnaps the baby of her employers. Because she wanted a ransom?
No, because she adored the child. A homeless male attacks single women. A
sadist? No, he wanted to steal their purses.41
We might phrase this a little differently and say that in emphasizing the
exceptional, the fait divers both presupposes and confirms commonsensical notions of causality. And yet this is only part of the story because that
everyday causality is constantly met and challenged by another order:
that of coincidence. Indeed, the rule-bound world of the fait divers is a
world suffused with randomness, unpredictability, indeterminacy. Causality becomes a paradoxical and highly ambiguous affair. This is the key
to the fait divers. Aleatory causality, organized coincidenceits at the
junction of these two movements that the fait-divers is constituted: both
ultimately refer to an ambiguous zone where the event is experienced as
a sign whose content is nonetheless uncertain. We are thus in a world not
of meaning but of signification, which is probably the status of literature,
a formal order in which meaning is both posited and frustrated: and
its true that the fait-divers is literature, even if this literature is reputed
to be bad.42
Benjamin, we recall, wrote about the fate of storytelling in the age of
modernity. In fully developed capitalism, he argued, a radically new form
of communication emerges which threatens the art of telling a story and
the possibility to exchange genuine experience like never before, and
that this form of communication is information. In our time, he claimed,
1004
information has replaced narrative. By the same token, the category of

the plausible has replaced that of the miraculous.
Was Benjamin right? What Ive been trying to do so far is show that
narrativity survives in the age of mass communication, even as we enter
the prime vehicle of information: the newspaper. For the press also opens
a new literary space. Already we can begin to see that the journalistic
genre known as the fait divers has a counterpart within the literary world
properin the novella, in the tale of the unheard-of. And at the heart of
the fait divers is an event, just as in the novella, only that in the fait divers
the unheard-of event has undergone change: the event of the fait divers
is a domesticated one. Narrativity, it seems, doesnt survive in unmodified form. Or to put things a little differently: what is the fait divers other
than the attempted resolution of the conflict between the category of
the plausible (newspaper) and that of the miraculous (die Novelle)?
What, then, remains of the novel? This is the key problem. Indeed, if
the nineteenth century witnesses how the notion of the event undergoes
change, partly as a result of the expansion of the press and the emergence
of a new anthropological space, and if, furthermore, the press happily
appropriates the particular kind of eventhood inherent in the novel as
well as in the novella, then what happens to the literary artifact we know
as the novel? What, in the age of printed news media and the fait divers,
remains for the novel to do?
Basically two things. The novel may explore the domain of the linguistic
event, as opposed to that of the narrative event. Or else the novel may
attempt to incorporate the newspaper within itself, including the entire
new anthropological and literary space that emerges in its wake. James
Joyce, in Ulysses, did both.
VII
The world is full of trivialities, and Joyce had his scissors ready for it.
He collected words; he collected phrases; he collected slang, rhymes,
songs.
In 1931, nine years after the publication of Ulysses in Paris, Joyce corresponded with George Antheil. He had suggested the idea of writing
an opera based on Byrons Cain and had ideas about how to cut the
libretto. Antheil, for his part, wanted him to rewrite the libretto. Joyce
declined. I would never have the bad manners to rewrite the text of
a great English poet. He explained that one would have to curtail the
text of two acts and, should Antheil so desire, he may well use Joyces
name. I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste
man, Joyce explained, for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust
description.43
joyces scissors
1005
A scissors and paste man. Lets take Joyces designation seriously and
approach Ulysses as a vast cut-and-paste job. Theres good reason. Joyce,
after all, had a voracious appetite for the daily press. He organized his 1922
epic around a newspaper man, whose mind is swimming with news text
and advertising slogans lifted straight from a variety of unlikely sources;
Joyce also saw to it that the Aeolus episode, taking place as it does in a
news office, is interspersed with capitalized crossheads.
But what is even more important is that the period around 1900 was a
veritable cut-and-paste culture. Anke te Heesen has shown that beginning
in the late nineteenth century, when printed news became a mass medium
proper, newspaper scraps were cut, clipped, pasted, collected, assembled,
and circulated on a massive scale.44 Bits of newspapers, decontextualized
and then recontextualized according to a new and unfathomable logic,
floated in and out of a strangely material dream-space. A wholly new
archive came into being, in fact, a wholly new professionalong with the
necessary equipment: special boxes, special albums, special scissors.
Where, then, did Joyce find his raw material? We know what he said
about his novel. I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if
the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.45 We also know that the realities of Dublin
derived not so much from Joyces memory as from various kinds of
printed matter. Ulysses, indeed, is more than just a formidable monument
to everyday life.46 Its also a monument to the archive.47 Joyce owned a
copy of Thoms Dublin Directory for 1904, and thanks to this bulky book,
he had access to an ocean of reality effects: names and addresses of
citizens, houses, shops, pubs, parks, offices, and, yes, public urinals, as
well as the layout of streets and lanes and walks and tramways and railways. As for slang, he most probably consulted sources such as Patrick
W. Joyces English As We Speak It in Ireland (1910) and J. Redding Wares
Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang,
and Phrase (1909). Even the German dictionary Londinismen, compiled
by one Heinrich Baumann, has left numerous traces in Ulysses.48
What is even more important is that Joyce owned the newspapers of
June 16, 1904. An entire chapter, we recall, takes place in the offices of
the Freemans Journal, where Bloom and his colleagues talk about whats
going into the next edition. A couple of hundred pages later, late at
night, Bloom will be reading the latest issue hot off the press.
But what people generally dont know is what papers Joyce actually
used as he was cutting and pasting stuff into his verbal recreation of
the Irish capital. Danis Rose and John OHanlon have shown that Joyce
used The Times, the venerable paper produced in the heart of the British empire. [Joyce] devoured the June 1904 issues of this great organ
edaciously, drawing copious notes from them and entering these into [his
manuscript]. Many of the major and minor themes which permeate the
1006
all-too-Irish Ulysses derive ultimately from the all-too-English Times.49

Only late in the process was Joyce able to lay hands on copies of Irish
newspapers. In The Times, Joyce found stories about the Ascot Gold Cup
and other horse races, the Gordon-Bennett motorcar race, the Royal Hungarian lottery, the scandal of corporal punishment in the Royal Navy, the
visit of the Lord Lieutenant to open the Mirus Bazaar in aid of Mercers
Hospital, and many other things, including useful obituaries.
Joyce was surely not the first to derive raw material from newspapers.
Its well known that Stendhal found the storyline for his most famous
novel, Le rouge et le noir (1830), in a newspaper. The same is true of
Madame Bovary: its basic plot also originates in a fait divers found by
Flaubert in a newspaper.
Flaubert, incidentally, was obsessed with trivialities. Always on the
lookout for worn-out phrases and linguistic commonplaces, he collected
the clichs of his age. He even compiled a dictionary of accepted ideas
that was meant to be part of a vast compendium of stupidities. This
monument to the universal idiocy of his age would be his testament to
posterity. And what is Madame Bovary if not a delicious cut-and-paste
job? It brings together sociolects and idiolects, slang and Latin, quoting,
quoting, quoting, although the quotation marks are invisible. But what
is even more interesting is that Flaubert invented an amateur journalist,
monsieur Homais, a key character who reports on events taking place in
Emma Bovarys village. Flaubert even goes so far as to reproduce these
journalistic texts verbatim. A single newspaper article by Homais, Flaubert once said, would be enough for future attempts at reconstructing
scientifically all the ineptitude of a bourgeois.50
It was not Joyces way. Unlike Flaubert, Joyce did not wage a war on
the middle-brow. He reveled in it. His was not a world to be endured,
much less ridiculed. It was to be loved, quietly and rigorously, and this
is why he had his scissors ready.
After breakfast on June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom withdraws to the
outhouse in the backyard. He brings an old issue of Titbits that he has
found in a drawer.
Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his
bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize
titbit: Matchams Masterstroke. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer.
Three and a half. Three pounds three. Three pounds, thirteen and six.
Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his
bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight
constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope its not too big bring on piles again.
No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be
joyces scissors
1007
so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print
anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell.
Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing
witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back
through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied
kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds,
thirteen and six. (U 4:494517)
A perversely low passage, perhaps. Most of us find a bit of materialism

healthy, especially when we have spent a lot of time in the lofty spheres
of high culture, but theres materialism and then theres materialism.
Joyces great achievement is to have taken matters of literary materialism
to a wholly new level, that is, to the basest level possible: he introduced
money, sex, and snot into serious realism. The point is that he did it
without fanfare.51
Why was this and similar incidents in Joyce so scandalous? First, because
there were no trumpets, Joyce effected a kind of neutralization of the
content. When Rabelais has his hero urinate on 216,418 Parisians, its
an event. When Joyce has his hero urinate in his outhouse, its not. The
incident is no more, but also no less, significant than any other incident
in this little story of a day. Its just banal, trivial, common.
Second, the incident was scandalous because Joyce highlighted the
form, the linguistic form. And its precisely because he neutralized the
content that he was able to highlight the form, the linguistic gestalt. The
outhouse episode, we might say, is a linguistic event.
So here we are: Bloom is doing what he has to do, meanwhile reading
an old issue of Titbits. A cheap periodical that actually existed, Tit-Bits
was a weekly magazine that helped introduce a new school of popular
journalism.52 The full title was: Tit-Bits from All the Most Interesting Books,
Periodicals and Newspapers in the World. One can almost hear how cheap
it was. A so-called penny paper of sixteen quarto pages, it consisted of
scraps from books, periodicals, and newspapers. It also offered contributions from readers as well as prize contests and insurance schemes. The
editors knew how to boost circulation.
Launched in 1881 by the enterprising newspaper man George Newnes,
Tit-Bits marks a watershed moment in the history of British press.53 It
helped revolutionize the lowest level of cheap journalism.54 Interestingly
enough, the appearance of Tit-Bits coincided with the emergence of a
sizeable working-class and lower middle-class readership, which helps
explain its extraordinary success. It catered especially to clerks, shopkeepers, and other urban workers who commuted to their workplaces.55
In the spring of 1897, Tit-Bits could boast of a circulation of more than
600,000.56 George Newnes, incidentally, also launched Country Life and
Strand Magazine.
1008
If Tit-Bits had been a French periodical, one would have said that it
specialized in faits divers. Legend has it that Newnes came up with the
idea of Tit-Bits when he was reading a Manchester evening paper and
happened on a short news text about how a young girl had been rescued
from a runaway locomotive. Now this is what I call a tit-bit. Why does
not somebody bring out a paper containing but tit-bits like this?57 And
so Newnes launched a weekly magazine that he made sure to fill with
human interest snippets, amusing news items, anecdotes, jokes, vignettes,
excerpts, riddles, short stories and other kinds of fiction, advertisements,
even statistical information and legal detailnothing which required
sustained attention on the part of their readers, let alone concentration,
as Altick remarks somewhat caustically.58 This is partly why the formula
was so successful. Tit-Bits, indeed, kept the eyes of the readers busy while
their brains took a rest.59 In a word, it was perfect outhouse reading.
VIII
It seems logical that Joyce decides to place Titbits in a scatological context. The choice of locationthe outhouseappears to suggest where
this cheap publication belongs, and Joyce appears to drive home his
point inshall we say: concrete? graphic? stinking?detail, as though
to say that the novel, as a genre, is vastly superior to Titbits. After all, as
Bloom is reading, each Titbits column is emphatically matched by a bowel
movement. A little later, he will tear out Matchams Masterstroke and
use it as toilet paper. Need we say more?
Yes, we do. The passage contains a crucial piece of information. The
key words in this gloriously low episode are: Print anything now. Silly
season. Where do they come from, these seemingly insignificant phrases?
From Bloom, of course, but also from Joyce himself. This is Joyce winking
at the reader. For what hes doing here is to offer a metacommentary of
sortson his decision to zero in on Blooms defecation. And ultimately,
these words also serve as a global metacommentaryon the deeper
significance of Joyces totalizing desire, on his backbreaking ambition
to record the lived minutiae of twenty-four hours in the life of a group
of very ordinary people in the Irish capital. For what Joyce sought to
do in his book was, among other things, to capture human experience
as it unfolds, in the immediacy of the unfolding. And experience, for
Joyce, included all kinds of human needs. This, after all, is why his
novel provoked such controversy. If books could belch, Ulysses might be
the one. And if books could belch without apologizing, Ulysses would
definitely be the one.
Here he is, then, Mr. Bloom, caught right in the act of reading, just as
we too are caught right in the act of reading. And if we, the readers of
1009
joyces scissors
Ulysses, seem to mirror Bloom in reading about these silly things, then
this is an analogy that can be carried quite far. Just as Tit-bits consisted
of scraps from books, periodicals, newspapers, and contributions from
readers, so Ulysses is a compilation of bits and pieces that have been lifted
from a variety of unlikely places, often very trivial ones, all the way from
German dictionaries of the English language to anecdotes overheard in
local bars and advertisements found in newspapers and magazines. Above
all, Joyces book abounds with faits divers: its full of miniature stories,
anecdotes, gossip, lore.
Is this to say that Ulysses is like Tit-bits? Or that Joyces book is like a
newspaper? Not at all. That would be a gratuitous point, and besides,
its not true. But I hope to have complicated the often antagonistic story
about the world of news and that of the literary work of art. For in this
outhouse episode, one can study, as though in a nutshell, how Joyce
incorporated the logic of the newspaper and especially of the fait divers
into his book, how he told a tale that ultimately explodes the glorious
tradition of the realist novel from withinprecisely by taking realism to
extremes. In absorbing the logic of the event inherent in the press and
turning it inside out, much like a glove is turned inside out, Joyce was able
to create a bulky book that is both a glorious monument to the world of
the newspaper and a powerful negation of it. On the one hand, Ulysses
mimics the kind of sensational simultaneity that governs the world of the
news. Joyces narrator is on the scene, but he is detached from it. The
narrator observes what is going on as its going on, no more, no less,
noting what people do, think, and feel, and he does so at a distance. In
this sense, there is a strong affinity between Ulysses and the world of the
news. But on the other hand, Joyce negates the logic of the newspaper.
He gives us simultaneity, presence, immediacybut without events.
IX
Its the daily dietangers, fears, humiliations
Dr. Johnsons tea, Balzacs coffee, Freuds cigars
which lead the liver to overlabor, stomach to
puncture, heart to fail, the quiet worker to go
berserk and ghetto to erupt, though its only
the seizure, stroke, or strike which reaches the
papers.
William H. Gass60
In October 1927, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Sergei Eisenstein started taking notes for a new film.61
The content would be based on Marxs Das Kapital. The aim of the
1010
project was clearto teach the worker to think dialecticallybut the

method was not. For although Eisensteins script already existedhe
referred to Marxs text as scenario or, alternatively, librettoit now
remained for Das Kapital to be translated into images, into something
like a visual narrative. The question was how.
Eisenstein had made three films, Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin
(1925), and October (1927), all pathbreaking, experimental works of
cinema that served to throw open new modes of expression. Now he
wanted to make a film treatise, a discursive work. Yet the formal problems
involved were as formidable as ever. For what is a revolution if not an
unheard-of event, a transition so radical, so extraordinary, so singular
that it motivates a new chronology? How does one represent the kind
of thinking that precedes such an event?
The following spring, Eisenstein came to the conclusion that the
form of Capital would be based on the form of Joyces Ulysses. Indeed,
in thinking about how to approach the question of form, his single most
important source of inspiration was Ulysses. On April 8, 1928, he wrote:
CAPITAL will be dedicatedofficiallyto the Second International!
. . . The formal side is dedicated to Joyce.62
He thus turned to the very novel that Radek, Stalins secretary, was to
condemn a few years later. We know why Radek regarded Ulysses as a heap
of dung. Joyces novel did not do enough. It immersed itself in everyday
life for the sake of everyday life, clinging to small things, cherishing the
mediocre, dulling whatever is grand in life. Last but not least, Joyce was
content merely to portray whatever human being on whatever day. As it
happens, these were precisely the reasons why Eisenstein found Ulysses
extraordinarily well-suited to serve his revolutionary purposes.
For although Eisenstein rejected the idea of a continuous, organic,
and sequential historical narrative, he did not reject narrative as such.
The difference is crucial, and it takes us straight to the heart of both
Eisensteins work and that of Joyce. Instead of a narrative whole, there
would be a collection of faits divers, historiettes, or short film-essays. Instead
of an overarching plot, there would be an assemblage of insignificant
courses of action. Instead of major events, there would be an utterly
trivial intrigue organized around nonevents such as making soup. The
form of faits divers or collections of short film-essays is fully appropriate
for replacement of whole works, Eisenstein noted in March 1928. In
thinking about the structure of Capital, he thus projected a break, not
from narrative, nor from sequence, but rather from the event.
Eisenstein was especially attracted by the idea of mounting a little
story of a day. Take a trivial progressive chain of some action . . . For
instance: one day in a mans life. Minutieusement set forth as an outline
which makes us aware of departure from it. For that purpose only.63
1011
joyces scissors
Inspired by Joyces kidney episode, he considered basing the film in

kitchen footage, focusing on how a woman prepares soup for her worker
husband.
Such extreme concreteness was necessary. The raw materialthe
factual units, as Eisenstein liked to call themwould be mounted in a
serial, parallel, repetitive, or associative fashion, so as to make the viewers
mind pass between the concrete and the abstract, between the fact and
the idea. This, for Eisenstein, is what dialectical thinking meant.
Eisensteins Capital never became more than a torso. But its an interesting fact that Eisenstein, in his attempt to make a revolutionary
film about the necessity of revolution, would seize on the scandalous
connoisseur of the ordinary, the resourceful scissors and paste man, the
writer who had gone further than any other in the attempt at culling
things from the flow of existence before the veneer of eventhood has
begun to spread over them.
We might put all this a little differently and say that life is a mess,
especially when its going on, and that Joyce did more than most modernist writers to reproduce the messiness of that mess. Writing in an age
where human experience was mediated like never before, in novels and
newspapers, in adverts and the cinema, in photographic reproductions
and phonographic recordings, Joyce went for immediacy, for nonmediated experience. He sought to reproduce things as they occur, when they
are occurring, well before they can even congeal into something like an
event. And so it is that Joyce ended up writing one of the most scandalous books to have been published in the twentieth century, a book in
which a lot is going onbut precious little happens.
Sdertrn University
Notes
1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (1938; New York: New Directions,
2007), 39. Sartre, La Nause (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 2005), 65:
Quand on vit, il narrive rien. Les dcors changent, les gens entrent et sortent, voil tout. Il
ny a jamais de commencements. Les jours sajoutent aux jours sans rime ni raison, cest une
addition interminable et monotone. De temps en temps, on fait un total partiel, on dit: voil
trois ans que je voyage, trois ans que je suis Bouville. Il ny a pas de fin non plus: on ne quitte
jamais une femme, un ami, une ville en une fois. Et puis tout se ressemble: Shangha. Moscou,
Alger, au bout dune quinzaine, cest tout pareil. Par momentsrarementon fait le point, on
saperoit quon sest coll avec une femme, engag dans une sale histoire. Le temps dun clair.
Aprs a, le dfil recommence, on se remet faire laddition des heures et des jours. Lundi,
mardi, mercredi. Avril, mai, juin. 1924, 1925, 1926.
On Sartre and the event, see Fredric Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New Haven,
CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), 1939.
2 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 457; and
Djuna Barnes, Vagaries malicieux, Double Dealer 3 (May 1922): 253.
1012
3 Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1935), 30.
4 James Joyce to Carlo Linati, 21 September 1920, in Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart
Gilbert (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 146: [Ulysses] is an epic of two races (Israelite
Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day
(life).
5 Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Random House, 1986), 45 (hereafter
cited as U with episode number, followed by line number).
6 For recipes, see Ira B. Nadel, Mollys Mediterranean Meals and Other Joycean Cuisines, in Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Geert
Lernout, and John McCourt (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2007), 21022.
7 Karl Radek, Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of the Proletarian Art,
in A. Zhdanov et al., Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers
Congress, ed. H. G. Scott (London: Martin Lawrence Limited, 1935), 153.
8 For a discussion of Radeks critique, see Jeremy Hawthorn, Ulysses, Modernism, and
Marxist Criticism, in James Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. W. J. McCormack and Alistair
Stead (London: Routledge, 1982), 11225.
9 Margaret Anderson, ed., The Little Review Anthology (New York: Hermitage, 1953),
297.
10 Anderson, Little Review Anthology, 299.
11 For a recent discussion of Ulysses and censorship, see Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for
Arts Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press,
2007), 78106. See also Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses
(Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998); and Jeffrey Segall, Joyce in America: Cultural Politics
and the Trials of Ulysses (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1993). On
how Joyce himself saw censorship, see Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 14553.
12 For Steins philosophy of the paragraph, see How to Write (1931; New York: Dover,
1975), esp. 2535. For a convenient summary, see Stein, Narration, 2223. On the sentence,
see William H. Gass, Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence, in The World
Within the Word: Essays (New York: Knopf, 1979), 63123.
13 On Steins theory of narration, see Hayden White, The Modernist Event, in Figural
Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999), 8286.
14 Stein, Narration, 31.
15 What truly explains the originality of Steins theory of narrative is something else,
however. In her view, the primary building block of narrative is the paragraph. Indeed, for
Stein the smallest intelligible unit is not the sentence but the paragraph. To the extent
that Stein is an unabashed formalist, and in many ways she is, her particular brand of
formalism is founded not on syntax but onlets call it morphologya morphology of
the paragraph.
16 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gesprche mit Goethe (Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1913),
216.
17 See Walter Benjamin, Der Erzhler, in Illuminationen: Ausgewhlte Schriften (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1977); see also Jameson, afterword to Sartre, 21117.
18 Heinrich von Kleist, Die Marquise von O, in Erzhlungen (Frankfurt: Insel, 1997),
11780.
19 Johann Peter Hebel, Unverhofftes Wiedersehen, in Schatzkstlein des rheinischen
Hausfreundes, ed. Jan Knopf (Frankfurt: Insel, 1984), 24850.
20 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Erlebnis des Marschalls von Bassompierre, in Erzhlungen,
ed. Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1979), 13242.
21 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendlndischen Literatur (1946;
Tbingen, Ger.: Francke, 2001), 42259; Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality
in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957),
45492.
joyces scissors
1013
22 Franco Moretti, Serious Century, in The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture,
ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 381.
23 For a critical discussion of the concept of experience in Benjamin, see Martin Jay,
Songs of Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2005), 31260.
24 What is an event, narrative or otherwise? While the category of the event (Ereignis,
vnement) is a recognized one in modern philosophy, in both the analytical tradition and
the so-called continental one, this is not the case in literary theory. In fact, in literary theory
its not a category at all. In highlighting the event, I hope to show that it deserves to be
treated as a literary-theoretical problem in its own right. The problems I discuss in this
essay (what does it mean to say that something happens?) are typically discussed under
the rubric of action, originally an Aristotelian notion, or else under plot or fabula; as
for the dissolution of the event, literary theorists tend to approach it under the rubric of
the plotless novel. For an analytical-linguistic approach, see Lennart Nordenfelt, Events,
Actions, and Ordinary Language (Lund, Swed.: Doxa, 1977). In the tradition that stretches
from Heidegger and Sartre to Derrida, the event is a central problem: see, for example,
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005); and
Jacques Derrida, A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event, Critical Inquiry
33, no. 2 (2007): 44161. For a historiographical discussion, see White, The Modernist
Event, 6686. For literary-theoretical approaches, see Jameson, The Nature of Events,
in Sartre, 1939; and Richard Terdiman, The Depreciation of the Event, in Marcel Prousts
Remembrance of Things Past, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1987), 13546. For a
narratological discussion, see Mieke Bal, Narratology, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 1997), 18293. Events, Bal writes, are the transition from one state to another
state, caused or experienced by actors (182). In literary theory, however, there is a vast
body of literature devoted to the problem of the moment, or kairos; for a discussion, with
a substantial bibliography, see Aris Fioretos, Det kritiska gonblicket (Stockholm: Norstedts,
1991), 228. One of the advantages of the category of the event is that it allows for a
distinction between narrative events and linguistic ones, and this distinction, I want to
argue, is crucial to literary modernism.
25 On Joyce and journalism, see Stephen Donovan, Dead Mens News: Joyces A Painful
Case and the Modern Press, Journal of Modern Literature 24 (Fall 2000): 2545. On the
expansion of the press and British nineteenth-century literature, see Louis Dudek, Literature
and the Press: A History of Printing, Printed Media, and Their Relation to Literature (Toronto:
Ryerson Press, 1960).
26 On the role of advertising in Ulysses, see Alfred Paul Berger, James Joyce Adman,
James Joyce Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1965): 2533; Moretti, The Long Goodbye: Ulysses and the
End of Liberal Capitalism, in Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms
(1983; London: Verso, 2005), 182208; and Jennifer Wicke, Advertising and the Scene of
Writing in Ulysses, in Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 12040.
27 Not headlines but rather crossheads: see Donovan, Short But to the Point: Newspaper
Typography in Aeolus, James Joyce Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2003): 51940.
28 The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, ed. Francis Steegmuller (London: Picador, 2001), 213. Ce
qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, cest un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache
extrieure, qui se tiendrait de lui-mme par la force interne de son style, comme la terre
sans tre soutenue se tient en lair, un livre qui naurait presque pas de sujet ou du moins
o le sujet serait presque invisible, si cela se peut. Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16
January 1852, Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 197398), 2:31.
29 See Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso,
2002), 205.
30 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Penguin, 1992), 12 (translation modified). Son cou sortait dun col blanc, rabattu. Ses cheveux, dont les deux bandeaux noirs semblaient chacun dun seul morceau, tant ils taient lisses, taient spars
1014
sur le milieu de la tte par une raie fine, qui senfonait lgrement selon la courbe du
crne; et, laissant voir peine le bout de loreille, ils allaient se confondre par derrire
en un chignon abondant, avec un mouvement ond vers les tempes, que le mdecin de
campagne remarqua l pour la premire fois de sa vie. Ses pommettes taient roses. Elle
portait, comme un homme, pass entre deux boutons de son corsage, un lorgnon dcaille.
Flaubert, Madame Bovary, ed. Philippe Neefs (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1999), 73.
31 Andreas Gailus, Form and Chance: The German Novella, in Moretti, The Novel, vol.
2, Forms and Themes, 751.
32 Anke te Heesen, Der Zeitungsausschnitt: Ein Papierobjekt der Moderne (Frankfurt: Fischer,
2006), 17.
33 See Dudek, Literature and the Press, 12135.
34 Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, December 5, 1914.
35 Stein, Narration, 36.
36 In France, the expression fait divers came into usage in the mid-nineteenth century,
originally denoting something like journalistic narrative. Interestingly enough, in France
theres a rich critical discourse on the fait divers, inaugurated by Roland Barthes in 1961.
Even the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty has devoted a piece to the journalistic phenomenon: Sur les faits divers, in Signes (1954; Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 38891. Numerous writers turn out to have been passionate collectors of faits divers, such as Andr Gide,
Marcel Proust, and Jean Paulhan. The most extensive treatments are Georges Auclair, Le
mana quotidien: Structures et fonctions de la chronique des faits divers (Paris: Anthropos, 1970);
Anne-Claude Ambroise-Rendu, Petits rcits des dsordres ordinaries (Paris: Seli Arslan, 2004);
and David H. Walker, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the Fait Divers (Oxford:
Berg, 1995). See also Flix Fnon, Nouvelles en trois lignes, ed. Patrick Wald Lasowski and
Roman Wald-Lasowski (Paris: Macula, 1990); Novels in Three Lines, trans. Luc Sante (New
York: New York Review Books, 2007).
37 What distinguishes a fait divers from an anecdote? The anecdote, after all, is also a short,
freestanding account of an event. While its true that the fait divers and the anecdote have
common roots, the former is a media phenomenon and would be unthinkable without the
world of mass media. Whats more, the fait divers is typically based on true events, whereas
an anecdote may well be based on invented ones. And as Barthes shows, the fait divers is
not only organized by a specific rhetorical structure, but also obsessed with the question
of causality. For a discussion of the genre of the anecdote, see Lionel Gossman, Anecdote
and History, History and Theory 42 (May 2003): 14368.
38 Voici un assassinat: sil est politique, cest une information, sil ne lest pas, cest un
fait divers. Barthes, Structure du fait divers, in Oeuvres compltes, ed. ric Marty, 3 vols.
(Paris: Seuil, 199395), 1:1309.
39 Barthes, Structure, 1:1310.
40 In the novella, as we have seen, the inexplicable appears in a vast number of guises.
In the world of the modern press, however, the inexplicable is an utterly narrow category.
It appears in two guises only: as marvels and as crimes. Historically speaking, marvels
have always been associated with heaven, but in a disenchanted time such as ours, that
celestial universe of almighty gods and able-bodied angels is reduced to flying saucers. In
the fait divers, causality may thus be displaced onto heaven, but that does not mean it has
been canceled. Benjamin, in his essay on storytelling, makes a similar point: in the age of
information, the category of the plausible has been substituted for that of the miraculous.
As for the crime story, it, too, is centered on causality, but here its a deferred one. The
crime story thrives on the distance traveled between the event and its cause: as Barthes
suggests, the task of the police investigator is to fill, retrospectively as it were, the empty
space separating the crime from its origin.
41 Barthes, Structure, 1:1312.
joyces scissors
1015
42 Barthes, Structure of the Fait-Divers, in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972), 194. Causalit alatoire, coincidence ordonne, cest
la junction de ces deux mouvements que se constitue le fait divers: tous deux finissent
en effet par recouvrir une zone ambigu o lvnement est pleinement vcu comme un signe
dont le contenu est cependant incertain. Nous sommes ici, si lon veut, non dans un monde
du sens, mais dans un monde de la signification; ce statut est probablement celui de la
littrature, ordre formel dans lequel le sens est la fois pos et du: et il est vrai que le
fait divers est literature, mme si cette literature est repute mauvaise. Barthes, Structure,
1:131556 (Barthess emphasis).
43 Joyce to George Antheil, 3 January 1931, in Letters of James Joyce, ed. Gilbert, 297.
44 te Heesen, Der Zeitungsausschnitt. See also Cut and Paste um 1900: Der Zeitungsausschnitt
in den Wissenschaften, ed. te Heesen, special issue, Kaleidoskop 4 (2002).
45 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Grayson and Grayson
Ltd., 1934), 69.
46 On Joyce and the everyday, see, for example, Klaus Reichert, Welt-Alltag der Epoche, in Welt-Alltag der Epoche: Essays zum Werk von James Joyce (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004),
5376.
47 On the archive unleashed by the printing revolution, see Hugh Kenner, James Joyce:
Comedian of the Inventory, in Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1962), 3066.
48 See Danis Rose and John OHanlon, foreword to James Joyce: The Lost Notebook, ed.
Danis Rose and John OHanlon (Edinburgh: Split Pea Press, 1989), xxiixxvi. All of the
information in this paragraph comes from Rose and OHanlon.
49 Rose and OHanlon, xxii.
50 A single article by Homais, Flaubert thus wrote, suffirait dans lavenir aux Cuviers de
la psychologie, pouvoir reconstituer toute lineptie dun bourgeois, si la race nen tait
imprissable. Quoted in Claudine Gothot-Mersch, La gense de Madame Bovary (Paris:
Jos Corti, 1966), 207.
51 Elisabeth Ladenson makes this point with great force in her book on literary censorship: the physicality of Ulysses has none of the dramatic, and potentially moralistic,
impact of violence, horror, and death. Instead, Joyce gives us bodily functions in all their
mundane unpleasantness. . . . Ulysses caused a stir not only because of its sexual content
. . . but because of its insistence on the banality of the everyday. Joyce takes this further
than anyone before him, to the extent of featuring the first noncomical defecation in
literature (Ladenson, Dirt for Arts Sake, 83). See also Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality.
52 In Joyce circles, the reference to Titbits has of course long been identified. See Don
Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press,
1988), 80. Tit-Bits was restyled Titbits in 1968.
53 See Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 18801910 (Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2001), 5385. See also Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social
History of the Mass Reading Public, 18001900, 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press,
1998), 36364.
54 Altick, English Common Reader, 363.
55 Jackson, George Newnes, 55.
56 Altick, English Common Reader, 396
57 Hulda Friederichs, The Life of Sir George Newnes (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1911), 5455; quoted in Donovan, Dead Mens News, 32.
58 Altick, English Common Reader, 36364.
59 Altick, English Common Reader, 364. For a more nuanced discussion, see Jackson, George
Newnes, 5385.
60 Gass, Mr. Blotner, Mr. Feaster, and Mr. Faulkner, in The World Within the Word, 55.
1016
61 Sergei Eisenstein, Notes For A Film of Capital, trans. Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and
Annette Michelson, in October: The First Decade, 19761986 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1988), 11538. For a discussion, see Anette Michelsons two-part essay, Reading Eisenstein
Reading Capital, October, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 27-38 and October, no. 3 (Spring 1977):
82-89. On Eisensteins interest in Ulysses as he was projecting Capital, see James Goodwin,
Eisenstein, Ecstasy, Joyce, and Hebraism, Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (2000): 529-57.
62 Eisenstein, Notes, 133.
63 Eisenstein, Notes, 119.

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couple of years before the appearance of Ulysses, James Joyce

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